Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set

by Walter Isaacson

  There was a knowing, self-referential quality in that exhortation. Einstein himself had little inclination or talent for sharing other people’s troubles, and he compensated by focusing on what was important to him. “Tete really has a lot of myself in him, but with him it seems more pronounced,” Einstein conceded to Mari. “He’s an interesting fellow, but things won’t be easy for him.”32

  Einstein visited Eduard in October 1930, and together with Mari tried to deal with his downward mental spiral. They played piano together, but to no avail. Eduard continued to slip into a darker realm. Soon after he left, the young man threatened to throw himself out of his bedroom window, but his mother restrained him.

  The complex strands of Einstein’s family life came together in an odd scene in November 1930. Four years earlier, a conniving Russian writer named Dimitri Marianoff had sought to meet Einstein. With great nerve and tenacity, he presented himself at Einstein’s apartment and was able to convince Elsa to let him in. There he proceeded to charm Einstein by talking about Russian theater, and also to turn the head of Elsa’s daughter Margot by engaging in a grand show of handwriting analysis.

  Margot was so painfully shy that she often hid from strangers, but Marianoff ’s wiles soon brought her out of her shell. Their wedding occurred a few days after Eduard had tried to commit suicide, and a distraught Mari made an unannounced visit to Berlin to ask her former husband for help. Marianoff later described the scene at the end of his wedding ceremony: “As we came down the steps I noticed a woman standing near the portico. I would not have noticed her, except that she looked at us with such an intensely burning gaze that it impressed me. Margot said under her breath, ‘It’s Mileva.’ ”33

  Einstein was shaken deeply by his son’s illness. “This sorrow is eating up Albert,” Elsa wrote. “He finds it difficult to cope with.”34

  There was, however, not much he could do. The morning after the wedding, he and Elsa left by train to Antwerp, from which they would sail for their second voyage to the United States. It was a hectic departure. Einstein got separated from Elsa at the Berlin station, then lost their train tickets.35 But eventually they got everything together and embarked on what would be another triumphal American visit.

  America Again

  Einstein’s second trip to America, beginning in December 1930, was supposed to be different from his first. This time, there would be no public frenzy or odd hoopla. Instead, he was coming for a two-month working visit as a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. The officials who arranged it were eager to protect his privacy and, like his friends in Germany, they viewed any publicity as undignified.

  As usual, Einstein seemed to agree—in theory. Once it was known that he was coming, he was swamped with dozens of telegrams each day with speaking offers and award invitations, all of which he declined. On the way over, he and his mathematical calculator, Walther Mayer, holed up, working on revisions to his unified field theory, in an upper-deck suite with a sailor guarding the door.36

  He even decided that he would not disembark when his ship docked in New York. “I hate facing cameras and having to answer a crossfire of questions,” he claimed.“Why popular fancy should seize on me, a scientist, dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is a manifestation of mass psychology that is beyond me.”37

  But by then the world, and especially America, had irrevocably entered the new age of celebrity. Aversion to fame was no longer considered natural. Publicity was still something that many proper people tended to avoid, but its lure had begun to be accepted. The day before his ship docked in New York, Einstein sent word that he had relented to reporters’ requests and would hold a press conference and photo opportunity upon his arrival.38

  It was “worse than the most fantastic expectation,” he recorded in his travel diary. Fifty reporters plus fifty more cameramen swarmed aboard, accompanied by the German consul and his fat assistant. “The reporters asked exquisitely inane questions, to which I replied with cheap jokes, which were enthusiastically received.”39

  Asked to define the fourth dimension in a word, Einstein replied, “You will have to ask a spiritualist.” Could he define relativity in one sentence? “It would take me three days to give a short definition.”

  There was, however, one question that he tried to answer seriously, and which he alas got wrong. It was about a politician whose party had risen from obscurity three months earlier to win 18 percent of the vote in the German elections. “What do you think of Adolf Hitler?” Einstein replied, “He is living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important.”40

  Time magazine that week featured Elsa on its cover, wearing a sprightly hat and exulting in her role as wife of the world’s most famous scientist. The magazine reported, “Because Mathematician Einstein cannot keep his bank account correctly,” his wife had to balance his finances and handle the arrangements for the trip. “All these things I must do so that he will think he is free,” she told the magazine. “He is all my life. He is worth it. I like being Mrs. Einstein very much.”41 One duty she assigned herself was to charge $1 for her husband’s autograph and $5 for his photograph; she kept a ledger and donated the money to charities for children.

  Einstein changed his mind about staying secluded aboard ship while it was docked in New York. In fact, he seemed to pop up everywhere. He celebrated Hanukkah with fifteen thousand people in Madison Square Garden, toured Chinatown by car, lunched with the editorial board of the New York Times, was cheered when he arrived at the Metropolitan Opera to hear the sensational soprano Maria Jeritza sing Carmen, received the keys to the city (which Mayor Jimmy Walker quipped were given “relatively”), and was introduced by the president of Columbia University as “the ruling monarch of the mind.”42

  He also paid a visit to Riverside Church, a massive structure with a 2,100-seat nave, which had just been completed. It was a Baptist church, but above the west portal, carved in stone amid a dozen other great thinkers in history, was a full-length statue of Einstein. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the noted senior minister, met Einstein and Elsa at the door and gave them a tour. Einstein paused to admire a stained-glass window of Immanuel Kant in his garden, then asked about his own statue. “Am I the only living man among all these figures of the ages?” Dr. Fosdick, with a sense of gravity duly noted by the reporters present, replied, “That is true, Professor Einstein.”

