Audra J. Wolfe - Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science

FREEDOMS LABORATORY

Audra J. Wolfe

The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science

2018 Audra J. Wolfe

All rights reserved. Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Johns Hopkins University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wolfe, Audra J., author.

Title: Freedoms laboratory : the Cold War struggle for the soul of science / Audra J. Wolfe.

Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018004445 | ISBN 9781421426730 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781421426747 (electronic) | ISBN 1421426730 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1421426749 (electronic)

Subjects: LCSH: Science and stateUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Science and stateEurope, WesternHistory20th century. | United StatesRelationsEurope, Western. | Europe, WesternRelationsUnited States. | Cold WarSocial aspects.

Classification: LCC Q127.U6 W654 2018 | DDC 338.973/0609045dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004445

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For my parents

The American herpetologist Arnold Grobman once told me a story about earthworms. I had already encountered this story in various manuscript drafts and correspondence; Grobman told it frequently. But since I had come all the way to Gainesville, Florida, to meet the crotchety nonagenarian, I was happy to hear it firsthand. In the late 1950s, Grobman began, he traveled to Hong Kong to observe high school science teaching. The teachers invited him to watch the students dissect earthworms. As the students began their work, Grobman noticed something peculiar. The anatomy of the students specimensdug up from local soildid not match that in their British textbooks. The students nevertheless dutifully labeled their worms according to the diagrams in their texts. Since they were studying for British exams, they prioritized fealty to the text over observed reality.

A contemporary observer might draw any number of conclusions from this set piece, from the tyranny of standardized tests to the insidious ways that colonialism distorted even the most mundane aspects of daily life. Grobman absorbed a different lesson. As a humid Florida breeze blew across the patio, Grobman explained to me that forcing students to choose between empirical observation and received authority deprived them of one of the central benefits of laboratory instruction. Instead of basing their understanding of the natural world on scientific knowledge derived from their own experience and curiosity, they did what they were told. This was dangerous, he told me, because it left the students vulnerable to the influence of Communism.

With the distance of sixty years, Grobmans claim that mislabeled earthworms exposed students to the risk of Communist indoctrination is strange, even comical. To midcentury US educators like Grobman, however, the links between scientific observation and liberal democracy were transparent and urgent. They believed that political freedom depended on scientific freedom and that scientific freedom emerged from unobstructed encounters with the natural world. Nor was this assumption specific to educators. From the late 1940s through the late 1960s, the US foreign policy establishment saw a particular way of thinking about scientific freedom as essential to winning the global Cold Warand not just because science created weaponry. Throughout this period, the engines of US propaganda amplified, circulated, and, in some cases, produced a vision of science, American style, that highlighted scientists independence from outside interference and government control. Science, in this view, was apolitical.

Many Cold War ideologies collapsed alongside the Berlin Wall in 1989, but the idea that science is apolitical has had remarkable staying power. Scientists in the United States continue to lean on the language of science and freedom to defend their funding streams and research agendas, even as political leaders display less and less interest in their claims of expertise or even in the existence of facts. The claim sticks, even though a societys decisions about how science should be conducted are inherently and obviously political, involving choices about access, representation, compensation, and expertise. Appeals to apolitical science arguably made even less sense during the Cold War than they do now. Scientific research consumed a larger portion of the US federal budget during the Cold War than during any other peaceful period in US history. The fervor of anti-Communism subjected researchers to loyalty oaths and security checks. In the conformist culture of the Cold War, the specific kind of scientific freedom on offer was primarily available to college-educated, straight, able-bodied white men with impeccable anti-Communist credentials.