Division <;o„ . J0H49 f Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/jewsinamerica00hend_0 THE JEWS IN AMERICA THE KINGDOM OF THE KHAZARS This map, reproduced from The Jewish Encyclopedia , shows the distribution of religions in Europe in the tenth century. It indicates that there was only one great compact mass of Jews and that these were the Khazars, a Turkish or Mongolian people, who were Jews only in religion. These form the nucleus of the Polish or Eastern Jews of to-day, who have emigrated to the United States in such great numbers. COPYRIGHT, 1922, I923,, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. First Edition PREFATORY NOTE These pages make no pretense to being a complete discussion of a very large subject. They do present several novel points, however, of the utmost interest and importance in any consideration of the Jewish question. They attracted wide attention when published in the World’s Work, and are issued in book form in compliance with a great public de¬ mand. The term “Polish Jew/’ used inclusively, has caused some misapprehension. As ex¬ plained in the text, the great mass of Jews con¬ centrated in Poland in the Middle Ages. On the partition of Poland in the Eighteenth Cen¬ tury, the Polish provinces in which these Jews had lived for centuries became parts of Rus¬ sia, Austria, and Prussia. The vast majority of so-called Russian Jews are therefore more properly described as Polish Jews, and the latter term, as used in this book, is intended to include them, as well as their co-religionists in Poland itself and in Austria. “Eastern Jew” is another expression that is used inter¬ changeably with “Polish Jew.” CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. How They Came to This Country i II. Do the Jews Dominate American Finance? . 44 III. The “Menace” of the Polish Jew 92 IV. Radicalism Among the Polish Jews . 134 THE JEWS IN AMERICA THE JEWS IN AMERICA CHAPTER I HOW THEY CAME TO THIS COUNTRY I HE wave of anti-Semitism, which has X been sweeping over the world since the ending of the Great War, has apparently reached the United States. An antagonism which Americans had believed was peculiarly European is gaining a disquieting foothold in this country. The one prejudice which would seem to have no decent cause for existence in the free air of America is one that is based upon race and religion. Yet the most conserv¬ ative American universities are openly setting up bars against the unlimited admittance of Jewish students; the most desirable clubs are becoming more rigid in their inhospitable atti¬ tude toward Jewish members; a weekly news¬ paper, financed by one of the richest men in 2 THE JEWS IN AMERICA America, has filled its pages for three years with a virulent campaign against this element in our population; secret organizations have been established for the purpose of “fighting” the so-called “Jewish predominance” in American life; Congress has passed and the President has signed an immigration law chiefly intended — it is just as well to be frank about the matter — to restrict the entrance of Jews from eastern Europe. It is an impres¬ sive fact that these manifestations of a less cordial attitude toward the Jews find their counterpart in another country which, in modern times, has been friendly to them — that is, England itself. That anti-Semitism should prevail in Russia, Germany, France, indeed in the whole continent of Europe, is not surpris¬ ing; but its development in the Anglo-Saxon countries is something entirely new. Yet such conservative organs as the London Morning Post and the London Spectator are picturing the activities of English Jews as one of the most disrupting and dangerous influences in British life. In the long tragedy of Israel there is no misfortune quite so deplorable as the increas¬ ing unfriendliness in the great liberty-loving THE JEWS IN AMERICA 3 Anglo-Saxon democracies. For two thousand years hatred and persecution have been its portion. This hostility has usually been ex¬ plained as one of the natural consequences of that ignorance, religious bigotry, and racial consciousness which chained the mind and conscience of Europe in the Middle Ages; that it would disappear with the general diffu¬ sion of intelligence and the growth of free democratic institutions has been taken for granted. But Great Britain and America are the most liberal countries in the world; the United States especially stands for a free chance for every individual, irrespective of his racial origin or his religious faith. Cer¬ tainly here is a development that calls for ex¬ planation. What are the facts about our Jewish popu¬ lation? What part do they play in American life? Is it true that they dominate American finance, American industry — that they hold the purse strings of the United States in their hands? Are they the brains of the Nation in the professions, in education, in journalism, in literature, in music, in the drama? Are they increasing every day their influence in politics and attaining a disproportionate share of the 4 THE JEWS IN AMERICA public offices? How many Jews are there in this country? Where did they come from? Why did they come here? Above all, is it true, as is so commonly charged, that the Jews constitute an utterly unassimilable element in our population, that they can never become Americans, never think like Americans, that in this country, as elsewhere, they form a kind of Gulf Stream in the great ocean of humanity — that they are part of the general mass and yet entirely distinct from it? These are only a few of the questions that must be answered before the fundamentals of the problem can be understood. There are no official figures as to the num¬ ber of Jews in the United States, for the Jews themselves have strenuously — and successfully — opposed any attempt to enumerate them; this is the reason that the United States Census does not enroll our people according to religion, but according to nationality. Our great Jewish population therefore appears in the documents of the Census Office as “Rus¬ sian,” “Austro-Hungarian,” “German,” and the like. But the highest Jewish authority, the Communal Register, estimates — on ap- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 5 parently excellent grounds — the Jewish pop¬ ulation of New York City at 1,500,000; and numerous statisticians who have exhaustively studied the subject figure that the Jewish pop¬ ulation of the United States ranges from 2,500,000 to 3,000,000. An error constantly made is that of regarding this Jewish popula¬ tion as homogeneous; the fact is that it is composed of several elements; a point not commonly grasped is that certain types of Jews differ from each other almost as much as the Jews themselves differ from Gentiles. Unless this truth is completely understood the real nature of the so-called Jewish “problem” will not be comprehended. It is only until a comparatively recent time that America has had anything in the nature of a Jewish “prob¬ lem”; this is not only because the Jewish im¬ migration has increased so enormously in twenty years; the explanation that goes much deeper is the fact that the Jewish influx from eastern Europe comprises a type of Jew very different from that which had previously been a more or less familiar figure in American life. No descendant of the Mayflower is prouder of his American origin than the Jew whose 6 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ancestors have lived in this country for two or three generations. It is impossible to say an unkinder thing to such an American aristocrat than to confuse him indiscriminately with the recent arrivals from Poland and Russia. The basic fact in the Jewish question is that Jewish immigration divides into three important classes. Perhaps many'Americans.who regard them¬ selves as “native stock,” whose ancestors fought in the Colonial Wars and in the Revo¬ lution, may be surprised to learn that there is a Jewish element in the American population with a pedigree as long as their own. The first shipload of Jews to reach the soil which is now the United States landed in New York City when that little community was a Dutch settlement known as New Amsterdam. These early American Jews, like most representatives of their race who have since sought America, were refugees from persecution; in this case the object of their flight was the Spanish In¬ quisition, which, in the Seventeenth Century, was a flourishing institution in Spanish Amer¬ ica. These exiles belonged to that branch of their people which had for centuries been re¬ garded as the aristocracy of Israel; they were THE JEWS IN AMERICA 7 the type described as the Sephardim — the name by which the Jews of Spain and Portu¬ gal had been long known. This Sephardic Jew was such a different person, physically and intellectually, from the more familiar Northern Jew that certain authorities have regarded him as belonging to an entirely sep¬ arate race, a race which has nothing in com¬ mon with the sons of Israel except the Jewish religion. His origin goes far back into antiquity. He was living in Spain in the days of Julius Caesar; certain historians have attempted to identify him with the Phoenicians, who were early colonizers in Spain — they founded the city of Cadiz — and were unquestionably a Semitic race. These derivations are probably fantastic, but the fact remains that the Spanish Jew had lived long enough in Spain to take on at least one Spanish characteristic, and that was an intense and haughty pride. He has always regarded himself as a being infinitely superior to the other members of the scattered hosts of Israel, and this superiority his co-religionists have generally acknowledged. Physically the Spanish Jew, and especially the Spanish Jew¬ ess, had decided claims to distinction. This 8 THE JEWS IN AMERICA was the type of Jew that Rembrandt liked especially to paint; his well-known “Jewish Doctor,” with his thin, intellectual features, his black silken beard, his piercing black eyes, his straight — entirely un-“Jewish” nose — per¬ haps represents the Spanish Jew at his best. Possibly the Spanish haughtiness is a legiti¬ mate inheritance, for in Spain, during the Middle Ages, there was a constant mingling of Jewish and Gentile blood. There are those who explain the languorous beauty of the Spanish woman of to-day on this ground; her dark and dreamy eyes, her olive skin and her graceful body, are really, according to this theory, Oriental traits which she has derived from her remote Jewish ancestors. Whatever basis there may be for this idea, there is un¬ questionably a delicacy in the features of the Sephardim, men and women, which most ob¬ servers would regard as decidedly non-Jewish ; not theirs the thick lips, the curly hair, the swarthy complexion, the hooked nose, or the round heads, which are generally accepted as Jewish characteristics. Neither do they mani¬ fest certain traits of behaviour which a not too friendly eye sometimes stigmatizes as “Jewish.” In manner, the Spanish Jew is THE JEWS IN AMERICA 9 neither servile nor bumptious; in fact, his car¬ riage is usually not lacking in a genuine Cas¬ tilian grace; he does not cringe before his superiors or browbeat those beneath him; he is invariably soft spoken; he moves with dig¬ nity, and he has always been distinguished for elegance and good taste in dress. The aristocratic quality of the Sephardic Jew is unquestionably explained by the un¬ usual position which he had held for centuries in the Spanish Peninsula. At times, it is true, he was the victim of ferocious persecution ; yet there were century-long intervals when he was at peace, and permitted to develop socially and intellectually in accordance with his own genius. His religion made him obnoxious to both the other faiths that controlled Spain for so many centuries, the Catholic and the Mohammedan, yet among both his accom¬ plishments had given him an important posi¬ tion. At times they afflicted him with the discriminations that were the common fate of the Jews in the Middle Ages, yet his skill in administration, in finance, in scholarship, and the arts made him indispensable to both Moor and Christian. “The Jews reign in Granada,” was the wail of a Moorish writer — a wail that IO THE JEWS IN AMERICA has a decided modern ring — “they have di¬ vided between them the city and the prov¬ inces and everywhere one of this accursed race is in supreme power. They collect the taxes, they dress magnificently and fare sumptu¬ ously while the true believers are in rags and wretchedness.” In the main this gives a fair picture of their position and activities, for, as a racial group, the Spanish Jews were rich and well educated; they were the financial and commercial leaders of Spain; at a time when banking was an infamous occupation and the taking of interest a ground for excom¬ munication the Jews naturally monopolized money-lending; they were the physicians and scientists — “there is not a noble or a prelate,” says one monkish writer, “but keeps a Jewish devil as a physician.” Their intellectual emi¬ nence is sufficiently indicated by the fact that Spinoza, the great philosopher, was a Spanish Jew, his ancestors having been expelledin 1492, at the time of the great persecution. Besides these intellectual pursuits, the Spanish Jews achieved important rank in the state and even in the Church. An interesting phase of their sojourn in Spain, indeed, and one that has great bearing upon the question of Jewish THE JEWS IN AMERICA n assimilation, is the extent to which they changed their faith to Catholicism and mar¬ ried into the greatest families of Spain. Many a distinguished court official and many a cardinal and bishop had a large mixture of Jewish blood, and it is an historical fact that King Ferdinand, the husband of Queen Isa¬ bella — and a terrible persecutor of Jews— was himself descended from a Jewish ancestor. So important did the Spanish Jews become that they enjoyed one privilege which Jews in no other country possessed during the Middle Ages and that was the right to own landed property. The greatest of them maintained the almost royal estate of a Spanish grandee. The background of the race thus furnishes a sufficient explanation for that pride and ex¬ clusiveness — a pride and exclusiveness di¬ rected chiefly against their own co-religion¬ ists — which has always characterized the Sephardic Jews even in the United States. And, up to the outbreak of the American Revolution, these were practically the only kind of Jews who lived in this country. Their migration to American soil was merely an¬ other outcome of the persecution which reached its height in 1492. The conquest of i2 THE JEWS IN AMERICA the Moors, the unification of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, and the increasing strength of the Catholic Church, inspired an outburst of Spanish fanaticism, which found its chief expression in measures directed against its Jewish population. The Inquisi¬ tion itself was established in Spain for the particular benefit of the Jews. This institu¬ tion had no interest in orthodox Jews, of course, for the purpose of the Inquisition was to stamp out heresy, and the Jew, not being a Christian, obviously could not be a heretic; but there was a peculiar type of Jew that en¬ listed its most persistent ministrations. The existence of this strange breed of Jew, and its existence in great numbers, indicate the pe¬ culiar position which Israel had obtained in this great Catholic dominion. He was known as the Marrano — a Spanish word which means “damned” and “hog”; another designation was crypto-Jew , or Converso. He was a Jew who was supposed to have em¬ braced the Christian religion; the fact that, in 1492, there were more than 100,000 Marran- os in Spain, gives some idea of the extent to which the formal acceptance of Christianity had taken place among this supposedly most THE JEWS IN AMERICA 13 tenacious of all races. But the trouble arose from a general suspicion that these converts were not Christian at heart, and that they had merely taken this new religion as a means of escaping the social and legal disabilities that were inflicted upon the race. That they in¬ dulged in Judaism in secret, that they prac¬ tised upon their sons the covenant of Abra¬ ham, that among themselves they clung to the Jewish dietary laws — all these charges were constantly made and popularly believed. And in the main the accusations probably were not untrue; a large number of Maranos doubt¬ less remained faithful to Catholicism and their blood flows in a considerable proportion of the Spaniards of the present time; but the great majority were Christians only as a mat¬ ter of convenience and profit. And this was the circumstance that led to the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition. Its original pur¬ pose was to spy out alien backsliders, both Moors and Jews, and to bring them back into the fold of the true church. The setting up of this tribunal merely marked the beginning of the persecutions of which the Jews now be¬ came the victims. As a means of transform¬ ing Jews into good Christians the Inquisition i4 THE JEWS IN AMERICA proved a failure; and the government, in 1492, decided on a more effective method of purgation; it issued an edict expelling all Jews from Spain. The cruelty with which this law was en¬ forced, the dreadful sufferings which it brought upon about 200,000 souls, is a famil¬ iar story; it finds a modern counterpart, even in details, in the expulsion of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915; the point that is chiefly interesting at the present time is that this ex¬ pulsion gave America its first Jews. The date is significant — 1492; that was the same year that Columbus sailed on his first voyage; in¬ deed his diary describes how, as he passed out of Palos on his way to the unknown Western Sea, he spied a miserable caravel loaded with Jews — exiles under the recent edict. Cer¬ tain modern Jewbsh historians insist that Columbus was himself a Jew, or at least a Marano; what is indisputable is that his ex¬ pedition contained several Jews, and that the very first man to land on the Western Hemi¬ sphere was a baptized Jew, Louis de Torres. The influx of Spanish Jews which followed was never large in its proportions, compared with migrations of the present time; indeed THE JEWS IN AMERICA 15 more Russian Jews have frequently reached the United States in one year than the entire number expelled from Spain at this time; but it was interesting in its quality. The great mass of exiles distributed themselves in more friendly European countries, especially in Holland, in Italy, and above all, in Turkey, where their descendants in great numbers live to-day, still speaking the Spanish lan¬ guage of the days of Ferdinand and Isabella; but a certain number found their way to the New World, establishing their homes in the Spanish colonies almost as soon as they were founded. But these colonies were still Span¬ ish, and in most of them the Spanish Inquisi¬ tion was promptly set up; the Jews were still Maranos, and as such subject to its investiga¬ tions; persecution again started them on their travels, and the only hospitable havens in the New World were the Dutch and English settlements. Thus the Spanish Jews began to arrive on American soil long before the Declaration of Independence. At first their welcome was not especially cordial. In 1654, a ship — referred to above — containing twenty- seven reached New Amsterdam, but Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch Governor, received 16 THE JEWS IN AMERICA them with exceedingly ill grace, and it was not until a year afterward that, under peremptory orders from the West India Company — in which several influential Spanish Jews were stockholders — he gave them permission to re¬ side permanently in the little Dutch settle¬ ment. Here they and their descendants have lived for the succeeding two hundred and sixty years. The Spanish synagogue on Central Park West is to-day not only the most vener¬ able Jewish congregation in New York, but almost the oldest religious body in the Ameri¬ can metropolis; it is older than Trinity Church by more than fifty years. This Jew¬ ish community — and similar Sephardic colo¬ nies were established in most important Amer¬ ican cities, such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston — have since led a career of exclusiveness and hauteur that is typically Spanish. As in Spain centuries ago these Israelites constantly associated with the best in the intellectual and social life of the old grandees, so to-day the New York Men- dozas, Cardozos, Acostas, Pintos, and Cor¬ dobas — for they all still retain their old Span¬ ish names — find their most congenial associates THE JEWS IN AMERICA 17 among cultivated Gentiles. They have always looked down upon their Russian co¬ religionists, and even upon the Germans, as inferior breeds. No anti-Semite among the native American stock has ever regarded the poor Polish immigrant with greater aversion. There was a time when a Spanish Jew or Jew¬ ess who married a German or Russian co¬ religionist would be promptly disowned; the hostility to such alliances was much stronger than it has ever been between Protestant and Catholic. The Sephardim have always had their own graveyards in which German and Russian Jews have not found rest. Part of this feeling has been due to ancestral pride; part had a more rational basis, for it is incon¬ testable that, from most points of view, the Spanish Jews are superior to other representa¬ tives of Israel. There are only a few of them ; they are nearly all rich or at least prosperous; they are merchants, bankers, and land owners; they are not pawnbrokers or peddlers or rag¬ pickers; and they have a distinct talent for public life. It is no accident that the most distinguished Jewish statesman of Great Britain, Disraeli, was a descendant of Spanish Jews, and that the greatest public man of 18 THE JEWS IN AMERICA American Jewry, Judah P. Benjamin, Secre¬ tary of State of the Southern Confederacy and probably the most adroit brain in the Secession movement, belonged to the same branch of the race. It is also significant that the Jew who has reached the most powerful position of any member of his race in recent American life, Mr. Bernard Baruch, also traces his origin to the Jews of Spain. So long as the Jewish population was lim¬ ited chiefly to Spanish Jews America had nothing that remotely resembled a Jewish “problem.” Before the American Revolu¬ tion practically the whole Jewish population of this country consisted of these Sephardim. They played an honourable part in the Revo¬ lution and lived on terms of friendship and re¬ spect with the other racial elements. There were only about 2,000 of them in the whole United States at that time. Just how many there are now is not known ; that their number is steadily decreasing is apparent, and here again the explanation has a great importance; the Spanish Jews are becoming fewer through inter-marriage not with other branches of the race, but with Gentiles. In England it is said that the Spanish Jews have practically disap- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 19 peared, and, as in this country, through inter¬ marriage with Christians. I have instanced above three Sephardic Jews who have reached high public station in Great Britain and the United States: Disraeli, Benjamin, and Baruch. All three of these men married Christians. The tendency that was so com¬ mon five and six hundred years ago in Spain, when cardinals and kings acknowledged a mixture of Jewish blood, is similarly apparent in the England and America of the present time. II Neither did the second phase of Jewish im¬ migration create anything that could be called a “problem.” This was the much larger in¬ flux of German Jews, which began soon after the Battle of Waterloo, reached a considerable proportion in the ’forties and ’fifties and fell off appreciably in the late ’seventies. These dates indicate that German Jewish immigra¬ tion had about the same rise and fall as German immigration in general, and it is a fact that it was not a dis¬ tinct movement but was merely part of the general flow of German immigrants to this 20 THE JEWS IN AMERICA country. German Jews came here for the same reason that other Germans came; in part the motive was economic, the desire to get a better chance at life, and in part the motive was political. German Jews participated ex¬ tensively in the German liberal movement of ’48; when it failed they emigrated in large numbers, precisely as did their Christian as¬ sociates; the two most distinguished of these political refugees were Carl Schurz, a Gentile, and Abraham Jacobi, a Jew. But racially and culturally the German Jew seemed an entirely different person from his Spanish predecessor. He belonged to the second and northern division of Israel, the type which the Jewish writers designate as the Askenazim. Physically he was probably inferior to the Sephardim. His features were inclined to be coarser, his lips thicker, his hair morewoolly in its texture, his head round rather than long; his physical type was not invariably brunette, for blond hair and blue eyes were not un¬ common. These points, however, can be pushed too far; the women were not infre¬ quently exceedingly beautiful, and the most famous of American Jewesses belonged to the Germanic branch. This was Rebecca THE JEWS IN AMERICA 21 Gratz, a Jewess distinguished for her beauty and piety, and for her friendships with emi¬ nent Americans. There