Witch Hunt

Numerous books have dealt with the deleterious effects the post-World War II “red scare” had on American life, but American Science in an Age of Anxiety is the first to provide a comprehensive history of how it affected scientists and science policy. The book presents a stark, often disturbing picture of lives ruined and principles compromised.

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Jessica Wang, an assistant professor of U.S. history at the University of California, Los Angeles, begins her book with a description of the “progressive left politics of science” that was on the rise at the end of World War II. The scientists' movement advocated “commitment to the internationalist world order, international scientific cooperation on research in atomic energy … the application of social good as a criterion for federal funding of science, and an insistence that the American public should benefit freely from publicly funded research.” In the immediate post-war years, as political activism among scientists flourished, two congressional measures were particularly important to the scientists' efforts: the McMahon bill, creating the civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the Kilgore bill, creating a National Science Foundation (NSF).

The author shows how the scientists' crusade drew the immediate opposition of the FBI and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). The McMahon bill, claimed HUAC's J. Parnell Thomas, was “the creature of impractical idealists.” Despite passage of the legislation and the creation of the AEC, Thomas continued his efforts to expose those that supported the bill as dangerous subversives. In 1947, when Thomas became chair of HUAC, he announced an eight-point program for future investigations, including “investigation of those groups and movements which are trying to dissipate our atomic bomb knowledge for the benefit of a foreign power.” In a statement made later that year, the congressman said that American scientists “have a weakness for attending meetings, signing petitions, sponsoring committees, and joining organizations labeled ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive,’ but which are actually often communist fronts.” Thomas (later convicted of payroll padding) and fellow congressional demagogues left behind them a swath of ruined careers and terrorized scientists.

One of the most surprising revelations in Wang's book is the frequent expression of anticommunism found within scientists' groups, including local branches of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). The FBI, which aggressively gathered “information on every major FAS chapter,” was assisted in its investigations by confidential informants from within the organization. Sometimes, the FBI funneled information on alleged communists to FAS leaders, who conducted what Wang calls “political purges.” According to the author, “Scientists felt … pressures and impulses to equate left-leaning politics with disloyalty and dogmatic adherence to the Communist Party and to ferret out radicals within their midst.” She contends that “the internecine battles within the Federation over the rapidly evolving politics of anticommunism” played a major role in the decline of the FAS in the late 1940s.

Wang has also assembled compelling material on the federal government's nightmarish loyalty-security investigations. She includes poignant vignettes on how the investigations affected the lives of Eugene Rabinowitch, John and Hildred Blewett, Robert H. Vought, Harlow Shapley, and Edward U. Condon. These individuals faced bizarre, kafkaesque circumstances, including the sudden, often unexplained loss of a security clearance based on anonymous charges. Even after vindication by one investigation, these scientists were often re-investigated several times. Said Rabinowitch, the co-founder of the Bulletin, “In the eyes of some, being identified with the fight for international control of atomic energy [was] a sign of subversive activities.”

According to the author, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, and the FAS all originally intended to forthrightly defend civil liberties and freedom of conscience. But in the end they did little more “than study the personnel security problem and recommend procedural reforms through appropriate channels.” This watered-down behavior, she argues, reflected not only their fears of being labeled subversive, but the integration of top scientists into the government's Cold War apparatus, including the AEC. By retreating from their fundamental principles, Wang contends, the major scientific organizations were ill-prepared to resist the wave of political persecution that washed over the national landscape in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Scientists faced security nightmares whether they did classified or unclassified research, whether they worked for the government or for private corporations and universities, and whether they were Americans wanting to travel abroad or foreigners applying for visas to attend scholarly gatherings in the United States. Meanwhile, as Wang notes, they lost their struggle to influence “the politics of science through the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Science Foundation. … The AEC quickly became a Cold War agency, and Senator Kilgore's vision of the NSF never made it through Congress.”

American Science in an Age of Anxiety, which focuses on the period from 1945 to 1950, is a first-rate work of scholarship. It draws upon an unusually large number of manuscript collections, including the records of America's major scientific organizations and the papers of key scientists. In addition, it is a lively, well-written account. It will appeal to scientists and others interested in the history of science and public policy.

Some of Wang's assumptions, however, are debatable. For example, she seems to believe that the anxiety of FAS leaders about the possibility of communist influence on FAS activities was inappropriate. But unlike public institutions, private citizens' groups have the right to make political choices. With the American Communist Party acting as a Soviet fan club, it was not entirely unreasonable for FAS activists to reject communist influence in its internal operations–whether to protect the organization from external attack or to maintain its political integrity. (Spying on one's colleagues, of course, is another matter.)

Wang puts domestic anticommunism at the forefront of the FAS's problems. But this underestimates the effects of other factors, especially the heightening Cold War, which convinced many scientists that international control of atomic energy was either illusory or dangerous.

Nevertheless, it is hard to fault her final conclusion. “Political repression not only harmed individual scientists,” she writes, “but, more significant, [it] generated an atmosphere of fear that made all scientists question whether political activism was worth the personal risks. As a result, anticommunism narrowed scientists' political role, as well as the range of possibilities for science policy.”