This 1938 pro-science manifesto defended democracy against fascism

Here in the United States in 2025, our society has endured a series of attacks on science, health, and the civil service in our country as never before. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees, after being stripped of their legal protections from political firings, have lost their jobs over the first ~100 days of the second Trump administration. Hundreds to thousands of workers, including many scientists, have been terminated — without cause — from their jobs at federal agencies such as:

• the US Forest Service, which protects us from wildfires,
• NOAA, which monitors our climate and coastline,
• the Department of Education (which is likely to be closed entirely),
• the National Nuclear Safety Administration, which safeguards our nuclear power plants, weapons, and waste storage,
• the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control, which are presently fomenting the largest vaccine-preventable disease outbreak in the USA in the 21st century,
• the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean drinking water and clean air to breathe,
• the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects citizens against fraudulent schemes propagated by corporations,
• the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees food and medical device safety,

and many more. We’ve also experienced deep foundational cuts to pillars of scientific success in the USA and the world: NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and much more.

Although many are still in denial about it, this is a classic anti-democracy, pro-fascism move. Project 2025 co-architect and director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, has publicly stated what the goals of these moves are. “The impact is intimidation and fear… We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work…. We want to put them in trauma.”

But the world successfully fought back against fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, and we can do so again today. After all, history has laid out our roadmap for doing so, and many scientists led the way. Here’s how.

People watch the smoke and flames from the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on January 07, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. As of February 2025, the estimated damage of these wildfires exceeds $250 billion in total cost of what was destroyed. Concurrent with this devastation, the US Forest Service’s meagre budget, of under $10B initially, has been cut, as has a large fraction of their workforce.

Back in 1938, five years after Hitler’s initial rise to power in Nazi Germany, the entire world was feeling the effects. While German citizens in marginalized groups — based on race, religion, sexuality, country-of-origin, gender identity, or any other metric — were those who experienced the greatest forms of oppression within Germany, leading many to flee the nation entirely, the international impact was significant as well. Globally, it wasn’t just waves of displaced former Germans and German residents that the international community had to reckon with, but issues like:

• the alienation of former allies,
• damage to the world economy and to international trade,
• recessions and depressions,
• banking failures,
• and destabilization of global markets,

which strongly parallel the international ripples stemming from internal politics in the USA here in 2025.

Another export from Nazi Germany was the acceptance, normalization, support for, and rise of fascism-related ideologies. Threats to freedom of speech, freedom to love (sexual orientation), freedom of the press, freedom of religion (e.g., religious intolerance), and even the freedom to advocate for equities and equality of rights are hallmarks of fascist thought (and thought-policing), and those threats spread globally in the 1930s, as they are spreading now here on Earth in the 2020s. Many have noted that education against fascism-related views, such as bigotries on the basis of race, sex, gender expression, sexual orientation, country-of-origin, and religion, is required to strengthen social ideals like respect and tolerance for others and working collectively towards the common good.

David Hilbert (far right, front row) was one of the most prestigious mathematicians of the 20th century, and led the faculty at Göttingen for many years. After the 1933 exodus of Jewish mathematicians, he declared that there was no longer mathematics at Göttingen. Based on publication rates, advances, and breakthroughs made prior to 1933 versus afterward, he was proven quite correct.

It’s important to recognize that fascism has been fought before, including by scientists, quite successfully over the long-term. There was a mass exodus of scientists from Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s, including Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Max Born, Eugene Wigner, Hans Krebs, Edward Teller, Erwin Schrödinger, Wilhelm Feldberg, along with future scientists Lilli Hornig and Dieter Gruen. The so-called “brain drain,” was lauded by Hitler himself, who responded to Max Planck’s petition to stop the dismissal of scientists on political grounds by saying,

“Our national policies will not be revoked or modified, even for scientists. If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years.”

This echoed a similar 1933 statement Hitler made when Carl Bosch, then the head of IG Farben, advised that the dismissal of Jewish scientists from Germany would set physics and chemistry back by 100 years: “Then we’ll work a hundred years without physics and chemistry.” But this was a wrongheaded move on Hitler’s part in every way. In fact, in post-World War II scholarship, the exodus of top-tier scientists from Nazi Germany (and surrounding countries beginning in 1938/9) has become known as Hitler’s gift, because of the substantial benefits reaped by those countries where those exiled scientists eventually landed.

