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 THE HOMELANDS OF JEWRY 
 
 PERCENTAGES OF TOTAL POPULATION ARE INDKAIEI) l!V SHAD1NC;S 
 
 Cmirtny »t American-]exi:hh C.ommitlre
 
 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 A NARRATIVE OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF 
 THE WAR TO THE JEWS OF EASTERN 
 EUROPE, AND OF THE MANNER IN 
 WHICH AMERICANS HAVE AT- 
 TEMPTED TO MEET THEM 
 
 By M. E. RAVAGE 
 
 New York ALFRED • A • KNOPF Mcmxix
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 
 
 PRINTED IN THB UNITKD STATES OT AMERICA
 
 THIS BOOK IS OFFERED 
 as a tribute to the millions of 
 Americans — Jews and non- 
 Jews — who have cheerfully 
 given of their plenty and of- 
 ten submitted to sacrifices in 
 order that the unfortunates 
 of distant lands might live.
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 I The Homelands of the Jew 3 
 
 IT Jews and War in Eastern Europe 14 
 
 III The Reliance of the Jew in the New World 29 
 
 IV The Earliest Response 35 
 V America to the Rescue 45 
 
 VI Slow Progress 56 
 
 VII The Philanthropy of the Masses 65 
 
 VIII The Dramatic Beginning 75 
 
 IX The Conquest of the Country 86 
 
 X The Conduct of a Campaign from Without 94 
 
 XI The Conduct of a Campaign from Within 103 
 
 XII The Psychology of Giving 115 
 
 XIII The Share of the Others 122 
 
 XIV Problems of Distribution 134 
 
 XV Problems for To-day and To-morrow 145
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 1. The Homelands of Jewry (Map) Frontispiece 
 
 2. In the Wake of the Annies Facing page 11 
 
 3. Dangerous Enemies " " 26 
 
 4. Campaign Posters " " 98 
 
 5. In the Whirl of a Campaign " " 110 
 
 6. A Bit of Applied Christianity " " 131
 
 THE JEW PAYS
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE HOMELANDS OF THE JEW 
 
 THE outbreak of war in August, 1914, fell 
 upon the ears of America as a tragic surprise. 
 To the nations of Europe it came as an almost wel- 
 come relief from a nightmare of suspense. To 
 one people alone the call to arms was an unmiti- 
 gated catastrophe. The Jews of Eastern Europe, 
 in common with the other peoples of the continent, 
 had seen war lurking on the European horizon for 
 a generation past; but, unlike their neighbors, they 
 had beheld the thing in its naked barbarity, stripped 
 of its traditional trappings. To the great nations 
 of the West — or at least to their governments — a 
 European war promised doubtless to be a day of 
 reckoning with a menacing rival; to the small sub- 
 jugated or half-free countries lying east of Ger- 
 many, between the Baltic and the Mediterranean, 
 such a war might well hold out the hope of ma- 
 terializing long-cherished national aspirations. To 
 both alike a struggle in the open was in any event 
 to be preferred to the threat and the tension of half
 
 4 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 a century of more or less secret whettings of the 
 sword. 
 
 Not that the common man and woman in every 
 country of Europe was unmoved by the prospect 
 of the blood and terror made familiar to them by 
 the experiences of past struggles; nevertheless for 
 the strong as well as for the weak, there was a com- 
 plement and at least a partial reward in the high 
 enthusiasm of belligerency and the high hopes for 
 a brighter and a more stable future. The Pole, for 
 instance, while thoroughly aware of his share of 
 the pathetic cost of a great war, might yet be glad- 
 dened by the prospect of his country's unity and 
 independent statehood resulting from the general 
 ruin. The Vlach, projecting his vision beyond the 
 gloom around him, might not unreasonably be 
 stirred by the hope of reunion with independent 
 Rumania. And each of Austria's subject peoples 
 could welcome the bitter necessity of shedding its 
 blood for the immediate benefit of its ancient en- 
 emy and oppressor, by reflecting on the inevitable 
 collapse of the polyglot empire in a world war. 
 France, in the face of possible annihilation, might 
 take comfort in the gratification of her sentiment of 
 revenge and find relief in at last coming to grips 
 with a brutal and intolerable foe. While England, 
 not reckoning the price and not heeding it, might 
 well hold any cost trifling in exchange for the
 
 HOMELANDS 5 
 
 freedom of the seas. Only the Jew of East-Europe, 
 unblinded by any possible advantage to himself in 
 the outcome, must view the lowering calamity with 
 impartial judgment and set it down, both for him- 
 self and for the world, as all but a total loss. 
 
 There is not in all this the slightest implication 
 of superior insight on the part of the Jew, nor of 
 inferior patriotism. The Jew of Russia and Aus- 
 tria and the Balkans is, of course, gifted with 
 no more statesmanlike vision than his fellows. 
 Neither does he lack, by comparison with them, in 
 devotion to his hearth and to the gods of his house- 
 hold. Even in lands where the Jew is deprived of 
 the rights accorded to other portions of the popula- 
 tion, there is no human creature more devotedly at- 
 tached to home and family than he. And it is this 
 affectionate attachment which is, after all, the very 
 heart and meaning of patriotism. The European 
 Jew's sober valuation of international warfare is 
 only a logical outgrowth of his place in history. It 
 inevitably proceeds from his unique position in 
 the European polity. Whatever good or ill war 
 may bring to others, to him every war is a chapter 
 in extermination. Bound by ties which transcend 
 national frontiers, all battle is, as far as the Jew 
 goes, a fratricidal irrelevance. Whether or not 
 there is in practice Christian brotherhood on this 
 earth, there can be no doubt of the very real and.
 
 6 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 to the war-makers, the very annoying existence of 
 Jewish brotherhood. The status of Jewry in the 
 world is, in this respect, exactly opposite the status 
 of America. Both are international peoples. But 
 while the American commonwealth partakes of the 
 blood and bone of all peoples, the remnant of Israel 
 is scattered among all the nations of the earth and 
 its blood and bone is part and parcel of them all. 
 It matters not what nation may battle against what 
 other, every struggle in the Western world is a 
 battle between Jew and Jew. Such is the penalty 
 that Jewry pays for being the one dispersed people 
 among the nations and for persistently carrying on 
 its mission through the flux and instability of his- 
 tory. It is owing to the fact that the Jew retains 
 his name, but not his local habitation, that he is, 
 or should be, the single missionary of peace in a 
 world that clings, despite its infamy and absurdity, 
 to the military tradition of a past and utterly 
 shelved age. 
 
 How quickly this Jewish premonition was more 
 than vindicated is well known to all those who are 
 in the slightest degree familiar with the records 
 of the Eastern war zone. For it is to be under- 
 stood that when I speak of the Jews in the world 
 I am thinking principally of the unemancipated 
 millions who inhabit that strip of territory which 
 is the border-line between Western and Eastern
 
 HOMELANDS 7 
 
 Europe, and, indeed, between the Occident and 
 the Orient. Here, on a narrow band of the earth's 
 surface, comprising a fraction of the fallen Aus- 
 trian and Russian empires, and including the ma- 
 jor part of the Balkan Peninsula, are concentrated 
 not only the largest number of Jewish folk, but 
 also that distinctive tradition and point of view and 
 manner of life which is the recognized hall-mark 
 of Jewry. It is here preeminently that the Jew is 
 a Jew by every test and definition. It is here that 
 for a thousand years or more the major fraction of 
 the Remnant has survived (in the body as well as 
 in the spirit) and has evolved a culture and a civili- 
 zation of its own. Jews in the Western World 
 generally, and in the Western Hemisphere in par- 
 ticular, have, to be sure, made precious and con- 
 siderable contributions to the world's life and 
 thought which not even their most inveterate en- 
 emies can gainsay, but these contributions are gen- 
 erally the gifts of individuals to the country and 
 the polity of which they are, in a larger or lesser 
 sense, a part. Heine was as much a German poet 
 as Koerner or Goethe. Disraeli was an English 
 peer and as much a British statesman as Gladstone 
 or Palraerston. Spinoza was no more a tribal 
 philosopher than was Spencer or Kant. That all 
 these men happen to have been Jews is of no more 
 significance than the fact that Mr. Gompers or Mr,
 
 8 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 Adolph Ochs or Mr. Leon Trotzky are Jews — of no 
 more significance than the fact that Mr. Frank P. 
 Walsh is a Catholic or Mr. Bernard Shaw a 
 Protestant. In the Western World a man may call 
 himself a Jew for any one variety of reasons: it is 
 only in Eastern Europe — in Poland, in Galicia, in 
 Lithuania, and the rest — that a Jew is part of a 
 people and a civilization. 
 
 It is in Eastern Europe, as I say, that the Jew is 
 really a Jew in the genuine sense of the word. 
 Here, as much as in the Palestine of the prophets 
 and the kings and the early Christians, contribu- 
 tions to the common progress of mankind when 
 made by Jews become first the inheritance of Jewry 
 and are only indirectly, through the channel of the 
 Jewish people, handed on to the rest of the world. 
 Here a Jew, if he is a poet, will write in a tongue 
 which Jews alone can understand, and draw his 
 matter and his inspiration from sources distinctly 
 Jewish. Here the thinker of Jewish parentage will 
 be a Jewish thinker, and here statesmen like Ahad 
 Ha'am and Mr. Sokolow, who are of Jewish stock, 
 are Jewish statesmen. In the region stretching 
 from Finland on the north to Jugo-Slavia on the 
 south, the religion of the elder Jews is still quite 
 recognizably the Jewish religion. On this strip 
 of European territory the Jewish Exile, with all its 
 distinctive character of discrimination tempered by
 
 HOMELANDS 9 
 
 massacre, still follows the traditional models, so 
 that no one can mistake it for something else. And 
 here in this distant corridor, between East and 
 West, the seemingly shattered Jewish spirit still 
 knows at times how to flame into revolt after the 
 fashion of the prophets and the founder of Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 It was this distinctive civilization, this Jewish 
 common life, primarily, that Jews with vision the 
 world over, saw threatened with destruction in the 
 last days of July, 1914. And the threat lay in the 
 geographic and social and historical position of 
 Jewry in the Christian system. Jewry was, to be- 
 gin with, a buffer between the nations of Central 
 Europe and the Russian Empire. It was lying om- 
 inously and helplessly in the path of huge armies 
 rushing for each other's throat; which in itself 
 was a sufficient promise of extinction. But there 
 were elements in its position, besides, which ex- 
 posed it to destruction vastly surer and more effec- 
 tive than that which threatened to overcome any 
 other buffer people in Europe or Asia. For Jewry 
 in Poland and in Rumania rested not only like a 
 grain between the millstones of neighboring and 
 quarreling states; it was a buffer between its indi- 
 vidual next door neighbors as well. Jewry was 
 threatened with sudden death not merely from with- 
 out, but with particular suddenness and complete-
 
 10 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 ness from within. The Jewish community in East- 
 em Europe was a tenant community. It had never 
 owned its home. It was, in the best and quietest 
 times even, a stranger in its own back yard; and 
 its bitterest and most terrifying danger lay in the 
 direction, not so much of the invading enemy, as 
 of the foe at home. The Prussian, to be sure, 
 might well be relied on to work havoc in his prog- 
 ress, but as an invader he might at least be expected 
 to make it general and to play no favorites. His 
 vengeance could with some degree of certainty be 
 trusted to fall alike upon alien Jew and loyal Mus- 
 covite or Pole. What the loyal Muscovite and 
 Pole, on the other hand, might take a fancy to do 
 while his armed brethren were busy repelling the 
 invader, was at once more mysterious and more 
 certain. It was the more certain because these 
 gentry had been gracious enough to exhibit fair 
 samples of what they were capable of in peace 
 times. And the mystery lay in just how far they 
 could improve upon previous effort at a time when 
 civilized attention was centered upon other things. 
 The suspense was mercifully not long drawn out. 
 The moment that the great armies were let loose. 
 East European Jewry was caught in the hurricane, 
 and there began that grinding process which has 
 persisted for five years and which will continue 
 to the end unless the civilized conscience of man-
 

 
 HOMELANDS 11 
 
 kind shall step in and bring that greater and more 
 basic relief to supplement the heroic single-handed 
 effort of the Jews of America at temporary salvage, 
 which is the theme of this book. The pathetic tale 
 of the woes of invaded Belgium becomes by com- 
 parison almost cheerful reading. Indeed, no peo- 
 ple in history was ever overwhelmed by a disaster 
 that in any degree could measure up to this one. 
 For Belgium was an organized State, and when it 
 was forced into the war it instantly became the ally 
 of great powers and enlisted the sympathy of the 
 entire world. Belgium was a country with a gov- 
 ernment of its own, it had a place in the political 
 and economic scheme of the world, which insured 
 it moral and material support from other nations. 
 Its government could borrow, as it did, numberless 
 millions to feed its people, against its own national 
 resources and prospects. It could take the fortunes 
 of war with some degree of calm and hope. Faced 
 with a powerful enemy on the one side, it could 
 at least rely on its powerful friends on the other. 
 In time the tide might turn, the invader be thrust 
 out, and the liberator be welcomed. Jewry could 
 take no comfort in any such hopes in the hour of 
 its trial. Enlisted though it was in the service of 
 both belligerents, it could expect no protection 
 from either. What it might await and what it ac- 
 tually got was the charge of disloyalty to both. I,
 
 12 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 for one, should esteem the Jewish spirit the less 
 if the charge should prove to be untrue ; but whether 
 the Jews of Poland and Russia and Rumania were 
 pro-German or pro-Russian during the war does 
 not in the slightest alter their case. German and 
 Russian treated them with equal impartiality as 
 their immediate and principal victims. It seems 
 as if the governments and the general staffs of both 
 countries had tacitly agreed that whatever might 
 be the outcome of the major objects of the war, it 
 should at least be made certain that one aim shall 
 not remain unachieved, namely: the extermination 
 of the Jews of Eastern Europe. 
 
 For it was not the mere routine terrors, which 
 the civil population of a border country ought to 
 expect, that these people were subjected to. From 
 all accounts and all witnesses the conviction grows 
 irresistibly that their fate was a matter of deliber- 
 ate and diabolical conspiracy. As the armies at- 
 tacked and counter-attacked and rolled each other 
 backward and forward, the non-combatant popu- 
 lation endured all the usual misery that belongs to 
 warfare, and the Jew got of this no more than his 
 share. What fell to his lot behind the lines is 
 another story. And it is by the side of this story 
 that the case of Belgium fades into insignificance. 
 Wholesale deportations of women and old men and 
 children — people of no earthly industrial value;
 
 HOMELANDS 13 
 
 the looting of homes and shops without even the 
 apology of calling it punitive indemnity; forced 
 evacuations of whole towns without notice and in 
 the middle of the night; freight cars filled with the 
 sick and helpless, left on the railway tracks in the 
 wilderness until their occupants succumbed from 
 hunger or suffocation — such was the order of the 
 day for the Jews of the Russian Empire regardless 
 of which side was in control ; while the vast masses 
 who could not be either massacred or exiled re- 
 mained in their places to survive or perish, as their 
 stars might decree. 
 
 This was the state of things in the homelands of 
 the world's Jewry in 1914, when the appeal and the 
 cry went forth to America for help. 
 
 It was a cry and an appeal that was to be heeded 
 before it was issued.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 JEWS AND WAR IN EASTERN EUROPE 
 
 THE terrible catastrophe which overwhelmed 
 the great Jewish community in Eastern 
 Europe had its roots in something much deeper and 
 more lasting than the great war. The war merely 
 served to increase the tragic burden. For one 
 thing, it completed the isolation of the Jewish peo- 
 ple by destroying communication with its sister 
 communities in Western Europe and America. It 
 diverted the attention of the world to more pressing 
 problems and thus left Jewry to the mercies of its 
 ancient enemies. The world war was in effect no 
 more than the signal for bringing the age-long 
 guerrilla between Jew and non-Jew in that quarter 
 of the world into the open. The tinder had been 
 there for centuries, everlastingly smoking, upon 
 occasion emitting tongues of flame, but for the 
 most part, smoldering covertly. It needed but a 
 general conflagration in neighboring and distant 
 parts to set off" this highly inflammable magazine. 
 In brief, the frightful and consuming misery of the 
 
 14
 
 JEWS AND WAR 15 
 
 Jews in Russia and Poland was a product directly 
 of anti-Semitism and only incidentally of war. 
 The war was not its cause; it was only its occasion 
 and excuse. 
 
 For a moment it looked indeed as if the Jews of 
 Russia at least were going to bear no more of the 
 burden than the other groups of the population. 
 The Czar's proclamation, issued shortly after the 
 declaration of hostilities, promised to wipe out the 
 old discriminations. It really looked as if, in the 
 midst of a great national struggle, even the infa- 
 mous despotism of the Romanoffs would become 
 sufficiently enlightened to see the wisdom of uniting 
 the multitude of races and peoples, whom it had 
 divided in order to dominate, purely as a measure 
 of attaining their support. The promise, to be 
 sure, was of no great merit coming from such a 
 source. The word of the autocracy had too often 
 in the past been plighted only to be broken. 
 Nevertheless, Jewry heeded it hopefully, thinking 
 that perhaps for once the leopard might really 
 change his spots. The Jews were to be swiftly dis- 
 illusioned. 
 
 The ground began to be prepared in the very first 
 days of the war by methodically discrediting the 
 Jewish population in the eyes of its neighbors. It 
 was a process that proved all too easy. The Jews 
 spoke a language closely akin to German. There-
 
 16 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 fore it was logical that they should be sympathetic 
 to Germany. Furthermore, the Jews were an 
 "alien" people who had migrated centuries before 
 into Poland and Lithuania from certain German 
 provinces. Some of their fellows still remained 
 in the German Empire and constituted a no insig- 
 nificant part of the German armies. Therefore it 
 was to be expected that Jewish soldiers of Russia 
 would be in constant and fraternal communication 
 with their kinsfolk among the enemy. The very 
 infamy of the autocracy in its past dealings with 
 the Jewish population was seized upon at once as 
 evidence and as partial justification for the 
 trumped-up charges. As a member of the Con- 
 stitutional Democratic Party frankly confessed in 
 the Duma in a different connection, "The Jews 
 have suffered such cruel persecutions in Russia 
 that they might well be excused even if the spy 
 stories were found to be true." No resource was 
 too base or too fantastic to be used against this 
 helpless people. 
 
 And so the ball was rapidly and systematically 
 set rolling. First it was a series of spy stories de- 
 signed to injure selected individuals and indirectly 
 to cast reflection upon the loyalty of the mass. 
 For the most part these inventions were concocted 
 and circulated in Poland, as might naturally be 
 expected, both in consequence of the greater in-
 
 JEWS AND WAR 17 
 
 tensity of anti-Jewish feeling in Poland and because 
 of the fact tliat the war in its earlier phases was 
 fought in Polish territory.^ 
 
 The circulators of these damaging charges were 
 not given to fastidious discriminations. The Jew 
 was branded as disloyal now to the Austro-Ger- 
 man, now to the Russian cause, depending only on 
 which belligerent happened for the moment to be 
 in power. It was of little consequence that the 
 charges were invariably proven to be groundless. 
 By the time investigation had been completed the 
 effects of the indictment had traveled too far to be 
 recaptured, and the intended injury was accom- 
 plished beyond recall. How many deaths of in- 
 nocent people resulted from these accusations one 
 can only faintly imagine. In the town of Zamosti 
 near the Hungarian frontier five Jewish men were 
 hanged by the Russian authorities without trial, in 
 September, 1914, although seven others who had 
 been charged with the same offense of having given 
 aid to the Austrian enemy during his temporary 
 occupation of the town were subsequently acquit- 
 ted. At Lemberg about the same time nearly 
 seventy Jews were subjected to severe bodily in- 
 
 1 For material in the remainder of this chapter I am deeply in- 
 debted to the excellent material collected in a little volume en- 
 titled "The Jews in the Eastern War Zone," published in 1916 
 by the American Jewish Committee; to which I would refer the 
 reader for further details.
 
 18 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 jury in consequence of accusations made against 
 them and a large number of their fellows of having 
 fired upon Russian troops. They were in the long 
 run, after due investigation, cleared of all guilt, but 
 the frightful damage inflicted upon them had in 
 the meantime been done and could not well be re- 
 paired. The Jews of whole towns — Kieltse, Ra- 
 dom, Mariampol, and many others — were sub- 
 jected to endless indignities and downright physi- 
 cal suff'ering only to be declared innocent in the 
 sequel. Perhaps the fiercest instance of the rav- 
 ages of this spy mania and insane hatred of a whole 
 people is the case of the Jews of Jusefow, nearly all 
 of whom were ruinously maltreated and at least 
 fourscore of whom were actually murdered on the 
 never proven charge that they had poisoned the 
 wells of the district. Sometimes, though all too 
 infrequently, the victims of this wholesale plotting 
 were rescued at the last moment from the clutches 
 of their slanderers. Once it was a Russian priest; 
 another time it was a Polish officer; then again 
 military tribunals became the instruments of merci- 
 ful justice appearing in the nick of time to 
 present the redeeming evidence. But in the ma- 
 jority of cases no such fortunate accident inter- 
 vened on behalf of the proscribed. 
 
 Affairs came to such a pass that even the most 
 reactionary elements in Russia awoke to the danger
 
 JEWS AND WAR 19 
 
 of this unheard-of procedure. Inclined as the 
 average member of the ruling class might be to 
 curry favor with the Polish population during the 
 war, it became evident even to them that this con- 
 stant repetition of unfounded charges, with all their 
 consequences of execution, plunder and deepening 
 animosity, was threatening to disintegrate the 
 morale of the civil population and to create a spirit 
 behind the lines which would inevitably undermine 
 the effectiveness of the armed forces of the coun- 
 try. Wherefore it should not be surprising that in 
 many a controversy between Jews and Poles, the 
 Russians, many of them of long anti-Semitic pres- 
 tige, were found taking sides with the Jews. The 
 very leader of the anti-Semitic party of Russia, re- 
 turning from Poland early in 1915, was constrained 
 to admit that he had seen "nothing bad on the part 
 of the Jews although the Poles made up all sorts 
 of accusations against them." "In these Polish 
 reports," according to an account of his remarks 
 in the Russian newspaper Rasviet, of April 26th, 
 1915, "you feel prejudice, vindictiveness, hatred, 
 nothing else. The Jews are loyal and brave and 
 it is most inadvisable to pursue a policy which 
 might convert six million subjects into enemies." 
 
