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  After the Armistice was signed in November of 1918, Veblen took a four-month tour of Europe to debrief his counterparts about their experiences during the war. Many had already returned to academia, giving him the opportunity to observe the state of European mathematics firsthand. Göttingen, Berlin, Paris, and Cambridge were the centers of the mathematical world, while Harvard, Chicago, and Princeton were still far from catching up. Veblen returned to Princeton determined both to replicate the success of the European institutions and to recapture some of the informal mathematical camaraderie of the Proving Ground.

  He set three immediate goals: to sponsor postdoctoral fellowships for promising young mathematicians, to free existing professors from crushing teaching loads, and to promote cross-fertilization between mathematics and other fields. “It has frequently happened that an attempt to solve a physical problem has resulted in the creation of a new branch of mathematics,” he wrote to Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, urging the Rockefeller Institute to extend its existing National Research Council fellowships, focused on physics and chemistry, to include mathematical research.7

  Veblen’s proposal was adopted, and four months later he returned to Simon Flexner with a more ambitious request. “The way to make another step forward,” he suggested, “is to found and endow a Mathematical Institute. The physical equipment of such an institute would be very simple: a library, a few offices, and lecture rooms, and a small amount of apparatus such as computing machines.” Veblen sketched out a mathematical Utopia, somewhere between the High Tables of Cambridge or Oxford and the computing shacks of the Proving Ground. “The main funds of such an institute,” he emphasized, “should be used for the salaries of men and women whose business is mathematical research.”8

  Simon Flexner answered that “I wish that sometime you might speak with my brother, Mr. Abraham Flexner, of the General Education Board.”9 The Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board, chartered by Congress in 1903 for “the promotion of education within the United States of America, without distinction of race, sex, or creed,” focused on high school education in the American South, but was free to support higher education of any kind.

  Simon and Abraham Flexner, the fifth and seventh of nine children, were born in Louisville, Kentucky, and ended up at the Rockefeller Foundation by very different paths. Their father, Moritz Flexner, born in Bohemia in 1820, was a Jewish immigrant peddler who settled in Louisville in 1854, carrying his wares on his back until he saved four dollars to buy a horse. Simon Flexner, born in 1863, dropped out of school after the seventh grade, drifting in no particular direction until a job in a drugstore and a near-fatal brush with typhoid sparked an interest in microbiology that led to a career in medicine and, eventually, to his becoming an authority on infectious diseases and director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Established on a 425-acre farm in Princeton, and later expanded to 800 acres, the Rockefeller Institute was the leading microbiological research institute in the United States.

  Abraham Flexner, born in 1866 and the only Flexner to be sent to college, was sponsored by his eldest brother, Jacob, after the death of Moritz, in attending Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 1886. He returned to Louisville to teach Latin and Greek at Louisville High School, and then opened his own school, after establishing his reputation by flunking an entire class. He credited his parents with being “shrewd enough to realize that their hold upon their children was strengthened by the fact that they held them with a loose rein,” a principle that guided his educational philosophy, even though “to be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks.”10

  “A small hawk-like wiry man with a wonderful twinkle in his eye and a front of obviously false modesty that immediately made you suspect the strength and power, the cunning and cleverness that were hidden behind a delightful sense of humor, Flexner was not a scholar himself,” explained Klári von Neumann, “but had a very practical mind which conceived the idea that there should be a place where men whose only tools of work were their brains could spend time entirely on their own, with no obligation of teaching or looking after students; a place in a milieu of relaxed thinking, a place where they could talk to each other if they felt like it but if not, each was respectfully left alone.”11

  In 1898, Abraham Flexner married a former student, Anne Crawford, who became a successful Broadway playwright (The Marriage Game, All Soul’s Eve, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch), allowing them to leave Louisville behind. He sold his school in 1905, going first to Harvard, where he earned an MA in philosophy in 1906, and then to Germany, where he wrote a scathing critique of American higher education, published in 1908. The Carnegie Foundation then commissioned him to compile a report on medical education, where standards were even worse. He visited some 155 medical schools, and his exposure of their deficiencies resulted in the closure of two-thirds of the medical schools in the United States. In 1911 he was commissioned by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to conduct a “thorough and comprehensive” study of prostitution in Europe, an assignment that took him to twenty-eight cities in twelve countries, from London to Budapest. His report, published in 1914, was acclaimed in the United States and he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in France. In 1913 he joined the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board, his influence rising until he was ousted in 1928.

