Chapter 43 - 'Scientists Don't Read': Part 6 - Things Look Up

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Mira came home from Newport in September. With whatever portrait work she had found, she and Alfred were financially surviving, but not thriving, in the closing months of 1934. As for the family property in Poland, Alfred now had only dim hopes of recovering anything from it. And a year after publication of Science and Sanity, he and Mira still had only minimum income from the book. By the end of the year, sales had reached about 500 copies—not exactly a best seller. Alfred had also given some lectures with minimal remuneration. And neither the Roosevelt government nor any grant-giving foundations had so far shown interest in supporting his work.

Still, by the end of the year, the overall response to the book showed promise. Given the book’s rather limited distribution and Alfred and Mira’s inability to pay for advertising or other marketing, the large number of reviews and other newspaper and magazine articles about his work seemed remarkable. They were filling up the pages of their scrapbook. And reviews and articles continued to come in—as they would for a number of years to come.

So far he had heard and seen only a few truly bad reviews. But other than Keyser’s Scripta Mathematica review (which he cherished) and perhaps Tyler’s early newspaper review, most of the positive reviews seemed tepid and had left him feeling rather tepid himself. He couldn’t complain about the recognition. But, as he wrote to Trainor, the responses of ‘grand, grand’ from people who had not seemed to study it in any depth were not what he wanted.(31)

Reading what he called the “splendid” new review of Science and Sanity by Markus Reiner in the October 1934 edition of The Psychoanalytical Quarterly surely must have buoyed up Alfred’s mood. Reiner, a Palestinian Jew living in Jerusalem, only had psychoanalysis as a side interest. As an engineer and applied mathematician, he had helped found and name a new branch of mechanics—rheology, the study of flow and deformation of complex materials under stress. After the founding of the state of Israel, he became a professor at the Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, in Haifa, where he taught for many years. Regarding his 1934 review of Science and Sanity, Kendig later wrote in the General Semantics Bulletin, “No reviewer-critic who tackled the book cold (i.e., without training) has surpassed Reiner’s grasp of the basic formulations and clarity in expounding them.”(32) With responses like Reiner’s, Korzybski felt encouraged. He’d had good responses to his lectures too. And he felt heartened that Lynn, Trainor, Potts, and Kendig (among others) had begun to use and research his work.

It also did him good to know that his old friend Walter Polakov supported his work. Walter had finished his first reading of the book earlier that year and was doing his best to push it. Walter had written a review for The New Republic, which had instead published Ernest Nagel’s short but dismissive book note. The magazine later published Walter’s reply to Nagel, more than twice as long as Nagel’s notice, for which Alfred felt grateful.(33) At a regional conference of the Progressive Education Association held in New York City in late November, Walter also gave a presentation on “Science’s Contribution To The Social Sciences” which featured Alfred’s work and later got published in the monthly journal of the association.

And earlier in the year while still working for the Tennessee Valley Authority, Walter—on the lookout for non-aristotelian trends for his friend—had informed Alfred about the theoretical research of Vytautus A. Graicunas and Lyndall F. Urwick on a manager’s span of attention or control. Graicunas had published a short paper, “Relationship in Organization”, in 1933, now considered a classic of management. According to him and his colleague Urwick—who wrote another 1933 paper on the subject, “Organization As A Technical Problem”—the number of relationships an executive would have to deal with, increased dramatically as he or she added assistants or major functions under his or her control. According to an equation involving exponential growth that Graicunas formulated, each addition of an assistant or function beyond about four would result in a sharp rise in complications. This could increase the likelihood for confusion and failure. Granted, other factors might increase or mitigate the complications. Nonetheless, in 1934 Polakov had begun to apply this in his consulting work. Korzybski considered it extremely significant and later made it the subject of a 1943 paper, “Some Non-Aristotelian Data On Efficiency For Human Adjustment” which included Polakov’s summary of Graicunas’ and Urwick’s original articles. Korzybski also came to impart the span of control as an important formulation in his seminars since it highlighted for him the havoc that could result in human affairs if people ignored non-additive factors. (33a)

Korzybski demonstrating the Graicunas diagram,
August 1947 IGS Seminar-Workshop

A year after the publication of the book, thanks to Walter and other readers, reviewers, and supporters with varying levels of enthusiasm, a great deal of interest had been stirred up. The potential for his work seemed promising. But there was no getting around it, Korzybski was going to have to meet more people, give more lectures, and publish more articles, if he wanted to sell more books, to get general semantics into the scientific and general culture—and to make a living.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

31. AK to Joseph C. Trainor, 7/25/1934. AKDA 33.598. 

32. Kendig, “Introduction” to Markus Reiner “Science and Sanity, A 1934 Review”, reprinted in General Semantics Bulletin 28 & 29 (1961/1962), p. 119. 

33. Walter Polakov, “Was Korzybski Irrelevant?” in “Correspondence”, The New Republic, Oct. 24, 1934. AKDA 2.719.

33a. At archive.org, you can find both the Graicunas and Urwick articles in Gulick and Urwicks 1937 book, Papers On The Science of Administration, which Korzybski owned and carefully studied. 

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Chapter 43 - 'Scientists Don't Read': Part 5 - Kendig

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

On a Wednesday afternoon, August 8, 1934, Marjorie Mercer Kendig rang the doorbell at 321 Carleton Avenue in Brooklyn. Reading Science and Sanity for the first time only a few months before, she had gotten excited and phoned Korzybski to make an appointment. Now here she was to see him. She had just finished her course work at the Columbia University Teachers College, Department of Higher Education, with only her final thesis paper to complete in order to graduate with a Masters Degree in Higher Education (which she received the following July, 1935). In only a matter of days, she would be heading for Kansas City, Missouri to begin her new job for the fall term as the Head of Barstow School, a private academy for girls with about 500 students ranging from nursery school to college preparatory age. She entered the old brownstone building and began climbing the four flights of stairs to the Korzybskis’ ‘penthouse’ studio. Looking up, she saw a “round-faced, shaven-head, khaki-clad” figure—Alfred himself—“beaming” down at her from the top bannister. She was seeking his help in what she was planning for Barstow—a one-woman revolution in education. She would only realize many years later that the main ‘revolution’ for her—a slow, internal one—would take place within her self.(26)  At this point in 1934 at the age of 42, Kendig (as she liked to be called) had already reached an outer level of competence in her chosen field of education. She seemed mainly focused on changing the world around her—or at least the small piece of it at Barstow, she had just been charged with directing.

