10 Americans You Won't Believe Were Accused Of Being Communists

8. Albert Einstein

Technically again not an American, but he did live in the country. The 1921 Nobel Prize winner in Physics and the man who came up with the general theory of relativity - not to mention a leading scientist involved in the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb - Albert Einstein was also accused of being a Communist. J Edgar Hoover was particularly adamant that the German-born theoretical physicist was a socialist agent, and he insisted on Einstein being tracked throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Einstein made no secret of his disdain for capitalism, wrote an essay named "Why Socialism?" to highlight his leftist views, and even praised Vladimir Lenin "as a man who completely sacrificed himself and devoted all his energy to the realisation of social justice", but it is unlikely that he was actually a Communist. Despite this, the FBI's file on Einstein grew to 1,427 pages - and the German physicist believed that Joseph McCarthy was a danger to intellectual freedom.