Joan Hinton, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, but spent most of her life as a committed Maoist working on dairy farms in China, died on Tuesday in Beijing. She was 88.
The cause has not yet been determined, but she had an abdominal aneurysm, her son Bill Engst said.
Ms. Hinton was recruited for the Manhattan Project in February 1944 while still a graduate student in physics at the University of Wisconsin. At the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., where she worked with Enrico Fermi, she was assigned to a team that built two reactors for testing enriched uranium and plutonium.
When the first atom bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945, she and a colleague, riding a motorcycle, dodged Army jeep patrols and hid near a small hill about 25 miles from the blast point to witness the event.
“We first felt the heat on our faces, then we saw what looked like a sea of light,” she told The South China Morning Post in 2008. “It was gradually sucked into an awful purple glow that went up and up into a mushroom cloud. It looked beautiful as it lit up the morning sun.”
Ms. Hinton thought that the bomb would be used for a demonstration explosion to force a Japanese surrender. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she became an outspoken peace activist. She sent the mayors of every major city in the United States a small glass case filled with glassified desert sand and a note asking whether they wanted their cities to suffer the same fate.
In 1948, alarmed at the emerging cold war, she gave up physics and left the United States for China, then in the throes of a Communist revolution she wholeheartedly admired. “I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to kill people,” she told National Public Radio in 2002. “I wanted to figure out how to let people have a better life, not a worse life.”
In China she met her future husband, Erwin Engst, a Cornell-trained dairy-cattle expert, who went on to work on dairy farms as a breeder while she designed and built machinery. During the Cultural Revolution, they were editors and translators in Beijing.
Ms. Hinton applied her scientific talents to perfecting a continuous-flow automatic milk pasteurizer and other machines. For the past 40 years, she worked on a dairy farm and an agricultural station outside Beijing, tending a herd of about 200 cows.
Joan Chase Hinton was born on Oct. 20, 1921, in Chicago. Her father, Sebastian Hinton, was a patent lawyer who invented the jungle gym in 1920. Her mother, Carmelita Chase Hinton, founded the Putney School, a progressive coeducational secondary school in Putney, Vt., which Joan attended and where she excelled as a skier, qualifying for the United States Olympic Team that would have competed in the 1940 games had they not been canceled.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in natural science from Bennington College in 1942, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a doctorate in physics in 1944.
At Los Alamos, teams were assigned to theoretical and practical work. Ms. Hinton, assigned to practical work, piled beryllium blocks around the core of the site’s first reactor and constructed electronic circuits for the counters.
According to Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg, the authors of “Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project,” she then helped design and construct the control rods for a second reactor.
In her spare time, she played violin in a string quartet whose members included the physicists Edward Teller and Otto Frisch.
After the war she studied with Mr. Fermi as a fellow at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago and then left for China, where she met and married Mr. Engst, who had been in the country since 1946 teaching agriculture and dairy-herd management.
Mr. Engst died in 2003. In addition to her son Bill, of Marlboro, N.J., she is survived by another son, Fred Engst of Beijing; a daughter, Karen Engst of Pau, France; and four grandchildren.
During the McCarthy era, Ms. Hinton’s name surfaced as a possible spy and spiller of nuclear secrets after she spoke at a peace conference in Beijing. Rear Adm. Ellis M. Zacharias denounced her in a 1953 article for Real magazine titled “The Atom Spy Who Got Away.”
An illustration depicted her as a furtive blonde in a trench coat, taking notes as she observed a nuclear test. There was never any evidence to show that Ms. Hinton passed secrets or did any work as a physicist in China.
She and her husband remained true believers in the Maoist cause.
“It would have been terrific if Mao had lived,” Ms. Hinton told The Weekend Australian in 2008 during a trip to Japan. “Of course I was 100 percent behind everything that happened in the Cultural Revolution — it was a terrific experience.”
