Agency Amidst the Agencies

Jessica Wang. American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 392 pp. Notes, bibilography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

The 1990s may well be remembered historiographically as the age of agency. Historians have turned their attention to the way individuals and groups make history. We have written books about making the New Deal, making whiteness, and making America corporate. When not making, Americans have been busy mobbing, taxing and most of all, contesting, to judge by the titles of some recent works. The heuristic reasons for this trend vary. The triumph of social and cultural history have shifted attention away from top-down political history. Deconstruction of broad economic, political, and social categories has turned our attention to the power of individuals and the role played by contingency. Outside of the academy, the end of the Cold War symbolized by the literal deconstruction of the Berlin Wall has led scholars and non-scholars alike to reexamine conclusions that just a few years ago seemed cast in concrete. The inevitable result of all of this constructing from the bottom up and deconstructing from the top down has been a healthy revival of historical possibility. Even losers--especially losers--effect change when historians of the nineties tell the story. In this spirit, American Science in an Age of Anxiety revisits a time-worn question--the impact of the Cold War and anticommunism on communities of inquiry--only this time, the good guys are armed with agency. The bad guys are the agencies.

Agency is not an unmitigated blessing. For all of its liberating potential, it also carries the awesome responsibility to deploy it. Once empowered (albeit retroactively ) the failure to exercise one's agency can turn a good guy into a bad guy in a hurry. Such is the fate of many of Jessica Wang's protagonists, who started out with the right idea about the social role of science and the correct approach to realizing it politically, but forgot that they had agency just when they needed it the most.

American Science is a fine-grained social history of politically active scientists in the decade after World War II. Wang defines a community that defies easy categorization. Most members were men and most worked in the physical sciences. Most were employed by the government or in laboratories and universities that contracted with the government. Many had some connection to atomic energy, and virtually all were concerned about how that awesome power would be controlled after the war. Wang notes that even before the Cold War, scientists were an ideologically diverse group. Wang labels those represented by the Federation of Atomic Scientists formed in the winter of 1945-46 (and soon renamed the Federation of American Scientists [FAS]) the "progressive left." These scientists generally supported internationalism and public participation in defining the structure of state-subsidized science. The group shared, in Wang's words, a commitment to "Internationalism, opposition to military funding of science, and New Deal notions about social and economic equity" (p. 11). Progressive left scientists also crafted a distinctive political style, one that initially relied upon public mobilization and visible political activity. Wang leaves little doubt about her loyalties: the progressive left scientists had the correct conception of science and the right idea, at least initially, about how best to organize.

American Science contrasts the progressive left scientists, who tended to be younger, to the "elite scientist administrators"--the "elder statesmen of science and team players when it came to matters of policy" (p. 14). Ideologically, with the exception of Oppenheimer, they were conservative. As their label suggests, the scientist-administrators preferred to use their connections and position to influence political outcomes. They were wary of the mass mobilization style. The progressive liberals and elite scientist administrators soon split on two important pieces of legislation. The progressives favored, and got, civilian control of atomic energy in the form of...