Emerson Phillips
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover suspected that world-renowned physicist Albert Einstein was a communist and considered him an extreme radical.
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Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. He renounced the authoritarianism that swept through his birth-nation, Germany, in the late 1920s-early 1930s and was equally critical of militant nationlism, calling it “the measles of mankind.” He also denounced racism and was a devout pacifist, working the rest of his life to bring nuclear weapons under some form of international control.
In 1933 Einstein and his wife left Nazi Germany and emigrated to the United States, where he went to work for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Beginning in December 1932, the FBI kept a secret dossier on Einstein that would grow to 1,427 pages by the time of Einstein’s death in April 1955.
Given Hoover’s attitude that liberalism was the first step toward communism, it’s no shock that the FBI became interested in Einstein. The FBI spied on him, and surveillance of him, which began after the war, seemed to be aimed both at him and Helen Dukas, his secretary, who had worked for him since 1928 and lived with him and his stepdaughter Margo and sister Maja in his house in Princeton.
Hoover authored a letter summarizing Einstein’s antiwar and leftist activities and an unsigned, undated ”biographical sketch” that some historians suspect was influenced by right-wing German sources. The sketch described Einstein’s apartment in Berlin in the early 1930s as ”a Communist center” and his country house in Caputh as ”the hiding place of Moscow envoys.”
According to Dr. Richard Gid Powers, a historian at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of ”Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover,” the bureau had no choice but to watch Einstein, especially after the war, when officials worried that they were losing a ”high-stakes game of propaganda” to the Soviets as luminaries like Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin criticized American policy.
There are many other reports on the FBI and its obsession with Einstein. This is another of our favorites.