David_D said
I think the poster is wrong. China was correct to leverage foreign specialists, and implementation of the policies she called for would have largely precluded this. The Soviet first five-year plan also relied on experts from foreign countries in a situation in which the “five nots and two haves” were implemented.
In my opinion, such “Left” errors would have further opened the door to the likes of Deng Xiaoping and his crass theory of the productive forces. The problem is voluntarism and a one-sided stress on the concept that *solely* through transformation in productive relations, increases in level of the development of the forces of production will necessarily occur.
Mike E said
I think you misread the issue, David.
She is not saying that ALL foreign specialists should be denied privileges — but rather that they be made voluntary. I.e. that the people who came to china as communists and revolutionaries should participate in this revolution as communists and revolutionaries (not be “foreign” and “specialists” forever).
Yes, it is true that a socialist country needs to be able to hire specialists from abroad — and clearly that has to be done at world rates (not internal socialist wages). But there is value when internationalists (within China’s “foreign” community) suggests that the wind of socialist revolution sweep through those arrangements too — and that (perhaps) those who are communists should not be sequestered and pampered in an automatic way.
It was a demand by those “Friends of China” to participate in the revolution (as communists).
The Chinese revolutoin had some problems with voluntarism (which have emerged in every revolution i’ve learned about). But do you really think it is voluntarism?
And is it really true that what we should learn about such winds is that they “opened the door to the likes of Deng Xiaoping and his crass theory of the productive forces”?
Really, you think a poster like this one (by revolutionary maoists among the foreign specialists) “opened the door” for counterrevolution?
I think there was wild debate over many changes… and making such proposals opened the door to their participation in the revolution, and represented their attempt to support the fight for egalitarianism more widely in Chinese society. Perhaps you also think the fight for egalitarianism in general helps counterrevolution?
David_D said
I don’t think the poster itself was an issue, but the implementation of a policy that ALL foreign specialists be denied special wages and privileges would cause problems in economic construction. And problems in economic construction can be a material foundation for the emergence of revisionism. I should be clear that by “Left” errors I mean implementation of policy and not mere advocacy in the heat of debate.
I agree that proletarian internationalists who came to China should have had the right to participate in the economic and political struggle as socialist working people and not be exiled as “foreign specialists.” I did misread things in that case.
Yes, I think “Left” errors of policy and “communist winds” in a real sense pave the way for revisionism in a situation of low development of the level of the productive forces in particular. As I’m sure you’re very aware, there was an interesting struggle in China over “restricting bourgeois right” starting around 75 or so. There were some noises by Hua’s forces of continuing policies to narrow wage differentials but of course as Deng became ascendant, the pseudo-”to each according to their work” line of giving up on any attempt to rein in polarization won out. Perhaps the answer lies in studying that episode. I do not know right now.
During the Cultural Revolution, there was a lot of stress on hard struggle, bitter sacrifice, and never forgetting class struggle. Earlier on, Lin Biao said “fight self.” People did get “burned out” to some extent. I think that’s a pretty fair assessment. Was that necessarily going to occur, or could have different policies and different ideological work prevented that? Nonsense like “better socialist weeds than capitalist flowers” is alienating to all but the most advanced. In a real way it allowed Deng to win over people with saying that an impoverished socialism is not a qualified socialism.
I think the Nepalese comrades have well-assimilated lessons from the whole episode. They want to make Nepal a Himalayan “Switzerland” and will leverage all their advantages to make the country strong, independent, and prosperous. Isn’t communism all about freeing people to engage in unalienated labor under conditions of plenty?
Mike E said
David writes;
Well, that may be true… but is there any evidence that there was such a policy?
And isn’t the main point the importance of preventing the acceptance and widening of inequalities (as happened unfortunately in the Soviet Union over the 1930s and beyond)?
Where was there a policy in China opposing any “special” exceptions to socialist efforts at egalitarianism when needed to deal with foreign specialists (and places like Hong Kong)?
And if not, what are you raising?
