Do we like Albert Einstein?
Our score: 8 out of 10. He spent his public life backing refugees and Black Americans, and the diary slurs are a real mark against it, not a pattern of campaigning.
Nothing new on him lately, which is fair enough for a bloke who died in 1955. He still turns up in the news through auctions and relativity experiments, but there is no fresh scandal for us to chew on.
The harm check on his public life reads very differently. In 1937 Marian Anderson was refused a room at a whites-only Princeton inn, so Einstein invited her to stay at his home, and she did whenever she performed in town for the next 18 years. At Lincoln University in 1946 he reportedly said segregation was “a disease of white people.”
He also worked the phones for refugees. In August 1939 he wrote urgently to an NYU dean to find a fellowship for his former doctor, Rudolf Ehrmann, because he judged an appeal to Washington hopeless. The dean said yes, and by October Ehrmann had a clinical professorship in New York.
So where does that leave us? Same man, two ledgers. The diaries are a real stain and he should cop that, but when it counted, in public and at some cost, he used his name for people who had none. He's not a saint; he's a good bloke with a bad notebook.