UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #263
IHDE, AARON J.

IHDE, Aaron J. (1909-2000)
Undergraduate and Graduate Student; Professor of Chemistry, History of Science, and Integrated Liberal Studies
At UW: 1927-1931; 1938-1980
	
First Interview
Interviewed: 1983	
Series: Life Sciences
Interviewer: Laura Smail
Length: 5 hours

Experiences in fraternity house; Experimental College; Rowing team; Job at a dairy company; Decision to earn Ph.D.; Harry Steenbock; Quality of teaching in the Chemistry and Biochemistry departments; Farrington Daniels; John Williams; Emphasis on research in the Chemistry department; Growing interest in the history of science; Creation of the Department of History of Science; Creation of the Integrated Liberal Studies (ILS) program; Enthusiasm of original ILS faculty; Courses; Quality of teaching; Students; Effects of Ford Foundation early entry students on ILS; Teaching assistants; Robert Pooley's success as chairman; Student newspaper; ILS students' involvement in protest movement and effect on ILS; Physical universe course; Joseph Mathews; Teaching assistantship strike; Decline of ILS; AI’s wife.

Second Interview
NOTE: poor quality audio, parts inaudible
Interviewed: 1963	
Interviewer: William K. Alderfer
Length: 2 hours

Work at Blue Valley Creamery Company in Chicago; Otto Hunziger; Henry Schuette; Chemistry department’s involvement in the war effort; Farrington Daniels; Karl Paul Link; Controversy over Rachel Carson and Silent Spring; Harry Steenbock; E.B. Hart; National figures in the history of chemistry.

FIRST INTERVIEW (1983)
								
First Interview Session (May 3, 1983): Tapes 1-2

Tape 1

00:00:01	Aaron Ihde entered the UW as a chemistry undergraduate in 1927.  He explains why he regrets joining a fraternity during his junior and senior years.  In 1930-31, with hard times clearly ahead, some fraternity members ran up bills of hundreds of dollars and never paid them.  The fraternity finally folded in 1933.

00:04:46	He describes some reasons why he did not like the fraternity.  The members drank heavily and were prejudiced against Catholics, Jews and the physically disabled.

00:11:52	AI did not like the values promoted by fraternities.  In 1920s and 1930s, they had a great deal of influence on student life and politics.  He did not join the chemistry fraternity, Alpha Chi Sigma, because he could not afford the expense and because of his negative experience with the first fraternity he joined.

00:17:44	The Experimental College began the year AI entered college.  He recalls that Experimental College students were looked down upon because they did not attend classes regularly, which suggested they did not study.  In retrospect he sometimes wished he had enrolled in the College.  A disproportionate number of people who went through the College became outstanding in later life.

00:21:20	There was not a lot of sympathy among the faculty for the Experimental College.  Students were suspected of being communists.  Many came from out-of-state, especially New York.  Students outside the College misunderstood the College’s goals, AI recalls.
 
00:26:11	AI played some football and was on the crew team for three years.  When his crew went to the nationals in 1931, it was the last crew to do so for many years because of the effect of the Depression on the athletic program.

00:30:43	End of side.

00:30:45	As a coach, George Murphy was likable, but he could also encourage the crew members to work hard.  There were attempts to kill crew after Murphy left in 1934 or 1935, and not until after WWII was there another full-time coach.  Eventually the team became a national power.  AI explains that the crew succeeded because of its excellent conditioning program.  Students ran from the Red Gym to the Yahara River, rowed up and down the river, then ran back to the Red Gym again.

00:33:40	AI describes the history of the chemistry department he is writing.  The department was on the move by the 1920s and by 1940 had become quite distinguished.  AI discusses the research he is doing for his book.

00:36:45	Joseph Mathews, chair of the chemistry department, was a good administrator but not a good teacher.

00:37:54	AI had always wanted to teach.  Because no teaching or research assistantships were available when he graduated in 1931 and he needed to help his family, he accepted a job in industry.  He was one of three graduates from the chemistry course that year to be offered a job before graduation.  AI describes his work for a dairy company, a job that did not involve as much research as he had hoped.  He found some of the company’s practices unethical and decided he did not want to spent the rest of his life in a commercial laboratory.

