FIGURE 41. The Olympia Academy members, ca. 1903. Conrad Habicht, Maurice Solovine, and Einstein. (Wikimedia Commons)
Identity and Principles
Einstein’s introduction to the concept of civil rights occurred in 1919, at the very beginning of his political engagement. His first encounter with the concept was a negative one. Convinced that discrimination against Jews in German society, especially against East European Jews, was pervasive, he argued that defending their civil rights in the courts would be of little help to them. Rather, he believed it would only prolong the illusion of assimilation (see “Einstein’s Confession,” CPAE, Vol. 7, Doc. 37, published September 24, 1920; and Jewish Identity and Ties, “The Cultural Zionist Ideal,” below). Separation from the ruling majority alone could offer a guarantee to Germans of Jewish extraction. Ironically, Einstein failed to follow his own advice, as evidenced by the fact that he remained in Germany until late 1932.
As the Nazis stripped Jews and actively dissenting Gentiles of their civil rights in Germany and proceeded to a systematic program of persecution and liquidation, Einstein, now a resident of Princeton, New Jersey, sought to obtain entry into the United States for those increasingly under threat. This consisted for the most part of securing affidavits in support of applications for immigration visas, the large number of which are part of the Einstein Archives. In fact, the sheer number of the affidavits that he signed soon diluted their impact on the authorities. He confessed that he could not “give any more affidavits and would endanger those that are still pending if I were to give more…. The pressure on us from the poor people over there is such that one almost despairs, faced as one is with the depth of misery and the few possibilities of helping” (see letter to Michele Besso, October 10, 1938; Einstein Archives 7-376). Horrified by the revelations of the Holocaust and determined to counter measures by the State Department to exclude increasingly desperate refugees, he managed with the help of his influential friend, Rabbi Wise, to convince President Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in January 1944. By war’s end, 200,000 Jews had been rescued to the United States (see Part I, Friends, “Stephen Wise”).
Efforts on behalf of the victims of the Nazi terror are most closely linked in the public’s mind with the humanitarian Einstein. Yet it was not only in this area that he asserted a spirited defense of the civil rights of the disadvantaged. Of increasing concern to him in the 1930s was the ambitious vision of some in the Zionist camp that threatened both Arab rights and his model of social justice for Palestine. He excoriated the narrow nationalism that called for the disenfranchisement of the Arab population and undermined his aim of coexistence between the two peoples (“The Goal of Jewish-Arab Amity,” New York Times, April 21, 1935; draft in Einstein Archives 28-305).
During the three winters spent in Pasadena at the beginning of the 1930s, Einstein observed one of the uglier undersides of American society, a rampant racial prejudice against the Negro that denied him basic civil and human rights. He considered prejudice an aspect of the “universal fact that minorities … are treated by majorities among whom they live as an inferior class.” It not only led to disadvantages in economic and social relations; more tragically, “those who meet such treatment themselves for the most part acquiesce in the prejudiced estimate … and come to regard people like themselves as inferior.” Einstein clearly identified the lot of the Negro in America with the Jew in Germany, though a decade later he drew the opposite conclusion. He had seen no future for the Jewish minority in Germany. In America, he hoped that “emancipation of the soul of the minority can be attained” (“To American Negroes,” The Crisis, February 1932; Einstein Archives 89-262), though he later admitted that he did “not believe there is a way in which this deeply entrenched evil can be quickly healed” (“The Negro Question,” Pageant, January 1946; Einstein Archives 28-640).
In Einstein’s militant pacifist phase at the beginning of the thirties, he had delivered his famous “Two Percent Speech,” advocating civil disobedience in order to paralyze compulsory military service (see Pacifism, below). While he soon gave up the idea of Gandhian passive resistance in the face of the Nazis, it was to become the linchpin of his moral stance during the McCarthy period in the early 1950s. He was adamant that those called on to testify about their political views refuse to do so on the grounds that government hearings violated an individual’s civil rights (see reference to the open letter to William Frauenglass under Political Contexts, “Postwar and Cold War,” and no. 202 in appendix C). He admonished the socialist Norman Thomas to stop lending his voice to “the hysterical hunt for the few Communists there are here (including those fellow citizens whose red tinge is weaker, à la Jefferson” (see letter to Norman Thomas, March 10, 1954; Einstein Archives 61-549).
Einstein summarized his views on the subject of civil and human rights a month earlier in an address to a lawyer’s group: “The existence and validity of human rights are not written in the stars. The ideals concerning the conduct of men toward each other and the desirable structure of the community have been conceived and taught by enlightened individuals in the course of history. Those ideals and convictions which resulted from historical experience, from the craving for beauty and harmony, have been readily accepted in theory by man—and at all times have been trampled upon by the same people under the pressure of their animal instincts. A large part of history is therefore replete with the struggle for those human rights, an eternal struggle in which a final victory can never be won. But to tire in that struggle would mean the ruin of society” (“Human Rights,” February 20, 1954; Einstein Archives 28-1012).
Education: Einstein’s Views
“The Nightmare”
Einstein’s experiences at school and university (see Part I, Education), as student and teacher, were closely related to his views on education. Plagued in his earliest years by the orthodoxy of textbook learning, he stressed the importance of imparting “a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good” through personal contact with teachers. In addition, he thought that “overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization … kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends” (Ideas and Opinions, p. 67). He reiterated this forcefully in “The Nightmare” (Berliner Tageblatt, December 25, 1917; see CPAE, Vol. 6, Doc. 49; Einstein Archives 78-205), in which he rails against the compulsion of the secondary-school leaving examination. This hurdle, he argues, intimidates the pupil, thereby destroying the central purpose of education, which is to foster curiosity and encourage creativity. Here is the full text with original emphases rendered in italics. (Reprinted with permission of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.)
I consider the secondary-school leaving examination that follows the usual school education not only unnecessary but even harmful. I consider it unnecessary because the school faculty is without doubt able to judge the maturity of a young man who attends the school for several years. The teachers’ impression of a pupil that is formed during the latter’s many years in school and the surely numerous written exercises that every pupil has to complete, together yield a sufficiently complete basis on which to judge a pupil better than any, however carefully implemented examination.
I consider the secondary-school leaving exam harmful for two reasons. The fear of exams as well as the large number of subjects that have to be committed to memory harm the health of many young men to a considerable degree. This fact is too well known to need extensive substantive verification. I will nevertheless mention the well-known fact that many men in the most varied professions have been plagued, into their later years, by nightmares whose origins trace back to the secondary-school leaving exam. And these are men who can hold their own in life and can by no means be counted among the neurasthenics.
The secondary-school leaving exam is furthermore harmful because it lowers the level of teaching in the last school years. Instead of an exclusively content-oriented engagement with the individual subjects, one all too readily lapses into a more or less shallow drilling of the pupils for the exam. Instead of in-depth teaching one gets more or less an exercise in showmanship designed to lend the class a certain luster in front of the examiners. For these reasons, do away with the secondary-school leaving exam!
“Uproar in the Lecture Hall”
As a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Einstein was not obligated to teach but did offer occasional lecture courses at the University of Berlin. In February 1920, one such lecture on relativity was interrupted by a brouhaha that made the local papers. The uproar began when Einstein announced an open admission policy that violated university regulations. Only registered students, auditors, and docents of the University were entitled to attend. Yet the popularity of Einstein’s lectures knew no bounds after confirmation of general relativity. The overflow crowd of more than 1,500 individuals included a large contingent of unregistered East European Jews. Following the lecture, Einstein opened the floor to a discussion of his newly announced admission standard. For the most part, a decorous exchange ensued, at the end of which an orderly vote was taken in favor of making the lectures open to the public.
In recounting the incident for a liberal newspaper (8-Uhr Abendblatt, February 13, 1920; see CPAE, Vol. 7, Doc. 33, for the translation used here), Einstein played down the anti-Semitic character of some of the lecture-hall catcalls but conceded that the undertone could be interpreted that way. The student council took the local press to task, viewing the incident as demonstrating the fragility of the academic community when the daily media, irrespective of its political leanings, attempted through distorted press accounts to exploit events within the university. Here is the almost complete text. (Reprinted courtesy of The Albert Einstein Archives, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.)
My popular lectures on the theory of relativity were attended not only by students but also by many individuals who actually were not authorized to attend. For this reason the student council declared that it would no longer tolerate this. I pointed out that the large hall has room enough for all who want to listen and that this should hardly cause any problems. The student council was not satisfied with this and turned this question in to the rector of the university. The rector sent me a letter in which he pointed out that according to existing regulations, these individuals have no right to enter the hall. This is formally correct. I, however, took the point of view that I find it reprehensible to deny these individuals the right to listen without good reason. Therefore, yesterday, instead of lecturing I began a discussion with my audience, which, however, did not lead to a definite result. Consequently, I found it necessary to cancel further lectures and declare to the student body that they could request a refund of their tuition fees. However, I have no intention of canceling my lectures in general; I plan to resume them in a different form…. Should an incident like yesterday’s occur again, I will cease my lecturing altogether…. Anti-Semitic remarks per se did not occur, but the undertone could be interpreted that way.
Jewish Identity and Ties
Allegiances, Old and New
As a young boy in Munich, Einstein received Jewish religious instruction at the home of a distant relative, though this influence was superseded at age twelve by a fascination with the natural sciences. Upon obtaining Swiss citizenship in 1901, for instance, he declared himself to be “without religious affiliation.” Nor in the almost twenty years that he spent in Switzerland—completing his secondary education, attending and teaching at the university, and working at the Swiss Federal Patent Office—did he have any sense of belonging to a Jewish religious or cultural community. He “was unaware of his Jewishness, nor was there anything present there which affected or stimulated my Jewish sensibility” (“Wie ich Zionist wurde” [How I Became a Zionist], Jüdische Rundschau, June 21, 1921; republished in CPAE, Vol. 7, Doc. 57).
