American Prometheus (4 page)

From the ages of seven through twelve, Robert had three solitary but all-consuming passions: minerals, writing and reading poetry, and building with blocks. Later he would recall that he occupied his time with these activities “not because they were something I had companionship in or because they had any relation to school—but just for the hell of it.” By the age of twelve, he was using the family typewriter to correspond with a number of well-known local geologists about the rock formations he had studied in Central Park. Not aware of his youth, one of these correspondents nominated Robert for membership in the New York Mineralogical Club, and soon thereafter a letter arrived inviting him to deliver a lecture before the club. Dreading the thought of having to talk to an audience of adults, Robert begged his father to explain that they had invited a twelve-year-old. Greatly amused, Julius encouraged his son to accept this honor. On the designated evening, Robert showed up at the club with his parents, who proudly introduced their son as “J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The startled audience of geologists and amateur rock collectors burst out laughing when he stepped up to the podium; a wooden box had to be found for him to stand on so that the audience could see more than the shock of his wiry black hair sticking up above the lectern. Shy and awkward, Robert nevertheless read his prepared remarks and was given a hearty round of applause.

Julius had no qualms about encouraging his son in these adult pursuits. He and Ella knew they had a “genius” on their hands. “They adored him, worried about him and protected him,” recalled Robert’s cousin Babette Oppenheimer. “He was given every opportunity to develop along the lines of his own inclinations and at his own rate of speed.” One day, Julius gave Robert a professional-quality microscope which quickly became the boy’s favorite toy. “I think that my father was one of the most tolerant and human of men,” Robert would remark in later years. “His idea of what to do for people was to let them find out what they wanted.” For Robert, there was no doubt about what he wanted; from an early age, he lived within the world of books and science. “He was a dreamer,” said Babette Oppenheimer, “and not interested in the rough-and-tumble life of his age group . . . he was often teased and ridiculed for not being like other fellows.” As he grew older, even his mother on occasion worried about her son’s “limited interest” in play and children his own age. “I know she kept trying to get me to be more like other boys, but with indifferent success.”

In 1912, when Robert was eight years old, Ella gave birth to another son, Frank Friedman Oppenheimer, and thereafter much of her attention shifted to the new baby. At some point, Ella’s mother moved into the Riverside apartment and lived with the family until she died when Frank was a young teenager. The eight years separating the boys left few opportunities for sibling rivalry. Robert later thought he had been not only an elder brother but also perhaps “father to him because of that age difference.” Frank’s early childhood was as nurturing, if not more so, than Robert’s. “If we had some enthusiasm,” Frank recalled, “my parents would cater to it.” In high school, when Frank showed an interest in reading Chaucer, Julius promptly went out and bought him a 1721 edition of the poet’s works. When Frank expressed a desire to play the flute, his parents hired one of America’s greatest flutists, George Barère, to give him private lessons. Both boys were excessively pampered—but as the firstborn, only Robert acquired a certain conceit. “I repaid my parents’ confidence in me by developing an unpleasant ego,” Robert later confessed, “which I am sure must have affronted both children and adults who were unfortunate enough to come into contact with me.”

IN SEPTEMBER 1911, soon after returning from his second visit to Grandfather Benjamin in Germany, Robert was enrolled in a unique private school. Years earlier, Julius had become an active member of the Ethical Culture Society. He and Ella had been married by Dr. Felix Adler, the Society’s leader and founder, and, beginning in 1907, Julius served as a trustee of the Society. There was no question but that his sons would receive their primary and secondary education at the Society’s school on Central Park West. The school’s motto was “Deed, not Creed.” Founded in 1876, the Ethical Culture Society inculcated in its members a commitment to social action and humanitarianism: “Man must assume responsibility for the direction of his life and destiny.” Although an outgrowth of American Reform Judaism, Ethical Culture was itself a “non-religion,” perfectly suited to upper-middle-class German Jews, most of whom, like the Oppenheimers, were intent on assimilating into American society. Felix Adler and his coterie of talented teachers promoted this process and would have a powerful influence in the molding of Robert Oppenheimer’s psyche, both emotionally and intellectually.

