Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  Parades quickly became Whalen’s forte. When the Prince of Wales visited in November, Grover, having witnessed a handful of clerks throw ticker tape from a couple of office windows in previous celebrations, took the idea an ingenious step or two further.

  “I organized11 a word of mouth campaign along lower Broadway,” Whalen boasted. “Some office workers even carried the idea beyond ticker tape. They tore up phone books, waste paper and almost any kind of paper and tinsel they could get their hands on and threw it in great volume from tens of thousands of windows.”

  He may not have invented the ticker tape parade,12 but he certainly upped the ante of frenzy, and the blizzard of confetti that has rained down ever since became one of Grover’s most famous trademarks. Moreover, since all European visitors arrived by boat, Whalen ordered the municipal fireboats to shoot massive jets of water aloft from their hoses as they docked.

  “The Whalen welcomes13 are always perfectly managed and thumpingly successful,” reported The New Yorker. Their success, in fact, was partly manufactured. Whalen had wisely decided to stage his parades between noon and one o’clock, when he knew the streets would be full no matter who was being feted: “The visitor is always brought to shore at twelve sharp. Many an honest foreigner’s eyes fill with drops of tenderness and gratitude on the ride up Broadway, as he observes the vast throngs which have turned out in honor of lunch.”

  Added to Grover’s genius was the fact that his ceremonial parades just happened to pass right by Wanamaker’s store.

  By his second year in office, Mayor Hylan had had enough. Although he had pushed Whalen into the spotlight (a position in which Hylan was never comfortable), Grover was perhaps hogging a little too much of the public’s attention. While the papers took to calling the mayor “Red Mike”14 (referring not just to his flaming hair, but to his notoriously hot temper), Whalen was being referred to as “the brains of the administration.” In May 1919, Hylan kicked him upstairs as commissioner of plant and structures, which put Whalen in charge of bridges, ferries, and bus lines. It wasn’t far enough. After another year, he approached Rodman Wanamaker and hinted that maybe Grover would like his old job back.

  “But I wouldn’t want15 to take him away from you.” Rodman grinned, enjoying the mayor’s discomfort.

  “Never mind me,” Hylan replied.

  Finally, in 1924, citing the need to make more money for his family, Whalen resigned from politics and returned to Wanamaker’s as director of executive administration. His real job was to make sure the parades kept marching past the store, and as usual it didn’t last long.

  Elsa and Albert Einstein arrive in New York aboard the S.S. Belgenland, 1930. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  3

  A VOLUNTARY EXILE

  In December 1932, Albert Einstein and his wife, Elsa, boarded a steamer ship named Oakland and set sail for America. They had made the trip on two previous winters, as Einstein preferred the warmer climate of Pasadena, California, where he was a guest lecturer at the California Institute of Technology, to the harsh winters of Berlin. But this time, the trip had greater significance. Einstein’s native Germany had become a dangerous place for Jews, and for several years Einstein, perhaps the world’s most famous Jew, had been singled out as a particularly nasty target.

  In fact, he was in the second decade of anti-Semitic attacks. As early as 1921, a German crackpot named Rudolph Leibus was arrested for offering a reward to anyone who would assassinate Einstein.1 More than a decade before the Nazis took over, Leibus was fined only $16 for the offense. And now, with what seemed like the inevitable rise to power of Adolf Hitler, the situation turned truly dangerous for Einstein. His life was threatened again, and this time by a more serious faction than Leibus.

  Despite his current commitment to Caltech, Einstein had already begun private negotiations with a man named Abraham Flexner, director of the newly created Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in New Jersey. Flexner, wanting desperately to have Einstein join his faculty, wooed the scientist with the promise of a “haven where scholars and scientists2 may regard the world and its phenomena as their laboratory without being carried off in the maelstrom of the immediate.”

  To Einstein, Flexner’s offer seemed irresistible: He was to become the most famous member of a very small but prestigious staff and to have absolutely no duties of any kind whatsoever, except for the occasional lecture. In short, Einstein would be hired merely to do as he pleased, and to think.

  When asked how much he would want for such a coveted position, Einstein answered firmly that he required a salary of $3,000 a year.

  “Could I live on less?”3 he asked.

  “You couldn’t live on that,” Flexner replied, counteroffering the impressive sum of $16,000 a year.

  Despite the money, Einstein at first demurred. As yet unwilling to leave his homeland for good, he wondered if he could divide his time between Berlin and New Jersey. Finally he settled on a schedule that would require him to be in residence at Princeton from October 1 to April 15 each year. He may still have been unsure of his future as he and Elsa boarded the Oakland in Bremerhaven on December 10.

  “I am not abandoning Germany,”4 he said as they prepared for their voyage. “My permanent home will still be in Berlin.”

  Nevertheless, his scientist mind prepared him for any permutation; he and Elsa set sail with thirty trunks stowed in the ship’s storage. Einstein was looking forward to their trip. He enjoyed his visits to the United States and was perpetually fascinated by the customs and nature of its people. He also found it particularly amusing that they treated him like a movie star.

  “Sometimes the Americans5 are just children,” he said. “You should see them flocking to see me, as if I were a miraculous animal. All this interest is very pleasant, but still sometimes it can be inconvenient.”

