Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [18]
Not for all time. Democracies are generally quick to demobilize after wars end, their citizens returning to peacetime pursuits and frequently with expressions of regret for time lost to militancy. Scientists determined to do their duty in wartime (and no doubt excited by the quick application of their work) balked after the Armistice at the discipline and secrecy imposed on them by military authorities. American scientists were not shot for alleged ideological crimes, but they had sometimes felt themselves bullied and disrespected by high-handed officers. The generals, for their part, had tired of civilian independence, insubordination, and impracticality. In the military’s parlance, the scientists were ‘damn professors’, useful if paying attention to realities, but too often inclined to loose gossip and head in the clouds theorizing.33
Science, including physics, nevertheless proved popular in America during the 1920s. George Hale persuaded philanthropists to finance a science school in Pasadena called the California Institute of Technology. It quickly attracted top physicists—it would share Robert Oppenheimer with Berkeley—and drove other universities to expand their physics programs in response. Exciting discoveries inside the atom raised the visibility and glamor level of the physicists, even if most laypersons failed to grasp the essence of atomic science. The federal government funded research, and state legislatures boosted the budgets of their home universities. Most of all, the market worked to the considerable advantage of scientists generally. ‘Science is not a thing apart,’ insisted the Saturday Evening Post in 1922. ‘It is the bedrock of business.’ By the latter part of the 1920s, the United States was spending $200 million each year on scientific research, with industry spending three times as much as the government. A cult of admiration, even affection, emerged around Albert Einstein, the exponent of the theory of relativity and German émigré who settled permanently at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1933. Einstein was more rumpled than glamorous, but that proved no obstacle to the chemist and scientific popularizer Edwin Slosson, who wrote in 1925 (and apparently not about Einstein) that scientists were as ‘cleanshaven, as youthful, and as jazzy as a foregathering of Rotarians’.34
What the market provided for American scientists during the 1920s it took away during the 1930s. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, funding for physics research, both government and private, dried up. Kevles summarizes the damage: federal government scientists were fired in droves, AT and T sacked 40 percent and General Electric 50 percent of their lab workers; untenured university faculty feared for their jobs and senior faculty had difficulty finding positions for their students; NRC fellowships grew scarce. Along with that, many Americans bizarrely blamed scientists for plunging the nation into penury. Humanist critics decried the nation’s over-reliance on science and technology; with efficient machines had come less work for men and women. Religious critics saw in the disaster evidence that science, not God, had gained control of the American mind, with predictably awful results. Across the country rolled a wave of recrimination directed at scientists, in whose hands so many had recently and gratefully placed their fate.35
The situation for scientists in the United States would improve dramatically, of course, with the arrival of the Second World War and the end of the depression in the early 1940s. Public esteem for physicists in particular would grow once more, while federal funding would increase