Albert Einstein (1959), charcoal and
watercolor drawing by Alexander Dobkin. Dobkin (1908–1975) was an
important painter of the mid-twentieth century American realist
tradition along with other left-wing artists such as Jack Levine, Robert
Gwathmey, Philip Evergood, and Raphael and Moses Soyer. A student and
collaborator of the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, his work is
in the permanent collections of the Butler Art Institute, the Museum of
Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the
Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and the
Smithsonian Institution.
A Spring 1949 memorandum in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Albert Einstein File,” part of the FBI’s Vault of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, states:
Advised [by an agent in the field that] in
April 1949, a circular was distributed in the Nashua, New Hampshire
area, announcing a new magazine entitled “Monthly Review,” “an
independent Socialist magazine.” The first issue was dated to come out
as the May 1949 edition. The first issue would contain articles by
Albert Einstein—“Why Socialism[?]”; Paul M. Sweezy—“Recent
Development[s] in American capitalism”; Otto Nathan—“Transition to
Socialism in Poland”; Leo Huberman—“Socialism and American Labor”…. Re:
New York report, dated 3-15-51 Espionage-CH.1
The rest of the message is blacked out. Another memorandum that
immediately follows in the FBI’s Einstein file, and which is similarly
redacted, reads:
Advised the New York Office that the
“Monthly Review” 66 Barrow Street, New York City, self-proclaimed “an
independent Socialist magazine” made its initial appearance in May of
1949. The first issue contained articles by Albert Einstein and others.
This [investigative] report stated further that a study of the articles
contained in a background check of the editors and contributors revealed
that this magazine was Communist inspired and followed the approved
Communist Party line…. New York report, dated 1-30-50; Re: Internal
Security.2
Albert Einstein, the world’s most famous theoretical physicist and
its most celebrated scientist, had fled Germany upon Adolf Hitler’s
rise, immigrating to the United States in 1933, where he became a
citizen in 1940. Yet, for J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Einstein remained a
dangerous and Un-American figure, threatening the internal security of
the United States by his very presence in the country. His publication
in 1949 of an article titled “Why Socialism?” for the new periodical Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine was thus viewed by the FBI as a direct confirmation of his strong “Communist sympathies.”
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Alejandro Valle Baeza 