Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  To Oppenheimer, the Chaveses, their history, the countryside of northern New Mexico and, especially, Katherine herself were all excitingly and wonderfully grand and he became infatuated. According to Fergusson, Oppenheimer would bring flowers to Katherine ‘all the time’ and would ‘flatter her to death whenever he saw her’. Katherine seems to have enjoyed the attention and to have returned it. ‘For the first time in his life,’ Smith later recalled of the time they spent in Los Pinos, Oppenheimer ‘found himself loved, admired, sought after’. Inspired by Katherine’s example, Oppenheimer developed a love of horse riding and, together with the rest of the group, explored the slopes and valleys of the area around Cowles; this included – most momentously from a historical point of view – the Pajarito Plateau, upon which stands what is now the town of Los Alamos, but which in the summer of 1922 contained nothing but the Los Alamos Ranch School. A lasting memento of the horse rides Oppenheimer and Katherine took together is what to this day is still called ‘Lake Katherine’, one of the highest lakes in New Mexico, which is contained in a cirque (what in England would be called a coombe) just below Santa Fe Baldy, one of the tallest summits of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. On one of their rides together, Oppenheimer and Katherine, or so the story goes, discovered this hitherto unknown lake.

  By the time he and Smith left New Mexico, Oppenheimer was a skilled and proud horseman and was, it seems, determined to prove himself to be as adventurous and as brave as the ancestors of the Fergussons and the Chaveses. On their way back to New York, Oppenheimer and Smith decided to ride on horseback through Colorado. The question thus arose as to which route they should take. Oppenheimer’s suggestion was that they should take a trail that led through the highest pass of the snowcapped mountains, a route Smith felt sure would lead to their death by freezing. Eventually they settled the matter by tossing a coin, and, as Smith later commented: ‘Thank God I won.’

  On his return to New York, Oppenheimer seemed to everyone who knew him a changed person. His old classmate Jane Didisheim remarked: ‘He had become less shy. I think he had become gayer also.’ But his mother’s hopes that a romance might develop between Jane and Robert were forlorn. Not only was Robert infatuated with a very different kind of woman back west; but he had, emotionally at least, severed himself completely from ‘Our Crowd’ and become a different person – one who, he hoped, would be fit for Harvard.

  * * *

  fn4 It is possible, I think, that Oppenheimer gave the name ‘Trinity’ to the first atomic-bomb test site in Alamagordo – not far from Albuquerque and Roswell – in memory of the New Mexican ‘troika’ that he had joined in the summer of 1922.

  fn5 In the South-west the word was used to describe anyone who was not either of Spanish or of Native American ancestry, so Germans, Norwegians, Danes, and so on, were as much ‘Anglos’ as English people were.

  4

  Harvard

  ‘THE SUMMER HOTEL that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.’

  These words were written not, as one might think, by an anti-Semitic commentator on the ‘Seligman Affair’, but by Abbot Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard. And they were written not in the 1870s, but in the early summer of 1922, just a few months before Oppenheimer was due to take up his place at Harvard to study chemistry. During that summer, Lowell sparked an acrimonious nationwide controversy by announcing publicly that he was seeking measures to restrict the number of Jews that his university admitted. In the previous decade, the proportion of Jews at Harvard had risen sharply from 10 to 20 per cent. This was much larger than at most of the other Ivy League universities – at Yale the figure was 7 per cent and at Princeton a mere 3 per cent – and among both staff and students there was growing talk about the ‘Jewish problem’. Harvard, it was said, was going the same way as the University of Columbia in New York City, where, by 1920, 40 per cent of the students were Jewish. For Lowell, the vice president of the Immigrant Restriction League and a firm believer in the superiority of both the Christian religion and the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’, this was an intolerable prospect.

