Once he’s made his mind up about something there’s no talking to him.
—WR, from Brain Waves and Death
IN the years following the Crash of 1929, Loomis and Thorne turned increasingly to the field of investment banking, becoming the dominant players in the Bankers Trust Company. They were also the major powers in the Central Hanover Trust Co. and in the First National Bank, which was the old institution of George F. Baker, the “Titan of Tuxedo,” as Cleveland Amory dubbed him, and one of the richest men in the country until his death in 1931. Thorne, who was close to the Baker family, was appointed a director of both Bankers and First National and joined the board of First National. Loomis became a trustee of the Central Hanover, as well as a member of the executive committee of Bankers Trust. While the Bankers Trust, First National, and Central Hanover were not the biggest banks in the city, they were among its most influential. By the beginning of 1932, with their many directorships and overlapping spheres of influence, Loomis and Thorne were towering figures on Wall Street. The New York Evening Journal reported: “[They] are one of the two or three most important financial interests in the banking business. The others are the Rockefellers, with their interest in the Chase National, and the Morgans.”
As the economic consequences of the Depression necessitated, the two financiers took an active role in trying to restore confidence in the banking industry and avoid a collapse. After a dinner with President Hoover at the White House on January 4, 1932, Stimson raised the matter of “a new proposal for a bank bill” that had come to him from Loomis:
Alfred Loomis, Landon and George Roberts [senior partner of Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts] are all very much troubled over the banking situation and are very much in fear of a really big collapse of all the banks, and they have been working over with the officers of Bankers Trust Company a plan, rather ingenious in its nature which I think Alfred has been at work on, which amounts to an amendment of the banking law and will permit the officers of a closed bank to use its liquid assets to form a new subsidiary and go right on in business, making the new assets available at once for distribution among the depositors and thus restoring credit. The President was at work on the same thing from another aspect. That evening when I was with him, he was talking over the telephone with Barney Baruch and others. So that this suggestion fell right in with his thoughts. He authorized me to arrange an interview between Alfred and George Roberts and Ogden Mills of the Treasury. . . .
When he got back to Woodley, his baronial estate on the outskirts of the city, Stimson phoned Loomis and company to tell them to “come right on to Washington” to meet with Mills. The evening papers carried a report of the emergency message Hoover had sent to Congress laying out all his defense measures against the panic. Loomis’ proposal, Stimson confided in his diary, “came right in time.” He added: “Everybody is working under pressure now, so I was glad to have my chance to help a little bit.”
It was a bleak winter, and as the banking crisis became acute, Loomis found himself frequently called to Washington by Stimson, Mills, and other Republican advisers who anxiously sought his advice. Stimson continued to lobby vigorously for Loomis’ amendment to the banking law. He also consulted Loomis, who had close contacts in British banks, about the worsening situation in Europe. There were dreadful reports from Germany, which showed ominous signs of being economically depleted and at the end of its rope. Britain, which regarded Germany as an economic bellwether, was contending with the loss of confidence that had spread to its own banking system, where there had been a run on the pound and the abandonment of the gold standard. Both Stimson and Loomis understood better than most in Hoover’s administration that the fate of American finance was intricately tied to Europe’s. If Germany fell into bankruptcy, it would be vulnerable to the forces of revolution, either on the Right or the Left, and that could only have grave implications for the rest of the world’s fortunes.
Europe’s travails, however, were secondary to the desperate situation at home. Ten million people were unemployed, and thousands of banks had gone under, with more failures threatened every day. Hoover, who ran for reelection in a climate of fear and confusion, lost by a landslide to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Distracted by the demands of a brutal campaign, Hoover had overlooked the pressing problem of the war debts, and the half yearly deadline for payment was set for that December 15. During the summer of 1932, the European nations had negotiated a revision of the German war reparations and reached a “gentlemen’s agreement” that this revision depended on the United States’ willingness to accept changes in the European debt structure. Unfortunately, by November 1932, Congress was in no mood to review the debts and defer payment. Two days after the election, both France and Britain delivered notes indicating they might default on their debt payments. The news hit “like a bombshell,” and Stimson would spend his final days in office trying frantically to negotiate a workable compromise. The American banks that had extended the credit reacted in panic and demanded help from the White House. During the tense four-month interregnum, Loomis commuted back and forth to Washington, trying to help Hoover’s lame duck administration push through last minute legislation to rescue the banking industry.
On February 14, 1933, disaster threatened when Michigan closed all its state banks. Stimson wrote in his diary the following day that he feared there might not be enough time to implement Loomis’ measures:
Alfred Loomis lunched with us after a long talk at the Treasury all this morning. He had been in a conference with Ogden Mills, [Arthur] Ballantine, and [Eugene] Meyer of the Federal Reserve Board, and others. Then he went back there afterwards and was with them all afternoon and spent the night again with us. The situation is very gloomy. They have decided they cannot get through the measures that Alfred and Landon had proposed to permit failing banks to segregate their good assets and go on in business with those, because it would have all kinds of bad amendments stuck on it in the House of Congress. So they were trying to work it out a different way, and by nightfall, they had devised a plan by which they thought it could be done through the medium of legislation in the different states aided by a joint resolution from the Federal Government permitting the Comptroller to do things in every state which the state law allowed. . . .
By the end of the week, Stimson’s worst fears were confirmed. None of the requisite steps had been taken, and when the banks opened again, there would still be no relief in sight:
The talk at Cabinet Meeting this morning was about the situation at Detroit, which has become very serious and has not yet been settled. . . . Everybody now agrees that the proposed plan of legislation I brought forward a year ago from Alfred Loomis and Landon Thorne is the solution of the general situation throughout the country, but Mills reported that [Democratic senator] Carter Glass would not agree to it in the Senate and that blocked the whole situation. . . .
It would be left to the new administration to take action. On March 3, the night before Roosevelt’s inauguration, Stimson called Loomis, who was back in New York, and they had a long talk. Loomis was “a good deal worried” and said he thought the approaching weekend would be “the critical one, and we will know better after Roosevelt’s announcement tomorrow what is going to happen and how we are going to weather the storm.” Loomis felt the great danger was that there could be a bad inflation that would upset values and destroy national credit. “That is what everybody is afraid of,” observed Stimson, “and nobody has been able to get Roosevelt to take a strong position on it.”
