The linkage of science and politics had already taken a form and direction Haldane did not understand. Charlotte noticed the cost. “Nearly all ex-middle-class and middle-aged or old people showed visible signs of the strain. They were underfed, shabby, cowed, unless they belonged to the intellectual élite, such as technicians, teachers, scientists, or politicians.”11 JBS had not read Lenin’s plainspoken letter to Gorky. “The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they’re the brains of the nation. In fact, they’re not its brains, they’re its shit.”12
There were signs that the supposed new “élite” were in as much danger as the old. While the Haldanes were in Moscow for the Congress, the Shakhty Trial was in progress in the Hall of Columns and dominated the news. This was a precursor of the great show trials to come. Engineers, or “specialists,” were accused of “wrecking” mining in the Donetz Basin, in which the North Caucasus town of Shakhty was set. In reality, the Bolsheviks had severely damaged the coal mining industry by neglecting capital investment and imposing a regime of increasing production quotas, while degrading the management of the mines. Fifty-three engineers were selected to take the blame; they were tortured to confess to a fantastic conspiracy involving the former “capitalist mine owners,” who either had been “altered” by the Bolsheviks a decade earlier or had fled abroad, but had, out of spite, somehow persuaded the engineers to deliberately flood the mines. Five of these “specialists” were sentenced to death, including the leading expert in his field, Peter Palchinsky. Forty-four were sent to the rapidly emerging system of forced-labor prison camps that came to be known as the Gulag, and the remainder were acquitted.
We know that JBS followed the Shakhty trial. He would have discussed it with his friend Professor A. N. Bach, who was one of the “public prosecutors” at the trial.13 To illustrate Soviet devotion to science, Haldane told the Fabians that “a shop-window display of books bearing on the trial of the Donetz colliery engineers was ‘starring’ a volume on the relation of geology to economics.” Haldane made no other comment on the case.14 By contrast, the New York Times considered Walter Duranty’s reports, that “most” of the accused deserved their fate, news fit to print.15 “Those of course were the days when we looked to the Soviet Union for light and hope,” according to Haldane’s sister, Naomi. “In the thirties we refused to believe any criticism of the Soviet Union because that put us on the same side as those for whom money power is the standard: not love, not comradeship.”16
3. THE THIRTIES
After his trip to Russia, it would still be some time before Haldane publically displayed the shift in his politics that was under way. He started to refer to the Soviet Union more often, usually in very favorable terms, but took care to leave some room for doubt. An article he published in The Nation in 1931 shows this technique fully fledged. It involved a great deal of “one might be as bad as the other” fudging.
Today the old civilization of Europe which we share is adapting itself with some difficulty to the new conditions created by modern industrialism. But it is also threatened by two new types of civilization on its east and west, namely, communism and Americanism, which claim to be improvements on it. Both of these interest me intensely, and I think that we could copy some features of each with advantage. I should like London to have as good operas as New York1 and as good biological teaching for the average person as Moscow. But I do not desire that London should adopt either of their standards of personal liberty. I follow with immense interest the fierce and sometimes bloody struggles of the American and Russian governments against wets and whites respectively, in which they display a vigor and intolerance to be found only in young and growing civilizations. I am particularly interested in the Five year plan of economic expansion in Russia. If it succeeds it will prove that socialism is a practicable system, and I shall probably live to see some form of socialism adopted in England. If it fails, Russia may revert to capitalism, and socialism all over the world experience a great setback.
