S U N S H IN E

OR

NOIR?

Millikans image of science and business reproducing Aryan supremacy on the shores of the Pacific undoubtedly warmed the hearts of his listeners, who like himself were conservative Taft-Hoover Republicans. An orthodox Social Darwinist, Millikan frequently invoked Herbert Spencer (the great thinker) in his fulminations against socialism (the coming slavery), the New Deal (political royalists), Franklin Roosevelt (Tammanyizing the United States), and statism in general. In the face of breadlines, he boasted the common man . . . is vastly better off here today in depressed America than he has ever been at any other epoch in society. Yet, as private support for scientific research collapsed during the Depression years, Millikan reconciled his anti-statism with Cal Techs financial needs by advocating military research as the one permissible arena where science and industry could accept federal partnership - an $80 million windfall to Cal Tech in the war years.103 In an important sense, this utter reactionary, who was totally out of step with younger, more progressive scientific leaderships in places like Berkeley and Chicago, defined the parameters - illiberal, militarized and profit-driven - for the incorporation of science into the economy and culture of Southern California. Nowhere else in the country did there develop such a seamless continuum between the corporation, laboratory and classroom as in Los Angeles, where Cal Tech via continuous cloning and spinoff became the hub of a vast wheel of public-private research and development that eventually included th Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Hughes Aircraft (the world center of airborne electronics), the Air Forces Space Technology Laboratory, Aerojet General (a spinoff of the latter), TRW, the Rand Institute, and so on. But the rise of science in Southern California had stranger resonances as well. Just like Hollywood, that other exotic enclave, Cal Tech struck sparks as it scraped against the local bedrock of Midwestern fundament alism. It was not unusual for Albert Einstein to be lecturing at Cal Tech on his photoelectric equation, while a few blocks away Aime Semple McPherson was casting out the devil before her Pasadena congregation. At the height of the Scopes Trial controversy, and amid the efforts of the Bryan Bible League of California to make the King James Bible a required textbook in schools, Millikan - to a great many people in Southern California (Babbitts and quacks included) the greatest man in the world - intervened

57