  Unlike his famous predecessor, Charles Eliot, who had used his presidency to establish and build upon Harvard’s international reputation as a leading centre of academic research, Lowell’s first priority was to maintain and, if possible to increase, Harvard’s reputation for undergraduate teaching, and, in particular, its reputation for educating students who would go on to be leaders in their chosen field, not just in academic life, but also in commerce, law and politics. His models were Oxford and Cambridge, universities that recruited students of good ‘breeding’ and equipped them with the learning, the manners, the contacts and the confidence to take their place at the very head of society.

  The growth in the proportion of Jews at Harvard threatened this vision of what the college ought to be by raising the possibility of ‘WASP flight’, the desertion of the college by the families of the Protestant elite, something that had already occurred at Columbia. To prevent this, Lowell believed that it was necessary, openly and frankly, to restrict the numbers of Jews – that is, to introduce a quota system. It was no good, he thought, trying to limit the number of Jews by adopting criteria, whether of academic ability or of behaviour, which gentiles would pass but Jews would fail, since there simply were no such criteria. The problem was not that Jews were not good students, or that they were bad people; it was that, just by being Jews and for no other reason, they were unacceptable, except in small enough numbers, to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ elite that Lowell’s Harvard sought to attract.

  Lowell’s initial move to restrict the number of Jews was an attempt to persuade Harvard’s admissions committee to adopt discriminatory procedures, imposing higher standards on members of the ‘Hebrew race’ than on other applicants, so that only those ‘Hebrews . . . possessed of extraordinary intellectual capacity together with character above criticism’ would be allowed in. When the chairman of the admissions committee refused to adopt such a fundamental change without the explicit assent of Harvard’s faculty, Lowell was forced to debate the issue, first with his academic colleagues and then with the public at large. At a faculty meeting on 23 May 1922, Lowell managed to pass a motion calling upon the admissions committee to ‘take into account the . . . proportionate size of racial and national groups in the membership of Harvard College’, but, within a week, he received four separate petitions asking him to call a special meeting to allow the faculty to reconsider a move that one petition described as ‘a radical departure from the spirit and practice of the College’.

  The subsequent special faculty meeting, held on 2 June, agreed to rescind the motion passed on 23 May, but left in place a decision to appoint a special committee ‘to consider principles and methods for more effectively sifting candidates for admission’. Lest anyone was in any doubt about what this meant, Lowell added a statement to the minutes of the meeting making it explicit that ‘the primary object in appointing a special Committee was to consider the question of Jews’. By now, the admissions policies of Harvard were national news, reported in all the main newspapers and the subject of much comment, a good deal of which was vehemently critical of Lowell’s methods, aims and motives.

  A few weeks after the announcement that the special committee was to be appointed, the American Hebrew printed an illuminating exchange of letters between Lowell and the lawyer and Harvard graduate A. A. Benesch. Reminding Lowell that Jacob H. Schiff, Felix Warburg ‘and other eminent Jews of New York City’ (including Benesch himself) had been important contributors to Harvard’s endowment fund, the lawyer told Lowell:

  Students of the Jewish faithfn6 neither demand nor expect any favors at the hands of the university; but they do expect, and have a right to demand, that they be admitted upon equal terms with students of other faiths and that scholarship and character be the only standards for admiss
ion.

  In reply, Lowell pointed out the existence of ‘a rapidly growing anti-Semitic feeling in this country’ and claimed that the strength of anti-Semitism among students increased as the number of Jews increased, and that therefore it was best tackled by keeping the proportion of Jews small. Benesch’s riposte to this was devastating: ‘Carrying your suggestion to its logical conclusion would inevitably mean that a complete prohibition against Jewish students in the colleges would solve the problem of anti-Semitism.’

  Lowell’s official response to the controversy he had unleashed was to try to present himself as someone tolerant of minorities, whose chief concern was to establish and maintain racial harmony. ‘We want,’ he insisted, ‘to have both Gentiles and Jews in all colleges and universities and strive to bring the two races together.’ Unfortunately for Lowell, a rather franker version of his views was made public in December 1922, when details of a private conversation that he had had on the matter with Victor Kramer, a Harvard alumnus, were published in the New York Times. The real answer to the problem, Lowell told Kramer, was for Jews to abandon their religion, recognising that it had been superseded by Christianity. ‘To be an American,’ he insisted, ‘is to be nothing else.’ If the proportion of Jews at Harvard could be kept down to about 15 per cent, Lowell reasoned, then Harvard could ‘absorb’ them – that is, turn them into good Americans.

