Albert Einstein's political views emerged publicly in the middle of the 20th century due to latter's fame and reputation for genius, who offered and was called on to give judgments and opinions on matters often unrelated to theoretical physics or mathematics.
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With increasing public demands, his involvement in political, humanitarian and academic projects in various countries, and his new acquaintances with scholars and political figures from around the world, Einstein was less able to achieve the productive isolation that he needed in order to work.[1]
Einstein was not timid, and he was aware of the world around him, with no illusion that ignoring politics would make world events fade away. His very visible position allowed him to speak and write frankly, even provocatively, at a time when many people of conscience could only flee to the underground or keep doubts about developments within their own movements to themselves for fear of internecine fighting.
Einstein flouted the ascendant Nazi movement, tried to be a voice of moderation in the tumultuous formation of the State of Israel and braved anti-communist politics and resistance to the civil rights movement in the United States. He participated in the 1927 congress of the League against Imperialism in Brussels.[2] Einstein also met with many humanists and humanitarian luminaries including Rabindranath Tagore with whom he had extensive conversations in 1930 prior to leaving Germany.[3]
Einstein flouted the ascendant Nazi movement and later tried to be a voice of moderation in the tumultuous formation of the State of Israel.[4] Fred Jerome in his Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East argues that Einstein was a Cultural Zionist who supported the idea of a Jewish homeland, but opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine “with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power.” Instead, he preferred a bi-national state with “continuously functioning, mixed, administrative, economic, and social organizations.”[5][6] However Ami Isseroff in his article Was Einstein a Zionist, argues that Einstein supported the recognition of the State of Israel and declared it "the fulfillment of our dream" when President Harry Truman recognized Israel in May 1948. In the presidential election of 1948, Einstein supported Henry A. Wallace’s Progressive Party which advocated pro-Soviet and pro-Israel foreign policy.[7][8]
Throughout the November Revolution in Germany Einstein signed an appeal for the foundation of a nationwide liberal and democratic party,[9][10] which was published in the Berliner Tageblatt on 16 November 1918,[11] and became a member of the German Democratic Party.[12]
In his article Why Socialism?,[13] published in 1949 in the Monthly Review, Einstein described a chaotic capitalist society, a source of evil to be overcome, as the "predatory phase of human development". In this article Einstein expressed both his support for socialism as a social and economic system, and (more indirectly) his distrust for the bureaucratic and authoritarian excesses of the Soviet Union (see quote below in Socialism).
He braved anti-communist politics and resistance to the civil rights movement in the United States. On the floor of the US Congress, Einstein was accused by John E. Rankin of Mississippi of being a "foreign-born agitator" who sought "to further the spread of Communism throughout the world".[14] He also participated in the 1927 congress of the League against Imperialism in Brussels.[15]
After World War II, as enmity between the former allies became a serious issue, Einstein wrote, "I do not know how the third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth – rocks!"[16] (Einstein 1949) With Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell, Einstein lobbied to stop nuclear testing and future bombs. Days before his death, Einstein signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, which led to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.[17]
Einstein was a member of several civil rights groups, including the Princeton chapter of the NAACP. When the aged W. E. B. Du Bois was accused of being a Communist spy, Einstein volunteered as a character witness, and the case was dismissed shortly afterward. Einstein's friendship with activist Paul Robeson, with whom he served as co-chair of the American Crusade to End Lynching, lasted twenty years.[18]
Einstein said "Politics is for the moment, equation for the eternity."[19] He declined the presidency of Israel in 1952.[20]
Born in Ulm, Einstein was a German citizen from birth. As he grew older, Einstein's pacifism often clashed with the German Empire's militant views at the time. At the age of 17, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and moved to Switzerland to attend college. The loss of Einstein's citizenship allowed him to avoid service in the military, which suited his pacifist views. In response to a Manifesto by 93 leading German intellectuals including Max Planck in support of the German war effort, Einstein and three others wrote a counter-manifesto.[21] Remaining in neutral Switzerland throughout World War I, Einstein was saved from fighting in the conflict. When Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and Germany moved to the Weimar Republic, Einstein was offered a position at a university. Einstein accepted the position, and in a show of support to the new democracy, Einstein reacquired German citizenship. In the years after the war, Einstein was very vocal in his support for Germany. In 1918, Einstein was one of the founding members of the German Democratic Party. In 1921, Einstein refused to attend the third Solvay Congress in Belgium, as his German compatriots were excluded. In 1922, Einstein joined a committee sponsored by the League of Nations, but quickly left when the League refused to act on France's occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. As a member of the German League of Human Rights, Einstein worked hard to repair relations between Germany and France.
