Al Shadowitz; physicist inspired by Einstein to plead "the first"
Hyfler/Rosner
April 26, 2004 Monday Ontario Edition
HEADLINE: Physicist Al Shadowitz stood tall
BYLINE: Catherine Dunphy, Toronto Star
In the McCarthy hearings, he was first to plead the First
Hero Einstein inspired his brave stand and his career
In every life, it is hoped, there occurs at least one brave
and dangerous moment during which a man will take a stand
for everything he believes in and thereby risk everything he
has.
For Al Shadowitz, then a New Jersey electrical engineer,
that moment occurred on Dec. 16, 1953, when Senator Joe
McCarthy asked him if he was or ever had been a member of
the Communist Party - and Mr. Shadowitz refused to take the
Fifth.
Many, if not most, of those facing accusations of being a
Communist sympathizer or even a spy in those ignominious
Cold War red-baiting years defended themselves by pleading
the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects
people from having to testify against themselves.
Mr. Shadowitz was the first to tell the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations that he was refusing to
answer the question because it was in violation of the First
Amendment, the guarantee to freedom of speech and
association.
And that this was on the personal advice of Dr. Albert
Einstein.
The next day, his photo and story hit the front page of the
New York Times. The headline: "Witness, on Einstein advice,
Refuses to Say if He was Red."
He lost his job; relatives stopped speaking to him. His
young family survived on the wages his wife, Edith, could
earn as a supply teacher. Neighbours raised enough money to
attempt to buy the house in which they were living, to oust
them from the neighbourhood. His three daughters were openly
hated in school hallways and suddenly not welcome at the
homes of former friends.
Later he was charged with contempt of Congress, a charge
dismissed in 1955 after McCarthy himself had been censured
by the Select Senate Subcommittee. Mr. Shadowitz had been
hoping to take his case to the Supreme Court to test the
right to freedom of thought.
"I was always proud of Dad. He stood up to bullies. And he
was always very proud of what he had done," says his
daughter, Sarah Shadowitz. In 2000, she moved her father to
Toronto to live near her family. He became a landed
immigrant Jan. 3, 2001.
Mr. Shadowitz died here on March 26, just shy of his 89th
birthday. On his birthday last year - May 5 - his daughter
privately published 10 copies of her father's memoirs. By
coincidence, the U.S. Senate released all of the secret
McCarthy testimonies that same day.
Two framed letters to her father hang in the hall of Sarah
Shadowitz's home, both written and signed by Albert
Einstein. In one, the Nobel-winning physicist states in a
postscript that "I am glad I could be of some moral
assistance in your case. I believe your testimony to be
allright (sic) in every way."
In his memoirs, Mr. Shadowitz says he has no idea what
motivated him to drive to Princeton to call on Einstein. A
letter from the scientist published in July that year in the
New York Times urged anyone facing the McCarthy hearings to
plead the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech and,
by implication, Einstein reasoned, freedom of thought.
Having grown up in a progressive pro-Zionist home in a
family of successful Jewish immigrants, Mr. Shadowitz
regularly read six or seven daily newspapers and certainly
had read Einstein's widely publicized letter. He remembered
it when he was subpoenaed to appear before the subcommittee
months later.
Like many young people during the war years, he had joined
the Communist Party as a way to protest Hitler's treatment
of the Jews. Born with two clubfeet and deformed calves, he
had tried to enlist for war duty three times and been
rejected each time. He became a Communist to fight Hitler.
After the war, he lost interest and left the party in 1950,
when he and the rest of the Western world learned of the
atrocities committed by Stalin.
While still a party member, however, Mr. Shadowitz had
worked for the U.S. army in Maryland as a junior engineer,
testing the trajectory of bullets and missiles. Later he had
started the Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists
and Technicians, a left-leaning union, at his workplace at
the International Telephone & Telegraph Company. The family
believes it was the combination that brought him to the
attention of the Wisconsin senator.
What led him to Einstein was another combination: chutzpah
and hero worship. Mr. Shadowitz had been thwarted in his
ambition to be a physicist. His practical father encouraged
him to take the subway to the Polytechnic Institute of
Brooklyn rather than enrol in MIT, and later, after he'd
worked as an engineer to earn the money to enrol at Harvard,
he dropped out when he was told he would never be hired
there because he was Jewish.
He tried again to study at Berkeley under the aegis of J.
Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atom bomb," but
failed to pass a required exam. It was as an engineer that
he drove the Princeton streets asking strangers where
Einstein lived.
The great man was at home, in corduroys, old slippers and a
baggy sweatshirt. He led Mr. Shadowitz up to his spartan
study and told him, "I am prepared to let you use my name,
in any way you see fit, if only you will justify your
failure to answer McCarthy's questions only on the basis of
the First Amendment to the Constitution."
Einstein died in 1955, but Mr. Shadowitz and his wife stayed
friends with his secretary, Helen Dukas. Perhaps because of
that link to Einstein, as well his joblessness, Mr.
Shadowitz went back to school and earned his doctorate in
physics in 1958 from New York University. He taught physics
at Fairleigh Dickinson University for 28 years.
Physics consumed him. He wrote seven books, including two
textbooks still in print; he scribbled complex formulae on
restaurant placemats during family outings. At the same
time, he was a rebel, smoking marijuana in the '60s, urging
his granddaughters to drop out of school and experience
life, and, after finally earning his Ph.D., adopting as his
signature an X.
His son-in-law, Ted Grosberg, believes he was fearless. "I
don't think the thought 'what if' ever crossed his mind," he
says.
And Sarah Shadowitz acknowledges that she grew up in a very
unconventional home, in which her father could muse over
theoretical aspects of low-temperature physics for five
silent hours at a time. They joked that their father had "a
lot of problems," as he was always retreating into his
preferred world of abstract problem-solving.
For five months each year, he would go to his Vermont cabin
to write books and think about physics - after putting in
four hours of manual labour. To compensate for his crippled
legs, he developed a strong upper body by working with
nature.
Sarah Shadowitz was closing the deal on her own
cottage-country shack an hour before her father died. She
wants to scatter his ashes over the lake there to celebrate
his love of nature, and acknowledge the strength of a father
who was born with painful physical deformity yet firmly
stood up for what he believed.
GRAPHIC: U.S.-born Al Shadowitz took advantage of the
shunning he received in the wake of the infamous McCarthy
witchhunt to go back to school and earn the Ph.D. in physics
he'd always wanted.