Authors: Walter Isaacson
Einstein had initially thought that his first visit to America might be a way to make some money in a stable currency in order to provide for his family in Switzerland. “I have demanded $15,000 from Princeton and Wisconsin,” he told Ehrenfest.“It will probably scare them off. But if they do bite, I will be buying economic independence for myself—and that’s not a thing to sniff at.”
The American universities did not bite. “My demands were too high,” he reported back to Ehrenfest.
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So by February 1921, he had
made other plans for the spring: he would present a paper at the third Solvay Conference in Brussels and give some lectures in Leiden at the behest of Ehrenfest.
It was then that Kurt Blumenfeld, leader of the Zionist movement in Germany, came by Einstein’s apartment once again. Exactly two years earlier, Blumenfeld had visited Einstein and enlisted his support for the cause of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Now he was coming with an invitation—or perhaps an instruction—in the form of a telegram from the president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann.
Weizmann was a brilliant biochemist who had emigrated from Russia to England, where he helped his adopted nation in the First World War by coming up with a bacterial method for more efficiently manufacturing the explosive cordite. During that war he worked under former prime minister Arthur Balfour, who was then first lord of the Admiralty. He subsequently helped to persuade Balfour, after he became foreign secretary, to issue the famous 1917 declaration in which Britain pledged to support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”
Weizmann’s telegram invited Einstein to accompany him on a trip to America to raise funds to help settle Palestine and, in particular, to create Hebrew University in Jerusalem. When Blumenfeld read it to him, Einstein initially balked. He was not an orator, he said, and the role of simply using his celebrity to draw crowds to the cause was “an unworthy one.”
Blumenfeld did not argue. Instead, he simply read Weizmann’s telegram aloud again. “He is the president of our organization,” Blumenfeld said, “and if you take your conversion to Zionism seriously, then I have the right to ask you, in Dr. Weizmann’s name, to go with him to the United States.”
“What you say is right and convincing,” Einstein replied, to the “boundless astonishment” of Blumenfeld. “I realize that I myself am now part of the situation and that I must accept the invitation.”
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Einstein’s reply was indeed a cause for astonishment. He was already committed to the Solvay Conference and other lectures in Europe, he
professed to dislike the public spotlight, and his fragile stomach had made him reluctant to travel. He was not a faithful Jew, and his allergy to nationalism kept him from being a pure and unalloyed Zionist.
Yet now he was doing something that went against his nature: accepting an implied command from a figure of authority, one that was based on his perceived bonds and commitments to other people. Why?
Einstein’s decision reflected a major transformation in his life. Until the completion and confirmation of his general theory of relativity, he had dedicated himself almost totally to science, to the exclusion even of his personal, familial, and societal relationships. But his time in Berlin had made him increasingly aware of his identity as a Jew. His reaction to the pervasive anti-Semitism was to feel even more connected—indeed, inextricably connected—to the culture and community of his people.
Thus in 1921, he made a leap not of faith but of commitment. “I am really doing whatever I can for the brothers of my race who are treated so badly everywhere,” he wrote Maurice Solovine.
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Next to his science, this would become his most important defining connection. As he would note near the end of his life, after declining the presidency of Israel, “My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human tie.”
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One person who was not only astonished but dismayed by Einstein’s decision was his friend and colleague in Berlin, the chemist Fritz Haber, who had converted from Judaism and assiduously assimilated in order to appear a proper Prussian. Like other assimilationists, he was worried (understandably) that a visit by Einstein to the great wartime enemy at the behest of a Zionist organization would reinforce the belief that Jews had dual loyalties and were not good Germans.
In addition, Haber had been thrilled that Einstein was planning to attend the Solvay Conference in Brussels, the first since the war. No other Germans had been invited, and his attendance was seen as a crucial step for the return of Germany to the larger scientific community.
“People in this country will see this as evidence of the disloyalty of the Jews,” Haber wrote when he heard of Einstein’s decision to visit America. “You will certainly sacrifice the narrow basis upon which the
existence of professors and students of the Jewish faith at German universities rests.”
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Haber apparently had the letter delivered by hand, and Einstein replied the same day. He took issue with Haber’s way of regarding Jews as being people “of the Jewish faith” and instead, once again, cast the identity as being inextricably a matter of ethnic kinship. “Despite my emphatic internationalist beliefs, I have always felt an obligation to stand up for my persecuted and morally oppressed tribal companions,” he said. “The prospect of establishing a Jewish university fills me with particular joy, having recently seen countless instances of perfidious and uncharitable treatment of splendid young Jews with attempts to deny their chances of education.”
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And so it was that the Einsteins sailed from Holland on March 21, 1921, for their first visit to America. To keep things unpretentious and inexpensive, Einstein had said he was willing to travel steerage. The request was not granted, and he was given a nice stateroom. He also asked that he and Elsa be given separate rooms, both aboard the ship and at the hotels, so that he could work while on the trip. That request was granted.
It was, by all accounts, a pleasant Atlantic crossing, during which Einstein tried to explain relativity to Weizmann. Asked upon their arrival whether he understood the theory, Weizmann gave a delightful reply: “During the crossing, Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.”
