Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (12 page)

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:

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real answer to the problem, Lowell told Kramer, was for Jews to abandon their religion, recognising that it had been superseded by Christianity.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 friendship 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.

At the time that he and Oppenheimer were introduced by Black, Edsall
had just been chosen by the Liberal Club to be the editor of its new journal, which did not yet have a name. It is an indication of the impact Oppenheimer made on Edsall that the title he chose was one suggested to him by Oppenheimer:
The Gad-Fly
. This was an allusion to Socrates’s description of himself in Plato’s
Apology
as a gadfly whose role in society was ‘to sting people, and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth’. Eagerly embracing this image, Edsall, in his editorial for the first issue, published in December 1922, announced: ‘Among the collegiate herd of sacred cows and their worshippers now buzzes the Gad-Fly.’

Oppenheimer was persuaded by Edsall to serve as assistant editor and to write for the journal for the first issue and for the second, which came out in March 1923. In truth, however, Oppenheimer had no appetite for this, or, it seems, for any other role in Harvard student politics, and after that left the Liberal Club and wrote no more for its journal. His decision to leave the club at that particular time confirms the impression that he was determined to have nothing at all to do with the controversy at Harvard over the issue of Jewish students. For it was precisely at that time, with Lowell’s Committee on Methods of Sifting Candidates for Admissions about to submit its report, that the issue was coming to a head and that the Liberal Club got involved in it, taking a public stand against discriminatory admissions policies. Even while he was a member, Oppenheimer’s attitude to the Liberal Club was one of lofty alienation. ‘I don’t know what that was all about,’ he later said of his brief participation in it. ‘I felt like a fish out of water.’ In only his second letter to Smith from Harvard, written in November 1922, he seemed determined to distance himself from the club, referring disparagingly to its ‘assinine pomposity’.

Whether he was aware of it or not (and it is hard to see how he could not be aware of it), Oppenheimer, by quitting the Liberal Club, was cutting off his most promising means of making new friends. He had, as far as one can tell, little more to do with Algernon Black and, it would appear, not much to do with Edsall either, until the two of them renewed their friendship at Cambridge, in England, in 1925. This left him with the ‘unit’ that he had formed with Fred Bernheim. The only other person Oppenheimer would allow to join this ‘unit’ – and, apart from Bernheim, the only close friend Oppenheimer had at Harvard – was another chemistry student, William Clouser Boyd. Boyd was a gentile from Missouri. He has recalled how he and Oppenheimer were classmates in Chemistry 3, which was a course in qualitative analysis.
^fn9
Recognising
Boyd as the most advanced student in the class, Oppenheimer used to show him his work to check that it was right, much to the irritation of some of the other classmates. ‘Who is this guy Oppenheimer who keeps coming to you?’ Boyd remembers one of them saying. ‘I think he’s a pest.’ ‘I didn’t think he was a pest,’ Boyd insisted; it was obvious to him that Oppenheimer was ‘a very talented person, very able and very sensitive, and we had lots of interests in common aside from science. We both tried to write and we wrote poetry, sometimes in French, and we wrote stories in imitation of Chekhov.’ Here, Boyd and Bernheim differed. While Oppenheimer’s literary interests were part of what drew him and Boyd together, they threatened to drive him and Bernheim apart – Bernheim remarking that he found Oppenheimer ‘a little bit precious in the way he quoted French poetry, Verlaine, Baudelaire and so on. And I tended to resent it.’