Crowther, Hogben and Huxley in the 1920s

Of Huxley, Hogben and Crowther, only Huxley had serious contact with the US before the 1930s. The eldest of the three, Huxley was born in 1887 and educated at Eton and Oxford, where he studied zoology. He then did research on regeneration at the Naples Marine Biological Station, before returning to Oxford as a demonstrator, where he began seriously to study the courtship habits of birds. In 1913 he moved to Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he was assistant professor of biology. He later recalled that, on a preparatory visit to the US, ‘New York thrilled me with its skyscrapers (though they were nothing compared to the later giants)’; he was impressed by ‘the grandeur of its two main railway stations … [and] the beauty of Brooklyn Bridge’. He returned to England three years later, having realized that he ought to ‘do something about the war’, served in the intelligence unit of the Army Service Corps, and in 1919 was made a fellow at New College, Oxford. Some of Huxley's contemporaries suspected that his success was largely owing to his family connection to T.H. Huxley.Footnote ²²

Hogben and Crowther had no such, or lesser, shadows to escape from. Born four years apart, Hogben's background was working-class, while Crowther's father was the headteacher of Halifax Technical School and his mother taught music. Hogben finished his degree (which he had been awarded on a scholarship) at Trinity College, Cambridge, shortly before Crowther won a scholarship to study physics and mathematics there. Crowther took up his place, which was deferred thanks to the war, after working on anti-aircraft gunnery with A.V. Hill at Portsmouth; Hogben, meanwhile, was in jail (in solitary confinement) for conscientious objection. Once the war ended, Crowther survived one term at Trinity before experiencing a nervous breakdown and dropping out. In the same year, Hogben married Enid Charles, a feminist mathematician, who was a friend of Crowther's sister, Dodo (they had attended Newnham College together). In 1922, seeking an appointment, Hogben moved to Edinburgh, before going to Canada and Cape Town. Crowther, meanwhile, scraped a living as a temporary teacher before securing a job with Oxford University Press as a travelling book salesman. Testing his bosses’ limits, he soon began commissioning books, and was saved from dismissal thanks to his knack for spotting a bestseller.Footnote ²³

The intimacy that existed between Huxley and Hogben did so in spite of serious political and ideological differences.Footnote ²⁴ Hogben and Crowther were socialists: both were active in the Plebs League, a movement which promoted radical working-class education, and both visited the socialist 1917 Club in London; they also rejected religion at an early age.Footnote ²⁵ However, Hogben was never a communist, unlike Crowther, who briefly joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (in 1923, and probably only for a year).Footnote ²⁶ Huxley, by contrast, had more conventional political and social views, which he set out in Essays of a Biologist (1923). Hogben and Crowther both criticized the book, Hogben commenting on its ‘timid superficiality and insipid obscurantism’ which reflected ‘the defects of mental immaturity’.Footnote ²⁷ In the Sunday Worker, Crowther similarly said that Huxley was incapable of dealing with sociological issues. Huxley

Though he was no radical, Huxley did believe in social progress, which – as Roger Smith has shown – ‘entailed “community” and progressive evolution towards “individuality” of both person and collective’; in the case of humans, ‘individuality’ meant freedom from, and mastery of, the environment. This was an elite version of social progress, which left little room for democratic participation.Footnote ²⁹ One element of the world view, and the next step in humans’ progressive evolution, was eugenics, which Huxley promoted in the 1920s. Hogben and Crowther, by contrast, were about as opposed to eugenics as it was possible to be in this period.Footnote ³⁰

Racism was a key part of Huxley's eugenic beliefs in the 1920s, as revealed in one article from a series published in 1924 in The Spectator under the title ‘America revisited’. Overall, Huxley believed the US's ‘civilization is essentially different from anything which exists in Europe … The country is still in the semi-pioneer stage’.Footnote ³¹ Each essay dealt with an element of the US's distinctive culture: religious fundamentalism (and anti-Darwinism), universities, segregation, immigration, architecture (‘the first blossom of a genuine American artistic culture’) and Prohibition.Footnote ³² In ‘The Negro problem’ he observed that ‘the negro mind is as different from the white mind as the negro from the white body. The old characterization “the minds of children” is perfectly true’. People of mixed race, meanwhile, were ‘disharmonious organisms’ owing to the ‘Mendelian recombination of the two sets of factors which co-operatively build up the well-adapted negro and Caucasian type respectively’. He noted ‘with relief that, contrary to much popular belief, [black people] are not increasing faster than the whites’. Many were migrating to the northern states, but they tended ‘to die off more rapidly’ there; however, this would ‘not solve the problem’ because the mortality ‘will assuredly bear harder on the coal-black negro than on the mulatto’. Segregation was the only solution, and he foresaw a time when Southern Europeans and black people would intermarry in the South such that ‘it would be impossible to draw a sharp colour line’ and the US would divide into two regions, ‘one in the South where there was no distinction of colour, and one in the North where the negro could be kept out, or at least allowed no privileges’. In the meantime ‘the problem is acute and likely to remain so for some time’.Footnote ³³ Huxley's racism became less pronounced after experience in Africa and as he became opposed to Nazism in the 1930s, and this change was reflected in his comments on the New Deal.Footnote ³⁴