However, in 1933, with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Einstein left Germany, renounced his citizenship, and never returned.[22] After World War II ended, and the Nazis were eliminated, Einstein refused to have anything to do with Germany. Einstein refused several honors bestowed upon him by Germany, as he could not forgive the Germans for the Holocaust, where 6 million of his fellow Jews were killed.[23]
Einstein was a prominent supporter of both Labor Zionism and efforts to encourage Jewish-Arab cooperation.[24] He supported the creation of a Jewish national homeland in the British mandate of Palestine but was initially opposed to the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power.”[25]
Fred Jerome in his Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East argues that Einstein was a Cultural Zionist who supported the idea of a Jewish homeland but opposed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine preferring a bi-national state with “continuously functioning, mixed, administrative, economic, and social organizations.”[5][6] In 1931, The Macmillan Company published About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein.[26] Querido, an Amsterdam publishing house, collected eleven of Einstein's essays into a 1933 book entitled Mein Weltbild, translated to English as The World as I See It; Einstein's foreword dedicates the collection "to the Jews of Germany".[27] In the face of Germany's rising militarism, Einstein wrote and spoke for peace.[28][29]
Einstein publicly stated reservations about the proposal to partition the British-supervised British Mandate of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish countries. In a 1938 speech, "Our Debt to Zionism", he said: "I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state. ... If external necessity should after all compel us to assume this burden, let us bear it with tact and patience."[25]
In a 1947 letter to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru intended to persuade India to support the establishment of a Jewish state, Einstein stated that the Balfour Declaration's proposal to establish a national home for Jews in Palestine "redresses the balance" of justice and history.[30]
The United Nations did divide the mandate, demarcating the borders of several new countries including the State of Israel, and war broke out immediately. Einstein was one of the authors of an open letter to the New York Times in 1948 deeply criticizing Menachem Begin's Herut (Freedom) Party for the Deir Yassin massacre (Einstein et al. 1948) likening it to "the Nazi and Fascist parties" and stated "The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party". The letter stated clear concerns for the future of Israel if the Freedom Party continued to gain power. When President Harry Truman recognized Israel in May 1948, Einstein declared it “the fulfillment of our(Jewish) dreams.”[7] Einstein also supported vice president Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party during 1948 Presidential election which also advocate pro-Soviet and pro-Israel foreign policy.[8]
Einstein served on the Board of Governors of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In his Will of 1950, Einstein bequeathed literary rights to his writings to The Hebrew University, where many of his original documents are held in the Albert Einstein Archives.[31]
When President Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, Einstein was asked to be Israel's second president, but he declined, stating that he had "neither the natural ability nor the experience to deal with human beings."[32] He wrote: "I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it."[33]
Einstein had moved to the United States in December 1932, where he had been at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California,[34] and also was a guest lecturer at Abraham Flexner's newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.[35]
During the 1930s and into World War II, Einstein wrote affidavits recommending United States visas for European Jews who were trying to flee persecution. He raised money for Zionist organizations and was, in part, responsible for the 1933 formation of the International Rescue Committee.[33][37]
In Germany, Deutsche Physik activists published pamphlets and even textbooks denigrating Einstein. Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark led a campaign to eliminate Einstein's work from the German lexicon as unacceptable "Jewish physics" (Jüdische Physik). Instructors who taught his theories were blacklisted, including Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg, who had debated quantum probability with Bohr and Einstein. Philipp Lenard claimed that the mass–energy equivalence formula needed to be credited to Friedrich Hasenöhrl to make it an Aryan creation.[38][39] A man convicted of conspiring to kill Einstein was fined a mere six dollars.[40]
Concerned scientists, many of them refugees from European anti-Semitism in the U.S., recognized the danger of German scientists' developing an atomic bomb based on the newly discovered phenomena of nuclear fission. In 1939, the Hungarian émigré Leó Szilárd, having failed to arouse U.S. government interest on his own, worked with Einstein to write a letter to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which Einstein signed, urging U.S. development of such a weapon.[41] On 11 October 1939 Alexander Sachs, an adviser to Roosevelt on economic affairs, delivered the Einstein–Szilárd letter and persuaded the president of its importance.[42] "This requires action", Roosevelt told an aide, and authorized secret research into the harnessing of nuclear fission for military purposes.[42][43]