Religious affiliation received particular attention during Einstein’s three-semester intermezzo at the German University in Prague, 1911–1912. It was the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph’s particular hobbyhorse to demand that all civil servants, including university personnel, profess allegiance to one of the four established religions in the Empire—Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, or Judaism. Atheism was not tolerated—nor was Islam—and a clash with Einstein’s long-standing declaration of nonaffiliation seemed inevitable. The ever-pragmatic candidate realized, however, that he would be sacrificing his position in Prague if he were to act on conviction. With equanimity, he announced that it mattered not at all “to return to the bosom of Abraham. It is merely a piece of paper that must be signed” (cited in a letter from Paul Ehrenfest to Tatiana Ehrenfest, February 25, 1912, Museum Boerhaave, Leyden).
During his time in Berlin and after, Einstein continued to maintain that he did not believe in anything that might be described as “Jewish faith,” and resisted becoming a member of a Jewish congregation. At the same time, his identification with the disadvantaged Jews from Eastern Europe who suffered most from the burgeoning anti-Semitism in postwar Germany shifted the weight of his concern from the religious aspects of Judaism to cultural ones, and here his conviction was principled and steadfast.
In spite of his own religious indifference, Einstein did not see a contradiction between a Jewish religious outlook and the outlook of science. To his mind, Judaism did not demand an act of faith but was concerned almost exclusively with a moral attitude in life and toward life, of which a scientist could certainly partake. He derived comfort from the stern rationality of Spinoza and looked askance at the concept of a transcendent God. (For more on Einstein’s thoughts on religion and ethics, see the frontmatter, Credo: “What I Believe,” and Religion, below.) Baruch Spinoza, a seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher who lived in the Netherlands, broke with the prevailing dogmas of Judaism, arguing that the laws of the Torah were obsolete. For this he was excommunicated from his congregation as a heretic, a fate that the indifferent Einstein was spared.
Catalyst: The Role of Kurt Blumenfeld
Kurt Blumenfeld was the chief ideologue of the German Zionist Federation and the critical catalyst in Einstein’s turn to the Jewish nationalist cause of Zionism in 1919. After engaging in intensive discussions with this persuasive Zionist leader and attending one of his lectures in the beginning of that year, Einstein declared his newfound loyalty with the following metaphor: “I am against nationalism, but I am for the Zionist cause … If a man has both arms and constantly asserts ‘I have a right arm,’ then he is a chauvinist. If a man is missing his right arm, however, he must do all in his power to compensate for the missing limb.” This is how Blumenfeld many years later recounted Einstein’s sudden commitment to the Zionist cause. The power of the anecdote lies in its capture of an emotional leap rather than in the precise historical reconstruction of Einstein’s transformation (see Blumenfeld, Erlebte Judenfrage [The Jewish Question Experienced], pp. 127–128). In Einstein’s eyes, Zionism’s nationalist coloration was dimmed by the expectation that it might achieve the internationalist goal of bridging with common purpose the fragmented Jewish communities of Europe. Thus he was able to reconcile the tug of Zionist nationalism and his heartfelt belief that intellectuals had a moral obligation to strive for international solidarity.
Blumenfeld also convinced Einstein to accompany the leaders of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) to the United States in 1921 in order to raise money for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In doing so, he pointed out to the leadership that Einstein was above all a nonconformist, and while he could always be counted on to support the Zionist cause, caution should be exercised in letting him make speeches in America, as he might say things that were detrimental to the cause.
Blumenfeld remained a mentor in Zionist matters for the rest of Einstein’s life, though the two parted ways over Blumenfeld’s more militant and political interpretation of Zionism’s goals. (A discussion of Einstein’s opposing view of Zionism follows below.) Einstein wrote him in 1944 that he sometimes had the feeling that Blumenfeld was his literary doppelgänger: “This is apparent from the fact that you can copy my style so effortlessly that after a certain time I can no longer tell which one of us was actually the author” (Blumenfeld in Seelig, ed., Helle Zeit-Dunkle Zeit, p. 77). Less than a month before his death, Einstein again thanked Blumenfeld for “helping to make me aware of the Jewish soul” (see letter to Blumenfeld, March 25, 1955; Einstein Archives 59-274).
The Cultural Zionist Ideal
By 1920, Einstein was openly contemptuous of the assimilationist position that proposed integrating Jews into German society. In particular, he scorned the policy of maintaining religious practices while rejecting a Jewish cultural identity. The institutional embodiment of this policy was the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, which saw accommodation as a way of guaranteeing Jewish civil rights. Einstein’s contempt for the association was to a large degree fueled by his disdain for an elite organization of German Jews that sat in judgment of powerless cousins from the lower classes. By its very name, it denied kinship to its East European brethren. Called upon to address the group in the spring of 1920, Einstein refused, arguing that yielding to the hegemonic German culture was tantamount to seeking approval from the Gentile community. It was, he thought, a fatal concession to the normative authority of the anti-Semite and one that perpetuated humiliation. Only by expressing solidarity with an East European Jewish community that had maintained authenticity through loyalty to its roots, might assimilated German brethren recapture feelings of communal worth (see “Einstein’s Confession,” in Israelitisches Wochenblatt für die Schweiz, September 24, 1920, reprinted in CPAE, Vol. 7, Doc. 37). Zionism afforded this promise.
A movement that arose at the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism advanced the proposition that the Jewish people constitute a nation and are entitled to a national homeland. All Zionists agreed that the fatal illusions of assimilation could best be avoided by undertaking tasks in common, and all concurred that Palestine was the heart of such an enterprise. Yet the question remained how best and how realistically that might be achieved.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had recognized the Zionist aim of a national home for the Jewish people. In setting up a British mandatory authority there three years later, the League of Nations used the same expression: “national home.” Much in the development of Zionism over the next thirty years would hinge on the interpretation of this phrase. Two points of departure dominated within the Zionist camp. One stressed Zionism’s spiritual and cultural character, the other, its political nature. Cultural Zionists directed their energies toward a Palestine that would rekindle a sense of self-worth in the Diaspora, and in which Palestine and the Diaspora would enjoy a constant reciprocal spiritual relationship. They sought relatively modest funding for gradualist settlement that was committed to the social and economic development of Palestine as a spiritual resource for world Jewry. Political Zionists, on the other hand, wished more or less openly to advance an agenda for the formation of an independent political entity, that is, a state. They dwelled on the importance of mass colonization and ambitious supporting budgets to achieve this goal. Einstein, it is clear, viewed Palestine as a universal symbol of Jewish cultural unity rather than as the seedling of a politically independent nation.
While always placing the greatest emphasis on the cultural aspect of the Zionist enterprise, Einstein did recognize the need for administrative, economic, and social organizations to galvanize it into action. At an early stage of settlement, however, he felt the exercise of power would not endanger the moral purpose that lay at the heart of the enterprise.
This then was Einstein’s Zionist ideal: Palestine as a synthesis of tradition and modernity, linking the communal enthusiasm of shtetl Jews with the rational spirit of the secular Enlightenment. The construct could also bridge the differences between cultural and political Zionists, reconcile the fervor of the righteous with the pragmatism of the pioneer, and give the analytic rigor of the intellectual full play.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Though Einstein only took an active interest in Jewish concerns after the First World War, the foundation for his devotion to the Hebrew University was laid in his youth and was rooted in a sense of obligation. According to his sister, very early in his life he felt a responsibility to those fellow-Jews in Europe who were denied “an independent domain” in which to develop their intellectual gifts (see Maja Winteler-Einstein’s memoir, “Beitrag für sein Lebensbild” [Biographical Sketch], February 15, 1924, CPAE, Vol. 1, p. lx). The solution was to create an institution of higher learning that would form internationally renowned research departments: “This university will not just form the intellectual center of Jewish Palestine, but will mightily increase the sense of solidarity among the numerous academically employed Jews scattered throughout the world. That a place for free research should already be provided at such an early stage in the development of construction projects in Palestine is consistent with our people’s particular love of the intellectual” (see letter to Sylvio de Mayo, August 22, 1923; Einstein Archives 36-866). For Einstein, the Hebrew University provided the centerpiece of his cultural Zionist aspirations.
In the spring of 1921, Einstein had an opportunity to put this vision into practice. Asked to accompany Chaim Weizmann and other leaders of the World Zionist Organization to the United States on a fund-raising journey on behalf of the Hebrew University, he quickly agreed, “scarcely giving it more than five minutes of thought” (see letter to Fritz Haber, March 9, 1921, CPAE, Vol. 12, Doc. 88; Einstein Archives 12-332). The tour was only a qualified financial success, and his later association with the university, the cornerstone of which he laid on his only trip to Palestine in 1923, was not a happy one. Einstein’s dispute with the administration of the Hebrew University was both personal and one of principle. Impatient with the intrigues of its first chancellor, Judah Magnes, he further resented what he thought was the latter’s incompetence compounded by stubbornness. Einstein was above all concerned that the university become an international center of learning and not a provincial backwater. In the face of Magnes’s opposition, Einstein fought to keep academic and administrative control in the hands of recognized European scholars, at the same time belittling the intellectual authority of those in Jerusalem. Multiple threats on his part to resign from the governing bodies of the university, as well as actual resignations and reluctant resumption of oversight duties, haunted his relationship with the university in the late 1920s. The upshot was that an exasperated Einstein became thoroughly alienated from the very institution that had first attracted him to the Zionist fold. (See Rosenkranz, Einstein before Israel, chapters 5 and 7, for an excellent discussion of Einstein’s relationship to the university.)
The Jewish Question and Its Resolution
Einstein waded into the political waters that swirled around the Jewish question in 1920 when he brusquely refused to address the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. He also tangled with the World Zionist Organization (WZO) when he publicly took issue with its political Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state (see “The Cultural Zionist Ideal,” above). His differences with that organization became increasingly evident as his prediction that Palestine would be unable to absorb large-scale immigration (see letter to Maurice Solovine, May 20, 1923; Einstein Archives 80-845) proved far off the mark.