Born in 1892 in Utica, New York, Kendig—the sickly, only child of an apparently distant father and a possessive mother—got an unusual, informal early education. Her mother liked to read aloud to her for hours at a time from literary classics like Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, etc. As a result she had grown up with “a relatively high oral vocabulary without the slightest notion of how words and sentences look.” (She only learned to read and write at the age of 10.) (27) While she was still a child, her family moved first to Brooklyn, then to an apartment on Sutton Place in Manhattan, a prestigious New York City address. She entered Vassar College in 1911 at the age of 19, graduating in 1915 (a few years after one of her favorite poets Edna St. Vincent Millay) with a Bachelor of Arts degree, having focused on history, chemistry, French and economics. She began work in the publishing business at Scribner’s, moving from the advertising to the publication department and then into editorial work. After the U.S. entry into the ‘Great War’ in early 1918, she volunteered for a Nurses Training Camp at Vassar becoming ill during the influenza epidemic near the end of her training at New York City’s Presbyterian Hospital (where she ended up being hospitalized herself). With the end of the war that winter, she didn’t continue with nursing but reentered the publishing business, working throughout the nineteen-twenties first at Doran and later at Consolidated Magazines Corporation where she became Director of the Department of Educational Information, until 1931.

Looking back many years later (in the late 1960s/early 1970s) Kendig saw her younger self (from her childhood into at least the early 1930s) as a rather alienated person. She had participated to some extent in the revelries of the “roaring twenties”, but although she appeared immersed in the literary mileu surrounding F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the “Crowd”—as it was called—didn’t involve her much.(28) Indeed, by 1931 (as she described herself later) she felt “very alone, against the world and afraid.” She had become a workaholic with a tough outer shell she used to protect herself from powerful feelings of fear and anger, etc., that she had learned to suppress as a child. As she said later, “I wasn’t happy. I just wasn’t unhappy as long as I drove myself.” And by 1931, despite her professional success, life within the ‘smart set’ of the New York publishing world no longer seemed enough for her. She felt drawn to the world of education. “For years I had been asking ‘What’s wrong with education?’ and what could we do to develop ‘intelligence’ — if we gave up defining it as inborn and unchangeable.”(29) Her questions and dissatisfactions had much in common with Korzybski’s pre-1914 malaise about society and science.

Kendig left New York City in 1931 to study and work in Europe for the next two years. She had already read Ogden and Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning. Then she met C.K. Ogden in Nice, France at an international meeting on Progressive Education. She went to England for a brief time to study with him, reading his Basic English and other works. Under Ogden’s guidance, she then went to Geneva, Switzerland where she took courses at the University of Geneva, Switzerland with Piaget and others while working as Assistant to the Director of the American College for Women in Geneva. As a result of her studies, she became more and more convinced that the answer to her questions somehow involved the relations of ‘language’, ‘thought’, and ‘behavior’.

After returning to New York City and stumbling into a brief and unhappy marriage, she enrolled in 1933 into the Masters program in Higher Education at Teachers College, Columbia, training to teach at the college level. Her degree was in problems of instruction in institutions of higher learning. When she read Science and Sanity in April 1934, she felt that she had found a basic key to her long-standing quandaries.

At their first meeting, Kendig and Korzybski talked for hours. It was a fateful day for them both. In Korzybski, Kendig had found a mentor who provided her with a specific approach for the practical reformulation of education and improvement of ‘intelligence’ in the way that she had long envisioned. She intended to make ‘language’ (as she understood Korzybski’s formulation of it) the central focus of all the teaching at her school. As she would come to say over the next few years at Barstow, “Every class is an English class.” (She would later somewhat modify this emphasis on the centrality of ‘language’ per se as she developed a better understanding of general semantics).

Conversely, in Kendig, Korzybski found a highly intelligent student who would shortly become one of his most hard-working and dedicated co-workers. After her time at Barstow, Kendig would devote the rest of her life to helping Korzybski while he lived, and promoting his work long after his death (she died in 1981). Of course, when they first met in August 1934, neither of them knew this. 

M. Kendig, circa 1940-1941

But Korzybski nigh certainly knew that Kendig’s work at Barstow could help him immensely in applying, researching, and promoting his work. Kendig had superb educational credentials. She was intent on applying and testing his general semantics in the most rigorous manner she could. In her position as Head of Barstow School, she was planning to turn the entire school, not just one classroom, into a test laboratory for Korzybski’s methods. He certainly felt more than willing to help her.

One of the first things he did was to provide a topic for her thesis paper. As he usually did with people he met, he put her in touch with a number of his other contacts, friends, and associates. She soon learned more about Trainor’s and Potts’ classroom research. She decided to write a research proposal on the effects of general-semantics training entitled, “A Proposed Research Investigation Valuable in the Improvement of Teaching on the Junior College Level: Application of a Method for Scientific Control of the Neuro-Linguistic and Neuro-Semantic Mechanisms in Learning”. Her paper laid out in detail the rationale and protocol for a controlled two-year study on the effects of general-semantics training on “academic success, and increased ‘emotional’ stability and ‘social’ and ‘individual’ adjustment.” The actual study never got done (over the next few years at Barstow, she had her hands full with many other things) but the paper sufficed for completing her Master’s Degree requirements.(30)

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

26. M. Kendig, personal notes,11/22/1965. IGS Archives. 

27. Kendig to Henri Laborit, 2/20/1968. IGS Archives. 

28. In a September 30, 1970 letter to her life-long friend Priscilla Sheldon, whom she had met at the Nurses Training Camp, Kendig wrote:

...I found Zelda [by Nancy Mitford] as fascinating as you described -- and pathetic, too. Yes, the book was full of ghosts of my life in the 20’s and 30’s. Slightly, in one way or another, my life touched many of (the) persons in the Fitzgeralds’ saga...Actually, though, I recall all too well the Fitzgerald Epoch, I was not much in touch with the “Crowd,” but that is hardly the important thing about the book as a tremendous production and its evocation-impact personally. [Kendig qtd. in Priscilla Sheldon, “A Tribute to M. Kendig, Memorial Gathering, January 10, 1982”. General Semantics Bulletin 50, pp. 17–18]

29. M. Kendig, personal notes, 8/6/1965. IGS Archives. 

30. Kendig 1935. “A Proposed Research Investigation Valuable in the Improvement of Teaching on the Junior College Level: Application of a Method for Scientific Control of the Neuro-Linguistic and Neuro-Semantic Mechanisms in the Learning Process” (Paper presented to complete the requirements for Master’s Degree, Department of Higher Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, July 1935.), in Baugh 1938.

