Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  By donating $5,000 to the Ethical Culture Society whenever Adler asked him to, Oppenheimer was not only helping the Society, but also enabling himself to live a more ethically cultured life by shedding some potentially harmful superfluous wealth. ‘The habit of luxurious living is eating into the vitals of society, is defiling the family, and corrupting the state,’ Adler preached. But, of course, opinions will vary as to what exactly the ‘essentials of a civilised life’ are, and therefore how much wealth is required in order to provide them. Where is one to draw the line between the things that are an essential part of being civilised and the things that are mere luxuries?

  Julius and Ella Oppenheimer, though never ostentatious, certainly led what many would consider a luxurious life. Soon after they were married they moved into an apartment at 250 West 94th Street, just down the road from Ella’s mother. It was a fairly large apartment in a fairly smart neighbourhood, but nothing very out of the ordinary. Where, however, they went way beyond what most people would regard as being essential to a civilised life was in the furnishing and decorating of the apartment, particularly with regard to the paintings that adorned its walls. It was in those days customary among wealthy German Jewish New York families to have a private art collection. In this respect, as in so many others, the members of ‘Our Crowd’ tended to veer on the side of conservatism, caution and conformity. Abby, the central character in Emanie Sachs’s Red Damask, sneers that they ‘haven’t enough physical courage to go in for sports like the rich Gentiles, and a little too much brains. So they go in for art collection with an expert to help. They wouldn’t risk a penny on their own tastes.’

  Left to his own devices, Julius might have fallen into the kind of conservatism mocked by Sachs, but in Ella he had his own expert, one who, having studied Impressionism in Paris, was certainly not afraid to risk money on her own taste. The result was an extraordinary private art collection that was to be the pride of the family for generations. It included a Rembrandt etching, paintings by Vuillard, Derain and Renoir, no fewer than three Van Goghs – Enclosed Field with Rising Sun, First Steps (After Millet) and Portrait of Adeline Ravoux – and a ‘blue period’ Picasso, Mother and Child.

  The private contemplation of fine works of art might be seen as the very opposite of the way of life promoted by the Ethical Culture Society, a society that emphasised social responsibility and the importance of the deed, of doing something practical to help those less well off than oneself. This was a society that set up educational programmes for the working class; that put forward practical suggestions for improving the health, the working conditions and the housing of the people of New York; that involved itself in trade-union disputes; and that helped set up a number of nationally important campaigning groups – the National Child Labor Committee, the Civil Liberties Union, the Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, the Society for the Advancement of Colored People, and so on. Spending large sums of money (for even though Julius and Ella were ‘early buyers’ of Van Gogh and Picasso, the cost of these paintings was still considerable) on works that would be seen only by one’s immediate family and one’s closest friends scarcely looks consistent with the ethics that inspired the movement and its many social and political initiatives.

  And yet, when looked at in another way, it was not only consistent with Adler’s vision, but a fulfilment of it. Despite the practical nature of much of the work of the Ethical Culture Society, and despite its repudiation of theology, Adler’s vision was first and foremost a spiritual one. His central motivation was to find a way of preserving the spiritual guidance that religions had provided, even after all faith in religious beliefs had been abandoned. He thought he had found what he was looking for in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, with its emphasis on what Kant called the ‘Moral Law’, which Kant thought all of us would find in our hearts. In a famous passage that Adler quotes in his discourses, Creed and Deed, Kant writes: ‘Two things fill the soul with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence: the star-lit heavens above me, and the moral law within me.’ According to Kant, the moral law is the same for all people at all times and at all places, and according to Adler: ‘The moral law is the common ground upon which all religious and in fact all true men may meet. It is the one basis of union that remains to us amid the clashing antagonisms of the sects . . . all that is best and grandest in [religious] dogma is due to the inspiration of the moral law in man.’

  What, then, is the moral law? In Kant’s formulation, it is this: ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’. This means something like: do as you will be done by; or: do to others what you would be happy to have done to you. Adler’s formulation, however, is rather different: ‘The rule reads, “Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other.”’

  One brings out the ‘spiritual personality’ by awakening in other people the sense of the sublime, of the infinite. Art is able to do this, Adler emphasises, since it is a ‘high endeavour’ and ‘Truly disinterestedness is the distinguishing mark of every high endeavour’. Thus: ‘The pursuit of the artist is unselfish, the beauty he creates is his reward.’ The goal of life is to pursue ‘the Ideal’, which ‘is void of form and its name unutterable’. We can find the Ideal within ourselves – in fact, we can only find it within ourselves – through the discovery and appreciation of the moral law; and the ‘high endeavours’, of art, science and public service, can help us find it. So the acquisition of fine works of art does not, after all, constitute ‘luxurious living’, but rather a means of fulfilling the ‘Moral Law’.

  It was in an environment governed by this idiosyncratic version of the moral law that a concerted effort would be made to ‘bring out the spiritual personality’ of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

  * * *

  fn1 Adler resigned as president of the New York Society in 1882, though of course he remained – as he is described on Julius and Ella’s marriage certificate – ‘Leader of the Society for Ethical Culture’.

