Lstoryproject CKEMISTRY, EDUCATION, A.HD

University of California General ~ibrary/~erkeley Regional Cultural ~lstoryProject

Joel H, Hildebrand

CKEMISTRY, EDUCATION, A.HD !i!HE UIHTEESITY OF CALTPORHIA

An InteFcrier Conducted By Edna Tartatil Daniel

Berkeley 1962 All uses of this manuscript are covered by an agreement between the Regents of the University of California and Joel H. Hildebrand dated 11 June 1962, The manuscript is thereby made available' for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, includir~the right to publish, are reserved to the General Library of the University of California at Berkeley, No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the University of California at Berkeley,

Joel Henry Hildebrand, professor emeritus of chemietq at the University of California, waa described as a nworld-renowned teacher of chemistry, formulator of wise educational policy, important and far-seeing military and government adviser in both World War I and IIn at the time of receiving the Willard Gibbe Medal in chemistry in 1953, Around the Univereity he is known also for his leadership as dean of the College of Letters and Science and the College of Chemistry, for hie effective and continuing concern with all phases of education, for his prominent part in the loyalty oath coritroversy of 1949-1950 -- and aa sn' inveterate mountain climber, skier, and Sierra Club member,* In 1913 he began his career as.= assistant professor in chemistry under Dr, Gilbert B, Lewis, and it was because of his ensuing long and influential association with the University of California at Berkeley that this interview was undertaken at the request of Professor Walton E, Bean as one of a series of interviews on the history of the University, Professor Hildebrand was intemiewed from February through March 1960 and again in August 1960,

*General biographical material about Professor Hildebrand is most recently available in Chemical and Engineerinp News, April 2, 1962, p, 111, The interviews were tape recorded in his office In the Chemistry Building, ROO^ 228, at the top of two long, narrow flights of steps which placed him somewhat apart from student traffic among the building's laboratories, ,: The high-ceilinged room comfortably housed a deek, files, and several tall bookcases; its tall bay windows at one end opened onto a lazge outdoor panorama of trees and surrounding buildings. In this airy and pleasant room Professor Hildebrand responded openly in a resonant voice to the interviewer's questions, his replies enthusiastically spiced with anecdotes, At seventy-nine years his manner and appearance were resilient and fresh, Spare-framed, garbed in quiet- keyed and comfortable clothes, he moved quickly from file cabinets to bookshelves when in pursuit of paper8 or books to augment his remarks, After the interviews were transcribed, they were edited by the interviewer, and corrected, amended, and added to by Professor Hildebrand with the same thorough- ness and dispatch as has characterized everything he has undertaken, In addition he made available photographs of himself and printed materials illustrative of his work and philosophy, Miss Elizabeth Me Nutting of the Chemistry Library also gave valuable assistance in the preparation of the manuscript, Since the completion of the interviews, Professor Hildebrand has received two more awards: in 1962 the American Chemical Society's Priestley Medd for "distinguished services to chemistry," and the William Proctor Prize of S1000 awarded annually by the Scientifio

Research Society of America to "a scientist or engineer I

in recognition of notable accomplishment in scientifio 1 research or in the administration of ecientific research," ill

This intedew Is part of a series of tape recorded autobiogra~hiesdone by the Regional Cultural History Project of the Library with individuals who have contributed significantly to the life of their times. The Project, under the administrative supervision of Assistant Librarian Julian Michel, is headed by Willa Baum.

Edna Tartau'). Daniel Interviewer

Regional Cultural History Project University of California, General Library June 1, 1962 TABLE OF COMTErrmS

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Earls .Years through Hipfi School . 6 "

COLLEGE, GRADUATE STUDY, AHD FIRST INSTRUCTORSHIP . 17 ,. University of Pennsylvania, BoSo 1903, Ph.D. 1906 European Experience, 1906-1907 -- Physical Chemistry under Nernat Instructor in Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania, 1907-1913 33 CHEMISTRY AND THE UIU'mSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

Call to the University of California, Berkeley, 1913 38 Teaching Freshman Chemistry Chemical Engineering Gilbert No Lewis Graduate Work in Chemistry Chemistry at UCLAand Other University of. California Cam~usea Television Teach-, of Chemistrg CHBfIC& WARFARE, WOZD WAR I COld6EllTS ON THE SCIENTIST AlJD SOCIETY interrelationships between the Military Services

and Scientists , !he Social Responsibility of Scientists Science as a Way of Tbinkinq GOVEEIIJMENT SERVICE D ~ WORLDG WAR I1

S~ecialAssignment in Chile, July 1943 ' Advisor to the War Production Board Mission to London, Iday 1943 to'July 1944 National Academy of Sciences, War Service ACADIWIC ADMINISTRATIOX, UIJIVERSI!TY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Council of Engineerinp and A~pliedChemistry Reorpanization of the Academic Senate. 1920 Expansion to a Multi-Campus University Special Committee on Admissions Sele.ction and Prorcotion of Faculty Members Budpet during the Depression Dean of Letters and Science REFLECTIONS Chemistry around the World California Education BIBLIOGRAPHY APPENDED MAZIrnIALS PARTIAL INDEX Ancestors

JHEI: Hy maternal grandfather was a very remarkable man, He was born in a poor white family in the ShenantIoah Valley in Virginia of German stock, like my father's family, They are all of that group that came west and went down I into, the southeastern Pennsylvania region, spilled over into Virginia, My father and all the Hildebrands for generations were born in East Berlin, Adams County, Penn- sylvania, The Hildebrand tannery was on the west side of I Conawauga Creek, I The Germans who came over after the abortive revolu- I tion in 1848 from Germany were from the cities. They were. the revolutionists who didn't want to undergo military . service, and they didn't like it when Bismarck and others scotched their revolution, They settled such cities as I Cincinnati, Chicago and Milwaukee, and so on, They were a I different stock, My ancestors came over before the American Revolution. They were peasant and artisan classes from the upper Rhineland country. They went down the Rhfn-e--to-%o%land, whence they sailed to America, The name which the Dutch gave I - them corresponded to "immigranten They spoke the dialects of 4 1 the upper Rhineland country, which became corrupted gradually d I into what is now known as tTennsylvania Dutch," ,I Johannes Hildebrand came in 1851, He was German Swiss, born in Ziirich, The names of all my father's friends in I East Berlin were German, One of my grandmothers was a Shaeffer, another was a Raber, I recall my father's talking Pennsylvania Dutch to his cronies while visiting my grandparents, We usually divided my father's summer vacation between Gettysburg, where my mother's father lived, my maternal grandfather, and East Berlin, only 14 miles distant, Bancroft Library I

FAMILY AND CHILDHOOD

Ancestors

JHH: My maternal grand-father was a very remarkable man, He was born in a poor white family in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia of German stock, like my father's family, They are all of that group that came west and went down into the southeastern Pennsylvania region, spilled over into Virginia, My father and all the Hildebrarids for generations were born in East Berlin, Adams County, Pena- sylvania, The Hildebrand tannery was on the west side of Conawauga Creek, The Germans who came over after the abortive revolution in 1848 from Germany were from the cities, They were the revolutionists who didn't want to undergo military service, and they didn't like it when Bismarck and others scotched their revolution, They settled such cities as Cincinnati, Chicago and Milwaukee, and so on, !bey were a different stock, My ancestors came over before the American Revolution, They were peasaat and artisan classes from the upper Rhineland country, Tney went dorm the mine to Holland, whence they sailed to America, The- name which the Dutch gave them corresponded to nimmigrant,n 'Phey spoke the dialects of the upper Rhineland country, which became corrupted gradually i&o what is now ]mown as "Pennsylvania Dutch.' Johannes Hildebrand came in 1851, He was German Swiss, born in Ziirich, The names of all my father's friends in East Berlin were German, One of my grandmothers was a Shaeffer, another was a Raber, I recall my father's talking Pennsylvania Dutch to his cronies while visiting my grandparents, We usually divided my father's summer vacation between Gettysburg, where my mother's father lived, my maternal grandfather, and East Berlin, only 14 miles distant. JHH: I swam in the Conawauga Creek in East Berlin and in Rock Creek at Get$ysburg, I astonished the boys in East Berlin very much by being able to swim the overarm side-stroke, They only dog-paddled, As a city boy I achieved considerable prestige by being able to do tMs, My ancestors were artisans rather than farmers, MID: What kind of artisans? JHH : Ky father's brother was a fine cabinet-maker, My father had an ophicleide constructed by one of my uncle& B what? An ophicleide, It was a sort of giant or bass saxophone, a brass instrument, I never saw one anywhere else, but I remember this as it stood in its case, The men in those days took >ride in being able to make things, They lived in this tom which served the countryside, and they were more or less sufficient unto themselves, Besourcefulness is part of your very life from the start? Oh, everybody took pride in being able to do things and to . do them well, It was before the age of mass yroduction, Each person had to be competent, The women had to be good cooks and good. housekeepers, My grandmother baked her om bred up until she was eighty-five, She sat as straight as an arrow on a little rocking chair, She baked a peach custard pie, Before putting it into the oven, slices of pea& were floated'on the custard and they would acquire sort of a streaked mahogany color, It was perfectly deli- cious, She baked a potato bread, It was a bread in which pre-cooked mashed potato instead of shortening was mixed with the flour, Sugar was s~rinkledon top, Once a year they prepared their apple butter for the year, It was boiled all day in a big copper kettle outdoors, with the addition of cider and more apples and spices and so on, They had thefr own pig, which ate the table scraps, It was slaughtered.and cured, and that supplied them with meat, Thatts the way they lived, JEH: .- t!y paternal grandfather had only a common school education, but he had a library that would do credit to a college graduate today. ETD: Why do you think he had an extensive library? JHB: He had intellectual curiosity, and when book salesmen came around to sell books -- in those days they sold pretty good ones -- he bought them, For instance, I remember finding ?lutarchfs Lives in his library, Well, I read Plutarcfrvs Lives instead of comic books, Xobody had any comic books, EllD: What, pzxicularly, do you remember about him?. JIIH: I recall him very clearly, but by the time I hew him, when I was eight to ten years old, he was pretty much afflicted by erthritis and walked with difficulty, He didn't talk very much. Their little house had a big kitchen, in which they spent most of the day, Grandfather sat in his rocking chair by the fire wkile Grandmother did the cooking and washed the dishes, She went outside tn draw water from a well, I remember the well very distinctly, and the flagstones between the door ad the well, They had a small vegetable garden, He was eighty years old at the time I remember him, Grand- mother outlived him a few years, When my grandfather was asked once if he would take over the tavern, the hotel of the tom, he refused because he didn't believe in "putting a bottle to his neighborst lips," He had high standards of integrity, ETD: Do you rsenber any conversations with him? JHH: No, Itnafraid I don't, I rercember that sort of thing much more clearly with my other grandfather, who was a little younger, Xy principal impression is of their dignity, character and independence, When I knew them they were living in a mall house in a little country town of a few hun.2red people, at the end of a short spur railroad track, Xy grandfather was a man who had been brought up in a tannery and carried on until age forced him to give it up, Can you remember the range of subject matter among your grandfather's books? JHH: It was very great, I found in that library my first book on chemistry, It was Youmants Classbook on Chemist-, published in 1858, when water was HO instead of H20. I soaked that book up from cover to cover, I thought it was wonderful, I wmted to perform the chemical reactions I- read about, I have that book at home, carefully preserved, It really started me on the road to science, ETD: When you were a little boy, then, you enjoyed your grandparents, JHH: Oh, yes indeed, It was an interesting experience to go there on our vacations, I have a vivid recollection of the appearance of the old oaken bucket and the well, They lived a life of quiet comfort which was satisfying, !hey weren't frustrated and worrying about their social position or about keeping up with the Jonesea. I can remember going for a walk out in the woods with my father and my grandfather, He had to walk a little slowly, with a cane, but we walked and talked. What we talked about I don't remember. It wasn't anything very consequential but it was comfortable conversation, ETD: Can you remember any particular attention directed to trees or plants as you walked? JHH: No.. I don't remember any interest in such things as trees, %om nature readers and other experiences I was made more 3 alert to bugs and small animals, 1 ETD: You weren't asking your parents, as you went along, about 1 the things about you? j

JHH: Ro. My parents had not had any scientific education at all, 1 1 I got my material from books, The things that interested me intellectuzlly came largely from books, I was observant, We moved from Camden, New Jersey, out to a suburb of Phila- delphia, Wayne, when I was eleven years old, I remember then going out into the fields and woods with my companions JHH: and explaining things to them because I had read about the tadpoles and the frogs and the dragonflies and so on, I discovered what fun it was for me to explain these things to my friends, I was a teacher thenceforth, Em: Now, what about your other grandparents? JHEX: My other grandparents lived, at the time I first became acquainted with then, in Gettysburg. My grandfather was the pastor of the big Lutheran church. It was the principal church in this part of Pemsylvafiia, There were perhaps two or three other churches in town, but this big Lutheran church was the church of Gettysburg, I remember the town very clearly, Streets radiated out from a central circle, I was ten to fifteen years old at the time I'm now talkins about, ly grandfather's father was a small farmer with one slave, He lived in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, not far from Winchester, My grandfather decided in his youth to become a minister, He attended a seminary and became a Lutheran preacher, That was the natural thing for a country lad with intellectual leanings to do in those days, ETD: Well, he might have been a teacher, m: He might have Seen a teacher, yes, although the strong religious background in his home made the ministry seem a higher profession than teaching, Many of our earlier Americana taught school for a while as a step in their education, So a teacher in a small country school was not nearly the person- age that the minister of a church was, There were two branches of the Lutheran church, one very orthodox; it asserted the actual transubstantiation of the wine into blood, But my grandfather, before I came on the scene, decided that he couldn't accept the literal and rigid doctrines of his denomination, so, as I understand it, without waiting to prepare another berth, he simply resigned, Then the more liberal branch accepted him, Of course, he had a library, Bnncrof~Library 6

ETD: Were you allowed to -- JHH: Oh my, yes, both of these librmies I could use freely, In a day when not many people had libraries, by virtue of my Grandfather Hildebrand' s natural instinct for learning and my Grandfather Swartz's greater education, I had access to two libraries of considerable size, MlD: What strong interest besides chemistry can you detect in your childhood? JHR: As I look hack on my early life, I responded naturally to music, Poetry and literature were cultivated tastes, but =sic was a natural taste. I remember to this' day the thrill of hearing the second movement of the "Moonlight Sonata," I remember my mother at the piano in Camden, She helped the family income, in my very young days, by teaching music, She had come from a very musical family, Although I had no lessons, it wasn't long before she and I were playing Eeethoven symphonies four-handed, that is, the parts that weren't too allegro,

Ezrly Years Through Hi~hSchool

ETD: When did you learn to read? Or perhaps I should say do you remember ever not reading? J': "-ZO. From my ezrliest recollection I was an avid reader, I had-graded nature readers, for example, which explained the mysteries of such things as seashells, ants and bees. I read copiously, I read whenever I was eating alone, MID: You began school with these books mound you, m: Yes, ETD: And where was this? J-KH: I began at a Quaker private school in Camden, ETD: Xas it small? m: Yes. ETD: Do you remember any of your teachers there? m: No, I just have a general impression that the teaching was pretty good, but no one teacher in that period stands out in my mind, The only person I recall was a man who came, f Bancroit ~ i b ~ ~ ~ 7

suppose, once in two weeks and talked science to us, He mzde hydrogen, burned it, and blew up a soap bubble, fie ~ickedup scraps of paper with electrified sealing -. wax, =d so on, I was entranced by all that he did, . . and repeated at home everything I possibly could, Bow long did you attend this school? Did you go through the elementary level? No. I did a few grades there, Then I went $0 public school for a year or two, That doesn't stand out in my mind, I vrould like to know something about Camden at this time, Camden is across the river from Philadelphia, in New

Jersey, It was the town that served for vaudeville ' artists to make fun of before a Philadelphia audience, I remeaber the author of "The Good Old Summer Timen in a monologue at the Keith Theater in Philadelphia, He said, "1 met a man the other day who came from Camden, I asked him where he came from, and he didn't say 'Camden' as you night expect, He sort of inhaled it,!' It's like -7sllpitas, - Hoboken, and so on. Canden served as the resi- dence for a great many people who commuted in ferry boats to Philadelphia, I remember the large Esterbrook pen factory, My father used to go there to get artesian well water in jugs fro2 the well at the Esterbrook factory, instead 1 4 I of using the Delaware River water, The water from the 1 'I Delaware 2iver that came through our pipes in Philadel~hia '1 i when I was in the university would be brown after a storm, It was raw water, and typhoid fever was ram~ant. 1 It wasn't controlled yet, of course.

>To, This was when I was living in the dormitories at I the University of Pennsylvulia, So you see why going out and getting water from an artesian well was worthwhile, What kind of neighborhood did you live in as a child? Were you in a house that had space around it? JHH: No, I was in one of a row of houses, all alike, Each was a single house, the reverse of its neighbor, The two fr~ntdoors would be side by side with a little I fence between them, We had a little front yard, perhaps 20'x3OV, and a back yard fenced in, ETD: There did you play7 JHH: In the back yard, the front yard and in the street, There was no traffic to speak of on the street'. It was an unsaved, sandy dirt road. There was a lumber yard I nearby, Ye went into the lumber yard, roamed around, I szt and played and talked, I don't have any recollection of any particular games. lvly princi~alrecollectiom of this ~eriodare in the house, my mother's music and my I own reading, I remember I used to get bored, especially I when it was raining and there was nothing to do, I'd say, '%other, what shall I do?') There was no great library in I my father's house, You see, my father had nothing but a I common school education, I 3y mother attended what was called a "young ladies' ~eninsry,~It was the Haegerstown Seminary for Women, ETD: ',%at about your father's activities at this time? 1 1 JHH: He was rn insurance agent. He was invited to become a E partner in the agency, He had an office in the Drexel Building in Philadelphia, the first "skyscrapert1 built in Philzdelphia, five stories high, It's recently been torn down to make room for the library of the American Philosophical Society, ETD: Did this interest you at all? JHH: Not particularly, no, I remember in a vague way the appearance of the office, 1Jy parents tell about one incident when I was four years old, hIy mother was shopping-in Philadelphia, At that age I was wearing kilts, You weren't supposed to have pants until you were six years old and had a birthday party, Then you got little pants, Before that it was kilts, Vell, I wandered off on my own investigations away from my mother, A policeman found me and he said, "Sissy, what's your name?" Then, they tell me, I said, "I'm no sissy, I'm Joel Henry Hildebrand, 108 Linden Street, Camden, Bew Jer~ey," And they took me to the police station, My mother got in touch with my father and they finally found me in the police station, like the boy Jesus in the temple, talking with the policemen surrounding me, ETD: Isn't that lovely, You had a -- JHH: A sort of self-sufficiency, ETD : Your next step in education was beyond this small school, But then you also went to a different place entirely to live, so -- Oh yes, When we moved to ~ayne,a nice suburb 13 miles viest of Philadelphia, my father rented for a year or two and then he built a house, a very nice house, on a lot an acre and a seventh in area, I could wander around in the country viith my friends, There was a little creek, where I could shoot frogs with my air rifle, Me made a dam'in the creek, big enough to hold a little kayak that I built. I had a workshop and lzboratory on the third floor of the house, I had tools and a work bench, where I made many things, ETD: Did you do all this on your own or did your f~therhave this sort of thing as a hobby?

JHH : No, no, his hobbies were gardening and horses, He had a I good vegetable garden and he liked to drive a pair of horses, Ve also rode them; that was very fine, ETD : You hadn't done this before you went out there? No, I didn't ride much until I was In college, When

I went home over weekends I rode horseback.;i::, . , . . :. . 2 ... , , ,: . \ . . ETD : What ..about the laboratory? ...... :. .. .,. . .. . JHH: I had s:uch chemicals as I could get. ETD: mis ';as entirely on your own? m: This was altogether on my own, There was notiirig like I it in .. school. or anywhere else, I had to learn the hard I way, They didn't even have science books in the school library, ETD: Was there ever any question about the cost of, this? mi Well, I earned some money, I did jobs, mostly around I the house. I may have earned something from neighbors, but mostly I got my money in consideration for helping with the family chores, I had no regular allowance, ETD: Were you an only child? JHH: No, I had a sister four years younger, and a brother ten I years younger than I, 1 Did you have any particular communication with your sister, or was she just a little girl? We played and got along very well together. She was very bright and very energetic, ETD: Did you ever baby-sit her? m: Oh, I suppose I did, Our tradition was that everybody should help with the family work, I learned how to cook, I I liked to do anything which was challenging, So we all took part in the family affairs. ETD: Did your mother continue to teach piano? 1 JHH: Not after we went to Wayne, We had one servant, I

ETD: She continued, though, to play, I'm sure, I m: Oh yes, and she and I played a great deal; I also sang to her accompaniment, My father liked to play the mouth I organ, the harmonica. I would accompany him on the piano, : 1 We often played thus after supper, MID: Then your playing was probably as much ensemble as it was I Individual. Yea, it was, I never took lessons and never performed ' i' individually, I did have a flute, I acquired it at the time that we went to Wayne, My grandfather had two old-fashioned wooden flutes, and h-e gave me one of them and I just learned to play it. By that time he had become pastor df a small mission church in Devon, Pennsylvania, several miles farther west, It was for him a sort of retired pastorate, It was under the aegis of the Preaby- terian church but he didn't have to subscribe to Calvin- istic doctrine, We attended church services there, I used to play the flute along with the little organ, in the church, All this with no instruction? The flute is not hard to learn to play, The scale is very obvious, It doesn't take any special technique, Playing the flute in church taught me to read music easily, You liked this? Yes, it was fun from the time I played at home with my mother, I continued when I was courting, and then after I was mzrried I played or sang many of the songs of Schumann and Schubert, A certain amount of violin literature can be handled more or less adequately on the flute, I developed a very wide acquaintance of classical and romantic music in that way, ErD: What about school in Wayne? JHH: I went to a school to which I owe a great deal, I had Latin, French, German, and history, European and ancient, I had mathematics through solid geometry and plane trigo- nometry, The quality of my mathematics instruction was so good that I was able to win a prize for the best dxamina- tion in mathematics upon entering the University of Pennsylvania. The privilege of being certified by the school had just been adopted, but that seemed to me like 12 . . . I.. . . -...... - . . JHH: sneaking in by the '.back .door, so I took the full set of I entrance exams, I wanted to prove to myself that I could pass the examination and get in the front door, Furthermore, there was a $50 prize for the best entrance examination in math, I won the $50, I earned prizes for two essay examinations while still in high school in my junior and senior years, I think the prize was $20 for the best essay. I was very ambitious, I wrote one of these on the "Eastern Questi~n,~ which I, of course, solved. I won the prize money each time, and that together with my entrance prize enabled me to buy a fine silver flute, ETD: How interesting that you ah~uldput a lot into a flute. This is the soul of the musician, isn't it? JKB: Yes, Music has always been my principal spiritual recrea- tion, I have now a large record library, most of it bmoque music, a great deal of Bach and Mozart, Of course my mother's interest in music was a great advantage, The principal of my school was a graduate of Harvard, a liberal arts graduate, Ee had had no courses in "education" but he was a well educated man, and very musical, He led good choral music in school. In those days there was no Philadelphia Orchestra, but the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave two concerts a month in Philadelphia, The 1 principal and I would go in together, stand in line for II the top gallery, pay a quarter, and then we'd tear up 11 I several flights of stairs to try to get seats in the front I,I' row, A new field opened to me as I listened to this music, 11 But it never occurred to you to do this as your life work? No, Well, I remember thinking what a wonderful thing it would be to conduct an orchestra, but I always realized that music, except for the very few, is a better avocation than vocation. Also, I had this tremendous pull toward science, 13

ETD: Your pull to science was just larger than your pull to music, JHH: Yes, !Chat's true of many scientists, Among the physical scientists and mathematicians the appreciation of music of the baroque type, not the romantic -- M1D: You localize this interest to baroque? JHH: Yes, because it's the music that has intellectual form, not -just emotional appeal, We appreciate that kind of music much more, for exanple, than we do Wagner, ETD: Getting back to Philadelphia - JHH: I ke?t my programs and sketched the first few bars of themes on the margins, That helped to fix a theme in my &d and gave me a storehouse of musical knowledge, I could think through a whole Beethoven symphony, I woulttntt have all the notes in it. Nevertheless, I would hear the orchestra, ETD: What did you hear mostly? JHH: A great deal of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky was very popular, ETD: Did you like Tchaikovsky? JHH: Oh, pretty well, I liked Beethoven better. I used to get irked by the fact -- they had a final request con-. cert at the end of the season for the Philadelphia Orchestra and people voted for which of the things k played previously during the season they would like to have replayed, Year after year they voted for the Path& 1 tique S-ymphong of Tchaikovskg, Well, I used to be some- 'I what irked by that, not tkat it isn't a good symphony but I'd rather have the Fourth Symphony of Tchaikovsky, for example, than the Pathetique, The latter is a more erno- tional symphony, E!FD: Had you much chance to hear baroque? JHH: No, not very much, You see, Bach's music is not orchestral unless it's transcribed for a small orchestra, We owe a great deal now to the phorograph, which enables ua to hear 14

3HB: music which it wasn't profitable to play, To pay far a concert you have to have a large audience, It is costly to put on the old baroque music with %he special instruments and smaller effects, Furthermore, a good deal of the literature hadn't yet been rediscovered. Vivaldi is really a discovery of the last few decadea, I never heard of Vivaldi when I was young, ETD: Do you think you have covered the chief musical experiences of your early yeara? JHH: I might add another factor, My mother was very anxious while I was a university student for me to take singing lessons, I did so, just to make her happy, They didn't last very long but my teacher was a woman who was very good at placing the voice, After I came to Berkeley, in 1913, I found that I could lecture to a big roomful of students at nine o'clock, and then repeat it at ter o'clock, and my voice was still good at the end of the second hour, Moreover, I could be heard -- it was before the days of the loudspeaker -- and I could be understood, In the early twenties, I substituted for President Barrows at a big meeting in San Diego in Balboa Park, out of doors; before an audience of about 6,000 people I was heard on the outskirts, not because I have a voice like Bob Sproults, but because I had learned to articulate. I then realized what my mother had done for me, . . After I was married I alternated flute-playing with. singing, I never sang for company; but my wife and71 enjoyed music as one of the features of our home life, After the Berkeley fire, where we lost all our furniture and our house, the first thing we bought was an article of necessity, rather than of luxury; that is, we bought a grand piano from Professor OtNeill, They were giving it UP It was a Steinway, in beautiful birdseye mahogany, It has been a center of our activity for many years, ETD: Earlier you mentioned good math in high school. m: The best teacher, and one who did the most for me, was a teacher of mathematics, She could explain things sucoinctly and clearly, and she insisted that we get things straight, I owe a great deal to her, English and mathematics are the two chief foundations of a scientific education, EIID: H~sname? JHH: Her name was Anna Sensenig. I wrote her many yeare later and told her what I thought she had contributed to my life, She evidently was quite overwhelmed and proud to have that recognition, One's bread doesn't always come back after being cast on the waters. She was a very fine woman, I had instruction in Zatin and French and German, not all of the same length, but it was all good, Did everyone have three languages? I think everybody studied at least two, We had no courses in "senior problem^.^ We were not burdened by excessive extra-curricular activities. We didn't discuss the advantages and disadvantages of getting married, or how to have a nsuccessful dateen ETD: How did you manage to avoid Greek, or wasn't it offered? JHH: Greek wasn't offered, Latin was still strong in the schools but Greek was a comparative rarity. ETD: What opportunities in literature do you remember at this 1evel? I've often preached to students that they should try to cultivate a taste for which they have a mere glimmer&g, even if it 'e small, Because I can remember gradual progress in my appreciation for poetry, literature and art, While in high school, I became editor of the "High School Criticw for which I did a good deal of writing, My first appreciation of poetry came with the reading of Riley's JHEI: Rhymes of Childhood. I liked the alliteration, I had good instruction in Riglish. In college I did a great deal of writing, much more than most young- sters do now, ETD: High school was a busy place for you, What more 38 there to add? JHH: I played football on the high school team and I was a pole-vaulter, ETD: Your body was just as busy as your mind? JHH: Oh yes, I've always been very active physically. Bsncroft Llbrrv 17

. . COLLEGE, GRADUATE STUDY, AND FIRST INSTRUCTORSHIP'

University of Pennsylvania, BeSD,1903. Ph.D., 1906

ETD: How did you decide to go to the University of Pennsyl- vania? d JHE: Well, it was rather natural, We were living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and f didn't how much about any other university, This was a good institution, nearby, and I would have many acquaintances, Another boy from my high school class went with me and we roomed together in the university dormitories, So it was just a "naturalw, ETD : Where along your high school career did you decide,. or did you, that you wanted to continue in the field of chemistry? JHH: I wasntt sure when I entered the university whether I was going to be a chemist or a physicist. I took a combined major in chemistry and physics in the college of arts and science, ETD: Were many students in your high school interested fn scientific subjects? JBB: No,. In my class I was the only one who had a strong scientific bent. ETD: You had physics and chemistry in high school? J-lm: I had chemistry, There was no physics, ETD: I see, Was there any work offered in biological sciences? JHH: NO. ETD: So you neren *t even introduced *to this field, J-HH: Not by any studies in school, As a matter of fact, physl- cal science is a foundation for biological science, I think it's unfortunate that biology or biological studies of one sort or another are taken in many schools in excess JHH: of physics and chemistry because there -- ETD: What do you mean by "taken in excessn? JHH: More students study biology than physics., because physics requires mathematics, and children have been brought up to dislike mathematics. . . -. EllD: We'll have to pursue this. What courses interested you as you started university work? JHH: I took a sort of group curriculum, It included physics, chemistry, and a good deal of mathematics, but it also included logic, ethics, history, speech, German and -. French, It was all good solid stuff. - I remember particularly the professors of philosophy, One of them, Fullerton, was an extraordinar$ly stimulating lecturer, He had been a member of a commls- sion known as the Sibert Commission to investigate spiritualism, He told us fascinating stories, He invited a small group of us to his house in the evening and told us about his experiences with the spiritualistic mediums. That was exciting, He discussed hypnotism, He hypnotized a member of the class and told us what hypnotism could and could not do, That was all very interesting, It was not just bookish knowledge, you see, It was from his own experience, A professor of English, Felix Schelling -- his brother was a noted pianist -- lectured in literature, and we found him very stimulating. He opened windows to great lltera- ture and had a great-effect in developing my originally pretty slender literary taste, We also had Professor Child, a ~haucerauthority. I took a course in literature from him, He was very good. And Cornelius Wygant, who I think is still living, was a very good teacher, I took a course in history under Monroe, who later went to the University of Wisconsin, I had great respect for each of these men, On the whole I look back with more admiration JHH: upon the non-scientific faculty than I do upon the scientific, ETD: !Phis is not surprising because the faculties in science . at that time were not very --