 Unhappily this sanity came somewhat tardily to 
 the traditional bureaucratic and military mental- 
 ity of the old regime, and even then was somewhat
 
 20 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 sporadic and capricious in its visitations. The 
 lifelong custom and usage of an entire oligarchy- 
 swaddled and nursed in traditional practices can- 
 not be changed by sudden conversion. The Jew 
 had by long habit become entirely too convenient 
 a scapegoat to be dispensed with in these strenuous 
 times. For generations Russian officialdom, from 
 the Czar down, had been trained to resort to race 
 hatred as a way out of administrative difficulties 
 consequent upon its own congenital imbecility. 
 From time immemorial the Jew in Russia had been 
 the safety valve of the inefficient despotism. 
 Whenever the peasant or the town laborer showed 
 symptoms of restlessness that threatened to become 
 a danger to authority, officialdom had always 
 known, as by a kind of instinct, how to deflect the 
 popular sentiment in the direction of the Jew. 
 Now the autocracy had once more boggled its job. 
 The Russian armies were experiencing defeat after 
 defeat in their combat with the vastly superior au- 
 tocracies of Germany and Austria. It looked as 
 if the whole immense military power of the empire 
 would be crumpled up under the pressure of the 
 intelligent enemy. Therefore the feeble-minded 
 command, seeking an avenue of escape from the 
 wrath of the people whom it had betrayed, fell 
 back quite naturally on its ancient and well-tried 
 instrument; and from this day on until its timely
 
 JEWSANDWAR 21 
 
 end, at the hands of the revolution, one finds the 
 constituted authority of the country itself engaged 
 in spreading suspicion within the army and among 
 the people. 
 
 It may seem incredible, but the records leave no 
 doubt of the actual issuance of military orders call- 
 ing upon the army and the civil authorities to take 
 drastic measures against alleged Jewish treachery. 
 It became a common daily occurrence for the Rus- 
 sian forces upon occupying a town to take hostages 
 among the Jews and to threaten them with execu- 
 tion "in case of necessity." Jewish homes and 
 shops were regularly searched for arms and in- 
 struments of communication. The use of the Yid- 
 dish language was prohibited. People who had 
 for centuries been accustomed to no other speech 
 were suddenly forbidden to employ that medium 
 either publicly or privately. Jewish theaters and 
 the entire Yiddish press were, as a matter of course 
 and routine, suppressed. A deputy in the Duma 
 furnished to that body, without contradiction, the 
 following long list of discriminations perpetrated 
 by the official censorship alone against the Jews. 
 
 1. It systematically expunged or mutilated the 
 names of Jews to whom the cross of St. George had 
 been awarded. 
 
 2. When the Mayor of Petrograd congratulated 
 the Jewish community upon the heroic conduct of
 
 22 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 a lad of 13, named Kaufman, the censor suppressed 
 tlie fact that Kaufman was a Jew, and that the 
 community referred to was the Jewish community. 
 
 3. Stories in the Russian press of the valor of 
 Jews in the French armies are either suppressed 
 or the Jewish names cut out. 
 
 4. A news item referring to the fact that Gen- 
 eral Semenov, whom Jewish soldiers had saved 
 from capture by the Germans, was treating Jews 
 kindly, was suppressed by the censor. 
 
 5. Letters of regimental commanders to the par- 
 ents of Jewish hussars congratulating them on the 
 valor of their sons, or notifying them of medals of 
 honor bestowed upon them, were suppressed by 
 the censor. 
 
 6. The military censorship also suppressed news 
 of an absolutely non-military nature, whenever it 
 might in any manner have been construed as friendly 
 to Jews. Thus, a news item referring to the non- 
 sectarian activities of the National Relief Com- 
 mittee, headed by the Princess Tatyana, daughter 
 of the Czar, was suppressed. A news item regard- 
 ing the disapproval of the Council of Ministers of 
 the policy of expelling Jews en masse and of whole- 
 sale charges of treachery was also suppressed. 
 
 7. Even the official declaration of Count Bo- 
 brinski, Military Governor of Galicia, referring to
 
 JEWS AND WAR 23 
 
 the correctness of the conduct of the Jews of Gali- 
 cia, was suppressed. 
 
 8. But — outrageously false items published in 
 the notoriously anti-Semitic papers were generally 
 passed by the censor without hesitation. The No- 
 voe Vremya, the Russkoe Znamya, and other anti- 
 Semitic organs, systematically published reports 
 of wholesale Jewish desertions, treachery, spying, 
 etc., without at any time producing an iota of evi- 
 dence. Thus, Russkoe Znamya declared that the 
 loyalty of not a single Jewish soldier could be de- 
 pended upon. The Novoe Vremya declared that 
 the Jews were without exception embittered enemies 
 of the Russian army, and that during the Japanese 
 war 18,000 out of 27,000 soldiers voluntarily sur- 
 rendered as prisoners to the Japanese. Stories 
 without name, date or place to the effect that small 
 Polish boys warned the Russian soldiers to take 
 nothing from Jews because everything they would 
 furnish was poisoned were passed by the censor, 
 and made much of by the press. The notorious 
 Kuzhi canard was not only passed by the censor 
 and printed in the official and semi-official press of 
 Russia, but the censors even hinted, to that section 
 of the press which hesitated to publish a tale so 
 manifestly absurd, that future relations with the 
 censorship might be imperiled if the story were
 
 24 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 not given proper publicity. Editors received a 
 continuous stream of circulars forbidding them to 
 touch upon questions which had absolutely no re- 
 lation to the war. 
 
 9. When the great writers and publicists of 
 Russia decided that it would be desirable, for the 
 honor of Russia, to speak a good word for the 
 Jews and thereby indirectly deprecate before the 
 world the merciless governmental policy, the 
 pamphlet containing their symposium was sup- 
 pressed by the military censor. Even the prelim- 
 inary letter of inquiry sent out by these eminent 
 Russians, soliciting information as to the partici- 
 pation of Jews in the war, was suppressed. The 
 Jewish weekly, the Novy Voskhod, was fined 2,000 
 roubles and ultimately suppressed because of the 
 publication of this letter.^ 
 
 The results of this policy of suspicion and sup- 
 pression might readily have been foreseen. The 
 dark forces of race animosity thus supported by 
 official encouragement and cooperation grew bolder 
 from day to day and continually multiplied their 
 activities. Thy spy mania, never quite extin- 
 guished, broke forth with greater venom and in- 
 tensity than ever. Atrocities upon the Jewish in- 
 habitants, hitherto of a sporadic and local char- 
 acter, assumed the shape of an organized nation- 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 57-60.
 
 JEWS AND WAR 25 
 
 wide policy. Where there had formerly been cas- 
 ual expulsions of suspected individuals there was 
 now a wholesale and standing order for the re- 
 moval of the entire Jewish masses from the regions 
 affected by the fighting, which might at any moment 
 be executed without notice. The sudden enforced 
 migrations to which reference was made in the last 
 chapter were among the first fruits of this enlight- 
 ened governmental attitude toward a portion of its 
 constituency. Whole towns, particularly of the 
 smaller kind, were cleared over night of their Jew- 
 ish inhabitants under the now familiar pretext of 
 military necessity. For a time it looked as if the 
 long-desired expatriation of Polish and Lithuanian 
 Jewry would be accomplished as one of the perma- 
 nent achievements of a glorious world war. But 
 at this moment the threatened disaster to the Rus- 
 sian armies occurred and Poland and Lithuania 
 were overrun by the German invader. 
 
 Imagination can well portray the scenes incident 
 upon these evacuations. But there happens to ex- 
 ist the most unquestionable sort of evidence which 
 may at once assist as well as check the vagaries of 
 the fancy. In a speech before the Duma the 
 Deputy Dzubinsky, himself a non-Jew, offered this 
 testimony: 
 
 "As a representative of our Fifth Siberian Division I 
 was myself on the scene and can testify with what in-
 
 26 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 credible cruelty the expulsion of the Jews from the 
 Province of Radom took place. The whole population 
 was driven out within a few hours during the night. At 
 11 o'clock the people were informed that they had to 
 leave, with a threat that any one found at daybreak 
 would be hanged. And so in the darkness of the night 
 began the exodus of the Jews to the nearest town, Ilzha, 
 thirty versts away. Old men, invalids and paralytics had 
 to be carried on people's arms because there were no 
 vehicles. 
 
 "The police and the gendarmes treated the Jewish 
 refugees precisely like criminals. At one station, for 
 instance, the Jewish Commission of Homel was not even 
 allowed to approach the trains to render aid to the 
 refugees or to give them food and water. In one case 
 a train which was conveying the victims was com- 
 pletely sealed and when finally opened most of the in- 
 mates were found half dead, sixteen down with scarlet 
 fever and one with typhus. . . . 
 
 "In some places the governors simply made sport of 
 the innocent victims; among those who particularly dis- 
 tinguished themselves were the governors of Poltava, 
 Minsk, and Ekaterinoslav . . . who illegally took away 
 the passports of the victims and substituted provisional 
 certificates instructing them to appear at given places in 
 one of five provinces at a given date. When they pre- 
 sented themselves at these designated places they were 
 shuttled back and forth from point to point at the 
 whim or caprice of local officials. 
 
 "In Poltava the Jewish Relief Committee was officially 
 reprimanded by the governor for assuming the name 
 'Committee for the Aid of Jewish Sufferers from the 
 War,' and ordered to rename itself 'Committee to Aid the
 
 pjii^W.v 
 
 4 
 * 
 
 fT-:*^ 
 
 DANGEROUS ENEMIES
 
 JEWS AND WAR 27 
 
 Expelled' on the ground, as stated explicitly in the order, 
 that the Jews had been expelled because they were po- 
 litically unreliable — and, therefore, presumably, de- 
 served no help." ^ 
 
 From the foregoing it will readily be seen that 
 what the Jews of America were called upon to 
 cope with was something enormously greater than 
 the mere relief of a civil population suffering the 
 consequence of a great war. The problem of 
 America in dealing with Belgium was of that or- 
 dinary variety. The situation of the Jews in the 
 Russian Empire was in an entirely separate class. 
 Only the first act in this drama can in any way be 
 compared with it. The second act, however, was 
 but incidentally, as I have ventured to say before, 
 a condition created by international hostilities. It 
 was obviously and fundamentally the rescuing of 
 an entire people from an ancient conspiracy en- 
 deavoring to accomplish its dastardly purpose in 
 the chaos and darkness of a world upheaval. 
 What the Jews of Eastern Europe were threatened 
 with was not the temporary suffering and decima- 
 tion inevitable in war, but the total extermination by 
 ingenious and rapid torture of a whole race. Hap- 
 pily, the eyes of the world, for all its terrifying 
 preoccupations, could pierce through this artifi- 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 62-3. Quoted from Evreyskaya Zhizn, Aug. 9, 
 1915.
 
 28 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 cially erected opaque barrier, and to a degree in- 
 tervene. The climax of the piece was yet to be 
 enacted. Bolshevism, that ingenious universal 
 weapon invented by a generous Providence for the 
 use of reactionaries everywhere, had not yet been 
 perfected. How American Jewry and the decent 
 lovers of justice and kindliness in the world are to 
 cope with this new engine of misrepresentation is 
 the problem that the Great War hands on to the 
 coming period of peace.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE RELIANCE OF THE JEW IN 
 THE NEW WORLD 
 
 FOR more than a generation past the remnant 
 of oppressed Jewry in the Old World has had 
 its eyes turned to the West for salvation. With 
 but little exaggeration it may be said that every 
 Jew in Europe (failing the realization of the Zion- 
 ist hope) contemplates America as his ultimate 
 home. The Jews, more than any other unemanci- 
 pated race, have taken the American experiment and 
 the American tradition to his heart. To a greater 
 degree than any other they have listened to the 
 promise of the New World and accepted it literally. 
 It should not be hard to understand why, when one 
 keeps in mind that European Jewry has had the 
 longest and bitterest career of oppression of all the 
 peoples of the Old World. 
 
 But beyond the fond dream of some day be- 
 coming an American himself, the common man 
 overseas, and particularly the Jew, has looked upon 
 the New World as some sort of a divinely appointed 
 
 29
 
 30 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 refuge whither his kin might betake themselves to 
 escape the terrible uncertainty of existence in the 
 ancient home and to come forward in time of need 
 with proffers of counsel and material assistance. 
 
 Among European Jewry this is one of the vivid 
 portraitures of America — that she is a land where 
 a part of the Jewish people have prospered and 
 been spared the struggles and sufferings of their 
 fellows abroad, so that they might be ready in 
 emergencies to help those whom they had left be- 
 hind. It is characteristic of Jewish solidarity that 
 the ghettoes have ever regarded their more for- 
 tunate sons in free and prosperous lands as if they 
 still were part and parcel of the communal body 
 with all the responsibility of unbroken member- 
 ship. The East-European Jew experiences a per- 
 sonal gratification in the thought that the children 
 of his people are sharing the freedom and plenty 
 of the far-away Republic; and he can face the 
 prospect of dire misfortune with the thought that 
 his brethren in blood and faith are so situated that 
 they can come to his relief. 
 
 It is the modern version of the ancient dream of 
 the Messiah. Even with the devoutest in the Euro- 
 pean ghettoes, whose faith in the divine promise 
 of a restored Israel is undiminished, this shift from 
 the traditional trust in a legendary savior coming 
 out of the East, to reliance upon a more realistic
 
 RELIANCE OF THE JEW 31 
 
 Providence in the Western Hemisphere is unmis- 
 takable. In the past thirty or forty years the Jew- 
 ries of Russia and Austria and Rumania turned 
 ever more in their distress toward the nations of 
 the West, and especially to America, as to the mold- 
 ers of their destiny. The rehabilitation of Pales- 
 tine, the complex relations between Jews and local 
 authority, the transfer of millions of their numbers 
 to more liberal climes when life in their native 
 homes became unbearable, the intervention of the 
 decent opinion of the world in times of renewed 
 oppression — in emergencies of endless variety, the 
 Jew has become accustomed to look for help to his 
 influential fellows in the democracies of Western 
 Europe and the United States. 
 
 I am not certain whether the Jews of America 
 have always been very keenly ^live to this confi- 
 dence on the part of their less fortunate brethren 
 in the old countries. If they have not, they con- 
 stitute a striking exception to the other peoples and 
 races who make up the American nation. For 
 among all other groups in the United States there 
 is a very vivid consciousness of the responsibility 
 that they bear toward the destiny of their kin in 
 the homeland. We are accustomed to the sympa- 
 thy of Irishmen and Germans in America with the 
 proper strivings of their peoples in the Old World ; 
 but in the past few years we have seen an even
 
 32 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 more striking demonstration of these family ties 
 between European peoples and their American 
 kinsfolk in the lively participation (countenanced 
 and even encouraged by our Government) of Poles 
 and Bohemians, Russians and Jugo-Slavs, Ruman- 
 ians and Ukrainians in the nationalistic and hu- 
 manitarian movements of their homelands. Never 
 before in the career of this country had groups of 
 European origin so persistently and openly at- 
 tempted to advance the legitimate interests of their 
 native countries. 
 
 Everywhere in the Old World America has be- 
 come, by countless demonstrations, the shining hope 
 of the unfortunate. At least it was so until we 
 entered the war. Not alone the direct kin of Euro- 
 pean nations, but the American people as a whole, 
 have time and again poured out their hearts and 
 their purses to the victims of sudden disaster. 
 When earthquakes shook villages from their 
 foundations, when volcanoes left multitudes home- 
 less and helpless, when great fires destroyed cities 
 and cast their inhabitants upon the mercy of the 
 elements; in famine, in wars and in pogroms, the 
 American Government, on behalf of the American 
 people, seldom failed to respond with a generous 
 hand to the call of the suffering. America seemed 
 to be the philanthropist among the nations, just as 
 she had been for a century the model of revolution
 
 RELIANCE OF THE JEW 33 
 
 and popular aspiration to liberty and the asylum 
 of heroes and rebels against tyranny. And the 
 poor and oppressed and the disinherited of the 
 earth came to regard her as something more than 
 a land of liberty and wealth. She became in their 
 minds a friend and a prop in adversity. 
 
 Precisely as an individual family in the Old 
 World sends forth one of its younger members to 
 blaze the trail for the entire group and relies upon 
 him later to draw the group after him to the New 
 World and to make their lot more tolerable in the 
 interval, so European Jewry has, metaphorically, 
 sent forth portions of itself to America as a meas- 
 ure of security against future needs. The first of 
 their pioneer-pilgrims were a handful of the so- 
 named Spanish and Portuguese Sephardic Jews. 
 In the middle of the last century the delegation 
 was chosen from among the defeated democracy of 
 the German kingdoms and dukedoms. And both, 
 whether consciously or not, embarked as a kind of 
 advance guard of the great Jewish community of 
 the European continent. They settled in the New 
 World and became the inheritors of the liberty 
 and the material prosperity for the lack of which 
 they had deserted the scenes of their childhood. 
 Had it not been for the persistence of the Russian 
 despotism with its recurrent measures of oppres- 
 sion and its petty aping neighbors — above all, had
 
 34 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 t not been for the oudJm calamity of 191", 
 American Jewry might, I suspect, have become ut- 
 terly detached from its Old World ties and forgot- 
 ten its mission and its responsibility.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE EARLIEST RESPONSE 
 
 GERMANY declared war on Russia on the 1st 
 of August, and within scarcely more than a 
 fortnight New York City witnessed its first con- 
 ference on behalf of the victims. I am not statis- 
 tically certain that this meeting of a group of im- 
 migrant Jews was the very first to consider the prob- 
 lem for relieving war sufferers, but I venture the 
 opinion that if any gathering preceded them the 
 people who promoted it were equipped with seven 
 league boots. The Jewish race has a tradition and 
 a deserved reputation in benevolence which no 
 other people can match, and its record is an out- 
 growth of its two thousand years of almost contin- 
 uous oppression and suffering. There is no Jew- 
 ish community anywhere in the world that is not 
 prepared at any moment of the day and as a part of 
 its ordinary routine, to respond to a call for help 
 from its less fortunate brethren in one quarter or 
 another. The Jews of America, especially, be- 
 cause of their fortunate position socially and eco- 
 nomically, have in the past generation received an 
 
 35
 
 36 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 education and developed a technique in the process 
 of relieving suffering which is unique even among 
 Jews. Beginning with the Russian massacres of 
 1881 and the migration of the masses of survivors 
 which ensued upon them, the Jews of America have 
 undergone a regimen of training of the most thor- 
 oughgoing sort and which culminated in the pres- 
 ent emergency. Eighteen eighty-one was but a 
 starter. It was followed in rapid succession by 
 the misery of the Galicians, the movement from 
 Rumania, and more recently by the pogroms which 
 preceded and accompanied and followed upon the 
 revolution of 1905. So that when 1914 came 
 along with its budget of horrors the philanthropic 
 Jewish purse in America was well filled and ready. 
 It was especially fitting that orthodox Jewry 
 should be the first to step into the breach. For it 
 is this element along with another group which was 
 later to be organized into the People's Relief Com- 
 mittee, which was bound by the closest ties of kin- 
 ship to the sufferers abroad. Orthodox Jewry in 
 America consists almost solely of Eastern Euro- 
 peans — of the very people on whose behalf the 
 relief expeditions of the past generation were in- 
 stituted. For the most part, the victims of the 
 present war are their own blood relatives. The 
 funds which they collected went directly to care 
 for the comforts of the brothers and sisters and the
 
 EARLIEST RESPONSE 37 
 
 fathers and mothers of the donors. Moreover, this 
 was the first great opportunity that this group had 
 had of contributing materially and on an organized 
 scale to the welfare of that part of the Jewish peo- 
 ple which still remained under the yoke from which 
 they had escaped. 
 
 How readily and magnificently they met this 
 opportunity is now a matter of proud record. For 
 the initial gathering of the 18th of August which 
 was of a preliminary character, was followed a 
 month later by a much more representative meeting 
 at which plans for an organization were actually 
 outlined and an immediate attempt made to rally 
 kindred groups throughout the United States. It 
 happened that the solemn season of the New Year 
 and the Day of Atonement was approaching. 
 Therefore the meeting proceeded to address tele- 
 grams to some hundred religious bodies in as many 
 cities, urging them to turn the fast-days to account 
 by issuing appeals to their respective congregations 
 on behalf of the war sufferers on those days. 
 Within two months of the outbreak of the war an 
 establishment was actually in operation with of- 
 fices in New York and with machinery for collect- 
 ing funds installed in many ends of the country. 
 The organization took the name of the Central Com- 
 mittee for the Relief of Jews Suffering Through 
 the War. 
 
 \
 
 38 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 These early meetings and the men and women 
 who gathered at them gave the new organization the 
 tone and temper which they have preserved through 
 their honorable career down to the present mo- 
 ment. They set their stamp not only upon the 
 type of the personnel in the organization, but to a 
 very significant degree also they laid the founda- 
 tions of its approach and its methodology. The 
 Central Relief Committee had and still has its con- 
 stituency in that element of immigrant Jewry which 
 distinguishes itself primarily by its adherence to 
 the ancient Jewish faith and tradition. On the 
 one side it is flanked by the reform group (which is 
 Western European by origin), and on the other side 
 by the great working mass whose affiliations are 
 with the labor unions and kindred movements. 
 The rank and file of the Central Committee are, 
 socially and by tradition, the middle class. They 
 consist in the main of the storekeeper and the small 
 business man. Spiritually they belong in the camp 
 of the traditional faith and ritual. Their leader- 
 ship is preeminently to be found among the rabbis 
 of die old dispensation and in a small but power- 
 ful group of intellectuals who constitute the mod- 
 ern prop of the synagogue. It is a middle class 
 group not merely by antecedents and aspirations, 
 but by the nature of its position in the Jewish com- 
 mmiity as well. It is a transition element, stand-
 
 EARLIEST RESPONSE 39 
 
 ing as it does between the more Americanized 
 Western European wing and the class-conscious 
 idealistic working party of the Left. Except for 
 the constant progress of Jewish immigration into 
 the United States, its numbers would have been 
 increasingly thinning out by an inevitable process 
 of assimilation and absorption into the other two 
 groups. In actual fact, there can be no doubt that 
 it is a diminishing body and that of all immigrant 
 groups it is having the hardest struggle to survive 
 the corroding influences of the American environ- 
 ment. 
 
