Rally ’Round the Cannon: Going Backstory

This Train
Carries broken-hearted
This Train
Thieves and sweet souls departed
This Train
Carries fools and kings
This Train
All aboard
— “Land of Hope and Dreams,” Bruce Springsteen, 2001

As we visit the tales of Princetonians, those current (the few) and past (the many), it always seems to add an extra level to the discussion if the subject is peculiarly influenced not only by the denizens of the University, but also by her or his upbringing, the path and ideas by which she happened on the scene, with the opportunity — and in some cases the fate — to leave a lasting impression upon all of us via our common experience of such a singular institution.

We’ve seen this many times. The Billington brothers, happenstantially both members of the Class of 1950, each becoming a teaching colossus in his own field while slyly insisting the other was the smart one. Henry Morgenthau III ’39, with his globally influential family, buddies with Einstein, persevering through the antisemitic Princeton club system, becoming a groundbreaking documentarian. Or Fei-Fei Li ’99, soaking up inspiration from both Einstein and Neil deGrasse Tyson, using the great sacrifice of her expatriate parents (and the Parsippany school system) to become a global giant in AI. Or even one of the most notable cases of all, the Aaron Burrs, father and son, with Aaron Jr. 1772 absorbing the legacy of college presidents, father and grandfather, and following a destiny to the vice presidency, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a position of his own in the Princeton Presidents’ Plot.

Today we see this again in what amounts to a tale, not so much of two family members, but of two separate existential planes, one the global battle across the 20^th century of communism vs. capitalism, the other the emergence and preeminence of Princeton mathematics across an entire century, in its students and its faculty as well. And in the spirit of the current news, let’s add a stern reminder of freedom of speech on campus. These recollections were triggered by the death, just this past February, of Bill Browder *58, member of the math faculty for 61 years and huge influence on his myriad students and the field of topology. He also played a mean flute and was a stalwart of chamber music in Princeton. But his family was as singular as he was, and so it’s best to start with them.

The New York Times’ obituary of Bill’s father, Earl Browder, described him as a “sharp-minded, tart-tongued Kansan.” Born in 1891, he got involved early in the labor union movement, then as a socialist, then became an impassioned pacifist when World War I broke out. This he had in common with Norman Thomas 1905, but from that point the two dramatically diverged. Browder was jailed for draft evasion, spent time on and off in Moscow, Vladivostok, and China in the 1920s, met Lenin, and married an extremely bright Russian woman, Raissa Berkmann. Their two eldest sons, Felix and Andrew, were both born in Russia; their last, William, in 1934 back in the U.S. The nascent Communist Party in the U.S. had previously had its obligatory Stalin/Trotsky ferment, then been blindsided by the Depression, and turned to Earl for leadership as general secretary in 1932. He ran for president in 1936 against Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alf Landon, and Thomas, finishing a distant fourth with half of Thomas’ votes (the socialists clearly had their act together better than the communists); Browder tried it again in 1940 to even less avail.

He traveled the country speaking, On May 19, 1938, he responded to the Princeton Liberal Club and gave a speech in McCosh 50, urging economic embargos against the Axis countries as a vehicle to world peace, joining the Soviet Union, Mexico, and France. He also noted, more dubiously, that the Communist Party was essentially a democratic organization. The following day The Princetonian strongly endorsed the booking, noting that it despised communism but that the right to hear all points of view was critical to both freedom and education.

Then on Aug. 24, 1939, came the Molotov-Ribbentrop alignment between Hitler and Stalin, and the door opened for the Second World War. In a flash, this turned the American Communists into pariahs. Harvard’s John Reed Society invited Browder to speak on Nov. 15, but the Department of Justice had filed a false-passport indictment against him, and Harvard rescinded approval. Whig-Clio, after stormy debate, filled the void with an invitation of its own, which a week later was canceled by Nassau Hall. The Prince excoriated this “bigotry in an institution where it would have been least expected” and noted “Mr. Browder has scored another publicity coup for a persecuted minority.” Browder spoke at Yale, then went to prison for four years, but was glaringly pardoned by President Roosevelt essentially the day after Hitler abrogated the treaty and attacked the Soviets. In the re-reconfiguration of international communism at the beginning of the Cold War in 1946, Browder was not only jobless but ignominiously tossed out of the party by Moscow. And now Americans feared communists again.

