PART I Discovering America 1 "What's This, an Inquisition?" A s they left their country home in Caputh, Germany, in the autumn of 1932 to return to their Berlin apartment and prepare for their coming visit to the United States, Einstein turned to his wife, Elsa, and said, "Before you leave this time, take a good look at the villa." "Why?" Elsa asked. "You will never see it again."1 As the year drew to a close, so did Germany's thirteen-year attempt at a liberal democracy, the Weimar Republic. With one out of three workers unemployed and inflation out of control, millions of angry, hungry Germans turned to Hitler's new nationalism for simple, soothing answers, and a convenient scapegoat for all their problems: "the international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy."2 Winning 230 of the 608 seats, the Nazis had become the largest group in the German Reichstag (although they never won a majority and their vote actually declined by two million before Hitler came to power and did away with elections). The pro-Nazi press grew increasingly shrill in its attacks against Jews, with Einstein prominent among the targets. These press accounts, as we shall see, came to play a significant role in Einstein's FBI file.

In 1931, a Leipzig publishing house produced a book of essays entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein; the following year, a top German Army general reportedly sent a warning to Einstein that his life "is not safe here anymore."3 Violent, often armed street battles between uniformed Nazi gangs and leftists erupted daily, and the exodus of German intellectuals began. Among those moving to Russia were author Arthur Koestler and the architect Hannes Meyer. The artist George Grosz and his wife, after receiving numerous death threats, sold their large house and moved to the United States. Marlene Dietrich, who had become famous while visiting Hollywood, came home to Berlin in 1932, surveyed the political scene, and returned to America-this time for good. What's remarkable is not that so many German artists and writers fled the country in 1932, but that so many held out hope and stayed until after the Nazis seized power in 1933. The latter included Kurt Weill, his wife Lotte Lenya, Bertolt Brecht … and Einstein.4 Without question, the world's most celebrated scientist was becoming increasingly apprehensive about the rise of Nazism and assaults against the Jews in Germany.

"Einstein … for all his serenity, was anxious," reported Norman Bentwich, an attorney friend, after visiting the scientist in Berlin and observing "grim signs of a rising anti-Semitic flood … many Jewish shops had been sacked … ." But despite Einstein's anxiety and his premonition about their house in Caputh,f he and Elsa planned to stay in the United States for only a few months, fully expecting to be back in Berlin by the spring.5 For the third year in a row, Einstein planned to spend the winter as a guest faculty member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. On their way home, he and Elsa had scheduled a brief visit to Princeton, where he had accepted an appointment at the soon-to-open Institute for Advanced Study. Under his arrangement with the Institute, Einstein would continue living in Berlin but spend half of each year in Princeton. As they packed for their trip to America that first week in December 1932, they undoubtedly looked forward to a vacation from the tension that was daily life in Germany. On previous trips, Einstein had visited the United States and other countries as an unofficial representative of the Weimar Republic, which handled his travel and visa arrangements. But by December 1932, the government was in a shambles, teetering on the brink of collapse.

For the first time, the Einsteins had to make their own visa arrangements. The details were simple enough; they had no trouble with the forms. Or so it seemed. On the morning of December 5, Einstein received an unexpected call from the U.S. Consulate General in Berlin, requesting that he and Elsa come by to answer a few questions related to their visa application. He was busy, Einstein said, and asked if they couldn't simply send him the visa, but the consular authorities insisted. Assuming it was just the routine mechanism of bureaucracy, he and Elsa agreed to stop in during the afternoon.

6 It would be anything but routine. Even as a half-time resident, Einstein's presence in America was a prospect that set off a Red-alert in the Woman Patriot Corporation. When it was launched fourteen years earlier (April 1918) in Washington, during the heady last months of World War I, the organization's weekly newspaper, The Woman Patriot , proclaimed across the top of its front page: FOR THE HOME AND NATIONAL DEFENSE, AGAINST WOMAN SUFFRAGE, FEMINISM AND SOCIALISM. Almost all its officers and board members used their husbands' names-such as Mrs. James Wolcott Wadsworth, Jr. ( See endnote 11.) While this was in keeping with their antifeminism, it also left no doubt that these were ladies of substance-the wives and widows, daughters and dowagers of some of the most prominent families in Eastern politics and business. Several Woman Patriot leaders also held office in the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, but the new group linked antifeminism to a more comprehensive agenda.

Headlines in their paper's first issue included: MAKE THIS YOUR WAR … VICTORY OR ENSLAVEMENT FOR AMERICA ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS TO WAGE UNCEASING WAR AGAINST FEMINISM AND SOCIALISM WOMEN SUFFRAGE VS. PROHIBITION The editorial statement proudly declared the group "stands for a strong and safe suffrage, … [and] the exemption of women from unnatural responsibilities, voting duty, jury duty and political turmoil." After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified (despite the Woman Patriot's best efforts), the group turned to other targets, crusading against the proposed Constitutional amendment outlawing child labor-an amendment they denounced as "a communist plot." But by 1932, the Woman Patriot Corporation had fallen on lean times. They had moved twice to smaller offices in Washington and their weekly newspaper was now a monthly, reduced from tabloid to newsletter size. In fact, the group had never recovered from the devastation of seeing women enter voting booths. With that battle lost, most of the better-known names and much of the organization's funding gradually dropped off. Nonetheless, the remaining Patriots valiantly upheld the flag, focusing their fire on protecting America from dangerous ideas.

In 1928, their president, Mrs. Randolph Frothingham, made headlines when she helped the Daughters of the American Revolution compile a "blacklist of speakers" they sought to bar from public appearances. Mrs. Frothingham's public-enemy nominees to the DAR's blacklist included William Allen White, Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter (both at Harvard Law School), college presidents Neilson of Smith and Woolley of Mt. Holyoke, Clarence Darrow, Norman Hapgood, David Starr Jordan, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise.7 By 1932, she and her fellow Patriots had decided to concentrate their remaining forces on guarding America's gates against "undesirable aliens"-communists, pacifists, feminists, and other un-American types seeking to enter the United States. Along with playwright George Bernard Shaw and the grandson of Karl Marx, Einstein had earned a top spot on the Woman Patriot keep-out list.

In August, when the Institute-in-formation at Princeton announced that Einstein's half-time residency would begin the following year, Mrs. Frothingham set to work. Within three months, she submitted a memo to the State Department arguing that Einstein should be barred from the U.S. under the Alien Exclusion and Deportation Law. As revised in June 1920, that law forbid "aliens" from entering the United States (or if they had managed to enter, from staying) if they were anarchists or wrote, spoke, or even thought like anarchists. It was designed specifically to "correct" the "gaps" found in the law after the "Palmer raids" of January 1920. (The vast majority of immigrants arrested in those raids had to be released when someone discovered that they had committed no criminal acts.

Six months later, the rewritten law decreed that aliens could be denied entry, deported, or even jailed, simply for possession of literature or expression of anarchist opinions, even if they had committed no overt actions.8) But the Woman Patriot group did not limit its anti-Einstein allegations to anarchism. Mrs. Frothingham accused the scientist of virtually every politically subversive sin, including treason and inciting troops to shoot their officers. Asserting that Einstein should be barred from the United States because he was the "leader of the new 'militant pacifism,'" the document states: Who is the acknowledged world leader, who, by direct affiliation with Communist and anarcho-communist organizations and groups, and by his own utmost personal efforts, is doing most to "shatter" the "military machinery" [as] the "preliminary condition of any people's revolution"?