Perhaps more to the point:
Revolutionary mass movements (including under socialism) cannot be reduced simply to “policies” or processes for advocating and establishing policies. They have different dynamics, and important independent purposes.
In mass movements there will be tides and eddies, there will be excesses and experimentation. What gets hammered out in mass movements is the consciousness, power and organization of the people — not merely this or that set of policies. Put another way; Ideological and political line is not reducible to questions of policy.
It is important to see socialism as a such period of class struggle — and not simply as an apparatus of policies and administration.
I think that what “burned people out” was not the problem of extremes (still less should it be placed on the lap of ‘ultra-leftism”) — what burned people out is that the revolutionary pole could not defeat the counterrevolution. In the actual engagement, the forces of counterrevolution proved very strong, the objective conditions (internally and externally) did not favor the radical changes, and ultimately the phenomenon of “bourgeois democrats turned capitalist roaders” characterized major portions of the previous revolutionary core.
Could better policies (among the revolutionaries) have improved conditions? Well, on one level, when revolutionaries do better, it can’t help but produce better revolutionary results.
But it is (unfortunately) not the case that failure is always the result of errors by revolutionaries. Nor is it true that better approaches by revolutionaries could have created victory (where in fact defeat emerged).
David writes:
It is not nonsense to say that our own errors and setbacks (socialist weeds) are still different that progress made by capitalism (i.e. capitalist flowers). Mao made the point (which I think is important) that we should always differentiat between “Yenan and Sian” — i.e. between revolution and counterrevolution.
In china, the counterrevolutionaries would publicize various problems (and even perhaps occasional inanities) that emerged from the revolutionary ranks. But so what? don’t counterrevolutionaries do that all the time? Isn’t that what Fox news does? Or anticommunist histories? Don’t they take our worst moments, and hold them up in order to sully the great goals of socialism and communism?
And it was in answer to the whining complaints of the right that the revolutionaries correctly pointed out “better socialist weeds than capitalist flowers” — it is not nonsense but a deep truth. The fight in China was not over policies, or efficiency, or even the fastest road to “development,” — it was about who should rule, and what direction society would take. And this deep decisive conflict was far from clear in revolutionary China, or among those watching China.
Sure there were mistakes among the left. How could there not be? Sure there were excesses, and even occasional inanities? How could there not be? If you draw millions into political life, if you open the powerful to criticism, if you allow people to express their ideas and their grievances…. how could the situation NOT become complex and mixed?
But not to have gone there, not to have unleashed great storms in China (during the GPCR) would have been to oppose the capitalist roaders with mere policy and moderation — i.e. not to oppose them at all.
And if you read (for example) Enver Hoxha (the leader of Albania’s communists) and his utter inability to understand the Cultural Revolution (in his Reflections on China) you can see precisely how that looked at the time: the idea that you could defeat counterrevolution without the wild storms of revolution. That you could use party policy, police, and leadership actions to identify “alien class elements,” exclude them from power, and defeat them. And from that point of view, the problem in China was not that they tried to make new revolution, but that they allowed the people to rip loose. I think that is a deeply mistaken view – that would discard the very lessons of revolutionary China that we should uphold, and that would put in their place the assumptions of the 1930s, that they replaced.
Bezdomni said
Wildly misinterpreting and subsequently picking on a sentence quoted in an obituary of an incredible person who dedicated their life to science and revolution is worse than being a “revisionist”.
Who cares if the poster was “wrong” or not? And what criteria are we to use in determining this? It was a demand made decades by foreign revolutionaries in China (probably written in Chinese) – what sense is there in worrying about its purity? Such a demand is now long past its expiration date, and it should be viewed as an artifact of history to learn from rather than a detail (from an obituary!!) to bicker over.
The communist movement as a whole would do much better to exercise restraint on what gets the label “revisonist” smacked on it. In fact, we would be doing much better to ditch the term entirely and focus on expanding our vocabulary and the concepts underlying it. The world has changed profoundly since the end of the Cultural Revolution, yet our thought and speech has hardly changed. The language of anti-revisionism was revolutionary at one time, but now it reeks of tradition – and there is no such thing as a revolutionary tradition.
