Joan was once asked to summarize her life and her contributions, and she said: “I have taken part in two of the greatest things of the 20th century – the development of the atom bomb and the Chinese revolution. Who could ask for more?”
As we remember the American nuclear physicist, Joan Chase Hinton --an internationalist, a people’s scientist and a true socialist, we hope that the lessons in her life and struggles will inspire the youth of today in search of a better world.
Joan was born on October 20, 1921 in Chicago, USA. She is the youngest of three siblings from the distinguished and progressive Hinton family.
Her father, Sebastian (known to many as Ted) was a patent lawyer. His fascination with kids’ play that involves climbing and swinging using wooden structures in three dimensional spaces enabled him to invent the jungle gym (the jungle gym is now commonly known as monkey bars in children’s playground).
Her mother, Carmelita was a teacher and founder of The Putney School, an independent progressive coed high school in Southern Vermont. Joan attended her secondary school at Putney where she learned the tenets of “learn by doing”, “don’t be afraid of hardships”, “honesty and truth above all else”, “the world is made by your head and your hands”, and “having education does not make you better than working people”.
Her elder sister, Jean Rosner was a civil rights and peace activist and her older and only brother, William was a farmer, revolutionary and best-selling author of Fanshen, published in 1966. Fanshen chronicles the land reform process in the northern Chinese village called Long Bow where he participated in the 1940s.
Her great grandfather, mathematician and philosopher George Boole was the inventor of Boolean logic and was later regarded as the founder of the field of computer science. Her
Joan was recruited and became one of the few women physicists that worked with the Manhattan Project, a secret US military research project created during the World War II to develop the first nuclear bombs and the first human-engineered nuclear detonator.
great grandmother, Mary Everest Boole was a self-taught mathematician and inventor of string geometry.
Her great, great uncle, Sir George Everest was the English surveyor of India, for whom Mount Everest was named after.
Her great aunt, Ethel L. Voynich was the best-selling author of the 1897 book, The Gadfly, which sold over a million copies in the Soviet Union and China.
Joan was only two years old when her father died, leaving her and her siblings under the care of her strong-willed mother. Her mother’s Dewey-inspired philosophy of “learning by doing” influenced for most parts her love for hard work, arts, science, and community development. This was confirmed in an interview when she said, “If you want to know about me, you should know my mother.”
The virtues she learned from her mother and the Putney School enabled her to value the arts and physical fitness and the outdoors and hard work. Joan was good at playing the violin and became an excellent skier and eventually a ski instructor. She even qualified in the US Olympics team to join the 1940 Norway Olympic Games had the war did not cancel it. Her love for the outdoors and science later convinced her to study Physics at Bennington College where her sister Jean also studied.
While completing a long college project at Bennington, Joan studied cloud chambers that allowed her access to Cornell University’s physics department. It was at Cornell where she first met Erwin Sid Engst, a dairy farmer from upstate New York.
Sid Engst shared a rented room with her brother, Bill, who by then gave up sociology and studied agriculture at Cornell. Bill and Sid became good friends and later Joan, too.
After finishing her course in 1942, Joan pursued further studies at the University of Wisconsin and earned her doctorate in Physics in 1944. In February of that same year, Joan was recruited and became one of the few women physicists that worked with the Manhattan Project, a secret US military research project created during the World War II to develop the first nuclear bombs and the first human-engineered nuclear detonator.
As a graduate student of the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago, she worked with the Project’s water boiler reactor alongside prominent scientists such us Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi and witnessed the first nuclear bomb (Trinity test) detonation in Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1945.
She left the project soon after she learned how the nuclear bombs they developed were eventually used in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. She tirelessly lobbied to internationalize atomic energy in the US Congress and became active in the peace movement.
In 1948, her disillusionment with pure science and her belief in internationalism made her decide to give up her career in Physics and go to China. The revolutionary fervor brought by China’s social transformation inspired and attracted many young people including her brother, William, and his friend, Sid Engst, who all eagerly looked for a better option to capitalism. Bill came to China in 1937 to observe land reform at work and later wrote his account of land reform in a village in Communist China in the bestselling book, Fanshen. Engst, on the other hand, worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association as an agricultural and dairy specialist to the Chinese government since 1946. The same determination and commitment to internationalism also brought Joan to China. Joan first worked with Madam Sun Yat Sen in Shanghai before making her way to the Liberated Areas where she reunited with Sid Engst. Both were married in April 1949 in Yanan and later raised three children.
