In 1933 Machen’s simmering concern about religious progressivism (or “liberalism,” as he generally termed it) in the Presbyterian mission field motivated him to form the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. The move prompted the mainline Presbyterian Church to excommunicate him, so in 1936 he created what later became known as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He was, in many ways, a Presbyterian Martin Luther—a man who boldly challenged the intellectual corruption of the very church that had become a central part of his own life.
“Radical Libertarian”
Machen didn’t much care for politics. He saw it as inherently stifling and anti-individual. The idea that true Christianity was to even a small degree compatible with any form of statism—socialism, communism, or fascism—was, to Machen, a dangerous fiction. Historian George Marsden, in his book Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, labels Machen’s political views “radical libertarian” because the theologian “opposed almost any extension of state power.” Machen might have been happy with the description, but he would have seen it as a natural extension of the teachings of Christ, who advocated character building and spiritual renewal, not state power.
Although Woodrow Wilson had been a close family friend dating back to their Princeton days, Machen spoke out against U.S. involvement in World War I and condemned the subsequent Versailles Treaty as “an attack on international peace” that would produce war after war “in a wearisome progression.” He deemed Wilson’s overseas interventions as starry-eyed adventurism. He denounced conscription, arguing that the draft was an assault on freedom and a “brutal interference” with the individual and with family life.
When a proposed child labor amendment to the Constitution grabbed headlines in the 1920s, Machen slammed it as “one of the most cruel and heartless measures that have ever been proposed in the name of philanthropy.” He understood the economics of a measure outlawing any employment for children under the age of eighteen: it would either drive child labor underground and into deplorable conditions or relegate poor families to even greater poverty. More important to Machen was what the amendment represented: a federal usurpation of a matter more properly left to the states, localities, and families.
At a time when the overwhelming majority of Presbyterians supported alcohol prohibition, Machen fought it. Scripture cautions against inebriation, he argued, but nowhere does it suggest government coercion as the solution.
He objected to Bible reading and prayer in public schools because they mixed politics with faith; Christians, he said, should form their own schools. He believed it was foolish to think that government would be anything but a soul-crushing, collectivist mediocrity in the classroom:
Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.
In 1979 President Jimmy Carter signed the bill that cursed the country with the U.S. Department of Education. If Carter, a Sunday school teacher, had read Machen’s warnings from more than a half century earlier, he might have avoided that colossal mistake. In 1926 Machen testified before Congress against a proposal to create such a federal department. His remarks, positively prophetic in light of more recent history, deserve an extensive excerpting here:
The department of education … is to promote uniformity in education. That uniformity in education under central control it seems to me is the worst fate into which any country can fall.…
It is to be opposed … because it represents a tendency which is no new thing, but has been in the world for at least 2,300 years, which seems to be opposed to the whole principle of liberty for which our country stands. It is the notion that education is an affair essentially of the State; that the children of the State must be educated for the benefit of the State; that idiosyncrasies should be avoided, and the State should devise that method of education which will best promote the welfare of the State.…
The principle of this bill, and the principle of all the advocates of it, is that standardization in education is a good thing. I do not think a person can read the literature of advocates of measures of this sort without seeing that that is taken almost without argument as a matter of course, that standardization in education is a good thing. Now, I am perfectly ready to admit that standardization in some spheres is a good thing. It is a good thing in the making of Ford cars; but just because it is a good thing in the making of Ford cars it is a bad thing in the making of human beings, for the reason that a Ford car is a machine and a human being is a person. But a great many educators today deny the distinction between the two, and that is the gist of the whole matter.…
I do not believe that the personal, free, individual character of education can be preserved when you have a federal department laying down standards of education which become more or less mandatory to the whole country.…
I believe that in the sphere of the mind we should have absolutely unlimited competition.… A public education that is not faced by such competition of private schools is one of the deadliest enemies to liberty that has ever been devised.… I think that when it comes to the training of human beings, you have to be a great deal more careful than you do in other spheres about preservation of the right of individual liberty and the principle of individual responsibility; and I think we ought to be plain about this—that unless we preserve the principles of liberty in this department there is no use in trying to preserve them anywhere else. If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might as well give them everything else as well.
“Faithful unto Death”
In December 1936 Machen traveled to North Dakota for several speaking engagements. In the exceptional cold, he contracted pleurisy, which then developed into pneumonia. He died on New Year’s Day, 1937. He was only fifty-five.
