they were Republicans, compared to 35 and 23 percent of the general public, respectively. When one thinks about it, it becomes clear why this is currently the case. The conservative movement has largely become associated with—and financed by—old industry and traditional religion, both of which perceive an existential threat from new science. Rather than supporting exploration of wherever the evidence leads, they have invested big money in an authoritarian model of defending their values and business models, and that means denying science that contradicts those things. The rise of authoritarianism among the Republicans running in the 2016 US presidential elections is an example of this.
Early in the twentieth century this situation was almost reversed. It was the Southern Democrats, defending Jim Crow and traditional religion, who opposed science. Republican Abraham Lincoln had created the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. Republican Teddy Roosevelt, who had grown up wanting to be a scientist, became America’s great defender of wildlife and the environment. Republican William McKinley, who would later be admired by Karl Rove, won two presidential elections, in 1896 and 1900, both times over the anti-evolution Democrat William Jennings Bryan, and supported the creation of the Bureau of Standards, which would eventually become today’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. Bryan’s strident anti-evolution campaigns, culminating in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, helped to drive even more scientists toward the Republican Party.
As an exasperated Republican, the physicist and CalTech chair Robert A. Millikan, wrote in the leading journal Science in 1923, the year he won the Nobel prize,
We have many people even here who hasten to condemn evolution without having the remotest conception of what it is that they are condemning, nor the slightest interest in an objective study of the evidence in the case which is all that “the teaching of evolution” means, men whose decisions have been formed, as are all decisions in the jungle, by instinct, by impulse, by inherited loves and hates, instead of by reason. Such people may be amiable and lovable, just as is any house dog, but they are a menace to democracy and to civilization, because ignorance and the designing men who fatten upon it control their votes and their influence.
Other prominent scientists noted the political divide. The great botanist Albert Spear Hitchcock, who would soon become principal botanist at the US Department of Agriculture, wrote the following spring in the same journal that “it is absurd for a scientist to shiver with fear if he sees a black cat cross his path or if he walks under a ladder. It is equally absurd to believe that all Germans or all democrats, or all Roman Catholics . . . are undesirables and a menace to society.”
By the early twentieth century, the Democratic Party, which originally grew out of Thomas Jefferson’s Anti-Federalists, had become dominated on the national level by Southern religious conservatives and was divided over culture-war issues like evolution, the prohibition of alcohol, restricting immigration, Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Catholic faith of Al Smith, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928. Republicans, by contrast, were the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, of progressive optimism and tolerance, of environmentalism and finance—the party of rationalism and national parks. And by the early 1930s, one of the most famous men in the world was a Republican scientist named Edwin Hubble.
Hubble, who was born in 1889, grew up in Marshfield, Missouri, and then, at the turn of the century, his father John relocated the family to Wheaton, Illinois, where he attended public school and was famous for his athletic prowess. At the time, science was considered a fanciful pursuit and a less-than-solid career path, much like the arts—something suited more for adventurers and wealthy “gentlemen scientists” than professionals. Hubble’s father wanted him to be a lawyer, and when Hubble earned one of the first Rhodes Scholarships while a star student of Millikan’s at the University of Chicago, he went to the Queen’s College at the University of Oxford to study law, not physics.
Still, it was a time when great discoveries were being made in astronomy, which captivated Hubble’s imagination. America was entering a golden age of science, propelled in no small part by the massive philanthropic investments of two Republican men: steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who funded public libraries across the nation, helped found what is now Carnegie Mellon University, and funded basic scientific research through the Carnegie Institution of Washington (since renamed the Carnegie Institution for Science); and John D. Rockefeller Sr., who endowed the University of Chicago as well as Rockefeller University and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Public Health. As Hubble began secretly studying astronomy on the side while at Oxford, the imagination of the American public was captured by the growing fame of a former Swiss patent officer with wild hair, an ever-present violin, a playful face, and some mind-blowing ideas—one Albert Einstein.
The Hoax of Relativity
Published in 1916 during World War I, Einstein’s general theory of relativity had made the striking prediction that gravity could bend space and so disrupt the straight-line flow of light. On May 29, 1919, with the war over, the British astronomers Sir Arthur Eddington and Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin set out to test the theory by traveling to the island of Príncipe near Africa, and carefully observing the way starlight behaved during a solar eclipse. If Einstein was right, the sun’s gravity would bend the light of stars that were in line with it, making them appear to be slightly offset. The eclipse, which lasted nearly seven minutes, was one of the longest of the twentieth century. It blocked enough sunlight that astronomers could see the stars and measure changes in their apparent locations. If they shifted, Einstein’s theory would be proved.
The test’s audacity drew the attention of scientists and journalists the world over. If Einstein was wrong, his reputation would be ruined. If he was right, he would be celebrated as a genius whose theory changed everything we thought about the universe. The results were dramatically presented at a November joint meeting of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Astronomical Society, and they confirmed Einstein’s predictions spectacularly.
The popular press loved the drama, and Einstein became a household name—a little tramp of a professor who was also a bold genius, with his funny hair and beloved violin, not unlike Charlie Chaplin and his cane. In contrast to Americans’ image of the snobby European intellectual, Einstein connected emotionally as an underdog, a trait that appealed to the antiauthoritarian aspect of the American spirit and was cited in press accounts of his “hero’s welcome” when he first visited America in 1921, the year he won the Nobel Prize.
America’s embrace of Einstein stood in stark contrast to the treatment he was getting at home in Germany. Even though Berlin was the world capital of culture, art, and science, right-wing relativity deniers were on the rise. Like modern climate-science deniers, relativity deniers mounted ad hominem attacks against Einstein, and loudly branded general relativity a “hoax,” despite—or perhaps because of—its recent, dramatic scientific confirmation. They were led by an engineer named Paul Weyland, who formed a small but mysteriously well-funded group that held antirelativity rallies around Germany, denouncing the theory’s “Jewish nature” and organizing a major event at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall on August 24, 1920. Einstein attended, only to suffer more personal attacks. The political animosity grew so bad that he decided to leave Berlin.
“This world is a strange madhouse,” he wrote to a friend three weeks after the rally. “Currently every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.” His words would be echoed decades later by mystified climate scientists.
Even prominent German physicists were getting into relativity denialism, largely along political lines having to do with nationalism and rising anti-Semitism, which, paradoxically, was occurring as Germany was awash in a new liberalism. The winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physics, Philipp Lenard, who had previously exchanged flattering letters with Einstein, had since become bitter about Jews and jealous of the popular publicity Einstein’s theory was receiving. He now called relativity “absurd” and lent his name to Weyland’s group’s brochures. As a Nobel laureate, he worked behind the scenes to try to deny Einstein the prize.
The Greatest Triumph of Satanic Intelligence
At the same time, antiscience had been growing in the United States in reaction to the perceived