This 1958 photograph shows six scientists in the United States with a model of the Explorer-1 rocket. At far right, Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger is standing, next to Dr. Werner Von Braun (seated). Together, these two men were among the many former Nazis that were brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip: to secure their scientific knowledge and talents.

As mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski would later write of those times,

“When Hitler arrived in 1933, the tradition of scholarship in Germany was destroyed, almost overnight. Now the train to Berlin was a symbol of flight. Europe was no longer hospitable to the imagination—and not just the scientific imagination. A whole conception of culture was in retreat: the conception that human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty. Silence fell, as after the trial of Galileo. The great men went out into a threatened world…”

But here in America, where Einstein himself had immigrated coincident with the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany, the American Association for the Advancement of Science put forth a 1938 resolution noting that science itself was wholly independent of national boundaries, and furthermore stated that for broader society, “races and creeds can flourish only when there is peace and intellectual freedom.” In the aftermath of that, a total of 1284 American scientists signed a manifesto that built upon the AAAS’s resolution, declaring in December of 1938 that the defense of democracy is the sole means of preserving intellectual freedom and ensuring scientific progress, while simultaneously condemning fascism.

This political cartoon, published in 1933, shows Einstein shedding his pacifist wings to roll up his sleeves and take up a sword labeled “preparedness.” Einstein would at this point call upon the friends of civilization all across the world to unite against Nazi militarism.

With Franz Boas — known as the founder of American anthropology and a senior prominent scientist — chosen as their spokesperson, the manifesto intended to protect scientists from the fate that many others in fascist, totalitarian states were facing and, in some instances, had already faced. Boas himself put out a separate statement, noting that:

“The present outrages in Germany have made it all the more necessary for American scientists to take a firm anti-fascist stand. We are sure that the great majority of German scientists and the German people as a whole abhor fascism. The thousands of teachers and scientists who have been exiled since Hitler came to power bear testimony to the incompatibility of Fascism and science.

Our manifesto declares that we scientists have the moral obligation to educate the American people against all false and unscientific doctrines, such as the racial nonsense of the Nazis. The agents of fascism in this country are becoming more and more active, and we must join with all men of good will in defending democracy today if we are to avoid the fate of our colleagues in Germany, Austria and Italy.”

The complete manifesto also included three Nobel Laureates (a more impressive number considering the Prize had only existed for under 40 years) as signees:

• Robert Millikan of Caltech, who discovered the quantization of electric charge,
• Irving Langmuir, who pioneered how electrons arranged themselves in atoms and molecules on surfaces,
• and Harold Urey, who helped co-develop the atomic bomb and won the Nobel Prize for discovering deuterium.

A child receives a polio vaccine drop in Gwalior, India, to reduce the risk of contracting and spreading the disease. Misinformation and anti-vaccine propaganda, spurred on largely by concern trolls and untrue information, continues to drive vaccine hesitancy and amplify the spread of preventable diseases.

What follows is a reproduction of that manifesto’s contents, of scientists defending the practice of science and the freedom of all scientists, in full. [Illustrations added by me.]

“In an article entitled ‘the pragmatic and dogmatic spirit in physics,’ which appeared in the April 30 issue of nature (with strong editorial disapproval), wide publicity is given to the official nazi position on science and scientific research. In essence, the article is an attack on all theoretical physics, and, by obvious implication, on scientific theory in general. It introduces the official racialism of the Nazis to divide physicists into good, i.e. non-theoretical and ‘Aryan,’ and bad, i.e., theoretical and Jewish. Similar notions have appeared in many popular magazines and scientific journals in Germany, in the addresses and writings of the Minister of education, of university rectors and deans, of scientists and non-scientists. apart from racial theories, furthermore, science and art are subject to ruthless political censorship. These ideas have found concrete expression in the dismissal and persecution of over 1,600 teachers and scientists (By the fall of 1936) from German Universities and research institutes (and now Austria and Italy too), and in the restriction of higher education to students having the ‘proper’ political and racial qualifications.

In this photo dating back to 1935, Lysenko delivers a fiery speech accusing mainstream biologists of being anti-collectivist, anti-Marxist, and anti-Soviet Union. Stalin, looking on (at far right), appears to be thoroughly impressed. The politicization of science, including biology and agricultural sciences, has occurred many times over the 20th and 21st centuries in a variety of authoritarian regimes, most often leading to preventable famine, starvation, illness, and death.

