Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

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  I. The discovery of toxic caches at the former military testing site, now one of Washington, DC’s most coveted residential zip codes, has resulted in a costly twenty-year cleanup, with the total bill expected to run more than $230 million.

  CHAPTER 6

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  Air Castles

  I shan’t put to sea like the Flying Dutchman, plying from nowhere to nowhere. I shall hail from a recognised respectable port, being duly registered and legally owned, in a word, married.

  —George Santayana, The Last Puritan

  When Conant returned to Harvard in January 1919, he discovered word of his wartime exploits had preceded him. His former colleagues and professors had read all about his secret assignment in charge of a poison gas factory, the months spent cooped up behind barbed wire, and successful development of the deadly lewisite. “Naturally, I was impressed,” recalled the journalist John Tunis, class of 1911, who was astonished that “an unknown twenty-five-year-old chemistry instructor should be promoted so quickly.” Every time Tunis heard Conant’s name mentioned in Washington, he was being awarded a new commission—bumped up from captain, to lieutenant, to major—and given new, awesome responsibilities. He remembered going to visit him at the Chemical Warfare Service, only to find his office empty. Conant, he was informed, had just been “moved upstairs.” The next time he dropped by, he learned his friend had suddenly left the city, tapped for a mysterious operation that would earn him a “Commendation for Unusual Service” and much public acclaim.

  The war had made stars of organic chemists. They had played a central role in securing victory, and were poised to play an even bigger part in the postwar world. When the American Chemical Society (ACS) first offered its services at the outbreak of the hostilities, the War Department had declined on the grounds that “it already had a chemist in its employ.” Now there were thousands of chemists working for the military, carrying the same rank as the medical corps. They had won a new place in society, and were no longer regarded as strange recluses working in obscurity but as scientific warriors, worthy of respect and homage alongside warriors in the field. Thanks to the flag-waving postwar press coverage, many of them were now public figures. “The army and powers that be in Washington no longer think the Chemists’ Art is a method of transmuting water into wine, but a system where by patient laborious effort produces those things which are valuable to man for destruction and construction,” reported Laurence V. Redman, chairman of the ACS, in a trenchant editorial in the January 1919 Chemical Bulletin. “Suddenly, as by magic, this erratic individual emerges with marvelous discoveries, and airy nothingness receives a local habitation and a name.”

  The new importance of chemistry in both industry and academe was reflected in the many attractive job offers that came Conant’s way that winter. Because of his outstanding record with the Chemical Warfare Service, B. F. Goodrich Company, the giant tire and rubber manufacturer, was eager to recruit him for their research division. Roger Adams, who had worked with Conant in Washington, recommended him to Julius B. Stieglitz, chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of Chicago. “Would you be willing to consider a call as Assistant Professor of Chemistry with a salary of $2,500,” Stieglitz proposed in a letter that February, expressing his desire to lure “a promising young man like yourself” out west. When Conant opted to remain at Harvard, Chicago chemistry professor Gerald Wendt chided him for being “so rockbound in your provinciality as to insist on Boston in spite of anything and everything.”

  Conant was certainly provincial, but he also had personal reasons for wanting to stay put. When he turned down an opportunity with a mining concern in Ohio, they raised their offer and pressed him to accept. After he turned them down a second time, they demanded an explanation. “I’m going to marry a girl who wouldn’t care to live in your state,” he told them frankly. “And if she did, I wouldn’t want to marry her.”

  It took nerve to court his famous mentor’s daughter, but Conant was full of confidence. Almost immediately on his arrival in Cambridge, still wearing his uniform, he presented himself at the Richards home at 15 Follen Street. The last they had heard, he was still a captain, and Patty and her mother, Miriam Richards, made a show of fussing over his major’s stripes and telling him he looked “most impressive.” Conant regaled them with amusing tales of his mousetrap incarceration, and Patty later wrote in her diary that she was relieved to find that success had not gone to his head. He was the same modest boy she remembered, his manner “very nice and simple.” The news from Europe was still coming thick and fast, and he had something to say about everything. “As usual, he just bubbled with ideas on the universe,” she wrote. “He talked at a great rate about labor and representation for labor, nonintervention in Russia, and government control of the railroads.”

  If Conant was a product of the brash new professional middle class, Grace (Patty) Thayer Richards belonged very much to Boston’s old cultural elite. While the whole idea of class difference was deeply repugnant to him, Miriam Richards’s exhausting attempts to enlighten him as to her daughter’s pedigree and antecedents—generation after generation of pious and patrician men—forced him to concede that the family was on both sides intellectually eminent. Patty had been born into what he would later refer to with a tight-lipped smile as Harvard’s academic “caste system.” Her maternal grandfather was Joseph Henry Thayer, a widely revered theologian at the Harvard Divinity School, biblical scholar, and fellow of the Harvard Corporation, the tiny, self-perpetuating group responsible for the conduct of the university. The Thayers, Miriam liked to remind people, were direct descendants of Percival Lowell, a prosperous British merchant who had crossed the Atlantic and settled in the seaport town of Newbury in 1639. Thayers were for the most part Brahmins and intellectuals, distinguished in some line of endeavor other than making money—be it as statesmen, scholars, scientists, or clergymen. Fortunately, two forebears had married wealthy Greenough sisters, injecting enough money into the line to ensure respectable affluence. There was a strong family resemblance: Thayers were all tall, blond, and blue eyed, with the same set of jaw and aristocratic profile.

