by David Kaiser
3. Fine, “Russia Is Overtaking U.S.,” 1, 80 (“essential for survival”); Fred M. Hechinger, “U.S. vs. Soviet: Khrushchev’s New School Program Points Up the American Lag,” New York Times, 3 July 1960, E8 (“stockpiles,” “cold war of the classrooms”); Nicholas DeWitt, Soviet Professional Manpower: Its Education, Training, and Supply (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1955); Alexander Korol, Soviet Education for Science and Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1957); and Nicholas DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment in the USSR (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1961).
4. DeWitt, Soviet Professional Manpower; DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment. See also Nicholas DeWitt, “Professional and Scientific Personnel in the U.S.S.R.,” Science 120 (2 July 1954): 1–4. Biographical details from “Soviet-School Analyst: Nicholas DeWitt,” New York Times, 15 January 1962, 12. On the founding of Harvard’s Russian Research Center, see David Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 2.
5. Korol, Soviet Education. Biographical details from Erwin Knoll, “U.S. Schools Must Do More: Red ‘Training’ Isn’t Enough,” Washington Post, 29 December 1957, E6; and from Donald L. M. Blackmer, The MIT Center for International Studies: The Founding Years, 1951–1969 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for International Studies, 2002), 144, 159 (CIA contract); see also chap. 1 on the center’s founding. On the report’s reception, see Rowland Evans Jr., “Reds Near 10-1 Engineer Lead,” Washington Post, 3 November 1957, A14 (“fastidious,” “most conclusive study”); Knoll, “U.S. Schools Must Do More” (“solid factual data”); and Harry Schwartz, “Two Ways of Solving a Problem,” New York Times, 22 December 1957, 132.
6. DeWitt, Soviet Professional Manpower, viii, xxvi–xxxviii, 133, 187, 259–61; DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment, xxxix, 3, 33, 339, 374, 549–53; and Korol, Soviet Education, xi, 391, 400, 407–8 (“unwarranted implications”), 414.
7. On physics curricular comparisons, see Korol, Soviet Education, 260–71; DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment, 277–80; and Edward M. Corson, “An Analysis of the 5-Year Physics Program at Moscow State University,” Information on Education around the World, no. 11 (February 1959), published by the Office of Education of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. On the other caveats, see DeWitt, Soviet Professional Manpower, 107, 125, 252; Korol, Soviet Education, 163, 195, 294, 316, 324, 383–84; and DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment, 342, 365, 370, 401.
8. DeWitt, Soviet Professional Manpower, 94–95, 158; Korol, Soviet Education, 142–43, 355, 364; and DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment, 210, 229–31, 235, 316.
9. DeWitt, Soviet Professional Manpower, 168–69; and DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment, 341–42.
10. Fine, “Russia Is Overtaking U.S.”; “Red Technical Graduates Are Double Those in U.S.,” 21. On a 10 November 1955 press conference, see Barbara Barksdale Clowse, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 51. On Allen Dulles and the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy hearings, see Clowse, Brainpower, 25–26. See also Donald Quarles, “Cultivating Our Science Talent: Key to Long-Term Security,” Scientific Monthly 80 (June 1955): 352–55, on 353; and Lewis Strauss, “A Blueprint for Talent,” in Brainpower Quest, ed. Andrew A. Freeman (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 223–33, on 226.
11. DuBridge’s testimony was quoted in National Science Foundation, 1956 Annual Report, 13, http://www.nsf.gov/pubs. On formation of the national committee, see 1956 Annual Report, 17–19; Howard L. Bevis (chair of the new committee), “America’s New Frontier,” in Freeman, Brainpower Quest, 178–86; and Juan Lucena, Defending the Nation: U.S. Policymaking to Create Scientists and Engineers from Sputnik to the “War against Terrorism” (New York: University Press of America, 2005), 40–41. On stocks of scientists and engineers, see DeWitt, Soviet Professional Manpower, 255 (see also 223–25).
