SUNY series in American Philosophy and Cultural Thought

Thomas S. Kuhn, James B. Conant, and the Cold War "Struggle for Men's Minds"

George A. Reisch

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438473680
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Politics of Paradigms shows that America's most famous and influential book about science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, was inspired and shaped by Thomas Kuhn's political interests, his relationship with the influential cold warrior James Bryant Conant, and America's McCarthy-era struggle to resist and defeat totalitarian ideology. Through detailed archival research, Reisch shows how Kuhn's well-known theories of paradigms, crises, and scientific revolutions emerged from within urgent political worries—on campus and in the public sphere—about the invisible, unconscious powers of ideology, language, and history to shape the human mind and its experience of the world.

PART I

WAR AND CRISIS

1

Progress and Revolution in the Suburbs of New York

On Saturday November 16, 1935, in the small town of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, students at the Hessian Hills School performed a day-long assembly for their parents and their community. The theme was peace, and it was topical. Only months before, Congress had passed the first Neutrality Act to help Americans avoid future wars. Hessian Hills had its finger on the pulse of the nation, and other schools and organizations joined in. Students from area schools attended, as did representatives of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Federation of Children’s Organizations—known previously as the Communist Party–sponsored Young Pioneers of America.

The most exciting development of the day concerned a new organization called the American Student Union. Inspired by students at Oxford University who vowed earlier that spring that “this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country,” the students at Hessian Hills, the oldest roughly equivalent to the eight grade, decided that they too would stand against war and take the Oxford Pledge.

Leading off the festivities was thirteen-year-old Thomas Samuel Kuhn. He gave a remarkable speech that local papers quoted in their editions the following Monday.

CROTON, Nov. 18—A boy about fourteen years old stood confidently on the platform: “Who profits by our national possessions?” he asked. “Not you, Not I, nobody but the capitalists. If, to protect the interest of those people, we must spend the bulk of our national income on armaments, then I say, ‘damn our possessions!’ ”

During afternoon debates—in which adults were not allowed to participate—the reporter was struck by the intelligence and maturity these children. They

talked of jingoism, propaganda and trade unionism with a familiarity few adult audiences could surpass. One girl who didn’t seem to be over 10 asked to have explained how the German Socialists justified their participation in the World War—she said it has never been completely clear to her.

A student from New York’s public Patrick Henry School was impressed by this private, progressive school and quickly sensed that his education fell short. He scolded his teachers for failing to discuss matters of war and peace and warned that unless they stepped up, he and other public school students would be educated by “soap-box orators on corners” spouting propaganda. At this point, another boy responded to remind this young man that “the word ‘propaganda’ must be used carefully since propaganda is used for constructive purposes as well as destructive.”1

Six months later Kuhn was on stage again. Hessian Hills now had its own chapter of the American Student Union and it assembled to celebrate the union’s international student strike. The festivities included reminiscences from a Hessian Hills teacher who had lived in Belgium in the aftermath of the Great War. Students sang the gospel standard “Down by the Riverside” (with its decisive refrain, “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More”) and they presented a play they had written. “Let Dread War Cease” was about a young girl struggling to persuade her older brother to refuse the call-up. Despite her arguments, he went to war and was killed in combat. In the final scene, his ghost tells the audience that his sister was right after all: “War is hell.” At the end of the assembly, those students who had just formed the new chapter took the stage holding aloft a banner. It read, “Unite! Fight Against War. Organization Will Lead to Peace.”2

Many years later, Kuhn recalled that, despite his ardent pacifism, he did not join his fellow students in taking the Oxford Pledge. Were the nation invaded, he reasoned, then surely he would fight to defend it.3 But his handwringing about the pledge did not mean that he bowed out of this day’s events. At eleven o’clock, when students around the world left their classrooms, Kuhn read his report to the audience:

Today is the day elected by the American Student Union for their strike against war. All over the country between 11 and 1 o’clock, High school and college students are striking against war. The reasons why [include that] these students are beginning to realize that they are the ones who will have to fight in a future war.

