# Robert Millikan, Japanese Internment, and Eugenics

Thomas Hales
University of Pittsburgh

###### Abstract

Robert A. Millikan (1868-1953) was the second American to win the Nobel Prize
in physics. At the peak of his influence, no scientist save Einstein was more
admired by the American public.

Millikan, the head of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) during
its first 24 years, oversaw its rapid growth into one of the leading
scientific institutions of the world. In response to demands for social
justice following the murder of George Floyd, Caltech launched an
investigation into Millikan. Caltech reached a decision to strip Millikan of
honors (such as the library named after him), following accusations from
various sources that he was a sexist, racist, xenophobic, antisemitic, pro-
eugenic Nazi sympathizer. In short, Caltech threw the book at him.

This article analyzes a specific accusation against Millikan that was
published in _Nature_ : that he collaborated to deprive Japanese Americans of
their rights during their forced relocation to internment camps during the
Second World War. An examination of original historical sources will show that
this accusation is false. On the contrary, Millikan actively campaigned during
the war to promote the rights of Japanese Americans. This article traces the
stages of misrepresentation that led to current false beliefs about Millikan.
In view of Millikan’s extraordinary position in American science, this
misrepresentation is a cautionary tale.

The article also treats Caltech’s central accusation against Millikan: he lent
his name to “a morally reprehensible eugenics movement” that had been
scientifically discredited in his time. The article considers the statements
purporting to show that eugenics movement had been denounced by the scientific
community by 1938. In a reversal of Caltech’s claims, all three of Caltech’s
scientific witnesses against eugenics – including two Nobel laureates – were
actually pro-eugenic to varying degrees. This article concludes that
Millikan’s beliefs fell within acceptable scientific norms of his day.

##  1 Robert Millikan

This first section describes some of Millikan’s contributions to science and
society.

###  1.1 Scientific contributions

Millikan’s life spanned one of the most fertile periods in the history of
physics, covering the birth of quantum theory, special and general relativity,
subatomic physics, and nuclear energy. He was born in a small town in Illinois
in 1868 not long after James Maxwell published his famous equations on
electromagnetism and died in 1953 shortly before the birth of Yang-Mills
theory. Millikan was one of the greatest experimental physicists in the world
during the first half of the 20th century. He built his reputation on high-
precision instruments that he designed for experimental use. During his
lifetime, the United States moved from the margins of physics to a powerful
central position.

In 1951, in a letter to Werner Heisenberg, Millikan made a self-assessment of
what he thought to be his most important scientific contributions [60,
43:729]. First on his list was the isolation the electron and the measurement
of its charge. Millikan was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1923 for the famous oil-
drop experiment, which measured the electron charge. These measurements also
led to reliable estimates of Avogadro’s number [55].

Second was his experimental verification of Albert Einstein’s photoelectric
equation, which was also recognized by the Nobel Prize. Einstein’s and
Millikan’s Nobel Prizes are closely linked: Einstein’s for the theoretical
derivation the photoelectric equation and Millikan’s for the experimental
verification. (Contrary to what some might expect, Einstein’s Nobel Prize was
not for the theory of relativity.) As a bonus, Millikan obtained what was then
the best experimental value of Planck’s constant.

The photoelectric effect gave one of the first strong indications of wave-
particle duality. Even today, wave-particle duality poses puzzling
philosophical questions [56]. Einstein hypothesized the existence of what is
now called a photon – a hypothesis that flew in the face of the settled
science of wave optics. This unsettling concept of light motivated Millikan in
his experiments, and he eventually confirmed Einstein’s equation. Millikan’s
research on the photoelectric effect and the electron helped to propel physics
from the atomic scale to subatomic particles.

Third was the closing of the gap between light spectra and X-ray spectra,
using the “hot spark source of light.” Robert Kargon described the research
findings as follows:

> In a series of papers with R.A. Sawyer and Ira Bowen, Millikan was able to
> make a considerable extension of the map of the ultraviolet spectrum; they
> had been able to photograph, measure the wavelength, and analyze the atoms
> of light elements and multiply ionized atoms of the heavier atoms. They
> found about 1,000 new [atomic spectral] lines, and showed that their
> wavelengths were consistent with the Bohr theory –Kargon [44, p 125].

More accurately, Millikan and his collaborators compared their new lines
against the predictions of an enhancement of the Bohr model: the relativistic
Bohr-Sommerfeld model of the atom [62, pp 209–231]. They found some problems
with the theory that were later reconciled by the introduction of electron
spin to the model [94].111The Uhlenbeck-Goudsmit article of December 1925,
which introduced the concept of electron spin, stated, “The assumption of the
spinning electron leads to a new insight into the remarkable analogy between
the multiplet structure of the optical spectra and the structure of X-ray
spectra, which was emphasized especially by Landé and Millikan. … [This
analogy] obtains an immediate explanation on the hypothesis of the spin
electron” [94].

The fourth on the list is “the law governing the pulling of electrons out of
metals by intense electrical fields.” See [44, p 126] and [62, p 261]. The
experimental results of C. F. Eyring, Millikan, and Charles Lauritsen were
eventually explained by J. Robert Oppenheimer quantum-mechanically as
electrons tunneling through a potential barrier.

Fifth was the extraterrestrial origin of cosmic rays. The term ‘cosmic ray’
was coined by Millikan, but he was not the first to provide evidence of the
extraterrestrial origin of cosmic rays. In 1912, several years before Millikan
became involved in cosmic ray research, Victor Hess, in Nobel Prize winning
work, made measurements in balloons and “concluded that the upper atmosphere
is ionized by radiation from space” [71]. Millikan and G. Harvey Cameron
submerged electroscopes into mountain lakes and found that their readings at
different water depths confirmed the extraterrestrial origin of cosmic rays
[21]. In the early days of cosmic ray research there was much to investigate:
how cosmic ray intensity varies according to altitude, latitude, and
longitude; how deeply they penetrate; whether the rays carry positive,
negative, or no charge; and their energy distribution. Millikan was among the
most active researchers in this field.

Millikan was sometimes wrong. If cosmic rays carry charge, then they are
deflected by the earth’s magnetic field, producing a more abundant shower of
cosmic rays near the earth’s poles than the equator. Millikan and Cameron made
a scientific expedition to Peru in 1926 to answer this question
experimentally, but because of their lack of thoroughness, limitations of
their electroscopes, and partial equipment failure, they failed to detect any
significant dependence of cosmic ray intensity on latitude. Millikan fatefully
took non-detection as evidence that cosmic rays carry no charge. In opposition
to Millikan’s conclusion, the next year, Jacob Clay presented experimental
evidence that cosmic rays do indeed vary in intensity according to latitude,
and hence that cosmic rays do carry charge. Arthur Compton backed up Clay’s
results. Millikan eventually accepted the Clay-Compton conclusion, but only
slowly and only after acrimonious exchanges with Compton, which were dragged
into the public arena by _New York Times_ reporting [44].

Sixth is the design of a specialized cloud-chamber for the detection of cosmic
particles. Carl Anderson was a PhD student under Millikan at Caltech. After
completing his PhD, Anderson continued at Caltech as a Research Fellow
(1930-1933) but shifted to cosmic ray research, still supervised by Millikan,
who ran three different cosmic ray research groups, each using a different
kind of detector. Anderson later recalled, “Professor R. A. Millikan and the
writer in the spring of 1930 planned a cloud-chamber apparatus suitable for
cosmic-ray studies, …[2]”222Millikan wrote that he and Anderson designed the
cloud chamber in the summer of 1929, but Anderson’s date seems more plausible,
because of the period of Anderson’s fellowship [62, p 322]. Anderson built the
cloud chamber over a period of months. In August 1932, when Anderson was only
26 years old, his cloud chamber detected a positron, the first form of anti-
matter ever detected. For the discovery of the positron, Anderson was awarded
a Nobel Prize in physics. It was Millikan who nominated him. Four years later,
Anderson and his first graduate student, Seth Neddermeyer, discovered yet
another elementary particle, the muon, which carries the same electric charge
as the electron, but possesses greater mass.

###  1.2 Secondary influences

Millikan attracted and was attracted to truly extraordinary scientific talent.
He went to Germany for three semesters after finishing his PhD at Columbia in
1895 and was present in Berlin for Wilhelm Röntgen’s first large public
exhibition of the X-ray. In 1896, Millikan attended Max Planck’s lectures.
According to Millikan, it was during those lectures that Planck conceived the
idea of the quantum or discontinuous change (but did not publish on the topic
until a few years later). Elsewhere in Europe were Henri Becquerel’s discovery
of radioactivity in 1896 and J. J. Thomson’s research on the electron in 1897.
It was a new era in physics. Millikan wrote in his autobiography that these
“discoveries actually determined the direction of my own study and research
for the next fifty years” [63, p 270].

The first American Nobel Prize winner in physics was Albert A. Michelson, who
won his prize for the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which failed to
detect motion of the earth relative to the luminiferous ether, a fact later
explained by Einstein’s special theory of relativity. It was Michelson who
recruited Millikan to the University of Chicago. For decades in Chicago, until
Millikan left for Caltech, the two were close colleagues and friends, playing
tennis together regularly [63, p 87]. Michelson regarded Millikan as his
successor at the University of Chicago, but history had other plans.

The second American to win a Nobel Prize in physics was Millikan. The third
was Arthur Compton, Millikan’s nemesis in the cosmic ray debate. (Arthur’s
brother Karl will be relevant later in this article.) The fourth was
Millikan’s student Carl Anderson, mentioned earlier. The fifth was Clinton
Davisson, who as a student at University of Chicago was inspired by Millikan
to go into physics. Davisson faced financial hardship as a student, and it was
through Millikan’s recommendation that Davisson obtained employment as a
physics teacher, while he continued to work his way through school [26] [46].
Davisson won his Nobel Prize for observing diffraction patterns of electrons,
confirming Louis de Broglie’s prediction that wave-particle duality is not
limited to photons.

Millikan’s influence extended beyond pure science into industrial research
that shaped the modern world. The physicist Frank Jewett was the first
president of the legendary AT&T Bell Telephone Labs starting in 1925 and later
became the chairman of its board of directors. Jewett and Millikan were the
closest of friends. Millikan helped line up Jewett with his wife, who had been
a Millikan student; and Jewett was the best man at Millikan’s wedding [63, p
53].

In 1909, chief engineers and executives at AT&T started discussing the
feasibility of establishing transcontinental phone service. The core
technological problem was that as the telephone signal travels down the copper
wire it grows weaker, so that a signal originating in New York would be
entirely lost before reaching San Francisco. What was needed was an efficient
_amplifier_ (or _repeater_ to use the term originating in the telegraph
industry) that boosted the signal and kept it from attenuating in its
transcontinental journey [27, p 21].

Already in 1909, Jewett was a senior manager at AT&T. The task of
amplification became Jewett’s responsibility. He consulted his friend Millikan
about the problem in 1910. Jewett asked Millikan to let him “have one or two,
or even three of the best young men who are taking their doctorates with you
and are intimately familiar with your field. Let us take them into our
laboratory in New York and assign to them the sole task of developing a
telephone repeater” [27, p 22]. Millikan sent Jewett his recent PhD student,
Harold Arnold (who would later become Bell Lab’s first director of research)
to work on the task.