The day after he took the oath of office, Roosevelt called Congress into an emergency session in four days’ time, suspended gold convertibility and gold exports, and declared a four-day banking holiday to stop a run on the banks. On March 9, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, which let the relatively healthy financial institutions reopen their doors, boosted the public’s confidence in the banking system, and bought Washington the time it needed to enact legislation. Over the next one hundred days, from March to the middle of June, Congress would pass a raft of bills that would make sweeping changes in the banking industry, most notably the Glass-Steagall Act, which stabilized the country’s banks by guaranteeing deposit insurance. Many of Senator Glass’ measures took direct aim at the Wall Street giants and, to many in the industry, seemed designed as much with an eye toward punishment as toward reform. Loomis had been right when he had told Stimson that that weekend would be “the critical one.” It proved to be the turning point in the country’s fortunes. Roosevelt appealed for calm in the first of his famous “fireside chats” over the radio, and when the reorganized banks opened the following Monday, the lines of panicked investors were gone.
Despite the fact that they were from opposing political parties, Roosevelt asked the outgoing Republican secretary of state to brief him, and the two met and talked on several occasions. On March 28, Stimson went to see the new Democratic president at the executive office. Winthrop Aldrich, president of the Chase Bank, was present and engaged in a talk about the new restrictions on commercial banks and trust companies and how they should probably apply to private bankers as well. After Aldrich left, Stimson congratulated Roosevelt on his success in stopping the financial panic thus far and warned him against the damage that might be done if the further necessary legislation was taken up “by the leadership of the senatorial investigation rather than the direct executive leadership of himself.” It is impossible not to detect Stimson’s concern that the public was in a rush to blame bankers and exact revenge for Black Thursday. High finance was on trial:
I said that in the ticklish situation of public confidence today such an investigation might do serious damage to public confidence as well as injustice to the bankers who had already put their houses in order, because it would make no discrimination between the innocent and the guilty. Roosevelt very warmly agreed in this and said it must always be borne in mind that most of the bankers were conscientious and were doing their duties. . . . We took up the subject of foreign affairs. I praised his banking bill, pointing out the importance of the final paragraph suggested by Loomis and congratulating Roosevelt on the fact that the bill had stopped withdrawals and had produced an immediate return of gold and hoarded currency. . . .
Loomis, although politically conservative, was able to look past party loyalties to the candidate and his positions. He was sympathetic to some of the economic measures Roosevelt was trying to implement, particularly fixing the gold standard, which he told Stimson he “strongly believed in.” Loomis participated in a series of “serious talks” among Stimson, Ogden Mills, economic adviser Herbert Feis, and Senator F. W. Walcott regarding Roosevelt’s inflation bill, to which the Republicans were organizing an opposing statement. Loomis had been drawn into the matter after he received a telegram from Senator Francis Townsend asking for his views on inflation. After consulting Stimson, Loomis prepared a memorandum on his views of the gold bullion standard, in which he argued that “the old Peel view of currency standard,” based upon a fixed amount of gold in the dollar or pound, was now obsolete in England. He sent the memorandum to Stimson, along with a hasty note:
Landon and I had a most interesting talk at lunch with Mr. Fred Kent, who, as you know, is the Foreign Exchange authority through which the Secretary of the Treasury is acting in controlling all foreign exchange operations of the country. He feels the same way we do about the proposed emergency gold bill, namely, that it probably offers the best method of solving our international situation at the present time.
Over the telephone, Loomis told Stimson he thought that “the legislation was pretty good in its final form.” After reading Loomis’ memorandum, Stimson passed it around:
I showed his memorandum to Feis, who said he agreed with every line in it except that he [Feis] might have gone a little further than Loomis in warning against the misuse of the powers granted in the bill. I told Mills over the telephone that Loomis had expressed approval to a certain extent of legislation and that I was a little sorry that Mills had not seen him or learned of his views before he advised the Republican statement in opposition to it. Mills was much surprised at Loomis’ position. The issue in general seems to be that Loomis and Feis and Roosevelt’s advisors are in favor of a controlled money standard. . . . I talked over Loomis’ views with Walcott, and Walcott said he agreed with them all except he did not approve of the provision in the bill which gave the President Power to fix the gold content of the dollar. . . .
On April 9, exactly one month after the Emergency Banking Act was passed, Loomis and Thorne announced that they would be stepping down as chief executives of Bonbright. Their “retirement” had essentially been forced by the bill, which prohibited investment bankers from being directors of Federal Reserve Member Banks. By leaving Bonbright, they would be free to hold their many bank directorships without conflict with the new stricter provisions. Loomis and Thorne’s abrupt departure made headlines and was hailed as a seismic shift in the structure of the financial world. In the peerage of American businessmen, they were among the sharpest players, distinguished for building companies of rock-bottom strength and rapidly increasing capital girth. They were the young and restless forces behind the giant new power companies, and their impeccable credentials had allowed them to pool money from a dozen of the greatest private fortunes in the country—Morgan money, Mellon money—with the money invested by millions of working-class people. Bonbright, thanks to their efforts, was now one of the “Big Six” Wall Street investment houses, and their handpicked successors, Sidney A. Mitchel and Pearson Winslow, could be counted on as loyal allies in any future ventures. Most of their peers predicted Loomis and Thorne would give up the securities business to move aggressively into commercial banking, and as the New York Journal reported, there was considerable need for men of their proven ability:
[They] are two of the small group of younger leaders who have come to the front in Wall Street in the last two years. It was in the 1920 depression that they took hold on Bonbright & Co. and steered it from the shoals of bankruptcy, toward which it was heading. . . . They did and, in effecting a reorganization, among those to retire were Senator Walcott of Connecticut, who started the recent stock market probe. Now another depression has rolled around and again Thorne and Loomis find themselves the gainers. . . . Both have done exceptionally well in this depression.
But that spring, Loomis informed Thorne that he was through. There was a certain finality about this announcement so that Thorne knew it was pointless to object. “They really did everything together, so when Alfred decided he wanted out, that was it,” said his daughter-in-law, Betty Loomis Evans. “Alfred just totally lost interest in business. He felt he had enough money to do whatever he wanted, and what he wanted to do was science. In the end, I think Landon understood. They never had any words over it, or any kind of falling-out. Landon knew that was just who Alfred was.”
Loomis was not someone you could argue with. He would listen patiently to an opposing opinion, reflexively patting his shirt pocket where he kept his Lucky Strikes and then lighting one up. But his consideration was nothing more than that—an act of politeness on his part. “He would always just shrug and walk away,” said Evans. “I never once knew him to change his mind about anything.”
According to Henry’s first wife, Paulie Loomis, “Alfred was always set on being a scientist, right from the beginning. But he had responsibilities—he had to take care of his mother, his sister, his family. He helped Henry Stimson, and made him a lot of money. Stimson could never have had the career in politics he did without it. Alfred was a very premeditated person. He had it all figured out. He did what he had to do, and the first real chance he had, he took all his money and invested it in his own firm and got the hell out.”