Machen is buried in a cemetery in his hometown of Baltimore, where the modest stone over his grave declares simply his name, degree, dates, and the phrase “Faithful unto Death” in Greek.
Lessons from J. Gresham Machen
Don’t avoid intellectual combat: J. Gresham Machen was a man of both intellect and principle. He spoke out against the policies of family friend Woodrow Wilson, fought what he regarded as theological apostasy among his colleagues, and challenged religious progressivism even when his critiques led to excommunication.
Oppose extensions of state power: Machen was one of those all-too-rare Christian thinkers who understood that Christians should actively resist unwarranted encroachments by the earthly state on matters of spirituality and personal choice.
20
Marie Curie
Trailblazing Scientist
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize—in fact, to this day she remains the only woman to win two—and the first person of either sex to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. These achievements make it all the more noteworthy that her undergraduate education took place at an illegal private institution.
When I learned that the Polish-born and naturalized French scientist Marie Curie attended an “underground” university in the 1880s in Warsaw, I immediately recalled a personal experience. In 1986, while embedded with the antigovernment resistance in communist Poland, I met people who were taking classes at such a place, as well as others who had received their illegal degrees at underground commencement exercises. Little did I know then that Poles have a storied history in what could be termed “educational independence.”
A hundred years before my visit to Poland, Curie’s college years began at the so-called Flying University (sometimes known as the Floating University). The nation of Poland had formally disappeared in 1795, partitioned for the next 123 years into regions of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia. Warsaw was under Russian occupation when the Flying University beg
an there in 1885. Poles wanted to avoid “Russification” and desired to teach ideas that the Russian authorities officially censored, so they did what daring people do: they published books and created educational programs and institutions without government approval.
Both sides of Marie Curie’s family were involved in resistance movements against occupiers and suffered property seizures and hassles with the police for years, which probably explains her lifelong skepticism of central authority and claims of “consensus.” Her father, a teacher and scientist, was punished and demoted by the Russians for holding views contrary to the powers that be. You can understand, then, why she felt compelled after attending the Flying University to emigrate to France at the age of twenty-four and earn her graduate degrees in a freer country. This was a young woman determined to pursue her passion for scientific truth no matter what the regime or consensus imposed. She once said:
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms, machines, gearings, even though such machinery also has its beauty. Neither do I believe that the spirit of adventure runs any risk of disappearing in our world. If I see anything vital around me, it is precisely that spirit of adventure, which seems indestructible and is akin to curiosity.
Perseverance and Confidence
In 1893, two years after her arrival in Paris, the brilliant but penniless Marie Skłodowska (Curie’s maiden name) earned the first of two master’s degrees at the University of Paris. It was in physics; she would collect the second, in mathematics, a year later. Over the next forty years she would earn a PhD in physics from the University of Paris and receive almost twenty honorary doctorates from prestigious institutions in half a dozen countries on both sides of the Atlantic.
Words of Wisdom from Marie Curie
“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves.”
Apparent to all who came to know her was her insatiable drive to excel and achieve. “Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that?” she said. “We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”
In 1894 she met a young scientist named Pierre Curie, and in 1895 they married. When a friend offered to gift her a dress for the occasion, she instructed: “I have no dress except the one I wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.” She wore that dark blue dress in the lab for many years.
When it came time to settle on an area of research for her PhD, Curie decided to explore the source of the recently discovered “radiance” or energy emitted by the rare element uranium. What was the nature of these rays (which she would ultimately call radioactivity)? To what purposes might they be employed?
Biographer Robert William Reid notes that though Pierre later put aside his own work and assisted Marie in her initial discoveries, she set the agenda:
The [research] idea was her own; no one helped her formulate it, and although she took it to her husband for his opinion she clearly established her ownership of it. She later recorded the fact twice in her biography of her husband to ensure there was no chance whatever of any ambiguity. It [is] likely that already at this early stage of her career [she] realized that … many scientists would find it difficult to believe that a woman could be capable of the original work in which she was involved.
Her task required the acquisition of a large quantity of uranium ore known as pitchblende from mines in Bohemia. That posed a seemingly insurmountable cost problem, but Marie overcame it through shrewd bargaining and the use of her and Pierre’s meager savings. Their daughter Eve Curie would later write of this pivotal moment in her parents’ lives:
They were not so foolish as to ask for official credits [or subsidies].… If two physicists on the scent of an immense discovery had asked the University of Paris or the French government for a grant to buy pitchblende residue, they would have been laughed at. In any case, their letter would have been lost in the files of some office, and they would have had to wait months for a reply, probably unfavorable in the end.
