The Price of Altruism (20 page)

In November 1952 America had obliterated a Pacific island with an H-bomb. A Central Asian desert was rocked by a Soviet trial just nine months later. By that time the number of CIA agents was ten times greater than it had been only three years earlier, and the budget for secret activities had grown from $4.7 to $82 million. “You have a row of dominos set up,” President Eisenhower waxed metaphorically in the spring of 1954. “You knock over the first one, and…the last one will go over very quickly.” The Cold War race for the allegiance of the unaffiliated nations was well into its blistering noon. George Price had already come to the rescue of modern science. Now, from his cramped little apartment on Sixth Street in South East Minneapolis, he was hatching a plan to save the world.
¹⁸

It started with economics. He had been wondering whether poverty leads to communism, as many were claiming. Since he could find no negative correlations between per capita income in different countries and the degree of sympathy toward communism, it didn’t look as if it did, after all. Communism, he thought, was rather usually brought about by professional agitators, and agitation flourished under conditions of unhappiness. Correlations between poverty and unhappiness were known to be weak, but George thought that if they could somehow be measured, unhappiness and communism would track. What America needed to do was to tell this to the world, especially to those “domino” nations dangling precariously in the balance.
¹⁹

With no training in the field, but with confidence that hardly disclosed it, he had sent an article on the matter to
Science
. Miraculously his demolition of a Marxist theory by an economist named George Altman was accepted for publication. Altman had argued that since markets ebb and flow according to fixed laws of capacity, governments needed to intervene and take control; socialism was the only answer to the laws of economics. George disagreed. “To try to reduce economic cycles to a simple question of ‘too much capital’ or ’too little capital,’ is like trying to explain all of chemistry in terms of the four elements of the alchemists.” He proceeded to review Altman’s calculations one by one with a steel-trap logic. Economic booms and busts were not the result of investment above some imagined “capacity of the economy,” a function of a Malthusian “ecological law of nature.” In free economies they were rather always the sum result of decisions of entrepreneurs based on expectations of gain or loss. And expectations themselves were determined by all sorts of things, ranging from sophisticated mathematical models to—George knew all too well—“communication from the spirit world.” Economic behavior was complicated; no single-cause mathematical model stood a chance to be of any value. It was high time, he thought, to approach such problems with new tools. And since economics was still at a developmental stage from which the natural sciences had largely emerged, George suggested that it would be worthwhile to see what contributions the natural sciences could make to economics. Maybe there were deeper natural laws pertaining to behavior. “Perhaps the time approaches,” he wrote rather mysteriously, “for a new Boyle to produce a
Skeptical Economist
.”
²⁰

Was he talking about himself?

Next he turned to the second part of the plan: research and development. Possession of a superior economic system would not suffice to win the Cold War, nor even would a deeper understanding of human nature. What was needed further was superiority in technology, the means by which to produce faster and better and more. Now, in “How to Speed Up Invention” in
Fortune
magazine, George presented the answer.

He called it the “Design Machine.” Certainly, industry needed to plot “optimum strategies,” to set “impossible goals,” and to reward engineers more handsomely. But the Design Machine would be the true panacea. A machine to take over the mathematical and mechanical operations of the drafting department and model shop, it would revolutionize American industry. How it worked was simple:

It was a system for dealing with models—models constructed out of mathematical equations stored in the computer memory—and nothing like it yet existed. If marshaled on a national scale, it could become a repository for all the design and engineering information able to be programmed. And though intended for mechanical design, analogs for electronics and for chemistry could easily be imagined. Finally, here was an idea to make his old teachers at Stuyvesant proud.