  Veblen’s proposal to the Flexners met with no immediate response, but Princeton University was eventually awarded $1 million by the General Education Board, contingent on the university’s securing an additional $2 million in matching funds. Veblen deferred the credit to Woodrow Wilson and Henry Fine. “I should not think that my little dream of a Math institute should be stressed too much,” Veblen later admitted, looking back. “The building of a mathematical department in Princeton University which was completely out of proportion with the standing of the University in other fields of scholarship had been going on under the leadership of H. B. Fine since 1885.”12

  Henry Burchard Fine, the son of a Presbyterian minister from rural Pennsylvania, had entered the College of New Jersey in 1876, and became close friends with Woodrow Wilson while serving as editor of the Princetonian in his senior year. After obtaining a PhD in Leipzig in 1885, he returned to Princeton and was appointed dean of faculty by Woodrow Wilson in 1903. Fine chose Veblen for one of the new preceptorial positions, and built up the core of the Princeton mathematical group. He hired promising young mathematicians, supported their research, and made no objections when they were called somewhere else.

  Fine’s brother John founded the Princeton Preparatory School (on the east side of town) for boys, while his sister, May, founded Miss Fine’s School (on the west side of town) for girls. After Wilson’s election to the U.S. presidency, Henry Fine declined an appointment as ambassador to Germany because he believed that teaching undergraduates should come first. Fine and Wilson were both friends with fellow alumnus Thomas Davies Jones, who enjoyed a lucrative Chicago law practice, a controlling interest in the Mineral Point Zinc Company, and self-described “superfluous wealth.” The Jones family put up the entire $2 million to match the contribution from the General Education Board, more than enough to realize Veblen’s ambitions for mathematics at Princeton—but Fine began distributing the money to other departments first. Things changed suddenly at the end of 1928.

  In 1913 the former Lenni Lenape footpath through Princeton had become part of the first transcontinental motorway across the United States. The Lincoln Highway, beginning at Times Square in New York City and terminating at an overlook above Point Lobos in San Francisco, followed the route of the old King’s Highway between Princeton and Kingston, and was fully paved between New York and Philadelphia by 1922. In the late afternoon of December 21, with darkness falling, a driver heading toward Kingston failed to see a seventy-year-old bicyclist making a left turn. The cyclist was Henry Fine, entering the driveway of his brother’s school. The driver, Mrs. Cedric A. Bodine, whose husband ow
ned a funeral home in Kingston, was held under a charge of manslaughter, while a series of memorials, with Nassau Hall’s bells tolling, mourned Princeton’s loss through Christmas Day.

  Thomas Jones and his niece Gwethalyn pledged an additional $500,000 to build (and maintain) a new mathematics building in memory of Fine. At the time of Veblen’s arrival in Princeton, the mathematicians shared a few small offices in Palmer Hall. “The principle upon which Fine Hall was designed,” according to Veblen, “was to make a place so attractive that people would prefer to work in the rooms provided in this building rather than in their own homes.”13 Jones, believing that “nothing is too good for Harry Fine,” instructed Veblen to construct a building that “any mathematician would be loath to leave.”