is a tradition that Henry Clay was an unsuccessful suitor, and one of her most distinguished friends was Washington Irving. This later association had important literary consequences; Irving was likewise a close friend of Sir Walter Scott, whom he used frequently to visit at Abbots¬ ford; it is said that his description of Miss Gratz, of her loveliness of person, her fine¬ ness of character, her devotion to her re¬ ligion and her race — a devotion that had prevented her from marrying, most of the men with whom she associated having been Christians — so fired the romantic imagination of Scott that he put her in the novel that he was then writing. In this way it hap¬ pened that Scott’s most famous woman char¬ acter, his Rebecca of “Ivanhoe,” was drawn from Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia. In the main, however, the German Jew was inferior, in manners, intelligence, and social adaptability, to the Spanish type. In num¬ bers he was much greater; from 1815 to about 1880, when German-Jewish immigration, on a large scale, came to an end — in this follow- 22 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ing the course of German immigration in general, of which, as already said, it was merely one phase — probably not far from 200,000 German Jews arrived, though scien¬ tific statistics are not available. With them arrived those characteristically Jewish figures — the rag picker, the itinerant peddler, the pawnbroker, the petty tradesman. These German Jews were not workers; for most part they were middlemen. Many of the best known Jewish families of the United States founded their fortunes in these humble occupations. The Seligmans, who estab¬ lished one of the most important Jewish- American banking houses, were originally peddlers and clothing merchants; so was Solomon Loeb, who founded the great bank¬ ing house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company; and Benjamin Altman, who died the owner of the most distinguished department store in New York and the possessor of one of the greatest collections of paintings ever assembled by an American — a collection which, with fine public spirit, he willed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — is said to have started his business career with a pack on his back. Mr. Oscar S. Straus, ex-Ambassador to Turkey, THE JEWS IN AMERICA 23 has recently given, in his very interesting memoirs, a charming picture of a German- Jewish family attempting to establish itself economically in its new environment. Mr. Straus’s father was an itinerant peddler in the South; he drove a wagon from plantation to plantation, disposing of a miscellaneous cargo of “Yankee notions.” Such a peddler was a welcome figure in Southern life preceding the Civil War; his coming was an annual event that was eagerly anticipated; he usually be¬ came the guest of one of the planters in the community in which he set up his temporary emporium, taking his meals at the family table; his host would never accept pay for this entertainment, but the Jewish merchant, as an acknowledgment of the hospitality, in¬ variably made a parting gift to the wife or daughter— not uncommonly an unusually fine piece of dress goods. It may well be imagined that the arrival of an exotic figure of this kind, with his conversation of great cities and his reminiscences of European life, gave a welcome and bazaar-like colour to the some¬ what monotonous life of a Southern planta¬ tion; and this scene also is typical of the entirely kindly relations that prevailed sixty 24 THE JEWS IN AMERICA years ago between the native population and the Jewish immigrant. The great point to be kept in mind is that these German Jews did not congregate in vast colonies in the great seaboard cities. New York had its slums in the era preceding the Civil War, and they were located practically where they are to-day — in the great section east of the Bowery and south of Fourteenth Street. Here a condition of overcrowding existed which was even more malodorous than that of the present time; but the inhabitants were almost exclusively Irish and German immigrants. The fact that the German Jew was not a factory worker or a labouring man, but a small tradesman, necessarily caused him to distribute himself pretty generally through¬ out the country. He was thus found in every state, large and small; he was a con¬ stant figure in all Southern cities and towns; he followed the western tide of migration after the Civil War; his little hastily as¬ sembled store, pitched frequently under a tent, was a common sight in the early Cali¬ fornia settlements; the Jewish packman oc¬ casionally appears in the pages of Bret Harte; and the Jewish peddler early became a stock THE JEWS IN AMERICA 25 figure on the American stage. Perhaps the public feeling now and then was a little con¬ temptuous; the Jewish sharpness in trading created a veritable literature of Jewish anec¬ dotes; but the American attitude was always good natured; the idea that this race was a “menace” to American institutions never oc¬ curred to the most harebrained of contem¬ porary thinkers. In certain respects the German Jew displayed a greater tendency to “assimilation” than did his Spanish prede¬ cessor. The change in the ritual of the syna¬ gogue, for which the German Jew was responsible, is most significant from this point of view. Fundamentally this represented an attempt to Occidentalize somewhat the Jew¬ ish services — to make them more like the pro¬ ceedings in Christian churches. Meetings were held Sunday instead of Saturday; Eng¬ lish sermons were introduced; organs and choirs became regular features of the pro¬ gramme; the men removed their hats and the women appeared in bonnets instead of shawls. The German Jews greatly shocked their more conservative Spanish co-religionists by the ex¬ tent to which they ignored the dietary laws; 26 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ham and bacon not infrequently appeared upon their breakfast tables; and oysters, lob¬ sters, and other forbiddencreatures tempted the Jewish appetite as irresistibly as the Gentile. Jewish children formed a small minority in every public school and high school; a still smaller contingent appeared in all the col¬ leges — thirty and forty years ago Yale, Har¬ vard, and Princeton usually had four or five in every graduating class ; now and then a Ger¬ man Jew was elected to one of the most exclu¬ sive city clubs — though here, it must be admitted, progress was more difficult. It would be absurd to deny that a certain preju¬ dice existed against the Jews, even in the days when the Spanish and German elements con¬ stituted almost exclusively American Israel, but it was not intense or bitter, and never reached the proportions of a public issue. Occasionally the desire of Jews to be exempted from the provisions of Sunday laws — on the ground, that, as orthodox Hebrews, they kept their establishments closed on Saturdays — caused a ripple of dissatisfaction; the refusal of summer hotels to admit them led to several lawsuits of sensational character; but, in the main, the Gentile population showed little THE JEWS IN AMERICA 27 alarm about their progress, and anti-Semitism was a word whose significance few Americans remotely understood. Ill The facts of chief importance are that the Jewish population before 1880 consisted al¬ most exclusively of Spanish and German J ews, or their descendants ; that they were com¬ paratively few in number; that they were bankers or tradesmen, large and small; that they did not form a compact mass of wretched¬ ness in large cities; that, in education, man¬ ners, and social opportunities their past did not compare unfavourably with that of the other immigrating races. It is the year 1881 that marks the beginning of the American Jewish “problem” as that word is commonly understood. Then began the influx, on an enormous scale, of an entirely different type of Judaism from the staid Spanish Jew and the energetic German of the previous genera¬ tions. It is customary to speak of Israel as a scattered people, as a race that is constantly seeking a home among other nations, as one that really possesses no settled abode of its own. In a sense that is true; but in its larger 28 THE JEWS IN AMERICA aspects it is not true at all. For the Jews, as a mass, have inhabited the same territory for at least a thousand years. At the present time there are perhaps 9,000,000 Jews in Europe. Comparatively small numbers are found in all countries — perhaps 100,000 in France, 240,000 in the United Kingdom — despite the ribald accusation that Scotland is no place for the Jews, the record discloses about 27,000 north of the Tweed — 15,000 in Belgium, 8,000 in Greece, and so on. These are merely the fringes of European Israel; of the 9,000,000 Jews living in Europe, not far from 7,000,000 are congregated as a mass in one rather restricted area.* This territory comprises western Russia, eastern Prussia, and northern Austria. One hundred and fifty years ago not a square mile of this region be¬ longed to the three countries named; all of it was part of the ancient Kingdom of Poland. Until the partitions of Poland in the Eighteenth Century, neither Russia, Prus¬ sia, nor Austria had any large number of Jews; their present Jewish populations, that is, are an inheritance from that unholy piece * These statistics are taken from “The Jews,” a very valuable work Dr. Maurice Fishberg, of New York. THE JEWS IN AMERICA 29 of statecraft. There is thus a certain inaccu¬ racy in referring to Russian and Austrian and Polish Jews; in reality, they are all Polish Jews. The great majority of all the Jews in the world found their way into Poland in the Middle Ages and in that country their de¬ scendants have remained until thepresenttime. Here, then, is the present Jewish home — or at least here it was in 1881, but there is one coun¬ try now which also has a very large Jewish population. That is the United States. In forty years, that is, American Jews have grown in numbers from 200,000 to 3,000,000.* And the significant fact is that this growth represents a type of Jew that was hardly known to this country in 1881. Almost all of our American Jews have come from those provinces of Poland which were until recently parts of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The transplantation of millions of Jews from their mediaeval home in Central Europe — a trans¬ plantation which was perhaps not at first de¬ liberate and conscious, but which is becoming increasingly so — forms not only the most startling migration in the history of Israel, * Certain authorities insist that there are more than 3,000,000, but, in the lack of absolute information, this figure may be taken as a conservative esti¬ mate. 3o THE JEWS IN AMERICA but gives the United States its great “Jewish problem.” Unless the influx is artificially dammed there is not the slightest question that, in less than a generation, this great mass of Central European Jews will have been moved to this country. America will fulfill the role which Poland filled in the Middle Ages as the great home of the Jewish race. , It would have been strange if this eastern European Jew did not present such dissimi¬ larities to the type of Jew which had already been domesticated here as to seem almost to belong to an entirely different race. His his¬ tory had been a deplorable one. Possibly his remote ancestors may have resembled the Spanish Jew or the Jew from Bavaria and the Rhineland, but centuries of separation, in the era when means of communication were all but unknown, had produced a type that had little in common except a common re¬ ligion. The Polish Jew had lived for cen¬ turies among Slavs and physically he had taken on so many Slavic characteristics that there is little doubt that in his veins there flows a considerable amount of Slavic blood — just as in the Spanish Jews there flows a considerable mixture of Spanish blood. The THE JEWS IN AMERICA 31 brunette type — the Jew of coal-black eyes and raven hair — is perhaps the most com¬ monly met among the Polish Jews, but there was a considerable proportion of blonds — Jews and Jewesses with the fair hair and the blue and gray eyes that unquestionably in¬ dicate a considerable mixture with other races. Even that feature which is so dear to the cartoonist, the hooked nose, is infre¬ quently found among the so-called Russian Jews; their nose is more commonly retrousse or pug. The hair is not always kinky or curly, but more commonly straight — again a Slavic characteristic. While physically the Eastern Jew frequently resembled the peoples among which he had lived for centuries, and so presented traits which greatly contrasted with his co-religionists already established in this country, mentally and spiritually he is something entirely different. The thing that marked him most conspicu¬ ously was his religious orthodoxy. The long, unkempt beards, the trailing hair, the little curls about the ears — these carefully preserved stigmata of traditional Israel were merely the outward signs of lives that were lived strictly according to the teachings of rab- 32 THE JEWS IN AMERICA binical law. It is perhaps not strange that the Jewish communities already established in this country regarded these strange ap¬ paritions as peoples alien to themselves, and that, although they sympathized with their sufferings and gladly assisted in establishing them in their new environment, they refused to regard them as social equals, abhorred the idea of intermarriage, called them uPo- laks” and “hinter Berliners” — and practised against them, indeed, many of the discrimi¬ nations which all Jews have for generations suffered at the hands of their Gentile com¬ patriots. Strange as these Eastern Jews may have seemed in American eyes, their own bewilder¬ ment amid this new civilization was even greater. It would probably be impossible to find two states of society more dissimilar than Russia and the United States. These new Jewish immigrants came from a country that was still living in the Middle Ages, for Russia represented a condition of progress that was little removed from, say, England in the Twelfth Century. It must be remembered that up to 1 86 1 serfdom — a modified form of slavery — had been the social status of the THE JEWS IN AMERICA 33 Russian peasant; though a ukase of the Czar had ostensibly made him a free man, his actual condition had little changed; his life was still a squalid and poverty-stricken routine; he was totally illiterate and he lived apparently only to be exploited by the no¬ bility and the government. The graces and decencies of life had never been his portion; he was about as ignorant and stupid a human being as the earth contained. Russia was a great shambling agricultural country; at least 90 per cent, of the population lived on the farm; agricultural methods were extremely primitive; that industrialism which is the great feature of modern life had made prac¬ tically no progress. There were virtually only two orders of society: this great sluggish peasantry, ill-fed, ill-housed, purposely kept in ignorance and over-burdened with taxes, and above them a small group of exploiting nobles. Thus the environment to which the Russian Jews had been accustomed for many centuries was that of an inferior civilization. And in this Russia, numerous as the Russian Jews were, they had never been anything but aliens. The mediaeval conception of the Jew as a thing apart, as a cursed creature doomed 34 THE JEWS IN AMERICA to expiate the crime of the Crucifixion by ages of wandering and misery, represented Russian statesmanship as applied to this alien people. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews who reached America in the Seventeenth Century spoke Spanish and Portuguese; the German Jews who came in the Nineteenth Century spoke German; but the Eastern Jews, though they had lived for centuries in Poland and Russia, spoke neither Polish nor Russian, but an outlandish jargon, a combination of Ger¬ man and Hebrew, known as Yiddish. The fact that these people had not acquired as their vernacular the speech of the peoples among which they had sojourned so long, tells their story. In these old Polish provinces of Rus¬ sia the Jews had always been an imperium in imperio. They were not citizens; they were not a part of the Russian state; they were a separate entity, to a considerable extent being governed by their own laws. The Russian could no more convince of the Jews being admitted to the rights of citi¬ zenship than the Turk could look upon his non-Mohammedan populations as free men entitled to the same privileges as Moslems. The idea of citizenship as devel- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 35 oped in Anglo-Saxon countries — the concep¬ tion that every man, woman, and child has the same rights before the law — was entirely un¬ known to the half-western, half-Oriental Rus¬ sian state; the Jews were simply strangers, who really had no right to be living amid Christian peoples and who could justly be controlled by special laws. They paid taxes which their Christian neighbours did not pay; they were prohibited from owning or culti¬ vating the soil ; they could not be admitted to schools and universities except under certain restrictions. The Russian code contained more than one thousand articles directed exclusively against the Jews. The most seri¬ ous were those which restricted his rights of residence. Not only was the Russian Jew compelled to live in cities, but in cities in a certain part of the Empire — the seven¬ teen western provinces which formed the famous Pale of Settlement. He therefore did not possess those indispensable rights of a free man — of selecting the place where one will live and the occupation in which one chooses to engage. If the American Government should take 10,000,000 of its citizens, drive them into the cities of New 36 THE JEWS IN AMERICA England, prohibit them from living any¬ where else, oblige them to follow certain occupations, forbid them to own land, and heap upon them numerous other restrictions from which the mass of the population was free, we should reproduce a condition which resembles the fundamental fact in the ex¬ istence of the Jews in Russia. The over¬ crowding, the squalor, the poverty, the phy¬ sical misery that resulted from this herding are indescribable; the gaunt and hunted faces, the weary eyes, the hollow chests and the shrivelled frames of the shiploads of human wretchedness that began to land at Castle Garden in the ’eighties only faintly reflected the hideous restrictions to which these people had so long been subjected. Despite these limitations, the Jews had at¬ tained a definite economic position in Russian society. Russia, as already made clear, had only two social orders — its great impassive peasantry and its nobles. Yet a country with 160,000,000 people, even though most of them are engaged in agriculture, must necessarily stand in need of business men. The Russian masses themselves were too ig¬ norant and too indolent to fulfill this function THE JEWS IN AMERICA 37 and the Russian nobles, in accordance with the standards of their caste, regarded “trade” as degrading. Naturally the Jew, with his keen aptitude for business, stepped into the vacant place. For centuries the Jews had thus been the middlemen of Russia. The laws restrict¬ ing residence did not apply to the merchant class; at all times these laws were constantly evaded; the result was that in every part of Russia trade and commerce were in Jewish hands. They were the shopkeepers, large and small, the bankers, the commission men, the grain merchants, the money lenders, the vodka dealers, the tavern and hotel keepers; above all — and this was the occupation that made them especially unpopular with the peasantry — they were the stewards of the nobility, the' managers of their estates, the men whose business it was to wring the last copek which the much-burdened husbandman could pay as rent. The Jew was the obnox¬ ious person who moved between the manor and the hut, and the fact that he usually farmed the revenue on shares made him an especially rapacious persecutor in the peas¬ ants’ eyes. His position as liquor seller — and alcoholism was the besetting vice of the mujik 38 THE JEWS IN AMERICA — increased the public odium in which he was generally held. Yet this influx from Russia contained also a considerable mass of manual workers, for the most part of the unskilled kind, though skilled Jewish workmen were not unknown. The Russians themselves were tillers of the soil and in the cities of the Pale the great majority of the handicraftsmen were Jews. They were carpenters, house painters, plumb¬ ers, glaziers — indeed they worked as artisans in practically every occupation, usually for the most beggarly wages ; above all, however, they were workers in the tailoring trades. Sev¬ eral explanations have been furnished for the mysterious attraction which the manufacture of wearing apparel has for the Jew. One of the most plausible is that it is merely a natural development from dealing in second¬ hand clothing — one of the inferior occupa¬ tions to which the Jew was reduced by legal restrictions. Another is that the Jew is, com¬ pared with the average Gentile, of poor phy¬ sique, with less muscular power, and that he is therefore better adapted to the needle trades than to more robust occupations. Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that the THE JEWS IN AMERICA 39 clothing business in Russia, both on the manu¬ facturing and the merchandizing side, has for generations been a Jewish monopoly. Simi¬ larly the great mass of Jewish artisans in America are workers in the clothing trades, and this at once emphasizes another respect in which Russian Jewish immigration differs from that which had come from Spain and from Germany. The Spanish Jews were mainly bankers, high-class merchants and tradesmen, professional men and scholars; the Germans, when they arrived — though their economic status has vastly improved — were small shopkeepers, peddlers, rag pickers, pawnbrokers; but the Russian Jews, besides having a large number of this type of trades¬ men, also possessed a large proportion of un¬ skilled workers in the needle trades, hectic in their industry, remorseless in their competitive zeal. Yet the motive that first started this great Western exodus was not economic. The Russian Jews were not primarily immigrants looking for jobs; they were rather political refugees. America’s present Jewish problem has its origin in a sensational event of the year 1881. The crazy Nihilist who hurled a 4o THE JEWS IN AMERICA bomb at Czar Alexander II was the ultimate creator of the New York Ghetto and the man who added 3,000,000 Jews to the American population. For the direct result of that act was to put the reactionary party into power in Russia. The murdered Czar had been liberal in his tendencies; he had emancipated the serfs, and, at the moment of his assassi¬ nation, he was about to issue a Russian Con¬ stitution. His death ended all that. It caused a national revulsion against every¬ thing resembling free institutions — or, as the Russian votaries of autocracy put it, the “rotten parliamentarism of the West.” Anything suggesting democracy became ana¬ thema in the eyes of these new forces. One of the strangest figures in modern history now became the supreme power in Russia. This was M. Pobiedonostseff, the Procurator of the Holy Synod. Compared to this sharp- featured Russian obscurantist, Bismarck was a democrat and the ex-Kaiser a second edition of Thomas Jefferson. In his philosophy the greatest evil of modern life was the thing usually known as “progress.” Popular edu¬ cation, freedom of speech and of the press, religious toleration, representative govern- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 41 ment — these modern ideas were the inventions of the devil, and, as such, would necessarily bring destruction to Holy Russia. Pobie- donostseff, therefore, set himself to bringing the darkest period of the Middle Ages back to Russia — though most observers believe that Russia had not emerged very far from that period. In his new and purified Russia there were three great pillars — autocracy, Greek orthodoxy, and nationalism, and anything or anybody that interfered with these three great aims was to be ruthlessly destroyed. Naturally one of the most formidable obsta¬ cles in his way were the Jews. They were the enemies— or were so regarded — of Russian nationalism — for they were not Russians, and, according to the accepted idea, never could become such ; neither were they members of the Greek Orthodox Church, and not likely to be converted. Necessarily any complete Russification of Russia must dispose first of all of the Jews. When asked how he was to get rid of them, PobiedonostsefT replied — at least he is reported as replying, “One third will be converted, one third will be massacred, and one third will emigrate.” To just what extent the first item in this programme was 42 THE JEWS IN AMERICA carried through is not definitely known; the indications are that it was not particularly successful. The persecutions and pogroms which now began all over Russia, and which have continued with only occasional breathing spells up to the present time, represented a sincere effort to make good on the second de¬ tail. These onslaughts on the Jews were in¬ deed of an atrocious character. Whatever the Russian masses may have thought of the governmental programme as a whole, there is no doubt that its