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Chapter 43 - 'Scientists Don't Read': Part 4 - My Work is Preventive and Educational

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

The multi-faceted nature of Korzybski’s work opened up multiple possibilities for misinterpretation. Each reader could approach his system like a blind man standing before an elephant, groping around, and prematurely identifying the beast in terms of whatever part he didn’t find useful. To some ‘educated’ laymen, intimidated by equations and other scientific trappings, it might seem like he was teaching mathematics and science, although he was not so much interested in the technical details as in the method and mode of human behavior they demonstrated. To some mathematicians and physico-mathematical scientists, his background review and examples from math and physical science might seem obvious, even trite. And why was he dragging in the other stuff from psychiatry, biology, etc. Some psychiatrists, on the other hand, might puzzle about the physico-mathematical stuff.

                                                                             

                                        The Blind Men and the Elephant
                    Illustrator unknown - From The Heath readers by grades, D.C. Heath and Company (Boston), p. 69.

He wanted to help people solve problems in living. But his ultimately simple methods could get lost in what might seem like a forest of technicalities which provided their rationale. On the other hand, his methods could be dismissed as trivial. Or, as he would encounter more and more frequently as his work became more widely known, they could get neglected by enthusiasts more interested in talking and theorizing than in doing. In his “Outline”, he was emphasizing this last point especially: general semantics involved physiological, “neuro-semantic”, “neuro-linguistic” mechanisms that had to be worked to be useful.

As he wrote and re-wrote his outline, sending out drafts to friends like Tyler and Keyser for editing suggestions, his eagerness to find people applying and researching his work—or interested in doing so—bubbled to the surface. In August, Mira had gone to Newport to paint. Alfred, as usual, chained to his desk in Brooklyn, sent out a form letter to several dozen psychiatrists, psychologists, and educators around the country who had ordered his book:

August 16, 1934 

Dear __ , 

I am preparing a paper on General Semantics giving some data on experiments in psychotherapy and education. I wonder whether you have had an opportunity to experiment yourself, and if so, with what results? I would be very grateful if you could give me some data.  

     With Appreciation,
     Yours Very Sincerely, (23)

For some time he had been getting interesting and positive reports from Joseph C. Trainor, a psychology instructor at Washington State Normal School in Ellensburg, Washington. Trainor clearly appeared smitten with general semantics. The school’s library had ordered a copy of Science and Sanity, which Trainor had already read once by the time he wrote what looks like his first letter to Korzybski at the beginning of November 1933. By the start of 1934, Trainor had ordered his own copy of the book and started on his third reading (he was reading it aloud to his wife this time). Like Tyler, Trainor had some physico-mathematical background and seemed to take naturally to Korzybski’s work. It provided him with a conscious framework and language for an orientation that before then he’d been struggling towards unconsciously on his own.

He already had begun restructuring his beginning psychology and social psychology courses according to non-aristotelian principles. He made a copy of a structural differential out of wall-board to use in his classrooms. Even though Trainor had unintentionally violated his copyright, Korzybski didn’t get upset when he found out. He told Trainor—a young man he seemed eager to encourage—to destroy his copy once he received the hand-made mahogany differential Korzybski sent to him. Trainor also experimented with teaching non-aristotelian principles to his young son. In addition, he started a non-aristotelian study group in Ellensburg with Seldon Smyser, another teacher at the Normal School, who had been corresponding with Korzybski since mid-1933. Over the next year, Trainor gathered data from his psychology classes, where he was bringing general semantics into the lectures and drilling his students in Korzybski’s methods, including the use of the structural differential. Student writings and interview comments, as well as pre- and post-course intelligence and personality testing (using paper and pencil tests) indicated remarkable improvements in I.Q., mental health, and problem-solving measures.

In a study he presented the following year (1935), Trainor measured a mean increase in I.Q. test scores from 137 to 173 in an experimental group of sophomores in his Beginning Psychology class. They received extensional training according to the guidelines given in Chapter XXIX of Science and Sanity. With 30 students in his reported test group, Trainor was the first to admit, “It is impossible in an experiment as limited in scope as this, or with so many factors unmeasured, to give a highly detailed explanation of the results obtained in the usual cause-and-effect formula.” However, given the dramatic changes he observed and measured in his students, he concluded, “[f]urther and extensive research is imperative and its advisability would seem to be indicated by the results given.”(24) 

Korzybski was also hearing about the research of Harold M. Potts, a principal in the Olympia, Washington public school system, who had also gotten interested in general semantics after contact with Trainor, probably from participation in the Ellensburg non-aristotelian study group. Potts found a teacher in his school, whom he called a “natural non-aristotelian” to work with. The two studied Science and Sanity together and then designed a classroom plan to train a group of mentally retarded children ranging in age between 12 and 17 years old with I.Q.s ranging from 56 to 80 on the Binet-Simon Individual test. The children received lessons in general semantics from one half to one hour per day for four months and then a lesson every two weeks for a total of seven months. In his report “Some Results of Extensional Training of “Mentally Retarded” Pupils”, also presented in 1935, Potts detailed a “typical example of classroom procedure in abstracting” which began as follows: “The teacher writes upon the blackboard the word rain, as a symbol of an event taking place outside at the time and under observation of the children in the class. They are then asked to tell all that they know about the rain.” Remarkably. by the end of the lesson “[t]he class [of retarded children] began to see the infinite nature of an object [rain].” Among the results of training noted by Potts:

...5. The method seems to impress them almost immediately, tending to enhance interest and sound curiosity, eliminating feelings of inferiority, hopelessness, inertia, etc., and this is reflected in the general orientations of the pupils. 