By the mid-1920s, Crowther had begun to submit his own articles to the New Statesman and the Manchester Guardian.Footnote ³⁵ He wanted the interpretation of science for non-specialists to be a political endeavour, as he acknowledged to Huxley in 1925 when he approached him about creating a ‘journal whose business it is to expound the significance of new scientific work to the general public’, which ‘would be conducted so that it would be acceptable to the WEA [Workers’ Educational Association] and other serious minded socialist student movements’.Footnote ³⁶ Two years later, Crowther secured his first scoop for the Manchester Guardian: ‘There is much surprise in scientific quarters about the announcement of Professor Julian S. Huxley's decision to resign the Chair of Zoology at King's College, London’, he wrote.Footnote ³⁷ A few months before, Huxley had embarked on a book project with H.G. Wells and his son, G.P. Wells, to be published as The Science of Life; he decided to free up more time for writing when the quantity and quality of his copy had not satisfied the elder Wells.Footnote ³⁸ Commenting on Huxley's decision to ‘explore the methods of communicating the results of scientific research to the public’, Crowther said that ‘the development of cheap printing, broadcasting, and the systematisation of popular lectures has revolutionised the possibilities in this direction’.Footnote ³⁹

While Crowther and Huxley were both experimenting with new careers in the interpretation of science, Hogben told Crowther that he had been ‘pitchforked into the middle of the seventeenth century’ in Cape Town, which was ‘a semifeudal society with a white “Labour” bureaucracy [where] any sentence which I might write to any body involving the word native lays me open to deportation’. He hated South Africa and wanted ‘to be back where things are happening that affect the world’.Footnote ⁴⁰ He got the opportunity to do so when he was offered the chair of social biology at the London School of Economics, which he took up in 1930. Here, he continued to challenge right-wing eugenics by investigating the relationship between nature and nurture.Footnote ⁴¹ While in London, Hogben and Enid Charles stayed with Crowther and his wife Franziska.Footnote ⁴² Crowther had been made the ‘scientific correspondent’ of the Manchester Guardian in 1928; Huxley's reputation as a first-rate writer, meanwhile, had been secured by the publication of The Science of Life. Yet even Huxley felt the need to ask Crowther to check the articles he had been writing for The Times and Nash’s: ‘One is so likely after such a short time to make some stupid mistake, and I do not want to be taken to task over trivial matters’.Footnote ⁴³

Such were the relations between Crowther, Hogben and Huxley up to 1931, when representatives of the USSR arrived in London to attend the Congress on the History of Science. As might be expected, they had quite different responses to the delegation and to the USSR generally.

Crowther in particular liked what he heard and took inspiration from both Hessen's analysis of the history of science and Bukharin's exposition of dialectical materialism. He had helped to organize the congress, and was already familiar with developments in Russia (having advised the Bolshevik government on technical education in the late 1920s and visiting the country to see his childhood friend, the novelist Ralph Fox).Footnote ⁴⁴ Publicly, he said that the Soviet Union's importance lay in the ‘invaluable data’ it provided on planning ‘for those who must sooner or later devise a satisfactorily organized industrial society’, something that he thought could happen in Western countries without a revolution.Footnote ⁴⁵ Hessen's essay, he reflected a decade after hearing it,

He adopted Hessen's method, albeit not dogmatically, in British Scientists of the Nineteenth Century (1935) and Famous American Men of Science (1937), where he attempted to contribute to the solution of contemporary social problems in the English-speaking world. Around the same time, he grappled with dialectical materialism, and interpreted it in Soviet Science (1936), where he said that ‘the inspiration of some remarkable doctrine’ was responsible for the achievements of science under the Bolsheviks.Footnote ⁴⁷ Russia To-day’s reviewer considered Crowther's chapter on dialectical materialism to be ‘as clear an exposition of a complicated subject as the reviewer has met’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Hogben, meanwhile, in the words of the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb (writing in her diary in 1933), was ‘upset by the dogmatism of the soviet scientists and their childish exegesis of Marx as Holy writ; but he delights in their anti God campaign, and approves of economic equality: so, by and large, he is on their side’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Hogben objected strongly to premature and doctrinaire discussion of dialectical materialism.Footnote ⁵⁰ He commented in 1931 that the Russian delegation ‘did not seek to establish any rapprochement between the standpoint of dialectical materialism and the empirical temper of our own tradition’; the Russian philosophy had ‘not yet been upholstered with the pragmatic simplicity congenial to the English-speaking peoples’.Footnote ⁵¹ Dialectical materialism would be more attractive to Americans than to the British, he predicted, because in the US ‘natural science is regarded as part of the equipment of an educated man or woman and the behaviourist school in psychology has paved the way for a radical re-examination of traditional philosophic systems’.Footnote ⁵² As we shall see, he saw Crowther's histories of science, and in particular Famous American Men of Science, as contributing to this project of making ‘the doctrines of the Russian school’ intelligible to ‘the empirical temper of our own tradition’.Footnote ⁵³

Huxley was less influenced by the Russian delegation than were Crowther and Hogben, though he appreciated the practical importance of what was happening in the USSR. In July 1931, he visited Russia in a delegation which Crowther arranged on behalf of the Society for Cultural Relations.Footnote ⁵⁴ As he reported in A Scientist among the Soviets, on the way to Russia the group stopped in Hamburg, ‘just when the German financial crisis of July 1931 was engaging the world's attention’. On returning to England, he found ‘the whole capitalist world … in the throes of a crisis’. In the meantime, he had seen in Bolshevik Russia ‘a scientific experiment, and the only one ever yet carried out in such a field and on such a scale’. He evidently considered the experiment in terms of his own ideas about social progress and individuality, as he regarded individual elements of the USSR ‘in relation to the growth and travail of the whole vast organism’. Travail, because Russia was in ‘transition between a mediaeval past and a communist future, a compromise between a chaos and a plan, a mixture of expedience and principle’. Towards the end of A Scientist among the Soviets, after admitting that some form of planning was necessary, he asked, ‘is the Russian method the only practicable one?’Footnote ⁵⁵ This was a question that others who, like Huxley, worried about the restriction of liberty from above were asking. The New Deal suggested to Huxley that planning and freedom were reconcilable, and that alternatives to the Russian method existed.