Shown the proposal, a leading computer expert was skeptical. In reply George quickly prepared a seventy-five-page, single-spaced supplementary memorandum showing how an IBM 704 computer could be incorporated into a Design Machine, how a complex part could be described to the machine, and how the machine could display the part—in 3D. The skeptic conceded, and other IBM experts did, too. Not only could it be done, but it could be done in three to five years for less than 5 million dollars. The Russians, with their Bison bomber, took only four years to go through the eight-year development cycle that Americans needed for the B-52. “The tempo of U.S. technological progress,” George wrote, “is not an academic matter.” Time was of the essence. No less than the “fate of the non-communist world” was at stake.
²²

George was growing nervous. The “Reds” had just launched Sputnik II, and marched machines and men in an awesome celebration in Moscow to mark forty years since the Bolshevik revolution. Russia was gaining on America. In a strongly worded essay in
Life
magazine titled “Arguing the Case for Being Panicky,” he now detailed the precise steps by which the United States would become a member of the USSR by 1975—if it didn’t wake up and smell the kvass. Americans were like the people in the Hans Christian Andersen tale “who stood and watched their emperor parade naked though the streets, and then turned to one another to praise the beauty of his clothing.” America was like Babylon, Baghdad, Constantinople, and Rome: the rich, proud, luxuriant nation, smugly confident and dangerously oblivious to the “tough barbarian adversary, poorly provisioned and shabbily dressed but high spirited and strong in its drive to conquer.”
²³

The article appeared interspersed by a full-page ad from Bell touting the “Seven Ages of the Telephone.” There was a photo of a smiling mom holding the receiver to her blond baby’s ear: “Hello, Daddy!” the caption read. Another, of a “Dynamic Teen” resting on a sofa with plaid skirt and varsity letter, obviated the footer: “Girls talk to girls. And boy talks to girl. And there are two happy hearts when she says, ‘I’d love to go!’” And what about “Just Married,” with a brunette in an office chair with phone and adoring hubby reclining above her?: “Two starry-eyed young people starting a new life together. The telephone, which is so much a part of courtship, is also a big help in all the marriage plans.”

What more did Americans want? George asked, indignant: “A Cadillac? A color television? Lower income taxes?—or to live in freedom?” Would it be luxury or liberty? The World Series or the Nobel Prize? And who would play the part of a Franklin or a Hamilton? “Optimism talks” felt good but were confusing. If America didn’t double its defense budget now, it wouldn’t be long before it became a Soviet province.
²⁴

He had parachuted from nowhere to the center of a debate about the foundations of science. He had jumped into the fray over world economics. He had invented a “Design Machine.” And now he had used a premiere stage to warn of impending national disaster. With his crew cut, steel-framed round clear-rims, pursed lips, and bow tie, the unknown thirty-four-year-old from Minnesota cut an original figure. Whatever you said of him, he was hustling.

Still, there was a weird duality to these disparate interventions: What seemed like genuine concern for the welfare of America and the world also had the panatela reek of egotistic smugness. Was he a cocky chemist? A sober economist? A restless engineer? A prophet? Somehow George Price was simultaneously all of these—and none.

Whether this was altruism, patriotism, or diarrheic self-promotion, people were beginning to take notice. “We are proud of you,” Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey wrote to him following a full-spread write-up of the Design Machine in the
Minneapolis Sunday Tribune
. It was a welcome piece of encouragement: George was supporting two apartments, two cars, two telephones, and two attorneys. It was freezing. There were no women to meet, and he was sex starved. His shoulder still bothered him. Already he considered himself an “ex-chemist,” yet this was still his job. No, he wrote to Al, it wasn’t due to his usual “masochism” that he had yet to leave Minnesota; it was due to his reluctance to work as a chemist, and others’ reluctance to employ him “as a physicist, economist, writer, or anything else for which I have little training.”
²⁵

Finally he quit, in the winter of 1957, leaving porphyrins, Schwartz, a steady salary, and his daughters, who had since moved with their mother to Marquette, all behind. He was moving to Kingston, New York. A respected researcher at one of America’s premier hospitals, he would now become a rather low-rung subcontract technical “reviewer,” working for Stevens Engineering Company on instruction manuals for IBM computers.