...... JHH: . That's true, When I was an undergraduate, we hew .. .-,.. . nothing about the insides of atoms or the arrangement of atoms in crystals, Chemistry was still largely descriptive. We had lectures and laboratories and quizzing. The lectures were delivered by the man who was then vice provost. Later he became provost, A man of considerable reputation in his day, he had been educated in Germany, He received his doctor's degree in Gattingene He brought back the German theory of running a department, You see, in a German institute there was only one fill professor, He was the head and the oracle, The subordin- ate professors and assistants had no voice in institute affairs. It was a highly competitive system where men jealously guarded their prerogatives, The professor staked out a claim to an area of research and tried to keep off all intruders, You didn't contradict him, at least not openly, He had absolute authority, MID: This 13 the sort of man who gave your freshman lectures? m: Yes, He was interesting, a good speaker, and he had good demonstrations, ETD: How did he tackle the material? JHH: In a highly descriptive way. His logic was atrocious, He defined chemistry as the science dealing with "the deep-seated permanent changes of matter,n and made a great point of distinguishing chemistry from physics, He illustrated this distinction in one of several ways. He would turn on the current of an electromagnet and pick up a nail, He'd break the current, and the nail would drop, That wasn't permanent, and was therefore physics, I would have liked to have asked him, qqSupposethe core of Bancroft Llbrrry 20 I JIIH: the magnet had been made of steel and become permanently magnetized; the nail would have remained sticking there when you turned off the current, Would that make it cheml~try?~ - ETD: But you didn't, JHH: I didn't ask him but I felt perfectly free to make my own interpretation, Having found out in high school that I could disprove a Harvard professor, I was not - overawed by authority, He performed also the 3istoric experiment of mixing sulphur and iron filings, You can pick the iron filings out with a magnet or dissolve out the sulphur with car- - bon disulfide, That's physics, But after you heat it and make iron sulfide you can no longer separate them in these ways, That's chemistry, a permanent, "deep- seated change," but veep-seatedn and "permanentn are very loose adjectives, If one prepares nitrogen chloride, it explodes almost instantly, That isn't very permanent; but it is surely chemistry, He asserted that hydrogen is like the metals, There are corresponding compounds: hydrogen chloride, sodium chloride; hydrogen sulfate and copper sulfate, etc, Hydrogen and metals can replace each other in compounds, But that doesn't mean that physically hydrogen is a metal, He heated a platinum wire to redness with an electric current, He then surrounded the wire with hydrogen but the same current would not cause the wire to glow, He said that proves that hydrogen is like the metals, It conducts heat and electricity, NOW, the way that hydrogen conducts heat is very different from the way a metal conducts heat, Electrons are the conductors in metals, but hydrogen conducts heat because its molecules are so light that they move with much greater speed than do the mole- 21

cules of air and conduct heat from the wire, Further- more, that experiment does not prove that hydrogen conducts electricity, That was the kind of logic to which I was subjected. rnD: Didn't this discourage you? JHH: No. It encouraged me to know that I could draw my own conclusions, I didn't accept authority on its face value; that is the beginning of scientific wisdom, 3 must say in his favor that he had a strong scientific instinct and did a lot of experimental work, Therefore it was a stimulating place, rmD: What kind of chemistry did you have? JHE: The chemistry was given in the order of its historical development, General chemistry, observing the properties of substances and how they react to each other, was first. Then came qualitative analysis; you would take a mineral and find out what was in it, Then the next year you'd have quantitative analysis to find out what quanti- ties were there, This was followed by organic chemistry which came later in the historical evolution, ETD: How did you approach organic? JBH: The lectures were given by a man who was a sycophant; he had been a sort of handyman to the chief, He taught organic, but all under the direction of Smith, the provost, the head of the department. His lectures were the most repulsive that I've ever been subjected to, He was a man with a harsh voice, and utterly humorless, He prepared the lecture during the preceding hour by reading Smith's translation of a German book, making notes of boiling points and melting points, Then he would retell this to us, I kept track of where he was in the book, and cut most of the time and studied from the book, ETD: Did you do laboratory work in organic? m: Yes, we had to do laboratory preparationa, E!l?D: What do you mean by that? JHEI: One prepares a substance from others by chemical reactions. We did the same thing in inorganic chemistry;.I spent a long time on preparationa, Physical chemistry was not known when I was an undergraduate, It was just beginning to be recognized in a few p3aces, in the ldassachusetts Institute of Technology and in Germany, I was commissioned to go to Germany and study for a year, to =turn as an instructor in physical chemistry at Pennsylvania, ETD: You've jumped quite a distance, from students' labs and classes to faculty status, JHH: Well, I'm just explaining why I didn't study physical chemistry, I told you about other things that I was studying, including humanities, By taking a liberal arts course instead of straight chemistry I avoided some of the courses in chemistry which, from my present standpoint, were either not important or not true, Ern: Was there a college of chemistry as such at the University of Pennsylvania? JIM: No, There was a "Tome Scientific Schooln; however, I enrolled in the college of arts and science, where I could 1a follow a very much broader curriculum, As a matter of fact, what I studied in liberal arts contributed more to making me a good teacher of chemistry than would these 1 I 1 courses in chemistry that I missed, bzcause they consisted Jj so largely of only analytical chemist~y, Assaying, for

example, consisted in carrying out routine operations; it .. . was like following a cook book, I did not intend to be an assayer. It wasn't important. There was no theory connected with it, The course in quantitative analysis was taught by a man who had not even graduated from college. The univer-

a sity was pretty tight-fisted, This man had been a jani- L I tor, but he learned enough about practical. chemistry to be put in charge of quantitative analysis, I remember that the results of my first quantitative analysis were not accepted, They weren't accurate enough, I repeated them about three times until finally I got correct nu- bers, I didn't know, and I donft know to this day, what I did the fourth time that was different from the first, t It was just like throwing dice repeatedly till you get a certain number, I was pretty much disgusted with that sort of thing, but there was no alternative, so I went through with it, In the meantime, of course, I was taking physics and mathematics, ETD: 'Nas the teaching in physics better? JHH : The head of the department of physics gave a course in thermodynamics which followed the notes which he had taken when he was a student, It gave little notion of the power of this grand subject. One of the best mathematics courses I ever had was in a graduate course in analytical mechanics, One had to translate problems from English into mathematics, operate with it, and translate the result into English, .I made up my mind in that course that I would never let a problem stump me, Once I worked all night to solve a problem, I had the satisfaction of coming in with a more elegant and concise solution than the professor had, so I felt well rewarded, ETD: Was there quite a good deal of student activity at the University of Pennsylvania? JHH: Oh yes, a good deal, We didn't have all the circuses that we have around here, but I was secretary of my freshman class; I played on the freshman football team; I stroked the freshman eight oar crew, I used to swim in the university series of races, winning fourth place, I L - up____2 Hildebrand, stroke, with the University of Pennsylvania Four, Poughkeepsie 1901 JHH: was a member of the gym team, I stroked the vwsity four-oar at Poughkeepsie in my sophomore year. The four-oared group didn't have a coxswain in those days, The bow man did the steering with his foot, which was quite a stunt, In my junior year I stroked the varsity crew, We didn't win, and by my senior year they found another man with more muscle than I had so I didn't stroke the crew in my senior year, It was a miracle 'I ever stroked at all because I'm not a six- footer and I'm not hugely muscled, I won my positions on the crew perhaps more by generalship and by always being in good physical shape, In our practice races I knew when to spurt, In modern crews it's the coxswain who does all the deciding, but I decided the timing. ETD : Was the student body organized when you were at the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania? m: We had no associated students, I was elected president of the senior class and was the leader of the student body as far as we needed any leader, but we didn't have all this huge ASUC apparatus, so we were saved from spending too much time on it. ETD: What happened to your early interest in music? Were you singing and playing? JHH: No, not at the university, I lived in the university dormitories and went home over weekends, We lived 14 miles out of Philadelphia, and I usually brought one or two friends home with me, My parents had never been to college, and it was a great experience for them to meet my college friends. There we would have music, good food, and entertainment. When there was no guest, I might play accompaniments to my father on his harmonica, or my mother and I might play four-handed or she would play the piano while I was playing my flute, ETD: College seems to have offered you broad experiences, Bancroft Lib.rl

MlD: Would you say that you spent as much time on your chemistry, physics, and math as the present chemistry major spends on his program in scientific subjects? JHE: It's pretty hard to generalize about people, Some spend more and some spend less, At present there are more tempting diversions from the main path, I always found the intellectual side of my life extremely interesting and absorbing, and I treated my atmtics and social life as avocations and not as vocations, I was not preparing to sell bonds or to be primarily a mixer, XTD: When did you come to a decision about graduate school? JHB: I didn't decide really until I was a senior whether I would go on to graduate study in physics or chemistry, But chemistry was then'more exciting than physics; physics was in the doldrums, Radioactivity had not been discovered, There was much less research going on in the physics department than there was in chemistry, MlD: Can you remember the general lines of research in the chemistry department? JHH: The only significant research was done under Edgar Smith, He had two principal lines, One was electroanalysis, Be had developed rapid methods for stirring a solution while electrolyzing it, That avoided waiting for slow diff'usion 1! to take place, He used a weighed platinum dish containing 1 J ii a solution of two or more salts, The anode was rotated I ;

rapidly, In the course of minutes he deposited all of 1I I

one metal on the dish, The solution was poured into 4 another dish, the first was washed, dried, and weighed. Then he'd increase the voltage and deposited a second metal on another dish, One could then wash and dry the deposit, and weigh it, Mr thesis consisted of doing the same sort of thing with alkali halides, such as sodium chloride, I used a mercury cathode -- this is my own idea -- and a silver- i

Banwoft Ubr- 26

JHR: plated anode, The chlorine deposited on the silver as silver chloride, which I could weigh. The sodium went into the mercury and then dissolved in an outer compart- ment to.give sodium hydroxide, which I could titrate, Smith was also engaged in making wha't he called "complex inorganic acids," by boiling together, say, a I phosphate, a molybdenate, and a tungstate, Be would boil such substances together and obtain crystals of different colors and shapes, which he would analyze and report as new compounds, That didn't appeal fo me because it was just dwnpihg things together to see what would happen, There was no theory to guide it, He was also much interested in trying to discover an element, Re would have sold his soul to Mephistopheles for a new element, ETD: This was a sure road to glory in chemistry at the time? JHH: Yes, His notion of the periodic system of elements, which was then fairly new, led him to expect that he might find an element associated with certain others, I tested some of his findings with a spectroscope, You see, I was a physical chemist by instinct, but I had learned in physics something about spectra, I vaporized tbe columbium in an arc between copper electrodes, His columbium (now called niobium) contained no new element, 1 only titanium. I could tell whether his columbium was e,I purified from titanium. It's very hard to sepasate the ! two, He wasn't sure that he was getting o'ut all the 1 titanium, I could take pure colunbium and compare it I with his purified material and see if the titanium lines had disappeared, Physical chemistry had then just been' invented, and Smith realized that to be up-to-date he'd have to have it included in the curriculum, But he took a dim view of this new-fangled, theoretical subject, Arrhenius had called JHE: attention to the fact that salts dissolved in water conduct an electric current and behave as if they are split apart into positively and negatively charged ions. The older men could not gra6p the significance of the character of electronic structure and the fact that a sodium atom that has lost an electron is totally different stuff. Copper that has lost an electron is a blue material, soluble in water. It isn't metallic, And the chloride in sodium chloride is not like chlorine, a war gas, a lethal substance, Snith wanted somebody whom had trained to teach physical chemistry, one who would be safely conservative, I was practically commissioned to go to Europe, and get some education in physical chemistry, which I would come back and teach as part of the orthodox course, Of course, > I disappointed him. ETD: Did he choose the place for you to go? JHH: no, we talked it over together, E!rD: How did you decide? - JHH : Xernst in Berlin was the recognized leader in physical chemistry, Vanlt Hoff, an older Dutchman, one of the pioneers in physical chemistry, was also in Berlin. Berlin was the chemical capital of the world. German chemists had taken the lead in developing forward-looking, active research, They contributed enormously to Germany's strength as a nation. The German chemical industry was based very largely on coal tar as raw material, Although the first aniline dye was discovered by an Englishman, it was a German who developed the aniline dye industry, German scientists had a very high standing in society and in industry; their basic research contributed fundamentally to the growth of German industry. Nearly every industry depends upon chemistry, The German government understood very well the importance of chemistry, Banodt L,- - I.. 28

JRH: !Ihe universities in England had remained more scho- lastic than those in Germany, ETD: Can you characterize nscholasticn? JRH : Instruction remained largely linguistic and philosophi- I, Science had not yet penetrated, The great English scientists in the early days were amateurs, not. university professors. In Germany the great scientists were in the universities, and Berlin was the Mecca cf German science and scholarship. The great figure in physical chemistry when I went to Germany in 1906 was Walter Nernst. He was the recognized leader of physical chemistry. He was a nGeheimrat.w At meetings of the Bunsen Gesellschaft, he would pronounce the final word, He wrote a book of which I still have the 1907 edition. It was the Bible of physical chemists, ETD : Xhat about Switzerland? JHH: I should mention GBttingen also as a place that attracted many Americans. As a matter of fact, lJernst went to Berlin from Ggttingen only a year or so before I went to Berlin. I had a most interesting year. It was very stimulzting, culturally and scientifically. I began by taking the "praktikum," the laboratory course in physical chemistry. Each experiment served me as the basis for studying the whole field connected with that experiment. I had to educate myself, which is not a bad idea because the only real education is that which one gets for himself, It isn't something done to you; it's something you have to take, In Berlin I saw something of other great figures, including Emil Fischer, one of the greatest organic chemists in the history of chemistry. Each of these leading professors had an institute of his own. MID: Outstanding men in the same-general field were not in the same institute?

I B~ncroltLibraw 29

No, You'd go to Nernst's institute to study physical chemistry ar you'd go to Emil Fischer to study organic chemistry, Most of the leading chemists of the United States had gotten their doctor's degree in Germany up until about my time, From then on it was no longer necessary to go to Germany for one's PhoD, At this time one of the leading figures was Theodore William Richards, at Harvard, Another more knfluentiaf in the development of chemistry was BOA, Xoyes at M,I.T, He founded the first research laboratory for physical chemistry, A number of the men who later played leading roles in the development of physical chemistry in this country began at Noyes' laboratory, That was true of Gilbert Lewis, who later on became dean of the College of Chemistry here. Later, Noyes went to Pasadena and laid the foundation for the great department at Cal Tech, There were several notable organic chemists in this country, including WoA, Noyes, of the University of Illi- nois, and Stieglitz of Chicago, Getting back to your experience abroad, how did you finance it? My father gave me $1,000 and that financed ft, Entirely, ,I Yes, I used to live for about $25 a week in Berlin. I t ate at a vegetarian restaurant and cooked some of my own I meals, But I got along and I took a tour during the li11 spring vacation to Prague, Rome, and Raples, B1 Although the university wanted you to study abroad, it ii ! didn't supply support? Were there no graduate scholarships? I There were no graduate scholarships that I knew of, There , were undergraduate scholarships, but these paid little but / tuition, I B-nuoft Llbrerl 30

European-Experience, 1906-1907 - Physical Chemistry Under Nernst

ETD : Were you interested in going to Europe for more than stucly in chemistry? m: Oh yes, I looked forward very eagerly to expanding my cultural knowledge. rnD: How did you go? - JHR: I went second-class in a boat that carried cattle from Philadelphia to Antwerp. It also carried second-class passengers, It took 12 days to make the passage, It was a rather slow boat, It was the 'tHaverford," But I had a good year and got a tremendous lot from it, I was going to say that although I had no innate artistic talent I wanted to go to the galleries and see the great pictures, So every time I went to a city with a good art gallery I'd go to see the pictures. ETD: You were curious? m: At first it was intellectual curiosity, I didn't have any particular emotional response, but it was interesting to find out what I could see in them, For a while I lived in a private family with a young man, now a very well known Canadian painter, I would go with him to the Although he was not articulate, I would catch his enthusiasm and try to see what he saw, We'd be walking at night, I remember once we were walking in Tiergarten. There was a line of the trees, "Oh," he said, "isn't that a wonderful line!" Well, it helped me to see things, I went to cathedrals as I went to pictures, seeing all that I could from Antwerp to St, Peter's, As the year wore on, I found myself more and more eager to see the great pictures, Gradually, I was learning to see what they contained, Z -cr~f?li&w

EllD: You mentioned: Rome. JHK: From Antwerp I went to Bruges and Ghent, During the Christmas vacation I traveled with two other American students to Dresden and Leipzig and hiked around Saxon Switzerland. Then in the spring vacation we traveled in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, and Bavaria. I gut a tremendous kick from Rome, I went with great intellectual curiosity, because Rome was for centuries the center of civilization, When viewing the Appian Way, the Colosseum, etc,, I tried to imagine a little of what once went on there. It was terrific, It was not a sudden transformation, but as I compared the beginning of the year with the end, I realized that 1 had been greatly matured j.zltellectually and culturally by the experience, ETD : What about your work in chemistry? Did it live up to expectations? m: Yes, The first thing I did was to take what was called a Praktikum, a laboratory course in physical chemistry, I was to give such a course at the University of Penn- sylvania, so I went all through the Praktikum, ETD : Was the Praktikum in the graduate or undergraduate school? m: They made no such distinction. The German university begins at about the level of the American junior year, ~rloststudents attended for about four semesters. Those who wanted doctorates continued on for four or five years, I went as a post-doctorate student, I had no requirements to fulfill, since I already had my degree, After I finished the Praktikum Nernst gave me a little narbeit,n an investigation which I carried on and which was published at the end of my stay, I should also say something about Van't Hoff, He was a Dutchman who had been called to Berlin as professor. He was a very important figure in the early development of JHH : physical chemistry, He had envisaged the tetrahedral nature of the bonds about carbon atoms. I had a letter of introduction to him, and he was very courteous and gave me needed advice about my Fear in Berlin, I was soon thereafter surprised and delighted to receive a postcard from Frau Vantt Xoff inviting me to dinner. This was the first of a number of times when f was a guest in the Vantt Hoff home, He was one of the giants of science in that day, It was a great privilege to have that personal contact with him, He was very genial and cordial, During my Christmas vacation while in Munich I saw in the Deutsches Nuseum Vantt Hoffts original cardboard models of tetrahedral atoms, ETD: What about Nernst as a person? JHH : He was not an engaging personality. I've seen him brow- beat a lecture assistmt unmercifully for not having something fully prepared, However, he was always courteous to me. I never had any trouble. He was very jealous, of course, of his supreme position. ETD : Did you visit any other teaching centers? JHH : No, In the continental universities it was the habit of serious students to spend a year or two at one institution and then go to another, . The German universities were all under the same ministry of education and were all organized alike, They had no such rigid curricula as we have, If a student did not wish a degree, he only attended lectures, Even this was rather voluntary. The professor signed one's record book at the first lecture and again at the last, Whether the student ever appeared in the meantine was no concern of the professor, JHH : There were three kinds of lectures, One was public, Every professor was expected to give a set of public lectures, Second, there were the "private" lectures for which the student paid a fee., so much. per,unit, 20 marks, .$5, if I remember correctly. Third were the seminars to which one was admitted only by permission of the lecturer, The professors received this money, ETD: This went, then, to the school fund? JHH: No, k percentage of it may have, At any rate the professor who had a popular subject and could attract many students would have a very large income, The professor with an unpopular subject would have a pretty small income, Mernst had also a big income from a certain patent, There was a fairly close relation between German industry and the academic world, I came to Nernst with a doctor's degree which he said simplified the matter, So I had enough standing to be admitted. When he asked me one day who was the professor of physical chemistry at the Vniversity of Penn- sylvania I said, "I'm going to be," "Xell, " he said, %ow we shall see," When I went back to Berlin in 1930 he was retired znd was an old man, md ghysics had gone past him, Eut I was pleasantly received, He opened his latest edition of his theoretical chemistry to see whether he had mecfioned me and my work, which he had,

Instructor in Chemistrv-city of Pennsylvania, I 1907-1913

* 3TD: After your year of study in Germany you returned to the University of Pennsylvania an2 were taken on in the department, JHH : As an instructor, ETD: \%at about the department at this time? JHH: The head was Edgar F. Smith, whom I mentioned before, He was a very remarkable personality. He was very fond of people. He took pains to learn the names of students, He sat in the front office, with his secretary in the rear office, so that when the iceman came he would be the one who would tell the iceman where to put things, He was not progressive. Ee did not have a desk telephone, When the telephone rang he'd get up and go over to the corner and take down a receiver from a wall telephone, And I cm see him talking and gesturing to the telephone a.s he answered it. He was an opinionated person, He had an immense store of knowledge, w'th a very slender theoretical background, even for the day, He introduced physical chemistry because it was becoming something that had to be recognized, rather th& anything he believed in. All of his research was in inorganic chemistry, most preparations and electroanalysis. He devised methods for rapid separation of metals from salt solution, He wrote a book on electroanalysis, and his recipes for making the sepzrations were very useful industrially and scientifically, My thesis was something that he had suggested, although I carried it out in a way that he had not suggested. He barely tolerated my mention of ions. You see, when you dissolve sodium chloride in water it separates into a sodium ion that has lost an electron. Therefore, it is no longer metallic sodium, and a chlorine atom that has gained an electron, It's not chlorine, It's a chloride ion, And these ions can move in opposite directions in the electric field and conduct the current. The solution behaves as if there were two materials instead of one. It would have double the effect on the freezing point of water, for example, that you'd have JHH : from the single substance such as alcohol, Well, he didn't really believe in ions, He allowed me to talk about them but with a sort of indulgent sneer on his face as if to say that I'd get over that nonsense as I got a little more sense knocked into ny head, Smith liked to be surrounded by lesser people, There was one professor I liked very well -but he had not - done much research. Another one who was a sort of personal valet to Smith csee page 213, although he did only one piece of research in his life, a very poor thesis, was gradually advanced to a full professorship, ETD : Vhat about the chemistry students? JHH: le had some good students, of course, several in my own class, Then I had several pretty good graduate students, One of them was a man who took a major in chemistry and a minor in philosophy. He and I tzlked on all sorts of subjects. Bis first research wzs done with me, It couldn't serve as his thesis because it wasn't done under Smith, so he had to do another one under Smith, But the one he did with me was embodied in one of my nost important early papers. And he eventually became prof.essor, or perhags an assistant professor, at Pennsylvania, But then he was I cailed to Yale where held been a professor for many years.. !I1 He just recently retired. And he's a member of the 4 I National Academy of Sciences. He was my first research 1 student, 11

MID: The atmosphere at Pennsylvania seems to have been very ! I stifling, JI i JHH: Yes, but I always knew what I wanted to do and I did it 1 in my own way. I made up my mind, since I hzd so little r instruction, that each of my researches for a while would be different problems. All the time I was at Pennsylvania JHH: each research was different from the others, I wanted to develop my own knowledge, and I had enough ideas so that I could go from one to the next, Ey notebook had a ntmber of questions which I could try to answer, ETD: What was your teaching schedule at Pennsylvania? JHH: As I recall it was about 18 hours, A good deal of that was laboratory. It was a small class, so I hzd my office right in the laboratory, and I could do some of my work while the students were there, !hey could come to me with their questions. But it mzs a big teaching schedule. Furthermore, I had a big program, I had a lot of things that interested me, My wife would come over with supper znd some reading and some sewing, I could go right on with a run, I'd have to change the tem~eratureof my furnace and then wait some time until the temperature becme uniform, and so on, She would read to me, We would ezt together, And when I was making measurements she would sew. That was a very pleasant partnership, She had z part in my career which wzs indispensable, And I worked-many times- just beczuse I liked to, because I was interested, I wanted to get ahead, but I'm i sure the thing that motivated me was not t3e professorship dangling before my eyes. I was interested in what I was doing, and I would take the other as dessert, I I was at Pennsylvania for six yezrs. Yy szlzry for /I three years was 51,000 per annum with a couple of hunCred j I for teaching in the summer, Then for another three years 1 it was $1,200. TCy two professorial soas skipped the 1 i instructor's grade entirely, an interest- comment on the I i

difference be-hveen that day and this, I ETD: Could you live at all on this kind of szlary? Weren't you very pressed? JHH : Oh, no, I never got anything from my father and eventually I had to support him; but my father-in-law built us a house, XTD : Let's see -- pQb were married in 1908. rL!arriage December 17* 1908, to Eiiily J, Alexander-3 JHH : Yes, and one year later we were presented .with a house, so that we were relieved of rent, But of.course you must remember that around 1910 money was worth at least four times what it is now, ETD: This is why I'm asking wha-t it meant, JHH : We waited three years to have our first child, By that time we had, I think, 53,000 in the bank, and we've never been strapped since, CHENlISTRY AT TKE UNIVIiXSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BEt??LEY

Call to the University of California, Berkeley, 1913

JHH: I presented a paper in 1912 at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, One of the men who heard it was William Bray, who had come to Berkeley with Leds in 1912, a year- before I was calfe6, ETD: What was the paper? JHII: It was on dissociation of barium peroxide, a pretty good paper .for those .days, and it was original: "The Thermal

Dissociation of Barium Peroxide, " r Journal .of the American Chemical Society, Volume 34, page 246.3 Well, Bray hzd seen me, and must have been favorably impressed by my ability as a lecturer, Cottrell, who had taught physical chemistry here, was then in the government service but he was always much interested in people, and retained his interest in the University of California, He had developed his electrical precipitation of smoke while he was still here, He had visited ne one day in Philadelphia, on a Saturday. You see, I had to do my research at nights and Sundays and holidays. ETD: You weren't allowed time for it? JXH: I had an 18-hour teaching schedule. So, on that Saturday I was working in the laboratory and Cottrell called on me, He stayed a long time, Well, I was coning dom with the flu, and when I went home I told my wife thzt "he stayed so long that I thought he must have been looking ne over for some purpose or otherOtt I added, "I certzinly didn't make a good impression,'l My personality was surely not shining that day, However, he recommended me to Lewis -- a?d Sray had heard me speak, When Lewis came to Berkeley in 1912 he JHH : brought a man to teach the freshmen, who didn't prove to be very successful, He left at the end of the year for a different type of a position, more suited to his talents, So I received an invitation to visit Berkeley on a trial trip in March of 1913, ETD: Bray was teaching freshman chemistry at that time? JHH: Yes, The whole department was helping with freshman chemistry, You bee, that was a new way of handling freshmen in American universities. ElPD: What do you mean? JHH: Usually the freshman courses are put in the hands of some one person who makes it his personal course, It is still tke case M many universities and colleges today that one man is in charge of a freshman course, sometimes the oldest, and the least productive member of the department, He has a corps of assistants, a sort of sub-standard faculty who are given no recognition for good teaching, Lewis set up a system whereby the whole department pitched in to teach the freshmen, We were a long way from the centers of population, we had no reputation, we had to start freshmen properly in order to produce the kind of graduate students we wanted, ETD: The idea was to give them superior training from the very start, JHH: Yes, to confront them with science as science and not just as a lot of descriptive material to be committed to memory, rnD: This was Lewis' particular contribution? JHH: Yea, They invited me to come out on a trial trip in March, I had at the same time an offer from the Bureau of Standards at $3,500, which was better than $12,000 today, But I came to Berkeley to inspect and be inspected, I gave three lectures, 40

JHH: One of my lectures was on the hydrogen electrode, I a paper that I had prepared to deliver at a meetiw of the American Chemical Society in Milwaukee on-my way home, That proved to be a very important paper, I could have distributed a thousand reprints if I had foreseen the demand, JED: It was entitled:. "Some applications of the hydrogen electrode in analysis, research and teachingon JHH: Yes, It was a grandiose title, I was put on the general program of the American Chemical Society, ETD: What do you mean, the general program? JHH: Sometimes we have sections on restricted subjects, But in those days there would be sessions that all attended, The society then numbered about 3,000; it now numbers nearly 100,000, My paper got a good deal of attention from my presentation of it in Milwaukee, and from its subsequent publication, In Berkeley I found an atmosphere'very different from that of the department at the University of Penn- sylvania, It was a democratic atmosphere, Lewis courted disagreement for the sake of discussion, ETD: What about chemistry at other universities? JEH: At Johns Hopkins there was a man who had just come back. from Germany, a physical chemist, who turned out to be a complete flop, There was a man at Wisconsin who waa a good lecturer and had a good personality, but he was an utter conservative. He was worse than Smith in his attitude towar'ds the newer physical chemistry, At Harvard the chief figure was Theodore William Richards, who was determining atomic weights, I had heard him lecture, He was a Roosevelt professor in Berlin when I was there, and a very fine gentleman, but I wasn't excited by what he said. The place that I might have gone to with advantage was MoIoTo where A.A. Noyes had set up the first real group ... . , . . , . . . ., _.. : . ,. . ..I . - . JHH:, of physical chemists in the country, Lewis was there, ' .. 1;. " He earned his degree at Harvard, Later he joined A,& I Noyes at MoIoTe Bray had been trained at M,I,T, and I there were others who later on achieved some stature in 1 that group, That was the focus from which modern ghyai- :I. cal chemistry spread in the United States, Well, I developed on the side, Perhaps it's just I4 as well because I had to rely upon myself, and I didn't i have to worry too much about agreeing with anybody, In 1 fact, the researches that I set up for myself were E 3 probably more original and more worthwhile than if I had gone elsewhere and worked up things that were then fashionable at M,I,T. I have no regrets, mZ): In any case the University of California's department i of chemistry attracted you more than any other, JHH: First of all, on my trial trip I sensed an entirely new atmosphere, Here was a young university, At Pennsyl- vania it was the old men who had all the say. Nobody asked an instructor an opinion about anything. California was obviously a fresh, young university in the making, There were no precedents that one was bound to follow. One could propose something new, Soon after I came, Lewis made an assertion and a graduate student said, "That isn't soen Lewis said, "No? Why not?m I On another occasion a student contradicted Lewis, I 1 who said, "That's an impertinent remark but it's also ? 1 pertinent, 1 i And here, instead of an 18-hour teaching schedule iI I taught six hours, ETD: That was a dramatic change, JHH : Lewis did not want to fill all our time up with teaching, because the foundation of our graduate instruction was research; we even introduced undergraduate research, The 1938. Chemistry 1A-B instructors discussing with Hildebrand the quiz they are to give before going to their lab sections. Seated, left to right: J.K. Royal, L.V. Coulter, W.F. Libby, T.T. Magel, [unidentified]. Standing, left to right: A.P. Carrol, storekeeper for the freshman laboratory, J.H. Hildebrand, J.C. Good-rich, D.C. DeVault, J.W. Kennedy, R.W. Long. . . new plan avoided mere memorizing and reciting, still prevalent in American universitiee,

...... , ...... :. - .:. ... -. :* ...... '. ... i; .,,>:: ;..:.: ;.... ;...-:...... ,.:. .:...... Teachlw Freshman Chemistrs ...... :...:; -~ . :.-.... :.-,::. . ;: ,F: :I:.;: ;....>:- ...- ::-,..: ...... -, . .- -...... -

My first assignnent was to give the freshman lectures and take a quiz section, There were two lecture sections, each meeting twice weekly, Lewis took a small part from time to time in quizzing freshmen but he did not like to do it and wasn't very good at it; He was mamelous with graduate students but not for freshmen, But he was intensely interested in the freshman course, *Almost everybody in the department had a freshman quie section, There were also .teaching assistants, Our poliuy was to have new teaching assistants as under- studies in a section presided over by a regular staff member, ETD: The idea was to have a full faculty person in charge of each quiz section? JHH : No; there were not enough of us for that, ETD: llhe one faculty person might circulate through three or four quiz sections meeting at the same the? JHH : No, Each had one or two, The teaching assistant uaa thus able to observe how the older man handled the section. He handled another section on his own, There were eventually as many as 60 sections, We never had enough faculty to handle that many, 'Phe point is that every new teaching assistant is trained in his first years by being an understudy, perhaps one hour to one faculty man, another hour to another faculty man, ETD: This arrangement was entirely new to you? Jm: Yes. Our first quie sections did not meet in small laba, Edy custom was to take the best section at one hour and the JHH : worst section at another hour, ETD: You separated the students according to their promise from the very start, JHH: Yes, I would have four hours of lecturing azid two hours of quizzing, When we built the freshman laboratory, just after World War I, we had the quizzes in the laboratory as part of the laboratory period, ETD: The listing of courses in the department of chemistry for the year 1912 to 1913 is quite a long one. Besides the traditional 1A-ILB, there were lC, U), and 1% Who took those courses? Students who hadn't had any high school chemistry and just wanted a little for credit, They weren't on the ladder, ETD: This sort of thing was discontinued with the passing of 0 Neill, JHH: No, This catalog was printed before I had taught any- tu* .ETD: Who was the Tolman? JHH: He was Richard Tolman, the elder brother of our Edward Tolman, He was here for a few years, then left for war work, After World War I he went to the University of Illinois, and later to Pasadena after the California Institute of Technology was established, ETD: Biddle was teaching some of this beginning -- JHH: Biddle was an organic chemist, We had a good deal of trouble with Biddle, He was doing a lot of private consulting work which the department had decided was not in order, Lewis finally took steps to have him dis- connected, ETD: Edward Booth, Who was he? JHH: He was a very charming old gentlemar., pretty well along in years, ETD: Bachelor of Philosophy, undergraduate, The College of Natural Science gave that demee, Then Professor Bray, identified a8 coming from the M,I,T, group, He received his Ph,D, in Leipzig, then joined the M,I,T, group, How did you cope with what was hand ed to you as beginning chemistry, 1A-lB? I did the best I could, At first the lectures and the laboratory had different numbers, Putting them under one number was not a major innovation, It did help, of course, to emphasize the unity of the course, After a couple of years I began to organize the material topically, on the basis of theories and principles of chemistry rather than on the basis of a descriptive survey of the elements. I mildly shocked even Lewis, He said, "Well, you've put a good deal of time on this, haven't you?" ETD: He wasn't in agreement about reducing it to principles? JHH: No, It was something he apparently had not considered, although it was in line with his general philosophy of the subject and science in general, ETD: How long did it take you to prepare the groundwork for acceptance of this idea? JHK: here was never any real resistance. My Principles of Chemistrx was published in 1918 while I was in France, ETD: Not until 1918, and you began your f;eachiag experience here in 1913, I Yes, Within a year or so, and for several years, I had m: 1/i a syllabus, an outline of lectures arranged accord* to topics, I hadn't been here very long when I started to 1

work on the book, I ETD: Did this make any difference in the laboratory's teaching? JHH: Bray was mainly responsible for the lab course and he and I worked together and kept it coordinated. 'Phe course was called General Chemistry and.Qualitative Analysis, Bp introducing the latter into the freshman course, the student could practice applying basic concepts such as ionic theory, chemical equilibrium, and kinetics, !l!hat fitted in beautifully with my ideas, and we had prettp good coordination. ETD: Viewing the student and the subject, what were your objectives? JHH: Well, we wanted to develop the student into a.scientist, We wanted to afford him practice in scientific thinking, ETD: How did you do it? JHH: Let me illustrate by the questions that we asked in quizzes, When I was a student I was asked, "What is the method of separating iron, zinc, and nickel, copper,. and a so on, We asked questions of a very different sort, such as the following: "An unknown is made by selecting from among the following substances - ?" Then we gave observa- I tions which are not in the order of any standard procedure, In the standard procedure you first add water and see I what you can dissolve, Then you add hydrochloric acid and I1 see whether you get precipitates, If so, you filter them out. Then you add hydrogen sulfide, and so on. Instead we might say, "This unknown is treated with six mold of ammonia, It gives a precipitate, which is 5 J filtered out, It is found to be soluble in hydrochloHc