By coincidence, the ascent of the next Browder generation began at the same time. Raissa, in a foreign land, living Earl’s checkered existence, poured her life into preparing her three sons for the intellectual world. Felix Browder *48, the eldest, was a genuine math prodigy, and picked up his bachelor’s from MIT at age 16 in 1946, then his Ph.D. two years later at Princeton under department chair Solomon Lefschetz. Despite that, his last name was enough to guarantee him difficulty in job hunting; he ended up in research at the Institute for Advanced Study with Einstein and Oppenheimer, then was drafted during Korea. Oppenheimer didn’t dare write Browder a deferral recommendation given his own battles with Congress. (Remember, this is because of Felix’s father’s past affiliations, not his own, unlike Princeton professor David Bohm in 1951). So he then pumped gas for two years at Fort Bragg because no one would trust him with a clearance. Afterward, at long last he got a teaching job, but only through direct intervention at Brandeis by trustee Eleanor Roosevelt. From there, he continued to a distinguished career as a genius in nonlinear functional analysis at MIT, BU, and Yale, with 12 years as department chair at Chicago and, finally, 26 years as the first vice president for research at Rutgers, which let him move back to Princeton.

His brother Andrew, born in 1931, also got caught in the Korea draft following his bachelor’s at MIT, but really didn’t intend to try grad school (perhaps because of Felix’s adventures?). Then a drawdown chance at early release from the Army motivated him to reapply to MIT and he got in on the GI bill. In 1961 he had his Ph.D., and from 1960-98 he taught “well over one hundred different math courses” at Brown, while serving as department head and publishing two highly regarded books in function algebras. His emergence just as the communist-hunters were receding certainly made his experience dramatically contrast to Felix’s.

Because of Andrew’s delay after college, William Browder *58’s timing caught up to him. Bill and his flute graduated from Yonkers High (like his brothers) in 1950, MIT (like them) in 1954, then headed straight to Princeton and on to his Ph.D. under John Coleman Moore in 1958. He wrote his thesis on Homology of Loop Spaces, and he became focused on algebraic topology, differential topology, and differential geometry. After stops at Rochester and Cornell, in 1964 he was hired at Princeton as a full professor at 28 years old, at that time the youngest in the history of the math department. His work in homotophy became known as Browder-Novikov theory (in concert with a Soviet co-discoverer), then simply as surgery theory.

But as teacher and organizer-manager he left most mathematicians in the dust. He served as department chair (like his brothers!), but also as director of graduate studies and as the department’s enduring secret weapon, undergraduate representative. He was chair of the University Resources Committee and the Concerts Committee, almost certainly a unique double-dip. He chaired the Office of Mathematical Sciences of the National Research Council; served on innumerable American Mathematical Society committees, its council and finally as chair; he edited the Annals of Mathematics for 12 years; and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In his day job, his students adored him and beat a path to his door. Bill guided 34 Ph.D. students in the 48 years before his retirement, including winners of the Fields Medal, the Wolf and Abel prizes, two National Medal of Science winners, and according to the Math Genealogy Project, an astounding 726 descendant scholars. That doesn’t even address the dozens of superb undergrads whom he patiently goaded along as supervisor of their theses, in the best Princeton tradition. Or for that matter the marathon math department chamber music jam sessions at his house on Maple Street, flute and all.

When Earl Browder fell prey to ill health in the 1960s, he moved to that house in Princeton, quite an arresting image for the ex-Communist Party presidential candidate and ex-con who had inadvertently become a dramatic symbol of repressed free speech on the Princeton campus so many years before. When he died there in 1973, his name in the obituaries was intermingled with the three sons who were exempla of the great free academic traditions of the West. And Earl Browder’s memorial service was held at the School for Public and International Affairs.