  Throughout Oppenheimer’s first academic year at Harvard, while the special committee appointed in June continued to deliberate, Lowell did his best behind the scenes to keep the numbers of Jews down by whatever means he could. As Benesch had noted, the proportion of scholarships won by Jewish candidates was, at 50 per cent, much greater than the overall proportion of Jews at college, suggesting a disproportionate degree of success when they were allowed to compete on equal terms. Though he had failed to persuade the admissions committee to impose quotas, Lowell had more luck with the dean’s office, which was responsible for the allocation of scholarships, persuading it to ensure that the percentage of scholarships allotted to Jews did not exceed the total percentage of Jewish students, and thus, in effect, imposing a quota of about 20 per cent.

  Another measure was designed specifically to identify Jews among applicants, in order to ensure that Harvard did not unknowingly admit Jews. Starting in the autumn of 1922, all applicants were required to state their ‘race and color’, their religion, the maiden name of their mother, the birthplace of their father and to answer the question: ‘What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully.)’ As a double check, the school from which the applicant was applying was also asked to indicate the applicant’s ‘religious preference so far as known’.

  On 7 April 1923, the Committee on Methods of Sifting Candidates for Admissions finally delivered its report. The committee had thirteen members, three of whom were Jews, including Paul Sachs, the uncle of Oppenheimer’s Ethical Culture classmate, Inez Pollak. The members had been carefully chosen, not least the Jewish members, to be as sympathetic as possible to Lowell’s position. Sachs, for example, was seen as an upper-class German Jew and thus ‘far removed from the element’ (primarily the Russian and Polish Jews) that Lowell was targeting. Despite this, the committee’s final report provided little support for Lowell. Its principal recommendation was that ‘no departure be made from . . . the policy of equal opportunity for all regardless of race and religion’.

  In the short term, therefore, Lowell’s plans were thwarted and the rise in the proportion of Jewish students was allowed to continue for another couple of years. By 1924 it was 25 per cent and the following year 27.6 per cent. In 1926, after years of persistent fighting, Lowell decided to achieve through stealth what he had failed to achieve openly. When Dean Mendell of Yale visited Harvard that year, he reported: ‘They are . . . going to reduce their 25 per cent Hebrew total to 15 per cent or less by simply rejecting without detailed explanation. They are giving no details to any candidate any longer.’

  The Harvard that eighteen-year-old Oppenheimer entered in the autumn of 1922, then, was a college in the midst of one of the most rancorous controversies in its history, whose president had revealed himself to be fully prepared to pander to the anti-Semitism of some parts of American society in order to pursue his vision of Harvard as an institution for the education of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ elite. And yet, in the letters that Oppenheimer wrote from Harvard, at least those that survive, he never once mentions, or even so much as alludes to, the controversy. Neither does he give any indication of how the anti-Semitism at college affected him personally, even though his later friend David Hawkins once remarked (presumably on the basis of conversations with Oppenheimer) that it was ‘not a negligible fact in Robert’s background that he had been a victim of considerable anti-Semitism at Harvard and elsewhere’.

  In the surviving correspondence of the time,fn7 there is not only no hint of this, but there are even, here and there, mildly anti-Semitic phrases used by Oppenheimer himself, such as when he addresses Herbert Smith as ‘Shylock’ and when, in a letter to Francis Fergusson, he attributes Smith’s ‘misanthropy’ to his having to kowtow to ‘skinflint Jews’. The only time in his letters that Oppenheimer mentions President Lowell is a passing reference in a letter to Smith to ‘the benign Lowell’, which one might imagine must have been meant sarcastically, although the letter provides no indication whatever that this is so. It is as if Oppenheimer were determined to present himself not as a victim of Lowell’s prejudices, but as a beneficiary of them.