  “Then I will have to be very careful for the rest of my life as to what I do and say,” Einstein answered. Afterward, according to an article in the church bulletin, he joked, “I might have imagined that they could make a Jewish saint of me, but I never thought I’d become a Protestant one!”43

  The church had been built with donations from John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Einstein arranged to have a meeting with the great capitalist and philanthropist. The purpose was to discuss the complex restrictions the Rockefeller foundations were putting on research grants. “The red tape,” Einstein said, “encases the mind like the hands of a mummy.”

  They also discussed economics and social justice in light of the Great Depression. Einstein suggested that working hours be shortened so that, at least in his understanding of economics, more people would have a chance to be employed. He also said that lengthening the school year would help keep young people out of the workforce.

  “Does not such an idea,” Rockefeller asked, “impose an unwarranted restriction upon individual freedom?” Einstein replied that the current economic crisis justified measures like those taken during wartime. This gave Einstein the opportunity to propound his pacifist positions, which Rockefeller politely declined to share.44

  His most memorable speech was a pacifist clarion call that he gave to the New History Society, in which he called for an “uncompromising war resistance and refusal to do military service under any circumstances.” Then he issued what became a famous call for a brave 2 percent:

  The timid might say, “What’s the us
e? We shall be sent to prison.” To them I would reply: Even if only 2% of those assigned to perform military service should announce their refusal to fight ...governments would be powerless, they would not dare send such a large number of people to jail.

  The speech quickly became a manifesto for war resisters. Buttons that simply said “2%” began sprouting on the lapels of students and pacifists.* The New York Times headlined the story on page 1 and reprinted the speech in its entirety. One German paper also headlined it, but with less enthusiasm: “Einstein Begging for Military Service Objectors: Scientist’s Unbelievable Publicity Methods in America.”45

  On the day he left New York, Einstein revised slightly one of the statements he had made upon his arrival. Asked again about Hitler, he declared that if the Nazis were ever able to gain control, he would consider leaving Germany.46

  Einstein’s ship headed to California through the Panama Canal. While his wife spent time at the hairdresser, Einstein dictated letters to Helen Dukas and worked on unified field theory equations with Walther Mayer. Although he complained about the “perpetual photographing” he had to endure from his fellow passengers, he did let one young man sketch him, and then he appended his own self-deprecating doggerel to turn it into a collector’s item.

  In Cuba, where he relished the warm weather, Einstein addressed the local Academy of Sciences. Then it was on to Panama, where a revolution was brewing that would depose a president who, it turned out, was also a graduate of the Zurich Polytechnic. That didn’t stop officials from offering Einstein an elaborate welcome ceremony at which he was presented a hat that “an illiterate Ecuadorian Indian worked for six months weaving.” On Christmas day, he broadcast holiday greetings to America via the ship’s radio.47

  When his ship docked in San Diego on the last morning of 1930, dozens of newsmen clambered aboard, with two of them falling off the ladder as they rushed their way onto the deck. Five hundred uniformed girls stood on the dock, waiting to serenade him. The gaudy arrival ceremony lasted four hours, filled with speeches and presentations.

  Were there men, he was asked, living elsewhere in the universe? “Other beings, perhaps, but not men,” he answered. Did science and religion conflict? Not really, he said, “though it depends, of course, on your religious views.”48

  Friends who saw all the arrival hoopla on newsreels back in Germany were astonished and somewhat appalled. “I am always very amused to see and hear you in the weekly newsreel,” wrote the sharp-penned Hedwig Born, “being presented with a floral float containing lovely sea-nymphs in San Diego, and that sort of thing. However crazy things must look from the outside, I always have the feeling that the dear Lord knows what he’s up to.”49

  It was on this trip, as noted in the previous chapter, that Einstein visited the Mount Wilson Observatory, was shown evidence of the expanding universe, and renounced the cosmological constant he had added to his general relativity equations. He also paid tribute to the aging Albert Michelson, carefully praising his famous experiments that detected no ether drift, without explicitly saying that they were a basis for his special theory of relativity.

  Einstein soaked in a variety of the delights that southern California could offer. He attended the Rose Bowl parade, was given a special screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, and sunbathed nude in the Mojave desert while at a friend’s house for the weekend. At a Hollywood studio, the special effects team filmed him pretending to drive a parked car, and then that evening amused him by showing how they made it seem as if he were zipping through Los Angeles, soaring up into the clouds, flying over the Rockies, and eventually landing in the German countryside. He even was offered some movie roles, which he politely declined.

