EinsteinEverything you need to know about Albert Einstein.

The Political Einstein

The pacifist who signed the bomb letter, the Zionist who declined a presidency, the socialist monitored by the FBI. Einstein's politics, told through documented acts rather than slogans.

The pacifist — and the reversal

In October 1914, as Europe’s intellectuals rushed to sign manifestos blessing the First World War, Einstein signed the opposite one: the “Manifesto to the Europeans” (Aufruf an die Europäer), drafted with the physician Georg Nicolai. It called on Europe’s scholars to resist nationalist frenzy. It gathered four signatures — Einstein, Nicolai, Wilhelm Foerster, and Otto Buek. The document is a matter of record; its failure is part of the story.

Through the 1920s Einstein was the world’s most famous pacifist: he campaigned against conscription, supported war resisters, and lent his name to disarmament causes. Then came 1933. With the Nazis in power, Einstein publicly reversed his absolute pacifism: against Hitler’s Germany, he wrote, he would support armed resistance — a position his former pacifist allies denounced as betrayal. The reversal is documented in his 1933 statements and correspondence. It is also the context for the Roosevelt letter six years later (see The Roosevelt Letter): the pacifist who would not fight had become the anti-fascist who would warn.

The Zionist who said no

Einstein supported the Zionist movement from 1919, above all its cultural project: in 1921 he toured the United States with Chaim Weizmann raising funds for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he later bequeathed his personal papers to that university — the archive that makes this site possible. He was a cultural Zionist, not a nationalist: he favored a Jewish homeland but warned repeatedly against narrow nationalism.

In November 1952, after Weizmann’s death, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s government offered him the presidency of Israel. Einstein declined in writing on 18 November 1952, saying he lacked experience in dealing with people and official functions. The offer and the declination are both documented in the Einstein Archives (see Reception).

“Why Socialism?” (1949)

In May 1949 Einstein published “Why Socialism?” in the Monthly Review. His argument, in his own documented words:

“I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.”

He was not a party Marxist — he criticized Soviet authoritarianism in the same essay — but he was an explicit, published socialist, and the American right noticed. The FBI kept a file on him from the 1930s onward (released decades later under the Freedom of Information Act); J. Edgar Hoover’s bureau tracked his associations, his mail, and his phone calls. He was never charged with anything.

The civil-rights ally

On a May 1946 visit to Lincoln University, the historically Black university in Pennsylvania, Einstein received an honorary degree and spoke with unusual directness for a public figure of that era. His documented words from the address:

“There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States. That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”

He lectured on relativity to the students, called racism America’s worst disease, and kept up friendships with Black intellectuals — including W.E.B. Du Bois, whose defense he publicly joined. This is the least-mythologized part of his politics, and one of the best documented.

The last signature: Russell–Einstein (1955)

Eleven days before his death, on 11 April 1955, Einstein signed the manifesto Bertrand Russell had drafted warning of nuclear war and urging the abolition of war itself. Issued in London on 9 July 1955, after Einstein’s death, the Russell–Einstein Manifesto became the founding document of the Pugwash Conferences on science and world affairs. His final political act was a warning about the weapons his 1939 letter had helped make possible.

Neither campaign

Einstein’s politics are quote-mined from both directions — the left claims the socialist, the right claims the anti-communist, pacifists claim the 1920s and hawks the 1930s. The documents support a simpler reading: a man whose positions moved with the evidence of his century — pacifist against the Kaiser, anti-fascist against Hitler, socialist against unregulated capital, anti-racist in America — and who paid for the consistency of his conscience with an FBI file. (The “neither campaign” verdict on his religious views is the parallel case in Reception.)

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