Albert Einstein,
Radical: A Political Profile
“There lies before us,
if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom.
Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We
appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget
the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you
cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”
By
John J. Simon
Monthly Review, May 2005
Posted by Bulatlat
Albert Einstein |
2005 marks the
fiftieth anniversary of the death of Albert Einstein and the centennial of
the publication of five of his major scientific papers that transformed
the study of physics. Einstein’s insights were so revolutionary that they
challenged not only established doctrine in the natural sciences, but even
altered the way ordinary people saw their world. By the 1920s he had
achieved international popular renown on a scale that would not become
usual until the rise of the contemporary celebrity saturated tabloids and
cable news channels. His recondite scientific papers as well as interviews
with the popular press were front page news and fodder for the newsreels.
Usually absent, however, was any sober discussion of his participation in
the political life of his times as an outspoken radical—especially in
profiles and biographies after his death.
|
Albert Einstein was
born on March 14, 1879, into a liberal, secular, and bourgeois German
Jewish family. Young Albert’s childhood and early adolescence does not
seem to have been out of the ordinary. Like many late nineteenth century
young men, he was curious, read Darwin, and was interested in the
material, that is the natural, world and wished to fathom “the arcana
of nature, so as to discern ‘the law within the law.’”
In 1895, Einstein,
aged sixteen, renounced his German citizenship and moved to Switzerland.
His main reason was to avoid military service and also to complete his
education at Zurich’s Polytechnic Institute. There he eventually earned
his Ph.D. in a climate relatively free of the anti-Semitism that pervaded
German and Austrian universities. But Zurich had other rewards. Einstein
spent much time at the Odeon Café, a hangout for Russian radicals,
including Alexandra Kollontai, Leon Trotsky, and, a few years later,
Lenin. Einstein admitted to spending much time at the Odeon, even missing
classes to participate in the coffee shop’s intoxicating political
debates.
Unable to find an
academic job, Einstein went to work in 1902 in the Swiss patent office in
Berne. It was there in 1905 that he had his annus mirabilus,
publishing articles on the special theory of relativity, quantum
mechanics, and Brownian motion. In 1914 he was offered and accepted a full
professorship in Berlin. Fred Jerome, author of The Einstein File,*
notes that the job offer was probably a result of a bidding competition
among universities in Britain, France, and Germany looking for scientific
and technological talent to abet their respective governments’ imperial
objectives. Unfortunately, Einstein took up his post just as the First
World War broke out with Germany among the chief belligerents.
Einstein opposed the
war, putting him at odds with the German Social Democrats to whom he had
been previously sympathetic, instead aligning himself with the party’s
minority who saw the war as a dispute among the ruling classes of the
belligerents. Einstein also found himself in disagreement with most of his
scientific colleagues. Max Planck, then a physicist of roughly equivalent
stature to Einstein, and nearly a hundred other scientists signed a
supernationalist “Manifesto to the Civilized World,” endorsing Germany’s
war aims in language that prefigured the Nazi rants of a generation later,
rationalizing the war as justifiable resistance to “Russian hordes,”
“Mongols,” and “Negroes” who had been “unleashed against the white race.”
Einstein and only three others replied in a document suppressed at the
time by the German government, describing the behavior of the scientists
(sadly joined by numerous writers and artists) as shameful. At least one
of the signatories of the reply was jailed. Einstein was not; it was the
first instance of the power of his newly acquired celebrity not only to
protect himself, but to allow him to speak out when others couldn’t.
In the turbulent
aftermath of the war Einstein continued to speak out. Famously, on the day
Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated—it was during a fortnight that saw not only the
armistice, but the fall of seven other European monarchies, all replaced,
for the moment, by liberal and socialist regimes—Einstein posted a sign on
his classroom’s door that read “CLASS CANCELLED—REVOLUTION.” He had joined
with and defended liberal and radical students and colleagues for their
wartime opposition; now he was with them in their postwar resistance to
the burgeoning revanchist militarism that would quickly morph into
Nazism.
