J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Cape Cod connection
A teacher with deep Brewster roots brought him to Los Alamos
Not included in the blockbuster J. Robert Oppenheimer movie is how a Cape Cod connection played a crucial role in Oppenheimer’s early life, including his eventual move to Los Alamos to build a bomb that can destroy the world.
It swings through Brewster, and a man who was Oppenheimer’s teacher, an early role model — part mentor, life guide — who stayed in touch with his former student throughout his life: Herbert Winslow Smith.
Son of wealthy New Yorkers, Oppenheimer attended a private progressive high school in Manhattan, the Ethical Culture School. He was idiosyncratic from the start, six feet tall, never more than 125 pounds, and when he came down with dysentery and colitis as a teenager his frailty scared his parents.
Enter Herb Smith, a popular teacher at the school, Harvard educated, erudite as well as forceful, a hail fellow well met. Smith’s Cape Cod roots are as deep as they go for a European, Mayflower arrivals, East Brewster and West Brewster coming together in later generations. Smith was in Brewster almost every summer and naturally retired here, the family owning several homesteads. His granddaughter Ellie Johnson (now deceased) with her husband Peter, both much engaged in town affairs, lived in town for many years, where Peter still resides.
None of that mattered to J. Robert’s father. His son liked Herbert, Herbert liked his son, so came a proposal:
Would Smith be willing to take this teenager on an Outward Bound kind of challenge into a rugged world, toughen him up, ready a brilliant, eccentric lad for the rigors of life (and Harvard)?
Smith was agreeable. The Oppenheimers proposed an extended trip, willing to cover Smith’s school semester sabbatical salary and then some, but Ethical Culture nixed that. So what happened was a shorter summer adventure:
Smith and Oppenheimer headed to country Smith had explored but Oppenheimer had never seen; the American Southwest. 1922.
The impact was profound.
“In later life (Oppenheimer) was fond of saying that he had two loves: physics and the New Mexican desert,” wrote Ray Monk in a biography. “Of those, the first was New Mexico.”
Smith put the city kid on horseback (though as a boy of privilege, he had done some of that already), and they settled into a dude ranch called Los Pinos, northeast of Santa Fe. They rode, camped, made fires, sat up late talking. Oppenheimer developed a crush on a woman who ran the ranch. He came to feel accepted, less an outcast.
Then, riding through the awesome New Mexico landscape, they came upon a wild canyon, uninhabited by Europeans except for a hermetic boys boarding school, named for cottonwood trees that grew there; Los Alamos.
The summer sojourn accomplished its goal; Oppenheimer emerged stronger, more confident — and forever attracted to the Southwest. Soon after returning, heading to Harvard, he heard Smith was going back for another trip and wrote, “Of course I am insanely jealous. I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos … spending the moonlight on Grass Mountain.”
Twenty years later, 1942, Oppenheimer convinced military brass that Los Alamos was the right place to pursue the project named after his city of birth, Manhattan. The eccentric boarding school was bought by the government and expanded into a town with hundreds and then thousands of people – lugging the first nuclear generators, centrifuge, particle accelerator, across the desert.
Oppenheimer’s growing misgivings about the project translated into his feelings about Los Alamos itself:
“I am responsible,” he confessed later, “for ruining a beautiful place.”
He was responsible for much more than that.
Within days of the second atomic bomb dropping at Nagasaki in August, 1945, Oppenheimer, tortured by remorse, was making a case that the bomb should be made illegal, “just like poison gases after the last war.” He and his wife retreated to a cabin near Los Pinos, the ranch where Smith first took him in New Mexico, and he wrote his old teacher:
“You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many moments of high promise, is yet only a stone’s throw from despair.”
(“American Prometheus,” the biography that inspired and informed the movie, is source for quotes and background here except as relates to Cape Cod, or as noted. And thanks to Peter Johnson, who inspired and informed this effort.)
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Seth, you did a WONDERFUL job,. When you mentioned the West Brewster/East Brewster link I thought you might be referring to the fact that Herbert Smith of the West Brewster Winslows married May Chapman of the East Brewster Chapmans.