I acid," and so on. These observations are not on the I I order of any standard recipe, The student has to know the I 1 moves as he does in a game of chess, but he also has to put this all together, If one substance is present, i1 '4 another must be absent. The student is asked to decide I 4 5 whether each substance on the list is present, absent, or

This type of question has been developed through the !I year8, Dick Powell told me recently of an interesting . JHH: modification, After stating certain observations, he asked: "What experiment would you perform next, and why? You see, that is altogether different from merely reciting a recipe learned from a book, It appeals to a different type of mind, A scientist is far more than a stockpile of inform* tion, A scientist is not a person who bows only the answers to stock questions, he is one who invents new questions and- answers, He mst have not oxiIy -owledge, but also imagination and ingenuity, Here in the book principles of Chemistq~are given the kind of questions we ask to bring this out, This is ote I like: we give the concentration of calcium ions and carbon dioxide in sea water, the solubility of carbon diolcide at atmospheric pressure, the first and second ionization constants of carbonic acid, and then we ask what acidity a clam has to be able to establish in order to make his shell from sea-water, I suggest a freshman should have the ambition to how at least as much about chemistry as a clam doee, There were no such questions when I was young. ETD: How did the department share its ideas about the course? JHH: We met every week to discuss this course, And even now the instructors of each section meet just before the laboratory session and discuss the questions of the day, All participate thus in developing a good course, In writing the book, I served as editor for the ideas of the others, ETD: The initial development of this kind of book is your plan, JHH: I claim credit for that, yes, Let me give another example, One might ask, "What are the elements in group three in the periodic system?" Instead, we taught them atomic structure, and practiced a great deal with the relation of the structure of an atom to ita behavior, It depends upon the number of outer JHH: electrons and the electron8 just below the outer group. Accordingly, we ask a question like this: mAtoms X, Y, and 2 have atomic weights Increasing in that order. X haa 2-8-8-2 electrons outside its nucleus, The atomio number of Y is 11 greater than that of X, and the atomic number of C is 13 greater than that of X, The simplest ions of these elements are , The strongest reducing agent is- . The least metallic elemen* is 0 A student must understand something of atomic structure in order to answer such questions, He can't do it on the basis of memory alone, We then ask another question: "Equations are given for certain reactions, On the basis of these observations select the strongest oxidizing agent, the strongest reducing agent, If the data aren't sufficient to permit a decision write in the word fundetermined,*" Bow, this is essentially an exercise in the logic 03 inequalities, If A is greater than B, and B is greater than C, A is greater than C, But if A is greater than B, and C is greater than B, you can't tell the relation of A and B Prom that alone, However, in our question there were involved more than three oxidizing agents, mD: With what level of students did you spend most time? JHH: Usually I taught only freshmen and graduates, the two most interesting periods. I did for a while, however, give a course in surface phenomena for juniors and seniors, Later on I made this a reading course, XPD: Do you recall any interest in the history of science and the developmental aspects of ideas in chemistry? JHH: OtNeill gave a course in history, and I think Booth did later, and alasdale, The trouble with the history of science is that there are several ways of doing it. If you want to explain certain things nowadays you don't necessarily retrace the>order in which the ideas were developed because later evidence may be clearer and more direct 'than the evidence once at hand, There are many

people nowadays who have been interested in the logic of / &k:L,., science per se, The books by Gerald Holden and by Taylor -- - present very interesting accounts of the way in which the major concepts were developed. The concept of energy, for example, replaced the concept of fluid: electric fluid, magnetic fluid, You learn a great deal about the history rather incidentally, Thus, in teaching freshmen I didn't use a historical approach systemztically, only incidentally, more to illuminate ideas than to present them as history, Another trouble with the history of science is that most of us scientists are so busy making history that we don't want to spend our time writing about it, In a certafi sense we have taught only three subjects, organic, inorganic and physical chemistry, We try to teach freshmen in a way that will serve as an introduction to all the later courses, ETD: You have related chemistry to many fields and ideas, What about relating it to the timid undergraduate who would like to enlarge his acquaintance with it but who can only regard Chemistry 1A as a possible drastic experience, What about a survey course? There is no Chemistry 10 and I can tell you why, Most high school graduates have had chemistry in school, far more 1 than have had physics, There is no room for a chemistry I between our Chemistry 1A and high school chemistry, MID: What do you mean, there isn't room? JHH: Well, there isn't material, there is no real gap. A person who has had a good course in high school chemistry should be able to take Chemistry 1A or even 1B. And he should have JIM: laboratory work. It's easier ' to offer instructive laboratory work in chemistry than it is in physics, where more instruments are needed, In chemistry a student can perform experiments with test tubes, beakers and balances, and he can be more on his own, It can be more of an experiment, Physics 10 doesn't lead to anything. A student doesn't need to be very smart to get a *Cn in Chemistry lA. If he can handle a little arithmetic and read he can pass Chemistry UI, ETD: You don't feel you can pick up future scfen€Is€s by offering a teaser? JEH: No, Trying to learn science without practicing it would be 1ike.trying to become athletic by sittlng in a grand- stand, I don't know why we sho-dd give the sort of course that one could get fron a paperback, You don't capture scientists that way, They must do something scientific, A student who works out an "unknownn in qualitative analysis carries on what is for him a little piece of original research, He has to perform experiments and observe and read. It can be fun, ETD: Supposing a student hasn't had chemistry in high school and supposing he's curious, Then what? JHH: If he's had physics and good mathematics and is bright we'll admit him, We want ability, Chemistry and physics are not very different. If he's had physics he rill have learned about atoms, ETD: To what extent have you had to pick up and eliminate defi- ciencies in preparation which the student may present? JHH: Oh, a great deal, A typical case was that of a student who wrote me a letter after the course was over saying that in high school he never knew whether he had a brain or not because it all consisted in memorizing and reciting. When he took our placement test he didn't do very well. JHH: But he heard me in the lecture recommend trying to analyze problems rather than merely to apply formula8 and rules, It seemed to him good sense and he made up his mind to try it, He found himself improving, His letter is a sort of Pilgrim's Promess, He ended the course with an "Amw He said, "This is not only going to help get me into medical school, It's going to make a difference in everything I do from now onew A former student accosted me in a hotel not long ago He introduced himself, saying he was in my class lOlA during a certain year, He said, "I'm not in chemistry, I'm in jet propulsion, You did something for me no other professor ever did,' I didn't ask him what it was, We had only a moment together, We have recently introduced a more advanced course in freshman chemistry for a small group of well prepared students, There is no reason why they can not handle a stiffer course than we were able to give 25 or 30 years ago, MlD: mat about honors courses? JHH: I think they originated with Lewis, We wished to afford the ablest students the opportunity to dig much more deeply than the others, It's importaut to give varsity competition to those who can take it, A bright student should not be bored by sitting around while his class- mates are trying to understand the bare fundamentals, A good lecturer must be something of a ham actor, He should perform experiments on the lecture teble, not just demonstrations. I '~edmore and more as the years went by to stimulate students to interpret for themselves what they see on the lecture desk, The dramatfst doesn't tell, in the prologue, how the last act is going to turn out, 51

Dick Powell substituted for me once when I was still freshman lecturing, and he said to me in the afternoon, "Joel, I was chagrined this morning because the experiment didn't turn out the way I said it would," I sad, "Dick, when you are as old as I am you will not say, 'Now I am going to demonstrate --,' You will say, 'What will happen if --?'n I said, "This is playing safe, of course, but there's amore important reason for doing this, One should create suspense, to get the students to thing, One should not give answers before evidence. You should first give evidence and stimulate them to figure out answer^,^

. I think that is the key to good teaching, but I'm afraid it isn't always done that Eay, The temptation to show off is too great, Do you feel, when you present chemistry in this way, that you may be engaging the attention of someone new to chemistry? Well, we get a good many of the very brightest in the class shifting from other curricula into chemistry because it gives an intellectual challenge which a technical course, consisting essentially in imparting practices and rules and procedures, does not,

Chemical Engineering 1A In the 1913-14 catalog Chemical Technology 140A-B is listed, i '1 I can tell you something about that, In the early days it I consisted mostly of descriptions of industrial processes, I Of course every department of chemistry tries to prepare , people for industrial employment, So they try to give them some notion of what's going on in industry, The trouble was that there was no recognized content, I was not long in Berkeley before I was appointed a member of the Engineering Council ~1916-19173. There were at the time separate colleges of mihing, civil, electrical and mechanical engineering, The dean8 of these colleges plus certain representative8 -- one from chemistry, one from mathematics, one from geology -- constituted the Engineer- ing Council, It was very interesting for me, a youngster, to be sitting in with these deans, Ern: Why were you chosen From this department? These other people were deans, Why not the dean of chemistry? JHH: Lewis did not wish to do it; he waa not willing for the College of Chemistry to be one of a series of technical colleges, His conception of the College of Chemistry was that it should be as purely a scientific college as possible, The engineering point of view was one with which he was not in sympathy, ETD: If he had been on this council he would have dignified this whole application of theory idea with his presence, in a way, JHH: He would, but I don't think he would have had very much effect, knowing the membership of the council, They were pretty set in their ways, mow with the rise of chemical engineering -- you see, the term chemical engineering was rather new, ETD: !Che chemist worked in industry, but one didn't call it chemical engineering, JHH: That's right, The chemistry of the day consisted mainly in manufacturing heavy chemicals such as sulphuric acid and soda, on the time-honored lines. mere were few chemical processes that required that a plant be engin- eered in relation to new chemical reactions, But especially after World War I, where chemistry began to be important -- MID: Do you think this was one of the first big spurts in this field? Oh, yes, We had been dependent before the waz on mope, especially Germany, for dyestuffs and medicines, But we took over German patents and started our own chemical industry on a large scale immediately after the Pirst World War, So the nature of technical chemistry, Indus- trial chemistry, changed very rapidly, Before the First World War a great many of the industrial chemists had been trained abroad, especially in Ger- many, Just before my day they went to Germany for Ph.D. degrees, I might have done the same thing, but with the rapid rise of American universities to the stature of real universities rather than just colleges it became gradually more and more possible to get good training in chemistry in this country, and then go abroad as I did, Of course, my training in physica3 chemistry was nil in this country, I had to train myself, ETD: There wasn't yet a great and creative center in physical chemistry in the United States? JHB: no. ETD: Where was itfdeveloping at that point? JHH : The most influential center in tae United States was the laboratory of physical chemistry at the Massachusetts- Institute of Technology, ETD: It was from here that Professor Lewis came? JHH: It was from A,A, Noyes' laboratory that he came, Chemical technology in the early days was chiefly a description of processes, I had a course in it at the University of Pennsylvania, It consisted very largely in . copying from the blackboard diagrams of standard apparatus, which the professor copied onto the board from his note- books, whence they had been copied from books on technical chemistry, It was pretty well garbled by the time it got into my notebook, and it was a dull subject, How do you make sulphuric acid? How do you make caustic soda? How do you make bicarbonate of soda? and so on, JHH: With the advent oZ igdustrial companies that were trying to make medicines &~ddyestuffs and fine cheml- cals, there was a need for the establfsbment of laboratories engaged in more than just analyzing the raw materials that went in and testkg the product for purity, Most industrial chemistry was just analytical chemistry, A time came when our students could get better jobs 5n industry if they could go out with training in what - came to be called chemical engineering instead of technical chemistry, lIhe College of Chemistry proposed to change the name to chemical engineering, but the engineering deans were very jealous of the term "engineering," If it was going to be called engineering it would have to be under their jurisdiction, E!ID: This was about what time? JEH: In the early twenties, But we didn't want them to pass upon our curricula, The curricula in engineering were rigid as could be, 'Phe dean of civil engineering didn't believe in graduate study, He insisted that a graduate should go out and get a job, get into the practical world, Well, that was very different from our point of view, The engineers were not giving doctors' degrees, We were, So we sa.id, "Very well, we don't want you to be ntn- ning our chemical engineering so we'll continue to call it I

Chemical Technology," I1 ETD: Who in the department carried -- I JHH: Lewis put it in the charge of Merle Randall, who had been . his co-author of Thermodynamics, He had used Randall a great deal as a collaborator and calculator, and he simply asked him to take charge of this, Well, Randall was not a chemical engineer, His course was very feeble. Lewie believed that the best training for a chemical engineer is primarily sound training in certain aspects of chemistry, especially thermodynamics, physical chemistry, and that he should learn something about engineer- in the College of Engineering, A number of our men who were medout that way rose in the world very well. The chief difficulty they had was in getting a start, because they didn't have the title nchemical engineerom 'Phe young society of chemical engineers, the Institute of Chemical Engineers, were very proud of their special status and didn't want to admit anybody into their ranke who hadn't had a proper chemical engineering training, even though our training was, according to our ideae, a pretty good one, Our students were be- trahed in fundamental science, I may cite the example of my oldest son, who graduated with a major in physics and then learned his practical engineering with the Standard Oil Company, and later became assistant chief engineer in the big Richmond refinery, We decided after Lewis passed that we must have, in fairness to our students -- This was not until -- After the Second World War, Then we had to meet the opposition or the rivalry of the College of Engineering, ETD: How did you organize all thisi JHH: I'was dean of the College of Letters and Science. We began by getting Weodore Vermeulen, He started it, Then we gradually added some very able young men, From where did he come? He was a Cal Tech Ph.D,, and he had been an assistant to one of the principal vice-presidents of chemical engineering in Shell Development, He had a very good record, Then re added others, Hanson cDonald H,J and Willke [Charles R,r and Bromley rLeRoy A,J and Tobias [Charles W,a, What about this Tobias? You know, there's another Tobiaa, There are two Tobiasn in physics rcornelius A,; and Jamea Go 56

JHH: is listed as assistant clinical professor of medicine, in the Medical School, San Francisco3, They're brothers, They are very remarkable men, The one I know, of course, is Charles, mD: You were chairman of the department when these developmente occurred? JHH: I was concerned with chemical engineering primarily as chairman of the department of chemistry, It was thm-that we had to carry on this controversy over whether the University should offer two curricula, one in'the College of Chemistry, the other in the College of Engineerfng, There was no very clear directive fro= the president on this matter. Xike O'Brien, the dean of engineering, was very anxious to have a curriculum in chemical engineering, They set it up, calling it "process engineeringOw They never had more than a handful of students, whereas we built up a splendid department, Two of our men had earned prizes for the best papers presented at meetings of the Institute of Chemical Engineers, And we had the students, Recently, we created two departments within the College of Chemistry, a department of chemistry and a I department of engineering, ETD: How did the difference between engineering and chemistry resolve itself? Just by the physical fact that not many I 1 students enrolled in process engineering? i JHH: That had a good deal to do with it but finally I think l it was Kern who made the decision because it was embarras- I

sing to the University to support two curricula in a single I field, It should have been done earlier, It was an inde- f ensible situation, ETD: But you found apeaceful way to marry chemistry and engineering, What about other alliances? JKH: We told Wendell Stanley we'd like to have him build his virus laboratory up close to us, and he recognized that as a good idea, of course, ETD: A chief objective would be ready communication of ideas.. JIEl: That's right, When I was young, every lecturer on freshman chemistry would begin by telling the distinction between chemistry and physics, Now there is no recognize& distinction, The areas to which we gave distinct names qesimply elevated portions of the general terrain, The distinctive feature of a basic subject is that it is part of the foundations of a number of others, Chem- istry is basic to physiology and various sorts of technology, to agriculture, to engineering, to medicine, anything that involves understanding of the nature of the materials that make up the,universe as chemistry, astronomy, physice, ETD: You mentioned Lewisg book on thermodynamics, Thermodynamic8 appears in the catalog of courses in 1916 or 1917, Why at that moment? JHH: As soon as we had trained freshmen and aophomores in the elements of chemistry, thermodynamics was necessary for further progress, Our department became a recognized center for thernodynamics for the country and the world, Lewis and Randallgs book was of tremendou~importance, one of the most famous books on science ever written. A new edition has now been published, prepared by Pitzer and Brewer,

Gilbert I?, Lewis

ETD: In following personnel and policiea of the chemistri department I sense the aloofness of Gilbert N. ~ewisto departmental workaday matters, JHEi: He never did legwork, He delegated it, He had an assistant dean, C.W, Porter, who met students, Lewis interviewed graduate students but he had nothing to do with the undergradustee. JHE: Another man, Rollefson, was director of the laboratory, He took care of the business end of it, Originally when Lewis came to Berkeley he fortunately followed an easterner who had turned down the job, So Pbeeler was disposed to make more concessions than he would haveif Lewis had been the first to be invited, So Lewis made clear stipulations, He should always have, for instance, a personal research assistant, Because of his iatellect and forceful personality, he was not a man to be pushed around, There was the time just after 'World War I when Lewis took me with him to interview the Administrative Boardo Stephens had died and was replaced by Ralph Merritt, then controller, The Administrative Board had taken no measures to -foresee and provide for the inundation of return- ing students, So instead of a class of about 600 in freshman chemistry, nearly 1400 applied for the course, We did not have the instructors or the laboratory facilities, The board proposed that Lewis should agree to admit all applicants, Lewis was dead set against that, He said, "We will take as many as we can handle properly and no morean Lewis was being %ailed on the carpetn by the board, Be took me wkth hfm-3xrthe interview, Lewis made his refusal very frank &d forthright. The atmosphere was getting more add more tense, Finally Jones said, "Well, Mr. Lewis, I'd accept your resignation at any time," "Oh, I know you would, Dean Jones, but you haven't got it, not yeton The meeting broke up. I stayed behind and Ralph Merritt and I decided what should be done, He was a young man, not of the age or rank to get on a high horse and talk down to anybody, He and I were interested only in getting the University back on her keel.' It was arranged that we would give a lecture course for the people we couldn't accommodate with the full course, and then a double laboratory course the next term, p --?-8. 7 r -ET

JHH: In the meantime we would try to find instructors to handle it, That was done, ETD: Yon were actually liaison for Professor Lewis, weren't you? m: Yes, ETD: Did you have this function a lot of the time? JHH: Well, I didn't have any ,,. ETD: Not officially, of course, JHH: But Lewis consulted me a great deal and often,asked mF advice, ETD: You described Lewis as being a very stimulating person as you first saw him functioning in a discussion group, becaus2 he did allow rather a free flow, m: Oh, in a graduate colloquium - ETD: !Phis always was so? JHEr: Oh my, yea, and among his equals, He always had a small number of close friends with whom he loved to consort, He was very sociable on an intimate, personal level; his mind was far-ranging, He had a ready wit and a boyish sense of humor that would inject something amusing even into a serious conversation, When he was aroused he could be very effective, He was interested deeply in anything; intellectual, and in people who had intellectual interests, He was a brilliant conversationalist, He always wanted a research assistant, He didn't like to use his own hands, I think he was probably rather awkward, so he always wanted a good Ph.D, research assistant. Nearly all of his papers are by Lewis and somebody, - Seaborg was his assistant for a while, He's had some very fine assistants, It was a great opportunity to work as his assistant, Joe Mayer, who is now going from Chicago to UCLB, was one of Lewis' research assistants. Tolman was a research assistant for a while. Calvin was also, Bdncrofi Labrsry

60 mD: His chief force the. was within his department, not on an institutional level at all. m: He wouldn*t be happy today in the world of expanding population and an enlarging university, He would like to keep a small department of intimate scholars, ETD: Of course chemical engineering didn't define itself until he was off the scene really. m: He would have opposed it, It would have been almost impossible for him to accept it, I thfnk, But then the chemical engineers that we turned out succeeded in engineering because they welegood physical chemists, The point is, our men were able to rise, many of them very high, because we recognized that what they needed primarily was basic chemistry, Xumerically we weren't providing very many but we provided a number of very, very able people. ETD: I would like to pick up, if possible, the people who grew along with the expanding knowledge in chemistry, You've mentioned Giauque, JHH: Yes, He came as an undergraduate, after working for a while at Hiagara Falls, ETD: Did you recognize him as a particularly gifted mind? JHH : Oh, he was in my own freshman quiz section, He wae sbply out standing, E!rD: At that point, JHH: Oh yes. The staff gave me a lovely part on my seventieth birthday, Giauque told about how thrilled he was to learn from me about chemical equilibrium, which had never been presented to him in his earlier chemistry, He also attended a graduate seminar that I offered. His keen incisive mind was always evident, He hew where he was going, all right, He didn't need any guidance, MID: And it was the good teaching here that implemented hi8 ideas, Graduate Work in Chemistry

-. . ETD: I think we will have to come to grips with graduate schools in chemistry and their characteristics, JHH: In many cases a graduate school is, more than ap undergraduate school, a product ofthe men who are in it. There are certain institutions that have .one very great man, Sfudents go to him and get a certain kind of fraZn- ing, but the rest of the faculty may not amount to much, One could get some idea of the productivity of graduate schools from the places where the National Academy of Sciences members got their training, ETD: This is one way of doing it, but to a certain extent this depends on the academy committees, JHEi: Well, no, not very mch, Because, unlike the American Philosophical Society, any of our 70-odd chemists crur nominate a candidate for election, and we discuss these nominations not in committees but in the sections, At every meeting of the academy, the chemists who are attending get together and discuss possible candidates, We agree to recommend to the whole section that certain names be given priority, All thfa goes on in the section on chemistry, not ia a small committee, All the chemists in the academy have a chance to express themselves at several stages, lfhe nominees of the section, with biblio-

graphies and supporting material, then go to all members ' of the academy, A preference ballot is taken on the order in which candidates will be voted upon, We elect without discussion all nominees who have received a majority of the votes cast, The subsequent names are then taken up seriatim, The merits of each are presented and a vote taken. Occasionally a question is asked or an opinion is expressed which results in rejection. JtIH: We elect our quota and etop; those who have not been reached are carried over until the next year, We have wide representation from the principal universities, so that the election of the academy is a pretty good indica- tion that at least the institutions of origin of the members are significant, Now, of course, there is a tendency naturally to make a Harvard man more likely to be elected than a University of Kansas man because he's better known, ETD: At the time that you came here it appeared as if some of the most vital work was being done at M.I.T, Would you have considered that to be the number one -- JHH: Chemistry was developing very significantly, not only here but in Chicago, Chicago was strongest in organic chemistry, Stieglitz and Bef had been trained in Europe, and were recognized as leading chemists, Remsen was at Johns Hopkins. He was a German-trained organic chemist, Columbia had several good men, Harvard had Richards and one or two others, Good men were being turned out 'in each of these places, Some ten years ago, I listed the institutions that had trained the physical chemists in the National Academy of Science, and found that about one-third of them were trained in our department, An interesting comparison was made in Chicago in the late thirties, The alumni association, I believe, had listed the institutions in which the men newly added to the starred list in American Men of Science had been educated, Eleven of them had been trained in Berkeley, *he next university on the list had trained four. ETD: Suppose, between 1955 and 1960, you had been choosing a school in which to study chemistry, would there have been one place above all others to which you would have wanted to go? JHH: Oh no, because many institutions now are offering very good training, If a man wanted a certain subject he might go to one place rather than another. But first-rate chemists are being trained in a number of institutions, 'Phese are, however, still a minority of all those that callthem- selves universities, We think it well for our graduates to pursue their work in another institution in the interest of breadth, We senti our best men mostly to Harvard, Columbia, Prince- ton, Chicago, Cal Tech, ETD: Do you have this feeling about overseas centers of study? JHH: Well, we don't like to send our graduates overseas to get a doctor's degree because they came back with nobody to sponsor them, ETD: This is a practical problem, isn't it? JHH: Yes, It is better to spend a post-doctoral period abroad, ETD: What about the foreign students studying chemistry here? JBH: !Phey can go back with added prestige for having studied in this department, That has been the experience of my own post-doctoral research collaborators, I have had two excellent Ph.D,s and a full professor from Japan, I have had seven good research assistants from English universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool, Bristol, During the ten years since my pseudo-retirement I have had two Ph.D, research assistants each year, Every one of them is now well placed,

ETD : I don't believe I've seen a Xegro in chemistry, Is this (III i because the preparation in southern schools is inadequate? . 1 JHH: We have some, But that's true, the Negro in the South has an awfully hard time getting started, Most of the schools in the South give poor preparation, And a legro has a special disability, They like to keep the Negro in the artisan-servant class, so they're perfectly willing to have Prairie View University, a college near Houston whtch prepares barbers and horseshoers and the like. Howard University in Washington, DOC., has attracted Negroes who want good education, Howard has a department of chemistry? Yes, I and two other chemists were asked about six years ago independently to examine them and advise a8 to whether they were ready to give doctors* degrees in chemistry, Each of us answered They showed great restraint, however, by decfding first to improve their undergraduate curriculum, ETD: Did you evaluate their undergraduate curriculum, too? JHEf: No, But they later decided to proceed with graduate instruction, and just last year they turned out their first two Ph,D,s, They invited me to give a lecture in celebration of this event, The present head of the department is one of our Ph,D,s, We now have a Negro assistant professor on our staff, a very fine fellow, I found at Howard University that nezrly every member of the staff had a good Ph,D, from a northern university, We have now several Negro graduate students, Can you place them in industry? This is a problem, It is a problem, We can place them, I think, I don't know what our recent experience has been, You'd better ask Rollie Myers [associate professor of chemistrya, who is in charge of placement, and he could tell you what his experience is, In certain parts of the country I th-rnk you'd have little or no difficulty, It would vary from industry to industry, It depends upon the prejudices of the people you are dealing with, I recommended our Dr, Lloyd Ferguson to Howard, and he has done very well indeed, I suppose that at other northern univerei- ties there are Negroes on the staff just as there are here, and if we had an exceptionally good Negro we could place him in a university, The situation is gradually improving. ETD: Does thfs sort of situation face other minority group8 in the sciences? m: Well, of course Japanese and Chinese have been the subject of prejudice. ETD: Are the science foundations helpful in bringing foreign students to the United States? JHH: Yes, Two or three of my men have had Fulbrights for travel to come here. Ern: You have always been up to your ears in teaching, learning, human involvement, and international awaseness, JHH : Oh, I regard the years through which I have lived as the most thrilling in all history, Tremendous thfngs have happened, I saw a statement in which some university . had calculated that 90 per cent of all the scientists who have ever lived are now living. rnD: 5tvsamazing, m: Isn't it? But it c-ot be far from the truth. Publica- tions in the field of chemistry are doubling every eight years, ETD: One of the real problems, I'm sure, in the field of chem- Lstry, is to keep track of what is going on. JHH: Of course. The people responsible far chemical abstract8 qe doing extensive research on this problem. Abstracte and reviews, such as the Annual Review of Physical Chem- istry, fill a great need.

Cheinistry at UCLA and other University of California Campuses

ETD: We have been talking about chemistry on the Berkeley campus. What about the development of chemistry at Los Angeles; was there any relationship at all between Berkeley and UCLA? m: Well, a little. I might give you a few recollectionam In -" l 'bray 66

JRH : the first place I don't remember if I have recorded the fact that when the proposal to establish the southern campus was being considered President Campbell took me south with a small party to look over sites that were being proposed. I remember being entertained by Hunting- ton for luncheon in his palatial home and afterwards gohg through the Huntington Li-brary, The prospectuses that had been prepared for us almost invariably featured a stadium as the heart of. the institution, ETD : Because this was still in the stadium fever period, wasn't it? JHH : Yes, The new instiNtion, the nSoathern Branch," took over a state normal school on the Vermont Avenue campus, and a two-year curriculum was established, The man employed for chemistry was Professor Crowell, He's still living, although retired, a very nice person, Soon William Conger Morgan took over, He had been in the Berkeley department, but left in 1912 when Lewis came and went to Reed College where he spent a few years, Be had a very strong personality and was a popular lecturer, but he was not a productive scientist. He did no research, and did little to build up a scientific department, That came ~uchmore slowly, ETD: Taking on a person who had been discontinued here didn't make for close relations, m: No, Well, he resigned because he didn't fit into the new regime, We took a benevolent attitude, We gave advice when called for, I ETD: Were you ever called on for advice? JHH: Yes, somewhat, ETD: How? JIM: Well, as a matter of faot, Moore, who had been the chief 67

of a normal school, became director of the new institution, hd he wrote to me asking for suggestiona, When' the question arose regarding the extension.- of graduate study at UCLA I was chairman of the Committee on Educa- tional Policy. Sproul asked me to submit to the committee the question of whether graduate study should be inangurated there, I advised him it would be much better not to bring that question out into the open in the presence of member8 from the south, and suggested that I should canvass opinion in the north and report to him, There was only one man among all that I consulted who was opposed, They all said in effect that you can't build a great university without graduate students, Now, the southerners were very slow to realize that we were not disposed to oppose their grow& An opportunity to counteract that suspicion aroae right after the Second World War with the inauguration of 'the all-University conferences, I served as the first chairman with Rank Ridner as my able assistant, At the conference, a northerner would room with a southerner, Many people were much impressed, especially the southerners, with the fact that we northerners-often held different opinions and that such differences of opinion did not represent north versus south, but were based on other considerations, MID: This is a problem always, and if there are local, almost geographical feelhgs, it's quite sad. JHH: Our relations with the department of chemistry at UCLA are excellent; we're proud of them, We are pleased when their members are elected to the National Academy of Scienoes, We're not competing, ETD: Has the development of other campuses been different from the development of the University of California at Los Angeles? Has the further expansion of University activity been less difficult or ie it the same? JHB: There has been no difficulty. Davis for a while, for example, was -anagricultural college, and everything was subservient to -agriculture, but they have always had some very good men there in chemistry, We took the lead in making them members of the faculty of our College of Chemistry, ETD: Oh, they are part of this College of Chemistry? JHH: Yes, and we collaborate in doctors' degrees in chemi~try, EPD: When their work first developed in chemistry it was in . cooperation wit.h what you were doing here? JHH: No. They simply had their ovm department and their own interests, The chairman of their department was one of our own Ph,D,s, as was also the man who gave the freshman lectures, ETD: This is a much imddiately closer relationship than the one with UCLA. JEH: Yes, Besides, this was not a riv~slryof equals, of two institutions of comparable size and prestige, and we could do much for them by collaborating with them and helping them and letting them participate with us as much as possible, At Riverside the nan who is in charge of physical science, Conway Pierce, is a very fine chemist, I recommended him for the job when Gordon Watkins consulted me about it, Pierce had been at Pomona, earlier at Chicago,

