Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday
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Within a week, Haldane replied with a cursory and blunt review, pointing out several typos and other slips in the paper and objecting to what he thought were statistical inadequacies, requiring “drastic revision at certain points.”2 Woolf had not, he argued, properly considered the effect of skew distributions (one of Karl Pearson’s favorite topics) when working out correlations, or made other due-diligence checks for normality. Woolf had also failed to cite relevant work recently done by others, and Haldane cautioned him that “If you attack other statisticians you want to avoid a vitreous domicile.” JBS also suggested that the Journal of Hygiene might be a more suitable venue for the paper.
The fury from Woolf that followed gives a rare glimpse, behind the scenes, of the extent to which left-wing politics had crept into scientific practice by this date, and the ways in which the personal networks established by political activities and shared sympathies could be exploited. Hogben replied first, politely regretting the errors pointed out by Haldane, but suggesting that they could easily be fixed, and reiterating that the article was “of first rate social importance” and more original than Haldane had supposed. Then once more he appealed directly to Haldane’s political sensibilities: “I am a simple Englishman, albeit an old-fashioned social democrat, apt to assume that when you address audiences about the social orientation of scientific research in the Soviet Union, you mean what you say, and am therefore anxious to promote socially oriented research in this country.” In response to complaints by Haldane that he was too busy to assist Woolf, Hogben chided, “you are not the only person who is distracted by a variety of responsibilities.” He thought that Biometrika would confer more prestige than the Journal of Hygiene, and the question remained about the shortage of paper.3
Haldane didn’t budge.4 A few weeks later, Woolf lost patience with his old mentor in a ten-page letter that combines contempt for Haldane and modern statistical practice with mordant wit that would not have disgraced Karl Kraus, reinforced with invocations of Communist Party duties. “It pleases you to use your position to make reckless and false accusations of incompetence and ignorance against those who are younger and lower-paid than yourself. You take a perverse pride in this so-called ‘plain speaking’ to those you judge too dependent on your favour to answer you back. Let’s see if you can take a little of what you so lavishly hand out.”5
Woolf then proceeded to pour scorn on Karl Pearson, R. A. Fisher, W. S. Gossett, and modern statistical practice in general—and therefore Haldane in particular—confiding that he would have to reinvigorate the subject himself. Fisher’s foundational Statistical Methods for Research Workers6 he dismissed as a “masterpiece of muddle.” Gosset’s t-test was “out of date since 1929.” While Haldane might “swallow the idealist hocus-pocus behind this approach to experimental data,” “I as a Marxist do not.” “My generation has rightly cleansed its habitations of antimacassars and Pearson’s skew curves, of partial correlation coefficients and aspidistras. You tenderly rescue them from the dustbin of history.” Worse, “all our statistical journals are dominated by two rigid prejudiced unbending autocrats who are determined to defend to the last ditch the established orthodox dogma. I refer of course to R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane.” The finer technical details of Woolf’s critique are beyond our scope here, though we may note that the statistical field has yet to take the slightest notice of it.
Woolf dismissed the errors pointed out by Haldane as either unimportant or mistaken criticism—“has Perfection blundered? Has the Pope, speaking ex cathedra, been found fallible?”—and jibed that he easily found similar errors of a similar order in Haldane’s own book Causes of Evolution (1932): “I think you might consider including ‘to give up sneering’ among your New Year resolutions.” The prior work mentioned by Haldane he waved away as not relevant enough to merit space: “I see no reason, out of all this mass, for singling out the two Wright studies for mention, just because they are the only two you happen to have heard of.” And anyway, “practically all the previous work has employed faulty or inconclusive statistical techniques.” Haldane was “thoroughly wrong and un-Marxist,” having let himself become worked up into a “frothy frenzy of self-complacent superiority.” We can only marvel at the abuse on offer, as for example:
You . . . have a most powerful mind. It can, and does, harbour three or four obsessions at one and the same time. This gives your conversation and writings a certain element of unexpectedness, because, although one can usually predict exactly what you will say on every occasion for several months ahead, one cannot be sure of the order in which you will say them . . . Reliability is a rare and praiseworthy quality. In every speech and letter and almost every article you have composed for months past, you have contrived to convey the astonishing information that, unlike anybody else in Britain, you are on urgent war work. It was with considerable anxiety that I noticed this was not specifically mentioned in your first letter. But you did not keep me in suspense too long.
More damning still was the reiterated suggestion that Haldane was not much of a Marxist after all. “It is a pity you use up so much Marxism in your Daily Worker articles and week-end speeches that you have none to spare for statistics. Otherwise you might, like me, be watching with interest and excitement the emergence of a new and genuinely dialectical materialist theory of statistics out of the needs of practice.” There is accidental bathos in much of this. “As a materialist, you must be aware that publication at the present time depends on a very tangible factor—paper supply.” Then Woolf gets down to more serious business.
The next thing I want to ask is whether you will sponsor my paper for Biometrika, subject to any outstanding differences of opinion about its composition being settled by mutual agreement between us? I am not asking this as a personal favour.