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When the ship pulled up to the Battery in lower Manhattan on the afternoon of April 2, Einstein was standing on the deck wearing a faded gray wool coat and a black felt hat that concealed some but not all of his now graying shock of hair. In one hand was a shiny briar pipe; the other clutched a worn violin case. “He looked like an artist,” the
New York Times
reported. “But underneath his shaggy locks was a scientific mind whose deductions have staggered the ablest intellects of Europe.”
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As soon as they were permitted, dozens of reporters and cameramen rushed aboard. The press officer of the Zionist organization told
Einstein that he would have to attend a press conference. “I can’t do that,” he protested. “It’s like undressing in public.”
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But he could, of course, and did.
First he obediently followed directions for almost a half hour as the photographers and newsreel men ordered him and Elsa to strike a variety of poses. Then, in the captain’s cabin, he displayed more joy than reluctance as he conducted his first press briefing with all the wit and charm of a merry big-city mayor. “One could tell from his chuckling,” the reporter from the
Philadelphia Public Ledger
wrote, “that he enjoyed it.”
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His questioners enjoyed it as well. The whole performance, sprinkled with quips and pithy answers, showed why Einstein was destined to become such a wildly popular celebrity.
Speaking through an interpreter, Einstein began with a statement about his hope “to secure the support, both material and moral, of American Jewry for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.” But the reporters were more interested in relativity, and the first questioner requested a one-sentence description of the theory, a request that Einstein would face at almost every stop on his trip. “All of my life I have been trying to get it into one book,” he replied, “and
he
wants me to get it into one sentence!” Pressed to try, he provided a simple overview: “It is a theory of space and time as far as physics is concerned, which leads to a theory of gravitation.”
What about those, especially in Germany, who attacked his theory? “No one of knowledge opposes my theory,” he answered. “Those physicists who do oppose the theory are animated by political motives.”
What political motives? “Their attitude is largely due to antiSemitism,” he replied.
The interpreter finally called the session to a close. “Well, I hope I have passed my examination,” Einstein concluded with a smile.
As they were leaving, Elsa was asked if she understood relativity. “Oh, no, although he has explained it to me many times,” she replied. “But it is not necessary to my happiness.”
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Thousands of spectators, along with the fife and drum corps of the Jewish Legion, were waiting in Battery Park when the mayor and other
dignitaries brought Einstein ashore on a police tugboat. As blue-and-white flags were waved, the crowd sang the
Star-Spangled Banner
and then the Zionist anthem
Hatikvah.
The Einsteins and Weizmanns intended to head directly to the Hotel Commodore in Midtown. Instead, their motorcade wound through the Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side late into the evening. “Every car had its horn, and every horn was put in action,” Weizmann recalled. “We reached the Commodore at about 11:30, tired, hungry, thirsty and completely dazed.”
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The following day Einstein entertained a steady procession of visitors and, with what the
Times
called “an unusual impression of geniality,” he even held another press gathering. Why, he was asked, had he attracted such an unprecedented explosion of public interest? He professed to being puzzled himself. Perhaps a psychologist could determine why people who generally did not care for science had taken such an interest in him. “It seems psycho-pathological,” he said with a laugh.
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Weizmann and Einstein were officially welcomed later in the week at City Hall, where ten thousand excited spectators gathered in the park to hear the speeches. Weizmann got polite applause. But Einstein, who said nothing, got a “tumultuous greeting” when he was introduced. “As Dr. Einstein left,” the New York
Evening Post
reported, “he was lifted onto the shoulders of his colleagues and into the automobile, which passed in triumphal procession through a mass of waving banners and a roar of cheering voices.”
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One of Einstein’s visitors at the Commodore Hotel was a German immigrant physician named Max Talmey, whose name had been Max Talmud back when he was a poor student in Munich. This was the family friend who had first exposed the young Einstein to math and philosophy, and he was unsure whether the now famous scientist would remember him.
Einstein did. “He had not seen me or corresponded with me for nineteen years,” Talmey later noted. “Yet as soon as I entered his room in the hotel, he exclaimed: ‘You distinguish yourself through eternal youth!’ ”
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They chatted about their days in Munich and their paths since. Einstein invited Talmey back various times during the course of
his visit, and before he left even went to Talmey’s apartment to meet his young daughters.
Even though he spoke in German about abstruse theories or stood silent as Weizmann tried to cajole money for Jewish settlements in Palestine, Einstein drew packed crowds wherever he went in New York.“Every seat in the Metropolitan Opera House, from the pit to the last row under the roof, was filled, and hundreds stood,” reported the
Times
one day. About another lecture that week it likewise reported, “He spoke in German, but those anxious to see and hear the man who has contributed a new theory of space and time and motion to scientific conceptions of the universe filled every seat and stood in the aisles.”
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After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.”
On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the
Congressional Record.
David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.”
Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether
he
understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The
Washington Post
carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy
. The
New York Times
ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.”
At a reception in the National Academy of Sciences on Constitution Avenue (which now boasts the world’s most interesting statue of Einstein, a twelve-foot-high full-length bronze figure of him reclining),
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he listened to long speeches from various honorees, including Prince Albert I of Monaco, who was an avid oceanographer, a North Carolina scholar of hookworms, and a man who had invented a solar stove. As the evening droned on, Einstein turned to a Dutch diplomat seated next to him and said, “I’ve just developed a new theory of eternity.”
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