Under the relentless persecution and wholesale murder of European Jews, the growing influx of immigrants into the British mandate of Palestine in the 1930s, as well as the uncharitable restrictions on their admission to Western countries, increased the importance of Palestine as a potential place of refuge. Yet, under Arab pressure, Great Britain refused to allow large-scale Jewish immigration. In eventually recognizing the viability of the Jewish presence in Palestine, Einstein began excoriating the British policy of coldheartedly denying European Jews sanctuary and of pitting Jew against Arab. During the Second World War and after, he was tireless in his devotion to the cause of rescuing Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, writing countless affidavits to secure them positions in the United States.
For some time, Einstein had also feared the narrow nationalism of militant Zionists who engaged in land speculation and displayed a brutal indifference to Arab rights in Palestine. Social justice, as Einstein saw it, was the defining characteristic of Judaism, and from this basic assumption he derived political consequences that were often uncomfortable for the Zionist leadership, much as Kurt Blumenfeld had predicted (see “Catalyst: The Role of Kurt Blumenfeld,” above). Fearing that the spiritualization of the Jewish community in Palestine would suffer if a Jewish state was created, he bluntly stated his opposition to the idea (“Our Debt to Zionism,” New Palestine 28, no. 16 [April 29, 1938]: 2). Einstein’s emphasis on the moral foundations of Zionism as well as his internationalist and pacifist views were increasingly at odds with the mainstream of the Zionist movement.
Einstein’s moderate position on the nature of the Jewish homeland was increasingly being overwhelmed by events. In May 1942, the chairman of the Jewish Agency’s Palestine Executive and later the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, openly called for the creation of a Jewish army and transformation of postwar Palestine into an independent Jewish commonwealth. Einstein continued to resist, calling for a binational solution, but as the full horror of the systematic genocide of European Jews was revealed, the dynamic in favor of a Jewish state became increasingly irresistible. In the end, Einstein accepted its creation but on the condition that it meet the critical test of upholding the ethical ideal of “peace, based on understanding and self-restraint, and not on violence” (“The Jews of Israel,” November 27, 1949, in Out of My Later Years, pp. 274–276).
On the question of the political future of Palestine, Einstein’s paramount consideration was the necessity of accommodation between Jew and Arab. He sought reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace rather than the creation of a Jewish state, which with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power undermined any such rapprochement.
He accepted the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, though he never wavered in his conviction that the supreme moral test of a Jewish presence was “our attitude toward our Arab minority … the true touchstone for our moral standard” (see letter to Zvi Lurie, January 4, 1955; Einstein Archives 60-388).
TESTIMONY BEFORE THE ANGLO-AMERICAN COMMITTEE
Einstein did not try to disguise his contempt for the British policy of divide and conquer that satisfied neither Jew nor Arab. He also caused consternation among many Zionists by reiterating his resistance to the idea of a Jewish state and calling for a binational solution to the Palestine issue. In early January 1946, Einstein appeared before a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Jewish Problems in Palestine and Europe to examine the Palestinian issue. The goal of the Committee was to assess political, economic, and social conditions in Mandatory Palestine relevant to the problem of Jewish immigration and settlement. The British government had suggested the inquiry, fearing Arab resistance to the influx of Jewish immigrants into Palestine and hoping to secure American co-responsibility for its Palestinian policy, which was refused. The British then turned to the United Nations. What follows are extracts from Einstein’s testimony before the Committee, which met in the State Department Building, Washington, DC, on January 11, 1946.
Einstein: I wish to explain why I believe that the difficulties between the Jews and the Arabs are artificially created, and are created by the English. I believe, if there would be a really honest government for the people there, and get the Arabs and the Jews together, there would be nothing to fear. I cannot convince you, gentlemen, but I can only say what convinces me.
I may first state what I think about British colonial rule. I find that the British colonial rule is based on a native. Do you know what that means? The native was exploited already before the English came into the land. Of course, the English had two interests. The first was to have raw materials for their industry. Also the oil in those countries. I find that everywhere there are big land owners who are exploiters of that race of people. These big land owners, of course, are in a precarious situation because they are always afraid that they will be gotten rid of. The British are always in a passive alliance with those land-possessing owners which suppress the work of the people in the different trades.
It is my impression that Palestine is a kind of small model of India. There is an attempt to dominate, with the help of a few officials, the people of Palestine, and it seems to me that the English rule in Palestine is absolutely of this kind. It is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise […]
Committee member Frank Aydelotte: What would you do if the Arabs refused to consent to bringing these refugees to Palestine? Suppose the Arab population were prepared to resist it by force; would you compel them by force to receive the refugees?
Einstein: That will never be the case if there is not politics. But there are not only Arab politicians, but Jewish politicians, as well.
Committee member James McDonald: Would you eliminate the Jewish and Arab politicians both?
Einstein: No, you cannot eliminate them. If you eliminate them, ten others grow up in their place. [Laughter.] […]
Committee member Joseph Hutcheson: I have asked various persons if it is essential to the right or the privilege of Jews to go to Palestine, if it is essential to real Zionism, leaving out of the picture the political side of the question, that a setup be fixed so that the Jews may have a Jewish state and a Jewish majority without regard to the Arab view. Do you share that point of view, or do you think the matter can be handled on any other basis?
Einstein: Yes, absolutely. The state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with many difficulties and a narrow-mindedness. I believe it is bad.
Organizational Ties
Einstein did not join many organizations. For groups whose goals he supported, however, he allowed his name to be used, which gave the false impression that he was also an active member. An independent thinker, he was not one to give his unequivocal allegiance to any political party. Even the Zionists were aware that Einstein was not a man to toe the line.
He did actively participate in the organizations discussed below.
Olympia Academy
The “academy” was a discussion group of three young men, launched Easter 1902 in Bern by Einstein and Maurice Solovine, which Conrad Habicht subsequently joined (fig. 41). Addressing the academy a half-century later, he recalled that it was “established … in order to make fun of your large, old and self-important sisters” (see letter to the immortal Olympia Academy, April 3, 1953; Einstein Archives 21-294). Einstein was chosen as honorary president and signed “official” letters as “A, Ritter v. Steissbein” (“A[lbert], Knight of the Tailbone”; see letter to Conrad Habicht, December 14, 1909, CPAE, Vol. 5, Doc. 191; Einstein Archives 12-412). The group had its beginnings when Solovine followed up on an advertisement in a Bern newspaper that offered private lessons in physics for three francs an hour (see “Advertisement for Private Lessons,” CPAE, Vol. 1, Doc. 135, which only mentions that the first lesson is free). After meeting a few times, Einstein informed his pupil: “You don’t have to be tutored in physics; our discussion of problems that stem from it is much more interesting. Just come to see me and I will be glad to talk with you.” They began reading Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science, and were soon joined by Habicht, whom Einstein knew from Schaffhausen and who was working on his doctorate in mathematics in Bern. The friends subsequently read and discussed a daunting list of works, including Mach’s Analysis of Sensations and Mechanics; Mill’s Logic, particularly Book III (dealing with induction); Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature; Spinoza’s Ethics; some of Helmholtz’s memoirs and lectures; some chapters from Ampère’s Essay on Philosophy; Riemann’s On the Hypotheses Which Serve as a Basis for Geometry; some chapters from Avenarius’s Critique of Pure Experience; Clifford’s On the Nature of Things in Themselves; Dedekind’s What Are Numbers?; Poincaré’s Science and Hypothesis; Sophocles’ Antigone; Racine’s Andromaque, Dickens’s Christmas Tales; most of Don Quixote, etc. They reveled in their dinners together, which were “models of frugality. The menu ordinarily consisted of one bologna sausage, a piece of Gruyère cheese, a fruit, a small container of honey and one or two cups of tea” (Letters to Solovine, 1906–1955, pp. 5–15). The group began to dissolve in summer 1903 when Habicht finished his doctoral work in Bern and returned to Schaffhausen before taking a position in eastern Switzerland. Einstein may have continued discussions with Solovine intermittently even after 1904, when he began auditing courses in Lyon, but certainly no longer than 1906, when Solovine moved to Paris.
FIGURE 41. The Olympia Academy members, ca. 1903. Conrad Habicht, Maurice Solovine, and Einstein. (Wikimedia Commons)
Bund Neues Vaterland (Association for a New Fatherland)
Bund Neues Vaterland (BNV) was a pacifist organization, founded in November 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. It attracted individuals from a political spectrum that stretched from the center to the left and encouraged political and economic understanding among members of the European cultural community. Most attractive for Einstein was its effort to reestablish the international “republic of letters” and restore the bonds of cooperation among intellectuals from the belligerent states.
Einstein first attended a meeting of the organization as a guest, together with his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, in March 1915. At this time, Einstein was still struggling with his general theory of relativity and most probably accompanied Elsa as a favor to her. His political mentor, Georg Nicolai (see Part I, Friends), presumably also urged Einstein’s attendance. By the beginning of June, he had become a member. In the course of its first year, the organization’s ringing condemnations of the policy of German annexation and its intimate connections with the Dutch Anti-War Council resulted in disbandment by the authorities in February 1916.
As the war was ending, September 1918, the association was reconstituted. As a member of a working committee, Einstein called for the construction of a German socialist republic on a democratic foundation that was committed to the task of international reconciliation. With others, he also delivered a speech under BNV auspices in November 1918 that insisted on the immediate convening of a National Assembly with legislative powers and warned of a dictatorship of the proletariat (see “Need for a National Assembly,” November 13, 1918, CPAE, Vol. 7, Doc. 14; Einstein Archives 28-001). More than a thousand people attended. In addition, the reconstituted organization pursued the question of war guilt and how to facilitate the introduction of civil liberties while seeking a middle ground between the extremes of the revolutionary left at home and foreign demands for vengeance.
A year later, in his capacity as a BNV spokesman, Einstein welcomed a board member of the French Clarté movement who spoke in the former Prussian House of Lords about setting up a “brain trust” to facilitate international reconciliation. Einstein even briefly entertained the suggestion that he head a German branch of Clarté. On a trip to Amsterdam under BNV auspices in February 1921, after a liberal constitution for the Weimar Republic had been adopted (August 1919), Einstein urged the International Federation of Trade Unions to intervene on Germany’s behalf in Allied debates about the republic’s crushing burden of reparations.