anti-Jewish activities were popular, for the sons of Israel were every¬ where detested. The earliest manifestations took the form of expulsions from other parts of Russia into the Pale of Settlement. The residential laws had largely fallen into abey¬ ance during the mild rule of Alexander II, and thousands of Jews were illegally living in prohibited areas. The May laws of 1 88 1 required all these unfortunates to pull up stakes and withdraw to the Pale, and, when they did not move fast enough, the Cossacks fell upon them and drove them from their homes with every conceivable form of bru¬ tality. These expulsions and these massacres had THE JEWS IN AMERICA 43 another purpose — and one which was chiefly interesting to the United States. When the Jews protested against these proceedings to Count Ignatieff, the author of the May laws, he made this laconic answer: “The Western borders are open to you Jews.” Up to this time Russia had had vigorous laws prohibit¬ ing emigration; but now she began to relax these laws. One privilege was extended to the Jews that was withheld from all other deni¬ zens of the Czar’s dominion: they were not only permitted but invited to leave the country. Such was the original impetus of the move¬ ment that, in forty years, increased the Jew¬ ish population of the United States from 200,000 to 3,000,000. CHAPTER II DO THE JEWS DOMINATE AMERICAN FINANCE? I THE progress which the Jews are making in the economic life of the United States is generally regarded as one of the most con¬ spicuous portents of the times. The phrases that are not infrequently used to describe this progress — the “menace” of the Jew, the “Jewish peril,” the “Judaization” of America — best portray the emotions which it arouses in certain quarters. It is the ambition of the Jewish race, we are told, to “dominate” the United States. This is the ultimate achieve¬ ment in a widespread Jewish plot to conquer modern civilization, to destroy its Christian quality, to heap up its accumulated riches all to the glory of Israel. Probably there is no more astounding fact in modern life than the seriousness with which certain people have accepted a curious document which has been 44 THE JEWS IN AMERICA 45 widely circulated in all European countries and the United States in the last four or five years. This is known as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” It purports to describe a campaign waged by the Jews with diabolical persistence for the destruction of modern civi¬ lization and the erection of a universal Jewish state on the ruins. If one accepts this docu¬ ment as authentic, he must believe that the Jews, for several centuries, have been working with supreme ability and supreme malevolence to wreck all Christian nations, to set them at cross purposes with one another, to start wars, revolutions, riots, strikes, financial panics — to create disorder everywhere, all for the pur¬ pose of overturning the present system of so¬ ciety. They started the French Revolution, all the wars of the Nineteenth Century, the re¬ cently ended World War; their supreme ac¬ complishment, a foretaste of the chaos and the ruin that they plan to precipitate in every civilized country, is the Bolshevist regime in Russia. Naturally in this plan of mighty conquest the United States represents an ulti¬ mate goal. The fact that there are 3,000,000 Jews in this country, that they “control” or “dominate” so many departments of American 46 THE JEWS IN AMERICA life, is hailed as proof that this century-old conspiracy is rapidly achieving success. Certainly this is a scheme so magnificent in its iniquity that it is in itself almost a compli¬ ment to any racial group to which it is at¬ tributed, especially one so numerically infer¬ ior and so generally ostracized as the Jews ; not less astonishing than the plot itself is the fact that so many normally level-headed people be¬ lieve it. That Henry Ford should base his anti-Jewish campaign upon these “Protocols” is perhaps not surprising; but that such organs of public opinion as the London Morning Post and the London Spectator should take them seriously is much more significant. What, then, is the truth, so far as the United States is concerned? Are the American peo¬ ple being “Judaized”? First of all, are American business and finance rapidly pass¬ ing into the hands of the sons of Abraham? This conspiracy of the “Elders of Zion” is the most startling discovery of the Anti- Semite, yet its conception involves a quality which the anti-Semitic writers themselves have always denied the Jews. “The Jew,” says the historian Mommsen, “unlike the Oc¬ cidental, has not received the gift of political THE JEWS IN AMERICA 47 organization”; and it is not only in matters national and political that this same failing is apparent. If there is one thing that the Jews have proved in their age-long wandering over the face of the earth, it is that they lack the power of cooperation. They occupy their present isolated position, not because they have been persecuted by the Christians, but because they lack that aptitude for coherence and organization whose ultimate expression is nationality. This nomadic tendency of Israel is nothing new. It is not even modern. It does not date from the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A. D., as most people suppose; the Jewish proclivity for circulating among other un¬ friendly peoples was as much a feature of the ancient world as it is of the present one. The city of Rome, in the mixture of its peoples, filled a place in ancient times not unlike that occupied by the New York of the present day; and Jews were proportionately almost as com¬ mon along the Tiber in the days of Julius Caesar as they are along the Hudson in the days of Warren G. Harding. “This remark¬ able people” — I am again quoting Mommsen — “yielding and yet tenacious, was in the an¬ cient as in the modern world everywhere and 48 THE JEWS IN AMERICA nowhere at home, and everywhere and no¬ where powerful. The successors of David and Solomon were of hardly more significance for the Jews of that age than Jerusalem for those of the present day; the nation furnished doubt¬ less for its religious and intellectual unity a visible rally-point in the petty kingdom of Jerusalem, but the nation itself consisted not merely of the subjects of the Hasmonaeans, but of the innumerable bodies of Jews scattered through the whole Parthian and Roman empire . . . How numerous even in Rome the Jewish population was already be¬ fore Caesar’s time, and how closely the Jews even then kept together as fellow countrymen, is shown by the remark of an author of this period, that it was dangerous for a governor to offend the Jews in his province, because he might then certainly reckon on being hissed after his return by the populace of the cap¬ ital.” And the great historian adds another important detail. The usual explanation for the trading and commercial propensities of the Jew and his aversion to agriculture, is that the laws of the Christian world have prevented him from owning land and thus have forced him into business activities. Yet, THE JEWS IN AMERICA 49 according to Mommsen, the Jew of Rome in the day of Julius Cassar was precisely like the Jew of modern times; he was scattered in all parts of the Roman world, and, as to-day, he was a city dweller and a trader. The individ¬ ualistic trading instinct of the Jew is not the result of fortuitous circumstances; it is in¬ herent in the very germ-plasm of the race. Evidently this absence of national organi¬ zation, this inability to cooperate for the achievement of a unified purpose, is a deep- lying racial trait. It explains why the Jews lost their standing as a nation and why they have never regained it. Read the story of the fall of Jerusalem, as painted by the great Eng¬ lish historian of the Jews, Dean Milman. Why did Jerusalem succumb? Not neces¬ sarily because Titus had greater military strength, but because the Jews themselves were divided. While the siege was going on, and all the resources of the Jews were needed to resist the exterior enemy, three factions within the city were engaged in brawls and riots, massacring one another in most horrible fashion. Though this is an extreme illustra¬ tion, the fact remains that the most conspicu¬ ous trait of the Jew is an intense individual- 50 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ism. Each man is an entity in himself; the faculty of association, even in matters that con¬ cern his own race and religion, does not ap¬ pear to be an Hebraic quality. The million and a half Jews who comprise the Jewish population of New York City are standing illustrations of this truth. Their intense individualism regulates practically every phase of their daily existence. From this point of view there is no sight more signif¬ icant than that of Fifth Avenue, south of Thirty-Second Street, at the noon hour, when the Jewish workers in the clothing factories, many thousands strong, pour into this great thoroughfare. It is one of the New York sights that most astonishes the visitor. New York has plenty of other crowds, but this one differs from the others. The aggregation moves differently from most human groups; it advances more slowly; there is a conspicuous lack of order; the pavement seems full of ob¬ structions ; little assemblages stand frequently in the middle of the throng, forcing the pedes¬ trian to make detours around them. Most American crowds divide into two files, going in opposite directions, an instinctive arrange¬ ment that produces order and comfort; but THE JEWS IN AMERICA 51 this is not invariably the case with these throngs of Jewish clothing workers. Each person seems to be for himself; he takes the right side, the left side, or the middle, irre¬ spective of any rules of the road; he fre¬ quently travels in the street; the result is an impression of a slow-moving, rather aimless horde, without precision and without the slightest regard for cooperation. The scene is typical of the Jewish community as a whole. It really consists of a mass of inco¬ herent human particles, each revolving in his own orbit. This complaint constantly runs through all the Jewish literature produced in New York. The difficulty of making their people cooper¬ ate for Jewish ends, even in so inspiring a cause as Zionism, is the perpetual despair of the leaders of their race. The disregard with which the mass of New York Jews treat their own religion is the unending complaint of the rabbis. The problem of the unchurched is one of the pressing issues of Protestantism, and, to a lesser degree, of Catholicism, but even more acute is the Jewish problem of the unsynagogued. The synagogue itself is per¬ haps the most outstanding illustration of Jew- 52 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ish individualism. There are 700 or 800 syna¬ gogues in Greater New York, but each one is a separate group, having absolutely no rela¬ tion with the others. The Jewish religion is the only one in the United States which exists without an organization; there are no Jewish bishops, or presbyters, or conferences, or con¬ vocations; all attempts to create a Grand Rabbi, a functionary who would have a kind of pope-like supervision over all the Jewish congregations, have failed. In politics the same condition prevails. There is no such thing as the “Jewish vote”; Jews notoriously vote independently — be it said to their credit; a Jewish district that goes Republican this year may go Democratic the next. If the Jews of New York acted as a political unit, they could easily control the city and capture many of the offices; yet that trait which the politicians regard as their “instability” all but robs them of political influence. Though the Jews are far more numerous than the Irish, there are only five or six Jewish district lead¬ ers out of thirty-two in Tammany Hall; the Irish still control this organization. The Jews cannot be depended on to vote even for members of their own race; they could easily THE JEWS IN AMERICA 53 have elected Morris Hillquit mayor in 1917, and, had they manifested that clannishness in politics which their critics regard as a Jewish quality, they would certainly have done so; instead, the masses threw their support to the Irish candidate of Tammany Hall, John F. Hylan. The fact that the only large com¬ pact vote obtained by Mr. Hillquit was in the Jewish sections is another phase of the Jewish question which will be discussed in a subsequent chapter. The Jewish labour leaders are always com¬ plaining of the unresponsiveness of their peo¬ ple. The fact that almost every barrel orator operating in New York streets is a recent importation from Russia, creates the impres¬ sion that the Jews are enthusiastic devotees of trade unionism ; yet the truth is quite the other way. That they are persistent “joiners” and that, at times of crisis, they do engage in great and tumultuous strikes, is true; yet it is also true that they hold their allegiance lightly, that they backslide as soon as the particular strike is over, and that they are most unde¬ pendable as dues payers. The explanation is that trade unionism demands organization, and that the power of organization is not a 54 THE JEWS IN AMERICA characteristic of this individualistic race. It is just as significant that stocks and bonds are difficult to sell in the New York Jewish quarter. The Russian immigrant cannot understand that a piece of paper can possibly be property. Stocks and bonds imply joint ownership, cooperation, organization, where¬ as the Jewish conception of property is indi¬ vidualistic. Diamonds that he can carry in his pocket, a tenement house that he can own and manage himself, a push-cart that his arms can propel through the streets, a small shop that he can operate to his own personal profit, even a great bank in which the system of con¬ trol is either individual or a select partner¬ ship — these are the forms of business enter¬ prise in which the Jewish genius best expresses itself. But the mere possession of a scrap of paper that makes the Jew a partner with sev¬ eral thousand others, and this in a form of property — such as a railroad, a steel mill, a great factory — which he never sees, and which he cannot manage exclusively himself, fails to arouse his interest. In business, as in pol¬ itics, in religion, and in social activities, the Jew is thus primarily an individualist. It is the one clear and unfailing quality of an THE JEWS IN AMERICA 55 otherwise complex character. Perhaps the Jew’s constitutional restlessness under re¬ straint, his determination to strike out for him¬ self, his unwillingness to accept the station in which circumstances have placed him, explain this independence; at any rate, the quality is an active one and is of the utmost importance in considering the place which the Jew oc¬ cupies in American life. In itself it shows that the idea that the Jew is organized in a mighty secret plot having ramifications in all parts of the world for the undermining of Christian civilization, is about the most gro¬ tesque manifestation of that hysteria which is part of the psychosis which we owe to the World War. II Another point which must be subjected to analysis is the prevalent belief in the supe¬ riority of the Jewish mind. Americans are constantly being informed that the Jewish school child is more intelligent than is the child of any of the other races making up the American population. The bitterest enemies of the Jews attribute to them a keenness of intellect, a talent for success, not only in busi- 56 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ness and finance, but in the arts, far above that met with in Gentiles; indeed, that is one of the stock grievances against the race. So universal is this impression that it may seem a little absurd to submit it to investigation. Yet, after all, is it true? In several thousand years of history, in what respect have the Jews demonstrated greater mental power than the Gentiles among whom they have lived? Possibly the judgment of mankind has awarded them the priority in religious leader¬ ship, instancing the prophets from Abraham to Jesus Christ; yet in the arts and mechanisms that make up what we call modern civilization it is not at all clear that the Jews have reached a higher level than the European races. If we examine from this point of view the sev¬ eral phases of progress, one fact seems to stand out conspicuously. In practically all of them the Jews have shown talent of a high order; in practically none of them have they demonstrated preeminent genius. In music, in poetry, statesmanship, and science the Jews can exhibit several leaders of unusual ability; the few lofty mountain tops that emblazon that lonely quality known as genius are held by Gentiles. The Jews have great powers THE JEWS IN AMERICA 57 of imitation; they can develop the ideas and principles of others; the mighty gift of crea¬ tion, however, they possess only in a mod¬ erate degree. Wagner, in his essay on “The Jews and Music,” denies them creative power in this art. They have lesser lights — a Mendelssohn, a Meyerbeer, an Offenbach; they have no Beethoven, no Mozart, or — he might have added — no Wagner. In poetry they have a Heine, but no Milton, no Byron, no Keats, no Wordsworth. In the drama they possess sev¬ eral figures of minor importance, but where is the Jewish Shakespeare or Moliere or Schiller? In statesmanship they have a Dis¬ raeli, but no Cromwell or Pitt or Washington or Lincoln. What Jewish orator is there to put in the same class with Burke or Fox or Sheridan or Webster? What Jewish jurist ranks with Blackstone, Lord Mansfield, or John Marshall? In philosophy indeed the Jews do possess one man of the very first rank, Spinoza, and that exception to the gen¬ eralization made above must be noted; but in science is there any Jewish name to put beside Copernicus or La Place or Galileo or Newton or Darwin — unless, indeed, the recent work 58 THE JEWS IN AMERICA of Einstein may ultimately include him in these exalted ranks? Even in that branch in which the Jews have been especially active and in which they have demonstrated great ability, medicine and surgery, their names by no means occupy the first place. Run over the list of the great medical discoveries of the last three centuries from that of the circu¬ lation of the blood to that of bacteriology; the most impressive fact is that the vast majority of the preeminent brains are Gentiles. Even in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, when Jewish scholarship in this country and in Europe has had free scope, the great accom¬ plishments have been made by non-Jews. Probably the greatest medical achievements of modern times were the discovery of vaccina¬ tion, of anaesthetics, and of bacteriology; the first was English, the second American, the third French. Indeed it would probably be possible to mention half-a-dozen American achievements — such as anaesthetics, ovari¬ otomy, Marion Sims’s work in gynecology, Dr. Beaumont’s discovery of the laws of digestion, Dr. Holmes’s discovery of the contagious¬ ness of child-bed fever, Dr. Walter Reed’s work in yellow fever — to which Jewish med- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 59 ical science can present few parallels. In this department, as in the arts, the Jewish mind lacks the great faculty of creation; Jew¬ ish medical scientists, such as MetchnikofF, Ehrlich, and Wasserman, have important achievements to their credit, but their work consists in elaborating principles discovered by other men; the work of the three mention¬ ed, for example, is all based upon the orig¬ inal investigations of Pasteur. Nor is it any sufficient answer to point to the comparatively small number of Jews, for one of the most certain teachings of history is that the genius of a people, and the proportion of great men it produces, has no relation to its numbers. The genius of the English people had its finest flowering in the days of Elizabeth, when the population of the little island was less than two million. The genius of the Greeks reached its most eloquent expression in the days of Pericles when the population was only a few hundred thousand. The small numbers of the Jews as compared with Gentiles is therefore no reason why they should not have produced a great array of geniuses of the first class if, as we have been taught to believe, we are dealing with a race of supermen. 6o THE JEWS IN AMERICA Thus the prevailing idea that the Jewish mind is superior to the Gentile is disproved by the most cursory examination of human achievement, though that it is quick, nimble, talented, sometimes to an astonishing degree, is apparent. The records of Jewish and “American” children — the latter term is not entirely satisfactory, yet it does convey a definite classification — in the New York pub¬ lic schools brings out the same point. Here again we at once come into conflict with a con¬ viction which is as general as it is untrue. That Jewish children are superior mentally to the other breeds is usually accepted, even by Gentile writers, as a demonstrated fact. Yet there is no evidence substantiating this be¬ lief. That Jewish children are more indus¬ trious, that they will work six hours at their studies where “American” children work two or three, and that they are therefore likely to carry off a disproportionate share of the prizes, does seem to be true — though this fact, also, is merely an impression, and has not been submitted to examination ; but that they have better minds, that their mental processes are more rapid and more accurate, that they are capable of greater intellectual achievements, THE JEWS IN AMERICA 61 is not believed by those who come daily into contact with them. I have myself discussed this question with Jewish teachers in the New York public schools. They do believe that the Jewish mind is better than that of the southern Italian and other immigrating races, but they at once deny that it is superior to that of the native “American” stock. The recently conducted “psychological tests” seem to en¬ dorse this statement. If we examine the rec¬ ords of a public school, where the population is overwhelmingly Jewish, and of another where the native American names are very numerous, any idea that the Jewish intellect is superior to that of the Anglo-Saxon at once disappears. The test chiefly valuable from this point of view is the one known as “I. Q.” — the “intelligence quotient” — which regis¬ ters the rapidity and accuracy of the child’s mental operations. The records of the Jew¬ ish children show the widest divergences. A great many, of course, evidence mental qual¬ ities above the normal; but there are also a large number whose mental qualities are sub¬ normal. On the whole, the record is a firmly good one. (Incidentally, it may be remarked that whenever an Italian name is noted, 62 THE JEWS IN AMERICA the type of mind revealed is usually be¬ low par.) Excellent as the Jewish intelli¬ gence appears, it is no better than that of the children who bear such names as “Anderson,” “Andrews,” “Robinson,” and the like; the im¬ pression left after looking over several hun¬ dred names is that the “Intelligence Quo¬ tient” of these latter children is uniformly on a considerably higher level than the Jewish. Ill It seems fair to say that the Jewish mind lacks two qualities — the creative faculty and the ability to organize or to cooperate. In estimating the progress of the Jews in the United States, these facts are of the utmost consequence, for these are the qualities in which Americans, at least in their industrial and economic development, are preeminent. Certainly the prime attribute of American business and finance has been its genius for organization. Individualism passed out of American enterprise a generation ago. Even the co-partnership, as a method of conducting business, ceased to be important soon after the Civil War. The stock company and the corporation succeeded it; then came the trust, THE JEWS IN AMERICA 63 the combination of subsidiary corporations, with its hundreds of millions of securities, its great boards of directors, its highly efficient and specialized executive staffs. The story of American industry is a long chronicle of trusts, combinations, holding companies, and interlocking directorates; the history of American railroads also has represented the linking of one railroad to another, the crea¬ tion of mighty trunk systems out of thousands of distinct, uncoordinated lines; similarly, American banking and finance centres in vast aggregations of capital, under corpora¬ tion control. This tendency to concentration has perhaps led to glaring abuses; it has cer¬ tainly aroused much popular antagonism; but it at least brings into striking emphasis the fact that American enterprise demands above all the quality of team play. Solitary indi¬ vidualistic undertakings make little progress; everything is the product of energetic leader¬ ship working through organization. American enterprise has also possessed another quality; it has been preeminently creative. A Chicago professor once caused international laughter by his comparison of Shakespeare and Rockefeller; both, he de- 64 THE JEWS IN AMERICA dared, were great creative artists; both had the imaginative instinct to that degree that constitutes genius; one happened to express himself in writing plays, the other in develop- ing a great world-wide industry. Perhaps the illustration was a little unfortunate, yet there is in the idea a certain amount of truth. Arnold