Richard Crockatt - Einstein and Twentieth-Century Politics: A Salutary Moral Influence

This project began when, during an extended stay in Jerusalem, I found I was living within walking distance of the Albert Einstein Archive at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As a historian of the cold war I had long been interested in the politics of the A-bomb and knew of Einsteins part in alerting Franklin Roosevelt to the possibility of nuclear fission, which led to the Manhattan Project and ultimately to the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My initial idea was simply to look at the original of Einsteins letter to Roosevelt and some of the surrounding documentation. Soon I found myself straying into neighbouring topics and in the end to the full range of Einsteins political and social interests. There was far more to discover than I had imagined. Without the help of Barbara Wolff, the Archives Information Officer, this process would have been immeasurably more difficult and time-consuming. Beyond helping me to find my way around the Archive, she repeatedly encouraged, challenged, and corrected me on matters large and small when I floated ideas to her or showed her draft chapters. Whether she will be satisfied with everything I have done is another matter. Whatever the case, my debt remains large. As always in such situations, however, I take full responsibility for the end result. Thanks are due also to Dr Roni Grosz, the Curator of the Archive, and to Chaya Becker, his assistant, who helped to make my visits to the Archive a pleasure rather than a chore. I am grateful for permission to quote from the Archive.

I owe a special debt to Richard King, who read an early draft of and to Lydia Goehr for putting me in touch with him. Needless to say, none of the above can be held responsible for the uses I have made of their invaluable help.

I owe a different kind of debt to Bootham School, where in the early 1960s I was exposed to the Quaker ethos of liberal internationalism. For me that ethos was most fully embodied in one particular teacher, John Kay, whose enthusiasm for the French Enlightenment and the tradition that flowed from it has stayed with me. That he had served in the Friends Ambulance Unit in the First World War offered at least a distant link with the war that Einstein opposed with such fervour and was the primary cause of his politicization. In reconstructing what in this book I call the liberal international of the first half of the twentieth century, of which Einstein was such a prominent member, I am drawing heavily on my own liberal education received over fifty years ago.

I am grateful to anonymous readers at Oxford University Press for their thoughtful comments. Robert Faber at OUP has proved an unfailingly supportive editor, as has Cathryn Steele. Warm thanks are also due to the rest of the editorial staff at OUP who worked on the book, especially Hilary Walford, who copy-edited the text with skill and patience, and Vaishnavi Ananthasubramanyam who expertly oversaw the final stages of the production process. I have been struck in writing this book by the generosity of friends and family, who regularly sent me material on Einstein whether of a scholarly type or from the press and other media during the centenary year of the General Theory of Relativity (2015). It seems everyone likes Einstein, illustrating one of the themes of this book, which is the magnetic power of the man, his ideas, and his image. Philip Feldman drew my attention to the essay on Einstein by C. P. Snow, and my brother Philip alerted me to an important item on Einstein and Freud. My father, John Crockatt, sent whatever came his way on Einstein and shared with me his experience of tackling Einsteins own book on the theory of relativity. Barry Sheridan and Amira Katz-Goehr also supplied me with references to current material on Einstein. I have benefited greatly from conversation with Del Hawley, whose understanding of mathematics and physics has conveyed to me the excitement of Einsteins world. My book is about Einsteins politics, but no one can spend this amount of time studying Einstein without engaging at some level with the science. Clive Scott helped out with translation of a passage in French. All family members not mentioned above, both Crockatts and Goehrs, deserve thanks for their continual support and interest in the project. My largest debt is to Julia, who pushed me at critical junctures to continue with the book when I could not see a way forward and provided a sounding board for my ideas as well as moral and other support every step of the way. For this, as always, I am eternally grateful.