Revisionism is best thought of as a *force* (rather than an ideology) which guides the transformation of socialism into capitalism. It makes no sense to call an individual or refer to any particular idea as being revisionist. There are many individuals who will have many ideas that are contrary to and detrimental to socialism, which is very fragile and easily harmed in its early development.
It is easy for a country of millions to head down the capitalist road without intending to do so. The way to avoid this is not to spend all of our efforts trying to stamp out revisionism – but to rapidly strengthen socialism and build so much inertia down the revolutionary road that the force of revisionism becomes negligible (and thus we can safely forget that word) and the probability of capitalist transformation approaches zero.
So, we should not be so eager to label things from our past as revisionist – but on the contrary, we should be eager to make such unpleasant words obsolete so that we may forget about them entirely. In the mean time, we should exercise restraint in the use of such loaded and ambiguous vocabulary unless there is no other way to clearly express a thought.
We should be especially eager to exercise this restraint when a moment of thoughtful reflection about a comrade who has recently passed away is what is called for, rather than picking apart a poster quoted in her obituary.
Joan’s deep understanding and respect for nature and human life will be remembered fondly for many years. Her legacy as a nuclear physicist, peace activist and communist revolutionary is an inspiration to us all.
nando said
Bezdomni:
I completely agree.
I suspect David_d’s point is somewhat different: If I read his post right, he thinks it is not that great to uphold the Cultural Revolution, or those (like Joan) who were fierce partisans of continuing the revolution in that way. His picking (and distorting) of their poster is a way of saying “Mao was wrong and ultra-left” — by saying that those who followed him, and fought for more egalitarianism under socialism were just helping the counterrevolution (by supposedly being impractical and utopian).
I may misread David (I hope not). But I suspect this exchange is not about “purity” — but about not really supporting the revolution in question: i.e. the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or supporting Mao’s great attempt to save the revolution and advance it.
David_D said
Nando said: “I suspect David_d’s point is somewhat different: If I read his post right, he thinks it is not that great to uphold the Cultural Revolution, or those (like Joan) who were fierce partisans of continuing the revolution in that way.”
Any distortion on my part was honest and unintentional. I don’t know anything about Joan Hinton outside of this obituary, but I don’t think that precludes discussion of its contents. I suppose I should learn “no investigation, no right to speak.” It wasn’t my point to erect a straw man. There was a real struggle over what realms in China were “off limits” to the Cultural Revolution: foreign policy, foreign experts, domestic experts, the PLA, etc. I think it’s a conversation worth having in some forum.
I think the Cultural Revolution was indeed the furthest advance of proletarian revolution in world history, and its defeat was a terrible setback to the world revolution and international communist movement. I’m grasping – perhaps feebly – at what may be some of the material bases of that defeat or how it may have been avoided. It seems like Mao advocated different things at different points, and I’m not sure it was entirely due to changed external conditions but rather due to seeing the material results from different sets of policies, and revising those. Why was Deng rehabilitated, for instance? Why was he deposed again? Why was Lin Biao deposed? The “greater Soviet danger” thesis?
And I must state, I did not accuse Joan Hinton of being a revisionist. I do feel that the above statement is incorrect. I would like to learn from all your responses and contributions. I’m no expert, but probably nearly blinding grasping about…
G said
Interesting, I can read David_D’s message in slightly different vien. I’ll try to articulate what I think he point may have been.
I don’t think he was arguing against egalitarianism or the GPCR per se, but that to attract progressive specialists who may not be ready politically to go through certain types of activities that they may be deemed as hardships, would be to undermine their needed contributions to the society. There should be a balance reflecting the level of development, that its still uneven and there is a division of labor—but that to overcome it requires a step-by-step process, or else a voluntarist push can turn into its opposite. Of course, its almost a catch-22 since there would not be this hardship if it were not for the fact of the level of productive forces prevailing at the time that created the conditions. I think Mao was correct to err on the side of pushing for equality with the Chinese people, but everything divides into two, and we should be aware of finding the fine line between our goals and our methods, which need to reflect changing conditions and be in accordance to the goals–not static “this is the right way” approach.