Einstein’s visibility
made him a focus of the revival of virulent anti-Semitism. His work on
relativity was denounced as a “Jewish perversion” not only by far
right-wing politicians, but even by fellow German scientists. Einstein was
by now an illustrious international figure. In 1921 he received the Nobel
Prize for Physics for work on the photo-electric effect, which
demonstrated the quantum nature of light. He was also a visible presence
in the cultural and social life of the Weimar
Republic. At the same time,
Einstein became increasingly outspoken in his political views. Opposing
the mounting racist and jingoist violence and ultranationalism in Germany
in the 1920s, he worked for European unity and supported organizations
seeking to protect Jews against growing anti-Semitic violence. His
egalitarian streak was irrepressible: confronting rising course fees
poorer students couldn’t afford, Einstein routinely offered free
after-hours physics classes. As the European economic and political crises
grew more acute, Einstein increasingly used platforms at scientific
conferences to address political questions. “He had no problem,” Jerome
notes, “discussing relativity at a university lecture in the morning, and,
on that same evening, urging young people to refuse military service.”
By 1930 Hitler’s
National Socialist party was poised to become the dominant political force
in Germany and Einstein, while still vocal at home, more and more found
himself looking abroad for congenial outlets for both his scientific and
political expression. He lectured in Britain, the Netherlands and
elsewhere in Europe and, from 1930 on, annually as a visiting professor at
the California Institute of Technology. On January 30, 1933, the Nazis
seized power and confiscated Einstein’s Berlin property. In May, Goebbels,
Hitler’s propaganda minister, organized a public book burning, prominently
featuring Einstein’s work; photos of the atrocity were published
worldwide. Following the offer of a large cash bounty for his murder in
Nazi newspapers, Einstein was forced to complete a speaking tour in the
Netherlands with the protection of bodyguards. That winter, while at Cal
Tech, he and his family decided not to return to Berlin. Instead he
accepted a lifetime appointment from the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Princeton,
New Jersey, settling into a modest house
on Mercer Street.
There, while trying
to orient himself to his new country, Einstein worked doggedly on his
Unified Field Theory, an attempt to demonstrate that electromagnetism and
gravity were different manifestations of a single fundamental phenomenon.
It would be his main scientific concern for the rest of his life and
remains one that continues to animate contemporary physics and cosmology.
In the years before
he was granted U.S. citizenship in 1940, Einstein’s political concerns
were focused on the depredations of Nazi anti-Semitism and the rise of
fascism. Once again, making use of his renown, he petitioned the
government to allow refugees to migrate to the United States, but to no
avail. He then joined with other European intellectuals to ask Eleanor
Roosevelt to intervene with her husband, but the result was the same. This
was not Einstein’s first conflict with FDR’s administration. He vigorously
and publicly supported the anti-Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War.
While the Nazi Luftwaffe bombed Spanish villages, the United States, along
with Britain and France, enforced a phony “neutrality” embargo, denying
Republican troops needed munitions. Despite organized demonstrations and
appeals to which Einstein lent his name, the blockade was never lifted and
the fascist regime imposed on Spain survived (with postwar U.S. aid) for
nearly four decades. Nearly 3,000 American volunteers of the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade defied their government to fight with the Republic, with
Einstein an early and zealous supporter.
In 1939, at the
urging of the physicist and fellow refugee from the Nazis, Leo Szilard,
Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt to warn about German advances in
nuclear research and the prospect that they might develop an atomic
weapon. The letter led to the U.S. effort to build such a bomb. It remains
Einstein’s most remembered public act. However, a combination of
government fear of Einstein’s radicalism and his own reluctance kept
Einstein from having any role in the Manhattan Project.
After the war,
Einstein protested the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fred Jerome
cites a 1946 interview with the London
Sunday Express, in which
Einstein “blamed the atomic bombing of Japan on [President] Truman’s
anti-Soviet foreign policy” and expressed the opinion that “if FDR had
lived through the war, Hiroshima would never have been bombed.” Jerome
notes that the interview was immediately added to Einstein’s growing FBI
file.