Einstein’s swan song as an active participant in public activities of the BNV—now renamed the German League for the Rights of Man— came at a joint peace meeting of German and French delegates in Berlin in June 1922. Returning to a theme he had touched on many times before, in his speech he called for a bridge over the abyss that separated different cultures by subordinating the needs of one’s own country to the interests of a greater European union (see “Address to the French-German Peace Meeting,” June 11, 1922, CPAE, Vol. 13, Doc. 228). In early 1926, Einstein asked to resign from the executive committee of the German League, citing other pressing obligations (see letter to Otto Lehmann-Russbueldt, January 3, 1926; Einstein Archives 44-328).
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation
Apart from his ties with the Bund Neues Vaterland, Einstein confined his organized political activity during the early and mid-1920s mainly to working with the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) affiliated with the League of Nations. His on-again-off-again relationship with this elite body reflected not only the volatile state of European politics but the varying level of his disappointment with the spinelessness of the League. Stubbornly his own man, Einstein also inclined to the view that he was acting in his capacity as an individual, not as the spokesperson of national policy. Though he favored the idea that intellectual elites should have a platform for voicing their views on human affairs, he came to feel that the ICIC could not live up to this goal because the constraints of national interest hampered its efforts.
The assassination of Einstein’s friend, the German-Jewish foreign minister Walther Rathenau, in June 1922, as well as rumors that he too had been placed on death lists, led to his first announcement of resignation from the committee that he had joined less than a month earlier. When fellow member Marie Curie urged him to stay on, he reconsidered. A second resignation followed in spring 1923 after his return from the Far East. This time it was the impotence of the League of Nations in the face of the French-Belgian occupation of the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr that prompted his withdrawal (see letter to Pierre Comert, April 11, 1923, CPAE, Vol. 14, Doc. 10; Einstein Archives 34-799). The formation of a more conciliatory French government a year later brought another change of heart. Einstein expressed regret for his “temporary demoralization” and asked to rejoin the ICIC (see letter to Gilbert Murray, May 30, 1924, CPAE, Vol. 14, Doc. 258; Einstein Archives 34-808).
After attending the fourth session of the group in late July 1924, Einstein explained the goal of the commission in a prominent German newspaper: “We are not so much concerned with utopian plans, but have already begun with more modest, but fruitful detail work: the international organization of reporting scientific research, exchange of publications, protection of intellectual property, exchange of professors and students of various countries, etc. The greatest emphasis has been placed on the problem of reporting scientific work.” Of greater interest to the general public, he admitted, was the question of Germany’s entry into the League of Nations, of which he was a strong proponent (see “On the League of Nations,” August 29, 1924, CPAE, Vol. 14, Doc. 314).
His initial misgivings that the group lacked the determination necessary to achieve real progress toward improving international relations only grew when the committee’s work was taken over in 1926 by the Paris-based Institute for Intellectual Cooperation. Einstein regarded the institute’s exclusive funding by the French government as a naked intrusion of national interests in the committee’s work and an unacceptable undermining of its internationalist mission. Disheartened by unsuccessful efforts to interest Max Planck in setting up a German national commission of moderates as a counterweight to French influence, Einstein tendered his final resignation from the ICIC in 1932.
Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists
Well before the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the Second World War, Einstein had developed grave concerns about containing that which he had helped set in motion (see letter of March 25, 1945, in Politics, “Hitler in Power and the Second World War—Letters to FDR,” below). Someone else who shared these misgivings was Leo Szilard, who in summer 1939 had prevailed upon Einstein to put his name on a first letter to President Roosevelt that only two years later indirectly precipitated the Manhattan Project. By accepting the chairmanship of Szilard’s brainchild, the newly created Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists (ECAS) in May 1946, Einstein did so with the intent of lessening mistrust and increasing accord between the United States and the Soviet Union, the two premier powers to emerge from the war. Einstein and Szilard recognized that an American monopoly on atomic power was an illusion and that the United States would soon be joined in the atomic club by the Soviet Union. (In late August 1949, the Soviets conducted their first atomic weapons test and followed this up with a thermonuclear device—a hydrogen bomb—four years later).
The ECAS, initially comprised of eight distinguished physicists and chemists as trustees, had no pretensions to make policy. Its primary aim was to improve communications between atomic scientists and the public. To that end it released a “Statement of Purpose” that included the following facts on which, so it claimed, all scientists had achieved a consensus. Atomic bombs could be made cheaply and in large numbers, and their destructive capabilities would rapidly increase; there was no military defense against atomic weapons and none was to be expected; other countries would soon be able to replicate processes leading to atomic weaponry; no state of preparedness against atomic war was possible and if attempted, would destroy the social fabric; civilization would be destroyed in any conflict in which atomic bombs were deployed; so that the only solution lay in international control of atomic energy, and ultimately in the elimination of war.
The following excerpts from an interview given by Einstein one month after the inception of the ECAS was originally published in the Sunday magazine section of the New York Times, and reprinted by the ECAS for distribution in its fund-raising activities:
Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we knew it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking…. Our defense is not in armaments, nor in science, nor in going underground. Our defense is in law and order. Henceforth, every nation’s foreign policy must be judged at every point by one consideration: Does it lead us to a world of law and order or does it lead us back toward anarchy and death? I do not believe that we can prepare for war and at the same time prepare for a world community. When humanity holds in its hand the weapon with which it can commit suicide, I believe that to put more power into the gun is to increase the probability of disaster…. Science has brought forth this danger [of atomic war], but the real problem is in the minds and hearts of men. We will not change the hearts of other men by mechanisms, but by changing our hearts and speaking bravely” (“The Real Problem Is in the Hearts of Men,” New York Times Magazine, June 23, 1946; republished in Nathan and Norden, Einstein on Peace, pp. 383–388).
According to one of its members, Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, the committee was officially disbanded in 1951, nearly five years after its formation, largely because of the strain that committee work placed on an aging Einstein. While it may have been a contributing factor, the demise of the organization was at heart more political and financial. Donations in support of nuclear nonproliferation activism began to diminish. Even more significantly, the rift between the United States and the Soviet Union continued to grow as the consensus within the ECAS broke down. Many committee members held opposing views concerning the U.S. government’s intention to develop and produce the hydrogen bomb. Similarly, there were sharp disagreements about how to organize and implement a world government that all agreed was necessary to prevent atomic war. The final meeting of the Board of Trustees was held on September 8, 1951.
Political Contexts
The First World War and the Weimar Republic, 1914–1932
A resurgent interest in Judaism and a tentative articulation of internationalist sentiments mark the first phase of Einstein’s involvement in politics. The move from Switzerland to Berlin in spring 1914 and the outbreak of the First World War jolted sensibilities that for years had lain dormant while he devoted himself single-mindedly to the pursuit of physics. Once in the German capital, his outrage at the harassment of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe led to his first political article on their behalf for a mass-circulation newspaper. Fearing that the war would do irreparable harm to the international character of science, he signed a public appeal immediately after hostilities began, protesting the German Army’s violation of Belgian neutrality (see “Manifesto to the Europeans,” below). His participation in a short-lived pacifist organization gave him access to a network of politically like-minded individuals outside the world of science (see Organizational Ties, “Bund Neues Vaterland,” above). In 1916, he published an essay in which he agreed with Tolstoy’s comparison of patriotism to a mental disorder (“My Opinion on the War,” CPAE, Vol. 6, Doc. 20; Einstein Archives 70-457. See also no. 59 in appendix C).
Though many imperial institutions and elites survived unscathed into the successor Weimar Republic, Einstein recognized that his views on moral and political issues, confined to private letters and the occasional publication during the war, would be broadcast throughout the world and carry great weight, especially now that he was world-famous. It is under these circumstances that he found his public voice and deepened his political commitment.
In the postwar period, he participated in various initiatives to obtain funding for research in the defeated countries, chiefly in his capacity as a member of the Emergency Society for German Science and Scholarship. His condemnation—in correspondence and publications—of the harsh terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the opinion that the Allies might be the lesser of two evils reveal his evolving independence of judgment. Less than a year after the cessation of hostilities, he stated what would become a lifelong leitmotif: “I don’t believe that humanity as such can change in essence, but I do believe that it is possible and even necessary to put an end to anarchy in international relations, even though the sacrifice of autonomy will be significant for individual states” (see letter to Hedwig Born, August 31, 1919, CPAE, Vol. 9, Doc. 97; Einstein Archives 8-254).
Initially, Einstein had high hopes for the supranational League of Nations, but these were frustrated by America’s refusal to join and by the League’s repeated reliance on economic sanctions as a last resort. Appointed in 1922 to its International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (see Organizational Ties), he attempted for a decade, in an on-again off-again relationship, to counter the intrusion of national interests.
The assassination in June 1922 of the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, a Jew and friend of Einstein’s, whom he had advised beforehand to give up his exposed position, crystallized Einstein’s decision to step back from his own political involvement. The political atmosphere in Germany had degenerated to the point, as Einstein put it, “that a Jew would do well to exercise restraint as regards his participation in political affairs” (Nathan and Norden, Einstein on Peace, p. 59). He remained on the political sidelines until 1924.
Although he wrote very little on European politics after returning from a lengthy tour of the Far East (1922–1923), he was heartened by the stabilization of the German economy in 1924 that ushered in a brief era of tranquility under the leadership of the German foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann.
Politics was, he thought, too important to be left to politicians: “I believe that there is a political idea and a political task, which no one who claims to be a contemporary should shirk. By that I mean the task of restoring the unity between nations which has been so completely destroyed by the world war … I am convinced that participating in this is a duty which no one can avoid, however great his achievement in any field whatsoever” (interview given to Neue Zürcher Zeitung, November 1927).
The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 shattered any remaining illusions about Germany. In residence at Caltech in Pasadena at the time, Einstein was determined never to return to his homeland.
