n January
30, 1933, the day Hitler and the Nazis took over the German
government, the most famous scientist in the world may also
have been the luckiest. Albert Einstein and his wife Elsa
were away from their Berlin home on a
visit to Pasadena,
California – his third winter there as a guest faculty
member at Caltech. The Einsteins had planned to return home
in the spring, but that was before January 30. Within a few
months, the Nazi regime made it clear that Einstein was
still alive primarily because he was not in Germany.
Einstein,
more than any other scientist, arguably more than any other
human being, by his very existence – a genius who was also a
Jew, a democrat and, later, a socialist – gave the lie to
Hitler’s Nazi theories.
Even before
the Nazis started calling themselves Nazis (before Hitler’s
National Socialist Party emerged in the mid 1920s),
right-wing German nationalists had targeted Einstein for
attack: Some of these Nationalists took to waiting for
Einstein outside his apartment on Haberlandstrasse, or his
office in the Prussian Academy of Science, and shouting
denunciations of “Jewish science” as soon as the familiar
figure appeared. Others filled his mailbox with obscene and
threatening letters. On one occasion, a gang of right-wing
students disrupted Einstein’s lecture at Berlin University
and one of them shouted, “I’m going to cut the throat of
that dirty Jew.” An anti-Semitic demagogue named Rudolph
Leibus was arrested [in 1921] – and fined the trivial sum of
sixteen dollars – for offering a reward to anyone who would
assassinate the hated scientist.
And while he
was invited to speak and hailed by audiences around the
world – one trip took the Einsteins to China, Japan,
Palestine, and Spain, where they were cheered by hundreds of
thousands -- in Germany, a group calling itself the
Committee of German Scientists for the Preservation of Pure
Scholarship launched an attack on Einstein, labeling the
Theory of Relativity “a Jewish perversion.” Even in winning
the Nobel Prize in 1921, Einstein faced anti-Semitism.
For several
years in the mid 1920s, public anti-Semitism subsided
and the ultra-Nationalists lowered their profile as the
German economy steadied with substantial economic aid from
the US and England. But towards the end of the decade, the
economy faltered, and the far-right flexed its political and
paramilitary muscles. Hitler’s Aryan-supremacy racism
infected millions of Germans seeking scapegoats for their
economic difficulties and loss of international influence.
And when the worldwide economic depression of 1929 brought
rampant unemployment and inflation to Germany, it also
brought the Nazis a large, disgruntled base of potential
recruits. The Nazi Party, led by Hitler, had first made
headlines in 1923 with its “Beer Hall Putsch,” a failed
attempt at taking over the government in the German state of
Bavaria. Following the “Putsch,” the Party grew slowly, and
by 1929 they had 12 representatives in the Reichstag (the
German Congress). The impact of the economic depression and
the success of Nazi propaganda brought a sudden surge of
Nazi votes in the 1930 elections, increasing their Reichstag
seats to 107.
Nazi
street-gangs launched increasingly violent attacks against
Hitler’s enemies, especially leftists and Jews. As one
historian put it, “To ready the ground for the Nazi rise to
ultimate power, the party raised the level of violence
witnessed by ordinary Germans with each passing month.” An
incident on June 10, 1932, was typical of the strategy. That
afternoon, several hundred members of the Nazi SA and SS
private armies invaded the working-class district of
Berlin-Wedding, blocked the ends of a stretch of road
chanting anti-Semitic slogans and attacking anyone luckless
enough to be out and about. The Nazis beat up some thirty
locals, including several old people and one pregnant woman,
who was hospitalized in dire condition.
There was no
question about the identity of the Nazis’ number one target.
Their hostility, in the words of Philipp Frank, “was
concentrated to an astonishing and…frightening degree
against Einstein.” In 1929, a Leipzig publishing house
issued a book titled One Hundred Authors against Einstein.
The book itself had little impact, “but it was a warning,”
according to Levenson. Attacks against prominent Jews may
have faded during the stabilized mid-1920s, “but now…the
threat was back.” A friend who visited Einstein in Germany
in 1930, described the growing signs of anti-Semitism –
“Many Jewish shops had been sacked” – and reported that the
scientist, “for all his serenity, was anxious.”