The son of Rabbi Samuel Adler, Felix Adler had, with his family, emigrated to New York from Germany in 1857, when he was only six years old. His father, a leader of the Reform Judaism movement in Germany, had come to head Temple Emanu-El, the largest Reform congregation in America. Felix might easily have succeeded his father, but as a young man he returned to Germany for his university studies and there he was exposed to radical new notions about the universality of God and man’s responsibilities to society. He read Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and a host of German philosophers, including Felix Wellhausen, who rejected the traditional belief in the Torah as divinely inspired. Adler returned to his father’s Temple Emanu-El in 1873 and preached a sermon on what he called the “Judaism of the Future.” To survive in the modern age, the younger Adler argued, Judaism must renounce its “narrow spirit of exclusion.” Instead of defining themselves by their biblical identity as the “Chosen People,” Jews should distinguish themselves by their social concern and their deeds on behalf of the laboring classes.

Within three years, Adler led some four hundred congregants of Temple Emanu-El out of the established Jewish community. With the financial support of Joseph Seligman and other wealthy Jewish businessmen of German origin, he founded a new movement that he called “Ethical Culture.” Meetings were held on Sunday mornings, at which Adler lectured; organ music was played but there were no prayers and no other religious ceremonies. Beginning in 1910, when Robert was six years old, the Society assembled in a handsome meeting house at 2 West 64th Street. Julius Oppenheimer attended the dedication ceremonies for the new building in 1910. The auditorium featured hand-carved oak paneling, beautiful stained-glass windows and a Wicks pipe organ in the balcony. Distinguished speakers like W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, among many other prominent public personalities, were welcomed in this ornate auditorium.

“Ethical Culture” was a reformist Judaic sect. But the seeds of this particular movement had clearly been planted by elite efforts to reform and integrate upper-class Jews into German society in the nineteenth century. Adler’s radical notions of Jewish identity struck a popular chord among wealthy Jewish businessmen in New York precisely because these men were grappling with a rising tide of anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century American life. Organized, institutional discrimination against Jews was a relatively recent phenomenon; since the American Revolution, when deists like Thomas Jefferson had insisted on a radical separation of organized religion from the state, American Jews had experienced a sense of tolerance. But after the stock market crash of 1873, the atmosphere in New York began to change. Then, in the summer of 1877, the Jewish community was scandalized when Joseph Seligman, the wealthiest and most prominent Jew of German origin in New York, was rudely turned away, as a Jew, from the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York. Over the next few years, the doors of other elite institutions, not only hotels but social clubs and preparatory private schools, suddenly slammed shut against Jewish membership.

Thus, by the end of the 1870s, Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture Society provided New York Jewish society with a timely vehicle for dealing with this mounting bigotry. Philosophically, Ethical Culture was as deist and republican as the Founding Fathers’ revolutionary principles. If the revolution of 1776 had brought with it an emancipation of American Jews, well, an apt response to nativist Christian bigotry was to become more American— more republican—than the Americans. These Jews would take the next step to assimilation, but they would do it, so to speak, as deist Jews. In Adler’s view, the notion of Jews as a nation was an anachronism. Soon he began creating the institutional structures that would make it practical for his adherents to lead their lives as “emancipated Jews.”

Adler insisted that the answer to anti-Semitism was the global spread of intellectual culture. Interestingly, Adler criticized Zionism as a withdrawal into Jewish particularism: “Zionism itself is a present-day instance of the segregating tendency.” For Adler, the future for Jews lay in America, not Palestine: “I fix my gaze steadfastly on the glimmering of a fresh morning that shines over the Alleghenies and the Rockies, not on the evening glow, however tenderly beautiful, that broods and lingers over the Jerusalem hills.”

