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The three articles that follow particularize Einstein in quite different ways--and then use that specificity to paint on a broader canvas. Einstein's politics have all too often been smoothed over, rendered into the odd predilections of a do-good naif. Yet everything we know and are learning one thinks here of Thomas Levenson's Einstein in Berlin indicates that he was not a political sap in his youth and did not become one in his maturity. |
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From Berlin , Einstein had signed a public letter against many of his German nationalist colleagues in the middle of World War I. When a large and rather unpleasant crowd cheered at an anti-Einstein rally a few years later, he was anything but cowed: he bought a ticket and showed up. That political thick skin did not peel away at the debarkation port when he arrived in the United States in 1932. Enter Fred Jerome. |
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For years, Jerome fought--in the end successfully--to extricate Einstein's vast FBI files from the clutches of bureaucracy. From these texts even with all their errors, blackened portions, and missing pages--it becomes quite apparent that J. Edger Hoover did not consider Einstein a harmless academic eccentric. The head G-man took the most prestigious theorist to be a threat and had plans for his incarceration. Hoover knew what we, a half century later, have too often forgotten: that Einstein in the 1940s and 1950s was choosing his political causes and organizations with care and forethought--and then backing them significantly. Jerome's essay for this issue shows us an important and little-known Einstein, an Einstein who would not buckle under the post-World War II reaction against black civil rights activism. Einstein lectured on black campuses, defended W. E. B. Du Bois, and--at a time when sympathizers were being harassed and worse--invited Paul Robeson to his Mercer Street home. |
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