The threats
against Einstein increased as Hitler came closer to power.
A local baker in Caputh, the village near Potsdam where the
Einsteins had built a summer house, began to complain loudly
to his customers about the scientist’s “Jewish house.” In
late spring 1932, the scientist stopped walking alone, and
their friend Antonina Vallentin warned Elsa that to “leave
Einstein in Germany was to perpetrate a murder.” Just
before he and Elsa left Germany for the last time in
December 1932, he received a “friendly warning” from a top
German General that his life “is not safe here any more.”
Officially,
the Einsteins were departing for one more semester abroad
and planned to return to Berlin in the spring. Einstein told
the NY Times, “I am not abandoning Germany…My
permanent home will still be in Berlin.” But he may have had
a suspicion they would not return: When the steamer
Oakland left Bremerhaven on December 10, 1932, it
carried the Einsteins and thirty pieces of luggage. It was,
as Einstein’s friend and biographer Abraham Pais put it, “a
little excessive for a three months’ absence.”
In America,
Einstein was quickly vilified by the German state. He was
assailed as the chief of a secret anti-Nazi movement,
sometimes described as “communistic,” sometimes as the
“Jewish International.” On March 23, the Third Reich barred
Jews and Communists from teaching in universities, working
as lawyers or in civil service jobs. Scientists,
especially Jewish scientists, were a special target for the
regime that preached Aryan supremacy. One Nazi pedagogical
leader put it plainly: It is not science that must be
restricted, but rather the scientific investigators and
teachers; only men who have pledged their entire personality
to the nation, to the racial conception of the world will
teach and carry on research at the German universities.
The Nazis
repeatedly raided the Einsteins’ Berlin apartment, seized
all their belongings, and froze their bank account. In
March, Nazi SA agents ransacked their summer house in Caputh,
searching for a secret cache of weapons “allegedly hidden
there by Communists,” and intended for an anti-Nazi
uprising. When they found no weapons – “all they found was a
bread knife,” the NY Times reported – they
confiscated the house, anyway, declaring it was “obviously”
about to be sold to finance subversive activities.
Einstein was
suddenly a refugee. Even if he might – miraculously – have
survived a return to Germany, he told the press: “As long
as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a
country where civil liberty, tolerance and equality of all
citizens before the law prevail… These conditions do not
exist in Germany at the present time.”
But the
Einsteins did return to Europe in the spring and summer of
1933, spending several months in the Belgian coastal town of
Le Coq-sur-Mer for rest and reconsideration of future plans.
On hearing that Nazi newspapers had put a price of $5,000 on
his head, Einstein quipped, “I didn’t know I was worth so
much.” Nonetheless, the death threats were serious: During
his stay at Le Coq, the Belgian government assigned
two 24-hour bodyguards to protect him from a reported Nazi
assassination team. And when the Hitler regime issued an
official book of photos of “Enemies of the State,” the
caption under Einstein’s photo read: Noch Ungehängt –
Not Yet Hanged. Einstein was also wanted – but alive and
thinking – by leading institutions of learning around the
world. Several European universities, including Oxford,
Paris, Madrid and Leiden, offered Einstein faculty
positions, as did the newly-established – and well-funded –
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Einstein felt at home in Europe, but, as author and
physicist C. P. Snow, explains, the choice of where to
settle was, to a large extent out of his hands:
He was himself Hitler’s greatest public enemy… He was a
brave man, but if he returned [to Germany], he would be
killed…. Belgium suited him. He was more comfortable in
small cozy countries (Holland was his favorite), but he
wasn’t safe from the Nazis. Unwillingly, he set off on his
travels again, [and moved] to Princeton….
It was a kind of exile. There is no doubt that he, who had
never recognized any place as home, sometimes longed for the
sounds and smells of Europe. Nevertheless, it was in America
that he reached his full wisdom and his full sadness.