Over the next few months, Loomis and Thorne resigned from a succession of bank directorships and utility boards, including the Commonwealth & Southern Corp. and the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey. By Christmas of 1934, the only title Loomis retained was president of the recently formed American Superpower Corp. He and Thorne sold out virtually all their holdings with the exception of United Power, which was the one stock they would never part with. They sold all their shares in Bonbright and put the proceeds into a holding company that Loomis entrusted Thorne to manage as a personal investment company. Without so much as a backward look, Loomis quit Wall Street for good.
Loomis had discovered early in life where his talents lay and had twice set off in the direction of a more reliably profitable future, first in law and then in finance. His life had now come full cycle, with his enormous wealth enabling him to recapture his schoolboy’s love of invention. “It was a counterattraction—he always liked the other girl better,” observed William Golden, a wealthy investment banker who also turned to a career in science after World War II. “He was a very active, creative man. He had already been very successful in two different professions. He didn’t just want to double his money and be the richest man in the graveyard. What would be the point in that?”
Loomis never once expressed any regret at leaving the business world. In some ways, he seemed to have no regard for money. “Having made it that way, and so quickly, it became impersonal with him,” said Caryl Haskins. “He wasn’t interested in it. When he needed it to buy things—new instrumentation, new technology—he bought them. That was all he really cared about. And of course, he gave a lot of it away. But he never talked about that with me. I don’t think he thought his past accomplishments were worth mentioning.”
Thorne continued to keep one foot in the financial world and ran the Thorne Loomis investment company, operating out of a large office in the law firm of White & Case at 14 Wall Street. He remained one of the largest shareholders in the First National and exercised considerable influence in banking affairs. He was already much wealthier than Loomis, and in the coming years his assets would far outstrip those of his brother-in-law. Thorne had always known that this day would come and had long strived to keep Loomis interested in their joint ventures, even if it had often meant shouldering more than his share of the work. He had felt fortunate to have someone of Loomis’ brilliance as his business partner, if only on borrowed time. Although they went their separate ways, according to Henry Loomis, their partnership lasted to the end of their lives. “In a sense, they never really stopped working together. Alfred was always in the background. He just spent more time doing what he wanted to, which was physics.”
There were some hurt feelings on Thorne’s part that Loomis did not invite him to participate in his scientific work—“as if he were somehow not smart enough,” said Evans. Loomis acted as though he were engaged in some exclusive activity at Tower House, and while this provoked some jealousy, nothing was ever said about it to her knowledge. Thorne was always very supportive of Loomis’ scientific work and on more than one occasion contributed substantial sums to his research projects.
The changing climate on Wall Street undoubtedly hastened Loomis’ departure. Fear and cynicism had turned the American public’s mood ugly, and their favorite target was New York’s banking elite. Loomis was shaken by the imputations of self-serving dishonesty. He had been among a small group of men with enormous private power, and now the public and Washington were holding them accountable and seeking to curb their influence. Like most of his fellow club members and board directors, he did not trust Roosevelt. He did not believe in initiatives like the Industrial Recovery Act, which put the state in partnership with big business, and he put his faith in private enterprise over politicians and their blundering bureaucracies any day of the week. He strongly believed the corporate form was by far the simplest and most efficient way to raise capital to build dams and power plants and modernize old industries. In his view, Washington could never have raised the money and planned the expansion of the public utility industry half as well as Bonbright and other investment companies had done in the twenties. But Loomis had no stomach for the endless infighting and no intention of spending his time colluding with Republican malcontents like Ogden Mills, “mounting assaults on the fortresses of the New Deal.”
Loomis saw the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), established in May 1933, as a symbol of the worst of the New Dealers’ tactics. “He thought it would destroy the business world,” recalled Paulie Loomis. The TVA undertook a massive program of construction, engineering, and education to harness the Tennessee River, improve navigation, and supply low-cost electricity to the rural South. The utilities industry naturally resented this form of direct government competition and claimed that the TVA enjoyed an unfair advantage while they were being forced to reduce their rates. The TVA works program became such a source of bitter controversy that the law firm of Winthrop & Stimson was called on to file a nineteen-company suit on behalf of Commonwealth & Southern (the holding company whose board of directors had until only recently included Loomis and Thorne), which had interests in Tennessee and ten other states. The suit challenged the constitutionality of the TVA, which they argued was “the entering wedge” for the eventual “government ownership of all essential industries.” The case was lost on the ground that the plaintiffs lacked the right to sue.
Loomis was appalled by all the litigation and wanted no part of the endless and complex regulatory proceedings. Stimson, who had returned to his law practice, became embroiled in related litigation and later was retained by Wendell Willkie, then president of Commonwealth & Southern, to negotiate the sale of one of its subsidiaries to the TVA. For Loomis, though, the final affront came a few years later, when Congress held hearings on banking practices and Bonbright came under scrutiny for its huge profits. Though never accused of any wrongdoing, he adamantly refused to testify and defend himself against questions about the greedy design of big holding companies, which essentially allowed for an unlimited chain of acquisitions. The attack on his honor turned Loomis permanently away from politics and left him with the profound sense that it was a game whose rules he neither liked nor fully understood. He continued to support Stimson’s political career loyally and hoped he would one day run for president. But more and more, Loomis felt a revulsion for public life and preferred the sanctuary of his laboratory. “He didn’t want to have to fight the world,” said Paulie Loomis. “He was happy to let Henry Stimson fight for him.”
In the end, Thorne went to Washington alone, though he spoke for both of them when he preached strongly against too much government interference, warning, “Legislation which restricts the management of such companies unduly or limits their investments arbitrarily cannot fail to hurt the economic developments of the country.”
“Alfred hated all that,” said Ed Thorne. “He was very private, and he was not all that comfortable with controversy. He didn’t want any public role. It was the only time I ever heard my father complain about him.”
Loomis retreated to his scientific Valhalla in Tuxedo. His business associates were shocked by his self-chosen exile, which ended one of the bluest of blue-ribbon careers. From time to time, whenever a prestigious board seat came vacant, his name would be mentioned in connection with the plum job. When Loomis was honored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in March 1933, a New York Sunday writer observed that his “growing fortune” had clearly become “secondary to his scientific preoccupations,” and the transition from finance to physics, long in coming, was now complete: “He is chosen as one of 250 American scientists, listed as foremost in their different fields of research. He is a physicist.”