00:43:54	In 1938, he returned to Madison to work on a Ph.D. with Henry Schuette, the food chemist in the department.  He explains that his academic record was not distinguished because he tended to study the things that interested him in depth, but not necessarily complete all of his assignments.  He used his savings to return to school, and after two years was offered a teaching assistantship.  Very few students were supported by WARF money, and AI was not among them.

00:47:57	AI explains that he decided to take a minor in biochemistry in order to learn more about vitamins.  He talked to Steenbock, whom he describes as a poor teacher.  The biochemistry department was not blessed with effective classroom teachers, with the exception of Karl Paul Link and the partial exception of E.B. Hart.  In the College of Agriculture, good teaching did not count towards tenure.

00:51:19	The first biochemistry course for graduate students AI took was team-taught.  He describes some of the professors who taught the class.  Link was fun because he was unorthodox.  The chemistry department was somewhat better in classroom teaching than the biochemistry department.  Harvey Sorum and Homer Adkins were particularly strong teachers.

00:56:23	AI chose to study with Steenbock because he was interested in fat soluble vitamins.  He became acquainted with Steenbock by asking him questions after class.  Steenbock was a good teacher on a one-to-one basis.

00:58:41	Steenbock was uptight, serious and business-minded.  But he was also friendly and could see the humor in a situation.  He was suspicious of colleagues and was prone to think they were trying to beat him to discoveries in his field.  Steenbock’s work in vitamin D and A led him to do related work in calcium and phosphorous metabolism.

01:00:41	End of side.  End of tape.

Tape 2

01:00:45	Steenbock was suspicious of everyone.  He and Link did not get along.

01:02:15	Steenbock was straight-laced and moralistic.  He found fault with nearly everyone, and frequently criticized students for being late or for not getting enough done.

01:03:36	AI got along well with Steenbock.  He got away with some things that other students might not have.  On Saturdays and Sundays he would often bring his wife and child into the lab.  Steenbock became fond of AI’s daughter, who enjoyed filling the feed receptacles in the rat cages.  Steenbock could be very understanding but also very mean, and one could never predict which side of him one would see.

01:07:43	AI mentions Steenbock’s failing health, which he thinks might have contributed to his temperamental nature.  Samuel McElvain in the chemistry department was also temperamental.  AI describes how McElvain’s students handled him.  Steenbock had pernicious anemia, and McElvain suffered from ulcers.

01:09:48	AI relates an anecdote demonstrating Steenbock's extreme rigidity.  Steenbock refused to excuse AI from a required laboratory course even though AI had already covered the material and wanted to take a more advanced class instead.  The teaching assistants for the course ended up asking AI for help.

01:15:41	He compares the biochemistry faculty as teachers.  All were effective researchers and all produced well-trained biochemists.  Steenbock reached his peak in 1924, after which his research career went downhill.

01:18:08	AI mentions the spectrophotometry equipment Steenbock brought in during the 1940s.  In his later years he did not use advanced equipment and techniques effectively.

01:20:02	The biochemistry department had a reputation for keeping its graduate students a long time.  AI explains how new students were assigned to assist advanced graduate students with their research, and were only allowed to pursue original problems after several years.  Some students stayed as long as eight years.

01:22:43	Students frequently did not know what their dissertation would be about.  Rather than start with a defined problem, they would write up data they had accumulated over several years and not yet used.  In the chemistry department, students were more likely to focus on a clearly defined question, and they usually took four or five years to earn their PhD.

01:24:16	AI preferred working in chemistry to working in biochemistry.  The graduate students tended to be friendly and cooperative rather than to compete with one another.  Schuette was rather low-key and did not supervise his students too closely.

01:26:51	AI used chromatography in his work, which was a new technique in the area of food chemistry analysis.

01:28:20	The chemistry department was strong in organic and physical chemistry.  AI explains the work in organic analysis he did with Schuette.  Schuette was a misfit in the department because his work combined organic and analytical chemistry.  AI comments on John Williams’s status as a misfit.

01:30:37	End of side.