Before
leaving Germany, Einstein was not only an outspoken critic
of the Nazis, but he had begun to speak out against racism
in America – the parallel to Nazi anti-Semitism and
Aryan-Superman theory was hard to miss. In 1931, W. E. B. Du
Bois, a founder of the NAACP and editor of its magazine,
The Crisis, wrote to Einstein, still living in Berlin:
Sir:
I am taking the liberty of sending you herewith some copies
of THE CRISIS magazine. THE CRISIS is published by American
Negroes and in defense of the citizenship rights of 12
million people descended from the former slaves of this
country. We have just reached our 21st birthday.
I am writing to ask if in the midst of your busy life you
could find time to write us a word about the evil of race
prejudice in the world. A short statement from you of 500 to
1,000 words on this subject would help us greatly in our
continuing fight for freedom.
With regard to myself, you will find something about me in
“Who’s Who in America.” I was formerly a student of Wagner
and Schmoller in the University of Berlin.
I should greatly appreciate word
from you.
Very sincerely yours,
W. E. B. Du Bois
Einstein
replied on October 29, 1931:
My Dear Sir!
Please find enclosed a short contribution for your
newspaper. Because of my excessive workload I could not send
a longer explanation.
With Distinguished respect,
Albert Einstein
To American Negroes
A Note from the Editor [Dr. Du Bois]:
The author, Albert Einstein, is a Jew of German
nationality. He was born in Wurttemburg in 1879 and educated
in Switzerland. He has been Professor of Physics at Zurich
and Prague and is at present director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm
Physical Institute at Berlin. He is a member of the Royal
Prussian Academy of Science and of the British Royal
Society. He received the Nobel Prize in 1921 and the Copley
Medal in 1925.
Einstein is a genius in higher physics and ranks with
Copernicus, Newton and Kepler. His famous theory of
Relativity, advanced first in 1905, is revolutionizing our
explanation of physical phenomenon and our conception of
Motion, Time and Space.
But Professor Einstein is not a mere mathematical mind.
He is a living being, sympathetic with all human advance. He
is a brilliant advocate of disarmament and world Peace and
he hates race prejudice because as a Jew he knows what it
is. At our request, he has sent this word to THE CRISIS with
“Ausgezeichneter Hochachtung” (“Distinguished respect”):
It seems to be a universal fact that minorities, especially
when their Individuals are recognizable because of physical
differences, are treated by majorities among whom they live
as an inferior class. The tragic part of such a fate,
however, lies not only in the automatically realized
disadvantage suffered by these minorities in economic and
social relations, but also in the fact that those who meet
such treatment themselves for the most part acquiesce in the
prejudiced estimate because of the suggestive influence of
the majority, and come to regard people like themselves as
inferior. This second and more important aspect of the evil
can be met through closer union and conscious educational
enlightenment among the minority, and so emancipation of the
soul of the minority can be attained.
The determined effort of the American Negroes in this
direction deserves every recognition and assistance.
Albert Einstein
Du Bois’
request for a message from Einstein revealed that the
African American scholar had a flare for public relations.
Einstein’s article brought The Crisis a rare, if
small, headline in the NY Times: EINSTEIN HAILS NEGRO
RACE. Nearly twenty years later, another Einstein-Du Bois
correspondence would bring even more momentous results, but
in the fearful 1950s, there would be no press coverage. On
the eve of Einstein’s move to America he joined the
international campaign to save “the Scottsboro Boys,” nine
African American teen-agers from Alabama, falsely accused of
rape – eight of them sentenced to death in 1931. For
Einstein, the Scottsboro Defense was the first of several
protests against racial injustice in the American legal
system. For J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, it was the first
“Communist Front” listed in Einstein’s file.
Einstein
joined with Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois and the Civil
Rights Congress. Indeed, almost every civil-rights group
Einstein endorsed after 1946, including the Council on
African Affairs cited earlier, had Robeson in the
leadership. Perhaps because Einstein had seen the Nazis use
the “Communist” scare tactic, he did not shrink from
Robeson’s red glare. Like Robeson, the CRC had close ties to
the Communist Party. While defending Rosa Lee Ingram, Willie
McGee, the Martinsville Seven and other African Americans
they saw as victims of “racist frame-ups,” the CRC also
supported the more than one hundred CP officials jailed
under the Smith Act
during the McCarthy/Hoover period. CRC statements pointed to
Hitler’s Germany where the Nazis had first rounded up the
Communists while most liberals shrugged from what they
thought was a safe distance.