What happened next is mythical. An amplifier, called an _audion_ , had already
been recently invented by Lee De Forest. (In 1946, Millikan called De Forest’s
audion the single most important advance in electronics of all time [60,
43:63].) Arnold and his team went to work improving the performance of the
audion for AT&T, after the organization bought the patent rights to De
Forest’s invention. From time to time, Millikan consulted on the project, but
he was mostly a bystander. The research and development resulted in a
practical vacuum tube amplifier, which was used in the transcontinental
telephone line. At the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1914,
Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson, positioned in New York and San
Francisco, gave the first transcontinental public demonstration: “Mr. Watson,
come here, I want you,” echoing their immortal words from decades earlier [27,
pp 23-24]. The vacuum tube amplifier revolutionized electronics throughout
multiple industries: communications, radio, film, television, computer, and
consumer electronics.

The friendship between Millikan and Jewett led to a procession of physicists
that were trained by Millikan and employed by Bell Labs. Mervin Kelly was
another physicist who obtained his PhD under Millikan [27, p 16].333How many
PhD students did Millikan supervise? A very rough estimate suggests he
supervised more than 80 PhDs in physics, including more than 30 from the
University of Chicago. At Caltech alone, by 1940, Millikan supervised about
one-third of the more than 135 PhDs [29, p 107]. Kelly became director of
research at Bell Labs starting in 1936 and later became president of Bell
Labs. As research director, Kelly redirected research focus from vacuum tube
technology to solid-state physics and recruited William Shockley to lead the
solid-state research group. Kelly once stopped by Shockley’s office (which was
shared with Davisson) and lectured on the coming day when something electronic
would replace telephone relays. “For the rest of his life Shockley considered
Kelly’s lecture as the moment when a particular idea freed his ambition, and
in many respects all modern technology from its moorings” [27, p 23]. The
research group – Schockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain – was awarded
the Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of the transistor.

Relationships were not merely scientific. Chien-Shiung Wu is known for the
discovery of parity violation, for which she was awarded the Wolf Prize in
physics in 1978. When Chien-Shiung Wu married Luke Chia-Liu Yuan in 1942, none
of the parents were able to attend, because of the war. The Millikans hosted
the wedding, which was held at their home. Millikan was Yuan’s doctoral
advisor. Yuan’s grandfather was Yuan Shikai, the first president of the
republic of China.

###  1.3 Education

In education, Millikan and Gale’s _First Course in Physics_ is perhaps the
best selling English-language physics textbook of all time. Including all
editions and title variations, Millikan and Gale sold 1,610,637 copies between
1906 and 1952 [60, 43:520]. It is particularly remarkable that these numbers
were achieved in the first half of the twentieth century, when the physics
textbook market was much smaller than it is now. In the international textbook
market, a Caltech webpage states that “ _The Feynman Lectures on Physics_ is
perhaps the most popular physics book ever written. More that 1.5 million
English-language copies have been sold; probably even more copies have been
sold in a dozen foreign-language editions (the number of copies in Russian
alone, for example, is estimated to be over 1 million)” [32]. By way of
comparison, popular physics books have sold far more copies. Stephen Hawking’s
_A Brief History of Time_ has sold more than 25 million copies [57].

###  1.4 Caltech’s executive

Kargon wrote that the physicist Millikan, astrophysicist George Hale, and
chemist Arthur Noyes formed a “triumvirate” that “was responsible for the
rapid rise to prominence of … the California Institute of Technology” [44].
The idea of a founding triumvirate of Caltech has been repeated almost to the
point of cliché, but the three scientists contributed in entirely different
ways to the rise of the institute.

George Hale was the dreamer. He called himself a schemer. In 1903, Hale
secured funding from the Carnegie Institute to construct a solar observatory
on Mount Wilson near Pasadena. Each of his dreams led to another. Hale
envisioned a chemical laboratory to handle problems that arose at Mount
Wilson, then more ambitiously of an outstanding technical institute to house
the chemistry lab. In 1907, Hale became a trustee of Throop Polytechnic
Institute in Pasadena, which was an unremarkable local manual training school.
Hale channeled his hope of creating an outstanding institute into Throop. He
spent years recruiting Noyes to head the division of chemistry, and Millikan
to serve as president. Jewett called Hale the “gifted strategist” and Millikan
“the field general” [44, p 92]. What Hale schemed, Millikan brought to life.

Millikan was appointed the chief executive of Caltech in 1921, the year after
Throop was renamed the California Institute of Technology; he held the
position for 24 years. He was offered the title of president but instead chose
an organizational structure that made him the chairman of an executive
council, consisting of four trustees and four distinguished members of the
faculty. Noyes was one of them. Millikan was also the director of Caltech’s
physics division – the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics. “Millikan was
everywhere planning, pushing, deciding, admonishing. … His day at the
Institute, starting at eight o’clock in the morning, frequently did not
terminate until long after midnight” [21].

Noyes had been acting president of MIT for two years before moving to Caltech
and had considerable administrative know-how. Linus Pauling wrote that
“Millikan became a great public figure, who in the minds of the people of the
country represented the California Institute of Technology; but Noyes was
often the one who was responsible for the policies that were announced by
Millikan” [74].

When Millikan first arrived at Caltech, DuMond recalled, “the faculty and
graduate students were still a small enough group so that at the first faculty
dinner we could all sit around a single long table in the basement of the
Crown Hotel” [21]. Under Millikan, Caltech swiftly grew. During its first
decade, Caltech made several stellar faculty appointments.

  * •

Theodor von Karman, who became the director of Caltech’s Aeronautical
Laboratory and later a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory;

  * •

Carl Anderson, the Nobel Prize winning discoverer of the positron, discussed
earlier;

  * •

Fritz Zwicky, an astronomer of neutron stars, dark matter, and gravitational
lenses;

  * •

Robert Oppenheimer, who was head of the Los Alamos Lab during the Manhattan
Project to develop nuclear weapons;

  * •

Richard Tolman, who served as scientific advisor to General Leslie Groves, the
director of the Manhattan Project;

  * •

Thomas Hunt Morgan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for establishing that
chromosomes carry the genetic material;

  * •

Alfred Sturtevant, who made the first genetic map of a chromosome;

  * •

Theodosius Dobzhansky, who was one of the architects of the modern synthesis,
combining Darwinian evolution, population genetics, and Medelian genetics; and

  * •

Linus Pauling, one of the founders of quantum chemistry and the recipient of
two Nobel Prizes (in Chemistry and Peace).

Other renowned scientists were closely affiliated with Caltech. Charles
Richter, who developed the Richter scale, was part of the Caltech
Seismological Lab, which at the time was a cooperative venture between the
Carnegie Institute and Caltech. Edwin Hubble, who gave evidence for the
expansion of the universe, was nearby at the Mount Wilson Observatory.

The growth of Caltech can be measured in many ways. In scientific
productivity, “by 1930, Caltech was ranked as the leading producer of
important physics papers in the country” [29, p 108]. Its endowment, which was
almost nonexistent in 1920, had grown to $25 million by 1947. Caltech had
completed construction of only two permanent buildings in 1920 and thirty-six
by 1947 [63, p 249].

Caltech initiated a broad array of scientific projects, each of which was an
undertaking of industrial scale, requiring major funding (from sources such as
the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Fund, the Carnegie Institution, or
industrial partners); scientists, engineers, and students; buildings, labs,
and equipment. In cooperation with the Southern California Electric Company, a
high-voltage lab was built. The Guggenheim aeronautics lab tested Douglas
airplanes in its wind tunnel. “Caltech’s Daniel Guggenheim Graduate School of
Aeronautics played a major role in turning southern California into the
aircraft capital of the world [29, p 177].” There were Millikan’s cosmic ray
project, a seismology project, the study and development of jet propulsion,
and the study of oil under high pressure sponsored by the American Petroleum
Institute. Starting in the 1920s, Hale had a vision of building the largest
telescope in the world. Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, including its 200-inch
Hale Telescope, became operational in 1948 [63, pp 238–250].

##  2 Japanese Internment and the Fair Play Committee

World-altering political events shaped Millikan’s final years at the head of
Caltech. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on
Japan. Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were forced to relocate to
internment camps. An organization named the _Fair Play Committee_ was formed
in Berkeley to defend the rights of Japanese Americans. Millikan became a vice
president in this organization. After the war ended, scientific missions were
organized to Japan to evaluate Japan’s scientific capabilities. Millikan
assisted in the recruitment of scientists and engineers for these missions.

###  2.1 Pearl Harbor

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The next day, the United
States declared war on Japan. In January 1942, anti-Japanese sentiments
intensified, and widespread hostile feelings were directed against Japanese
Americans.444This article uses the term Japanese American inclusively both for
United States immigrants of Japanese citizenship (Issei), and for American-
born citizens (Nisei) of Japanese ancestry. What this article and many sources
today call internment camps were formerly called relocation projects.
Formerly, internment camps meant enemy alien camps administered by the
Department of Justice. Anti-Japanese rhetoric was especially fierce in
California, which was the home to the majority of all continental Japanese
Americans. In California, the Hearst newspapers, the McClatchy newspapers, the
_Los Angeles Times_ , as well as hundreds of civic organizations were united
against Japanese Americans [77, p 37] [49]. On January 29, 1942, a Hearst
newspaper columnist wrote of the Japanese on the West Coast, “Herd ’em up,
pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands. Let ’em be pinched,
hurt, hungry and dead up against it. … Personally, I hate the Japanese. And
that goes for all of them” [58]. A barber shop offered “free shaves for Japs”
but was “not responsible for accidents” [93, p 18].

The newspapers and public opinion were backed up by political power. In
February 1942, Earl Warren was the California attorney general and was soon to
be elected governor of California (January 1943–1953). Years later, he would
become the chief justice of the United States. Warren favored the evacuation
of Japanese aliens from California.

Walter Lippmann, one of the most respected journalists of his time, visited
Warren and General John DeWitt in California. Lippmann published an enormously
influential column that appeared in the _Washington Post_ and 250 other
newspapers on February 12, 1942.555After meeting in person with him, Millikan
praised Lippmann’s 1943 book on U.S. foreign policy for its clarity of thought
and statesmanlike proposals [60, 45:889]. However, in 1942 on Japanese-
American policy their views were in sharp opposition.  The article amplified
the general’s and attorney general’s fears of sabotage. The title “The Fifth
Column” referred to those who engage in sabotage within their own country.
Lippmann stoked fears of a Japanese sea and air attack on California,
coordinated with sabotage by “enemy agents on land.” His readers knew which
racial group he was referring to. He called for Washington to act decisively
to establish the West Coast as a combat zone, letting “the explanations and
the reparations come later” [53] [77, pp 49–50]. Lippmann’s column went to
Secretary of War Henry Stimson and to the second in command, John J. McCloy.
According to McCloy’s biographer Kai Bird, “More than any other individual,
McCloy was responsible for the decision [of Roosevelt], since the president
had delegated the matter to him through Stimson” [11].