At the 1952 Asia and Pacific Regional Peace Conference in Beijing, Hinton was quoted in expressing “a 
deep sense of guilt and shame” for Hiroshima and condemned the bomb as “a crime against humanity.” Since then she learned about converting killing weapons into useful tools, from cooking pots, ploughs, and hoes to wagon wheels and pumps and gates for irrigation canals.
Details of all these including Hinton and Engst’s concrete, real and day-to-day struggle in agricultural production alongside their Chinese counterparts and raising a family in the socialist construction are told in the book, “Silage Choppers and Snakes Spirits: The Lives and Struggles of Two Americans in Modern China” by Dao Yuan Chou published by IBON Books. From the Great Leap Forward to the Socialist Education Movement that followed, and into the Great Cultural Revolution, which brought them to Beijing where they worked for the first time in office buildings (as editors and translators) rather than in direct production, to being caught in the middle of the struggle for China’s political spirit, they participated in a turning point big character poster (da zi bao) denouncing the isolation and special treatment of foreigners, which was approved by Mao himself, empowering the foreign community in Beijing to join the Cultural Revolution.
Eventually kicked out of their work units, they continued their revolutionary work in the Bethune-Yanan Rebel Regiment made up of hundreds of foreign comrades who had come to China to help build socialism.
In the 1970s, the family stayed for a few months with William Hinton’s family to work in Dazhai, the famous socialist agricultural model and learned the lessons and truth of Dazhai’s struggle for self reliance through transformation of self and land.
By the end of the Cultural Revolution, Hinton and Engst were back to production and agriculture at the Red Star Commune south of Beijing where they helped design and build machines and instruments to mechanize China’s dairy industry.
her disillusionment with pure science and her belief in internationalism made her decide to give up her career in Physics and go to China. The revolutionary fervor brought by China’s social transformation inspired and attracted many young people including her brother, William, and his friend, Sid Engst, who all eagerly looked for a better option to capitalism.
they helped design and build machines and instruments to mechanize China’s dairy industry.
While at the Red Star they saw the response to the death of Mao and Zhou, and the subsequent rise to power of Deng Xiao Ping. In witnessing the profound changes in China, still from the perspective of being in production with ordinary people, they summed up the annihilation of the revolution to which they gave their lives this way: “In China, you have to have a sense of history, a sense of struggle and a sense of humor.”
Hinton valued her days of working together with farmers and workers to build a communal society. She 
acknowledged the power of “the hands of the people”: “everyone would do the most they could. Everyone developed to their full capacity. Everyone was busy. Everybody had a job. People weren’t exploiting each other.”
As a people’s scientist, she longed for any place that “could put even more effort into construction, into building better homes for her people, into eliminating floods, into stabilizing crops, into bringing in machinery and transforming their land from one of despair and poverty into one of prosperity, enlightenment, a nation of scientists working for the enrichment of mankind.”
Following Engst death in 2003, Joan continued to live in China and fought against the privatization of the State-owned Academy of Agricultural Mechanization Services, a mechanized dairy farm north of Beijing.
Joan is survived by her three children, Bill of Marlboro, New Jersey; Fred of Beijing and Karen of Pau, France and four grandchildren.
POEMS BY JOAN HINTON
All the people of Latin America
Squeezed by the IMF, World Bank and WTO.
Are looking to Venezuela,
Where Hugo Chavez alone has stood up to say NO!
With Wolfwitch, a wolf disguised in sheep’s clothing,
Appointed by Bush as head of the World Bank.
Everywhere viewed with fear and loathing,
As his tail appears swaggering behind Washington’s think tank.
Worst of all we have Bolton on calling
For UN Ambassador as Bush’s choice.
Now even republicans are stalling,
While democrats oppose him all with one voice.
So when congress is away on vacation
Bush pulls an executive decree,
Behind their backs he appoints John Bolton
As the UN Ambassador to be.
Away with Bush’s dream of world domination.
Away with the IMF, WTO and WB.
As the world’s people force Imperialism’s extermination,
So then and only then will they too be free!
- JH
2005.8.11
ODE TO BLIND BELIEVERS IN
“THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE”
(Written in 1963 while China was still building socialism)
|
Yes How strange.....
You think you’re so far ahead!
What’s wrong?... You tremble in a panicked fear. But then..... After all...... It’s not your fault you laud |
Open your eyes Just look! A force is growing fast And then?...... As heated water comes to boil This decrepit degeneration Six billion hands, six billion eyes And that which you have failed to see
- JH |
Jazminda Lumang is the Executive Director of IBON Foundation, Inc. This biography was read during a memorial for Joan Hinton on 6 July 2010 at Bantayog ng mga Bayani, Quezon City, Philippines.
