Convictions

Einstein believed that a famous name carried an obligation to speak. From 1914 until the week of his death he lent his to causes, many of them unpopular.

War and Peace

When war broke out in 1914, ninety-three leading German intellectuals signed a manifesto defending Germany's conduct. Einstein was one of four who signed a counter-manifesto calling for European unity.

By the end of the 1920s he was calling himself a militant pacifist and urging young men to refuse military service. In 1930 he argued that if only two percent of those called up refused to fight, governments would be powerless.

Hitler changed his mind. In 1933 he shocked his pacifist allies by saying that, in the present circumstances, if he were Belgian he would not refuse military service. Some never forgave him. He held that pacifism was right in principle and that it could not be applied against an enemy bent on destroying life itself.

After 1945 he campaigned for international control of nuclear weapons and for a world government with real authority, which he saw as the only alternative to eventual catastrophe.

The Bomb

His part in the atomic bomb was the 1939 letter to Roosevelt and a follow-up in 1940. He was refused a security clearance and took no part in the Manhattan Project. He was on vacation at Saranac Lake, in upstate New York, when the news of Hiroshima came over the radio.

Late in life he told the chemist Linus Pauling, by Pauling's account, that signing the letter was the one great mistake of his life, though he added that there had been some justification: the danger that the Germans would make the bomb first. He became chairman of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists in 1946 and spent his remaining years warning of what had been made.

Nationalism

Einstein distrusted nationalism from his school days, when he gave up German citizenship at sixteen. He called it an infantile disease. He was a citizen, at various times, of Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, and for five years of nowhere.

Jewish Identity and Zionism

He was not religious, but the antisemitism he met in Germany made him identify strongly as a Jew. He supported Zionism as a cultural and humanitarian cause, toured America in 1921 to raise money for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, served on its first board of governors, and left it his papers.

He was uneasy about a Jewish state with borders and an army, repeatedly urged cooperation with the Arab population, and in 1948 signed a letter condemning the party of Menachem Begin. When Israel offered him its presidency in 1952, he declined with evident feeling.

Civil Rights

Arriving in Princeton, Einstein found a segregated town.

In 1937, when the singer Marian Anderson was refused a hotel room in Princeton, he invited her to stay at his house, and she stayed with the Einsteins whenever she returned. He worked with Paul Robeson against lynching, and in 1946 traveled to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a historically Black college, to accept an honorary degree and give a lecture on relativity. He told the students that segregation was not a disease of Black people but a disease of white people, and that he did not intend to be quiet about it. In 1951, when the federal government put the 83-year-old scholar W. E. B. Du Bois on trial, Einstein offered to appear as a character witness. The case was dismissed.

Socialism

In 1949 he wrote an essay titled "Why Socialism?" arguing that the profit motive and unchecked private power were damaging society, and favoring a planned economy. In the same essay he warned that planning could bring an all-powerful bureaucracy, and asked how the rights of the individual would be protected. He never joined a party and criticized the Soviet Union's suppression of freedom.

Religion

He did not believe in a personal God who answers prayers or judges people. Asked directly, he said he believed in the God of the philosopher Spinoza, revealed in the orderly harmony of what exists. He called the awe he felt before the structure of nature a cosmic religious feeling, and thought it the strongest motive for scientific research.

He rejected the label of atheist and disliked the certainty of militant unbelievers. Yet in a private letter the year before he died he described the word God as a product of human weakness and the Bible as a collection of honorable but primitive legends.

The Price

The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a file on Einstein in 1932 and kept adding to it until his death. It ran to well over 1,400 pages. Agents investigated claims that he was a Soviet spy, which were never substantiated, and, according to the journalist Fred Jerome's study of the file, immigration officials looked into whether he could be stripped of his citizenship.

He did not back down. In 1953, at the height of Senator McCarthy's power, he advised a schoolteacher summoned before a congressional committee to refuse to testify, and to be prepared for jail. The advice was printed in the New York Times.