In the dining room of the inn one day, Leo and Trude met Walter Volbach and his wife, both German refugees. Volbach, a theatrical producer in Europe who then taught theater arts and ballet in Texas, knew Szilard’s reputation as a scientist but was surprised by his other interests. In their conversations, Szilard predicted that Russia would have an A-bomb within a year or two. (It did, thirteen months later.) But Volbach recalled that Szilard “seemed to be in the best mood” when talking about the arts: not only films, which he and Trude enjoyed, but drama and the theater; concerts and opera; and the philosophy of art, painting, and sculpture. “He had not just a fine memory but a tremendous knowledge in all the fields—and a very delicate feeling for the complex aesthetics of various styles.”
The Volbachs invited Leo and Trude for a ride into the mountains, and off they drove toward Bear Lake. Parking the car, the Volbachs and Trude decided to hike for an hour to a higher lake. Not Leo. He quickly found a large, flat rock and sat down to botch.21 In fact, all the while Trude chatted with guests, read, or took studied black-and-white photographs of the landscape, Leo lost himself in writing, usually short pieces of fiction and satire. Oblivious to the surroundings, he scribbled thoughts and plots on paper that he spread on picnic tables, balanced on the log railing of his rustic cabin porch, juggled on his lap, or held on the arm of his chair.
During a visit to the Stead Ranch in July 1948, Szilard wrote satires on medicine and politics, “The Mark Gable Foundation” and “The Diary of Dr. Davis.” The first described how a person escaped social and political problems by being preserved and revivified in the distant future. The second questioned how to finance productive scientific research. Szilard and organic chemist Aaron Novick had opened a biology research laboratory at the University of Chicago that spring, so blending the theory and practice of science had become a daily challenge. When puzzled, Szilard often found answers in his fiction. But this sometimes confused readers who could only take science—and life—very seriously.
Alone for a week at the Rancho Del Monte near Santa Fe, New Mexico, in September 1948, Szilard wrote “Science Is My Racket,” which urged academics to be more active politically. A few months later, he began work on one of his best-remembered tales: “Report on ‘Grand Central Terminal,’” a satire on archaeology, politics, and more. When invaders from outer space visit New York City after a nuclear war, they analyze the terminal’s pay toilets, trying to understand the values of the vanished society. The invaders are led by Xram (Marx spelled backward) and produce a curious socioeconomic explanation for the disks (coins) found in the door slots. Because they had found no disks in other “depositories” around the city, the visitors conclude that those in the pay toilets “had been placed there as a ceremonial act” connected with “deposition in public places and in public places only,” the images on the coins being tributes to their leaders.22
With mirth and anger, Szilard also used satire to confront the cold war. At the Stead Ranch in the summer of 1949 he wrote “Calling All Stars,” a science-fiction satire about cybernetics, biology, and nuclear annihilation. What worries superhuman minds on a distant star is that creatures on Earth were both smart enough to separate uranium235 yet dumb enough to use this knowledge to make weapons. The distant minds conclude, as Szilard himself had by then, that if these Earth organisms are “engaged in co-operative enterprises which are not subject to the laws of reason, then our society is in danger.”23
In his fiction, Szilard satirized the US-Soviet nuclear arms race by looking behind the military confrontation to the science and politics at play in the two countries. His “Nicolai Machiavellnikow,” a comedy skit finished in July 1949, mocked the congressional hearings then being led by Sen. Bourke B. Hickenlooper, an Iowa Republican eager to discredit Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman David Lilienthal. That spring, Szilard had advised witnesses appearing before the committee but did not testify himself. The skit treats these hearings as part of a Soviet plot to undermine America’s nuclear power research. Lilienthal wants to combine US nuclear reactor development with British efforts, which are more advanced. Oust him and America’s program will remain “a complete mess,” a failure, chides Szilard, because “they did not even get back any of their good men who had worked on [atomic energy] during the war.”24
