Manifesto

Last week New York City's hen-shaped Mayor LaGuardia was belaboring the Nazis of Germany with his customary vigor--and so, less loudly and more indirectly, was handsome Anthony Eden, who had just arrived in the U. S. from England (see p. 9). Few days later another blast at Nazi and Fascist ideology came from a quarter which has hitherto been relatively silent--U. S. science.

Johannes Stark is a crusty old "Aryan" German, whose researches in physics were good enough to win him a Nobel Prize (1919). For a long time he has whooped up the merits of hardheaded experiment as against those of dreamy theory. Last spring, in the British journal Nature, he succeeded in getting published a manifesto entitled "The Pragmatic and the Dogmatic Spirit in Physics" (TIME, May 23). In this he declared that the Jews--e. g., Einstein--have always tended to be theorists and dogmatists in science, that their influence is evil. The editors of 'Nature pooh-poohed this tirade, but printed it for the scrutiny of scientists in free countries.

In the U. S. the Stark statement made many scientists thoroughly angry. They formed a committee, chose as its spokesman "Papa Franz'' Boas, 80-year-old Columbia University anthropologist. Papa Franz, a Jew of German birth, has been attacking German racial theories for a quarter-century, and after the rise of the Third Reich his books were burned at Kiel. The Boas committee drew up a counter-manifesto condemning the Stark statement from beginning to end, decrying the "ruthless political censorship'' which is crippling science in Germany.

The manifesto of U. S. science, made public last week, was signed by 1,284 scientists, including three Nobel Laureates (Millikan of Caltech, Urey of Columbia, Langmuir of General Electric). 64 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 85 college presidents, deans, directors of industrial laboratories and experiment stations. It declared:

"American scientists . . . hold fast to their conviction, that . . . science is wholly independent of national boundaries and races and creeds and can flourish only when there is peace and intellectual freedom. ... It is in this light that we publicly condemn the fascist position towards science. The racial theories which they advocate have been demolished time and again. We need only point to the work of Heinrich Hertz in physics, Fritz Haber and Richard Willstatter in chemistry, Ludwig Traube, Paul Ehrlich and August Wassermann in biology and medicine, all German Jews and all empirical [observational and experimental] scientists. The charge that theory leads to a crippling of experimental research is ... a denial of the whole history of modern physics. From Copernicus and Kepler on, all the great figures in Western science have insisted, in deed or in word, upon the futility of experimental research divorced from theory."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.