On February 19, 1942, a little more than two months after the attack on Pearl
Harbor, President Roosevelt signed an executive order 9066. The order
authorized the establishment of military zones, and all Japanese Americans
living within these zones were soon to be forcibly expelled and relocated to
internment camps. The military zone included all of California, coastal
portions of Oregon and Washington, and southern parts of Arizona.

Starting in 1942, all (about 112,000) Japanese Americans were forcibly
relocated from the West Coast into ten internment camps that were built in
scattered locations throughout western states and Arkansas. For example, the
Topaz internment camp in central Utah housed over 8000 Japanese Americans in
military-style barracks, each small family in a one-room apartment lit by a
single lightbulb and heated by a potbelly stove. Life was austere, yet the
camp offered a range of basic services: a hospital, library, schools, Buddhist
and Christian churches, general stores, co-ops, banks, repair shops, and
police and fire departments run by the internees. The camp was one square
mile, surrounded by barbed wire and guard stations.

A civilian government agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), ran the
internment camps. Dillon S. Myer was the WRA director for almost the entire
duration of agency’s existence, 1942-1946. Although the director over
internment, Myer became opposed to internment.666Assessments of Myer vary
enormously. Greg Robinson’s book on internment states that Japanese Americans
celebrated Myer’s camp administration during the war, but that Japanese-
American attitudes turned sharply against him in the 1980s [78, p 256]. Others
held that Myer inherited “what may well have been the toughest, most
exasperating civilian job during the war” [42] [97].  The historian Alonzo
Hamby, in a book review of Greg Robinson’s book on internment [78], wrote that
Myer and a few others “struggled futilely for an early end to the program
against a flood tide of hysteria and expediency” [36].

Over time, legal challenges against internment made their way to the Supreme
Court. Finally, on December 17, 1944, the “Roosevelt administration issued
Public Proclamation No. 21 … declaring that Japanese Americans could return to
the West Coast the next month.” This proclamation marked the end of Japanese
internment. The proclamation pre-empted by one day the Supreme Court, which
issued two decisions (Korematsu v. United States and Ex Parte Endo). The
justices ruled that the WRA had no authority to detain loyal citizens.

###  2.2 Japanese-American petitions to Millikan

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Robert Millikan and his
wife Greta were traveling in Mexico City. As Greta tells it, “a Mexican
gentleman, recognizing us as Americans, I suppose, told [our guide] E. that he
had just heard on the radio of Japan’s attack on Manila and Hawaii. It seems
impossible that it has really come – we were sobered and stunned, …” [60,
80:89].

As soon as Greta was back in Pasadena in January 1942, she hurried over to the
home of her Japanese gardener Harris Ozawa and his family, recording in her
diary, “Although warned to stay at home, they had gone quietly about their
jobs, having nothing to conceal or be ashamed of” [60, 80:108]. Later, when
about to be forced out of Pasadena, in a sentimental scene, Ozawa replanted
the azaleas from his own home into the Millikan garden as a parting gift, but
Greta insisted that the flowers were only on loan until his return. Greta saw
the Ozawas off at the train station, as they left for the Tulare detention
camp: “With duffle bags and big suit cases, bedding rolls and baskets,
families assembled at the starting point where a sympathetic social service
worker helped them with details; a group of church women served hot coffee and
rolls.” Concerned about the living conditions at the temporary detention
camps, Greta visited the Santa Anita camp. She made contacts with
organizations to aid Japanese-Americans. Harris’s wife Elizabeth wrote
frequent letters to Greta that chronicled life under internment. After the
war, the Ozawa family was prevented from retaking their house in Pasadena, and
Greta assisted with the “time-consuming and not a little exasperating” legal
process to regain possession [60, 80:109,132,135,284,381].

The war brought Robert Millikan into renewed contact with Japanese
acquaintances. A friend, T. Hori, sent a plea to Millikan [60, 43:1016].

> Yes, the United States is now at war. It is my sincere hope that this
> country will win and forever banish the demons of war from this world. …
>
> Last Monday, a week ago today, all our assets were frozen because of my
> visit to Japan for the sole purpose of visiting my invalid brother who lived
> in this country for over thirty years, and also because I am an alien.
> During this past week, a majority of the leading Japanese aliens were taken
> away to the Terminal islands for investigation, …
>
> On the other hand, my wife, who is an American citizen, received many
> telephone calls from her American church friends asking about her welfare. …
> This kindness and thoughtfulness impresses us deeply. …
>
> Yes my entire household is wholeheartedly supporting the cause of freedom
> and democracy for which the United States stands. … – Hori, Dec 15, 1941

Arriving back in Pasadena from Mexico, Millikan responded to Mr. Hori [60,
43:1016]:

> Your letter touched me deeply. I shall be glad to talk over the situation
> with you anytime, and if I can be of any assistance in making the difficult
> situation in which you and other loyal members of your group find yourselves
> I shall want to do it. Mrs. Millikan, too, has been wondering whether she
> could be of help to members of your group. – Millikan, Jan 6, 1942

A former Caltech student Koichi Kido sent a plea to Millikan on January 28
[60, 28:452]:

> You, Dr. Millikan, are a champion of democracy. You, sir, are a champion of
> human freedom. Will you fight to help maintain them in these United States?
> …
>
> There is the probability that many of us will be moved inland very shortly.
> …There is the final possibility that all of us will not only be moved inland
> but be interned for the duration. …
>
> We who are citizens of the United States just as you are and who have no
> political ties with Japan (dual citizenship for instance) have the same
> rights and privileges as you do. Everyone who has any knowledge of the
> Constitution and the Bill of Rights is aware of this fact. …
>
> Who will defend us? – Koichi Kido, Jan 28, 1942

Moved by Koichi Kido’s letter, Millikan wrote to the Pasadena Chamber of
Commerce and City Board of Directors [60, 28:454].

> Pearl Harbor awakened this country from its idle dream of isolated security.
> It is very important that we do not go to the other extreme and take
> hysterical, instead of considered, action in the matter of defense. …
>
> It is particularly important that we do not go to any unwise wholesale
> schemes in trying to protect ourselves against the dangers arising from our
> residents of enemy country origin. …
>
> To adopt any wholesale policy of putting them all in concentration camps
> would be an action which would defeat its own purpose, not only in weakening
> the defense industries in which they are so useful, but also in arousing
> justified resentment because of the unfair treatment of loyal American
> citizens and thus increasing, rather than decreasing the danger of sabotage.
> – Millikan, Feb 4, 1942

Millikan responded to Mr. Kido [60, 28:454].

> [I] appreciate fully the difficult situation in which you, the American
> citizens of Japanese parentage, are placed by the action of the Japanese
> government. I have been doing all I can to get discrimination and sanity
> into the treatment of the many who are likely to suffer unjustly in this
> difficult situation. If there is anything in particular I can do to help you
> I hope you will let me know. – Millikan Feb 6, 1942

By mid-February, through two of its press releases, Millikan had become aware
of the Fair Play Committee in the California Bay Area, which opposed
discrimination against Japanese civilians. (The organization was to go through
several renamings, but this article consistently calls it the Fair Play
Committee.) The organization’s first press release in October 1941 (before
Pearl Harbor) called upon “fair-minded Californians to combat discrimination
against their fellow residents of Japanese race” [48]. The first paragraph of
the press release stated [48].

> … popular resentment toward Japan may find expression in greater
> discrimination or even physical violence against fellow-residents of
> Japanese extraction, distrust of the Japanese Government being transferred
> to all persons of Japanese race. A moment’s thought will show that such
> animus would be not only un-American, but also a menace to public welfare
> and the good name of the state. – David Barrows, Fair Play, Oct 1, 1941.

On February 15, 1942, Millikan wrote to the Fair Play organization with an
interest “in securing cooperation in Los Angeles County.” Millikan’s overture
was welcomed. On March 3, 1942, Millikan was appointed a vice president of the
committee. Millikan was now a senior officer in an organization fighting for
the fair treatment of Japanese Americans.

###  2.3 Fair Play

The Fair Play Committee is an organization that was formed in California to
defend the rights of Japanese Americans. The Fair Play Committee was formed in
the fall of 1941 by David Barrows and Galen Fisher. Barrows was a political
scientist and former president of the University of California. The historian
Robert Shaffer has written, [83]

> Galen Merriam Fisher (1873–1955) was probably the most significant and
> consistent white organizer of opposition during World War II to the
> wholesale incarceration … of Japanese Americans. As a former missionary in
> Japan … Fisher was the key founder in 1941 of the [Fair Play Committee]. …
> Throughout the war Fisher wrote numerous articles criticizing the
> mistreatment of Japanese Americans. – Robert Shaffer, Densho Encyclopedia

From the beginning, the committee had strong university ties, especially with
Berkeley. Robert Sproul, the president of the University of California, became
the honorary chairman. Provost Monroe Deutsch and several Berkeley professors
were also active participants.

The Fair Play advisory board consisted of a group of highly influential
political, business, educational, and religious leaders, including Stanford’s
Chancellor Ray Lyman Wilbur; its Dean of the Graduate School of Business,
Jackson; former California Governor, C. C. Young; the President of the
California State Chamber of Commerce, A. Lundburg; former President of the
State Bar Association, G. Hagar; the Mayor of Berkeley, F. Gaines; and many
others.

The Committee’s executive secretary, Ruth Kingman, had access to the corridors
of government power, meeting with key government figures such as California
State Attorney General Bob Kenny, U.S. Attorney General Biddle, WRA Director
Myer, Assistant Secretary of War McCloy, FDR’s daughter Anna Roosevelt
Boettiger, and some members of Congress.777Robert Cozzens, the Assistant
National Director of the WRA, said that “Ruth Kingman was to see us at least
once a week and generally a couple of times a week.” Kingman worked a lot with
state Attorney General Bob Kenny, who was “said to have influenced Warren
finally to accept the inevitable” [18]. Judicious and steadfast, she always
seemed to know what to suggest next to nudge policy makers one step further
into alignment with the goals of Fair Play. The committee was loyal to the
United States and the war effort and worked as a “moderating influence on both
public opinion and government authorities, and helped avert mob violence
against Japanese residents” [48]. The committee was not a relief organization.
It worked to change policy and public opinion through speakers, educational
materials, and corrections to the press. A membership drive leaflet affirmed
its purpose:

> The fundamental purpose of the Committee is to support the principles
> enunciated in the Constitution of the United States, and to that end to
> maintain, unimpaired, the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. The
> Committee believes:
>
>   1. 1.
>
> That attacks upon the rights of any minority tend to undermine the rights of
> the majority.
>
>   2. 2.
>
> That attempts to deprive any law-abiding citizen of his citizenship because
> of racial descent are contrary to fundamental American principles and
> jeopardize the citizenship of others. …
>
>   3. 3.
>
> That it is un-American to penalize persons of Japanese descent in the United
> States solely for the crimes of the Government and military cast of Japan.
>
>

>
> – Fair Play [16]

The page footer of Fair Play stationary quoted FDR: “Americanism is not, and
never was, a matter of race or ancestry” [25].

