It's difficult to know what events in a person's early life later came to define their personality, their ways of thinking, or their politics. It's especially difficult when the person you are writing about tended to avoid discussing the particulars of their early life. But even when you know someone's entire life story -- your own, for example -- is it really so easy to put your finger on what it is that made you the way you are? Based on the amount of money and time people spend in therapy to answer just this question, I'm thinking that it's not so easy.
In my own case, I've never really been sure what made me the way that I am. My mother is an artist and my father is a surgeon. Is that the genetic or social equation for producing a poet/historian of science? And why does it only produce this result in one out of four instances (none of my 3 younger brothers has gone this route and arguably we've been exposed to most of the same experiences). Does the fact that I was born to a couple of graduate students and grew up while my father was in medical school explain why I have spent so much time in graduate school myself? It would be a convenient explanation but it's not very satisfactory. Not really necessary, not really sufficient. So it's difficult for me now to try to pick apart the life of someone I never met and try to explain what made them tick. I'm not a fan of armchair psychoanalysis. And yet this is what most people seem to expect a biographer to do.
Still, it seems very important to me (and to this project) to reveal as much as possible about Harold Urey's "country boyhood." Why?
Part of the reason is that I am not really interested in Urey's childhood as a source of identity for Urey, and so I'm not worried about using his childhood in order to construct him (or the problems that would come with this). I'm not interested in how an integrated self emerges from a life full of circumstance and experience. I'm not even sure I believe in personal identity in this way -- as the sum of all parts. (Although I am interested in the way that we retrospectively create order out of chaos when examining our own lives in the service of constructing our identities -- and for that matter the way in which we do the same thing to important historical figures in the service of larger arguments about time, place, etc.)
In Urey's case, I'm really interested in his childhood for two main reasons (maybe three):
First of all, it gives me some insight into the origins of one of the 20th century's celebrity scientists. We have to remember that when Urey was born at the end of the 19th century, urban and rural life were still relatively distinct entities. In some places more than others, people lived cut off from the changes that were occurring as American cities grew, working class culture emerged, and the heterosocial lifestyle we're familiar with today began to develop. Urey's family lived in just such a community. Not only were they relatively isolated geographically in a small farming community in northern Indiana, but they were isolated socially in a 'peculiar' religion (more about this later). My hope is that by studying Urey, I might be able to say something about whether or not those scientists who grew up in more traditional rural backgrounds brought the values of their rural communities into the American scientific community. Were the values of modern science really modern? Or were they an amalgamation of the cosmopolitan ideals of science (partly inherited from the previous generation of amateur scientists/men of leisure and learning) and the rural values that these new professional scientists brought with them to the scientific community? To this end, I am interested in examining the social and familial world within which Urey grew up.
Second, I'm interested in finding out what parts of Urey's life story did not make it into his official autobiographical and biographical materials and determining why they didn't make the cut. Some of the omissions to his autobiography (unpublished in its original form but later released in condensed form as a children's book) seem deliberate. Those parts that are left out are the ones that might have made him seem like a less-than-typical American success story. As he told it, his was a Horatio Alger-like rise from the humblest, poorest origins to the heights of scientific stardom. He was raised by two poor widows -- his mother and his paternal grandmother -- on a failing farm and only was able to attend high school because of a small amount of money left behind by his father's life insurance. He taught in one-room country schoolhouses until finally attending the University of Montana and working his way through school busing tables, working on the railroad, and digging irrigation canals. He then caught the eye of some influential professors, became a scientist, and landed at the UC Berkeley and Neils Bohr's Institute in Copenhagen.
Every bit of this story is true. But there was a lot more to the story. I hope to address a couple of these omissions in the next few posts over the next few days. For now, I just want to address the omission as a point of concern for me. In a conversation that I recently had with Urey's son, he suggested to me that it was Urey's All-American, rags-to-riches story/reputation that protected him from McCarthy. While McCarthy did call Urey before closed hearings, Urey's son suggests that he didn't dare call him before open hearings for fear that Urey's reputation was beyond reproach. Whether or not this is true, it certainly demonstrates just how important an asset the family believed Urey's life story to be.
But Urey's history of omitting his religious upbringing and certain other details of his childhood predate the Cold War and McCarthyism. The habit of hiding many of the particulars of his origins dates back at least as far as 1914. This was the year that Urey began school in Montana, and this was also the year that WWI began in Europe. It seems like more than just a coincidence that it was at this time that Urey began trying to shed his country accent and mannerisms, and to present himself as a regular full-blooded American. The alternative would have been to claim his ethnic German Anabaptist roots -- something that could have been very dangerous in Montana during this time (Montana turns out to have been one of the worst places in America to be a German American during WWI). In fact, this is just one reason why he might have wanted to cover up his roots (I think the reasons are overdetermined, really), and I'll get to these in time.
Again. If it seems like I'm leaving a lot out, I am. I plan to come back to this subject over the next few days as I get further into revising this chapter. But this post lays out at least a couple of my goals for the time being.
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