‘A new and hopeful type of social organism’: Huxley and the Tennessee Valley Authority

People like Huxley began to look to the USSR for ideas because, by the early 1930s, it was clear that democracy was in trouble. Democratic countries seemed incapable of dealing with the Depression, and as the decade wore on they gave way to other, more totalitarian, forms of government which seemed better able to cope. In this context, liberal democracy's ability to survive was in doubt. If, as some suggested, democracies also adopted a degree of planning to tackle ‘the big problems of the day’, would liberal values be compromised?Footnote ⁵⁶

The New Deal attempted to answer this question. As Roosevelt said, it drew for pragmatic reasons on ‘some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Supported by southern Democrats, who initiated and backed progressive social legislation in Congress so long as it did not threaten racial segregation, the New Deal enabled ‘an unprecedented degree of national state intervention’ designed to deal with economic collapse.Footnote ⁵⁸ The emergency legislation passed during Roosevelt's Hundred Days was ‘characterized by immense powers delegated from the legislature to the executive branch that dramatically expanded the powers of federal agencies, many of which were new’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Notably, the Banking Act (1933) aimed to stabilize banks by, for example, requiring the separation of investment and depository functions; the Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933) brought in a series of subsidies for farmers designed to stop overproduction and raise commodity prices; and, more controversially, the National Industrial Relations Act (1933) allowed workers to unionize, attempted to raise wages via collaborations between trade associations and unions, and provided over three billion dollars (largely from taxes) for the construction of infrastructure.Footnote ⁶⁰ In all this activity arose an answer to Huxley's question whether the Russian method of planning was the only practicable one.

By the mid-1930s, Huxley was well placed to appreciate the New Deal's attempt to rescue liberal democracy via experimental intervention in the economy. Over the previous few years, he had gradually moved closer to the red scientists’ belief that science needed to be organized for the benefit of society. In 1934, he sent Crowther an advance copy of his Scientific Research and Social Needs, a book which contained transcripts of discussions between Huxley, Hyman Levy and the socialist physicist Patrick Blackett.Footnote ⁶¹ Huxley told Crowther that writing the book had ‘both enlarged and altered my ideas on the relations between science and social activities in general’.Footnote ⁶² He became a great advocate of planning, actively participating in groups such as Political and Economic Planning and the Next Five Years Group, which searched for a middle way and tended towards a form of ‘capitalist planning’ characterized by industrial self-government.Footnote ⁶³ The rise of Nazism also worried Huxley, and he became an opponent of its racial theories. These developments formed the context of Huxley's interest in the New Deal.

Huxley focused on the Tennessee Valley Authority, another piece of New Deal legislation passed during Roosevelt's Hundred Days. The TVA was ‘a public power company’ which was granted wide-ranging powers in its task of electrifying the southern states.Footnote ⁶⁴ In If I Were Dictator, published in 1934, Huxley mentioned the ‘government ownership and administration of the hydro-electric station at Muscle Shoals’ as a promising example of large-scale planning, though acknowledging that as it had only just begun, ‘so … we cannot yet judge its results’.Footnote ⁶⁵ A year later, having visited the US, Huxley was better placed to comment, and he reported in The Times and The Listener on the experiment, emphasizing its scale and the planning involved in dealing with such problems as drought and siltage. In modernizing the valley, Huxley wrote that administrators had to deal with similar problems as had the Bolsheviks in Russia, including poor agriculture and a ‘backward’ (but not genetically inferior) population. He gave a sense of the scale of the effort, and said that ‘planning is needed, and interconnected planning covering all aspects of life’.Footnote ⁶⁶

Huxley believed that the TVA was an example of planning which did not unduly impinge on freedom. The project proceeded with ‘the necessary modicum of authority, of compulsory powers, and financial backing’, but, unlike efforts prosecuted under Hitler's or Mussolini's regimes, it aimed ‘at exerting its influence for the most part indirectly, by persuasion or demonstration’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This was most evident in the use of model farms, which encouraged farmers to adopt innovations that they could see were worthwhile, and more generally in the way the TVA engaged in social engineering without dictatorship. According to Huxley, ‘the population must be educated towards better economic methods and towards a higher and richer standard of life’ in order for further electrification to proceed, and so the TVA focused on uplifting the ‘hillbillies’ through education and improvements in health.Footnote ⁶⁸