I cannot accept the American and Communist ideals because both are too exclusively economic. They agree in taking economic efficiency to be the principal human virtue, even though in one case the benefits go mainly to private individuals, in the other to the state. They are both moving toward the mechanization of life and the standardization of man. Now I am not much interested in machinery, and very much so in life.2
But on July 29, 1931, MI5 intercepted a letter from Maurice Dobb to Rajani Palme Dutt (1896–1974),3 then considered to be the leading theoretician in the Communist Party of Great Britain. Dutt was a founding member of the Party back in 1920 and a Comintern representative. The letter proposed a new journal of Marxist ideology, “to break the hold of bourgeois ideology, to explore and uproot the assumptions underlying current thought and practice.” Dobb insisted that the “small working” editorial board “must be composed of persons completely accepting the Marxist line.” He did not need to explain to Dutt that the Marxist line to be completely accepted was more specifically the line of the Communist Party, as opposed to heretics like the Trotskyites. Dobb also proposed forming a board “to act in an advisory capacity to the editors.” One of the names he suggested was J. B. S. Haldane, along with V. Gordon Childe, Roy Pascal, Piero Sraffa, and Lancelot Hogben, who were all fellow travelers, and the Dutt brothers themselves, a fail-safe addition.4 To be considered worthy of this company was high praise for a Marxist, and suggests that, even if Haldane had not fully realized it yet, he was making the grade. From then on, MI5 considered him to be within the orbit of the Communist Party.
Haldane drew political attention again the following year. On February 8, 1932, a traveling exhibit of posters on Soviet education was hosted at Cambridge in the YMCA hall, at which he was the opening speaker. It is likely that his connection to the exhibit was based on political sympathy. When the YMCA belatedly realized that their hall was being used to display anti-religious propaganda, they closed the exhibit down, resulting in some newspaper coverage.5
The gifted American mathematician Norbert Wiener spent a year’s sabbatical at Cambridge in the early 1930s and got to know Haldane well, after noticing his science-fiction story “The Gold-Makers” in The Strand Magazine.6 Wiener declared that he had “never met a man with better conversation or more varied knowledge.” The Wieners visited Roebuck House. “I used to go swimming with him in a stretch of the River Cam, which passed by his lawn. Haldane used to take his pipe in swimming. Following his example, I smoked a cigar and, as has always been my habit, wore my glasses. We must have appeared to boaters on the river like a couple of great water animals, a long and a short walrus, let us say, bobbing up and down in the stream.”7 Wiener was fiercely left-wing himself, and would later, after Hiroshima, attract attention from the FBI for publically denouncing nuclear-weapon research.
Haldane’s election to the Royal Society in 1932 underlined his professional frustration at Cambridge. Brash, unpopular, and controversial, after a decade he had still not been offered a fellowship there, despite several attempts on his behalf. His habit of stentorian discussion of intimate personal details at High Table, accompanied by a gallon jar of urine from his latest experiment, set down among the college silver, did not help. Nor, one suspects, did his notoriety at the Philosophical Society for cracking open walnuts by placing them on a table and hammering them with his forehead. Attacking organized religion at the Union as a purveyor of fear and shame to the emotional and defective, by means of the dregs of the universities, may have been unsettling to some.8 The Australian anatomist James Thomas Wilson, who had known John Scott Haldane well, considered JBS at this time “clever—sometimes too clever not always profound, & frequently wrongheaded & bitter.”9 Nor had he made much headway in his part-time position, which he had held since 1927, as an adviser on genetics at the John Innes Horticultural Institute. But the Royal
Society praised his work of the past decade on “mathematical evolution” and his swelling output of forty-three published papers, electing him in 1932. His sponsors “from personal knowledge” included F. G. Hopkins, R. A. Fisher, A. V. Hill, R. C. Punnett, and Charles Sherrington.