As the Journal wistfully concluded a few years later in a story on new business leaders, there was little chance that Loomis and Thorne would ever be lured back to “active duty” on Wall Street: “Shortly after the depression started, they went into retirement with their fortunes. Thorne spending more time fishing and hunting and Loomis with scientific work at his place up the Hudson. Loomis is now one of the top ranking scientists of the country. . . .”
GIVEN their spectacular success, it was only natural that Loomis and Thorne extended their partnership to include many projects outside business, based no doubt on their compatibility, mutual confidence, and shared appetite for new challenges and adventures. Although the country was in a depression, they were both vastly enriched, emboldened, and in high spirits and began to indulge in many of the luxurious pastimes enjoyed by their fellow millionaires. “Landon was always the instigator in those years,” said Paulie Loomis. “Landon could talk anybody into anything, and Alfred would always make it happen. They were made for each other, and they had a ball together.”
While Loomis certainly enjoyed living well, and maintained two large mansions in Tuxedo staffed by a dozen or more servants, along with a twenty-room duplex penthouse at 21 East 79th Street off Fifth Avenue, his primary interest was comfort and convenience, not the pursuit of stylish social ostentation, which was always more in Thorne’s line. Like many of New York’s gilded aristocrats, Thorne liked everything on a grand scale. He went on gaudy buying sprees, collecting art, antiques, and horses, all of which came with fancy pedigrees and even fancier price tags. His magnificent 230-acre Long Island estate, which he named Thorneham, boasted its own indoor and outdoor swimming pools, indoor tennis court, athletic house, and stables. Thorne maintained several large trout ponds on the property, which he kept well stocked, so the fishing was always good. He commissioned the famous landscape architect Umberto Innocenti to design the estate’s ornate gardens, which for many years were considered among the finest in the country.
“Landon was the showman,” said Bart Loomis, Alfred’s grandson, recalling the ostentatious $100,000 Tiffany sapphire necklace Thorne once presented to his wife, Julia. “He liked to own things—yachts, islands, railroads, you name it, he bought it. You want to talk about big money, Landon Ketchum Thorne was big money. He was the flashy one. That was not Alfred’s way, but he went along with it.”
Despite their contrasting personalities, Loomis and Thorne were as close as two men could be, professionally and personally, and Loomis enthusiastically joined in Thorne’s extravagant hobbies and sporting pursuits. Loomis’ three sons were close in age to Thorne’s two boys, Landon junior and Edwin, and the two families became inseparable, visiting each other often and going off on extended holidays together. In large part this was due to Julia Thorne, who was as charming and charismatic as her husband, and Loomis doted on her. Compared to his sister, Loomis’ wife, Ellen, seemed sweet but rather vague or, as one family member put it, “a bit on the fey side. At times, you wondered if she was really all there.” “Julia was very overpowering and kind of spoiled,” noted Paulie Loomis, “but both Alfred and Uncle Landon thought the world of her.”
Julia was at the center of the two tribes, and she “loved to hold court.” She threw splendid parties that were famous for the opulent gold dinner service adorning the table and the giant flagons of champagne that white-jacketed waiters tipped into glasses. Witty, intelligent, and unusually well read for a woman of her day, “she was one of the most informed women you could ever meet,” said her daughter-in-law Mimi Thorne Gilpatric, who was married to Landon junior. “She could hold forth about anything that was going on, whether it was politics or literature, and she always had something interesting to say.” She was a connoisseur of rare manuscripts and first editions, and assembled one of the foremost collections of William Blake, which she later gave to the Morgan Library. With age, she became very grand, and commissioned an elaborate genealogy of the Thorne family’s blue-blooded ancestry, which she had bound in leather, with hand-engraved parchment pages and an elaborate gilded crest on the cover.
Julia was in every way “a glamorous figure,” recalled Gilpatric. “She would be sitting there in one of her Mainbocher gowns, and all her jewelry, with five rings on each finger and gold bracelets from here to here”—pointing from wrist to elbow—“she looked like one of the royal family.”
During the winter of 1930, Thorne had been regularly featured in the sporting columns as a member of a syndicate of yachting enthusiasts headed by Paul Hammond, a great sailor, who were building the Whirlwind, one of the four yachts that would compete for the honor of defending the America’s Cup. The other three aspirants were the Enterprise, owned by Harold S. Vanderbilt; the Weetamoe, backed by a syndicate headed by Junius S. Morgan and George Nichols; and the Yankee, belonging to a Boston syndicate headed by John S. Lawrence and Chandler Hovey, with Charles Francis Adams, secretary of the navy, sailing her. But as it turned out, Hammond quickly got in over his head—spending a bundle on a second large boat to house his crew of thirty—and halfway through construction informed Thorne the syndicate was busted. So Thorne, with his deep pockets, took control of the syndicate and, as he did in all things, brought in Loomis as his equal partner. The two already owned several boats together, and Loomis agreed to split the cost of completing the yacht.
The two partners were prepared to spend whatever it took to win the America’s Cup. It was an unbelievably extravagant undertaking at the time, as J-class racing sloops were built exclusively by powerful syndicates of wealthy families such as the Astors and Vanderbilts and not by self-made men like Loomis and Thorne. While there is no record of how much money they lavished on the Whirlwind, a good measure lies in the ultimate fate of the J-boats themselves, which became too prohibitive even for the very rich, so that by the end of the 1940s, America’s Cup races were relegated to smaller twelve-meter boats.
Of course, the Whirlwind, which took its name from a famous clipper ship owned by a Thorne ancestor, was destined to be no ordinary racing sloop. The boat featured a highly original, innovative—and untested—design, which Loomis and Thorne hoped would give them the edge in the competition and win them the right to race against the British, namely Sir Thomas Lipton, in one of his periodic attempts to capture the cup from the New York Yacht Club. As one critic marveled at the time, “No cup yacht or any other racing craft ever carried quite so many newfangled ideas, and anyone who has the opportunity should carefully examine this marvelous creation.” The Whirlwind’s radical design was created by L. Francis Herreshoff, son of the famous Bristol naval architect Nat Herreshoff, who had turned out the previous five America’s Cup defenders. Rumor had it that the father had lent a hand in the design, and the boat, which was being built at Lawley’s shipyard in Boston, was the subject of many flattering notices and much fanfare, accompanied by intense speculation. “There has been much mystery about her,” The New York Times reported in March 1930:
Until the Whirlwind is overboard and rigged it will be impossible to pass judgment on her beauty. She is the longest and largest of the four defense boats, stretching several feet more on deck than any of the others, and is 158 tons, thirteen more than Yankee, the second largest. . . . She is the only real cutter, depending entirely on her keel, whereas the others have centerboards to put them in the sloop class. Also she is the only one of the four to have wood planking. She is of composite construction, with mahogany over steel frames. . . . With her large hull the Whirlwind will not be able to spread as much sail as the other boats. If she did she would not keep within the measurement limitations. A larger, lighter hull with less canvas is the plan for her.