6. Restlessness, etc., due probably to some extent to their incapability of solving their own problems by intensional methods and language, disappear and marked calmness, hopefulness, careful self-reliance, etc., make their appearance. 

7. The value of knowing that an event has extensionally an infinite number of characteristics, from which our nervous system abstracts only the object, has an unconscious effect upon the pupils over a period of time. It has been eight-months since this method was first applied and at the present time when a new center of interest is started they consciously try to discover or explore the many-sided (infinite-valued) aspects of any event without overt urging. 

8. They do not feel inferior to others, because they know that, although some know more about an object or a situation than they do, nevertheless no one knows ‘all’ about the simplest things, and they enjoy field trips and experiments to discover new data...(25) 

Extensional training appeared to benefit both college students and retarded children. This was just the kind of research Korzybski wanted to see. He would mention the work of both men in his “Outline”. But obviously much more needed to be done.

It seemed less and less likely that Philip Graven would come through with publishing any of his case studies, although Alfred continued to correspond with him and encourage him. He referred to Graven’s unpublished case studies in the “Outline”. Clearly Alfred was going to have to begin cultivating other psychiatrists—a number of whom he had already met—who might be more likely to write and publish about his methods.

Among this group, John G. Lynn—a young psychiatrist who had recently begun his psychiatric residency at McLean Hospital, a prestigious private mental hospital in Waverly, Massachusetts near Boston—had gotten terribly excited by Korzybski’s work. Lynn, who didn’t seem to have a problem with writing, began a program of treatment for two of his patients with alcohol-abuse problems and in the following year presented a case report on the men, “Preliminary Report of Two Cases of Chronic Alcoholism Treated By the Korzybski Method”. Korzybski and Lynn would have a great deal of contact over the next few years and Korzybski would visit McLean, among other psychiatric hospitals, to observe and give presentations on his work.

Korzybski didn’t object to ‘psychologists’ (he would usually place the term in quotes) doing research related to his work. For a number of years he had remained friendly with psychologist Abraham Roback, who later wrote about Korzybski in his 1952 History of American Psychology. After the publication of Science and Sanity, psychologists like Gardner Murphy and Henry Murray had also begun to express interest in Korzybski’s theories. Nonetheless, he seemed to esteem psychiatry much more than ‘psychology’. In the coming years, he would focus more of his attention on psychiatrists. Why?

For Korzybski in 1934, psychology—having only recently emerged as a scientific discipline separate from philosophy—still generally seemed not quite scientific enough. Elementalism seemed rampant in the profession, with behaviorism ascendant (a dead end as far as Korzybski was concerned), while psychologists mainly ignored the vast area of human activity, science and mathematics, that he had come to consider as basic for understanding human behavior. On the other hand, although psychiatrists also seemed to have ignored science and mathematics as behavior, they somewhat made up for this lack by their study of insanity. And as physicians, psychiatrists necessarily had training in medicine. So however poorly they did so, psychiatrists tended to connect their work to other sciences, such as biology, chemistry, etc. As a branch of medicine, psychiatry was also inherently oriented towards application. And their casework with individual patients gave psychiatrists an extensional push to gather data and notice the differences between generalizations about behavior and what they might see in an individual. Despite Korzybski’s attitude toward ‘psychology’, many more psychologists would become interested in his work. (Although, as far as I know, no psychologist would seriously take up his suggestion to replace the term “psychology” with “psycho-logics”.)

Korzybski’s personal aim was not to reform psychology or psychiatry (he hoped he might inspire others in those fields to do so). He didn’t aim to do psychotherapy either. The region overlapping mental hygiene and education, which he considered inseparable, would constitute his main teaching arena. As he often emphasized throughout his career, he saw general semantics as primarily ‘preventive and educational’. But demonstrating prevention could be difficult. Getting psychiatrists to use his methods could test the power of his educational approach for ameliorating even so-called ‘psychiatric’ problems, many of which he felt convinced had their origins in semantic (evaluational) factors—not traditionally considered medical. Any resulting ‘cures’ could thus help substantiate the case for prevention. Conversely, educators like Trainor and Potts could also help to show the link between education and adjustment. In the late summer of 1934, Korzybski was to meet one of the most important people among those who would help him in his quest to demonstrate this link and develop his work in education for sanity.


Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

23. AK to Professor H. M. Johnson, 8/16/1934. AKDA 25.128. 

24. See Trainor’s report “Experimental Results of Training in General Semantics Upon Intelligence-Test Scores” in Baugh 1938, p. 60. I understand that 140 and above is now considered at the “genius” level. Perhaps the high before-and-after scores of Trainor’s students has something to do with the particular kind of test scale he was using in 1934/1935 (the Detroit Intelligence Test, Advanced Form); in 1939, Wechsler introduced a new scale which then became the standard. 

25. Potts, pp. 63–64.

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Chapter 43 - 'Scientists Don't Read': Part 3 - Coghill

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Korzybski’s relationship with biologist George Ellett Coghill (1872–1941) helped him put into perspective his efforts to connect with other scientists. For people like neuroscientist  C. Judson Herrick, who wrote a biography of Coghill, and evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, Coghill qualified as a major—though rather unacknowledged—scientific figure. Shortly after Coghill’s death, Huxley said, “His death is a devastating loss to science. In my opinion Coghill stood among the twenty outstanding biological scientists of our time, although so few people were cognizant of his work that perhaps not many others would agree with me.”(13)

George Ellett Coghill 

Korzybski had started to correspond with Coghill in 1933, after reading his book, Anatomy and the Problem of Behavior. To Korzybski, Coghill’s approach to biology ably embodied the dynamic, structural approach he had sought to lay bare in his non-aristotelian system. Coghill, then a primary researcher at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology in Philadelphia, also served as President of the American Association of Anatomists and had spent a lifetime of teaching and research in zoology, embryology, histology, and anatomy. His pioneering studies on the relation of so-called ‘function’ and ‘structure’—which Coghill considered inseparable in living organisms—had focused on the embryology of behavior and associated bodily apparatus. Coghill had used the simplest research tools— a human hair at the end of a wood splinter—to tickle embryos of the amblystoma, a type of salamander, at different stages of development. Then he observed and described what they did and made generalizations about their development in relation to their behavior. Coghill tickled Korzybski too, who used a number of quotes from Coghill’s book in Science and Sanity.

