Chapter 20

One particular crossing sticks in my mind. The waters were calm and the sun shining. I usually exercised by walking the deck clockwise for thirty minutes and then reversing the direction for the next half hour. I had to do something about the quantities of excellent—and free—food and drink I consumed. One morning, I neared a gray-haired man at the rail. He bit off the tip off a cigar, spat the end over the railing, and then returned to his deck chair. He held out a newspaper—The Dearborn Independent—whose headlines caught my eye.

JEWISH POWER AND AMERICA’S MONEY FAMINE
JEWISH IDEA MOLDED FEDERAL RESERVE PLAN

As I passed, he offered his hand. “I heard you play,” he said. “Great stuff.” Then he relit his cigar.

“Danke . . . thank you.”

“W. W. Wilson from Pennington, New Jersey. Got me a Ford dealership there.”

“I’m familiar with Henry Ford. But I never heard of that newspaper.”

“Second largest circulation in the US behind New York’s Daily News.” He leaned forward, “Tell you a little secret. Ford owns the paper and makes every dealership buy a ton of them to distribute to their customers. Truth is, I’d buy it anyway. He’s the only fellow that’s got enough gumption to tell what’s wrong with our country.” He jabbed his finger at the headline. “Them Jews are the reason the world’s in such a pickle.”

“Some say we have the same problem in Germany.”

“Of course you do. They’re controlling the banks and gold reserves all over the world.” Disdain dripped from his voice. “Lucky for us we got people in Washington who are clear-headed about this. Finally passed some laws that make sense.”

He explained how the America-first supporters believed in a “shut-the-door” policy, and that President Coolidge shared their beliefs. In his first inaugural message, Coolidge said, “America must be kept American.” The Johnson-Reed Act passed both houses of Congress. The aim was to effectively limit Jews from immigrating to the United States, and to totally bar immigration from Asia.

“Congressman Albert Johnson says right here in this paper,”—Wilson poked the page and then looked up at me—“he’s the one who co-sponsored the bill, and I quote, ‘this law is intended to suspend immigration . . . to Jewish people (because they are) filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.’ End quote.”

He was only too happy to share his views with me so I asked, “What about the Jews already here?”

“Got their grubby fingers in everything. They run the banks. They created the Federal Reserve to make certain they could control the money supply. But I’m telling you, son, change is in the wind. Not only because of this new immigration law, but the doors are finally being slammed shut so good Americans will never be pushed aside again. Here, look at this.” He presented me with one of the back issues he was catching up on. Others lay on the chaise next to him.

The Peril of Baseball—Too Much Jew
The International Jew: The World’s Problem
Jewish Jazz—Moron Music—Becomes Our National Music

“I understand what the immigration laws will do to limit who enters your country, but how can you make the sort of changes you’re talking about?”

“Let me put it this way, son. I got my degree from the local college down the road from where I grew up. Princeton. You might have heard of it. It is part of what they call the Ivy League. President Wilson was its president before he became governor of New Jersey and then president of the U S of A. He got the race thing right. He knew the coons couldn’t hack it. He’s the reason we won the war. Now we’re teaching you Krauts a lesson so you never step out of line again . . . if you know what I mean.”

I couldn’t resist the challenge. “We don’t see it that way. Had our leaders not forsaken us, the outcome might have been different.” Wolf’s and Ludendorff’s rants about being stabbed-in-the-back were so ubiquitous they were ingrained in me.

“Once America got in it, son, there was no way you were going to win anything. But that was years ago. No hard feelings, right?”

He stuck his hand out, and we shook on our present civility.

W. W. Wilson then picked up the thread of his thinking. “I was talking about the Ivy League to make a point.”

“I know about the Ivy League. One of my acquaintances in Germany went to Harvard: Putzi Hanfstaengl. Maybe you know him? His family has a fine arts publishing business in New York.”

“I’m not into art. But your friend’s school—Harvard—has got it right. Two years ago, under its president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, it put in Jewish quotas to limit how many of those folks could worm their way in. Other Ivies followed suit. Same with law schools and medical schools. Finally, these schools got enough sense to keep those places for the original Americans.”