Although his sailing experience had been mostly in racing small boats, Thorne was determined to take the wheel, while Loomis, who was an expert navigator from his days on Long Island Sound, tackled that job with his usual acumen and unwavering self-confidence. Naturally, Loomis adopted a scientific approach and enlisted the help of MIT’s Naval Architecture Department, and together they undertook a thorough study of hull shapes. During the test program, they also decided to replace the 158-foot mast with a metal one—at a cost of approximately $25,000—constructed of duralumin, the strongest and lightest aluminum alloy. In the preliminary races, the yacht still did not seem balanced, or “in her groove,” and they thought if they stepped the mast twenty inches forward, it would improve her windward handling and make her faster. But it took two men tugging at the wheel to keep her sails full and drawing in a breeze, and one time a helmsman was thrown clear over the wheel. In an effort to correct the fault, they decided to move the mast up again, a total of five feet forward from its original position. The boat was hauled out of the water so many times that summer, and was so many weeks behind her three rivals in shaking out her sails, that the odds were heavily against her in the preliminary betting.
Loomis hoped to improve her chances by seeing to it that the Whirlwind was outfitted with any number of ingenious devices of his own design. At the time, people joked that you could always spot the Loomis-Thorne boat a mile off because of all the whirling gigs and wind trackers that covered the deck. “Of course, Uncle Alfred developed some navigating equipment that was kind of the last word, and later a lot of people adapted his ideas to other things,” said Ed Thorne, who was sixteen at the time and split the job of cabin boy with his brother, taking turns reading the courses and speeds at ten-minute intervals for the navigator.
During the trials, according to Ed Thorne, Loomis never once came above deck but remained below, surrounded by all his gadgets: “We had a couple of races on foggy days, those days when you couldn’t even see more than a couple of hundred yards. And of course in those days, you didn’t have radar. But with Uncle Alfred’s calculations, we’d always find the mark, even when all the other people had trouble. The only race we ever won was because of his navigation skills. We cut the right buoy and everyone else cut the wrong one. It never even occurred to my father to come about that buoy, because Alfred said it was another fifteen seconds or thirty seconds, or whatever. They had complete trust in each other, they had that kind of partnership.”
Ultimately, the Whirlwind proved to be something of a clinker and finished dead last in the final race off Newport, Rhode Island. The victor, Vanderbilt’s Enterprise, later defeated Lipton’s Shamrock V. The Whirlwind was the outstanding failure of the America’s Cup that year: in twenty-two starts, she won only one race. The yacht, expected to be the one with the greatest power, never attained her potential and at times “looked as if she were trailing a sea anchor.” Everyone agreed, however, that she had by far the most spacious and luxurious living quarters of any America’s Cup defender. While some later carped that the yacht might have fared better if Thorne had allowed himself to be relieved at the wheel by a more experienced skipper, the larger problem—which would often prove to be the case with the younger Herreshoff’s creations—was finding her proper trim and rig. But at the end of the season, when it came time to settle the expenses, which all hands knew had run nearly half a million dollars, Thorne forever endeared himself to his friends when he told them “to forget it,” adding that he and Loomis “would look after the matter.”
In 1931, finding Long Island too tame and increasingly suburban, Thorne saw an opportunity to buy Hilton Head Island, in South Carolina, which before the bridge was built was an isolated strip of beach reachable only by boat. The island paradise, once home to wealthy southern landowners and sprawling plantations, was occupied by Union forces during the Civil War, and on General William Sherman’s orders, the confiscated land was sold to freed slaves for a dollar an acre. When the cotton crops failed, many abandoned Hilton Head, and the island was almost forgotten. In the 1890s, hunters began buying the property for recreational purposes, and a New Yorker named William P. Clyde eventually managed to acquire nine thousand acres, including the last of the antebellum houses, Honey Horn. When Thorne, whose ancestors had owned plantations in the Sea Islands for generations, heard that the current owner, a northern industrialist named Roy Rainey, had been ruined in the Crash, he proposed that he and Loomis buy the land and turn Hilton Head into a private hunting and fishing resort for family and friends. Loomis, who was by nature a loner, loved the idea of having his own island and was all for it.
“They paid about $120,000 in cash, because they had cash on the barrel head in those days,” recalled Ed Thorne. “They bought up about twenty thousand acres, which was virtually the entire island. There was almost nothing on it, except what had been an old Confederate fort, and the Honey Horn plantation, which was a one-story house that dated back to the Civil War. They fixed that up and expanded on it, and they turned it into a marvelous sporting preserve. They built another boat together, the Northern Light, which they took there.”
Even today, Betty Evans remembers being struck by how remote and fantastic the island was then: “There was no one there at all, only a few black families, and they spoke nothing but Gullah. It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen. Julia brought her horses there, and fixed up the house with the most elegant antiques and rugs. They threw huge house parties there, inviting all their family and friends. Early in the mornings, a boy would come and light a fire in the bedrooms while we were still asleep, and get the potbellied stove going in the bathrooms. Everybody would be up at the crack of dawn to go hunting. And you never saw such hunting. It had every animal known to man.”
Loomis and Thorne hired a local islander, Mose Hudson, to patrol their property on horseback and keep trespassing hunters away, and to make sure the reserve was always well stocked with mink and other game. “This was hunting in a grand style, with horses and dogs, and elegant picnics,” said Frederick Hack Jr., who grew up on the island and whose family later bought Honey Horn in 1950. “The whole plantation more or less operated on that level. It was quite something.” After a typical morning shoot, the party would find a shady spot and set up camp. “It was just like on safari,” recalled Paulie Loomis. “A black man would come along, all trimmed out in a waiter’s uniform, and bring tables, and tablecloths, and chairs, and china. You couldn’t believe your eyes. We’d have this fancy lunch outside, and they would grill quail, and great big oysters in the shell and melt butter. It was a feast.”