Coghill had read most of Science and Sanity by January 1934 and wrote to Korzybski:

...At least I have read Science and Sanity as far as the mathematical part, which I am taking in small doses... 

It was a pleasure to follow your analysis and interpretation of the nature and problem of sanity. The presentation is clear and forceful. It should do a great deal of good—an inestimable amount if the book is sufficiently studied. It should be studied by all teachers of children, and all parents particularly.  

My own interpretation of the scientific method seems to me to be directly in line with your ideas of abstraction and identification; and my concept of the relational nature of scientific data seems to be an expression of Einsteinian relativity. In the reading of the book I could see why you liked the methodological part of my address before the Anatomists in Anatomy and the Problem of Behavior]. (14)  

Coghill clearly got what Korzybski had wanted to get across. Indeed, he already had a broadly, non-elementalistic viewpoint before he read Science and Sanity. Perhaps it had some connection with the fact that in his student days, he had enjoyed studying the calculus for fun. As a solitary researcher, Coghill had little day-to-day contact with other scientists, but he would do what he could to help promote Korzybski’s work including arranging a lecture for him at the Wistar Institute (which he managed to do in 1935). Korzybski, in turn, felt able to confide in the scientist. He wrote back to Coghill the next day:

I am struggling with enormous odds, scientific, commercial, religious (‘aristotelian’), etc., I knew that my path will be a thorny one, but I did not realize to what extent the scientific world having established for themselves a monopoly of ‘wisdom’ do not feel like their duty to be scientific in all concerns. As I see it we generally still depend on ‘philosophers’ to do the methodological work for us. I suggest that we abandon these hopes and do it ourselves. This is of extreme importance for education, as this is more transmittable than mere technicalities, as necessary as they are: besides it is more workable. (15) 

In the following month, Korzybski would further reveal to Coghill what he had begun to formulate as his problem with the ‘scientific community’ at large and, given that, where he wanted to help direct it if he could. He was asking Coghill for assistance:

...Methodology deals with general human orientations and so directly with life problems...Your great work differs so fundamentally from other similar works that I believe that the work as such would advance much further if all research men would be educated to its importance, and this can be done only in methodological papers. Assuming that you are interested in your work as work not as a personal issue (I am convinced of that), I am certain your work as work would benefit if you could or would educate methodologically large numbers of students...Under the present practice of science we are inefficient, we do not realize that some laboratory facts, no matter how important, are less important than new and reliable methodological papers which explain non-commercial and non-patented semantic [evaluational] processes by which you have achieved such important results. (16)

While Coghill wanted to help Korzybski, he had begun to suffer from serious heart troubles and furthermore was coming into a period of conflict with the administration of the Wistar Institute which forced him to retire at the end of 1935. Coghill couldn’t follow through with the kind of writing or teaching that Korzybski suggested for him to do. But as a particularly sympathetic reader, he did give valuable advice for promoting GS to scientists, which Korzybski ended up following.

Coghill wrote back to Korzybski on March 3: “...Your presentation of the problems you are facing have run back and forth through my mind in many ways. Whether the result will prove to be constructive remains to be seen.” He mentioned the possibility of writing a review for Science, although he didn’t think his present state of health, combined with his natural slowness in writing, would lead to his getting this done quickly. (It turned out he didn’t write the review.) Based on his observations of some fellow workers who were trying to read Science and Sanity, he told Korzybski:

...My impression is that the chief obstacle before the reader, particularly the experimental scientist, is the size of the book. I believe that relatively few experimentalists are great readers. Philosophers are; and they will probably read the book–for books are their bread of life. But when an experimentalist faces a book of nearly 800 pages he is likely to say to himself: “well, I would like to read that book: I must some time”, and he puts it back on the shelf with all good intentions but no results–probably ever.

I am of the opinion that your field of action now is to re-state parts of the book–not so much parts of the book as the ideas you have developed there–piece by piece, so to speak–and publish a series of articles in various magazines. In all these articles you would of course refer to the full treatment of the subject in S&S. By this means you could get your ideas instilled in the minds of readers and at the same time stimulate a desire to read more in the book itself.

In the same respect, other books of the non-A series should be relatively short...A series of short books along the lines which you have advertised, if written for particular classes of readers, –teachers in public schools– physicians– psychiatrists– etc. would I believe be read. S&S would stand as the opus magnum of the series, or the main source, and the smaller books would lead out into various fields of thought and practice with specific applications in each case.

To come back to my own situation– your book has been much help to me, and your evaluation of my work has been most stimulating. But my health is such now that I must watch my step...

I mention this personal side of my life so that you will not judge my slowness too harshly. (17)  

By June, 1934 Korzybski had concluded he was going to have to follow Coghill’s advice. He had just attended, as an invited guest, the Ninetieth Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New York City. Reginald St. Elmo Murray, M.D., a psychiatrist at the Veterans Hospital in Lyons, New Jersey, had gotten interested in his work and written a paper on it called “The Semantic Differential in Mental Hygiene”. As the title might suggest, Murray’s grasp of the book seemed rather limited. Despite at least one prior face-to-face meeting, back and forth correspondence, and some editing on Korzybski’s part, Murray presented ‘semantic’ reactions as responses to words only, a significant mistake that many others would make as well. From Korzybski’s point of view, Murray’s style of expression seemed rather florid and the paper came across more like a church sermon than a scientific talk.(18)  

Still, with considerable resistance from the psychiatry meeting organizers (who, given his status as a non-psychiatrist, seemed loath to give him any time on the program), Korzybski got 10 minutes to serve as a discussant for Murray’s paper. Before the meeting, Alfred wrote to many of his psychiatrist friends inviting them to come to the talk. The paper delivered on June 1, the last day of the meeting, drew a lot of interest, not only from the attending psychiatrists but also from the press. An Associated Press reporter wrote a piece about the presentation that included interview comments from Korzybski and had national distribution.