I am not asking, I am demanding. I am putting it to you as a Party duty. It is not only important that my work shall be published, it is important that it be published quickly. It is politically important that it shall be out before the Parliamentary debates on the Government Beveridge proposals. . . . The political importance of such investigations is obvious. . . .
. . . I am demanding, as a political duty, that you sponsor my paper, take or send it to Pearson, and press for early publication. And I demand at any rate a definite reply to this request.
Woolf drew to a close with a sententious attack on Haldane’s contemporary reputation, and some gratuitous advice for his mentor:
May I end by saying that I did not enjoy writing this letter. . . . I have written it as a Party duty. . . . It is bad for the Party that its No. 1 scientist should so behave as to get himself laughed at by those who have no direct dealings with him, and loathed by those who do. It is bad for the Party that a member of its central committee should get the reputation of being always ready to do down or discourage a young worker, that he should publicly humiliate young men specifically gathered to do him honour, that he should give on public platforms exhibitions of indiscipline, egotism and contempt for his audience. It is bad also that he should be called a back number, as I have heard you called more than once, and that people should be discussing when he will retire. . . . Where is the old J.B.S. of Daedalus, of the Tyrol—hell, I’m no good at preaching. Why don’t you get a grip on yourself, stop antagonising those who like you most, realise your potentialities to the Party and to science?
Haldane had a notoriously short temper, but by the time he replied to his former protégé (after offering a preliminary deflection through his secretary) he seems to have mastered it enough to only beg off replying in detail, because he disagreed with so many points that he did not have the time, just as he did not have time to meet Woolf personally.7 There is no way of knowing whether he accepted Woolf’s strictures about “Party duty” or considered himself under orders, but Woolf’s paper was finally published in 1945 in the Journal of Hygiene, just as Haldane had suggested.8 Nevertheless, Haldane always took his Party duty seriously.
Haldane p
layed an active role in the contribution of the Communist Party of Great Britain to the Cold War, on top of campaigning extensively for them in elections and running the editorial board of the Daily Worker. JBS explained to his readers that “We do not take orders from Moscow as, for example, some members of the late Conservative government took orders from New York and Berlin when they were directors of firms belonging to international cartels.”9 The Party viewed his scientific work and active journalism as an extension of his work for them, but it was concerned about the demands made on his time. An intercepted note from Emile Burns to “Dear Sam” underscored this. “As for Haldane’s other commitments—do not raise this one. An article for Nature is Party work of a very high order—I only wish more comrades realised this & acted accordingly.”10
Haldane was often present at street meetings, trying to drum up interest for the Party. Conditions could be difficult, and the public fickle. An MI5 report records one such meeting in late 1946, held in “torrential rain” and attended by “about 30 patrons of the East Street Sunday morning market, sheltering in nearby doorways.” Jimmy Bent opened the meeting, speaking through a loudspeaker attached to a van, but disappointed the damp and dripping audience by announcing that Haldane could not make it because of the bad weather. The van then sped away. A few minutes later it sped back, bearing Haldane, who, it was said, had arrived unexpectedly. JBS boomed through the loudspeaker that police had been discriminating against the Communist Party by arresting their leaders, rather than people like Oswald Mosley. “He said that in 1938 he was present at a communist meeting which was broken up by the fascists. He was himself attacked and took refuge in the doorway of a public house. Some policemen arrived but made no effort to protect him, being more concerned with safeguarding property in the public house, the window of which had been smashed.”11
At another meeting a few weeks later, regarding the International Policy of the Communist Party, he anticipated that it would be at least five years before they were in power, but suggested that until then the Labour government should emulate the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, who were “working for peace” and were trying “not to interfere with internal policies of other countries.” This was proved by the dissolution of the Communist Third International. The problem was that past foreign policies of the UK had made the Soviets suspicious. “We want a socialist policy and not an imperialist policy.”12
Early the next year, in January 1947, he was in New York City to speak at the “Lenin Memorial Meeting” held at Madison Square Gardens—MI5 received a helpful report from a U.S. government source. There was a crowd of 15,000 people, and a backdrop of Lenin silhouettes in black against a red and white background, with the hammer and sickle arranged in a cross with the stars and stripes. Copies of a book on Lenin could be purchased from “comrades of both sexes” in the crowd. As the fifth speaker, Haldane was a figure of some importance, and received heavier applause than most.