Szilard’s direct—and daring—solution to the anti-Communist hysteria in America was simple. “If someone is accused of being a communist,” he said even before Sen. Joseph McCarthy made red-baiting a nationally televised sport, “we should all take him out to lunch. If someone is charged with subscribing to the Daily Worker, we should all subscribe.”25 When Trude returned from Colorado to New York in August 1949, Szilard moved from the Stead Ranch to the white-columned Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, a larger and more formal resort, where he stayed alone to botch. There he quickly established an easy routine, reported by letter to Trude as “breakfast in town (steak). Lunch in the cocktail room at the hotel at 11:30 a.m. (melon, bread, butter + honey, milk). Dinner in the evening in town.” He shaved every day, walked into town for meals, and slept from 10:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. One day in town he stepped onto a scale to read his weight and fortune. “Weight: 181 lbs. Fortune: You are very attractive to the opposite sex.” He wondered if the scale would give the same fortune at 185 pounds, a weight he expected to reach “probably very soon.”26
Botching went well at the Stanley, especially the essay on red and green money, and one evening economist Jacob Marschak stopped by to pick up Szilard for dinner and a chat about the paper.27 Marschak mentioned Orwell’s just-published satirical novel 1984, but Szilard refused to read it, saying the book’s horrors conformed too closely to his own.28 Physicist Hans Bethe visited the Stanley, too, and drove Szilard to the Fall River Pass near the Continental Divide. Aaron Novick stopped by for two days of talks on his way to a biology conference in California. But mostly Szilard kept company with his many thoughts. “Not talking to anyone here about anything,” he wrote Trude, “which is very good for writing.”29
Szilard’s demeanor was often formal, and his thinking was at times dead serious. Yet in many ways he was still a child at heart and enjoyed the company of young children. At the Stanley Hotel that August, he wrote a delightful fable about a child’s fears and fascinations. The tale is based on his encounters with the daughter of Dr. Gertrude Hausmann, a friend of Trude’s who lived in Denver. At the Stead Ranch earlier that summer, Szilard and Kathy had enjoyed wadding tissue paper to plug holes in the screen door of the Hausmanns’ cabin, and at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs the two had dined at a table of their own. With Kathy, Szilard saw his mountain retreat through the eyes of another child, one more open with feelings and fears.30
KATHY AND THE BEAR
This is a beautiful spot to stay in the summer. The hotel is well run. The food is good. Only the service at meals is too slow for my taste; it is intolerably slow for a child of four.
Kathy and her mother spent the last weekend here. At lunch Kathy sat next to me.
“You want some sugar in your milk, Kathy?” I asked.
“She never takes any sugar,” her mother said.
“Yes, please, I want sugar,” said Kathy.
I gave her lots of sugar and she started to drink her milk. Halfway through she put her glass down.
“Mother,” she said, “can I go to see the bear?”
“What bear?” I asked.
“She means that huge bear skin on the wall in the lobby,” the mother said. “Would you like to take her there? I shall get you when the meat comes.”
Kathy led me to the bear, but stopped at a respectful distance.
“He is dead,” she said. “He was shot. You can put your hand into his mouth, he can’t do anything to you.” And after a moment of silence: “I won’t put my hand into his mouth; I am scared.” She stood there fascinated and looked at the bear, but kept her distance.
“All right,” I said, after a while. “You have seen him now. Let us go ba
ck to lunch.”
The meat was not there yet when we got back to our table, and Kathy’s mother was across the dining room talking to some friends.
“Does a bear like to be shot?” Kathy asked.
“I don’t know, Kathy,” I said. “I do not think so.”
“Doesn’t a bear go to heaven when he dies?” Kathy wanted to know. I wasn’t going to compromise with truth, not even for the sake of a girl four years old.
“I do not know, Kathy,” I said. “But I am sure your mother can tell you. Why don’t you ask her after lunch, when she puts you to bed?”
“My grandfather is dead and he is in heaven,” said Kathy. “And my grandmother is dead and she is in heaven. God is in heaven too, and he is not dead. How is that?” asked Kathy. This was beginning to get difficult.