The “lab” in which the Curies worked was nothing more than a shed that had once been a medical school dissection room. It leaked when it rained and offered no more ventilation than the single door would provide. But it was there that Marie, with the aid of Pierre, began her work on the sacks of imported ore. In the process, she proved that the radiation came from the uranium atom itself and not from an interaction between uranium and something else. She then discovered that other elements, such as thorium, emitted radiation, too.
Curie was convinced that elements as yet unidentified were also sources of radioactivity within the pitchblende ore. In 1896 she ascertained the presence of one and named it polonium in honor of her native Poland. The existence of the other, which she detected and called radium, remained to be proven. In 1902 she succeeded in isolating a decigram of pure radium—a scientific breakthrough of massive significance. Before the year was out, she also announced a finding that would have implications for the next century of medical treatment: when exposed to radium, cancer cells were more vulnerable than normal cells.
In June 1903 Marie was awarded her doctorate from the University of Paris. That same month, she and Pierre were invited to present a paper on radioactivity at the Royal Institution in London, but as a woman she was required to be silent while Pierre spoke for them both. Six months later, the couple were declared joint winners, along with a third scientist, of a Nobel Prize in Physics “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena.”
In 1906 tragedy struck when Pierre was killed in an accident with a horse-drawn carriage, leaving Marie with two small children. The University of Paris had been ready to offer Pierre a teaching position. They gave it to Marie instead. She was determined to use it to pay tribute to her late husband.
The Business of Saving Lives
No doubt Pierre would have been proud of Marie’s subsequent achievements. Her work grew immensely in international stature. She founded and headed the Radium Institute, which advanced scientific study of radium specifically and radiation in general. She was awarded a second Nobel in 1911 “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element.”
Curie did not keep her discoveries confined to the laboratory. When World War I broke out, the two-time Nobel Prize winner developed mobile x-ray units to bring this vital medical equipment right to the front. Her mobile devices treated more than a million wounded soldiers during the war, saving many thousands of lives.
Marie Curie died in 1934 at the age of sixty-six. The cause of death was a form of anemia brought on by exposure to the very radiation she had discovered. To this day her papers from the 1890s—and even her cookbook—are so contaminated that they’re stored in lead boxes to be viewed only by scientists in protective clothing.
Curie’s discoveries set physics in a new direction by opening the door to atomic energy and the controlled use of radiation for medical treatment. With good reason she is regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the modern age.
Lessons from Marie Curie
Persevere with confidence: A tireless, driven achiever, Marie Curie was responsible for some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the modern age. She won two Nobel Prizes at a time when science was almost exclusively the province of men. She had the confidence to overcome all obstacles.
Put your gifts to work for others: Curie advised that “we must b
elieve that we are gifted for something.” Her scientific findings led to profound advances in medical treatments, and she personally developed mobile x-ray units that saved thousands of lives during the First World War.
21
Prohibition’s Foes
Still Teaching Lessons Today
Barely a century ago, the hatchet-wielding “temperance” fanatic Carrie Nation smashed bars and saloons in Kansas and Texas. She was arrested at least thirty times for her self-described “hatchetations.” Some of the targets of her rage posted signs in their establishments that read, “All Nations Welcome Except Carrie.”
Nation died in 1911. Less than a decade later, her “good intentions” were realized when the federal government attempted to accomplish with guns and police what she had so eagerly pursued with a hatchet.
Carrie Nation was not a hero. Years before she appeared on the scene, former president Rutherford B. Hayes wisely rejected the violent tactics of the temperance movement in an 1883 diary entry: “Personally I do not resort to force—not even the force of law—to advance moral reforms. I prefer education, argument, persuasion, and above all the influence of example—of fashion. Until these resources are exhausted I would not think of force.”
So if not Carrie Nation, who is the real hero of this story? Not one person but many: all those Americans who opposed Prohibition and thereby paved the way for its repeal after almost fourteen years of futility and violence. We have much to learn from them today.
The Futility of Prohibition
It took a constitutional amendment (the Eighteenth) and a law of Congress (the Volstead Act) to outlaw the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in January 1920 and another constitutional amendment (the Twenty-First) to undo them in December 1933. In the intervening years, Americans paid an awful price for a fruitless effort to stamp out alcohol. No one disputes that some people will abuse just about anything, even the freedom of speech. But the answer to the sins of the irresponsible few isn’t to outlaw the private, personal, and peaceful choices of the many.
Real Heroes Page 13