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

“A wonderful, well-researched book evoking deep questions of science, freedom, and democracy.” — Congressman Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science”In this fascinating and deeply researched work, Audra Wolfe reveals the role of science in US cultural diplomacy, showing the way the idea that science was politically neutral enabled the pursuit of forms of scientific internationalism that served US Cold War interests. An important contribution.” — Mary L. Dudziak, author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences

“In Freedom’s Laboratory, Audra Wolfe does a remarkable job resurrecting the covert and overt ways during the Cold War that the CIA and the US government influenced science—and the way science, in turn, influenced the Cold War, from Iowa cornfields to genetics to biology textbooks. In doing so, she offers an important meditation on the true boundaries and meaning of ‘scientific freedom’ in the titanic battle between the United States and the Soviet Union. Writing with the eye of a journalist and the authority of a scholar, Wolfe delivers a compelling new look behind the curtain of a still shadowy moment in history.” — Garrett M. Graff, author of Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die

“Marvelously crafted, terse, and sprightly, Freedom’s Laboratory is also original, utilizing new archival material and drawing on a wide and impressive range of primary and secondary sources. One of the first full-length treatments of the relationship of science, American democracy, and foreign policy, the book will appeal to broadly educated general readers and will very likely be widely utilized in courses on the Cold War and recent science.” — Ronald E. Doel, Florida State University

Ordering Information

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Media/Review Inquiries

For review or media copies, please contact Kathryn Marguy, Publicist, JHU Press via e-mail or at (410) 516-4162.

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