MANIFESTO TO THE EUROPEANS
In the first months of the First World War, ninety-three of Einstein’s most prominent German colleagues in the arts and sciences signed a “Manifesto to the Civilized World” that expressed solidarity with the German Army’s violation of Belgian neutrality. Einstein was outraged by this appeal to narrow nationalism, all the more because it was proclaimed from the ranks of a cultural elite, to which he had recently been recruited. In response, he helped draw up a countermanifesto reaching out to all Europeans. Composed in its first draft by Einstein’s friend and colleague, Georg Nicolai, the final version of the document was “collectively decided” upon by Einstein, Nicolai, and two others in mid-October 1914 (Nicolai 1917, p. 12). The countermanifesto, officially titled “Manifesto to the Europeans,” was circulated among a large number of academics, but aside from its authors, only one graduate student was prepared to sign. Wartime censorship in Germany consigned it to three-year oblivion, from which it only emerged in 1917. In that year, the countermanifesto was published in neutral Switzerland in the preface to a book by Nicolai, The Biology of War. Here is Nicolai’s translated text, taken from Rowe and Schulmann, Einstein on Politics, pp. 64–66:
While technology and commerce clearly compel us to recognize the bond between all nations, and thus a common world culture, no war has ever so intensively disrupted cultural cooperation as the present one. Perhaps our acute awareness of the disruption that we now sense so painfully is due to the numerous common bonds we once shared.
Even should this state of affairs not surprise us, those for whom a common world culture is the least bit precious should redouble their efforts to uphold these principles. Those, however, of whom one should expect such conviction—in particular scientists and artists—have thus far only uttered things which suggest that their desire for maintaining relations has vanished simultaneously with their disruption. They have spoken with an understandable hostility—but least of all of peace.
Such a mood cannot be excused by any national passion; it is unworthy of what the entire world has until now come to understand by the name of culture. It would be a disaster should this mood pervade the educated classes.
Not only would it be a disaster for civilization, but—and we are firmly convinced of this—a disaster for the national survival of individual states—in the final analysis, the very cause in the name of which all this barbarity has been unleashed.
Through technology the world has become smaller; the states of the large peninsula of Europe today move in the orbit of one another much as did the cities of each small Mediterranean peninsula in ancient times. Through a complex of interrelationships, Europe—one could almost say the world—now displays a unity based on the needs and experience of every individual.
Thus it would appear to be the duty of educated and well-meaning Europeans at the very least to attempt to prevent Europe—as a result of an imperfect organization of the whole—from suffering the same tragic fate which befell ancient Greece. Should Europe, too, gradually exhaust itself and collapse in fratricidal war?
The struggle raging today will likely produce no victor; it will probably leave only the vanquished behind. Therefore, it seems not only good, but rather bitterly necessary, that intellectuals of all nations marshal their influence such that—whatever the still uncertain end of the war may be—the terms of peace shall not become the cause of future wars. The fact that through this war European relationships have to some extent become volatile and malleable should rather be used to make of Europe an organic entity. The technological and intellectual prerequisites are given.
How this European order is to be brought about should not be discussed here. We wish merely to emphasize as a matter of principle that we are firmly convinced that the time has come when Europe must act as one in order to protect her soil, her inhabitants, and her culture.
We believe that the will to do this is latently present in many. In expressing this will collectively we hope that it gathers force.
To this end, it seems for the time being necessary that all those who hold European civilization dear, in other words, those who in Goethe’s prescient words can be called “good Europeans,” join together. After all, we must not give up the hope that their collective voice—even in the din of arms—will not trail off entirely unheard, especially, if among these “good Europeans of tomorrow,” we find all those who enjoy esteem and authority among their educated peers.
First it is necessary, however, that Europeans get together, and if—as we hope—enough Europeans in Europe can be found, that it is to say, people for whom Europe is not merely a geographical concept, but rather a worthy object of affection, then we shall try to call together a union of Europeans. Such a union shall then speak and decide.
We wish only to urge and appeal; and if you feel as we do, if you are similarly determined to lend the most far-reaching resonance to the European will, then we ask that you sign.
A LETTER TO SIGMUND FREUD FROM “WHY WAR?”
Einstein’s last action as an associate of the League of Nations took place in 1932 after he had already submitted his resignation. Asked to initiate a written exchange of views with another leading intellectual about any major problem facing humanity, he invited Sigmund Freud to discuss the psychological factors at play when nations go to war against one another. Einstein’s essay emphasized the deep-seated irrational impulses, normally latent, that well up in wartime. It was a bitter echo of his “My Opinion on the War,” which he had written during the First World War (see no. 59 in appendix C). (Reprinted courtesy of The Albert Einstein Archives, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.)
Caputh near Potsdam, July 30, 1932
Dear Professor Freud,
The proposal of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation at Paris that I should invite a person, to be chosen by myself, to a frank exchange of views on any problem that I might select affords me a very welcome opportunity of conferring with you upon a question which, as things now are, seems the most insistent of all the problems civilisation has to face. This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for civilisation as we know it; nevertheless, for all the zeal displayed, every attempt at its solution has ended in a lamentable breakdown.
I believe, moreover, that those whose duty it is to tackle the problem professionally and practically are growing only too aware of their impotence to deal with it, and have now a very lively desire to learn the views of men who, absorbed in the pursuit of science, can see world-problems in the perspective distance lends. As for me, the normal objective of my thought affords no insight into the dark places of human will and feeling. Thus, in the enquiry now proposed, I can do little more than to seek to clarify the question at issue and, clearing the ground of the more obvious solutions, enable you to bring the light of your far-reaching knowledge of man’s instinctive life to bear upon the problem. There are certain psychological obstacles whose existence a layman in the mental sciences may dimly surmise, but whose interrelations and vagaries he is incompetent to fathom; you, I am convinced, will be able to suggest educative methods, lying more or less outside the scope of politics, which will eliminate these obstacles.
As one immune from nationalist bias, I personally see a simple way of dealing with the superficial (that is, administrative) aspect of the problem: the setting up, by international consent, of a legislative and judicial body to settle every conflict arising between nations. Each nation would undertake to abide by the orders issued by this legislative body, to invoke its decision in every dispute, to accept its judgments unreservedly and to carry out every measure the tribunal deems necessary for the execution of its decrees. But here, at the outset, I come up against a difficulty; a tribunal is a human institution which, in proportion as the power at its disposal is inadequate to enforce its verdicts, is all the more prone to suffer these to be deflected by extrajudicial pressure. This is a fact with which we have to reckon: law and might inevitably go hand in hand, and juridical decisions approach more nearly the ideal justice demanded by the community (in whose name and interests these verdicts are pronounced) insofar as the community has effective power to compel respect of its juridical ideal. At present, however, we are far from possessing any supranational organisation competent to render verdicts of incontestable authority and enforce absolute submission to the execution of its verdicts. Thus I am led to my first axiom: the quest of international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action, its sovereignty that is to say, and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.
The ill-success, despite their obvious sincerity, of all the efforts made during the last decade to reach this goal leaves us no room to doubt that strong psychological factors are at work, which paralyse these efforts. Some of these factors are not far to seek. The craving for power which characterises the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty. This political power-hunger is wont to batten on the activities of another group, whose aspirations are on purely mercenary, economic lines. I have specially in mind that small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority.
But recognition of this obvious fact is merely the first step towards an appreciation of the actual state of affairs. Another question follows hard upon it: How is it possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of their ambitions. (In speaking of the majority, I do not exclude soldiers of every rank who have chosen war as their profession, in the belief that they are serving to defend the highest interests of their race, and that attack is often the best method of defence.) An obvious answer to this question would seem to be that the minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organise and sway the emotions of the masses, and makes its tool of them.
Yet even this answer does not provide a complete solution. Another question arises from it: How is it these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is possible. Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex of factors we are considering, an enigma that only the expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve.
And so we come to our last question. Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness? Here I am thinking by no means only of the so-called uncultured masses. Experience proves that it is rather the so-called “Intelligentzia” that is most apt to yield to these disastrous collective suggestions, since the intellectual has no direct contact with life in the raw but encounters it in its easiest, synthetic form—upon the printed page.
To conclude: I have so far been speaking only of wars between nations; what are known as international conflicts. But I am well aware that the aggressive instinct operates under other forms and in other circumstances. (I am thinking of civil wars, for instance, due in earlier days to religious zeal, but nowadays to social factors; or, again, the persecution of racial minorities.) But my insistence on what is the most typical, most cruel and extravagant form of conflict between man and man was deliberate, for here we have the best occasion of discovering ways and means to render all armed conflicts impossible.
I know that in your writings we may find answers, explicit or implied, to all the issues of this urgent and absorbing problem. But it would be of the greatest service to us all were you to present the problem of world peace in the light of your most recent discoveries, for such a presentation well might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of action.
Yours very sincerely, A. Einstein
Source: Einstein and Freud, Why War?
Hitler in Power and the Second World War, 1933–1945
A heightened concern for the fate of his fellow Jews and reluctant abandonment of pacifism marked Einstein’s political commitment in the twelve-year period beginning with Hitler’s seizure of power and the defeat of the Axis in 1945. As wholesale killing of European Jews followed their repression in Germany, Einstein dedicated himself to aid Jewish emigration and resettlement. After the defeat of the Axis powers, his internationalist sympathies were channeled into a tireless pursuit of a world at peace and free of nuclear weapons.
In reaction to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, he severed ties with Germany and issued statements that characterized his views on political tolerance and condemned the acts of brutality perpetrated by the Nazi government. In one proclamation entitled “Political Manifesto,” he compared the disease that had crept into the German social organism with a distemper that affects animals and that had eliminated “political liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law” (Political Manifesto, March 11, 1933; Einstein Archives 28-235.1). Similar statements brought heated denials from the German press and led to his loss of German citizenship the following year (see Part I, Citizenships and Immigration to the United States).
Another victim of Hitler’s savagery was Einstein’s erstwhile militant pacifism. In the face of the German dictator’s increasingly hostile behavior, Einstein rejected passive resistance on the individual level and strove for rapprochement among the powers arrayed against Germany. “I do not believe that under present circumstances passive resistance is an effective method, even if carried out in the most heroic manner. Other times, other means, even if the final aim remains the same. The confirmed pacifist must therefore at present seek a plan of action different from that of former, more peaceful times. He must try to work for this aim: That those States which favor peaceful progress may come as close together as possible in order to diminish the likelihood that the warlike programs of political adventurers … will be realized” (“A Re-Examination of Pacifism,” Polity, January 1935; reprinted in Nathan and Norden, Einstein on Peace, pp. 254–256).