I think its related to on the one hand to, 1. how far you can expect people to struggle under certain conditions without sufficient political consciousness and thus willingnesses, and on the other, 2. even when you do have that level of commitment, his point that people do “burn out” if its not properly moderated, and balanced. Thus, this push forward of intense activity, that has much good and revolutionized social relations, can backfire and create the basis for people wanting an “easy way out,” or escape–if its not balanced correctly. Too much emphasis on hard work, sacrifice, etc. does burn people out. They need a break, rest, and levity, along with a vacation to do nothing except relax, and enjoy free creative time to do whatever they want in their free time of personal pleasures of life, to free themselves from the burden of labor, so as to allow their free expression and creativity to blossom without constraints of needing to work—one of the goals of communism as David points out.
There are many kinds of “communist winds” and too strong a wind given not sturdy conditions risks blowing away the basis for stronger communists winds that we want, and may actually increase the ability of revisionism to take hold. We should alway be working to chip away at commodity relations, and restricting bourgeois right, to narrow wage differentials, but that struggle has to be in tandem with material conditions rising for people, and making their lives better. I agree with Mike’s analysis of the slogan “better socialist weeds than capitalist flowers”–its not nonsense. Howeveer, I think David’s point (perhaps not a good word choice) is that it was not sufficient to ask people to accept weeds in light of capitalist flowers. The masses may not have been advanced enough to simply accept that, and so just proclaiming that they get weeds, even socialist ones—instead of some actual flowers (socialist ones), was alienating. And, I think that was David’s point since he follows that up with , “In a real way it allowed Deng to win over people with saying that an impoverished socialism is not a qualified socialism.”
Ironically what may have contributed to China being reversed, may have, to some extent, have the very advanced social revolution that inspired progress and revolutionary people around the world, or at least aspects of how the ideological work that was done as part of trying to get people to revolutionize their social and production relations at an accelerated rate in conditions that created lots of hardship.
David_D said
G – basically, you do a better job expressing my thoughts than I.
nando said
great to see us work together to clarify views and issues. will give this some thought later today.
David_D said
I would like to pay tribute to Joan Hinton for her service to the Chinese revolution and unwavering commitment to the communist cause. Reading more about this woman, I found her story very remarkable. In particular her statement with regard to her work on the atomic weapons that she regretted “helping build a bicycle when I didn’t have control of where it was going to go” strikes me as noteworthy. It raises the important point that the class struggle and the struggle for scientific development mustn’t be separated with an iron wall. I think that impulse is what motivated her poster, at least in part… The question is how they should relate, and how non-communist scientific personnel and other technical experts should be utilized and related to.
I also find it interesting that she condemns Jiang Qing, referring to her as Mao’s “terrible wife.” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5653644/ I don’t think it reflects on her contributions, nor does this or that poster. But I am curious if she believed that Hua Guofeng led the revolutionary headquarters, and that his final defeat in late 1978 represented the pivotal moment. She wouldn’t have been alone in that regard…
Mike E said
It is true that “the Hintons” played a very bad role in the early days after the coup in China. Bill Hinton rather doggedly insisted that the Hua coup (against the Four associated with Mao) had been a good thing, that the knocking down of the Four had been a good and revolutionary thing. And that the Communist party of China remained on a revolutionary path.
And he fought very hard for that position. I attended a talk he gave as late as 1983, where he was very energetic (and rather extreme) in defending the position of the Chinese government — including their view that we should view the Soviet union as the ‘main danger” on a world scale, and make major alliances with u.s. imperialism against that main danger. It was a terrible position, and Bill had one of the most extreme version of that position.
