Free Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk

however, including John Elliott and David Muzzey, the associate leader of the New York Society, were prepared to publicly support the pacifist case, which put them at odds with Adler himself, whose pro-American position compelled him, after the US entered the war in April 1917, to declare his support for the war. From November 1917 onwards, the Ethical Culture meeting house followed most other public buildings in flying the US flag. Most of the Ethical Culture leaders who had previously been pacifist followed Adler in his support for the war, but John Elliott continued to pursue a pacifist line, devoting himself (even at the risk of being thrown out of the Society) to defending the rights of conscientious objectors. In this, Elliott was radically, and increasingly, out of step with Adler, who, in his Easter Sunday sermon of 1917, went so far as to argue that resistance to the war was
treason
.
    In the midst of this potentially ruinous split in the Ethical Culture movement, Oppenheimer, now thirteen years old, entered the high-school part of the Ethical Culture School. The school journal,
Inklings
, had by this time nailed its mast firmly to Adler’s colours and become belligerently pro-war. Encouraging students to do whatever they could for the war effort – joining the Auxiliary Red Cross, sewing bandages, and so on –
Inklings
declared it to be ‘the duty of every high school chap to put his shoulder down and buck up for his country’: ‘All of our brave plans and hopes for the future have to be cast aside to give place to the one predominant purpose of the entire nation . . . We are in the fight and we have got to win!’
    In its issue of March 1918, the journal expressed its solidarity with those who regarded political dissent as treachery. ‘In discussing the war,’ its editors declared, ‘we must think of rights which are greater than the individual’s right to expression of personal views . . . one thing we do not want is opposition to the government.’ Three months later, this attack on government critics was renewed: ‘There is no room for dissenters and joy-killers. There is no room for those who complain of the government, of the suffering of the soldiers, of no results, of hard times, etc.’
    It is doubtful that Oppenheimer shared these sentiments. His father was such an admirer of Adler that it is difficult to imagine him doing anything but following Adler’s position at every stage; but there are signs that, during his high-school years, Oppenheimer began to distance himself, both from his father and from the Ethical Culture movement. In a satirical poem that he wrote for his father’s birthday he included the slightly mocking line, ‘he swallowed Adler whole like morality compressed’, and in his last year at the Ethical Culture School (1920–1) he wrote a poem for his English teacher which might naturally be read as an indictment of the line taken by Adler and
Inklings
during the war.
    The poem is untitled, but an apt name for it might be ‘The Damning Lie’. In its entirety, it reads:
    In Flanders’ fields the sun sinks low
    And clouds flamed crimson with its glow
    Unnumbered crosses – here we lie
    While life & love go swirling by
    Ours – had God decreed it so.
    He can not guide you where to go,
    He can not prompt with ‘yes’ or ‘no’
    The stage of life; ours was to die
    In Flanders’ fields –
    Yet now we see: We have no foe.
    Nurtured by hatreds that must grow
    It was, we see, the damning lie
    And, in a quaking voice we cry
    ‘Let us have Peace’; the sun sinks low
    On Flanders’ fields.
    RO
    The ‘damning lie’ of which the poem speaks is the insistence that it was the duty of those soldiers whose ‘unnumbered crosses’ lie on Flanders’fields to regard the soldiers on the other side as their ‘foe’, to hate them and kill them, even at the expense of their own lives. Once this is seen to be not just untrue, but a lie, the poem seems to suggest, then the