  There were inklings that this voyage from Germany would be their last. A few days earlier, as they were closing up their home, Einstein turned to his wife and said, “Before you leave our villa6 this time, take a good look at it. You will never see it again.” Elsa thought he was just being silly.

  Their repeated visits to California, the land of celebrity, had solidified Einstein’s reputation as a bona fide star in America. He regretted it, but all the attention seems to have had a positive effect. “Gone was the flustered7 and bewildered German scientist,” one reporter noted after his first three-month stay at Caltech, “who early in December first met a crowd of news gatherers and cameramen … and then fled from them in dread. In his place today was a gentleman who was smilingly at ease.”

  He also found a way to deal with what he considered to be the inane practice of autograph seekers: He began charging them a dollar a pop.

  Although Einstein gradually accepted his fame, for the rest of his life he never understood the public’s fascination with him. When a popular magazine offered to pay him a large sum of money for an article, he was dumbfounded. “What?” he deadpanned. “Do they think I am a prizefighter?”8

  Slowly, Einstein began to accept the idea that all the interest and ballyhoo had less to do with his work than with his own eccentricities. Moreover, he began to suspect that the incomprehensibility of his theories was part of what had made him so popular to begin with. And once that was understood, he began to enjoy it a little more.

  “The Einstein of 19339 has become fairly reconciled to the occupation of popular idol,” stated The New Yorker. “He has developed into a mixer, a wit, an authority on things in general.”

  Not that America was making it any easier. Before his final departure in 1932, the American Women’s Patriotic Organization lodged a complaint against him with the State Department, demanding that the United States deny him an entry visa and calling him a Communist. In response, Einstein joked, “Never before have I experienced10 from the fair sex such energetic rejection of all advances. Or if I have, never from so many at once!”*

  Unfortunately, the situation grew more serious tha
n at first he was willing to believe. Two days after his off-the-cuff rebuke, the United States Consulate General demanded his presence in order to determine his fitness to visit America. Einstein was incensed; on every other voyage to California, officials of whatever shipping line he traveled on had handled the issuance of visas and other formalities. At first he refused the order; then, accompanied by his wife, he reluctantly appeared at the consulate. They questioned him for forty-five minutes.

  “What is your political creed?”11

  Unable to stop himself, Einstein suddenly burst out laughing. “I don’t know,” he said when he had finally regained himself. “I can’t answer that question.”

  “Are you a member of any organization?”

  Einstein ruffled his hair and turned to Elsa in astonishment. “Oh, yes! I am a War Resister!”

  He grew more and more impatient as the minutes, and the interrogation, ticked on. The questions were so inane that Einstein began to believe it was all an elaborate practical joke.

  “Gentlemen, are you trying to kid me?” he asked. “Are you doing this to please yourselves or are you acting upon orders from above?”

  Finally, when he was asked, “What party do you belong to or sympathize with?” his normally genial expression turned cold and stern. His voice broke.

  “What’s this?” he cried. “An inquisition? Is this an attempt at chicanery? I don’t propose to answer such silly questions. I didn’t ask to go to America. Your countrymen invited me; yes, begged me! If I am to enter your country as a suspect I don’t want to go at all!”

  With that he grabbed his hat and coat, pulled Elsa to her feet, and left the office. That night, they abandoned the thorough packing of their belongings and left Berlin, heading for their country home in Caputh, where despite inquiries Einstein refused to comment on the matter. Elsa spoke for him to a crowd of reporters who had invaded their property.

  “If we don’t get that visa12 by noon tomorrow,” she said, delivering the ultimatum her husband had dictated for her, “that’s the end of our ever going to America again.”

  Einstein, who had been listening to the commotion from another room, gleefully joined the party now that the fireworks had started. The shocked faces he saw put him back in his old mischievous mood.

  “Wouldn’t it be funny13 if they didn’t let me in?” He grinned, rubbing his hands together and delighting in the brouhaha he was stirring up. “Why, the whole world would laugh at America!”

  The ultimatum did the trick. At eleven a.m. the following morning, Einstein got a call from George Messersmith at the United States Consulate General. He would personally issue a visa that afternoon; there would be no more questioning. Einstein thanked him, hung up the phone, lit his pipe, and smiled broadly. He would submit to all the stupid questions of the world for a victory as sweet as this one.

  That afternoon, he and Elsa returned to Berlin and resumed packing. His mood could not have been brighter.

  In the 1930s, Einstein himself could be called “the paradox of paradoxes.” Perhaps most puzzling of all was the turbulent conflict of his fervent pacifism, which he had confirmed over and over again in public, with his recent militarism regarding Adolf Hitler.

  This inner struggle plagued Einstein. He had once described himself as an “absolute pacifist.”14 Now he was becoming a “convinced pacifist,” he stated, struggling to define the difference in his own mind as well as for his confused admirers and followers. “That means there are circumstances in which in my opinion it is necessary to use force. Such a case would be when I face an opponent whose unconditional aim is to destroy me and my people.”

