270 Part III: Emigration Years
individual members, their origins, their activities and their attitudes
towards the USA. Unlike Pollock, and also Löwenthal, who informed
Horkheimer about the visitation in a letter, the latter did not take the
matter lightly. He regarded it as the beginning of a changed attitude
towards the German immigrants on the part of the American authorities.
Horkheimer was alive to the danger represented by Roosevelt’s new
foreign policy, which was directed against Hitler’s expansion plans.
Horkheimer approved of the policy, needless to say, but it contained
the risk that the immigrants might in general be suspected of being part
of a fifth column.^145 In the circumstances, might it not be advisable to
dissolve the institute on the grounds that it was an all-too-visible organiza-
tion of German émigrés? On the other hand, there was the attractive
opportunity of becoming more closely integrated in Columbia University
or the Department of Sociology there. Such an integration presupposed
that the institute could be maintained as a fully functioning and financially
secure research organization over the longer term. This meant carrying
out empirical research projects and, in the absence of funding of its
own, laborious applications to the foundations. Horkheimer clearly
understood that such a research programme was very much in tune with
the expectations of his colleagues at Columbia University who were
protecting him: namely ‘solid research and team work in the field of
social science’.^146 But, as he put it in a letter to Löwenthal, this ‘getting
on with the work is destroying us both materially and theoretically. It
will be our ruin in every respect.’^147
The alternative to Horkheimer’s bleak view, which was connected
in his mind with a research programme on the American model, was to
cut back the number of staff and the building space required in order
to be able to secure a more or less adequate financial basis for the
people who could be regarded as the core members of the institute.
Whereas closing the institute meant that Horkheimer and his associates
might well lose the extremely valuable protection of Columbia Univer-
sity, further integration meant that the increasing adaptation to the
American research model would threaten their own academic identity.
According to Horkheimer’s view at the time, this identity would find
expression in the ability of each individual member to develop his own
theory of society in which there would be less emphasis on empirical
verifiability than on its philosophical foundations. Despite his negative
experience with Lazarsfeld, Adorno was by no means hostile to the idea
of empirical research; in fact, he thought it meaningful and necessary
in principle. However, his own intentions were naturally closer to
Horkheimer’s interest in theory. In his frequent letters to Los Angeles,
he emphasized his complete agreement with Horkheimer and pleaded
‘for the institute to be closed on 31 December, staffing to be reduced
to a minimum so that the money will suffice for a few people, unless we
really obtain a lot of money in the meantime.’^148 In contrast to Marcuse,
Löwenthal and Neumann, Adorno spoke out strongly in favour of