Although he published hundreds of scientific papers in biochemistry, genetics, cosmology, statistics, ethology, and other fields, and served as a voluble lightning rod for many of his colleagues, Haldane is still known mainly for his work on theoretical population genetics.10 This research ran through the 1920s and early 1930s, resulting in nine major papers and a classic book of published lectures, The Causes of Evolution (1932). The book combined less formal and wider-ranging, sometimes philosophical, commentary with an appendix summarizing the mathematical theory. The problem he addressed had been raised by the rediscovery in 1900 of Mendelism, with its discrete, particulate genes as units of heredity. It was now clear how variation was preserved and then refreshed by recombination. The paradox of blending inheritance, the inexorable homeopathic watering-down of characteristics that had perplexed Darwin, was dissolved. But the question was whether Darwinian natural selection was strong enough to be an important driver of evolutionary change. “A satisfactory theory of natural selection must be quantitative. In order to establish the view that natural selection is capable of accounting for the known facts of evolution we must show not only that it can cause a species to change, but that it can cause it to change at a rate which will account for present and past transmutations.”11
Haldane showed that the natural selection of genes was effective by constructing difference, or “recurrence,” relations between discrete generations of idealized populations, where the variation was acted on by natural selection of those genes. He then solved those equations. His results showed that selection of genetic variation inexorably drove evolution by altering the frequencies of the genes in populations, gradually shifting their distributions. He progressively relaxed the assumptions he had made at first, and then proved that the results still held true for the new recurrence relations that emerged, solving those too. The non-linearity of the recurrences meant that he had to invent methods that gave numerical approximations instead of exact solutions. “Some of my calculations led to surprising results. Thus it appears that, as a result of the survival of the fittest, a population may become less fit, just as the effect of gravity on a spinning top is to make it stand up, instead of falling down.”12 At the same time, R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright were independently working on broadly similar ideas, which meant that there were now three different ways to attack the problem, starting from different assumptions. This successful combination of natural selection with Men delian genetics was called the “Modern Synthesis” by Julian Huxley.13
In 1933, Haldane left his readership at Cambridge to accept a chair as Professor of Genetics, and later Weldon Professor of Biometry, at University College London. Perhaps this setback fed his emerging alienation from the institutions, traditions, and history that had produced him. While Charlotte house-hunted in London, disappointed and frustrated by her Roebuck coterie and supposing herself “a rebel against Cambridge intellectual and social snobbery,” JBS spent three months teaching at Berkeley in California at the end of 1932. They then moved to London in 1933, taking 16 Park Village East, “an almost hidden secret corner of Regent’s Park” facing the canal.14 Charlotte at least was back on home ground. They would be seen more often at Kleinfeldt’s Fitzroy Tavern between Bloomsbury and Soho, in the questionable company of painters such as Augustus John and Nina Hamnett, their old friend Malcom Lowry (when he was sober enough to go out drinking), their jazz-piano-playing former student Martin Case, his brother Ralph, and occasionally Bertrand and Dora Russell.15
At the John Innes Institute, the cytologist Cyril Darlington interacted with Haldane frequently. Darlington found his conversation stimulating and later credited Haldane with helping to spark, “in long youthful discussions,” the ideas that finally led to the exploration of social biology and genetically informed history in his Evolution of Man and Society—“although I parted company with him over communism.”16 In Darlington’s view, Haldane’s reliance on the genetic data gathered by others allowed him to make rapid advances by cross-fertilizing ideas between related fields, but was a “source of weakness” in the long term, since he could not establish his own comprehensive empirical research program; he was restricted to the role of a skilled interpreter, providing “quick effects” and “unusual connexions.” Darlington thought him “induction blind,” blinkered by his unusual talent for deductions from mathematical models, an exactness that often led to excessive caution. Most of all, JBS was always an outsider. “Haldane had his own view of friendship. Men, he had told me a few years earlier, were of no interest to him save in an intellectual sense. This was a view which revealed something more than he could have understood. It showed him as a man emotionally undeveloped: a man lacking that irrational gift of friendship so widely needed and so warmly felt in managing human affairs.”17