  Miriam Richards was a singular personality, and Conant could tolerate her only in small doses. Since every time he called on Patty he was expected to take tea with her mother, he saw rather more of her than he would have liked. Miriam had been blessed with beauty and talent. She studied music in Leipzig and could have been a professional pianist had it not been for the fact that women of her day did not, as she put it, “waltz onto the stage.” Denied a career, she would not be thwarted in her determination to be a drawing room diva, and delighted in giving performances for guests at every opportunity. Miriam basked in the attention, and to satisfy her need for constant society turned their large, dark-paneled parlor into a genteel salon, inviting well-known musicians, artists, authors, poets, and scientists who were intimate family friends. Patty’s father, Theodore Richards, who played the violin, also painted, had a whimsical sense of humor, and radiated warmth and intelligence. The Richards house, close to campus, was always filled with the great and the good, including the writer George Santayana, the art collector Bernard Berenson, and the wealthy financier Charles Loeser. Such learned company attracted William James, the philosopher and psychologist, who, along with his novelist brother, Henry, was a frequent dinner guest. After one party, William James wrote to a friend approvingly of the Richardses, and observed that Miriam, with her “splendid playing and general grace and amiability was proof of how much hidden wealth Cambridge has.”

  As Conant soon came to realize, the Richardses occupied what Jean Strouse, in her biography of the Jameses’s sister, Alice, described as a “highly cohesive, rarified world of independent means and shared assumptions.” It was not simply that they were well born and well connected—Boston was full of families that were far grander—but that they inhabited an extraordinarily brilliant and cultivated circle, composed of a group of m
en who had all been at Harvard together, risen to fame together, and were bound by an almost familial feeling for the college. Adding to the incestuous closeness of their set were the many overlapping marital ties, both to the university and academia. Miriam’s older sister, Edith, was married to another fantastically erudite Harvard scientist, Lawrence Joseph Henderson, a biochemist, physiologist, and philosopher of distinction, author of numerous books on organic evolution and teleology, and the first unofficial roving professor at Harvard. Her younger sister, Lucy, was married to an exceptionally learned—he had five doctorates—New Testament theologian, Caspar Rene Gregory, who was teaching at Leipzig when the war broke out, enlisted in the German army, and died on the Western Front in 1917. In addition, Theodore Richards’s younger brother, Herbert Maule Richards, was a widely respected botanist and leading authority on the physiology of plants.

  There was no doubt the Richards family would make an interesting study in heredity. That two brothers should reach the highest rank in their respective fields of science struck Conant as an anomaly, especially in light of their “unusual” upbringing. Their father, William Trost Richards, was an American Pre-Raphaelite artist, and one of the country’s foremost marine painters and watercolorists. He was a follower of the English critic John Ruskin’s dictum of artistic truth to nature, and his painstaking efforts brooked no compromise. His plein air watercolors of the rugged New England coastline, and dramatic oils of the magnificent, wind-battered cliffs near his home in Newport, Rhode Island, were famous for their clarity and meticulous detail, and found favor with the Gilded Age barons of the day. Theodore Richards was raised in an imaginative and unorthodox household, under the watchful eye of his mother, Anna Matlack, a formidable intellect and gifted poet. She homeschooled the five of their eight children who survived into adulthood, creating a rigorous curriculum that included reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history, as well as art and music.

  At the age of fourteen, Theodore Richards passed the entrance exams for Haverford, a small Quaker college near Philadelphia, never having set foot in school. Three years later, after graduating at the head of his class, seventeen-year-old Richards enrolled in Harvard as the youngest member of the senior class of 1886. After acquiring a second bachelor’s degree at Harvard, graduating a year later summa cum laude with the highest honors in chemistry, he went on to earn a PhD for his investigation of the relative atomic weights of hydrogen and oxygen. It was an extraordinarily difficult undertaking, requiring an absolute commitment to accuracy. The qualities that set Richards’s work apart were his excruciatingly exact and laborious repetition of experiments, combined with a certain artistry—an unusually fine manual dexterity and ingenuity—he brought to bear on the problems he encountered in the newly developing field of physical chemistry. Almost as important as his data were his improved apparatus, tricks of manipulation, and mastery of the mercury thermometer. The results of his work were published in a joint paper in 1888 that immediately won him international acclaim. In the same year, Richards produced three other papers based on his study of the atomic weights of copper and silver, as well as one dealing with the heat produced by the reaction of silver nitrate with solutions of metallic chlorides. “Four publications and the young investigator was not yet twenty-one!” Conant would later write of his mentor.