They know that “war clouds are gathering in Europe” and “naval and army appropriations are growing larger.”

War was horrible and futile, Kuhn argued, and it was extremely expensive. For the cost of one battleship, he had calculated, “you would be able to get thirteen million books” for needy school children, or you could “feed a needy student three meals a day … for fifty thousand years” or, more practically, “fifty thousand men for one year.”

At thirteen, Kuhn seemed to know that pacifism was not only a thesis to be defended with economic arguments, but also something like the constructive propaganda that came up at the assembly months before. The strike showed not only that these students objected to war, but that their opposition was rooted in a larger set of cultural values and expressions. Yes, he admitted, there were probably some who just carried signs without knowing why. But most, he pointed out, “really are in ernest [sic].” Most

are assembling either in their school or some other place and having speakers just as we are having speakers. Songs, just as we are going to have songs. Skits, just as we are going to have a skit. These things are to build up a feeling, and a unity against war.

He also knew that this growing sense of unity was not popular everywhere: “But let me tell you that in some public high schools the principal had the school surrounded by police, and had the teachers hold the doors, and that if a student still got out he was expelled from the school!”

Kuhn agreed with the local reporter. These were important adult matters that only the older children at the school could begin to engage with. But soon enough, he pointed out in closing, the younger students would come to understand what was at stake—nothing less than “the future of the world and of the Human race.”

Thomas Kuhn never shied away from bold, sweeping claims. His youthful confidence that the world could be made better and more peaceful had at least two sources: his parents and his school. His mother, Minette Stroock, was a New Yorker of Dutch descent. Her husband, Samuel L. Kuhn, belonged to a family whose roots in merchandising and banking stretched from Germany to Cincinnati to New York City. The Manhattan banking firm Kuhn & Loeb (later, Lehman Brothers Kuhn & Loeb) established by Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb became one of the nation’s prominent investment banks in part by helping to finance the expansion of the nation’s railroads.4 While Abraham retired to Germany after founding the firm in New York, his brother Samuel remained in Cincinnati to found his own banking house, S. Kuhn & Sons. His son Simon remained in banking as he and his wife, Setty Swartz Kuhn, became prominent figures in Cincinnati business and civic affairs. Setty was once voted “outstanding woman of the half century” by the Better Housing League in Cincinnati, one of the civic and philanthropic causes she founded and supported before her death in 1920.5

Their son Samuel served in World War I and studied at Harvard and MIT to become a hydraulic engineer. After Thomas was born in 1922, Samuel and Minette moved to Manhattan, where they lived as prominent, liberal Jews who supported an array of educational, cultural, and economic causes. These ranged from Junior Achievement and the Jewish Board of Guardians, to the public woodworking shop that Samuel created decades later on East Seventy-Fifth Street. Samuel was so devoted to woodworking, the New York Times reported at the time, that he opened a storefront business called Your Workshop where amateurs could use his shop’s tools and machinery. The business was essentially philanthropic, the reporter suggested. The hourly rates one would pay to build a chair, repair a picture frame, or get expert advice from Samuel covered only some of his expenses.6

Kuhn’s parents were generous and progressive. For Thomas and his younger brother Roger, they believed in the new, American style of “progressive education” taking root in the nation’s larger cities. Before Hessian Hills, Kuhn attended the experimental Lincoln School in Manhattan then recently founded by the Rockefeller-funded educational philanthropy, the General Education Board. The board supported the reform and establishment of high schools throughout the nation, often enlisting local universities to run the schools along progressivist lines. The Lincoln School was run by the Teachers College at Columbia University, home of the philosopher John Dewey, the nation’s foremost authority on and supporter of progressive education. Dewey, his star student Sidney Hook, and his colleague George S. Counts helped make New York the center for the theory and practice of progressive education.

