When Computers Were Human (45 page)

The army contract represented a moment of promise at a time when the future of the Mathematical Tables Project had started to grow dim. The WPA, in response to the shift of government funds toward military preparation, was shrinking week by week. In the first six months of 1941, the WPA liquidated half of its assets and released four hundred thousand workers.
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Just after Lowan consummated the contract with the army, he received the worrisome news that the WPA was considering closing the Mathematical Tables Project.
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No decision had been made, but Lowan tried to stall a closure by requesting that the project be certified as essential for national defense, a status that could be granted only by the secretary of war or the secretary of the navy. The prospects for such certification were not good, as most certified WPA projects were either military construction efforts or salvage teams that were gathering scrap materials from city dumps.
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As he had in times past, Lowan turned to Philip Morse of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for assistance. Lowan asked Morse to use whatever influence he might have with the office of the secretary of war. “I wish to point out that if the desired classification as a Certified Defense Project is granted by the War Department,” he wrote, “many of the difficulties under which we are laboring would be obviated.” As an incentive, he pointed out that if they were certified, the computers could
finish a large table of interest to Morse and do any other work that he would need for defense projects. Lowan mailed this letter from his home in Brooklyn, not from the Mathematical Tables Project office on Manhattan, and ended the correspondence with the warning, “For obvious reasons, it would be advisable not to mention this letter in your recommendation to the Secretary of War.”
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For about a year, Lowan had been conducting a clandestine correspondence with Morse, posting the letters from Brooklyn and asking for replies to his home address. Often these letters were paralleled by official messages that were logged in the WPA correspondence file. In such cases, Lowan would tell Morse, “An office letter of somewhat similar contents will reach you … in due course.”
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There was nothing illegal about what they were doing. There was no promise of funds, no exchange of favors, no hints of special treatment. Lowan was merely trying to orchestrate support for his project, though he was trying to do so in a way that appeared free from the very actions he undertook.

About a half dozen scientists received unofficial letters from Lowan, including his former mentor at the Institute for Advanced Study, John von Neumann. Lowan asked von Neumann for a letter of recommendation for the project. He liked to publish such letters as a way of attracting new work. Von Neumann was quick to oblige, but he sent a short and tepid letter, the kind of recommendation that one might pen for a distant and slightly disreputable nephew. Lowan responded immediately to von Neumann, firmly rejecting the letter and asking that it be rewritten. “In its present form, … the phrase ‘To Whom it May Concern' and the general tone of the statement stamp it as being solicited and, therefore, unsuitable for the purpose for which it was intended, as I stated in my previous letter.” Not trusting von Neumann to write a proper reply, he dictated the form of the new recommendation. “Include in it a personal letter, addressed to me, say, commenting on the program outlined in the April circular, … and perhaps making further suggestions for the computation of new functions of importance in applied mathematics.”
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Without further comment, von Neumann did as he was bidden.

Lowan never saw any contradictions in his approach to promoting the Mathematical Tables Project. He had been trained as a scientist, a searcher for truth, or at least his best understanding of truth, and yet believed that truth was rarely to be found in the political sphere of this world. At the WPA, he had struggled with contradictory demands: the need to produce accurate mathematical tables and the requirement to employ the greatest number of workers, the goal of keeping a large computing floor busy and a managerial structure that made it difficult to prepare new computing plans for that floor. Five separate offices reviewed Lowan's computing plans.
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Each office could reject plans and require
Lowan to rewrite them. During the two and a half years of operation, Lowan had written emergency telegrams to Washington, begging WPA officials to approve his computing plans. On one occasion he had to file a late telegram, warning, “We have only 10 days work for manual computing group.”
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In the fall of 1941, the Mathematical Tables Project moved in a twilight world, without enough support to become a permanent operation and yet not facing the kind of opposition that would result in termination. Most scientists, including those engaged in calculation, simply held no strong opinions about the group. When R. C. Archibald tried to rally the MTAC committee to recommend certification for the Mathematical Tables Project, he discovered that the majority of his committee members would not respond to his calls and letters.
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The only strong voice came from Wallace Eckert at the
Nautical Almanac
. “I am not prepared to certify that the organization should be looked upon as a war necessity whose resources should not be in any wise curtailed,” Eckert wrote. He noted that “many worthy programs are being curtailed and even abandoned.”
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The December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor went unremarked in the records of the Mathematical Tables Project. Monday, December 8th, was much like Friday the 5th. There were worksheets to collect, computing plans to check, agreements to make with suppliers. In three quick days, the country was pulled into the war. “There is a lot of fanfare and excitement about the dramatic occasion,” complained the writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, “and yet I feel chiefly a desperate lack of dignity, lack of seriousness, lack of humility about the whole.” Lowan may not have shared Lindbergh's assessment of public attitudes, but in some way, he shared the plight of her husband, the aviator Charles Lindbergh. In December 1941, Charles Lindbergh had no obvious role in the war effort. Until the attack, he had been an ardent opponent of American intervention, a leader of the “America First” movement. Charles “wants terribly to get to work,” observed his wife, “constructive work—almost with his hands, work in his craft again, have his contribution count—his experience, his technique, his training.”
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Like the famous aviator, Lowan desperately wanted to work at his craft, to have his contribution count. Each day he went to work hoping that the notice of defense certification would be lying on the top of his wire in-basket and fearing that the termination letter would be there in its place. Every night, he returned home anticipating a letter of guidance from Phil Morse. A month after the Pearl Harbor attack, Morse urged Lowan to expand his efforts to contact military research laboratories and contractors. There “will have to be built up a technique whereby you can be in more continuous touch with some of the Defense activities,” he wrote, “so that your project can be shifted from time to time as the computation
needs change.” He told Lowan to put operations in the hands of his assistant, Gertrude Blanch, and spend his time meeting with the scientists who needed computing services. This kind of work could not be easily done with an “exchange of letters,” Morse explained to Lowan, “but probably should be done by frequent visits to various defense research centers.”
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Though Lowan was a vigilant publicist, he was not comfortable with the kind of personal contact that Morse suggested. He preferred to work from his Manhattan office, or his Brooklyn home, and promote the project through letters and fliers. He let Morse serve as the public representative of the project, even though he would have benefited from more contact with the members of the National Defense Research Committee.
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In March of 1942, Morse brought the fate of the Mathematical Tables Project to the attention of the National Defense Research Committee and urged the group to place the project under the control of its Division D, the division whose activities included exterior ballistics, bombing trajectories, and the aiming of guns. This last subject, known as “Fire Control,” was developing into a substantial field of mathematical research.
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The National Defense Research Committee was willing to take responsibility for the Mathematical Tables Project, but they were thwarted by the project's relief status. “Congress is exceedingly jealous of its prerogative in laying down the rules according to which government funds may be spent,” reported the committee attorney, and hence “it would be pretty dangerous to attempt [to take control of the Mathematical Tables Project] pending further study of the situation.”
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Accepting this recommendation, the National Defense Research Committee left Lowan with no secure future.