“In his speech Haldane stated that the Soviet Union, given thirty years of peace, would by 1975 demonstrate a higher standard of living for its people than any other nation under capitalistic economy. He stated that Lenin was a philosopher whom no scientist could neglect.” It was possible that, if Britain and France got the atom bomb, a small group within them might hold those nations to ransom. Lenin, he believed, would have regarded it dangerous to one’s own citizens to possess atomic bombs.13 A convoluted argument ranked Lenin with George Washington: “one could not say that a non-Russian person was pro-Russian if he revered and loved Lenin for his contributions to mankind, any more than one could label a Latin American as pro-American if he admired George Washington for his contributions.”14
As the Iron Curtain imposed by the Soviets rapidly isolated the occupied countries of Eastern Europe, Haldane was a dependable participant in “Peace” congresses and science get-togethers organized there. “The ‘iron curtain’ is round capitalist science, not Soviet science,” he assured his readers. Before the war was even over, he had been confident that German reconstruction would work out well. “Fortunately the Soviet union, which has suffered far more from German aggression than Britain, let alone the U.S.A. will have a large share in determining the policy adopted.”15 Some idea of his hopes for this process followed: “Germany will only cease to be aggressive when its ruling class is wiped out. I do not mean that they should all be massacred, though I hope that those who are actually responsible for murders will be killed. I mean they should cease to exist as a class. . . . This could be accomplished in several ways, of which I should prefer the method of the Russian Revolution adopted.”16 As for fears for the political freedoms of the residents there (whose countries would all be taken over by Soviet-imposed regimes), the “plain fact is that over most of the world such parliaments as survive are at least as subservient to Big Business as is the Supreme Soviet in Moscow to the Communist Party.”17
Later in 1947, Haldane attended a conference in Czechoslovakia, then under a communist-dominated regime bolstered by the NKVD. Broadcasting on a government radio station there, he enthused about what he had found. “I think the average Czech is better off than the average Englishman. I also think he is slightly happier than the average Englishman and a good deal happier than the average American.” Even though everything had been collectivized, there was “plenty of room for the little man who wants to work for his own profit, provided he fits into the general plan of production.” Touring the coal mines, he discovered that they had completely solved the problem of dust. Every miner lived in a beautiful village and had his own vegetable garden, and even a cow. The only drawback Haldane could find was that pipe tobacco was hard to get, at least for foreigners—and that the latter might not finish their dinners, given that food was so plentiful.18 The communist coup of the following year, during which the prime minister fatally “fell” from his window, and remaining non-communists in the government were purged, went unmentioned on Haldane’s lecture circuit.
Wroclaw in Poland hosted the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in late August 1948. There were some six hundred delegates in total, dominated by fellow travelers ranging from Bertolt Brecht to Pablo Picasso, Hewlett Johnson to Ivor Montagu, and Irène Joliot-Curie to J. B. S. Haldane. The congress was funded by the USSR, which repeatedly throughout the Cold War was to harness international intellectuals to promote “peace”—at all times the main aim of the Eastern Bloc, or so they said. Haldane’s contribution to the congress was unswerving, as he warned those present that American imperialism was the main threat of war in the world. But he worried that the Soviets were not releasing enough information about the superior living conditions in the USSR, which would help win the propaganda war in the West.19 American doctors who did research on bacteriological warfare were, he said, traitors to the human race like the Nazi doctors in Auschwitz. The Politburo was pleased with the results of the Wroclaw congress and immediately voted a large budget to fund the next event, held at Paris in April 1949.
In the meantime Haldane moved on to Hungary, where the International Medical Congress was being held at Budapest on September 11, 1948. This congress was another front for the Soviet-backed “Peace” movement; it passed a resolution that the “fight against common diseases must be linked with the battle for lasting peace,” urging all to “despise the traitors of science and the medical profession who sell themselves and serve the warmongers.” Addressing the delegates, Haldane was grateful for the “opportunity to see the rhythm and élan with which Hungary has carried out the work of reconstruction and surmounted all difficulties caused by the war.” In a subsequent lecture, he explained that racial arguments should not be used “to prevent any human being from enjoying the benefits of higher culture,” for to do so was a “most revolting injustice.” Before he left, he informed the press that he and his wife Helen had wandered about the city without a guide and had been delighted to see “an air of democratic luxury” everywhere. Visitors could see for themselves that the “Iron Curtain” di
d not exist.20 The Haldanes then returned to London via Prague.
Pairing talk of “peace” with proclamations about race had long been a staple of anti-Western propaganda, and Haldane frequently returned to this theme on other occasions—though note his careful restriction to indefensible uses of race. In his novel The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn explained how this technique was used in the unlikeliest ways in the USSR. American visitors to a Gulag camp, including “Mrs. R.,” are treated to a spotless example of prisoner rehabilitation and shown dormitories of respectable prisoners, tolerably spruced up and putting on flesh after being hastily fed and clothed shortly before the visit. Sensing a travesty, the Potemkin prisoners protest excitedly in Russian. When the visitors ask their concierges to translate, their conductors are quick to explain that the prisoners are protesting about the maltreatment of Negros in the United States.21 Similarly, Soviet cartoons portrayed menacing troikas on the march: a hooded Klansman with lynching rope and a club, a gangster policeman, and a white-coated geneticist gleefully brandishing a hypodermic needle and calipers.
Did Haldane really believe this Eastern Bloc fantasy? There is solid evidence that he did not. An intercepted telephone call from the previous year (October 13, 1947) recorded some Communist Party members sharing their concerns over anti-Russian remarks that Haldane had made at a Party meeting held at Muswell Hill. Haldane had complained about the restrictions imposed on science and research behind the Iron Curtain. Although he believed that the Americans had started this, it was “very bad” that the Russians had reciprocated; Britain was left to be squashed between the two parties. Mary Jones wanted something to be done about Haldane, while Kitty Cornforth suggested that Mary could take that up directly with Haldane himself.22