 The reader should keep this characterization in 
 mind in estimating the service of this committee. 
 There is a disposition in certain circles to appraise 
 the institution by a consideration of mere financial 
 figures detached from their human implications, 
 and thus to minimize the immense actual service 
 which they represent. It has been said over and 
 over again that there is no logical necessity for the 
 existence of the organization at all. Considering 
 its constituency, the argument runs, the amounts 
 that have been collected by the organization could 
 have been doubled or even quadrupled if the work 
 had been conducted by the two other agencies in 
 the field. Appeals for funds addressed to the 
 membership of the Central Committee would have 
 carried vastly more weight, according to its critics,
 
 40 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 if they had emanated from the great influential 
 leaders of the American Jewish Relief Committee. 
 I am inclined to recognize the validity of much of 
 this reasoning, but I cannot forget a number of fac- 
 tors on tlie other side which tend strongly to coun- 
 terbalance the greater part of this adverse attitude. 
 I cannot forget that the Central Relief Committee 
 was the first organization to heed the call of the 
 sufferers abroad; that its membership, both by 
 origin and mental constitution, are excellently 
 equipped to understand the needs of their unhappy 
 kinsfolk, and above all, that the social and spiritual 
 by-products of any such enterprise as they had been 
 engaged in are of even greater worth than the en- 
 terprise itself, and that its usefulness in this sense 
 could not have been achieved for it by any other 
 agency. Nevertheless, I am strongly of the opin- 
 ion that a coalescence of the Central and American 
 Relief Committees, at this time at least, would be 
 of immeasurable benefit to the cause for which 
 both are laboring. The by-products of which I 
 just spoke — the more thorough consolidation of 
 orthodox Jewry in the United States, the revival 
 of Jewish consciousness in individuals scattered 
 far and wide in the remote ends of the land, the 
 inculcation of a sense of responsibility on the part 
 of such individuals, the development of an esprit 
 de corps and a temper of mutual aid, and in par-
 
 EARLIEST RESPONSE 41 
 
 ticular, the heightening of the esteem for the im- 
 migrant Jew on the part of his neighbors wherever 
 he may live in America — are things of enormous 
 significance ; but tliey now belong to history. They 
 are achievements which may well make the Central 
 Committee and its affiliated organizations proud of 
 their record. But the future also has its claims; 
 and for the future I can conceive of nothing more 
 urgent than a union, as complete as may be, of the 
 two bodies which have so much in common. In- 
 deed, an organic alliance between the Central Com- 
 mittee and the American would in itself be an ex- 
 pression of that spirit of accommodation and co- 
 operation which is to be reckoned as the principal 
 benefit accruing to the American Jew in the 
 process of his generous efforts for his brethren in 
 Europe. 
 
 The religious cast of the newly formed com- 
 mittee at once began to color its activities. Begin- 
 ning with its appeal to orthodox synagogues and 
 their congregations all over the country, to which 
 I referred above, the management proceeded to 
 avail itself of whatever materials it could cull from 
 the religious consciousness of its people and to turn 
 them into assets for consolidating the structure of 
 its tragic undertaking. The very history and tra- 
 dition of the Jewish people furnished a tremendous 
 store-house of memories and symbols which were
 
 42 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 ready at hand to be converted into emotional stim- 
 uli. The very speech of ancient Israel in all its 
 eloquent and touching modulations had been some- 
 how prophetically fashioned for this supreme hour. 
 The trained organizer, equipped with a knowledge 
 of the Jewish soul, could turn to the sacred books 
 and find therein texts without number for his pur- 
 pose. One-quarter of the content of the Bble is 
 a record of Jewish struggle and sorrow, and fairly 
 teems with gems in the literature of exhortation 
 and appeal to compassion. Half the Jewish fasts 
 and feasts are redolent of exile and oppression 
 and the threat of national extermination. The 
 Passover service begins with an invitation to the 
 hungry and the stricken to come and partake of 
 the bread and prosperity of their more fortunate 
 brethren. The New Year and the Day of Atone- 
 ment are essentially days of repentance, and in the 
 Jewish tradition repentance ever begins with love 
 and charity toward one's neighbor. The Feast of 
 Purim celebrates tlie memory of a man and a 
 woman who were instrumental in rescuing the peo- 
 ple of Israel from annihilation; and the Ninth of 
 Ab is a fast of mourning over the destruction of 
 the national life. No people can match this ac- 
 cumulation of tragic record. 
 
 The management of tlie Central Relief Commit- 
 tee had a vivid consciousness of the value of its
 
 EARLIEST RESPONSE 43 
 
 resources and it promptly set about to make the 
 most of them. It organized the rabbinical fra- 
 ternity into a kind of auxiliary corps, and each 
 rabbi in turn transformed his congregation into 
 a subsidiary relief committee for raising funds. 
 Scarcely a service was allowed to pass without 
 some sort of reminder of the unspeakable events 
 abroad. The printed matter wh'ch was circulated 
 to every comer of the country was interlarded with 
 references to the present woes of Israel in the lan- 
 guage of the past. Each single day almost of the 
 ancient calendar furnished some pretext for con- 
 trasting the splendid record of ancient unity with 
 the contemporary danger of disintegration and dis- 
 appearance. Traditional phrases, known to every 
 Jewish child, were culled from venerable texts 
 and found new applications in the service of 
 the war victims. 
 
 Nor did the committee confine itself to the in- 
 strumentalities provided for it by the past. It 
 early began to make an astute use of American 
 custom and mode of life, in so far as these af- 
 fected their immigrant constituency. In the sum- 
 mer, as an instance, the vacation hunters were cir- 
 cularized with an appeal which read, "Enjoy your 
 vacation but remember that others need bread." 
 It was one of the members of this organization 
 who first saw the possibilities of the saving stamp
 
 44 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 as an aid in collecting money. The device of get- 
 ting storekeepers to contribute certain percentages 
 of their sales on given days to the Cause, while not 
 invented by this body, was put by it to excellent 
 use. And finally it was this group of alien men 
 and women, most of whom had scarcely acquired 
 the use of the English language, that courageously 
 presented its petition to the President of the United 
 States for an official proclamation from him setting 
 aside a Jewish Relief Day on the 4th of October, 
 1914. The proclamation was subsequently repro- 
 duced in a variety of forms and was the means of 
 directing untold hundreds of thousands of dol- 
 lars into the coffers of the sufferers of Eastern 
 Europe and Asia Minor.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 AMERICA TO THE RESCUE 
 
 THE Central Relief Committee had been but a 
 gauge of the state of feeling in American 
 Jewry upon the outbreak of the European war and 
 the calamity to the Jewish people abroad which it 
 was bound to bring in its trail. It had been quite 
 natural that the tragedy to the Old World ghetto 
 should reecho first and most profoundly in its 
 counterpart in the New. But ere long the wave of 
 horror and sympathy spread to the remotest corners 
 of the great Jewish community in America and gave 
 impetus to an immense undertaking to cope with 
 the emergency. On the 25th of October, 1914 — 
 less than three months after the opening of hos- 
 tilities, — Mr. Louis Marshall made the first attempt 
 to enlist the organized effort of American Jewry 
 in the great task. As the President of the most in- 
 fluential Jewish body in America — the American 
 Jewish Committee, — he invited the leading Jewish 
 men and women in commerce, philanthropy and af- 
 fairs to a meeting at the Temple Emanu-El. No 
 more representative body had, I daresay, ever been 
 
 45
 
 46 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 brought together in the history of Jews in America. 
 Platform and floor alike were crowded with men as 
 well as women whose names have become known 
 far beyond the confines of not only their racial 
 group but of America herself. It was a meeting 
 almost wholly of world figures — men noted for 
 huge industrial and financial enterprises; men 
 whose names had been for a quarter of a century 
 identified with international benevolences, leaders 
 in religion and jurisprudence, commerce and sci- 
 ence — men for the most part whose names had be- 
 come a word to conjure with in the remotest cor- 
 ners of the earth. 
 
 Little parliamentary claptrap marked the delib- 
 erations of this distinguished gathering. The 
 business in hand was as clear as it was urgent, and 
 there was in consequence a unanimity of purpose 
 and procedure not always characteristic, alas, of 
 Jewish public affairs. It required scarcely any 
 time to crystallize an organization, and there de- 
 veloped no opposition or partisanship in the choice 
 of its directing officers. The new body was con- 
 ceived of as an off-shoot and a subsidiary of the 
 American Jewish Committee, and Mr. Louis 
 Marshall, for this as well as for many other and 
 better reasons was made the Chairman; with Mr. 
 Felix M. Warburg as Treasurer and Mr. Cyrus L. 
 Sulzberger as Secretary.
 
 TO THE RESCUE 47 
 
 For a twofold reason the newly formed com- 
 mittee decided to use existing machinery in the 
 pursuit of its task. To begin with, no one had the 
 remotest notion of the length of time during which 
 the organization would be necessary. It was rather 
 hoped that the war and its consequences to Eu- 
 ropean Jews would be of short duration. More- 
 over the employment of agencies already estab- 
 lished would save time. The need over there was 
 too urgent to wait upon the creation of special in- 
 strumentalities. Hence Mr. Sulzberger who as the 
 Secretary was charged with the practical elabora- 
 tion of the plans of the body invited the Industrial 
 Removal Office and its directorate to take over at 
 least for the time being the affairs of the American 
 Jewish Relief Committee. The choice was a happy 
 one in a variety of ways. Of all the existing Jew- 
 ish philanthropies the I. R. 0. was the one like- 
 liest to be rendered inoperative as a result of the 
 war. It was an institution whose object had been 
 for many years past to assist the great masses of 
 Jewish immigrants to spread inland from the ports. 
 The war promised to put a sudden and at least a 
 temporary stop to Jewish immigration. Here, 
 then, was a peace establishment which could with 
 the least dislocation be turned to uses created by 
 war. Most important of all, Mr. David M. Dress- 
 ier, the Director of the organization, had demon-
 
 48 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 strated by years of service his capacity for adapting 
 himself to untried tasks of magnitude and im- 
 portance. Mr. Bressler hesitated for a time. He 
 was willing enough to turn over his office but he 
 was not certain, in his modesty, whether he was al- 
 together qualified to become the directing head of 
 an undertaking as vast and complex as this one was 
 likely to become. Moreover, he had for some time 
 been contemplating a change in his own career and 
 he considered this a good time to effect it. Now 
 that, for the first time since the organization of the 
 Industrial Removal Office, a lull was about to occur 
 in its affairs, it might be well for him to try his 
 energies upon more remunerative employments. 
 But Mr. Sulzberger would brook no pleas of either 
 modesty or self-interest; and after long persuasion 
 Mr. Bressler became the Director of the new Relief 
 Committee with the title of Assistant Secretary. 
 
 I have carefully studied the records of my ma- 
 terial and they leave little doubt in my mind that 
 the tremendous success and influence of the or- 
 ganization in the past five years has rested on the 
 foundations laid for it during these early months 
 of Mr. Bressler's incumbency. Virtually without 
 exception all the ingenious devices and instrumen- 
 talities which were employed with such incredible 
 efficiency later on were either actually elaborated 
 or at least conceived during this early period.
 
 TO THE RESCUE 49 
 
 What followed later was in large measure a states- 
 manlike expansion and application of policies 
 initiated at the beginning. I have no wish to clut- 
 ter my account of a unique and stirring movement 
 among the Jews of America with controversies, and 
 least of all do I desire to be partial to individuals. 
 Wherever the achievements and contributions of 
 persons or loyal groups in the great Cause are in 
 question, I have no other thought but to assign 
 credit where it belongs. And I have no hesitation 
 in stating my conclusions that the present splendid 
 structure rests very securely on the underpinnings 
 of its early Director. 
 
 Thus, for instance, the very bone and sinew of 
 the great organism as we know it to-day consists 
 in a country-wide system of state committees and 
 county and local sub-committees, all of which center 
 in the home office at New York; and this intricate 
 and difficult establishment had its inception during 
 the first six months of the Committee's existence. 
 As a conception, it is, to be sure, one of the most 
 elementary devices in large-scale organization; but 
 Mr. Bressler's part in its elaboration went consid- 
 erably beyond the mere inception. When the Com- 
 mittee made its historic departure three years later 
 there was little to alter in its basic and original 
 texture. The energies generated at that time were 
 directed chiefly to an intensification of the process.
 
 50 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 Mr. Bressler has himself admitted with character- 
 istic frankness that neither he himself nor any one 
 else that he can think of could have carried the 
 work to the great heights which it has attained in the 
 past two years under its recent management. But 
 there can be no two opinions of the impetus which 
 the Committee received from him in its earliest 
 endeavors. Just what share of its effectiveness is 
 due to him and, just what contributions have come 
 from other sources, it will be quite impossible at 
 this time to determine. Dr. J. L. Magness, Mr. 
 Sulzberger and no end of others have, I know, 
 labored devotedly with time and energy toward the 
 general result. But there is no unfairness, I take 
 it, in the custom of historians to lump the progress 
 of an era under the name of its most active and 
 titular administrator. 
 
 It was, as far as I can gather, the Assistant Secre- 
 tary who in December, 1915, proposed that great 
 historic mass meeting which in effect furnished the 
 motive power of the undertaking for the next two 
 years. That meeting was a milestone not alone in 
 the career of the American Jewish Relief Commit- 
 tee nor merely in the annals of Jewish generosity. 
 It marked an era in the career of the Jew in 
 America. I have been present at gatherings, as- 
 semblies and conventions of many sorts where en- 
 thusiasm ran high; but there has been nothing in
 
 TO THE RESCUE 51 
 
 my experience to equal that. This was not a mere 
 mass meeting; it was one of those events which 
 from time to time in the history of Israel have 
 stirred an entire people to its foundations and 
 marked a departure in its career. 
 
 The meeting was held in Carnegie Hall and it 
 was made notable by at least three striking features. 
 To begin with, the preliminary arrangements were 
 novel. Remembering its purpose, Mr. Bressler 
 and his co-workers were determined that, as far as 
 it could be managed, no seat in the hall should be 
 occupied by any one except a prospective generous 
 contributor. Therefore it was announced in the 
 press that no seats would be had at the door. Tick- 
 ets could be obtained only by asking for them in 
 advance. Therefore, again, the management must 
 see to it that men and women of large means were 
 properly inspired with the desire to attend. And 
 the line was, in consequence, very lavishly and ap- 
 petizingly baited. The names printed on the pro- 
 gram constituted a catalogue of America's finest 
 platform orators. The result, as Mr. Bressler tells 
 me, was that scarcely any Jew of pecuniary im- 
 portance was missing when the meeting was called, 
 and that until the very hour when the doors were 
 to be opened requests by telephone and messenger 
 kept pouring in to the office of the Committee for 
 tickets and more tickets. But it turned out that a
 
 52 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 considerable number of the speakers as announced 
 had failed to appear and this was one more of the 
 unique characteristics of the occasion; for it left 
 the field wide open to that unique orator in Jewry 
 whose voice and whose prophet-like sincerity are 
 reminiscent of the golden age of Hebrew eloquence. 
 The speaking progressed as if by fore-thought to 
 a more and more noble pitch, until it culminated in 
 a climax when Dr. Judah L. Magnes arose before 
 the great audience and delivered what was on all 
 hands regarded as the most moving appeal that 
 American Jews had ever listened to. 
 
 And then followed the third distinguishing 
 feature of the evening. Never had an audience of 
 well-to-do, comfortable and distinguished people 
 been so thoroughly lifted out of their complacency. 
 As Dr. Magnes proceeded from point to point in 
 his masterly portraiture of the frightful scenes in 
 the homelands of Jewry, one could hear women in 
 every corner of the Hall softly sobbing until, as 
 the speaker reached the end, the entire assemblage 
 had thrown all reserve to the winds. Men arose in 
 their seats and waved their hands toward the plat- 
 form in an access of emotion, begging to be per- 
 mitted to help. Women with tear-stained faces 
 nervously wrenched jewels from their ears and 
 fingers and tossed them upon the platform. At a 
 signal from the speaker the ushers moved up the
 
 TO THE RESCUE 53 
 
 aisles with their baskets to take up the cash and 
 checks and pledges which were in all parts of the 
 hall being spontaneously held aloft. An elderly 
 man who had been standing in a corner by the door 
 and who later proved to be a cap-maker out of 
 work, elbowed his way through the throng and 
 upon reaching the platform begged Dr. Magnes to 
 accept the nickel he had saved for his carfare. 
 "How," he said in a tremulous voice, "can I think 
 of riding luxuriously in the car when my brothers 
 and sisters back in the old country are suffering!" 
 Until 2 o'clock that morning officials and ushers 
 stayed in the hall to count the collections. 
 
 This first Carnegie Hall mass meeting was a 
 barometer indicating the extent to which American 
 Jewry was ready to succor its unfortunate fellows in 
 Europe. To be sure, its audience had consisted 
 almost entirely of New Yorkers. None the less, its 
 splendid spirit and achievements left no doubt in 
 the minds of the men and women who had or- 
 ganized it that what New York was willing to do, 
 the rest of the country would surely be prepared 
 to match proportionately. Hence the Campaign 
 Committee decided that its previous goal of one 
 million dollars should be raised to three millions. 
 A vast quantity of stationery which had been 
 printed for publicity purposes had to be the next 
 day destroyed so as not to divulge the original
 
 54 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 objective of the campaign. Two days later as new 
 contributions and pledges began to pour into the 
 offices of the organization, the Committee once 
 more realized how modest its hopes had been and 
 moved its quota up to five millions. It goes with- 
 out saying that this latest goal was more than 
 attained. But what was of even greater sig- 
 nificance than the mere collection of huge funds 
 was the consolidation of the Jewish community in 
 the United States into a more unified body. The 
 organization of committees in distant cities went 
 on apace and almost without effort from the central 
 office. It became obvious even at this early date 
 that the sheer progress of the fund-raising cam- 
 paign would prove a far more vital factor in ex- 
 tending the organization than any direct attempt at 
 setting up subsidiary agencies. 
 
 The rapid advance of the movement throughout 
 the country expressed itself in a growing and in- 
 sistent demand from every comer of the land for 
 speakers and for literature. Dr. Magnes's address 
 had been printed and sent broadcast and, as was to 
 be foreseen, there immediately arose a clamor 
 for his presence and his eloquence. "We are try- 
 ing to do our share in our city," so the demand 
 usually ran, "and if you will only send us Dr. 
 Magnes we will guarantee that we will over-sub- 
 scribe any quota that you may assign us." But
 
 TO THE RESCUE 55 
 
 Dr. Magnes could not, obviously, be sent every- 
 where. Therefore Mr. Dressier resolved to mul- 
 tiply his rare asset. New York and other cities 
 were rich in forensic resources. There was an 
 abundance of both talent and fame which were 
 for the moment lying fallow and which could by 
 proper diplomatic method and skillful direction be 
 turned to account. The directorate bee;an with the 
 salient figures. It enlisted the cooperation of mf^n 
 of the caliber of Mr. Nathan Straus, Mr. Jacob H. 
 Schiff, Mr. Louis Marshall. But diese also were 
 limited in number and restricted by time and space, 
 and the demand for them was increasing from 
 scores to hundreds. It became therefore necessary 
 to recruit not merely leading personalities but all 
 the talent that could be mustered. Bv the time 
 the year was over the American Jewish Relief Com- 
 mittee had organized a speakers' bureau which 
 could be set up favorably against any lyceum or 
 Chautauqua.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 SLOW PROGRESS 
 
 FOR three years the movement progressed in 
 this fashion. Millions of money were being 
 collected. Enthusiasm was running high and the 
 funds were actually reaching their destination and 
 accomplishing all and more than could be looked 
 for. But somehow the feeling began to grow 
 among the leaders as well as the rank and file that 
 the machinery was not developing all the power 
 that it might. To begin with, the need had become 
 increasingly greater since 1914 while the means, 
 though also expanding, had not kept pace. It be- 
 gan to look as if one were trying to fill a leaking 
 barrel with a spoon. Moreover, the spirit of giv- 
 ing, which had been educated to an undreamed-of 
 degree since the opening of hostilities, was not ex- 
 pressing itself in sufficiently substantial form. The 
 engine, as it were, was turning and spinning mer- 
 rily, but it was not hooked up to the axle. Clearly, 
 the time had come for more ambitious demands. 
 It the technique that had been hitherto followed was 
 
 adequate, then something must be done to apply it 
 
 56
 
 SLOW PROGRESS 57 
 
 more vigorously. It was not at all that there was 
 inefficiency, or that anything was out of gear. Staff 
 and organization were working wholeheartedly 
 and devotedly, but it was a structure that had been 
 devised to meet the emergencies of a brief war with 
 proportionately moderate needs. The war had de- 
 veloped into one of the longest in modern times. 
 Therefore an altogether new model of relief ma- 
 chinery must be invented and set in operation to 
 cope with the unforeseen state of affairs. 
 
 It was to discuss this question that the little meet- 
 ing which was held immediately following the 
 resignation of Mr. Bressler, heretofore the director 
 of the organization, was called. The gathering was 
 quietly brought together on a memorable Sunday 
 in December, and its deliberations were attended by 
 a few men whom I should estimate as the intellect 
 of the movement and whose names I therefore shall 
 desist from mentioning. It was agreed before the 
 discussion had progressed very far that two dis- 
 tinct and separate problems must be solved if the 
 projected new machinery was to be set in motion 
 and kept going. The first of these was the injection 
 of new blood into the organism. A man must be 
 found somewhere who had latent genius rather than 
 vast experience. Vast experience, indeed, it was 
 realized, might be a handicap. The business of 
 collecting money had a tendency to smother the
 
 58 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 energy that propelled it. The qualifications, there- 
 fore, of the new motive mind were few and simple 
 as compared with the weaknesses that might dis- 
 qualify it. The new relief engineer — for that is 
 a precise description of what the new director ought 
 to measure up to — must be simply a young man 
 with inexhaustible energy and resourcefulness, and 
 be equipped with a sense of artistic reserve. What 
 he must not be, was a whole chain of things. He 
 must not be known too well, he must not be too 
 experienced, he must not be a business man. Cer- 
 tainly, he must not be an advertising man or a pro- 
 fessional moneygatherer. In a word, he must not 
 be stale. He must come to his task fresh and en- 
 thusiastic and unhampered. 
 
 Such was the mold into which the new director 
 must fit. The practical problem was to discover 
 somewhere, somehow, such a paragon. It was 
 remarked v/ith a twinkle by one of the conferees 
 that the social service profession was not given 
 to breeding paragons. A who is who was drawn 
 up of all the philanthropic experts in the land that 
 could be thought of, and an inquisition into their 
 past records, their present status and their future 
 possibilities was instituted. As they passed in re- 
 view, each was weighed in tlie balance and his 
 measure minutely taken. But the majority of those 
 who promised to qualify were found to be already
 
 SLOW PROGRESS 59 
 
 engaged in some indispensable task; and the rest 
 were found wanting in one direction or another. 
 The field of choice was thus extremely limited and 
 kept narrowing down further and further until but 
 two candidates remained. One of these was a Mr. 
 Jacob Billikopf, the director of Jewish communal 
 activities in Kansas City. It was decided that he 
 should be requisitioned. 
 