12. Henry M. Jackson, “Trained Manpower for Freedom,” sixteen-page report addressed to the Special NATO Parliamentary Committee on Scientific and Technical Personnel; quotations from 3–4, 6–10. The report is dated 19 August 1957, and its cover marks it for release on 5 September 1957. Jackson’s advisory committee included several physicists and mathematicians (such as Richard Courant, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Edward Teller, and John Wheeler), as well as the president of MIT (James Killian), the former president of the National Academy of Sciences (Detlev Bronk), and the president of the Motion Pictures Association (Eric Johnston). A copy of Jackson’s report may be found in PDP box 2, folder “Scientific manpower.” For more on Jackson’s report, see John Krige, “NATO and the Strengthening of Western Science in the Post-Sputnik Era,” Minerva 38 (2000): 81–108, on 88–93.
13. DeWitt quoted in Homer Bigart, “Soviet Progress in Science Cited,” New York Times, 1 November 1957, 3; Hoover quoted in Robert Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 52–53. On the Johnson hearings, see Clowse, Brainpower, 59–60; and Divine, Sputnik Challenge, 64–67 (Johnson quotation on 67).
14. “U.S. Sponsored Report Warns on Red Education,” Washington Post, 28 November 1957, A6; Evans, “Reds Near 10-1 Engineer Lead” (“absolute necessity”); cf. Korol, Soviet Education, 398–417 and v–vii (Millikan’s preface). The Eisenhower administration’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare released a similar report on 10 November 1957, entitled “Education in Russia,” which focused mostly on education at the primary and secondary levels. Eisenhower briefed his cabinet on the report on 8 November 1957, warning them to prepare for a new barrage of questions upon its release. See Clowse, Brainpower, 15.
15. On Rabi’s 15 October 1957 meeting with Eisenhower, see Clowse, Brainpower, 11; Divine, Sputnik Challenge, 12–13; and John Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 108. Hutchisson’s Newsweek quotation in Clowse, Brainpower, 19; Hutchisson to AIP Advisory Committee on Education, 4 December 1957, in box 3, folder 3, Elmer Hutchisson Papers, collection number AR30259, Niels Bohr Library, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD; Teller as quoted in Divine, Sputnik Challenge, 15; and Hans Bethe, “Notes for a Talk on Science Education,” n.d. (ca. April 1958), on 2, in HAB box 5, folder 4. See also Robert E. Marshak and LaRoy B. Thompson to Congressman Kenneth B. Keating, 22 November 1957, in HAB box 5, folder 4; Samuel K. Allison, “Science and Scientists as National Assets,” talk before Chicago Teachers Union, 19 April 1958, on 12–14, in box 24, folder 11, Samuel King Allison Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, IL; and Frederick Seitz, “Factors concerning Education for Science and Engineering,” Physics Today 11 (July 1958): 12–15. On media coverage during the National Defense Education Act debates, see Clowse, Brainpower, chap. 9; and Divine, Sputnik Challenge, 15–16, 92–93, 159–62. Franklin Miller Jr., a physics professor at Kenyon College, warned against “overselling” physics training in the wake of Sputnik in a letter to Hutchisson, 2 April 1958, in box 4, folder 23, Hutchisson Papers.
16. Clowse, Brainpower, 13, 87 (“Trojan horse”), 91 (“willing to strain”). See also Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom, chaps. 1, 3; and Science Policy Research Division, Legislative Reference Service, Library of Congress, Centralization of Federal Science Activities, report to the Subcommittee on Science, Research, and Development of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1969), 48.
17. On grants and fellowships funded by the act, see Clowse, Brainpower, 151–55, 162–67; Divine, Sputnik Challenge, 164–66; and Roger Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 6. The data on PhDs in the physical sciences and engineering come from National Research Council, A Century of Doctorates:
Data Analysis of Growth and Change (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 1978), 12. The issue hardly went away after passage of the National Defense Education Act. See, e.g., Fred M. Hechinger, “Russian Lesson: New Study of Soviet Education Contains Warning to U.S.,” New York Times, 21 January 1962, 157; and John Walsh, “Manpower: Senate Study Describes How Scientists Fit into Scheme of Things in Red China, Soviet Union,” Science 141 (19 July 1963): 253–55.
18. Based on data in the series of National Science Foundation reports entitled American Science Manpower (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1959–71). On the National Register, see the form letter from Henry A. Barton (director, AIP), dated 16 November 1950, a copy of which may be found in LIS box 1, folder “Amer. Inst. of Physics (AIP).” The so-called “baby boom” played a minor role in driving the rapid burst of training in physical sciences; the demographic bulge of new students began to enter undergraduate studies only in 1964.
19. Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Project Hindsight (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 1969). See also Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1978), 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chap. 25; Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), chap. 9; Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge, chaps. 8–9; and Kelly Moore, Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1946–1975 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), chaps. 5–6. Data for figure 7.2 from National Research Council, Century of Doctorates, 12; and National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Statistics, Science and Engineering Degrees, 1966–2001, report no. NSF 04-311 (Arlington, VA: National Science Foundation, 2004).
20. David Kaiser, “Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33 (Fall 2002): 131–59.
21. DeWitt, Soviet Professional Manpower, 167–69; and DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment, 339–42. A few academics expressed frustration with journalists’ roughshod treatment of these and similar studies at the time: George Z. F. Bereday, review of Korol, Soviet Education, in American Slavic and East European Review 17 (October 1958): 355–59; and Seymour M. Rosen, “Problems in Evaluating Soviet Education,” Comparative Education Review 8 (October 1964): 153–65. At the time, the Soviet Union had a small number of universities (thirty-three in 1953, forty in 1958) but more than seven hundred technical “institutes,” which trained the vast majority of higher-education students. Natural sciences and mathematics were taught only at the universities, which, in turn, taught very few students in applied science or engineering. Most of DeWitt’s analysis therefore focused on the technical institutes.
22. DeWitt, Soviet Professional Manpower, 167–69; and DeWitt, Education and Professional Employment, 339–42. US institutions continued to graduate twice as many science students per year as the Soviets through the 1970s: Catherine P. Ailes and Francis W. Rushing, The Science Race: Training and Utilization of Scientists and Engineers, US and USSR (New York: Crane Russak, 1982), 65. Of course, DeWitt’s and Korol’s studies themselves need hardly be taken at face value: Russian expatriates working with CIA funding might not be expected to produce “value-free” studies, especially during such charged times. Nonetheless, any ideological distortions or idiosyncratic choices of emphasis—should these have entered their detailed reports at all—paled in comparison to the ways that various readers treated their efforts. More recent “scientific manpower” projections have proven equally feeble when compared with actual outcomes. See esp. Lucena, Defending the Nation, chaps. 4–5; Earl H. Kinmonth, “Japanese Engineers and American Mythmakers,” Pacific Affairs 64 (Autumn 1991): 328–50; and Michael S. Teitelbaum, Falling Behind? Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
23. See, e.g., Lucena, Defending the Nation, chap. 4; and Kinmonth, “Japanese Engineers and American Mythmakers.” Declines in annual PhD conferrals across each category were calculated from data tabulated in the annual National Science Foundation reports, “Science and Engineering Doctorate Awards,” 1994–2006, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/doctorates.
24. David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (New York: Basic, 1995), 95–102; Daniel Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), chaps. 8–9; Eric Weinstein, “How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers,” unpublished working paper, http://www.nber.orb/~peat/Papers/Folder/Papers/SG/NSF.html; and Lucena, Defending the Nation, 104–12, 133. See also Teitelbaum, Falling Behind?
25. See esp. Lucena, Defending the Nation, chap. 4.
26. Berliner and Biddle, Manufactured Crisis; Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics; and Lucena, Defending the Nation.
27. Cf. Jeremy Bernstein, Physicists on Wall Street and Other Essays on Science and Society (New York: Springer, 2008).
Chapter 8
1. Richard Feynman, Robert Leighton, and Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, 3 vols. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1963–65).
2. Feynman, Leighton, and Sands, Feynman Lectures, 1:3–5. See also Richard C. M. Jones to Robert B. Leighton, 16 April 1962, and Leighton to Earl Tondreau, 27 March 1963, both in box 1, folder 1, Robert B. Leighton Papers, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, CA.
3. Leo Bauer to M. W. Cummings, 7 November 1963, in box 1, folder 2, Leighton Papers (emphasis in original).
4. On sales figures, see unsigned memo, ca. November 1968, in box 1, folder 2, Leighton Papers. On the enduring interest in the books, see Robert P. Crease, “Feynman’s Failings,” Physics World 27 (March 2014): 25.
