Lewis Einstein

Lewis David Einstein (born March 15, 1877 in New York City ; died December 4, 1967 in Paris ) was an American diplomat.

Life

Lewis Einstein was the son of the wealthy wool merchant Lewis L. Einstein, he was related by marriage to civil rights activist Joel Elias Spingarn and archaeologist Charles Waldstein through his two sisters and was the uncle of the British politician Henry Walston .

Einstein graduated from Columbia University and received a master's degree in 1899. He joined the United States diplomatic service in 1903 and began his diplomatic training at the Embassy in Constantinople . In 1904 he married the Englishwoman Helen Ralli, from his father's point of view a mess alliance and a career obstacle, he was therefore disinherited. In 1906 he was a member of the American delegation to the Algeciras Conference , and in 1908 he witnessed the revolution of the Young Turks in Constantinople . Einstein briefly became US ambassador to Costa Rica in 1911 and then worked at the State Department in Washington, DC .

In 1913, in view of the threat of war in Europe, he anonymously published the article The Anglo-German Rivalry and the United States in the British journal National Review . In November 1914, after the outbreak of war in Europe, the article The War and American Policy followed in the same place , Theodore Roosevelt wrote the preface to a book edition of both essays in 1918.

In 1915 he was sent back to the Ottoman Empire and there was an observer of the attack by the Entente on the Dardanelles , which ended in a defeat in Gallipoli . In his diary he also noted his information about the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The American legation under Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. found no means of moderating the Ottoman War Minister Enver Pascha and the Interior Minister Talât Pascha .

When the USA entered the First World War in 1917, he returned to the USA.

Einstein was accredited as US ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1921 and stayed in Prague until 1930 . Einstein became a member of the influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations .

In addition to diary entries from his diplomatic activities, he published a large number of articles on topics of history and art history, as well as several volumes of poetry. His correspondence with federal judge Oliver Holmes was published in 1964, a volume of memoirs in 1968.

Fonts (selection)

• The Italian Renaissance in England . New York, Columbia University Press, 1902
• Luigi Pulci and the Morgante Maggiore . Berlin: E. Felber, 1902
• The relation of literature to history . New York, 1903
• Napoleon III and American diplomacy at the outbreak of the Civil War: an address read in French before the Société d'histoire diplomatique at Paris, on the ninth of June, 1905 by Lewis Einstein . London 1905
• Thoughts on art and life . Boston, Merrymount Press, 1906
• American foreign policy . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909
• Inside Constantinople: A Diplomatist's Diary during the Dardanelles Expedition, April – September, 1915 . New York, EP Dutton, 1918
  • the same, introduction to Ara Sarafian . London: Gomidas Institute, 2014 ISBN 978-1-909382-11-4
• A prophecy of the war (1913–1914) . Foreword by Theodor Roosevelt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1918 (2010)
• Tudor ideals . 1921; New York, Russell & Russell, 1962
• Roosevelt: His Mind in Action . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930
• Divided Loyalties: Americans in England during the War of Independence . 1933; reprint Freeport, NY, 1969
• Verses . London: De La More Press, 1938
• The winged victory and other verses . London: De La More Press, 1941
• Historical change . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946
• Scattered verses . Florence, tip. Giuntina, 1949
• Looking at Italian pictures in the National Gallery of Art . Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1951
• James Bishop Peabody (Ed.): The Holmes-Einstein Letters: Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Lewis Einstein 1903-1935 . London, Macmillan, 1964
• A diplomat looks back . Lawrence E. Gelfand, editor. Foreword by George F. Kennan . New Haven: Yale university press, 1968

literature

• Einstein, Lewis , in: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1971, Volume 6, Sp. 539f.
• George W. Liebmann: Diplomacy between the wars: five diplomats and the shaping of the modern world . New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp. 1-50

Web links

• Literature by and about Lewis Einstein in the WorldCat bibliographic database