It was a historical parallel Einstein agreed with. “The fear
of Communism,” he declared at the height of the McCarthy
era, “has led to practices which have become
incomprehensible to the rest of civilized
mankind…”
His
outspokenness on civil rights included a virtually unknown
1948 interview with the Cheyney Record, student
newspaper at a then-small Black college (Cheyney State) in
Pennsylvania: “Race prejudice has unfortunately become an
American tradition which is uncritically handed down from
one generation to the next,” Einstein declared. That he did
the interview is hardly surprising, given Einstein’s
previous visit to Lincoln University and his openness in
talking and writing to young people. More surprising,
however, is Einstein’s statement in the same interview, “The
only remedies [to racism] are enlightenment and education.
This is a slow and painstaking process in which all
right-thinking people should take part.”
Shortly
after the Cheyney interview, Einstein continued his
organizational network by sending a message to the
“Southwide Conference on Discrimination in Higher Education”
held at Atlanta University in 1950, and sponsored by the
Southern Conference Educational Fund. With the Red-scare,
Congressional investigating committees like HUAC had
red-baited virtually any southern group that called for
integration, and driven many of them out of existence. The
Highlander Folk School, where Rosa Parks took part in
interracial discussions during the summer before her famous
arrest for refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery,
Alabama bus, was one of the few organizations that managed
to survive. Another was the Southern Conference Educational
Fund.
Four years
before Brown v. Board of Education, SCEF sponsored a
rare integrated conference in the South (albeit at a Black
university) to oppose racism in southern universities.
In his greeting to the group, Einstein wrote:
If an individual commits an injustice he is harassed by his
conscience. But nobody is apt to feel responsible for
misdeeds of a community, in particular, if they are
supported by old traditions. Such is the case with
discrimination. Every right-minded person will be grateful
to you for having united to fight this evil that so
grievously injures the dignity and the repute of our
country. Only by spreading education among all of our people
can we approach the ideals of democracy.
Your fight is not easy, but in the end, you will succeed.
Perhaps
Einstein’s most effective civil-rights action was testimony
he didn’t actually give. At the start of 1951, the Federal
Government indicted W. E. B. Du Bois, then chairman of the
Peace Information Center, and four of the group’s other
officers, for failing to register as “foreign agents.” The
government’s principal charge was that the Peace Information
Center – described by historian Robin D. G. Kelley as an
“antinuclear, anti-Cold War” group – had committed the
“overt act” of circulating the Stockholm Peace Petition. The
petition declared:
We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of
intimidation and mass murder of people.
We demand strict international control to enforce this
measure.
We believe that any government which first uses atomic
weapons against any other country whatsoever will be
committing a crime against humanity and should be dealt with
as a war criminal.
We call on all men and women of goodwill throughout the
world to sign this appeal.
Several
millions people signed the worldwide peace petition
initiated in 1950 by the Stockholm-based, pro-Soviet World
Peace Council. HUAC denounced it as “the most extensive
piece of psychological warfare ever conducted on a world
scale…a smoke screen for [Communist] aggression.” If one
needs a single image to represent McCarthyism in America, it
might well be the picture of W. E. B. Du Bois in 1951 facing
a judge in a Federal courtroom – the world-renowned black
scholar, at the age of 83, goateed, short in height but
standing unbent, wearing a pinstriped, three-piece suit and
handcuffs. Like Robeson, Du Bois had refused to go along
with Washington’s anti-Soviet, anti-Communist policies,
refused to cooperate with Congressional investigating
committees, had his passport suspended, and had been ousted
from the NAACP.
Shortly
after the Federal indictment, Einstein sent Du Bois a copy
of his just-published book, Out of My Later Years –
it was almost exactly twenty years after Einstein had first
heard from Du Bois and written his statement for The
Crisis. In April, Du Bois wrote back and included
information about his upcoming court case: “Mrs. Du Bois and
I have received your autographed book with deep appreciation
and will read it with pleasure and profit. I am venturing to
enclose with this letter a statement on a case in which you
may be interested.”