01:30:39	AI continues to discuss Williams, who worked in colloid chemistry.  After the department purchased an expensive ultracentrifuge in the 1930s, Williams was pushed into work that relied on this technique, even though he might have preferred to use other techniques.  Relations between Williams and Farrington Daniels were not good from the 1930s onwards, in part because Daniels did not think highly of colloid chemistry.  Although Williams was a good chemist, he was not good at public relations.

01:34:22	Around 1950, the air-driven ultracentrifuge was invented, which made the old ultracentrifuge obsolete.  Williams’ type of research was phased out and he was unable to establish a new program with a new kind of instrumentation.

01:35:59	During WWII, Williams did valuable work on the fractionation of blood protein, work that could not have been done elsewhere.  Daniels never came to understand other people’s research because he was too deeply interested in his own.

01:37:04	Daniels had a unique capacity to see future trends in research, a capacity that allowed him to abandon a field that would no longer be fruitful. In the 1930s, he was involved in kinetics.  By the war, he became involved in the uranium program.  He realized that because the quantity of uranium in the world was finite, it would not provide an indefinite source of power, and he switched to the study of solar energy.

01:39:17  	AI describes the hiring process in chemistry.  Daniels had little to do with the search and screen process.

01:40:07	In her biography of her husband, Mrs. Daniels claimed the relations in the chemistry department were uniformly positive, but the experiences of both Williams and Harvey Sorum suggest otherwise.  AI discusses Sorum’s unhappiness, which stemmed from his preference for teaching over research.

01:40:55	AI ran into problems with Daniels in the 1950s when he became interested in the history of chemistry because Daniels did not look favorably on people who did not do experimental research.  Yet when AI was offered a job as director of the Consumers Union laboratory and publications division, Daniels worked to get AI promoted so that he would remain at UW.

01:43:57	AI gives reasons for his interest in the history of science.  During his undergraduate years he became interested in the history of food legislation.  When he began teaching, he realized students would understand a complicated concept best if they saw how it developed, and he began to use historical anecdotal material.

01:46:13	By the end of WWII, AI was deeply interested in the history of chemistry and he obtained permission to teach a course in the area.  He enjoyed teaching freshman chemistry and wanted to find an approach that would interest students.

01:50:21	AI became involved with the history of science faculty as soon as they began coming to the university.  Henry Guerlac had started the history of science program in 1941, but then left for MIT and later Cornell.  Robert Stauffer and Marshall Clagett were hired in 1946 and 1947.

01:52:15	AI explains that before Dean George Sellery retired, he hired Guerlac.  Sellery insisted that the historian of science should not come from the history department because an historian would not treat the history of science sympathetically.  Dean Mark Ingraham agreed to keep the history of science department separate from the history department.

01:53:10	Erwin Ackerknecht, an historian of medicine, arrived soon afterwards, followed by the historian of pharmacy George Urdang, which brought the number of historians of science to four.  Under Clagett’s chairmanship of the department, AI received a joint appointment with history of science.  The chemistry department tolerated this joint appointment as long as AI’s activities in history were not too visible.  After a year’s leave at Harvard, he decided to pursue history of science more seriously, at which point Daniels made it clear he did not support AI.  AI explained to Daniels that he was much more interested in the history of chemistry than in chemistry.

01:55:16	Until Edwin Young became dean of Letters and Science, AI’s salary was very low.  After he was offered a deanship elsewhere, Young and Dean Arthur Uhl of pharmacy persuaded him to turn it down, and his salary was increased.

01:56:17	After Daniels retired, he became a strong backer of AI’s work in the history of science.  Daniels was not one to hold a grudge.

01:59:00	End of side.  End of tape.

Second Interview Session (July 22, 1983): Tapes 3-4
	
Tape 3

00:00:22	AI discusses the Daniels curriculum committee report of 1939 or 1940, which dealt with the place of science in the general curriculum.

00:02:53	Although the Daniels report did not have a direct connection to the Integrated Liberal Studies (ILS) program, it brought about some faculty thinking that ultimately fed into the science program created in ILS.  AI also mentions the Ogg report, which contained a recommendation for a Curriculum B.  Dean Ingraham created a committee, chaired by Robert Pooley of the English department, to study Curriculum B.

00:03:57	AI explains that Pooley was chosen to chair this committee because the English department feared that Curriculum B would undermine the required freshman English program.  AI lists several other members of the committee.