With Europe entering a new era of crisis, Einstein formulated three principles that served as touchstones for his mature political views. He firmly rejected autocratic forms of government while affirming his belief in democracy, despite the recent travails of the Weimar Republic; he upheld the creative individual and not the political state as society’s most precious asset; and he characterized the military mentality as the single worst manifestation of the “herd mind” in modern society (see the frontmatter, Credo: “What I Believe”).
By the autumn of 1933, Einstein had settled in Princeton, where he soon assumed a completely new role, that of a Cassandra. He put the Allies on notice that “the Germans are secretly rearming on a large scale. Factories are running day and night (airplanes, light bombs, tanks, and heavy ordnance, produced in part on Swedish territory). A million troops are being covertly trained.” The warning was contained in a private letter but Einstein urged that there be a “quiet organized effort directed toward American authorities and the American press” (see letter to Stephen S. Wise, June 6, 1933; Einstein Archives 35-133).
When in 1938, Clifton Fadiman, book editor of the New Yorker, asked Einstein to prepare a sequel to his essay “What I Believe,” written eight years earlier (see Credo in the frontmatter), reflecting on what had changed in the world in the ensuing years, Einstein painted a dismal picture: “In these ten years confidence in the stability, yes, even the very basis for existence, of human society has largely vanished. One senses not only a threat to man’s cultural heritage, but also that a lower value is placed upon all that one would like to see defended at all costs” (“Ten Fateful Years,” in Fadiman, ed., I Believe, pp. 367–369; reprinted in Einstein’s Out of My Later Years, pp. 6–8).
The impact of the Holocaust that was unleashed in Europe in the early 1940s was decisive for Einstein. He never again budged from his conviction of the German people’s collective complicity in the crimes of their government. The near-annihilation of the Jewish people also convinced him that Palestine would have a central role to play in the life of the survivors, though he held to his conviction that a nation-state was not desirable (see Jewish Identity and Ties, “Testimony before the Anglo-American Committee”). The victory of the Allies and the founding of the United Nations gave him renewed hope that a lasting peace might finally be achieved by the integration of conflicting nations into a higher sovereignty or world government.
LETTERS TO PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT ON THE ATOM BOMB
Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Einstein learned from the émigré physicist Leo Szilard that German scientists might use the recently discovered process of nuclear fission to develop a powerful new type of bomb. In late July 1939, at the urging of Szilard and a fellow Hungarian émigré, Eugene Wigner, Einstein helped prepare a letter warning President Roosevelt of this threat. Because of the letter and because the equivalence of mass and energy expressed in his signature formula E = mc2 underlies the relation between nuclear fission and the release of prodigious amounts of energy, Einstein has sometimes erroneously been called “the father of the atomic bomb” (see Part I, Myths and Misconceptions, “Responsible for the Atom Bomb”).
As Einstein explained to the Japanese pacifist Seiei Shinohara after the war, the attribution of such paternity was misplaced. His letter to Roosevelt was only one of many factors that led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project, the enterprise dedicated to the manufacture of nuclear weapons, headed by General Leslie Groves and under the technical direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In fact, Einstein’s warning had very little impact. The initial Advisory Committee on Uranium, set up two months after the letter was written, with Leo Szilard, Edward Teller (representing Enrico Fermi), and Eugene Wigner serving as experts on nuclear fission, was superseded in June 1940 by the National Defense Research Committee. Its chairperson, Vannevar Bush, took a wait-and-see approach to nuclear research. It was only when Bush and others read the British government’s MAUD Committee Report in October 1941 on the practicability of a “uranium bomb” that the tide turned. This committee (Military Application of Uranium Detonation) had spearheaded the British atomic bomb project and prompted the United States to begin its own project in the New Mexico desert at Los Alamos. On December 6, 1941, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the Manhattan Project was finally approved, more than two years after Einstein signed the letter to FDR (which was in fact composed by Leo Szilard, in consultation with Eugene Wigner, and presented to Einstein for his signature). Once under way, moreover, the Manhattan Project, in which British scientists collaborated as well, had no use for Einstein. Labeled a security risk in a confidential report issued by the U.S. Army, he remained officially in the dark about nuclear research throughout the war. In any case, he would have had little to contribute, as he had not kept up with the rapid development of nuclear physics in the 1930s. He did, however, give advice on explosives for the U.S. Department of the Navy.
Texts of two of Einstein’s four letters to FDR follow. The first was hand delivered by economist Alexander Sachs, a confidant of the president, but not until October 11, after a number of delays. (See all letters in FDR Library at http://fdrlibrary.marist.edu/; first letter is in Einstein Archives 39-468.) (Both of the following letters are reprinted courtesy of The Albert Einstein Archives, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.)
Peconic, Long Island, August 2nd, 1939
Sir:
Some recent work by E[nrico] Fermi and L[eo] Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of [Frédéric] Joliot[-Curie] in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America—that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.
The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is [the] Belgian Congo. In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an inofficial [sic] capacity. His task might comprise the following:
a) to approach Government Departments, keep them informed of the further development, and put forward recommendations for Government action, giving particular attention to the problem of securing a supply of uranium ore for the United States;
b) to speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of University laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining the cooperation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.
I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son [Carl Friedrich] of the German Under-Secretary of State, [Ernst] von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
Yours very truly, Albert Einstein
Roosevelt replied, in part, on October 19, 1939, as follows: “I have found this letter of such import that I have convened a Board consisting of the head of the Bureau of Standards and chosen representatives of the Army and Navy to thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestion regarding the element of uranium” (Einstein Archives 33-088).
Einstein indirectly wrote two more letters to FDR. One was written on March 7, 1940 (Einstein Archives 39-475), to Alexander Sachs, to be transmitted to FDR, and a second was sent to Lyman Briggs, the head of the secret “Uranium Committee” and director of the Bureau of Standards, on April 25, 1940 (Einstein Archives 39-484), also intended for FDR. Both letters recommended more work on nuclear research. He sent a lesser-known letter (also drafted by Szilard) directly to Roosevelt five and a half years later, on March 25, 1945, as he began to fear the possible misuse of uranium (Einstein Archives 33-109).
Sir:
I am writing you to introduce Dr. L[eo] Szilard, who proposes to submit to you certain considerations and recommendations. Unusual circumstances which I shall describe further below induce me to take this action in spite of the fact that I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilard proposes to submit to you.
In the summer of 1939 Dr. Szilard put before me his views concerning the potential importance of uranium for national defense. He was greatly disturbed by the potentialities involved and anxious that the United States Government be advised of them as soon as possible. Dr. Szilard, who is one of the discoverers of the neutron emission of uranium on which all present work on uranium is based, described to me a specific system which he devised and which he thought would make it possible to set up a chain reaction in unseparated uranium in the immediate future. Having known him for over twenty years both from his scientific work and personally, I have much confidence in his judgment, and it was on the basis of his judgment as well as my own that I took the liberty to approach you in connection with this subject. You responded to my letter dated August 2, 1939 by the appointment of a committee under the chairmanship of Dr. [Lyman] Briggs and thus started the Government’s activity in this field.
The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilard is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy. In the circumstances, I consider it my duty to give Dr. Szilard this introduction and I wish to express the hope that you will be able to give his presentation of the case your personal attention.
Very truly yours, A. Einstein
Roosevelt died April 12, 1945, of a cerebral hemorrhage. He probably never saw this letter.
Sources: fdrlibrary.marist.edu; dannen.com; hypertextbook.com/eworld/einstein.shtml; http://www.mphpa.org/classic/COLLECTIONS/MP-Einstein∼Sachs/Pages/Ein-Sachs_Gallery_01.htm; and Lanouette with Silard, Genius in the Shadows, pp. 261–262, for exchanges of letters on the matter; Alexander Sachs, “Early History of the Atomic Project in Relation to President Roosevelt, 1939–40: From Inception to Presentation of Idea by Albert Einstein and Alexander Sachs,” August 8–9, 1945, at Einstein Archives 39-488.1. See also Nathan and Norden, Einstein on Peace, pp. 292–306.
Postwar and Cold War, 1946–1955
The solution to the dilemma of disarmament at the end of the Second World War seemed obvious to Einstein: “The secret of the [atomic] bomb should be committed to a world government, and the United States should immediately announce its readiness to do so” (“On the Atomic Bomb, as told to Raymond Swing,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1945, pp. 43–45). In late 1945, the Soviets did not yet possess an atomic weapon, though they had been working feverishly on one in secret. It thus appeared possible by introducing confidence-building measures to convince the Russians that a world government would guarantee their security. That this was illusory would soon be demonstrated, though Einstein steadfastly continued to argue that a world at peace could only be achieved by ridding all countries of their military establishments and the arms that provided their raison d’être. (See Organizational Ties, “Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists”; Pacifism; and World Government, below.)
Fear of the Soviet Union and communism gripped the United States after the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb in September 1949. As Cold War tensions deepened, Einstein’s confidence in the American political system waned. Recalling how liberal democracy had come under a similar attack in Germany, thereby enabling Hitler “to deal it the death-blow with ease,” he predicted that the same would happen in the United States “unless men with vision and willingness to sacrifice come to the defense” (see letter to Norman Thomas, March 10, 1954; Einstein Archives 61-549). The sharp crackdown on those whose activities betrayed a lack of firm allegiance to the American way of life was, in his eyes, a form of ideological tyranny: “The fear of Communism has led to practices which have become incomprehensible to the rest of civilized mankind and exposed our country to ridicule” (Human Rights, February 20, 1954; Einstein Archives 28-1012).
