The program was approved by 728,860 voters and by the man from New York who won the election.
In 1936 Thomas’s vote dwindled to 187,342, and he knew why: “…the Socialists watched with some eagerness as Democrats adopted policies they had long recommended in such fields as tariffs and trade barriers, labor legislation, social legislation, social security, and… farm policy, such as the Resettlement Administration.”
He would join almost any picket line, mount any stump, whatever the danger. In March 1935, in a Mississippi county called Birdsong, he spoke out for black sharecroppers, and a drunken mob of whites dragged him from the platform, beat him bloody, and threw him across the county line. One said, “We don’t need no goddam Yankee bastard to tell us what to do with our niggers.”
Three years later he went into Jersey City to speak against Mayor Frank (“I am the law”) Hague. Hague forbade the rally and warned Thomas to stay away. Thomas came. Hague’s police slugged him, drove him across the Hudson, and ordered him never to enter Jersey again. He returned to it an hour later. The cops mauled him again and again threw him, hemorrhaging, on a Manhattan sidewalk. This time he went to a federal court. A judge issued an injunction against the mayor and his heavies, and Thomas, bandaged but upright, denounced “Hagueism” to an enormous throng in Jersey City’s Journal Square.
Communists hated him. He visited Moscow during the purge trials and later declared:
For the believer in the dignity of the individual, there is only one standard by which to judge a given society and that is the degree to which it approaches the ideal of a fellowship of free men. Unless one can believe in the practicability of some sort of anarchy, or find evidence there exists a superior and recognizable governing caste to which men should by nature cheerfully submit, there is no approach to a good society save by democracy. The alternative is tyranny.
Leon Trotsky hooted, “Norman Thomas called himself a Socialist as the result of a misunderstanding.” But Thomas was firm: one must work within the system. He believed the New Deal should have nationalized the steel industry, but he became convinced that Roosevelt’s election had brought “the salvation of America… the welfare state and almost a revolution.”
In World War II he battled against the internment of Japanese-Americans and Roosevelt’s demand for unconditional surrender. He believed “the lowest circle of hell” would be a Nazi victory, but thought a call for a statement of democratic peace terms would be more reasonable.
Almost alone in 1945 he condemned America’s use of atomic bombs: “We shall pay for this in a horrible hatred of millions of people which goes deeper and farther than we think.”
His last campaign was in 1948; he entered only because he saw how the Communist party was manipulating Henry Wallace. The day after the election an eminent New York Democrat said, “The wrong man lost.” “Dewey?” asked a friend. “No,” said the Democrat, “Thomas.”
In later years he spoke not as a candidate, but as the evangelist he had always been. In 1960 he anticipated the ecological crisis and the need for disarmament. He was convinced that ultimate disaster lay in military aid to other nations, and he believed in the wisdom of the Marshall Plan.
Along the way he wrote twenty books. His energy was unbelievable. In his eighties, crippled by arthritis, this old man deformed by sickness crisscrossed the country by auto or in trains—sleeping in upper berths to save money—speaking out against the Vietnam war. And college students, who had sworn to distrust everyone else of his generation, crowded halls to hear his indictment of the war. But he never counseled them to violence:
“The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and to hold them in the right scale of values. The value of dissent and dissenters is to make us reappraise those values with supreme concern for truth. Rebellion per se is not a virtue. If it were, we should have some heroes on very low levels.”
A reporter once asked him what he considered to be his achievements over the years. He replied in part:
“I suppose it is an achievement to live to my years and feel that one has kept the faith, or tried to… to be able to sleep at night with reasonable satisfaction… to have had a part… in some of the things that have been accomplished in the field of civil liberties, in the field of better race relations, and the rest of it. It is something of an achievement, I think, to keep the idea of socialism before a rather indifferent or even hostile American public.”
When he died in his sleep in December 1968, President Johnson, Vice President Humphrey, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, United Nations ambassador Arthur Goldberg, and New York Mayor John Lindsay issued shining tributes to him. Everyone agreed he had kept the faith.
They omitted the end of Norman Thomas’s answer to the reporter’s question: “That’s the kind of achievement that I have to my credit. As the world counts achievement, I have not got much.”
Not much. Only a beam of immortality.
SEVEN
Through the Night With a Light from Above
In Hitler’s Third Reich the science of fundamental physics did not exist. There was Jewish physics, which was against the law, and German physics, the responsibility for which was vested in the Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung (Ministry of Science, Education and National Culture) at No. 69 Unter den Linden. Actually a Jewish woman was, until March 1938, one of the ministry’s brightest stars. Working with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner had been bombarding uranium with neutrons in the laboratories of Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institut, and logging unbelievable results. Dr. Meitner was an exception to anti-Semitic legislation because she wasn’t a German. She was Viennese.
After the Anschluss all Austrians were transformed into citizens of the Reich, however, and as a non-Aryan, Lise Meitner found herself locked out of her own laboratory. The shadow of the concentration camp lay across her path. Her eminent colleagues went to the Führer himself. Race had nothing to do with science, they argued. Physics was either true or false, and because Germany had been guided by truth, the fatherland led the world in Nobel laureates—three times as many as the Americans. Hitler angrily dismissed them as “white Jews.” A warrant for Lise Meitner’s arrest was issued. She slipped over the Dutch border disguised as a tourist and made her way to the small Swedish seaside town of Kungälv, near Göteborg. Two great physicists, Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Hahn, now in Stockholm, were hospitable and kind, but to her it seemed that her career was over, her life in ruins.
In point of fact all of them, and their colleagues in the United States, stood on the threshold of science’s Elizabethan Age. Astonishing discoveries were being made simultaneously in a half-dozen countries. Enrico Fermi had won a Nobel Prize for his work with neutrons. Hahn, Strassmann, Bohr, Chadwick at Cambridge, and the Joliot-Curies in Paris were at the frontier of investigation and driving hard. Over thirty years earlier Albert Einstein measured atomic energy in the abstract from his theory of relativity. Einstein observed that a body in motion has a greater mass than a body at rest, the difference being defined by the velocity of light. Now real neutrons were splitting real nuclei, new elements were being discovered, three isotopes (types) of uranium were under investigation, and formulae had been committed to paper which, under conceivable circumstances, might translate Einstein’s theory into a stupendous reality. The nuclear physicists didn’t expect the world to understand. They could hardly credit their own work. When Hahn posted a report on his atom splitting to Naturwissenschaften on December 22, 1938, he felt that somehow he must be wrong: “After the manuscript had been mailed, the whole thing once more seemed so improbable to me that I wished I could get the document back out of the mailbox.” But when Bohr read it, he struck himself on the forehead and cried, “How could we have overlooked that so long?”
They were fascinated, awestricken, frightened, and at odds with one another over what it all meant. Einstein told William L. Laurence of the New York Times that fission could not produce an explosion. Bohr, arguin
g with a colleague, ticked off ten persuasive reasons why such a device could never be built, and Hahn said of it, “That would surely be contrary to God’s will!” But across the Atlantic there was disagreement. On February 2, 1939, Leo Szilard wrote Joliot-Curie from America:
When Hahn’s paper reached this country about a fortnight ago, a few of us at once got interested in the question whether neutrons are liberated in the disintegration of uranium. Obviously, if more than one neutron were liberated, a sort of chain reaction would be possible. In certain circumstances this might then lead to the construction of bombs which would be extremely dangerous in general and particularly in the hands of certain governments.
He did not identify “certain governments.” Everyone knew; it was on all their minds: with such bombs, Hitler could rule or destroy the world.