But Bill Hinton was an honest man, and a sincere revolutionary. And he had a hard time sustaining that view. And it became clearer and clearer to him that something fundamentally wrong had happened — especially as socialist relations were destroyed in the Chinese countryside (something he knew a lot about and felt very vicerally).
By the end of the 1980s, he had changed his view and did some valuable work of exposure — pointing out in his 1989 book The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989, that capitalism had been restored.
In his view, the restoration happened in 1978 (when the dismantling of socialist property forms started full force), not in 1976 (when, in my opinion, the capitalist roaders seized overall state power) — and this left him an opening to still uphold the Hua Guofeng forces (who staged the coup).
More important politically, this view allowed him to see various Hua-like forces still in the Chinese Communist Party as somehow Maoist — and to hold hopes of a reversal of the restoration of capitalism from within the Chinese Communist Party (and without a new revolution).
However, without nitpicking all the details of his analysis, it can be said that Bill Hinton played a heroic role in the early days of the Chinese revolution — especially agrarian revolution, and that they through themselves into the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (where their line was closer to the Zhou Enlai forces than the forces closest to Mao). Bill did not understand what was happening in China after 1976 at first, and played (it must be said) a terrible role politically, confusing and misleading quite a few people. And then, he was honest enough to see what was actually happening, and come over to a rather radical and pro-socialist critique of the restoration of capitalism in China.
I am not as familiar with Joan Hinton’s approach to the details of the Chinese revolution (since unlike her brother she did not write or speak in great detail, and spent much of her time in China itself). But I suspect that there were a great many honest people in China who were confused by the 1976 events, temporarily willing to give the Hua government the benefit of the doubt, and who then saw (with great horror) that capitalism was being restored.
There is more to say about this “Huaist” summation —
one element of that view was (as David points out) a deep dislike for the more Left forces (like the Four), who were becoming more isolated over time as the revolutionary forces were being dispersed and exhausted.
the other element was seeing the process of restoration in terms of the policies of dismantling socialist relations, not in the moment of capitalist seizure of power. (IN other words, restoration is seen as a series of mistaken policies coming from Chinese Party over time — not as a major class struggle between restorationist and revolutionary forces, that came to a decisive moment of gaining or losing power.)
I think Bill Hinton deeply misunderstood what was happening — and it made his political role rather terrible from 1976 to 1980s. His politics were rather rightist on some other issues before (for example he was an advocate of communists supporting the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972, and left the RU over that.) But after 1976 he was really supporting the counterrevolution in China, and also calling (very aggressively and openly) for a close global military support for U.S. imperialism. (Which, regardless of his sincerity and intentions, is a very bad mistake to make in the middle of the escalating cold war!)
But this is an example of a sincere communist — who made mistakes. And he “came over” and repudiated some of those mistakes — in a way that is important. And certainly, looking at his life (and his major life’s work like Fanshen and Iron Oxen and his later work exposing restoration), we can have a quite powerful summation that these people were communists, trying to fight their way to liberation and new work, trying to contribute to the people of the world in an internationalist and self-sacrificing way.
Mike E said
I think the story of the Manhattan project is somewhat important.
It is understandable to lament (as some did) scientists making such horrible weapons, but it is worth saying more. It needs to say that it was particularly wrong for communist and radical scientists to make such horrible weapons for the U.S. imperialism.
They didn’t just bring something awful into the world — but they handed it to one of the most ruthless and relentless instruments of oppression in world history — the U.S. government and military. And they had convinced themselves (during world war 2) that supporting the U.S. government (its flag, its wars, its strategies, its troops) was the progressive and “antifascist” thing to do.
They were (again like Bill Hinton above) often sincere in their attempt to ‘do the right thing.’ And virtually their whole generation was won over to the idea that they needed to make an alliance with U.S. imperialism against a greater evil (Nazi Germany) — especially in order to defend the Soviet Union.