By 1942 this effort had become the Manhattan Project, the largest secret scientific endeavor undertaken up to that time. By late 1945, the U.S. had developed operational nuclear weapons, and used them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Einstein himself did not play a role in the development of the atomic bomb other than signing the letter although he did help the United States Navy with some unrelated theoretical questions it was working on during the war.[44]
According to Linus Pauling, Einstein later expressed regret about his letter to Roosevelt.[45] In 1947, Einstein wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly arguing that the United States should not try to pursue an atomic monopoly, and instead should equip the United Nations with nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of maintaining deterrence.[46]
When he was a visible figure working against the rise of Nazism, Einstein had sought help and developed working relationships in both the West and what was to become the Soviet bloc. After World War II, enmity between the former allies became a very serious issue for people with international résumés. To make things worse, during the first days of McCarthyism Einstein was writing about a single world government; it was at this time that he wrote, "I do not know how the third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks!"[47] In a 1949 Monthly Review article entitled "Why Socialism?"[48] Albert Einstein described a chaotic capitalist society, a source of evil to be overcome, as the "predatory phase of human development" (Einstein 1949). With Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell, Einstein lobbied to stop nuclear testing and future bombs. Days before his death, Einstein signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which led to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.[49]
Einstein was a member of several civil rights groups, including the Princeton chapter of the NAACP. When the aged W. E. B. Du Bois was accused of being a Communist spy, Einstein volunteered as a character witness, and the case was dismissed shortly afterward. Einstein's friendship with activist Paul Robeson, with whom he served as co-chair of the American Crusade to End Lynching, lasted twenty years.[50]
In 1946, Einstein collaborated with Rabbi Israel Goldstein, Middlesex University heir C. Ruggles Smith, and activist attorney George Alpert on the Albert Einstein Foundation for Higher Learning, which was formed to create a Jewish-sponsored secular university, open to all students, on the grounds of the former Middlesex University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Middlesex was chosen in part because it was accessible from both Boston and New York City, Jewish cultural centers of the U.S. Their vision was a university "deeply conscious both of the Hebraic tradition of Torah looking upon culture as a birthright, and of the American ideal of an educated democracy."[51] The collaboration was stormy, however. Finally, when Einstein wanted to appoint British economist Harold Laski as the university's president, George Alpert wrote that Laski was "a man utterly alien to American principles of democracy, tarred with the Communist brush."[51] Einstein withdrew his support and barred the use of his name.[52] The university opened in 1948 as Brandeis University. In 1953, Brandeis offered Einstein an honorary degree, but he declined.[51]
Einstein was in favor of socialism, as illustrated by the following quote:
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate (the) grave evils (of capitalism), namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society."
Given Einstein's links to Germany and Zionism, his socialist ideals, and his links to Communist figures, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation kept a file on Einstein[53] that grew to 1,427 pages. Many of the documents in the file were sent to the FBI by concerned citizens: Some objected to his immigration, while others asked the FBI to protect him.[54]
Einstein considered Joseph McCarthy a danger to intellectual freedom. In a letter to William Frauenglass, a New York city school teacher who, having been called to testify, refused, and facing dismissal from his position, wrote to Einstein for support. In his reply, Einstein stated: "The reactionary politicians have managed to instill suspicion of all intellectual efforts into the public by dangling before their eyes a danger from without. Having succeeded so far they are now proceeding to suppress the freedom of teaching and to deprive of their positions all those who do not prove submissive, i.e. to starve them." His advice: "Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify, i.e. he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of his country." Concluding, Einstein said, "If enough people are ready to take this grave step they will be successful. If not, then the intellectuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them."[55]