  2

  Childhood

  IT WAS IN the extraordinarily tasteful and expensively furnished apartment in West 94th Street that, on 22 April 1904, J. Robert Oppenheimer was born. To help look after the baby, the Oppenheimers employed a nursemaid and, later, a governess. They also employed a cook, a chauffeur and three live-in maids to help Ella look after the apartment. There was no hint of decadence or overindulgence, but it was a luxurious life and a very sheltered one, too. ‘My life as a child did not prepare me in any way for the fact that there are cruel and bitter things,’ Oppenheimer later recalled. His parents, particularly his mother, saw to it that everything and everyone with whom he came into contact was refined, tasteful and pleasant. From everything discordant, ugly or unpleasant he was shielded and protected. Above all, there was an atmosphere of moral rectitude. He was, he later considered, ‘an unctuous, repulsively good little boy’, his upbringing having offered him ‘no normal, healthy way to be a bastard’.

  Oppenheimer grew up surrounded by people trying to be and, as far as it is possible to tell, succeeding in being good. ‘Not religion as a duty,’ ran one of Adler’s more austere maxims, ‘but duty as a religion.’ There was some levity. Julius is remembered by one of Robert’s friends as ‘a hearty and laughing kind of person’. But the general tone was one of earnestness and propriety, Julius’s attempts at joviality at the dinner table – sometimes he would even burst into song – being met with acute embarrassment by his wife and son. A friend later recalled that Robert Oppenheimer would often be very critical of his father, particularly of what he perceived to be his vulgarity. On the other hand, he was never known to utter a word of criticism of his mother. Ella Oppenheimer was, as far as her son was concerned, beyond any kind of reproach. She, for her part, seemed determined to ensure that her family lived in a world from which all coarseness, vulgarity and discord had been expunged. She was, a family friend recalled, ‘a woman who would never allow anyth
ing unpleasant to be mentioned at the table’. She saw to it that Robert, and later his younger brother Frank, had as little as possible to do with the outside world. When their hair needed cutting, a barber came to the apartment; when they needed medical attention, a doctor was called for; when they needed to go anywhere, the chauffeur would take them in the family limousine. There was, Frank later said, ‘a general distrust of the pollution of the outside world’.

  Frank was not born until 1912, when Robert was eight – too late to be a childhood companion. When Robert was not yet four, however, in March 1908, Ella gave birth to her second son, Lewis Frank Oppenheimer, who lived for just forty-five days. His death was one of those unpleasant things that was never mentioned, and a main cause of the air of melancholy that seemed to pervade the Oppenheimer household. One of Robert’s friends described Ella as ‘a mournful person’, and one has the feeling that she never stopped mourning the death of her second son. Robert, naturally, had no memories of Lewis, but the ghost of his younger brother haunted the family, and therefore the apartment in which he grew up, in a way that was all the more pervasive because it was unacknowledged. After Lewis’s death, Ella, who was always an anxious mother, fretted terribly about any little illness that Robert caught. As Robert, who was never robust, either as a child or as a man, caught a large number of colds and other childhood illnesses, she fretted a great deal. She would only rarely allow him to play with other children, for fear of exposure to disease and infection. As a result, Robert grew up alone, his intellectual interests and abilities developing well beyond his years, but his social skills remaining stunted, thereby creating a sense of separation between himself and other people that, he said, he managed to overcome only in the spring of 1926 at the age of twenty-two.fn2

  His parents did everything they could to stimulate Robert’s intellectual and artistic interests. ‘I think my father was one of the most tolerant and human of men,’ Oppenheimer later said. ‘His idea of what to do for people was to let them find out what they wanted.’ In the case of Robert, whose precocious intelligence was manifest from a very early age, this meant providing him with everything in which he showed any interest. When, at about the age of five, he declared an interest in ancient and modern buildings and expressed a desire to become an architect, his father gave him photographs and prints of the great buildings of the world, together with books on architecture. Responding to his mother’s expectations of him, Oppenheimer next declared that he wanted to be first a poet and then a painter, and received in turn volumes of poetry, his own easel and an abundance of brushes and paint. In deference to his mother’s wishes, he took piano lessons but they were a great torture for him. The lessons stopped when Robert came down with some childhood illness or other and his mother asked him how he felt. ‘Just as I do when I have to take piano lessons,’ he replied, no doubt realising that the lessons would henceforth be cancelled.

  The young Oppenheimer had everything a child could wish for – except the thing that most children wish for above all: the company of other children. So, though he acquired impeccable adult manners from an early age and was extremely (perhaps even unnaturally) well behaved, he never experienced the simple childhood pleasures of rambunctiousness and mischief that arise from playing with childhood companions. There was very little fun to be had in the ethically cultured, artistically refined and intellectually advanced Oppenheimer household. In place of fun there was a great deal of achievement, fuelled by expectations that were absurdly high and felt by Oppenheimer to be even higher than they actually were. He always felt as if he were letting his parents down, if not intellectually, then morally. ‘I repaid my parents’ confidence in me,’ he once remarked, ‘by developing an unpleasant ego which I am sure must have affronted both children and adults who were unfortunate enough to come into contact with me.’