“Why don’t you drink your milk, Kathy,” I said. “It isn’t too sweet for you—or is it?”
“It is too sweet,” said Kathy. I accepted the verdict in silence.
“But I like it too sweet,” said Kathy, and with that she picked up her glass and started to drink.
The next day at lunch we had again to wait for the meat.
“May I go to see bearsy-wearsy?” said Kathy.
“All right, Kathy,” I said. “Come along.” When we got into the lobby, Kathy said:
“He was a bad bear. He killed all the chickens. And the farmer took his gun and shot him. And then they saw that he was beautiful, and they put him on the wall so that little girls can look at him.” With that she started to stroke tenderly the one paw that she was able to reach.
“Lift me up, please,” she said. “I want to put my hand into his mouth.” I lifted her up and she had her wish.
“You want to come back to the dining room now?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I want to stay with the bear.”
“All right,” I said, “but don’t stay too long.” Kathy settled down on the couch and began to pet the beast. I went back to the dining room. After a while Kathy appeared and sat down in her chair.
“Honeybear,” she murmured and picked up her milk.
Soon after writing “Kathy and the Bear,” Szilard confronted his own fears when he reread Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. The work “considerably frightened” him because “neither Sparta nor Athens wanted war, yet they went to war with each other” for thirty years. Only half-joking, Szilard thought his situation was more dangerous than the ancients’ because “in many respects these Greek city-states were politically more mature” and “both Sparta and Athens were much more democratic than are Russia or the United States.” Szilard feared that just as in 431 B.C., when the conflict had “started as a war between an ally of Sparta and an ally of Athens,” so any country in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the Warsaw Pact might prompt a nuclear war that both superpowers dreaded.31 Three days after Szilard wrote this, on September 23, 1949, President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb. For several months, Szilard carried a copy of Thucydides in his pocket and warned about its ominous message repeatedly until the book became dog-eared and fell apart.32
In the 1940s and 1950s, Szilard worried about nuclear war incessantly, but he also feared the planet’s extinction from other causes, especially poverty and overpopulation. To the advisory committee of the newly created Ford Foundation, Szilard offered, in January 1949, his thoughts on how their money might be used “for the betterment of mankind.” He urged analyzing ways to create alternative forms of democratic government that are more flexible than the Westminster and Washington models. His key concern for eliminating world poverty focused on finding effective birth-control methods, especially for India and China. He also urged the foundation to sponsor a “Voice of Europe” radio system to increase international understanding by beaming programs to the United States.33
With nuclear chemist Harrison Brown, a colleague at the Met Lab and in later arms-control groups, Szilard brainstormed about the connections between governance and biology, advancing the idea that the earth has a natural “carrying capacity” that must not be exceeded. This theme Brown developed in seminars at the University of Chicago, which Szilard attended in 1950 and 1951, and in the 1954 book Challenge of Man’s Future. Brown and Szilard discussed the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, population pressures, and alternative food supplies, issues raised by the Club of Rome in the 1970s. In the late 1940s, Szilard believed that nuclear power would someday be cheaper than coal or oil and would become a significant energy source worldwide, especially in developing countries.34 By 1956, however, Szilard wrote that Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” proposal to export nuclear reactors had “offended my sense of proportion” because “to establish a secure peace when the bombs stare us in the face is a tall order. If we want peace, we have to make peace and not atoms.”35
Fearing that a nuclear war with H-bombs might occur soon, Szilard worried about how children would survive to rebuild the shattered planet. He proposed founding a private boarding school in Mexico City and urged his University of Chicago colleagues to enroll their children. In June 1951 he drew up plans for the school, “Where will your children spend the war?” Children would enter at age nine and could graduate at eighteen or twenty-one, receiving “a solid body of knowledge” in “a climate physical, intellectual, and moral that will make them fit to live later as they may choose either in the United States or in South America.” In conversations around the Quadrangle Club, Szilard claimed he had talked about the school with the Mexican president and had arranged for a high-quality, bilingual education. Some faculty members resented the fact that Szilard, who had no children, would be so insistent about how theirs should be educated and protected. For his part, Szilard was angry when friends shunned his rational advice but gladdened when Chancellor Robert Hutchins—an admirer given to his own quirky schemes—smiled on the plan.36
In another flight of rational fancy Szilard proposed a way to assure fairer presidential elections when one party’s candidate is overwhelmingly popular. President Dwight Eisenhower had soundly defeated Illinois’s Democratic governor Adlai E. Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election and was a popular favorite for reelection in the winter of 1955 when Szilard strolled into the K Street office of Washington lawyer Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., swept past his secretary, and stood before his desk.