00:07:32	A series of hearings helped to ensure acceptance of the committee’s report by the L&S faculty, many of whom felt antagonistic towards the Curriculum B proposal.  The faculty did not like the idea of overly broad survey courses, and they also did not want to lose departmental control over courses.

00:10:22	Pooley became very interested in general education programs and traveled around the country to assess other schools with this kind of program.  AI notes that Pooley managed to shape the Curriculum B so as to avoid the weaknesses he found at other schools.  For example, a separate faculty was not brought in to teach the Curriculum B courses; instead, faculty members were borrowed from existing departments.  Also, Pooley tried to avoid the isolation the Experimental College students had faced.

00:13:02	The sciences were a weak area in many general education programs studied by Pooley.  Homer Adkins persuaded the committee not to write detailed course outlines, but instead to leave the details up to the faculty members who would teach the courses.

00:14:52	The committee was aware of the great books program, but chose not to design their program around a series of books.  AI describes the science program, which consisted of a physical universe course including physics, chemistry and astronomy, followed by an earth science course, followed by a biology course.

00:16:12	The faculty approved Curriculum B in the spring of 1947.  Dean Mark Ingraham immediately appointed Pooley to be chairman of a department to administer Integrated Liberal Studies.  The committee had decided that Curriculum B ought to be administered as a department rather than as a diffuse program.

00:17:31	Although President Fred was not directly involved in the creation or staffing of ILS, he was quite sympathetic towards the program.  The term Integrated Liberal Studies was proposed by Ingraham.

00:18:45	Pooley’s first job was creating a faculty, which would be borrowed from existing departments.  He looked over the faculty and tried to pick people whom he believed would create courses that would fit into the program, and then went to departmental chairman for permission to approach the individual faculty members.  AI was picked early to teach the physical universe course because he had become known for his general chemistry teaching.

00:22:17	AI explains that the criteria for ILS faculty were effective undergraduate teaching and an interest in interdisciplinary approaches.  The social sciences part of the program was never strong because several of its faculty members were not charismatic teachers.

00:25:47	He describes the attempts he and Pooley made to improve the teaching of several of the faculty.  AI approached Richard Hartshorne, whose course on international politics was not well received by the students.  A course on American culture taught by Frederick Hoffman of the English department was so unsuccessful that Hoffman resigned from ILS.  AI discusses a history professor whose course was a “disaster” because he expected students to memorize too much detail.

00:30:25	End of side.

00:30:30	AI continues to discuss episodes of poor teaching in ILS.  Despite these incidents, the ILS faculty was far above average in its teaching ability.  AI mentions some of the outstanding teachers in the program, including Walter Agard, Robert Pooley, Robert Reynolds, and Lowell Noland.

00:34:58	AI describes the evolution of and assesses the courses offered in the areas of humanities, social studies and the sciences.  He focuses particular attention on the botany and zoology course, which was initially taught by C. Leonard Huskins and Lowell Noland.

00:41:35	The faculty members Pooley chose were so respected that they often went on leaves of absence and had to be replaced for a semester or two.  Their departments would usually try to loan poor faculty to ILS to substitute for them.  In the mid 1960s, during AI’s chairmanship, many faculty retired from ILS.  One of AI’s greatest successes as chair was persuading Harold Groves to teach the economics course in ILS for three years; these were the only years during which the course was well taught.

00:47:42	About half of the ILS faculty conducted research while they taught.  AI lists those faculty who were best known for their research.

00:49:17	Excluding mathematics from the ILS program was a deliberate choice, because it was thought it would be difficult to design a broad mathematics course.  AI was strongly influenced by James Bryant Conant’s case-based approach to science.  He compares the course he taught at Harvard during his leave of absence to the course he taught at UW.  AI believes his course on the physical universe was more a course in how scientists work and think than a course in physics, chemistry and astronomy.

00:53:36	AI’s year at Harvard, where he worked with George Sarton and I.B. Cohen, diverted his interest into the history of science.

00:54:27	Some ILS faculty approached their courses with great excitement and worked hard to adapt their teaching methods to the interdisciplinary nature of the program, but others did not.  The faculty frequently met during the year before the program started in order to coordinate their courses.  Some of the original professors in the program sat in on other professors’ lectures, but faculty who later joined the program did not keep up this tradition.

