Audra J. Wolfe is the author of Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (2018) and Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (2013). A Philadelphia-based writer and editor, her work has appeared in the Washington Post, TheAtlantic.com, Slate, and the popular podcast American History Tellers, as well as more scholarly venues.From Wolfe's Physics Today interview with Melinda Baldwin:
PT: In your book you argue that the Cold War bolstered and spread a vision of science as a neutral, apolitical activity. Tell us a bit about how that happened.Visit Audra J. Wolfe's website.
WOLFE: The idea that science is neutral or somehow apolitical existed before the Cold War, but it took on new significance in the ideological struggle that pitted capitalism against communism. As they looked out at the international political landscape in 1947, US policymakers were alarmed at the evident appeal of communism, particularly in Western Europe. The Marshall Plan, the massive economic assistance program to rebuild war-torn Europe, was one response to that crisis.
The Soviet Union retaliated by relaunching its international propaganda operation, the Communist Information Bureau, usually known as the Cominform. That prompted the US to step up its own propaganda campaign, including everything from overt information programs like the Voice of America broadcasting agency to covert cultural campaigns like the CIA’s funding of the British literary magazine Encounter.
Science was just as much a part of those campaigns as art, music, literature, or sports. US propaganda boasted of an American commitment to empiricism, objectivity, basic research, and internationalism in science and contrasted that with a caricature of Soviet science as based on state authority, political litmus tests, practical applications, and nationalism.
We still hear echoes of those ideas nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s an institutional legacy. Many of our most important scientific institutions...[read on]
The Page 99 Test: Freedom's Laboratory.
--Marshal Zeringue