Although he was spared the ignominy of having to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committeee (HUAC) or Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, in 1953 Einstein lashed out publicly against such inquisitorial methods: “What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this evil? Frankly, I can see only the revolutionary way of non-cooperation in the sense of Gandhi’s. Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify, i.e., 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” (“Open Letter to William Frauenglass,” New York Times, June 12, 1953; see no. 202 in appendix C). The Times itself featured an editorial the following day that took harsh issue with Einstein’s position, saying it would be “most unwise … [t]o employ the unnatural and illegal forces of civil disobedience” in an attempt “to attack one evil with another” (Nathan and Norden, Einstein on Peace, p. 550). (See also Civil and Human Rights, above.)
FBI’S EINSTEIN FILE
Twenty-five years after Einstein’s death, the FBI revealed that J. Edgar Hoover had been keeping a secret file on Einstein’s political activities at least since the early 1930s. The reasons were that Einstein had been seen alongside Communists attending pacifist meetings, and he had supported the republican cause in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Einstein had not been aware of this intrusion into his privacy, which lasted until his death. The 1,427 pages of material, no longer classified, are available online in fourteen parts at http://vault.fbi.gov/Albert%20Einstein.
The file consists of a dossier filled with memos from FBI agents to one another about what the “subject” or “captioned individual” had been up to. There are notes and observations about meetings Einstein attended and organizations that listed him as a member. Most documents in fact indicate that he was neither a Communist nor “subversive,” yet the file remained active. Already in September 1933, shortly before leaving Europe for good, he had publicly explained his view on communism in a letter to the London Times, stating that he had never favored communism and did not favor it now (see no. 144 in appendix C). In a letter of July 26, 1940, about two months before Einstein became an American citizen, he was denied security clearance by Brigadier General George Strong. The FBI was not the first or only organization interested in Einstein’s activities: the Germans had also spied on him (see Grundmann’s The Einstein Dossiers, discussed in appendix A, “Specialized Books”).
In all of the classified memos, some words and passages are blocked out, most likely to protect innocent people who were still alive. An assortment of rubber-stamped locutions warn the reader that this page is “secret” or “confidential,” though these words were crossed out when the file was declassified. In addition, copies of dozens of newspaper clippings that cover Einstein’s activities are included for the record. Some samples of the file’s entries follow.
A memo discusses the “Committee of 1,000,” the plan of Harlow Shapley of Harvard to recruit one thousand prominent Americans, including Einstein, in a drive to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
A memo discusses Counterattack, a weekly newsletter published by the American Business Consultants Inc. of New York. It ran an article about a meeting of the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists, and Scientists, which it claimed was a Communist-front organization, and maintained that Einstein had allowed himself to be “roped” into it.
A memo claims Einstein made the following statement in December 1947: “I came to America because of the great, great freedom which I heard existed in this country. I made a mistake in selecting America as a land of freedom, a mistake I cannot repair in the balance of my life.”
Files dated February 13 and 15, 1950, state that Einstein had no formal security clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission or the Manhattan Engineer District, a fact that would confirm that Einstein could not have worked on the atom bomb project. One of the memos maintains that “the Bureau files fail to reflect that any investigation has ever been conducted on Professor Einstein for any purpose whatsoever.”
The memo then states that Einstein was affiliated in “some way or other” with at least thirty-three organizations that were listed by the attorney general, HUAC, or California HUAC as Communist organizations. He was also affiliated with fifty organizations that were not so listed. “He is principally a pacifist and could be considered a liberal thinker as indicated by his connections with the various organizations indicated above.”
The file notes that Einstein is sympathetic to Russian scientists and sympathizes with the Soviet Union. Supplementary handwritten notes mention that Einstein’s son is in Russia. Another memo quotes an informant as saying that Elsa Einstein was “scared to death” over the fact that son Hans Albert was in the Soviet Union around 1944 and might be held hostage there to force Einstein into some particular action. (Elsa had died in 1936. There is no record that Hans Albert, her stepson, was in the USSR at the time, or any other time. No doubt, Hans Albert had been confused with the Russian émigré Dmitri Marianoff, Elsa’s son-in-law.)
A memo of March 13, 1950, claims that Einstein’s office in Berlin had been used as a telegram address for Soviet Comintern agents and other Soviet apparatchiks in the early 1930s, before he left Germany, and that he had hired a group of typists and secretaries who were Soviet sympathizers. (In fact, Helen Dukas was his only secretary at the time.) The memo states that one of Einstein’s secretaries turned over the telegrams (“conspirative correspondence”) to a special “apparat man” (a Soviet courier) who also picked up telegrams at other designated addresses. Einstein’s address was considered a useful cover for a letter drop because he received telegrams from all over the world. The telegrams were in code, and it was assumed Einstein did not know their contents. (Siegfried Grundmann, as reported in his book The Einstein Dossiers, carefully examined these allegations and concluded that they were unfounded.)
A memo of September 14, 1950, states that “this naturalized person, notwithstanding his worldwide reputation as a scientist, may properly be investigated for possible revocation of naturalization…. It appears that appropriate investigation for that purpose is warranted.” This investigation was warranted because of the alleged Soviet use of Einstein’s address in Berlin.
A memo of October 23, 1950, from J. Edgar Hoover himself, requests that Helen Dukas be investigated for “past activity on behalf of the Soviet Union” (that is, while serving as Einstein’s secretary in Berlin).
Later memos fault Einstein for allowing Paul Robeson to deliver Einstein’s letter to President Harry Truman stating his opposition to lynching. Robeson was chairman of the American Crusade to End Lynching, an alleged Communist-front organization. Another memo lists “Indicators of Einstein’s Sympathy with the Communist Party.”
See also R. A. Schwartz, “Einstein and the War Department,” Isis 80 [1989], 281–284, and Fred Jerome, The Einstein File, for a thorough discussion.
THE RUSSELL-EINSTEIN MANIFESTO
During the last months of his life, Einstein was directly involved in a new political effort aimed at overcoming the impasse that separated East and West. With the advent of the hydrogen bomb in 1952, the threat of nuclear disaster loomed larger than ever. This circumstance prompted Bertrand Russell to make a worldwide effort to avert catastrophe by means of a widely publicized statement issued in his and Einstein’s names. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto called for the governments of the world “to acknowledge publicly, that their purposes cannot be furthered by a world war” and “to find the peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them” (Nathan and Norden, Einstein on Peace, p. 635). Although he did not live to see it publicized, just by lending his signature to this document Einstein helped bring public attention to these pressing political problems.
This document discussing the perils of a nuclear world was drafted by Bertrand Russell and signed by Einstein just days before his death in April 1955—it was Einstein’s last signed document. Other prominent intellectuals and scientists joined as signatories, and Russell released the statement at a press conference on July 9, 1955, in London in the midst of the Cold War. Within two years it led to the creation of the Pugwash Conferences on Sciences and World Affairs, in which scientists of all political persuasions assemble to discuss the threat posed to civilization by weapons of mass destruction. The conferences are still held annually. The manifesto is reprinted here in its entirety.
In the tragic situation which confronts humanity, we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction, and to discuss a resolution in the spirit of the appended draft.
We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt. The world is full of conflicts; and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between Communism and anti-Communism.
Almost everybody who is politically conscious has strong feelings about one or more of these issues; but we want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.
We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.
We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there are no longer such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?
The general public, and even many men in positions of authority, have not realized what would be involved in a war with nuclear bombs. The general public still thinks in terms of the obliteration of cities. It is understood that the new bombs are more powerful than the old, and that, while one A-bomb could obliterate Hiroshima, one H-bomb could obliterate the largest cities, such as London, New York, or Moscow.
No doubt in an H-bomb war great cities would be obliterated. But this is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced. If everybody in London, New York, and Moscow were exterminated, the world might, in the course of a few centuries, recover from the blow. But we now know, especially since the Bikini test, that nuclear bombs can gradually spread destruction over a very much wider area than had been supposed.
It is stated on very good authority that a bomb can now be manufactured which will be 2,500 times as powerful as that which destroyed Hiroshima. Such a bomb, if exploded near the ground or under water, sends radio-active particles into the upper air. They sink gradually and reach the surface of the earth in the form of a deadly dust or rain. It was this dust which infected the Japanese fishermen and their catch of fish.
No one knows how widely such lethal radio-active particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.
Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert’s knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.
Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war.
The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty. But what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is that the term “mankind” feels vague and abstract. People scarcely realize in imagination that the danger is to themselves and their children and their grandchildren, and not only to a dimly apprehended humanity. They can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they, individually, and those whom they love are in imminent danger of perishing agonizingly. And so they hope that perhaps war may be allowed to continue provided modern weapons are prohibited.
This hope is illusory. Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war, and both sides would set to work to manufacture H-bombs as soon as war broke out, for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.
Although an agreement to renounce nuclear weapons as part of a general reduction of armaments would not afford an ultimate solution, it would serve certain important purposes. First, any agreement between East and West is to the good in so far as it tends to diminish tension. Second, the abolition of thermo-nuclear weapons, if each side believed that the other had carried it out sincerely, would lessen the fear of a sudden attack in the style of Pearl Harbour, which at present keeps both sides in a state of nervous apprehension. We should, therefore, welcome such an agreement though only as a first step.
Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West.
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.
RESOLUTION
We invite this Congress, and through it the scientists of the world and the general public, to subscribe to the following resolution:
“In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them.”
[Signed by]
Max Born, Percy W. Bridgman, Albert Einstein, Leopold Infeld, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Hermann J. Muller, Linus Pauling, Cecil F. Powell, Joseph Rotblat, Bertrand Russell, Hideki Yukawa
Political Philosophy
Pacifism
As is true for all his political reflections, Einstein’s pacifism can best be understood as the function of a moral stance rather than of a particular political commitment. It was for him “an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting. My attitude is not derived from any intellectual theory but is based on my deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred” (see letter to Paul Hutchinson, July 1929, reprinted in Nathan and Norden, Einstein on Peace, p. 98). His stance also assumed a number of guises over time. Eight months after the outbreak of the First World War, in March 1915, he joined a short-lived pacifist organization, the Bund Neues Vaterland (Association for a New Fatherland; see Organizational Ties). Yet his apparent indifference at the time to military applications of his occasional work on a gyrocompass and on airplane design belies the persistent myth that he was a consistent and avowed pacifist (for a discussion of the tension between Einstein’s pacifist stance and his lack of concern about military applications of his own work, see Fölsing, Albert Einstein, pp. 446–449). Nowhere are the motives for an emotional embrace of pacifism more apparent than during his first visit to Germany’s western neighbor after the war, in April 1922. Repulsed by the sight of the destroyed villages and battlefields of eastern France, he urged that all students, German or otherwise, be brought there to witness the horror of war (fig. 42).