George brushed aside accusations of self-destruction. Whether others believed in his reality meter or not, he was on his way to turning his fortunes around. He hadn’t yet secured a “big” job, but prospects seemed encouraging. From IBM’s headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue in New York City, Emanuel Piore had expressed interest in his
Fortune
Design Machine. A Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, Piore had risen to become the navy’s top-ranking scientist, winning its Distinguished Civilian Service Award and serving on President Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee. As IBM’s director of research, he was leading the corporation into the era of digital computers. Would George mind coming down to the offices, he wrote to him, to discuss some of his ideas?
²⁶

The day before the meeting with Piore, on July 15, 1957, an old girlfriend from the time he was breaking up with Julia appeared rather suddenly in town. Her name was Anne, she was from the Midwest, and, like Julia, was a Roman Catholic. He had thought of marrying her before he fell ill with polio, but she had broken it off for another man. Now, she made it clear, she was once again for the taking. Still jealous, George said he’d think about it.

The next day he settled into a large camel-colored sofa in a plush office on the twenty-third floor of the IBM Building. It was still premature for the corporation to start developing the Design Machine, Piore told him, smiling. But if he was interested, George and his imaginative ideas would be welcome at Research and Development. This was quite an offer to a subcontracting technical reviewer, and from the director of research, no less. But unknown to Piore, George had already contacted a fancy lawyer from midtown to inquire about a patent. If Piore was not interested in developing his machine, George wasn’t going to bite. After all, if he joined IBM he wouldn’t be able to work on a private patent, and millions of dollars were at stake. They parted with a friendly handshake. George had to run to make his vacation flight to Puerto Rico—his first trip ever outside America.
²⁷

The following week George went down to the train station to pick up his girls, who were living now with their mother in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Julia was a frustrated woman who “never saw the beauty around her.” She considered her marriage to George “unlucky” after all, she’d been a med-school prospect, and worked on the Manhattan Project—now she was a third-grade teacher. These days, when their mother’s dull schoolteacher friends came over for coffee and cookies, she demanded good manners and hushed voices of her daughters, and, under no circumstances, any talk of Daddy. When Annamarie and Kathleen refused to go to church she gave them her untempered piece of mind. There were rants about Daddy leaving because “they were so awful.” Worst of all, there were Aunt Edith’s hideous boiled dinners, followed by dreaded stewed prunes. Life was not exciting.
²⁸

New York was a far cry from Ypsilanti. Quirky and fun and just the opposite of in-lockstep, George was showing the girls the big world. Carefree and boundless, they went for hot dogs and ice creams, climbed the Statue of Liberty, visited Niagara Falls, and listened to Johnnie and Joe’s one-hit wonder, “Over the Mountain, Across the Sea.” And then there was Yul Brynner starring in
The King and I
on Broadway. When George waved good-bye at the end of the week as the train pulled away from Grand Central, a crying nine-year-old Annamarie and eight-year-old Kathleen couldn’t have known that it would be one of the last times they’d spend a week with their father.

He was considering proposing to Anne that week, when he received a notice of termination from Stevens. IBM was cutting ties to subcontractors, and he would need to leave his office by Friday. Meanwhile, the Patent, Trade Marks and Copyrights division at the law offices of William R. Lieberman at 551 Fifth Avenue wrote to explain that a patent needed to be applied for before November, when the
Fortune
piece would turn public domain. Since he didn’t have the money for this or even a prospect that could promise collateral, it began to sink in with George that his patent was slipping away. Frantic, he wrote to Piore, asking to be considered again for the IBM job. But Piore was on a month’s vacation, and his replacement showed no interest in a fired subcontractor technical editor of whom he had never heard. George had made up his mind by this time—he wanted to marry Anne. But he was out of work and in debt, and she was back in the Midwest and drifting. If only he had proposed to her that day before he met Piore: Surely he would have been focused on finding a stable job then, and grabbed the offer handed to him so generously by the director. It was on that fateful day, he would later claim—July 15, 1957—that his downward spiral began.
²⁹