Bennett described the American tele¬ phone system as the most “poetic” achieve¬ ment of the United States. The develop¬ ment of the American telephone from a mere mechanical toy into an agency that reaches practically every American house and farmhouse and puts practically every person in the United States into immediate speaking touch with every other person ; the concentra¬ tion of a thousand agencies, manufacturing, technical, executive, under a single head, for the accomplishment of this one purpose; this kind of an achievement is something new in the history of the human race; it really rep¬ resents the creative faculty working in an entirely new field. The story of steel — the thousands of new uses to which it has been put, the most daring of which, perhaps, is the erection of many-storied buildings — enforces the same point. Until the inven- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 65 tion of American farm machinery, agricul¬ tural methods had changed little from the days of the Babylonians; the sickles used by our great grandfathers differed little from those that are dug up in Etruscan tombs. The American adoption of machinery to the proc¬ esses of farming, the energy with which Americans have carried these improvements into every corner of the world so that Ameri¬ can harvesters are now almost as commonly met with on the banks of the Nile and the Ganges as along the borders of the Missouri and the Platte; the tremendous consequences, social, political, and economic, of this devel¬ opment — there is only one word for this sort of thing: it is creative genius applied to indus¬ try. The imagination that could conceive and carry out the idea of transforming the automo¬ bile from the luxury of the rich into an article of comfort and necessity of the everyday citi¬ zen, clearly belongs in the same class. For ages petroleum had lain unused in millions of pools under the earth’s surface; the skill that brought this to the light of day, that pumped it thousands of miles in pipe lines, that with it made millions of homes almost as light at night as at noonday, and that trans- 66 THE JEWS IN AMERICA formed it into so many uses that “oil” is now recognized as almost the most important ele¬ ment in world politics; this is creative genius of a different kind than that which produces a “Hamlet” and a “Macbeth,” yet it is crea¬ tive genius all the same. It at once becomes apparent that the Rus¬ sian Jew, in transferring himself from eastern Europe to the United States, came into contact with a kind of competition which he had never before encountered in his more than two thousand years of wanderings. He met both a new kind of people and entirely new surroundings. He came from a country where trade and industry had for centuries been looked down upon as degrading oc¬ cupations, unworthy of gentlemen; he came to a country where these had for several gene¬ rations engaged the energies of many of its finest brains. His old home had progressed not far beyond the mediaeval stage; 90 per cent, of its population were ignorant, illiterate peasants engaged in agriculture; in his new home the prevailing note was modernity; education was universal; equality of oppor¬ tunity was almost the national religion; the industrial centres contained a great artisan THE JEWS IN AMERICA 67 class famous for its skill and its energy; the farming sections supported an aggregate of nearly 7,000,000 landholders, who, in intel¬ ligence, education, self-respect, and all that goes to make energetic, upstanding citizen¬ ship, formed an amazing contrast to the brut¬ ish, dull-witted mujik who had for generations been the Jews’ conception of a husbandman. Perhaps the greatest difference in the Old World and the New World environment was the fact that Russia, Austria, and Rumania had only two social classes, the nobility and the peasantry, divided by an all but impene¬ trable wall, while the bulk of the American people were composed of a vast middle class, which found readily accessible the path of transition into the ranks of the educated and the prosperous. Above all, however, was the difference in the racial stock — in the germ- plasm from which the Slavic and American peoples had developed. The American popu¬ lation had come from northwestern Europe, the part of the world which has unmistakably led in modern progress, especially in commer¬ cial and industrial progress. Overwhelmingly its largest element had been derived from Eng¬ land, Scotland, and Wales; clearly, therefore, 68 THE JEWS IN AMERICA in native talent and energy the Jew was to pit himself against a higher type of mind than had for centuries tested his qualities in his wanderings through Spain, the Levant, east¬ ern Germany, Poland, Austria, and Russia. If, as the anti-Semitic writers assert, the Jew is essentially an exploiter of inferior peoples, a person who attaches himself to the body of an industrious people and, by superior persist¬ ence and cunning, extracts the profit of its toil, it is quite apparent that this extremely intelli¬ gent American population would be more difficult to “exploit” than the sodden Euro¬ pean peasantry. When it comes to shrewd trading the Yankee himself is no despicable antagonist. Before he is anything else he is a business man, and, at a matching of business talents, even so capable a person as a Jew needs to sharpen his wits. A well-known Jewish lawyer, once retained as an associate in an important case by Joseph H. Choate, was appalled at the size of the check which Mr. Choate sent him — his share of an ex¬ tremely generous fee. “Oh Joseph, Joseph,” he wrote in acknowledgment, “almost thou persuadest me to become a Christian!” It is therefore perhaps not surprising that THE JEWS IN AMERICA 69 the Jew has made no astonishing economic progress in this country. Probably this state¬ ment itself will at once cause a general demur¬ rer. The success of the Jew has become almost a fixed idea. That he turns to gold whatever he touches; that he rapidly gains possession of financial power; that he “domi¬ nates” business and finance ; that he practises a kind of competition which other races can¬ not meet; that for these reasons his pres¬ ence is a standing “menace” to American life — these beliefs have gained so firm a foot¬ hold in the popular mind that it is per¬ haps useless to subject them to examination. Yet the so-called “dominance” of the Jew is perhaps the strangest illusion abroad at the present time. It is difficult to see how it ever originated. Mr. Henry Ford has spent a fortune in his recent investigation of the Jewish problem; his theme has been this “Jewish control” of America’s wealth. Yet the most hasty survey of the American scene demonstrates the absurdity of this idea. The actual wonder is not that the Jew has ac¬ complished so much in the United States but that he has really accomplished so little. The one aptitude which is unanimously at- 70 THE JEWS IN AMERICA tributed to the Jews is a genius for banking and finance. He has always been a money¬ lender; the idea that this is an occupation to which he was forced by Christian persecution is, as already shown, not well founded; from his earliest appearance the Jew has shown great talents as a banker. What then is his position in American finance? The great financial power of the United States rests with the national banks, the trust companies, the savings banks, the life insurance companies, and other mighty fiduciary institutions of like character. Into these huge receptacles the liquid capital of the American people steadily pours in an unending stream. The national banks have deposits of $15,500,000,000, the trust companies, of $10,000,000,000, the sav¬ ings banks hold $26,000,000,000. Here is an aggregate of $51,500,000,000; these billions of dollars comprise what the common man re¬ gards as “money”; they are cash resources which are constantly available for the stimula¬ tion of business, of agriculture, of the develop¬ ment of the nation in a thousand ways. These aggregations represent the colossal financial power of more than one hundred millions of American people. Any man, or any group of THE JEWS IN AMERICA 71 men, or any racial unit, which could control this reservoir would “dominate” American finance; unless such a group did control these resources any suggestion of “domination” would be childish folly. Do the Jews exer¬ cise any such control? Everyone can apply the test for himself. Run over the list of di¬ rectors and officers of the national bank or the savings bank in your region; how many Jews do you find occupying such places? If there is one American city where the Jews should exercise such power it is New York, for half the Jews in the United States are found within its boundaries. Of its six million people and more, at least one and a half million are Jews. Most of these have come in the last forty years, but at least 200,000 or 300,000 have an origin that goes back much further; the race has had plenty of time to acquire prominence if it pos¬ sessed the indomitable talent for success which is attributed to it. But reading the lists of the great financial and fiduciary in¬ stitutions of New York brings out no more astonishing fact than the infrequency with which Jewish names are encountered. He who believes in the ability of the “Anglo- Saxon” element will have his vanity tickled; 72 THE JEWS IN AMERICA for the one fact this investigation proves is that the brains and energies of the nation are still found in largest proportion in the racial stock that founded it. The names of an overwhelming majority of the bank presidents and officers and directors of New York are English and Scotch. The greatest banks are the National City, Charles E. Mitchell, President; the Chase National, Albert H. Wiggin, President ;the First National, George F. Baker, President; the Chemical National, Percy H. Johnson, President; the Park Na¬ tional, Richard Delafield, President; the Guaranty Trust Co., Charles H. Sabin, Presi¬ dent; the Bankers Trust Company, Seward Prosser, President. It is safe to say that hardly anything of magnitude can be accom¬ plished in financial New York without the co¬ operation of these institutions. Not only are the officers almost exclusively Christian, but a Jewish director on one of their boards is the greatest rarity. The National City Bank — the “Standard Oil Bank” — the most powerful financial institution in New York, with de¬ posits of $644,000,000, has 22 directors; not one of them is a Jew. The Chase National has 22; not a single Jew. The list could be THE JEWS IN AMERICA 73 extended indefinitely. The Bowery Savings Bank is located in the lower East Side, in the great Russian Jewish section; its deposits are drawn largely from the poor Jewish workers; its president is Henry A. Schenck, and of its directors, the Jewish representation is small. The great trust companies are similarly under Gentile “domination.” The great life insur¬ ance companies — the Equitable, the Mutual, the New York Life, the Mutual Benefit of New Jersey — whose financial power is almost unlimited — are similarly a Gentile preserve. Some years ago the greatest financial scandal in American history involved the first three of these; the abuses brought to light were of that peculiar kind which the anti-Semitic writer likes to portray as “Jewish”; the directors, that is, were found “exploiting” the resources of the policy holders; practi¬ cally all the names that conspicuously figured in this unsavoury affair, however, were Christian. Why does the Jew, supposedly the world’s keenest financial mind, have so little in¬ fluence in these great fortresses of liquid capital? The Jew himself would probably answer that a prejudice exists against him; 74 THE JEWS IN AMERICA that there is a conscious effort to exclude him. But that is an unsatisfactory explanation. The fact that there is an occasional Jew occupying a position of importance in these institutions shows that there is no bar to his success provided he possesses the essential qualifications. The real solution lies deeper; it will be found in what has already been said about the Jew as an individualist. So long as banking was an enterprise in which an indi¬ vidual, or a group of individuals, could suc¬ cessfully engage, then the Jew stood a much better chance of survival — even of “domi¬ nance.” The great bankers of Europe in the Nineteenth Century were the Rothschilds; the Rothschilds were, and are, merely a family group, working sympathetically, but with the loosest kind of an organization. They are really pawnbrokers on a grand scale. They lend to governments and to private en¬ terprises — always as individuals. Forty years ago August Belmont, a Jew from Frankfort, who came to the United States as American representative of the Rothschilds, was far more prominent as a banker than is the house of that name to-day; the Seligmans, a banking family that really represented an attempt THE JEWS IN AMERICA 75 to establish something in the nature of an American Rothschild dynasty, rendered great service in financing the Federal Govern¬ ment in the Civil War; the house of Seligman, which is still important, by no means occupies the position now that it did then. The point is that American banking and finance are rapidly losing their old individualistic char¬ acter. The business is now being done by great corporations, even by great “trusts.” Financial power is controlled by large aggre¬ gations of stockholders who exercise their power through the agency of boards of directors, presidents, vice-presidents, and the like. The prime quality that is needed for success is that of cooperation, of team work, ability to lead great forces of subordinates, to work as a unit in a great organization. The present-day banker does not operate with his own capital, but with that of thousands of depositors; he does not necessarily labour to build up a great institution which he owns himself; he is daily constructing an edifice in which his proprietor's right is frequently quite small. These qualities are not Jewish qualities. There is one great centre of Jewish financial 76 THE JEWS IN AMERICA power in New York; in all discussions of the “international Jew” the firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. invariably occupies the centre of the stage. That this is an institution of great importance is true. Yet this, like all the big Jewish financial houses of New York — Speyer & Co., Hallgarten & Co., Goldman, Sachs & Co., Lazard Freres — is a private bank. It is a partnership, not a corporation. It is also an exceedingly close partnership, almost a family affair; an examination shows that tendency to intermarriage which the Rothschilds regarded as an essential part of their success; thus Mr. Jacob H. Schiff married the daughter of Solomon Loeb, Mr. Otto H.Kahn married the daughter of Abra¬ ham Wolf — an important member of the firm until his death about twenty years ago — Mr. Paul Warburg married the daughter of Solo¬ mon Loeb, and Mr. Felix Warburg married the daughter of Jacob H. Schiff. The tend¬ ency to make the Jewish banking houses asso¬ ciations of relatives, either by blood or by mar¬ riage, is a characteristic of Jewish financial houses; the banking house of Lehman Broth¬ ers, of New York, will admit no partner who does not bear the name of Lehman. The THE JEWS IN AMERICA 77 mere recital of these facts discloses that such importance as the Jewish community has at¬ tained in American finance is a product of the individualistic instinct. The successful Jew¬ ish bankers are practically all “private” bank¬ ers. Yet of this group there is only one that is extremely important, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and it is significant that the success of this house is largely the result of its association with the man who was perhaps the greatest financial genius of his time — a non-Jew, indeed so typ¬ ical a Yankee as Edward H. Harriman. Mr. Otto Kahn, of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., has himself described the great contributions which Har¬ riman, through his operations with the Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, Northern Pacific, Santa Fe, and other great railroad systems, made to the house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. The prominence of this concern, in the last twenty- five years, is largely attributable to these daz¬ zling achievements. Yet even Kuhn, Loeb & Co. is by no means the greatest of the private banking houses. Compared with J. P. Morgan & Co. it is rather a small affair. The late Mr. Schiff and the late Mr. Morgan were contem¬ poraries; they may be said to represent the 78 THE JEWS IN AMERICA banking achievements of the Jew and the Gentile in their most successful aspect. Mr. Schiff was a product of the Jewish banking school of Frankfort, Germany; Mr. Morgan was literally a Connecticut Yankee — he was born in Hartford, of a family which traced its origin to the Pilgrim Fathers. The average observer of American finance would not hesi¬ tate long in estimating which was the greater of the two. It was incomparably Mr. Mor¬ gan. The Morgan mind had a continental sweep, a profound insight into the energies and capacities of the American people, a con¬ structive grasp of the forces that underlay American progress, and a creative quality that could establish great industries and rebuild great properties, which one would vainly look for in Mr. Schiff. Mr. Schiff was a great money lender, while Mr. Morgan added to the functions of a banker a great business and organizing capacity, and even certain quali¬ ties of the statesman. He was the creator of the United States Steel Corporation, the In¬ ternational Harvester Corporation, the Inter¬ national Mercantile Marine; when Great Britain, in the early years of the century, had its great shock over the “American invasion,” THE JEWS IN AMERICA 79 and the average Englishman each morning ap¬ prehensively opened his paper to find what new British industry had fallen into American hands, Mr. Morgan was the man whom they visualized as the great national peril. Even his name passed into an ominous pun; he was the great “Morganizer,” his acquisition of British interests were “Morganatic mar¬ riages.” To recount Mr. Morgan’s achieve¬ ments means to tell practically the whole rail¬ road history of the last forty years. Besides his interests in railroads and big industrial en¬ terprises, Mr. Morgan possessed great sub¬ sidiary banks and trust companies — the Guar¬ anty Trust Company, the Bankers Trust Com¬ pany, and the like. Mr. Schiff had no such tributaries as these. Whenever trouble loomed in American business and finance, it was not to Mr. Schiff that the community looked for assistance; the financial capital of the United States automatically became Mr. Morgan’s library on Thirty-Sixth Street. Nor has the financial greatness of the Morgan house passed with his death. In the World War, the Morgan firm was the banker and the fiscal agent of all the Allied Governments, and, as such, the corner of Wall and Broad streets 8o THE JEWS IN AMERICA became the financial capital of the world. The gulf that separates Morgan & Company from Kuhn, Loeb & Co. grows wider every day. There is no complaint that rests on so slight a foundation, therefore, as the so-called Jewish “dominance” of American finance. There is no peril quite so illusory as that of the “international banker.” Compared with the financial power wielded by certain Ameri¬ can financiers, the greatest “international banker” is a pygmy. John D. Rockefeller could buy up all the Rothschilds and have a tremendous fortune left after doing it. The annual income of this famous family is very much smaller than that of Henry Ford. That there are many Jewish brokers; that an incon¬ siderable number belong to the New York Stock Exchange; that Paul Warburg was partly responsible for the Federal Reserve Law — thereby rendering a very great public service; that the same gentleman, at the earn¬ est solicitation of the Government, became a member of the Federal Reserve Board; that Mr. Eugene Meyer is the head of the War Finance Corporation — in this case also ren¬ dering an efficient public service; that there THE JEWS IN AMERICA 81 are certain minor private Jewish banking houses in New York and other cities — these things are true ; but, in view of the overwhelm¬ ing importance of native Americans in the control of the financial resources and banking operations of the country, they form an exceedingly flimsy basis on which to erect this huge myth. Moreover, not only does “the international banker” not monopolize things now, but it is extremely unlikely, for the rea¬ sons given, that he ever will. Besides the fact that the Jewish temperament and mental mechanism are rather unadapted to the Ameri¬ can scheme of business organization, the shift¬ ing of the world’s financial capital from Europe to the United States will react un¬ favourably upon the Jewish banker. In the past he has served as a medium through which European money has been directed into American enterprise, but there is no longer any European money to flow westward. The movement is in the other direction. IV An examination of American industry brings out the same facts. The Jews do not 82 THE JEWS IN AMERICA control the great corporations which manip¬ ulate the mighty American industrial ma¬ chine; in fact, they are almost negligible. The Lewisohns and the Guggenheims are import¬ ant people in copper smelting, but they are by no means monopolists, for Mr. John D. Ryan and others are very active. The Jews have practically nothing to do with the Standard Oil Company and its many branches, or with the United States Steel Corporation, or with American railroads — except in some cases as bankers — or with street railways or light and power companies, or with telephones or telegraphs or electric works, or with the textile factories, or with the automobile business, or with the manu¬ facture of agricultural machinery, or with lumber or its manufactures, or with leather and its manufactures. These industries com¬ prise the largest part of what may be called the American economic structure. Neither as owners, controllers, managers, or workmen are the Jews of even minor importance. It is hardly to be expected that they should be. Few of these enterprises give much scope for that individualism which is the Jews’ leading quality — and defect. They are all combined THE JEWS IN AMERICA 83 into huge corporations. Nor in the basic sources of American wealth is this element in our population especially powerful. Amer¬ ica’s greatest wealth is her farms; the Jew is not a farmer, and the vast riches annually yielded in the agricultural regions therefore do not enrich him except as they indirectly enrich the whole American population. In the preparation of foodstuffs certain Jews — Morris and Sulzberger — have established a certain eminence, but here again their con¬ trol is far from monopolistic. The Armours and the Swifts are still the overshadowing “villains” of the beef trust. In the publishing business there are a few Jewish houses, but the vast bulk of the business is in the hands of Gentiles. Much is said about the so-called “dominance” of the Jews over the newspaper press. Yet those who make this broad asser¬ tion seldom give specifications. It is true that Mr. Adolph S. Ochs, the proprietor of the New York Times , is a Jew; indeed, when the anti-Jewish writers wish to portray the “menace of the Jew,” Mr. Ochs usually serves the same purpose in journalism that Mr. Paul Warburg does in finance. Yet he is about the only Jew of commanding importance in 84 THE JEWS IN AMERICA American journalism. William Randolph Hearst, the most extensive owner of American newspapers and periodicals, is not a Jew! The other great newspapers of New York — the Herald, t he Sun, the Tribune, the World* the Globe, the Evening Post — are all owned by Gentiles. In Chicago, the McCormicks own the Tribune, Mr. Victor Lawson the Daily News, and Hearst the American. The Associated Press, the chief disseminator of news, is a Gentile organization; Mr. Melville Stone has been its presiding genius for years. The Rosewaters, who once did yeoman service as part of the Jew stage army regularly trotted out by anti-Semitic writers to prove the Jew¬ ish control of the American press, no longer own the Omaha Bee. Possibly a few smaller towns have Jewish proprietors and editors, but the great mass of American journalism, on both the business and the literary side, is Christian. The editorial staff of the New York T imes, at least in its important positions, is almost exclusively Gentile. When it comes to the matter of retail trade, an interesting situation presents itself. Here * There is a Jewish strain in the Pulitzers, who own the World, but they regard themselves as Gentiles and are so regarded by the New York community. THE JEWS IN AMERICA 85 is a phase of business in which the Jew, ac¬ cording to the popular conception of his business characteristics, should excel. He is generally portrayed as the great middleman, as the world’s premier merchant; how then does he thrive in a land which its detractors love to pillory as the great nation of shop¬ keepers? In this department the Jew has indeed made excellent progress, even when pitted against a native population which is especially gifted with the business instinct. If we go back twenty-five years, practically all the New York department stores were owned and operated by Christians. That statement is no longer true. Perhaps the larger number of