“Joe, I’ve got it figured out,” Szilard announced. The two had known each other since they had lobbied for the McMahon bill in 1946, when Rauh was chief counsel of the National Committee for Civilian Control of Atomic Energy. Now Rauh was active in Democratic party affairs and a respected civil rights lawyer.
“Yeah?” Rauh said, then recalling they had recently discussed electoral reforms.
“This is what we do next year,” said Szilard. “We run Ike on both tickets, Stevenson for vice-president on the Democratic ticket, Nixon for vicepresident on the Republican ticket. Then the voters can decide who they want to succeed Ike.”
“Who’s in charge of getting these nominations on the two tickets?” Rauh asked.
“Oh, you are!” Szilard said.37
Like most of Szilard’s schemes, plans for a Mexican school and a two-party ticket were soon forgotten. But his concerns about education and politics thrived, especially in conversations with historian Max Lerner, a professor at the new Brandeis University. In January 1952, Lerner invited Szilard to speak to seniors about his “experiences and working philosophy,” and a month later he flew to Boston and rode by taxi to the hilly campus in the western suburb of Waltham. There Szilard spent three joyful days chatting with students and faculty, savoring his role as a welcome celebrity. Since childhood Szilard enjoyed designing social and political institutions, and Brandeis was an appealing place to apply his musings. Soon he had proposed organizing a tutorial system there by drawing on specialists at the better-known universities in the Boston area.38
The vitality at Brandeis was a welcome contr
ast to Chicago, where Szilard was about to close his biology laboratory because his indispensable partner, Aaron Novick, planned to leave for a sabbatical in Paris. In fact, as early as the previous fall Szilard had considered quitting biology research altogether, preferring to join the university’s central administration “to work on the improvement of the finances of the University . . .” by brainstorming investment schemes that would profit from the school’s tax-exempt status.39 In the fall of 1952, Szilard took an unpaid leave from Chicago to become visiting professor of physics at Brandeis. The university’s press release announced that this “nuclear physics pioneer who was largely responsible for the development of the atomic bomb . . .” would assist in developing the expanding graduate and undergraduate science program, conduct seminar courses in “Frontiers of Science” for advanced students, and teach in the graduate school.40
Szilard played his new role as teacher with the same gusto he brought to his science. “Mass murderers have always commanded the attention of the public, and physicists are no exception to this rule,” he said to shock his audience at a talk “On Education,” but quickly added that “. . . the most important thing to remember about science is the fact that it is supposed to be fun. . . . Doing nothing—in a pleasant sort of way—was always considered in Europe a perfectly respectable way of spending one’s time,” he said, voicing his own predilection. “Here in America you are expected to keep busy all the time—it does not matter so much what you are doing as long as you are doing it fast.”41
In another “Talk on Education” Szilard urged Brandeis students to study the humanities as a preparation for public life. “The skills and knowledge you acquire determine what you can do,” he said. “Your knowledge and wisdom determine who you are. In our society, there is a market for skills and knowledge. But I have some doubts if there is much of a market for wisdom.” In Szilard’s view, “the great educational problem in our society does not lie at the college level but at the level of the high school,” and as a remedy he proposed a national high-school reading program keyed to college study.42
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