  Richards’s rapid progress came at a price. In the course of completing his doctorate, he overexerted himself and suffered a breakdown, prompting his mother to move to Cambridge for a time to look after him. “The work had been strenuous,” he would later recall, “and my none too vigorous physical strength had been severely taxed.” After a year abroad, spending a semester training at German laboratories in Göttingen and Leipzig, and another studying in England, Richards returned to Harvard and was promptly appointed an instructor in quantitative analysis. Concerned that a heavy teaching load might lead to a relapse, his parents encouraged him to concentrate on his experiments and provided generous financial support. Richards’s career continued to flourish, but his physical and psychological health remained precarious. He suffered from fatigue, hopelessness, and bouts of melancholia. He was prone, family letters reveal, to “morbid views and dark forebodings.”

  His temperament was decorously referred to as “nervously sensitive,” though the turbulent emotions and “dark prospect” were almost certainly symptoms of depression. “He was too bright,” his mother would write his fiancée, Miriam Stuart Thayer, in an effort to explain his fragile equilibrium in the face of tremendous expectations. “He has gone too far and too fast—and now the ‘wheels of the world of bread-and-butter’ have got him, and he cannot escape.”

  Theodore Richards was twenty-eight years old when he married Miriam, two years his senior, a cossetted, unworldly woman who thought she had found in him a tender soul who shared her love of poetry and music, and understood them to be the “vital elements” in her life. Instead, she discovered his “vital life” existed solely among the “fascinating subtleties of atoms.” It proved a less than harmonious union. The young chemist who would soon become known for the painstaking precision of his work was forced to resign himself to the permanent chaos of his household. Miriam was a hypochondriac who took to her bed at the slightest provocation. She was afflicted by a variety of mysterious ailments that her friend Charles Loeser characterized in a letter shortly before her marriage as “your disease of ethics, metaphysics and allied festering and fettering inflictions,” problems that, he added reprovingly, “have no raison d’être; their existence is never real; but only in one’s making.”

  The Richardses were a high-strung, overstrung family at the best of times. All three children inherited their parents’ intelligence and passion. All three were burdened by too much intensity. A talent for music, art, and poetry was in their genes, and assiduously nurtured from birth. Each was assigned an instrument: Patty, the oldest, played the family’s Steinway grand; William (Bill), two years her junior, the cello, a Stradivarius known as “Angelika”; and Greenough (Thayer), the baby by five years, the clarinet. Hours of daily practice were enforced. It went without saying that they were expected to be exceptional. Mediocrity in anything was not to be tolerated.

  Patty’s mother was a perfectionist. Miriam believed in upholding “standards” and imposed her rigid principles, inhibitions, and mantra of self-improvement on her offspring. Although her father was a man of the church, her only true religion was her unshakeable belief in the Social Register. People of “quality” were distinguished by their genteel conversation and bearing; wealth was not supposed to have anything to do with it. Unlike most women of her day, she was not in the least inclined toward domesticity, and her overweening desire to be recognized for her own talent would influence her children, their grandiose dreams and deep vulnerabilities, at least as much as their formidable father. In her diaries, Patty lamented at being born into a “stern Yankee household,” with such a high bar for excellence and scant praise, driving her to ever-greater feats in the futile search for affirmation. She was dogged by the sense she was a disappointment—“an overwhelming sense of my unworthiness”—that in turn inspired hours of lacerating self-scrutiny and martyrdom “as a spur” to do better.

  Socially ambitious, both for herself and her children, Miriam increasingly chafed at what she perceived as the shabby gentility of “university people.” Raised a proper Victorian lady, she required a phalanx of servants to be at her beck and call. The Richardses employed a cook, a girl to wait on table, a housemaid, a lady’s maid, and a succession of European governesses referred to as either “Fräulein” or “Mademoiselle.” Although well-to-do by most standards, they could not begin to compete with Boston’s new industrial rich, their stately Beacon Hill mansions, steam yachts, stables of horses, and exclusive club memberships. Compared with the Boston “swells” Patty felt like a country bumpkin, dowdy and unfashionable, as if Cambridge, located just on the other side of the Charles River, were a hopelessly provincial hamlet.
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br />   For Richards, who resented the “distracting task of making money,” the family’s mounting debts were a constant source of stress. Few outside the family knew that Richards suffered from crippling bouts of depression. He drove himself hard and desperately fought the descending clouds that threatened to choke his productivity. As Conant observed many years later, “The habit of attempting to foresee all possible contingencies, which was basic to his success as a scientific investigator, placed a heavy strain on his life as a husband and father.”

  Unfortunately, the infinite pains Richards took over his experiments carried over into his personal affairs and condemned him to a lifetime of worry. Small problems could take on immense proportions. Preoccupied with contamination, in the lab and at home, he compulsively washed his hands. Petrified of illness, he fastidiously guarded against infection, and insisted that anyone who showed any unfavorable symptoms wear a protective mask. A cold was cause for hysteria. When twelve-year-old Patty came down with scarlet fever, he became almost unhinged with worry. He banished her to a back room, draped a sheet over the threshold, and forbade any family member to breach the barrier. Her only human contact for the entire six weeks of quarantine was the plump, gray-haired nurse who was hired to care for her, and the doctor who finally pronounced her well.