The early postwar
years were marked by a manipulated anticommunist frenzy in government and
business circles to support U.S. international and domestic goals.
Manhattan Project scientists, who had earlier debated the use of the bomb
in the months between Germany’s defeat in May 1945 and the Hiroshima
bombing in August, were well versed in the issues the bomb raised. Many
feared a nuclear arms race between the United States and the
Soviet Union.
To lobby against that prospect, they founded the Emergency Committee of
Atomic Scientists (ECAS), which Einstein agreed to chair. In that role,
Einstein sought first to try to meet with Secretary of State George C.
Marshall to discuss what he saw as the militarist expansion of U.S. power.
He was rebuffed, but in an interview with a mid-level Atomic Energy
Commission official he described Truman’s foreign policy as anti-Soviet
expansionism—Pax Americana were the words he used to describe what
he saw as U.S. imperial ambition. There was a substantial public response
to ECAS’s antinuclear message, but, in the end, the group was unable to
reach its goal of removing atomic development from the military and
placing it under international control.
Another major
political concern of Einstein in the 1940s was the persistence of racism,
segregation, lynching, and other manifestations of white supremacy in the
United States. During the war, the country had been mobilized to support
the war effort, both on the battlefield and the home front with the
promise of equality. In fact, however, the official message on racial
justice was, at best, mixed. FDR set up a Fair Employment Practices
Committee, an entity with much promise but with little power to affect
discrimination in the work place. And the eleven million member-strong
military remained segregated. In the aftermath of the war, economic
dislocations, job shifts, and housing shortages were all dealt with in the
usual Jim Crow manner: in the words of Leadbelly’s song “if you’re black,
get back, get back, get back.”
The town of Princeton,
New Jersey, where Einstein lived
(and for that matter, its university), though only a short drive from New
York, might well have been in the old southern Confederacy. Paul Robeson,
who was born in Princeton, called
it a “Georgia plantation town.”
Access to housing, jobs, and the university itself (once led by the
segregationist Woodrow Wilson) were routinely denied to African Americans;
protest or defiance were often met with police violence. Einstein, who had
witnessed similar scenes in Germany and who, in any event was a longtime
anti-racism militant, reacted against every outrage. In 1937, when the
contralto Marion Anderson gave a critically acclaimed concert in Princeton
but was denied lodging at the segregated Nassau Inn, Einstein, who had
attended the performance, instantly invited her to stay at his house. She
did so, and continued to be his guest whenever she sang in
New Jersey, even after the hotel was
integrated.
In 1946, in the face
of a major nationwide wave of lynching, Paul Robeson invited Einstein to
join him as co-chair of the American Crusade to End Lynching. The group,
which also included W. E. B. Du Bois and others in the civil rights
movement, held a rally in Washington at which Einstein was scheduled to
speak. Illness prevented that, but he wrote a letter to President Truman
calling for prosecution of lynchers, passage of a federal anti-lynching
law, and the ouster of racist Mississippi Senator Theodore G. Bilbo. The
letter was delivered by Robeson, but the meeting was cut short when he
told Truman that if the government would not protect blacks they would
have to do so themselves. An uproar followed, but Einstein, in his letter,
agreed with Robeson, writing, “There is always a way to overcome legal
obstacles whenever there is an inflexible will at work in the service of a
just cause.”
Einstein was willing
to use his fame on behalf of social justice, but steadfastly refused to
accept honors his celebrity might have brought his way. There was one
exception, however. In May 1946, Horace Mann Bond, president of Lincoln
University, a historically black institution in Pennsylvania, awarded the
scientist an honorary degree. Einstein, accepted, spending the day
lecturing to undergraduates and talking, even playing, with faculty
children. One of them was Julian Bond, then the young son of the
university’s president, who later went on to be a leader in the civil
rights movement and is now chair of the NAACP. The press ignored the
event, but, in his address Einstein said, “The social outlook of
Americans...their sense of equality and human dignity is limited to men of
white skins. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains
me. I can escape complicity in it only by speaking out.”