Fair Play advocated a policy of _dispersed relocation_ for Japanese civilians
after the war, a policy in agreement with the War Relocation Authority [85].
The policy had three noteworthy components. (1) The policy opposed segregation
into Japanese ghettos. (2) For practical reasons, “it is convinced that there
will never be a mass return of evacuees to the West Coast.” (3) Finally, “the
right of loyal Japanese to come back [to the West Coast], if they so elect,
cannot be denied without a denial of all that America has hitherto meant to
racial and religious minorities, of all that it has symbolized for the hopes
of humanity” [85]. During the war, while working to change policy and public
attitudes, Fair Play held that Japanese-American rights must ultimately
prevail. However, recognizing the strong public opposition, the committee did
not insist on their immediate return. Millikan publicly supported Fair Play’s
policy of dispersed relocation.

In fact, dispersed relocation is how history played out. According to the
_Washington Post_ , “When at last the Army rescinded its exclusion order about
57,500 evacuees moved back to their former homes in the West Coast states. But
about 51,800 settled eastward in new homes” (March 28, 1946) [7]. Even before
rescission, under Myer’s lenient policies, a significant fraction of Japanese
had left the internment camps and resettled outside California [6] [99].

###  2.4 Investigation into Pasadena’s Fair Play

The Pasadena chapter of Fair Play came under political attack in December
1943. Leading the attack was California State Assemblyman Chester Gannon, who
ran the California State Assembly Committee on the Japanese Problem, which
opposed the return of Japanese-Americans to California. Anti-Japanese
sentiments were flaring up, because of reports of Japanese riots at the Tule
segregation camp the previous month.888 Accounts of the Tule camp events of
November 1943 vary widely. Myer believed that “no violence was planned” [3].
Barbara Takei, the author of a book on the Tule camp, has written that the
Japanese “riots” were actually a “peaceful show of support” and dismissed the
newspaper reports of rioting as “sensationalized tales” [92]. The events of
November led to the imposition of martial law at the Tule camp, which lasted
into January 1944. Accusing the Pasadena chapter of waging a pro-Japanese
campaign, Gannon organized hearings at the State Building in Los Angeles and
subpoenaed the entire executive committee of the Pasadena chapter. The
committee grandstanded to intimidate Fair Play and to portray the Pasadena
chapter in a bad light. In reaction to Gannon committee excesses, the _Los
Angeles Times_ published an editorial against the committee’s tendency to
“browbeat and abuse witnesses.” “When they turn themselves into witch-burning
agencies … they go far afield” [5]. A December 1943 article “Inquisition in
Los Angeles” in _Time Magazine_ described the hearings as a “legislative romp
into U.S.-Jap baiting” [4].

When it was realized that Millikan had not received a subpoena, an attorney
for Gannon’s committee called Millikan on the telephone for a statement, which
was read into the record of the hearings. For the record, “Dr. Millikan stated
that he was familiar with the statement to this committee by Mrs. Maynard F.
Thayer [Pasadena Fair Play chapter chair] and was in hearty accord with it”
[17].

###  2.5 Kuroki and Sproul speeches

In an oral interview about the Fair Play Committee, Ruth Kingman recalled that
there were two events in 1944 that “marked the first real change in the
attitude of the state” of California: the Kuroki speech at the San Francisco
Commonwealth Club999 Today, “the Commonwealth Club of California is the
nation’s oldest and largest public affairs forum … Martin Luther King, Ronald
Reagan, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates have all given landmark speeches at the
Club” [8]. In decades past, it was viewed as an influential group of business
and professional men in San Francisco and northern California. and the Sproul
speech in southern California [49].

Ben Kuroki was an American citizen of Japanese descent in the United States
Army Air Force who flew a total of 58 combat missions over Europe, North
Africa, and Japan during World War II. Monroe Deutsch, who was on the Fair
Play executive committee and the president of the San Francisco Commonwealth
Club, arranged for Kuroki to speak. He spoke frankly about his combat
experience and the discrimination he faced.

> [L]oyal Americans of Japanese descent are entitled to the democratic rights
> which Jefferson propounded, Washington fought for and Lincoln died for.
>
> In my own case, I have almost won the battle against intolerance; I have
> many close friends in the Army now – my best friends, as I am theirs – where
> two years ago I had none. But I have by no means completely won that battle.
> Especially now, after the widespread publicity given the recent atrocity
> stories,101010The “atrocity stories” are events at the Tule Lake camp before
> and during a period of martial law that lasted until January 15, 1944. I
> find prejudice once again directed against me, and neither my uniform nor
> the medals which are visible proof of what I have been through, have been
> able to stop it. – Ben Kuroki, Feb 4, 1944 [51]

Kuroki received a standing ovation. Many in the audience were weeping. The
publicity was resoundingly positive, even from the Hearst and McClatchy
newspapers [49].

The second event was the University of California President Sproul’s speech in
Los Angeles. Katherine Kaplan, the Fair Play executive for southern
California, decided to organize a Los Angeles chapter. Her husband Joseph
Kaplan, a physicist at UCLA and friends with Sproul, persuaded Sproul to speak
at a luncheon in Los Angeles to launch the local chapter. At Sproul’s
suggestion, Katherine Kaplan asked Millikan to be the “chief sponsor of the
event and to act as Master of Ceremonies.” Millikan agreed [43] [49]. Sproul
called for increased tolerance:

> The barometer of tolerance toward the evacuees is still too low on this
> Coast, and the opposition is still vehement and unscrupulous. We need your
> help … to create an acceptance by the California public of the enlightened
> way of dealing with law-abiding persons even though they are members of an
> unpopular minority. –Sproul, June 29, 1944 [85]

Sproul’s speech “was considered probably the best single statement made all
during the war on the status of Japanese Americans” [49]. Katherine Kaplan
called it “magnificent!” The speech, which was made into a pamphlet and became
an authoritative statement of Fair Play policy, received “the same degree of
favorable publicity as Sergeant Kuroki got up North” [49]. Thousands of copies
of the pamphlet were distributed [101].

Ruth Kingman spoke about the changes in public opinion after the Kuroki and
Sproul speeches [49].

> From then on, we got opposition, but very little hate opposition. We got a
> great deal of support for constitutional rights; the rights of men in
> uniform; or the rights of people who were doing a job for the country which
> the public would never have accepted before as being the prerogative of
> anybody of Japanese ancestry. Opponents didn’t talk very often anymore. Some
> did, but by and large there was no further extensive or rabid talk about
> “They’ll never come back!” It was, sort of, “Well, when they come back.” –
> Ruth Kingman

###  2.6 Millikan’s participation

Millikan’s participation in the Fair Play Committee should not be exaggerated.
There was a limit to what he could contribute. Caltech, which was going
through major transformations during the war, needed Millikan’s decisive
leadership. Caltech became “practically a factory for the production of war
weapons,” building more than a million rockets [60, 43:564] [63, p 248]. At
the same time, many were on leave for war work. It was a challenging time to
lead Caltech.

Despite being a busy man, Millikan contributed what he could to Fair Play. He
was the master of ceremonies at Sproul’s speech, an event that helped turn the
tide of public opinion; his name inspired the Pasadena chapter, the most
active chapter outside the Bay Area; he helped organize the Los Angeles
chapter and became a member of the chapter’s executive committee, while still
serving on the the committee’s central advisory board [43, p 51].

On September 29, 1944, not long before Roosevelt issued the proclamation
ending internment, the Pasadena chapter of Fair Play sponsored a talk by WRA
Director Myer at the local public library auditorium. The political factions
on internment policy were complicated and take some time to unravel. As
mentioned earlier, Myer had become opposed to internment and pushed to
dismantle the program. However, politicians and public opinion hindered his
efforts. Fair Play supported Myer’s belief in the Bill of Rights for all
citizens. Antagonistic Hearst newspapers accused the WRA of coddling the
Japanese. Many wanted Director Myer dismissed and replaced with a hard-liner.

Millikan, introducing Myer to an overflowing audience, quoted parts of
Sproul’s speech, emphasized the need to preserve the Bill of Rights, and
denied Hearst newspaper accusations. Myer spoke of softening public attitudes.
As reported by the _Los Angeles Times_ , “A changing attitude on the part of
the public will make the return of all Japanese to all sections of the country
an easier job from here on” [6]. Myer won the audience over.

On December 18, 1944, the day after the proclamation from FDR that ended
internment, the chairman of the community council at the Wyoming Heart
Mountain relocation center (one of the ten Japanese internment camps) sent
Millikan a thank-you note. The Japanese community council, which met twice a
week, formed the leadership of the Heart Mountain center.

> Dear Dr. Millikan:
>
> May we take this opportunity to thank you for your untiring efforts in
> bringing the principles of this nation into proper perspective to the people
> in regards to the evacuation of Japanese from the West Coast. We are in
> receipt of the good news today of the lifting of the restriction on Japanese
> by the Western Defense Command. We realize that you played no small part in
> realizing this very important move.
>
> –Minejiro Hayashida, Dec 18, 1944 [60, 43:931]

The letter shows that Millikan’s influence was felt directly in the internment
camp. Many Japanese-Americans thanked Fair Play in letters. In 1946, after its
purpose was completed, Fair Play was dissolved.

###  2.7 Postwar scientific missions to Japan

Millikan’s wartime involvement with Japanese policy came primarily through the
Fair Play Committee. In addition to his Fair Play activism, Millikan also had
a small indirect scientific connection with postwar Japan. At the end of the
war, Millikan communicated with the physicist Alan Waterman about scientific
missions to Japan, organized through the Office of Scientific Research and
Development (OSRD). This section describes the origin of these scientific
missions and Millikan’s assistance in recruiting Japanese-American scientists
and engineers.

During the war, Vannevar Bush, who reported directly to FDR, was the head of
the Office of Scientific Research and Development, a wartime agency created to
conduct scientific research for the military. This U.S. federal government
agency coordinated almost all wartime military research and development. Even
the Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs was initially under the OSRD.

Within the OSRD, Bush created the Office of Field Service (OFS), and appointed
Karl Compton chief and Alan Waterman deputy. The OFS provided “civilian
technical expertise needed by military commands in the field, particularly
those in the Pacific.” Its employees were largely scientists and engineers –
especially physicists, electrical engineers, and communications experts [82, p
17].

The OSRD and its field office were directed by renowned names in science.
Bush, who had been a dean and vice president at MIT and an early researcher in
analog computers, became a visionary of information technology. The physicist
Karl Compton, the brother of the Nobel laureate Arthur Compton, was president
of MIT for 18 years. After the war, Waterman, a physicist, became the first
director of the National Science Foundation. He is remembered today through
the prestigious Alan T. Waterman Award for scientists.

