Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
During a tour of Universal Studios, Einstein mentioned that he had always wanted to meet Charlie Chaplin. So the studio boss called him, and he came right over to join the Einsteins for lunch in the commissary. The result, a few days later, was one of the most memorable scenes in the new era of celebrity: Einstein and Chaplin arriving together, dressed in black tie, with Elsa beaming, for the premiere of City Lights. As they were applauded on their way into the theater, Chaplin memorably (and accurately) noted, “They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.”52
Einstein struck a more serious pose when he addressed the Caltech student body near the end of his stay. His sermon, grounded in his humanistic outlook, was on how science had not yet been harnessed to do more good than harm. During war it gave people “the means to poison and mutilate one another,” and in peacetime it “has made our lives hurried and uncertain.” Instead of being a liberating force, “it has enslaved men to machines” by making them work “long wearisome hours mostly without joy in their labor.” Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief object of science. “Never forget this when you are pondering over your diagrams and equations!”53
The Einsteins took a train east across America for their return sail from New York. Along the way, they stopped at the Grand Canyon, where they were greeted by a contingent of Hopi Indians (employed by the concession stand at the canyon, though Einstein did not know that), who initiated him into their tribe as “the Great Relative” and gave him a bountiful feathered headdress that resulted in some classic photographs.54
When his train reached Chicago, Einstein gave a speech from its rear platform to a rally of pacifists who had come to celebrate him. Millikan must have been appalled. It was similar to the “2%” speech Einstein had given in New York. “The only way to be effective is through the revolutionary method of refusing military service,” he declared. “Many who consider themselves good pacifists will not want to participate in such a radical form of pacifism; they will claim that patriotism prevents them from adopting such a policy. But in an emergency, such people cannot be counted on anyhow.”55
Einstein’s train pulled into New York City on the morning of March 1, and for the next sixteen hours Einstein mania reached new heights. “Einstein’s personality, for no clear reason, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,” the German consul reported to Berlin.
Einstein first went to his ship, where four hundred members of the War Resisters’ League were waiting to greet him. He invited them all on board and addressed them in a ballroom. “If in time of peace members of pacifist organizations are not ready to make sacrifices by opposing authorities at the risk of imprisonment, they will certainly fail in time of war, when only the most steeled and resolute person can be expected to resist.” The crowd erupted in delirium, with overwrought pacifists rushing up to kiss his hand and touch his clothing.56
The socialist leader Norman Thomas was at the meeting, and he tried to convince Einstein that pacifism could not occur without radical economic reforms. Einstein disagreed. “It is easier to win over people to pacifism than to socialism,” he said. “We should work first for pacifism, and only later for socialism.”57
That afternoon, the Einsteins were taken to the Waldorf Hotel, where they had a sprawling suite in which they could meet a stream of visitors, such as Helen Keller and various journalists. Actually, it was two full suites connected by a grand private dining room. When one friend arrived that afternoon, he asked Elsa, “Where is Albert?”
“I don’t know,” she replied with some exasperation. “He always gets lost somewhere in all these rooms.”
They finally found him wandering around, trying to find his wife. The ostentatious spread annoyed him. “I’ll tell you what to do,” the friend suggested. “Lock the second suite entirely off, and you will feel better.” Einstein did, and it worked.58
That evening, he addressed a sold-out fund-raising dinner on behalf of the Zionist cause, and he finally made it back to his ship just before midnight. But even then his day was not over. A large crowd of young pacifists, chanting “No War Forever,” cheered him wildly as he reached the pier. They later formed the Youth Peace Federation, and Einstein sent them a scrawled message of encouragement: “I wish you great progress in the radicalization of pacifism.”59
Einstein’s Pacifism
This radical pacifism had been building in Einstein throughout the 1920s. Even as he was retreating from the fore of physics, he was becoming, at age 50, more engaged in politics. His primary cause, at least until Adolf Hitler and his Nazis took power, was that of disarmament and resistance to war. “I am not only a pacifist,” he told one interviewer on his trip to America. “I am a militant pacifist.”60
He rejected the more modest approach taken by the League of Nations, the international organization formed after World War I, which the United States had declined to join. Instead of calling for complete disarmament, the League was nibbling at the margins by trying to define proper rules of engagement and arms control. When he was asked in January 1928 to attend one of the League’s disarmament commissions, which was planning to study ways to limit gas warfare, he publicly proclaimed his disgust with such half measures:
It seems to me an utterly futile task to prescribe rules and limitations for the conduct of war. War is not a game; hence one cannot wage war by rules as one would in playing games. Our fight must be against war itself. The masses of people can most effectively fight the institution of war by establishing an organization for the absolute refusal of military service.61
Thus he became one of the spiritual leaders of the growing movement led by War Resisters’ International. “The international movement to refuse participation in any kind of war service is one of the most encouraging developments of our time,” he wrote the London branch of that group in November 1928.62
Even as the Nazis began their rise to power, Einstein refused to admit, at least initially, that there might be exceptions to his pacifist postulate. What would he do, a Czech journalist asked, if another European war broke out and one side was clearly the aggressor? “I would unconditionally refuse all war service, direct or indirect, and would seek to persuade my friends to adopt the same position, regardless of how I might feel about the causes of any particular war,” he answered.63 The censors in Prague refused to allow the remark to be published, but it was made public elsewhere and enhanced Einstein’s status as the standard-bearer of pacifist purists.