In these comments on reformation of the South, Huxley largely overlooked Jim Crow laws. As with other New Deal legislation, the existence of the TVA relied on the votes of southern Democrats in Congress, who correctly ‘assumed that the law's administration would do nothing to disturb the racial order’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Huxley believed that the TVA was unable rather than unwilling to tackle the problem, noting that ‘race prejudice and all the difficulties it engenders will persist for a long time, and no extraneous authority can do much’.Footnote ⁷⁰ He said that, on principle, the TVA ‘employs negroes in the same proportion in which they occur in the population at large (about 12 per cent. for the area as a whole)’ and ‘pays negro and white the same wage for the same work’.Footnote ⁷¹ He did not mention that, in practice, blacks were employed in mundane jobs with no opportunity to learn additional skills, or that segregation characterized TVA regions.Footnote ⁷² Foreshadowing something that would hamper New Deal initiatives later in the decade, Huxley noted that there had been ‘a large accession of negroes to trade unionism in this region of the South’.Footnote ⁷³ As we shall see, Huxley's blind spot regarding race was shared by Crowther and, to a lesser extent, Hogben. Huxley perhaps thought it inexpedient to suggest similarities between the US's and Germany's racial policies at a time when he was speaking out about the latter.Footnote ⁷⁴

Overall, it was the experimental nature of the New Deal – the application of scientific methods to society – that appealed to Huxley. This went beyond vague references to ‘scientific planning’, which – as Ritschel suggests – merely concealed planners’ political stances.Footnote ⁷⁵ Huxley saw the scientific method writ large in the New Deal. Indeed, the TVA ‘marked the beginning of the large-scale application of the experimental method in social affairs’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The experiment went beyond that of Bolshevik Russia, because it had a scientific control to determine whether the experiment had worked. The TVA had ‘been carefully planned to give a specific answer to certain definite questions’ – in particular ‘whether a public agency can generate electric power more cheaply and more efficiently than private companies’.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Electric Power Association of one county, though it paid ‘the same taxes as any private company’ and had ‘an amortisation charge for the purchase of the property’, had rates which were ‘only about half those of the private company previously operating in the county’.Footnote ⁷⁸ In other words, the experiment had succeeded.

In all, Huxley thought he had witnessed ‘the early growth of a new and hopeful type of social organism’, one that was progressive by combining ‘science and vision’ on a large scale.Footnote ⁷⁹ He hoped that a similar experiment could be introduced in Britain: ‘If one has got to try some sort of planning, the methods employed by the TVA are adapted to a democratic regime’; Russian methods could never be applied ‘to such individualistic countries as America or Britain’.Footnote ⁸⁰

‘A valuable American belief in political experimentalism’: Crowther on Franklin and the US Constitution

Huxley's articles describing the remarkable experiment in planning which was under way in the Tennessee valley appeared just as Crowther was searching for a topic for his second book on the history of science. Inspired by Hessen, Crowther had begun in 1931 to work on a history of nineteenth-century scientists ‘precipitately, for fear of being forestalled’.Footnote ⁸¹ British Scientists of the Nineteenth Century eventually appeared in 1935, and Famous American Men of Science followed two years later. In his autobiography, published in 1970, Crowther said that he chose to write about American scientists because his lack of foreign languages restricted him to reading sources written in English. ‘At the same time, visits to scientific institutions in the U.S.S.R. having become more difficult, and visits to German scientific institutions repulsive, I paid more attention to other countries’.Footnote ⁸² These motivations, combined with his belief that history of science ‘was essential for the solution of contemporary social problems due to the unorganised growth of a technological society’, conspired to create a situation in which he could not avoid commenting on, or intervening in, US politics. Indeed, in writing about the US, he had a choice. He could have dismissed the New Deal as fascist, or written that it was doomed to fail (just as capitalism was destined to collapse). In the event, he chose to use the histories of prominent scientists to endorse the experimental approach to politics embodied in the New Deal, and to hint at how to keep the project from going off course.

Crowther's approach in Famous American Men of Science was informed by Hessen, but also drew on the theories of others. He approved of the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen's ‘brilliant writings’ and intended, as he wrote to his publisher, ‘to look at [the psychologist William] James from the standpoint of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class’.Footnote ⁸³ In his research notes he paraphrased Veblen's argument that the ‘aberrant scions’ of the leisure class advanced science, especially those ‘middle-class persons who have risen into [the] leisure class’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Benjamin Franklin was a perfect example: whereas the researches of the leisure class were usually non-practical, Franklin came from the lower middle class and inherited their industrious talents.Footnote ⁸⁵ Meanwhile, Crowther suggested that Thomas Edison was not ‘the inexplicable wizard of invention’, as traditionally portrayed. Joseph Henry, as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, represented ‘a distinguished forerunner of the modern social planners, who wish to integrate science into the machinery of society’. The physical chemist Josiah Gibbs remained underappreciated because, though his science had social use, he was at Yale where most of his peers regarded science as an offshoot of curiosity.Footnote ⁸⁶ Crowther's subjects highlighted issues of contemporary relevance: in this case, of practical science for social use and – perhaps most importantly – political experimentation in the form of planning.