The OSRD was reorganized when the war in Europe ended. Compton was transferred
to Manila to establish a Pacific branch of the OSRD, and Waterman replaced
Compton as OFS chief. There were plans to expand the Manila office to more
than two hundred scientists and engineers. However, the day after Compton
arrived in Manila, on August 6, 1945, the atomic bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima. Japan surrendered days later, on August 14 (Victory over Japan Day
or V-J Day). The plans to expand the Manila office were abruptly cancelled.

Instead, efforts were immediately redirected toward postwar scientific
expeditions to Japan. According to Compton, “every branch of Army, Navy, Air
Force began immediately after V-J Day to get technical investigating teams” to
evaluate Japan’s scientific capabilities. Some of the teams were to number as
many as 750. Compton and Edward Moreland (who was Bush’s successor as dean of
engineering at MIT) themselves led one of the earliest expeditions, which
resulted in a massive 850-page scientific report [82, p 17] [41].

It was at this moment of intense activity of the OSRD in the Pacific when
Waterman sent Millikan an urgent request. Waterman asked Millikan for
information about “former Japanese students enrolled in scientific and
engineering studies” at Caltech [60, 31:1003]. The Office of Scientific
Research had an apparent urgent need for Japanese-speaking scientists and
engineers. Caltech’s registrar and alumni office promptly produced 44 names,
which Millikan forwarded to Waterman. The Waterman-Millikan correspondence
will matter in what follows, because of the way it was later misinterpreted.

##  3 Dishonor

Anthony Platt is a retired professor of American history, public policy, and
social sciences. He is the author of the book _Bloodlines_ , published in
2006, which is the source of false and inflammatory accusations about Millikan
[75].111111Cecilia E. O’Leary is listed as a coauthor of _Bloodlines_ , but
the acknowledgments state that “for health reasons, Cecilia was not able to
participate in the writing of this book.” The narrative voice is first-person
singular, recounting events of Platt’s life. This section analyzes some of the
claims in _Bloodlines_ , especially those related to Japanese internment.
Although false, some of these accusations became part of the official report
of Caltech’s _Committee on Naming and Recognition_ and were among the reasons
given to strip Millikan of honors [79].

###  3.1 Bloodlines

The book _Bloodlines_ is structured around the history of the original
typescript of the Nuremberg Laws, signed by Hitler, sealed with bright red
swastikas, and enacted by Nazi Germany in 1935 [75]. The laws established the
black-white-red swastika as the national flag, declared that only those of
German or related blood were eligible for citizenship, and prohibited marriage
between German and Jew.

The original Nuremberg document fell into the hands of General George S.
Patton Jr. in Germany at the conclusion of World War II, as a spoil of war.
When he returned to America, Patton was welcomed by a homecoming parade along
the streets of Los Angeles on June 9, 1945. Two days later in Pasadena, Patton
presented to Millikan the Nuremberg Laws, which were placed in the vault of
the Huntington Library for safekeeping. At the time, Millikan was the chairman
of the board of trustees at the Huntington Library. A historic photograph
shows Patton and Millikan standing together under a portrait of George
Washington, the document in hand. From there, Patton traveled to Washington
D.C. to meet with President Truman [75, p 102].

A central accusation of Platt’s book is that several of those who handled the
original Nuremberg Laws – including Patton, Millikan, and some trustees at
Huntington Library – formed an enclave of Nazi sympathizers. Platt
provocatively claimed that Millikan’s “ideological assumptions were the same
as those that guided the Nuremberg Laws. …”121212Platt does concede, however,
that “Millikan resigned from the American Committee for Democracy and
Intellectual Freedom because it was not sufficiently vigilant against Nazi and
Communist agents…” [75, p 124].  Platt imagined Patton and Millikan “in 1934
shaking their heads in agreement as they read an item in the U.S.-published
_Eugenical News_ , reprinted from the Nazi press, about how ‘large German
cities’ were being ‘literally swamped by … Jewish physicians.’ ”

Platt’s accusation that Millikan was ideologically aligned with Nazi Germany
is false and takes little effort to refute. His tale linking Patton and
Millikan to the Nazi press is purely fictional and is inconsistent with
Millikan’s character. Basic intellectual honesty requires Platt not to hide
primary sources that discredit his own interpretation. One convincing way to
see that _Bloodlines_ misrepresents Millikan is to read Millikan’s own words.
Millikan’s autobiography contains several statements about Hitler [63]. Every
single statement is enumerated as follows, to allow Millikan’s views on Nazism
to appear without editorial selection. On page 90, Millikan asks “is not the
greatest menace … defined as what Mussolini, Hitler and Lenin have done to
Italy, Germany and Russia?” On page 116, Millikan speaks of the “degradation
of Germany under Hitler.” On page 254, Hitler is called a gangster. On page
256, Millikan writes that Hitler “could have been permanently checked,” “had
we been in the League of Nations in 1936, prepared to do our part. …” On page
258, Millikan wrote that “for the sake of overthrowing Hitler we became
Russia’s ally, …” Finally, on page 277, Hitler is called a maniac. Not a
single one of these statements supports the claim that Millikan was a Nazi
sympathizer.

Starting the in the mid-1930s (and to a lesser extent in the 1920s) Millikan
warned America of the twin dangers of pacifism and isolationism. “Long before
Pearl Harbor he [Millikan] saw what was coming and led the movement against
isolationism in California” (_Los Angeles Times_ , 1950) [9]. Although the
_Los Angeles Times_ report might be hyperbolic, as the decade progressed, he
became increasingly publicly vocal through many speeches, publications, and
radio addresses on the evils of fascism and totalitarianism. Millikan did not
hold back. As an admired Nobel laureate, he had enormous influence, which he
directed towards this pressing cause. The documentary evidence is abundant.

Millikan’s evangelism against fascism had international reach. In his address
“India and the War” on June 12, 1940, Millikan made an appeal to India,
following his eight-month cosmic-ray expedition to India. He spoke with the
eloquence of a senior statesman [60, 67:730]:

> In no war in history have the fundamental issues of the struggle been made
> more clear either with respect to India, the United States, or any peace
> loving people, for they have been stated unmistakably in Mein Kampf. Or, if
> words are not considered sufficient evidence, and one thinks there is any
> chance that the expressed purposes will not be put into practice, the
> continuous stream of acts of perfidy, barbarism, and dishonor which have
> accompanied the inhuman treatment of the Jews and the successive rape of the
> liberties of the adjoining little countries of Austria, Czechoslovakia,
> Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Luxembourg, and Belgium make crystal clear
> what modern civilization the world over can expect from the triumph of the
> Nazis.
>
> Between the ideology of conquest and that of rational, peaceful change there
> is no possible compromise. … This is the time for every American and every
> Indian and every peace loving man everywhere to exert every ounce of
> influence he can to prevent the destruction of civilization and the return
> of the horrible tyrannies and despotisms that have cursed mankind through
> all history. – Millikan, June 12, 1940

###  3.2 Committee on Naming and Recognition (CNR)

A movement to have Millikan and others stripped of honors at Caltech (such as
the library named after Millikan) started during the summer of the 2020 _Black
Lives Matter_ protests amid the widespread toppling of statues. The Black
Scientists and Engineers at Caltech (BSEC) sent a petition to the Caltech
community on June 25, 2020 [79, p 36]:

> By now we are all well-aware of the global protests calling for police
> reform following the graphic murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor,
> George Floyd, and countless others at the hands of the officers whose
> supposed duty is to protect and serve. –BSEC

The BSEC called on Caltech to “reform the long-standing causes of racial bias
which have disproportionately hurt racially minoritized members of the Caltech
community” and called on the Board of Trustees to “rename the buildings which
currently honor Nazis, racists, and eugenicists: Millikan, Watson, Ruddock,
Chandler.”

A separate petition with many signatures was submitted by Michael Chwe (a
Caltech alum who now is a political scientist at UCLA) in July 2020\. Here are
the opening sentences of Chwe’s petition [79, p 39]:

> As members and friends of the Caltech community, we believe that Caltech
> cannot honor individuals who actively supported and encouraged crimes
> against humanity. Therefore we call for Caltech to rename all buildings,
> spaces, and programs named after Robert A. Millikan, …– Chwe petition

Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum formed a Committee on Naming and
Recognition (CNR) to examine the issues in the petitions. The committee issued
a final report on December 17, 2020, recommending “that Caltech remove the
names Millikan, Chandler, Gosney, Munro, Robinson, and Ruddock from all
Institute assets and honors.” The Caltech Board of Trustees endorsed the
recommendation. President Rosenbaum wrote that “renaming buildings is a
symbolic act, but one that has real consequences in creating a diverse and
inclusive environment.”

A follow-up article was published in _Nature_ on November 10, 2021 [91]. One
student is quoted, “I find it important to rename the buildings just because I
don’t want to have that constant reminder that the people who built this
institution didn’t want me to exist.” Another student said of the Millikan
library, “we shouldn’t be idolizing people with horrible views of the world.”
It is striking to find such emotionalism coming from Caltech students and
published in _Nature_.

It is beyond the scope of the research here to examine all of the claims of
the CNR report and the _Nature_ article. The scope of this section is
restricted to statements about Millikan’s wartime attitudes toward Japanese
Americans.

###  3.3 Bloodlines on internment policy

This subsection analyzes statements from the book _Bloodlines_ about
Millikan’s activism for Japanese-American rights. Millikan’s activism in the
Fair Play Committee for the protection of Japanese rights does not square with
_Bloodlines’s_ claim that Millikan was ideologically a Nazi. According to
_Bloodlines_ , “on the ‘Japanese Problem’ during World War II, Millikan took a
more complicated, but ultimately opportunistic position” [75, p 126].
Millikan’s position was not complicated: his support of the Fair Play
Committee was unwavering throughout the war. Millikan was not opportunistic in
the sense of seeking self-gain; nor did his actions lack ethical principle.
Most criticisms by Platt of Millikan on the Japanese issue are non-specific
and suggest that Platt held the entire Fair Play Committee in low regard.

Two sentences from _Bloodlines_ are particularly relevant. Platt wrote [75, p
126]:

> In 1943, Millikan told counsel for an Assembly committee investigating the
> dangers of treason that he favored dispersal throughout the country of
> California’s Japanese at the end of the war. – Platt

The sentence refers to Millikan’s telephone conversation during Assemblyman
Gannon’s committee hearings, as discussed earlier. The sentence is a peculiar
way to describe the Gannon hearings because of all that it leaves out – that
the Gannon committee and Fair Play were political adversaries, that Fair Play
was the target of the investigation, that Millikan was called up because of
his support of Fair Play, that the committee had the tendency to browbeat
witnesses, and that _Time Magazine_ called the hearings an inquisition.

The mention of “dispersal” in Platt’s sentence is a reference to Fair Play’s
policy of dispersed relocation, which is discussed in detail above. The policy
declared a Japanese right of return to California as soon as the exclusion
order was rescinded, while recognizing practical reasons for voluntary partial
dispersal outside California. Millikan endorsed this policy.