  Half a million dollars (equivalent to over $6 million today) went a long way in 1929. Fine Hall opened in October of 1931, with no detail overlooked: from the showers and locker room in the basement (“members of the department who wish to avail themselves of the nearby tennis courts or the gymnasium will not find it necessary to return to their homes to dress”) to the top-floor library with natural lighting, a central atrium, and a passageway to encourage mingling with the physicists in adjacent Palmer Hall. “There are nine offices with fireplaces and fifteen without,” reported Veblen. “Overstuffed chairs and davenports take the place of chairs and desks and the classrooms are fitted out after the manner of private studies,” reported Science magazine. The rooms were paneled in American oak, with concealed chalkboards and built-in filing cabinets. Equations for gravitation, relativity, quantum theory, five perfect solids, and three conic sections were set into leaded glass windows, and the central mantelpiece featured a carving of a fly traversing the one-sided surface of a Möbius strip. “Every little door knob, every little gargoyle, every little piece of stained glass that has a word on it, was something that Veblen personally supervised,” noted Herman Goldstine in 1985.14

  In April 1930, Veblen wrote to Albert Einstein requesting permission to inscribe a remark Einstein had made in Princeton in 1921—“Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott aber Boshaft ist Er nicht” (translated at the time as “God is clever, but not dishonest”)—above the fireplace in the Professors’ Lounge. “It was your reply when someone asked you if you thought that [Dayton C.] Miller’s results would be verified,” Veblen explained. “I hope you will not object to our using this ‘child of your wit.’ ”15 Einstein replied that “Lord” or “God” might be misconstrued, suggesting that what he really meant was “Nature conceals her secrets in the sublimity of her law, not through cunning.”16

  With the opening of Fine Hall, and Veblen’s appointment as Henry Burchard Fine Professor of Mathematics (also funded by the Jones family), Veblen’s position, along with that of mathematics at Princeton, appeared secure. Three misfortunes—the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism in Europe, and the approach of the Second World War—then combined with yet another windfall to allow Veblen’s dream of an autonomous mathematical institute to be fulfilled.

  During the three centuries since Henry Hudson explored the Newark estuary in 1609, the nonnative population of Newark had grown from 61 dissident Puritan settlers in 1666 to just under 350,000, almost doubling between 1890 and 1910. Among the new arrivals was Louis Bamberger, born in 1855, above his father’s dry goods store, into a family of Jewish merchants who had immigrated to Baltimore from Bavaria in 1823. After starting work in his maternal uncle’s store at age fourteen, Louis served as a buyer in New York City, scraping together the money to buy the stock of a bankrupt dry goods firm in 1892. Selling it out of a rented storefront in a blighted neighborhood of Newark, he realized enough of a profit to open his own business, taking on as partners his sister Carrie; her husband, Louis Frank; and their close friend Felix Fuld.

  By 1928, Bamberger’s department store occupied 1 million square feet, with 3,500 employees and over $32 million in annual sales. The Amazon.com of its time, Bamberger’s featured price tags on all merchandise, no-questions-asked money-back guarantees, toll-free telephone numbers, job security, and an on-site public library for employees. The eight-floor flagship store on Market Street in Newark included a 500-watt radio station, WOR, and introduced what is now the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

  The four business partners, with no children, lived together on the outskirts of Newark, in South Orange, on a thirty-acre estate. After Louis Frank died in 1910, Carrie married Felix Fuld, who died in January of 1929. The two surviving Bambergers decided it was time to retire, and in June of 1929 negotiated a sale to R. H. Macy and Co. that closed in September, just six weeks before the stock market crash. They received 146,385 shares in Macy’s, whose share price reached a high of $225 on November 3 before sinking to a low of $17 in 1932. The Bambergers, who took $11 million of the proceeds in cash, distributed $1 million among 225 employees who had served fifteen years or more, and enlisted their chief accountant, Samuel D. Leidesdorf, and legal adviser, Herbert H. Maass, to help decide what they should do with the rest.

