Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss by Colin Burke (review)

Most students of the Cold War are familiar with Noel Field, the one-time U.S. State Department officer, League of Nations employee, and Unitarian relief director in war-torn Europe, who disappeared, along with most of his family, behind the Iron Curtain in 1948. A long-time Soviet spy, Field was kidnapped, tortured, and portrayed as a dangerous U.S. double agent who had cleverly recruited scores of East European Communists as U.S. spies. Numerous men and women he had known and others of whom he was ignorant were imprisoned or executed as Iosif Stalin eliminated any perceived enemies in his satellite countries.

Far fewer will be aware of Noel’s father, Herbert Haviland Field, a fascinating, complicated, and visionary U.S. citizen who devoted much of his life to an effort to create a new scientific information system. In one of the weird coincidences of the history of espionage, Herbert worked as an agent for U.S. intelligence during the First World War, for a time under the direction of Allen Dulles, the same man with whom Noel cooperated in Switzerland during World War II to help defeat the Nazis, and who the Stalinists alleged was the hidden hand directing Noel’s activities. Colin Burke has written an interesting, not always entirely successful account of this colorful family.

The more successful half of the book details the life and obsession of Herbert Field. He was the product of an insular, well-to-do, progressive Quaker family that settled in New York. Born in 1868, Herbert studied science at Harvard, graduating in less than three years, and quickly obtained a doctorate in zoology. Despite early signs of professional success, he resolved to abandon scientific research to become an information scientist; that is, to develop a method for categorizing and cataloging all scientific information. Spurred by the explosive growth of knowledge resulting from the maturation of research universities, the burgeoning number of scientists around the world, and the consequent expansion of scientific journals and learned societies in numerous languages, Herbert determined to employ the cataloging system invented by Melvil Dewey—one attraction was its use of numbers rather than letters, making it a more universal language—and use postcards, rather than books or paper sheets to make it easier to store and update information. He would have researchers abstract, not just books or articles, but ideas or concepts.

These basic principles seemed simple, but each one created innumerable problems that had to be resolved. The first was money. Support from his wealthy family enabled Herbert to self-finance many of his start-up costs, but he faced daunting challenges as his project became larger and more expensive. He had to do battle with competing systems, some sponsored by national scientific societies, others by entrepreneurs with contrasting visions. He struggled to compress information to reduce printing costs and encountered difficulties in obtaining free copies of scientific journals. Moreover, he had to corral clients willing to pay. Further problems arose with ensuring accuracy, printing and storing enough cards to maintain an inventory to supply new clients, and assuaging nationalistic impulses that resented a U.S. company trying to oversee scientific knowledge. In 1895 he set up the Concilium Bibliographicum in Zurich, hoping that its Swiss location and subsidy from the government would bestow an international and neutral flavor to its work.

The project staggered along, eating up more and more of Herbert’s family money, until it was disrupted by World War I. As a Quaker pacifist well-known throughout Europe, Herbert was asked by U.S. representatives in Switzerland to coordinate the work of U.S. charities. Herbert got involved in relief efforts. That and his contacts in the international scientific community led him to assist Allen Dulles in his intelligence activities. Herbert later worked with U.S. diplomats at Versailles. Strongly anti-Bolshevik, Herbert remained to the end of his life a pacifist, an internationalist, and a...