The sentence from _Bloodlines_ makes Fair Play’s position sound sinister by
failing to mention its insistence on Japanese-American rights and by setting
the encounter at a “committee investigating the dangers of treason.” The
insertion of the dangers of treason into the context is a red herring: Fair
Play’s policy was entirely unrelated to dangers of treason. Indeed, Fair Play
waged a public relations campaign against false but widespread accusations of
Japanese-American disloyalty. From its very first press release, Fair Play
stated that it would be un-American to transfer a “distrust of the Japanese
Government” “to all persons of Japanese race.” The CNR copied verbatim Platt’s
sentence on the Gannon investigation into its report, without citing
_Bloodlines_ as its source.

Here is the second relevant sentence from _Bloodlines_ [75, p 126]:

> After the war ended, Millikan did not hesitate to turn over to military
> intelligence the names and known address of all students of Japanese
> background who had studied at Caltech between 1929 and 1944. – Platt

The sentence has an ominous feel to it. Millikan almost sounds like a wartime
collaborator with military intelligence against Japanese Americans, except
that cannot be, because of the timing after the war. Platt did not give
context, but this article has supplied extensive context in the section on
postwar scientific missions to Japan. Platt left out essential details: the
request came from a long-time acquaintance, the physicist Waterman; the
request asked specifically for scientists and engineers; the request came from
the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which employed many
scientists and engineers; the request was written on V-J day and was urgent.

The CNR copied Platt’s sentence into its report, without citing _Bloodlines_
as its source. The sentence was copied verbatim, except for a tiny but
significant change. Instead of writing, “after the war ended,” the CNR wrote
“ca. 1945.” Crucially, in the CNR report, it becomes possible to interpret the
Millikan’s action as occurring before the end of the war.

A game of telephones is in play here, where a message becomes increasingly
garbled with each repetition. The original context of postwar scientific
missions to Japan is described in detail earlier. Platt leaves out essential
context and makes the Waterman-Millikan correspondence sound ominous but
strangely anachronistic, because of the timing after the war. The CNR report
modified the date so that the exchange was no longer unambiguously after the
war.

The final stage of the game of telephones is provided by Nidhi Subbaraman,
writing for _Nature_. The year has been altered from 1945 to 1942, from the
end of the war to the beginning of internment. No trace remains of the
original historical context of postwar scientific missions to Japan. The
Waterman-Millikan correspondence on scientific recruitment was falsely
reported the following way in _Nature_ [91].

> During the Second World War, as the United States began a nationwide effort
> to imprison civilians living in the country who had Japanese ancestry,
> Millikan collected the names and addresses of Japanese students who had
> studied at Caltech in the previous two decades and passed the list to the US
> military. – Subbaraman, Nature 2021

This is simply false. From the syntax of Sabbaraman’s sentence, it is
recognized as being derived from _Bloodlines_ as modified by the CNR report.
However, the game of telephones has fully corrupted the meaning. The
corruption progressed from original sources, to Platt, to the CNR report, and
finally to Nature. At each stage, the meaning changed unjustifiably in the
same direction: always to injure Millikan’s reputation and never to bring him
favor.

##  4 Eugenics in 1938

According to Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum, “The most intense concerns at
Caltech center on Robert A. Millikan,” because he “lent his name and his
prestige to a morally reprehensible eugenics movement that already had been
discredited scientifically during his time” [80]. This section analyzes the
evidence in the CNR report in support of the claim that the eugenics movement
had been scientifically discredited by 1938 [79].131313 This section continues
to refer to the Committee on Naming and Recognition (CNR) as the CNR committee
or simply _the committee_. The _report_ refers to the CNR committee report.
HBF refers to the Human Betterment Foundation.  The discussion is restricted
in scope to scientific claims and does not treat the moral and political
dimensions of the eugenics movement. The word _eugenics_ evokes many
connotations; a starting point is the Oxford English Dictionary definition of
eugenics: “the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population
to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as
desirable.” From this starting point, the definition diverges in many
directions [98, p 44] [50].

The CNR report presents statements from three of Millikan’s scientific
contemporaries (Lancelot Hogben, Hermann Joseph Muller, and Thomas Hunt
Morgan) to establish by their authority that eugenics had “fallen into
disrepute” by the late 1930s [79].

###  4.1 Hogben

The first of the CNR committee’s three authorities against eugenics was the
medical statistician Lancelot Hogben (and author of the 1936 best-seller
_Mathematics for the Million_). According to the CNR report, “In 1931,
geneticist Lancelot Hogben declared that ‘all the verifiable data eugenicists
had accumulated on the inheritance of mental traits could “be written on the
back of a postage stamp””’ [84] [79]. (The quotations marks from the CNR
report have been preserved, which requires triple nesting.) There is a serious
problem with this quotation: it is a fabrication. Hogben declared no such
thing. In fact, what Hogben actually wrote was that

> all existing and and genuine knowledge about the way in which the physical
> characteristics of human communities are related to their cultural
> capabilities can be written on the back of a postage stamp. … there is as
> yet no biological knowledge bearing on the social capabilities of different
> ‘races’ … –Hogben (from Hogben’s 1937 preface to _Half-caste_ [20] and
> reprinted in [40, p 47])

In the preface to the book _Half-caste_ , Hogben was building an argument that
children of mixed marriages should be afforded the same cultural advantages as
other children. The subject matter was not eugenics, and it was reckless
scholarship to alter Hogben’s statement to make it appear to be.

Hogben himself wrote more than a postage stamp’s worth about eugenics, which
is the subject of the entire last chapter of his book _Genetic Principles in
Medicine and Social Sciences_ (1931) [39]. Hogben’s principled stance of
scientific detachment kept him from making policy recommendations.
Nonetheless, despite the detachment, Hogben most certainly did not view
eugenics as scientifically unfeasible.

He noted that “Eugenics was defined by [Francis] Galton as the study of
agencies under social control which may improve or impair the racial qualities
of future generations. With such a proposal it is difficult to see that any
reasonable person would disagree” [39, pp 209-210].

Hogben wrote that he “would prefer to use the term ‘genetic therapy’ for the
legitimate province of applied human genetics,” because of negative political
associations that the term _eugenics_ had acquired by 1931. Nevertheless,
eugenists have begun “to write with greater caution” in the past two decades.
“[W]e can agree about certain disorders which practically all comparatively
healthy people would wish to remove” [39, p 213].

In California, eugenic practice took the form of a large sterilization
program. The state government ran several hospitals for the care of those with
mental illness or intellectual disabilities. During the years 1909–1979, over
twenty thousand patients at those hospitals were sterilized [87]. The
“operations were ordered at the discretion of the hospital superintendents,”
as authorized by California law [98]. About three-quarters of sterilizations
in California in 1936 were performed by request or consent of the patient or
guardian [31, Popenoe:18:01] [98].141414 Calculations of consent rates were
based on signed consent forms. However, standards of written consent in the
1930s compare infavorably with ethical and legal standards of informed medical
consent today. In some cases, hospital release was contingent on consent to
sterilization [88]. In an analysis of the reasons for lack of consent among
Spanish-surnamed patients during the years 1935-1944, the most frequent reason
was that “no consenter was available” [54, p 148].

About sterilization laws in California, Hogben wrote “As a precautionary
measure, there do not seem to be any strong arguments against Californian laws
on administrative or clinical grounds. So long as the advocates of such a
policy do not claim that it is more than a precautionary measure, it would be
unreasonable to criticise the results achieved so far, …” [39, pp 207-208].

In summary, the CNR committee used a fabricated “postage stamp” quotation to
attribute views to Hogben that he did not hold. In truth, Hogben claimed it is
“difficult to see that any reasonable person would disagree” with eugenics in
Galton’s sense of the word.

###  4.2 Muller

We turn to Caltech’s second scientific witness against eugenics in the 1930s.
The CNR report states that

> Also in 1932, future Nobel laureate H.J. Muller denounced eugenics as an
> “unrealistic, ineffective, and anachronistic pseudoscience” in his paper
> “The Dominance of Economics Over Eugenics.” [79, p 13] [84].

There is a serious problem with this quotation as well: it is also a
fabrication. Muller made no such denunciation. On the contrary, that very
paper declares that it “is of course unquestionable” “that genetic imbeciles
should be sterilized” [66, p 40].

What did Muller mean by the dominance of economics over eugenics? His
“dominance” paper was an address to the Third International Congress of
Eugenics in 1932. Muller had become a devoted Marxist. The address was a
Marxist critique of capitalist societies, where he proclaimed an “impending
revolution in our economic system” [66]. Muller’s New York audience was
probably bewildered by his heavy-handed ideology. “Muller was convinced that
his eugenic ideas could only flourish in a socialistic state” [1, p 351].
Marxism and eugenics went hand in hand: Marxism to fix the environment and
eugenics to fix heredity. Socialism claimed dominance over eugenics because
revolution was nigh at hand. “In place of the economic conditions imposed by
the class struggle, entirely new conditions will be substituted. … True
eugenics can then first come into its own, … Thus it is up to us, if we want
eugenics that functions, to work for it in the only way now practicable, by
first turning our hand to help throw over the incubus of the old, outworn
society” [66].

True to his beliefs, Muller, who was born in New York, established a lab in
the Soviet Union. His timing could have hardly been worse. “It was not long
before he realized that the conditions for the development of a Bolshevik
eugenics were less promising than he had assumed” [73, p 579]. Muller’s
eugenic manifesto _Out of the Night,_ which was published in 1936, did not
please Joseph Stalin, and he fled the Soviet Union under inauspicious
circumstances.

According to the historian Garland E. Allen, Muller’s book _Out of the Night_
“occupies a significant place in the history of eugenic writing” [1]. Muller
wrote “Thus we see that only the eugenics of the new society, freed of the
traditions of caste, of slavery, of colonialism, can be a thorough-going and
true eugenics” [68, p 150].151515Magnus Hirschfeld held eugenic views similar
to those of Muller and quoted this particular sentence in his 1938 book
_Racism_ [38, p 174].

> In time to come, the best thought of the race will necessarily be focused on
> the problems of evolution – not of the evolution gone by, but of the
> evolution still to come – and on the working out of genetic methods, eugenic
> ideals, yes, on the invention of new characteristics, organs, and biological
> systems that will work out to further the interests, the happiness, the
> glory of the god-like beings whose meagre foreshadowings we present ailing
> creatures are. – H. J. Muller, 1936 [68, p 156]

The geneticist Elof Carlson, who received his PhD under Muller’s mentorship,
discovered evidence that Muller had suggested in private that Stalinesque
coercion might be used should voluntary programs fail. In Carlson’s words,
Muller envisioned that eugenic “controls might be imposed as a second step,
just as, after the Soviet Revolution, the land was given to the peasants, but
when agriculture remained as backward as under the czars, Stalin had to impose
a strict control over the land, collectivizing the farms, …” [13, p 186].