  He went sailing in the Pacific with Robert A. Millikan, Caltech’s president, who Einstein noted in his diary “plays the role of God” at the university. Millikan was a physicist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1923 for, as the organization noted, having “verified experimentally Einstein’s all-important photoelectric equation.” He likewise verified Einstein’s interpretation of Brownian motion. So it was understandable that, as he was building Caltech into one of the world’s preeminent scientific institutions, he worked diligently to bring Einstein there.

  Despite all they had in common, Millikan and Einstein were different enough in their personal outlooks that they were destined to have an awkward relationship. Millikan was so conservative scientifically that he resisted Einstein’s interpretation of the photoelectric effect and his dismissal of the ether even after they were apparently verified by his own experiments. And he was even more conservative politically. A robust and athletic son of an Iowa preacher, he had a penchant for patriotic militarism that was as pronounced as Einstein’s aversion to it.

  Moreover, Millikan was enhancing Caltech through hefty donations from like-minded conservatives. Einstein’s pacifist and socialist sentiments unnerved many of them, and they urged Millikan to restrain him from making pronouncements on earthly rather than cosmic issues. As Major General Amos Fried put it, they must avoid “aiding and abetting the teaching of treason to the youth of this country by being hosts to Dr. Albert Einstein.” Millikan responded sympathetically by denouncing Einstein’s call for military resistance and declaring that “the 2% comment, if he ever made it, is one which no experienced man could possibly have made.”50

  Millikan particularly disdained the crusading writer and union advocate Upton Sinclair, whom he called “the most dangerous man in California,” and the actor Charlie Chaplin, who equaled Einstein in global celebrity and surpassed him in left-wing sentiments. Much to Millikan’s dismay, Einstein promptly befriended both.

  Einstein had corresponded with Sinclair about their shared commitment to social justice, and upon arriving in California was happy to accept his invitations to a variety of dinners, parties, and meetings. He even remained polite, though amused, while attending a farcical séance at Sinclair’s home. When Mrs. Sinclair challenged his views on science and spirituality, Elsa chided her for having such presumption. “You know, my husband has the greatest mind in the world,” she said. Mrs. Sinclair responded, “Yes, I know, but surely he doesn’t know everything.”51

  During a tour of Universal Studios, Einstein mentioned that he had always wanted to meet Charlie Chaplin. So the studio boss called him, and he came right over to join the Einsteins for lunch in the commissary. The result, a few days later, was one of the most memorable scenes in the new era of celebrity: Einstein and Chaplin arriving together, dressed in black tie, with Elsa beaming, for the premiere of City Lights. As they were applauded on their way into the theater, Chaplin memorably (and accurately) noted, “They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.”52

  Einstein struck a more serious pose when he addressed the Caltech student body near the end of his stay. His sermon, grounded in his humanistic outlook, was on how science had not yet been harnessed to do more good than harm. During war it gave people “the means to poison and mutilate one another,” and in peacetime it “has made our lives hurried and uncertain.” Instead of being a liberating force, “it has enslaved men to machines” by making them work “long wearisome hours mostly without joy in their labor.” Concern for making life better for ordinary humans must be the chief object of science. “Never forget this when you are pondering over your diagrams and equations!”53

  The Einsteins took a train east across America for their return sail from New York. Along the way, they stopped at the Grand Canyon, where they were greeted by a contingent of Hopi Indians (employed by the concession stand at the canyon, though Einstein did not know that), who initiated him into their tribe as “the Great Relative” and gave him a bountiful feathered headdress that resulted in some classic photographs.54

  When his train reached Chicago, Einstein gave a speech from its rear platform to a rally of pacifists who had come to celebrate him. Millikan must have been appalled. It was similar to the “2%” speech Einstein ha
d given in New York. “The only way to be effective is through the revolutionary method of refusing military service,” he declared. “Many who consider themselves good pacifists will not want to participate in such a radical form of pacifism; they will claim that patriotism prevents them from adopting such a policy. But in an emergency, such people cannot be counted on anyhow.”55

  Einstein’s train pulled into New York City on the morning of March 1, and for the next sixteen hours Einstein mania reached new heights. “Einstein’s personality, for no clear reason, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,” the German consul reported to Berlin.

  Einstein first went to his ship, where four hundred members of the War Resisters’ League were waiting to greet him. He invited them all on board and addressed them in a ballroom. “If in time of peace members of pacifist organizations are not ready to make sacrifices by opposing authorities at the risk of imprisonment, they will certainly fail in time of war, when only the most steeled and resolute person can be expected to resist.” The crowd erupted in delirium, with overwrought pacifists rushing up to kiss his hand and touch his clothing.56

  The socialist leader Norman Thomas was at the meeting, and he tried to convince Einstein that pacifism could not occur without radical economic reforms. Einstein disagreed. “It is easier to win over people to pacifism than to socialism,” he said. “We should work first for pacifism, and only later for socialism.”57

  That afternoon, the Einsteins were taken to the Waldorf Hotel, where they had a sprawling suite in which they could meet a stream of visitors, such as Helen Keller and various journalists. Actually, it was two full suites connected by a grand private dining room. When one friend arrived that afternoon, he asked Elsa, “Where is Albert?”