Defense certification came quite unexpectedly to the Mathematical Tables Project in April 1942, but it offered no special status, as almost all of the surviving WPA projects were considered vital to the war.
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The New York office of the WPA informed Lowan that they were “interested in the work proposed for the coming year” and that they could only support the Mathematical Tables Project “provided workers are available.”
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The deserving poor were increasingly scarce as unemployment fell and WPA workers abandoned the relief projects for better-paying jobs in war industries. The Mathematical Tables Project lost several junior members of its planning committee to local manufacturers. Lowan was able to staunch the flight of these workers by transferring the entire planning committee to the payroll of the National Bureau of Standards and offering them competitive salaries.
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He was less successful on another problem, the departure of his IBM equipment. The army notified Lowan that they were canceling their contract for map computations and reclaiming
the tabulator, the card punches, and the sorters. They could no longer provide resources to a relief project, they explained, for “only our Civil Service employees will be used to operate these machines.”
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The defense certification did little to strengthen the position of the Mathematical Tables Project, and it raised a new issue that threatened the organization's survival. Shortly after the secretary of the army signed the certification order, he instructed Arnold Lowan and Gertrude Blanch to apply for Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) security clearances.
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In theory, the entire staff would have to be cleared in order to accept defense projects, but the first step was to ensure that the leaders were approved. Lowan and Blanch dutifully complied with the request only to have their applications placed in a security limbo, neither accepted nor rejected. We do not know the doubts that the FBI harbored about Lowan, but we do know that they believed that Blanch was excessively liberal and sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The evidence was circumstantial, but according to FBI analysts, it accumulated into a compelling case. The FBI reported that Blanch had been seen purchasing the
American Worker
, communist newspaper; that she was a registered member of the American Labor Party, which openly sympathized with communists; and that she had signed campaign petitions for communist political candidates. Unknown to her, the WPA had identified her as “potentially disloyal,” a claim of hearsay that was as impossible to refute as it was to prove. The most damning evidence against Blanch was her sister, Fanny, with whom she shared an apartment. Fanny freely acknowledged that she was a registered member of the Communist Party and actively recruited new members for the organization.
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At the time, the Soviet Union was an ally of the United States against Germany, but that was of little matter. The Russian revolution and the Soviet claims of world domination had frightened many in the West. Liberal thinkers argued that the communists would eventually move into the comfortable ranks of the middle class and drop their aggressive ways, but there was little evidence of this in 1941. The Soviet Union was actively spying on its ally, spiriting scientific information back to Moscow in diplomatic pouches and air flights over Alaska. At one point, a Soviet engineer had approached the Columbia Astronomical Computing Bureau and asked for “permission to visit your laboratory in order to receive some information as regards organization and method [
sic
] used there.” The request came through Amtorg, the notorious trading company that served as a cover for Soviet spies. The new director of the laboratory forwarded the request to his predecessor, Wallace Eckert. Eckert told the Amtorg official that the Columbia laboratory was open to all but then recounted the story of Boris Numerov, who had visited the laboratory four
years before and had subsequently disappeared. “I sincerely hope that his interest in machines was not construed by his government as treason,” Eckert wrote. “I am shivering a little bit,” wrote the new director after the exchange. “I would not be surprised if I wouldn't hear from them at all, and frankly I just as soon would not.”
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The Mathematical Tables Project never had any visit from Amtorg or any other known Soviet agency, but the label of “untrustworthy” joined that of “work relief” in the public image of the project. Gertrude Blanch and Arnold Lowan tried to compensate for their lack of security clearances by taking a public loyalty oath and soliciting testimonial letters from friends and supporters, including the faithful Philip Morse.
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These actions did nothing to improve the reputation of the Mathematical Tables Project, as Blanch and Lowan discovered when they were asked to prepare tables for the LORAN project.