David E. Lilienthal
David Eli Lilienthal (born July 8, 1899 in Morton , Illinois ; † January 15, 1981 ) was an American lawyer and head of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Atomic Energy Commission .
Life
Lilienthal was born in Morton as the son of Jewish emigrants from the former Habsburg monarchy. The father had a clothing store and the family moved frequently in Indiana , which later helped him professionally because of the local knowledge he acquired.
Lilienthal studied at DePauw University in Greencastle and was active in the Phi Beta Kappa and Delta Upsilon fraternities . He was also the spokesman for his semester, won a rhetoric competition and was known as a boxer. He met his future wife Helen Marian Lamb (1896–1999) in 1913.
After a summer job with a newspaper in Mattoon , the Daily Journal-Gazette , he moved to Harvard Law School . Despite his rather average academic performance, he achieved an important mentor in Felix Frankfurter .
He then worked for a few private law firms. Among other things, his participation in the so-called Sweet Trial, a murder trial, became known. The black doctor Ossian Sweet defended himself with friends and siblings in 1925, gun in hand, against a mob who wanted to drive him out of the predominantly white neighborhood immediately after moving into his house . One man was shot dead and another seriously injured. The subsequent acquittal for Sweets brother, Sweet himself and the others involved was an important step for the black minority and their interest group NAACP . Lilienthal also wrote an article for the progressive-left-liberal weekly magazine The Nation under the title Has the Negro the Right of Self-Defense? .
Another focus of Lilienthal's legal activities were infrastructure projects and semi-public or municipal utilities. Among other things, he was in charge of the Railway Labor Act, a legislative proposal which contributed to the improved right to strike and the freedom of association in infrastructure projects , which at the time was not a matter of course . He also assisted the city of Chicago in a lawsuit over their telephone company. Lilienthal was introduced to the governor and moderate Republican Philip La Follette and worked closely with him at times.
On the recommendation of his mentor, Lilienthal began to write diaries during his studies, which were later published and met with great interest. After working for the TVA and the Atomic Energy Commission, which made him known nationwide, he worked for the investment bank Lazard Freres. In 1951 he received the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences . In 1955 Lilienthal founded an engineering office, the Development and Resources Corporation (D&R), which continued some of the activities started at TVA internationally. He remained professionally and publicly active until shortly before his death in 1981.
Lilienthal and the Tennessee Valley Authority
Lilienthal worked as an employee of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission under Governor Philip La Follette for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), in whose first governing body he was then convened in 1932. His former professor Frankfurter had supported him with the application.
The TVA was a central infrastructure program of the New Deal . The program was not just about setting up an energy operator and its infrastructure. The TVA also served regional development, planning and economic development, which was an unusually strong state intervention in the market by American standards. Political controversies about the project were inevitable, fueled by Wendell Willkie , among others . The region around the Tennessee Valley was extremely poor, even by the conditions of the Great Depression, and the success of the TVA proved the initially controversial development project right in the eyes of the public. On August 4, 1947, Lilienthal was featured on the cover of Time Magazine and was henceforth known as Mr. TVA .
Atomic energy
In 1946, Dean Acheson asked Lilienthal to lead a panel of experts from industry, the military Manhattan Project, and infrastructure managers and administrators on the US attitude to nuclear proliferation at the UN for President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes .
He was subordinate to James Bryant Conant , Vannevar Bush , John Jay McCloy and Leslie R. Groves . In addition, Chester I. Barnard , head of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, J. Robert Oppenheimer , Charles Allen Thomas of Monsanto, and General Electric's chief developer Harry A. Winne were involved. According to Lilienthal, the commissioning politicians “had no clue what was going on”.
The report on the results, in the original the Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy or the Acheson-Lilienthal Report , proposed in 1946 that the nuclear monopoly in the civilian sector should be abandoned. For the transfer in favor of an international authority, strict controls and inspections of the proliferation should be allowed and enforced. The concept later became the basis of the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA .
From October 1946 to February 1950 Lilienthal headed the US Atomic Energy Commission and was a pioneer of non-military control of the US nuclear program.
In 1963 he spoke out against a too rapid development of a civilian nuclear industry because he saw the disposal question as not sufficiently clarified. The nuclear specialist and critic Klaus Traube quoted Lilienthal in a review of a basic work on German nuclear history in Der Spiegel as saying: “If you had known as early as 1946 that in the end nothing more than a new way of generating electricity would come out of nuclear technology, plus one that would was not even cheaper than the previous methods, Congress would never have been ready for the billions in funding. "
membership
In 1948 Lilienthal was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
Literature (selection)
- David Lilienthal. (1944). TVA: Democracy on the March .
- David Lilienthal (1971). The Journals of David Lilienthal, Vol. V , 1959-1963.
- David Lilienthal (1983). The Journals of David Lilienthal, Vol. VII , 1968-1981.
- David Ekbladh (2002). 'Mr. TVA ': Grass-Roots Development, David Lilienthal, and the Rise and Fall of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a Symbol for US Overseas Development 1933-1973. Diplomatic History , 26 (3), 335-374.
- David Ekbladh (2008). Profits of Development: The Development and Resources Corporation and Cold War Modernization. Princeton University Library Chronicle , 69 (3), 487-505.
- Erwin E. Hargrove (1994). Prisoner of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933-1990 .
- Jessica Wang (1999). American Science in an Age of Anxiety . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-4749-6 .
Web links
- David E. Lilienthal estate at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University
- Bibliography at the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
- Newspaper article about David E. Lilienthal in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Neuse, pp. 19-20.
- ↑ David E. Lilienthal, “Has the Negro the Right of Self-Defense?” The Nation , December 23, 1925, pp. 724-725.
- ^ Public Welfare Award . National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved January 14, 2016.
- ^ Lilienthal Journals. Vol. 2. p. 10.
- ↑ Quoted in Cooke. P. 42.
- ^ Wolfgang Rudig: Anti-nuclear Movements: A World Survey of Opposition to Nuclear Energy. Longman, 1990, p. 61.
- ↑ Klaus Traube : A pile of broken glass in the atomic scene . In: Der Spiegel . No. 4 , 1984, pp. 71-76 ( online ).
- ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 ( PDF ). Retrieved October 11, 2015
Lilienthal | Dean | Strauss | McCone | Seaborg | Schlesinger | Ray
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lilienthal, David E. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lilienthal, David Eli (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American lawyer and senior civil servant |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 8, 1899 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Morton , Illinois |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 15, 1981 |