Television Teaching of Chemistry

ETD: We couldn't leave chemistry without some comment about television teachhg, JHH: That's a subject I've been asked to comment on in the address I shall give later this month at Swarthmore College at the dedication of a new science laboratory. I was asked a number of questions by the faculty, and this wm one of them, the part which such.media can play, I said that they can play a part but it's well to understand not only their powers but their great limitations, You can't carry on an argument with a television screen, You can't ask it questions. It'e interesting, of course, for students to gain arr impression of the personality of a man such as Edward Teller, Not many students can see him in person but it is worth while even over TV to form some idea of his intense mental processes and his enthusiasm for science, as well as to appreciate his breadth of culture -- that is worthwhile, Neverthelqss, Teller oc the screen ie not Teller in person, Lantern slides are often better than a dietant lecture-demonetration, I have compared in practice the effectiveness of different ways of presenting material, I tried a variety of stage effects in order that the students in the rear would really see what was going on and have a chance to think about it, There are a few excellent motion picturea, However, it costs a great deal to make a really good film, A live j television broadcast is one thing, There you can get the I person, although if the person is not essential to the 1 11 subject as in newscasting I'd much rather hear it over I! I radio, I don't know why I should look at Edward R, Murrow 1 I when he's telecasting, Many people, of course, have to look at something, But the face of the broadcaster is to 1 ne a distraction from what he is saying, On the other hand, the reading of Shakespeare by a person such ae Charles Laughton is something that an ordinary person could not or would not do for himself, JHH: But now when it comes to a demonstration of physical or chemical properties, a great deal of prior preparation, thought and care are required to do it wel3, Aa 1 like to say, a good television show is as much more complicated than a radio broadcast as a stage play is than a monologue, You have to rehemse the stage play, YOU have to have progerties. You must rehearse it again and again, as I did in my lecture in "Continental Classr~om,~and also in the series that I gave over KQED for .the education network, First of all, I brought to each one of my lectures 4 over KQED a great deal of experience with my subject. I had to program it and gather materials, I would arrive at the studio in *he morning for detailed planning and rehearsal, We would have a trial run, If an airplane went overhead and made some noise they would stop and count back the time, There was a man to show me just exactly how I was holding my hands at the time of the interruption, It took a whole day to record a half hoar of fflm, I asked them how much it cost; the amount was $1,600. When I gave my lecture over "Continental Classroomm in Hew York last October I asked about the cost, I was told it was several times as much, It must be remembered also that a good lecture of that sort may cost about $2,000. Who is to pay for it, and what makes it worth all that money? The lecturer should be an acknowledged master of the subject, and he should have good command of language, . must speak clearly, with a well modulated voice, He should have the instincts of an actor, The staff must include persons who not only understand the technical aspects of what they are doing, and the showmanship required, but must also be interested in trying to make the presentation pedagogically effective, Hot every group of television experts would be interested in that part, They are used to showmanship but not to education, These me some of the requirements for really effective screen presentations, They are not easily fulfilled, Row, suppose you make a recording of this sort, It's got to have wide usage in order to justify the expense, and you can't re-do very often, On the other hand, a live lecture can be fresher than one recorded on a'film several years old, What about films for the presentation of interesting material which a local teacher could amplify? I spent part of my time during the last two years a6 chief editor of two films for advanced classes in physical chemistry, One film ran 11 minutes, the other 13 minutes, These were intended as adjuncts to teaching,. not as substi- tutes, They can present things visually which are very- hard to make real in words, For example, one of the films deals with molecular vibrations, A complex molecule vibrates in a number of different modes, To describe those is very difficult because although most people have three- dimensional brains, they have two-dimensional minds, and to visualize in three dimensions is very difficult, That's a quality required of a machinist but not of a professor, We could show a beautiful animated cartoon of a molecule in one kind of vibration, For example, in a tetrahalide having a central carbon with feu. hydrogen atoms arranged tetrahedrally around it, you can show first what we call a "breathing node," where all the hydrogens go in and out together, Then there's a twisting mode, in which they twist back and forth, And there are two different rocking modes, The film shows each independently and then all Ban-vr't I 1bay 72 operating together. One sees quickly and clearly what it is almost impossible to convey by words alone, But now, what does all this mean? How does one predict the number of possible modes? That is explained on the film bu* it is an idea which has to beamasticated and digested, Students can question the instructor, and they can then view the film again, perhaps several timee, The film and the instructor supplement each other; one ia not a substitute for the other. On a lower level, in the high school, there are many teachers teaching subjects for which they have very little preparation; such teachers tend to teach in a bookish way, requiring memorizing and reciting, The state textbooks on elementary science contain merely unrelated scraps of information, And at the end of each chapter there are lists of questions under the heading: "How much do I remember?" ns'c How much do I understand? What correla- tions and so on could f make? At this level it would be fine to have films available that present science as it really is, The nCon.ttnental Classroomw lectures which Harvey White gave for a year in physics and have been given this year managed by Baxter of Florida -- that's the series in which I contributed a lecture, Glenn Seaborg did, also. Thousands of high school students arise early in the morning to look at these films, and many got credit by doing the homework required by the accompanying text, It could be quite a stimulating ewerience for a high school lad to see Glenn Seaborg, who manufactured elements, tell you how he did it and what it's all about. That is something that is well worthwhile, and it could be done on a larger scale, I would like to record a short series on some such topic aa "It is fun to use your mind," I would present science as an enterprise, as a way of finding out the truth, JHH: not a stockpile of information, One script I'm thinking of is to tell the story of what fun I had as a high school lad proving the Harvard professor's book to be wrong, I would like to discuss with a live group of bright students some of the statements in the California state text books for grades seven and eight, asking ourselves "1s this statement really true? How could we test it?'@ ?hi8 would be on film, A film has advantages over television because you can have copies made and send them around, and it doesn't begin to cost what television costa. EIPD: But this film could be televised in turn. JHH: Yes, or it could be shown with a movie projector, Copies could be made by the hundreds, Hundreds of copies were made of the other films of which I spoke earlier, and they are now used in colleges and universities all over the country, Industrial laboratories are ordering copies to educate their own staffs, They have had an enormous and a responsive audience, on the whole. I'm thinking of the ten-year-old, the pre-adolescent not yet interested in the other sex, but in the things he sees around him, The world is a wonderful place, He asks questions, most of which are suppressed, They say, "Johnny, run along, Don't bother me, Don't ask so many q~estions,~ Or, worse yet, he is answered by lies, Now this is the age when they should be awakened to the possibility of using their own minds analytically, not simply as storehouse8 for facts to remember and to recite, But the sad thing is that very few of the books present subjects in that way. Very few of the teachers have caught the real structure of the subjects they teach. ETD: Something like a plan&arium, for instance, conveys an immense amount of elation. JHH: Oh yes, that's a wonderful teaching adjunct, I would have JHH: gloried to see a planetarium, although I didn't really need it, because when I was a youngster I read Newcomb's Astrogpgly, And in it were star atlases; I went out at night and observed the planets, I lived in an age when the sky wasn't full of smog, When I had children of my own, we studied the constellations together in the clear air of the high mountains, and often in Berkeley we could go out and see the stars, As my youngest son said in introducing me in Chicago, "He taught us the stars and constellations in the sky, the rocks and trees in the field,' CHEMICAL WARFARE, WORLD WAR I

EllD: Chemical warfare blazed across your University path in 1917. How did that happen, and what was the background? JEH: The National Research Council had just been established as the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences, Marston Taylor Bogart of Columbia University was in charge of perso~elin the'Nationa1 Research Council, He wae making an index of scientists and what they were good for, and so on, In November of 1917 Lewis and Millikan discussed the state of scientific affairs in Washington. The need was illustrated by this exam?le: The California section of the American Chemical Society sent a telegram to the War Department offering them their services, They got a reply that the army had its chemists, Lewis and Millikan thought it essential to establish coordination between the Bational Research Council and the Ordnance Department, which was then charged with the problems of chemical war- faxe, Millikan and Lewis arranged to have me commissioned a captain in the Ordnance Department, I was commissioned on Hovember 5, 1917, I was to act as a connecting link between the National Research Council and Army Ordnance, ETD: You were granted army rank in order to c~il~yon liaison between the two? JHH: Yes, I went to Washington and started to operate, but found the situation pretty discouraging, I wasn't much excited about preparing card indices of chemists, The Ordnance Department didn't know what to do with me, The little organization under Captain Ragsdale was pretty ineffective, Soon the "Chemical Service Section of the National &myn waa organized, Joel H. Hildebrand in Paris January 1918 ETD: Waa the National Army the National Guard? m: No. It wasnlt a part of the National Guard, but it had a somewhat similar status, They were not reserve, or were they reserve? The National Army was made up of men who were not career army personnel. It was composed of men from civil life to serve only for the duration of the war, The Chemical Service Section of the National Army was organized to operate in Washington and also in France, They wanted me to join it, and got me detailed, but not transferred till later, The group that went over early in January of 1918 included Lewis, myself, and four or five others, General Fries, chief of the service, was already in Prance to arrange for our reception and to start his organization, When we arrived we went first to Tours, which eventually was to be the headquarters of the service, General Amos A, Fries of the corps of engineers of the regular army, designated chief of this new unit, waa a man who had been active in peace-time activity, The Corps of Engineers built harbors and so on, He hd been in charge of building the Los Angeles harbor at Long Beach, He was accustomed to deal with civilians, He was a very fortunate choice, (~e'sstill living; I called upon him a year ago in Washington,) We established a laboratory at Puteaux in Parie, EIPD: Gas casualties were already important? JHH: Oh yes, very, ETD: So there was urgency, J-HH: A tremendous urgency, Mustard gas had just been used with devastating effect, EIPD: This was a complete surprise? JHH: A complete surprise, and we had all sorts of questions connected with it, What were the possible means of protection? Other gases were respiratory poisons, but mustard gae was not only a lung gas, it also burned the skin terribly, We must decide quickly how to protect the body; how to dis- infect shell holes; how to remove decontaminatedclothing; how to remove mustard gas that has been splashed on equipment; how to treat bums, All this was dumped right into our laps. You knew already the precise effect of mustard gas on tissues? Well, not at all precisely, We learned what we could from intelligence reports, but it was up to us to learn all we possibly could. Also, the so-called "sneeze gasn had been introduced, It was a smoke that penetrated the gas mask, True gases were adsorbed by active charcoal, but not these smoke particles, They went right on through the cannister into the respiratory tract, where they caused severe pain, coughing, and even vomiting, Then soldiers couldn't keep their masks on and could be gassed by more deadly gases, Well, all these problems were piled onto us, We were greenhorns with no army experience, We had to help decide what gas masks the American army should use, The French were uaing one kind of mask and the British another, At ffrst, the American army used French or British masks, It was a long time before any American masks arrived on the scene, We simply had to let the British and French pinch- hit for us while we prepared to fight the war, ETD: Professor Lewis was part of the group that went overseas with the National Army unit? am: At first, but for a very short time he was at the Paris laboratory, But when the Germans in their great March offensive of 1918 penetrated deeply, he was sent by General Fries to the front to observe and report, He made a very searching and rather devastating report about inefficienuy and ignorance in gas warfare. He saw the need for well-trained gas officers, General Fries was in some danger; he was called to Pershing's headquarters to account for the large number of gas casualties in our army, He took Lewis with him, and Lewis characteristically turned the defense into a counter-attack, He said, "It's because you do not give us the proper authority," They got needed authority fr~mthe general staff to appoint gas officers responsible for the orders about .defense measures, Please define gas officer, A gas officer is a man specially designated to be reapon- sible for gas, the handling of gas warfare equipment, the issuing of masks, the determination of when a mask was exhausted and should be replaced, Did every fighting unit, per unit number of men, have a gas officer? It did after we provided them, They were woefully unsup- plied before we tackled the job, When a gas attack appeared to be imminent, the gas officer took aver? Lewis and Fries got from the general staff the right of the gas officer, even if he were a second lieutenant, to give the order as to when the masks should be worn, and it could not be countermanded by the higher tactical officer. He was aupposed to know about gas and to give the proper orders regarding defense against gas, He was in charge of gas equipment, gas masks, and the other gaa equipment, The next task was to train gas officers for our rapidly growing army, When we went to France there were only about 30,000 in the American army. In the course of the next six months it grew to over a million, and had to be provided with gas officers and gas equipment. JHE: Lewis was responsible for the establishment of a training school for gas officers, It was located six kilometers from Chaumont, the army headquarters, The location waa named Harilon Field, It served further as the experimental field of the C,W,S, ETD: Before we go on, what is the relationship of this group to the training division with headquarters at'lakehurst? JHH: Lakehurst was in New Jersey, Gas officers were also being trained there, ETD: Did Professor Lewis have direction of this whole gas curriculum, so to speak? No, There was communication, but he was made first acting chief, then chief of a defense division of the Chemical Warfare Service in France, But on a chart which sets forth the Chemical Warfare Service, he's indicated as in charge of the training division of the whole Chemical Warfare Service, I think that came later, after his return to this country early in the fall of 1918, I would also like to know what his position was in the Paris laboratory before he went, - He was in charge of the Paris laboratory during the first few weeka. He had been commissioned major. And what did the Paris laboratory do? Were you ever there? Oh yes, I went there with Lewis, It tackled all these 4 questions I mentioned earlier, That laboratory continued 1 to be the main chemical laboratory for analyses, At first I 1 we analyzed the contents of enemy gas shells, Later that was transferred to Hanlon Field, nearer the front, We dealt with the matter of degassing clothing, Hanlon Field wasn't established until June, The Paris laboratory continued throughout the war, but many of the activities carried on there during the first six months were later transferred to Hanlon Field, ETD: How did the work of the two areas finally settle itself? JHH: There was no difficulty in allocating tasks, For example, we transferred the opening of gas shells to Hanlon Field, because it was dangerous and should be done in isolation. Also, Hanlon Field was near the front, and gas officers were always there for training in large numbers. ETD : These were enemy gas shells which didn't explode when they landed? Yes, Gas officers would gather these duds and send them to Hanlon Field for analysis, We would chill them with ice, drill a hole in the casing, and pour out the contents for analysis, Phosgene, for example, is a gas, but it can be liquefied at ice temperatures, Our operators had to how, of'course, how to drill the hole so as not to hit the explosive charge in the shell, and must therefore understand the construction of all kinds of enemy shells. It was very important to discover at the earliest possible moment any changes in the filling of ttz shells, WD: Did you develop a procedure for routine shell gas analysis? JHII: Oh yes, We had a little shanty off all by itself where these shells were opened. ETD: All of you worked on developing these procedures. JHH: Yes, For instance, when it was first done at the Paris laboratory, the chemist who did it was rather contemptuous of mustard gas until the next day, when he found that he had been badly burned by mustard gas, In the course of experience we found out how to do this sort of thing. We had good chemists, good analysts who could easily devise methods for analyzing such materiala, It was necessary to learn the physical and chemical properties of all war gases, WD: How did you decide what to do next, when you found something that was new? Did you do animal experimental work to study it? JHH: Not in Paris. We did no animal experimental work until we L..' ,,of: ::L.,,?

got the experimental field establiahed, Then, not much later, we acquired a very competent physiologist and phmc010gist Ern: This organization chart simply lists people,* JHEi: The chart shows the final organization only,. Hanlon Field waa also, for a while, the headquarters of the First Gas Regiment, This was a fighting organization that used Livens projectors and Stokes mortars, Who had developed the Livens projectors? JHH: That'was developed in the field during the early part of the war by the British, The Stokes mortar was similarly developed during the war itself, Our gas troops were specialists on using these weapons primarily, The use of cylinder gas was abandoned very early, rnD: What do you mean by ncylinder gasn? JHH: !Jhe gas first used by the Germans was simply chlorine compressed in big steel cylinders, They were carried to the front, opened, and the wind blew the gas over the enemy lines, But that was very dangerous, because the cylinders were very heavy and one had to wait for the right wind. In the meantime, your own cylinders could be shelled by the enemy, Lighter cylinders were later developed, but were soon abandoned in favor of longer range weapons, the da Livens projector and the Stokes mortar, 1 One of the problems solved at Hanlon Field was barbed 1 wire, Somebody thought of loading these 60-pound Liven8 /iI projector drums with explosive instead of gas, So we I i, filled a lot of these and added nuts and bolts and scrap iron, and carried out a trial shoot, We dropped them into the barbed wire and scattered it in all directions, The nuts and bolts rained down out of the sky for quite a period, It worked! *"The Organization and Work of Hanlon Field," Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, Vol, 11, No, 4, April 1919, p, 29, Bancroff Librq 82

ETD: Where was Professor Lewis at this 'time? .- JXH: His headquarters was at Tours. ~LieutenantColonel Gene Lewis, chief of the defense division of the Chemical Warfare Service, A,E,F,I The headquarters of the Service of Supply was at Tours, I was acting chief of the Techni- cal Division at Tours for a while before I went to Chaumont, Hanlon Field was just getting established, It was more important to help to get it under way than it was to be chief of the Technical Division doing paper work, Lewis was then at Tours, but he set up the program for the gas school and recruited its teaching personnel, I was commandant of the post and in charge of field experiments. Every unit that came to France was supposed to be equipped alzeady with a gas officer, But then they needed often the kind of training that we could give because our officers had had actual field experience, We trained an average of 150 officers a week, in a one-week course, Each week we had a new group, We began by putting them in a good humor, Many of them didn't like to be ordered away from their outfit to come to school, I had a lieutenant and a sergeant and a truck, whose duty was to scour the countryside and buy lettuce and eggs and fresh vegetables, etc, When the new students arrived for their first dinner they were seated at a little table covered with white oilcloth, and a little potted plant in the middle, They might then be served perhaps omelet and a green salad, Well, their eyes would bulge, They hadn't had anything like that since leaving home, !then we led them into our big barracks or auditorium and gave them a show, We had a good deal of talent of the song and dance sort, including a rapid sketch artist with a good sense of humor, We put on a pretty good show, By the next morning the newcomers were in a receptive mood, ETD: You buttered them up a bit. Then we would give them a course on enemy gas and our own gas, their use and defense, On the final night we would have the graduating class give a show, Any good stunt that they put on in their show we would adopt for OW own shows, What was the point of view of the men going into gas waz- fare? Did they sign up for this or were they simply assigned? I think in most cases when they were already in the unit they would simply be detailed, ETD: So they had no preparation? JHH: Officers with some sort of chemical or medical training were preferred, When we wanted specialists in the axmy we could often find them around, For instance, my watch once needed reparing, I told my adjutant, He found a watchmaker in the field company that was assigned to our field, and repaired my watch, ETD : In other words, you didn't have records which would tell you right off. No, Again, I needed another typist, Well, we canvassed the'company and we found two, ETD: You did your own personnel work, JHH : Oh yes. If something had to be done, we would just have to find the person who could do it. That's true, but in the course of time the army developed channels, You'd requisition certain kinds of personnel through channels, Yes, but you don't do that when a war is going on, and you're near the front, You need a man in a hurry, you have to be self-sufficient, ETD : Backing up, recapitulating and clarifying: You began overseas duty at the gas service laboratory at Puteaux and became director there, What was the date actually when you got to this place outside of Chawnont? JHH: I went there June 18, 1918, In May I had gone to Tours to JEH: be acting chief of the technical division of the Chemical Warfare Service. The chief returned to the States on a visit. I decided, with the chief of the service, General Pries, that Hanlon Field needed attention, It was still under construction and the A,E,F. Gas Defense School waer dust being started, So I went there, The one technically in command was the colonel of the First Gas Regiment because he was a regular army man, But he was away a good deal of the time, and I was most of the time the deputy commandant, Later, when the front became very active, he was seldom at Hanlon Field, I was named acting cornmandant. Finally, shortly before the armistice, I was made commandant and promoted to a lieutenant colonelcy, I remained a captain till June, till I was transferred from Ordnance to the Chemical Wafare Service and promoted to major, The Ordnance Department didn't know what to do with me, but when the Chemical Warfare Service wanted me they thought perhaps I was valuable after all, I had a couple of majors under my command while I was still a captain, not a very satisfactory arrangement, you know, They were very conscious of that, Finally they got me transferred cHanlon field^, and then I was made a major, I remained a maJor until the first of November, when I was promoted to lieutenant colonel, ETD: Now that we have your position somewhat defined, could we go back to Hanlon Field and learn what you had going there? JHH: I told you that after I had been at Chaumont a while, we 'acquired a very fine pathologist, Major Clark, and a very 'fine pharmacologist, The pharmacologist was Major A,R, Richards, who served as president of the National Academy of Sciences, 1947-1950, 1'11 tell you of an amusing incident, Richards wae an extremely able man but a little round-shouldered and not physically prepossessing. Before I left Hanlon Field JHH: after the Armistice I was expected to rate all my officers on several different counts, When I came to rate Richards for intelligence, I gave him all the points allowed, On military bearing I gave him perhaps only a thira of the allowable, Be told me that after he returneh to Washington to be discharged he appeared before the adjutant to General Seibert, the chief of C,I,S, in Washing- ton. He looked at iny ratings and said, IIIntelligence, 20" (or whatever it was). "That 's a good deal, 1'11 mdke that 15, Military bearing, only 5 points? Walk across the room, I'll make that 10,11 He didn't like my extreme ratings, He was an old cavalry officer, exercising all the authority he could. He knew nothing about Bichards, I did, Yet he tampered with the record. Of course, it made no difference to Richards, We laughed about it, ETD: You had a pathologist because you were concerned about the effect of gases on tissue? JHH: Yes, For example, there was the question whether Negro troops were more resistant to mustard gas than whites, One could not readily see the erythema, One of our Negro soldiers volunteered. He was slightly infected on his back, Major Clark then cut out a thin slice of sldn and examined it microscopically, and found that he was just as susceptible as a Caucasian. However, there were great differences in the susceptibility of different individuals, Thin skins were evidently more susceptible than thick, Some people are more susceptible to poison oak than others, and there are similar wide variations with respect to mustard gas, We had to try to find answers to any question put to us, Let me give you one example of the emergency problems that we faced, There was a rule in the axmy that when troops advanced behind a barrage they should keep as close as possible to the curtain of fire, even at the risk of an occasional casualty from a shell that fell short, At the same time, the manuals on gas warfare prescribed waiting an immense length of time before advancing over terrain that had been gassed, Now, in order to show the folly of that recommendation in a way $hat even a West Pointer could understand, I had a motion picture taken of men marching down right behind a phosgene cloud. You could see the cloud, and the soldiers right behind it. I had xi picture of these men taken of them the next day, They were not in a hospital, There was just.as much reason for following gas closely as following shrapnel closely. The regular army people were so afraid of gas that they had prescribed an excessive precaution, Again, I was asked to make tables giving the exact lengths of time to be allowed after use of each gas, How, the length of time that has to be allowed when mustard gas, a rather non-volatile liquid, has been used depends upon the temperature, the wind, the amowt of moisture 3x1 the soil, It's like asking how long it takes for one's clothes to dry. It could take ten times as long one time than another, me way to handle that sort of question is to have a person who has a little feeling for physical chemistry and for the rates of the operation, and then to allow him to use his best judgment, But then they wanted everything tabulated, In Vorld War I1 there was a manual issued by our own Chemical War- fare Service gixhg the exact length of a smoke gas pene- tration. It's effective for, say, so many hundred yards, Well, the picture showed it going there and then suddenly stopping, What actually happens is that it spreads and gradually thins out, There's no limit. Well, that sort of thing a scientifically trained person understands but another person does not, You've talked about different kinds of gas, There were only a few of them? JHH: The first gas used was chlorine, from cylinders. Then came phosgene, which was about ten t.imes as toxic as chlorine, and easier to confine because it liquefies at a higher temperature than chlorine, Then the Germans developed a gas that would not be absorbed by the French gas masks. The first French gas masks were simply made of layers of cloth sewed together and impregnated with different chemicals, They would absorb phosgene and chlorine pretty well, but then the Germans developed a gas called chloropicrin;which did not react rapidly, and passed through this cloth mask, It was also a lachrymator, It induced tears, so you had to have eye protection. The British developed cannistera containing charcoal, which absorbed it, We had to have a mask that would handle every gas. In the States they did a great deal of work on the efficiency of charcoals, One charcoal may be many times as efficient as another, It was fwmd that the charcoal prepared from peach and almond pits was especially good. Later it was found that effective charcoal could be prepared from coke by removing the hydrocarbons, That sort of thing was done in the States, We did have quite a conference early in the year on the design of the American gas mask that was to replace the British mask, The man from the States who was responsible for making these came over. E!PD: This was an industrialist whose organization manufactured them? JHH: Yes, ETD: The idea was to have a standard gas mask for all of the troops. JHH: Yes, but one which would be better for our purposes than the British, be more up-to-date, We also discussed the Bsncr-fl tit-- 88

JHH: possibility of a gas mask which would enable men to breathe naturally, In the British mask they were afraid that the face piece would leak, so they had a nose piece, pinched the nose shut, so a man had to breathe through his mouth, which was terrible, He would drool or his mouth would get dry, So we discussed the possibility of manufacturing a mask that would tightly fit the face. The mask must fit different faces and allow a man to breathe naturally, A serious problem with the British

I mask was clouding of the eye piece from water condensed on the inside of the eye piece, The mask had to be designed so that the incoming air would sweep over the eye piece, be breathed, and then go out through a rubber valve at the chin, Such masks were produced. When they finally arrived I had some soldiers conduct an experiment to see how long men could wear one, Aman isn't nearly as efficient in a gas mask, He can't see as well and he breathes against resistance, Soldiers remove them when they should not, I conducted a contest among a number of volunteers to see how long a man could wear the new mask, All wore the masks without taking them off for, perhaps, 24 hours, when I stopped the test, We had a special ceremony attended by General Fries and presented a watch to each soldier, General Fries used to visit Hanlon Field frequently. We had a nunbe- of horses to police our range so as to keep people off while we were carrying on dangerous shoots, li Normally I was in a position to reserve the best horse for I I my own use, After dinner I would ride out into the woods. I or along the M

JHH : We must have had over 300 regularly stationed at the post, I Then we had 100 to 200 more students, Also there was a school for higher gas officers about a mile away down on the Marne Canal, What were higher gas officers? Bigher ranking gas offi-cers and artillery officers who got a longer course, a sort of post-graduate school, I How did you conduct affairs on this kind of post? Was it I spit-and-polish military or was it primarily a research place? We didn't have any more spit and polish than the law requires. We were interested in winning the war, Most of you were technical people who were not military? Yes, In reading about Professor Lewis' war work, reference is made to something he did which minimized the effect of enemy gas attack, I JHH: I think it meant his development of the defense division of 'the Gas Officer Corps, I don't remember any specific chemical contribution that he made, He was doing chemical I work only during the few weeks while he was at Puteaux 1 laboratory, 3 z-arewsaw-him after May, MID: And Hanlon Field was the place where any work would have been done in developing specific gas defense, JHH : All the weapons work was done at Hanlon Field, and all the handling of gases on a large scale, I wouldn't want 1 11 to make public any criticism of the Paris laboratory, but i ,, 1 it was handled by men who didn't have too much to do, so I I they had to invent activities, They were a long way from i the front. We at Hanlon Field, on the other hand, were continual touch with the gas regiment and the gas officers who came to us from the fighting zone, ETD: The gas regiment stayed headquartered right there the entire time? i i JHH: No, the regiment itself was never on the field. 1 ETD: Yes, But the gas regiment would be detailed to one spot or another according to the need for its service? I JHH: Yes, they would move around in connection with the general strategy, ETD : You stayed at Hanlon Field until the -stice? JHH: Until after the Armistice, I left on Thanksgiving Day, It was the most thankful Thanksgiving Day I ever spent, Soon after the Armistice a high officer came .from general. headquarters, the training division, and asked me how many students we could accommodate, I told him how many but I said, "We're not getting this many, They've been falling off, llWell,n he said, "we're going to fill it right upon He had a grand idea that they were going to conduct a big school now the war was over, They had a lot of troops who couldn't go home, and here was a big place for them to live, My heart sank, But they couldnmtget men to take school seriously after the war was all over, The first group of men that came was small, and the next one was smaller still, Then the chief of the military police cane out to see the place, He was hunting for a headquarters, You never saw a real estate agent sell his property with more glamour than I did. He decided that here was just the place he needed, I said, "The trouble is that they are trying to keep the school going," He said, "Oh, 1'11 fix that all right." On Thanksgiving Day I left and joined General Fries for the return to the United States, 3e wanted to come back early in order to get the Chemical Warfare Service established as a permanent service, 2e brought back a few of us with him who had been over there longest, I was one, I Bbncrofl Librarl, 91

I ETD : What did you do? JHH : I was mustered out soon after I got back c~ecember28, 19191, But there were hearings, and I expressed. myself, I I pointed out the obsolescence ofthe Livens projector, It was too long and it wasn't mobile enough, You had I to dig in 20 of them in a trench, and then put in a I blasting wrangement and set them off with a single I blasting magneto, But we changed from a trench warfar8 I to a mobile warfare, and this wae not suitable and the I range was not sufficient, ETD: Did you develop any ideas about personnel practices and administration? JHH: I had a good deal to say about organization, I wrote a I paper on "The Scientist and the Warw which was published I in Chemical Ehgineering mews, Also, before I went into the Second World War I talked about science and war in a series of lectures the Los Angeles campus offered, 'Phis relation of the scientist to the armed forces is some- I thing I've dealt with more than once, The chief necessity is good communication between scientists and regular myofficers, because the whole I psychological attitude of the regular army is to train men for obedience, to agree that the man with the higher rank knows more. The kind of training one gets at a 1 military academy is very authoritarian, 1 ETD: In your World War I experience you didn't have much relationship with anything that was France or French, did you?

JHH: Not a great deal, no, While I was living in Paris for I several months I went to the Comkdie Frangaise and the Odt?on, but I had very little contact with French people. In the Chemical Warfare Service our liaison officer with the French was a man of French.extraction who spoke French perfectly and was very good at that sort of thing, He was a professor at Columbia University, ETD: What about relationships with the English? JHH: I had more to do with the Ehglish, ETD: Did you have some of their people in your conrmand? JHH: We secured several English officers to help run our school because they'd had greater experience, The man who really handled the curriculum in the school was a Captain Bush, an American of English extraction who had served in the Canadian army, where he bad had very extensive experience as a field gas officer, English officers visited our post. I made several distinguished acquaintances that way, I attended the Inter Allied Gas Officersf Conference in Paris where we met a number of distinguished men from other countries, but especially from England, ETD: When was that? JHH: About October 1918, ETD: Did any French personnel come to your school? JHH: No. Of course, we had to be familiar with their equipment, One thing, the French depended a great deal on a certain kind of gas shell that had hydrogen cyanide in it, I saw a demonstration in the early days (when I was attending the French school) of how it would kill a dog in a jiffy, but a British physiologist, experimenting with different animals, discovered that the great difference was the susceptibility of different animals to different gases, And the dog was hypersensitive to hydrogen cyanide, In ~1 I order to make that plain to the armed forces he took a dog into a gas chamber and turned on the hydrogen cyanide, - Y When the dog was dead he came out, You have to do it that way, you how, if you're going to make your lesson plain. But that was an act of some courage, ETD: When you left the army were you at all inclined to take a reserve aesignment? JHH: After the Chemical Warfare Service had been permanently established, the general invited me to take a colonelcy in the reserve corps, But I had a wife and four children, and felt that I had sacrificed about as much as I should; I did not want to be subject to call for pacifying Mexico, or anything of that sort, So I didn't accept. ETD: Was there much of a gap between Chemical Warfare Service and resumption of academic duty? JHH: No, I arrived for the beginning of the spring semester, COldMENTS ON THE SCIENTIST AND SOCIETY

Interrelationships between the Military Services arid Scientists

ETD: Did your war experiences bring anything to your work on the campus? JHH : Let me say first of all that it was a great advantage in my relations with students and civilians to have had a respectable part in the war, There's a tendency to regard professors as people who live in an ivory tower, The fact that I had borne responsibility in defense of the country and had a Distinguished Service Medal as testimony meant that they couldn't put me down as impracti- cal -- ETD : Who had just sat in a hole when the war was on, JHH : Yes, Furthermore, it coiitributed much to my understanding of human nature to have dealt with so many different sorts of people. ETD: You think it really did this? JHH : Oh yes, There are many kinds of people in the world, with different psychological quirks, I think it is very important, in order to be effective, to be able to mix with different sorts of people, people of different nationalities and occupations. ETD: Were the military a different sort of people? JHH : On the average there is a difference in emphasis, a difference of approach, In the military world one is not trained- to question accepted procedures, as in the academic world, ETD : Were there other new experiences? JHH : I discovered why certain people are rather ineffective, There are some who succeed in one area but are not able to cope with a radically new type of problem, In the laboratory you take all the time you need, You try to be 95