these emporiums — Altman, Stern Brothers, R. H. Macy & Co., Gimbel Brothers— are the property of Jews. Yet they by no means possess a monopoly; there are several great establishments — Wana- maker’s, Lord & Taylor, Arnold Constable, McCreery’s, Hearn’s — still under the very successful control of Gentiles. Despite Jew¬ ish ability in retail trade, the fact remains that the greatest American retail merchants are not Jews; the Jews themselves bow down be¬ fore John Wanamaker as America’s greatest 86 THE JEWS IN AMERICA merchant, and the Marshall Field establish¬ ment in Chicago certainly outranks any Jew¬ ish achievement in the same line. The Jewish prominence in the clothing trades is suffi¬ ciently evident; they “dominate” it on its manufacturing side; yet it is strangely true that the great retail clothing houses of New York are not Jewish; one needs only to recall such names as Rogers Peet, Brooks Brothers, Browning King, Brokaw. In retail trade, indeed, the Jews seem to display that same disparity to which attention has already been called ; they achieve substantial success, but they do not seem to reach the very highest class. The finest retail shopping quarter in the United States is Fifth Avenue, north of Forty-Second Street. The most casual walk on this beautiful prospect brings out one really astonishing fact: that is the infrequency of Jewish names. The great mass of these signs bear old English and Scotch names. An occasional Jewish patronymic appears, but it is in the minority. Even in those oc¬ cupations in which the Jews have excelled for centuries — such as jeweller and silver¬ smith — the Gentiles still hold undisputed sway. Tiffany, Gorham, Black, Starr & THE JEWS IN AMERICA 87 Frost, Theodore B. Starr, Reed & Barton, Crichton, Kirkpatrick, Cartier — these are the firms most important in the jewellery and sil¬ ver retail trade, and none of them are Jews. The same is true of even so Jewish a specialty as furs. Jews are not inactive, but the im¬ portant furriers bear such names as Revillon, Gunther, Jaeckel (not Jewish). Jews are active in the manufacture of hats and caps; yet New York’s great hatters are Knox, Young, Dunlap, Dobbs. This theory that the Jews are the all-power¬ ful forces in American trade and finance can be disposed of by one single consideration: who are the great American millionaires? Do their names invariably end in “-stein” and “-sky”? Here again is a test which each one can make for himself. Just think of the ex¬ tremely rich men in your neighbourhood. That some of them are Jews is not improbable; but the overwhelming majority are undoubt¬ edly Gentiles. As the wealth of the United States is largely centred in New York City and as New York contains one half of all the Jews in the United States, this test is especially im¬ portant in that city. The World Almanac publishes a list of what it calls “Rich New 88 THE JEWS IN AMERICA Yorkers”; in this connection it is worth while reproducing this list verbatim. J. D. Rockefeller, Sr. Louise W. Carnegie Adelaide C. Frick Helen C. Frick George Ehret Edward L. Harkness Vincent Astor J. P. Morgan Otto H. Kahn Thomas F. Ryan Edward D. Faulkner J. D. Rockefeller, Jr. Marianne Faulkner James B. Ford Anna M. Harkness Mark S. Harkness Oliver H. Aldred William E. Smith Cornelius Vanderbilt Anna K. Vanderbilt Gertrude V. Whitney Payne Whitney Arabella D. Huntington Florence V. A. Twombly Solomon R. Guggenheim Archibald B. Gwathmey, Jr. James T. Gwathmey William Hall Marion Haviland Louis Hilborn Flora Hirsch Louis L. Hopkins Anna B. Horn Blanche Hutton Lillian B. Hyde Daniel G. Reid Seymour J. Hyde Edith B. Parker Abby Rockefeller Helen G. Barker George F. Baker, Jr. James W. Barney Bernard M. Baruch Xavier N. Benziger Courtlandt Bishop Harry S. Black Lizzie P. Bliss Marie B. Bogart Frederick F. Ayer George F. Baker Helen D. H. Astor Adolph Lewisohn James A. Stillman Archibald B. Gwathmey Archer M. Huntington Ethel Israel Alice A. Block Helen C. Bostwick Isa MacB. Bindley Adelaide S. Clarke Leslie J. Pearson Mary C. Thompson Emily A. Thorn Minnie H. Wolff Artemas Ward James H. Kidder Lillie V. Kohn Benjamin M. Duke Mary E. Bierstadt Harry Payne Whitney Alice G. Vanderbilt Lucy P. Eastman Ernestine Hall Oscar Passavant THE JEWS IN AMERICA 89 Richard A. Spring John Stewart Robert E. Tod Mary L. Van Ingen Emma B. Auchincloss George Ehret, Jr. Charles L. Eidlitz Jennie T. Eidlitz Cyrus L. W. Eidlitz Lillian M. Stokes Helen L. Stokes Herman Taylor Emma Thorn Otto Timmie J. Kennedy Tod Ruth V. Twombly Fred W. Vanderbilt Grace Vanderbilt Grace G. Vanderbilt Louise A. Vanderbilt Anna von Seidlitz Felix M. Warburg Isaac H. Wolff Ramson L. Wood St. John Wood James Jagger Marguerite L. Johnson George O. Jones Frances O. Jones Joseph S. Joseph Leo Joseph Hamilton F. Kean James L. Laidlaw Valeria Langloth Charles W. Leighton Walter Lewisohn Ada W. S. Moore J. N. Morgan Junius S. Morgan Frances Morgan Barbara S. Morgan Henry New Belmont Tiffany Mortimer L. Schiff Thomas B. M. Gates Hattie A. Greenwald Daniel Guggenheim Edmond A. Guggenheim Henry F. Guggenheim Isaac Guggenheim Margaret Prager Alta R. Prentice Murry Guggenheim Ralph Pulitzer Simon Guggenheim Thomas Sinclair Herbert L. Carlebach Herbert J. Carr Henry W. Chappell William N. Cromwell Eleanor de G. Cuyler Marcus Daly Maisel Dreicer Ralph W. Dundas Sarah A. Duke This exhibit brings out certain facts. The main thing it shows is that the racial stocks which founded the United States one hundred and fifty years ago still control its wealth. With the exception of a few Jewish names 9o THE JEWS IN AMERICA and an occasional Scotch and German, all the families represented in this list were well established here when the Declaration of Independence was signed. That the Jews have a considerable representation is true, but the list at once disposes of the ridiculous theory that they are “dominant” in American finance. And the mere catalogue of names, of course, is not the important fact, but the for¬ tunes which these names represent. It would be a simple matter to pick out any one of sev¬ eral Gentiles — Rockefeller, Carnegie, Van¬ derbilt, Astor — who represent larger fortunes than those of all the Jews in this list combined. In all that has been said of the economic progress of the Jews in America one fact should not escape observation. The Jewish names in this list are especially significant: Lewisohn, Kahn, Wolff, Guggenheim, War¬ burg, Schiff; they are all names of German Jews. The same statement is true of the great Jewish department store proprietors: Straus, Stern, Gimbel, Altman. An examination of the occasional Jewish name that appears as a director of banks would bring out the same fact. The important Jewish banking houses — Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Speyer & Co., Goldman, THE JEWS IN AMERICA 91 Sachs & Co., Hallgarten — are almost exclu¬ sively Germanic. In the financial advertise¬ ments of the magazines a few Jewish names figure; they are invariably the names of Ger¬ man Jews. The big Jewish lawyers of New York — Untermyer, Marshall — and of Chi¬ cago — Levy Meyer, Samuel Alshuler — also belong to the German branch of the race. Most of the Jews who have reached important public position — Henry Morgenthau, Oscar Straus, Julius Kahn, Louis Brandeis, Abra¬ ham Elkus— are likewise German Jews; a few others, Bernard Baruch, Benjamin Cardozo, belong to that Spanish-Portuguese element which has been established in this country for nearly three hundred years. Yet these Ger¬ man and Spanish branches represent only a small minority of the Jewish population of America. CHAPTER III THE "MENACE" OF THE POLISH JEW I THE most important facts brought out in the preceding chapters are that the Jews have by no means made the great economic and financial progress in this country which is commonly attributed to them, and that the largest measure of success they have achieved is the work of the minority elements in the Jewish population — the Spanish, or Sephardic Jews, who have been a part of the American population for nearly three hundred years, and the German Jews, who came in considerable numbers from 1820 to 1880. Of the 3,000,000 or more Jews in the United States these more efficient elements comprise perhaps 500,000. What part have the remaining 2,500,000 or more played in the economic development of this country? To what extent have they shown themselves especially adapted to the 92 THE JEWS IN AMERICA 93 conditions on this side of the Atlantic? In other words, to what extent have they demon¬ strated that they are fitted for that assimila¬ tion in the economic, political, and social life of America which is the one supreme test of citizenship? From the standpoint both of the citizen and business man, no more abrupt change could be imagined than that which the Eastern Jew made when he transplanted himself from the old cities of Poland to the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. This Jew had never been a citizen, and had never developed the slightest sense of citizenship, as that word is understood. For thousands of years he had merely been the member of a tribe, governed by tribal laws and tribal chiefs. With the Jews from western Europe who had preceded him to America, in much smaller numbers, the Polish or Eastern Jew had little in common except a common religion. I have made this point before, but it cannot be made too fre¬ quently or too emphatically, for it is the fundamental fact in the existing Jewish prob¬ lem. The Armenian and the Englishman are both Christians; in fact, the Armenian was a Christian when the Englishman was a pagan; 94 THE JEWS IN AMERICA but no one would be justified in regarding an Armenian and an Englishman as members of the same race 'and upholders of the same ideals of society. Perhaps the difference between an Eastern and a Western Jew is not so great as that between an Armenian and an Englishman, but still this disparity does represent a wide gulf. And the difference — and this is the important point — is really one of race. It is necessary only to look at a typical Polish Jew, with his blond hair, his blue or green eyes, and his stubby nose, to see that physically he is quite a different per¬ son from the Spanish or the German Jew. These physical traits portray the great infusion of Slavic and Tartar or Mongol blood that flows in his veins; and this infusion is a matter of history. In the Middle Ages a famous kingdom of the Khazars extended its rule in Russia for a considerable area north of the Black Sea. The authorities are not agreed as to precisely what racial stock these people belonged or whence they came. The Jewish TLncyclopcedia describes them as of Turkish origin; other writers classify them somewhat indefinitely as “Turanians”; while others refer to them as Tartars or Mongols. THE JEWS IN AMERICA 95 On one point all commentators are agreed: historically and ethnologically they did not have the slightest connection with Israel. Yet the Khazars, according to so high an authority as Dr. Maurice Fishberg, “made up the nu¬ cleus of the future Jewry of eastern Europe.” For the Khazars are unique in this regard : they are the only non- Jewish people who are known to have embraced the Jewish religion. Judaism, in the main, has not been a proselyt¬ ing faith ; it has always been cherished as the exclusive possession of the children of Abra¬ ham; there are scattered groups of non- Jewish Jews, it is true — there are even a few Chinese Jews; but the Khazars, in a manner the historic details of which are not known, and concerning which many myths have gathered, adopted Judaism as their religion in the Eighth Century. A map published herewith, taken from the Jewish Encyclo¬ pedia , discloses that there was only one great compact mass of Jews in Europe in the Tenth Century, and that these were Khazars — eth¬ nologically, a non-Jewish people! For sev¬ eral succeeding centuries the Khazar King¬ dom was a flourishing one; the vicissitudes of history, however, destroyed the Khazar nation 96 THE JEWS IN AMERICA and dispersed its people ; great hordes of them drifted westward into Poland; the fact that their religion was Jewish made it inevitable that they should intermarry with the J ews who were already established there in large num¬ bers, and who had probably come from Ger¬ many. Thus the blood of this Turkish or Mongol people flows extensively in the veins of the Eastern Jew of to-day. A further large Slavic mixture makes the Eastern Jew racially alien to Jews from other parts of Europe. Thus the masses that comprise one fourth the present population of New York City trace their beginnings, in considerable degree, to certain tribes that roamed the steppes of Rus¬ sia in the Middle Ages and happened to ac¬ cept the religion of Judah as their own. As candidates for assimilation these Jews, as they land at Ellis Island, are about as promising as a similarly inflowing stream of Hindus or Syrian Druses. This may seem an extreme statement, but a glance at the Jews of eastern Europe, especially Poland, makes it clear that it is not. For these Eastern Jews have never been Europeanized. For ages they have lived, in Poland, in Russia, in Galicia, in Hungary, in Rumania, not as a THE JEWS IN AMERICA 97 nation or part of a nation, but essentially as a tribe. With them the Jewish religion has been the all-important consideration, far more important than nationality; the right to practise their faith, to observe their Sabbath and religious holidays, to limit their diet to the most rigid teachings of the Talmud, has been valued much higher than the mere right to enjoy political equality. A Jew of the old breed in America takes pride in calling him¬ self an American and resents any imputation that he is not; a Jew in Germany, as the Great War showed, is almost fanatical in his asser¬ tion of his Germanism; but a Jew in Poland just as vehemently resents being called a Pole. “I am not a Pole; I am a Jew,” he retorts. After a sojourn of 800 or 1,000 years in Poland he does not speak the Polish language; his dialect is a form of middle low German which was spoken in certain parts of Germany in the Middle Ages and which is still spoken in a few remote areas. The orthodox Jew in Poland not only lives, by preference, in crowded ghettoes in the cities, but he dresses in a way — a long gabardine of black cloth reaching to his ankles and a skull cap trimmed with fur — which emphasizes his Jewish par- 98 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ticularism. Elis long beard and the ringlets about his ears are also part of his religion. He treats his womankind in a way that sug¬ gests his Asiatic origin. “Thank God I am not a woman, Thank God I am not a goy ”* is the prayer of thanksgiving with which he begins his day. Just as Japanese women blacken their teeth and Chinese women bind their feet, so the orthodox Polish Jewesses, after marriage, shave their heads. These are merely the outward indications of an Oriental¬ ism that controls all phases of Jewish life. For centuries the orthodox Jews existed in Poland under an order that was tribal and patriarchal — never national. They were not subject to the laws and the civil and criminal administration of the country but they were ruled, in all departments of life, by their own rabbis, who administered the law as it is laid down in the Old Testament and the Talmud. They even counted time, not according to the Christian, but according to the Jewish calendar. The British Commission sent to investigate the condition of the Jews in Poland were astonished to find, in interro- >> * The word goy is Hebrew for non-Jew. It is translated as “gentile, “stranger,” or — in a free sense — “Christian.” THE JEWS IN AMERICA 99 gating witnesses, that few knew the day of the week, the month, or the year; the reason is that they all reckoned time according to the orthodox Jewish calendar. That this ex¬ clusiveness is not necessarily enforced upon an unwilling people is evident from the fact that the Jews of Poland demanded of the Versailles Peace Conference — and success¬ fully— the right to be regarded as a “mi¬ nority” people in a resurrected Poland. This means that the Jews intend to maintain them¬ selves in Poland as a separate people, with the right to a certain number of seats in every municipal council and the national parlia¬ ment, with important powers of legislation and taxation, with their own law courts, the privilege of using their own language, and other important advantages which they are to enjoy not as Poles but as Jews. Thus the organization of the Eastern Jews in Europe, in its political and social aspects, is primitive, tribal, Oriental; and their econo¬ mic status represented just about the same stage of progress. Though the population did contain a large number of handicrafts¬ men, especially in the tailoring trades, for the most part the Polish Jews were middle- ioo THE JEWS IN AMERICA men — hucksters, hawkers, peddlers, small tradesmen, petty bankers, and the like. The Polish masses were agriculturists, and the Jews, who were for the most part city dwellers, acted as middlemen in the distribution of their products. They would travel into the sur¬ rounding country, chaffer with the peasants for their vegetables, and sell them in the city. Poland of course was not an industrial state; factories were few; there was thus no oppor¬ tunity, had the Jew really had the inclination, for training in industrial life. They were the small shopkeepers in the town; they hawked their wares up and down the streets; such oc¬ cupations, however, could not furnish support for the entire Jewish population, the result being that the great masses lived under condi- tions of appalling poverty and social degrada¬ tion. That they were uncleanly in their habits was perhaps the inevitable consequence of the overcrowded conditions under which they exist, for their poverty was so extreme that a great population struggled from hand to mouth, never knowing whence their daily bread was to come. THE JEWS IN AMERICA ioi II Such was the exotic mass that the steam¬ ships began dumping on the Atlantic seaboard forty years ago, and which has been attempt¬ ing since to adjust itself to the economic conditions of the United States. That their preparation for this experience had been most meagre has already been made plain. The im¬ migrating races which had preceded the East¬ ern Jew had found abundant opportunities in a land whose foremost note was the pioneering spirit. Take the original settlers, for ex¬ ample — those colonists from the British Isles who, at the time of the Revolution, formed 80 per cent, of its population, and whose descendants form not far from 60 per cent, of its population to-day. We first see these hardy frontiersmen in the Seventeenth Cen¬ tury making accessible to civilization the Atlantic seaboard; in the early Nineteenth Century they poured across the Alleghany Mountains into the Ohio Valley, here also building up a great agricultural country and founding cities and great industries; after the Civil War the same elements crossed the Mis¬ sissippi and the Missouri, creating flourishing 102 THE JEWS IN AMERICA commonwealths as far as the Pacific Coast. This was a real immigration — this the real business of a new people in a new land. In the wake of this original population came the other great races of northwestern Europe. The Germans did their part, and it was a splendid one, in opening the farm lands of the Mississippi Valley — this also was nation building in the true sense; the Irish also, though rather too much inclined to form colo¬ nies in cities, distributed themselves generally and became a great contributing element in American industry and agriculture; the Scan¬ dinavians, almost exclusively farmers, were the most important forces in making the Northwest one of the most stately agricultural regions in the world. The Slavs occupied themselves largely in the mines, the packing houses, the industrial centres, and therefore, inferior though they were in the graces of civilization, they became creators of wealth on a huge scale. But the Eastern Jews presented an entirely different aspect. A preliminary view, as they left the immigration station, prepared to mingle with the other races toiling to upbuild the republic, was rather disconcerting. Their THE JEWS IN AMERICA 103 half-starved appearance, their furtive move¬ ments, their hollow chests, their undeveloped bodies were the outward physical signs of the centuries of city dwelling that had been their portion. However, these traits were super¬ ficial: a short course in the use of the bathtub and the toothbrush might easily have remedied these defects of early training; unfortunately there were more deeply lying phenomena which presented obstacles to Americanization in any real sense — incorpo¬ ration, that is, into all phases of American life. Probably the greatest of these were the religion and the mentality of the Eastern Jew. The orthodox faith itself offered an almost complete impediment to his industrialization. The German, the Irishman, and the Italian readily found employment in factories and on public works. The Jew could not do so and remain steadfast to his orthodoxy. His Sab¬ bath is Saturday; but American industry recognizes Sunday as the day of rest; munici¬ palities or railroads could not employ Jews as labourers, as they did the Irish, the Italians, and other races, because the orthodox Hebrew would have felt compelled to drop his imple¬ ments on the Seventh day. Again, the Jew 104 THE JEWS IN AMERICA is perhaps the most prayerful person in the world; he accompanies practically every act with a fixed ritual; almost every hour of the day has its religious observances. He can therefore engage in no occupation that does not give the opportunity for these almost con¬ tinuous communings with the Almighty; even though he had had an inclination for manual labour of the usual kind, he could not have engaged in it and remained an orthodox Jew. These facts set him as completely apart from the other immigrating peoples as did his dietary laws. So long as they con¬ trolled his daily routine he could never be¬ come a working unit in the American indus¬ trial machine. Inevitably, therefore, these masses began to seek their livelihood in the ways to which they had been accustomed for centuries in their Polish homeland. City dwellers for unnumbered centuries in Europe, they clung tenaciously to the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard. Three thousand miles of open continent beckoned to them — fertile lands in which, like Abraham and Jacob of old, they could have practised sheep herding and all the arts of husbandry; but apparently only the already teeming cities had any attrac- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 105 tions. For ages in Poland they had been slum dwellers, living in horrible, ill-smelling ghet- toes; similarly they became slum dwellers in New York, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and other Atlantic cities. This herding in the great centres of population was something un¬ precedented. The Irish and the Germans, and later the Italians did, indeed, form urban colonies to a certain extent — the large city population of “native Americans” was a de¬ velopment of the same kind; but no other immigrating race had become exclusively city dwellers, as did these Eastern Jews. But there was one manifestation more aston¬ ishing still. Not only did they flock almost as one man to the city slums; by far the greater proportion of them gravitated to one city. At present the Jewish population of the United States is something more than 3,000,000; of these at least one half live in New York City. According to the Jewish Communal Register, all meat which is slaughtered near New York, and for its consumption, is killed by Shohetim — official Jewish slaughterers commissioned by rabbis; Gentiles are therefore constantly eating Kosher meat with a sweet unconscious¬ ness of its Levitical cleanliness. On Jewish 106 THE JEWS IN AMERICA holidays at least 40 per cent, of the New York school children are absent; certain schools are totally deserted; and the city departments, in which Eastern Jews are extensively employed, are all but depopulated. There are more Cohens in the New York City Directory this year than Smiths! The fact that half the Jews in the United States are living in New York City — where one man in every four is a Jew — is an arresting one; it is the most astounding development of Jewish immigra¬ tion. Whereas the Jewish population of New York amounts to nearly 30 per cent, of the whole, the Jewish population of Phila¬ delphia is only 10 per cent, of the whole; of Chicago 10 per cent.; of Cleveland 12 per cent. ; of Detroit 10 per cent. ; of St. Louis and Baltimore 8 per cent. Why do the Eastern Jews flock in such mighty numbers exclu¬ sively to New York? Why do other great centres of urban America apparently have less attraction for them? It is the most portentous fact presented by the whole phenomenon of immigration. Their co-religionists, the Span¬ ish and German Jews, showed no such persist¬ ence for the greatest American city; at the time of the Civil War, these Jews were found THE JEWS IN AMERICA 107 in every city, every village, every plantation, every mining camp; there never was a time when at least half of them fixed their habita¬ tions in one urban community. Just as in Poland these people had been city dwellers, so here likewise they attempted to reproduce the economic life to which they had been accustomed for centuries. The