some type of adult girl

The world’s most brilliant scientist is also a kindly, lovably bumbling, grandfather figure: Professor Genius combined with Dr. Feelgood! Opinion-molders, looking down from their ivory towers, may have concluded that such an appealing icon will help the great unwashed public feel good about science, about history, about America. Why spoil such a beautiful image with stories about racism, or for that matter with any of Einstein’s political activism? Politics, they argue, is ugly, making teeth grind and fists clench, so why splash politics over Einstein’s icon? Why drag a somber rain-cloud across a bright blue sky? Einstein might reply, with a wink, that without rain-clouds life would be very, very short. Or he might simply say that a bright blue sky is a fairy tale in today’s war-weary world.

Yet, despite Einstein’s clear intention to make his politics public – especially his anti-lynching and other antiracist activities – the history-molders have seemed embarrassed to do so. Or nervous. “I had to think about my Board,” a museum curator (who doesn’t want his name used even today) said, explaining why he had omitted some of the scientist’s political statements from the major exhibition celebrating Einstein’s one hundredth birthday in 1979.

When it came to how to handle Einstein’s ashes or his house on Mercer Street, everyone involved meticulously adhered to his wishes. But when it involved his ideas, and especially his concerns about what he called America’s “worst disease,” the fact that Einstein wanted his views made as public as possible seems to have slipped past his historians.