Such sentiments were not unusual at the time. The First World War had shocked people by being so astonishingly brutal and apparently unnecessary. Among those who shared Einstein’s pacifism were Upton Sinclair, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, and H. G. Wells. “We believe that everybody who sincerely wants peace should demand the abolition of military training for youth,” they declared in a 1930 manifesto, which Einstein signed. “Military training is the education of the mind and body in the technique of killing. It thwarts the growth of man’s will for peace.”64
Einstein’s advocacy of war resistance reached its peak in 1932, the year before the Nazis seized power. That year a General Disarmament Conference, organized by the League of Nations plus the United States and Russia, convened in Geneva.
Einstein initially had grand hopes that the conference, as he wrote in an article for the Nation, “will be decisive for the fate of the present generation and the one to come.” But he warned that it must not merely content itself with feckless arms-limitation rules. “Mere agreements to limit armaments confer no protection,” he said. Instead, there should be an international body empowered to arbitrate disputes and enforce the peace. “Compulsory arbitration must be supported by an executive force.”65
His fears were realized. The conference became mired in such issues as how to calculate the offensive power of aircraft carriers in assessing an arms-control balance. Einstein showed up in Geneva in May, just as that topic was being tackled. When he appeared in
“One does not make war less likely to occur by formulating rules of warfare,” he declared to dozens of excited journalists who abandoned the conference to cover his criticism. “We should be standing on rooftops, all of us, and denouncing this conference as a travesty!” He argued that it would be better for the conference to fail outright than to end with an agreement to “humanize war,” which he considered a tragic delusion.66
“Einstein tended to become impractical once outside the scientific field,” his novelist friend and fellow pacifist Romain Rolland commented. It is true that, given what was about to happen in Germany, disarmament was a chimera, and pacifist hopes were, to use a word sometimes flung at Einstein, naïve. Yet it should be noted that there was some merit to his criticisms. The arms-control acolytes in Geneva were no less naïve. They spent five years in futile, arcane debates as Germany rearmed itself.
Political Ideals
“Go One Step Further, Einstein!” the headline exhorted. It was on an essay, published in August 1931 as an open letter to Einstein, by the German socialist leader Kurt Hiller, one of many activists on the left who urged Einstein to expand his pacifism into a more radical politics. Pacifism was only a partial step, Hiller argued. The real goal was to advocate socialist revolution.
Einstein labeled the piece “rather stupid.” Pacifism did not require socialism, and socialist revolutions sometimes led to the suppression of freedom. “I am not convinced that those who would gain power through revolutionary actions would act in accord with my ideals,” he wrote to Hiller. “I also believe that the fight for peace must be pushed energetically, far ahead of any efforts to bring about social reforms.”67
Einstein’s pacifism, world federalism, and aversion to nationalism were part of a political outlook that also included a passion for social justice, a sympathy for underdogs, an antipathy toward racism, and a predilection toward socialism. But during the 1930s, as in the past, his wariness of authority, his fealty to individualism, and his fondness for personal freedom made him resist the dogmas of Bolshevism and communism. “Einstein was neither Red nor dupe,” writes Fred Jerome, who has analyzed both Einstein’s politics and the large dossier of material gathered on him by the FBI.68
This wariness of authority reflected the most fundamental of all of Einstein’s moral principles: Freedom and individualism are necessary for creativity and imagination to flourish. He had demonstrated this as an impertinent young thinker, and he proclaimed the principle clearly in 1931. “I believe that the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and to make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality,” he said.69
Thomas Bucky, the son of a doctor who cared for Elsa’s daughters, was 13 when he met Einstein in 1932, and they began what would become a longstanding discussion of politics. “Einstein was a humanist, socialist, and a democrat,” he recalled. “He was completely anti-totalitarian, no matter whether it was Russian, German or South American. He approved of a combination of capitalism and socialism. And he hated all dictatorships of the right or left.”70
Einstein’s skepticism about communism was evident when he was invited to the 1932 World Antiwar Congress. Though putatively a pacifist group, it had become a front for Soviet communists. The official call for the conference, for example, denounced the “imperialist powers” for encouraging Japan’s aggressive attitude toward the Soviet Union. Einstein refused to attend or support its manifesto. “Because of the glorification of Soviet Russia it includes, I cannot bring myself to sign it,” he said.
