Albert Einstein in the Reign of Witches

When Albert Einstein took a stand against Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunt in 1953, he advised that American intellectuals should refuse to testify before McCarthy’s committee on the grounds that they were defending the free expression principles of the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights.

Russell and Einstein

America’s newspapers, the beneficiaries of the First Amendment, promptly and stridently denounced him. Anti-Einstein screeds appeared on the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer and others.

Einstein had sparked the firestorm by making public a reply he had given to a Brooklyn schoolteacher who had refused to cooperate with McCarthy’s hysterical inquisition into supposed “communist influence in high schools.”

“The problem with which the intellectuals of this country are confronted is very serious,” Einstein told him. “The reactionary politicians have managed to instill suspicion of all intellectual efforts into the public by dangling before their eyes a danger from without . . . They are now proceeding to suppress the freedom of teaching and to deprive of their positions all those who do not prove submissive…

“What ought the minority of intellectuals to do against this evil? I can only see the revolutionary way of non-co-operation, in Gandhi’s sense... based on the assertion that it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition…

“If enough people are ready to take this grave step they will be successful. If not, then the intellectuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.”

Seeing all the vitriol hurled against the venerable, kindly Einstein, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell penned a wry reply to the New York Times.
“You seem to think one should always obey the law, however bad,” the philosopher wrote. “I am compelled to suppose that you condemn George Washington and hold that your country ought to return to allegiance to Her Gracious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. As a loyal Briton, I of course applaud this view, but I fear it may not win much support in your country.”

Source: “Einstein: His Life and Universe” by Walter Isaacson