By the time Crowther began work on American Men of Science, the New Deal's ‘radical moment’ was temporarily faltering as some of its earliest initiatives were being ruled unconstitutional. In May 1935, the Supreme Court declared that the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) went too far in its delegation of legislative power to the president. As mentioned, NIRA regulated the economy, allowing ‘the national government to assume the leadership of private enterprise’ (in the words of one of Roosevelt's advisers), and initiated a public-works programme.Footnote ⁸⁷ It also ‘guaranteed workers the right to form and join unions’, leading to general strikes the year after its passage into law.Footnote ⁸⁸ This increase of power to workers continued after the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) was passed in July 1935. The Wagner Act (as it was also called) outlawed actions taken by employers to undermine labour unionization and established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). ‘With this law, the federal government offered organized labour a broad legal umbrella under which to shelter’, Katznelson writes.Footnote ⁸⁹ Membership of trade unions increased dramatically; by the late 1930s, ‘American workers had acquired substantial influence on both the shop floor and in the political realm’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Also in 1935, the Social Security Act came into law, which provided ‘old-age pensions and unemployment insurance’.Footnote ⁹¹ Notwithstanding the lack of desire to ‘build a socialism in which the national state would supplant private firms to become the central economic factor’, much less to ‘discard private property in accordance with the Soviet model’, it is perhaps unsurprising that this national planning and a resurgent labour movement would attract the attention of socialists such as Crowther.Footnote ⁹² At the same time, in response to the international political situation, Crowther recognized the need to compromise and became involved in the People's Front. For example, in 1936 his name appeared alongside Huxley's underneath a letter sent by For Intellectual Liberty to all Liberal and Labour MPs.Footnote ⁹³ The letter urged ‘the scattered forces of progress [to] call a truce to the civil war that now divides them, and co-operate for the defence of those democratic principles which are common to them all’.Footnote ⁹⁴

As Crowther researched and wrote about Franklin, the Manchester Guardian reported that the Supreme Court had ruled the Agricultural Adjustments Act (AAA) unconstitutional for infringing state power.Footnote ⁹⁵ Crowther commented, ‘at the present time, the Constitution is more than ever the centre of American political thought. The contentions between the executive, the houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, affect the foundations of American life’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Crowther aimed to shed some historical light on these tensions. On the very day that the Supreme Court made its decision about the AAA, Crowther read Woodrow Wilson's Constitutional Government in the United States (1908), which linked the ‘checks and balances’ embedded in the Constitution with Newtonian physics.Footnote ⁹⁷ Crowther fleshed out Wilson's argument that the Founding Fathers designed a balanced Constitution by drawing on Newton's physics, whereby ‘all bodies are nicely poised by a balance of the forces acting on them’.Footnote ⁹⁸ According to Crowther, they did so because they were lawyers and established members of the leisure class, and therefore did not have an up-to-date understanding of science: ‘Newton with pencil and paper worked out the Constitution of the Universe. This appealed to lawyers who desired to work out the Constitution of the United States of America with pen and paper’.Footnote ⁹⁹

But this was not the whole story because, as Hessen argued, Newton's ideas arose from his social environment. Crowther believed that comments by Niccolò Machiavelli and James Harrington on balanced constitutions suggested ‘that “Newtonian” ideas are older than Newton’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Indeed, Newtonian mechanics were ‘indebted to Whig or mercantile theories of government. In the environment of such theories, and allied systems of thought, [Newton] produced his mechanics’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Rather than providing the Founding Fathers with the idea of a balanced Constitution, then, ‘there was a continual interaction between notions of government and scientific ideas’, and the drafters of the Constitution adapted Newtonian mechanics ‘to give more precise expression to the theories of government suitable to trading classes’.Footnote ¹⁰² The result was a political structure ‘equipped with a system of automatic governors, safety valves and balance-weights’ which ‘harmlessly discharged [social discontent] through a temporary acceleration of the balanced mechanism, and the original relative positions of the interacting parts, or social interests or classes, would remain constant for ever’.Footnote ¹⁰³ In other words, the Constitution was a conservative force which kept people in their place. Understandings of science – as manifested in disagreements between the executive, legislature and judiciary – evidently played ‘a part in the rejection or delay, for good or ill, of social plans such as the New Deal’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Yet this was not the only political tradition which existed in the United States. Crowther also pointed out that Franklin was the only prominent Founding Father to disagree with the Constitution. He did so, according to Crowther, because ‘he was the most confident pioneer of the next advance of science beyond Newton’, so ‘could not sympathize with lawyers in love with a scientific point of view already old-fashioned’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As befitted his origins outside the leisure class, Franklin was a scientific experimentalist who also wanted to make political experiments. In recent years, Crowther observed, US politicians said that they wanted to experiment in politics without knowing the answers. ‘A new attitude has begun to appear in America’, he wrote, ‘where leaders have plainly said that they did not know beforehand the solutions to all problems, but merely wished to have power to try various experimental policies’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Yet this attitude was coming up against the Newtonian balance of forces encoded in the Constitution. Crowther's implicit argument was that the executive should be allowed to experiment by initiating ambitious plans such as the New Deal, and that the eighteenth-century Constitution was unfit for twentieth-century challenges.

