German-born scientist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was best known during his lifetime for his development of the theory of relativity, his contributions to quantum mechanics, and many other notable achievements in modern physics. However, Einstein's political views also garnered much public interest due to his fame and involvement in political, humanitarian, and academic projects around the world. Einstein was a peace activist and a firm advocate of global federalism and world law. He favoured the principles of socialism, asserting that it was an ideological system that fixed what he perceived as the inherent societal shortcomings of capitalism.
This became especially apparent in his later life, when he detailed his economic views in a 1949 article titled "Why Socialism?" for the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review. He was critical of the methods employed by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, stating that they did not have a "well-regulated system of government" and had instead established a "regime of terror" over the fallen Russian Empire. His visible position in society allowed him to speak and write frankly, even provocatively, at a time when many people were being silenced across the European continent due to the swift rise of Nazism in Germany.
In January 1933, Adolf Hitler assumed office as Germany's leader while Einstein was visiting the United States. Einstein, an Ashkenazi Jew, was staunchly opposed to the policies of the Nazi government, and after his family was repeatedly harassed by the Gestapo, he renounced his German citizenship and permanently relocated to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1940. Though he held a generally positive view of the country's culture and values, he frequently objected to the systematic mistreatment of African Americans and became active in their civil rights movement. As a Labor Zionist, Einstein supported the Palestinian Jews of the Yishuv. However, he did not support the establishment of a Jewish state or an Arab state to replace Mandatory Palestine, instead asserting that he would "much rather see agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state".
Germany
German Empire and World War I Born in Ulm, Einstein was a German citizen from birth. As he grew older, Einstein's pacifism often clashed with the German Empire's militant views at the time. At the age of 17, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and moved to Switzerland to attend college. The loss of Einstein's citizenship allowed him to avoid service in the military, which suited his pacifist views. In response to a Manifesto of the Ninety-Three signed by 93 leading German intellectuals including Max Planck in support of the German war effort, Einstein and three others wrote a counter-manifesto. Einstein accepted a position at the University of Berlin in 1914, returning to Germany where he spent his time during the rest of World War I. Einstein also reacquired his German citizenship. In the years after the war, Einstein was very vocal in his support for Germany. In 1918, Einstein was one of the signatories of the founding proclamation of the German Democratic Party, a liberal party. In 1921, Einstein refused to attend the third Solvay Congress in Belgium, as his German compatriots were excluded. In 1922, Einstein joined a committee sponsored by the League of Nations, but quickly left when the League refused to act on France's occupation of the Ruhr in 1923. As a member of the German League of Human Rights, Einstein worked hard to repair relations between Germany and France.
Rise of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party
Einstein moved to the United States in December 1932, where he worked at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California,Clark, R. "Einstein: The Life and Times" Harper-Collins, 1984. 880 pp. and lectured at Abraham Flexner's newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Einstein renounced his German citizenship in 1933 due to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
During the 1930s and into World War II, Einstein wrote affidavits recommending United States visas for European Jews who were trying to flee persecution and lobbied for looser immigration rules. He raised money for Zionist organizations and was, in part, responsible for the 1933 formation of the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization which gives support and shelter to refugees from social and political persecution.
After World War II ended, and the Nazis were removed from power, Einstein refused to associate with Germany. Einstein refused several honors bestowed upon him by Germany, as he could not forgive the Germans for the Holocaust, where six million of his fellow Jews were murdered. In 1944 Einstein stated "Behind the Nazi party stands the German people, who elected Hitler after he had in his book and in his speeches made his shameful intentions clear beyond the possibility of misunderstanding".Einstein, A. (1950). Out of my later years. Philosophical library, Inc. Chapter 53, To the heroes of the battle of the Warsaw ghetto. p. 239 Einstein, however, re-visited Germany on a trip to Europe in 1952.
United States
Civil rights for African Americans Einstein was a proponent of civil rights and used his renown to condemn American discrimination. When he arrived in America, he objected to the mistreatment of African Americans. Einstein, who had experienced heavy anti-Semitic discrimination in pre-World War II Germany, worked with a number of leading civil rights activistsCivil Rights Movement and civil rights organizations (such as the Princeton chapter of the NAACP) to demand equality and denounce racism and segregation.