push¬ cart, which had hitherto not been a familiar sight in New York, now began to clog certain public thoroughfares. Buying and selling on a small scale continued to be the occupation in New York, as in Warsaw and Lodz, of an in¬ finitely greater number than could possibly earn a living this way. Jewish street hawk¬ ers filled the crowded thoroughfares, and Jew¬ ish retail shops, in infinite numbers, sprang up in all parts of the city. Jewish signs, printed in Hebrew characters, began to appear, not only in the crowded East Side, but in other parts of New York. Jewish newspapers, likewise printed in Hebrew characters, were ultimately found on most New York news¬ stands. Advertisements, printed in the strange characters of the Talmud, found their way into the subway stations and cars. All this represented merely an attempt to reproduce 108 THE JEWS IN AMERICA in New York City the life which the Jews had led in eastern Europe. Ill Of this tendency a few concrete illustrations will suffice. For centuries the Polish Jews had been active in the liquor trade, and now again in this country their energies found an outlet in the same direction. Nothing better shows how the Jewish business instinct differs from that of the Anglo-Saxon. The Eastern Jew is the most adroit shoe-string capitalist in the world. He can start business on almost any¬ thing; a few dollars, the labour of himself and his family — with these as a foundation he fre¬ quently works himself up to at least a moder¬ ate prosperity. Above all, as already said, he is an individualist; he must work for him¬ self, not for others; he must exclusively reap the reward of his own talents and industry; the complexities of modern business organization are entirely beyond his grasp. Necessarily also he is a middleman. The scope of his par¬ ticipation in a minor way in certain trades — the whisky and wine trade, the tobacco trade — vividly brings out these facts. Though he has always been active in the liquor business, THE JEWS IN AMERICA 109 he has had nothing to do with beer. Why? Because the brewing of beer was a great or¬ ganized industry; it required a large capital, a big plant, an organization based on modern lines, with capital stock, directors, and execu¬ tive staffs. Again the beer business gave practically no opportunity for the middleman. In the main the breweries were their own mid¬ dlemen; they themselves owned the saloons, and the saloon keeper was little more than an employe or manager. In this branch of the business there was therefore no chance for the Eastern Jew. But the Jews had been wine merchants in Europe since the time of Charle¬ magne; and they now proceeded to follow their trade in this country in a way that dif¬ fered little from the methods in the day of that great monarch. They became omnipresent in the vineyards of California; of course they never raised the grapes themselves; they went from place to place, buying up the “must” — the unfermented juice freshly pressed from the grape; and this in turn they passed on to the vintners. The job was an intensely individual one and the Jewish cleverness at bargaining made this particular operation in the wine business a Jewish monopoly. Iio THE JEWS IN AMERICA Meanwhile in the great cities, especially New York, the Jews were working into the whisky business according to methods of their own. This occupation, as they engaged in it, required practically no capital; moreover, the trade was extremely profitable. Only exceptionally did the Jew become a distiller; as usual, he was the middleman. In Russia and Poland he had circulated among the peasants, selling his vodka; and now again in New York the retailing of whisky was done, on an extensive scale, as a peddling occupa¬ tion. The Jewish whisky-merchant started business in the smallest possible way. He would buy a few quarts from the distiller and take it to his tenement home. Every evening, assisted by his family, he would submit it to the process known as “blending”; he would pour in a little prune juice or caramel to give the necessary colour, put it up in bottles, and he was ready for the day’s business. The next morning he would load his little stock upon his pushcart, and make the round of his cus¬ tomers — at first usually personal friends or relatives. After scraping together a few hun¬ dred dollars in this painful fashion the Jew¬ ish whisky dealer would achieve his ultimate THE JEWS IN AMERICA m ambition: he would rent a “store” and make his bid — usually a successful one — for “family trade.” Almost never did he start a saloon, though, as his career progressed, he commonly did a large business supplying saloons, clubs, hotels, and restaurants. Hundreds of Eastern Jews, starting in this humble fashion, rose to be rich wholesalers of whisky; a few, though not many, became distillers. In the days of state prohibition — the ten or fifteen years pre¬ ceding the Eighteenth Amendment — these Jews did an immensely profitable “mail order” business — the business, that is, of ship¬ ping this indispensable beverage from alco¬ holic into non-alcoholic states. At present they furnish more than their just proportion of “bootleggers.” In the tobacco business the Eastern Jews have manifested precisely the same traits. Again they merely duplicate the kind of mer¬ chandizing which for centuries they have fol¬ lowed in Europe. Just as, in a limited sense, they became manufacturers of alcohol — con¬ fining their operations almost exclusively to “blending” — so, in a similarly restricted sense, have they become manufacturers and dealers in tobacco. The lines of the business that 1 12 THE JEWS IN AMERICA demanded large capital, organization, and manufacturing on a big scale they ignored; but we find the Jews filtering into those branches where the opportunities for small beginnings and individual operations are more favourable. In the formation of the Amer¬ ican Tobacco Company, for example, the Jews had practically no share. This great corporation is entirely “American.” But the middlemen with whom it has had constantly to deal are, for the most part, Jews. Just as the Jewish wine merchants traversed the vineyards of California buying up the “must” so does the Jewish tobacco expert cover the tobacco farms of the South, of New England, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, buying from the farmers the leaf tobacco. This business is intensely speculative; prices fluctuate from day to day, almost from hour to hour; a thousand elements determine them; the Jew has demonstrated so much skill at the opera¬ tion that he controls practically 90 per cent, of the crop. In tobacco manufacture he is also active, as capitalist and as workman — always within the limitations of mentality and temperament already set forth. As a manu¬ facturer, for example, the Jew figures hardly THE JEWS IN AMERICA 113 at all in the production of cigarettes, plug to¬ bacco, or snuff — the latter archaic substance being still made and used in this country to a greater extent than is popularly supposed. Why is the Jew scarcely identified with these important and highly profitable branches of the tobacco trade? For the same reason that, though extensively occupied with the whisky business, he concerned himself little with beer. The manufacture of cigarettes is a highly organized industry; it operates great factories in which machinery is largely used ; it requires a great capital; but the Jew does not take to organization; he is not gifted at the operation of machinery; he eschews the industries that demand a great initial outlay; and so, in to¬ bacco, as in all things, he is the shoe-string capitalist. But there is one branch of the tobacco busi¬ ness that still gives an opportunity for small- scale enterprise and in this department, as might be expected, the Eastern Jew is ex¬ tremely active. This is the manufacture of cigars. Cigar making is still largely a manual industry; all that the industrious Jew needs are a few handfuls of leaf tobacco, a board, and a knife; with these he can make his be- 1 14 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ginnings as a manufacturer. The trick of rolling cigars is acquired in a week or so. The first factory is a tenement room; the first employes are the wife and children of the aspiring industrialist. In a few days the com¬ bined efforts have heaped up a small stock of cigars; the head of the family then starts ped¬ dling these among his relatives or friends; in the old days the corner saloon became an early customer; not infrequently the corner grocery will exchange food for the product. In this way a few hundred dollars are assembled; a room is rented as a factory; Jewish immi¬ grants are pressed into service; in a few years the one-time peddler has established a profit¬ able business. The American Tobacco Com¬ pany manufactures a small proportion of its cigars, but probably not far from 75 per cent, of the product is in the hands of the Jews. The president of the American Cigar Com¬ pany, the subsidiary corporation that handles cigars, is Mr. A. L. Sylvester — a Jew whose life story illustrates the manner in which the race rises by painful stages. At the age of eleven Mr. Sylvester began his career as a “sprig boy” in a Jewish cigar factory; it was his uninspiring job to sit on the floor and re- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 115 cover the leaves or “sprigs” discarded by the assorters. He then became a buyer of leaf tobacco, an occupation that took him to the farms of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Ohio; and his skill as a purchaser ultimately made him the head of the largest leaf-tobacco house in the country. So strong was his grip on this phase of the business that he was taken in by the American Tobacco Company on its formation. Another better known American Jew who started his career in a tobacco factory and who has since extended his energies to other lines is Mr. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labour, and still a member of the Cigar Makers’ Union. IV But capitalism on a small and individual scale could hardly support the great mobs of Eastern Jews that were landed at American ports between the years 1881 and 1914. An overruling Providence seemed to have created the great American business of ready-made clothing specially with Jewish immigration in mind. The manufacture and the sale of wearing apparel had for ages exercised a fas- ii6 THE JEWS IN AMERICA cination for the Jew. Even in the Middle Ages tailoring was one of his favourite oc¬ cupations; a common sight in the cities of Poland was the hundreds of Jews and Jewesses sitting in the ghetto plying their needles and their shears. Many of the Polish Jews who found their way to this country in the period under review had already spent a life-time working in the clothing trades. For reasons already set forth the Jews could not possibly labour in American industrial establishments, even had they had the inclination — which is not likely; but these racial peculiarities formed no impediment to their absorption by the sweatshop. The manufacture of clothing in those early days was largely a household or tenement industry. The several members of the family could work according to their own routine and largely make their own hours; there was thus plenty of opportunity for the prayers, ablutions, and other devo¬ tional observances which are indispensable in the daily life of the orthodox Hebrew. They could keep their own Sabbath and religious holidays and work on Sunday. But the con¬ centration of the Eastern Jew upon the cloth¬ ing trades has a much deeper explanation than THE JEWS IN AMERICA 117 this. Once more it is the familiar story of Jewish individualism and Jewish talent for small-scale capitalism. It is one of the few remaining American industries in which a man can start manufacturing on little money and gradually build up a large business, and it is one of the few that is not yet combined in large corporations or trusts. The prevail¬ ing form of organization is still the individual or the partnership. Whereas most other great manufactured products are consolidated in big companies, there are still several thousand independent clothing factories in Greater New York. The industry is still competitive in all its many branches; and the transition from workman to sub-contrac¬ tor, from sub-contractor to contractor, and from contractor to wholesaler, is still a com¬ paratively easy one. Every cap-maker, sponger, sewing-machine operator, cutter, and baster of to-day is the proprietor of to¬ morrow; and success means his own financial profit — there are no stockholders among whom the earnings must be divided : the com¬ petition, which is feverish in its intensity, is competition between thousands of units; there is no Standard Oil Company or United States 1 1 8 THE JEWS IN AMERICA Steel Corporation dominating the garment business. The story of Jewish monopoly in the cloth¬ ing trades is not a pleasant one; it is a story of exploitation, commonly of an exceedingly cruel kind, and exploitation of Jews by Jews. Readers of Kingsley’s “Alton Locke,” to say nothing of Hood’s “Song of the Shirt,” do not need to be told that the sweating system in the tailoring trades did not originate with the Eastern Jews. But never has it reached such an intensity or been conducted on so extensive a scale as under this branch of Israel in the great cities of the United States, especially in New York. The manufacture of ready-made clothing began about 1850, long before the coming of the Eastern Jew; the earliest workers were the Irish ; to them succeeded the Scandinavian, then the German, then the German Jew. But the occupation in those days was a vastly different one from the trade as it has developed in more recent times. These earlier workers were journeyman tail¬ ors; they had mastered all the details of their trade, at which they had spent the usual period of apprenticeship. But the masses of Jews who entered the trades after 1881 were not THE JEWS IN AMERICA 119 tailors in any real sense. The work was now minutely subdivided and two or three weeks’ instruction was usually sufficient to teach a newly arrived immigrant one of the many op¬ erations necessary to the completion of a gar¬ ment. It was the introduction of this division of labour — the substitution of the unskilled worker for the old-fashioned tailor — that en¬ abled the Eastern Jew to obtain the absolute dominance of the business in all its depart¬ ments. The secret of their prosperity was the introduction of the contract system. For¬ merly the manufacturers had really made the product in all its details; now the so-called manufacturers became merely capitalists who farmed out the production of the stock to a multitude of contractors. One would do the cutting, one make the coat, another the vest, another the “pants,” and so on. The manufac¬ turer would leave these separate garments, or fraction of garments, with particular contrac¬ tors and collect them at a specified date. He put together his suits and coats, and the endless articles that constitute male and female wear¬ ing apparel, much as Mr. Ford manufactures his automobiles; his business was primarily to “assemble” the scattered fragments into an 120 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ordered whole. This organization rendered it possible to start with practically no capital and to advance rapidly to proprietorship. The workman ambitious of becoming a “con¬ tractor” — and, after labouring for a year or two, thousands began business for themselves — could usually acquire the needed machinery on credit, paying for it by instalments out of the proceeds of his contracts. He then recruited his force from the recently arrived immigrant ship; he would corral certain of his relatives or friends; he would stop pushcart peddlers in the streets, portraying the supreme opportunities of a career with a sewing machine or a pressing iron. Ten or a dozen operators, scraped to¬ gether in this fashion, would congregate in his tenement house; the contractor depended entirely for funds upon the manufacturer for whom he worked; the latter would call each Monday, receive the garments and pay cash, and with this the contractor would pay his wages; in case of a sudden shortage of money, the neighbourhood pawnbroker usually acted as his banker. The workroom, in these early days of the industry, before the state laws forced the sweatshops out of the tenements, THE JEWS IN AMERICA 121 was a pretty distressing place. The “task” system added to its discomforts. This was the plan of setting a fixed amount of work as the day’s “task,” and of rigidly holding the op¬ eratives to their “quota.” At the head of the “team,” as the group of workers was known, sat the contractor himself and he usually acted as the pacemaker. He did perhaps the “machine work”; finishing his operation, he would pass the garment to a neighbour, who did the needle work; the latter in turn would pass it to a “baster”; the baster would pass it to a “finisher”; the next in line would be the buttonhole-maker; then came the “feller,” then the “presser.” Five or six garments a day, produced under this hectic system, at first constituted the “task”; as competition increased, the number grew to ten, fifteen, or twenty. Ten or a dozen bent and wretched figures, huddled in a small unventilated room, the atmosphere fetid with the odours of cook¬ ing and heated with the fire of the pressing irons, every man feverishly struggling to fin¬ ish one garment before another was passed down — hardly anything more horrible than such a physical and nervous strain could be imagined. These unfortunates would work 122 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ten, twelve, sixteen, sometimes eighteen hours a day; the ambition that made the work endurable was the expectation of early grad¬ uation from the bench into the ranks of con- % tractors. Conditions, of course, have vastly improved since those early days; the work is now done for the most part in factories; but the essentials of the organization, the contract system, are still maintained. When the Eastern Jews first started in, the German Jews controlled this industry; the latter, however, could not survive this new kind of competition; their co-religionists from the east of Europe rapidly drove them out of business — many of them into bankruptcy. The case of Meyer Jonasson, a German Jew who, before the Eastern Jews became power¬ ful, was the greatest manufacturer of women’s cloaks, fairly pictures the displacement that now took place. The intense competition that came from his own co-religionists rapidly de¬ stroyed Mr. Jonasson’s great business and drove him to insolvency and to suicide. All personal experiences were not so tragic as this one; yet what took place in the case of Meyer Jonasson is the story of the whole trade — the German Jews were driven out by their THE JEWS IN AMERICA 123 Eastern brethren. Thus the economic his¬ tory of the Eastern Jew in this country is largely a history of the clothing trades. In this the masses have found employment and thousands of individuals have found fortune. In other ways it has served as a basis of pros¬ perity, for it has furnished the Jewish com¬ munity with the liquid capital that has made possible its operations in other lines. Just as the so-called Standard Oil group has used the money made in oil for the purchase of rail¬ roads, steel mills, and other enterprises, so have the Eastern Jews used the cash heaped up in the cloak and suit trade for operations in other lines. Their activities in the moving picture business — for it is a business of the crassest sort — especially illustrate this tend¬ ency. That the Eastern Jews dominate the “movies” just as overwhelmingly as they dominate the clothing trades is the fact, and the still more interesting fact is that there is the closest connection between the two oc¬ cupations. The entertainment of the Ameri¬ can masses is provided almost exclusively by men who a few years ago were occupied in clothing them. William Fox was a sponger in a garment factory; Marcus Loew was a 124 THE JEWS IN AMERICA dealer in furs; Adolph Zukor was also a fur merchant; and Carl Laemmle started his career in the clothing business. Writers who are called to Hollywood are somewhat dis¬ couraged to find that the men with whom they must discuss their scenarios and whose critical judgment they must appease are almost exclusively ex-buttonhole makers, basters, and pressers, whose knowledge of the English language is very limited and whose artistic taste has not progressed greatly beyond the intellectual standards of Laura Jean Libbey. There is much discussion to-day as to what is the matter with moving pictures; but what is the matter is very apparent: the trouble lies in the fact that they are merely one depart¬ ment of the cloak and suit industry. y The other activity in which the Eastern or Polish Jew has specialized is real estate. H ere is a kind of business that appeals es¬ pecially to his racial pride. As a recent European he places a social stress on the ownership of land to which the American gives little consideration; he comes from a THE JEWS IN AMERICA 125 part of the world where the possession of the soil has immemorially been the privilege of the aristocracy. More than this, the laws of Russia have always excluded Jews from own¬ ing land; the right of doing so in the United States therefore is perhaps the greatest boon conferred by their new citizenship. Real estate also calls into play those traits which have already been described as the most out¬ standing ones of the Eastern Jew: his individ¬ ualism, his passion for the personal possession of the thing that he can call his own, his genius for operating on a very small capital, his penchant for bargaining, for buying and selling, for speculation. He worms his way into the ownership of the soil in precisely the same way that he starts in the clothing busi¬ ness, in cigar making, in the liquor trade. He scrapes together a few hundred dollars at his sewing machine or pressing board; with this he purchases an equity in a tenement house, giving first, second, third, fourth, and fifth mortgages for the remainder. He then moves his family into the least desirable apartment; he himself becomes the janitor; his wife does not disdain the job of scrubwoman; his sons not infrequently do service as painters, paper 126 THE JEWS IN AMERICA hangers, and general repairmen. In this way the expenses are reduced to a minimum; his “overhead” is very light; everything is kept within the family, which labours eighteen hours a day with one consuming determina¬ tion — to get together money enough to pay off the series of mortgages as they fall due. The family can subsist on the modicum of food and can wear the cheapest clothes; it spends no money on amusement or general frivolity; it has but one purpose in view— to meet those payments! No “agent” or “manager” is employed; every week the proprietor visits his tenants, collecting his rent, almost all of which promptly goes into the bank. He has thus purchased a $30,000 or $40,000 tenement with a “shoe string” of a few hundred dollars; yet he invariably collects enough from his tenants to make his payments. One house paid for, he buys another and repeats the op¬ eration ; he begins speculating, buying one day and selling another, perhaps skimming a profit of a few hundreds; he is also an insatiable gambler in vacant property. So skilful are these newly arrived Jews in this game that practically all their racial com¬ petitors long since retired from the field. In THE JEWS IN AMERICA 127 New York City the greater part of the soil, at least in the tenement sections, is now held by Eastern Jews. A list of the owners of New York reads like an immigrant manifest at Ellis Island; if you glance over the real estate transfers in the morning paper, it is seldom that any except a Jewish name strikes your eye. Such well-established property- owning families even as the Astors are retir¬ ing from this field; for years they have been selling their lower grade land to Polish Jews. In the better apartment sections the Jews are also extensive owners; yet that same disparity which the Jews show in other direc¬ tions, commercial, scientific, and artistic, ap¬ pears also in this. Able as they are in many ways they seldom reach the top. The greatest landowners of New York are still Christians. The Jews own little property on Broadway, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, and other es¬ pecially high-grade areas. The great skyline that greets the incoming passenger represents Gentile not Jewish enterprise. The Jews do not own the Woolworth Building, the Metro¬ politan Tower, the City Investing Building, the Equitable Building, or hundreds of others that could be mentioned. New York, in its 128 THE JEWS IN AMERICA finest architectural aspects, is still the pre¬ serve of the native stock and every day be¬ comes more so. Of course the one business that most people have in mind when they think of Jewish ac¬ tivities is the theatre. The word “business” is used with complete accuracy. Several years ago Mr. Marc Klaw, in a public apology for the “theatrical trust” of which he was so important a part, boldly took the stand that the theatre was not art — it was purely a com¬ mercial enterprise. The Jews, discussing this phase of their activities, commonly use the expression “the amusement business.” The words tell the whole story. Yet, in estimating their influence upon the stage, it is necessary