 Mr. Billikopf had given evidence of his ability 
 to meet the emergency, of very striking promise. 
 It was not so much the positive achievement in his 
 career that was reassuring as the type of thing to 
 which he had inclined. There was a quality about 
 the tasks he had carried dirough quite out of the 
 usual. He had evinced a capacity for meeting the 
 greatest assortment of men and women on their 
 own ground. Professionally the manager of a 
 philanthropy, he had gone far afield in community 
 enterprises which had no sort of relation with char- 
 itable institutions. Scarcely known outside his 
 own city, or at best, his own state, he had by sheer 
 personality attained a vast friendship among the 
 leaders in his community. Neither had he con- 
 fined himself primarily to Jewish enterprises. He 
 had made himself one of the most valuable men in 
 that great undertaking known as the Galveston 
 Movement the purpose of which had been to de- 
 flect the current of Jewish immigration from the
 
 60 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 Atlantic seaboard to the interior. He had been the 
 prime mover, along with Mr. Frank P. Walsh, in 
 establishing the Board of Public Welfare — a splen- 
 did statesmanlike enterprise — which, largely 
 through the impetus he gave it, had in a very brief 
 time developed into a national project. Person- 
 ality and tact and an endurance which knew 
 scarcely any bounds were the principal qualities 
 of the director of the Jewish philanthropies of 
 Kansas City; they happened also to be the principal 
 qualifications of the prospective new engineer of 
 the American Jewish Relief Committee. It was 
 determined to telegraph for Mr. Billikopf. 
 
 But of him we shall see more anon and we shall 
 be able to judge him dynamically. Meantime the 
 select gathering which determined upon calling him 
 was confronted with another problem. Even a 
 latent prodigy could not be expected to attain the 
 results which conditions overseas demanded unless 
 he were to have the cooperation of a constituency 
 alive to its responsibility. The new director, as- 
 suming that he could be got, could well be relied 
 on to rouse his constituency to any desired plane of 
 enthusiasm. None the less, much time might be 
 saved and no end of misery be forestalled if the 
 ground could be somewhat prepared in advance 
 of his arrival. What seemed to be the fundamen- 
 tal need of the moment in the opinion of the meet-
 
 SLOW PROGRESS 61 
 
 ing was the dramatization of the movement in such 
 a manner that it would transform the potential 
 spirit of the American Jewish community into 
 something positive and kinetic. Events abroad 
 were, to be sure, all too stirring, but the experi- 
 ences of the past three years had proven that the 
 impulse of generosity will carry vastly farther if 
 it is motivated by home influences. The tale of 
 suff"ering in distant countries, if too often repeated, 
 will in time pall and steadily weaken in emotional 
 quality; but it will be found by actual test that a 
 man's generosity will multiply itself endlessly if 
 it is carefully stimulated to emulation. This is no 
 reflection upon the quality of mercy; it is only a 
 statement of fact in human psychology. 
 
 The usual array of schemes and suggestions were 
 laid before the house. But they had all been 
 tried. The great publicity campaigns; gigantic, 
 stormy mass meetings; new variations in the style 
 of appeal — everything had become stale. It was 
 decided to wait until the new director arrived. 
 He arrived, after much persuading and telegraph- 
 ing, in the middle of February. Thereupon the 
 caucus that had elected him was reconvened. Mr. 
 Billikopf was asked what the approaching cam- 
 paign ought to yield. He replied with an ulti- 
 matum: "I will have nothing to do with it if the 
 quota for the country is below ten millions." The
 
 62 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 conference was a bit taken aback. It had been a 
 struggle the year before to raise half that amount, 
 and this year of all years, with America herself 
 about to enter the war, and new demands being 
 constantly made upon the popular purse, it seemed 
 impossible. Again, the dramatization of the cause 
 was broached. Some one had an inspiration. 
 What was needed, he argued, was not so much 
 propaganda or publicity, but some great startling 
 event here at home that would leaven the half-inert 
 Jewry of America and set its spirit seething with 
 a vivid realization of its duty and its opportunity. 
 If only some leader of sufficient means could be 
 persuaded to leap over the traditional bounds 
 of generosity and set some new, some unpre- 
 cedented mark. A million dollars — just one 
 single donation of that round fancy-gripping fig- 
 ure — if that could be flashed over the country, it 
 would amount to a break with the past and be a 
 new departure in giving. It would be the needed 
 beginning toward making the effort commensurate 
 with the emergency. 
 
 It required no long discussion, no turning over 
 of long lists of names, to decide on a candidate for 
 this unique role. The roster of wealthy men was, 
 to be sure, considerable, and the proportion of them 
 who had established a record for magnificent sup- 
 port in charitable causes was above the common
 
 SLOW PROGRESS 63 
 
 ratio. For all that, the latitude of probabilities 
 was narrowly limited. For so unconventional a 
 part it required a mind gifted with more imagina- 
 tion than customarily fell to the share of million- 
 aires. The man would have to think about phi- 
 lanthropy in the same large terms as he was wont 
 to deal in in his business. And such as he — if they 
 grew anywhere — were most likely to thrive and 
 develop in that spacious region which is, of all 
 parts of the country, the most characteristic — the 
 Central West — where America is still youthful and 
 brimful of her early aspirations and enthusiasm. 
 In the East demands upon the generous were con- 
 stant, multitudinous and exacting. The West was 
 still young and self-reliant enough to leave the 
 charitably disposed without too burdensome a field 
 for their impulses in their own communities. But 
 for purposes of benevolence the Central West meant 
 Chicago, and Chicago meant but one man. That 
 man was Julius Rosenwald. Both by quality of 
 imagination and susceptibility to the appeal of mis- 
 fortune, the record of the man left him solitary in 
 the field. 
 
 Remembering his splendid work at the great Car- 
 negie Hall meeting of two years before, it was 
 suggested that Dr. J. L. Magnes should carry the 
 message to Garcia. The committee regarded him 
 as the master worker in stirring the mind and the
 
 64 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 emotions. No one had any inkling at the moment 
 that an intimate and gentle agent had already been 
 at work to prepare Mr. Rosenwald for the part just 
 assigned him. At any rate, Mr. Magnes begged 
 exemption on the plea that he was unequal to the 
 undertaking. He nominated in his stead Mr. Billi- 
 kopf, the newly arrived director. Mr. Billikopf, 
 an old friend of Mr. Rosenwald's, reluctantly and 
 with misgiving accepted the task.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE PHILANTHROPY OF THE MASSES 
 
 AT this point I must pause to narrate the 
 origins of the third and last of the Com- 
 mittees. If the American and Central Committees 
 were dramatic in their origin and career, the rise 
 a year after the outbreak of the war of a third 
 organization in the field, was hardly short of 
 spectacular. The elements constituting the former 
 organization were the traditional mainstays of char- 
 ity. The membership of the latter were, if not giv- 
 ers of long standing, at least firm believers in the 
 theory of benevolence. The seventy-five people on 
 the other hand who congregated on the east-side 
 one day in August, 1915, to institute the People's 
 Relief Committee were the very leaders and formu- 
 lators of the doctrine that all philanthropy is an 
 irrelevance and an impertinence. Surely there was 
 something striking and characteristic of the times 
 that labor union officials, former socialist candi- 
 dates, and radicals and semi-radicals of every stripe 
 and shade should be themselves instrumental in the 
 formation of a charitable society. In ordinary 
 
 65
 
 66 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 times these men had more than once led assaults 
 upon the institutions of benevolence in their midst 
 and had even gone so far as to discredit the motives 
 of their supporters. All philanthropy, they had 
 preached, was a screen devised by capitalists to 
 mask their depredations and to salve their con- 
 sciences. It was an instrument for misguiding the 
 poor by blinding them to the causes of their pov- 
 erty and inspiring them with a sense of gratitude 
 toward their despoilers. It was a wedge in the 
 solidarity of the proletariat designed to retard the 
 triumph of the fullest democracy. 
 
 But these were not ordinary times. Therefore, 
 contrary to the common belief diat radicals are 
 sticklers for theory, these leaders of labor faced 
 reality with practical sense. Millions of women and 
 children were perishing from hunger and exposure. 
 Whoever might be at fault; whatever the sinister 
 forces might be that were responsible for this vast 
 misery, the first thought for sane men must be to 
 devise methods for ameliorating it. Doctrinally, 
 indeed, every attempt at relief might be a way of 
 playing into the hands of the war-makers. But 
 this was no time for doctrine. This was hardly 
 in the category of usual benevolence. While whole 
 peoples were being starved and tormented one 
 could not sit back philosophically and wait for the 
 victims to trace the origin of their sorrows in the
 
 THE MASSES 67 
 
 hope that tliey might swell the ranks of the dis- 
 contented with the present order of things. The 
 immediate concern was inevitably to lighten as far 
 as one could the burden of the sufferers; and for 
 men with open eyes the immediate concern ex- 
 cluded for the time every other thought. 
 
 Nevertheless a residue of the old distrust re- 
 mained. The class-conscious working man could 
 not even in these times be got effectively to join 
 hands with banker and bourgeois in the promotion 
 of a cause which he felt to be principally his own. 
 The existing commmittees representing the inde- 
 pendent classes had on their part given scant at- 
 tention since their organization to the possible con- 
 tributions of the labor masses ; while the worker, on 
 the other hand, found it difficult to respond as gen- 
 erously as he felt to appeals emanating from 
 sources not representative of his class. It be- 
 came evident that if the contributions (insignificant 
 individually but enonnous in the aggregate) of this 
 element were not to be lost, a committee of their 
 own ranks was urgently needed. Such a group 
 would be in the closest contact with the rank and 
 file in the factory and in their homes ; it would know 
 their minds and theiT- means and would have their 
 confidence and their hearty cooperation. Such a 
 committee could not only add very considerable 
 sums to the common treasury but, like its sister
 
 68 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 organizations, it was bound to have immeasurable 
 influence in developing a spirit of responsibility 
 among the masses of Jewry which would be of in- 
 calculable value in the future. 
 
 From the purely democratic point of view this 
 new organization is in my estimation by far the 
 most interesting that has come out of the European 
 war in this country. A mere glance at the names 
 of the men and women who sit on its directorate 
 leaves no doubt of its thoroughly representative 
 character. The Central and the American Com- 
 mittees are largely self-constituted. They are rep- 
 resentative, to be sure, in the sense of general 
 leadership and influence. The People's Relief 
 Committee is a sanhedrin of the elected spokes- 
 men of the great mass of laboring Jews in the 
 United States. All the great industries in which 
 Jewish workmen are engaged, all the distinctive 
 social and political and educational bodies of Jew- 
 ish workmen, have contributed to its membership. 
 There is scarcely a significant figure identified with 
 labor or the political-economic movements which 
 supplement labor, but has its representative on the 
 Committee. There is a liberal air about the entire 
 conduct of the organization — its method of appeal, 
 its machinery of collection and the very atmosphere 
 of its office — which renders it unique among be- 
 nevolent societies.
 
 THE MASSES 69 
 
 It has not been as simple a matter as it may seem 
 to draw the line always between the constituencies 
 of this new organization and the Central Relief 
 Committee. Broadly speaking, the one represents 
 the intellectually emancipated mass while the other 
 finds its support among the adherents of the old 
 faith; one may be said to be the spokesman of 
 the younger generation and the other of their con- 
 servative elders. But in another sense the line of 
 demarkation follows the classification of labor and 
 the so-called non-productive classes. The conse- 
 quence is that boundaries are often impossible to 
 draw. Station in life does not invariably go hand 
 in hand with a class attitude in politics. Not all 
 workers shun the synagogue and vote the Socialist 
 ticket. There are doubtless thousands of humble 
 factory hands who are spiritually of the same 
 temper as their employers but who by the sheer 
 circumstance of occupation put their monthly dol- 
 lar into the treasury of the People's Relief Com- 
 mittee. Thus it happens, for instance, that an or- 
 ganization made up in the main of men remote 
 from the ancient faith and its practices, finds it 
 politic to keep its doors closed on the Sabbath. 
 
 The manager of the Committee's office relates 
 the following incident which, aside from its fine 
 pathos, illustrates how confusingly class and sect 
 lines criss-cross each other in the ghetto;
 
 70 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 "On Saturdays and holidays, though the office is 
 closed, I frequently come in to read the mail. I 
 have to do that because some of the most urgent 
 matters often present themselves on such days. 
 Not long ago I was at my desk on a Saturday morn- 
 ing when two men, taking advantage of my negli- 
 gence to lock the door, walked in. The more eld- 
 erly of the two promptly began to abuse me for 
 being at work on the day of rest. I kept telling 
 him that the office was not really open for its usual 
 business; but to no purpose. Then it occurred to 
 me to remind my critic that the very Talmud itself 
 made exceptions in the observance of the Sabbath 
 in the case of physicians and all emergencies where 
 life and health are involved. 'Our people,' I said, 
 'are starving and suffering by the thousands in 
 Europe, and even if I were working here on their 
 behalf on this day, as I do on all others, I should 
 hardly be transgressing.' This avenue of attack 
 seemed to prove effective. Whereupon I pro- 
 ceeded to read my visitors the cable message which 
 had just arrived from one of our commissioners 
 abroad: 'The famished had been keeping their 
 bodies and souls together upon a diet of rats and 
 mice. The result was that the price of even this 
 article of food rose to impossible heights. In 
 Riga people are paying as much as four roubles for 
 a rat, and now the supply is vanishing. The rats
 
 THE MASSE S 71 
 
 and mice are all cleaned out. Prominent men and 
 women, one time the wealthiest in the city, may be 
 daily seen rummaging in garbage stations for 
 scraps of bone to make soup for their children.' 
 I had barely finished reading when I observed that 
 my visitors were in tears. After a moment the old 
 man who had complained of my breach of the 
 Sabbath began nervously to search his pockets. 
 Then in a despairing and broken voice he turned to 
 me: 'I have now been on strike for ten weeks, so 
 I haven't any money. But can you make any use 
 of this overcoat?' He began to take it off. 'It 
 isn't much, but it's the best I've got and I can do 
 without it. Oh, if I only could go there myself to 
 throw it upon one of the living corpses over there! 
 Please forgive me for my bigotry. There's no 
 nobler work in the eyes of Heaven than this. Sick 
 men may eat even on Yom Kippur; so why should 
 I question the righteousness of your doing for oth- 
 ers what you would have to be doing for me if I 
 hadn't been lucky enough to be here?' He left 
 his overcoat on my desk and I heard him sobbing 
 as he disappeared." 
 
 As far as New York and other great industrial 
 towns are concerned the People's Relief Commit- 
 tee works largely and very effectively through the 
 trade unions and the social organizations of labor. 
 Workingmen, it has been found, respond with
 
 72 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 greater readiness to appeals when they are made 
 to them by their own elected and trusted leaders. 
 The actual collecting is carried on in a variety of 
 ways. In the majority of instances the worker 
 pledges himself to donate a set amount weekly or 
 annually. Often, as in tlie past two years, the 
 men and women of the factories have volunteered 
 to work on certain holidays and to devote the entire 
 proceeds of their toil to the cause. Now and then 
 in the course of campaigns collections are made 
 directly in the shops. A very considerable por- 
 tion of the contributions of this Committee have 
 come from immensely successful bazaars and pub- 
 lic entertainments — traditional methods which are 
 dear to the hearts of the rank and file. The first 
 of the bazaars, for instance, netted close to one-half 
 million dollars and generated more enthusiasm 
 among the Yiddish speaking masses than any de- 
 vice that has been tried since. In December, 1915, 
 a day was set aside by the People's Relief Com- 
 mittee for street solicitations. The occasion was 
 made notable by the enthusiasm and devotion of 
 the large number of young men and young women 
 who had been assigned to posts in the city of New 
 York. It was an atrociously dreary day. From 
 early dawn the skies were overcast and leaden and 
 the air was damp and penetrating. Soon after the 
 solicitors had arrived at their places the rain be-
 
 THE MASSES 73 
 
 gan to come down in buckets. Following a hurried 
 consultation in the office an order was issued to 
 call in the volunteers. But these young men and 
 women were a determined lot. They had been de- 
 tailed to a post of urgent duty and they had no 
 intention to be swerved from accomplishing their 
 task by such trifles as evil weather. They unan- 
 imously met the request to disband with a resolute 
 declaration that they were there to stick. They did 
 stick. And at the end of the day they had the 
 satisfaction of turning some fifty thousand dollars 
 of hard cash into the coffers of the People's Relief 
 Committee. 
 
 But the People's Relief Committee extends its 
 activities far beyond the industrial cities of the 
 Eastern seaboard. Its branches and sub-committees 
 operate in communities numbering no less than one 
 hundred and fifteen municipalities scattered over 
 three-quarters of the states of the Union. In these 
 distant localities it is customary for the workmen's 
 committee to work hand in hand with the local 
 representatives of the Central and the American 
 bodies. But everywhere their identity remains 
 separate and distinguishes itself by its constituency, 
 by its methods and by its fine spirit of generous 
 helpfulness. It is a safe surmise that proportion- 
 ately to income no element of Jewry in this country 
 does its duty by the sufferers aboard more com-
 
 74 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 pletely and at a cost of a more genuine sacrifice 
 than they. This is the first time in history that the 
 Jewish labor masses have had an opportunity to 
 give substantial evidence of the love that is in them 
 for their fellows. They have responded to their 
 opportunity with a nobility and an open-handedness 
 which is incomprehensible and which cannot be for- 
 gotten.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE DRAMATIC BEGINNING 
 
 TO return to the main currents, the account of 
 Mr. Billikopf's trip to Washington in search 
 of Mr. Rosenwald to deliver his bold message may 
 be best narrated in Mr. Billikopf's own words: 
 
 You may judge of the humor in which I set out 
 on my mission if you will remember that I had 
 seen Mr. Rosenwald only a few days before in 
 Chicago on my way to New York. We have been 
 friends for many years and I had, as usually, paid 
 a visit to his home. He knew of course of the 
 call I had received from the American Jewish Re- 
 lief Committee. He was not very optimistic about 
 it. I believe he had a moderately good opinion of 
 my ability — in fact a much better one than I could 
 live up to. But he could not, he insisted, conceive 
 of me in my new post. "What," he kept reiterat- 
 ing, "have you got to do with fund-collecting? 
 You are a social worker. You are even, if you 
 like, a diplomat, a statesman. But money raising 
 is a profession in itself and you do not belong in 
 it." He shrugged his shoulders doubtfully and 
 added: "Still, the people in New York have 
 chosen you and you are on your way, so here's my 
 
 blessing. But I would not have advised calling 
 
 75
 
 76 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 you if I had been taken into their counsels." And 
 here I was on my way to try the abilities which he 
 thought were not in me, on him for a starter. I 
 was not over-sanguine. 
 
 To add to my depression it was a wild night. 
 The rain and sleet were beating mournfully against 
 the window of my berth. The train was packed 
 with a vociferous throng of ward heelers and 
 office seekers in factitious holiday mood. It was 
 the night of the 3rd of March. On the morrow 
 President Wilson was to be reinaugurated. And 
 the gay scene with its laughter, its imitation good 
 fellowship and its heavy clouds of tobacco smoke 
 was almost insupportable. If only my quarry had 
 been in his customary haunts so that the familiar 
 scene might restore my ease and composure! 
 But he too was at the seat of Government. It 
 would be a crowded day for him. I had grave 
 questionings in my heart as to whether I could even 
 catch a glimpse of him. Affairs in New York 
 were so situated that I must return by the midnight 
 train on the day following. Mr. Rosenwald was 
 not only one of the busiest members of the Council 
 of National Defense, he was personally somewhat 
 close to the President, and to-morrow was a great 
 day in official Washington. Heaven alone knew 
 whether, for all his usual generous leanings, he 
 would be in a mood to listen to my horror-monger- 
 ing anent the Jews of Eastern Europe. 
 
 But the fate of six millions of people in the 
 shambles of the Eastern war-zone depended on the 
 success of my mission. My first campaign was
 
 THE BEGINNING 77 
 
 doomed in advance unless I brought back what I 
 had been sent for. There was no other way. Mr. 
 Rosenwald was the only reliance of the Committee. 
 If I allowed my discouragement to affect me and 
 he failed us, all our plans would be headed for the 
 rocks. All through the night I kept rehearsing the 
 speech I was to make to him. I doubt whether I 
 closed an eye all the way from New York to Wash- 
 ington. I sketched a most gloomy picture of the 
 state of things abroad, drawing largely on my over- 
 wrought imagination and on a printed copy of Dr. 
 Magnes's Carnegie Hall address. And I lay in bed 
 repeating it silently until I knew it by rote and was 
 almost in tears over its tragic details myself. As 
 my train pulled into the Union Station I was 
 crowding the porter off the car steps and I was the 
 first to issue upon tlie street. 
 
 Arriving at the Willard Hotel I made for the 
 Rosenwald suite. I was received with the usual 
 cordial hospitality. I was asked to join the family 
 at breakfast, but this was no occasion for broaching 
 my project. There were one or two other guests 
 with us at the table. I did however, manage to 
 convey to my host that I had something of im- 
 portance to talk about to him and he assured me 
 that he would make time for the purpose late in 
 the evening. The major part of the time during 
 the meal was given over to small talk about the 
 forthcoming celebration. Mr. Rosenwald insisted 
 on getting me tickets for the inaugural celebration. 
 1 saw him again when he returned to dress for an 
 official dinner, only for a moment.
 
 78 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 For the remainder of the day I was left with 
 nothing to do but to contemplate the trying business 
 that was ahead of me. A friend in whom I con- 
 fided the object of my visit succeeded in reducing 
 still further the little self-possession that was left 
 me. He thought the whole mission absurd and 
 fantastic. Happily I had the good judgment later 
 in the day to take Mrs. Rosenwald into my con- 
 fidence. She listened to my recital with a quizzi- 
 cal smile, never interrupting me, and when I had 
 finished she said quietly: "It is, I confess, a 
 rather ambitious mission you are on; I suspect 
 Mr. Rosenwald will throw you out of the window 
 when you broach it to him." Involuntarily I 
 glanced down on the pavement below. "It is not 
 very serious," I said with a forced smile. "It won't 
 be so much of a fall." We talked about other 
 things, or rather I should say Mrs. Rosenwald did. 
 She took considerable delight in mocking my brood- 
 ing seriousness; all of which was exceedingly for- 
 tunate for me, or the suspense and uncertainty 
 might have unnerved me altogether. Her excellent 
 good humor and kindliness and her efficient manner 
 of keeping my mind off my preoccupations saved 
 the day. 
 
 I joined the family again at dinner — the family, 
 that is to say, without the parents. Then the little 
 party disbanded and for the remainder of the even- 
 ing I had my task cut out for me in pacing the 
 lobbies of the Willard Hotel. 
 
 It was getting late and I dared not leave my 
 post lest he should appear while I was gone and
 
 THE BEGINNING 79 
 
 retire to his suite before I returned. For the first 
 time in my career I had a taste of a detective's life 
 and I found it unsavory. Whether or not I was to 
 succeed as a moneygatherer the future might tell, 
 but for the moment I learned that man-hunting was 
 distinctly out of my sphere. And in the meantime 
 the hour for the last train to New York was drawing 
 nearer and nearer, and far from having achieved 
 the object of my expedition I had not as much as 
 met the enemy. 
 