  In 1909, Ella’s mother, now elderly and ailing, moved into the Oppenheimer apartment. In the summer of that year, Robert, then aged five, was introduced to his father’s side of the family during a visit to Germany. It was then that he met Benjamin Oppenheimer, who, after watching Robert playing with some building blocks, presented him with an encyclopaedia of architecture – a strange gift for a five-year-old, and one that is hard to square with Robert’s recollection of Benjamin as an illiterate peasant. Benjamin’s other gift was to have a deep influence on the young Robert: a box of rocks, each labelled with its Latin and German names, obviously designed to be the starting point for a collection of minerals. Robert took the bait. Collecting and studying minerals became, and remained throughout his childhood, his main hobby.

  What little contact Robert had with other children was restricted to those he met through the Ethical Culture Society. Every Sunday the Society held a meeting that had something of the character of a weekly religious service, except that there were no prayers. At these meetings organ music was played and Felix Adler or a guest speaker would give a lecture, usually of a sermon-like nature. Julius and Ella, naturally, were regular attenders and, while they were at the meeting, Robert would attend the Sunday School, one of the rare occasions at which he was able to mix with other children. Until 1910, these meetings (attendance at which would sometimes reach a thousand) were held in Carnegie Hall, but in October 1910 the Society proudly opened its new, specially commissioned building at 2 West 64th Street, on the corner with Central Park West. At the dedication of the new building, with his parents in the audience, Robert, then aged six, joined the other children from the Society’s Sunday School in a presentation on ethical behaviour, which was followed by communal singing led by the children.

  When Robert started school in September 1911, at the relatively late age of seven (he entered in the second grade), he would already have known many of the children with whom he would be taught, since the school chosen by his parents was, inevitably, the Ethical Culture School, located at 33 Central Park West (just round the corner from the new Society hall). Since the very beginning of the Ethical Culture Society, Adler had seen education as one of its principal activities, and in 1878 he set up a free kindergarten for working-class children. This proved to be very successful and three years later it was expanded into a tuition-free elementary school called the Workingman’s School, which, Adler announced in his opening address, aimed to provide working-class children with ‘a broad and generous education, such as the children of the richest might be glad in some respect to share with them’.

  As it turned out, the rich were glad to share the excellent education offered by the school, and, indeed, were prepared to pay for the privilege. So in 1890 the school (which had run into grave financial difficulties) started admitting fee-paying students, drawn mainly from the affluent families of the Ethical Culture Society who, because of anti-Semitic prejudice, were finding it impossible to place their children in the best private schools. Within a few years of the introduction of fee-paying students the school changed its character completely, replacing its original mission of providing a model education for the poor with the rather different aim of educating and training future leaders of society in the ideals of the Ethical Culture movement. By the time it moved into its Central Park West building in 1902, only 10 per cent of its students were working-class children on scholarships. Most of the other 90 per cent were the children of Ethical Culture Society members, attracted not only by an education informed by the ideals of the Ethical Culture movement, but also by the quality of education on offer at the school, which by then was widely recognised as one of the best private schools in the country. Having by this time added a high school to the original elementary school, the Ethical Culture School was seen – by an increasing number of middle-class gentiles as well as by the German Jewish community – as an ideal preparation for admission to the top universities in the country.

  Despite the growing number of gentiles among its students, the school in Oppenheimer’s day was still widely viewed as a place for the education of Jewish children. The children themselves, however, came largel
y from families who, like the Oppenheimers, were assimilated to such an extent that their identity as Jewish was no longer entirely clear. One of Oppenheimer’s classmates, asked years later for her recollections of him, agreed that Oppenheimer felt uneasy about his Jewishness, but added: ‘We all did.’ In its publicity material, the school emphasised its role in American culture, particularly in American democracy. ‘The school is to be a nursery of “re-formers”’, its catalogue announced, with the aim of training people who would provide the leadership required to reform society so that it answered to the needs of, and expressed ‘the ideal aspirations of’, American democracy.

  The school, then, saw itself as shaping the minds of those who would in later life lead America, whether in politics, business, science or the arts. One might regard this as the application to the entire country of Adler’s version of the moral law: ‘Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other.’ The school would help America to realise its potential and become itself. Then, with its leaders trained in the ideals of Ethical Culture, America would at last fulfil the hopes of the German Jews who had gone there in the 1840s, expecting to find the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals. Even before he founded the Ethical Culture Society, when he was still a professor at Cornell, Adler had developed an exalted view of American democracy, which, in tracing a direct line between the Jewish prophetic tradition and the American democratic ideal, attributed to the latter a religious significance. In his first set of Sunday-morning lectures, he declared: ‘To larger truths America is dedicated.’ America could, he argued, provide both political and spiritual liberty and so break the ‘spiritual fetters that load thy sons and daughters!’ ‘All over this land,’ he announced, ‘thousands are searching and struggling for the better, they know not what.’ It was his role, the role of the Ethical Culture Society and of the students trained in its school, to teach those thousands what, exactly, they were searching for and thereby to define and exemplify what Adler was fond of calling the ‘American ideal’.