Korzybski appreciated the interest and the publicity but, as he told A. Ranger Tyler, he found the meeting depressing:

It seems that a fairly large number of psychiatrists are interested in my work, some of the really important very much so, but they are very slow. There were some really fine papers of an “inspiring” character for the profession, but these do not give workable means, and so they are quite useless for any immediate activities. My wife attended the meetings with me, she was quite happy because “every important paper went my way.” I was frankly very depressed, because out of a 20 year sentence (the average for all pioneers in human problems) I have served only six months, and so I will die before anything will happen if it goes this way. (19)  

Since the theory of sanity and mental hygiene had become so central to his work, he needed the cooperation of psychiatrists, who as a group seemed as reluctant to read the book as the experimentalists Coghill told him about. He decided to produce a brief outline of the initial remarks he had written for Murray’s paper. In the “Outline” he would distill the main points of Science and Sanity that most readers seemed to be missing, and with this perhaps entice others to open the book and read. He would either get it published as an article or print it himself as a pamphlet.(20) In any case, such a piece could help “to eliminate my wasting a life time of personal education of people by letters.”(21) He wrote to Coghill shortly after the psychiatric association conference, “My difficulties become clearer everyday and it seems that only lectures (which I cannot get) and articles (which nobody wants to print or read) would do.”(22)  

In this initial stage of figuring out how to promote his work, George Ellett Coghill’s support and advice seemed priceless. But Coghill was not going to be able to help with much else. He had a major physical collapse at the end of June 1934. He couldn’t even respond to letters from Korzybski until January 1935. In May of that year, he got Korzybski to lecture at the Wistar Institute. After Coghill was forced to retire from Wistar at the end of 1935, the two men stayed in touch. In 1939, Coghill agreed to serve as an Honorary Trustee of the Institute of General Semantics, a role he continued until his death in July 1941.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 
13. Julian Huxley, qtd. in Herrick 1949, p. 6.

14. G. E. Coghill to AK, 1/17/1934. AKDA 32.882. 

15. AK to G. E. Coghill, 1/18/1934. AKDA 32.878.

16. AK to G. E. Coghill, 2/21/1934. AKDA 32.889. 

17. G. E. Coghill to AK, 3/26/1934. AKDA 32.899. 

18. AK to David Fairchild, 8/16/1934. AKDA 25.126. 

19. AK to A. Ranger Tyler, 6/4/1934. AKDA 27.464. 

20. Korzybski presented “An Outline of General Semantics: The Application of Some Methods of Exact Sciences to the Solution of Human Problems and Educational Training for General Sanity” in 1935 at the First American Congress for General Semantics. He had it published in 1938 in General Semantics: Papers from the First American Congress for General Semantics, edited by Hansell Baugh. He later had it reprinted as a pamphlet sold by the Institute of General Semantics. It was later reprinted in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, pp. 189–224. 

21. AK to A. Ranger Tyler, 7/10/1934. AKDA 27.473. 

22. AK to G. E. Coghill, 6/10/1934. AKDA 32.871. 

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Chapter 43 - 'Scientists Don't Read': Part 2 - "Dear Professor Einstein"

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

By the end of 1933, the mathematical physicist—a world-famous, living symbol of science—was residing in the United States, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. His public endorsement could give Korzybski a powerful entering wedge into the awareness of other scientists, foundations, various state and federal agencies, the general public, and others who could further support his work. But although Einstein had become the object of great public interest, he had also become beset—as Korzybski knew—with the attempts of many people to get his attention for their causes or projects. Jewish scholars trying to escape Europe wanted Einstein’s support to get into the United States. Various Jewish groups and individuals saw Einstein as a leader—in spite of his lifelong detachment from Jewish culture and religion. Einstein may have mainly wanted to be left alone to pursue his research. Still, Korzybski would see if he could get Einstein’s attention and interest.

At the end of November 1933, he sent the physicist a copy of Science and Sanity with a one-page letter, which summarized his work:

Dear Professor Einstein:
I am taking the liberty of sending to you my new book Science and Sanity as an evidence of my deeply felt homage and gratitude for your great work.  

Methodological investigations have disclosed quite unexpected results; namely that elementary physico-mathematical methods as particularly embodied in your’s and Minkowski’s work, are essential for sanity. ... 

When he hadn’t gotten any acknowledgement by mid-January of the following year, he sent another letter asking if Einstein had received the book. If not, Alfred offered to send another copy. At the end of the month, Einstein wrote back in German thanking Korzybski for the book, which he had indeed gotten. At least Einstein (unlike Max Born) seemed to be reserving his judgment:

I received your book already some time ago and thank you cordially. My workload with duties and correspondence is so immense, that I could only dedicate little (time) to your work, in any case much too little to allow myself a judgment concerning it. I hope to perhaps be able to still catch up with it. (9)

Over the next year or two, Korzybski made efforts at further contact with Einstein through mutual acquaintances. In the late summer of 1934, Alfred’s good friend and supporter, botanist David Fairchild, was staying at the resort town of Watch Hill, Rhode Island where Einstein had also gotten a cottage for a summer of relaxation and sailing. Alfred did not shy away from suggesting to his friend David that developing a friendship with his “backdoor neighbor” Einstein might also benefit Alfred. Fairchild had met Einstein on the beach and chatted with him, but it seemed clear to Fairchild that Einstein mainly wanted to be left alone. Fairchild did not want to impose on the physicist. So that was that. Korzybski also knew a number of other people who knew Einstein, including a mathematician who seemed close to Einstein and who also seemed enthusiastic about Korzybski’s work. But her relationship, however close, never seemed to work out for Korzybski’s benefit.