Hogben, Muller, and Caltech geneticist Dobzhansky all signed the “Geneticists’
Manifesto” at the 1939 International Congress of Genetics. An article about
Ronald Fisher’s involvement in eugenics states that

> this document was signed by 23 leading geneticists, including some with
> strongly left-wing political views like J.B.S. Haldane, H.J. Muller and
> Lancelot Hogben. It started with the question “How could the world’s
> population be improved most effectively genetically?” They went on to say
> that “the raising of the level of the average of the population nearly to
> that of the highest now existing in isolated individuals … would, as far as
> purely genetic considerations are concerned, be possible within a
> comparatively small number of generations”. This goes far beyond the
> proposal of Fisher’s, … and shows that eugenic ideas were widely held across
> the political spectrum at the time (see Paul 1984 [73] for further
> discussion).– Bodmer et al. 2021 [12]

The manifesto called for a process of “conscious selection” to replace natural
selection in human evolution. “The most important genetic characteristics” for
conscious selection should be health, intelligence, and prosocial behavior
[19]. Some – including Muller, J.B.S. Haldane, and Julian Huxley – “continued
to argue the case for eugenics into the 1960s. …” [73, p 589]. Just months
before his death in 1967, in his last public address, Muller proposed gene
selection to enhance cooperative behavior among humans [1, p 352] [67].

###  4.3 Morgan

The committee’s final scientific witness against eugenics was Thomas H.
Morgan. The CNR report states that “By this time [1937], many geneticists –
including Nobel laureate and Caltech professor Thomas H. Morgan – had already
denounced eugenics for its lack of scientific merit” [79, p 21]. “In 1925, in
his book _Evolution and Genetics_ , Morgan criticized eugenics for its
interpretation of ‘feeble-mindedness’ and its insistence on the genetic basis
for such characterological traits” [79, p 13].

Indeed, Morgan’s book does contend that based on available evidence it would
be “extravagant to pretend to claim that there is a single Mendelian factor
for this condition” of feeble-mindedness [65, p 201]. He stated that until
certain questions “are better understood it is impossible to know how far
observed differences are innate and how far acquired” [65, p 200]. On display
here is Morgan’s modesty in the face of enduring questions about heritability.

He then expressed his opinions more fully.

> Lest it appear from what has been said that I have too little faith in the
> importance of breeding for mental superiority I should like to add that I am
> inclined to think that there are considerable individual differences in man
> that are probably strictly genetic, even though I insist that at present
> there is for this no real scientific evidence of the kind that we are
> familiar with in other animals and in plants. I will even venture to go so
> far as to suppose that the average of the human race might be improved by
> eliminating a few of the extreme disorders, however they may have arisen. In
> fact, this is attempted at present on a somewhat extensive scale by the
> segregation into asylums of the insane and feeble-minded. I should hesitate
> to recommend the incarceration of all the relatives if the character is
> suspected of being recessive, or of their children if a dominant. … How long
> and how extensively this casual isolation of adults would have to go on to
> produce any considerable decrease in defectives, no informed person would, I
> should think be willing to state. – T. H. Morgan [65, p 206].

In summary, in 1925 Morgan tentatively believed that there were significant
individual differences that “are probably strictly genetic.” He did not
condemn eugenic practices in the asylums. However, he hesitated to recommend
extending incarceration to relatives.

Morgan agreed to join the board of the Human Betterment Foundation (HBF), a
eugenic research and advocacy group based in Pasadena, California.161616For
unexplained reasons, the committee chose to judge Morgan and Millikan by
entirely different standards: one man deemed good and the other evil. In a
letter to board member William B. Munro on March 17, 1942, the founder Ezra S.
Gosney wrote,

Dr. T. H. Morgan has promised me that he would serve. I was very glad to find
that he approves our 8-page pamphlet, and in reply to my request for
constructive criticism he said “I would not change a word in the pamphlet, it
is all right.” He has manifested more interest in our work than I had expected
him to show. –Gosney, 1942 [31, 01:04:26]

The eight-page pamphlet refers to _Human Sterilization Today_ , authored by
Gosney in 1937 [30]. Morgan was voted unanimously onto the board, but because
of Gosney’s death later that year, Morgan’s participation was cut short.
However, by approving the pamphlet, Morgan surpassed Millikan in eugenic
piety. There is no evidence that Millikan ever read the pamphlet or endorsed
it. Board members were free to disagree: board membership did not imply
endorsement of the pamphlet.171717According to Gosney, “Dr. Munro was against
our first print [of _Human Sterilization Today_], Dr. Robert Freeman favored
…” [31, 01:01:23-25].

###  4.4 Millikan

Above all, the eugenics movement was a _big tent_ that transcended national
boundaries and political ideologies [10] [86]. In 1938, Haldane felt that
these questions “cut right across the usual political divisions” [35, p 9].
“Many eugenicists had very low regard for one [an]other and routinely
disagreed with others in the community” [98, p 45]. These squabbles did not
signal the end of the movement. Further evidence could be presented that the
scientific community was not united against the feasibility of eugenic
interventions in 1938. However, the committee’s case has been amply refuted by
its own witnesses, and it would be fruitless to continue.

Where did Millikan fit into the eugenics movement? Millikan was a bit player.
His name does not appear in the definitive histories of eugenics, and
biographies of Millikan do not mention eugenics. Caltech emeritus professor
Daniel J. Kevles, who is a leading authority on both Millikan and eugenics,
did not mention Millikan in his history of eugenics [47]. Overwhelmingly,
Millikan’s most significant contribution to the biological sciences was his
part in establishing Caltech’s division of biology [45]. Caltech was his
legacy.

The following context is relevant.

  1. 1.

In 1938, Millikan became a board member of the Human Betterment
Foundation.181818The CNR report states that Millikan joined in 1937, but the
correct date is 1938. He replaced the banker Henry Mauris Robinson on the
board, who died on November 3, 1937. Gosney wrote a letter on January 19, 1938
describing plans to ask Millikan to join, “We could promise him [Millikan]
that it would require a minimum of his time” [31, Gosney:08:13:17]. The
researcher Paul Popenoe had resigned from the organization in May 1937 [31,
Reid:08:14:49]. He did not attend the annual board meetings. Millikan’s non-
participation is documented in the form of signed proxy-vote slips that are in
the Caltech archives for those years that the board met [31]. By the time
Millikan joined, the foundation was dying. In its final stage, the
foundation’s only significant activities were the management of its real
estate assets and the distribution of old pamphlets.191919The foundation owned
a six story loft building in Los Angeles, business property in San Bernardino,
and ranch property [31, Castle:08:14:60].

  2. 2.

The foundation closed down after Gosney’s death in 1942, and its assets were
eventually donated to Caltech. In consultation with Gosney’s daughter, it was
Millikan who redirected the funds away from sterilization research [64].

  3. 3.

Millikan and other public intellectuals of the 1930s sponsored an enormous
number of civic organizations, events, and causes. The vast array of causes
that Millikan endorsed has never been catalogued. His Nachlass, which is more
than 125,000 pages, records many of them [60]. For Millikan, the HBF was a
drop in the ocean. Millikan’s permission to use his name was often no more
than words to the effect “I am willing to agree to the use of my name as you
suggest” [60, 45:433]. Sometimes these endorsements were recognized by a seat
on the board of these organizations. These honorary positions do not generally
mean that Millikan governed the organizations. Millikan viewed this system of
patronage as wholesome, but it was imperfect at best. Millikan once complained
that “executive committees over which the sponsors have no control make
commitments and take actions which the sponsors might warmly oppose” [60,
41:183]. Privately, Millikan murmured that John Dewey and Albert Einstein
endorsed causes they knew little about, yet Millikan was also
guilty.202020Voluminous FBI files catalogue many of Einstein’s endorsements.
The comparison between Einstein and Millikan is instructive. Should Einstein’s
endorsements and offensive travel diaries be evaluated today by the same
standard as Millikan’s endorsements and mean-spirited private remarks [24]?
Many (including the author) might find this standard too severe. Millikan
grumbled, “One of my friends tells me that my name is being so used … as to
let the public think that I am thoroughly familiar with its activities and am
one of its sponsors, when the facts are that I have known nothing whatever
about the management or the program … for something like twenty years. …” “I
cannot look up even a tenth part of the institutions seeking my sponsorship”
[60, 42:359].

  4. 4.

The CNR committee did not have access to Millikan’s own statements on
eugenics. As a result, the report was largely speculative. The committee
relied on private words of praise (phrases such as “magnificent job”) from
Millikan to Gosney to infer that Millikan’s beliefs were the same as Gosney’s
[79, p 16].212121 In a 1945 letter to Clarence Gamble, the heir of the Proctor
and Gamble fortune, Millikan referred to the establishment of the Human
Betterment Foundation as “epoch-making” [60, 28:441].  However, it is rash to
infer too much about the concordance of heartfelt beliefs when a university
president praises a wealthy donor, especially when the letters were written in
response to Gosney’s “generous gift” and “philanthropic enterprises.” After
the CNR report was issued, two statements about eugenics in Millikan’s own
words have surfaced. These direct statements from Millikan supersede the
committee’s speculations.

  5. 5.

In his first statement, as reported by the Los Angeles Times in 1925, Millikan
spoke out in strong opposition to eugenics. He denounced the race degeneration
theories of Albert Edward Wiggam and Lothrop Stoddard [100] [89]. Millikan
maintained, “We can’t control the germ plasm but we can control education” and
consequently, education was the “supreme problem” and a “great duty” [69].

  6. 6.

Millikan’s second statement on eugenics appeared in a 1939 article _Science
and the World of Tomorrow_ , which contained his forecast of how science might
change “life in America fifty or a hundred years hence” [61]. He readily
admitted that “the possibility that something so completely foreign to my
thinking may happen as to make any prognosis that I may hazard now look
ridiculous in the years to come, …” This article was written not long after he
joined the Human Betterment Foundation (HBF). If we are looking for the
message that Millikan might have delivered to the HBF had he ever attended a
board meeting, it is here that we should look. He wrote

> I have no doubt that in the field of public health the control of disease,
> the cessation of the continuous reproduction of the unfit, etc., big
> advances will be made, but here I am not a competent witness, and I find on
> the whole those who are the most competent and informed the most
> conservative.– Millikan, 1939 [61].

There is no mention of specific methods such as sterilization. There is no
suggestion of the use of coercion. He speaks in the future tense, “advances
will be made” in the coming fifty or hundred years. He is cautious. He humbly
professes his lack of expertise. That brief statement is all. No other
statements by Millikan on eugenics have surfaced. Based on available evidence,
it appears that Millikan was actually milder in his views than the committee’s
three witnesses against him.

We might suppose that Caltech geneticists would have been foremost in
Millikan’s mind when he deferred to the conservative views of “those who are
most competent and informed.” Chief among them would be Morgan, who served
alongside Millikan for many years on Caltech’s executive council. Morgan’s
views are documented above. Overall, Caltech geneticists voiced
caution.222222Dobzhansky, who signed the 1939 manifesto, wrote in 1946 that a
sterilization program may “take centuries or even millennia. … It is, perhaps,
not too selfish to say that posterity should be allowed to tackle its own
problems and to hope that it may have better means for doing so than we have”
[22]. In 1965, Alfred Sturtevant contended that eugenics was fraught with
uncertainties and difficulties [90, pp 130-132] [52].