“American scientists, trained in a tradition of intellectual freedom, hold fast to their conviction, that, in the words of the resolution adopted by the American association for the Advancement of Science, ‘Science is wholly independent of national boundaries and races and creeds and can flourish only when there is peace and intellectual freedom.’ If science, to quote the AAAS resolution again, is to ‘continue to advance and spread more abundantly its benefits to all mankind — and who can attack that goal — then the man of science has a moral obligation to fulfill. He must educate the people against the acceptance of all false and unscientific doctrines which appear before them in the guise of science, regardless of their origin. only in that way can he insure those conditions of peace and freedom which are essential for him and for the progress of all mankind.

The 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope is currently under construction, and will be the greatest new ground-based observatory on Earth. The spider arms, seen holding the secondary mirror in place, are specially designed so that their line-of-sight falls directly between the narrow gaps in the GMT mirrors, creating a view of the Universe without sharp corners to its mirrors or diffraction spikes around its stars. As one of the two US Extremely Large Telescopes proposed by astronomers and currently in development, it is an essential part of bringing about a new generation in cutting-edge ground-based astronomy facilities.

“It is in this light that we publicly condemn the fascist position towards science. The racial theories which they advocate have been demolished time and again. We need only point to the work of Heinrich hertz in physics, fritz Haber and Richard Willstatter in chemistry, Ludwig Traube, Paul Ehrlich, and August Wassermann in biology and medicine, all German Jews and all empirical scientists. The charge that theory leads ‘to a crippling of experimental research’ is tantamount to a denial of the whole history of modern physics. From Copernicus and Kepler on, all the great figures in western science have insisted, in deed or in word, upon the futility of experimental research divorced from theory.

Tycho Brahe conducted some of the best observations of Mars prior to the invention of the telescope, and Kepler’s work largely leveraged that data. Here, Brahe’s observations of Mars’s orbit, particularly during retrograde episodes, provided an exquisite confirmation of Kepler’s elliptical orbit theory. Kepler put forth his 1st and 2nd laws of planetary motion in 1609, with his 3rd law coming 10 years later: in 1619.

“We firmly believe that in the present historical epoch democracy alone can preserve intellectual freedom. Any attack upon freedom of thought in one sphere, even as non-political a sphere as theoretical physics, is in effect an attack on democracy itself. When men like James Franck, Albert Einstein, or Thomas Mann may no longer continue their work, whether the reason is race, creed, or belief, all mankind suffers the loss. they must be defended in their right to speak the truth as they understand it. If we American scientists wish to avoid a similar fate, if we wish to see the world continue to progress and prosper, we must bend our efforts to that end now.”

This image of the Very Large Array in the southwestern United States highlights the importance of arrays of radio dishes in measuring many different properties of our Universe, including searching for potential extraterrestrial signals that were created by an intelligent species. A next-generation facility, the ngVLA, is required to keep United States radio astronomy on the cutting edge, otherwise other international endeavors — China’s FAST telescopes, Europe’s ALMA, and the multinational Square Kilometer Array — will soon render our current capabilities obsolete.

We have seen, clearly and unambiguously since January 20, 2025, that it is not just freedom of thought, but the very enterprise of science itself — including a large number of scientists working in America — that are under assault by the federal government of the United States itself. Science students, postdocs, doctors, and researchers have been arrested, detained, deported, and even prevented from entering the USA. Their only crime? Being of the wrong race, skin color, or political ideology. Nonetheless, they have been targets of the new United States Government’s Administration, with many of them having been denied due process and with the administration continuing to defy court orders in many such cases.

The agenda, as is always the case with fascist and authoritarian regimes, is to intimidate any opposition so severely that the silence of critics is assured. There are numerous ongoing attempts by the US government to enforce exactly that, and only a few major institutions are standing up against such political intimidation today.

Science, after all, is the one thing we can rely on to reveal actual, physical truths about reality, and no amount of political maneuvering, grandstanding, or censorship can change that. After all, as scientists, we have the obligation, stated so clearly in 1938, to “educate the people against the acceptance of all false and unscientific doctrines which appear before them,” including the doctrine that loyalty to a fascist government will ever trump a loyalty to the truth of reality, or, for that matter, the inherent dignity of all humans living upon this Earth.