| Review of: |
The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist by Fred Jerome
St. Martin's Press, New York, 2002
Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome, Rodger Taylor
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2005
|
| Reviewed By: |
Robert Shaffer |
| Reviewed in: |
Peace & Change |
| Date accepted online: |
02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 32, Issue 03, Pages 435-462 |
Book Reviews
Historians have long known of the antiwar activism of Albert Einstein, especially his pacifism after World War I, while still in Germany, and his extensive efforts to stop the nuclear arms race during the early Cold War, after the famous refugee from Nazism had become a U.S. citizen. Einstein on Peace, edited and with commentary by his close friend and political associate Otto Nathan (with Heinz Norden), was published in 1960, five years after Einstein's death. It collected many of the legendary physicist's letters and brief essays on the subject, along with controversial statements on McCarthyism, world government, civil rights, and socialism. Recent works by Paul Boyer and Lawrence Wittner respectfully mention Einstein's activism, and Jamie Sayen, in the comprehensive Einstein in America (1985), chronicles both the scientist's extensive and wide-ranging political involvement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) efforts to tar Einstein as an "enemy of America."
Fred Jerome, a science writer, adds to these portraits in The Einstein File by sifting through the truths, rumors, and lies compiled by the FBI in its reports on Einstein. The Einstein File has many strengths, notably a dogged persistence in following up and convincingly refuting the various allegations that Einstein was a Communist dupe or that he engaged in espionage, and a wide view of both the progressive movement and the repressive forces of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. However, it is ultimately a problematic book.
Jerome makes four main overlapping arguments, two of which he demonstrates. First, the author shows that, because of his fame and personal commitments, Einstein played an integral part in the progressive movements of his day. Two examples must suffice. Einstein accepted entertainer and activist Paul Robeson's invitation in 1946 to serve as co-chair of the American Crusade Against Lynching, an organization that sought a strong federal response to the wave of racist murders that occurred after World War II. Einstein's public advice to a New York teacher in 1953 to refuse to testify before a Senate subcommittee about alleged ties to Communism demonstrated not only the scientist's resistance to McCarthyism, but his adeptness at using his prestige to help more vulnerable targets of repression. Although scathingly critical of the FBI's compilation of a dossier on Einstein, Jerome uses it to show the depth of the physicist's engagement, observing that the "FBI's file, ironically, contains the most complete listing of the political causes Einstein supported" (pp. 121-122).
Jerome documents in painstaking detail the long-standing concern of the FBI and other "intelligence" agencies, as well as the ultraright, with Einstein's political views and activities. Harassment began when the State Department delayed a visa to Einstein and his wife in 1932, a delay prompted by wildly inaccurate charges in The Woman Patriot, a publication left over from the Red Scare, that Einstein had ties to Bolshevism. The harassment continued with the FBI's participation in the successful endeavor to deny Einstein the security clearance needed to work even as a consultant on the Manhattan Project, and later with intensive, but ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to "prove" that Einstein aided atomic spy Niels Bohr. No allegation-even those originating with the Nazis-was too off-the-wall for the FBI and related agencies. The same baseless charges would be investigated time and again, and would be forwarded to others long after they had been proven false. Jerome shows that anti-Semitism often motivated such investigations, and that the racist attitudes of Hoover and of Congressional anti-Communists led them to equate civil rights activism with Communism.
Did such investigations and harassment add up to a "war" against Einstein? Jerome is less convincing here, in the third facet of his argument. According to Jerome's own evidence, J. Edgar Hoover was too circumspect to attack Einstein publicly, and the FBI chief ultimately concluded that he had no hard evidence against the scientist. To be sure, the FBI fed false rumors about Einstein to other government agencies and officials, such as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which in 1952 toyed with the idea of deporting the former refugee. (In one of many biting commentaries, Jerome notes that the Immigration and Naturalization Service considered deportation even as one of its own handbooks featured a quotation about the "liberty to express one's political opinion orally and in writing," from Einstein himself.) But the Bureau's surveillance of Einstein fell short of the harassment that many others faced at the time: Einstein's phone was not tapped, his closest associates were not questioned until after Hoover concluded that he would not find what he wanted, and Einstein's livelihood was not threatened. Jerome fudges the distinctions between surveillance techniques: monitoring who wrote to Einstein through "mail intercepts" (p. 89) is not the same as reading Einstein's mail, for example. One hesitates to appear sympathetic to FBI surveillance of political speech, but in the end Jerome demonstrates FBI tunnel-vision, ineptitude, wastefulness, and ideologically driven suspicions more than a "war" against Einstein.