 At 11 o'clock, however, Mr. Julius Rosenwald 
 appeared in the company of two senators. He 
 stopped at the hotel desk to ask for his mail and, 
 never hesitating an instant, I approached and 
 touched his shoulder. He hailed me cordially and 
 unsuspectingly. With his arm around me he led 
 me to where the gentlemen of the Senate were wait- 
 ing for him and proceeded to introduce me and 
 to tell them my life history. One of the legislators 
 was from my own State of Missouri; and being a 
 friendly and talkative person, he fell into rem- 
 iniscence. Did I know this one or that one? 
 Did I recall the last political battle between the 
 forces of light and the powers of darkness in Kan- 
 sas City? How was Old So-and-So getting on? 
 Did I say I had been instrumental in floating that 
 magnificent organization called the Board of Public 
 Welfare? Well, that was a noble piece of work! 
 And all this while I was rehearsing anew what I 
 was about to say to the man I had been shadowing 
 an entire day, assuming that I could get him alone 
 before train time. I squeezed Mr. Rosenwald's
 
 80 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 arm significantly and whispered in his ear that 
 I had something of importance to convey to him. 
 He studied me calmly. "Is it very, very im- 
 portant?" he asked lightly, and before I could give 
 him my emphatic reply he bade our friends good- 
 night and drew me off to a sofa in a corner of the 
 lobby. 
 
 "Well, tell me all about it," he said as soon as 
 we had sat down. I glanced up at him and my 
 entire harangue on which I had spent so much ar- 
 duous toil and thought evaporated. I heard my- 
 self, to my own great surprise, telling him in the 
 very simplest and most unadorned style that a cam- 
 paign for ten million dollars was about to be 
 launched, that it needed some powerful dramatic 
 stimulus to start it off effectively and to end it suc- 
 cessfully; that a committee had determined that 
 nothing but a great single gift would serve and that 
 he alone could make that gift. I dwelt hardly at 
 all on the state of things abroad, merely indicating 
 in a matter of fact way what he was well aware of, 
 that the condition of the European Jews was grow- 
 ing increasingly worse, and that therefore a re- 
 newed effort on a much greater scale than had ever 
 been tried must be initiated. He listened to me 
 without comment while my appeal was gathering 
 momentum and climbing logically from argument 
 to argument to a climax. I had had hundreds of 
 conversations with Mr. Rosenwald but I had never 
 before asked him for contributions of any sort, and 
 never before had I seen a face so transparent and
 
 THE BEGINNING 81 
 
 serene and yet so profoundly thoughtful. I kept 
 praying, as I talked along, that he might not break 
 in. We seemed both under the spell of a common 
 great purpose, and I knew that as long as the spell 
 was not broken the future of the undertaking was 
 assured. As I concluded with my specific request 
 for a round million the earnestness of his expres- 
 sion deepened. He said, "Do you think it will do 
 any good?" I nodded and was about to make a 
 highly colored forecast of the results of such a 
 contribution, when he added: "Very well, I will do 
 it. You may go back to New York and tell them 
 that I'll do it." 
 
 No one who has known Julius Rosenwald will 
 find any cause for surprise in the manner in which 
 he acceded to my suggestion. It was thoroughly in 
 keeping with the modesty, the vision and the utter 
 selflessness of the man. I have a very vivid pic- 
 ture in my mind to this moment of the complete 
 absence in his manner and mien of any thought of 
 vain reward. His quick, unhesitating response had 
 in it all the elements of an instinctive reaction. 
 But his reward came nevertheless in the great in- 
 centive that he gave to his fellows throughout the 
 country to follow his example; and that, for him 
 as for any genuinely generous heart, was reward 
 enough. Not alone the American Jewish Commit- 
 tee but the country as a whole was soon to feel 
 the impetus of his unparalleled act. The President 
 of the United States at once estimated its impor- 
 tance and telegraphed to him in these words:
 
 82 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 The White House, Washington, D. C, Mar. 28, 
 Julius Rosenwald, Chicago, 111. 
 
 Your contribution of one million dollars to the Ten 
 Million Dollar Fund for the Relief of Jewish War Suf- 
 ferers serves democracy as well as humanity. The Rus- 
 sian Revolution has opened the door of freedom to an 
 oppressed people but unless they are given life and 
 strength and courage the opportunity of centuries will 
 avail them little. It is to America that these starving 
 millions look for aid and out of our prosperity fruit 
 of free institutions should spring a vast and ennobling 
 generosity. Your gift lays an obligation even while 
 it furnishes inspiration. 
 
 WOODROW WILSON. 
 
 And the President of the American Jewish Relief 
 Committee sent his acknowledgment and appreci- 
 ation in a letter which, as a brilliant sum-up of the 
 task of American Jewry and as a forecast of the 
 good effects of Mr. Rosenwald's action, if for no 
 other reason, should be made a part of this record: 
 
 My dear Mr. Rosenwald: 
 
 I take great pleasure in extending to you, personally 
 and on behalf of the Committee, most cordial thanks for 
 your great goodness and generosity. Your impressive 
 action cannot fail to be a source of inspiration to every 
 right-thinking man and will undoubtedly call into ac- 
 tivity the latent energies of our co-religionists and arouse 
 them to a realizing sense of their obligation to their 
 suffering brethren in belligerent lands. We have needed 
 just such an incentive as that which you now, with char-
 
 THE BEGINNING 83 
 
 acteristic insight and modesty, have imparted to us. 
 There is nothing as contagious as a good example, and I 
 am confident that your initiative will induce hundreds 
 who have heretofore been indifferent, because of a failure 
 to recognize the crying need which exists, to give liber- 
 ally to the cause, which should enlist the sympathy and 
 charity of every man and woman who has the slightest 
 regard for the good name of Judaism. 
 
 Your offer was the first real ray of sunshine that has 
 come to us in these dark days. It seems, however, to 
 have been the precursor of that glorious hope which after 
 so many years of anxious and prayerful waiting has at 
 last dawned upon the inhabitants of Russia, and which 
 I firmly believe will prove a harbinger of universal lib- 
 erty and in large part lead to the solution of the many 
 serious problems which have in the past confronted 
 the Jewry of the world. 
 
 Be assured that we shall do all that lies in our power 
 to earn the million dollars which you are prepared to 
 give so unreservedly, and be further assured that the 
 consciousness of your devotion to suffering humanity 
 and to our own people, who have borne with so much 
 patience the unspeakable hardships which have befallen 
 them, will be an earnest of the undying friendship of 
 your associates and of those in whose hearts abides the 
 love of humanity. 
 
 I am, with sincere regards 
 
 Yours faithfully, 
 
 LOUIS MARSHALL. 
 
 to which Mr. Rosenwald replied:
 
 84 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 Hon. Julius Rosenwald, 
 Chicago, Illinois. 
 
 March 9, 1917. 
 Mr. Louis Marshall, Chairman, 
 American Jewish Relief Committee, 
 Dear Mr. Marshall: 
 
 The marked change for the worse which has taken 
 place in the condition of our co-religionists in belligerent 
 lands, so graphically outlined by Mr. Jacob Billikopf, 
 has impressed upon me most acutely the great need of 
 raising immediately the fund which the American Jewish 
 Relief Committee is endeavoring to collect. 
 
 In the hope that the urgency of the situation will be 
 brought home to the Jews of the United States, I make 
 the following offer: 
 
 I will donate to the fund of the American Jewish 
 
 Relief Committee an amount not to exceed one million 
 
 dollars conditioned as follows: 
 
 For every million dollars collected after March 1st, 
 
 I will contribute $100,000 but, in order that results 
 
 may be obtained with sufficient rapidity at least in 
 
 some small measure to meet the present crying needs, 
 
 I put a time limitation — until November 1, 1917 — 
 
 upon this offer. 
 
 I regret that conditions will not permit my joining 
 with you and your Committee actively in the raising of 
 these funds, sincerely believing that no greater crisis in 
 the history of the world has ever existed, where literally 
 millions of people are on the verge of starvation. 
 
 Trusting that the total amount of ten million dollars 
 will soon be collected and wishing you Godspeed on your 
 noble errand, I am 
 
 Sincerely yours, 
 
 JULIUS ROSENWALD.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE CONQUEST OF THE COUNTRY 
 
 THE effect of the great contribution was enor- 
 mously more profound than had been ex- 
 pected even by those who had inspired it. It was 
 as immediate as it was widespread. That it gen- 
 erated a new and increased energy in the American 
 Relief Committee goes without saying. That much 
 at least had been foreseen. The newly devised ma- 
 chinery depended exclusively upon this impulse for 
 its effectiveness. The additional stimulus, wisely 
 provided by the conditions of the donation, served 
 an excellent purpose. The great campaign of 1917 
 opened with a fanfare. A powerful impetus had 
 been injected into the hitherto pedestrian affairs of 
 the organization, and its new leadership saw to it 
 that none of its fruits should grow unharvested. 
 The new director, taking his cue from his initial 
 achievement, proceeded to organize the entire coun- 
 try upon a scale and with an intensity undreamt of 
 in the past. He had inherited the germ idea of 
 State committees. He set about devoting the en- 
 tire preliminary period of the campaign to a prac- 
 tical elaboration and extension of it. It is difficult, 
 
 86
 
 86 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 owing to the vagueness of the records, to make even 
 reasonably certain as to where the credit for specific 
 schemes of organization belongs. But it is safe, I 
 believe, to assert that it was Mr. Billikopf's skill in 
 organization that was responsible for the highly ef- 
 fective State committees, as the expression is now 
 understood. 
 
 In the past three years, the State committee had 
 been scarcely more than an aspiration. Virtually 
 all the moneys that had been collected had come 
 from the metropolitan cities and now and then from 
 the larger towns of the country. Scores of counties 
 in every State had not been as much as touched. 
 It requires time and toil of the most intensive sort 
 to fine-comb an entire State, especially in the less 
 populated regions. And the earlier organization 
 had had its hands more than full in compassing the 
 mobilization of the larger centers. Indeed, this 
 preliminary work with the cities provided the back- 
 bone and nucleus for the lining-up of the entire 
 country. State organization would have been al- 
 most unfeasible without these bases. Mr. Billi- 
 kopf and his staff, vividly aware of the value of 
 the legacy that had come to them from their pre- 
 decessors, made the most thorough-going use of 
 their agencies in cities like Chicago, Atlanta, New 
 Orleans and San Francisco. By way of economiz- 
 ing their resources, they enlisted the aid of city
 
 THE CONQUEST 87 
 
 chairmen everywhere in their efforts to extend the 
 organization into tlieir respective States. It was a 
 happy device which the new directorate was to use 
 repeatedly and with great effect in the future, and 
 it marked the initial recognition of the important 
 psychological fact that the indifferent outsider of 
 yesterday, having once been recruited, may read- 
 ily be turned into an agent for the conversion of 
 those who still remain outside. Every man who 
 was now asked to undertake the organization of his 
 particular State had perhaps no more than a month 
 before offered vigorous resistance to the effort of 
 the Committee to associate him with the work at 
 all. Now, however, he was a part of the establish- 
 ment, and with the customary human pride of or- 
 ganization, he was ready to go far beyond the lim- 
 its of his original intentions in rendering the work 
 as successful as might be. 
 
 The net result of this twofold endeavor — the re- 
 newed vitality at headquarters and the multipli- 
 cation of the directorate in forty-eight separate cen- 
 ters — was that within very few months a network 
 of intensely vigorous subsidiaries stretching from 
 coast to coast had been effected. For the first time 
 since the outbreak of the war, a complete mo- 
 bilization of the country had been brought about, 
 so that from now on collecting campaigns could be 
 launched and successfully conducted from head-
 
 88 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 quarters accessibly located and manned by people 
 who were both familiar with the financial and 
 psychological conditions of their sphere and who 
 were themselves influential and well-known to their 
 constituencies. In the majority of instances, the 
 erstwhile chairman of the leading city was trans- 
 formed into the State chairman, and he in turn was 
 invited to get into touch with prominent men in 
 well-chosen towns and counties throughout his 
 State as a preliminary to the establishment of local 
 committees. The national office, it goes without 
 saying, cooperated intensively. A method had 
 been devised whereby the State chairman could 
 be aided in the choice of his lieutenants by sup- 
 plying him with preliminary data as to the financial 
 qualifications of candidates. The State chairman 
 himself could be well relied on to supplement the 
 information conveyed to him from New York, but 
 it was of the utmost service to him to be presented 
 with a small selection of names from which he 
 might make his ultimate choice. The central 
 office continually consulted the lists provided by 
 the financial agencies in determining the standing 
 in the community of a prospective local repre- 
 sentative. Dun's and Bradstreet's provided the 
 fundamental basis of selection. The State com- 
 mittee, starting from that point, determined the
 
 THE CONQUEST 89 
 
 rest of the necessary qualifications of candidates. 
 But it was not solely upon the Jewish relief or- 
 ganizations that the Rosenwald contribution reacted 
 with such splendid effect. A new pace and 
 standard had been set for benevolence generally, 
 and men and women of means and generous im- 
 pulses were moved to think upon the problems of 
 both war and internal philanthropy in new and 
 larger terms. To be sure, there had been in the 
 past vast contributions of a semi-philanthropic 
 character, directed toward the endowment of 
 specific institutions. There had been for many 
 years in existence in America great foundations 
 which dealt in figures exceeding the Rosenwald 
 gift. Yet all such funds had been contributed 
 toward the advancement of what are called con- 
 structive projects. Clinics and universities, mis- 
 sionary bodies and establishments for the promo- 
 tion of universal peace and their like, had been 
 the exclusive beneficiaries of these staggering for- 
 tunes. Never before, however, had any mere 
 charity devoted to temporary and palliative relief 
 been known to scale such heights. The war had 
 served to familiarize people with huge expendi- 
 tures. But previous to March, 1917, a hundred 
 thousand dollars had been regarded as the startling 
 finality, even in war-giving. Such donatione had
 
 90 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 themselves been of sufficient rarity and they there- 
 fore never failed to elicit the wonderment and com- 
 mendation of an entire continent. 
 
 Now, at one amazing leap, a revolutionary de- 
 parture had taken place. A page in the history 
 of philanthropy had been turned and a new epoch 
 begun. A reclassification of worth was imminent. 
 The givers in six digits found themselves overnight 
 removed from the pinnacle of human generosity 
 and relegated to second place. Henceforth, none 
 but men and women who could think in terms 
 large enough to actually meet the demands of a 
 changed order, could hope to rank among the first 
 line of world-philanthropists. 
 
 The impact was felt throughout the country by 
 every variety of relief agency. Before the cam- 
 paign of that year had been completed the United 
 States had entered the war and the numerous war 
 work associations which had arisen to cooperate 
 with the Government became the inheritors as it 
 were of Mr. Rosenwald's imaginative act. A 
 spirit of generous rivalry and emulation had been 
 created. Scores of men and women in the front 
 ranks of these philanthropies took note of the 
 altered atmosphere and opened their treasuries in 
 accordance with the new standard set for them. 
 It was not merely a feeling that they could not 
 afford to be outdone; they had simply been orien-
 
 THE CONQUEST 91 
 
 tated anew. They were seeing their tasks and their 
 responsibilities in a fresh light. The angle of ap- 
 proach to war philanthropy had been widened ; the 
 point of view had been shifted to rarer elevations. 
 
 The permanent peace-time social institutions 
 likewise came in for their share. It was inevitable 
 but that the revised philosophy of philanthropy 
 should affect the pace and tone of general benev- 
 olence. Hospitals, orphanages and sanitariums of 
 all sorts which in times past had had a struggle to 
 raise trifling sums for their maintenance found 
 themselves in a position where huge endowments 
 exceeding the best dreams of their directors could 
 be secured almost overnight and with a minimum 
 of effort. The sympathetic ducts of the nation had 
 been touched and set flowing with a liberality and 
 regularity unknown before. Men and women — 
 and generous ones — who had hitherto been accus- 
 tomed to annual pittances in the interest of a news- 
 boys' club or the like, began to be stirred by a new 
 conscience and found themselves irritated by an 
 uncomfortable sense of having been unforgivably 
 slack. 
 
 The dramatic value of the Rosenwald contribu- 
 tion was turned to account in a manner so simple 
 as to suggest the attributes of genius. It will be 
 remembered that the donation had been promised 
 on condition that an aggregate amount equal to
 
 92 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 nine times its own size should be raised in the 
 rest of the country. In other words, Mr. Rosen- 
 wald's share of the campaign receipts was to be 
 ten per cent of the total, providing the total was 
 not over ten millions. Taking this circumstance 
 into consideration the directorate proceeded to 
 canvass the country for other donors who might 
 be prepared to play the same role in their own state 
 or community as the Chicago merchant had agreed 
 to play with respect to the country as a whole. The 
 device worked magically. Everywhere in the 
 United States "Local Rosenwalds" sprang up 
 offering to contribute one-tenth of the aggregate 
 contribution of their city, state or section. This 
 development was beyond doubt the most fruitful 
 of all consequences of the Rosenwald-Billikopf con- 
 spiracy as far as the immediate advancement of 
 the relief cause was concerned. Without it, it is 
 gravely to be questioned whether the most gripping 
 relief project ever undertaken by Jews in America 
 could have been carried to success. It was in a 
 performance crammed full of fancy-stirring inci- 
 dents, far and away the most impressive.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE CONDUCT OF A CAMPAIGN 
 AN EXTERIOR VIEW 
 
 HAD it not been for the circumstance that the 
 amazing spectacle of fortune-gathering as 
 it has been perfected in the past two years occurred 
 in the midst of the electric atmosphere of a world 
 at war, I have no doubt but that it would have been 
 noted as one of the most startling and stupendous 
 exhibitions of organized popular effort. The 
 modern world has made some very notable ad- 
 vances on antiquity in the matter of large-scale 
 public performance. It has inherited and re- 
 adapted the ancient circus, the arena and the open 
 air amphitheater and it has gone many an im- 
 pressive step beyond this meager legacy. It has 
 invented and carried to a high degree of perfec- 
 tion the international exposition; it has projected 
 and carried into the domain of reality the national 
 park and the national playground — ^-things that 
 sprawl over territories immense enough to comprise 
 an old-time empire, and draw multitudes undreamt 
 of by ancient monarchs. Most curious of all, it 
 
 has devised and developed that most fantastic of 
 
 93
 
 94 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 spectacles of modem times, the national political 
 campaign. 
 
 But in all seriousness there is nothing in any of 
 these that can even remotely rival the fund col- 
 lecting campaign as it has been developed in the 
 recent past. For sheer diversity of mechanism, 
 for the vistas it opens up into the exuberance of 
 human ingenuity, for the scope and depdi of its 
 bewildering appeal to the senses and the emotions, 
 for its startling utilization of the findings of the 
 new science of psychology, and for its purely 
 spectacular quality it is an entirely unique institu- 
 tion. 
 
 Consider the scene. Weeks before the opening 
 of the first guns there commences, and impercepti- 
 bly develops, an intense barrage of carefully se- 
 lected news, feature articles and pictorial material. 
 The reading public which had all its adult life man- 
 aged to plod on in felicitious ignorance of the very 
 existence of Walloons in Belgium or Uhro-Rusins 
 in Ukrainia or Jews in Lithuania is startled out of 
 its indifferent stupor with a skillfully graded 
 series of dramatized lessons in the history, ethnic 
 antecedents, present economic status and racial 
 aspirations of these somewhat vague, highly pic- 
 turesque and heroic peoples. The purely educa- 
 tional content of this gratuitous information is, 
 modestly speaking, enormous. The Mentor Asso-
 
 A CAMPAIGN 95 
 
 elation is by the side of this a mere tyro. You 
 suddenly realize how your education has been 
 falsified and skimped. Glancing down the broad 
 avenues of culture that stretch majestically before 
 you, you become a prey to regret and resent the 
 consummate frauds who called themselves your 
 teachers at school and college. What do they 
 know of art and archaeology, of literature and 
 geography, of history and anthropology? Why, 
 here are whole races — to judge by the accounts, the 
 very foremost members of the human family — with 
 records in warfare, in the art of self-government, 
 in the skill for divine song, whose very existence 
 had never even been mentioned to you throughout 
 your long arduous career at college. Of course 
 your heart is set vibrating with an uncanny sym- 
 pathy for these neglected portions of the race; 
 partly, no doubt, out of sense of kinship born of 
 the realization that you have yourself been care- 
 lessly passed over when the intelligence about 
 them was being generally imparted. An irresistible 
 yearning comes over you. You see these brave, 
 stalwart races. You extend your fraternal hand 
 to them to share widi them their noble lives and 
 worship communally with them at their sacred 
 shrines. 
 
 And then — it is curious how many interesting 
 things happen in the places and to the people we
 
 96 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 have lately read about! Before you have had 
 time to grasp the trend of your own tender emotions 
 the tragic news is flashed across half the world to 
 you, that these very recent friends and brothers of 
 yours are in a most serious situation. Their 
 venerable old men, their plucky, beautiful women, 
 their tender, wide-eyed children are being starved, 
 exiled and massacred by an unspeakable and cruel 
 enemy. Things look as black as night. You, and 
 you alone are the only prop in their adversity. 
 Irrelevantly the reports of these regrettable inci- 
 dents conclude with a query to you. Will you 
 help? Of course you will. The mere question is 
 a slight to your generosity. 
 
 This neat bit of propaganda is, as I say, but a 
 curtain raiser; the actual performance has as yet 
 scarcely begun. But the suspense is of brief dura- 
 tion. Things begin to move jauntily. Telegrams 
 sail across the wires "not single spy but in 
 battalions." Noted visitors make their appearance 
 in the city — visitors curiously enough who have 
 been public figures in American life for a genera- 
 tion, but who it is suddenly revealed are themselves 
 scions of the gallant unhappy peoples in question. 
 The accustomed tenor of the community's life is 
 quickened and galvanized. The "social" — an in- 
 stitution normally associated with the effete centers 
 — buds forth, blossoms and multiplies in tropical
 
 A CAMPAIGN 97 
 
 luxuriance. Formal luncheons and still more 
 formal dinner parties crowd the calendar. Public 
 halls are rented and given over to nightly per- 
 formances of undreamt magnificence. There is 
 eloquence and histrionic talent, bazaars riotous in 
 their oriental profusion of color abound ; and all of 
 this in the same persistent touching key. 
 
 The streets are lined with posters in endless 
 variety of phrase, color and size. Nor are the 
 public conveyances exempt. Mercantile interests 
 are forgotten, the spaces traditionally preempted 
 by familiar commercial announcements are sud- 
 denly and universally superseded by the pressing 
 appeals of the distant sufferers from the war. The 
 business houses of the town have with one accord 
 turned over their plants and their high-salaried ad- 
 vertising experts to the service of the great cause; 
 and these latter with their well-known skill por- 
 tray, with pens and brushes dipped in the tears and 
 sorrows of the victims, each pathetic detail of their 
 misery. Only as an afterthought and in the most 
 inconspicuous manner is it divulged that these 
 spaces in railway and newspaper are "contributed 
 by the First National Bank," or by the Universal 
 Sweets Corporation. 
 
