Man of the Hour Read online

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  At the end of his third year, Conant earned his bachelor of arts degree, making magna cum laude despite the accelerated pace. He was also awarded an honorary John Harvard Scholarship for academic distinction, as well as an Austin Teaching Fellowship to assist in Chemistry 5, which carried a salary of $500. The teaching stipend gave him his independence. He would no longer have to ask his father to help support him. He immediately enrolled in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and set to work on his PhD in summer school. Crombie, who that fall moved with him into Thayer Hall, one of the senior dormitories in the Yard, marveled at his roommate’s boundless energy and powers of concentration. Conant never seemed unduly burdened by his studies. He never burned the midnight oil. No matter how hard he crammed, he could always be convinced to put aside his books and nip out for a quick game of tennis. Even during midyear exams, they would study until nine and then go “knock the puck around” on the frozen river. “I had to work like the devil to get my degree,” Crombie said later. “Whereas Jim took everything in stride and swung without a single panting breath into the first ten of the Phi Beta Kappa.”

  College and chemistry were evidently not all consuming because Conant also found time to fall in love. The previous autumn had brought the arrival of his old chums Kenneth Murdock and Roger Twitchell, and though he was now an upperclassman, they were soon inseparable. The trio formed the habit of going back to Dorchester for Sunday night suppers at the Twitchells’, which brought Conant in regular contact with Roger’s lovely older sister, Helen. They had known each other all their lives, and now struck up an easy, flirtatious relationship. Soon she was regularly accompanying the boys to weekend skating outings on the Charles River, concerts and shows in Boston, and Saturday night dances at Brattle Hall. Conant was smitten. His diary for the winter of 1913 is full of praise for Helen. “She is an angel,” he swooned, head over heels, on February 8. The following week, she was his date for the big junior dance at the Union. Cocky and self-satisfied, he carelessly dismissed a rumor that he was engaged to a girl named Alice: “Ha! Ha!” he scribbled in a margin, “Oh Lord!” By spring, he was madly in love, courting during long, ardent walks in the park, and torturing himself with jealous thoughts. “Made a fool of myself by getting sore,” he confessed at the end of a tempestuous afternoon on May 18. “She kindly forgave me. All’s well.”

  At the end of term, awash in honors and assured of his prowess in his chosen field, Conant proposed. He was full of plans and promises. He took Helen to Duxbury for the weekend to see his sisters and test the waters. An entry on May 25 reads: “She decided to tell her parents. More nervous suspense.” It did not go well. Dr. Twitchell, the loyal family practitioner who had helped usher him into the world twenty years earlier, did not give the couple his blessing. Conant was too young to be thinking of marriage. He had years of study ahead and no money. It would be a mistake. Both families counseled them to wait. The diary was abruptly abandoned. He left no record of his disappointment, yet the empty pages speak to the magnitude of the defeat. It was the first time in his life he had set his sights on a goal and not achieved it. He had no doubt that he would amount to something—and something “big”—but he only had his brilliance as a guarantee. The experience only made him more ambitious, and impatient for the opportunity to prove his worth.

  CHAPTER 4

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  No-Man’s-Land

  Men who would otherwise be eminent in science, in literature, and in art, are now having their young lives torn out of them by shells, and it is for the youth of America to take their place. You are recruited and now in training.

  —President A. Lawrence Lowell

  When war erupted in Europe during those last, hot days of August 1914, Conant was too entrenched in the laboratory to take much notice. To him, like most Harvard students, the battle lines that had been drawn so rapidly that summer seemed far away, and of less relevance to his daily life than the startling announcement of a major overhaul of the club system. While he stayed abreast of the latest developments, scanning newspaper headlines and taking in the occasional radio dispatch and newsreel, he had little time for foreign affairs. Nothing disturbed the peace of his scientific sanctum. The sound of the Red Cross drive in the Yard, whose volunteers were raising funds for their work in France, barely penetrated the granite bulk of Boylston Hall.

  It never occurred to him that Europe’s quarrels could in any way touch him or disrupt his carefully laid plans. A confirmed pacifist, he was raised with an aversion to war by his mother, who had instilled in him the Quaker belief that there were better ways to settle disputes between peoples and countries. He favored peace, following the theory that the best way to maintain it was to stay out of the fight. He was not prepared for the fact that when war came, it would obliterate the serene and tolerant world he had always taken for granted. “[It] came with all the blackness and suddenness of a tropical storm,” he wrote. “In June there was one climate of opinion, and by September there was another; and with each succeeding month the atmosphere became more electric; the storms more frequent and more violent.”

  Conant’s political awakening coincided with the start of the fall term, and what a Crimson editorial described as an outbreak of “pyrotechnic patriotism” on campus. Officially, Harvard pledged to support President Woodrow Wilson’s policy of “complete neutrality” for the United States, a position favored by the majority of Americans. To Conant’s “amazement,” however, his professors all immediately took sides. They did not even try to conceal their sympathy with Britain and France. The brutal invasion of neutral Belgium, and the destruction of the University of Louvain, one of the most renowned in Europe, turned the intellectual community solidly against Germany. The burning of over 250,000 rare books in the ancient library was a crime against civilization.