Over the next decade, Korzybski would occasionally contact Einstein with a reprint or a note. In late 1939, more than a year after the founding of the Institute of General Semantics, Korzybski wrote to Einstein asking him if he would accept a position as an Honorary Trustee. It took Einstein some time, and a second letter from Korzybski, to respond, which he finally did on January 17, 1940 in an ornately polite letter written in German:

Dear Sir,
With great regret I don’t see myself in the position to accept your kind offer because I see myself unable to accept a moral responsibility of any kind for publications that currently appear under the topic of ‘Semantic’. (10) 

Even after getting turned down like this, Korzybski continued on occasion to write quite cordially and collegially to Einstein with, apparently—from comments in Korzybski’s letters—no response. By 1947, a few years before his death, Korzybski had ruefully come to conclude that Einstein was not able or willing to see the human import that Korzybski had derived from his work. He recalled an interview with Einstein he had seen a number of years before. Einstein was asked “What will your theory mean to the world?”

Einstein had no answer. He smiled only and said, “Let them discover.” “Let them discover.” And curiously enough, this is rather funny, curiously enough when it was discovered, then Einstein does not agree. Oh, the tricks of human nature. (11) 

Evidently, Einstein did eventually at least peruse Science and Sanity. In the early 1950s, some time after Korzybski’s death, Harry Weinberg, one of Alfred’s favorite students—was vacationing with his wife Blanche in upstate New York. They had taken out a boat on Lake Saranac and noticed a small sailboat in the distance with two white-haired figures, one of whom looked familiar—like Albert Einstein. The Weinbergs got themselves over to the other boat. They had indeed found Einstein who was sitting with a woman (his sister?) who looked startlingly like the scientist. Weinberg introduced himself as a student of Korzybski and asked permission to take a photograph (NOT the one below), which he was allowed to do. He understood that Korzybski had once sent Doctor Einstein a copy of Science and Sanity. Had Einstein read it and what did he think of it? Einstein replied in his heavily German-accented English, “Dot’s ah krrrazy boook!”(12)

'Science and Sanity? Dot's ah krrrazy boook!'

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

9. AK to Albert Einstein, 11/29/1933. AKDA 32.968; Albert Einstein to AK, 1/29/1934. AKDA 32.966. Translated by Max Sandor. 

10. Albert Einstein to AK, 1/17/1940. IGS Archives. Translated by Max Sandor. 

11. Korzybski 1947, pp. 48–49.

12. Pula 2001b. pp. 48–49. After her husband’s death, Blanche Weinberg told this story to my friend and colleague Robert P. Pula who related it to me a number of years before he wrote it down.

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Chapter 43 - 'Scientists Don't Read': Part 1 - Introduction

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Korzybski saw himself as a scientific worker and, despite the radical nature of his work as a gadfly in scientific borderland, he experienced remarkable acceptance by the scientific community at large throughout his career. Even before publication of Science and Sanity, he had gotten a good sense of this. A significant number of respectable scientists and mathematicians had helped him with the research and editing. It gratified him that these (mainly) men—with whatever corrections they’d suggested—found acceptable his treatment of their particular specialties. And just before the book came out, he got another significant confirmation of his status in the scientific community.

At the end of August 1933, he received an envelope from the Washington, D.C.–based AAAS. Very busy with the final production of the book, he had allowed the unopened envelope, which he assumed might be a bill about overdue membership fees, to get buried on his desktop among other papers and mail. When he finally got around to opening the letter he was surprised to see an official notification: “I have the honor to inform you that you have been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Respectfully yours, Henry B. Ward, Permanent Secretary.” The 'back of the membership card, included the definition of “Fellowship” from the “(Bylaws of the AAAS, Art. II)”: “Section 4. All members who are professionally engaged in scientific work, or who have advanced science by research, may be elected by the Council to be fellows on nomination or on their own application.” Replying to Henry Ward, Korzybski expressed his “deep appreciation for this honour.” The life-long honor might serve a useful purpose as well, if it helped him in his quest to find more scientists willing to cooperate with him.(1) 

Notification of Korzybski's Election as a AAAS Fellow,
AKDA 2.679

If enough scientists got inspired to jump into the non-aristotelian trenches, a great deal could be accomplished. For one thing the social sciences might move considerably forward. But even in the so-called physico-mathematical sciences, progress often seemed inhibited because of inadequately addressed linguistic, epistemological issues. Perhaps, as he suggested in the book, applying his methods could even help resolve such impasses as the esoteric controversy about the status of transfinite numbers in mathematics, to pick only one example. He believed that a consciously non-elementalistic, non-aristotelian revision—a methodological unification—of the sciences could result in unexpected breakthroughs through cross-fertilization of disciplines formerly seen as disconnected.

For such a non-aristotelian revision of the sciences and life to happen, polite interest or even general agreement would not suffice. A large enough number of individual scientists would need to get interested enough to study and apply what he was advocating and, as he realized even in 1933/34, they would first of all have to adopt and integrate it, to some degree, into their personal lives.* That requirement would always remain a snag—perhaps the snag—for many scientists, as well as others, trying to make sense of Korzybski’s work. 

* If you have trouble distinguishing between orders of abstractions (in other words, lack consciousness of abstracting) in your personal life, how can you possibly become optimally conscious of abstracting in your profession? 

Some scientists would respond as Max Born did, after Korzybski had sent him a letter early in 1933 asking for permission to quote from his writings. Alfred briefly explained the subject of his book and offered to send Born a copy when it came out.(2) Born—friendly, though interestingly ‘closed’, considering his role as one of the founders of quantum physics—wrote back in German:

I thank you for your nice letter and am glad that you have drawn inspirations from my book about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Indeed I really am interested in epistemology but absolutely cannot understand what this has to do with sanity (mental health). I’m afraid that we will not be able to communicate with each other over this point. Because I am very concerned with not drawing more conclusions from insights into physics than it is absolutely certain. The application for medical problems seems to me too bold. (3)

Nonetheless, other scientists found Korzybski’s work initially appealing. Visiting Baltimore and Washington in the first part of November, some weeks after the book was published, Alfred had a chance to gauge the response of many of his scientist friends, some of whom had at least read his manuscript or parts of it and consequently had received complimentary copies. While he found a great deal of interest, he ruefully noted that despite the fact many hadn’t read the completed book, they seemed to think they ‘knew all about it’.