 The ancient easy relationships of the com- 
 munity have been set awry. At first glance it 
 looks indeed simple enough. One hears a lot, to
 
 98 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 be sure, of a committee which is in charge of all 
 these amazing operations; and the appeals and 
 exultations are addressed presumably to the public. 
 In practice, however, the line between committee 
 and public, between solicitor and solicited is not so 
 readily drawn. The names printed on the deluge 
 of stationery which comes by the morning mail are 
 a fiction; the whole town is tlie committee. What 
 is taking place is not a mere benevolent enterprise. 
 Doubtless that is the eventual and ultimate object. 
 But for the time being and in its effect on the 
 home folks it is in round terms a conspiracy which 
 is spreading with astonishing speed and engulfing 
 all one's associates. One is walking on seemingly 
 familiar ground, but every inch of it is overspread 
 with an invisible net. There is no telling at all 
 when one shall inadvertently wander into its 
 meshes. 
 
 The entire delicate mechanism of mutual confi- 
 dence in society, in business, in the very home has 
 been undermined; so that one is at a loss as to 
 whom to trust and whom to suspect. One gets 
 invitations and instinctively accepts them. But be- 
 fore long one discovers that the very social ameni- 
 ties have been taken over by the campaign organi- 
 zation. A luncheon has ceased to be (for the 
 duration of the campaign at least) a friendly hour's 
 companionship, it has become one of the numerous
 
 Our Boys Freed Them 
 
 WON'T YOU FEED THEM? 
 
 
 AMERICAN JEWRY! The woKes of hunger mk stil) adatking. 
 Will we protect our own from starvation? 
 
 A RELIEF t_*Kl'.F-<' 
 
 HASP SA^? -OmIi, (i. 
 
 SHALL WE SAVE THEM? 
 
 WHAT WILL YOU DO? 
 
 Our Boys Freed Them- 
 
 WON'T YOU FEED THEM? 
 
 I plead (or this mother. 
 
 I plead (or this babe Jt her breast. 
 
 I plead for ihovisands ul stjr\ing children 
 
 Starvation is winning— while yoii Woil. 
 
 I plead for your generosity, so that THEY may live. 
 
 1MIJUCA.1 JtWHH lElltF COHMUllt 
 
 im^iimfmHimys'-m^ 
 
 ^i^j^^:^iJ^^^iWJeiy..-i.>^h 
 
 JEWISH 
 
 sufferer: 
 
 CAMPAIGN POSTERS
 
 ACAMPAIGN 99 
 
 methods of soliciting contributions. And what is 
 true of the noon repast applies with equal force to 
 dinners, card parties, the links and the club. 
 There is no safety anywhere. The whole com- 
 munity has been reorganized overnight into a 
 mutual association for soliciting funds on behalf 
 of the Jewish or Polish or Armenian war sufferers. 
 The teller at the bank, the stationer across the street, 
 the bootblack around the comer, are no longer in- 
 terested in their usual respective businesses; they 
 are each and all the secret agents of the Relief 
 Committee. 
 
 With the home and family life matters have gone 
 even worse. The domestic establishment has for 
 the moment been shelved and its place has been 
 taken by a subsidiary of the campaign forces. 
 The mother of the household is now the captain of 
 a team assigned to the exploitation of a specified 
 territory, which as all charity should, begins at 
 home. Her badge is a mere external though im- 
 pressive decoration. What astonishes her own 
 husband particularly is the vast extent of her in- 
 formation about the past history, the present needs, 
 and the future possibilities of her beneficiaries. 
 One has never suspected her gifts of organization 
 and resourcefulness as a business getter before. 
 What a tremendous asset she could have been in 
 her husband's economic enterprises!
 
 100 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 The wife is no more than the leading factor in 
 the plot. The dramatis personae include one's 
 children and even one's very domestic servants. 
 The cook is only incidentally a culinary expert. 
 Primarily he is an Italian and a member of the 
 Auxiliary of the Milk Fund for Sicilian Babies. 
 The chauffeur has his own racial affiliations, and 
 though he continues perfunctorily to perform his 
 customary secular duties his chief and absorbing 
 interest now is in determining by what methods he 
 might most efficiently make the contribution of his 
 employer to the Association for the Blinded and 
 Crippled by the War commensurate with the said 
 employer's income. The eldest heir of the name 
 announces modestly that he has resolved to turn 
 over the entire savings of a lengthy and arduous 
 lifetime to the French Orphans' Fund and there is 
 a query in his voice as to the exact figure that his 
 parent's contribution would come to should the lat- 
 ter, as he must, match it in a decent ratio to his own 
 resources and sacrifice. 
 
 The outcome of this universal and persistent 
 grilling is but a matter of time and endurance. 
 In the end no mortal man can successfully hold 
 out, and when the surrender inevitably comes, let 
 it not be supposed that it is a mere matter of finan- 
 cial surrender. One capitulates unconditionally. 
 And that involves (first of all, to be sure) a mone-
 
 A CAMPAIGN 101 
 
 tary donation of handsome proportions, but chiefly 
 a going over to the ranks of the enemy. One has 
 in yielding, made common cause with the con- 
 spirators and tacitly agreed to do unto others as he 
 has all this while been done by.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE CONDUCT OF A CAMPAIGN 
 AN INTERIOR VIEW 
 
 WHAT has just preceded is but an account of 
 what every American has lived through 
 while this community was in the throes of the cam- 
 paign. It is an attempt at portraying what occurs 
 on this side of the footlights and is visible to the 
 throng in the pit. What goes on in the inner re- 
 cesses of the stage in the process of assembling this 
 amazing spectacle, is a phase of the story that is not 
 so well known; but it is far and away the most im- 
 pressive. I do not pretend to know to what heights 
 this inner organization has attained in other bodies, 
 but it is precisely here that the new director of the 
 A. J. R. C. made his unique contribution to the 
 labors and achievements of the American Jewish 
 Relief Committee. The details of campaigning, the 
 toil of country-wide organization, the complexities 
 of publicity are largely mechanical tasks. They 
 demand persistent energy and indefatigable appli- 
 cation. And these qualifications have been very 
 notable in the equipment of the earlier manage- 
 
 102
 
 A CAMPAIGN 103 
 
 ment. What distinguished Mr. Billikopf was, as I 
 have previously intimated, a rare personal force, a 
 matchless capacity for winning to his side strategic 
 personalities and recruiting them into the service of 
 his enterprise. 
 
 It is this valuable gift that has enabled the new 
 director of the A. J. R. C. to improve so richly on 
 the past and to write a new chapter in the history 
 of war philanthropy. He had not, as it will be 
 remembered, any very considerable acquaintance 
 among the leading figures of American Jewry, and 
 in New York he had been practically a stranger. 
 He had set down in his little note book a brief list 
 of salient names, and had mentally resolved that 
 though he was to be himself the titular Commander- 
 in-Chief, he would make these influential men and 
 women the generals in his forthcoming enterprise. 
 The name was virtually all he knew of Mr. Jacob 
 H. Schiff, of Mr. Felix M. Warburg, of Mr. Nathan 
 Straus, of Mr. Henry Morgenthau and of Mr. Louis 
 Marshall, and of half a dozen others. 
 
 He proceeded to get behind these names to the 
 reality. He convinced himself, by way of a begin- 
 ning, that he had the rarest of merchandise to offer 
 to these influential persons and that it was, there- 
 fore, inevitable that they should become interested. 
 It was this one twist in his psychology that saved 
 him from failure. His predecessors had rational-
 
 104 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 ized the state of things differently. They had hesi- 
 tated to approach significant personalities because 
 it had seemed to them that they had little to offer 
 to their patrons. They were asking for large 
 contributions (so they reasoned) and were giving 
 nothing in return for them; therefore, their delicate 
 sense told them it would be extremely presumptuous 
 to accept, in addition to financial assistance, the 
 time and devoted interest of their clients. 
 
 Mr. Billikopf stated the case to himself in char- 
 acteristic terms. Far from regarding the transac- 
 tion as accruing to the benefit of one side alone, he 
 fell back on his grasp of realistic psychology and 
 arrived at the somewhat startling conclusion that in 
 all philanthropy, and especially in war benevolence, 
 the benefit, in so far as it is one-sided, redounds 
 almost exclusively to the giver. In large measure, 
 he owed this inverted but upright logic to Mr. 
 Nathan Straus, who some time before had altered 
 the slogan "Give till it hurts" to read "Give till it 
 feels good," and our new director, taking counsel 
 with himself, came to see the relationship between 
 solicitor and solicited in some such light as this: 
 
 "Of course, I have no material stock in my trade, but 
 where has it ever been set down that material goods are 
 the one specie* of irresistible merchandise? It is as 
 true as it ever was that what men and women most 
 earnestly seek is the intangible, unexchangeabje, and
 
 A CAMPAIGN 105 
 
 imperishable article. I am a trafficker in sympathy, and 
 it is only a question of skillful merchandising, of com- 
 petent methods in convincing my clientele of the supreme 
 worth of the goods I offer them." 
 
 So Mr. Billikopf proceeded to avail himself of 
 the really fundamental assets in his trade. Pri- 
 marily, he was not interested in obtaining huge 
 financial contributions from his leading figures. 
 Great sums he regarded as being valuable to his 
 purposes only in so far as they possessed psycho- 
 logical value — that is to say, in so far as they con- 
 stituted an incentive to other givers. Often enough, 
 to be sure, he went to disproportionate lengths in 
 his endeavors to raise prospective contributions to 
 some higher figure. He had worked up a scale in 
 which each man or woman had his or her definite 
 place, and he had made it a rigid policy never, as 
 far as it was in his power, to permit any contribu- 
 tion to slide below the level he had set for it. But 
 all this was part and parcel of his larger conception 
 of the policy of the organization. In many an in- 
 stance he felt that he could well afford to invest in 
 publicity a sum actually greater than the donation 
 he was aiming for. But the issue and success of an 
 entire campaign often depended on the size of the 
 offering of a given prominent person. If, for in- 
 stance, the leading citizen of Atlanta should be 
 known to have cut his share below a previously ap-
 
 106 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 pointed figure, the fact would be nothing less than 
 a kind of sabotage of the Atlanta campaign as a 
 whole. Lesser persons would inevitably be guided 
 by the pace set for them by the leader of their city; 
 and the net result of such an apparently insignifi- 
 cant mishap at the outset would be not only a 
 reduction in the aggregate, but a weakened, disor- 
 ganized campaign and a virtually complete loss of 
 those by-products of an intense atmosphere, which 
 Mr. Billikopf always held to be the most valuable 
 domestic increment of the entire affair. 
 
 It became, therefore, one of the fundamentals in 
 the new technique to wind up the financial phase of 
 a campaign before the public spectacle had begun. 
 The preliminary maneuvers received the most de- 
 tailed and careful manipulations. Commonly the 
 curtain-raiser took the form of a luncheon or dinner 
 given to a carefully selected, — and as a rule small, 
 — group. It was essential that this group should 
 include not only the financially and socially repre- 
 sentative, but the utmost care was necessary in the 
 selection to avoid an inadvertent chilling of the en- 
 thusiasm of the gathering. And this involved the 
 most painstaking scrutiny of each prospective guest 
 — a research into his past philanthropic record, his 
 social temperament, and his recent and present re- 
 lationship with his fellow citizens. To the local 
 officers had, of course, to be delegated the details of
 
 A CAMPAIGN 107 
 
 such a program, but in outline the director from 
 headquarters became for the time being a delver 
 into the communal ins and outs of every city which 
 was about to undertake a relief campaign. Much 
 of the data thus acquired was conveyed to the 
 speaker who was invariably detailed to address this 
 pre-campaign meeting. The speakers, by the by, 
 ranged from bishops to financiers and back again 
 to nationally known rabbis. Dr. Stephen S. Wise 
 and Dr. Nathan Kraus gave, perhaps, more un- 
 stintingly of their time and their talents than the 
 rest. But the honor list extends to every corner 
 of the country and embraces well-nigh every name 
 of oratorical importance. 
 
 It was not, however, in recruiting talent or even 
 in the development of the technique of publicity in 
 the ordinary sense that the new director made his 
 departure from the past. The achievement, to put 
 it roundly, consisted in a vigorous application to the 
 task in hand of the fundamentals of psychology. I 
 am not sure whether a publicity expert would find 
 any startling improvement in the material achieve- 
 ments of the new director as compared with those 
 of his predecessors. Emphatically the new start 
 was a matter of marshaling unused private re- 
 sources. The earlier management had looked 
 upon the prominent men in Jewry as its chief asset 
 in the direct raising of funds. The new manage-
 
 108 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 ment turned its attention to the problem of securing 
 the cooperation of newer and less known men by 
 making an astute use of the fame and influence of 
 these leading figures. Mr. Billikopf saw in such 
 personalities as Mr. Straus and Mr. Schiff far 
 vaster possibilities than the fortunes they might be 
 induced to contribute. Names like theirs had quite 
 a magic potency which, properly harnessed, could 
 be rendered instrumental in bringing in untouched 
 millions and injecting a spirit into the proceedings 
 hitherto undreamed of. All of these men and a 
 considerable number of others were heartily dis- 
 posed to be harnessed, since they were already 
 members of the council of the committee. The new 
 director invited their attention to the tremendous 
 services they were capable of contributing to the 
 cause they were so vitally interested in by lending 
 their names directly and with a minimum of reserve 
 to the process of campaigning. The suggestion 
 was irresistible. Never before had such eminent 
 men of aff"airs participated so constantly and so 
 devotedly in the interests of a philanthropy as did 
 Messrs. Jacob H. Schiff, Nathan Straus, Louis 
 Marshall, Julius Rosenwald, Abram Elkus, and 
 Henry Morgenthau in tlie interest of the American 
 Jewish Relief Committee. 
 
 Each of these men at one period or another gave 
 a kind of blank check to the management. Each
 
 A CAMPAIGN 109 
 
 wrote innumerable letters to prospective contribu- 
 tors who required special incentives. Mr. SchifF 
 and Mr. Straus, despite their advanced age, were 
 ever ready to make distant journeys, whenever in 
 the judgment of the committee their presence was 
 required in the opening of a campaign. Mr. Elkus 
 and Mr. Morgenthau, during 1918, became regular 
 bookings in the committee's far-flung circuit. 
 
 It would yield interesting results if one were to 
 estimate the incalculable fortunes that were de- 
 flected into the coff^ers of relief in consequence of 
 the personal influence exerted by these men at the 
 suggestion of their young generalissimo. I have a 
 vivid picture of the latter, flanked at his desk by a 
 pair of telephones, in constant conspiratorial com- 
 munication with the princes of earth. Latest re- 
 ports indicate (he confides to one of these) that the 
 leading personage of San Francisco will sabotage 
 the California campaign by scrimping his proper 
 share. Of course, one might withhold publicity in 
 the matter until the end, but it were best if a little 
 eff^ective pressure could be brought on certain defi- 
 nite points of his position. Would Mr. A. write 
 him in brief explaining the urgency of the situa- 
 tion? Or — the chairman of the State com- 
 mittee of Oklahoma is in the city on business. He 
 has been an indefatigable and most valuable 
 worker; a new campaign in his State is about to be
 
 no THE JEW PAYS 
 
 launched; and there is no telling how salutary to 
 his personal spirits and the general result an in- 
 vitation to lunch by Mr. B. would be. Or — an 
 attempt is being made to line up the insurance 
 fraternity on behalf of the forthcoming campaign 
 in the city. Mr. X. is not only a wealthy and 
 prominent member of the trade, but he is consumed 
 with immoderate social ambitions. His acceptance 
 of the chairmanship of the Insurance Men's Com- 
 mittee would be a foregone conclusion, if only Mr. 
 C. could manage to be present at the committee's 
 organization meeting to-morrow evening and bestow 
 certain subtle signs of recognition upon him. The 
 device, once one has captured it, is capable of in- 
 finite variation, and Mr. Billikopf's cabinet of fame 
 and distinction is at his service for them all. 
 
 The human instrument, in brief, is firmly grasped 
 in the nimble hands of our director and its every 
 stop played upon to excellent purpose. He has 
 studied and charted and graphed its possibilities in 
 infinite detail. Given a specified impulse and he 
 can, with striking accuracy, forecast the response. 
 That, in substance, is the essence of his technique. 
 The mechanics of mere organization, the intricate 
 problems of public campaigning, he leaves to those 
 who are gifted with the leaning and skill for that 
 sort of thing: his is a novel and distinct trade in 
 itself. And this trade is marked by a simplicity
 
 IN THE WHIRL OF A CAMPAIGN
 
 A CAMPAIGN 111 
 
 and a freedom from abstruse technicality character- 
 istic of the artist and the pioneer in science. There 
 are no fantastic instruments in his shop, no bustle 
 and scramble, no impressive files and devices. He 
 is but a modest searcher into the recesses of human 
 motive, a practitioner in the art of making human 
 contacts. 
 
 To the untrained mind there is a suggestion of 
 cynicism in the contemplation of such an art. It 
 thinks of a cold and somewhat desiccated adept, 
 removed from the -common emotions and concerns 
 of everyday humanity, insensitively dissecting and 
 laying bare the sacred infirmities of our nature. It 
 is an overdrawn picture. This new arrival in the 
 ranks of the subtler professions is not in the least 
 remote. He is very much a part of his own subject 
 matter — that is precisely why he is so astonishingly 
 effective at it. He regularly begins his analysis 
 with the nearest specimen at hand — himself. And 
 he arrives in the directest way imaginable at the 
 commonplace conclusion that though mankind is 
 very profoundly moved by the impulse of unaided 
 sympathy, the instinct for generosity is exposed to 
 other modes of irritation and is no more immune 
 than other human appetites to jading. Men are 
 what they are, and it would be mere scrupling sen- 
 timentality to forbear when other powerful motives 
 may so readily in the interests of a good cause be
 
 112 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 called into play. The craving for adulation, self- 
 advancement, and common vanity may not be 
 creditable to the race; but it is idle to deny that 
 they are part of all our equipment and it would be 
 sheer negligence to decline them recognition, when 
 the welfare of millions is at stake. 
 
 This resort to a subtler motivation by the em- 
 ployment of personal influences in due time de- 
 velops into an instrument of the widest utility. 
 Just as the Rosenwald contribution, coupled with 
 the ten per cent, formula upon which it was con- 
 ditioned, was at once adopted by numberless lead- 
 ers in other places, so the device of direct individual 
 pressure soon became a fundamental principle in 
 local organization everywhere. Something in the 
 nature of a hierarchy of social and commercial 
 prestige was gradually elaborated; the national 
 figures communicated certain forms of influence to 
 a limited list of prominent men and women in 
 various localities, and these in turn conveyed a 
 similar form of motivation to strategic individuals 
 in their respective districts; until the time came 
 when every hamlet in the country was in some sort 
 a link in the exquisitely graduated chain. This 
 broad-gauged system was, furthermore, being con- 
 tinually supplemented by a parallel mechanism of 
 official stimulation. The President of the United 
 States having set the pace by his proclamation, the
 
 A CAMPAIGN 113 
 
 organization succeeded in interesting, first, gov- 
 ernors of states, then chief executives of municipali- 
 ties, to give the enterprise a public send-'off. 
 
 The purely monetary results of this astute man- 
 agement were enormous, as a mere glance at the 
 figures would suffice to show. But the spiritual and 
 social by-products of the intensive cultivation of a 
 communal esprit de corps surpassed all expecta- 
 tions. New blood was infused into the civic and 
 philanthropic leadership of scores of cities. Men 
 and women without number and in every part of 
 the country who had never before been active in 
 communal affairs were initiated into th'e ways of 
 social usefulness, and came away feeling that there 
 were responsibilities for them which they could 
 never again disregard. And, contrary to the com- 
 mon assumption, the common effort of disinterested 
 people in behalf of a cause removed from barter 
 and profit has served to knit indifferent and often 
 exclusive and distrustful groups into a closer and 
 more intimate community of understanding and 
 cooperation.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GIVING 
 
 A GLANCE at some of the salient facts in the 
 history of war relief suggests a number of 
 curious and rather pertinent generalizations. 
 There is, to begin with, something striking to the 
 imagination in the spectacle of huge fortunes accu- 
 mulated upon foundations so intangible and impon- 
 derable. One sees practical men of affairs, whose 
 outlook and habit of mind has trained them 
 (presumably) to a rigid conception of values, sud- 
 denly and unaccountably flinging the principles of 
 a life-time to the winds and engaging not merely 
 their material resources, but their enthusiasm and 
 their high-priced time and energy upon a fantastic, 
 airy venture which yields no visible returns. In 
 ordinary times, in moments when we lightly think 
 of these men as being most themselves, you could 
 not very easily get them to participate in activities 
 outside the well-defined boundaries of their usual 
 affairs. When all is said and done, the lion's share 
 of the income of relief societies comes, after all, 
 out of the pockets of people broadly belonging to 
 the ranks of business — people popularly classified 
 as the level-minded, the profit-seeking, the hard- 
 
 114
 
 GIVING 115 
 
 headed, the unsentimental. And one beholds them 
 hobnobbing with social workers and charitable 
 ladies, lavishly squandering their substance and 
 their talents upon inconsequential concerns, weakly 
 yielding to altruistic appeals, often even lending a 
 hand in propagating them — and one wonders in- 
 voluntarily. What has become of the far-famed 
 tough back-bone of our most substantial class? 
 
 And this interest, be it noted, shows none of the 
 ear-marks of the temporary hobby. It endures 
 with unabated zest, not merely throughout an entire 
 campaign, but holds its own from year to year and 
 grows in intensity as time goes on. It is seldom, 
 indeed, that the personnel of committees is changed 
 to any appreciable extent in a given State or city, 
 unless it is by the adherence of new converts to the 
 faith. The appetite for good works far from show- 
 ing symptoms of getting jaded, seems unmistakably 
 io grow by what it feeds on. Other observers have 
 noted, and the statistics confirm, that contributions 
 tend, broadly speaking, to increase in geometrical 
 progression. Defection from the ranks of donors 
 is even rarer than back-sliding in the councils of 
 active workers. 
 
 It is a strange phenomenon. Mankind is notori- 
 ous for its capacity for fatigue. It tires of nearly 
 everything. Men grow weary of their work and 
 of their pleasures. There is no telling to what de-
 
 116 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 gree reform and revolution, the rise of new sects in 
 religion and the decay of old ones, the migration 
 of races, and the exchange of monarchies for re- 
 publics and republics for Soviets — there is no tell- 
 ing to what extent all mutations in the body politic 
 are influenced by the element of fatigue. If only 
 populations could be kept interested, or at least 
 indifferent, and disinclined to change, the heads of 
 statesmen and pontiffs would, perhaps, not turn 
 gray so prematurely. Yet the war relief engineer 
 has been with us this half a decade with all his 
 shouting and trumpeting and nagging and cajoling 
 and downright threatening; and not a rumble any- 
 where of mutiny, not a stir anywhere to depose him. 
 Still, as in the earliest blissful days of the autumn 
 of 1914, the procession of magi bearing gifts moves 
 on, headed for his sanctum — excepting only that its 
 ranks are fuller and its burthens richer. 
 