  Many teachers who had admired Germany’s strength and intellectual ability were shocked by its ruthlessness, and translated their anger into the worst kind of zealotry, so they were “not only pro-Ally,” he recalled, “but violently anti-German.” Members of the faculty who had been “bosom friends” became sworn enemies. Even his chemistry mentor, Theodore Richards, who had always spoken highly of his colleagues at Göttingen—that mecca of true science—and extolled their exemplary Kultur, became rabidly partisan. He now “despised all things German” and openly snubbed the few teachers who dared to express solidarity with their native country. The jingoism of his elders offended Conant’s moral scruples. “Such reversal of sentiment,” he noted scornfully, “brought to the surface all my New England contrariness.”

  Compared with the faculty, the student body seemed almost a model of impartiality. In an October 13 editorial, the Crimson urged members of the university to use nothing but the most extreme caution in “expression of personal opinion in the present crisis,” reminding them that it was the college’s duty to be impartial and “do nothing in word or speech that shall arouse fruitless passion or personal antagonisms.” In the opening stages of the conflict, there was no question of American involvement, and Conant and his friends engaged in lively forums and debates about the European struggle and where their loyalties should lie. By endorsing Britain’s blockade of German ports, its confiscation of cargoes headed for the Central powers, and mining of the North Sea to obstruct neutral trade, it seemed to many of them that the faculty was trying to pretend its Allies, aggressive colonial and imperial powers, were entirely blameless. Many of his peers were “highly critical” of the prejudicial remarks of their teachers. “The professors were losing their minds,” John Dos Passos, class of 1916, wrote of the ugly mood on campus. “Hating the Huns became a mania.”

  The more fanatical the faculty became, the more Conant reacted with skepticism. When he learned that a respected instructor of German studies had been “cut dead” in the street by a neighbor, and was later pestered to withdraw from the university, it aroused his indignation. Faced with such hatred and suspicion, he felt compelled t
o stick up for his convictions. “When I heard someone denounced for an attempt to justify the invasion of Belgium,” he recalled, “I became a pro-German apologist.” It was not that he was really pro-German, just that he despised the herd mentality induced by nationalism, and the insidious pressure to conform. Everyone acted like a “frenzied rooter at a football game,” he recalled, and not to pick one side or another was to incur “a potent blast of criticism from every side.”

  The college did little to curb the anti-German hysteria, which was further inflamed by the sinking of the RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915. Conant, shunning emotion, clearly saw how public opinion was being manipulated by both an excitable press and exploitive British and French propagandists determined to “swing the sympathy of the young as well as the old in Cambridge to the side of the Allies.” But he was swimming against the current. The news that the sleek Cunard liner, en route from New York to Liverpool, had been torpedoed by a German submarine, and that among the 1,198 passengers and crew lost were 128 Americans—5 of them Harvard men—rocked the campus. All at once, the European conflict had become real to Harvard students, and very personal. Most Americans still had little enthusiasm for the war in Europe, but in Cambridge and the rest of the anglophile Eastern Seaboard, they were clamoring for retribution.

  Although Conant managed to keep the growing crisis from interfering with his education, it had a profound effect on his ambitions and fortunes. In the spring of 1915, Harvard awarded him a traveling fellowship, and it was with deep regret that he turned it down. He had never been abroad. He had always dreamed of one day going to study in Berlin or Munich—“where the big scientists were”—but this was hardly an opportune moment. “Nineteen-fifteen was the year it became clear that the great European war was not going to be a short war,” he wrote later. “The Germans’ plans for a rapid victory had been thwarted. The belligerents had settled down to the horrors of trench warfare, with no end in sight.”

  At the same time, the drawn-out conflict, and disruptions to international trade, were creating new opportunities for the young chemists of his generation at home. Germany, one of the leading manufacturers of dyes, drugs, and fine chemicals, could not be counted on to resume its exportations anytime in the foreseeable future. With European factories overextended, and the Allies already suffering severe shortages, American industry was stepping up to meet the need for these products, as well as for munitions, metals, oil, and other military goods. In order to produce more materials in a shorter time, new technologies were being developed and new production processes implemented. Suddenly companies of all kinds were knocking on the university’s door, he recalled. “Organic chemists were in demand.”

  As a result of the war boom, that summer brought an unexpected offer of employment. Conant got a call asking if he was interested in working in the laboratories of the Midvale Steel Company in Philadelphia. A few years earlier, Midvale had hired a young Harvard chemistry instructor, George L. Kelley, to head up its research program. Kelley, who remembered Conant from class, offered him a job developing new analytical procedures. It was a chance to get a peek at one of the new industrial labs he had heard so much about, and make a little money in the bargain.