  Despite his dual feelings of nationalism vs. Nazism, the timing of Einstein’s departure in December 1932 could not have been better. The following month, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of the German government. Had Einstein not left the country seven weeks earlier, he might have spent the remainder of his life in a concentration camp. That is, if they’d allowed him to live at all.

  On January 9, they arrived in the Port of Los Angeles. Two weeks later, Einstein attended a public symposium at Caltech that was in part intended to improve relations between Germany and the United States. Einstein’s speech, entitled “America and the World Situation,” was broadcast worldwide. Oddly, although the occasion certainly called for it, he elected to basically ignore the issue of rising anti-Semitism in his native country.

  Instead, he blamed the current tension on economic resentment stemming from World War I: “It has been assumed,15 namely, that the world Depression for the most part had its origin through war debts,” he said. To avoid war, there must be a “moral disarmament … through international agreement.” America could help make this happen, “if she had not become accustomed to such great aloofness in the field of international politics.”

  As for America’s Depression, which was now entering its fourth and most severe year, Einstein asserted that its roots could be traced back to “the improvement in the apparatus of production through technical invention [that has] decreased the need for human labor … and thereby caused a progressive decrease in the purchasing power of the consumer.”

  And that pretty much summed it up. The rise of Nazism had its roots in economic depression and might lead to war if the newly elected president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, continued along his isolationist path. Clearly the great scientist was acting as peacemaker, holding in check, for the time being, his violent hatred for the party that now ruled his homeland.

  After their brief sojourn in California, on March 15, 1933, Einstein and Elsa were scheduled to sail from New York back to their home on board an ocean liner ominously named Deutschland. But now the voyage, and the question of his ever returning to Germany while Hitler was in power, was doubtful. On March 10, his last day in California, he gave a public statement of his intentions to reporter Evelyn Seeley of the New York World Telegram.

  “As long as I have any choice in the matter,” he said, “I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail…. These conditions do not exist in Germany at the present time.”

  When Seeley asked where the scientist would go if not to his native homeland, Einstein said he would probably choose to live in Switzerland, where he also held citizenship. He ended the interview, politely explaining that he had one final lecture to present in his commitment to Caltech. Seeley noticed something strange was happening. At that very moment, a massive earthquake was rumbling beneath Los Angeles, a mere twenty miles or so from where they stood.

  “As he left for the seminar,” Seeley reported, “walking across the campus, Dr. Einstein felt the ground shaking under his feet.”

  By the time they arrived in New York, Einstein had apparently made up his mind—he reluctantly canceled the homecoming trip aboard the Deutschland. In their suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, in case there was any doubt in the matter, he made his position clear: “[I do] not intend16 to put foot on German soil as long as conditions in Germany are as at present.”

  In response, the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger (Berlin Local Advertiser) commented on the news with the statement “Good news from Einstein—he’s not coming back.”

  Nevertheless, Einstein took no joy in renouncing his country. “Germany’s contribution17 to the culture of mankind is so vital and significant that you cannot imagine the world without it,” he said solemnly. Moreover, he hoped the situation was only temporary.

  During one of his ocean voyages, Einstein had made an entry in his private diary in which he mused poetically, “I decided today18 that I shall essentially give up my Berlin position and shall be a bird of passage for the rest of my life. Gulls are still escorting the ship, forever on the wing. They are my new colleagues…. How dependent man is on external things, compared to such creatures!”

  But Einstein knew he was dependent on such important matters as home, and that even the seagulls he admired eventually gave up the pursuit of flight
and turned back toward land. Now Einstein also understood that he was in permanent flight, perhaps with no hope of ever returning to the shore.

  As the Deutschland sailed for home without them, Einstein and Elsa sat alone in their hotel, the sum total of their belongings packed in crates in the Waldorf’s basement. What would become of their town house in Berlin and their idyllic cottage in Caputh? What would be the fate of their adult children: Albert’s two sons, Hans and Eduard; and Elsa’s two daughters, Margot and Ilse? And what of the Jews throughout Germany and neighboring Poland and Czechoslovakia and all the countries of Eastern Europe—what was to become of them as well?

  It was all a great mystery, a puzzle more unsolvable to the scientist than the mathematics of the universe he had worked his entire life to decipher. The threat, Einstein felt, was “not imminent. But where the danger19 comes in is that Hitlerism is contagious. This form of political thought and action has unfortunately become fashionable, for there are too many ignorant human beings in the world.”

  The Deutschland had left. Einstein and Elsa remained.

  From that moment on, he was a voluntary exile.

  With three extra days added to their sojourn in America—Einstein elected to sail for Antwerp on March 18 on the liner Belgenland as opposed to the Deutschland, to Belgium instead of Germany, aboard ships bearing their destination as titles—he and Elsa attended a reception thrown for them in support of a group of international pacifists. He gave a short speech reaffirming his belief in war resistance, after which an audience member asked him, “What do you think of pacifists20 who are pacifists in times of peace but not in times of war?”

  The scientist, for a moment, had no answer. Finally he smiled—a reluctant acceptance of the circumstances—and ever the mathematician added a ratio to the equation: “I am sorry to say that ninety percent of pacifists belong to this category.”