01:00:50	End of side.  End of tape.

Tape 4

01:01:51	AI talks about efforts to encourage new faculty to sit in on other professors’ classes.  Most of the original ILS faculty was tenured, but later faculty, many of whom were not tenured, faced intense time pressures that made it more difficult for them to attend extra classes.

01:02:40	He describes the courses students took in addition to their ILS courses.  In the 1960s, a new curriculum was created requiring both math and language courses that left students with an almost inflexible program.

01:05:20	AI discusses the students who chose the ILS program.  They tended to be above-average students, and AI speculates that many went on to very successful futures.  In 1951, the School of Education decided to require its elementary education students to go through the ILS program.  The education students often had trouble and many dropped out of the program.

01:09:39	Other students who became involved in the ILS program were the Ford scholars, who were very bright high school students who had been admitted to college early.  Their social immaturity and their tendency to earn many of the high grades caused antagonism with other students, whose As and Bs turned into Bs and Cs.  The Ford scholars were often arrogant and viewed ILS courses as an unwanted interlude holding them back from pursuing mathematics and the sciences.

01:14:07	The ILS program has never been well advertised.  The best recruiters for the program turned out to be the students themselves.  Some high school teachers also helped to promote the program.  The freshmen advisers did not encourage students to enroll in the ILS program; many faculty were antagonistic towards the program.

01:18:16	AI discusses the initial size and growth of the program.  It was particularly popular in the early 1960s.  He explains how teaching assistants led the discussion sections, which were capped at approximately twenty students.  Recruiting teaching assistants with a sufficiently broad background was difficult, particularly for a course such as AI’s course on the physical universe, which combined chemistry, physics and astronomy.

01:26:35	Pooley proved to be an extremely able administrator.  Students had a fine esprit de corps until the “age of dissent,” when they became critical of the ILS program.  Before this time, students attended all their discussion sections with the same group of students and so became very close to one another.  Pooley also held a party for the students in the fall semester.

01:29:30	The ILS Pioneer, a student paper initiated by students, also helped to build a sense of community.  The paper was a great success from the start.

01:30:14	End of side.

01:30:18	AI continues to talk about the Pioneer.  The paper fell by the wayside in the late 1960s, when students began preparing competitive newsletters that attacked the ILS program.

01:32:21	As chair of the program from 1963 to 1970, AI saw the worst of the criticism.  In 1970, he was so tired of facing hostility from students that he asked the faculty not to reelect him.  A year after he gave up his chairmanship, he once again became very popular with students.

01:33:57	End of interview session.

Third Interview Session (August 1, 1983): Tapes 4-5

00:00:01	AI continues to discuss his chairmanship.  From its beginning, ILS tended to attract a disproportionate number of liberal and even radical students.  Many faculty members believed that the radicalization that had occurred at Berkeley and other places would not take place at Wisconsin.  It was a surprise for faculty to find out how out of touch they were with the thinking of the radical element of the student body.  The Dow riot was an eye-opener.

00:03:40	ILS students played a leading role in the protests.  AI recalls that a young man once spent five minutes arguing in front of the class that courses such as AI’s were irrelevant and reactionary.  The students were displeased with the young man’s poorly presented argument, and began chanting “We want Ihde.”  No students followed his call to walk out of lecture in order to prepare for revolution, and Ihde used the remainder of the class period to initiate a class discussion on the issues the young man had raised.

00:09:01	During the student protests, students often attacked ILS courses as irrelevant to the important problems the world was facing.  The dissenting movement’s lack of knowledge about the university and the ILS program bothered AI.  For example, radical students incorrectly claimed the ILS program had not been changed since its creation in 1948.

00:14:32	AI points out that because students are on campus for only four years, they have a limited view of the university’s evolution.  He suggests that faculty ought to do more philosophizing on the subject material, the university and the world than they do.  He says his best teaching took place during tangential discussions on topics such as the insignificance of getting an A on a particular exam to success in life.

00:19:44	AI began teaching the history of chemistry in 1946, two years before he began teaching in ILS.  This period, during which he read widely in order to prepare himself to teach new subject materials, was a very exciting period.