Einstein
quickly volunteered to testify as a Defense witness in Du
Bois Federal trial. To give Einstein’s appearance in court
the maximum impact, defense attorney Vito Marcantonio
held back the announcement until the last minute. In a rare,
first-hand account, Shirley Graham Du Bois, describes the
judge’s response:
The prosecution rested its case during the morning of
November 20… Marcantonio…told the judge that only one
defense witness was to be presented, Dr. Du Bois. [But]
Marcantonio added casually to the judge, “Dr. Albert
Einstein has offered to appear as a character witness for
Dr. Du Bois.” Judge [Matthew F.] McGuire fixed Marcantonio
with a long look, and then adjourned the court for lunch.
When court resumed, Judge McGuire.… granted the motion for
acquittal.
Confronted
with the prospect of international publicity that would have
resulted from Einstein’s testimony, the judge dismissed the
case for lack of evidence before the Defense had a chance to
present its witnesses. Nine days later, Du Bois wrote to
Einstein again:
My dear Dr. Einstein:
I write to express my deep appreciation of your generous
offer to do anything that you could in the case brought
against me by the Department of Justice.
I am delighted that in the end it was not necessary to call
upon you and interfere with your great work and needed
leisure, but my thanks for your generous attitude is not
less on that account.
Mrs. Du Bois joins me in deep appreciation.
Very sincerely yours,
W. E. B. Du Bois
Einstein
almost never spoke at universities during the last twenty
years of his life. His increasingly frail health made travel
difficult, but mainly he considered the pomp and ceremony of
degree presentation to be “ostentatious.” Some may find it
remarkable that Einstein chose to break his no-college rule
by going not to an Ivy-League producer of prestigious
degrees,
but to a traditionally black university. (Chartered in 1854,
Lincoln was “the first institution anywhere in the world to
provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male
youth of African descent.”) But for Einstein, the 60-mile
trip from Princeton to Lincoln was not a casual choice. His
visit was “in a worthwhile cause,” he told the assembled
students and faculty. “The separation of the races
[segregation],” he declared, “is not a disease of colored
people, but a disease of white people,” adding, “I do not
intend to be quiet about it.”
Disease? To
appreciate today Einstein’s choice of the word requires
examining specific symptoms of the segregation sickness so
widespread in America eighty years after the Civil War.
Black soldiers, as we have noted, when allowed into combat
at all, fought in segregated units under white officers. To
a true believer, segregation always came first – even
before patriotism: Vowing never to fight “with a Negro by my
side,” a 28-year-old, West Virginia lawyer – and future
Senator – named Robert Byrd wrote to Mississippi’s Senator
Bilbo in 1945, “Rather I should die a thousand times, and
see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than
to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race
mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the
wilds.” (Byrd has since undergone a sea-change in his views
on race.)
Racial
segregation was the rule in most of America in May 1946,
with separate and unequal public and private facilities from
housing and schools to buses and beaches throughout the
south and many other parts of the country, including
Princeton, NJ. Some textbooks and even some documentary
films have pictured the separate (and decidedly unequal)
waiting rooms in Southern bus and train stations, and even
the separate drinking fountains marked “colored” and
“white.” But the disease went deeper. Even the blood donated
to save lives was donated at racially segregated blood banks
(when blacks were allowed to donate at all), with “white”
and “colored” blood kept in separately labeled storage
units. In 1942, in the midst of a world war, the American
Red Cross met in Washington and concluded that, while there
is no difference in the blood of the races, “most men of the
white race objected to blood of Negroes injected into their
veins.” No one apparently asked, according to one writer,
“how many white soldiers, hemorrhaging from a gaping wound
on the battlefield and sinking into a coma, would stop a
medic from giving them the ‘wrong color’ plasma.” The policy
of racially segregating blood continued in some parts of
this country well into the 1960s!
