einstein

Christ Church, his college at Oxford, he sat in the senior common room holding a notepad under the tablecloth so that he could scribble equations.
He came to realize, once again, that America, for all of its lapses of taste and excesses of enthusiasm, offered freedoms he might never find again
in Europe. 7
Thus he was pleased when Flexner came, as promised, to continue the conversation they had started at the Athenaeum. Both men knew, from
the outset, that it was not merely an abstract discussion but part of an effort to recruit Einstein. So Flexner was a bit disingenuous when he later
wrote that it was only while they were pacing around the manicured lawns of Christ Church’s Tom Quad that it “dawned on me” that Einstein might
be interested in coming to the new institute. “If on reflection you conclude that it would give you the opportunities that you value,” Flexner said, “you
would be welcome on your own terms.” 8
The arrangement that would bring Einstein to Princeton was concluded the following month, June 1932, when Flexner visited Caputh. It was cool
that day, and Flexner wore an overcoat, but Einstein was in summer clothes. He preferred, he joked, to dress “according to the season not
according to the weather.” They sat on the veranda of Einstein’s beloved new cottage and spoke all afternoon and then through dinner, up until
Einstein walked Flexner to the Berlin bus at 11 p.m.
Flexner asked Einstein how much he would expect to make. About $3,000, Einstein tentatively suggested. Flexner looked surprised. “Oh,”
Einstein hastened to add, “could I live on less?”
Flexner was amused. He had more, not less, in mind. “Let Mrs. Einstein and me arrange it,” he said. They ended up settling on $10,000 per year.
That was soon increased when Louis Bamberger, the primary backer, discovered that mathematician Oswald Veblen, the Institute’s other jewel,
was making $15,000 a year. Bamberger insisted that Einstein’s salary be equal.
There was one additional deal point. Einstein insisted that his assistant, Walther Mayer, be given a job of his own as well. The previous year he
had let authorities in Berlin know that he was entertaining offers in America that would provide for Mayer, something Berlin had been unwilling to do.
Caltech had balked at this request, as did Flexner initially. But then Flexner relented. 9
Einstein did not consider his post at the Institute a full-time job, but it was likely to be his primary one. Elsa delicately broached this in her letter to
Millikan. “Will you, under the circumstances, still want my husband in Pasadena next winter?” she asked. “I doubt it.” 10
Actually, Millikan did want him, and they agreed that Einstein would come back again in January, before the Institute would be open in Princeton.
Millikan was upset, however, that he had not finalized a long-term deal, and he realized that Einstein would end up being, at best, an occasional
visitor to Caltech. As it turned out, the upcoming January 1933 trip that Elsa helped arrange would end up being his last trip to California.
Millikan vented his anger at Flexner. Einstein’s connection with Caltech “has been laboriously built up during the past ten years,” he wrote. As a
result of Flexner’s pernicious raid, Einstein would be spending his time at some new haven rather than a great center of experimental as well as
theoretical physics. “Whether the progress of science in the U.S. will be advanced by such a move, or whether Professor Einstein’s productivity will
be increased by such a transfer, is at least debatable.” He proposed, as a compromise, that Einstein split his time in America between the Institute
and Caltech.
Flexner was not magnanimous in victory. He protested, falsely, that it was “altogether by accident” that he ended up in Oxford and speaking to
Einstein, a tale that even his own memoirs later contradicted. As for sharing Einstein, Flexner declined. He claimed that he was looking after
Einstein’s interests. “I cannot believe that annual residence for brief periods at several places is sound or wholesome,” he wrote. “Looking at the
entire matter from Professor Einstein’s point of view, I believe that you and all of his friends will rejoice that it has been possible to create for him a
permanent post.” 11
For his part, Einstein was unsure how he would divide his time. He thought that he might be able to juggle visiting professorships in Princeton,
Pasadena, and Oxford. In fact, he even hoped that he could keep his position in the Prussian Academy and his beloved cottage in Caputh, if things
did not worsen in Germany. “I am not abandoning Germany,” he announced when the Princeton post became public in August. “My permanent
home will still be in Berlin.”
Flexner spun the relationship the other way, telling the New York Times that Princeton would be Einstein’s primary home. “Einstein will devote his
time to the Institute,” Flexner said, “and his trips abroad will be vacation periods for rest and meditation at his summer home outside of Berlin.” 12
As it turned out, the issue would be settled by events out of either man’s control. Throughout the summer of 1932, the political situation in
Germany darkened. As the Nazis continued to lose national elections but increase their share of the vote, the octogenarian president, Paul von
Hindenburg, selected as chancellor the bumbling Franz von Papen, who tried to rule through martial authority. When Philipp Frank came to visit him
in Caputh that summer, Einstein lamented, “I am convinced that a military regime will not prevent the imminent National Socialist [Nazi]
revolution.” 13
As Einstein was preparing to leave for his third visit to Caltech in December 1932, he had to suffer one more indignity. The headlines about his
future post in Princeton had aroused the indignation of the Woman Patriot Corporation, a once powerful but fading group of American self-styled
guardians against socialists, pacifists, communists, feminists, and undesirable aliens. Although Einstein fit into only the first two of these
categories, the women patriots felt sure that he fit into them all, with the possible exception of feminists.
The leader of the group, Mrs. Randolph Frothingham (who, given this context, seemed as if her distinguished family name had been conjured up
by Dickens), submitted a sixteen-page typed memo to the U.S. State Department detailing reasons to “refuse and withhold such passport visa to
Professor Einstein.” He was a militant pacifist and communist who advocated doctrines that “would allow anarchy to stalk in unmolested,” the
memo charged. “Not even Stalin himself is affiliated with so many anarcho-communist international groups to promote this ‘preliminary condition’
of world revolution and ultimate anarchy as albert einstein.” (Emphasis and capitalization are in the original.) 14
State Department officials could have ignored the memo. Instead, they put it into a file that would grow over the next twenty-three years into an
FBI dossier of 1,427 pages of documents. In addition, they sent the memo to the U.S. consulate in Berlin so that officers there could interview
Einstein and see if the charges were true before granting him another visa.
Initially, Einstein was quite amused when he read newspaper accounts of the women’s allegations. He called up the Berlin bureau chief of United
Press, Louis Lochner, who had become a friend, and gave him a statement that not only ridiculed the charges but also proved conclusively that he
could not be accused of feminism:
Never yet have I experienced from the fair sex such energetic rejection of all advances, or if I have, never from so many at once. But are they
not right, these watchful citizenesses? Why should one open one’s doors to a person who devours hard-boiled capitalists with as much
appetite and gusto as the ogre Minotaur in Crete once devoured luscious Greek maidens—a person who is also so vulgar as to oppose every
sort of war, except the inevitable one with his own wife? Therefore, give heed to your clever and patriotic women folk and remember that the
capital of mighty Rome was once saved by the cackling of its faithful geese. 15