There were also a few men like the Harvard zoologist William Morton Wheeler who had already written to Alfred in late October to say he was reading the book and had realized he missed a great deal of value while correcting the proofs—having lost the trend of the reasoning while editing Korzybski’s English. As he was getting “a better understanding of the [non-] A system”, it was now making a “profound impression” on him. Wheeler also reported that two of his colleagues at the Harvard Biological Institute and the Comparative Zoology Museum, G.H. Parker and T. Barbour had bought Science and Sanity and were taking their copies to bed with them.(4) 

Later in November, Alfred (with Mira) went to Boston to see Wheeler and Bridgman and to meet with a number of other Harvard scientists. After he returned, he wrote about his trip to Keyser:

Dear Dear Old Man,  

Please excuse the delay in answering your dear old letter of Nov. 16 but I was lecturing at Harvard and came home only yesterday home [sic]. It seems the lectures were a success. I [had] a large and very mixed audience at a biological seminary [probably arranged by Wheeler at the Biological Institute] in which many specialists attended. I had a two hour lecture at the home of [E.V.] Huntington [where Alfred and Mira stayed as guests] with Birkhoff and also E.B. [Edwin Bidwell] Wilson, [Harlow] Shapley, [L.J.] Henderson, etc., two two-hours lectures at the psychopathic hospital to doctors, one to the astronomical group at the home of Shapley, and one to neurologists at the home of a prof. of physiology and anatomy. One never knows but it seems that all these specialists have been genuinely electrified. I gave hell to Birkhoff and Veblen (at the Nat. Academy dinner), and I think I got under their skin a little. We had a very nice and long dinner with Sheffer. I saw Whitehead twice and he was kind enough to invite us to his seminar. [Korzybski had already sent an extra copy of Science and Sanity to Huntington, who had delivered it to Whitehead’s home.] I attended also one lecture of Sheffer. I was amazed that both lectures were aiming the same direction. 

The widespread interest among these scientific workers encouraged him:

As a rule I am not optimistic about my lectures, but this time I believe that I really made good. I had other important conferences with [Henry] Murray (Clinic of abnormal Psychology) and anthropologists and physiologists, and we fell on each others’ necks, it looks really that perhaps my work may have after all some value. It is so peculiar that discussing the problems from so many angles with specialists all of them should find an advance in their fields.

But he also experienced some shocks or at least frustrations at Harvard. Whitehead, for example, seemed deeply concerned with the kinds of problems Korzybski had dealt with in his book. In his seminar, as Alfred wrote to Keyser, “Whitehead said “Identity is a horrible idea, no one seems to know what it means”.” Had Whitehead even glanced at the preface of Science and Sanity? Alfred commented:

The trouble with Whitehead is that he has no use for anthropology and psychiatry, otherwise he would know that ‘identity’ represents a misevaluation which makes the optimum adjustment impossible. 

...With Whitehead of course there is no discussion, he listens very attentively and sympathetically but he will not read. Personally to me this is a drama, but this cannot be helped. He told me that Wheeler ‘knows more about philosophy and logic than the whole department’. I utilized this and Wheeler promised to convey to Whitehead many points of my work. (5)

Another jolt for Alfred involved his friend Percy Bridgman, who hadn’t done more than glance at the book and seemed unlikely to read the whole thing. Since he had read parts of the manuscript, he seemed to assume he already understood Korzybski’s work and it was becoming more and more apparent to Alfred that he didn’t. Alfred’s meeting with the physiologists and neurologists also left him surprised and dismayed at what he perceived as their generally antiquated outlook.(6) 

After he got home Alfred also wrote to mathematician E. B. Wilson, who had attended the talk Alfred gave at Huntington’s home. The letter explained his work a bit more and asked for Wilson’s help in trying to get Alfred’s message across to scientists. Could Wilson write an endorsement statement for him for the foundations or perhaps even write a review for a scientific journal? Wilson replied several weeks later saying that despite his interest in the talk, he could make neither heads nor tails of Korzybski’s aim or message. He had also spent a few hours with Science and Sanity but, as he wrote to Korzybski, “I do not find your book intelligible any more than I found your talk intelligible.”(7) Wilson admitted that he thought the fault was probably in him but until he had more time to adequately study Korzybski’s work he could not say anything about it. Korzybski found Wilson’s response worrisome but expressed his gratitude to Wilson for his honesty and hoped he would continue to reserve judgment until he had further time to study and apply the material in the book.

Around this time, Korzybski got some other more annoying reactions. He had written to some book clubs to explore the possibility of them carrying his book. Not surprisingly, Science and Sanity seemed too specialized a volume for Book of the Month Club. But it just seemed wrong for the Scientific Book Club editor to reject it as over the heads of the majority of his members without having a look at the book itself.(8)

The wildly varying reactions to his work would continue to bother Korzybski. On the one hand, he had received enough positive responses from people like Keyser, Wheeler, and Dr. Wilmer, the famous Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist, to reassure him of the value of pursuing his plan to get scientists behind him. On the other hand, he felt bewildered by either the lack of interest, the lack of comprehension, or the closed-minded dismissal by a number of others. If he could only get Einstein, one of his great inspirations, on his side.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

1. AK to Henry Ward, 9/24/1933. AKDA 24.160. 

2. AK to Max Born, 2/24/1933. AKDA 35.121. 

3. Max Born to AK, 3/7/1933. AKDA 25.383. Translated by Max Sandor. 

4. William Morton Wheeler to AK, 10/30/1933. AKDA 34.197. 

5. AK to C. J. Keyser. 11/26/1933. AKDA 26.278. 

6. AK to C. J. Keyser, 12/16/1933. 26.306. 

7. E. B. Wilson to AK, 12/16/1933. AKDA 34.355. 

8. Kirtley F. Mather to AK, 9/19/1933. AKDA 34.248.

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