The Lincoln
students in Einstein’s audience, of course, knew most of
this in 1946. “On Friday, May 3rd, a very simple
man came to Lincoln University,” one student wrote a few
days later in the school newspaper, The Lincolnian:
His emaciated face and simplicity made him appear as a
biblical character. Quietly he stood with an expression of
questioning wonder upon his face as…President Horace Mann
Bond conferred a degree. Then this man with the long hair
and deep eyes spoke into a microphone of the disease that
humanity had. In the deep accents of his native Germany he
said he could not be silent. And then he finished and the
room was still. Later he lectured on the theory of
relativity to the Lincoln students.
That night, Albert Einstein went back to Princeton…
Before
returning home, Einstein had dinner at the home of Professor
Laurence Foster and his family. Dr. Foster’s daughter
Yvonne, shown in the photo of Einstein with children of
Lincoln faculty members, recalls, “The faculty had been
warned that Einstein was very shy and low-key, and, in fact,
he was quiet and spoke very little at dinner, but he became
amused by [her younger brother] Larry’s Pennsylvania Dutch
accent and couldn’t help but smile during the conversation.”
She adds: “We were honored” that during the
degree-presentation ceremony, “Einstein wore Professor
Phillip Miller’s academic robe and daddy’s mortarboard.”
“I was very
happy to know that my boy had an opportunity to see Dr.
Einstein,” one student’s mother told Lincoln’s President
Bond shortly after the event. In a letter to Einstein, Bond
relayed the mother’s words, adding his own thanks: “All of
us are as grateful as this humble mother." Einstein’s choice
of Lincoln, as well as his words, clearly seemed intended to
send a message to a wider audience. But the media then —
like the media since then — had different news priorities.
While almost all of Einstein’s public speeches and
interviews were extensively reported by major newspapers –
even sticking out his tongue made the front pages – in this
case, the mainstream media treated the address by the
world’s most famous scientist at the nation’s oldest black
university as a non-event. Only the black press gave
Einstein’s speech meaningful coverage. The Philadelphia
Tribune and Baltimore Afro-American carried
first-hand front-page reports with photos of Einstein
receiving the honorary degree from Lincoln’s President
Horace Mann Bond and lecturing on relativity to Lincoln
students. The Tribune’s headline, stretching across
half the front page, read: EINSTEIN AWARDED PORTFOLIO in
Historic Campus Ceremony.
Other black
papers covering the story included the NY Age, NY
Amsterdam News (“Einstein: Race Problem a Disease of
‘White Folks’”) and Pittsburgh Courier. All included
photos. No one has (yet) found a copy or transcript, or
even notes, of Einstein’s speech at Lincoln, nor has it ever
been quoted in the plethora of Einstein biographies and
anthologies. What follows are sections of his ten-minute
speech from the report in the Baltimore Afro American
of May 11, 1946. The Afro-American article, by J. W.
Woods, is datelined LINCOLN UNIVERSITY, Pa.:
The only possibility of preventing war is to prevent the
possibility of war. International peace can be achieved only
if every individual uses all of his power to exert pressure
on the United States to see that it takes the leading part
in world government.
The United Nations has no power to prevent war, but it can
try to avoid another war. The UN will be effective only if
no one neglects his duty in his private environment. If he
does [neglect it], he is responsible for the death of our
children in a future war.
My trip to this institution was on behalf of a worthwhile
cause. There is separation of colored people from white
people in the United States. That separation [segregation]
is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white
people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.
The situation of mankind today is like that of a little
child who has a sharp knife and plays with it. There is no
effective defense against the atomic bomb. For our own
safety, we must use it on an international basis. It cannot
only destroy a city but it can destroy the very earth on
which that city stood.
The New
York Times (May 4, 1946) carried a brief item on p. 7,
with a total of one sentence about the speech: “Dr. Einstein
said he believed there was ‘a great future’ for the Negro
[and] asked the students ‘to work long and hard and with
lasting patience.’” Assuming that was taken from the same
speech (none of the reports in the black press cite or
allude to that sentence or anything similar to it), it’s
interesting to contrast what the Times singled out to
publish with what the black press reported.
Notes
Fred Jerome, veteran journalist and science
writer, is the author of
The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the
World's Most Famous Scientist. He has taught
journalism at Columbia, New York University and other New
York-area universities. Rodger Taylor,
freelance writer, is supervising branch librarian of the New
York Public Library.