To transform his Weltanschauung into reality, Adler founded in 1880 a tuition-free school for the sons and daughters of laborers called the Workingman’s School. In addition to the usual subjects of arithmetic, reading and history, Adler insisted that his students should be exposed to art, drama, dance and some kind of training in a technical skill likely to be of use in a society undergoing rapid industrialization. Every child, he believed, had some particular talent. Those who had no talent for mathematics might possess extraordinary “artistic gifts to make things with their hands.” For Adler, this insight was the “ethical seed—and the thing to do is to cultivate these various talents.” The goal was a “better world,” and thus the school’s mission was to “train reformers.” As the school evolved, it became a showcase of the progressive educational reform movement, and Adler himself fell under the influence of the educator and philosopher John Dewey and his school of American pragmatists.

While not a socialist, Adler was spiritually moved by Marx’s description in
Das Kapital
of the plight of the industrial working class. “I must square myself,” he wrote, “with the issues that socialism raises.” The laboring classes, he came to believe, deserved “just remuneration, constant employment, and social dignity.” The labor movement, he later wrote, “is an ethical movement, and I am with it, heart and soul.” Labor leaders reciprocated these sentiments; Samuel Gompers, head of the new American Federation of Labor, was a member of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

Ironically, by 1890 the school had so many students that Adler felt compelled to subsidize the Ethical Culture Society’s budget by admitting some tuition-paying students. At a time when many elite private schools were closing their doors to Jews, scores of prosperous Jewish businessmen were clamoring to have their children admitted to the Workingman’s School. By 1895, Adler had added a high school and renamed the school the Ethical Culture School. (Decades later, it was renamed the Fieldston School.) By the time Robert Oppenheimer enrolled in 1911, only about ten percent of the student body came from a working-class background. But the school nevertheless retained its liberal, socially responsible outlook. These sons and daughters of the relatively prosperous patrons of the Ethical Culture Society were infused with the notion that they were being groomed to reform the world, that they were the vanguard of a highly modern ethical gospel. Robert was a star student.

Needless to say, Robert’s adult political sensibilities can easily be traced to the progressive education he received at Felix Adler’s remarkable school. Throughout the formative years of his childhood and education, he was surrounded by men and women who thought of themselves as catalysts for a better world. In the years between the turn of the century and the end of World War I, Ethical Culture members served as agents of change on such politically charged issues as race relations, labor rights, civil liberties and environmentalism. In 1909, for instance, such prominent Ethical Culture members as Dr. Henry Moskowitz, John Lovejoy Elliott, Anna Garlin Spencer and William Salter helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Dr. Moskowitz similarly played an important role in the garment workers’ strikes that occurred between 1910 and 1915. Other Ethical Culturists helped to found the National Civil Liberties Bureau, a forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union. Though they shunned notions of class struggle, members of the Society were pragmatic radicals committed to playing an active role in bringing about social change. They believed that a better world required hard work, persistence and political organization. In 1921, the year Robert graduated from the Ethical Culture high school, Adler exhorted his students to develop their “ethical imagination,” to see “things not as they are, but as they might be.”
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Robert was fully aware of Adler’s influence not only on himself but on his father. And he was not above teasing Julius about it. At seventeen, he wrote a poem on the occasion of his father’s fiftieth birthday that included the line “and after he came to America, he swallowed Dr. Adler like morality compressed.”

Like many Americans of German background, Dr. Adler was deeply saddened and conflicted when America was drawn into World War I. Unlike another prominent member of the Ethical Culture Society, Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of
The Nation
magazine, Adler was not a pacifist. When a German submarine sank the British passenger ship
Lusitania,
he supported the arming of American merchant ships. While he opposed American entry into the conflict, when the Wilson Administration declared war in April 1917, Adler urged his congregation to give its “undivided allegiance” to America. At the same time, he declared that he could not label Germany the only guilty party. As a critic of the German monarchy, at the war’s end he welcomed the downfall of imperial rule and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But as a fierce anticolonialist, he openly deplored the hypocrisy of a victors’ peace that appeared only to strengthen the British and French empires. Naturally, his critics accused him of pro-German sentiments. As a trustee of the Society and as a man who deeply admired Dr. Adler, Julius Oppenheimer likewise felt conflicted about the European war and his identity as a German-American. But there is no evidence of how young Robert felt about the conflict. His teacher at school in ethical studies, however, was John Lovejoy Elliott, who remained a fierce critic of American entry into the war.