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was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
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Vol. V, No. 13, May 8-14, 2005
Albert Einstein, Radical: A Political Profile
By John J. Simon 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. © 2004 Bulatlat
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Monthly Review, May 2005
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