Throughout the 1930s, Haldane’s open involvement in politics grew exponentially. The Relief Committee for the Victims of German Fascism and the Berlin Reichstag Fire trial drew him onto public platforms in 1933. At this time, British universities actively recruited persecuted academics fleeing the Nazis. “Herr Hitler supplied me with two first-rate junior colleagues, Drs. Grüneberg and Philip, who were of Jewish origin. I had some difficulty in finding them salaries, but when this was done through the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation, we got a real school of Genetics started in London.”18 In the self-obituary that he recorded for the BBC in 1964, he recalled another refugee, who had applied to him in person. “Among the people who came in was a man called Chain.19 We talked for an hour or two about the work he had been doing, and I said: ‘I don’t think I can help you much, but there is a man called Florey20 at Oxford who is certainly interested in this kind of stuff, and I would advise you to have an interview with him.’ Chain did, and, as perhaps you know, Chain and Florey shared the Nobel Prize for the isolation and preparation of Penicillin.”21
The Nazis were fodder for Willi Münzenberg, who discreetly ran the Relief Committee for the Victims of German Fascism and the subsequent Brown Book campaigns launched to protest the Reichstag Fire trial, at the behest of Moscow.22 Haldane’s appearance on their platforms was coordinated by Münzenberg’s associate, the OGPU agent Otto Katz, whose letters to Harry Pollitt containing the arrangements were intercepted by MI5.23 Haldane may not have been aware then of this backroom direction. Writing a few weeks before her death in 1969, Charlotte Haldane believed he was not all-in by then. “Around 1934–5 J.B.S., in my presence, told Professor Hyman Levy and Dr. Barnet Woolf (both then CP members) that he was a dialectical materialist, but not a communist. They thereupon instructed him that such a position was logically and practically impossible.”24
Haldane’s public positions on foreign and domestic policy, now appearing in print so regularly that it no longer seemed odd for the Professor of Genetics at UCL to volunteer them so eagerly, showed that he kept accurately synchronized with the party line regardless. Until 1936, that was to be officially for “Peace” and against rearmament, with the rationale that only the industrialists would benefit, and that war was “imperialist.” In a piece on the causes of war, which the BBC declined to broadcast but he published in the Daily Herald anyway,25 he elaborated.
I notice that Dean Inge26 has no use for the idea that armament manufacturers ever frighten us to make us buy their wares. . . . If you want to catch war-raisers find out who is making money out of wars and rumours of wars. . . . As long, then, as we have massive unemployment, there is a very good reason for war. Every unemployed man or woman is a cause of war. . . . if we really want peace, we must examine all the causes of war, economic and technical, as well as psychological and political.27
And so the government was advised from University College that they could save money and gain
security and friends by building airraid shelters instead of weapons. “If we had protection of this kind, we could afford to reduce our expenditure on ships and airplanes, and people in other countries would be less afraid of us.”28 Whereas in the 1920s Haldane had settled that “the man with a gift for thought on scientific lines is of more use to his fellows in the laboratory than out of it” and that “the scientific mind is still best employed outside politics,” he was now tackling Professor A. V. Hill in Nature about politically active scientists. “Prof. Hill condemns the irrational character of certain modern political movements. May it not be that the remedy for this lies simply in the application of scientific thought to political and moral problems?” Scientists “have not merely the right, but even sometimes the duty, to interest themselves in more controversial matters.”29 His own contribution, for now, was to start a long-running public clamor for gas masks and especially deep air-raid shelters, a recurring Haldane theme.
In 1936, his father, John Scott Haldane, to whom JBS had been close, died at Oxford of pneumonia, with “a look of intense interest on his face as though he were taking part in some crucial experiment in physiology which had to be monitored.”30 JBS paid tribute to him shortly before his own death. “I am sometimes asked to whom I owe most in my scientific career, and I have no reasonable doubt about that. I owe most to my father, the late J. S. Haldane. He was, like me, only more so, a dabbler.”31 Carrying the ashes back to Scotland, JBS made a scene with his sister, Naomi, and Aunt Bay, insisting on traveling third-class on his own. “We were told what was what about the capitalist class travelling first.” Naomi’s own political sympathies were strongly left-wing, but she still had a sense of the absurd. She noted that JBS now tried to eschew luxuries, “except for the spiritual luxury of open quarrelling with our mother,” which she could never do herself. He began writing a life of his father, but whenever Naomi asked him about it, “he flared into anger.” She interpreted his radicalization as a form of penance for their “class origin.”32
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