In the evenings, everyone would dress for dinner, and Julia would arrange for a wonderful feast in the big dining room. There would be a roaring fire afterward, and Loomis would keep the boys busy by giving them mathematical problems to work out or challenging them to a game of chess. Loomis, of course, always played with his back to the board and often played several matches at once, all the while keeping up a lively conversation with his other guests. Sometimes he could be persuaded to put on a magic show, and he would mesmerize them for hours doing tricks with a quarter and a few matchsticks. At the end of the evening, they always brought out a bottle of what Thorne called “sippin’ whiskey.” The island was littered with illegal stills, and he and Loomis took great pleasure in locating them all and helping themselves. Added Evans: “It was 120-proof bourbon—it only took one sip.”
At Honey Horn, Loomis enjoyed playing the country squire. He re-created Highhold, Stimson’s gentleman-farmer’s estate on Long Island where he had spent his happiest times as a boy. Over the years, with the help of a devoted manager named Ted Armstrong, he and Thorne transformed Honey Horn into a working farm, adding stables, servants quarters, a guesthouse, and laundry room. It was a totally self-sufficient compound, with its own milk cows, chickens, and a large vegetable garden. The generous offerings were described by a visitor:
The big kitchen at Honey Horn sent out a tempting fragrance of roast turkey and venison, of duck with orange sauce made from bittersweet island oranges, Carolina shrimp pie, oyster stewed with crisp bacon and onions and served with fluffy rice. There was crunchy benne seed candy in the crystal dish, or perhaps a plate of pecan pralines, with the nuts fresh and crisp from island trees.
Having made their fortune in rural electrification, Loomis and Throne fittingly imported an electric generator, bringing the first power to the island. Compared to the simple farms kept by the neighboring black families, Honey Horn was a mecca of modern engineering: the mere fact that they had the only tractor had a huge impact on the local economy. Over the years, Loomis and Thorne bought land from any families willing to sell, and by 1936 the black population on the island dropped to only three hundred as compared with three thousand forty years earlier. The northern conquerors even managed to acquire the last large lot, the 803-acre old Confederate Fort Walker site, from the federal government, for an additional $12,600. They had the island virtually to themselves until World War II, when the turn-of-the-century lighthouse in Palmetto Dunes became the site of a marine encampment. Gun placements, for target practice over the Atlantic Ocean, were set up on the beach, and Loomis’ sons remember collecting the shell casings that washed up on shore.
Over every winter for almost twenty years, Loomis and Thorne, along with their five sons, hunted to the hounds, shot skeet, fished, sailed, and entertained friends and important business executives, politicians, and a growing number of Loomis’ scientific colleagues. Stimson came to stay, as did Ernest Lawrence. On one occasion, they even played host to the king of Sweden. Guests would take the train from Penn Station to Hardeeville, a small station on the Atlantic coast line about twenty miles north of Savannah, where they would be met at the station and brought over to the island on a small boat. One frequent visitor was Karl Compton, who together with Loomis spent countless hours digging up the beaches in search of old Indian burial grounds, arrowheads, and other artifacts, all to no avail. In the process, they discovered that the place was teeming with poisonous snakes—huge rattlesnakes, water moccasins, and copperheads. Loomis had Compton call on his experts from MIT. “They would come over and trap them, so they could extract the venom to make serum,” said Evans. “I think Alfred also saw to it that some were sent to zoos.”
Loomis and Thorne loved the island and collected all the information they could on its early history and the wealthy men who had come before them and built the “Big Houses,” whose haunted ruins lay covered by weeds. There were also practical business reasons for becoming steeped in Hilton Head’s past. Eventually the land would be divided, sold, and developed, and prospective buyers would want a clear title and the names of the previous owners and dates of sale. They faced only one problem: Beaufort County’s land records had twice been destroyed, and no complete official history existed. Loomis and Thorne decided to fill in the gaps themselves and began researching the previous residents, their lots, titles, and sales, compiling detailed records of their own. An artist was commissioned to create a map showing the antebellum plantations, and the illustrated drawing was framed and hung in the hall at Honey Horn.
Loomis dedicated himself to making a scientific survey of the island, enlisting Compton’s help on more than one occasion, and over the years he had a number of elaborate maps drawn up. He also attempted to give a full account of the wildlife on their island paradise, noting for the record that “as many as 4,000 Widgeon have fed in the duck ponds during a winter”:
The island is used entirely for sporting purposes, ie:
Quail
Snipe
Dove
Duck
Deer
Wild Hog
Wild Turkey
Coon and Possum
Fishing (Sea-trout, Bass, etc. in the rivers and creeks;) (Blue fish, Red Snappers, etc., in the ocean.) (The oysters are plentiful and unusually good—also crab and shrimp.)
The covies of quail found in 1936 were 293—about 1,000 quail are killed during a season, the limit per gun a day being 10. The duck shooting is extraordinarily fine, and no less than 19 varieties have been seen on the Island, ie:
Mallard
Black Duck
Pintail
Widgeon
Gadwall
Blue Wing Teal
Green Wing Teal
Wood Duck
Shoveller
Canvasback
Redhead
Greater Scaup
Lesser Scaup
Ring Neck
Ruddy Duck
Bufflehead
Whistler
Hooded Werganser
Red-Breasted Werganser
Canada Goose
Much as he enjoyed Honey Horn, Loomis was probably happiest at Tower House, tinkering with the latest invention in his laboratory, listening to updates of the various experiments under way, and exchanging news and ideas with other scientists. But over the next few years, the island provided a welcome respite from his increasingly strained home life in Tuxedo. While they were the last family in the world to discuss such matters openly, it had become painfully obvious that Loomis regarded his wife with something more akin to forbearance than affection. “She was a very dependent person, on her parents, on Alfred, and on all the help,” said Paulie Loomis. “She used to have people waiting on her hand and foot, which Alfred just hated. He used to complain that he couldn’t walk into a room without bumping into one of her ‘Irish biddies.’ The fact is, I don’t think they ever really got along.”
Ed Thorne was not surprised that they drifted apart. “She was a lovely, sweet person, but very, very Boston. She was not a gregarious person at all, and sort of buried herself in her books and nineteenth-century novels. It almost seemed as if she were kind of out of this world.” Over the next few years, Ellen, who was always becomingly “delicate” in the Victorian sense, would suffer from recurring attacks of migraine headaches and mysterious ailments and took to her bed for weeks at a time. Loomis, following a practice that was then common to the point of being fashionable in the upper and middle classes, packed her off to various hospices and clinics for extended stays to be treated for nervous exhaustion. In February 1932, during one of these confinements, Stimson wrote to Ellen in the hospital, and in typical WASP fashion advised her to keep a stiff upper lip until she could regain her strength:
My dear little Ellen,
When I remember how faithfully you used to write letters to me in periods of stress and trouble, it makes me feel remorseful that I have not written to you before. I did not like to write a dictated letter, but I have been unable to get the time to do anything else. So finally I have curbed my pride, and I am sending you this note of affectionate encouragement.