JHH: right, not rapid. In war, however, decisions must often be made in a hurry, as they have to be when driving a car, or sailing a boat, or skiing, Moreover, your decisions are ineffective unless you can convince certain key persons that your decisions are the right ones, ETD: Could we pursue the interrelationship of military services and science? Do you think the scientists penetrated military brass in World War I? JHH: Oh yea, The fact that the military had to turn to so many civilians -- specialists, scientists, chemists, physicists, biologists -- shows that they realized their dependence on scientists, In that war, for the first time, science became conssiously acknowledged as an element that would in the future have to be taken into account, The Chemical Corps was therefore established on a permanent basis, and civilian advisory commissions were appointed, The Chemical Corps established its research department at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland; many civflian scientists were employed there, The scientists who have had close contacts with the members of the armed forces in many cases established last- ing friendships. The way was paved for the growing part that science must play in all human affairs. ETD: Do you think the scientists increased their awareness of being citizens as well as scientists? JHH: I think there were many scientists like myself who developed a strong sense of responsibility for urging points of view that grew from our experience, and which would not arise from the experience of a person trained differently. We pressed our views, I wrote a letter to our own San Francisco congressman, who was chairman of the Military Affairs Commit- tee, supporting the establishment of the Chemical Warfare Service on a permanent basis, He invited me to his house for lunch, I was a civiliaq, you see, supplementing the recommendations that General Fries and others in the forces were making, You took this responsibility, Yes, and I took it very seriously. My sense of responsibility also blossoned out in another soaenhzt different direction, During the controversy over our entry into the League of Nations, I joined Taft's "League to &force Pea~e,~and spoke to many audiences about %he importance of having some sort of international organization. I talked a number af times also on the general theme of the role of innovations in warfare, in order to awaken in the armed forces and in the people in general the realization that most successful wars are fought with new ideas. These ideas may be tactical and strategic. They may be mechanical and scientific. But I think I nentioned last time this train of examples that I bro~ghtforth, starting with the Syrian war chariots and coming right down to the First World War. ETD : To what extent are you able to remember other scientists doing this same sort of thing? Were you very unusual? JHH : Oh no, Many scientists who were deeply involved in the First ',Vorld War took part in conferences, allowed themselves to be appointed to committees and commissions, advisory commissions to the gcvernment. ETD: Vhile the scientists were aware of the relationship of science to war, Peyton C, !\larch, the army chief of staff, apparently felt that the whole business of gas warfare E1 was deplorable. The situation in World War I was very interesting, General I II Pershing was supreme in the war theater. Servicemen in the. I, United States were inclined to be jealous of the independ- I ence enjoyed by the services in the A.E.F. For example, I Sam Brovme belts were worn in =rope. They were prohibited on this side. When an officer returned from Europe ,,. they would continue to wear them, This distinguished us from the home officers who did not sport Sam Browne belts. JHH: March couldn't issue ord.ers to Pershing, So anything that started abroad that the people this country could scrutinize and perhaps reverse was an opportunity for them to throw their weight around. You see, in the armed forces you have men who take a very different attitude towards authority and innovation, General Fries, fortunately, was an engineer who had worked with civilians, who had an active job during peacetime, He recognized his dependence on civilians; practically all his staff were civilians. We saved his career. If it had not been for Lees* audacity Friea would probably have been replaced early in the war, He was being held responsible for matters that were not really his fault. Lewis beliered in the French motto, ttL'audace, toujours de l'auda~e,~and turned the defense of Fries into a counterattack, which Fries himself would hardly have been able to do, Lewis had nothing to lose, He would have been glad to leave the my, But it was Fries's life work, I met men in both wars who were open-minded, who could have become scientists themselves, who would talk with scientists without any sense of either superiority or inferiority. There were others who seemed very conscious of the fact that "I'm a West Pointer and you're only a damn ~rofessor,~~There are all sorts of people, Fortunately, as time has passed, between the wars and again in World War 11, the achievements 'of scientists were such that they could not be ignored, Their services were eagerly sought, The army, navy, and air force now send men to the University for graduate training under scientists, In several of my articles I advocated change in the character of West Point and Annapolis, I objected to taking young boys and indoctrinating them and exposing ~- -. JHH : them to teachers who, so far as techniques and material are concerned, can tell how things are done but who are not in the forefront of intellectual ferment, The West Pointer is taught by a civi1ian;it is true, but the civilian who is willing to teach at West Point is not the kind of scientist who teaches in a university, A good civilian chemist wants to be in a university, where things are going on, where the science is being advanced. Cadets in the military academies are seldom brought into contact with the inquiring, skeptical mind of the scientist, ETD : Military acceptance of medical science apparently was no problem, JHH : Well, the armed forces have always realized their dependence on medical men and the medical corps, In World War I1 there was a difference between the Americans and the British in respect to the status of the scientist in policy-making, In England the man in charge of the office of field research was a professor of physics in Imperial College, Re remained a civilian, He told me before making a trip to Eashington he planned to take a brigadier along as his assistant in order f0 indicate to the American brass what his equivalent status was, Xow, that didn't happen on our side, I had more influence on policy in Britain thm I would have had in the United States, because there civilians sat with men in uniform to discuss policy, I could give many concrete examples of that but I don't think we want to go into it - at too much length,

The Social,Responsibility of Scientists

This poses the question of the status of the scientist as a policy-maker in government affairs, JHH : Well, it's becoming high now, you see, because we have the President's Advisory Commission of Science; the State Department has a science adviser, The Xational Academy of Sciences through its National Research Council continually is carrying on at the request of the government huge projects that cost millions of dollars a year, ETD: You think the scientist has made quite a dent on the social panorama? JHH: He has made much more than a dent, Re has h+d quite an impact, but the process is not finished, We are a small part of the population, The labor movement, for example, includes a huge segment of the voters, and they can threaten, We have had to persuade and enlighten, The problem is complicated by the fact that some scientists get far beyond their professional capacity in giving advice on social matters, ETD: You mean their confidence in this field is something that creates a problem? JHH: Yes, I dealt with this at some length in my talk at the meeting of the American Chemical Society on the professor and his public, And I think I gave you informally one or two instances, I've discussed this ixl my paper to the American Philosophical Society on the social responsibility of scientists, E!J!D: Do you think the way of thinking of scientists can be separated from context and a plea made for the way of thinking of the scientist? JHH : Oh no. They merge into each other, But there are degrees - of emphasis, Nobody can tell where howledge begins and wisdom ends or the dividing line between judgment and imagination, My views on this are expounded at length in Science in the Making, ETD : When you are talking to an audience about education, for instance, do you put yourself into any other way of think- ETD: ing than when you are tzlking to your freshman chemtstry classee? JHH: I do to a certain extent. I try to indicate when I'm conscious of the fact that I'm expressing ny preferences, rather than the things that rest upon as rmch objectivity as I can inject into then, ETD: Coming from the First to the Second World War, do you think thatthe scientist has energed from it more conscious of being a citizen? JHIi: The wide participation of men in World War 11, which lasted so much longer with so many far-reaching and dire . consequences, made scientists very conscious of their part and their moral responsibility, There are many who declare that it's their duty not to work for any sort of measures involving nass destruction, Oppenheimer wrote that the scientists who participated in the manufacture of the atom bomb had felt a 'sense of sin," The articles that are published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, many of them written by scientists, on social responsibility, on disamament and the cold war, are evidence of a very keen sense of responsibility, in fact a keener sense of responsibility than is shown by many people in public life. ETD: Do you think this mill have the effect of c3anging the characteristics of scientists in the future? Do you think the scientist in the past chose to place himself apart from the world?

I JAW: A scientist doesn't have to be an introvert, but some degree of introversion has hel?ed many people to be scientists or creative artists of my sort, if they at lezst didn't feel dependent on beicg with people all the the, if they were willing to go it alcne, to adopt an unpopular doctrine or faith, Leonardo, for example, had many contacts with people, He was as sociable as the society allowed him to be, JHH; 'Phey just didn't understand him, They regarded him with I suspicion, as they have many scientists, of course, In certain periods a scientist could be confused with a witch, Isaac Newton's work was in astronomy, and he discovered the law of parttation had a relation to the problems of navigation, Thzt made it an important piece of work, The public could understand why you had to have ndgati-on, yon see. Ships were hei-rrg lo&, and so the discoveries of astronomy set up new conditions for navigation, Of course the Re~aissancescientists served princes. They constructed engines of war, They had -- I don't how if you'd call it social responsibility, but it was a means of livelihood, at any rate, The scientific habit of mind changes with time, with the nature of science, as Jacob Bronowsky points out 80 clearly, Science seem to be concerned with cause and effect, with fixity mi? absoluteness; with the discovery of the uncertainty principle the realization came that what we how is a matter of probability and not of absolute certainty. I think 1.told you, did I not, about the seven laws and principles that Iqernst announced in 1907 when I was attending his lectures? Since that time no fewer than three of those seven ~rincipleshave either B been modified or abandoned, Now, with the advent of the uncertainty principle we 3I realize that what we're dealing with in science is probabil- I! ity, not certainty, It's impossible to determine simul- /I li taneously both the velocity and the position of sn electron

because anything you do to an electron to find out where I it is hocks it out of its ~reviousorbit. You cannot get the orbit of an electron in the way that you can a comet, When you take a picture of a comet the taking of the picture doesn't affect the comet, But when you try to find out where an electron is you have to send a signal to it, and that modifies the electron's path, Therefore, all we can deal with is the probability of finding electrons in certain relations to atoms and mblecules, Now that modifies the whole philosophy of science tremendously, That's modified the thinking of scientists, kcrthermore, with the increase in the number of scientists and the participation of science in affairs -- no longer is the scientist simply a man who vrorks off all by himself in the laboratory, He's in an institution, He's working with other scientists on problems that almost immediately are likely to have social implications, ETD: To what- extent is it at all possible now for the scientist to work alone? JHH : Well, he can't work alone, He can sit down at his desk and spend a day alone, or even a month alone, But during that time he is looking up countless publications of other people, He may and probably should confer dth fellow scientists, discuss his ideas, see how good they are, He doesn't get any satisfaction unless he can publish them, That means that he has to run the gauntlet of referees and editors, The source of an idea in science is like that of a composer or painter; committees don't D paint pictures and compose symphonies, and committees j don't discover relativity, On the other hand, the veri- I! 5 fication of a hypothesis nay involve collaboration of a I

number of people, may involve the use of a cyclotron, I r have two Ph.D. research assistants. We work as a little . I team, They are not simply technicians carrying out my directions, They think of things, too. But what we talk about and what we do always has had its origin in the mind of one of us, The necessity for cooperation is greater in some matters than others, So many expensive instruments are available now that can measure things we didn't even realize existed, the electron microscope, for example, That opens up a whole new window, Nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared spectros- copy, a $15,000 machine, Well, when I was chairman we got one of these, Now it's in continual use, The men who are interested in it discuss their work with each other, That's an example of great change, And of course the fact that what you do now may almost immediately have implications for society means that we can't be unconscious of this, Thus, when I could predict the relative insolubility of helium that led to the use of helium oxygen mixtures in preventing the bends, I quickly got that into use by turning it over to the Bureau of ?fines, and then they to the United States Navy, I get a great deal of satisfaction out of this, I wouldntt have wanted to have been diverted from my basic research to do this development work, If I had the mind of an engineer then I would be the kind of person who would like to do that, But I take a good deal of satisfaction in the fact that this development means added wealth, It means added safety, It means saving life, So I have a social conscience, you see, and I don't know many scientists who aren't nuch the same way as I am and don't have a similar attitude, ETD: However, there is more useful scientific knowledge available than effective social institutions to use it, The scientist's enthusiasm for research doesn't spill over to reform, JHH : No, he's not likely to be very good at reform,

Science as a Way.of Think*

JHH : Yhat we need is a much wider understznding of the nature of science on the part of the public. ETD: Suppose you had a chance to develop this, what would you do? JHH: I think I have criticized the ordinary means of publi- cizing science because I think they dwell too exclusively on the end results, not upon the process. So the public begins to think of science as something that makes medicine and dyes and gadgets and plastics and so on. It isn't even good journalism, it seems to ne, because the exciting tbing about the South Pole is not how it looks, but the adventures and struggles of the men to get there. I've tried to emphasize this other point of view in the course which I gave following my quasi-retirement and in my lectures at Columbia University, Science in the Making. I discussed science in its relation to experimentation, What is a good experiment? Eow do you interpret experiments? How do you guard against being fooled by your experiments? I discussed the role of observations, What is a theory? %'hatis the difference between a law of science and a statute law? What is the nature of a scientific law? It's not legislation. It doesn't govern, People don't realize that, Many scientists are slow to understand it, I discussed concepts, I tried to bring out the fact that science is essentially a structure of concepts and relationshigs, It isn't just a collection of isolated facts, not an encyclopedia of infomation, My standing in the scientific world doesn't seen to be damaged much by the fact that I couldn't answer most of the questions that my colleagues might ask ne, I'm judged on the basis of the questions I have thought of and the answers I've been able to give some of them, It has relations to clear thinking, It's the scientific way of looking -- ETD: What about science and clear thinking? Do you think that training in science is more helpful in developing clear thinking than a lot of other kinds of training? 105 I\

JHH: Yes, I do, ETD: In what wafl JHH: In the first place, you have a check upon yaur thinking, You form a hypothesis in order to explain apparently related phenomena, The physical scientist csn devise an experiment then, He can select other cases which should come under the hypothesis as stated. He can do as I did, for example, when I thought I had a pretty good theory of solubility: I learned just after the second war of a new class of compounds which would put a terrific strain upon my theory, and I wondered whether my theory would stretch to include them, So I deliberately picked out the solubility of iodine and perfluoroheptane, two substames which should not react chemically with each other but which are very different physically, and where I expected very much less solubility than I would with ordinary substances, I deliberately picked out the case which would strain my theory more than almost any other that I could think of, Wow, the sociologist can't do that, you see, The economist can't do it, He has a theory of values and a theory of prices, He cannot isolate all but two variables and see how they are related to each other. He has to proceed statistically, One of the most important . things is for a person to realize what he cannot know, E.B. Wilson, a noted mathematician and statistician, gave the principal address at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the Berkeley' campus in the mid-thirties, during the depression, He had examined the business index, the so-called cycle, way back to the Revolutionary War, and how it fluctuates, The economists call it a cycle, Now, a cycle is something that recurs regularly. It may be a complex cycle like a JHH: musical tone. Nonetheless, if you analyze one stretch, a number of vibrations, that fits the next stretch, and you can predict what the tone will be doing if you're not too far away. He could break down this fluctuating business index into what looked like a curve of cycles and sub-cycles like a musical- tone. But he said when he put it together for the next 10- or 20-year period or so, it wouldn't fit. They weren't cycles at all; they were fluctuations, Now, he paid his respect to Irving Fisher of Yale, an economist regarded almost with veneration in this country at the time. Irving Fisher had failed to foresee the great depression. He had predicted continuing pros- perity. Wilson said, "1 don't blame Mr, Fisher for not knowing what was going to happen, but I do blame him for not knowing that he couldn't mow what was going to happen. " Let me tell you another example: I've written a chapter for a book to be published by General Electric Company on Irving Langmuir, It will reproduce his principal writings. They are classified, I was asked to write on his general philosophy, I quoted extensively, as I have in my Columbia lectures, a very important distinction he makes between what he calls convergent and divergent phenomena. The death rate in the population is a convergent phenomena because the statistical werages converge on what you are after, The insurance actuary must be bright enough, however, to realize that because the per- . centage of people in a certain population which is going 1 to die can be predicted with moderate accuracy, he can't li

say that John Smith is going to die at a certain period I or has a certain likelihood of dying, It's important to distinguish the kind of problem which is amenable to study. The economists like Irving Fisher would be much better if they talked in terms of probability, and so would the historian who tries to be scientific by inventing a single theory of history -- an economic theory, a climate theory, a cyclic theory, It's true, of course, that there is a swing back and forth between conservstism and radicalism that we can see, People get tired of one thing and shift back to another, But this isn't like the swing of a pendulum. It doesn't swing back exactly. The world never before has been like the world of today, It resembles it in a certain few respects, But it never had airplanes, it never had atomic energy, and so on, History is infinitely more complicated than any one hypothesis can make it, Well, the good historias donlt try to pose as scientists, It's all right to tzlk about inferences and judgments and to speculate, but if you have a real grasp of what science is you donlt come out with pronouncements, ETD: Do you go at your problems in education the same nay that you might go at your problems in the field of chemistry? Let me say this, You don't tackle a problem in chemistry by saying to yourself, T?ow, let's see, what is the appropriate method to use?" rnD: All right, 'Khat do you do? , JHH : Well, I proceed very much as an artist proceeds, I'm using instinct which has been guided and directed by criticism and experimentation, but I -- ETD: I can't follow you -- this means that probably you have a lot of very disciplined observations that you've tucked into your head? JHH : Surely, 1 ETD : And this may be what you mean by "instincton JHH : Yes, it is, I'm not speaking of an instinct like the bees' instinct, I mean something that I do as I would say instinctively, I ETD: You have based this on observation, really, JHFI: For example, when I see a fellow scientist make three observations, and when they are plotted in a certain way they don't fall in a straight line. When he draws a curve through those points I say he should have made at least one more observation because one of those three might have been a faulty observation. If he had four points, then, he might suspect one of them that falls off the line if the others would follow, That's the sort of thing you just learn through having rour fingers burned now and then, You draw a conclusion from data that are not quite adequate for it. This is familiar territory; you've been there and. you know. Yes, I once had a thesis to appraise. I was on a committee, It was a thesis in education, and it was on the youth movemen3, It was a long thesis done by a very intelligent young woman, and it was interesting, But she began and spent page after page discussing methods A, B, C and D which might have been used, and then justifying her choice of method C as guaranteeing good results, I said to her, n'J7hy do you go into all this? No historian ever thinks he can validate a conclusion by the fact that he chose a magic methodom she said, "1 wouldn't dare leave that out, That's the very apple of my professor's eye," I Now, you see, that's pseudo-science, ?

I said, nKhy do you have it so longlR I "Oh," she said, "We're expected to write a thesis I that's least 100 pages longon at J Well, one of my boys did three years of work, and I wrote it up in three pages, At first he was very disappointed because all that work didn't make a bigger showing. I said, 'My dear boy, if it was twice as long half ae many people would read itonAa a matter of fact, it's a classio paper, It laid the foundation for a.whole subsequent development in the theory of gas solubility, The faot that it was 80 clear made it possible to condense it. E!l!D: You have explained a bit of how you would get into a problem, JHH: I want to,make it clear that I don't have rules in my mind that I follow consciously, ETD: Ho, but you have a long history of observation, JBH: That *sright, A painter doesn't put a streak here because he says, "Well now, the rule of the golden mean means that I should put something here, or that "a certain color chart says that I ought to balance what's already there by something else," All that hbs become part of his background, It's like skiing, When you're learning to ski you have to think of why you do this and that, You keep on doing that and practicing until it becomes part of you, it becomes part of your reflexes, That doesnst mean that you would have the reflexes if you hadn't gone through all this procedure, You see, the musician who composes modern music has also learned Bach, if he's any good, in the training, ET.D: Then when you come to education, which is not chemistry, it may be assumed that your observations in education in the development of your teaching could be the background from which you -- 388: Oh, I've been tremendously influenced, of course, by all my background in everything that I do, In education in the University, of course, I'm influenced by the fact that I have a concept of what science is, and therefore that I should not simply ask my students: What is the melting point of sulphur? and What is the recipe for doing this and that? I want to ask questions which bring principles to bear, These are what cement the facts together and give the structure, The sciences, as I said in my lectures, are not just a lot of materials, even if arranged in orderly JEH: piles on the building site, they've been built into a structure. Banadt Llbraw 111 .. GOVERNMENT SERVICE DURING WORLD WAR I1 -

Special Assipment in Chile, July 1942

How did you become attached to the Office of Scientifio Research and Development [oSRD]? Prior to that time I had been asked to. go to South America on a brief trip by the National Defense Research Committee [NDRC] in connection with the development of the uweasel.n The nweaseln was a light cate~illar. tractor vehicle designed to go over snow, An invasion of Norway was being planned, I was consulted on the design of this since I'm pret by familiar with snow, I pointed out the great problem of very fluffy new snow, when even on skis you'll sink in halfway to your knees, and how a vehicle wdar those circumstances could easily - L push the snow ahead and pile it up instead of rising over .>. it. I had a good deal to say about the design in conferences in the East which I attended, The Studebaker Company was charged with manufacturing and first experimenting with such a vehicle, !Phey were getting toward the point of actual field trials, and I was asked over the telephone one day if I could make a 5:20 plane in preparation for a trip to South America. First I went to New York, I was to go down disguised aa a consultant for Pan American, This was extremely secret and Pan American lent their good offices to having me I appointed as a consultant to go to South America. !! b I the plane stopped in Washington a general came i and talked with me about it, I wasn't even to talk to the ambassador in Santiago, With me went Sver Pederson, 1 a very well known Norwegian meteorologist, He was trained in Norway, as many of the world's best meteorologists have been, Later he was at M.I.T. I think he is now at Chicago. I think his principal mission was to get In P JHH: touch with Horwegian consuls and others to get them prepared for this business, First of all we stopped in Camaguay, Cuba, and flew across the Gulf of Mexico when German submarines were operating in the Gulf, We went to Balboa, Panama, Then we took a DC-3, The first night we stopped at Call, Colombia, the next at Lima, Peru, and the third night at Santiago, First I went to see Lawrence Kinnaird of our own history department, who was attached- to the herim embassy in Santiago, Both he and Mrs, Kimaird were there, I talked to him confidentially without tal3rlng to zn ambassador, I had to do something to find out how I co~ldget up into the mountains to observe winter conditions, to see whether it would be feasible to try out such a vehicle there, Disguised as a commercial vehicle to be used in connection with mining, it was to be trans- ported by airplane, put together, and tried out on the winter snow, Through Lawrence I was put in touch with a man of the Braden Copper Company, an American who was completely loyal, and discussed with him the possibility of being taken up to their mine, ETD: What altitude was this? Was there always snow? JEH: Well, this was July, winter in Chile, The mine, I think, was somewhere around 6,000 or 7,000 feet. But an obstacle developed because they had had an outbreak of some disease and. they were quarantined, So I called upon my friend, Arturo Podesta, who had managed a Chilean ski team during a trip in the United States, I had met him at that time, (It's an advantage to have a wide variety of contacts,) I called upon him and he invited me to go up skiing, He took me to the home of Seiror Edwards, the principal banker, who also B.n.:o!t L;b.w 113

JHH: published in Santiago El Mercurio, the hemisphere's oldest newspaper. He was up in his little chalet in the mountains at 7,000 feet with three of his children, and the Seffora, a very handsome black-haired woman, wae at home with the two younger children, Every day at six 09clock they talked to each other by two-way radio, I was taken there in time to take part in the conversation and to be introduced, Well, it began with little Son ja up in the mountains singing a Tyrolean . mountain song in German and accompanying hers'elf on the zither, The family health was exchanged and I was introduced and received a very cordial invitation to go up there 48 hours later, S&or Podesta drove me up in his Model A Ford. He said the Model A was preferred down there to more expensive cars because if anything went wrong with it you could mend it with a screwdriver and didn't need to call a tor truck, I was driven over an ice road with rock slides and drop-offs, a little hair raising, But as we emerged from the canyon on the huge plateau at the top, miles away we could see the main peaks sticking up like the dorsal fin of a great marine monster, The wind waa blowing snow banners a mile long from the tops of the peaks. It was a beautiful sight, pure white. There were no trees at that altitude, and not many trees in that latitude. You have trees farther south. I was very cordially received, Sefior Edwards spoke excellent English. His father had been ambassador to England, and they were of English extraction, We had a little rope tow which we could use. We could pull it up and ski down. Pederson went with me. Being a Nor- wegian, he could ski too, I took my skis along with me, which looked a little strange to people going through the tropics. They thought I was crazy but I knew I wasn't. Of course you were in character as the Pan American consultant in this situation. Yes, This was a pure side issue as far as they were concerned. We had excellent food. It was the kind of chalet where you have Oriental rugs and servants and good food, and we had good conversation, I was driven out at night which wasn't so hair raising since I couldn't see where I would drop off. Well, it gave me an opportunity to observe the snow conditions, But I also made other observations, among them the percentage of German names in the telephone book under 'Fa and It was about 80 per cent. The people in South American countries do not break loose from the mother country the way they do in this country, The children of immigrants here don't want to be tied up at all with the oid country, But the South American countries don't have enough prestige to dis- lodge that allegiance. So many of the children are sent back to Spain or Prance or Italy or Germany for education, And the farther south you go the more Germans you have. Of course, the Hitler regime had its thumb on Germane. If you had relatives in Germany you were under pressure to be a loyal German, And I was perfectly sure that in the customs and the railroads and the post office, everywhere there would be people who were potential or actual spies, So when 1 got back I recommended against trying I I/ to run the risk of revealing this vehicle, Dr. Pederson didn't come back with me directly, He went over to Argentina and came up the east coast,

Advisor, War Production Board *

I was a member 09 an advisory commission to the Office. of Production Research under the War Production Board JHEI: which held meetings in Washington from time to time, I traveled a good deal in that assignment. ETD: What kind of advice did you give? JRB: 'Phis was in a matter that had to do with the production of strategic materials, chemicals, For example, in order to decrease the tendency of aluminum to corrode it was dipped in a bath of molten sodium nitrate, 'Phere are two kinds of nitrate, two origins, One was a pure nitrate, The other was a Chilean nitrate that we got up here, The airplane companies here declared that they couldnlt,use this nitrate. It wasn't pure enough. The result was they'd send it east to be refined, Then it would come back here, That was a pretty serious waste of time and transportation, So I suggested some work be done which revealed certain impurities, These were taken out and the trip east could be eliminated. That's just a sample of the usual thing you do,

Mission to London, Mag 1943 to July 1944

JHH: After the OSRD established a mission in London, the first man to go over there was a professor at the University of Chicago who had been one of my Ph.Ds, I was asked to go over and relieve him, ETD: How large was that office? JHH: We had about a half dozen scientists there and a secre- tarial force, E2D: How was the liaison carried on? Was this with opposite members in the British forces? JHH: Our first duty was to report to our appropriate organizations in the States, We were supposed to confer with the British and to get information from them to send back. So we wrote a continual string of reports. 116

E!l!D: When were you there? JHH: May 1, 1943, to July 1, 19444 I left London in May 1944, I had to do with potential chemical warfare with incendiaries, which were the biggest weapon in the waz, up to a certain period at least, and with explosives and smoke and other miscellaneous chemical matters, The British had committees composed of scientists and men from the services, I attended a couple of meetings a day, probably, Then I would report what seemed significant from this. One of these committees had to do with intelligence from the British intelligence officers about what was going on in Germany, I would get it and send it hot-foot over with perhaps my own appraisals and comments, There were various new exglosives being manufactured and experimented with, and the results of our own matdriel, The British used it, 'Flame throwers are another thing. They had some hapsack flzme throwers, but the British had developed flame throwers operated from tanks, I came home in May 1944, and I was asked to go out to the Pacific, MacArthurts headquarters, Things were getting pretty close to the invasion, I was not interested in staying in Europe and going into Germany and making observations of German factories to send back for the benefit of American manufacturers, I wasn't sure when I came back whether I would return or not, /II but as things developed I was glad not to go back, iI I Then I was asked if I would go out to MacArthur8s i:I headquarters, I gave that very serious study, I made Y some visits to chemical warfare in Florida where they

were experimenting under tropical conditions, and to I Georgia and Illinois where the universities were doing things, I came out here and visited the rocket propellante, which were being made under the direction of California Institute of Technology. But I finally decided I would not go, You had a choice in this matter? Ob yes, I could resign from the service, You were in the amp No, I was a civilian all this time. What was your status? I was a scientific liaison officer in the American embassy, I was not responsible to the army, You were an attaoh6, actually, in an ambassadorial apparatus, That ls right, If it had been Nimitz's headquarters I might have felt differently but MacArthur was not an attractive person, Had you met hfm? Ho, but I knew enough about him. But it takes you months to gain the confidence of people, My second six months over there was many times more efficient than the first, You have to get to bow people because much that you get is unofficial, just by conversation, You have to get people loosened up, and nommunicate, Well, I didn't think this Oriental potentate over there would be surrounded by men who would loosen up the way the British would, Furthermore, I could see that the war wae approaching an end and that the universities were going to take over from the army as our more important institution, and this , is where I'm efficient, mere you go around hat in hand to a large extent, Your activity depends upon your ingenuity, The very fact that in the American army they were not as ready to aclmowledge the status of scientists aa the British were made it a rather unattractive proposi- tion. Then I resigned and became a professor, I wrote a memorandum to the OSRD head, Vannevar Bueh, when I left, giving my criticisms of the organization. . Bsncrofr Librev 1

118

National Academy of Sciences, War Service

JHH: Later I wrote a memorandum to the then president of the National Academy of Sciences on the relation of the sciences to war effort, I also made a speech in the meeting of the National Academy which was the first speech I'd ever heard applauded there, I was comparing the influence of the Royal Society upon governmental affair8 with the relative inefficiency of the National Academy of Sciences, 'Phe charter of the academy prescribes that it should give advice when called upon, The trouble is that the people at the top don't know what questions to ask, and you must put the right questions into their mouths. Furthermore, the academy was rather stiff. The preceding presidents had been very fine gentlemen, William Wallace Campbell was one of them, But he was very meticulous about not giving advice unless it was asked, And the result was that we were not nearly as efficient as we should have been, I said, Vart of it is because we don't know each other, We ought to get acquainted." The Royal Society has the Royal Society dining club, which antedated -the society itaelf, I criticized the academy dinners, I said, "1Ke find ourselves seated between two estimable ladies with whom we can discover very few topics of conversation, The Royal Society dining club doesn't have any ladies, It's a hail-fellow-well-met sort of an organization.@ rnD: You mean the women members of the National Academy are not--- JHH : Well, they only have two or three of them, These would be the wives, you see, who would come to the academy dinners, And you can't find much to talk about with the wife of a man whom you don't even know personally, We'd come in and hear long speeches presenting medala, JHH: In the Royal Society dining club a man would be callea . upon who had just come from 1ndia or from Russia and he would tell about conditions he had just observed there, Or a man who had made an interesting discovery would tell about it informally, I said, "Perhaps what we need is a Bierabend," Ae a result of this we now have labela on our lapels and we have a Bierabend, On Wednesday, the last night, we have an informal buffet supper when we can juat talk informally about the status of the academy. We don't h&e time in the business meetings to do anything more than hear buai- ness reports, Well, it's made some difference, Also, Latimer and I were responsible for electing led Bronk to the presidency of the academy in place of Jim Conant, Conant had not displayed much interest in the academy, He set up this rival organization of NDRC instead of using the machinery of the academy, ETD: I wondered why this other structure grew, JHH: It was because it was moving into a vacuum, The National Research Council was not an effective organization, It had become moribund after the first war, and the presidency of the academy was in the hands of an old man who didn't have the adventuresomeness and mental alertness that he would have had years earlier, So Bush and Conant and othe2s just moved in and proposed their organization, and it gained the stage, You see, the NDRC men were i

simply aggressive enough to get funds, I 1 ETD: Do you think that scientists in the United States have I developed as effective communication with Washington as I English scientists enjoy with their government? I JHHr I think they do, except for certain geographical obstacles we have, In England everybody can come up to London, ETD: And this is always the meeting place? JHH: Edinburgh is only overnight away, Therefore you can have a meeting and discuss things, In this country you have to write letters. You might have a very good proposal and it will go to some desk man in Washington, and he would like to have his finger in the pie, You have to convince him personally if he doesn't have the background, b For example, I can give you a contrast. In this country the Chemical Warfare Service was not an operati* service nor much of a research service. However, it was an intermediary for the development of mechanized flame throwers, They made a contract with the Standard Oil Company of Indiana to develop a flame thrower, However, the adoption of this would depend upon the Tank corps, The Chemical Warfare Service didn't want to be squeezed out of its role as middleman, So the Standard Oil people and the Tank Corps people didn't discuss a comon concept of what the machine should do, The result was that thry built a huge dinosaur that could only go three miles hour, It could do everything for itself, brush its teeth and comb its hair, but it couldnlt run, Now, in England we had a conference between the chief of the petroleum warfare department, who had been a civilian, and a very able man (that department had some remarkable things to its credit); the major general from the ministry of supply who would be responsible for producing a tank; the major general from the war office who would be responsible for the adoption of the tank, And I, as a co;rtesy, was invited, as an American, We spent a whole day at a little place where the mis- tress of George I1 had been kept. Me discussed all sorts of technical features, whether it should have a range finder or not, and whether it should have a gun in addl- tion to the flame thrower. We faced each other and I talked it over. 1 Toward the afternoon the war office man said, llThis ie the one we want," .Then the other major general turned to the ministry of supply man and said, ''When could you have it?" He said, "We can have it bx October," And that was 5%. . That was it, Then you had to write only the confirmirig orders, You didn't have to write any argument, That difficulty still exists here, although to a lesser extent with airplanes, But people aren't so close to each other, They aren't so well acquainted, That's a difficulty we still face, The rocket situation is an example' of poor administration. No one seems to know if ' it should be in the army, navy, or civilian organization, What's the answer to that? I don't know about the answer to that particular one, I'm not close at all to the rocket situation, But we have rival organizations, Eisenhower has not brought about real unification, We still have rivalries and local prides, Each service is a sort of fraternity trying to boost its own status, This isn't as apparent in English governmental administration? I didn't see it as a serious obstacle there, no, You see, 11 could go to the Athenaeum, for instance, While I was there I was an honorary member of the Athenaeum, That's where the higher-ups congregated at noon, mere1s no comparable organization here, is there? 1 No, The Army and Navy Club in Washington is a different I thing, The scientists don't go there for lunch and vice- . , versa. I At the Athenaeum would you have people of very wide exper-

ience and activity? I Oh my, yes, The top people in the country were there,. cabinet members, admirals, generals, and leading scientists, members of the Royal Society, I'd sit at the same table. We'd get off in a corner afterwards and talk over something that would save a long interview on my part, I got the feeling of what was going on under the table, you see, aot simply what was out for exhibition. ETD: In the past, you know, there were small groups of people with related interests who gathered and communicated with each other, Well, the country was sma12, I wondered if the learned societies have superseded small local gatherings in this country, Well, we still have the American Philosophical Society which brings together men of different fields, scientists,

literary men. s And this is a really broad representation, Oh very, yes. Justice Warren is a member of it. - Does this break itself down into small enough groups so that you can communicate directly and comfortably? We don't break down into groups except around the table. We have a general meeting at which there would be papers from different fields represented at the same session. And men from different fields may discuss that single paper. Wen we have lunch right in the academy building, where we are surrounded by history. Then we have a banquet in the evening, and a dinner another evening, So it's a very intimate, personal affair. ETD: The National Academy at this point has a large membership and many publications. I JHH : The academy proceedings are pretty much preempted by U 1 biologists and mathematicians that don't have the publica- 4

tion media that we have. In chemistry we have the Shute I

Society with the industrial and academic chemists all to- (1 I gether, And we have a number of different journals. 1 a180 have the Sournal of Chemical Physics which is handled by the American Institute of Physics. So I can get prompt I JHH: publication. But the mathematicians don't have that sort of media, So they use a lot of the proceed&ngs, I scarcely look at the proceedings, I look at the table of contents and read one paper perhaps in a half dozen. But we are having symposia, We've been discussing - meetings, and I had a little hand in that. Instead of just having individual papers, very short ones, pretty technical, we now have very well organized symposia with papers by invitation. We even had a symposih on education a couple of years ago. Those are pretty good media for communication, E!CD: It isn't a random selection of material then, JHK: No. Along with the miscellaneous volunteer program you'll have a symposium going on in the other auditorium. They had a very fine one last year, for instance, on the recent investigations of the radiation belt around the earth, Well, that's a hot subject, you see. It's very important, and many people have contributed to it. We had Van Allen there, who waq the principal contributor. So we got straight from the horse's mouth what was known about the subject, That's of immense importance to the rocket people, the airplane people, the radio communications people, &d for theoretical physics as well. ETD: The geographical barrier to communication among scientist8 could be broken down. It's a matter of money, isn't it? (1 JXH: It costs about $300 to go east to a meeting, I get my I expenses paid across the country about five or six times 1 1 a year, but an instructor can't do that, i I ETD: And he's the man often who would need moat to have his I ideas stirred up, JHH: Yes, and many of them could contribute a great deal. ETD: Besides, some areas in this country have more ideas than others. I

Bancroft Library 124

JHH: Oh my, yes. Thus there are certain parts of the country that are' intellectual deserts, After you leave Kansas and Missouri you don't find very much until you get here to California. And in the South there are only a few institutions that are roughly up to standard: the University of Virginia, to some extent, North Carolina, Duke Universtty, Tulane University, and then there are isolated good men in some of th? others. But the intellectual climate that we have here, for instance, does not exist in more than a very few places in the.country.

