Selected notes

For more information on all the materials cited see the further reading page.

1. Ironically, the 1906 quake felled the arch within seconds.

2. “From California and from the Pacific coast must radiate the life to graft the principles of liberty upon the ruins of the dying empires of the Orient. Upon western men and upon western women has fallen the privilege of advancing the fulfillment of their Nation’s destiny.” Merrack, “Stanford University,” 104.

3. For the story of the competition and its local and national repercussions, see Brechin, “San Francisco: The City Beautiful.”

6. Payne, “City of Education, Part II. “The Greek analogy was already a commonplace by 1900 when the Overland Monthly noted, “The prophecy has often been made that [California] was destined to become a second Greece. The art, the love of beauty, the passion for culture, are all here in the germ. May the quickening touch of the new President of the State University do its work in causing them to grow!” “Two University Presidents,” 183-84.

8. Hearst could ill-afford the money for the theater at the time, but needed a device to cleanse his soiled reputation. Enemies charged that his incendiary papers had incited an anarchist to assassinate President McKinley at the Buffalo world’s fair in 190 1, and Hearst’s satyric private life did little to aid a man with presidential ambitions. At the dedication of the theater, Hearst owned seven newspapers and Motor Magazine.

11. While assembling the Homestake Mining Company, Hearst wrote his partner J. B. Haggin in 1878, “I will hurt a good many people. And it is quite possible that I may get killed. All I ask of you is to see that my wife and child gets [sic] all that is due them from all sources and that I am not buried in this place [i.e., Lead, South Dakota].” Cieply, “Loded Hearst,” 76-77.

12. The builders were unaware that the building was sited almost on top of the Hayward Fault.

15. Wheeler tied the university’s destiny to those of the arms makers from the moment he arrived: “A harbor that produced [Dewey’s] Oregon deserves to have by its side a school of naval and marine engineering.” Wheeler, “University of California and Its Future,” 7. Encomia to the Union Iron Works’ battleships were common in the years after Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay.

16. The theme remained one of Wheeler’s most consistent. See “Pacific States and the Education of the Orient,” 1-5, in which the university’s president voices the fear that if China became armed with “modern steel weapons; i.e., machinery, engines, dynamos, and rails, it means, of course, an economic revolution and an upturning from the depths. “The United States must prepare itself to resist the onslaught as the Greeks resisted Persia,” claimed Wheeler. As noted earlier, see Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, 276-82, for intellectual history behind such “prophecies. “

23. Moses argued that races should be segregated in the United States for their own good, but that in the Philippines, “it would be bringing together, not two races, but two kindred peoples, of whose amalgamation nature seems to approve.” “Bernard Moses on the Philippines,” 4-5. See especially the section “Right Kind of Exploiting Needed. “

32. The “awakening” of the Orient required that the university take action: “It is ours to mold their speculative and religious thought. To do this, we ought to know their habits of thought and life, their social conditions and problems.” See “California and the Orient”; and John Fryer, “The Demands of the Orient,” Blue and Gold ( 1900): 25-26.

35. “New Department of Anthropology,” 281-82. Hearst biographer Ferdinand Lundberg says that geologists and metallurgists went along to scout the prospects at the Cerro de Pasco mines, which subsequently were added to the Hearst portfolio.Lundberg, Imperial Hearst, 91.

46. L. Allen, “Westward,” 47.Eugenics professor S.J. Holmes expressed his own alarm to Dean Barrows that minor medical defects eliminated large numbers of men who otherwise could fight and “materially advance our economic productivity.” S.J. Holmes to Barrows, 11 April 1917, David Prescott Barrows papers, box 19.

47. Ross, “Suppression of Important News,” 55. Among the callow youths influenced by Jordan’s strident Saxonism was Herbert Hoover, as well as Jack London, who incorporated it in his immensely popular novels.See Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 309.

48. The ensuing furor over the Ross case contributed to the national movement for academic tenure.

54. “Aims of Better America Body Told Business Men of San Francisco,” San Francisco Call, 20 January 1922. Haldeman was grandfather of President Richard Nixon’s White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, who would serve on the board of regents in 1966-67.

67. In 1946, the year that Neylan first took Lawrence to meet William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon, he called the scientist “probably the most significant living human being.” Neylan nominated Lawrence to the even more exclusive Pacific Union Club in 1957, the year before the physicist’s sudden death. Oppenheimer was apparently not invited to join either club.

79. Oppenheimer called the bomb work at Los Alamos “an organic necessity,” and went on to explain, “If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large [sic] the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values. “ Easlea, Fathering the Unthinkable, 9 0, 129.