 Is it not legitimate, then, to inquire into the 
 sources of this astonishing vitality and growth? 
 When the American Jewish Relief Committee, 
 which congratulated itself upon its achievements in 
 harvesting ten million dollars two years ago, now 
 confidently sets out to raise twenty-five millions, 
 with every sign pointing toward success, the search 
 for the hidden springs of its mechanism becomes 
 irresistible. Were the Jewish organizations alone 
 in this uninterrupted progress, one might be in-
 
 GIVING 117 
 
 clined to answer that Jews have a habit of benevo- 
 lence. But they are not alone. Drives without 
 end or limit continue among us as if no armistice 
 had ever been signed. We have scarcely done with 
 the Near East, when the victims of the latest Italian 
 earthquake are upon us. The Salvation Army 
 scrapes its posters off the hoardings, only to make 
 room for the placards of the Boy Scouts. The 
 Victory Loan orators clear the rostrum, only to be 
 followed by the Knights of Columbus. But the 
 Jews themselves have kicked far out of the traces 
 of mere tradition. Even they have not made a 
 habit of accumulating imperial fortunes annually 
 for distribution among the needy. The habit 
 theory will not hold water. The indulgence in 
 voluntary sacrifice is not pleasant enough to become 
 second nature to any race. 
 
 Well, there has been the widest range of theoriz- 
 ing. Well-disposed psychologists have taken the 
 shortest route to truth, and have submitted that the 
 response is merely proportionate to the emergency. 
 Mankind, they have explained, is normally moved 
 to generosity by the spectacle of calamity, regard- 
 less of previous training and habits of thrift. The 
 same man who will keep a whole office staff up 
 until midnight to locate a missing penny in the ac- 
 counts, will give away half a year's income without 
 a qualm. Mr. Billikopf, as we know, holds
 
 118 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 tenaciously to the ancient doctrine that those who 
 have given their talents to the accumulation of 
 great wealth here below, are most inclined to lay 
 up treasures in Heaven where they may be least 
 exposed to corrosion and theft. Others, on the 
 other hand, have made much of the "motivation of 
 vanity" and have seen an astute business sense in 
 the exchange of large sums for still larger returns 
 in social and even economic prestige. I am not 
 eager to enter the discussion either as an umpire 
 or as an added contestant. If I must offer a judg- 
 ment, I should lean to the conclusion that the truth 
 is with them all. There is no more a uniform 
 philanthropic mind than there is an integrated mind 
 among the mass of men who compose an army. 
 Every class and temperament has been represented 
 on the contributors' lists, and there is no theory but 
 applies to some, and none that can lit them all. 
 Between Nathan Straus, who had to be restrained 
 from giving away his very home, and the insurance 
 agent who looks upon his association with the Com- 
 mittee as a subtle mechanism of business-getting, 
 there is a long road and there is room enough on it 
 for every conceivable motive in real or factitious 
 generosity. 
 
 Doubtless, the incentive of pure mercy is at once 
 the most potent and of the widest application. Cer- 
 tainly, this is true of the earliest stages. Witness
 
 GIVING 119 
 
 the spontaneous enthusiasm of the classic mass- 
 meeting at Carnegie Hall, and the warm response 
 everywhere, when once the state of suffering abroad 
 became manifest. It is, I believe, in sustaining an 
 even level of interest that the influence of other 
 impulses plays a real part. I have, myself, been 
 impressed time and time again, as I observed the 
 progress of campaigns, to how vast an extent work- 
 ers and contributors alike are moved by immediate, 
 as distinguished from remote, incentives. There is 
 a civic phase in the matter of war philanthropy 
 which is commonly overlooked. In most of the 
 recent drives the element of pure benevolence is 
 very slightly stressed; and for the most excellent 
 psychological reasons. The participants have by 
 this time ceased to visualize with any great vivid- 
 ness the tragedy which their aid is to mitigate. 
 Subconsciously, they are, of course, aware of the 
 ultimate destination of their funds; but what in- 
 terests them directly is that dear old Michigan shall 
 go "over the top" and incidentally teach proud, 
 disdainful New York that Western States know how 
 to be generous when duty calls. Now that the war 
 is over, it can give no comfort to the enemy to sug- 
 gest that the same subtle motive works in the raising 
 of volunteers for our anned forces. The given 
 community is, of course, primarily moved by the 
 patriotic sense, but directly the pride of the imme-
 
 120 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 diate locality counts for vastly more. One wants 
 to beat Germany, no doubt; but Germany is a long 
 way off, and the satisfaction of beating the adjacent 
 village or the next State is enormously keener. 
 
 An added influence springs out of the curious 
 human club-sense. The hardest work an organizer 
 in any field has to do is to get people to cross his 
 threshold. Once they are in, he can trust them not 
 only to stay in, but to drag every one of their family 
 and acquaintance, and every passer-by, in after 
 them. It is a commonplace phenomenon. I may 
 have some very lively objections to the synagogue 
 or the Methodist church, but having been persuaded 
 to join in its activities, I have become more than 
 a mere member. I have become a missionary. 
 But only yesterday Mr. Jonas Weil may have com- 
 plained that the War Relief Committee was a pest 
 and a nuisance; but somehow or other a member 
 of his family or of his firm has succeeded in bring- 
 ing him in, and from now on he will not only con- 
 tribute heavily and with good grace, but he will 
 regard every one of his friends and associates who 
 remain outside as a quitter and a slacker and will 
 never rest until they are in with him. How far 
 Mr. Jonas Weil's behavior is a complex of the in- 
 stinct for proselyting and the desire to see the rest 
 of the world in his own shoes, I am willing to leave 
 to the experts to determine.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE SHARE OF THE OTHERS 
 
 FROM its very inception, the movement for 
 saving the Jewish people in the war-torn 
 countries from annihilation assumed something 
 vastly broader than a tribal or sectarian character. 
 It will be remembered that President Wilson gave 
 the movement his blessing and support before it 
 had scarcely begun. But the American people, as 
 a whole, seem to have realized from the first that 
 when men and women and children are hungry and 
 suffering, their origin and their faith and their 
 local habitation are the least important things 
 about them. Such has, time out of mind, been the 
 American position wherever and whenever misfor- 
 tune befell human beings. And this disposition of 
 Americans is, I assume, a demonstration of the in- 
 ternational color of American thinking and sym- 
 pathy, and reminds one very vividly how keenly 
 alive the American people are to their own inter- 
 national origin. 
 
 But whether it was a too sensitive Jewish pride 
 or a fidelity to its record for independence in benev- 
 
 121
 
 122 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 olence, there was for a long time a reluctance on 
 the part of the leaders to accept contributions from 
 the non-Jews. Even to this day there persists in 
 various quarters a very deep distrust of the non- 
 sectarian campaign, although this method of ap- 
 peal has proved in many places its worth, not only 
 by a virtual doubling of collections, but especially 
 by its contribution to an enhanced community 
 spirit and a better mutual understanding between 
 Jew and Gentile wherever the plan has been tri^d. 
 
 But despite the proud reluctance and reticence of 
 the American Jew himself, contributions large and 
 small, financial and moral, became a feature of no 
 mean proportion from the very outset. The gen- 
 erous non-Jew, undaunted by the modesty of his 
 Jewish neighbor, simply insisted that he shall not 
 be excluded from participation in a Christian cause 
 even though its beneficiaries might be the un- 
 baptized. To these dedicated men and women this 
 was not a cause for any sort of limited group, 
 however genuine or artificial the lines that sepa- 
 rated that group from the rest of mankind might 
 be. Churchmen reminded their followers that 
 they owed a two-fold debt to the people of Christ 
 — one, for that people's gift to the world of its 
 faith and its prophets, and the other for the exile 
 and sorrows which Jews have been subjected to in 
 the past at the hands of would-be Christians and
 
 SHARE OF OTHERS 123 
 
 in the name of Christianity. And laymen remem- 
 bered that Jews in their respective American com- 
 munities had ever been the first to participate in 
 public undertakings with their money and their 
 time, whether these undertakings were of a broadly 
 communal character or of a distinctly sectarian and 
 non-Jewish kind. 
 
 But, primarily, the American Gentile looked 
 upon the relief of Jews in Europe as a purely 
 human task. They declined to rationalize the 
 matter. People were in want, and tliat was 
 enough. As Mr. George D. Armistead, the post- 
 master of San Antonio, in declining to accept 
 thanks for his share in the campaign conducted in 
 his city, expressed it: "I did what I could in this 
 noble work and I shall count myself undesei'ving 
 of the respect of my fellow Americans if I ever 
 thought of allowing race, creed or color to stand 
 between me and the duties of a real man when con- 
 fronted anywhere in the world by starvation and 
 distress." North and South, on the Atlantic sea- 
 board, in the middle-West and on the Pacific, men 
 and women who were faithful to the humane 
 American tradition, or who had not forgotten their 
 Bible, or who had had dealings with Jews in their 
 own villages, came forward enthusiastically to do 
 their part in every campaign, egged on by a sense 
 tliat a people, which in spite of twenty centuries of
 
 124 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 persecution could still retain enough of their vigor 
 to be continually making contributions to the 
 world's civilization and be worthy citizens every- 
 where, should not be allowed to perish in the 
 shambles of a world gone mad. 
 
 Judge E. B. Muse of Dallas has expressed, I 
 venture to hope, the attitude of high-minded non- 
 Jews in this matter in the most eloquent words — 
 words which coming from a Jew would have been 
 ungracious, but are all the nobler for their source: 
 
 "All we have to do is to stop and think — think, what 
 the Jew has done for the world — think what a debt the 
 world owes the Jew, to make honest, conscientious men 
 step forth and do their best now in behalf of the Jew. 
 The Jew first pointed man to the worship of the only 
 true and living God, a personal God, a God of love, 
 law, justice and mercy. 
 
 "The Bible, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on 
 the Mount — the foundation of all law in all civilized 
 lands comes to us from the Jew. 
 
 "We proudly appropriate it all as our very own, 
 then proceed promptly to deprecate and depreciate the 
 source from whence it came. 
 
 "Christ was a Jew; we worship, praise and prate about 
 the lowly Nazarene — We revere the spot and venerate 
 the land in which He was born, and then straightway 
 turn and revile the race that gave Him birth. 
 
 Oh generous, consistent Gentile! We take the gift and 
 welcome it to our bosom, then turn our backs and shut 
 the door in the face of the giver. Whoever saw a Jew 
 beggar — whoever saw a Jew begging for bread in this
 
 SHARE OF OTHERS 125 
 
 country of ours? Point the time and place. They are 
 a proud, sensitive people. They are a frugal, econom- 
 ical, thrifty and progressive people — all they ask is a 
 chance and opportunity to live and be happy. 
 
 They have contributed of their blood and treasure un- 
 stintedly to every good cause for freedom and humanity's 
 sake — from Bunker Hill to Yorktown and from York- 
 town all the way to this good hour. 
 
 No purer patriots ever lived, no more loyal friends 
 had any man or country than the Jews, who for country 
 and friendship sake financed Washington in the dark 
 days of the American Revolution. 
 
 The history of the world tells the story of their un- 
 dimmed devotion and undying love for freedom. 
 
 It appears to me to be not only a duty, but it seems 
 as well it should be the pleasure of every thinking, lib- 
 erty-loving Gentile in America, to arise and say — Yes — 
 yes, this is the first time I have ever been called upon 
 to help the Jew — God help me, I will do my best, it may 
 not be much, but much or little, I will do my best." 
 
 Writing to the press of his State anent the com- 
 bined campaign for one hundred thousand dollars 
 for the Jewish War Sufferers and the Jewish Wel- 
 fare Board, Judge W. R. Allen of the Supreme 
 Court of North Carolina stated the case for Ameri- 
 cans' cooperation with Jews in their supreme need 
 in these emphatic terms : 
 
 "The Jews have been foremost in giving of their time 
 and money for the upbuilding and improvement of our 
 city and country.
 
 126 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 They gave more than a third of the cost of our public 
 hospital, have bought liberally of Liberty bonds, War 
 Saving stamps, and have been generous contributors to 
 the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A. 
 
 Shall we be less generous and liberal than they? 
 
 Our President has said 'Give until it hurts.' I am not 
 sure but that Nathan Straus has expressed the duty bet- 
 ter when he says 'Give until it feels good.' 
 
 Jeanie Deans in her plea before the Queen for the 
 life of her sister, regarded as one of the most eloquent 
 passages in all literature, said truly, 'When the hour of 
 death comes it isn't what we have done for ourselves, 
 but what we have done for others that we think of most 
 pleasantly.' 
 
 I regard this as an exceptional opportunity to express 
 our appreciation to the Jews for what they have done. 
 If I had it in my power as Chairman of the Goldsboro 
 Jewish Relief Committee, / should prevent the acceptance 
 of any contribution from the Jewish citizens of this com- 
 munity, so that we, the non-Jews, might have the pleasure 
 of raising the entire quota ourselves" 
 
 I have, myself, seen scores of busy merchants, 
 and still busier mothers, forgetting their normal 
 duties for weeks at a time to devote themselves day 
 and night without stint and without thought of 
 themselves, to this work. Some drove motor cars 
 over unknown and impassable roads to solicit in 
 remote hamlets sums which in the aggregate barely 
 equaled the value of their time. Others pounded 
 typewriters or filed cards or talked from soap-boxes
 
 SHARE OF OTHERS 127 
 
 or performed any one of a dozen clerical tasks on 
 behalf of people whom tliey had never seen, in- 
 habitants of countries whose names they could 
 barely pronounce. I recall a banker in New Or- 
 leans who shunned his office and his desk for an en- 
 tire month, and that, before he had had time to re- 
 cover from the effects of a major operation; while 
 his wife turned over the care of her child in the 
 midst of the influenza epidemic, to a paid nurse, so 
 that she might, herself, head a woman's team of 
 solicitors. 
 
 And this splendid spirit, as it transcended the 
 lines of race and creed, passed also beyond the 
 boundaries of occupation and class. The wealthy 
 and the influential did no more in proportion than 
 the poor and the humble. Down in a town in 
 Georgia a little group of young women proved 
 once more that the love of mankind is no private 
 privilege of the fortunate. They had been asked 
 by the local committee to work for a little while 
 after office hours in order to help wind up the 
 campaign. The little while lengthened out until 
 two in the morning. They stuck to their type- 
 writers without complaint until the last letter had 
 been written and the last card filed. Then the 
 chairman off'ered them five dollars apiece for 
 their services. With one accord they declined the 
 off"er and begged that their labor be accepted as
 
 128 THEJEWPAYS 
 
 their contribution to the town's quota. These girls 
 were not Jewesses. Some of them would have been 
 hard put to it to tell what a Jewess was. They were 
 mere American girls. From a village in North 
 Carolina there comes the report of an elderly 
 spinster whose only source of income was a meager 
 property inheritance amounting to no more than 
 two hundred dollars a year. She was among the 
 first to respond to an advertisement inserted by a 
 Christian church in the local newspaper — the 
 church not being of her own denomination — with 
 a contribution of twenty-five dollars. 
 
 Both for genuineness of sentiment and simplicity 
 of language, I have no hesitancy in reproducing 
 the letter which follows, as one of tlie purest docu- 
 ments in the annals of man's love for his kind : 
 
 J. S. MURROW 
 
 MISSIONARY AMONG INDIANS 60 YEARS — 82 YEARS OLD 
 
 Under God's Direction Founder of 
 
 MURROW INDIAN ORPHANS' HOME 
 
 Bacone, Oklahoma 
 
 Atoka, Oklahoma April 20th 
 
 Mr. Herbert H. Lehman 
 
 Treasurer &c. 
 Dear Sir 
 
 I am not a Jew. — I am an old — worn out Christian — 
 Indian Missionary — a Baptist. — 
 
 Your God is my God. Your Father — my Father. Your 
 people are my Master's people. Your brethren are my
 
 SHARE OF OTHERS 129 
 
 brethren. My means are small — but my heart greatly re- 
 joices because of this privilege of sending the enclosed 
 one hundred dollars for the relief of the suffering and 
 starving Jews in Europe. 
 
 Sincerely, 
 
 J. S. MURROW, — 
 Atoka— Okla. 
 
 More impressive, perhaps, but in no way differ- 
 ing in spirit, was the conduct of a prominent citizen 
 of Wilmington, Delaware, at the end of a stirring 
 address. The speaker, who had been warned that — 
 by a promise made to the community beforehand — 
 no collections would be permitted at the meeting, 
 was compelled before he had ended, by the clamor 
 of a largely non-Jewish audience, not only to ac- 
 cept pledges amounting to more than three-quarters 
 of the quota assigned to the city for the entire 
 campaign, but to accept the promise of this promi- 
 nent citizen, that the quota would be either over- 
 subscribed by the community or that he personally 
 would make up the deficit. 
 
 There is no parallel on record to this downright 
 scramble on the part of men and women of other 
 faiths to render service to a Jewish cause. One has 
 but to read the hundreds of full-page advertise- 
 ments in the press of our country to be struck with 
 the depth and genuineness of this eagerness to help. 
 The names of the individuals and firms and insti- 
 tutions signed to these exhortations are a revelation.
 
 130 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 and constitute in themselves an amazing chapter in 
 the history of human relations. Newspaper owners 
 raced with bankers and business men; Protestant 
 churches competed with Catholic bodies in their 
 efforts to surpass one another's contributions. The 
 newspapers gave of their space freely in news, edi- 
 torials and in cartoons. And the churches, in ad- 
 dition to lending their buildings and even tlie serv- 
 ices of their clergy, vied with one another in pub- 
 lishing, entirely without solicitation, full-page 
 newspaper advertisements in which the plea of 
 humanity and a fundamental Christianity was con- 
 veyed more effectively than in any appeals made 
 by Jews themselves. As an illustration, I repro- 
 duce the facsimile of such an advertisement from a 
 Louisiana newspaper on the opposite page. 
 
 In towns and villages without number, where 
 Jews were either non-existent or inert, the non- 
 Jews took the initiative altogether. The people 
 would read their governor's proclamation, or the 
 mayor's of the near-by city, and resolve to do their 
 share. They would call a meeting of the most 
 influential citizens or the most generous or the most 
 capable, and falling back on their experiences in 
 Red Cross, Liberty Loan and United War Work 
 drives, proceeded to initiate a campaign and do 
 what was expected of them. A member of the 
 North Dakota Committee relates this incident: He
 
 Because Christ Commands It 
 
 "WE URGE EVERYONE TO HELP 
 THE JEWISH SUFFERERS 
 
 BECAUSE THEY NEED IT. BECAUSE WE- BELIEVE IN PAYING OUR DEBTS. 
 
 Humanity Owes Much to The Jews 
 
 Moses gave us the Moral Law; David voiced every cry of joy or sorrow of the human heart to God; 
 Christ, after the flesh, born a Jew, taught in the Good Samaritan story— 
 
 THAT WHO NEEDS MY HELP 
 IS MY NEIGHBOR 
 
 So; for Christ's sweet sake; HELP THE JEWISH SUFFERERS OVERSEAS with an open hand. 
 In the U. W. W. campaign the jews, knowing they wouk! only get three million dollars out of tlie 
 contributions; gave about twenty million dollars, and the Y. M. C. A; and the Red Cross were the 
 beneficjaries of their liberality to about seventeen million dollars. 
 
 It not for sweet charity's sake, at least not to be |)ut to shame! let us help those who; while giving 
 to ours, never before have asked us to give to theirs. 
 
 We Urge All Methodists to Give in the Name of Christ 
 Born of the House of David 
 
 —First Methodist Churdu 
 A BIT OF PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY
 
 SHARE OF OTHERS 131 
 
 had traveled many weary miles to one of the out- 
 lying counties in his State in order to confer with 
 certain leading men on methods of extending the 
 State campaign into that region. He arrived at the 
 little town which was the county seat, late in the 
 evening. Happening to be acquainted with the 
 local Supreme Court Judge, he drove up to his 
 house. His honor, he learned, was not at home; 
 he was attending a meeting at the Court House; so 
 to the Court House our committee man went to 
 find around a great table all the wealth and promi- 
 nence of the district. He was about to withdraw 
 in embarrassment at the intrusion, when the presi- 
 dent of the local bank boisterously invited him to 
 enter. "You are just in time," he said. "You 
 might be able to help us. We were just organizing 
 a campaign for Jewish relief." "Gentlemen," he 
 
 turned to the others, "this is Mr. , Mr. 
 
 this is our Jewish campaign committee." 
 
 Not only in spirit, but in actual substance has 
 the share of the Gentile in the cause of war-stricken 
 Jewry been mounting higher and higher, until there 
 is an inkling in the minds of many of the workers 
 that it has become quite disproportionate. I have, 
 myself, a suspicion that, incredible as it may seem, 
 certain Jews, seeing the growing willingness of their 
 non- Jewish neighbors to bear a part of tlie burden, 
 are disposed to delegate it to them in its entirety.
 
 132 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 It would therefore not be amiss at this time if some 
 enterprising statistician were to determine just what 
 portion of the funds that are now being collected 
 are derived from Jewish and non-Jewish pockets 
 respectively. Comparisons are odious, as Mrs. 
 Malaprop held, but if they prove in this instance 
 what I fear they might, the Jewish slacker will 
 deserve all the odium that they may cast upon him. 
 There are constant complaints, I am told authorita- 
 tively, from committees in scattered parts of the 
 country headed by non-Jews, that their Jewish fel- 
 low-townsmen are remiss in doing their part. 
 Chairmen write in from time to time to the directing 
 heads of the committees asking for suggestions as 
 to how such people might be brought to book. 
 The answer, I would venture to suggest, in all cases, 
 is the public exhibition of the names of backsliders 
 wherever they may be found and in such a way 
 that they will do the most good to the cause, and 
 the most harm to Mr. Scrooge,
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 PROBLEMS OF DISTRIBUTION 
 
 IN the collection of moneys it had proven im- 
 practicable, even though desirable, to effect a 
 fusion of the several committees and the constitu- 
 encies which they represented. On the part of the 
 immediate members of the committees there was 
 and remains, to begin with, a pride of organization 
 which constitutes a persistent and very real obstacle 
 to amalgamation. In addition, the two minor 
 bodies claim with an appreciable show of reason 
 that, in spite of the inherent community of interest 
 between all groups in Jewry and in spite of their 
 common purpose in relation to the European situa- 
 tion, there remains nevertheless a very real residue 
 of difference which is bound to express itself in 
 separate alignments. Admittedly, the People's 
 Relief Committee is doing a share of the fund- 
 raising which neither of its fellow-committees could 
 do for it and which it would be wasteful to neglect. 
 On the other hand, within the precincts of the Cen- 
 tral Committee officials are prone to confess that 
 while a large portion of its resources could undoubt- 
 edly be increased if they were tapped by the 
 
 133
 
 134 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 mechanisms of the American Committee, neverthe- 
 less, the aggregate of contributions coming from 
 this element of Jewry would not in all probability 
 be any greater and, not impossibly, even smaller. 
 At any rate, and regardless of the logic of the situa- 
 tion, it remains a fact that all efforts in the past 
 four years to convert the triple body into a single 
 unified and powerful organization have gone for 
 naught. 
 