I(I i Ij

I! 1 ACADEMIC ADBYIINISTRATION, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

Council of Engineering and Applied Chemistry

EID: We might go back now and pick up your work at the Univer- sity as it relates to the administration of academic affairs. JHH: I mentioned my work on the Council of Engineering and Applied Chemistry [1916-1917, p, 511. Each engineering college had a very rigid curriculum, and a student who wanted to vary a hair's breadth would have to petition and the dean would have to get the authorization of the council. The other deans, as a matter of senatorial courtesy, invariably approved the recommendation of one dean. It was a comedy to sit there and hear these deans referring to each other and solemnly approving one another's recommendations regarding trivia, ETD: Was this the entire matter of the council? JRH: That's the kind of thing that I recollect most clearly, It became rather silly, it seemed to me, for all these men to devote so much time to matters which any one dean was competent to decide, ETD: In 1917 you were on a committee of the Engineering Council concerned with the examination for freshmen engineers, I think you were the person in charge of that committee, JHH: I think they were discussing an examination in English for engineers. ETD: It wasn't on competence in engineering subjects. m: No, not at all. ETD: Was there a problem among the engineering students with respect to expression? Oh yes, There always is among students in every college, This rigid curriculum of the engineering college did not permit any sort of liberalizing education, even training in English, Probert was a member of this council, I remember talking this over with him one day. He expressed his great concern for good English. He said that when Presi- dent Wheeler was interviewing him, prior to calling him, he asked for his views on engineering education. Probert said, "1 said to him, 'President Wheeler, a sound training in the English language. " Well, Vlheeler said, "What else do you ad~ocate?~~'Wr. Wheeler, a sound training in the English language." Probert didn't have a scintilla of humor, and he could not see that his sententious pronounce- ment was pretty silly. No provision was made for engineering students to study English. ETD: You were a member of the Committee on Courses of Instruction in 1919. m: Yes. The quality of courses is a matter of constant concern in a first rate institution. The Academic Senate and the College of Letters and Science eaoh had a Committee on Courses of Instruction, ETD : Were the problems then different from what they are now? JHH: .The problems are basically much the same. The quality of every course must measure up to University or letters and science standards. ETD: Would this measurement ever change? JHH: Of course it changes somewhat. It's a matter of subjective opinion. But we have a great university here. It has . pretty successfully resisted the constant temptation to degenerate into a trade school, to offer courses which are merely informational, courses which do not represent sound scholarship. It is important, of course, to insure that the person who proposes to give a course is redly competent to give it, It is important from the budgetary JHHs standpoint to see that there is no unneceasarg duplication, From time to time, for example, there was concern over the fact that courses in statistics were being offered in several departments, The committee questioned the necessity for such duplication, The same principles of statistics are applicable in different fields, Let me give you another example, Probert -- in mining engineering -- wasn't satisfied with our course8 in quantitative analysis, partly because his student6 in mining found them rather difficult, He wanted a more technical course, a course in what he called "wet assayingen It was just a trade school cwse for miners, We try to teach quantitative analysis from the standpoint of basiu science: what are the principles of equilibrium and solubility, etc,, that determine good analytical procedure, The letters and science committee decides whether courses are suitable for a liberal arts college. ETD: What is a liberal arts college? This is a definition that slides around a good deal, JHH: The best I can do is refer you to the statement which the College of Letters and Science set up when Iwas dean of letters and science. I wrote a statement that my execu- . tive committee approved, The present catalog contains such a statement, I think you'll find that men in the 1 8 liberal arts colleges and the best universities all have 1 basically the same general idea, which is to try to pre- 'I sent subjects which are fundamental, that present the content of civilization -- the subjects that are worth studying I

regardless of their practical application, I I have illustrated the nature of liberal studies by

contrasting optometry and physics, Optometry ie an impor- 1 tant practical sub$ect, It eerves society, and optometrists are needed, But a student who etudiee optometry, but does not become an optometrist, has little profit from hie study, One who has studied physics, mathematics, literature, philosophy, has a wider outlook, whatever his occupation, These subjects, moreover, are basic to many other subjects, ETD : You are assuming, though, that these subjects are taught in-such a way that they do develop the individual, JHH: Of course, a basic subject must be taught by someone who handles it in a way to bring out its basic, liberalizing nature, ETD : It may, however, not always have this treatment, m: I've objected to a dichotomy between the sciences and what they call "the humanities," Humanism concerns the major intellectual and emotional concerns of men, Science is part of humanism, therefore, It's one of the great achievements of the human mind, No one can be liberally educated today without having some concept of the changed outlooks of mankind by the virtue of the advent of the scientific point of view and scientific activity. Science is as essential to a liberal education as literature and history, ETD : You have to learn that the germ theory is here to stay, and there are implications, m: Yes, There are tremendocs implications, for example, s0cia.l and philosophical, from the discovery of the uncer-

tainty principle by physj.cists, All philosophers, if they i are anything but metaphysicians with their heads entirely i 1 removed fromhumanaffairs, are taking account of these - 1 thin@ 1 3 Of course, it must not be forgotten that the so-called humanities are themselves subject to treatment as mere 1 technical subjects, I ETD: This is the point I was trying to get at before, JHH: Yes, Do you remember the definition of philosophy, that it consists in the abuse of a vocabulary especially designed to be so abused? A good deal of present day philosophy has little to do with man, It's a sort of game played with words, Literature also can be treated as something pseudo-scientific, e,g,, counting the number of times a certain man uses the infinitive, That has nothing to do with humanism, it seems to me, It nay have some ultimate humanistic purpose but in itself it is not humanism.

Reorganization of the Academic Senate, 1920

ETD: Your work on the Committee on Courses searched deeply into University teaching and objectives, You must have welcomed the Academic Senate reorganization in 1920 which allowed faculty members greater say in academic affairs. JHE?: It was quite an exciting time, The reorganization was conducted with dignity, I must say I was much better impressed with the tone of the speeches and the objectivity in that revolution thanzwas with-the speeches made and the tactics used during the "year of the oathom First of all, we had to make clear to the regents that we were just as worthy of a certain degree of self- government as were the students, We had to express our dissatisfaction with a scheme that foisted the senior professor as chairman upon a department regardless of his competence and fairness, We had to gain the dignity of adults and the right to appoint our own committees rather than have the president in his benevolent wisdom appoint all faculty committees, During the period of adolescence a benevolent, paternalistic government such as Wheeler exercised was appropriate, BesLdes, he was a scholar, wasn't he? He was a scholar, yes. But many of our departments were not filled with men of the distinction and vision required to build up the departments from within. Outside stimulus was necessary. Any departnent can become moribund, Wheeler was a very wise man. He could have been a success as a man of affairs, or in industry. Many scholars are of that sort, Others are not, ETD: What is your recapitulation of the salient facts, fancies, and faults of a faculty reorganization? JHH: When I returned to the University following World War I, Wheeler was beginling to suffer from senility, He hadn't been as vocal in condemning the Germas as the ultra- patriots thought he should be. He had been Eloosevelt professor and had been entertained by the Kaiser; he had a picture of the Kaiser on the wall of the President's House. Gayley and Stephens were very much bglophiles, and they became almost insulting to Wheeler, Wheeler was deprived of power and an administrative board was established, consisting of William Carey Jones, chairma, Gayley, znd Stephens. MID: Jones also became the undergraduate dean; however, there was an existing dean. JHH: Oh yes, that was Leuschner. Leuschner had been educated in Gemany and was not in favor. Jones just eae into Leuschner's office and announced that he was to replzce him, Patriotism became very emotional during this period, You weren't even supposed to play German music, Toward - the end of the war a state senator introduced a bill into the legislature to prohibit the use of the Germzn language in any state-supported institution. My lecture assist-t who was German-born, an utterly harmless person, was fired while I was in France. ETD: Were there other influences making reorganization necessary? m: The faculty became very restive at the end of the war because salaries had not been increased to correspond with the rise in the cost of living,, Purtherrnore, certain departments were very unhappy because of the custom of a?point- ing lifelong "headsH of departments, Some of these men were not very good adninistrators and some of them were not very considerate of their colleagues-. I* one case an . accusation was made that research money which should have been distributed among the department members was all taken by the head of the department, All this dissatisfaction came to a head under the rule of the administrative board, You may remember that Henry Morse Stephens died suddenly and Ralph Merritt was appointed in his place, This administrative board, apart from Ralph Iderritt, were men with very little administrative skill, Gayley, for exm-ple, was a very poor administrator, Jones was an older man, narrow in his interests, not a man of warm personality, not skilful in dealing with a person in a critical mood, These men appeared to be very conscious of their position now in the place of the president, MID: Did they envision this board as continuous or did they .envision it as temporary? JHH : Oh, I think they envisioned it as temporary until Wheeler

should be replaced, I Wheeler rapidly deteriorated. He had a good deal of I\1 aphasia and would wander around the campus not knowing II1 where he was, 'i I ETD: That was a very difficult situation, wasn't it?

JHH: It was tragic, At Charter Day exercises -- I believe it II

was the last year before his death -- I was asked to be I his escort, I didn't think much of Wheeler when I first , met him and I don't think he thought much of me, He said, I believe, that anybody from the University of Pennsylvania JHH: couldnft be expected to be very good, But when he found that I could handle big freshman classes -- he was very appreciative of teaching -- he became very cordial to me, I felt very much touched by being asked to be his escort, During the exercises he seemed more like his old self. I suppose the excitement increased his blood pressure, anB- he remembered people's names, It's one of my pleasant memories that my last real contact with him was on a day when his mind was fairly clear, ETD: Perhaps it was partly because he liked you, JHfi: I'm sure that he knew that he had a sympathetic escort. ETD: Before we leave President Wheeler, what would you say was his most effective characteristic in building the University? JHH: Well, one master stroke was to get Leuschner as dean of the graduate school, Leuschner has done more than almost any other single person to make this a great university, although few people know it, ETD: Specifically, what did Dean Leuschner do? JHH: He hew what a university should be, He had attended a German university, He was a distinguished astronomer, He knew how to apply high standards to graduate study, He was a very patient man, but very persistent, If he didn't win his point on one attempt he would return to it at the next opportunity. He was reasonable and sympathetic, He was a most valuable counselor, Leuschner was dean of the graduate school under presidents Wheeler, Barrows, and Campbell, and I think he continued for a while under Sproul. Each of these men leaned heavily on Leuschner, In his quiet way he had a tremendous influence upon the quality of the University, He knew what a university should be and the kind of men who should constitute it8 faculty, What about the University itself? Do you think that its physical position had a significance? We were here in the Golden Gate, at its principal port, San Francisco, a cosmopolitan city with connections all over the Pacific, and in a delightful climate, hd it was a young university in 1913, At the University of Pennsylvania I had been merely a youngster among a lot of old men. Here, although I was young, I felt at once that I was part of the University, At Pennsylvania I hadn't been expected to criticize my superior or hardly to make suggestions, There the chief monopolized graduate students, Xere Lewis sent graduate students to me, I think the department of chemistry had a good influence on the development of the University because of Lewis's own standards and his effectiveness as an administrator and scientist, You've talked about Lewis and you've talked about Leuschner as important leaders in the faculty. !Yere there others? There were others, too, George David Louderback should be

mentioned, and Andrew C, Lawson, - What about Professor Lawson? Lawson was the floor leader of the faculty in the Senate during the revolution, .He was a man of high standards, He was later elected to the National Academy, He had a national reputation as a geologist. He had a quick tongue; one had to be pretty sure of his ground in order to stand up to him. I recall incidents in the debates that went on while the faculty was making demands that the administrative board felt it ought to resist, Its members were so impressed with their new authority that they almost forgot they were professors, They seemed to think that they should resist the faculty instead of championing the cause of the faculty to a reasonable extent. Flaherty once made an effective speech in the senate, contrasting the pride the University had in student self-government with its utter unwillingness to trust the faculty to handle if8 own affairs. At that meeting Jones undertook to deplore the "personal tone the discussion was taking," Lawson jumped to his feet and said, ItNobody is personal but you, sir, and in a way that is highly improper," Jones never came to a senate meeting after that, Lawson was a little like Harold Ickes,. 9e loved to scare people, You'd think he would bite your head off, Soon after I came when I was appointed to represent the College of Chemistry on the Engineering Council, I thought I'd have to be very careful not to arouse any unnecessary discussion with Lawson because of the way he talked, But later on when I got to know him better I decided the only people he really respected were those who could stand up to him with a g~odargument, You were either a knight or a villain. If you were a knight on horseback he would respect you even though he fought against you, But he had no respect for a mere foot soldier. ETD: Apparently there were effective people surrounding meeler, and the group worked well together to establish a great university. JHH: Wheeler was bent on building a great university, His own personality helped him. He was an impressive figure, a handsone man, He used to ride around the canpus on his horse. He spoke well; his English was perfect, At the same time it was not high-brow. Anybody could understand - what he said. He was like Woodrow Wilson in that respect,

Both men could speak very effectively, with utter accepta- J bility to the intellectual, and yet not in any way beyond the comprehension of the ordinary citizen, He was not a man whom you would pick out as a university professor, He could mix with non-academicians, ETD: Another thing that interests me is this: This is before the day that the president of the University had to interpret the University to Sacramento in order to get more money from the legislators, JIM: That's very true. The state was a much simpler organism- than it is now, There was only the University of California, There was no regional pulling and hauling, no jealcusies between different parts of a state system, Apparently the administrative committee replacing Wheeler was not effective, How was that disposed of? JRK: It came to an end with the choice of Barrows as president, ETD: Was he everyone's number one choice? JHH: Let me go back into this, because the regents had their own ideas about who should be president, One man who waa being considered, so we heard, was Suzzallo, who wa8 president of the University of Washington, He was an aggressive, energetic man, but the kind of a man whom I would pick out as more suited to be the head of an advertis- ing company, He was a psychologist, How di3 he catch their fancy? Well, he was cne of those men who sound well in public, He could make a glib speech, But the trouble with him is illustrated by the fact, according to my information, that he had a $15,000 salary when the highest paid professor had $5,000, Now, if he was worth 515,000 it could 1 only be because he could get at least some $10,000 men to 1I come to the University of Washington, In a meeting of our I 1 advisory commission, Sproul told how he once reccnqended , that our first Nobel Prize winner should have a higher I I salary than he was getting, That illustrates the differ- I ence between the two men, 1 Ralph Merritt was being pushed by Guy Earl , Guy Earl. was chairman of the finance cornittee of the Board of Regents, and the most influential member of the board, Re was a big businessman who liked to help run the Univer- sity, He later on made it very difficult for Cangbell. . - Ralph Nierritt was his protegd, Earl had a kind of devo- tion to the University, He spent a great deal of his tirce keeping up with what was going on, ETD: Was there any communication between the regents and the faculty as this choice was being developea? xm: There was. The faculty demanded the opportunity to make its own views known, Fortunately, the regents' subcommittee that conferred with the faculty had Chester Rowel1 as chairman. Chester Rowell was a newspaperman who had built up the Presno Republican as one of the best papers in the country, Later he was one of the Chronicle editors, He was the only man on the board of regents who had a Ph.D. We all respected him, ED: Did you have your own committee? JHH : Yes, Lewis and Louderback were both members, I don't remember the others, They conferred with a cormittee of the regents, The regents' committee didn't disclose to the faculty committee what candidates they were consfder- ing, So the faculty committee would have simply to talk on a general basis about the kind of a man they wanted. They made it pretty clear their faculty specificztions did not fit some of the candidates, Ralph Merritt was then controller of the University, 3TD: What was Mr, Merritt's background apart from -- JHH : Well, in his early years it was very much like Sproul's, - He graduated from the University and became controller, I don't know if he was also manager of the ASUC, ETD: An organization man. JHH : He was an organization man, a businessman. His idea of the University was demonstrated by a conference I once attended when the people who were interested in athletics -- JHH : Ralph Merritt objected to the faculty's plans for admit- ting students because it made it hard for them to get good athletes and good fellov~sto join fraternities,. etc. Did the faculty have some specific person in mind? No, I don't think they did, A letter was published in the Argonaut by Sam Holmes, Sam Holmes was a professor of zoology. Holmes made it pretty clear that the faculty wanted an academic man as president, ETD : This established the position of the faculty, JHH : Yes, The regents as a whole were not hostile to the faculty. I think they were more friendly than was the administrative board; they acceded to the faculty's demands, We made our demands in a dignified way, We demanded (1) that the senate should appoint its own committees; (2) that we should elect a committee on comittees; (3) a committee on budget and fnterdepartnental relations; and (4) temporary department, chairmen in place cf permanent department "heads, * At first we won the right to elect the chaimen, but that was discontinued under Canpbell, We also demanded and got a conference comnittee of the regents, Eowever, when Campbell accepted the position he objected to that, We won the right of petition, or memorializing the regents. The president is required to transmit to the regents a memorial by the senate, ETD: Does a memorializing statement require a special percentage of the total vote? I JHH: No, a majority is adequate, 1I Let's go back to this period, Barrows was then chosen 4 i president. ETD: You still haven't explained exactly how the choice came to rest on Barrows, JHH : He was a man of striking and engaging personality; he was JHH: large; he spoke very well, He had organized the school system in the ~hill~pines,.He was a professor of pollti- cal science and talked about matters of public concern. So he was a figure of considerable dimensions, ETD: Was he the most outstanding figure on the campus? JHE: Well, one of the most, He was much interested in mill- tary affairs. He later became major general and commander of the state National Guard, And the alumni knew him, His many contacts made him widely known, very different, for example, from a man like Lewis, ETD: Why was he the choice among men who were quite distinguished in scholarship? JHH : Well, if there was any one reason, it was just that here was a man who was available aad who had the personal qualities, He could make a good speech and effectively represent the University before the public. MID: You weze thinking partly then in terms of public relztions, JHH : Yes. And the regents liked him, Everybody liked him, and they respected his achievements, He had done a good job in the Philippines, Unfortunately, he never really accepted the spirit of the revolution. He more or less resented the budget committee and consulted it grudgingly, When Campbell became president Walter Xorris Hart was vice-president, and he sat on the budget committee, '#alter Hart was in sympathy with the faculty. He could represent their views without the necessity of writing a lot of letters, And that attitude, that spirit, was continued under Sproul, ETD: Barrows interpreted the presidency as an authoritarian position still. JHH : Yes, Barrows failed, in my opinion, because he was too easy going and amiable. He tended to agree with the last person he talked to. He maintained the full confidence of neither regents nor faculty, JHH : An episode that contributed to criticism of the administrative board was the fact that it succumbed to pressure by nprogressivewschoolmen to substitute certi- fication by school principals for the subject requirements then in force. A great deal of pressure was put on the faculty to accede to this, It was finally jammed through the Academic Senate after the College of Letters and Science had voted it down three times, Barrows seemed to have no clear theory of University policy, He deserved credit for resigning, EiPD: He probably didn't understand the demands of the whole situation either, JHH: No, he didn't, For instance, he never organized a strong political science department, We all have our strengths and weaknesses, When a man becomes a public figure his weaknesses are open to public inspection and appraisal. And I'm immensely fond of many people whom I don't think would be competent to hold certain offices, ETD: In the development of the University President Wheeler provided what was needed in his time, The University outgrew him, and President Barrows was a transition: he was partly Wheeler but he hadn't taken on enough new qualities to be effective, JHH: He wasn't a profound thinker, His lectures in political science abounded in stories of his own varied experiences, He had had many experiences all over the world, which he would tell in the most charming way, Members of the faculty and some of the keenest-minded students criticized his lectures for lack of depth, ETD : Following the reorganization of faculty affairs, there were two short terms in the presidency of the University, Was this because it wasn't clear what kind of person was needed in the presidency? 140

JHH : We had won our revolution, in part and on paper, but it hadn't been consolidated and we hadn't establfshed firm precedents. All through the Wheeler, Barrow, and Campbell. administrations, the University owed an incalculzble debt to Armin 0. Leuschner, a man of great good well and infini-te patience but terrific persistence, And he knew better than any of those presidents what a university should be. ETD: Why wasn't he the president? JHH : Well, Wheeler was the president to begin with, and Wheeler was a much more imposing public figure, kt bxeeler was essentially a small college man from Brown University, where the British rather than the Gernan university idea was practiced, ETD : He couldn't have been made president when 'meeler was put aside. JHH: No. Because he had been educated in Germany, he had a rather difficult time. He became one of the suspects, As a matter of fact, nobody was more loyal than he. ETD: Leuschner was a casualty. JHH : But Leuschner's wisdom was used by all the presidents, and he helped a great deal to educate %'heeler in what a real university should be. Barrows and Ca~pbellused him continually. He was dean of the graduate 2ivision for many years. ETD: Were there any particular complications to the choice of President Campbell? Jrn: I don't think there was any real controversy. Campbell appeared to me a "natural." He also was a naq of command- ing figure, and generally regarded as our mcst distinguished scholar. We knew he would understand tBe faculty point of view. It wasn't lack of faculty support that plagued Camp- JHH : bell. His weakness was lzck of experience outside the academic world. He'd lived up on top of a mountain; he lacked contact with the outside world. He expected all persons to be logical and reasonable. I very reluctantly became dean of nen, out of loyalty to Czmpbell because I wanted his administration to succeed. I knew he would h~vedifficulty handling slxdents; he hadn't been in touch with students. He had a Scottish conscTence, and very strong convictions on what was right, However, you can't be too rigid in your code of conduct when you must deal with all sorts of people. You have to recognize the differences in their backgrounds, md you cannot expect all persons to behave according to ycur om high standards. For instance, when I was dean of Zen I ruled that the tennis courts should be open Sunday norning, They had been closed Sunday mornings on the theory that students should all go to church. But that is a poor way to induce students to attend church. If they prefer to play tennis, you'd better let them play tennis, They will be in a better state of mind on hlonday. Campbell was, I think, as far as academic affgirs were concerned an excellent president. I saw a great deal of him. He and Walter Idorris Hart and Baldwia Toads, w3o was another vice-president, met daily at nocn, Members of the faculty had ready access to the Campbell adninistra- tion. If you couldn't see Campbell on short 2otice, you could see Hart, and you'd get an answer by the following day. If you had a difficulty, something that required presidential action, you could get a prongt answer. As dean of men, I joined the group once a week to report on my activities. Campbell took me with hin when he went south to look over the sites for the proposed "Southern Branchan We were entertained at Huntington's mansion, We visited 142

. ...> bC JHH: the various sites and looked over their prospectuses, Most - '. of the plans for a camfius represented the stadium as the heart of the institution, ETD: That's an. interesting comment on the times, JHH : Those were difficult times for Campbell because of huge administrative problems of choice of site with real estate interests under the surfaee, ETD: What were the :actors that were most important in that choice? JHH : I think Campbell preferred Pasadena, in order to take advantage of the presence of the strong institution, the California Institute of Technology, But strong interests insisted on Los Angeles. ETD: What were the chief forces? JHH: The chamber of commerce, the alumni, and commercial . interests, It was suspected that some of the regents had real estate interests in the Westwood region, The regents made no provisionfor faculty housing, So now most members of the faculty have to live at long dis- tances from the University, The regents allowed real estate interests to sell for non-University purposes the surrounding country made valuable by the University. ETD: What sort of planning did you envisage for UCLA, or did it just grow? JHH : It grew without the most effective leadership, such as Kerr now provides. Guy Earl and others were not men whc could envisage a great modern university, A far better leader than Moore could have been a~pointedas "director," If there had been a few more men like Chester Rowel1 on the board at the time, results would have been different, ETD: Was he the only man who was reasonable and logical? JHH : No, There were several others, John Francis Xeylan in his younger days was a force for good quality in the University, JHH : John Francis Neylan was a very valuable regent prior to the oath business, He always had a lawyerts conscience, He would represent the czient whatever the cause and he would want to win a case, On the other hand, he did have a fairly high idea of a university, very different from Guy Earl 's. ETD: What was going on in the internal structure of the University? JHH: One of the changes that occurred in that period was the consolidation of colleges, We had a college of letters, a college of social sciences, a college of natural sciences, a college of chemistry, mining, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, !5e founding fathers thought, evidently, that in order to have a true university a lot of colleges were necessary, It was a misinterpretation of the English colleges, which were residential and social. The American college and university have evolved by assimilating more or less im- perfectly, on the one hand the German, and on the other hand the very different English organization of a university, The University of Nichigan had a good deal of influence in tlie early days on the development of other state universities, It was the first and the best of the state universities, at the beginning of the century, The colleges of letters, social sciences, and natural sciences were consolidated into a single College of Letters and Science offering the bachelor of arts degree, The

faculty of the college of letters fought the ~lanbitterly, kI I They believed that the A.B. degree should be given only I/ 5 for a curriculum based upon Latin, Greek, and mathenatics. I ETD: This was a strong feeling? JHH : Yes, William A. Merrill, who was chairman of the department of Latin, fought bitterly, He was a somewhat pedantic JHH: man who prided himself on being an authority on the Organic Act, which established the University, and he clashed with Lawson, During one of our debates somebody made a motion, somebody offered an amendment, and another person wanted something else, Merrill said, %lay I suggest, if I may cone to the assistance of the chair --" Lawson snapped out, "The chair doesn't need any assistance !" [~aughter] Merrill never attended another meeting of the senate, ETD: Well then, there was internal arrangement, .Now, the organization of the Academic Senate was proceeding -- JHH: The faculty then had to organize itself, you see, with these new rights accorded by the regents, We had to decide how to elect our committee on committees, what the budget committee should do, a=rd so on, I was nember of a committee that set up the general criteria for the promotion to the several ranks, Yie wanted to regularize it, Under Wheeler, a professor's salary was at the lea sure of the president, \Ve wanted to have ranks with designated salaries. This was necessary to avoid favoritism and resultant dissatisfaction, The Academic Senate adopted regulations, and prepared a manual. ETD: You were learning how to run your affairs, JHH: Yes, This work of organization did a good deal to make the faculty University-minded instead of just depart- mentally-minded, Service on the budget committee or on the Committee on Committees leads nost men to take a University point of view, to feel pride in an institution - which he has helped in sone small way to build up, ETD: This is a strength of democracy, isn't it? JHH : Yes; when it is a really functioning viable denccracy, then you take pride in it, In a university of this size the administration cannot recruit faculty wisely without faculty advice, I have been proud to be a me~ber of a great department, and proud also to be a nember of the faculty of a great university, brnL* C"Y*3. 145

JHH : Let me add a sequel to the 1920 reorganization, One of the rights the faculty gzined was departmental selection of chairmen, It didn't work out well because it led to electioneering within a department, the form- ing of parties, the pro-Jones party and the anti-Jones party, in a department, It led to too many meetings and too much electioneering, Ca2?bell insisted, when he became president, that this be dfscontinued, At present, a chairman is z3pointed by the chancellor on recommendation, When Davis was dean of letters and science he recommended the department chairmen, He was close to conditions within depzrkents, One may get a more acceptable chairman by privzte consultation than by a formal vote in the dep-bent. MID: What was the next large devexopnent after Academic Senate organization? JHH: One was a modus vivendi with the "Southerfi manch, " and how to nurture it up to maturity, ETD: This was a difficult thing, wasn't it? JHH: It was, for several reasons, One was the considerable difference in ideas on the two cmpuses. The southern institution had been grafted onto a state normal school. Certain members of its faculty were not of university i . caliber, but expected nevertheless to be university pro- I

fessors with all the perquisites of the rank. We later 1I faced the same problem in Szllta Barbara. I Riverside, on the other harld, started from scratch, I I without this incubus on its back, UCLA had to outlive I the past and dispose of th-gs, as Santa Barbara had to - I deal with industrial arts, Time has now largely solved I these problems. But they were then adolescents, prone to suspect us of trying to hold them down, For example, Leuschner once outlined a certain plan of operation between south arld north. One of the southern members said, "Well, this sounds all right but where's the ntgger in the w~odpile?~ ETD: Do you think that this has finally been dispelled? JHH : I think it has nearly disapneared, The Davis conferences have helped greatly, I think I mentioned the fact that I was chairman of the first post-war [World War 11) Davis conference, and the practice was to have a northerner and a southerner room together, I'm sure a lot of southerners were surprised to find that we were not trying to hold them down, MID: Did your people go down to staff-the faculty there? JHH : no, The Southern Branch suffered by the appointment of an educator, E.C. Moore, as provost, That was a great mistake, How dia he fall into this? Was it because he was well- horn? JHH : No. He had been head of the teachers' college and was just kept on, ETD: And he was there for quite z while, JHH: Yes, for a long time, One of the principal concerns of Sproul has been to unify the University and prevent the two parts from being public rivals; he devoted a great deal of his time to living on the UCLA campus and pro- moting this policy, He asked ne, when Hedrick died, if I would be interested in being provost, Yell, I've resisted that sort of thing pretty successfully, I'm just not interested in it, This vrould have been a very difficult job, 1 ETD: How did you establish a relationship in chemistry? This I I might be an interesting example of UCB-UCLA relations at work, JHH : I was consulted by Moore as to who might go there to teach chemistry, But he ended by selecting William Conger Morgan, who had been in Berkeley before Lewis came, and who wanted to be allowed to continue to run the freshman course according to his own ideas without any reference to Lewis's policies. When Lewis didn't accede to this he several years, Then Moore called hin to the Southern Branch, ETD: Well, that was unhappy. I JHH: That was a ridiculous thing to do, They should have 1: tried to get a person of the caliber of Lewis, But they called a man who had never published anything, a man with no scientific standing, !he nature of his II. lectures is indicated by the coment a young man made who called on me soon after I arrived in Berkeley, He said of Morgan, *He's a wonderful teacher. He walks up 1; and down and never looks at his notes, but the fellows I who had last year's notes found that they were repeated word for word." That's the kind of teacher he was, ETD: How long was he there? JHH: Many years, I don't how just how many, This created continual problems of adjustment thzt persisted a long time, When I was dean of letters and science I encountered I the reluctance of Sproul and Deutsch to have any diver- I gence in academic regulations between the two parts of I the University, We were supposed to have the same junior C ' certificate requirements. They feared that any divergence 1; . would result in separation. I said that the surest way to E have trouble is to hitch your team of horses so rigidly that you have no play between them. There was a Scottish dominie who went to see a quarrel- some couple. He remonstrated with the^, saying, "Why don't you live together peacefully like the cat and the dog - there, lying together on the heart?" "Ah, yes," said the man, "but tie them together and see what haypens," I believed it wise to allow each part of the University to experiment with curricula, to develop its own individ- uality, maintaining only such unifomity as was necessary in relation to entrance requirements, I! ETD: Were President Sproul and Dean Deutsch afraid that Univer- sity standards would be lowered? No, I don't think it was that so much as that they would fly apart and become two separate institutions, like the University of Oregon and Oregon State and the University of Washington and Washington State, each presenting a separate case to the public and to the legislature,

Expansion to a Silulti-Campus University - ETD: Coming along to a much later period, what do you think about the expansion into the Universities of California? JHH : It's quite a problem, of course, as an institution gets larger, not to overorganize it, There's always a tendency to multiply organization and business so that the professor has to spend a good deal of his the in the business aspects of the college. I think you've got to have coordination. Institutions must not be hostile to each other, They must be friendly rivals, They must emulate, not deprecate, each other, I think it's being handled pretty well, Our biggest threat has been a school system with the state colleges under an entirely different, uncoordinated administration and with very different ideals, I'm told thzt five out of nine presidents of state.colleges have only doctor of education degrees. In a proper state systeq the presidents should have more scholarship than that, ETD : Do you think there was any possibility of avoiding this kind of problem? JHH: Yes, I think the University did not display very much vision, There were many in Berkeley who opposed the establishment of junior colleges, They didn't realize that population was going to increase and that we couldn't just remain the tight little institution we were. JHH : I was much pleased, as.1 think I related before, when Sproul asked me to submit to the Committee on Educational Policy the question of whether UCLA should be allowed to have graduate study, I found only one man of all those I consulted who opposed extending the privilege to them. So I reported that the consensus here was that you couldn't have a great university if you denied %he professors the privilege of having graduate students as soon as they were ready, That did not mean that a weak department should start in right away to give Ph.D. degrees, But there were several departments at Los Angeles that were quite ready for it, The state college system has suffered from the same difficulty from which the University suffered in trying to transform normal schools into colleges, These state colleges were originally normal schools, First they wanted to become state colleges, next they wanted to become universities, regardless of quality, I don't how that we could have stopped it, Of course, if the state colleges had been taken out of the school system they would have been more anenable to higher standards, more willing to emulate us, It became evident in the recent years of the Sproul administration that our administrative structure should be decentralized, Sproul had over 50 persons supposedly reporting directly to him, Most of these rarely could get to him, A department chairnan told about how he tried in vain for weeks to get an =swer from the president to a simple question, Finally he got it by tele- - phoning daily for eight days, The regents employed an outside organization to examine the administrative organization of the University, ETD : Did the faculty have any say in how this was to be done? JHH: I was chairnan of the Senate Advisory Committee to the president, The South didn't have such a committee Bqrinted from SCEOOLAND SOCIETY,?day 26, 1945, VoL 61, So. 1587, pagea 349-350.

