Oppenheimer had met Chevalier, like Tatlock, at a rally for the Spanish Loyalists; the two men and Oppie’s girlfriend subsequently helped organize an East Bay fund-raiser that purchased an ambulance which was sent to Spain.40 Shortly thereafter, Oppenheimer and Chevalier founded a campus branch of the American Federation of Teachers following a union organizing meeting at Berkeley’s Faculty Club. Local 349 apparently spent more time taking controversial stands on international issues than lobbying for higher salaries—a rally at Oakland High School, where Oppie was the featured speaker, attracted only a few members—but the two men remained dedicated to the union nonetheless. Chevalier briefly served as its president; Oppenheimer was elected to the role of recording secretary, where, improbably, he licked stamps and addressed envelopes.41
By the late 1930s, Oppenheimer’s flat on Shasta Road had become a political as well as a physics salon, attracting “those who desired respite from the halls of academe—professors, graduate students, the Berkeley intellectual Left,” observed one habitué.42 The frozen martinis remained, but Bach fugues had been replaced by Mozart’s Concerto No. 24 in C Minor on Oppenheimer’s custom-built record player. Oppie and Chevalier thought the Allegretto perfect for a revolutionary anthem.
Trips continued across the Bay to Jack’s, with the coterie of favored students in tow. Yet dinner now typically followed not a dissertation defense but a political rally.43 From one of his graduate students, Oppie bought a subscription to People’s World.44
Coincident with the founding of the teachers union local, Oppenheimer and Chevalier also began meeting regularly with a group of like-minded colleagues to discuss the issues of the day. The group usually met evenings, once or twice a month, alternating between members’ homes during the school term. Besides Oppie, Chevalier, and Thomas Addis, the regular attendees included Arthur Brodeur, chairman of the Scandinavian languages department at Berkeley; Paul Radin, an anthropology professor on campus; Robert Muir, an employee of the California Labor Bureau, and Lou Goldblatt, a union organizer from San Francisco.45
Oppenheimer would later characterize the group as an innocent and rather naive political coffee klatch. To Chevalier, however, it was something much more: “a ‘closed unit’ of the Communist Party”—in effect, a secret Communist “cell” whose members, part of the CP’s so-called professional section, were discouraged from holding open membership in the party.46
After Oppenheimer helped Chevalier edit a broadside for a political rally, the two got the idea of publishing a periodic newsletter. Titled Report to Our Colleagues, on February 20, 1940, the first edition was sent to faculty members at Berkeley as well as to colleges and universities up and down the West Coast. According to Chevalier, Oppie wrote most of the four-page pamphlet, paid for the printing, and even chose the epigram: “But curs’d is he who is their instrument.”*
A second report, bearing a quotation from W. H. Auden, one of Oppenheimer’s favorite poets, followed on April 6.47 Like the first, it closely followed the party line, which at the time strongly opposed intervention:
Europe is in the throes of a war. It is a common thought, and a likely one, that when the war is over Europe will be socialist, and the British Empire gone. We think that Roosevelt is assuming the role of preserving the old order in Europe and that he plans, if need be, to use the wealth and the lives of this country to carry it out. We think, that is, that Roosevelt is not only a “war-monger” but a counter-revolutionary war-monger. We think it is this that has turned him from something of a progressive to very much of a reactionary.48
“There has never been a clearer issue,” April’s Report noted in conclusion, “than that of keeping this country out of the war in Europe.” The second Report, like the first, was signed “College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California.”
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Oppenheimer’s emotional isolation from the war was shaken by the fall of France in summer 1940. Driving back to Berkeley from the American Physical Society’s annual meeting in Seattle, Washington, late that June, colleagues were struck by the eloquence and passion with which Oppenheimer denounced fascism as a threat to civilization.49
But Oppie evidently remained ambivalent about what he called the “hocuspocus” going on in Europe. As much as a year later, only six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he wrote to friends that his “own views could … hardly be gloomier, either for what will happen locally & nationally, or in the world.”50
Thus far, Lawrence had observed Oppenheimer’s political activism from afar, with a combination of concern and bemusement.51 But a telling incident that occurred at this time sparked a blowup between the two friends. When Ernest came across a notice that Oppie had written on the Rad Lab blackboard, announcing an upcoming benefit for the Spanish Loyalists, the boys saw him silently clench and unclench his jaw in rage before wiping the notice off the board. Later that day, Ernest angrily admonished Oppie to never again bring politics into the laboratory. Alvarez, seated nearby at the controls of the cyclotron, was shocked; it was the first time he could remember seeing the two men argue.52
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By the late spring of 1940, Edward Teller was still waiting for a response to the letter by Einstein and Szilard. Roosevelt had put the matter in the hands of the director of the National Bureau of Standards, Lyman Briggs—a slow-moving, pipe-smoking physicist who was an expert in pedology, the science of soils. Briggs seemed more agitated about the possibility of a security leak than with the prospect of a German atomic bomb. After Briggs excluded Fermi—technically still an enemy alien—from meetings of his Uranium Committee, Teller agreed to go in the