That impulse to
political commitment led Einstein to take action on both the domestic
crisis in race relations and the simultaneous Cold War-fostered nuclear
menace. It also led him to support the new Progressive Party along with
his old compatriot Thomas Mann and his friend and neighbor Ben Shahn—famed
for his paintings on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, among many others with
political themes. The party, formed by the left wing of Roosevelt’s old
New Deal coalition, including radicals, socialists, and communists, was
established as a vehicle to run former vice president Henry A. Wallace for
president in 1948. Einstein especially admired the party’s stand against
Jim Crow and lent it his prestige and endorsement, being photographed with
Wallace and fellow third party supporter Paul Robeson. The latter two
campaigning in the South, despite violent attacks on them, refused to
appear before segregated audiences or stay in Jim Crow hotels. With
Einstein’s support, Wallace also called for the international control and
outlawing of nuclear weapons. In the end, however, a mix of anti-Soviet
jingoism and Truman’s belated promises of liberal, New Deal-type social
programs caused the collapse of the Wallace movement. Truman’s surprise
reelection removed whatever barriers to the accelerating Cold War and the
ideological repression that accompanied it.
Some among Wallace’s
supporters chafed at his party’s failure to move beyond New Deal
liberalism. They thought the party should have taken explicitly socialist
positions on questions like public ownership of basic industries, for
example. Among those who held such views were Leo Huberman and Paul M.
Sweezy, founders of this magazine as a venue for ongoing comprehensive
analysis and commentary from a socialist and Marxist perspective. Einstein
applauded the founding of Monthly Review, and, at the request of
Huberman’s friend Otto Nathan, wrote his essay,
Why Socialism?, for the first issue in May 1949. Together with
Einstein’s celebrity, the article’s clear statement of the case for
socialism in logical, moral, and political terms drew attention to the
birth of this small left-wing magazine.*
In the hostile political climate of that time, the article surely provided
necessary encouragement both to the authority and the circulation of this
magazine.
At the end of the
Second World War Einstein was also drawn to the crisis of European Jewry
following the Nazi genocide. Self-identified as a secular Jew, at least
since his first encounters with anti-Semitism as a child, he was an
intimate observer and intermittent victim of this ultra-nationalist
disease and reacted to it as he did to other hate crimes. As early as
1921, when he made his first trip to the United States to raise funds for
the establishment of Jewish settlements in Palestine, he sought solutions
to the impending catastrophe confronting Europe’s Jewish community. He
resisted growing legal and extra-legal restrictions on Jewish life in
Central and Eastern Europe, supported (with little success) Jewish
migration to the Americas, and advocated for the creation of what he and
others called a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. As such he was
identified with Zionism, a label that does not precisely fit but that he
did not actively avoid. Nonetheless, he separated himself from Zionist
jingoists and bigots including Vladimir Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin, and
often from mainstream Zionists like Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion.
In 1930, Einstein wrote, “Oppressive nationalism must be conquered...I can
see a future for Palestine only on the basis of peaceful cooperation
between the two peoples who are at home in the country...come together
they must in spite of all.” He went on to support a binational Jewish and
Palestinian state both before and after the war.
In 1946, with
hundreds of thousands of European Jews still “displaced” and with the
victorious allies unwilling to absorb even a portion of the refugee
population, Einstein appeared before an Anglo-American Committee of
Inquiry on Palestine, calling for a “Jewish homeland.” The Zionist
establishment seemed to have intentionally misread this as a call for
Jewish sovereignty, so with help from his friend Rabbi Stephen Wise, he
clarified his position. Jews, he said, should be able to migrate freely
within the limits of the economic absorptive possibilities of Palestine,
which in turn should have a government that made sure there was no
“‘Majorisation’ of one group by the other.” Resisting Wise’s demands for a
more forceful statement, Einstein replied that a “rigid demand for a
Jewish State will have only undesirable results for us.” Radical
journalist I. F. Stone praised him for rising above “ethnic limitations.”
(Einstein later became a charter subscriber to
I.