SHOULD MATHEMATICS BE DROPPED FROM HIGHSCHOOL CURRICULA? \\'E tontinue to read attaeks upon the preseripticm of matbel~raticsfor tollege entrance, such a8 the one by Lawrenee Elliott To~~~linsonin SCHOOL MP & crm, February IS; in which he says: "The high- scboul snbjects u-hieh rorrelute most highly with me- ess in college am the eonstants in general seeondarg dueation, and thex do not include mathematics and foreign I;m,gge." He, like others of the saw mind, base their aysertioms, so far as mathematies is con- rernecl, upn the findings of the "Eight Year Stuby," nctclrding to n-bieh (Time, November 25, 1940), "A group of. 46 wbo deliberately avoided mathematics in highehool surpassed their clossn~atesin every aollege subjer-t, indoding matbemath." So many, like Mr. ~o~uliisoh,have eoneluded Goru this hding that rrrathe~~lnties~u&y be omitted hm bigb-sdmol programs, or at least weakened, without ' loss either to stndents or to society, that we should take pius to be clear as to just what deductions are jnstiM on the kqsis of the evidence offered. There ~uustbe others, like ruyself, who would like to know whether anshing in the methods used in the "Eight Tear Stud\-m renders the above orthodox eonelusion any lrlore valid than others that might be suggested, inelndi the £oh*: L Students crm do a little better in elementary, high- do01 ruatht-utits if they postpone it till tbey anmore mature, in eolk-e 2. Elemeutaq nutbeumtieu, us taught in high-scboob, is of no value as prepantion fur inore advaneed tollc@ uIw==% 3. Culkgc dudeuta abo liave not ntudied motlierrmtiea in xbwl an- able, in most tollegeq, to find eournea reqwr- ing no nut11c-metical background, in wlricl~ good grada em easily be setud This king the ease, e,rvhwb ore under no obligation to equip studenta so as to keep oym to them tbc doom of opportunity into the varicue prof- smm for wbich eome mathematics b emntid. 4. It is not necessary to study elementary algebra d geometry in echo01 in order to be prepared for analpie geometry and calculue in college. 5. Evidence of a statistical nature, when gathered 4 interpreted by persons, Ilowever honest their intent, who are committed in favor of particular findings, edly I d to unwarranted eoncludonr I have su@ested these alternative inferences from the "Eight Year Study" to a nu~uberof persons, in- eluding some who were responsible for it, but without, till now, being able to discover any baeie for ding the111 out, despite the huge expenditure of money and effort upon that study. Until that can be done, it seems to 111e that we can hardly aaept Mr. Tomlip son's eonelusion as established. Indeed, I have p-sb- lished in this journal (dWar and the Deei~nalPoint," V. 55: 543, 1942) solne evidence to the contrary. When he says, "It would seem that college offieiah do not realize that lack of tnathematies in high sebod apparently does not hinder snemss in college," it in evident that he is standing too far off from eo- freshmen to see all that would appear on a aearer view. I have a freshman class in chemist^^ of over one thousand (divided, incidentally, into laboratory and quiz sections of only twenty-five each, so that n get to know them pretty well) hoping to be physi-

' cians, engineers, phpsieists, chemists, baet eriologists, botanists, zoologists, physiologists, or simply F~P educated people. But lnrny of them ertni~othandk the subject because of their wretched t'aining in school in nrith~iletieand elementary a1gein-n. (Cf. "War and the Decin~alPoint.") Can it really be true that the schools hare QO obligation toward nll these freshmen? Or is it thought possible tu differentiate thetn from the 0th- nt the early age of thirteen or fourteen) If there are answers to the above questions bad upon valid evidence, let us have them. JHH: because, they said, qow can three or five men represent the whole fac~lty?~They seemed to think that a man could represent only his own particular constituency, The outside surveyors were on the point of recom- mending a horizontal type of organization, with one officer responsible, e,g,, for liberal arts education on all campuses, My conmittee opposed that plan. (I think I put my meinorandum into the archives,) I said, nThe kind of man who would be willing to be a traveling statewide official would be very different from the kind of man willing to be a dean on a campus for a 'tour of duty,'n So we recommended a vertical type of organization, with quasi-independent campuses, coordinated by conference and adjustment rather than by rigid, legal restriction,

Special. Committee on Admissions

ETD: After ranging from the Comittee on Courses through Academic Senate reorganization to administration of a statewide university, would you please return to the Special Committee on hissions? You were in this group from 1928 clear through 1936, What were the problems in admissions? JHH:' With the advent of the progressive education movement the theory was advanced that a student should be admitted to

the University regardless of his school curriculum. ' There was an "eight-yew study," of perhaps 30,000 students which indicated, anazinglp, that students who didn't study mathematics in high school did even better in college than those who had,*

++SeeMr, Hildebrand's renarks on this in his article, "Should Mathernztics be Dropped from High-School Curricula?" School aqd Society, Vol, 61, No, 1587 (!flay 26, 19451, pages 349-350. JHR: The California State Department of Education was spearheading this movement, It was stated only a few years ago by an associzte superintendent of public instruction in California, He said, "The elementary school more than any other has pioneered and paved the. way to a truly community-centered, life-centered, child- centered, as opposed to subject-centered, educationem If you have three tlcentersn I don't know why you couldn't have a fourth. This is exposed in the teacherst guides to education in early childhood and later childhood, published by the State Department of Education as recently as 1956 and 1957, Let me read this into the record, These are samples of the doctrines presented in these guides, and which we've been suffering under for over. 30 Years, As the children follow through an area of experience they will learn geogra~hy,history, arith- netic, science, conservation, health, literature, music, art, not as separate subjects but as material essential in carrying out their purposes. What you do if the purposes don't happen to include arithmetic, isn't stated, Almost all the wide areas of human experience within which the children me guided are rich in o~portunitiesto extend their understanding of the traditional subjects through meaningful activities. For instance, through numerous experiences in building with wood, creating clothing for thenselves and their dolls, or engaging in a drmatic play in a ?layhouse, the children learn to use numbers, ...The school is a part of a constructive program aimed at the social and economic adjustment of all children, ..,The experienced curriculum places emphasis in education on the continuous and wholesome development of children, This curriculum is in contrast with others which emphasize subject JHH : matter mastery or certain zs~ectsof intellectual growth rather than the wholesome development of the child's total personality, ...By responsibly thinking through group problems and acting upon conclusions found by the group to be for the good of all, the children are building patterns of ethical democratic living, ETD: How do you relate subject mastery to experience? This concept doesn't do it, does it? JHH : No, not at all, When the child enters school his great task is to make himself one of a social group of his peers. He succeeds to the extent that be learns acceptable ways of participating as a rneder of a group, ETD : VCho defines the objectives of the group? JHH : The group does its own defining, If it happens to be a vicious gang, why of course you lem acceptable ways of participating with them. You go with the crowd, This is precisely, of course, whab Hitler and Xussolini and to some extent the Russian schools are doing so far as their social relations are concerned, ETD: And this doesn't teach the child to evaluate the crowd, JHH : Not at all, no. He adopts the nethods of whatever crowd he ha~pensto be with. Well, some of us believe that a child's great task on entering school is to learn to read and write and do a little figuring, But that's not what has been preached. That's a sanple of what we've been up against ever since the advent of progressive education, We had been practically forced in 1919 to accede to the admission of anybody recommended by the principal, ETD : Let's get back to 1919 ,when the zdnissions policy was changed, JHH : That was the time when the state department, speaking for the school men, demanded that the school should have the right of deciding who should go to college. They didn't want to have their curricula dominated by the - 153

JHH : University, they said. They wanted to be able to teach anything in their own way, and not be required to follow the subject pattern of the University, They were opposed to organizing their course of instruction for the benefit of "the feww going to college, Of course, a much larger fraction is coning to the University now ar,d conditions have changed, As I renenber, the ColIege of Letters and Science enphatically rejected this three tirnes, Then it was jammed through the Academic Senate i-n a packed meeting on the argument that it was necessary for public relations, Dean of the School of Education was Lange, When he became dean of education, he went over to the side of the progressive educators, He would encourzge the people in Sacramento, in the Department of =ducation, to adopt a regulation regarding admissions, and then announce to the senate what it must do to follow suit, There were bitter debates ad accusations about his conduct in matters of this sort, Re had a very bad influence, Hunt, the dean of agriculture, 3zd resisted the revolution, He was one of the very few who had not joined with the faculty in the revolution, Re ruled the College of Agriculture with a firm hand, He was o2posed openly by Charles Lipman a3d John Burd and cne or two others, Years later, the senate reasserted its control of admission requfrenents, George Louderback was the leader in this, Now, unlike all other state universities, so far as I know, we set our own standards for admission, In many states, all high school graduates are legally eligible for mission; many are admitted and then flunked, a loss to all concerned, As a matter of fact, many school principals found themselves in a hot spot because they were subject to pressure to recommend students who later failed and damaged the record of the school, The wiser principals began to realize that they had a hot potato, Me had to re-establish the requirements for admissions. ETD: In some states where a diploma from high school is the only prerequisite to admission to' a state university the flunk-out rate is very high, JHH: Yes, It is a waste of noney and a waste of time for a boy to spend a year trying to do something he won't get away with and which only uses up a yea. of his precious life, The selection and nurturing of college material at secondary level seems reasonable, but it certainly hae trouble gaining popular support, JHH: The argumeat is, we mustn't create an "elite classen ETD: Is this when you developed your method of selection of students for Chemistry 1A-lB? Yes, I don't reneniber the exact year, It began in the twenties, When the dm burst right after World War I we simply couldn't physically take all those who wanted to enter the course, We've beea able to hold that line ever since, The conon people are highly dependent upon the exceptional people, And you don't train the exceptional people in order that they may hew their way to positions I of wealth and gower, You prepare them to serve society. ETD: An effective democracy needs exceptional human beings, JHII: Of course it does, I Eventually they devised different nethods of admis-. sion to the University, all of them guaranteed to admit only those who had reasonable prospects of succeeding in University work, It's only fair to the student. With the develo~mentin California of junior colleges and state colleges we've been able to maintain this policy. Selection and Promotion of '~acultyMembers

ETD: Here's a committee that sounds as if it would be quite complicated: the Committee on Budget and Interdepart- mental Relations, This was 1923, JHH: I remember particularly that the budget committee at that time set up the criteria for the ranks in the academic ladder, what the criteria and the length of periods of instructor, assistant professor, associate professor are. ETD: This had been quite arbitrary? m: Yes, Formerly President Wheeler decided personally about all promotions, President Wheeler once told Eugen Neuhaus that he would give him a raise in rank but since he was earning so much by his public lecturing he wouldn't raise his salary, There was no regular plan, Our committee set the requirement of the doctor's degree or its equivalent for appointment as instructor, ETD: What is an equivalent to a doctor's degree? .Ear: Well, in a field such as the arts, for example, the Ph.D, is not the recognized nark of competence. The budget committee established the scale. It has been modified, of course, from the to time. I forget how many times I've been a member of the budget committee, I went abroad in 1930 for a year expecting that I could sneak back without being noticed for committee apgointnent, However, I found that again I had been appointed to the heaviest job of all, the budget conmittee, It is always a major assignment, It means working hours every day through the Christmas holidays. It's been a terrific job. DD: More detail on the resgonsibilities and work of the budget committee would be valuable, JHH : One of the very essential activities in maintaining the quality of a university is the selection of the faculty, That involves not only the scrutiny of candidates that are nominated from other institutions, but also qualifi- cations of those who are in the lower ranks and are nominated for promotion to a Sigher rank, For a promotion or call to an associate or full professorship a special committee is appointed by the budget committee, ETD: The budget committee always makes the choice, JHH : The budget committee actually nominates the member to the president, who issues the actual invitation to serve, The budget committee, as you bow, is appointed by the Committee on Committees, The Committee on Cormnittees is elected, Under Vheeler all the faculty committees were appointed by him personally, As a result of the revolution we acquired the right to select our own committees, It is done by this nethod. After World War I1 we altered the election procedure to provide for staggered terns for the Committee on Committees, I advocated the staggering of membership for the sake of continuity, A faculty that can't trust itself to elect menbers vrhoz they can trust for more than a year is not competent to elect anybody, Under the old plzn, furthermore, there were too many nominees, Under the present system one has only a few nominees to consider, usually double the number to be elected, In the south they elected nenbers to the Committee on Committees and ~adea~pointaents to the b~dgetcommit- tee on a rather regional basis. ETD: You mean from differect departments? JHH: Fron different areas of the University, ETD: What do you think is the basis here? 157

JHH: Me assume that a member of either ccmmittee is not representing a constituency, Xe seeks to promote the general welfare of the University, not just of his own part. Be merely puts at the disposal of the committee his special bowledge of tbe rsea to which he belongs, When the budget committee acted on the budget of the department of chemistry I did not vote. I gave informa-

tion only, I didn l t feel it was my business to aggrandize the department of chemistry at, the expense of another department, That zttitude was common during my years as a member of the budget ccnmittee, It's a sober- ing experience to be called upon to deal with the for- tunes of your colleagues, All members, during all of my experience, acted with a high degree of humility and honesty,

ETD: How viould you characterize a really good budget committee . member? m: A person serving on the budget committee should be pretty well acquainted with the fsculty, One who lacks such acquaintances cannot help to select members for a promotion committee, for example, Some members of the faculty are very conscientious and conpetent in such a matter, Others either dcn't take it sufficiently seribusly or lack the requisite judgment, A man was once elected to the Committee on Committees who hardly Mew one person in five of those up for consideration. He was an estinzble person but he just wasn't equipped for this task, Kenbers of the Committee on . Committees should be persons who have broad acquaintance with the members of the faculty and the operation of the , University, This eliminates the man who probably wouldn't be in Academic Senate activities beczuse study and writing claim his entire time, Professor Ferdinand Lessing, for instance, probably didn't spend much time away from his Mongolian dictionary when he waa compiling it. He did not join the faculty until rather late in life, I don't know what committees he has served upon, He would have been an excellent member of a committee having to do with Asian or Oriental languages and literature, . But we don't have very many people, do we, who are completely divorced from the social --? !here are some who never mix, never come to the Faculty Club, There are others, like most of the professors of educati~n,who never mix with anybody outside their own school, I once urged Dean Brownell to encourage hie staff to come up to the Faculty Club, I said, nYota people are often criticized unjustly. Why don't you come up and good-naturedly defend yourselves?' He said, "1 how we should, but we're so busy,@ I said, "Bill, do you realize that part of your busyness is due to the fact that you have, for example, 57 graduate courses in education? In chemistry we have ten,' You place the Committee on Committees, then, as broadly representative of the faculty, Yes, for although they're always rypointed from different areas, the faculty is not divided up into representational groups, Let me say something about the personnel of promotion committees, Of course, I don't know intimately at all what's happened during the last ten years, when I have I been a member of only a few committees on promotions and calls, It has been in general the custom to appoint to committees men who are members of related departments, Bnncro'. 1'b.ay 159

JHH: It is assumed that the department initiated the recommendation; what is called for is an independent evalua- tion, Let me give an example, When Professor Haskell retired from the chairmanship of the department of mathematics, the conunittee appointed contained no mathematician. Instead we interviewed virtually every member of the mathematics department, If a professor from the department had been appointed he might himself have been the candidate. He could not have truly represented the views of a whole department unless they were unanimous, As it was, we canvassed the views of practically all members of the department, The committee included Lewis and myself in chemistry; E.P. Lewis, chairman of physics; Leuschner from astronomy; and two engineers, Derleth and Cory, if I remember correctly, We were all vitally interested in strong mathematics for our students, ETD: 'What did you want in math at that time? JHH: We wanted a department of mathematics that would have the same sort of intellectual vitality that existed in physics, chemistry, and astronomy. (Engineering had less of it at the tine; Baskell was a very charnag gentleman, a very cultivated person, but he had not been an aggressive builder of a strong department.) We wanted mathematics to be stimulzting and exciting to our own students. Those who take seriously the building up of their departments, attend national meetings, get acquainted with the most promising young men in other institutions, ETD: The leadership in chemistry and physics was exerting a positive influence to vitalize mzthenatics, JHH: At that particular time physics had not yet been resur- rected as it was with the advent of Lawrence and others, Nevertheless, it was a good department, But notice that the committee includedtwo chemists.

JHH : We began by calling in for individual conference almost every member of the department, Ve discussed the problem at length, The committee recommended to the

president that I be commissioned to go east and interview a number of Fersons. First, I carried on quite a correspondence with scientists of my acquzintance in physics and chemistry as to what they thought of their own departments of mathematics ; who were their strong men. Next I studied the National Research Council post- doctoral fellows in mathematics, I rnade'two lists; one of the institutions they selected for their post-doctoral study, and the other the institutions that had produced them, those where they earned their Ph,D, degrees, I learned that they selected predominantly for post-doctoral study Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, M,I,T,, and a few others, But these institutions were not producing the Ph,D.s, They were not getting undergraduates interested in becoming mathematicians, It was remarkable that the two institutions@R with the best record in that respect were Rice Institute adthe University of Texas, The well- heeled students at Princeton were not being excited by mathematics, The Institute for Advanced Study played a strong role in attracting mathematicians to Princeton because it added to the number of mathezaticians. I spent about a month mwng this study, Then I went east and visited Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, M.I.T., Rice, the University of Texas, and perha9s one or two others. ziy return I recommended that we call Griffith Evans, then at Bice. He had lectured in Berkeley and I knew he would be Bersona grata to the de~artment. He is a very fine gentleaan, He couldn't cone at once, as he felt already comitted to Rice for the year, I also recommended Charles !.?orrey, who has since served as chairman of our department of mathematics, and was elected in 1962 a menber of the ati ion-a.1 Acadeny of Sciences. He was then studying with Evans at Rice, Evidently I have a good eye for promising people because Evans was elected BW ~-ftlibrary 161

JHH: to the National Academy of Sciences within a year or two, One thing I liked about him was that he was not a completely pure mathematician. He was interested in the application of mathematics to economics. That indicated that he would probably take a rather broad interest in the relation of mathematics to other fields. Mathematics should not be so pure as to be totally divorced from reality. Sone of the best mathematicians have been applied aathematjcians, %TD: This is a tool discipline, isn't it? Z-3: It's a tool discipline, It's more than a tool, of course. It's a basic part of other disciplines. Mathematics, physical chemrstry, and physics are merely different emphases of the same sort of activity, Kany advances in mathematics have been made by men who have had to develop a zxzthematic a1 procedure that would be useful for their own problems, 3T3: Then this choice started the mathematics department on an imaginative and effective course, didn't it? X3H: Oh yes. Bow it's a great department. By way of contrast, let me tell about a man who came to see ae not long after this episode. He came c 9-tU-"' from a Middle West university, where he was dean of a college, He.hzd no scholarly standing. He had been appointed dean because he had been a sort of handyman to the president. Be was on a tour to find a "head" for their depart~entof nathematics. But, unaided, he wouldn't have been able to distinguish a mathematician from an obstetrician, By t5at the I was up on the merits and faults of mathematicians all over the country. That's an object lesson of one reason why this has become a great university. The president does not send around a court favor- ite to select a head of an important department. We JBH: cooperate. The president cooperates with the faculty, It's too big a job to be done on the judgment of any one person, even a president, E!TD: Do you think by sad large this selection committee always works out advantageously? JHE: No, no, This is a very complex matter and it's only a8 good aa the people, There's no procedure that guarantees wise dealing with and about human beings. It dependp, on the other human beings, It's like government, There's no form of government which will work superlatively in the absence of high quality in the people who run it, So the machinery creaks now and then, There are brilliant successes at times, On the whole it has worked very well, The witness of that is the standing of the University, in the general science fields the number of Nobel prize men and the number of members of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, honors and so on, This achievement could not have been arrived at by the labors of a benevolent despotism, however wise, Wheeler started it, of course, by selecting some very good men, I3ut it's like training your children, It's very important to give them the right sort of guidance, but as they approach adulthood you must have trained them to become wise themselves, You can't be wise for them forever, And no one man now could run this university, No one man or even a group of men can know enough about the qualities and potentialities of the faculty to do it all by themselves, ETD: The courses in the fields which have to do with chemistry and physics and mathematics and the sciences appear to have been outstanding always, I don't know about the choices in departments which are nunscientific,a JHK: It seems more difficult to make sure judgments in these fields. !bey deal with materials which are vastly more complex, There are only several kinds of oxygen atom, for example, and two kinds of chlorine atom, and they may be_ almost dike, But when you're dealing with human beings you have a terrific spread, and all of human affairs involve such terrific complex- ity that it's very difficult to set up hypotheses, and establish theories that are very valid, There's a great temptation to imitate physical science by setting up a hypothesis that sounds very scientific but which represents an oversimplification. I dealt with this in my Columbia lectures, It doesn't mean that the people who are doing it aren't as smart as the rest of us, but they're dealing with a very much more complex problem and they don't get their fingers burned quite so easily, If I set up a theory or hypothesis which somebody questions he can perform an experiment. But how do you perform an experiment about a matter in economics of a country? You can't isolate your variables, It's more difficult even-in a biological system. You cannot find out what the functions of a gland are by taking it out and then expect all the rest of the body to remain the same, because the other glands are affected by the absence of that one, Therefore you are limited to statistical studies and you get degrees of probability, instead of certainty, ETD: Developing knowledge in fields that are difficult to analyze is one of the big problems in this time. JHH: I've been a member of committees here and there that have to do with subjects that are not too close to chemistry, Let me tell about one case, There was a proposal that a certain man be called -- it was a proposal Bencroft Llbrev

JHH: by the department of psychology -- to take charge of a personality assessment bureau, This was just after the war, and during the was they had tried to assess the qualification6 of men to become successful aviators, commando raiders, and so on, What are the qualities that would make a man a successful commando raider or a successful aviator? I heard Professor Tolman give a very interesting paper on his experiences in this, and it's a very difficult matter, Well, it was so difficult they wanted to have a special center for it, The man who was proposed was a psychoanalyst, Now, as most skeptical people realize, psychoanalysis is hardly a reliable science, It's hard to get away from medicine man procedure8 when you're trying to psycho- analyze people, The whole Freudian movement and the comparative discredit of it recently is an example of something that is seized upon as a revelation, almost, and then people discover that it's like extrasensory perception, clairvoyance, They automatically discount any contrary evidence by saying that a person isn't a medium, This individual was also said to be an anthropologist, Well, I said, "I'm not a psychoanalyst or an - anthropologist, but I'm on this committee and I have to vote, I'd like to form some idea of how his mind works and what sort of evidence he uses, So I'd like to read his magnum opusem Well, it was put into my hands, It was a long paper on the culture of the Sioux Indiana, - It was full of the jargon of psychoanalysis, It described in one place how the Sioux Indian would gash himself, mutilate himself in the frenzy of a religious dance, hdthere was a ready-made explanation for this, It was the result of frustration, and derived from not being allowed to bite his mother's nipple in infancy when nursing, Well, I wrote my own reaction to this, I said, is an amazing tour de force, to take off airily backwards from adult self-mutilation and arrive unerringly on the nipple of a nursing squawen I said, "I wouldn't have the imagination to jump that far, but if I did I would feel under some necessity to try an experiment, One experiment might be to select two groups of people, as much alike as possible, but one group had been breast fed and the other bottle fed, I'm sure from my own observation of my wife that no breast-fed baby is allowed to bite his mother's nipple,w Then youtd have to devise a test of frustration which would be valid. You'd have to apply it to these people, Then you have to see if this is valid, Now, this is just utter nonsense, yet a department would propose that, Let me give you an experience from another field, I was chairman of a committee to try to select a professor of art history, Art, to me, is in a different status from mathematics or, say, civil engineering, It isn't important for everybody to study civil engineering or even advanced mathematics. (1've said this before but let me say it again in this connection,) Everybody should have his appreciation of beauty in the arts and literature wakened as far as possible for his own benefit. Art is one of the windows through which you look on the period of history, especially in periods like the Renais- sance and ancient Greece and so on, So I thought that the professor of art had a wonder- f'ul mission to the campus at large, just as Albert Elkus in the course in music appreciation did a great deal for people who were not majors in music, (~achof my four children took Elkus' course in music appreciation, And it was a good course, It wasn't a stiff course, It Lcr.- I ,!.-?

166

JHH: shouldn't be a stiff course, It simply gave an opportunity to people to rise to the bait if they could.) But the faculty within the art department was quite divided and mutually critical because of differences of opinion in the general area of representational versus non-representational art, The two principal antagonists were Worth Ryder and Eugen Neuhaus, Fortunately I was on good personal terms with each one. Well, it so happened that Worth Ryder proposed Horn, our art historian. But he had picked ITeuhausl specifica- tiona pretty well ao that it was easy from there on, In the course of this discussion Worth Ryder came to me once with a snheme he had for reorganizing the whole instruction of the department of art. I looked it over and said, "Worth, this is very interesting, It's well thought out. But even though this were put in effect formally it wouldn't work avless your colleagues accepted it in theory, would it? Therefore there's no point in imposing it upon them, "On the other hand, you wouldn't need to altogether reorganize the department formally in order to bring some of these ideals into being,' Well, that helped to clear the air, This is the kind of thing that can be done by a person from another area because he comes without the prejudices of the con- flict within the area, He has to be trusted, of course. I like to have on the faculty as my associates as I many good men as possible, I mean good not just in the 1 J moral sense but men of general quality. I don't think j 1 that the duties and qualities of a professor should be I!

compartmentalized, During the oath controversy there iI were those who said that as long as a man taught, say, mathematics properly in the classroom, it didn't make any difference what sort of person he was, I It seem8 to me that integrity is not something that you can dissect, A person either has integrity or he doesn't, If he has intellectual integrity he strives at least to apply it everywhere, It isn't someth* like an organ stop that he pulls out when he's in the classroom and pushes in at other times. A lot of people don't agree with that, But I hold passionately to that point of view, that 'a professor has general obligations to have integrity, Let's stop right now and consider what you consider a good professor to be, Pirst of all, he must be devoted to the truth and be a competent seeker after truth in his own field, He must- be a successful explorer, ETD : This is easier in chemistry than in history, economics, or psychology, JEH: There are areas if study in which things are happening and you have to keep up with your field. There are other fields which are different -- for instance, public speaking, It isn't essential that a person be making discoveries in public speaking in order to teach public speaking, It's sort of a service course, I've objected to demanding research in the ordinary sense from people in fields of that sort, or even in art and music, because there'a a tendency to want to imitate the spectacular success of science by trying to be scientific, Well, you can't be a scientific historian and be a good histo-ian, You have to be literary as well as scientific to be a historian; ETD: Then the delineation of competence in each one of these fields is indigenous to that field, JHH: Yes, For instance, the essence of good in my field i8 creativity, In the field of literature I place a higher value on the person who can write a good poem than a man who can be merely a literary critic, The latter sounds more scholarly, A man who could compose a symphony would rank much higher with me than a mere musicologist who could be a diligent searcher of books and compiler, Of course you need some musicology, and when you do it the way David Borden does itta good, I use his book continually in listening to music because he's not just a compiler, He's a real interpreter, He understands and feels the thing, But I have defended the cause of men like Martin Flaherty, for example, in public speaking who didn't publish a lot of literary hack work, Now and then he would write an essay, though, which you would want to read. I remember once when Ned [~dward]Brewer, a German, was up for full professorship, One of his own colleagues thought he hadn't produced enough, Well, the kind of thing that the colleague had produced didn't seem to me to be very important, It was done just to have published papers, Bed Brewer didn't write so often but when he wrote it would be something that I'd want to read, And I knew a good deal about the influence he had on students, Be made German literature come alive, which a mere bibliophile or translator doesn't do, I think a good deal of a certain unity of learning, Every part on the easth's surface can be reached from some other part, These aren't separate planets. There- fore a person ought to be conscious of the relations of his own field to the broad spectrum of human intellectual and emotional life, Since you have touched on Professor Brewer in German, what more would you add about the selection of faculty in language? It's a very difficult matter, If you accept the principle that a man has to publish in order to get promoted in a field like a foreign language, or; .%oa lesser extent in English, you encourage people to become specialists on a certain author, Since most of the great authors have been written about they hunt around for somebody who hasn't been written on, Then they deciile to become the special interpreter of this man, Perhaps they go to England and visit his birthplace and they hunt up all sorts of data, biographical, and mix up criticigm and biography and so on, and turn out the only book that has ever been written on this man, I used to ask, *What reviews have been written on this book? Has anybody read it?" The fact that it's a book is evidence only of industry, It isn't evidence of quality, I'm not a judge of the book but I'm a judge of the process, the kind of evidence which is advanced, We have two kinds of activity going on in language -- let's take the foreign language departments, where it is clearest, One is teaching a foreign language. Now, f think there is a great deal in the old Geman method of having this done on the side, as it were, There are special tutors in foreign language, If in a Geman university you needed to learn English you could get a course in English and pay for it, but it didn't have to be given by a professor of literature, A professor of literature is too commonly irked by having to teach the language itself, It's a different sort of thing, A professor of literature ought to be a person who can make the literature come alive, who can do for his students . something that the mere reading of the thing by the student B wouldn't do, Of course, if you're trying to train literary 1 ii

critics that's another matter, but there isn't much need !1

for literary critics in America of foreign publications, 1 ETD: This supposes that the student would come to the university fluent in the foreign language, Yes, If he isn't, he ought to get very expert instruction, preferably from a person who speaks the language aa a native, We ought to have linguaphone records, and so on, but that's a more mechanical thing, ETD: This should be done at the secondary level? -m: It should be, And of course now with the University requirement of four years of a language we'll get more real competence than we did when he had two years of Spanish and two years of Rrench, Of course we'll stiIl have those who will want in a university the language which they didn't take in high school, But in any case it seems to me that the teaching of a language is something that doesn't demand a full professor of literature, My youngest son prepared for his French examination for a Ph,D, by linguaphone records, ETD: What about the Russian and Oriental languages? JHH: I think you have to handle a lot of them at the university level, You can't supply in every high school, of course, people who speak the exotic languages or even Russian, though you might get Russian some of these days, During the war it became very important to have people who knew something about Asian languages, In the early thirties I was on the budget committee when we set up the rank of associate for people who would teach a foreign language competently but who would not be on a ladder to become a full professor which presupposes another type of competence, Of course everybody in a university longs for the title of professor, It's a perfectly honorable thing to 11 be a good teacher of foreign language, You must do it 1 perhaps much better than a professor would do it who was eI born in this country, We always have this urge of people I who are not scholars, creative persons nevertheless, to be called professors, the more technical people, It's one JHH : that's very hard to resist but Z think it should be resisted, !There should be retained a distinction between creative scholarship and technical competence, Well, perhaps we've had enough of the processes of selection, I've tackled it in different areas outside of science as well as inside,

Budget durina the Depression

MlD: Here is an interesting designation in committee work: the Special Committee on Educational Policy, Why special? JHH: Well, in 1932 after the onset of the depression and the big drop in the funds of the University of California, Sproul appointed a Special Committee on Educational Policy with me as chairman, 'Pwo or three years later it became a regular Academic Senate committee and has continued ever since, It is a very valuable committee, I again became its chairman after World War 11, Its task in the thirties was to consider the emergency the University was in. Support of the University was reduced, What could we best afford to dispense with? That's a university-wide subject, you see. It involved not only things within a school or college but matters between schools and colleges, Did we have colleges or departments which had grown fat and lazy? Did we have excessive numbers of courses? If you have to reduce salaries, how are you to do it? ETD: How did you do it? JHE: We took more of it from the top ranks than we did the bottom, One of the members of the committee proposed ?4 1 a set of reductions for the several steps, I found that his reductions plotted against salaries gave a zig-zag line. I proposed an equation for a smooth curve, And JHH: that equation was adopted as the basis of downward adjust- ments, The question is frequently raised: Should cost of living increases be given mainly to persons lower or higher on the scale? If you raise salaries for the lower people, pretty soon you find that you have wiped out distinctions between ordinary and distinguished persons. A great university must recognize aistinctions. ETD: You have to have an incentive program? JHH: Yes, We don't compete only with Middle West universites, we compete with Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, The state controller has advocated once or twice, I remember, that we should be satisfied with a good university. If California decides to be satisfied with mediocrity* it would be in the position of a comercia1 organization selling inferior products, The fight against mediocrity ie never-ending, Another question raised by this committee in the thirties was one of priority of commitments. For example, the University had accepted money from Rockefeller for the Institute of Child Welfare. The idea was to help get the thing started and that the University would gradually tee it over, The plea was made that this commitment had priority over faculty salaries, I said, HNo, faculty salaries have priority over anything else, and if in view of We changed circumstances we couldn't make good on this commitment we should not support it at the expense of faculty salariesOn These constituted the prior If commitment. 4

Another question was: What is the University doing '1.i 'I that does not need to be done? i ETD : Oh dear, that's a difficult one, 1 JHH : Yes, indeed, What curricula and courses do we offer i which could properly be eliminated or curtailed? I asked . several interested members of the Committee on Educational Policy to draw up a plan for a coherent, ideal scheme of education for a liberal arts college, Several of the men took this very seriously, and presented very good schemes, But no two of them agreed, It was a good object lesson of the fact that there is no single, ideal curriculum for liberal education, This was well recognized in the recent reorganization of Setters and ecience curricula,

Dean of Letters and Science

Did your experience in academic administration stimulate the ideas in mDiscoveries in Higher Educationn [School and Societv, April 29, 1939, pp, 525-5321?

