Max Friedman

Max Friedman was a theoretical-physics student in J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Berkeley circle whose efforts to organize a union at the Radiation Laboratory became entangled with wartime security investigations. His record in the available account is defined less by a stated Communist Party affiliation than by the consequences of his union activity: he lost successive research positions, was labeled a subversive after an intelligence investigation, and after the war could find work only at the University of Puerto Rico.

Berkeley Circle and Political Setting

Friedman studied theoretical physics under Oppenheimer and belonged to a group of unconventional graduate students who treated their intellectual identity and political engagement as closely connected. Philip Morrison, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, David Bohm, Joseph Weinberg, and Friedman were among the students who regarded Oppenheimer as a mentor and role model. The group included members of the Communist Party USA as well as people on its fringe, and its members took part in different Popular Front causes. The account does not establish Friedman’s own membership in the Party; it does place him within this politically engaged student milieu.

Friedman also moved in the social circle around Bohm and Betty Goldstein, later known as Betty Friedan. Bohm introduced her to Friedman, Rossi Lomanitz, and Weinberg. They spent time together on weekends and sometimes attended what Friedan described as “various radical study groups.” That combination of physics, friendship, and political discussion formed the setting in which the students later considered how they might have a voice in the wartime scientific work around them.

The wider scientific culture offered a contrast to Oppenheimer’s circle. Ernest Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory was built around increasingly large, expensive machines and a mode of research identified with “big science.” Oppenheimer’s students were theoretical physicists, while the laboratory’s work was tied to large facilities and military applications. As the bomb project became more urgent, the distinctions between research, institutional authority, and political responsibility grew harder to keep separate.

Union Organizing at the Radiation Laboratory

In early 1943, Friedman joined Rossi Lomanitz, Irving David Fox, David Bohm, and Bernard Peters in FAECT Local 25. The decision did not arise from familiar workplace grievances: Lomanitz, for example, earned substantially more at the laboratory than in his previous job, and the account reports no complaints about working conditions. Lomanitz later recalled that the organizing seemed dramatic and youthful, even calling it a “ridiculous reason for forming a union.”

Friedman became the union’s organizer inside the Radiation Laboratory after Lomanitz and Weinberg persuaded him to take the role. He later minimized the practical extent of his work, recalling, “It was a title, I never did anything.” Yet he supported the principle of organizing. He explained that the scientists feared what the bomb might be used for and believed they should not work on it without having any voice in what happened to their efforts. For Friedman, then, union activity was connected not simply to employment conditions but to the question of who could participate in decisions about scientific labor and its consequences.

The union quickly attracted the attention of Army intelligence officers monitoring the laboratory. In August 1943, the War Department received a warning that several people inside the Radiation Laboratory were “active communists”; an intelligence report described Local 25 as dominated and controlled by Communist Party members or sympathizers. The administration asked the Congress of Industrial Organizations to stop its organizing drive at the Berkeley laboratory. The passage from an internal organizing effort to a matter of national-security concern made the union’s political label consequential even where the stated impetus was scientists’ desire for a voice in their work.

Surveillance and Loss of Research Posts

The investigation made Friedman visible to security officials through his association with a small group of Oppenheimer’s students. In June 1943, agents following Lomanitz observed him outside Sather Gate at the University of California, Berkeley, with Weinberg, Bohm, and Friedman. The friends had posed together for a campus photographer. After they left, a government agent bought the negative. Investigators identified the people in the photograph and marked the young men as subversives. The episode shows how an ordinary campus photograph became an instrument of surveillance: the group’s repeated association was treated as evidence of suspicious connections.

Friedman was called in and fired from his Radiation Laboratory job. He taught physics for a time at the University of Wyoming, and late in the war Morrison obtained a position for him at the Met Lab in Chicago. After six months, security officers found him there and he was fired again. The sequence cut short his research employment at two laboratories, though the account does not describe the specific evidence used to dismiss him from the Met Lab.

The pressure on Friedman belonged to a broader pattern in which Army intelligence treated union organizing as a sign of subversive tendency. Lomanitz and Friedman were associated with Local 25, and officers readily concluded that they should be removed. That context helps explain the institutional logic behind Friedman’s dismissals without establishing that every accusation made against the students was true or that Friedman himself belonged to the Communist Party USA.

Postwar Consequences and Significance

Friedman’s name later surfaced in House Un-American Activities Committee investigations into atomic spying. The postwar attention extended the consequences of the wartime scrutiny beyond the laboratory and the immediate demands of the project. The only job he could obtain was at the University of Puerto Rico. The account thus traces a substantial narrowing of his professional options: from theoretical-physics graduate work and a laboratory appointment, through teaching and another research post, to employment that followed repeated security-driven dismissals.

Friedman’s story makes visible the cost of collapsing political association, labor organizing, and security risk into a single category. He was recruited to organize Local 25, defended the idea that scientists should have a voice in the use of their work, and was identified by investigators through a photograph with fellow students. The resulting record centers on concrete professional consequences rather than a claim about his private beliefs: dismissal from the Radiation Laboratory, a second dismissal in Chicago, and postwar exclusion from most employment. In the wider account of wartime science, his experience illustrates how secrecy and military oversight could constrict both scientific work and the possibility of collective dissent.