I am dreadfully sorry that you are having such a long tie-up, but I am very glad that they are at least making you rest and avoid a little of the terrific strain you have been under. I know how your heart must be torn at being shut up and away from Dedham [her parents’ home in Massachusetts, where she often stayed when “undone” by life and illness], but I also know that you will reconcile yourself courageously to this as the best way to solve the problem and get fit again. Your life is so invaluable to so many people that you must take every step possible to save your health. If you can, send me a message through Alfred sometime just to let me know how you are feeling and getting on.
The exact nature of Ellen’s complaints, and whether or not many of her symptoms might fall under the heading of “neurasthenia”—the term then given to problems that occupied the gray area between medical and mental illness—remains a matter of some debate within the family. “Oh, she was a terrible hypochondriac,” said Evans. “The doctors prescribed all kinds of things, and she’d take some draft of medicine and go to bed for the day. If you went in to see her in the afternoons, she was always lying on the chaise in her room with the lights dimmed, the folds of her fancy lace gown perfectly arranged all around her.”
But to many in the family, Ellen’s illness seemed to serve as a convenient excuse for Loomis to pack her off, leaving him free to pursue his interests without distraction. “He kept trying to get rid of her,” said Paulie Loomis. “She wasn’t sickly, she was sick. But he wasn’t very sympathetic. Alfred wasn’t the kind of person who tried to understand people. He pushed a lot on her. And he changed. I think he changed into who he wanted to be and didn’t have a lot of time for her anymore.”
Loomis was not any easier a father than he was a husband. He set the bar very high when it came to his three sons. After he cashed out of Bonbright, he awarded each of the three boys a substantial share of their inheritance—roughly $1 million—on the theory that it was never too early to begin charting one’s own course. The youngest, Henry, was only fourteen when he was given complete financial independence. “Father decided to divide the estate because he didn’t want his money to become a tool of discipline with us boys,” he once recalled. “I remember that his cronies were aghast when he gave us the money and warned that we would make all kinds of mistakes with it. Father said we would make mistakes inevitably, but he’d rather have us make mistakes with the sums we’d be playing around with as boys than the ones we might make if we had to wait until his death to get the money, when we were thirty or forty years old.”
While Loomis routinely drafted his sons as “guinea pigs” in his research, he remained, for the most part, a distant and detached figure. They loved working with him in his laboratory and were fascinated by his projects and famous guests, but there was never any question that he was far more interested and engaged in his world than in theirs. As one of the many small rebellions that teenagers specialize in, Loomis’ sons regularly played a rather hazardous game of chicken on the railroad tracks that ran through Tuxedo, competing to see which of them dared stand the longest in the path of the approaching express trains. Not even this deadly sport succeeded in attracting his attention, and according to Henry, Loomis never bothered to reprimand them: “We were never consciously influenced by Father in anything—about getting cars, going out with girls, traveling or staying home, where to go to college, or anything else.”
Loomis was nothing if not difficult to impress, and his sons devoted much of their lives to trying to win his approval. They were fiercely competitive and went to great lengths to exceed their father’s expectations—engaging in daredevil sports, immediately volunteering for duty in World War II, and later endeavoring to achieve a measure of his success in either science, business, or politics. They would spend months mastering complicated chess strategies at boarding school, only to come home to be cut down by Loomis in a swift series of moves. There was a merciless quality to his reason that always seemed to defeat them. Henry never forgot a remark his father made over Christmas in 1935, when he and his two older brothers were making plans for their summer vacation. “Lee and I were talking about crossing the Atlantic in a thirty-five-foot boat, and Farney was planning to climb mountains in India,” he recalled. “Mother asked Father: ‘Will you still believe in your theories about children if all three of them get killed this summer?’ Father replied: ‘Three is not a sufficient number to prove any scientific theory.’ ”
“Alfred was a wonderful man in his own way, but he wasn’t really very much of a human being,” observed Paulie, who felt her former husband, Henry, and his brothers had been treated to a “funny, hard sort of childhood. . . . Alfred was selfish to the point where he never really gave very much unless he enjoyed what he was doing. Everything was always calculated—what could be gained, what could be lost. As long as he was happy, that was all that mattered.”
LOOMIS used his new freedom and financial resources to extend his largesse beyond his own laboratory to a great variety of philanthropic endeavors. Since the turn of the century, Andrew Carnegie had made funding schools, laboratories, and other institutions for the advancement of knowledge almost an obligation for newly rich American tycoons, particularly for those eager to put to rest any lingering doubts about how their money was made. As the billionaire who spent a lifetime building a steel empire had once stipulated, “Amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry.” It was a Gilded Age sense of social responsibility Loomis’ own grandfather had deeply felt, and he had dedicated his latter years to building tuberculosis sanitariums and medical schools. Now, at this low ebb in the country’s fortunes, having accumulated an embarrassment of riches, Loomis found new purpose in giving away his money. He would use his wealth to encourage scientific investigation and provide opportunities for excellent men, while indulging in his favorite hobby at the same time.
He gave money to any project—no matter how large or small or whimsical—that appealed to his Baconian belief that scientific discovery could be claimed by anyone “keeping the eye steadily fixed upon the facts of nature.” He himself was living proof of this principal, as he regularly became expert in a new field in only a few months, each time making important observations in the frontiers of astronomy, biology, and chemistry before moving on to the next of nature’s challenges. Loomis possessed a fundamental American bias in favor of experimental rather than theoretical science, which was repeatedly rewarded by the pioneering research carried out by the succession of brilliant young researchers he attracted to Tower House. His modus operandi was simple: he furnished the men and the money necessary to attack a problem, and once they had made a contribution, he let the momentum carry the others forward while he hunted for new, more fertile fields of inquiry. As his son Henry once observed, “As soon as he starts working on the next decimal place in the final answer, he shoves off.”
As a consequence of his insatiable curiosity, and impatience to make his reputation as quickly as possible, Loomis pursued a peculiarly eclectic strategy, attempting to advance and promote research in a wide range of disciplines, both through his own efforts and by funding the work of others. A great believer in self-education, Loomis, with Thorne’s help, established a foundation to foster America’s budding engineers, offering stipends so students could go on six-week tours of the leading industrial plants of the East and Middle West. He wanted to give young men who had not had his advantages of higher education an opportunity to travel and to see firsthand what was happening in modern manufacturing enterprises. The all-expense-paid camping trips sent ten boys at a time across the country in special Loomis-designed, gadget-laden Ford motor trucks that transformed into large tents, complete with sleeping quarters, kitchen, and “parlor.”
