Red Scare in the Green Mountains : The Mccarthy Era in Vermont 1946-1960 (9781578690138) by Winston Rick

Author:Winston, Rick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Carmelita Hinton at the Putney School, 1949 (photo by Rudolph Furrer, courtesy of Marni Rosner)

William’s younger sister, Joan, who graduated from the Putney School in 1939, also saw firsthand the Chinese transformation of 1949. Like her sister Jean, she went to Bennington College, but later transferred to Cornell. Cornell, however, would not accept a woman for postgraduate study in physics so she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. Following graduation she was recruited, at age twenty-two, to join the team of physicists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, who were working on atomic weapons. She was there when the Trinity atomic bomb test was carried out on July 16, 1945. “We first felt the heat on our faces, then we saw what looked like a sea of light,” she told the South China Morning Post in 2008. “It was gradually sucked into an awful purple glow that went up and up into a mushroom cloud. It looked beautiful as it lit up the morning sun.”

Joan Hinton, like several other scientists working at Los Alamos, thought that the bomb would be used only for a demonstration explosion to force a Japanese surrender. She was horrified when it was actually used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Though she did briefly go to the University of Chicago for more graduate work with Enrico Fermi in 1946, she then abandoned the field of nuclear physics and became an outspoken peace activist. As a member of the recently formed Federation of American Scientists, she took part in a campaign to send the mayors of every major city in the United States a small glass case filled with glassified desert sand and a note asking whether they wanted their cities to suffer the same fate. After unsuccessfully lobbying the government for the internationalization of nuclear power, she found another outlet for her political interests.

Her brother William’s roommate at Cornell, Erwin (“Sid”) Engst, had grown up on a New York dairy farm and, like William, had been working with the UNRRA in China since 1946. A budding romance between Sid and Joan, together with William’s own enthusiasm about China, led Joan to become involved with Chinese child welfare activities organized by Soong Ching-ling, the respected widow of President Sun Yat-sen. Joan traveled to Shanghai in 1948 to work directly with Madame Soong, who was also a key figure in establishing contacts with the insurgent Chinese communists. In 1949, Joan moved to Yan’an, Mao Zedong’s rural headquarters, to marry Sid.

A potential traitor

As postwar relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated, Joan Hinton’s decision to leave the atomic program and go to China eventually sounded alerts at the FBI. The communist takeover of 1949 had sent shock waves through the American government, with conservatives demanding to know “who lost China.” Any official (such as Owen Lattimore, John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent) who had gone on record in favor of negotiating with the communists came under suspicion.

Although Joan Hinton and her new husband were farming in the Chinese countryside without access to electricity or radios, she was viewed in official U.

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