00:20:56:	He describes his approach to the physical universe course.  He wanted students to see that science was an ever-changing body of knowledge.  He thought he did his best teaching in astronomy, a field about which he knew very little.  For his unit on astronomy, students were invited to Observatory Hill in the evening to learn to identify the major constellations.

00:25:37	End of side.  End of tape.

Tape 5

00:25:39	To prepare himself for the course, he consulted with Joel Stebbins, director of the observatory and Charles Huffer of the astronomy department.  He also bought star guides and spent time star-gazing in order to familiarize himself with the constellations and planets.  By the time the course began, he felt secure in his knowledge of astronomy.

00:27:24	Students first learned to identify the pole star.  Some students had learned a little astronomy, but the material was entirely new to most of them.  AI talks about the different mathematical and scientific backgrounds students brought to the course.  He began by teaching the Ptolemaic system, which was a geocentric model of the universe.  AI says students quickly learned that scientific theories are not fact, but are subject to change as new data is discovered.

00:32:12	Students with strong scientific backgrounds were offered the chance to do additional reading.  In the 1960s, after the honors program began, the students with strong backgrounds were separated into an honors section, which AI taught for many years.

00:33:40	AI found that students understood challenging material best if they encountered scientific ideas and facts in the same way that famous scientists had encountered them.  He compares this approach to the common method of teaching science from a modern standpoint, without any consideration of where the ideas came from.  He gives examples from his physical universe of how he used this approach.

00:37:00	The physical universe course involved no lab work.  AI did many demonstrations in class, and he accompanied students to the Chicago planetarium every year.  Students also saw the 40-inch telescope at the Yerkes observatory one year.  The Chicago trip was abandoned in the late 1950s when the astronomy department obtained its own planetarium.

00:42:14	AI continued to teach in the chemistry and history of science departments while he taught in ILS.  Compared to most chemistry professors, he taught an overload.  He never felt overburdened because he enjoyed teaching freshman chemistry.  Joseph Mathews, chair of the chemistry department, was not initially enthusiastic about AI teaching in the ILS department, but he later became proud of AI’s involvement in ILS.

00:45:44	AI describes Mathews.  In the early 1920s, Mathews had helped solve a murder case in Wisconsin by analyzing some materials from the suspect’s workshop.  Around 1940 he began teaching a course in scientific methods of crime detection in the sociology department.  Mathews was very interested in scientific apparatus, and as a result the UW was always one of the first universities to obtain new instruments that came on the market.

00:48:16	Mathews was very devoted to the chemistry department.  Under his chairmanship the department developed a reputation for strong research.  He was a very competent administrator.

00:50:07	Farrington Daniels was not as effective a chair as Mathews.  When Daniels became chair, he brought the faculty’s attention to trivial matters.  Departmental meetings became a shambles because there was no time to address important matters.  Daniels was far more focused on his own research than on administration.  AI discusses the evolution of the position of chair.

00:54:51	End of side.

00:54:54	AI talks about the weekly assemblies that all ILS students attended.  On Saturday mornings at 11 am, students learned about ILS and heard talks by non-ILS professors about their disciplines.  The course did not survive the first two years because students did not attend.

00:58:03	ILS students sometimes discussed important and controversial issues with interested faculty during the evenings.  Particularly during the era of protests, there were many evening meetings of faculty and students.  On one occasion, in about 1968 or 1969, AI canceled a trip to SUNY in order to meet all interested ILS students, teaching assistants and faculty.

01:02:17	A core group of about twenty students were activists.  Some of the teaching assistants encouraged the students to protest; these same teaching assistants took an active role in the 1970 strike.  The ILS department suffered much more from the strike than the chemistry department because far more ILS teaching assistants participated in the strike.  Many ILS students sympathized with the strike, and some student leaders picketed with the teaching assistants.

01:06:27	AI never supported the strike.  Because graduate students are not permanent members of the faculty, he did not believe they ought to have a substantial voice on academic policy.  He was sympathetic towards the teaching assistants’ arguments for smaller classes.