 When, however, the question arose as to the best 
 manner in which to dispose of the collected funds, 
 the long-drawn-out discussion of the advantages 
 and disadvantages of concentrated action was 
 abruptly brought to a close with almost no argu- 
 ment at all. In respect to distribution the minor 
 committees readily perceived the undesirability of 
 duplication and the virtual impossibility of their 
 own direct administration of their respective trusts. 
 Had their tasks been of an ordinary peace-time 
 character their passionate sense of identity might 
 even here have held them apart. But it was clearly 
 out of the question for groups composed of such 
 material as went into the making of the two immi- 
 grant committees to engage in diplomatic negotia- 
 tions, foreign exchange, and the complexities and 
 perplexities of freight transportation across the 
 Atlantic and the continent of Europe in time of war. 
 Whether or not the rank and file of their member-
 
 DISTRIBUTION 135 
 
 ship would prove more responsive to appeals made 
 to them by their own leadership, no one could ex- 
 pect trade union officials, rabbis, and small business 
 men to conduct an undertaking which, whether you 
 like it or not, is in the province of international 
 bankers and large entrepreneurs. 
 
 In its earliest days, to be sure, the Central Com- 
 mittee had made an attempt to do its own dis- 
 bursing. It had transported as early as October, 
 1914, considerable funds to Palestine and to 
 Austria, but this was at the time when the war had 
 scarcely begun and the avenues of European in- 
 tercourse had not yet become as effectually closed 
 as they were soon to be. Neither Italy and 
 Rumania on the one hand nor Turkey and Bulgaria 
 on the other had as yet joined in the war. The 
 Allied blockade of the continent had hardly as yet 
 been thought of; and yet even under these compara- 
 tively favorable circumstances tlie transaction had 
 been fraught with no end of difficulties and expense. 
 And it became obvious by this very experience itself 
 that, as a measure both of dispatch and economy, a 
 distributive union between the committees was in- 
 evitable. In consequence we find on the 27\h. of 
 November — precisely one week after the sums 
 above referred to had been transmitted to the Old 
 World by the Central Committee, a successful at- 
 tempt being initiated on the part of the Executive
 
 136 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 Committees of both organizations to effect a per- 
 manent disbursement agency. On that date a 
 meeting was called at the building of the United 
 Hebrew Charities which culminated in the estab- 
 lishment of the Joint Distribution Committee. It 
 was easily agreed that the membership of this new 
 body should consist of the Executive Committees 
 of its constituent members. The very name of the 
 new organization was a concession to the lively 
 sense of identity of the separate collecting agencies. 
 And its officers were drawn with an eye to the sen- 
 sibilities of all elements. Mr. Felix M. War- 
 burg, recently elected Treasurer of the American 
 Committee, was made the Chairman of the new 
 organization, while the active directorship was 
 turned over to a prominent member of the Central 
 Relief Committee. The People's Relief Commit- 
 tee, having as yet not been formed, its constituency 
 took no share in the proceedings. 
 
 It took but one afternoon for the delegations of 
 the two organizations to arrive at an agreement. 
 The fundamental need for a common instrumen- 
 tality was too patent to need discussion, and there 
 prevailed at the conference such a liberal spirit of 
 mutual trust and friendly cooperation tliat the cus- 
 tomary bickerings regarding representation and 
 leadership were automatically precluded. By the 
 sheer accident of its constituency the American
 
 DISTRIBUTION 137 
 
 Committee was freely recognized as possessing the 
 preponderant qualifications for taking the initiative 
 in the counsels of the new organization. Its mem- 
 bership (apart from their extensive commercial 
 affiliations in Europe) had had longer experience in 
 extending relief abroad and therefore was in touch 
 with a variety of groups and persons overseas who 
 could at this time render valuable assistance. 
 None the less the older Central Committee, both 
 by virtue of its precedence in the field and because 
 of its representative character, as well as in conse- 
 quence of its profounder understanding of the 
 problems of Jewry in Eastern Europe, was ac- 
 corded an equal position with its younger and more 
 influential partner. 
 
 The earliest operations of the Joint Distribution 
 Committee extended chiefly to Palestine. It was 
 from the Holy Land that the first direct cry for 
 assistance had reached America. For half a cen- 
 tury the Jewish immigrants of that country had been 
 receiving regular support from their co-religionists 
 in Germany and France and even in Russia and 
 Rumania. And the declaration of the state of 
 war, accompanied as it inevitably was by a dis- 
 location of international relations, brought the 
 severest consequences of misery upon these already 
 pauperized colonies before it touched even the 
 ghettoes. Theirs, above all others', was the most
 
 138 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 urgeni case and, in a sense, the immediate occasion 
 for creating the disbursing agency. 
 
 Ere long, however, the Joint Distribution Com- 
 mittee addressed itself to the more comprehensive 
 task. Utilizing the relationships which American 
 Jewry had established with Russia in tlie days of 
 the Kishinefif pogroms, the directorate quickly 
 initiated correspondence with the leaders of Jewry 
 in that empire. Baron Guinzburg, M. Schlossberg, 
 and their many associates who had proved them- 
 selves such able and devofeed workers in past emer- 
 gencieffe, were again set to work and given plenary 
 powers as the agents in their country of the joint 
 American organization. In Austria the Allianz 
 had had broad experience in administering aid to 
 the Jews of Galicia. It was reorganized and ren- 
 dered more representative by expanding its coun- 
 cils to include the orthodox and labor elements. 
 During and after the German invasion of the Pale 
 it was necessary for the Committee to conduct its 
 affairs through the medium of the German forces 
 of occupation, and by all reports these relations 
 were throughout in the highest degree satisfactory. 
 The American State Department was from the first 
 day to this, at once the closest and the most helpful 
 of the committee's allies. Even before the entry 
 of the United States into the war it was virtually 
 impossible for private citizens, however influential,
 
 DISTRIBUTION 139 
 
 to conduct a traffic of such immense proportions 
 without proceeding through diplomatic and con- 
 sular channels. After vve ourselves became a 
 belligerent the difficulties of transportation and ex- 
 change became more complex than ever. The re- 
 lations of the committee with the German and 
 Austrian authorities as well as with private agencies 
 within those countries, had as a matter of course 
 to cease. Shipping facilities diminished con- 
 tinuously until they reached almost the vanishing 
 point. Communication with the Eastern half of the 
 European continent was almost completely cut off. 
 The energies of the American Government and of 
 the American people were, as was to be expected, 
 deflected into military channels. And as if to com- 
 plete the cycle of obstacles the formerly disguised 
 chaos of the Czar's regime succumbed to open dis- 
 integration and revolution. 
 
 At this juncture the Committee found it expedient 
 to shift its channels of action from the Central 
 Powers to The Netherlands. The practical prob- 
 lems and difficulties in carrying out this change 
 were, as may be readily imagined, of the utmost 
 complexity; and the organization resolved to send 
 over a mission headed by Dr. Boris Bogen to con- 
 duct negotiations with the governments affected as 
 well as to open up communications through the 
 North of Europe. In a very brief period Dr. Bogen
 
 140 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 succeeded in establishing at The Hague a per- 
 manent committee of leading Dutch Jews who have 
 ever since very ably carried on an important phase 
 of the overseas affairs of the Joint Distribution 
 Committee. Their activities have come to be re- 
 garded as an integral part of the New York body. 
 
 But the progressive distintegration of the erst- 
 while Russian Empire became an unending source 
 of hindrance and obstacle to the distribu»tion of re- 
 lief. Continuous warfare, the rise and fall of 
 mushroom governments, the uncertainty of life and 
 the insecurity of property, the breakdown of rail- 
 way communication and of the entire economic 
 process of the immense country, the erection of 
 ever-new "national" boundaries, could not but in- 
 terfere severely with the movements of relief funds 
 and materials. It, in effect, put a virtual stop to 
 all operations. The American and the Allied gov- 
 ernments, which continued to exhibit the utmost 
 goodwill, were to all practical purposes powerless 
 to assist. Since the fall of the ancient regime no 
 government had been recognized anywhere in 
 Russia, and consequently no channels existed 
 through which the influence of the Allied and asso- 
 ciated governments could express itself. On the 
 other hand, the cessation of active fighting between 
 the major countries had resulted to a considerable 
 extent in reestablishing a measure of communica-
 
 DISTRIBUTION 141 
 
 tion between Western and Eastern Europe. De- 
 spite the collapse of the Central Empires, the ending 
 of the war was a forerunner of something like 
 normal relations in the heart of Europe. In Ger- 
 many and in most of the new states created out of 
 the wreck of Austria, Allied influence was para- 
 mount; so that it was at least possible to approach 
 the outer walls of the Pale. 
 
 Moreover, and as will be seen more explicitly 
 later, the condition of the helpless Jewish people 
 became both clearer and distinctly more aggravated. 
 As long as the fighting continued, the American 
 rescue agencies labored in the dark. One got 
 occasional glimpses, to be sure, of the state of 
 aff^airs over there from travelers, correspondents, 
 and now and then from a sporadic report issuing 
 directly from the Committee's own beneficiaries and 
 representatives. It is common knowledge, how- 
 ever, that reports from Russian Jewish sources 
 were of the meagerest and the very worst that the 
 New York offices received from anywhere. Now, 
 with the opening up of the Continent, there came a 
 sudden and most pungent revelation of the totally 
 unimagined misery and decay that four and a half 
 years of war had brought to the Jewries of old 
 Russia; and the Jews of America stood appalled at 
 the exhibition. Meantime, the horror, far from 
 being an accumulation merely of the recent past.
 
 142 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 was galloping on and growing continually worse 
 and increasingly less controllable. It looked in- 
 deed as if the sheer physical and nervous state of 
 six millions of people had reached a stage beyond 
 the ministrations of relief. What these people 
 were obviously suffering from was now not merely 
 the absence of ordinary physical human necessities. 
 That might have been their case three years before, 
 or even one year ago. At the moment, the Ameri- 
 can agencies found themselves confronted with a 
 population which had become, as a consequence of 
 nearly five years of intense privation and suffering, 
 utterly degraded. It was the backbone of East 
 European Jewry that had been crushed. Pauperi- 
 zation was the least of the terrible effects of a pro- 
 longed siege. One was face to face with a great 
 mass of humanity which had become devoid of 
 nervous force, of the power to resist — almost of 
 recognizable human form. Its vitality, its grip, 
 its common human pride, almost its very will to 
 life, had been destroyed. 
 
 And yet, desperate apparently as the problem 
 was, there was but one thing for organized Ameri- 
 can Jewry to do. It was to plunge in with the 
 utmost energy and to make an attempt at saving 
 what remained. Dr. Boris Bogen, who had pre- 
 viously distinguished himself by his success in The 
 Netherlands, was once more dispatched abroad.
 
 DISTRIBUTION 143 
 
 this time to Poland, to survey the field and to render 
 such aid as the immediate emergency demanded. 
 He remains there to this day — a plenipotentiary of 
 the Joint Distribution Committee, a diplomatic 
 official, a correspondent, a social expert, a modera- 
 tor between hostile races, a purchasing agent, a food 
 dispenser, a nurse and a comforter, all in one. He 
 was lately supplemented by a comprehensive dele- 
 gation, representative of all committees in America. 
 He is constantly collaborating with scores of local 
 agencies in Poland, in Galicia and Russia, most of 
 whom he has himself set up. He and the merciful 
 organizations whom he represents are doing all that 
 human effort and sympathy can do. It is not a 
 great deal, in the circumstances. He is spending 
 millions of money and rescuing whole communities 
 of children and women and men from death by star- 
 vation and from a life which is worse than death. 
 But no one is more keenly aware than they how far 
 from the ends they have set for themselves are these 
 painfully inadequate palliative efforts. The need 
 of the moment is not merely greater financial re- 
 sources — though that is the primary need — but a 
 reconstructed medium to move in. And that is, of 
 course, in a phrase, the problem that the period of 
 war hands on to our era of peace.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 PROBLEMS FOR TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 
 
 AND now at last the war is over. At least it is 
 officially and technically over west of the 
 Rhine. Hostilities are at an end. Armistices and 
 peace treaties of a sort have been signed. The 
 American people have done their celebrating, they 
 have paraded and cheered, they have put over the 
 last public loan, and are now ready to return to 
 business and the normal conduct of life. For what 
 is transpiring in Central and Eastern Europe, and 
 in a goodly share of the continent of Asia, they have 
 neither understanding nor concern. How should 
 they? They undertook to participate in a war 
 against a single power, and that power has gone 
 down to a ruin complete beyond the dream of 
 patriotism. The German war is over; and with 
 that happy consummation, the share of Americans 
 in the business is at an end. After all is said 
 and done, they belong in a world of their own. 
 They have never had, and they cannot have now, 
 any abiding interest in the rows and petty rivalries 
 of a strange and distant climate. The conflict with 
 Germany had, by an elaborate and well-sustained 
 
 144
 
 PROBLEMS 145 
 
 propaganda, come to have an intimate meaning for 
 them. It had been idealized and dramatized. But 
 the sequel is another affair. It is sordid and con- 
 fused to the point of dullness. Leagues of nations 
 and alliances, open diplomacy and secret covenants, 
 the new international order, territorial claims and 
 counter-claims, plebiscites, and the rights of racial 
 minorities, are alien phrases to them. They are 
 part of the jargon of European politics. And con- 
 trary to the expectations of the sanguine, the politics 
 of the Old World are to Americans as meaningless 
 after the war as they were before. The New World 
 will have problems and difficulties of its own which 
 will be somewhat distinct and separate; and good 
 Americans are naturally eager to grapple with 
 them. 
 
 Meantime, Europe is bleeding at her heart and 
 in her vitals; the armistice was unhappily not a 
 signal for universal disarmament and hand-shak- 
 ing; it was, as a lone realist here and there had 
 warned us beforehand that it would be, a bugle call 
 proclaiming that Europe was at last and in earnest 
 at war. Between the Rhine and the Pacific, the 
 official count discovers no fewer than fifteen in- 
 dividual wars. The actual number is doubtless 
 much greater. There are class wars, and slightly 
 reduced copies of the war for democracy and ideals, 
 and just plain old-fashioned national wars. Guer-
 
 146 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 rillas, pogroms, and civil strife of the most colorful 
 variety, scar the continent all the way from Munich 
 to Vladivostock. The carefully drawn line between 
 Entente and Quadruple Alliance has been utterly 
 obliterated. The precious small nations for whose 
 preservation the great war was initiated and pro- 
 longed, are now somewhat unideally conducting a 
 set of small wars for each other's annihilation. 
 
 It was, I always had a private conviction, a very 
 careless thing to begin the long-awaited European 
 war; but it was the sheerest absent-mindedness to 
 encourage a revolution in Germany and the disin- 
 tegration of Austria. Popular uprisings and the 
 collapse of polyglot empires are interesting 
 pastimes which are much easier to start than to 
 bring to a convenient and satisfactory finish. It 
 was one thing to defeat Austria; it is quite another 
 to cure the madness which Austria held in check. 
 It was one thing, and a comparatively simple one, 
 to fight a wild dog, even if he were many-headed; 
 it is quite another to cope with an entire brood of 
 scurrying pups, savagely snapping at you in an ef- 
 fort to devour one another. Wherefore it is not 
 surprising that healthy Americans are disillusioned 
 and annoyed and eager to wash their hands of the 
 whole matter. 
 
 In the very center of this beaa spectacle — of this 
 much-heralded new world — six millions of Jewish
 
 PROBLEMS 147 
 
 babies and women and men find themselves heirs 
 to an estate beside which even the chaos of the great 
 war seems in retrospect like the veriest salvation. 
 While America and Western Europe, with the able 
 assistance of Japan, Porto Rico, and Siam, are busy 
 fashioning a New World under the tutelage of the 
 League of Nations, the realists of Eastern Europe, 
 thoroughly familiar with the efficacy of scraps of 
 paper, are making a somewhat undignified scramble 
 for fails accomplis. The game of grab and hold is 
 on with greater zeal than ever. The little statesmen 
 of the Baltic and the Balkans have a firmer grasp 
 of the idealisms and the aspirations of Europe than 
 even Mr. Woodrow Wilson. The President of the 
 United States may rejoice unhindered over the 
 happy dissolution of the Central Empires; it is for 
 none but the eyes of the President of Poland and 
 the potentates of the Danube to behold the collapse 
 of the Entente as well. Europe is in flames and 
 wise men rush into the burning structure and save 
 what ihey can. Now or never is the time to gratify 
 old cupidities, to avenge past wrongs, to settle long- 
 standing accounts, and to get even with ancient foes. 
 And the oldest enemy as well as the most helpless is, 
 of course, the Jew. Japan, with all her reputation 
 for cunning is nowhere in it beside these Realpoli- 
 tiker. The most that she could devise was con- 
 queror's terms to a peaceful ally and neighbor at a
 
 148 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 moment when the watchful Great Powers were not 
 looking. They do it vastly better in East Europe. 
 They have out-grown the child's play of diplomatic 
 clap-trap. Conquered people may revive. The 
 dead alone cease to trouble. 
 
 East European Jewry finds itself exactly at the 
 same point in the highway at the conclusion of the 
 war as at its beginning. Only progress has become 
 next to impossible. It is no longer a civilized high- 
 way, subject to the laws of traffic. It has become 
 a miserable by-way outside of the pale of organized 
 mankind; its sides are a series of ambush, the nests 
 of brigands, and its terminus a bag's end. The 
 customary sanity and good-will of peace have 
 brought no more respite to these people than had 
 the customary solidarity of war. The ever-lasting 
 threat of Allied patriotism to make the Germans an 
 out-law nation, may or may not become a fact. 
 Outlawry is the unofficial, but, therefore, the more 
 effective, status of the Jewish people. Jewry has 
 become a huge prison camp. America is collecting 
 ever larger sums for its relief, but its condition is 
 beyond the ministrations of a mere bodily amelio- 
 ration. 
 
 The commissions recently sent over there by the 
 Joint Distribution Committee have returned with a 
 message of despair. Some of them are, to be sure, 
 going about the country appealing for renewed ef-
 
 PROBLEMS 149 
 
 forts, but there is not one of them who will not 
 confess that the problem of the East European Jew 
 is a thing incapable of solution by the method of 
 direct and unaided financial assistance. They 
 started abroad with a conviction that the cessation 
 of hostilities would begin a new chapter in the his- 
 tory of the salvage of European Jewry by American 
 Jewry. The effort at mere palliative relief, they 
 thought, would come to an end, and a greater and 
 more comprehensive endeavor would be initiated 
 looking toward the restoration of the victimized 
 millions to self-respect ind normal lives. That 
 had been the primary object of the expedition — to 
 discover ways and means of applying American 
 funds to the permanent rehabilitation of Russian 
 and Polish and Galician Jewry. The commission 
 has come back in a skeptical frame of mind. Such 
 members of it as I have spoken to invariably shake 
 their heads doubtfully at the mere mention of con- 
 structive relief. How, they ask, can one be think- 
 ing of reconstructing a community whose very nerve 
 and bone is in a state of advanced decomposition? 
 A "convict population" is the startling phrase which 
 constantly recurs in their accounts of conditions 
 over there. Even emigration is, for a long time to 
 come, out of the question. The war has made a 
 sick people of the Jews of Eastern Europe, just as 
 it has, I presume, made invalids of a great many
 
 150 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 others. They are not fit to travel; they have de- 
 veloped an entire catalog of novel physical and 
 mental ailments. Their children are under- 
 nourished and stunted; their women are sucked dry 
 of vitality and retain barely enough vigor to sustain 
 themselves, to say nothing of nursing their young; 
 and the men are afflicted with shattered nerves, 
 which render them timid of their environment and 
 distrustful of the future. 
 
 And so this little volume leaves off exactly where 
 it began. The question that I asked in the earliest 
 chapter remains unanswered, and becomes more 
 perplexing the longer I think of it. Here are six 
 millions of starving, homeless, utterly broken hu- 
 man beings. What is to be done about them? 
 The Jew of Eastern Europe is paying the price of 
 "peace" just as he has been paying the price of a 
 war not of his own making. Surely the simplest 
 and most immediate method of saving him from ex- 
 piring before our very eyes is for American Jewry 
 to go on with the burdensome work they have been 
 doing for the past five years. Whatever other 
 remedies may be thought of and applied, the first 
 need will be for vaster and ever vaster sums. 
 However vividly we may realize the inadequacy of 
 mere physical rel'ef, it is the one form of heh) that 
 can be immediately extended. And the splendid 
 record of American Jewry, since the beginning of
 
 PROBLEMS 151 
 
 the war, is a reassuring guarantee that nothing will 
 be left undone in this direction. But, clearly, this 
 heroic effort is bounded by a multitude of limita- 
 tions. It is an attempt to treat the patient by re- 
 lieving symptoms instead of by making a direct 
 attack on the malady itself. The present status of 
 the Jew in Eastern Europe is not a product of the 
 war, nor an inheritance of the day before yester- 
 day. Neither will it be changed with the ultimate, 
 and after all inevitable, reign of peace in Europe. 
 The thing has been with us altogether too long; and 
 unless something drastic and heroic is done, we 
 shall never see the end of it. The Eastern Jew is 
 threatening to become the world's public charge, 
 unless the organized decent opinion of the world de- 
 termines once for all to get at the causes of his help- 
 lessness and to remove them. There is here a duty 
 and an opportunity for civilized society in general 
 and for America in particular to step in and demand 
 that the Jew shall everywhere be allowed to live his 
 life in freedom and usefulness. America can with 
 particular grace and self-confidence make such a 
 demand by pointing at once to her own proud record 
 in her dealings with the Jew and to the magnificent 
 results of her policy. The rebuilding of the an- 
 cient Jewish homeland may perhaps eventually 
 solve the Jewish question; but for the time being 
 the life of an entire people and the sheer social
 
 152 THE JEW PAYS 
 
 health of a dozen European countries hang upon 
 an application of the Golden Rule and the political 
 experience of the last century to the sorely stricken 
 Jews of the Old World. 
 
 FINIS
 
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