People are just discovering the FBI's massive secret file on Albert Einstein.
Most people know Albert Einstein as the brilliant, Nobel Prize winning-physicist who gave us the theory of relativity. But what many might not know is that the FBI was secretly watching his every move for over two decades.
In December 1932, Einstein and his wife, Elsa, moved to the United States from Germany. Alongside his dedication to science, Einstein was an outspoken advocate for social issues of his day, regularly speaking out against war, racism, and nationalism.
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As a result, his activism made him a target for FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who was convinced that Einstein might be a communist and was what he called 'an extreme radical.'
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By the time of the scientist's death on 18 April 1955, the FBI file would be 1,427 pages long.
So, what exactly did Einstein do that warranted such surveillance?
Well, for one, he questioned capitalism.
“I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force,” he wrote in 1931. “Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.”
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Of course, during the Great Depression and the rise of communism abroad, anyone criticising the capitalist system was automatically suspect.
Alongside this, he protested racism. In 1946, in an address to the historically black Liberty University in Pennsylvania, he called segregation a 'disease of white people.'
When African-American singer Marian Anderson was denied a hotel room in New Jersey in 1937, Einstein and his wife immediately invited her to stay in their home. This moment marked the start of a lifelong friendship and demonstrated Einstein’s dedication to civil rights.
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Additionally, Einstein's relationship with nuclear weapons was complicated.
Initially a pacifist, he was forced to reconsider his stance when Hitler rose to power. In 1939, fearing that German scientists were working on atomic weapons, Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning him about uranium's potential as a weapon, writing that it 'may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future.'
Throughout the rest of his life, Einstein was a strong supporter of the idea that nuclear weapons should be globally controlled and war had become 'a form of insanity.'
Having witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe firsthand, Einstein was determined not to let America go down the same path.
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As his biographer Walter Isaacson notes, what Einstein valued most about America was 'the country's tolerance of free thought, free speech, and nonconformist beliefs' - the very qualities that made his scientific breakthroughs possible.
Einstein was not about to stand by and watch while, in the great physicist’s words, “the German calamity of years ago repeats itself.”
Meanwhile, as news about Einstein's FBI file circulates on Reddit, people are shocked to have only just discovered this.
"Damn. Yet more things I was never taught growing up," one Reddit user wrote.
"I didn’t know this was a thing," another added.
"Anyone that can “change the world with ideas” is a threat to those in power," someone else summed up the reasoning behind Einstein's FBI file.