In October 1936, the president of Harvard University, James Bryant Conant, wrote to Crowther, introducing himself as someone ‘interested in the History of Science’ who had read British Scientists (published in the US as Men of Science) ‘with much interest’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Conant thought an understanding of the history of science could help to defend free inquiry in universities: as he said in a talk to Amherst College in 1935, ‘without a widespread appreciation of what the creative spirit has accomplished, the forward advance will always be subject to the danger of being halted by a mob demanding dogma, not discussion, and crying for a moratorium on research’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Harvard needed ‘thoughtful rebels’ on its faculties, but it was hard to find merely ‘satisfactory teachers’ of history of science.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He invited Crowther to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard. Crowther set sail in February 1937, three months after Roosevelt's re-election, and shortly after departing, he wired for his wife, Franziska, to join him because he realized that she had ‘made a definite contribution’ to the lectures: ‘Her contributions in ordering & criticising was [sic] an organic part. The lectures were partly hers’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Political issues bulked large in his diary of the trip, from the ‘democratic’ atmosphere aboard the SS Paris that ‘reflected the French popular front’, to his comments on the political outlook of various scientists and left-wing writers.Footnote ¹¹¹ Upon arriving, the ‘beautifully clean & well-ordered’ New York with its ‘light & charming’ modern architecture immediately created ‘a lively impression’.Footnote ¹¹² He was surprised to find ‘strong anti-feminist feeling’ in Harvard, ‘even more than in England’.Footnote ¹¹³ Nor was he impressed by the socialists at a Science & Society party.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Most seemed intolerant, and there were ‘several pretty bitter men, perhaps [Communist] party members’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Overall, however, Crowther thought progressive views were in the ascendant at Harvard.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Yet when the Marxist archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957) visited Harvard later in 1937, he reported that Crowther's lectures ‘provoked controversy among historians’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Childe did not elaborate, but American historians were debating the uses of history in the 1930s. One Harvard historian, C.H. McIlwain, disparaged the utilitarian approach to the past in his Presidential Address to the American Historical Association in December 1936.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Already, McIlwain worried, ‘there are more than hints in certain parts of the world that all past history must be rewritten for a present purpose’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Crowther's lectures, and especially that on ‘Science and the American Constitution’, which Conant attended and in which Crowther presented his arguments about the frustration of the New Deal, must have seemed particularly disconcerting, coming as they did a month after Roosevelt had announced his plan to change the composition of the Supreme Court (in an attempt to make it more amenable to New Deal legislation).

Crowther's other lectures were apparently more successful. The New Deal brought with it attempts more effectively to plan science and fund activity at a federal level. These were spearheaded in particular by Karl Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and chair of the Science Advisory Board (which Roosevelt established in 1934). Conant was also associated with ‘this new generation of scientific leaders’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Crowther pointed out in his lecture on Joseph Henry (reported in the Harvard Crimson) that in promoting scientific research at the federally funded Smithsonian Institution (as its first secretary), ‘Henry did much toward establishing the profession of scientific administration, a profession which in the complexity of modern civilization is becoming more and more essential to scientific progress’.Footnote ¹²¹ This achievement in fact made Henry ‘the equal of Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin, Maxwell, and the other great scientists of the nineteenth century’.Footnote ¹²² Crowther's comments on Franklin were also well pitched. For Crowther, Franklin embodied the model ‘politician–philosopher–journalist’, a ‘model to which modern men must return if contemporary problems [were] to be solved’ and the dangers of specialism to be avoided.Footnote ¹²³ Specialists, Crowther said, tended to exaggerate the importance of their own subjects, and could easily be misled by quacks on other topics; the legalistic Founding Fathers, ignorant of modern experimental technique, were an example of this. Specialization was a ‘centripetal force … driving inward to dictatorship’.Footnote ¹²⁴ The solution, ‘philosophic journalism’, required ‘breadth of understanding, fertility of mind, and coordination of walled-in ideas’, combined with something which Franklin lacked: ‘some general idea of the system and tendencies of the forces that govern society’.Footnote ¹²⁵ The conservative Harvard Crimson noted that ‘Mr. Crowther's philosophy resembles President Conant's. The planning of the University Professorships is directly traceable to the necessity for broader, free, and more embracive thinking, with particular reference to the increasing complexity and specialization of contemporary society.’Footnote ¹²⁶ In a Manchester Guardian article on Harvard, Crowther highlighted ‘the appointment of professors whose teaching and creative work shall not be confined to any of the recognised subjects’ as being ‘of particular interest’.Footnote ¹²⁷

Famous American Men of Science received favourable reviews, and Crowther returned to the US in 1938 to promote the book on a lecture tour and to visit scientific institutes; he lived in New York for about three months after the tour. He ‘saw evidence in several directions that American science was progressing swiftly’ and that ‘the disparity between British and American academic institutions was rapidly growing’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Further exposure to US culture did not apparently awaken Crowther's sense of racial injustice; like Huxley, he largely ignored this aspect of the US. Crowther was more interested in the cultivation of science because it ‘had become the chief positive characteristic of civilization’ and could provide ‘a measure of a country's cultural, industrial and military strength’.Footnote ¹²⁹ In Famous American Men of Science, and in his lectures at Harvard, Crowther attempted to unearth a seam in US history which valued breadth of knowledge, efficient science administration and – above all – experimental politics, all of which he hoped could help to mitigate society's present troubles. As he said, understanding the history of science ‘was essential for the solution of contemporary social problems’.Footnote ¹³⁰

‘The commonwealth of knowledge’: Hogben and Anglo-American Marxism

In writing his books and drafting his lectures, Crowther received help from Hogben, who was equally enthused by the new interpretation of history of science. Indeed, Crowther and Hogben worked together to establish a Hessen-inspired approach to the history of science. Hogben wanted his Mathematics for the Million (1936) to be published by Routledge, Crowther's publisher, and considered the possibility of a shorter edition, to be written in cooperation with Crowther and published later.Footnote ¹³¹ This turned out to be unnecessary, because Mathematics sold in surprisingly large numbers. Hogben aimed to show, he said to Crowther, ‘that Marxism can be applied as an instrument of pedagogics and why the hell [Hyman] Levy doesn't do it better instead of talking generalities about science as a social venture I don't know!’Footnote ¹³² In his next ‘Primer for the Age of Plenty’, Science for the Citizen (1938), which sold equally well, Hogben specifically recommended Crowther's two histories of science in the preface, and the publisher Allen and Unwin hoped that Crowther would contribute a volume (ideally Famous American Men of Science) to the series.Footnote ¹³³

