Freedom’s Laboratory

Scientists like to proclaim that science knows no borders. Scientific researchers follow the evidence where it leads, their conclusions free of prejudice or ideology. But is that really the case? In Freedom’s Laboratory, Audra J. Wolfe shows how these ideas were tested to their limits in the high-stakes propaganda battles of the Cold War.

Wolfe examines the role that scientists, in concert with administrators and policymakers, played in American cultural diplomacy after World War II. During this period, the engines of US propaganda promoted a vision of science that highlighted empiricism, objectivity, a commitment to pure research, and internationalism. Working (both overtly and covertly, wittingly and unwittingly) with governmental and private organizations, scientists attempted to decide what, exactly, they meant when they referred to “scientific freedom” or the “US ideology.” More frequently, however, they defined American science merely as the opposite of Communist science.

Uncovering many startling episodes of the close relationship between the US government and private scientific groups, Freedom’s Laboratory is the first work to explore science’s link to US propaganda and psychological warfare campaigns during the Cold War. Closing in the present day with a discussion of the recent March for Science and the prospects for science and science diplomacy in the Trump era, the book demonstrates the continued hold of Cold War thinking on ideas about science and politics in the United States.

Reviews

“Of psy-ops, seismic detection, and other emanations of the Cold War as it was conducted in petri dishes and cyclotrons. . . A strong contribution to the history of modern science.” — Kirkus starred review

“Historian Wolfe (Competing with the Soviets) offers a thoughtful, thoroughly researched history of how the American government employed science and scientists to improve world opinion of liberal democracy during the Cold War.” — Publishers Weekly

“Cold-war history, Wolfe writes, is not a heroes-and-villains narrative: it must be told in ‘shades of gray.’ The government used scientists’ ideals for its own political reasons. And the scientists, who saw themselves as apolitical, used the government’s political messages and support to question, observe, conclude, write and speak — freely and in accord with their ideals.” – Ann Finkbeiner, Nature

“One of the common misbeliefs about science is that it is apolitical. Actually, as historian Wolfe reveals in her well-researched and closely argued study, during the Cold War, American scientists were often deeply involved in promoting American cultural values to other parts of the world in an effort to defeat the communists at the same game… [Freedom’s Laboratory is] an excellent study on a topic that deserves more attention.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“Wolfe’s new book, Freedom’s Laboratory, frontally addresses questions of what science is, how it is best done, and how it (and scientists themselves) might be strategically deployed to advance national interests.” — W. Patrick McCray, LA Review of Books

“Audra Wolfe’s provocative new book, Freedom’s Laboratory, dives into the fascinating history of why asserting the apolitical nature of science became a political priority during another notably politicized period in America’s past: the Cold War.” — Alex Wellerstein, Science

“[I]t is hard to imagine a history of science that is more timely than one that situates our current political environment in the context of the Cold War.”— Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Physics Today

“[S]cientists during the Cold War and today face the reality that research possibilities are frequently linked to national security goals and through them, the defense of global inequalities. Carefully researched works on the Cultural Cold War, like Freedom’s Laboratory, reveal what a murky world we have inherited.”—Patrick Iber, New Republic

“Historians of the Soviet Union have documented the significance of the two camps thesis for Russian science. Wolfe shows that it was endorsed by the US too.”—Steven Rose, London Review of Books

“Today, when both science and academic freedom have resurfaced as flashpoints in U.S. politics, Wolfe helps us think more clearly about how the inevitably political institution of science is not necessarily at odds with its intellectual integrity.”—Michael Gordin, Boston Review

Praise