F. Stone’s Weekly.)
Nevertheless, like
many Jewish radicals—including many socialists and communists—Einstein had
difficulty overcoming his emotional ambivalence about the Zionist project
and ultimately applauded Israel’s establishment. Given the often
inconsistent response of some radicals to Israel’s subjugation of
Palestinians after the 1967 war, it is difficult to guess how he would
have responded. But he was clearly concerned with the implications of
Jewish settlement on indigenous Palestinians; it’s not much of a stretch
to suggest that he would have been appalled by the four decades of
oppression of the latter by Israel.
The mid-century “red
scare” occupied much of Einstein’s last years. He wrote, “The German
calamity of years ago repeats itself.” Watching Americans lose themselves
in the suburbia- and Korean War-driven affluence of the early 1950s,
Einstein deplored the fact that “honest people [in the United States]
constitute a hopeless minority.” But determined to fight back he looked
for a forum—and found one in a reply to a 1953 letter from a New York City
school teacher who had been fired for his refusal to discuss his politics
and name names before a Senate investigating committee. Einstein wrote to
William Frauenglass, an innovative teacher who prepared intercultural
lessons for his English classes as a way of overcoming prejudicial
stereotypes. Einstein exhorted “Every intellectual who is called before
the committees ought to refuse to testify...If enough people are ready to
take this grave step, they will be successful. If not, then the
intellectuals deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended
for them.” The letter was national front-page news and had its desired
effect. The movement to resist the witch hunt grew stronger. Einstein was
supported by voices as distant as that of philosopher Bertrand Russell,
who wrote to the New York Times from London when they published an
editorial disagreeing with Einstein, “Do you condemn the Christian Martyrs
who refuse to sacrifice to the Emperor? Do you condemn John Brown?”
Shortly after the
Frauenglass affair, another unfriendly witness, Al Shadowitz, told Senator
McCarthy that he was refusing to testify saying “I take my advice from
Doctor Einstein.” McCarthy went ballistic, but, ultimately, the contagion
spread both to the Supreme Court, which in 1957 put the brakes on the red
hunters (one of the cases involved MR founder
Paul Sweezy) and to young New Left students who, beginning in 1960,
began to literally break up committee hearings, often with caustic satire
and ridicule. It was only ten years after Einstein’s letter that Martin
Luther King Jr. also employed civil disobedience to fuel the modern civil
rights movement.
In 1954, in response
to the denial of security clearance to his colleague, the wartime leader
of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and other violations of
the freedom of scientific inquiry, Einstein wrote, with typical humor,
that if he were young again, “I would not try to be a scientist or scholar
or teacher, I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler, in the
hope of finding that modest degree of independence still available under
present circumstances.”
Einstein also
undertook other, more difficult and potentially more dangerous political
acts.
Perhaps none
attracted as much international attention as his effort to intervene in
the case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In 1953, Einstein wrote to
trial Judge Irving Kauffman pointing out that the trial record did not
establish the defendants’ guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” He also noted
that the scientific evidence against them, even if accurate, did not
reveal any vital secret. When he received no response, he wrote to the
president with his views. Truman also did not respond, so Einstein
released the text of his letter to the media and later wrote to the New
York Times asking for executive clemency. Tragically, in this
circumstance, Einstein’s celebrity was to no avail. The Rosenbergs died in
Sing Sing’s electric chair on June 19.
Two years earlier, in
1951, when his friend W. E. B. Du Bois was indicted for his pro-peace
activities on the trumped up charge of being a “Soviet agent,” Einstein,
along with Robeson and civil rights heroine Mary McLeod Bethune, sponsored
a dinner and rally to raise funds for Du Bois’s defense. Du Bois’s lawyer,
the fiery radical ex-Congressman Vito Marcantonio, managed to reduce the
trial to a shambles even before the prosecution had finished its case. But
had the trial continued, Marcantonio planned to call Einstein as the first
defense witness.
