President Hoover and Madame Curie

Grand Old Partisan celebrates more than SEVENTEEN decades of Republican heroes and heroics.

Today, I spotlight a historic meeting of politics and science. October 30th 1929, Herbert Hoover received famous physicist Marie Curie at the White House. At the ceremony, he gave her a check for $50,000 to buy one gram of radium. Curie would use it to buy this radioactive metal for research. The money had been raised by the women of America.

Said the President:
 
"I am sure that I represent the whole American people when I express our gratification to Madame Curie that she should have honored our country by coming here. We give to her the welcome of a people who are grateful for the beneficent service she has given to all mankind.

It is not necessary for me to recount the great fundamental discovery associated with the names of her late husband and herself. The discovery of radium was an outstanding triumph of research in the realm of pure science. It was indeed a great and successful exploration into the unknown from which a new truth has brought to the world a practical revolution in our conceptions of substance. It has advanced all thought on the constitution of matter. And like all great discoveries of fundamental substance and fact it has found application to human use. In the treatment of disease, especially of cancer, it has brought relief of human suffering to hundreds of thousands of men and women.

As an indication of the appreciation and the respect which our people feel for Madame Curie, generous-minded men and women under the leadership of Mrs. William B. Meloney have provided the funds with which a gram of radium is to be purchased and presented to the hospital and research institute which bears her name in Warsaw. The construction of this hospital was a magnificent tribute by the city of her birth and the Polish people, in which the American people are glad to have even this opportunity of modest participation. The whole of this occasion where we pay tribute to a great scientist is again a recognition of the fundamental importance of scientific research and a mark of public appreciation of those who have given their lives to human service through its profession."

Madame Curie replied:
 
"I am conscious of my indebtedness to my friends in America, who for the second time, with great kindness and understanding, have gratified one of my dear wishes. My work is very much my life, and I have been made happy by your generous support of it.

I feel deeply the importance of what has been said by the President of the United States about the value of pure science; this has been the creed of my life. Scientific research has its great beauty and its reward in itself; and so I have found happiness in my work.

It has been, however, an additional as well as an unexpected happiness to know that my work could be used for relief in human suffering.

I do not believe that I deserve all the praise that has been given me, but I highly value the friendly feeling expressed by the President."

Grateful for his famine efforts after WWI, she continued:

""Mr. President, in my native land your name is revered for having saved, by your humanitarian work, a large part of the young generation. Your kind work of today will add to the gratitude of the Polish people toward you.

In accepting this precious gift, which will hasten the opening of the radium institute in Warsaw, I offer you and my American friends my most profound thanks. My laboratory in Paris will keep in close relation to the Warsaw institute, and I will like to remember the American gifts of radium to me as a symbol of enduring friendship binding your country to France and to Poland."

Later that day, they visited the National Academy of Sciences building.

Back to Basics for the Republican Party is my civil rights history of the GOP. To quote the book: "The more we Republicans know about the history of our party, the more Democrats will worry about the future of theirs. For more information, see www.grandoldpartisan.com. 

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Michael Zak is author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party, a history of GOP civil rights achievement.

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