He had come to some somber conclusions about Russia, he added. “At the top there appears to be a personal struggle in which the foulest means are used by power-hungry individuals acting from purely selfish motives. At the bottom there seems to be complete suppression of the individual and freedom of speech. One wonders whether life is worth living under such conditions.” Perversely, when the FBI later compiled a secret dossier on Einstein during the Red Scare of the 1950s, one piece of evidence cited against him was that he had supported, rather than rejected, the invitation to be active in this world congress.71
One of Einstein’s friends at the time was Isaac Don Levine, a Russian-born American journalist who had been sympathetic to the communists but had turned strongly against Stalin and his brutal regime as a columnist for the Hearst newspapers. Along with other defenders of civil liberties, including ACLU founder Roger Baldwin and Bertrand Russell, Einstein supported the publication of Levine’s exposé of Stalinist horrors, Letters from Russian Prisons. He even provided an essay, written in longhand, in which he denounced “the regime of frightfulness in Russia.”72
Einstein also read Levine’s subsequent biography of Stalin, a fiercely critical exposé of the dictator’s brutalities, and called it “profound.” He saw in it a clear lesson about tyrannical regimes on both the left and the right. “Violence breeds violence,” he wrote Levine in a letter of praise. “Liberty is the necessary foundation for the development of all true values.”73
Eventually, however, Einstein began to break with Levine. Like many former communist sympathizers who swung over to the anti-communist cause, Levine had the zeal of a convert and an intensity that made it hard for him to appreciate any of the middle shades of the spectrum. Einstein, on the other hand, was too willing to accept, Levine felt, some aspects of Soviet repression as being an unfortunate byproduct of revolutionary change.
There were, indeed, many aspects of Russia that Einstein admired, including what he saw as its attempt to eliminate class distinctions and economic hierarchies. “I regard class differences as contrary to justice,” he wrote in a personal statement of his credo. “I also consider that plain living is good for everybody, physically and mentally.”74
These sentiments led Einstein to be critical of what he saw as the excessive consumption and disparities of wealth in America. As a result, he enlisted in a variety of racial and social justice movements. He took up, for example, the cause of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young black men who were convicted of a gang rape in Alabama after a controversial trial, and of Tom Mooney, a labor activist imprisoned for murder in California.75
At Caltech, Millikan was upset with Einstein’s activism, and wrote him to say so. Einstein responded diplomatically. “It cannot be my affair,” he agreed, “to insist in a matter that concerns only the citizens of your country.”76 Millikan thought Einstein naïve in his politics, as did many people. To some extent he was, but it should be remembered that his qualms about the convictions of the Scottsboro Boys and Mooney proved justified, and his advocacy of racial and social justice turned out to be on the right side of history.
Despite his association with the Zionist cause, Einstein’s sympathies extended to the Arabs who were being displaced by the influx of Jews into what would eventually be Israel. His message was a prophetic one. “Should we be unable to find a way to honest cooperation and honest pacts with the Arabs,” he wrote Weizmann in 1929, “then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering.”77
He proposed, both to Weizmann and in an open letter to an Arab, that a “privy council” of four Jews and four Arabs, all independent-minded, be set up to resolve any disputes. “The two great Semitic peoples,” he said, “have a great common future.” If the Jews did not assure that both sides lived in harmony, he warned friends in the Zionist movement, the struggle would haunt them in decades to come.78 Once again, he was labeled naïve.
The Einstein-Freud Exchange
When a group known as the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited him in 1932 to exchange letters with a thinker of his choice on issues relating to war and politics, Einstein picked as his correspondent Sigmund Freud, the era’s other great intellectual and pacifist icon. Einstein began by proposing an idea that he
Ever since he was a teenager rankling at German militarism, Einstein had been repulsed by nationalism. One of the fundamental postulates of his political view, which would remain invariant even after Hitler’s rise made him waver on the principles of pacifism, was his support for an international or “supranational” entity that would transcend the chaos of national sovereignty by imposing the resolution of disputes.
“The quest of international security,” he wrote Freud, “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 that no other road can lead to such security.” Years later, Einstein would become even more committed to this approach as a way to transcend the military dangers of the atomic age that he helped to spawn.
Einstein ended by posing a question to “the expert in the lore of human instincts.” Because humans have within them a “lust for hatred and destruction,” leaders can manipulate it to stir up militaristic passions. “Is it possible,” Einstein asked, “to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him secure against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?”79
In a complex and convoluted response, Freud was bleak. “You surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction,” he wrote. “I entirely agree.” Psychoanalysts had come to the conclusion that two types of human instincts were woven together: “those that conserve and unify, which we call ‘erotic’... and, secondly, the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts.” Freud cautioned against labeling the first good and the second evil. “Each of these instincts is every whit as indispensable as its opposite, and all the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition.”