Hogben may have taken historical materialism seriously, but he had not abandoned the critique of dialectical materialism and its jargon which he set out as early as 1931. At that point, he had said that the US was more likely than the UK ‘to find an adequate exponent to interpret [the doctrines of the Russian school] in a language intelligible to the English-speaking world’.Footnote ¹³⁴ In 1937, Hogben presented this argument about the need for an English interpreter of Marxism to an American audience in an article for the US-based Science & Society; along with Bernal and Haldane, he was listed as being on the journal's editorial board. In this piece, titled ‘Our social heritage’, Hogben suggested that writings such as Crowther's pointed the way to an Anglo-American Marxism. He reminded his readers that ‘Lenin never encouraged his followers to kick away their own spiritual ladders’, and argued,

Marxists could ‘learn much from Soviet historians of science like Hessen’ in ‘the task of modifying and expanding the great empirical traditions of our common social heritage’, but the tradition of Hegel, when transplanted to a foreign Anglo-American culture, merely provided ‘theology with a new rationale and … reinforce[d] scholastic humanism in opposition to the claims of realistic research’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Adopting dialectical jargon – imposing ‘the idiom of a Volkssprache which helps Hitler to deceive his countrymen’ – was ‘neither good Marxism, good history or good salesmanship in the realm of propaganda’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Unlike Maurice Dobb's On Marxism Today (1932) or D.S. Mirsky's The Intelligentsia of Great Britain (1935), which adopted this jargon, Hogben judged that Crowther's books were ‘brilliant’.Footnote ¹³⁸

Indeed, some of Hogben's examples of how the legacy of English-speaking countries could be rescued came from Crowther. For example, Hogben said that the natural philosopher William Petty (1623–1687) and the social reformer Robert Owen (1771–1858) came up with the labour theory of value before Marx; Franklin also ‘subscribed to Petty's view that human effort is the only rational basis for costing a scientifically organized society’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Crowther had mentioned to Hogben ‘the germs of the Labour Theory of Value in Franklin & Petty’ a few months before.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In short, in order to ‘play a fruitful part in a popular intellectual front’, Hogben argued in his Science & Society article that advocates of Marxism must ‘emphasize its historical rôle as custodian of the positive cultural achievements of the English and American Revolutions’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ As Crowther said in a signed review of Hogben's Dangerous Thoughts (1939), Hogben ‘is at heart an English Protestant and Empiricist’; as such, ‘one of his special merits is that he understands and continues the English intellectual tradition’.Footnote ¹⁴²

This was a tradition which was, of course, increasingly under threat from fascism. After war broke out in Europe, the emphasis on a shared Anglo-American heritage understandably took on added importance, as those in the UK attempted to persuade the US to intervene in the war against fascism and in defence of common values. Joseph Needham delivered a series of lectures in the United States between June and November 1940, mostly to university audiences, on the general situation in Europe. Needham, writing under the pseudonym Henry Holorenshaw, had already done his bit to celebrate Britain's radical heritage. The Levellers and the English Revolution, published by Victor Gollancz in 1939, emphasized the communal, socialist inspiration of the early radicals.Footnote ¹⁴³ In the United States, Needham used a similar history to encourage cooperation with Britain. It was not just Britain, he said, ‘but rather Anglo-American democracy’, that could defend the world against Nazism. There was a ‘historical association between science, democracy, capitalism and puritanism’, all of which were ‘taken to America by the founding fathers, who set up in North America a society conformable to the “Good Old Cause” of the Parliament-men in 17th century England’. Now, Needham continued, ‘American democracy is, in its vast industrial production, coming to help of the Good Old Cause of Freedom in Europe, against “the Amalekite tyranny”, as Cromwell's troopers would have called it, of the Nazis’. Deep historical roots existed that justified Britain and the US collaborating to defend science, freedom and democracy against the irrationality, bondage and dictatorship of fascism. Emphasizing these roots was especially important as Needham noted that Americans tended to equate ‘fascism’ with other past European tyrannies – notably British imperialism. In all, ‘the fate of world-science … depends on the success with which the democracies, i.e. Anglo-American democracy, can overthrow Nazi tyranny, without themselves succumbing to fascist ideas in any other guise’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Back home, Crowther was ideally placed to propagate scientific achievements, having been appointed to the British Council, but any propaganda for a shared Anglo-American heritage was hampered because the US was outside the council's remit.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Nevertheless, Crowther sought to cultivate Anglo-American cooperation by mooting an Anglo-American Society of Sciences, modelled on his Anglo-French Society.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Conant also dined at the Tots and Quots, an informal discussion group attended by leftist scientists, in 1941; they discussed Anglo-American cooperation and the organization of contact between British and American scientists.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In the meantime, Patrick Blackett had visited the US and delivered a lecture at Harvard on the history of science.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Hogben's arrival in the US coincided with Needham's visit. He arrived in San Francisco in the summer, finding that ‘after a first view of the University of California campus at Berkeley, and the polychromatic prodigality of the garden sidewalks in the neighbourhood, it would be easy for a mere European to gush his way through several pages of effervescent encomiums’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ After visiting Madison, Wisconsin, Hogben ended up in New York, which he remembered as ‘relatively smokeless’; ‘some of its thousand-foot-high buildings, in particular [the] Rockefeller Center’, had to his taste ‘a unique geometric beauty’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ He believed that ‘if America continues to countenance recourse to bold expedients in the spirit of the New Deal, it can still buy time for testing a variety of ways of replacing production for profit by production for use’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Meanwhile, he continued (echoing Huxley),