  At Midvale, Conant studied the new electrochemical method used in steel production. The research led to his first three publications, authored jointly with Kelley, and covered techniques for the analysis of vanadium, chromium, and nickel content in steel. While the work was rewarding, he took more away from his time at the mill. The engineers did not exactly welcome the intrusion of the Harvard “doctors,” and took a dim view of the newfangled ideas they tried to bring to the business of making steel. It was Conant’s first practical job experience, and the tension he observed between the hands-on operating men and the research scientists gave him valuable insight into the challenges facing the young marriage of chemistry and industry. “What I learned about steelmaking I forgot in a few years,” he recalled. “What I learned about the inner politics of a manufacturing plant stayed with me.” At the end of the summer, Midvale offered him a permanent position. Conant wanted his doctorate. He returned to Harvard for his final year, but his view of the possibilities open to a young chemist had been “greatly enlarged.”

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  When he first contemplated earning a PhD, Conant had every intention of pursuing his research with Richards in physical chemistry. But after Kohler’s enthusiastic teaching style won him over to organic chemistry, Conant changed course and began his graduate work on fundamental cyclopropane chemistry. Torn between two mentors, he ultimately decided to present a double thesis, a politic solution that involved undertaking a separate research project with each professor. At heart, however, he was already a “committed organic chemist.”

  Conant’s decision to steer a compromise course served him well. He was conducting research on electrochemistry with Richards in his new, almost luxurious laboratory when it was announced that November that the renowned Harvard investigator was to receive the greatest honor that could be bestowed on his profession, the Nobel Prize. It was the first for an American in his field, and recognized not only Richards’s contribution to the periodic table—the exact determination of the atomic weights of some thirty elements—but also the new era of analytical accuracy he had inaugurated. Conant, who attended the swirl of celebratory parties at Harvard, had hitched his wagon to the most famous scientist in the country. Given his hatred of the German aggressors, and the all too real dangers of crossing the Atlantic, Richards chose to postpone the trip to Sweden to collect his prize.

  Conant, whose admiration of German achievements in chemistry made him more sympathetic to the kaiser’s cause, watched with dismay as Harvard’s campus became more war conscious with each passing day. More than eighty undergraduates had spent the summer at the Plattsburgh military training camps in New York learning maneuvers, and now marched about the yard in uniform. Drums resounded in the formerly quiet streets. Some of the more gung-ho decided to defy Wilson’s warning that the federal penal code barred US citizens from serving as belligerents, and were enlisting in the British and Canadian Expeditionary Forces, the Foreign Legion, and the Lafayette Flying Squad.

  In November the Crimson reversed its policy of isolation. The student council proposed voluntary military training for all members of the university, and soon afterward General Leonard Wood, a leader of the preparedness movement, announced that he favored the plan. He offered to have the US War Department supply all the rifles, bayonets, ammunition belts, and other equipment, and detail a special officer to drill the volunteers, provided that 400 students signed up within three days. The response was overwhelming, with 922 pledged by the second day. By January 1916, the new Harvard regiment was drilling in the Hemenway gymnasium and the baseball cage. President Lowell, who had been pro-Ally from the start, welcomed wounded French officers as military instructors.

  At the same time the regiment was being organized, alumnus and ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, one of the country’s strongest proponents of armament, wrote an editorial in the Harvard Advocate calling for the college to make military training—not merely drilling—part of the curriculum:

  Harvard ought to take the lead in every real movement for making our country stand as it should stand. Unfortunately prominent Harvard men sometimes take the lead the wrong way. This applies preeminently to all the Harvard men who have anything to do with the absurd and mischievous professional-pacifist or peace-at-any-price movements which have so thoroughly discredited this country during the past five years . . . The pacifist of this type stands on the exact level with the poltroon. His appropriate place is with the college sissy who disapproves of football or boxing because it is rough.

  Conant disliked the bullying rhetoric, which was clearly designed to push any waverers into line. Roosevelt had been a boyhood hero, but in the months leading up to the 1916 presidential election Conant’s attitude toward him soured. His conversion to Wilson and the Democrats had less to do w
ith their war policy than his feelings that the president’s critics had gone too far, and that in their zeal to get elected, Republican politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt and Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes, who surrendered his seat in order to run for office, were “showing more emotion than reason.” As a “dissenting youth,” Conant noted, “I adhered to the other camp.” Of course, it did not hurt that Wilson’s platform of noninvolvement meant he could continue to pursue his doctorate without fear of delay. Conant remained focused on his work, and continued to question the logic of America entering the European war, even though his adamant neutrality made him, as one colleague put it, “less than popular in many circles.”

  As the end of his graduate studies approached, Conant was in a quandary about what to do. He was obsessed with the idea that his professional training would be incomplete without the obligatory postdoc year at a German university, and once again cursed his rotten timing. He briefly considered combining a term at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, with a stint in the American Ambulance Field Service, but balked when he learned that drivers were required to commit to a full year. He was not prepared to spend that much time away from the laboratory. He took a rather jaundiced view of the patriotic impulse that inspired many of his friends and classmates to volunteer to drive ambulances at the front, among them Ken Murdock and Roger Twitchell. “Though, of course, the Ambulance Service was a noncombatant and in theory neutral, joining it was often regarded as an expression of a strong desire to help the Allied cause,” he recalled, “while in fact, in some cases, it seemed far more a manifestation of a desire to come dangerously close to a dangerous adventure without running much risk of becoming a casualty oneself.”