  7. 7.

Millikan was not opposed to birth control.232323A strong distinction should be
made between voluntary and involuntary sterilization. Worldwide today, almost
half of all “women of reproductive age (or their partners) are contraceptive
users” [70]. According to data from a recent study in Lancet, sterilization is
still the most common form of birth control in the world with prevalence
around 26% [33]. Decades of sterilization research (including Popenoe’s at the
HBF) have shaped our understanding of worldwide contraceptive practice today.
In a private letter, Millikan told the birth control proponent Margaret Sanger
that “I approve of your movement,” but he declined to make a public
endorsement [60, 45:851]. Like Millikan, Sanger has been accused of having
eugenic sympathies.

##  5 Conclusions

Millikan was one of the greatest experimental physicists in the world during
the early decades of the twentieth century. He made fundamental contributions
to the isolation and measurement of the electron charge, the experimental
verification of Einstein’s photoelectric equation, the measurement of
Avogadro’s number and Planck’s constant, the study of spectral lines of
ionized atoms, and the understanding of cosmic rays. He spurred the growth of
American science through his many contacts with Bell Labs, through the almost
countless number of graduate students he supervised, and through his best-
selling physics textbook. At the head of Caltech during the first 24 years of
its existence, Millikan oversaw its rapid maturation into one of the
outstanding technical institutions of the world.

The CNR report’s review of Millikan’s scientific achievements was deficient,
and this article has aimed to remedy that deficiency. About Millikan’s famous
oil drop experiment, the Caltech report seems to have no institutional memory.
The report quoted the first sentence from an _Encyclopedia Britannica_ article
about the experiment, not even making it to the second sentence. Concerning
the photoelectric effect, the Caltech report exhibited a similar lack of
institutional memory, by going no further than the one-sentence banner
statement from NobelPrize.org. In brief, Millikan’s greatest scientific
achievements were compressed to two stock sentences. By contrast, the CNR
committee members cared abundantly for their own reputations by including
seven pages of their bios in the report.

Throughout World War II, Millikan advocated for the rights of Japanese
Americans. At a time when public opinion had turned overwhelmingly against
Japanese Americans, Greta and Robert Millikan were both moved by compassion
toward their Japanese friends and acquaintances. When she received a letter
from her friend Elizabeth Ozawa, who was in a detention camp at Tulare, Greta
wrote in her diary that “things are far from right – we must keep alert and
busy on our Fair Play Committee” [60, 80:p 132]. Robert Millikan wrote to Hori
that “your letter touched me deeply” and to Kido that he had been doing all he
could to assist “the many who are likely to suffer unjustly in this difficult
situation.” For Millikan, who habitually executed his plans through a broad
network of committees, it was natural to reach out to a committee that shared
his views on Japanese-American rights. He became a vice president of Fair
Play, which worked tirelessly to change public opinion on Japanese-American
issues and had a significant impact on public policy.

This article has made an extended commentary on Platt’s ideas because of his
ultimate influence on the decision to strip Millikan of honors. His
fingerprints are everywhere. Platt was cited five times in Michael Hiltzik’s
_Los Angeles Times_ article, “Caltech faces reckoning,” which made the
petition against Millikan known to a large public [37]. The _LA Times_
published Platt’s false accusation that a quota existed at Caltech during
Millikan’s tenure “allowing for the appointment of only one Jewish full-time
faculty member per year.” More than two full pages (out of eight total pages)
of the archivist’s report to the CNR committee were direct quotations from
Platt’s book [15]. Michael Chwe’s presentation to the CNR committee quoted
Platt’s book four times [14]. Like Platt, Chwe imagined far fetched
associations between Millikan and Nazi Germany. Platt’s accusations that
“California’s elite” had “fascist sympathies” set the tone of moral
condemnation. Through an escalation of rhetoric, Millikan’s thoughts and deeds
came to be seen as “reprehensible” (Thomas Rosenbaum), “horrible” (Daniel
Mukasa, Caltech President of BSEC), and “crimes against humanity” (Michael
Chwe). The historian Kirt von Daacke has called for “us” collectively to atone
for this history.

Regarding the history of sterilization in California, the science historian
Alex Wellerstein has stated plainly, “We do not find Nazis in California
mental health institutions” [98]. Platt’s book _Bloodlines_ is an unreliable
source for Millikan scholarship. It is false that Millikan was ideologically
aligned with the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. The alleged association between Millikan
and Nazi Germany is abundantly refuted by Millikan’s own words as found in
many speeches, publications, and radio addresses. On Japanese policy, Platt
omitted key parts of Fair Play’s recommendation of dispersed relocation, which
fully recognized the right of Japanese Americans to resettle after the war
wherever in the United States they pleased. He falsely described the physicist
Waterman’s recruitment of Japanese scientists for postwar expeditions to
Japan, making Millikan seem to be a military informant against Japanese
Americans. All in all, Platt is more a storyteller than a careful historian.

_Bloodlines_ became the only source in Caltech’s CNR report on the issue of
Japanese internment. The report selected the worst tidbits from _Bloodlines_
for verbatim inclusion into its report. Remarkably, the committee selected the
worst parts from the worst secondary source, without consulting any primary
sources on Japanese internment. Here, “worst” is meant both in the sense of
historically unreliable and in the sense of hostile toward Millikan. The
report did not mention Millikan’s significant participation in Fair Play.
Finding itself at the final stage of a game of telephones, _Nature_ falsely
accused Millikan of colluding in a military roundup of Japanese for
imprisonment at the beginning of the war. Not only is this accusation false,
it is a complete reversal of historical fact; Millikan was one of a small
minority who actively promoted Japanese-American rights during the war.
Millikan received the Kansha Award, which recognizes “individuals who aided
Japanese Americans during World War II” [72].

According to Rosenbaum, Caltech’s most intense concern was Millikan’s
association with a eugenics movement that had already been discredited. The
CNR committee report made similar accusations against Millikan; he “failed to
perform the due diligence” and was “derelict in this duty” to ensure that the
HBF had its “science right” [79].

Alas, it was the CNR committee that failed to perform due diligence. This
article examined the three authorities that the CNR committee cited to prove
that the eugenics movement had been discredited scientifically by 1938. In a
dramatic denouement, it turns out that all three of the CNR committee’s
authorities had various degrees of eugenic involvement at that time. Two of
them signed the pro-eugenic Geneticists’ Manifesto in 1939, which proclaimed
“the truth that both environment and heredity constitute dominating and
inescapable complementary factors in human wellbeing, but factors both of
which are under the potential control of man and admit of unlimited and
interdependent progress” [19].

In the committee’s portrayal, “the hereditary nature of human behavior and
character had fallen into disrepute within various quarters…” by 1937 [79].
Millikan, who believed that education could be controlled but not the germ
plasm, did not hold strong hereditarian opinions. The CNR committee was quick
to condemn the hereditarians of that era, but it would be rash to pass
sentence, without grounding that judgment in recent science. The statistical
concept of heritability provides a scale that quantifies environmental and
genetic influence. Evidence in support of rather high heritability of
intelligence and various human traits is presented in [76] [95] [34]. Richard
J. Haier, who pioneered the use of neuroimaging in intelligence research, has
written, “Although the full role of genes is not yet known, the evidence for
major genetic involvement in intelligence is overwhelming” [34].

To be clear, nobody proposes a return to the California sterilization
practices of the 1930s. According to Wellerstein, sterilization rates in
California declined sharply in the early 1950s. The practice died not with a
bang but a whimper. “No one took credit for killing the practice, and no one
at the time appears to have noticed that it had ended.” “The horror we attach
to sterilizations today, and to eugenics in general, did not become widespread
until the 1970s, with the rise of interest in patient autonomy, women’s
rights,” among other reasons [98, pp 49-51]. During earlier decades, the
largest institutional force in moral opposition to eugenics had been the Roman
Catholic Church [23]. The moral outrage at Caltech grew out of the Black Lives
Matter movement and was directed toward the cause of “dismantling Caltech’s
legacy of white supremacy” [81] [79]. The landscape has changed in other
irreversible ways: birth control and genetic engineering have advanced far
beyond the capabilities of the sterilization era [59].

The committee relied on fabricated quotations from its authorities to buttress
its case. To be clear, the committee was not the original source of the
fabricated quotations it used. However, the committee failed to to detect that
the false words ring false. The committee, which was free to present evidence
of whatever form it pleased, chose to portray Millikan in the worst possible
light. It is telling that the evidence unravels so sensationally. Rosenbaum
stated that the committee reached its conclusions “by close reading of primary
sources” [80]. Rosenbaum’s statement is not credible.

We end this article with a postscript on merit and diversity. This article has
been written with a focus on Millikan. However, the larger message of the CNR
report is diversity. The word _diversity_ and its inflections appear 78 times
in the 77 page CNR report. The word appears as many as nine times per page.
The report, which is hosted by the Caltech diversity website, makes repeated
reminders that Caltech has an “ongoing effort to forge a diverse and inclusive
community.”

The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Daniel Golden has written on admission
practices at elite American universities. Caltech was unique among the most
elite. Not long ago, Caltech boasted that on matters of admission, it made “no
concessions to wealth, and it won’t sacrifice merit for diversity’s sake” [28,
p 278]. David Baltimore, who was the president of Caltech and a member of the
CNR committee, assured Golden that “Caltech would never compromise its
standards. ‘People should be judged not by their parentage and wealth but by
their skills and ability, … Any school that I’m associated with, I want to be
a meritocracy”’ [28, p 284].

Never say never. The era of uncompromising standards at Caltech has come to an
end. The _Los Angeles Times_ reported on August 31, 2023 that Caltech is
making historic changes to its admission standards. “In a groundbreaking step,
the campus announced Thursday that it will drop admission requirements for
calculus, physics, and chemistry courses for students who don’t have access to
them and offer alternative paths. …” “Data … showed a significant racial gap
in access to those classes.” Caltech’s executive director of undergraduate
admissions explained the new policy in these terms “‘I think that we’re really
in a time where institutions have to decide if everything that they’ve been
saying about diversity and inclusion is true,’ she said, noting that the
challenge is especially acute now that the U.S. Supreme Court has banned
affirmative action. ‘Is this something fundamental about who we are as an
institution … or is this something that was just really nice window dressing”’
[96].

The action against Millikan has been one campaign within a much larger
political movement. Millikan himself had this to say about those who engage in
mean-spirited attacks against America’s finest [60, 70:535]:

> To attempt to spread poison over the United States with respect to the
> characters and motives of the finest, ablest and most public spirited men
> whom American has recently produced is resorting to a method which, it seems
> to me, all men of honesty and refinement can only abhor and detest. –
> Millikan

To be sure, Caltech has stirred up a hornets’ nest.

#### Acknowledgments

The author gives special thanks to J. Goodstein, P. Collopy, D. Kevles, M.
Johnston, B. Palais, R. Warne, B. Charlesworth and other members of the Fisher
Memorial Trust, and the Caltech archives. The author bears sole responsibility
for content.

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