  “Because they had prospered to such an extent in the City of Newark, they were determined that whatever they did should benefit either the City of Newark or the State of New Jersey,” Maass recalled in 1955. Their intention was to establish a medical college, giving preference to Jewish faculty and students, on their South Orange estate. Maass and Leidesdorf were referred to Abraham Flexner, whom they called on in his office at the Rockefeller Medical Foundation in December of 1929. “His advice to us was that there were ample medical school facilities in the United States,” remembers Maass. Flexner, who had dismissed the American University as “an educational department store” in an Atlantic Monthly article in 1925, seized his chance. “Toward the end of our first conversation,” according to Maass, “he asked us, ‘Have you ever dreamed a dream?’ ”17

  Flexner remembers having been “working quietly one day when the telephone rang and I was asked to see two gentlemen who wished to discuss with me the possible uses to which a considerable sum of money might be placed.”18 He had been preaching about the deficiencies of higher education for many years, and when Maass and Leidesdorf visited, he had the proofs of his forthcoming book, Universities: American, English, German, sitting on his desk. His guests took a copy with them when they left.

  The book, expanding upon the Rhodes lectures Flexner had delivered at Oxford in 1928, gave a depressing account of higher education in America, concluding with a call for “the outright creation of a school or institute of higher learning” where “mature persons, animated by intellectual purposes, must be left to pursue their own ends in their own way … be they college graduates or not.” Flexner argued that this “free society of scholars” should be governed by scholars and scientists, not administrators, and even “the term ‘organization’ should be banned.”19

  Maass was “fascinated,” and Leidesdorf was “impressed.” A series of luncheon meetings with the Bambergers was arranged, and before Louis and Carrie departed for their customary winter retreat to the Biltmore in Phoenix, Flexner drafted a codicil to their last wills and testaments. “Having made an extensive survey of the field, guided by expert advice,” he wrote on their behalf, “we are presently of the opinion that the best service we can render mankind is to establish and endow a graduate college which shall be … free from all the impedimenta which now surround graduate schools because of the undergraduate activities connected therewith.”20

  The Bambergers were still cautiously approaching a decision, but there was no indecision on Flexner’s part. He renewed contact with Oswald Veblen, who was immersed in the construction of Fine Hall. Veblen sensed something was up. He reported to Flexner on the progress being made in Princeton, adding that “I think my mathematical institute which has not yet found favor may turn out to be one of the next steps.” Flexner took the bait. “What would American scholars and scientists do if some fellow or some foundation set up a ‘sure enough’ institution of learning?” he asked. “Is it necessary to carry the mill-stone o
f the college about the neck of the graduate school?”21

  On May 20, 1930, with Flexner appointed as the first director at a salary of $20,000 per year (equivalent to over $250,000 today), a certificate of incorporation was signed for “the establishment, at or in the vicinity of Newark, New Jersey, of an institute for advanced study, and for the promotion of knowledge in all fields.” The Bambergers committed $5 million to start things off. “So far as we are aware,” they announced in their initial letter of instruction to the trustees, “there is no institution in the United States where scientists and scholars devote themselves at the same time to serious research and to the training of competent post-graduate students entirely independently of and separated from both the charms and the diversions inseparable from an institution the major interest of which is the teaching of undergraduates.”22

  For the first two years, the Institute existed only on paper, envisioned by Abraham Flexner as “a paradise for scholars who, like poets and musicians, have won the right to do as they please.”23 It was one thing to criticize higher education, as Flexner had been doing for twenty-two years, and another to replace it with something else. Creating a paradise, even with $5 million during the Great Depression, was easier said than done.

  Flexner spent six months consulting with leading intellectuals and educational administrators across Europe and the United States. The notion of paradise varied from one person to the next. Classicists advised Flexner to start with classics, physicists with physics, historians with history, and mathematicians with mathematics. British biologist Julian Huxley advised mathematical biology, arguing that “there is in biology a lamentable lack of general appreciation of a great deal of systematic and descriptive work.” The Bambergers wanted to start with economics and politics, which they hoped would “contribute not only to a knowledge of these subjects but ultimately to the cause of social justice which we have deeply at heart.”24