An American president’s partisan gift to the Radium Queen
A short museum dispatch from Warsaw, Poland.
Just north of Warsaw’s tidy downtown skyline of Soviet-era brutalism and glimmering new towers bearing the logos of Huawei, Samsung and McDonald’s is a neighborhood called New Town. Contrary to the name given over 600 years ago, the district looks charmingly old. On Sunday morning, as I walked around enjoying my one free day here, the sun poured down from the terracotta shingle roofs onto the narrow, medieval streets lined with souvenir shops and restaurants with laminated picture menus meant to appeal to tourists sipping brunch-time beers and visiting the city’s oldest church, a gothic chapel dedicated in 1411 to St. Mary.
It was here, across from a gem store and an ice cream shop, that I found a shrine to a similarly named but secular Polish icon: Maria Skłodowska-Curie.
The famed scientist was born in the three-story tenement on Freta Street where her mother ran a boarding house for girls. Since 1967, Poland’s chemistry society has maintained the site as a museum to the physicist-cum-chemist twice awarded the Nobel Prize for her pioneering research into radiation.
If you find yourself in Warsaw, it’s worth a visit. The museum’s collection of photographs, notebooks, and laboratory equipment illustrates the audioguide’s impressively thorough biography of her life – the most exciting parts of which took place outside Poland, primarily in Paris. I won’t go into everything. But I did want to share with you one thing that struck me as funny and peculiar: The elephant in the room.
In a display case on the second floor, next to a petrified wood paperweight and a lacquered box, is a turquoise elephant figurine. President Herbert Hoover gave Curie the trinket as a gift when she visited the White House in October 1929.
Curie hadn’t crossed the Atlantic for a model of African megafauna. She arrived that year for her second and final trip to the United States to raise money for the newly-established Radium Institute in Warsaw, where she was working on new treatments for previously incurable cancers.
Some 31 years earlier, she and her husband and research partner, Pierre Curie, had discovered radium, a radionuclide that naturally forms from the decay of uranium and thorium. But the metal remained rare and expensive, costing $100,000 per gram – over $1.8 million in today’s dollars.
As luck would have it, a chemical company in the Belgian Congo had begun ramping up commercial production of the metal around that time, increasing the global market’s supply enough to halve the price.
So when Curie stopped by the White House to meet the Republican president, he bestowed her with a $50,000 check. Hoover told the Associated Press at the time that the money was an expression of the American people’s gratitude for the "beneficent service Madame Curie has given to all mankind."
But, according to federal archivists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the news was overshadowed by a different and far more catastrophic market shift. Two days before Curie’s visit, Wall Street stocks crashed, lighting the economic fuse that exploded into the Great Depression.
Just a year earlier, Hoover had delivered a speech promoting the idea that his Republican Party stood for “rugged individualism” and against what he called “a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines of paternalism and state socialism.” In his view, the U.S. relied too much on the federal government to intervene in the economy during World War I. His approach instead focused on enacting new tariffs to protect the wealthy titans of American industry from foreign competition. Hoover was so thoroughly blamed for making the depression worse that the makeshift shanty towns into which impoverished, out-of-work Americans moved were infamously called Hoovervilles. The disaster paved the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats.
There’s relevance here to today. President Joe Biden came to power amid the pandemic-induced crash and enacted policies openly modeled on FDR’s legacy. While still light on policy details in her 11th-hour bid to succeed Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris has so far signaled she would take a similar approach.
With Donald Trump publicly pining this year for a market crash and proposing enormous new tariffs to boost his bid to reclaim the White House, Democrats have attacked the Republican presidential nominee as a 21st century Hoover. Notably, the 31st president’s descendants do not appreciate the comparison.
At least one parallel, however, is undeniable: the two Republicans’ partisan bent.
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In the otherwise silent exhibition room at the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Museum, I couldn't help letting out an awkward laugh when the Polish-accented English of the audioguide explained why Hoover gifted the scientist the elephant. It was the symbol of the GOP.
A decade after a Democratic administration had made the restoration of Poland’s independence a key demand in the treaty that ended the First World War, Hoover wanted to remind Curie that the American people’s scientific support came wrapped in his party’s banner.
Nearly a century later, with Poland leading Europe’s effort to help Ukraine repel Russia’s invasion, the country’s prime minister is warning that a victory for the isolationist Republican candidate would be “disadvantageous.” So it goes.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Following a hectic few months of research, travel and writing, I’m pleased to be back in your inbox. I appreciate your patience, and I’m really excited to share with you some of the projects I have been working on in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, you can expect a forthcoming recap of all the drama that unfolded in the world of building codes and new developments in nuclear energy, two favorite topics of long-time subscribers to this newsletter. I might even have a little more light fare from Poland to share with you in the coming days.
For now, I thank you, as always, for your time and attention. I hope you felt this little museum story earned it. If not, maybe these songs will. Since it’s the end of the summer, and I waited so long to return to your inbox, it seems only fair that I give you more than the usual lone banger.
The first track is called “Zanja” by Italian jazz composer Gerardo Frisina. I don’t remember where I first heard the song, but I’ll never forget when it was seared into my memory. On the scorching Sunday afternoon when Joe Biden made the historic decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race, I was out running errands. I had just left the barbershop and popped over to the new Palestinian café across the street. As I stepped back outside, slid on my sunglasses, put this song back on my headphones, and took my first sip of an iced coffee, I opened my phone to Twitter and saw the news. That chaotic moment felt cinematic with Frisina’s dissonant, rhythmic piano as the soundtrack.
The second song should keep you visualizing my home borough. It’s called “Wavy in Brooklyn” by Felukah, an incredible up-and-coming local artist from Egypt and New York who raps and sings in both English and Arabic. The Boston-based Sudanese rapper Nadine El Roubi also has a really tight verse on the track. I can’t even count how many times I played this song and others from Felukah’s recent album as I cruised along the Belt Parkway with the windows down this summer or purposefully switched to the N train just to catch the bridgeview into Manhattan.
The third is called “Love of the Tiger.” The original track is by the Brooklyn-based Israeli indie-folk singer and guitarist Dida Pelled, but this one is a remix by the Los Angeles-based Australian electronic duo Jake and Abe. This poppy, upbeat version reminds me of songs I was obsessed with a decade ago by bands like Pnau and Yumi Zouma. It’s fun.
The last is a bit of a mystery to me. Comically named “TALK YO ASS OFF,” the song found its way into my ears via a Spotify playlist a few weeks ago while I was working out at the gym and I haven’t gotten it out of my head since. There isn’t much online about the artist, Always Proper. Their website is down for maintenance. After poking around on social media and looking at the Da Share Z0ne-eque album art, I can at least confirm they’re from Texas.
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Later today I’m heading down to Karpacz, Poland, where I’m speaking at the country’s 33rd Economic Forum next week. Come say hi if you’re there.
Signing off from sunny Warsaw, where the locals so love their national musical hero Frédéric Chopin that they put on two free recitals every Sunday all summer long in the city’s biggest park. I caught one yesterday. The entire park was filled, with people from all backgrounds sitting on every inch of grass and every garden wall. I saw a little girl going wild gesticulating the keys as the final number crescendoed while her dad sat mesmerized by the music. A really magical experience that I won’t soon forget.