In short, ‘there is hope for the New World because, and while, there is the hope of a New Deal’.Footnote ¹⁵³

Hogben did not gloss the shortcomings of the New Deal US, however, and recognized that

Hogben distinguished himself from Huxley and Crowther in explicitly acknowledging the tension between progressive Americans’ distaste for Germany's ‘unsavoury creed’ on the one hand and the US's ‘formidable and, as yet, unsolved race problem of the southern states’ on the other.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Hogben also noted the US's ‘faith in the eternal validity of the Constitution’, which was an exception to the country's willingness to experiment.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Probably influenced by Crowther's comments on this point, Hogben said that the system of checks and balances suited ‘the tempo of life at the end of the eighteenth century’, but now ‘far-reaching constitutional reforms may be the only way of preserving’ a way of life marked by ‘flexibility which permits a nation to face new social problems and to realise a new potential of plenty without recourse to violent upheaval’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Overall,

Continuing unemployment, Jim Crow, laissez-faire attitudes, an emerging surveillance state and a reluctance to reform the Constitution all counted against the United States.

Yet Hogben remained hopeful, partly because these political defects were outweighed by the US's culture, which was empirical and science-based. For Hogben, ‘what is most hopeful about America is that these States have produced a crop of writers at once accessible to what is new and fruitful in the intellectual milieu of the Old World and immune to the doctrinaire temper fostered by the scholastic tradition’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Authors such as Lewis Mumford were exploring ‘contemporary agencies which are shaping the contemporary world, while European scholars [notably the neo-liberal economist F.A. Hayek] continue to build skyscrapers of flawless logic on a floating foundation of mid-nineteenth century science’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Education in the US was not about such subtle mental games, based on outdated philosophies from the age of coal and steam, but about understanding and solving problems ‘in the age of hydroelectricity, magnesium–aluminium alloys, synthetic plastics, broadcasting, and aviation’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Roger Burlingame's Engines of Democracy: Inventions and Society in Mature America (1940), for example, provided ‘a swiftly changing view of social conditions produced by the interplay of a multitude of minor devices which are separate like the glass pieces of a kaleidoscope’.Footnote ¹⁶² Furthermore, in coming up with ‘remedies for social maladjustments’, US culture favoured the middle way because ‘higher education in America has not inherited the authoritarian temper of medieval Europe’.Footnote ¹⁶³ And, unlike Europe, the US was ‘building an educational system which produces the maximum yield from the gifts of the average man or woman’, which ‘is the only guaranty for the survival of democracy’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In circumnavigating the world and comparing the US with the USSR, Hogben became more convinced of two things: ‘that piecemeal planning by peaceful persuasion is the only path to an economy of abundance in our time’, and ‘that the fullest utilisation of scientific knowledge for human welfare calls for an educational reformation which will make the world outlook of modern science an open Bible’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Huxley also highlighted the importance of education to successful democratic planning when he revisited the TVA in 1942. His reflections were published in The Times and in a richly illustrated book, which had much to say about the beautiful architecture, and how the TVA had improved people's health, boosted tourism and made exhausted land productive again.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The Times article noted that he found the project even more impressive than when he had first seen it. ‘But what interested me most when I revisited the area in the spring of 1942 was the technique which the TVA has adopted with the deliberate aim of reconciling over-all planning with the values of democracy’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ This was a pertinent focus, because the war had brought the tension between freedom and organization, between democracy and dictatorship, into greater relief – in both Britain and the US. The year 1941 saw the appearance of Crowther's The Social Relations of Science, which concerned Hayek (who criticized it in The Spectator and was working on The Road to Serfdom (1944)). The US, meanwhile, had witnessed an increase in executive power and restrictions on freedom to deal with the demands of war and, as Huxley said, the notion that ‘over-all planning is incompatible with democratic freedom and individual initiative … lingers on in considerable strength in the U.S.A.’Footnote ¹⁶⁸ This, he thought, was odd ‘because it is precisely in the U.S.A. that planning has been most conspicuously and most successfully democratic’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ This achievement was owing to a focus on ‘planning by persuasion, consent, and participation’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ People in the region where planning was to take place were regarded ‘as participating co-planners’, and this cooperative participation was twofold: first, the TVA had to work alongside other government bodies and agencies; second, ‘people at large’ had to be involved.Footnote ¹⁷¹ This second activity was quite embryonic when Huxley wrote (a committee had been set up ‘to see how best the educational system and its curriculum can be utilised to bring about a wider understanding of the aims and achievements of the TVA’), but he pointed out that in the Columbia basin of the north-west US, administrators were asking the public to help frame ‘the plan itself’.Footnote ¹⁷² The ‘idea behind an administration’ thereby became decentralized, ‘so that its planning becomes a part of public opinion’.Footnote ¹⁷³ He concluded,

These comments suggest a shift in Huxley's politics, away from an exclusionary attitude towards the masses. Only by including the people could planning be harmonized with the principles of liberal democracy.