“What about the Negroes?”

“Take a seat, son,” he gestured to the empty deck chair next to his. “By the way, as I said, I like the way you play the piano. Looking forward to tonight. So is the Missus.”

I was more interested in hearing about how Americans dealt with the same issues confronting Germans than with him discussing my piano playing. “The Negroes? I heard that they have to sit in the back of the buses in the South. That there are separate bathrooms for whites and Negroes. Why is that?”

“Southerners know a thing or two about how to keep them in their place,” answered Mr. Wilson.

As he spoke, I pictured the Negro performers in Max’s Nightingale. They were talented, gracious, and reveled in the applause they received for their top-flight performances. The same held true for those I had seen perform in the Cotton Club. And then there was the revival of Eugene O’Neill’s play, Emperor Jones, that featured Paul Robeson. I had never heard such a majestic voice.

The car dealer continued. “Do you know why there are lynchings in the South, son?” I shook my head. “The South lost the Civil War,”—I had read about that—“so they passed laws that limited everything those folks could do. They aimed to keep the races separate at all costs. Why, if a nigger so much as looked at a white woman cross-eyed in the south, there’d be a good chance he’d be hung.”

Like the way our Brownshirts rough up political opponents at their rallies. But not lynching. Germans were too civilized for that sort of extreme measure.

“I didn’t see that kind of violence in New York.”

“Too many bleeding-heart liberals. Most of them Jews, too. Not that way in the South. No sir. Down there, niggers can’t eat in the same restaurants as whites. They can’t go to the same movie theaters, play in the same parks, or swim in the same pools. All that is against the law in the South. They keep the schools segregated. The whites have theirs and the coons got theirs. Then there are the blood laws.”

“What are these blood laws?”

“If there’s one drop of black blood in a white-looking person, that person is considered black as the ace of spades. We call it the One Drop Rule. And don’t forget about the Klan.”

“I know about clans. They are large families. The Scots are most proud of their clans.”

Wilson shook his head. “No, no, no. That’s clan with a c. I’m talking Klan with a K. Three Ks, as a matter of fact. The Ku Klux Klan. KKK for short. They have over four thousand chapters and four million members.”

“What do these KKK people do?”

“They enforce the purity and superiority of Anglo-Saxon blood. Their goal is to protect the integrity of anything that threatens our American heritage.”

“Are you saying that if they see something they think is wrong, they take the law into their own hands? How do they get away with that?”

“You would be surprised how much support they have across the country.”

“Even when they break the law?”

“Laws that don’t protect white folks are meant to be broken.”

*

I made nearly a dozen trips to the United States in 1924 alone. More over the next few years. I continued to hear how the Jews maintained their stranglehold on world commerce and witnessed how Americans maintained their racial barriers.

My takeaway from this exposure to America and Americans was that there was little difference between what they practiced in the States and what my NSDAP friends preached in Germany. Both believed in racial purity. We called ourselves Aryans. The dominant Americans were referred to as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Catholics were more recent immigrants, and were lower on their pecking order, but well above Jews and Negroes. It became apparent that while we had our Brownshirts, they had their white sheets. And, in terms of race and religion, they both stood for the same things.

What did I believe in?

Rather than find answers to my questions, my confusion increased. I regarded Max Klinghofer as I would a beloved uncle, if I could remember one. Far from inferior, I saw Max as a savvy intellectual who was fair and moral, his businesses notwithstanding. Dr. Joseph was sainted in my eyes. I knew in my heart that there must have been many others . . . like the Jewish tailors I patronized. I struggled to resolve the questions these discordances raised.

As I reflect on those early years, the answers should have been obvious to even someone without a memory: people are just people, whether they have white skin or brown. But at the time, I was surrounded by conflicting images and beliefs from within both countries that only served to confuse me. Not knowing what to do or whom to believe, I chose the easy path: to sail on and see what life unfurled.