When African American singer and civil rights supporter Marian Anderson was denied rooms at hotels and forbidden to eat at public restaurants, Einstein invited her to his home. After a bloody racial riot in 1946, where 500 state troopers with submachine guns attacked and destroyed virtually every black-owned business in a four-square-block area in Columbia, Tennessee and arrested 25 black men for attempted murder, Einstein joined Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes, and Thurgood Marshall to fight for justice for the men. Later, 24 of the 25 defendants were acquitted.
In 1946, he travelled to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall and the first school in America to grant college degrees to black students. At Lincoln, Einstein received an honorary degree and gave a lecture on relativity to Lincoln students.Albert Einstein, Civil Rights activist | Harvard Gazette
When two black couples were murdered in Monroe, Georgia, and justice was not served, Einstein was so outraged that he lent his prominence to actor and activist Paul Robeson's American Crusade to End Lynching and wrote a letter to President Truman calling for prosecution of lynchers and passage of a federal anti-lynching law. When Robeson was blacklisted due to his activism against racism, again it was Einstein who opened his home to his long-time friend of 20 years.
In 1931, Einstein joined Theodore Dreiser's committee to protest the injustice experienced by the Scottsboro Boys, a group of African American teenagers convicted of rape by an all-white jury. In 1946, Einstein also came out in support of Willie McGee, a black Mississippi sharecropper who was sentenced to death after being accused of raping a white woman.
Accusations of anti-Chinese sentiment Written between October 1922 and March 1923, private travel diaries of Einstein (released in 2018) contain remarks that have been called racist and xenophobic, but which also contrast greatly with the profound concern for racial justice he displayed in his later decades. In the earlier, private notes, he writes how the "Chinese don't sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods. All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse." After earlier writing of the "abundance of offspring" and the "fecundity" of the Chinese, he goes on to say: "It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary." Einstein's perceptions of the Japanese he meets are more positive: "Japanese unostentatious, decent, altogether very appealing," he writes. "Pure souls as nowhere else among people. One has to love and admire this country."
Views on homosexuality Einstein was one of the thousands of signatories of Magnus Hirschfeld's petition against Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which condemned homosexuality. The petition ran for more than thirty years in the intellectual circles thanks to the activity of Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which collected many signatures from Jewish members of the German intellectual elite.Carol Dunn: "The Jewish Connection to Homosexuality in the Third Reich", University of Sydney, citing p. 24,; John Lauritsen, David Thorstad: The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935), New York Times Change Press, 1974, 14
Animal rights Einstein was opposed to violence against animals, so he thought that one should "embrace all living creatures". He also sympathized with the idea of vegetarianism. The latest indications, a letter written to Hans Mühsam, dated March 30, 1954, suggest that Einstein was a vegetarian for the last year of his life, though he appears to have supported the idea for many years before practicing it himself. In this letter Einstein states that he was feeling quite well eating vegetarian food and that "man was not born to be a carnivore". He wrote in another letter a year before: "I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience".Alice Calaprice (Hrsg.): The Ultimate Quotable Einstein. Princeton University Press 2011, , S. 453–454. ()
Zionism
Before Israeli independence Einstein was a prominent supporter of both Labor Zionism and efforts to encourage Jewish–Arab cooperation. In 1938 Einstein explained "In this hour one thing, above all, must be emphasized: Judaism owes a great debt of gratitude to Zionism. The Zionist movement has revived among Jews the sense of community. It has performed productive work surpassing all the expectations any one could entertain. This productive work in Palestine, to which self-sacrificing Jews throughout the world have contributed has saved a large number of our brethren from direst need".Einstein, A. (1950). Out of my later years. Philosophical library, Inc. Chapter 52, Our debt to zionism. p 237 Einstein supported the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Mandatory Palestine but was opposed to the idea of a Jewish state "with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power." According to Marc Elis, Einstein declared himself a human being, a Jew, an opponent of nationalism, and a Zionist; he supported the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine but until summer 1947 conceived of this as a bi-national (Jewish and Arab) state, with "continuously functioning, mixed, administrative, economic, and social organizations.""Einstein and Complex Analyses of Zionism" Jewish Daily Forward, July 24, 2009Fred Jerome, Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas About the Middle East