  In his letters to Herbert Smith particularly (and, in his first year at Harvard, the only letters that survive are those to Smith), Oppenheimer strove hard to create the impression that he was fitting in very well with the other students. ‘Harvard has so far been most delightful,’ he wrote soon after arriving. ‘It has crushed none of my romantic illusions of what it ought to have been.’ ‘I have,’ he insisted, ‘not suffered from loneliness,’ adding unconvincingly: ‘There are plenty of amusing fellows with whom to read, talk, play tennis and make expeditions into the hills and toward the water.’ In fact, throughout his three years at Harvard he had a remarkably small circle of friends, and the few people who knew him well during those years all report that he did not mix easily with the other students.

  It is perhaps indicative of how hard it was in Harvard during the 1920s for a Jew – even a Jew as wealthy, as American and as un-Jewish as Oppenheimer – to mix with gentiles that his closest friend at the college was someone whose background was practically identical to his own. Frederick Bernheim was a German Jew from New York who had been at the Ethical Culture School and had come to Harvard, like Oppenheimer, to study chemistry. In later life he was a very renowned professor of pharmacology, nominated for the Nobel Prize for his research into effective treatments for tuberculosis. Bernheim had not known Oppenheimer at school, as he was a year younger, but, as a result of Oppenheimer’s enforced ‘gap year’, the two were now freshmen together. As it happened, as well as studying the same subject, they were living in the same hall, having both been allocated rooms at Standish Hall, a freshman dormitory facing the Charles River.fn8 Standish was not a Jewish dorm, but it was notable for being one of the few freshman halls that admitted both Catholics and Jews alongside its predominantly Protestant students.

  Both Oppenheimer and Bernheim had arrived at Harvard determined not to allow their ethnic background to restrict their social mobility. ‘I wanted not to be involved in a sort of Jewish enclave,’ Bernheim later said; ‘at that time there was a good deal of anti-Semitism, and . . . [I wanted to] be able to go around with the non-Jewish students, which I proceeded to do for the first year.’ Oppenheimer had exactly the same attitude. Nevertheless the two were thrown together, not just for their freshman year, but for the whole of their time at Harvard, living in their second and third years as room-mates in a shared house on Mount Auburn Street.

  Largely because of their relative isolation from other students, the f
riendship between Bernheim and Oppenheimer became intense – from Bernheim’s point of view, rather too intense. Oppenheimer was, Bernheim recalls, ‘a little bit possessive’. Oppenheimer resented it if Bernheim went out with a girl, and would object if Bernheim invited someone to dinner too often. As Bernheim put it, Oppenheimer had ‘a sort of feeling that we should make a unit’.

  That Oppenheimer had so few friends at college was not entirely due to the anti-Semitic climate of 1920s Harvard. It was also, to some extent at least, a matter of his own choosing. He was presented with at least one golden opportunity to enlarge his circle of friends, but chose not to take it. Soon after he arrived at Harvard, another ex-student from the Ethical Culture School, Algernon Black, tried to help him make friends. Black, who was a couple of years older than Oppenheimer and in his final year at Harvard, was from a relatively poor, originally Russian, New York Jewish family. In later life he was to find fame as a broadcaster, a social reformer and a spokesman for the Ethical Culture Society. At Harvard he was a leading member of the Liberal Club, one of the few student clubs (apart from those that were specifically for them) open to Jewish students. One day, noticing Oppenheimer eating on his own in the club dining room, Black introduced him to John Edsall, a third-year chemistry student who was also an enthusiastic and prominent member of the Liberal Club. An established Bostonian, a gentile and the son of the Harvard Dean of Medicine, Edsall was potentially an invaluable link between Oppenheimer and mainstream Harvard society. He was, moreover, greatly impressed by Oppenheimer’s obvious intellectual gifts.