I wrote that before becoming dean of letters and science. It was in part a trial balloon, For some time, Sproul had been urging me to accept the deanship, Louderback was retiring, But I had some unorthodox ideas and wanted to change some precedents, I wanted to make sure I would not be opposed by Louderback, I don't believe in bashing my brains out against a stone wall, Louderback was a very good Cri-end -of mine- and we had no personal quarrels, But he had a rather different theory which had attracted a considerable following, and I didn't want to start a controversy with him and his supporters, ETD: What precedents were you challenging? am: Well, there was a great deal of rigidity in the regulations of the college. For example, the study list limits were very narrow, A student was not allowed to sign up for more than a certain number of units, That was designed primarily I suppose to protect the student against overwork and undertaking more than he could handle. But it led to an absurdity such as thie, A student came from Cal Tech with I think 22 or 24 units of "AaN on JHH: his record in a single term, The dean would not allow that many units, despite the excellence of the record. Then when he came to graduate they would restore the

extra units, calling them a "technical shortage, a' That. '' was bookkeeping, and I considered it utterly absurd. !here were similar difficulties about language, A niece of mine, who was living with us -- I was putting her through college -- had a French mother, She had talked more French than Bnglish when she.was a child, When she went to school she was admitted to either third or fourth year French, She came to us, however, with only a limited number of units in French, Instead of accrediting her to the stage to which she had attained, the aollege gave her credit only for her school hours, That sort of thing riled me. There were many other things, I eventually made a list of such practices that when dean I had been able to discontinue, Another thing that I was opposed to -- I think I mentioned this before -- was the prescr- of abreadthn subJects in the first two years, Breadth is something to continue to strive for, not to complete, This principle is now recognized by letters and science, E!l!D: Didn't you have some ideas about pass grading in non- major subjects? JHH: Yes, I wanted to make it attractive to a student to try himself out on something beyond his immediate interests and vocational purposes. If he can develop some aware- 1 ness and appreciation of other liberal areas he'll be d a i better man, But if the student expects to be dependent 4 on a fellowship or a competitive appointment, he dare not I I

run the risk of a low grade, A person ought to be ?I allowed, for instance, to develop his musical appreciation by going to concerts without being graded on what he I' ,-I Librsy 175

aaslmilates. One should not insist that anything a student wants to try obligates him to get an if possible, If a chemist wants to try himself out in r course on art appreciation, he shouldn't be penalized if he doesn't do very well. The pass and fail plan was an application of this theory, A student can get "Asn by being intellectually docile, The straight nAN student is not necessarily the one who accomplishes the most in later life, The person who accomplishes a great deal is the person who has the courage to neglect things that don't seem to him worth a major effort, There is a great difference in the amount of original thought required in mastering different subjects, There are some curricula in which it is very easy to get "Asn and others in which it is difficult. I've had students who told me they could get "As" in educatdon without even studying, merely by repeating the cliche8 they hear from the professor, An 'A" in Chemistry 1A ia a more difficult thing to get than an "Aw in a course where memorizing and reciting is all that is required. You may have noticed that I made fun of mere "unitan in nDiscoveries in Higher Education." The unit is a . ridiculous sort of measure of achievement, It measures mainly the hours the professor spends in the classroom. In theory, a unit represents three hours of work on the part of the student. However, there are courses in which the student doesn't have to do any studying except the night before the examination, There are others in which he has to study for more than three hours per week. Furthermore, one student may do in one hour what requirea four hours by another. Time spent is not an adequate basis of achievement. ETD: No, but when we reduce a situation to numbers, we feel we have something. Cy- cr:k !.I. 7.7 -176

JHE: Yes, that makes it uscientific,m Well, as a scientist I make fun of that sort of science, Education has become arranged like a savings account. You bank units, one by one, or several at a time, and then when you have enough you 're educated. Harvard uses courses instead of units, !!!he couraee are all standardized, same length, which again is an mtificiality. ETD: At thie time there was one interesting item in the president's files having to do with religion. JBH: I remember that very well. There was pressure in the south and occasionally in the north from people who asserted, "Religion is an important el~mnent in human society, therefore the University should recognize it." We had a special committee, of which Professor Jacob Loewenberg was chairman. ETD: Was this the first time this problem had arisen? JEH: So far as I know, although it's the kind of problem that might have arisen before, Sympathetically, we tried to make plain to the public the difference between teaching religion and a subject such as mathematibe. First of all, there are religions; there is no single, recognized - religion, subject to the tests of scholarship, Which religion should the University teach? bound the borders of the campus there are many religious houses, no one of which recognizes the adequacy of the others. We need only one department of chemistry because there are no 11 irreconcilable chemical dogmas. Our duty as scientists' I is to discover truths, whereas religious denominations are Y engaged in guarding and propagandizing their faiths, In 2 3 an institution in an all-Catholic community, aa 18 the i case in many European communities, of course the Catholio I religion'can be presented exclusively, A private echool, a church school, can "teachw the religion of its spon- sors. But in a public institution %t!s a very different :'=.-. matter, . - You see, what advocates of religious teaching want I is to gain adherents, and that is out of place in a I public institution in a country with no government I established religion, What we seek in chemistry is understanding, not adherence to dogma, You dontt believe in chemistry in the sense of a religious commitment. What the committee did was to point out the courses the University off era for persons preparing for religious careere or who are interested in religion, I Yes, here we are [Circular of Information, ~erkeley, 1959-1960, Vole 53, No, 181: Students interested in the study of religion, either from the standpoint of liberal education, or of preparation for the ministry or some other phase of religious education, may select a major in one of the departments germane to the purposes of the student, or-they may propose an individual group major. That hasn't been changed since my time, I may have written this; at least we collaborated on it, I Courses appropriate for such purposes may be found in a number of departments, such as Anthropology, Classics, Economics, Education, English, History, Oriental Languages, Philoso- phy, Psychology, Semitic Languages, Sociology and Social Institutions, Social Welfare. Particular attention is directed to the following courses: History 122 (and so on), Near Eastern Languages .,, Philosophy, P Now, that's teaching of a scholarly sort, not teach- I ing of the sort designed to gain converts. That is all that a university can do, We had to point out in reply- ing to some of these requests the prohibition of allow- ing the University to be a platform for sectarian and clerical propaganda, Even in their own denominations they don't always agree, There are Fundamentalists and Liberals in the Presbyterian church, There are "high churchn and "low churchm Episcopalians, This is a distinction which probably needs to be retold and re- explained over and over again. There was another interesting item in the president's files which requested a four-year collegiate course in the history of the American colonies and the United States of America be required of all candidates for degrees from the University of California, How do you suppose that came up? I think that came from the legislature and patriotic people who wanted to make Americans, You see, we were still in the aftermath of the era of huge immigration. We had to Americanize the immigrants; when we got through Americanizing them, we had to make them patriotic, perhaps patriotic Democ~ats02 Republicans, but not Communists. So, as often happens, the American Legion and similarly-inclined groups insisted that the Univer- sity teach students to be patriotic. ETD: I wondered if this were the place it started, JEH: It had a good deal to do with it, It led to the Amerf- can Institutions requirement by the legislature. The regents denied the right of the legislature to dictate. a course, but this was such a hot subject that the board adopted the requirement "on their own,?! as it were, while theoretically rejecting it as a legislative demand, The letter was simply in the files, with no explanation. Do you remember considering the establishment of a college of applied arts? m: That came to us from Los Angeles, where they established a college of applied arte, There are certain subjects, such as physical education and industrial arts, which in the German system would have been in a "technical high school, * Letters and science has always been plagued by demands for majors that are not regarded by the college as liberal arte subjects at all, The pre-medical curriculum is one, optometry is another -- curricula simply dumped into the College of Letters and science. They aren't liberal arts subjects, There was a proposal to have some sort of supervision over these applied arts courses by putting them in a college and having a dean instead of having special curricula as independent units, each going its own way, Such a college of applied arte was set up at UCLA, but not in Berkeley, We believed in curtailing rather than encouraging substandard curricula, E!PD: W a would have sanctified them, JHH: Yes, There's no end to what you can do when you begin to prepare people for vocations, At Cornell they train people for hotel managing, ETD: Professor Birge was upset about the curriculum in optometry, JHE: The worst thing about it to him was that it was saddled upon physics, ETD : However, if the optometrists hadn't been trained at the University they might not have been as well-trained elsewhere, m: That was an argument, Nowadays, the state colleges and. junior colleges do much more of that sort of thing. There are many occupations which don't require more than a year or two of training, which can be given in junior colleges, We don't want the University to become a collection of,business colleges and barber schools, etc, , ad infinitum, The case of optometry was complicated by this fact: The M,D,s claimed you couldn't fit glassee JIM: without a mydriatic that only an M.Do may administer, ETD: In any case, University administration appears contin- uously to be evaluating curricula in applied learning, JHH: Recently it reexamined the appropriateness of criminology, ETD: I know, Public health is also called into question, m: Public health has been a great empire builder, When I was still dean I diecovered that although public health doesnqt train Its own lower division atudents, they were among the departments with the most numerous upper division courses, The nursing curriculum was another, They wanted to aggrandize and dignify nursing, The difficulty is that nurses cannot operate apart from medical men, and to nake a highly paid, highly trained person out of a nurse is one of the factors which makes nursing expensive, They wanted higher degrees and a more independent status. REF'LECTIONS

Chemistry Around the World

ETD: Do you think the development of chemistry in England is favorable, compared to other centers? JHH: Yes, it's very favorable, It's not as large quantitative:~ as ours, But England is a much smaller country, with fewer universities. Don't forget that radar, however, was developed primarily by the British,and a good deal of what went into the atom bomb was developed by the British, There are great centers of learning in the British universities, men of ext~emelyhigh standing, who are contributing immensely to the advancement of soience. Our men upon leave often go to England, A number of our present staff have spent six months at Oxford or Cambridge or one of the other British universities. Twice I have attended the symposia organized by the Paraday Society, Faraday, Davy, Darwin and J,J, Thomson were towering figures in the history of science, England has a long tradition of respect for intellectual excellence, I get most of my research assistants from . Liverpool, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge -- and Japan -- and they are quite competent to do what I wish, as well- trained as men from the best American universities, We are highly interdependent in this world community of scholars, and we profit greatly from British contributions,, There have been a few notable figures in F'rance and in Italy but the attitude of the French has been to their detriment, They have had such a strong nationalistic attitude, This is not inappropriate in the arts, which are essentialxy nationalistic, but not in science, which knows no nationality. I remember a history of chemistry which I read in part while I was a_graduate student. It ---.13- 182

opened with the words: "Chemistry is a French soience founded by Lavoisier of immortal fame," In 1930 I attended the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry in Liege, Belgium, The German scientists attended for the first time after the war, The German delegation was led by Fritz Haber, a towering figure in chemistry, Haber was a Jew, He wae treated miserably by Hitler, who wouldn't recognize his great service to Germany in World War I, The French scientists in attendance at Liege treated the Germans rudely, If a Frenchman preceded a German on the program, he would talk overtime, After the Second World War the center of gravity in scienoe shifted pretty strongly to the United States, And I should add that increasingly it's the post-doctoral work they do which gets the best men on the map, A man doesn't have an independent reputation when he gets his doctor's degree, He has done a piece of work under direction, and you can't tell how much of the idea of that research came from him -- most of the idea usually comes from the professor. But these post-doctoral boys who work for me spend usuallytwo years, In the course of that time they'll have three, four, or five papers, and be prepared to get a pretty good position, They work quite independently; I don't need to supervise them as I would. a graduate student, ETD: Do any of your students come from South America? m: Very few come from South America, and those who do come' mostly as undergraduates. Some of them have a hard time, ETD: Why? Is their preparation different? JHH: Their preparation is often not only different but inferior, South American universities follow the French pattern, Professors keep aloof from students. The student8 don't do much laboratory work, not for a long time at any rate, JHH: They take lectures, And they don't get the personal stimulus, Here, Pitzer is taking a freshman section again, having laid down the deanship, That's when you win people for science, at that early age, So they have a long way to go in South America, ETD: Do you get students from India? JHH: Yes, There is one difficulty: we cannot provide money for travel from far off India, Men coming from England can pay for their passage in pounds; when they arrive I lend them plane fare and the first month's expensea, We've had several students from India who have been very good, However, the struggle for existence in India is so terrific that they develop a combativeness, They don't come here relaxed at all, ETD: Has anybody come from Africa? JHH: no. If they were Boers from Africa they might go to Germany or Holland, If they are -1ish they might go to England, The University has had South Africans and people have gone there to meetings, A great deal of the intercourse now flows through international meetings which occur on a large scale, ETD: You haven't spoken about Russia, m.: Well, of course it's been very difficult, what with the Iron Curtain and the language barrier, Russia was not a great industrial country until rather recently, and language and travel have been difficult, Itrs been difficult until recently, A few years ago a man in Czechoslovakia asked me for some reprints, I had to - tell him that since my work was supported by the Atomic Energy Commission, although it was not classified work, I was not allowed to send him reprints, He replied by sending me a lot of his, I said to Will Libby, "Wetre making ourselves ridiculous, All these things have JIM: been published. They can get them more easily than if I send themen A scientist is fundamentally like the Athenians, who, according to St. Paul, you know, did not- else but to hear or tell of some new thing, and we love to hear and tell the new things that we unearth, As a matter of fact, I think the most valuable international influence zow is being furnished by the scientists, When we go to a foreign country and meet fellow scientists we are not trying to put anything over on them, Each gains by the interchange. It isn't a question of one taking something from the other, Anything that anyone takes from me leaves me the richer, not poorer, And the scientific spirit is one of the greatest unifying elements, It is the opposite of the narrow nationalistic religious spirit which sees in someone a heretic who is not orthodox in his own point of view, Now, of course, to spread that spirit among the population more largely is a very difficult task, But I think we're making progress, Last summer my youngest son went to Moscow and spent two weeks there, He was received with a great deal of courtesy and kindness, and was allowed to see things that other people had not been allowed to see, He can write to the head of the atomic energy establishment in Russia for information and get replies. They've met each other on several occa- sions, If there were more people who could do that the Russians and Americans would begin to realize more . interdependence and feel that the way to be richer is to collaborate and not to attempt to take something from the other, ETD: Would you comment a bit more on your very own work? JBI: I invented a theory of solutions which I call "regular sol~tions,~I published my first paper on this subject in 1916, In 1924 I had enough material for a book, called Solubilitg, The second edition appeared in 1936, the third in 1950, I drew in Professor Robert L. Scott, who is now at UCLA, as co-author of the third edition, But since the appearance of the 1950 edltion we have been able to get definitive answers to a number of Questions which were hanging in the air when the third edition was written. I have just written another book, published in March 1962, entitled Remlar Solutions, It presents a consistent, comprehensive theory of solu-. tions of considerable accuracy, I can predict the solubility of almost any gas in almost any solvent, and also how it changes with the temperature, far more accurately than I ever hoped to do ten years ago, ETD: Who has been working with you in this? JHH: I have two assistants supported by the Atomic Energy Commission, I .have had such support for a number of years, either from the Atomic Energy Commission or the National Science Foundation, or both, That ie dlthe assistance I want, I have had very good men, They're post-doctorals, competent, industrious, and enthusiastic, It's a great pleasure and satisfaction to get these boys started on a productive scientific career, EPD: Would you consider this to be a good example of free research conducted with government money? JHH: Yes, This isn't project research, I'm not making a

weapon, I don't promise to solve any particular problem, J The government makes no stipulations. The general field JHH: is stated as intermolecular forces and solubility, It ia so comprehensive as to leave me free to do whatever I wish, ETD: You have never had any problem getting money for this? JHH: Ho, I have been granted the budget8 I have proposed, I have also had collaboration from Dr. Berni J, Alder, who is on the staff of the lab at Livermore, He does a great deal of computation and usually spends a couple of days in the week away from Livermore in my laboratory, His problems are very close to mind, and he has been invaluable as a consultant, His name has been included as co-author of several papers we have published, Also my boys have occasionally collaborated in papers published under his name, ETD: I have a question about the sound of music floatfng through the chemistry building, There's a lot of it. Have you stimulated your students' interest in music as well as chemistry? JHH: I wasn't afraid to reveal to my students that I am intensely fond of good music, I told a class one day that the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra was going to play in Harmon Gymnasium that evening, I said, "Some of you would like that kind of music if you would expose yourselves to it; if you would sneak out of your fraternity, don't tell anybody you're going, "Good music is music which you can hear over and over again and. see new values in, Popular music is poor because you can't stand it for more than a limited time, You have to change to something else, In order to appreciate a Beethoven symphony, you must learn something about its structure, "Then," I said, "if you can't find anybody to explain it come to me, a I

J-KH: A number of them came up after lecture and said, I IIPlease explain to us the structure of the symphony, ". I I gave them a very brief explanation, and that was far I more effective than if I'd been a professor of music, I It only took a moment, you see, and I wasn't getting too far out of my beat,

California Education

ETD: Not long ago, your name was mentioned in connection with Melody Workshop, the nursery school Mrs. Lila Jora- lemon has been trying to continue in the face of strong I official opposition by the agents of the State Department of Social Welfare [~imeMagazine, August 29, 1960, p. 47; San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, August 11, 1960, p, 33, JHH: I know her father-in-law, Ira Joralemon, very well; he is a leading mining engineer, He told me about the difficulty his daughter-in-law was having, And 3 said, "Please I describe this to me in a letter," That was my beginn-, I laid the case before the Citizens* Advisory Commission, saying: A case has recently come to light and received wide attention in the public press which re- veals that the State Department of Social Wel- fare exercises its authority over the licensing of nursery schools to impose theories of training the pre-school child, illustrated by the following assertions of its agents: "Teaching I children the alphabet too early may lead to 1 acne and personality problems in adolescence. Ir The state is better qualified to determine pre- school activity than the parent. This board I cannot approve of any nursery that provides a shortcut to elementary school, It cannot toler- ate a nursery school with a schedule of teaching,. Then I said, "These are dogma of a totalitarian state. They have no place in Calif~rnia,~ JHH t The Citizens' Advisory Commission then formulated a recommendation that ,,,the Welfare and Institutions Code be amended clearly to limit the licensing authority of the Department of Social Welfare over private schools of every kind to matters pertaining to health and safety, and restraining the department from interfering with parental authority over the training and education of the pre-school childi+ The publicity in the News-Call Bulletin and Time magazine and the indignation thus aroused resulted in granting a license to Melody Workshop, It's enough to have a state department of education. To have the Welfare Department objecting to the parents providing the kind of experience that they want the child to have, that's too much, School administrators should have had a major in a liberal arts subject. No matter what they teach they should be educated persons, have been subjected to the discipline of one of the great intellectual fields and not simply a training in technology such as educational administration, Of course that means that your whole education should be leavened by a liberal spirit, by general intellectual curiosity, After all, the elements of science include moral qualities: the love of- truth, integrity, and disinterestedness, which have significance for all of man's activities. I would like to return to the Citizens1 Advisory Commission and ask what influence it may have had in California educational practices,

u Final Report [November 1, 19601 of the Citizens' Advisory Commission to the Joint Interim Committee on the Public Education System, in Report of the Joint Interim Committee on the Public Education System, pub-' liehed by the Senate of the State of California, 1961,

PO 40. 1 JHH: There were several bills enacted fnto law following its recommendations. S57, the Fisher Bill [Chapter 848, Statutes of California, 1961, Regular session], is about teaching credentials. A339 [added 7607 to Education Code] allowed foreign languages to be taught in elementary schools, A662 [added 7206-1 to Education Code] stipulated that all meetings of the State Curriculum Commission shall be open to the public, A340 [added Chapter 9 to Division 9 of Education Code] required testing programs measuring achievement and intelligence to be developed in each California school district, A2564 amended the Education Code to provide for curriculum changes. A3110 [added 11804 to the Education Code] was on the subject of psychiatric treatment, mD: Could you reduce to a few ~ordswhat you feel is the basic aim of education? JHH: In the case of my own children I've always endeavored to give them a sense of adequacy so they wouldn't have to seek competence by mere conformity, They could afford to be different and let others emulate them. I3D: Emeritus status for you in 1952 doesn't seem to have extended beyond the University's modification of its bookkeeping about you. There certainly isn't much else of an emeritus nature to be found in your present activities. JHH: Tomorrow I'm talking about "Conflicts in Educationn to Town Hall in Fresno, A sizeable response has developed to my remarks on receiving the Priestley Medal [Ameri- can Chemical Society Awards Banquet, March 26, 19621, a surprisingly large number of requests has been made for reprints4 "The Battle for Basic Educationn was published to the some 98,000 members of the American Chemical Society [Chemical and Engineering Eews, April 2, 1962, p. 104 ff,], and members in various states have been ordering reprints by scores and hundreds, The re- print in paperback of my Science in the Makw has just appeared, and Remlar Solutions, whieh I mentioned earlier, has just been published. I address many audiences: chapters of the American Association of University Women, service clubs, county school boards, local PTds, teachers' institutes, citizens' groups, students and faculties in universities and colleges, scientific symposia,

Transcriber: D, Sandstad Typist: L, Wood BIBLIOGRAPHY

Note: A list of Books and Book Reviews by Joel Hildebrand is provided for all copies of this manuscript. k seventeen- page list, Scientific Papers by Joel Hildebrand and Collab- orators, and Miscellaneous Articles by Joel Hildebrand, will be found in the original copy of the manuscript deposited in the General Library of the University of California at Berkeley. k==:n:,b,ov

191

BOOKS

Principles of Chemistry, with R, E, Powell, 1918, (New York: The Macmillan Company) Revised edition, 1926, Third edition, 1932, Fourth edition, 1940, Fifth edition, 1947, Sixth edition, 1952, Solubility, 1924, American Chemical Society, Mono- graph Series. (New York: The Chemical Catalog Company, Inc,) Chapter on emulsions in Theory and Application of Colloidal Behavior, ed, Robert H, Bogue, 1924, (New York: McGraw-Hill Company, Inc, ) Chapter on chemistry in Paths to Success, ed, H, G, Black, 1924, (Heath & Son, Inc,) Solubility of Non-electrolytes, with R, L, Scott, 1936, American Chemical Society, Monograph Series No, 17, (Reinhold Publishing corporation) Third edition, 1950, Part I in Camp Catering, or Bow to Rustle Grub, with Louise Hildebrand, 1941, (Brattleboro, Vermont: Stephen Daye Company, )

Wcience and Warw in The Meaning of War to the Americas, 1941, Lectures delivered under the auspices of the Committee on International Relations on the Los Angeles campus of the University of California, (LOS Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, ) On editorial committee, Manual of Ski Mountaineering, ed, David Re Brower, 1942, (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California press, ) Second edition, 1946, (San Francisco: Siema Club,) Third edition, 1962, "Molecular Forces and Solubilityw in Science in the University, 1944. 75th anniversary of the found- I ing of the University of California, (~osAngeles and Berkeley: University of California Press,) I Regular Solutions, with R, L, Scott, 1962, (~nglerood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, ) Science in the Making, 1957. (New York: Columbia University Press.) Paperback edition, 1962, Contributed chapters to Going Light with Backpscg or .Burro, ed, David Re Brower, 1952, (San Fraricisco: Sierra Club,)

BOOK REVIEWS

Laboratory Exercises in Inorganic Chemistry, Borris and Mark, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 45, 2473 (1923). A Course in General Chemistry. McPherson and Henderson, Journal of the American"~hemica1Society, ;iZ, 1062 (1913). Introduction to Modern Inorganic Chemistry, Mellor, Journal of the American Chemical Society, s, 2234 (1914). Die Wasserstoffionenkonzentration, Michaelis, Joumal of the American Chemical Society, x,673 (1915). Laboratory Directions and Study Questions in Inorganic Chemistry, Journal of the American Chemical Society, q2, 1289 (1920), The Electron in Chemistry, J,J, Thompson. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 46, 1320 (1924). Elementary Physical Chemistry, adapted from a Treatise on Physical Chemistry, Hugh S, Taylor, Journal of the American Chemical Society, 50, 5, 1512 (1928) Mechanische Eigenschaften fldssiger Stoffe, B, Kremann, Journal of the American Chemical Society, z, 2849 (19281, Chemical Warfare, Curt Wachtel, founder Pharmacological Section of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Vortex, February 1942. The Eleotronic Theory of Acids and Bases, W,F, Luder and Saverio Zuffanti, Journal of Chemical Education, Vol, 24, No, 8, August 1947, Kinetic Theory of Liquids, J. Frenkel, Journal of Chemical Education, Vol. 24, No. 10, October 1947. On Understanding Science, Jamea B. Conant, Journal of Chemical Education, Vol, 24, No, 11, November 1947. Joel E, FLldebrrnC ?.nL Collcborato~z,

On t;ho "Cclor Ze~~r,3trrtfot',of the I~~ZC.ZZ:~'-LC,F~;Actj02.0f ?::ator' of - c Jonca a& Allen. Je heC;::e;?-. 50~.,%,.- 1.314 (1906). -

The -if icatica of lercwy, J. Az2. Ck2:z. EOC.,31B933 (1923). mar die Farbe von Jodl8sx~~or..2, physZc, Chols., 2,679 (1.310).

The Theral Dissochtio~0:' :~.,?lm%roxidc, J. An, Chcn, Soc,, 34, 216 (19U). .. .4 Tho Raid Get~rzSatfon of .':c:,-r?.esiaIn 52rsstoxe by ::~R::s 09 the 5ydr0- Cen Zlcc-~poCZe(with IIcrberi; 2, i??.:*:r:c2). O_r.i~, Cart, ,LLI Intcrmt, ---.-I Cow. .',:Zfed Chodstry, 1, 217 (lsu,, \ t \I' Thc Var.3,- ??css.r;re of Zl~e.'.:~lm.-s. tr.r- ~~-3.- F A3, ~~Qc~zwc~~L..Sac. ,22, 319 (1912). - The ?elation bstreer, tho 2otostlal ol" ziclcie kal~xz~Cclls r-tC the Cc:-stitutLon of the Arrzlcsn, T~ans,2-. SlcctrocSem, Soc., 22, -c- (1512). .T- The :. onst ltutLon of Certain LLquX E.=lg=xs, J, Ax, C:-1..s, Scc,, c;.: c;.: (i31~) *,

QG. 3 P.~:-,SLczLILons of t'le IIrC~o:;en 91cet.rcCe L;= rir,rly3is, - Rccc~~rchrrd 7.-1%\ c . . 3, ,q3. Chezl,. 30c., 35, Lai'7 ( -J-WZ.

Vapor Gold Thc Prsos-me of Silver, ar.C ZLcz~thE.-nlcaas (mit;?::j2r=cn, .. 3. ~astxan), J. Aa. Chem, Soc,, 36, 2022 i1314).

Tho Entro-oy Va~orizatlona3 e X5nna of Listlas18ha ?:or)r;lnl Liqules. 3. An, Chon. Soc., 37; 970 (1918). 'sciontif lc Papers (J.J.11.) Cont 'd

, 17, The Vapor Prossure of Tm11211~~Rrrsl~azm (xi% 'Trzon D, Zastran) . J, An, Chen, Soc,, 37, 2452 (1915). 18, A Stu&y of tho Action of 8r'~slion CortzL? Zinc Salts by Xenns of th %droqen Slectrode (vlth !'I, I;, Sozors), 3, >z,Cken, Soc., 3 7C5 (leleF. I 19, Princi,olos Endorlyiw FlotcstLon, Xlnicg Sci, Fross, July (1916), 20, Solubility, J, !a, Chozz, Zoc., 2, 1452 (1916), I 21, A StuCj of the Systan E;r,Ll:ne-Zexene (32th 2olzald 3, Eeyes), 3, $a Chez, Soc,, s,2126 (1917), I 22, me Specific Zeats eM Ecats of Fusior,- of T~t;'rrcz~lc~thzxe,Antba- qulnone anc? Aztkraccne (571th Alfce s, 5::scki, !.- 2, F'oster, SEA C, K, peebe), J, Ax, Chcfl. ~GC,,s, 2225 (l%l'?*, - I 23, Solubility and Bterrcal Pi-ess-me, J, dz, Ck3, SOC,~Z9, 2297 (1917). I - 24, Solubilities o,t Ant'nrccecr , !kztI~sc;t~lzo~z,%.rz~o~oi;;~zene, ?ksr-=?ca-- t3xene ase IoZ'az in t'arlo-;s Soivezts (rlt5 Z, T, Zil~fsonWS C,F. Eeobe), 3, An, Chea. Soe,, 2, 2301 (1.317). 25, The Vapor 3ossures of Licpid 2:otals, J, A=, 2'?3~, Soc., 4@, 45 (13l3),

16, The Btr-sctioz of PotssS cr.5 Clthc? Cors',ituaaZs f=.zzC'>57.e.-.,&er ;~~..erx.-4 4-4 3, I=&. Szc, C'ze=n,, 10, $6 (191C),

28, Tf.,a Vay;;r, k.ezs-s-ea of CaE:-,lzn, LezC 255 ?k-h1~amq, J, Az. Ckez. Soc ,, 42, 565 (1920). - - .. 23, Solcljilitr pi, SO~II';~~~WRelet ZGZ~GI T-c?X?~i:e~e 2::: iOc,,;=C In t3e Vsrious Solvents, ir-,cl~Cin~a i.:zt::-35?or >zl-~Sln.:< -::.;lu';.11Z27 Zata .c. - 4 p33 (2233). (wit3 Cloresce A, Jonks) . q. .FY?:. W.:CZ, SOC,, -z

31, Solubility VI, TlsrmByn?s2c Rcl~tL~ri~Fjctxsen S~l~bflltga& ,';~tem~l: I~sssure, J, Ax, Cbez, ::oC,,- 43, 5GO (ZCJZl),

SF 22, The Surface Y~ES~O~&rd COCSL~ICSof L:c;::d L'c-rc3=7, CackLtm, Z~ZC, LeaC, Tin ar,8 35~~~1th(with :,';'ho~fin2, Eosess), J, Ax, Cherz, S~C., -43, 1621 (1021). 1 C3. SoluSlllty VII. Sol~bilitrRol~tionsc," i2303ic-S:;lz~ (with Cb~~zce A. Jcn?

- 94, ti^^^ 13 Tt1271 A~co~o~98 SO~VCZ~(zit3 ???r: Z. Zl~hog,Zatker i.. ~lt'crotge). 3. An, Cho~i. Soc,, 44, 1Z5. (1422).