"It's widely believed that Einstein was the 'father of the atom bomb.' In fact, readers of Fred Jerome's new book The Einstein File will discover that the scientist was barred from working on the bomb, as a security risk by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and US Army officials.
It was part of Hoover's secret, 23-year campaign to undermine Einstein's influence, a campaign that included illegally opening the scientist's mail, monitoring his phone, trying to link him to Soviet spies, and trying to take away his American citizenship..."
Check the centerfold spread from "Life" magazine, April 5, 1949:
Red Rumpus
Dupes And Fellow Travelers Dress up Communist Fronts
"Some of those pictured here publicly and sincerely repudiate Communism, but this does not alter the fact that they are of great use to the Communist cause. Indeed membership would damage their special usefulness. Innocently or not, they accomplish quite as much for the Kremlin in their glamorous way as a card holder does in his drab toil. "
Einstein on one page, Chaplin on the other. Arguably the two most lovable, and loving, men of the 20th century. Also Aaron Copland, Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, F.O. Matthiessen, Thomas Mann, Gene Weltfish:
With her fellow graduate student and husband, Alexander Lesser, Weltfish traveled in 1928 to Oklahoma. There she began her linguistic studies among the Pawnee. Every summer, and for an entire year in 1930, Weltfish lived with the tribe, learning to weave baskets and sharing the daily lives of the women. In 1935 when Weltfish returned to the Pawnee, she set out to reconstruct the seasonal cycles of the Skidi Pawnee in Nebraska for the year 1867. She was assisted in this effort by Mark Evarts, an elderly Pawnee whose childhood was spent in Nebraska.
Weltfish returned to Columbia in the fall of 1936 to teach in the graduate anthropology program. There she taught the traditional courses and added some of her own, on invention and technology, and race relations. She also participated in the development of the School of General Studies, where she offered a wide range of anthropological courses.
During the war while Weltfish remained at Columbia, she also fought racial prejudice and lobbied for equal rights for women, authoring a pamphlet, "The Races of Mankind," at the request of the U.S.O., giving many speeches across the country, appearing on radio programs, etc. Her beliefs, activities, and the organizations she had joined in the 1940's caused her to fall victim to the anti-Communist fervor of the early 1950's. Weltfish lost her Columbia position and she was not able to obtain another teaching post for nine years.
In 1954 at the invitation of a former student, Weltfish spent four years at the University of Nebraska researching the historical, archaeological, and ethnological records of the Pawnee. She correlated this information with her 1930's field work to portray everyday life of the tribe through the seasons of one year in an influential and widely read book, The Lost Universe (1965).
from Biography of Gene Weltfish
Inventory of the Gene Weltfish Pawnee Field Notes, 1935 (google cache)
more complete biography (click photo above) at
Women's Intellectual Contributions to the Study of Mind and Society
Webster University
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"No one knows what our future will be. In all things the outer bounds of our lives are broken�in the universe and in the home; in the family and in the nation; in the region and in the uni-nation. Are there more people beyond our planet? In the past people have come from other continents and destroyed many local worlds. When the European invader set out from his continent to explore the oceans, he too broke the secure images of life of the people he met and overwhelmed. Fearfully we can imagine that advanced peoples live on the planets, and they may come to us."
The Lost Universe