80. Richard Rhodes speculates that President Roosevelt “was concerned less with a German challenge than with the long-term consequences of acquiring so decisive a new class of destructive instruments” when he ordered fullscale development of the weapon prior to Pearl Harbor. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 379. See also Franklin, War Stars.

81. E.g., in 1955, the regent Edwin Pauley secretly used Lawrence as a gobetween to hire Major General K.D. Nichols, general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission, as a “consultant” for thirty-five thousand dollars per year, with a 10 percent commission for any business he brought Pauley. Edwin Pauley to K.D. Nichols, 24 January 19 55, Ernest 0. Lawrence papers, reel 70, frames 1 57779 and 1 57780.

83. As chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Advisory Committee on Raw Materials from 1947 to 19 52, the geological engineer and U.C. professor Donald H. McLaughlin-along with friends closely involved in mining and power-acted to set a base price for uranium supplies bought by the AEC. McLaughlin was, at that time, president of Homestake Mining as well as Cerro de Pasco and a close confidante of the Hearst family. Governor Earl WarrenMcLaughlin’s campmate at the Bohemian Grove-nominated him to the board of regents in 1951, after the university began its nominal management of the weapons laboratories that, in turn, created much of the demand for uranium supplies. After leaving the advisory committee, he took Homestake “aggressively” into uranium production to offset falling gold prices, and acknowledged that “we did very well in uranium.” McLaughlin, “Careers in Mining Geology.” I am indebted to Professor Charles L. Schwartz for allowing me to review his files regarding the conflicts of interest of other U.C. regents. See also Taylor and Yokell, Yellowcake.

88. Stanford is usually credited with spawning Silicon Valley by those who miss the vital connections of the “rival” universities via the demands of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. See Lowen, Creating the Cold War University.

89. David Lilienthal wrote in 1949 , “Reports from LA and Berkeley [Lawrence and Alvarez] are rather awful.” He had heard that there “is a group of scientists who can only be described as drooling with the prospect [of a positive H-bomb decision] and bloodthirsty.” Lilienthal, Journals of David E. Lilienthal, 582. See also p. 577. Pringle and Spigelman, Nuclear Barons.

90. See Broad, Star Warriors, for the ongoing attempts of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the conservative Hertz Foundation to attract the best young men for the development of new generations of weapons. This was one of the repeatedly stated aims of Professor Tuve’s 1944 memorandum, where Tuve also recommended a “parallel attack [on weapons development] under independent direction.” The AEC commissioner Thomas E. Murray said Lawrence gave him credit for “apply[ing] the principle of competition in the ‘H’ field” by establishing the second weapons lab at Livermore. T.E. Murray, Nuclear Policy for War and Peace, 110–11. For the pacesetter role, see quotes by Herbert York and George Kennan in Udall, Myths of August, 145-46.

91. The regents commissioned author Herbert Childs to write An American Genius: The Life of Ernest Orlando Lawrence for the opening of the Hall of Science.

92. The regent John Francis Neylan wrote to Lawrence in 1947 that attempts to share atomic energy were being “utilized as a political racket domestically and internationally,” and said, “Whether it is because I am 62 years of age, or because I have heard so much about the destructiveness of atomic energy, I have become more or less fatalistic about it and am willing to accept the fact that if the human race wants to commit suicide, I cannot stop it.” As chair of the regents’ liaison committee with the Atomic Energy Commission, however, Neylan was in a favored position to help humanity along. His letter went on to state that public opinion would have to be shaped to stress the positive, rather than negative, aspects of atomic energy. The role of Neylan, William Randolph Hearst’s close friend and proxy, in the cold war arms race has yet to be investigated. The regents Neylan, Donald McLaughlin, and Pauley served on the fund-raising committee for the Lawrence Hall of Science. Neylan to Lawrence, 15 April 1947, John Francis Neylan papers.

98. More privately, they discussed the need for what they hoped would be a limited nuclear war that would eliminate the Soviet Union. The AEC maintained an office building just off campus on Bancroft Avenue.

101. The chairman of the board of regents Edwin W. Pauley told Ernest Lawrence that when he opened his son’s mail, he found a plea from the Friends Committee on Legislation and Dr. Albert Schweitzer to halt nuclear testing for reasons of health. Pauley had the president of the Better America Federation, Major General W. A. Worton, send him a dossier on all those named. Pauley to Lawrence, 9 July 1957, Ernest 0. Lawrence papers, carton 46, folder 13.

103. See Mumford, “Gentlemen, You Are Mad.” The initiation of the nuclear arms race nearly drove Mumford himself mad, and it caused him to lose his earlier optimism in the liberatory possibilities of technology. In The Pentagon of Power, Mumford investigated the link between thermonuclear technology and the atavistic wishes of the earliest sun kings.