Haunted by this specter, the giants of European physics joined Lise Meitner in a general migration. Leaving Fascist Italy to receive his prize in Stockholm, Fermi canceled his return ticket in Sweden and headed for New York and the laboratories of Columbia University. Young Edward Teller went to George Washington University. Victor F. Weisskopf joined the Rochester faculty, and Bohr was packing to join Einstein in Princeton. He suggested that Lise Meitner and her nephew Dr. O. R. Frisch remain in Copenhagen long enough to conduct a confirming experiment. On January 16, 1939, Bohr reached New York. Awaiting him was a cable from Meitner and Frisch. The experiment had been affirmative—staggeringly so; the atom they split had freed 200 million volts of electricity. If uranium could be harnessed, theoretically it would be twenty million times as powerful as TNT.
Had the man on the street grasped this, he would have been as astonished by the source as by the fact. Popular notions of the scientist were of wildly impractical eccentrics—Dr. Frankensteins, giggling madly as they juggled retorts and vials and threw enormous switches. It is worth noting that when General Leslie R. Groves later recruited a staff to work with the nuclear scientists, he said: “Your job won’t be easy. At great expense we have gathered here the largest collection of crackpots ever seen.” The scientists were aware of their reputation and were indifferent toward it. There was about prewar nuclear physicists an informality, a casual air which would vanish in a terrible cloud six years later. In 1939 the very word “physicist” was uncommon; many Americans couldn’t even pronounce it. Universities paid men with Ph.D.s in science $1,500 to $1,800 a year. They accepted because they had little choice. Industry didn’t want them. In one year, 1937, there were only four research openings for them in the whole country, and the mite set aside for government research was largely confined to the Department of Agriculture.
In return, science was left alone. Genuinely international, scientists had no secrets from one another. Even in the Soviet Union, A. I. Brodsky could publish an article on the separation of uranium isotopes in 1939, and two of his colleagues carried out fission experiments in a shaft of the Moscow-subway. (The Kremlin then ordered the work discontinued on the ground that it had no practical value.) Even when the concept of security crept in, scientific investigators didn’t worry about it. They could talk shop with confidence that no layman could understand them. Indeed, only a handful of their own colleagues knew of fission in its new context. Before leaving Denmark, Bohr had been well aware that the Wehrmacht might invade his little country, and he was concerned about his precious hoard of heavy water—water in which the hydrogen has an atomic mass of two, invaluable for slowing down neutrons. But how many Nazis had heard of it? Very few, so he solved his problem by pouring it into a large beer bottle and putting it in his refrigerator, where it sat through five years of alien rule.
It was in America, perhaps, that dedication to academic freedom was greatest, and it was here that the first moves on the atomic chessboard were made in full view of an incurious public. The Meitner-Frisch cable had been sent in clear. The idea of coding information would have been considered absurd. Similarly, the experiment was reconfirmed by the simple expedient of reserving a Columbia laboratory for the night of January 25, calling in Fermi as an adviser, staging the uranium test, setting up an oscilloscope to measure energy, and pushing a button. The needle registered precisely 200 million volts; duplication was that exact. To discuss interpretations, everyone moved into lecture room 301 of Columbia’s Pupin Physics Laboratory at Broadway and 119th Street. The door wasn’t even closed, let alone locked. Anyone could have walked in from the pavement and learned of the latest developments in nuclear science—provided, of course, he could understand the jargon and the graphs, charts, formulae, and chalk scribbles on the blackboard.
Even a Washington conference was free in 1939. Fermi and Bohr were among those attending the spring meeting of the American Physical Society there, and Bohr went to the lectern to report on their work. He stated flatly that a projectile armed with a tiny fragment of U-235 under bombardment from slow neutrons could blow up most of the District of Columbia. As he lectured, delegates slipped in and out of the hall, placing long-distance calls to their campuses, and one young American, Robert Oppenheimer, was scrawling furiously away on a yellow pad, roughly calculating what the critical mass would be. There was a New York Times reporter at that meeting, but either he or his editors failed to grasp the full weight of what had happened. The Times did carry a brief account on the achievement of uranium fission. The next morning Dr. Luiz W. Alvarez was getting a haircut at the University of California when the story caught his eye. He leaped right out of the barber’s chair, swirled the sheet around him like a toga, and dashed into the Radiation Laboratory to spread the news.