FIGURE 42. Viewing a village destroyed in the First World War near Dormans in northeastern France. The photo was taken on April 9, 1922. (L’Illustration [Paris], April 15, 1922; Library of Congress)
Buoyed initially by the possibility of an agreement to halt the arms race during the World Disarmament Conference in the early thirties, Einstein argued that governmental initiatives should be supplemented by voluntary associations of concerned citizens (“Statement on a Kellogg League,” July 1931, in Lief, ed., The Fight against War, p. 42). A more brazen proposal was his so-called two-percent solution, in which he assumed that governments would be helpless and prison systems would collapse “if only two percent of those supposed to perform military service should declare themselves war resisters” (address to the New History Society, “The Two Percent Speech,” December 14, 1930, in New York City; see Rowe and Schulmann, Einstein on Politics, p. 240). The failure of the great powers to come to an agreement was a severe blow to his hopes for unilateral pacifism. Yet he had already grown wary of the not-so-secret rearmament on all sides that lay at the heart of this failure. After Hitler came to power (fig. 43), Einstein realized that he had to change tack: “I am still of the opinion that to make war impossible is one of the most important goals of humanity. On the other hand, I recognized that refusal of military service could not be endorsed any longer since in certain countries the resistance to compulsory military service became impossible … The only means to reach [the pacifist] goal is, in my opinion, an international organization for the enforcement of military security for the whole world” (see letter to John G. Moore, March 30, 1942; Einstein Archives 123-384).
FIGURE 43. “Einstein takes up the sword,” published in The Brooklyn Eagle, 1933, after Einstein abandoned his earlier pacifist stance upon learning of Hitler being granted emergency powers in Germany in March 1933 following the Reichstag fire a month earlier. (Drawing by Charles Raymond Macauley. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-42467)
In the face of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, Einstein refined his pacifist message once more. Believing that advances in military technology, such as atomic weaponry, had altered the rules of the game, he pleaded for an effective world government as necessary for survival: “Do I fear the tyranny of a world government? Of course I do. But I fear still more the coming of another war” (“On the Atomic Bomb, as told to Raymond Swing,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1945, pp. 43–45). To implement this vision, Einstein allowed himself to be appointed chair of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists in autumn 1946 and began actively campaigning for an international framework for the control of nuclear energy (see Organizational Ties). With the advent of the hydrogen bomb in 1952, the threat of nuclear disaster loomed larger than ever. This circumstance prompted Bertrand Russell to issue a statement in his and Einstein’s names, and those of other prominent scientists, calling for the redoubling of efforts to avert catastrophe. Einstein did not live to see its publication. (See Russell-Einstein Manifesto, above.)
Initially an advocate of the laws of supply and demand for distributing economic goods, Einstein came to regret this position, arguing in 1944 that a certain amount of compulsion, organization, and bureaucracy was necessary to provide for the material and intellectual needs of a society. The economic malaise following the Great Depression had convinced him that the ill effects on society of unchecked egoism and competition had to be balanced by the “limiting and regulative force” of the state in order to keep competition among workers within healthy limits (“Production and Work” [September 22, 1932], in Ideas and Opinions, pp. 92–93). His primary critique of capitalism was its negative potential for directing individuals’ energies away from the full development of their creative powers. This in turn would inhibit innovative contributions to the public good—a feature, he believed, that capitalism ironically shared with its diametric opposite: the antidemocratic, bureaucratic Soviet state.
In his essay, “Why Socialism?” (Monthly Review, an Independent Socialist Magazine 1, no. 1 [May 1949], pp. 9–15), written at an early stage of the Cold War, he indicted “the oligarchy of private capital” while arguing for a planned economy as a means for achieving equitable ends. Socialism maximized material benefits to each member of society, though it was vulnerable, he thought, to the creation of a powerful bureaucracy that could encroach upon individual rights. Einstein’s embrace of socialism was as a social-ethical philosophy, not a political-economic ideology. Nor did he conceive of socialism as a placebo, or as “the solution to all social problems, but merely as a framework within which such a solution is possible” (“A Reply to the Soviet Scientists,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 1947, pp. 35–37; reprinted in Out of My Later Years, pp. 169–175).
A central contradiction in Einstein’s socialist views is that he was not a convinced egalitarian but rather more of an elitist. While frequently demonstrating philosophical sympathy for socialism with a human face, including many of its economic principles, as a nineteenth-century liberal he never identified with the intellectual tradition of the European labor movement or its Marxist legacy. As he unabashedly proclaimed in 1930: “what is truly valuable in our bustle of life is … the creative and impressionable individuality, the personality—he who produces the noble and sublime while the common herd remains dull in thought and insensible in feeling” (“What I Believe”; see the frontmatter, Credo, for the full essay). These are scarcely the words of someone wedded to the tenets of class struggle.
World Government
Einstein first used this term in anticipation of the Disarmament Conference of 1932, when he declared that the abolition of war could only succeed through the surrender of a portion of each nation’s sovereignty in favor of an international body. After the Second World War, this became the touchstone of his political philosophy. The catastrophes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the publication of Emery Reves’s book, The Anatomy of Peace, in particular, spurred Einstein to initiate a campaign not only to control nuclear weapons but to build the framework for a world government with enough power and authority to contain national military conflicts and violence. Einstein particularly seized on Reves’s criticism of “all the wrong steps already taken (secrecy in armament under purely national viewpoints, especially about the production of the atomic bomb, occupation of strategic parts of the Pacific under exclusive U.S.A. control)” (see letter to Emery Reves, August 28, 1945; Einstein Archives 57-292).
An interview given to a sympathetic ABC correspondent, Raymond Gram Swing, and published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1945, provides the most pointed public exposition of his views (see nos. 178 and 183 in appendix C). Beginning from the premise that war is inevitable as long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, Einstein argued that with the advent of atomic weapons, only the commitment of all military resources to a world government might avoid otherwise inevitable warfare. Outlawing war itself, as suggested by Linus Pauling among others, he thought to be “ineffective. Even if it would be possible to create a mass movement with this slogan, it is clear that one cannot prevent competitive armament and the danger of war without a kind of world government of sufficient strength and independence” (see letter to Linus Pauling, June 8, 1954; Einstein Archives, 60-874). He proposed that the three great powers—the United States, Soviet Union, and Great Britain—draft a constitution for such a government and after its adoption encourage smaller nations to join. In addition to military jurisdiction, a world government should also have the power to interfere in countries where a minority was oppressing the majority, thereby creating the kind of instability that leads to war. While acknowledging the possibility of a tyrannical world government, Einstein feared another war even more. In a letter to his best friend the following spring, he explained that, though it was a shame to waste “much energy on the meager soil of politics,” it was important to inform the public of “the necessity of a world government, without which all our human grandeur will go to the dogs” (see letter to Michele Besso, April 21, 1946; Einstein Archives, 7-381).
The Soviet Union’s rejection of the Baruch Plan of 1946, an American proposal to reinforce its atomic monopoly, scarcely slowed Einstein’s resolve. In an “Open Letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations,” published October 1947, he called on the United States, with or without the Soviet Union, to work for reforms that would strengthen the organization with an eye toward a future world government. Only thus could its moral authority be strengthened by bold decisions and could the security, tranquility, and the welfare of all mankind be guaranteed. He stated further that the authority of the General Assembly should be increased, so that the Security Council is subordinate to it; delegates should be elected directly by the people and not by governments; and the General Assembly should remain in session during the period of transition. With the failure of the Baruch Plan, however, the die was cast, and the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on programs of relentless weapons development, innovation, production, and testing as part of the overall nuclear arms race of the Cold War.
Einstein’s views on this subject are contained in his credo of October 1930 in the essay “What I Believe” (see the frontmatter for the full essay). At the source and heart of all religious experience is the mysterious: “To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.”
With Spinoza, he rejected the idea of a transcendent God, believing that Nature and God are one and the same, an identity that he termed a “pantheistic” point of view. His dismissal of traditional religion was sharp-edged and to the point: “I can only view confessional traditions historically and psychologically; I have no other relationship to them” (1922, in a reply to a YMCA member in Tokyo, CPAE, Vol. 13, Doc. 398; Einstein Archives 28-013). Similarly, he dismissed the idea of a punitive God, whom he considered to be a mere reflection of human frailty. The concept of an immortal soul he found utterly unconvincing, a product of man’s fear and egotism: “It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.” (See the frontmatter, Credo: “What I Believe.”)
In addition to rejecting organized religion—he declared himself without religious affiliation already in the Swiss years—Einstein also rejected atheism, feeling that the intolerance of atheists is the same as that of religious fanatics, who “can’t hear the music of the spheres” (1941; Einstein Archives 54-927). In an interview with the Saturday Evening Post on October 26, 1929, he flatly stated “I am not an atheist,” but he did not know if he was a pantheist, either: “The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.” Yet he believed there should be reason behind one’s beliefs: “Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all” (letter to V. T. Altonen, May 7, 1952; Einstein Archives 59-059). Fundamentally, he declared, his stance on “God” is that of an agnostic: “I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially [one] who works on the basis of reward and punishment” (letter to Morton Berkowitz, October 25, 1950; Einstein Archives 59-215). In 1954, toward the end of his life, Einstein wrote a telling letter about his religious feelings to philosopher Eric Gutkind. Jewish religion, like all other religions, he wrote, “is the embodiment of the most childish superstition … and the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive, rather childish legends” (January 3, 1954; Einstein Archives 33-337). This handwritten letter, which contained further statements about his beliefs, was sold at auction in London in 2008 for more than $400,000, twenty-five times the presale estimate.