The only requirement was that participants had enough money to pay for their own boots—a paper package containing a khaki uniform was provided free of charge—and agreed to keep a diary of everything they did and saw during their travels. Loomis contacted Compton at MIT, who agreed that it seemed “an interesting venture” and promised to send over enough “technology men” to fill one of the trucks. In all, two thousand young “industrialists” made the trip from Tuxedo to Kansas and back, and Loomis paid to have selections from their diaries printed privately in booklet form.
“It was a very extravagant trip,” remembered John Modder, who like many local boys at the time considered signing up. “The average worker was making about a dollar a day, maybe a dollar and a half. Loomis was giving people sixty dollars to go on the trip, which would be like a thousand now. It was mostly college students, but anybody could go, and quite a few from Tuxedo did. And if you had some sort of idea you wanted to work on, you could go up there and tell Mr. Loomis, and he’d feed you and house you and everything else while you were working.”
One newspaper columnist, noting Loomis’ propensity to underwrite all manner of projects, predicted that if he kept up this hobby, his name would soon be “not so well known in Wall Street as he is in the field of science”:
It is in the field of physics that this studious financier has his primary interest. In Tuxedo Park, his home, he has built the Loomis Laboratories and any scientist who wishes to devote a week to a year of study to pure science (commercialism is as far from the minds of the true scientist as it is from the heart of a Rembrandt) is welcome to remain there as Mr. Loomis’ guest. Mr. Loomis likewise is conducting his own studies, and he has surrounded himself with interesting scientific students, largely drawn from the faculties of leading American universities. He would rather sit in on an argument over the Einstein theory than tune in on an Aldrich versus Eccles debate [Mariner Eccles, head of the Federal Reserve Board] on excess reserves. . . .
Loomis was not interested in public acclaim so much as a certain kind of respectability, and many of his large charitable donations and anonymous gifts were clearly designed to court favor with the scientific establishment, which might otherwise have been inclined to dismiss him as a dilettante. There had long been a prejudice against “amateurs” in American science—the scores of laymen, collectors, and quacks who supported the many popular journals and publications but otherwise gave the profession a bad name. As far back as the 1840s, the physicist Joseph Henry had complained, “Every man who can . . . exhibit a few experiments to a class of young ladies is called a scientist.” Since that time, Henry and his allies at Harvard and other institutions of higher learning had organized and closed rank to keep amateurs from playing a prominent role in research, and to that end, they created a national professional organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fraternity over whose membership they could guarantee control. Even more exclusive was the National Academy of Sciences, a private organization created during the Civil War to provide advice to the government and one that Loomis longed to join.
Aware of their deep-seated prejudice against “gentleman scientists,” Loomis launched a calculated campaign to win over influential members of the profession. He was willing to pay his dues and to earn membership in their club. His famous laboratory gave him a strategic advantage, and he sponsored dozens of scientific conferences, meetings, lectures, and dinners, increasingly ingratiating himself with cash-poor universities and scientific agencies. Loomis, along with Wood, sat on the planning committee to select science exhibits for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, and several of the meetings were held at Tuxedo Park. The fair’s triumphant theme that year was “the Century of Progress,” highlighting the benefits of science and technology. Unfortunately, it was the midst of the Depression, a time when many politicians and leading public figures were questioning what the industrial advances had wrought on society, so Loomis reached into his own deep pockets to fund many of the large-scale exhibits—doing pro bono public relations work for his chosen field.
With his dedication to pure research, willingness to play favorites, and unlimited funds, Loomis turned himself into a powerful behind-the-scenes force. Along the way, he made some important friends, chief among them the popular Compton. The two men were a natural fit: Compton with his genial manner and political skill, Loomis with his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and talent for fostering other scientists’ work. Thanks in part to Loomis’ maneuvering, Compton was offered the job as MIT’s new president in 1933. As a testimony to his loyalty, Compton in turn stated as one of his conditions to taking the job that his influential patron be named a trustee. According to Loomis, it was not an empty bluff: “As a new president, he wanted to know if he asked for things, he could get them. He probably used this as a test to see how serious they were,” he said, adding, “They wanted young blood. He was young and I was young.” He would go on to help establish MIT’s graduate school, providing substantial financial aid and raising funds from other business leaders.
As adept as he was at playing politics, Loomis never underwrote any project that did not appeal to his own specific studies and interests. During the height of the Depression, when most academic journals teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, he offered to foot the bill for the fees assessed by the Physical Review, so that new and interesting work could be published without regard to cost. For years afterward, anyone who submitted an article received a bill along with a form letter from the Physical Review that stated: “In the event that the author or the institution is unable to pay the page charges, these will be paid by an anonymous friend. . . .” While his identity as the Review’s “angel” was not made public until after his death, it was common knowledge among the presidents of leading institutions, who in turn began appointing Loomis to their prestigious boards and committees.
By June 1933, when Yale University conferred the honorary degree of master of science on its alumnus, Loomis was lauded as a man who defied traditional categories and whose experimental approach made him a bold example for the times. The citation listed his several identities—“lawyer, businessman, physicist, inventor, philanthropist”—and compared him to the prototypical American physicist: “In his varied interests, his powers of invention, and his services to his fellow-man, Mr. Loomis is the twentieth century Benjamin Franklin.”
All his efforts made certain that while he had retired to Tuxedo Park, it would not be for long. He was only forty-five years old, and his finest work was still ahead of him. His reputation—carefully crafted by himself and the wily Robert Wood—had spread to Europe, and Tower House had gained international fame as one of the best-equipped and most interesting private American laboratories. Whereas today physicists look forward to spending August studying at a school on Lake Como, in the 1930s the lucky few received an invitation to spend the summer at Tuxedo Park, working with the famous scientists who gathered there, including Fermi, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Einstein.
Alvarez, who was working in the Berkeley Physics Department, first heard of the legendary Alfred Loomis from a Berkeley colleague named Francis Jenkins, who had spent a summer at Tower House as Loomis’ guest. “He had told me in wide-eyed amazement about the fantastic laboratory in Tuxedo Park, and about the mysterious millionaire physicist who owned it,” recalled Alvarez. Jenkins told him in confidence that he was sure Loomis was the Physical Review’s anonymous benefactor. He thought Loomis a “wonderful person” but made it clear he did not care for the other residents of the park. “He thought they were too ‘snooty,’ and looked down on the scientists as barbarians who ‘didn’t even dress for dinner.’ ”