Aside from the moral issue—which was being raised even then—a thousand questions needed answering. Ahead lay the discovery that uranium was not only rare; 99.6 percent of it was U-238, too stable for fission. U-235 had to be separated from the masses of U-238 and refined until the metal had reached a degree of purity unknown in America. Any bomb would have to be designed, a task which in the event would be entrusted to a German refugee named Klaus Fuchs with interesting political opinions. Most important, the move from theoretical physics to an actual device would be so expensive that private sponsorship would be inadequate. Thousands of millions of dollars would be needed, and only one man in the country commanded resources that great. Probably they would have gone to Roosevelt in any event. Moral checks were not strong yet, and scientific curiosity was. But debate became pointless, because a single argument swept all before it. The scientists were now absolutely convinced that Hitler was building his own bombs—was, on the evidence, far ahead of them.
The Nazis knew about nuclear fission, of course; Hahn had told them in his Naturwissenschaften article. Early in 1939 two German physicists called at No. 69 Unter den Linden and suggested the possibility of constructing a “uranium machine.” In April the Reich’s six most distinguished atomic scientists met twice in Berlin; they agreed to join in such an undertaking and keep quiet about it. Then Dr. S. Flügge, an anti-Nazi physicist, learned the details. Nobody had sworn Flügge to secrecy, and he thought the world’s scientific community ought to know what was going on. He published an extensive report on uranium chain reaction for the July 1939 number of Naturwissenschaften and then gave a simplified version to an interviewer from the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a conservative newspaper Goebbels hadn’t yet suppressed. The inevitable copies found their way out through Zurich, slipping past the censors because the material was as incomprehensible to ordinary Nazis as it was to ordinary Americans. But the scientists in America didn’t know the where or the why. They thought Flügge was showing them only the tip of the iceberg, and if the tip was that large, the world was in trouble. Then, that summer of 1939, came the most alarming development of all. Suddenly, without explanation, the Germans forbade the export of uranium ore from Czechoslovakia and ordered a blackout of all news about uranium. Since the known uses of uranium were confined to pottery and the painting of luminous dials on clocks, there could be only one interpretation of the embargo. The gentlemen at No.
69 Unter den Linden must be on their way. And in truth, they were. Being Germans, they had naturally tricked out their project with lines of authority, word of which also drifted through Zurich. It was Operation U, directed by appointed members of the Uranium Verein (Uranium Society) and responsible to the Heereswaffenamt (Army Weapons Department) in Berlin.
Roosevelt must be warned. But how? Most of the nuclear physicists in the United States who knew about fission were newly arrived expatriates. They had no friends in power; some were still learning the language. Szilard and Teller went to Washington and were met with blank stares. Even Fermi, with his Nobel Prize, was received coldly. The Army and Navy needed all their energies to acquire conventional weapons; they had no time for Buck Rogers games. The State Department saw no reason for urgency. According to their files, uranium was a rare and rather useless metal which was found, among other places, in Czechoslovakia and Belgium. Europe was in the last days of peace, armies were mobilizing, the crisis was desperate, and foreign service officers had no time for disheveled men who talked like organ grinders about splitting atoms.
But there was one tousled scientist, the sloppiest of them all, who could not be ignored. Albert Einstein was so famous that when he decided to wear his hair long he added a phrase to the American idiom. By July, after bureaucratic Washington’s last turndown of Fermi, Einstein left Princeton for his summer holiday on Long Island. When Szilard and Eugene Wigner sent word that they must see him, however, he consented. Their plans were vague. They doubted that even Einstein could get through to the President; it seemed more practical to warn Brussels through Einstein’s friendship with the Belgian queen mother. First, of course, they had to find Einstein on Long Island, and that turned into quite an expedition. On the hottest day of the year they set out for an address which had been given to them over the telephone. It had sounded like “Patchogue” but was really Peconic. Even after reaching Peconic they were bewildered. Szilard was arguing that they ought to quit, that they ought to go home and think it over, when a small boy volunteered to lead them to Einstein’s house.
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