01:09:28	He discusses his stand on the Vietnam war.  In the beginning he was sadly supportive, but several years later he became strongly opposed to the war.  Although he was sympathetic to the anti-war movement, he did not like the way students made their point.

01:12:21	AI talks about the current status of ILS.  During the years he chaired the department, he saw ILS go downhill.  In the early 1960s, his and Pooley’s attempt to create a second ILS program called Basic Studies–a program targeted to students in the professional fields that would have involved a smaller number of required courses–badly hurt the program.  Faculty from the humanistic departments killed the program.

01:16:03	A new L&S curriculum requirement that students take both language and mathematics classes also hurt the ILS program.  Students had difficulty fitting the new required courses into their schedule.

01:16:57	A third reason for ILS’s decline was student discontent, AI notes.  After the student population peaked in 1964, enrollment decreased.  Students became increasingly focused on professional goals and were less interested in general education.  AI talks about two dissertations dealing with the ILS program.

01:20:55	AI talks about the support his wife, Olive Ihde, gave him during his entire career.  As chairman of the University Dames, an organization of graduate student wives, she worked to improve housing conditions for graduate students.  She frequently made sacrifices for his academic career.

01:24:37	End of side.  End of tape.

SECOND INTERVIEW (1963)
NOTE: poor quality audio, parts inaudible

First Interview Session (May 15, 1963): Tape 6

Tape 6

00:00:18	AI talks about his work at the Blue Valley Creamery Company in Chicago, Illinois during the Depression.  This company was one of the leading manufacturer of butter and other dairy products.  AI’s job involved trouble-shooting and developing new products such as cream cheese and salad dressings.

00:06:31	He relates an anecdote about a price war over mayonnaise sparked by Kraft’s introduction of Miracle Whip.  The Board of Directors at Blue Valley instructed its chemists to find a way of lowering the price of their mayonnaise by four cents an eight-ounce jar.  Although the entire price drop was supposed to come from using cheaper raw materials, AI calculated that in fact the total cost of the materials per jar came to exactly four cents.  So they would have had to sell air in order to cut material costs by the amount the Board of Directors requested.

00:10:45	AI talks about Otto Hunziger, the director of the Blue Valley laboratory.  Hunziger was considered one of the leading authorities on butter and other dairy products.  He played a role in the introduction of the neutralization of cream prior to churning, a technique that dramatically improved the flavor and storage quality of butter.

00:18:02	AI continues to talk about Hunziger’s contribution to the butter industry.  Hunziger’s work allowed Blue Valley to make a better-quality product out of moderately inferior cream.

00:22:41	AI left Blue Valley in January 1938 to begin graduate work in the UW chemistry department.  He describes Henry Schuette, his major professor, who studied food chemistry and sanitary chemistry.  Schuette’s most active research was in the area of fatty oils.  AI’s research for his Masters degree concerned the content of lead in honey.  Through his next area of research, on the trace components of the unsaturated portion of rye germ oil, he became more closely involved with the biochemistry department.

00:25:50	Schuette’s laboratory was at the height of its success in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  He was interested in legislation and consumer protection.

00:27:36	AI had taken a course with Schuette during the last year of his undergraduate studies.  This course had left AI with an interest in food chemistry.  He explains how he obtained the position at Blue Valley.

00:28:30	AI completed his degree in 1941, before the war broke out.  A number of professors in the chemistry department were involved in war-related research.  John Willams and Farrington Daniels were among those who became involved.  Daniels ultimately became involved in the atomic bomb work.

00:32:31	AI describes John Williams’ work on blood plasma extenders and composition of blood plasma.  Homer Atkins did research on ointments that could be used to treat gas burns.  The organic chemists in the department worked on anti-malarial agents.

00:36:35	Joseph Hirschfelder, a theoretical chemist, worked on problems relating to conventional explosives and later had some involvement with the atomic bomb project.  After the war, he was sent to the Pacific Islands to observe the dropping of the first test bombs.  He later returned to the university and continued his work on theoretical aspects of military chemistry.

00:38:15	Daniels was working on nitrogen fertilizers, a research area that came out of his earlier involvement in the nitrogen fixation program.  In the late 1940s he worked on mineral analysis for uranium content.  During these years he also tried to convince the government to take an interest in a nuclear reactor to be used to generate electricity.  About the time that he gave up on the power reactor, he became interested in solar energy.

