Book Review | Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science that Changed the Course of World War II by Jennet Conant

Tuxedo Park is about a Wall Street tycoon, a brilliant scientific mind, and an inventor of devices and instruments used by the military to defeat the forces of evil.

No, he’s not Tony Stark; he’s Alfred Lee Loomis, and his work helped bring down the Nazis and win World War II. And yet, you’re unlikely to find a lot of information on Loomis in the history books. A businessman turned scientist, he was one step up from a dilettante among scientists, possessing the abilities to understand and to cultivate scientific research in his top of the line, skunk-works lab that he built on his property in the decades preceding World War II. His rise was remarkable for the seeming ease with which he accomplished every task before him.

Prior to the war, Loomis built a fortune as a Wall Street investor selling bonds for the incipient utilities industry. As the market began to bubble, Loomis recognized the signs of instability, and divested his holdings in utilities. Then as the crash of 1929 rolled the country, he earned even more through careful investing, growing his fortune at a time when others were ruined. By the time the 1930s were closing, Loomis had been able to leave business with a fortune that put him in the upper echelons of society in America, while at the same time allowing him to pursue his true interest, scientific research. As World War II began, and the Nazi menace spread, Loomis joined a nationwide network of scientists working to develop technologies that would help defeat Germany and its allies.

Loomis’ story is remarkable, but in many ways felt lacking largely because of the lack of tension or obstacle. Written by a descendent, Tuxedo Park (the location of the laboratory Loomis built) feels like a long Wall Street Journal article, where quotations are given with the expectation that they will appear in the press and facts are presented dispassionately. In short, the story lacks narrative, a sense of progress. Loomis appears on the scene–whatever the scene may be– and sua sponte achieves his aims. As one friend suggested while discussing the book, there’s not many obstacles that can’t be overcome, apparently, if you’re both brilliant and filthy stinking rich. Especially rich.

And yet, wealth is no excuse for a flat story. Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill also came from means, rising from wealthy families, but both would overcome great obstacles during their life to create biographies that beg to be told. If Loomis has that story, I found this one to be lacking in that regards. While I’m glad to have learned a new chapter of the World War II saga, I don’t know that I would have missed not reading it.

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Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science that Changed the Course of World War II Book Cover

Title: Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science that Changed the Course of World War II
Author: Jennet Conant
Genre: Nonfiction, biography
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: May 9, 2002
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 352

In the fall of 1940, as German bombers flew over London and with America not yet at war, a small team of British scientists on orders from Winston Churchill carried out a daring trans-atlantic mission. The British unveiled their most valuable military secret in a clandestine meeting with American nuclear physicists at the Tuxedo Park mansion of a mysterious Wall Street tycoon, Alfred Lee Loomis. Powerful, handsome, and enormously wealthy, Loomis had for years led a double life, spending his days brokering huge deals and his weekends working with the world's leading scientists in his deluxe private laboratory that was hidden in a massive stone castle. In this dramatic account of a hitherto unexplored but crucial story of the war, Jennet Conant traces one of the world's most extraordinary careers and scientific enterprises. She describes Loomis' phenomenal rise to become one of the Wall Street legends of the go-go twenties. He foresaw the stock market crash of 1929 in time to protect his vast holdings, making a fortune while other bankers were losing their shirts. He rode out the Depression years in high style, and indulged in the hobbies of the fabulously rich. He raced his own America's Cup yacht against the Vanderbilts and Astors, and purchased Hilton Head Island in South Carolina as his private game reserve. Conant writes about the glamour and privilege of his charmed circle as well as Loomis' marriage to a beautiful but depressive wife, whom he sent away for repeated hospitalizations while he pursued a covert affair with his protege's young wife. His bitter divorce scandalized New York society and drove Loomis into near seclusion in East Hampton. At the height of hisinfluence on Wall Street, Loomis abruptly retired and devoted himself purely to science. He turned his Tuxedo Park laboratory into the meeting place for the most visionary minds of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, James Franck, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. With England threatened by invasion, he joined Vannevar Bush, Karl Compton, and the author's grandfather, Harvard president James B. Conant, in mobilizing civilian scientists to defeat Nazi Germany, and personally bankrolled pioneering research into the radar detection systems that ultimately changed the course of World War II. Together with his friend Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning atom smasher, Loomis established a top-secret wartime laboratory at MIT and recruited the most famous names in physics. Through his close ties to his cousin Henry Stimson, who was secretary of war, Loomis was able to push FDR to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create the advanced radar systems that defeated the German Air Force and deadly U-boats, and then to build the first atomic bomb. One of the greatest scientific generals of World War II, Loomis' legacy exists not only in the development of radar but also in his critical role in speeding the day of victory.