Read Online American Prometheus by Kai Bird - Free Book Online

French literature and began writing poetry, a few examples of which appeared in Hound and Horn, a student journal. “When I am inspired,” he wrote Herbert Smith, “I jot down verses. As you so neatly remarked, they aren’t either meant or fit for anyone’s perusal, and to force their masturbatic excesses on others is a crime. But I shall stuff them in a drawer for a while and, if you want to see them, send them off.” That year, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published, and when Robert read it, he instantly identified with the poet’s sparse existentialism. His own poetry dwelt with themes of sadness and loneliness. Early in his tenure at Harvard, he wrote these lines:
    The dawn invests our substance with desire
And the slow light betrays us, and our wistfulness:
When the celestial sa fron
Is faded and grown colourless,
And the sun
Gone sterile, and the growing fire
Stirs us to waken,
We find ourselves again
Each in his separate prison
Ready, hopeless
For negotiation
With other men.
    Harvard’s political culture in the early 1920s was decidedly conservative. Soon after Robert’s arrival, the university imposed a quota to restrict the number of Jewish students. (By 1922, the Jewish student population had risen to twenty-one percent.) In 1924, the Harvard Crimson reported on its front page that the university’s former president Charles W. Eliot had publicly declared it “unfortunate” that growing numbers of the “Jewish race” were intermarrying with Christians. Few such marriages, he said, turned out well, and because biologists had determined that Jews are “prepotent” the children of such marriages “will look like Jews only.” While Harvard accepted a few Negroes, President A. Lawrence Lowell staunchly refused to allow them to reside in the freshman dormitories with whites.
    Oppenheimer was not oblivious to these issues. Indeed, early that autumn of 1922 he joined the Student Liberal Club, founded three years earlier as a forum for students to discuss politics and current events. In its early years, the club attracted large audiences with such speakers as the liberal journalist Lincoln Steffens, Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor and the pacifist A. J. Muste. In March 1923, the club took a formal stand against the university’s discriminatory admissions policies. Though it cultivated a reputation for radical views, Robert was not impressed, and wrote to Smith of the “asinine pomposity of the Liberal Club.” In this, his first introduction to organized politics, he felt himself “very much a fish out of water.” Nevertheless, lunching one day at the club’s rooms at 66 Winthrop Street, he was introduced to a senior, John Edsall, who quickly convinced him to help edit a new student journal. Drawing on his Greek, he persuaded Edsall to call the journal The Gad-fly; the title page reproduced a quotation in Greek describing Socrates as the gadfly of the Athenians. The first issue of The Gad-fly came out in December 1922, and Robert was listed on its masthead as an associate editor. He remembered writing a few unsigned articles, but The Gad-fly did not become a permanent fixture on campus and only four issues survive. However, Robert’s friendship with Edsall continued.
    By the end of his freshman year at Harvard, Robert decided that he had made a mistake in selecting chemistry as his major. “I can’t recall how it came over me that what I liked in chemistry was very close to physics,” Oppenheimer said. “It’s obvious that if you were reading physical chemistry and you began to run into thermodynamical and statistical mechanical ideas you’d want to find out about them. . . . It’s a very odd picture; I never had an elementary course in physics.” Though committed to a chemistry major, that spring he petitioned the Physics Department for graduate standing, which would allow him to take upper-level physics courses. To demonstrate that he knew something about