Chicago, however, was a close rival. Colonel Francis W. Parker had founded a progressive school there and Dewey had earlier created the Laboratory School next to the University of Chicago campus. Parker and Dewey insisted that classrooms must not be sites of indoctrination and memorization, where rows of atomized student-soldiers await educational orders in reading, writing, and arithmetic from their superiors. As Dewey argued in his books Education and Democracy and School and Society, schools should be microcosms of egalitarian and democratic society. Students learn and grow best, Dewey wrote, when school offers a kind of “embryonic community life, active with types of occupations which reflect the life of the larger society, and permeated throughout with the spirit of art, history, and science.”7 Human learning is not only a cognitive or intellectual process, Dewey insisted. It is social and proactive—it comes when curiosity and intelligence have room to discover the world, the reality of other points of view, and the dynamics of debate and criticism. Progressive educators therefore organized classrooms for active collaborations. Where the youngest learned to stack blocks, the oldest could build musical instruments or plan an imaginary city.

Dewey himself never shied away from bold, ambitious claims on behalf of his innovations. Progressive education reflected the epic story of human learning, through which pioneers in science or literature drew lessons from experience without the benefit of textbooks or teachers. Progressive educators did not pretend to know exactly how these processes worked—Parker was known to say that in education “the road to success is through constant blundering.” At the Lincoln School, its director Otis Caldwell once remarked that there is “a kind of frankness about what we don’t know about education.”8 None believed that each and every child could be shaped to become an Isaac Newton or a William Shakespeare; but they knew what the startled reporter observed that November day in 1935 at Thomas Kuhn’s school: most children have a potential they are unlikely to realize in schools that control behavior tightly and train the mind to memorize poems, names, dates, and multiplication tables.

George S. Counts and the Revolutionary Classroom

With the stock market crash of 1929, progressive education and its ideals became more popular. Articles in the New York Times enthused over the reforms at Lincoln and other schools, the virtues of learning-by-doing, and the replacement of the Three R’s by new, progressive methods. One article described how students founded their own, imaginary bank.9 But progressive educators were never themselves unified by shared goals, methods, and values. The more radical New Yorkers insisted that the progressive, child-centered school of the 1930s was not adequate to the immense social and political challenges created by the Depression. Columbia educator George S. Counts, speaking at educational meetings in 1932, provoked and challenged his audiences with lectures titled “Dare Progressive Education Be Progressive?,” “Education Through Indoctrination,” and “Freedom, Culture, Social Planning and Leadership.” He chided his fellow progressives for not being progressive enough and failing to understand and grasp the revolutionary opportunities at hand. He called on them to reject

the viewpoint of the members of the liberal-minded upper middle class who send their children to the Progressive Schools—persons who are fairly well-off, who have abandoned the faiths of their fathers, who assume an agnostic attitude towards all important questions, who pride themselves on their open-mindedness and tolerance, who favor in a mild sort of way fairly liberal programs of social reconstruction, who are full of good will and humane sentiment, who have vague aspirations for world peace and human brotherhood …

His sermons pointed at families like the Kuhns who believed in progressive education, social and economic reform—but not in revolutionary change. Yet that was no longer good enough, Counts explained. For “in spite of all their good qualities,” progressives such as these could not be counted on given what lay ahead: “We live in troublous times; we live in an age of profound change; we live in an age of revolution.”10

Like Dewey, Hook, and other intellectuals of his generation, Counts had visited Russia and found compelling potential solutions to American problems. The year before he delivered these challenging lectures, he translated a Russian schoolbook about Stalin’s first five-year plan for accelerated social and cultural reform. He also wrote the book The Soviet Challenge to America to show Americans that education was a powerful force for social and political change.11 There was nothing wrong with “indoctrination” in Counts’s eyes. As he told an audience at the National Council of Education meeting in Washington, children are inevitably indoctrinated and shaped—the question was whether this would be done by the interests and institutions that “actually rule society” and create and sustain inequality and injustice, or by progressive educators who, if they seized the opportunity, “might become a social force of some magnitude.”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Bombs and Books: An Introduction
• Timeline of Events and Documents
• Cast of Additional Characters
• Part I. War and Crisis
• Part II. “The Struggle for Men’s Minds”
• Part III. The Cold War Origins of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Part IV. The New World of Paradigms
• Epilogue Writing and Rewriting History
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover