by Jill Lepore
Despite these reports, the scale of Nazi atrocities remained all but unknown in the West. Only about a fifth of the prisoners at Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, and Dachau were, in fact, Jews; the rest were political prisoners and prisoners of war. The death camps, like Auschwitz, where nearly all the prisoners were Jews, had been closed before the Allies arrived, or else liberated by the Soviets. American reporters did not generally see them.112 The extent of the genocide—the murder of six million Jews—would not reach the American public for years to come.
In 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and other U.S. generals stopped at a newly liberated concentration camp at Ohrdruf, where the remains of burned bodies were found on railroad tracks. Three days after Eisenhower stopped at Ohrdruf, the 305th Infantry invaded the island of Iejima, near Okinawa. Reporter Ernie Pyle was in a jeep that was driven into a ditch by machine-gun fire. When Pyle raised his head to look around, he was shot in the temple, a hairsbreadth under his helmet. He was forty-four. He died on April 18, 1945, with the dogfaces he loved and whose war he’d chronicled better than any other writer. At the time he was shot, he’d been writing a column. A draft was found in his rucksack. It began, “And so it is over. . . .”113
It wasn’t quite over, but very nearly. On April 24, Secretary of War Henry Stimson sent a memo to the fledging President Truman, stamped SECRET. “I think it very important that I should have a talk with you as soon as possible.” Truman had been told about the existence of the atomic bomb within hours of his swearing-in, but Stimson wanted to tell him, now, that the weapon was almost ready.114
In Europe, the Allied forces closed in on the Axis. On April 25, American forces fighting Germany from the west and Soviet forces driving from the east met on the Elbe River. Italian partisans caught up with Mussolini on April 28, shot him down, and dumped his body on the street, where a mob urinated on it, and hung him by his heels. Two days later, in a bunker in Berlin, Hitler committed suicide. Germany signed a total and unconditional surrender on May 7.
Stalin had already begun pressing his claims to influence over the territory Hitler had so brutally conquered. At Yalta, he’d promised to allow “free and unfettered elections” in Poland; by spring, he’d abandoned that pledge. On April 28, Churchill, astutely perceiving what this foretold, wrote to Stalin: “There is not much comfort in looking into a future where you and the countries you dominate, plus the Communist parties in many other States, are all drawn up on one side, and those who rally to the English-speaking nations and their Associates or Dominions are on the other.”115 There was little comfort in such a future, but it would come all the same.
The World of Tomorrow imagined by the smooth-talking planners of the 1939 World’s Fair, a world of Elektro the Moto-Man and automatic dishwashing machines, would come, too. Its chorus line of women dressed in white, performing a “Pageant of Peace,” had been followed by six years of horrifying warfare and genocide, the shocking brutality of modernity. “People living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals,” Albert Einstein had written in 1939, and “anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror.”116 And yet the fevered dream for world peace remained and seemed to many less a fantasy and closer to a reality when, on June 25, Truman attended the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco.
Delegates from fifty nations signed a charter that Truman called “a victory against war itself.” The American experiment, begun at the height of the Enlightenment, was to see a new day. “Let us not fail to grasp this supreme chance to establish a world-wide rule of reason,” Truman said, “to create an enduring peace under the guidance of God.” As the conference closed, acting secretary general Alger Hiss boarded an army transport plane along with this cherished treasure, the United Nations Charter, locked in a seventy-five-pound safe, attached to a parachute that read “Finder! Do Not Open. Send to the Department of State, Washington.”117
The United States, a nation founded in an act of severing, had tied its fate to the fate of the world. A nation that had refused to join the League of Nations had taken the lead in establishing its replacement.
It remained to be seen whether the moment would be fleeting or lasting, but it had been long in coming. The Depression, the New Deal, and Roosevelt’s political rhetoric had taught Americans about the danger of an island. “We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations, far away,” Roosevelt had said in 1933, in his first inaugural address. “We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that ‘The only way to have a friend is to be one.’” And the millions of American sailors and soldiers and nurses and airmen who fought on all four corners of the globe gained a cosmopolitanism unknown to any previous generation of Americans. One GI, a “corporal with a rural background,” told Yank magazine that, before the war, “I never got much more than fifteen miles from home,” but “The Army’s taken me through fifteen countries from Brazil to Iceland and from Trinidad to Czechoslovakia.” In July 1945, the Office of War Information drafted “America in the World,” a statement unimaginable in any other era in American history: “In this interdependent world, there is no region in which the United States can renounce its moral and ideological interest.”118
Truman, meanwhile, faced a dire decision about how to end the war in Japan. In June 1945, Leo Szilard wrote to Truman, urging him against deploying the atomic bomb: “A nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.” Szilard was a great admirer of H. G. Wells, who’d predicted atomic warfare in a novel published in the dark days of 1914. Wells had imagined an atomic World of Tomorrow. “Power after power about the armed globe sought to anticipate attack by aggression. They went to war in a delirium of panic, in order to use their bombs first,” Wells wrote in his novel. “By the spring of 1959 from nearly two hundred centres, and every week added to their number, roared the unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bombs; the flimsy fabric of the world’s credit had vanished, industry was completely disorganized, and every city, every thickly populated area, was starving or trembled on the verge of starvation.”119
Szilard, fearing that Wells’s long-ago predicted dystopia was at hand, began gathering signatures to send to Truman. When the military threatened to charge Szilard with espionage, J. Robert Oppenheimer decided to delay sending the petition. But Szilard pressed on, and by July 17, seventy scientists working on the Manhattan Project, having witnessed the first test of the atomic bomb, had signed his petition of protest.120
Outside of those scientists, the president, and a handful of military men with clearance, Americans did not know about the existence of the atomic bomb, but they who knew, knew fear. Weapons capable of destroying cities or even humanity itself had been the stuff of science fiction for decades. And the scale of destruction, between the First World War and the Second, augured nothing so much as yet more staggering destructive force.
Archibald MacLeish tapped into this fear in a campaign he waged to raise popular support for the United Nations. He arranged for so many pro–United Nations radio broadcasts that journalist and former America Firster John T. Flynn complained, “You cannot turn on the radio at any hour of the day—morning, noon, or night—whether you listen to the Metropolitan Opera or to a horse opera, a hill-billy ballad, a commentator or a newscaster, that you do not hear a plug for this great instrument of peace.”121 MacLeish’s most powerful project was Watchtower Over Tomorrow, a fifteen-minute film screened at movie theaters across the country, queued up with the newsreels that appeared before feature films. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Watchtower Over Tomorrow opened with footage that Hitchcock took from a 1936 science fiction film, Things to Come, an adaptation of yet another dystopian novel written by Wells, which imagined a decades-long war and a new machine age in which a race of super-scientists
have built a “space gun.” In the footage used by Hitchcock, a giant crane lowers a bomb into the barrel of a giant missile that, launched in a giant cloud of dust, reaches the stars before falling to earth and exploding. “Death from the sky, from a bomb fired by an enemy, thousands of miles away, the bomb which could be the opening of World War Three,” a narrator says. “It is to prevent the firing of such a bomb that we of the United Nations have struggled on the Italian Front, the Western Front, the Eastern Front, throughout the Balkans, halfway around the world, in China, in Burma, in the Atlantic, up and down the Pacific, wherever the enemy can be brought to bay, to make possible a peace more permanent than a breathing spell between devastating wars.”122
Watchtower Over Tomorrow began appearing in theaters in the spring of 1945. The future that it imagined the United Nations would stop came all the same. That summer, on August 6, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, it dropped another on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered. “This is the greatest thing in history,” Truman said.123 The Second World War had ended. And, watchtower or no, an altogether new tomorrow had begun.
John Mauchly’s ENIAC, sometimes called the Giant Brain, marked the beginning of the age of information.
Part Four
THE MACHINE
1946–2016
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends—honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded, then, is a return to these truths.
—Barack Obama,
First Inaugural Address,
2009
Thirteen
A WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE
In an era of American abundance, TV sets in a store window broadcast Eisenhower’s announcement of his decision to run for reelection in 1956.
THE END OF TIME BEGAN AT EIGHT FIFTEEN ON THE morning of August 6, 1945. “Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk,” the writer John Hersey reported in The New Yorker. “Just as she turned her head away from the windows, the room was filled with a blinding light. She was paralyzed by fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment.”
Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.1
In the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books: the violence of knowledge.
Hiroshima marked the beginning of a new and differently unstable political era, in which technological change wildly outpaced the human capacity for moral reckoning. It wasn’t only the bomb, and the devastation it wreaked. It was the computers whose development had made dropping the bomb possible. And it was the force of technological change itself, a political power unchecked by an eighteenth-century constitution and unfathomed by a nineteenth-century faith in progress.
Truman got word of the bombing on board a cruiser. The White House told the press the next day. The story went out over the radio at noon. Listeners reeled. John Haynes Holmes, a Unitarian minister and avowed pacifist, was on vacation at a cottage in Kennebunk, Maine. “Everything else seemed suddenly to become insignificant,” he said, about how he felt when he heard the news. “I seemed to grow cold, as though I had been transported to the waste spaces of the moon.” Days later, when the Japanese were forced to surrender, Americans celebrated. In St. Louis, people drove around the city with tin cans tied to the bumpers of their cars; in San Francisco, they tugged trolley cars off their tracks. More than four hundred thousand Americans had died in a war that, worldwide, had taken the lives of some sixty million people.2
And yet, however elated at the peace, Americans worried about how the war had ended. “There was a special horror in the split second that returned so many thousand humans to the primeval dust from which they sprang,” one Newsweek editorial read. “For a race which still did not entirely understand steam and electricity it was natural to say: ‘who next?’” Doubts gathered, and grew. “Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear,” CBS’s Edward R. Murrow said. “We know what the bombs did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” wrote the editors of Fortune. “But what did they do to the U.S. mind?”3
Part of the uncertainty was a consequence of the surprise. Americans hadn’t known about the bomb before it fell. The Manhattan Project was classified. Even Truman hadn’t known about it until after FDR’s death. Nor had Americans known about the computers the military had been building, research that had also been classified, but which was dramatically revealed the winter after the war. “One of the war’s top secrets, an amazing machine which applies electronic speeds for the first time to mathematical tasks hitherto too difficult and cumbersome for solution, was announced here tonight by the War Department,” the New York Times reported from Philadelphia on February 15, 1946, in a front-page story introducing ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. Inside, the Times ran a full-page spread, including a photograph of the computer, the size of a room.4 It was as if the curtain had been lifted, a magician’s veil.
Like the atomic bomb, ENIAC was produced by the American military to advance the cause of war and relied on breakthroughs made by scientists in other parts of the world. In 1936, the English mathematician Alan Turing completed a PhD at Princeton and wrote a paper called “On Computable Numbers,” in which he predicted the possibility of inventing “a single machine that can be used to compute any computable sequence.”5 The next year, Howard Aiken, a doctoral student at Harvard, poking around in the attic of a Harvard science building, found a model of Charles Babbage’s early nineteenth-century Difference Engine; Aiken then proposed, to IBM, to build a new and better version, not mechanical but electronic. That project began at IBM in 1941 and three years later moved to Harvard, where Aiken, now a naval officer, was in charge of the machine, known as Mark I; Columbia astronomer L. J. Comrie called it “Babbage’s dream come true.” The Mark I was programmed by a longtime Vassar professor, the brilliant mathematician Grace Murray Hopper. “Amazing Grace,” her colleagues nicknamed her, and she understood, maybe better than anyone, how far-reaching were the implications of a programmable computer. As she would explain, “It is the current aim to replace, as far as possible, the human brain.”6
During the war, the Allied military had been interested in computers for two primary reasons: to break codes and to calculate weapons trajectories. At Bletchley Park, a six-hundred-acre manorial estate fifty miles northwest of London that became a secret military facility, Turing, who would later be prosecuted for homosexuality and die of cyanide poisoning, had by 1940 built a single-purpose computer able to break the codes devised by Germany’s Enigma machine. At the University of Pennsylvania, physicist John Mauchly and electrical engineer Presper Eckert had been charged with calculating firing-angle settings for artillery, work that required iterative and time-consuming calculations. To do that work, American scientists had been using an analog computer called a differential analyzer, invented at MIT in 1931 by FDR research czar Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer. Numbers were entered into the differential analyzer by people who were known as “computers,” and who were usually women with mathematics degrees, not unlike the “checkers,” women with literature degrees, who worked at magazines. But even when these women entered numbers around the clock, it took a month to generate a single ar
tillery-trajectory table. In August 1942, Mauchly proposed using vacuum tubes to build a digital electronic computer that would be much faster. The U.S. War Department decided on April 9, 1943, to fund it. Construction of ENIAC began in June 1943, but it wasn’t fully operational until July 1945. ENIAC could make calculations a hundred times faster than any earlier machine. Its first assignment, in the fall of 1945, came from Los Alamos: using nearly a million punch cards, each prepared and entered into the machine by a team of female programmers, ENIAC calculated the force of reactions in a fusion reaction, for the purpose of devising a hydrogen bomb.7
Vassar mathematician Grace Murray Hopper programmed Mark I. The machines built to plot the trajectories and force of missiles and bombs would come to transform economic systems, social structures, and the workings of politics. Computers are often left out of the study of history and government, but, starting at the end of the Second World War, history and government cannot be understood without them. Democracies rely on an informed electorate; computers, the product of long and deep study and experiment, would both explode and unsettle the very nature of knowledge.
The boundlessness of scientific inquiry also challenged the boundaries of the nation-state. After the war, scientists were among the loudest constituencies calling for international cooperation and, in particular, for a means by which atomic war could be averted. Instead, their work was conscripted into the Cold War.
The decision to lift the veil of secrecy and display ENIAC to the public came at a moment when the nation was engaged in a heated debate about the role of the federal government in supporting scientific research. During the war, at the urging of Vannevar Bush, FDR had created both the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development. (Bush headed both.) Near the end of the war, Roosevelt had asked Bush to prepare a report that, in July 1945, Bush submitted to Truman. It was called “Science, the Endless Frontier.”8