Perhaps no one had
been more pilloried or isolated during the “red scare” than Einstein’s
great ally from the struggle against lynching, Paul Robeson. Attacked as
much for his militant stands against white supremacy as for his radicalism
and his call for pan-African independence, Robeson had become a virtual
non-person in his own country, denied an income, venues for concerts, and
the right to travel. In 1952, in a very public act to break the curtain of
silence around Robeson, Einstein invited him and his accompanist Lloyd
Brown to lunch. The three spent a long afternoon discussing science,
music, and politics, all subjects of mutual interest. At one point, when
Robeson left the room, Brown remarked about what an honor it was to be in
the presence of such a great man. To which Einstein replied, “but it is
you who have brought the great man.”
Einstein’s last years
were taken up with both private and public acts of resistance. He used his
still considerable network of acquaintance and influence to try to find
jobs for those, who, like Frauenglass and others, who had been fired for
non-cooperation with investigating committees. And in 1954 he permitted
the celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday to be the occasion for a
conference on civil liberties fight-back by the Emergency Civil Liberties
Committee (ECLC). The committee had been formed in response to the failure
of the American Civil Liberties Union to defend Communists and to take on
civil liberties questions raised by the Rosenberg case. The conference,
with speakers including I. F. Stone, astronomer and activist Harlow
Shapley, sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Henry Pratt Fairchild, and
political scientist H. H. Wilson, launched ECLC on a forty-six-year
trajectory defending freedom of expression, the rights of labor, and
multifaceted campaigns for civil rights.
It is difficult to
know how to conclude this brief and necessarily incomplete summary of
Einstein’s politics. Not discussed here, for example, are Einstein’s
lifelong commitments to pacifism and to some sort of world order, nor his
long association with the physicist and Marxist Leopold Infeld. Einstein
was also deeply committed, as were a number of other left-wing scientists,
to mass education in the sciences as a tool against obscurantism and
mystical pseudo-science, often used then—and again today—in aid of
political and social reaction.
Days before he died
on April 18, 1955, Einstein signed what became known as The
Einstein-Russell Manifesto. In it, the theoretical physicist and the
philosopher-mathematician Bertrand Russell, go beyond vague moral
arguments for pacifism. Instead they posed political choices: “There lies
before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and
wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our
quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your
humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a
new Paradise; if you cannot, there
lies before you the risk of universal death.”
Einstein was a
radical from his student days until his dying breath. In the last year of
his life, ruminating about the political affairs of the day and his world
outlook, he told a friend that he remained a “revolutionary,” and was
still a “fire-belching Vesuvius.”
Note on Sources
and Suggested Further Reading
Fred Jerome, The
Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret War Against the World’s Most
Famous Scientist (New York: Saint Martin’s Press/Griffin, 2002); see
also Fred Jerome, “The Hidden Half-Life of Albert Einstein: Anti-Racism,”
in Socialism and Democracy 18, no. 2 (http://www.sdonline.org/33/fred_jerome.htm).
Jerome’s important
work uses the huge FBI-compiled file on Einstein, not only to expose
Hoover’s machinations as well as the covert mechanisms and techniques of
character assassination, but as a vehicle to introduce readers to the much
hidden activist radical and socialist the scientist was. Forthcoming in
July is Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, Einstein On Race And Racism
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press).
Two useful
biographies are: Jeremy Bernstein, Einstein (New York: Viking
Press, 1973); and Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times
(New York: Avon Books, 1984), the standard biography, but with
almost no mention of Einstein’s politics other than Zionism.
Books by Einstein for
the general reader include: Ideas and Opinions (New York: Three
Rivers Press, 1995); The World As I See It(New York: Citadel Press,
1993); Out of My Later Years (New York: Gramercy Books, 1993); and
(with Leopold Infeld) The Evolution of Physics (New York: Free
Press, 1967), still the most accessible and the best description of the
progression from Newtonian to modern quantum mechanics and relativity.
Notes
*
This narrative makes extensive use of research and insights found in
Jerome’s book (its full title is The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover’s
Secret War Against the World’s Most Famous Scientist [New York: Saint
Martin’s Press/Griffin, 2002]), for which this writer is grateful.
*
This article has been frequently reprinted in Monthly Review over
the last half-century and can be found on the MR website at
http://www.monthlyreview.org/598einst.htm.
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