And this played a huge role in the nuclear program, where quite a few of the scientists were rather radical and left — and yet threw themselves into the work of giving this monstrous weapon to the U.S. government.
History shows that many of their hopes were betrayed: this was not used to defeat nazi germany (after all) or defend the Soviet Union. It was dropped on Japan in a genocidal way, and was an attempt to intimidate the revolutionary forces of China and the USSR. And it gave the U.S. imperialists an unprecendented power to use — in harvesting a new global empire out of the chaos of World War 2. The U.S. was not an “antifascist” power as they believed — but quickly propped up its own fascist states and clients in large swaths of the world (in indo china, latin america, southern Africa, southern Korea, Iran, etc. etc.)
The radical scientists (under the influence of the Communist Party USA) had helped bring a terrible weapon into the world, and had given it first to the real “rising imperialist power” — who was soon to threaten and brutalize millions around the world.
One of the things to sum up from this World War 2 experience (and also from the “Soviet main danger” talk of the 1980s) is that it was a mistaken idea (among communists) to believe that there was one main danger on a world scale — and (as an extension of that) that communists should/could make common cause with their own world-straddling oppressors (in countries like Germany, Britain, India, Puerto Rico, and the U.S.) in the name of fighting that ‘main danger.” It is also not true that the Main danger threatening a socialist country (and there are such dangers!) is automatically a main danger for the worlds people (on a global scale).
Bob H said
While I agree overall with what Mike says in #13, I think there’s a case to be made for communists working in the Manhattan project who were sharing the results with the USSR as a kind of “secret socialist R&D”. Arguably, they were doing more to harm imperialism by handing over technical details to imperialism’s main enemy, than the harm caused by abstaining. Besides, aside from refusing to work on the project, it’s not like a scientist in 1944 could have gone public to the press about the terrible danger of atomic weapons. They would have been arrested and the story squashed. There was a case of a science fiction writer in the 1940s who got arrested and interrogated by the FBI because he published a story about the war ending with something like the atomic bomb by sheer coincidence.
You could also make a similar case for working on such a project to slow it down, which is what some people speculated Heisenburg had done in Germany when he messed up a key calculation on critical mass which led the Germans to think a bomb was impractical, but apparently it was just a fortunate mistake. The point is that taking a moralistic stance in the 1940s probably would have been less effective resistance to imperialism than taking the route of espionage or sabotage.
Mike E said
Bob H:
No one argues against sabotage. But in fact the approach of the left scientists in the U.S. was fairly enthusiastic and patriotic participation in U.S. imperialism’s greatest historic grab for world domination.
That’s what we are discussing.
The fact that a few may have given details to the Soviet Union much later (after the war, after the bomb had been created and used) does not change how (frankly) criminal it was to hand U.S. imperialism this bomb in the first place.
What would have happened if the communists had been more radical? It is hard to know. Certainly if the communists of the United States had not united so utterly with their government, many things would have been different.
Among those things: Instead of having a period of their greatest membership growth, the 1940s for the CP would have been a period of persecution and difficulty. The state would have moved to break their bones (which happened later anyway… in the McCarthy Period).
But really is that so impractical? What is wrong with being arrested for refusing to support the war effort? Debs was arrested during WW1, and the Wobblies faced lynching for resisting the patriotic wind. Was that so terrible?
I don’t think that not working on the bomb (or for imperialism) is “moralistic.” I don’t think the danger of arrest makes it impractical.
(I have heard people among the oppressed say “I had to inform for the police, they had a gun to my head.” No you didn’t.)
Compare the approach in Germany to the collaboration in the U.S.: many scientists refused to work for Hitler. Some left Germany to avoid helping the war effort. Some suffered for their principles and choices. Was all that also impractically moralistic? Nah.
The name for such actions is revolutionary consciousness and principle. And it is has the potential for effectiveness on many levels — even if in some case, it leads to arrest and temporary isolation.