More distressing is Jerome's fourth thesis, that the "one area of Einstein's life that's been neglected by biographers is his politics" (p. xiii). Although it is natural for writers to emphasize the freshness of their findings, Jerome fails to acknowledge previous work adequately. Sayen's book, for example, does not appear in Jerome's bibliography, and there are only partial citations to it in Jerome's footnotes. And yet several passages in The Einstein File closely parallel passages in Einstein in America on the scientist's political views. (Compare Jerome, pp. 116 and 307n.33, with Sayen, p. 229, for example.) Similarly, Jerome ignores Einstein on Peace when commenting on the relevant literature, but repeats almost verbatim passages on Einstein's stand against McCarthyism from that earlier book. (Compare Einstein on Peace, p. 546, with The Einstein File, p. 23; Jerome's wording at times is also uncomfortably close to Paul Boyer's and Athan Theoharis's.) Jerome implies in his text that Time "virtually ignored" Einstein's politics in its 1999 designation of the scientist as the "person of the century," only to concede in a footnote that a lengthy sidebar explored such views.
Jerome, with coauthor Rodger Taylor in Einstein on Race and Racism, goes even further with such charges, alleging that those "who shape our official memories" (p. ix) have insulated the public from Einstein's radicalism. This conspiracy mongering may, for some readers, diminish Jerome's credibility regarding the FBI. Jerome's unorthodox documentation style makes The Einstein File at times difficult to follow, and there are many assertions with no relevant footnotes at all. Anyone who has used FBI files on individuals will recognize that Jerome is not attentive enough to the problems of chronology in these peculiar documents. His hyperbole can be sophomoric: Elizabeth Dilling's anti-Semitism, reprehensible as it may be, does not "make Mein Kampf seem like a Boy Scout manual" (The Einstein File, p. 48).
And what is one to make of the very brief book, Einstein on Race and Racism? Three of its four major themes-Einstein's associations with Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, the scientist's public statements in favor of civil rights for African Americans, and the FBI's suspicion that Einstein's antiracist activities linked him to subversion-were fully developed, often at greater depth, and at times in substantially similar wording, in the earlier book. The fourth theme, that Einstein maintained good personal relations with Princeton's persecuted African American community, a theme developed through extensive oral history interviews, is new, but hardly justifies a new book. Indeed, in their digressions about Princeton in the 1700s, and in the reprinting in the appendix of documents already quoted at great length (or even in full) in the text, it seems as if the authors are padding their story to reach an acceptable book length. (Most of these documents, by the way, have been previously reprinted, although not in one place.) The authors barely use Einstein's papers, available at Princeton, and they leave unexplained why several key encounters, especially between Einstein and Robeson, have no corroborating documentation from Einstein's side. On several points, Jerome and Taylor are more categorical in their assertions than Jerome had been in the earlier book, but with little or no additional evidence. For example, The Einstein File noted that Einstein was "prominent among the targets" (p. 3) of the Nazis from 1930 to 1933, whereas Einstein on Race and Racism calls Einstein the "Nazis' number-one target" (p. 5).
Jerome and Taylor write in an engaging style; if their work reminds scholars and the public of Einstein's activism, they will have performed a valuable service. (Jerome has rendered researchers another service by posting Einstein's FBI file at www.theeinsteinfile.com.) But readers should be wary of some of the arguments and assertions in The Einstein File, and they will find little new in Einstein on Race and Racism. For serious scholars, in addition to the exegesis of Einstein's FBI file, perhaps the best service Jerome and Taylor will have rendered will be to direct them back to other works, such as Einstein on Peace, Einstein in America, and the scientist's own Out of My Later Years (1950).