5. Hans Bethe, “30 Years of Physics at Cornell” (ca. 1965), 10, in HAB box 3, folder 21; A. Carl Helmholz, interview with the author, Berkeley, 14 July 1998; and W. C. Kelly, “Survey of Education in Physics in Universities in the United States,” 1 December 1962, in box 9, American Institute of Physics, Education and Manpower Division records, collection number AR15, Niels Bohr Library, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD. See also Victor F. Weisskopf, “Quantum Mechanics,” Science 109 (22 April 1949): 407–8; and David R. Inglis, “Quantum Theory,” American Journal of Physics 20 (November 1952): 522–23. See also Stanley Coben, “The Scientific Establishment and the Transmission of Quantum Mechanics to the United States, 1919–32,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 442–60; Gerald Holton, “On the Hesitant Rise of Quantum Mechanics Research in the United States,” in Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 147–87; and Katherine Sopka, Quantum Physics in America: The Years through 1935 (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1988).
6. Francis G. Slack, “Introduction to Atomic Physics,” American Journal of Physics 17 (November 1949): 454.
7. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Science and the Common Understanding (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), 36–37.
8. See esp. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005), chaps. 1–2; and Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), chap. 2. Oppenheimer quoted in “The Eternal Apprentice,” Time, 8 November 1948, 70–81, on 70 (“unctuous”).
9. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, chaps. 2–3.
10. Raymond T. Birge, “History of the Physics Department,” 5 vols., in vol. 3, chap. 9, p. 31. Birge’s “History” is available in the Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley.
11. Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, 84. See also David Cassidy, “From Theoretical Physics to the Bomb: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American School of Theoretical Physics,” in Reapp
raising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections, ed. Cathryn Carson and David A. Hollinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 13–29.
12. Copies of Bernard Peter’s notes from Oppenheimer’s 1939 Berkeley course (Physics 221) are available in several university libraries, including Caltech and Berkeley. As late as 1947, administrative staff in Berkeley’s physics department still fielded repeated requests for copies of Oppenheimer’s 1939 lecture notes; see correspondence in box 4, folder 16, University of California–Berkeley, Department of Physics records, collection number CU-68, Bancroft Library, University of California–Berkeley.
13. Felix Bloch’s handwritten lecture notes from the mid-1930s are available in FB box 16, folders 13–14. The Caltech communal notebooks were called the “Bone Books” and span 1929–69; they are available in the Caltech archives, Pasadena, CA. See esp. entries by Sherwood K. Haynes, 6 January 1936, in box 1, vol. 2; and by Martin Summerfield, 10 March 1939, in box 1, vol. 3 (emphasis in original).
14. Edward Condon and Philip Morse, Quantum Mechanics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), 1, 2, 7, 10, 17–21, 83; and Edwin Kemble, “The General Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Part 1,” Physical Review Supplement 1 (1929): 157–215, on 157–58, 175–77. Cf. Arthur Ruark and Harold Urey, Atoms, Molecules, and Quanta (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1930); Alfred Landé, Principles of Quantum Mechanics (New York: Macmillan, 1937); and Edwin Kemble, The Fundamental Principles of Quantum Mechanics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937). On reviews, see Paul Epstein, “Quantum Mechanics,” Science 81 (28 June 1935): 640–41; E. U. Condon, “Quantum Mechanics,” Science 31 (31 January 1935): 105–6; “Foundations of Physics,” American Physics Teacher 4 (September 1936): 148; Karl Lark-Horovitz, “Quantum Mechanics,” Science 87 (1 April 1938): 302; L. H. Thomas, “Quantum Mechanics,” Science 88 (2 September 1938): 217–19; and “The Fundamental Principles of Quantum Mechanics,” American Physics Teacher 6 (October 1938): 287–88. My discussion of interwar trends in teaching quantum mechanics within the United States is indebted to several pioneering works, though I find much greater emphasis upon philosophical engagement in the extant teaching materials than has previously been noted. See esp. Silvan S. Schweber, “The Empiricist Temper Regnant: Theoretical Physics in the United States, 1920–1950,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 17 (1986): 55–98; Nancy Cartwright, “Philosophical Problems of Quantum Theory: The Response of American Physicists,” in The Probabilistic Revolution, ed. Lorenz Krüger, Gerg Gigerenzer, and Mary S. Morgan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 2:417–35; Alexi Assmus, “The Molecular Tradition in Early Quantum Theory,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 22 (1992): 209–31; and Alexi Assmus, “The Americanization of Molecular Physics,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 23 (1992): 1–34.