to be discriminating. The actors and ac¬ tresses, for the larger part, are Gentiles; the same is true of the playwrights, and, to a greater extent than is commonly supposed, of the “producers” — the managers who put on the plays. The artistic side of the stage, with certain important exceptions, is thus in the hands of Christians. That the American stage, so far as the production of the work of American writers is concerned, has greatly improved in the last quarter of a century; that THE JEWS IN AMERICA 129 the technique of play production — lighting, scenic effects, and the like — has similarly im¬ proved; must be apparent to all except those who are altogether hopelessly hidebound wor¬ shippers of the past. That it has acquired a startling freedom in the treatment of certain aspects of life is also apparent. There is a tendency to attribute this salaciousness to Jew¬ ish management; yet there is a danger of be¬ coming overhasty in this judgment. The English stage, to say nothing of the French, shows the same tendencies, and the Jews do not dominate these theatres to the extent that they do the American. Another disconcert¬ ing fact is that the authors of these plays are too frequently Gentiles. Recently Mr. Avery Hopwood has permitted to be published the fact that he has made nearly $1,500,000 in the last ten years as a playwright. Unfortunately many of the most profitable of his plays are of salacious character. Making all necessary qualifications, how¬ ever, the fact remains that the Jewish in¬ fluence on the stage, as a whole, has been de¬ plorable. Probably most people would not regard David Belasco and the Frohmans as disintegrating influences; significantly Mr. 1 30 THE JEWS IN AMERICA Belasco is a Jew of Spanish-Portuguese stock, while the Frohmans are German in origin. On the other hand, the Shuberts are Hungar¬ ian Jews; they belong to that eastern branch of the race which has shown less sympathy with American ideals than have their Ger¬ man and Spanish predecessors. The chief sin that is commonly laid at the feet of these men is that they have reduced the theatre to a purely commercial and speculative enterprise. Only to a limited extent are they theatrical men at all; that is, they produce few plays; primarily they are dealers in theatrical real estate. By purchase, lease, or other arrange¬ ment they have succeeded in gaining control over most of the theatres in the United States. Their business is that of renting these buildings to the actual producers of plays. This power makes them practically the dictators of the theatrical profession; they can say what plays are to be produced, where they are to be produced, and when. The re¬ sult is the elimination of the theatrical man¬ ager, as he was known in the old days. The managers who then gave distinction to the American stage were men — occasionally wom¬ en — who trained their own companies, con- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 131 trolled their own theatres, and arranged their own “bookings.” Every important American city had its own stock company, companies that not only furnished wholesome entertainment but did great service as schools of actors and actresses. In those days such actors as Edwin Booth and Mary Anderson could start on tour with no company of their own, using the stock companies in the cities they “played” as “sup¬ port.” But the Jewish theatrical syndicate, by gaining control of the theatre buildings, reduced theatre managers to the position of caretakers and janitors; they had nothing to say as to the companies they could engage; all this was arranged for them by a “booking office” in New York. The most unfortunate effect was this disappearance of these old schools of acting. Actors like Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson, Richard Mansfield, and Lawrence Barrett, and actresses like Mary Anderson and Ada Rehan and Helen Mod- jeska have vanished, leaving no successors. There are many other aspects of Russian Jewish immigration. The second generation is largely employed in the public service — as clerks and stenographers in the city depart¬ ments, as lawyers, doctors, dentists, as school i32 THE JEWS IN AMERICA teachers, policemen, and firemen. Yet this survey of their activities, limited as it is, proves one thing. Their “assimilation” has taken place only to a very moderate extent. They have penetrated only slightly into the multitudinous businesses and industries that make up that great complex known as Amer¬ ican life. Any race fifty per cent, of whose people live in one city, and the remaining fifty per cent, in other large American cities, can hardly be regarded as having become flesh of the flesh of the American body. And this summary of their achievements shows that the economic progress made by the Polish Jews has not been extensive. Peddlers, push¬ cart men, small liquor dealers, factors in wine and tobacco, petty tradesmen and merchants, speculators in real estate, manufacturers and dealers in wearing apparel, operators in mov¬ ing pictures and theatres — these in the main are their occupations, and in none have they advanced far beyond the methods of the old world. In the great tide of American busi¬ ness and finance they play little part. In most activities they are speculators — mere profit-takers. The solid achievements that can be placed to the credit of the Jewish THE JEWS IN AMERICA 133 populations are almost exclusively the work of the Sephardic and German elements. To the spirit that animates the American indus¬ trial machine the Eastern Jews are still alien. The masses, economically speaking, still live in the Middle Ages; the scope of American life is still far beyond their imagination. Moreover, they manifest certain disquieting tendencies, which will be described in the next chapter. CHAPTER IV RADICALISM AMONG THE POLISH JEWS R.E the Polish Jews anti-nationalistic in 1 JL spirit, devoid of patriotism, unsympa¬ thetic with the thing known as Americanism, lacking in understanding and appreciation of the principles that control the American system? Are their political tendencies sub¬ versive, destructive? Is their attitude, so far as American institutions are concerned, one of restlessness, dislike, contempt, and even of hostility? This is the most serious charge brought against the Polish Jew; and it cer¬ tainly calls for close and honest examination. The last two or three years have witnessed a flood of anti -Jewish literature. Perhaps the book that has aroused the greatest interest is “The Jews,” by Hilaire Belloc. Mr. Belloc’s central idea is that the Jew is a hope¬ less alien in any European society; that nationalism is not one of the gifts with which heaven has endowed him; that he can never THE JEWS IN AMERICA 135 » think like an Englishman, a German, a Frenchman, or an American; that wherever he is, he is fundamentally and always a Jew and that any attempt to incorporate him as a citizen in the European and American sense is certain to fail. Probably most intelligent Americans will have difficulty in accepting this sweeping generalization. There are too many striking illustrations to the contrary. Is it true that the nationalistic, or the “patri¬ otic” impulse, is an emotion of which the Jew is constitutionally incapable? Take England itself. Was Disraeli always a Jew and never an Englishman? That of course was the charge made by those Englishmen who, in his own day, persisted in regarding him as an adventurer and not as a statesman. Yet it is difficult to read his life, as recently presented in six big volumes by Moneypenny and Buckle, without concluding that the glory of England was the one inspiration of his career. Few Englishmen of a hundred generations had a greater conception of England’s mission and few felt a greater pride in extending that influence than this gifted descendant of the Jewish refugees of Spain. To seek an illus¬ tration in another country, who will deny that 136 THE JEWS IN AMERICA Sarah Bernhardt was a Frenchwoman in every fibre of her being? American history, past and present, offers too many illustrations of patriotic Jews to make Mr. Belloc’s accusation acceptable. The old established Jews of colonial days played an entirely creditable part in the American Revolution. Though their instincts were aristocratic, they aligned themselves, al¬ most to a man, on the side of the colonies, fought in the American Army and contributed in many other ways. The story of Haym Salomon, a Polish Jew, is a typical one. This man not only volunteered for the most dangerous of all kinds of military service — that of a spy — but he gave his entire fortune to the patriotic cause and was one of Robert Morris’s chief reliances in financing the Revolution. It would certainly be an un¬ grateful American who, in view of this ex¬ ample, would say that patriotic Americanism is beyond the emotional and intellectual scope of the Jew. But it is not necessary to ransack history. The recent war sufficiently refuted the Belloc generalization. Most of the Jews of western Europe became as partisan nationalists as the Christians themselves. THE JEWS IN AMERICA 137 The French Jew was hardly excelled in na¬ tional fervour by the Frenchman of long standing. The German Jew was as rabidly German as the Kaiser himself; in this country the pro-Germanism of the German Jew, even after the sinking of the Lusitania, made him exceedingly unpopular. The Jew who had been domiciled for generations in England supported the British cause with the utmost loyalty. The attitude of all these Jews was nationalistic; like the rest of the population they fell victims to the old-fashioned and — in some circles — discredited psychosis known as “patriotism” ; their minds, that is, func¬ tioned normally, not, as the Belloc school would persuade us, exceptionally. The the¬ ory that the Jew is incapable of becoming an American is one that most observers can refute for themselves. All of us know Jews whose Americanism is as deep seated as our own. Who will say that Abraham Jacobi, Joseph Seligman, and August Belmont, in the past generation, were not high-minded Americans? Who can deny such a virtue to Henry Mor- genthau, Oscar Straus, Julius Rosenwald, Adolph Ochs, and thousands of others whose names will quickly come to mind? The 138 THE JEWS IN AMERICA charge that the Jew is always and necessarily an alien, that he can never think like an Amer¬ ican, never feel pride in the American tradi¬ tion, never devote his energies to maintaining the American ideal of government and or¬ dered liberty, is one that breaks down at the slightest test of the facts. Yet, in discussing this phase of the Jewish question, as all the others, it is necessary to draw a sharp line of discrimination. There are three divisions of Jews in the United States. These are the Sephardic Jews, the Ger¬ man Jews, and the Eastern or Polish Jews. The first two make up perhaps 500,000 of the more than 3,000,000 Jews in the United States. The last comprise more than 2,500,000; they comprise the vast bulk of our Jewish popula¬ tion. In previous chapters the present writer has emphasized the fact that about the only quality the Sephardic and German Jews have in common with the Polish Jews is a common religion. In all other respects, in history, ethnology, in physical and mental character¬ istics, they are absolutely different. Practi¬ cally all students of Jewish history maintain that the Jews of western and eastern Europe are distinct races — as different as is an Eng- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 139 lishman from a Sicilian, or a German from a Slav. That the Western Jews represent a vastly higher stage of achievement in business, in politics, in literature, and the arts than the Eastern, has already been made clear. Practi¬ cally all the great Jewish names that have become familiar to cultivated people — Spi¬ noza, Mendelssohn, Heine, Disraeli, Ehrlich — are those of Western Jews. Such success as has come to American Jews in business and finance is confined, almost exclusively, to Jews of Western origin; such are the Seligmans, the Schiffs, the Kahns, the Warburgs, the Guggenheims. Is it true that in this matter of “Americanization” this same distinction must be made? Is it a fact that, as a mass, the Spanish and German Jews become good Americans and that, as a mass, the Polish Jews do not? It is only conclusions based on the status of the rank and file that have the slightest value. Many writers dispose of these questions by a test which is simplicity itself. The question of the Jewish leadership of Russian Bolshe¬ vism has produced a violent literature, pro and con. Anti-Semitic writers have produced books and pamphlets demonstrating that the 1 40 THE JEWS IN AMERICA movement is a Jewish one: the champions of the Jews have rebutted with ponderous proofs that it is not. The literary methods in both cases are the same. Elaborate lists of Soviet cabinets are printed intended to show that the majority of the leaders are, or are not, Jews. Yet such evidence as this is not espe¬ cially important. The point is not whether certain leaders are Jews or Gentiles; the only important point is the extent to which the Jewish masses themselves are infected with this revolutionary practice. And the same principle applies to the study of the quality of the citizenship of the Polish Jews in the great American cities. That Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman are Eastern Jews does not necessarily prove that the whole East Side of New York is inhabited by anarchists. That Morris Hillquit, an Eastern Jew, is the lead¬ ing exponent of Socialism in this country, is not positive proof that the entire Jewish com¬ munity is devoted to the teachings of the Third Internationale. The only evidence that has value is that which concerns the masses of the people. That the names of Polish Jews so constantly appear in all revolutionary and anti-nationalistic movements in New York is THE JEWS IN AMERICA 141 not a sufficient reason for framing an indict¬ ment against the million and a half men, women, and children that make up its Jewish population; the one point that concerns the nation is the extent to which these seditious leaders really represent this great compact population. It must be admitted, at the beginning, that the history and “psychology” of the Polish Jew are not a satisfactory preparation for American citizenship. His background has been altogether unfavourable. He differs from his Sephardic and Germanic brothers in that he has not developed a mentality charac¬ terized by the nationalistic impulse. Unlike the Spanish and the German Jew, the Polish has never been the citizen of any nation, unless Israel itself is a nation. His natural feeling, indeed, is to distrust and hate the government under which he lives, and, in view of his his¬ tory for the last century and a half, this is not surprising. Throughout this period, the larger number of the Polish Jews have been denizens of the Russian Empire. They be¬ came the children of the Czar when the east¬ ern provinces of Poland were forcibly added to the Russian dominion. The treatment re- 1 42 THE JEWS IN AMERICA ceived for the ensuing century and a half was hardly the kind that would persuade them that government was a thing to be loved and re¬ spected. The hostility which the Eastern Jews manifest toward any established order, even that of the United States, is usually at¬ tributed to this severe experience. Is it surprising, their apologists ask, that they should think that government is some¬ thing to be feared, hated, and even conspired against? Yet entire frankness obliges one to insist that the problem is more deep-seated. The Polish Jew has been a subject of the Czar for less than a century and a half; for the six or seven hundred years preceding that he had been a subject of the old Polish Kingdom. Under the rule of Poland he had, on the whole, been treated well. In the Middle Ages Poland was generally known as the paradise of the Jew. Here he was permitted to live in peace and quiet, to ply his favourite trades un¬ disturbed, to enjoy his religion and religious practices unimpeded by the fierce bursts of fanaticism that disgraced most other coun¬ tries of Europe. Despite this fact, the Polish Jew had never developed any particular attachment to Poland. He had apparently THE JEWS IN AMERICA 143 not learned to love the nation in which he had found so hospitable a refuge, and, in the course of the centuries, he had never become an in¬ tegral part of it. He had never even learned its language; though the Spanish Jews spoke Spanish, the French Jews French, the Ger¬ man Jews German, and the English Jews English, the Polish Jews had never adopted Polish as their vernacular. They were almost the only branches of their race who continued to write their speech in the strange Hebrew characters of the Old Testament. Similarly they had never become a part of the Polish State ; they were as distinct a tribe in the midst of a European civilization as were the bands of gypsies that also roamed eastern Europe. The life they maintained was modelled after that of the Jews of the days of Ezra. They always resented — as they do to-day — the idea that they were Poles or a part of the Polish State; they insisted on being Jews and nothing else. Nor does it seem to be the case that the Jews in Poland were compelled to lead a dis¬ tinct existence by the Government as a part of an anti-Jewish policy; the Ghetto was their own creation and their own choice; the fact that they were able to enjoy this privilege and i44 THE JEWS IN AMERICA many others was what made their sojourn in Poland so agreeable and so free from the per¬ secutions to which they were subject in other countries. This seems to indicate that the lack of national feeling which the Polish Jews evince to-day is not the product of Russian persecution, but that it is a deep-lying racial trait. Poland was perhaps the greatest “melt¬ ing pot” of the Middle Ages ; it found no diffi¬ culty in absorbing Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Irish; but it never absorbed its Jews. For it seems the fact that the Polish Jews care no more for Poland to-day than did their mediaeval ancestors. As a mass they have shown no interest in a regenerated Poland; in the World War their support was thrown to Germany; and the present bitter anti-Jewish feeling in Poland to-day is ex¬ plained by this pro-Germanism. Why is it that, whereas German, French, Spanish, and French Jews have demonstrated this nation¬ alistic impulse, the Polish Jews have seemed to be so devoid of it? That is a question for the historian and the student of racial psy¬ chology. The training of this mass Polish mind, therefore, is not favourable to a quick under- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 145 standing of and enthusiasm for American principles. Are there any manifestations of indifference and even unfriendliness in the daily life of the Polish Jews in New York? The first fact that impresses the inquirer, as he attempts to glance into the composite mind of metropolitan Jewry, is its reading matter. The thing that startles is that the Yiddish press of New York City is extremely social¬ istic. The great newspapers edited by Jews, published by Jews, and read by Jews, are preaching political principles whose success means the destruction of the American system of government. The great Yiddish newspa¬ per of New York’s East Eide, is Vorwdrts ( The Forward) , edited by Mr. Abraham Cahan, a Russian Jew of romantic personal history and of literary attainments of a high order — he has won wide recognition as a short story writer in English. The Forward has a daily circulation of 160,000 copies. It is one of the most successful and one of the most profitable newspapers in New York or in the United States. It is found in practically every Yiddish reading home and wields with its clientele an influence such as few English papers can boast with theirs. Its political 146 THE JEWS IN AMERICA principles are not found in the platforms of the Republican or Democratic parties, in the Declaration of Independence, or in the Constitution of the United States. It draws practically no inspiration from American history. The lives of Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the other American immortals furnish its writers no examples. Its principles are derived from Das Kapital of Karl Marx. The wisdom or the folly of So¬ cialism are not the issue here. The only point insisted on is that Socialism is not American¬ ism ; it may be better or worse ; but it is not the same. The triumph of Marxism means the destruction of every principle upon which the American state rests, and it makes ridiculous a century and a half of American history. It substitutes “internationalism” for a robust American nationalism, “the solidarity of the working classes” for the American allegiance to the central government, “the dictatorship of the proletariat” for representative institu¬ tions. That a newspaper should exist advocating these doctrines is not especially significant; every opinion, in politics or theology, neces¬ sarily has its spokesman in so large and THE JEWS IN AMERICA 147 diversified a country as the United States; what is significant is that the newspapers preaching such doctrines, especially The For¬ ward , should be the most widely read of all publications on the East Side. That, in order to obtain a large circulation with the Yiddish reading public, a newspaper should be obliged to preach the same principles that produced the Bolshevist Revolution in Russia is the thing that gives one pause. Let us imagine, for example, that the New York Times , the Tribune , and the Evening Post were con¬ stantly advocating the overthrow of the American Government and its substitution by a Socialistic state; that they were con¬ stantly denouncing American “nationalism” and praying for the day when it would be superseded by international “solidarity.” This would not necessarily mean that these newspapers represented a perverted men¬ tality, for any man is free to believe these doctrines and to advocate them and need not be regarded as an abandoned soul because he does so. Such a policy would merely show that these journals, hitherto the upholders of American constitutionalism, had given up American principles and that they hoped for 148 THE JEWS IN AMERICA the overthrow of the American Government. Moreover — and this is the point — it would show that the English reading masses in New York City regarded Socialism as a better political system than the American Democ¬ racy. This one fact, therefore, that the most influential and most largely circulated Jewish press of New York is devoted to Socialism, gives us that insight into the mass mind of the Polish Jew which is essential to any adequate comprehension of his present atti¬ tude toward the American state. If any one of the big English papers of New York should advocate such political principles, they would immediately lose their readers and pass out of existence; evidently the Yiddish press can keep its readers only by taking this stand. To those who still believe in the Constitution this fact is really appalling. This enthusiasm for the doctrines of Karl Marx, in preference to the doctrines of Washington and Jefferson and Franklin and Lincoln and Roosevelt, appears in other directions than in the daily press. Any one who attends a Socialistic meeting in New York is immediately impressed by the fact that the audience is almost exclusively composed of THE JEWS IN AMERICA 149 East Side Jews. The great public meeting place established by Peter Cooper is a favour¬ ite headquarters for East Side radicalism. Practically all the orators of discontent who occupy soap boxes in the New York streets are unmistakably Eastern Jews. The mass meetings that are occasionally called in the interest of American recognition of the Rus¬ sian Soviet Government are overwhelmingly Jewish in their composition. The behaviour of European and American Socialists, when face to face with the European War, strik¬ ingly brings out the alien quality of American radicalism. Ever since the days of Karl Marx it has been a Socialist tenet that all wars are the products of capitalism; from this it necessarily follows that it is the duty of all Socialists in all countries to refuse to support their governments in war. This had been a doctrine of the First Internationale, but it went to pieces when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870. The Second Internation¬ ale, organized on the ruins of the First, simi¬ larly made this rule of non-participation in nationalist wars one of the fixed stones in its edifice. Again the existence of such a prin¬ ciple did not affect the Socialists of Europe 150 THE JEWS IN AMERICA when the war began in 1914. The followers of Marx proved that their devotion to this idea was merely lip service; and that it had never seized their minds and their consciences. The repetition of a pacifistic phrase could not obliterate many centuries of history; though the Socialists of Germany, France, Belgium, and England had for years accepted the idea of the “solidarity of the working class” in preference to patriotism on national lines, they were utterly unable to forget, when the test came, that they were first of all Ger¬ mans, Frenchmen, Belgians, and Englishmen. In all these countries, therefore, the Socialists, as a party, supported their countries in the war, and fought in their armies; despite the doctrines they had been absorbing for years, they became