00:42:54	AI talks about how in the 1940s his interests turned from chemistry to the history of chemistry.  He gives some reasons why he did not enjoy bench chemistry.

00:46:16	End of side.

00:46:32	AI continues to talk about the history of chemistry at UW.  Professor Edward Kremers of the pharmacy department taught the first history of chemistry course in about 1908.  Later Louis Kahlenberg took over the course, which he continued teaching until his retirement in 1940.  Several years later, AI obtained permission from Joseph Mathews, chair of the chemistry department, to teach the course.

00:49:21	While working on his Masters degree, AI and Schuette put together a bibliography of early records on honey.  Even at this time AI was interested in the scientific history of foods.

00:50:52	Fifty years ago it was common for chemists to take an interest in the history of chemistry, but that is no longer the case, AI notes.  For this reason AI thinks it is very important that historians of science preserve the history of chemistry.  He argues it is important to record both mistakes and successes.

00:55:21	AI talks about some of the scientists with whom he worked.  He describes Conrad Elvehjem as serious, almost completely humorless, and deeply interested in the biochemistry of nutrition.  He had a very widespread knowledge of nutrition, but as dean of the Graduate School he had difficulty understanding research problems outside the field of vitamins.

00:59:37	Karl Paul Link was brilliant and unorthodox.  He would take a student whom other faculty thought unpromising and make a good biochemist out of him.  Of all the biochemists, Link was the most interested in the history of science, and only he would send his students to take AI’s course.

01:02:27	End of side.

Second Interview Session (May 21, 1963): Tape 7

Tape 7

00:00:03	AI talks about a public dispute between Karl Paul Link and Conrad Elvehjem over the issue of adding vitamin K to aspirin.  Link was untraditional in his choice of clothing, and was one of the first professors to wear shorts on campus.  After developing tuberculosis, Link had to spend a year in a sanatorium.  Upon being released, he immediately complained publicly about how patients in the sanatorium were treated.

00:05:57	AI describes Link’s work in rodenticides.  Link consumed some of the substance himself to prove it was harmless to humans.

00:07:15	AI talks about his well-publicized views on the improper uses of pesticides, a topic championed by Rachel Carson.  He describes some of those who have opposed Carson, and relates a controversy among UW faculty on the issue of pesticides.  The controversy began when Carl Schmidt read Silent Spring on the program Chapter a Day and the entomology department reacted with fury.

00:13:06	AI talks about Harry Steenbock and his work in nutrition.  He describes Steenbock as a sincere, sober, and hard-working faculty member who drove his students very hard.

00:18:42	Steenbock’s laboratory was large but rather humorless.  AI describes the state of knowledge about nutrition when Steenbock entered the field and his contribution to research in fat-soluble vitamins.

00:22:00	AI compares Steenbock and Link’s personalities and notes that they did not get along.

00:23:56	E.B. Hart, chairman of the biochemistry department, successfully kept the peace between Steenbock and Link by trying to keep them separated as much as possible.  AI talks about Hart’s personality and his contributions to biochemistry.  Hart showed that copper is necessary to the human diet and demonstrated that an iodine deficiency produces premature, hairless pigs.

00:30:42	AI discusses William Peterson, a fermentation biochemist whose work involved a lot of bacteriology, and W.E. Tottingham, a senior member of the department who worked on plant biochemistry.

00:38:13	AI talks about two national figures in the history of chemistry, Henry Leicester and Sidney Edlestein.

00:45:47	End of side.

00:45:49	AI continues to talk about Sidney Edlestein.  He describes two other major historians of chemistry, Dennis Duveen, whose collection of books the UW bought, and Herbert Klickstein.

00:55:51	He discusses some members of the history of science department at UW.  He recalls that Henry Guerlac founded the department about 1940 or 1941, but was called to Washington to do war work and then took a position at Cornell.  Robert Stauffer and Marshall Clagett were brought in soon afterwards.  UW has the largest history of science department in the world.

00:59:06	AI comments on E.B. Fred’s contributions to the bacteriology department.

01:01:11	End of side.  End of tape.

END OF ORAL HISTORY #263