The U.S. working class lost its radical section between 1937-1950 — as they handed over their radicalism (in the name of antifascism, lesser evil and democracy). Most communists who emerged from that period were knee-jerk patriots. And the cost of those terrible politics was paid for two decades.
Bob H said
In the 1980s I was an undergraduate studying physics. As I got politicized (among other things by RW articles against Reagan’s SDI — “Star Wars”), I tried to organize a faculty debate about SDI in the physics department. An eye-opener for me was how many faculty members had an attitude of “we know it won’t work, but it’s more money for physics so why we would we speak against it”? This craven attitude helped turn me away from a scientific career. So for me this is not an academic question (no pun intended).
We are talking about a specific moment, the generation of scientists in the 1940s recruited to work on the Manhattan Project. Scientists in Germany and Central Europe, as you say, had the option to flee the Nazis to Britain and America before the war, and rightly did (although you ignore the fact that many went on to work for the MP). But part of that specific moment was that the Comintern and ICM was totally geared towards defense of the USSR. So in these circumstances these scientists had the following options: 1) work for American/Britain 2) abstain and try and speak out 3) spy for the (then socialist) USSR and 4) try and sabotage the work from within
Most took option 1, which we agree is bad. You seem to advocate option 2, but I think that would have been ineffective since any attempt to speak out would land you in jail and you’d be effectively isolated and silenced — a moral gesture at best. 3 seems like the most effective option. 4 would have been difficult because there were enough people in category 1 to spot the problems and fix them, and you probably wouldn’t be able to do it for long. It’s probably still a more effective option than 2, in my opinion. It’s still an individualistic moral gesture, but one that harms imperialism more than 2.
Maybe Einstein, with his scientific standing and public persona, could have advocated 1 and had a real political impact, but of course in 1939 he wrote his famous letter to Roosevelt that got the ball rolling. Probably a political critique of that era’s scientists should focus on him, rather than abstractly talk about what scientists as a whole should have done
All of this is a sideshow to the question of what Communist parties should have done in the late 30s/early 40s. Maybe the CPUSA should have followed the lead of the SWP and organized strikes. Maybe the Indian CP should have followed the lead of Bose and launched people’s war to kick out the British (but strengthen Japan). Had all that been happening then maybe scientists in the USA would have taken a stronger anti-militarist stance. But scientists are not the vanguard, and that’s who I though we were talking about — not Debs, or Wobblies, or SWP leaders for that matter. That’s why I find a touch of moralism in your argument, it’s more about symbolic actions scientists should have taken than the concrete politics of the era (although I’m sure you can critique the politics of the 1940s far better than I can).
I think it’s also worth talking about your point that “the danger of arrest makes it (resistance) impractical”. It is always very easy to get arrested. The question I ask is, is it the most *effective* way of achieving a goal. Einstein in a U.S. prison in 1940 for advocating a physicists’ strike has a much bigger impact than an unknown grad student like Joan Hinton trying to do so. So perhaps we shouldn’t talk about this in the purely abstract (moral) sense but in the concrete/tactical sense. I’ve watched a lot of people volunteer to get arrested at demos and on my more cynical days I ask myself is this primarily about resistance or about absolving one’s conscience?
David_D said
I think abstention would be not very productive. And of course simple collusion would be wrong.
I still don’t know what to think about the whole “united front against fascism.” The theoretical conception of a “progressive bourgeoisie” in capitalist countries is problematic, but the practice of the front itself might not have been so bad. The end result was the creation of a whole community of socialist countries and more favorable conditions for national liberation in the third world. Is that pragmatism to focus on the result?
The CPUSA went beyond viewing the UFAF as a peculiarity of a specific alignment of forces internationally, and Browderism emerged? But need that have happened? The Chinese party also engaged in the UFAF (subsuming the Red Army into the KMT army, collaboration with KMT), but certainly pivoted when conditions changed.
That said, the second world war was an imperialist war as well as a war between socialism and imperialism. There’s been much debate on which aspect is principal and what should have been done. Honestly, I do not know…
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