as effective “nationalists” as the most moss-grown devotees of an effete patri¬ otism. To this rule of Socialistic behaviour there was one great exception. There was just one country in which the Socialists re¬ mained true to Socialistic teaching on the sub¬ ject of war. There was one country, that is, in which the Socialists refused to support their government, and in which they actually took up a position of hostility. That country was THE JEWS IN AMERICA 151 the United States. The test of conflict dis¬ closed that American Socialists were the only kind who remained faithful to their Socialistic creed. The American Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917; the very next day the Socialist party of America met in con¬ gress at St. Louis and adopted a manifesto calling upon its followers to oppose the war. “The Socialist party of the United States in the present grave crisis,” so read its proclama¬ tion, “solemnly reaffirms its allegiance to the principle of internationalism and working- class solidarity the world over and proclaims its unalterable opposition to the war just de¬ clared by the Government of the United States. . . . As against the false doctrine of na¬ tional patriotism we uphold the ideal of inter¬ national working-class solidarity.” That the war was the handiwork of the capitalists, that American capitalists had forced the United States in, that German submarine warfare was not an invasion of American rights and that, “in modern history there has been no war more unjustifiable than the one in which we are about to engage” — such were only a few of the sentiments contained in this document. These assembled Socialists pledged themselves 152 THE JEWS IN AMERICA to “continuous, active, and public opposition to the war through demonstrations, mass pe¬ titions, and all other means in our power.” They voted to oppose “all legislation for mili¬ tary or industrial conscription,” “any attempt to raise money for payment of war expenses by taxing the necessaries of life or issuing bonds,” to organize workers“into strong, class¬ conscious, and closely unified political and industrial organizations, to enable them by concerted and harmonious mass action to shorten this war and establish lasting peace.” Why is it that the American Socialists, unlike the Socialists of all other countries, thus turned upon the nation whose citizenship they enjoyed? The answer is apparent. The German Socialists were Germans, and possessed the instincts and the emotions of Germans; the French Socialists were French¬ men; the Belgian Socialists were Belgians, and the English Socialists were Englishmen. But Socialism in the United States has made little impression upon native Americans. With the exception of a scattering of “intellec¬ tuals,” American Socialists have always been aliens. The first American Socialists were Germans, but they were few in number, and THE JEWS IN AMERICA 153 are not especially numerous even now. The recent influx from southern Italy has added considerably to our Socialist population, as have the miscellaneous inroads of Slavic races from eastern and southeastern Europe. It does not appear that the German Jews who came in considerable numbers in the ’forties, ’fifties, and ’sixties contained any considerable percentage of Socialists; many were political revolutionaries, but revolutionaries of the type of Carl Schurz; their enthusiasm was not for the Socialistic state, but for the Republican form of government. But the vast inpouring of the Jews from eastern Europe presented an entirely different aspect. Not all were Socialists; perhaps the majority, in their diffi¬ cult lives, had not done sufficient thinking on political problems to take a decided stand; yet the fact cannot be overlooked that large numbers of them had been Socialists and radi¬ cals in Russia and that America, whatever charm it may have had, was not able to inspire them with any great fondness for its political institutions. Political oppression had been their lot for several generations; government meant in their eyes something that robbed in the name of taxation, that suppressed speech 154 THE JEWS IN AMERICA and press, that applied the lash as a punitive measure, that exiled to Siberia, that deliber¬ ately instigated pogroms; government was thus an unlovely and a hateful thing. This feeling was especially poignant among the Jews who came after 1905, the year when the autocracy suppressed the revolution in such hideous fashion. Thus the arrival of these Polish and Rus¬ sian Jews introduced a new element into the American population. For the first time the Socialists became powerful enough to elect an occasional member of Congress or of a state legislature. Even with these accessions Socialist voters have not been very numerous; yet the fact remains that the only considerable Socialistic bloc in this country is composed of these same Eastern Jews. And this, of course, is the reason why the American Socialists took their stand against the war in 1917. That the movement was almost ex¬ clusively alien is evidenced by the fact that most Socialists of “American stock” — and there were a few — broke away from the party; that is, they behaved precisely like German Socialists in Germany and French Socialists in France; the homeland had a THE JEWS IN AMERICA 155 stronger hold upon them than they had imagined; when the time came to make the choice, they dropped their “internationalism” and became “Americans.” The exodus in¬ cluded such members as Charles E. Russell, W. E. Walling, John Spargo (English born), J. G. Phelps Stokes, and Allen Benson. The last, who had been the Socialist candidate for President in 1916, publicly explained the cause of his departure. “The present foreign- born leaders of the Socialist party,” he said, “if they had lived during the Civil War, would doubtless have censured Marx for con¬ gratulating Wilson ... I therefore re¬ sign as a protest against the foreign-born lead¬ ership that blindly believes a non-American policy can be made to appeal to many Amer¬ icans.” The line of schism was picturesquely emphasized in the political divergence of the Stokes family. Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes, a man of ancient American lineage, had for years been one of the leaders of American Socialism ; but the idea of abandoning his own country and championing the Kaiser, and this at the dictation of certain recently arrived im¬ migrants from Russia, was too much for his gorge, and he promptly left the party. His 156 THE JEWS IN AMERICA wife, however, was Miss Rose Pastor, a Rus¬ sian Jewess; she remained true to her Social¬ ism, committed various offences against Amer¬ ican law, and was indicted under the sedition law. Yet an even more important question is this: To what extent did the Polish Jews, as a mass, endorse the programme of these leaders? On this point the evidence is pretty- direct. For many years the leader of Amer¬ ican Socialism has been Mr. Morris Hillquit of New York. A few months after the St. Louis gathering dispersed, Mr. Hillquit be¬ came the candidate for Mayor of New York on the Socialist ticket. Moreover, he made this St. Louis declaration the leading plank in his canvass. He boldly took the issue of “patriotism the great sham,” the “solidarity of the working classes,” and the iniquity of the war as the leading motifs of his speeches. This gentleman was born in Riga, Russia, in 1869 — his name is said to have been originally Hillkovitz — and lived there until his seven¬ teenth year, when he came to the United States as an immigrant. His new country has ap¬ parently done well for him in a material way; he has prospered as a lawyer; one of the jibes THE JEWS IN AMERICA 157 frequently thrown at Mr. Hillquit during the mayoralty campaign was that every night, after preaching the social revolution to the hard-working proletariat on the East Side, he himself returned for a good night’s rest to his luxurious apartment on Riverside Drive. Mr. Hillquit has little respect for the country which has given him these opportunities. For years his energies have been devoted to de¬ stroying the American system of government. For the present Constitution he would substi¬ tute something resembling the present order in Russia. In his political cosmos there is really no such thing as an American citizen, in whose place there is a somewhat amorphous figure, a member of an international brother¬ hood, a worker who finds his political identity not as a member of a state, but as one of the great mass of toilers in all parts of the world. This conception is written into the very Con¬ stitution of the Socialist party of America. To belong to it, it is not necessary to be an American citizen; aliens are as freely admit¬ ted as the descendant of Plymouth Rock; and this is logical, for the Socialist party denies that there is such a thing as an American ; such a creature simply does not exist; all that does 158 THE JEWS IN AMERICA exist is “the solidarity of the working class” in all countries, to whom all political power, all wealth, and the enjoyment thereof are re¬ served. The inspiration of the Hillquit movement, therefore, was anti-national and anti-American. For several weeks Mr. Hillquit, in his mayoralty campaign, toured the tenement districts of New York City, preaching these doctrines to extremely enthusiastic audiences. At that time — it was the autumn of 1917 — the United States was engaged in war with Ger¬ many. Mr. Hillquit boldly accepted this challenge; his speeches denounced American participation, practically championed the German cause, and were a perpetual incite¬ ment to his hearers to obstruct the American effort. Mr. Hillquit even loudly boasted of the fact that he had purchased no Liberty Bonds. All this is of little consequence so far as Hillquit himself is concerned; for years his revolutionary attitude had been well known; its only importance in the present connection is the light which it sheds upon the extent to which these radical teachings are part and par¬ cel of the mass-mind of the Polish Jew. These Jewish sections had three candidates to choose THE JEWS IN AMERICA 159 from in this election: the radical anti-nation¬ alist Hillquit, the Tammany Hall Democrat John F. Hylan, and the independent John Purroy Mitchel — the last the most effective and chivalrous figure who has appeared in New York local politics since the Civil War. Whom did they vote for? The election re¬ turns tell the story. The assembly districts in which the Polish Jews are most numerous — the ones in which they practically amount to the entire population — are the Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, and Seventeenth in Manhattan, and the Third, Fourth, and Fifth in the Bronx. The vote in these districts was as follows : Assembly District Hylan Mitchel Hillquit Fourth . 2,661 328 3,878 Sixth . 2,187 831 3,827 Eighth . 2,715 994 4,847 Seventeenth . 2,622 1,733 4,78o Bronx — Third .... 3,301 1,586 4,865 Fourth . 3,016 I,5i7 4,967 Fifth . 3,313 2,121 5,864 Total . I9,8i5 9,110 33,028 These figures show that the Jewish voters did not vote as a mass for this anti-American candidate. Their support in these and in other districts in which the Polish Jews are exceedingly numerous was thrown in a con- 160 THE JEWS IN AMERICA siderable degree to Tammany Hall. Yet the Socialist candidate, even in face of the very seditious campaign he had made, did prove the favourite in these densely populated Polish districts. Though there were consid¬ erable minorities who went to the other candi¬ dates, the fact remains that more of them voted for Socialism than for any other cause. They prove that the only sections of New York City which contain a large Socialistic popu¬ lation are those in which the Polish Jew is the predominant element. The local election re¬ turns for fifteen years demonstrate the same fact. Whenever a Socialist is sent as a con¬ gressman to Washington, an assemblyman to Albany, or an alderman to the City Hall, he always represents a district in which the popu¬ lation is almost exclusively composed of Pol¬ ish Jews. In their labour organizations the immi¬ grants from Poland and Russia show precisely the same tendencies. Up to about the year 1914 the labour movement in America had presented one sharp angle of contrast with the labour movement in Europe and even in Eng¬ land. It had been kept separate and distinct from programmes that were destructive of the THE JEWS IN AMERICA 161 existing political order. The labour move¬ ment had been American in its purposes and its methods. The old Knights of Labour and the existing Federation of Labour had aimed only at improving the conditions of the work¬ ing classes, to give them better wages, better working conditions, better opportunities at life. That these organizations had frequently indulged in acts of lawlessness is true; but the destruction of the present political and economic system had never been their am¬ bition, and the teachings of Karl Marx had never obtained any hold on any large number of American workingmen. They had always accepted the American Constitution as their political ideal and such changes as they sought to bring about in the industrial system were always planned to be accomplished within the operations of that instrument. One of the facts that had astonished foreign observers was the extent to which the American labour movement had been kept free from politics. Many parties had been launched adorned with the labour label; many attempts had been made to organize American workmen in a political unit for political action, but they had always failed. American workmen, like 1 62 THE JEWS IN AMERICA American millionaires, became Democrats or Republicans; politics, at least in its form of organization, recognized no social distinc¬ tions; the American “proletariat” was signally insensible to the attempts of alien agitators to stimulate its “class consciousness.” No other country presented any phenomenon quite like this. At the present time the British Labour party, with its 130 members, is the second party in the British Parliament; but there is not in the American Congress a single member who sits there as the representative of a labour political organization. Mr. Gompers’s career as President of the American Federation of Labour, largely rep¬ resents a determination to keep the American labour movement free from Socialism, anar¬ chism, or political radicalism of any type. Mr. Gompers believes in the American Con¬ stitution, in the American system of govern¬ ment, and he has no patience or sympathy with any attempt to destroy them. He believes that he can secure his reforms under that Con¬ stitution and he is prepared to fight his battle on that line. Many times have the radical forces in the labour ranks tried to unseat him, but up to the present time they have inglori- THE JEWS IN AMERICA 163 ously failed. Mr. Gompers is himself a Jew, and in his own person sufficiently refutes the mistaken Belloc dictum that no Jew can be a sincere nationalist; the fact remains, however, that the chief opposition he has met in his at¬ tempt to keep American labour free from radicalism has come from Jews — almost ex¬ clusively of the Polish or Russian type. Up to 1914 the working classes in the clothing trades had never been very closely organ¬ ized. The unions had existed for years and had engaged in many fierce strikes, but that lack of cohesion which is one of the failings of Jewish mentality had caused the members to hold their allegiance lightly and to become backward in paying dues. The great labour group in the clothing trades was the United Garment Workers of America, a union whose form of organization followed the accepted American standard. It was a union, that is, on simple craft lines; it existed to improve the general economic conditions of the workers; it proclaimed no political purpose, and cer¬ tainly cherished no Socialistic or subversive programme. As such the United Garment Workers of America was affiliated with the American Federation of Labour and partici- 1 64 THE JEWS IN AMERICA pated in all its conventions. It had accom¬ plished many beneficial reforms, especially in the abolition of the sweatshop and improved working conditions. Its membership, naturally, was overwhelm- ingly Jewish, though there was then, as there is to-day, a considerable representation of Italian workers. For years the forces of radi¬ calism had been seeking to capture the gar¬ ment workers ; in the year 1914 these elements, under the leadership of Sidney Hillman, one of the most revolutionary labour captains in New York, succeeded so far as to elect a group of radical delegates to the convention of the American Federation of Labour. Mr. Gompers’s convention refused to admit these gentlemen because their announced pro¬ gramme was revolutionary and un-American. The Hillman cohorts therefore withdrew from the hall, started a rump convention in another building, and organized a new union called the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. The purpose of the new group was not disguised. It was blatantly radical. Its aim was to organize the clothing workers for political action; and it proposed to use the men of the clothing trades as a voting unit to THE JEWS IN AMERICA 165 destroy the present system of government as well as the present economic order and to plant in their place a condition not unlike that which prevails in Russia. Its constitution is full of the now familiar talk about “class con¬ sciousness,” “capitalism,” the “ruling class,” the “ruled class,” “the constant and unceas¬ ing struggle,” “craft unionism,” and the like. Its whole purpose is summed up in this sec¬ tion : “The industrial and inter-industrial organization, built upon the solid rock of clear knowledge and class consciousness, will put the organized working class in actual con¬ trol of the system of production and the working class will then be ready to take pos¬ session of it.” That is, the plan is for the one big union— the organization of all the work¬ ers, not on craft lines, but on class lines — this as the preparation for the day when the work¬ ers will themselves take possession of industry. The programme is thus that of the Soviet. Again and again the leaders of the Amalga¬ mated have proclaimed this purpose. “We are going to move heaven and earth,” shouted Abraham J. Shiplacoff, manager of the Jewish Board of Clothing Workers, in a public speech, “to educate our people that they and 1 66 THE JEWS IN AMERICA they alone are the owners of the industry, and not the idlers and loafers at our backs. The workers in Russia have found this out, God bless them! . . . Everybody knows it is war. We are going to control the industry.” And again this same speaker: “If I knew that old Sammy Gompers knew as much as that, I would tell you to go and do what the workers did in Turin. Ten thousand of them marched to the factory with music and a flag, and they opened the doors and went to work and said : ‘To hell with the owners of the factory!’ ” The Secretary of the Amalgamated is Joseph Schlossberg, who, in a speech at Madison Square Garden, announced its programme in these words: “The clothing industry is ours. We are not going to permit the employer to determine where his factory shall be or how many hours we shall work. . . . The flame of rebellion is blowing fiercer every day in the hearts of all the men in the clothing industry.” The attitude of the Amalgamated toward the American Government was suf¬ ficiently indicated by a banner borne in the streets of Boston during one of their strikes, with the following legend: “To hell with the United States.” The opinion of an THE JEWS IN AMERICA 167 American union leader of the old type, Mr. John P. Holland, President of the New York State Federation of Labour, may also be quoted. “The Amalgamated Clothing Work¬ ers,” he says, “do not believe in the Govern¬ ment. There is not a place where one of their speakers goes that he does not ridicule the form of government of. the United States. Only a few weeks ago one of their speakers was in Buffalo, and at McKinley Square spoke, ridiculing the Government and the method of doing business.” Again, this movement would have no racial bearing if it was an isolated thing, unrelated to the daily lives of the masses that make up the great Jewish districts. Again, the impor¬ tant point is, do the rank and file endorse this radical union? Again the facts are available. Since the break took place in 1914, a fierce battle has been fought between the United Garment Workers, the conservative union, and the Amalgamated, the radical, for the control of the clothing industry. The cloth¬ ing workers have abandoned, almost in mass, their conservative leaders and have gone over to the spokesmen of sedition and revolution. The old United Garment Workers is still 1 68 THE JEWS IN AMERICA affiliated with the American Federation of Labour, but it is a feeble concern. Its mem¬ bership is about 30,000 while the membership of the radical organization is about 175,000. It is extremely significant that the first labour movement in America to become Socialistic and anti-Government in its purposes should derive its membership from immigrants from eastern Europe. The radical writers rejoice in this fact. “No strong and important group of unions in the United States,” says George Soule, in a recent book, “has wholeheartedly accepted the new unionism and consciously modelled structure and strategy accordingly, except the unions in the clothing industry.” The phenomenon is something entirely new in American life. That there is a great mass of radicalism among the Polish Jews is thus apparent; to deny it or attempt to explain it away would help us little in the discussion of the immi¬ gration problem. Yet it is necessary also to be entirely just. The study of the Jewish character involves one in a maze of contra¬ dictions. That the Jew should be a Socialist at all is a startling fact. The main charge brought against him is his alleged materialism, THE JEWS IN AMERICA 169 his acquisitiveness, his passion for property, his insistence on the personal possession of the thing that he can call his own. An economic system that contemplates the abolition of pri¬ vate property and the common possession of the fruits of industry would seem to be the last one that would appeal to him. Why should a race so devoted to building up property also be so eager to pull it down? And in his atti¬ tude toward the American Government the Polish Jew shows a similar contradiction. His newspaper reading is Socialistic, he votes for candidates whose canvass is based on vio¬ lent hostility to the American Government, and his labour unions, alone of all American labour unions, seek to establish a Soviet system in place of the one established by Washington and Franklin. Yet it must also be recorded that Liberty Bonds were sold in large quantities on the East Side during the war, and that the Jewish sol¬ diers, especially those in the New York Sev¬ enty-Seventh Division, fought bravely and effectively. It would be exceedingly unkind and unfair in any attempt to appraise their qualities as citizens not to make a record of this fact. Yet the one clear conclusion is that the 170 THE JEWS IN AMERICA process of “Americanization” is going to be slow and more difficult with this class of im¬ migrants than with any other, except perhaps the Southern Italians. The million and a half Jews — probably more — that have crowded into the New York tenements are by no means digested. This does not mean that they never will be. The completeness with which the Sephardic and German Jews have been absorbed into the national life, the high standard of patriotic citizenship they have evinced, and the services they have rendered in education, science, letters, and other activities, show that there is nothing in the Jewish nature that necessarily dooms him to be forever an alien. But the task with the Polish Jew is going to be a longer and more difficult one. That there are hundreds of thousands in New York’s Polish Jew population who do not align themselves with these radical move¬ ments, and to whom American history and American institutions mean much, is clear. The unpleasant fact, however, is that there is an uncomfortable remainder who do. An actual count in the clothing workers of Amer¬ ica shows 175,000 radicals against 30,000 con¬ servatives. In its present great Polish Jew THE JEWS IN AMERICA 171 population — in its work of assimilating them, of making them sturdy and loyal fellow citi¬ zens of the Republic — the Nation already has a considerable job cut out for it. Until this mass is brought into harmony with American traditions and American instincts it would cer¬ tainly be folly to add considerably to it. To do so would be unfair, above all, to the Jews already here. There is only one way in which the United States can be protected from the anti-Semitism which so grievously afflicts the eastern sections of Europe. That is by put¬ ting up the bars against these immigrants until the day comes when those already here are ab¬ sorbed. This country already has too many racial and social problems and too many tasks of economic regeneration to add unnecessarily to them. Happily this conviction has at last become a fixed one in the popular mind. There is no more hopeful manifestation in American life to-day than the fact that the Nation, after fifty years of fumbling and dis¬ cussing, has at last reached the point of wis¬ dom in the restriction of immigration. THE END Date Due 4 PRINTED IN U. S. A.