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Jews were hardly equal citizens in the United States in 1945. Formal quotas and informal social discrimination kept Jews largely out of the top universities and highest government posts until at least the 1960s. But relative tolerance is what matters, and by comparison to the other options, the United States was for Einstein and so many of his fellow brilliant scientists a new Jerusalem. It was their work that led to the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, giving America the world's first nuclear weapons. Perhaps never in world history has an infusion of immigrant talent so immediately translated into a scientific advance and military advantage of such planet-altering magnitude.

Within a few years, however, the United States was no longer the world's sole atomic power. To the east of Europe had risen another colossus, the Soviet Union, whose rivalry with the United States would be the defining geopolitical reality of the ensuing decades.

Interestingly, as the Cold War began, it was not at all clear which of the two superpowers was the more tolerant. While the United States certainly offered more religious freedom, its commitment to ideological openness was undermined by the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s. Moreover, in some parts of the country, racial apartheid was practiced under the name of Jim Crow. By contrast, the U.S.S.R. did not respect religious or ideological freedom but proudly proclaimed its racial and ethnic universalism.

The territory taken over by the Bolsheviks in 1917 included a complex array of ethnic, national, and tribal minorities. In their rise to power, the Bolsheviks harnessed the discontent of Russia's ethnic minorities, promising them “equality” and “the genuine right to self-determination.” The first ail-Union Census of 1927 identified 172 separate “nationalities” in the Soviet Union, although (through various political and ethnographic manipulations) by 1939 this number had been whittled down to just 57. At least in principle, Soviet “nationalities” policy was supposed to promote non-Russian cultures and languages, to give “all the nations” within the Union considerable autonomy, and to allow the best and brightest non-Russians to participate and rise in the Soviet system. On the international front, the U.S.S.R. invited delegates from Cuba, China, and African nations to Moscow in order to strengthen ties within the Communist bloc. At the same time, Soviet propaganda reported constantly on American blacks’ “semi-slave” status and the “frequency of terroristic acts against negroes,” including “the bestial mobbing of four negroes by a band of 20-25 whites” in Monroe, Georgia, in 1946.”

There is no doubt that racism caused the United States considerable international embarrassment. In one notorious case, when Haiti's secretary of agriculture arrived in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1947 for a conference, the hotel (not expecting the secretary to be black) refused for “reasons of color” to let him stay with the other conference attendees. After the incident, an outraged editorial in a Haitian newspaper wrote, “The Negro of Haiti understands that the word democracy in the United States has no meaning.”

In part, the U.S. government's postwar receptivity to civil rights reform reflected American interests in bolstering the country's international stature. In a 1948 New York Times Magazine article, Robert E. Cushman, a member of President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights, argued: “ [T]he nation finds itself the most powerful spokesman for the democratic way of life, as opposed to the principles of a totalitarian state. It is unpleasant to have the Russians publicize our continuing lynchings, our Jim Crow statutes and customs, our anti-Semitic discriminations and our witchhunts; but is it undeserved?” Cushman concluded, “[Americans] are becoming aware that we do not practice the civil liberty we preach; and this realization is a wholesome thing.”24

As the twentieth century unfolded, the oppressiveness of the Soviet regime became increasingly