THE JEWS WHO CAME FROM RUSSIA HATED DESPOTISM AND autocracy. After what they had suffered at the hands of the czar, it’s not hard to understand why. The czar had thrown them out of the country after his Cossacks were allowed to run rampant in a campaign of murder, rape, and pillaging. It’s no wonder many of the Russian Jews embraced such left-wing ideologies as socialism, championed by the German economist Karl Marx, which called for the decision-making powers of society to go to the workers, not the company owners; communism, which called for a classless, stateless society; and anarchism, which called for the abolition of all rulers, laws, and religious leaders.
The most visible anarchist in America at the turn of the twentieth century was a hard-boiled woman by the name of Emma Goldman. She had been born Jewish, in a shtetl in Russia, and when she was thirteen, her family moved to the city of St. Petersburg. Czar Alexander II had just been assassinated, and a wave of pogroms left her family in dire need. She had to leave school to work in a factory.
Even as a child, she insisted on making her own decisions. When she was fifteen, her father tried to marry her off, but she held steadfast and refused. She was sent to live with relatives in Rochester, New York, where she resided in a slum and worked in a sweatshop.
In Chicago, in 1886, protesters were holding a rally in support of the eight-hour workday when someone threw a bomb into the crowd. Four men, who called themselves anarchists, denied being involved, and there was no substantive evidence to prove their guilt, but the judge convicted them anyway, just because they had said they were anarchists.
The incident, known as the Haymarket Riots, spurred Goldman to become an anarchist herself. She divorced her husband of ten months and moved to New York City in 1889. There she met Johann Most, a socialist who made Goldman his protégée. Her cause became the overthrow of the capitalist system. But, after a time, that no longer was her intent. Personal freedom became what interested her most, and she made spreading the gospel of anarchism her life’s work.
As Emma Goldman defined it, anarchism was not a violent philosophy. She wanted to abolish laws, because, she argued, laws were used to benefit the rich and oppress the poor. In the battle between the wealthy corporations and the workers, she was on the side of the workers. Monopolists, she said, supported the government and robbed the poor. She also accused the church of taking, through the priests, from the poor what belonged to them. Her solution was to abolish religion.
Emma Goldman. Library of Congress
When asked how she operated, her answer was: moral law. When asked what that meant, she said, “Moral law obligates everyone not to do harm to the next one.”
Her message carried no weight with the public or the press, who considered all anarchists bomb-throwers and a danger to society. As a result, despite her moral position, Emma Goldman—having been labeled an anarchist—was considered by corporate America and by right-wing politicians as a menace to American society. That notion became a fixture in everyone’s mind during the Homestead Steel strike in 1892, after seven locked-out workers were killed by Pinkerton thugs hired by the steel company. Her lover and fellow anarchist, Alexander “Sasha” Berkman, sought revenge, and he shot and wounded Henry Clay Frick, the manager of the steel plant. Despite the fact that Goldman firmly believed that each person should act on his own and was horrified by what Berkman did, there were whispers— although no evidence—that she had conspired with him to shoot Frick. Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison. He served fourteen.
A year later, Brooklyn tailors went on strike. In front of a crowd, Goldman told the unemployed that she had no problem if they stole whatever food they needed. For saying that, she was arrested in Philadelphia while attending a meeting of anarchists there. There is no doubt that what offended those in authority—besides her radical political activity—was that she was not only a rabble-rouser but an independent woman lacking stature and grace. And if that wasn’t enough, she was a Jew.
In an echo of Puritan leader John Endicott’s description of Lady Deborah Moody as a “dangerous woeman,” Police Superintendent Byrne told the press, “Emma Goldman is a bad woman in many ways and her sway over ignorant anarchists is wonderful! She is more like a man than a woman in her mannerisms. She never loses an opportunity to incite ignorant Hebrews to rise against law and order. She is an immoral woman, too, and has been the mistress of a dozen prominent anarchists. We have a clear case against her, and I believe we shall rid the city of her for a long time.”
For telling the starving to do what they had to do to survive, she was sentenced to a year in jail. Said the judge, “You are a woman above the ordinary intelligence, yet you have testified that you have no respect for our laws. There is no room for you in this community.”
After she was released, she continued her lecturing, but the cause of anarchism was set back forever on September 7, 1901, when a self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz, the son of Russian Poles, traveled to Buffalo, New York, where he shot President William McKinley with a .32 revolver. When he was arrested, Czolgosz said he got his idea to shoot McKinley from listening to one of Emma Goldman’s speeches at a meeting in Cleveland.
Dr. M. A. Cohn, Brooklyn’s most prominent anarchist, defended Goldman. His main argument was that she believed each person should take action independently. He said he didn’t believe Czolgosz acted on behalf of any group of anarchists, “for it is absurd to think that we do our work that way. We do not select men to kill off the rulers. Our aim is to abolish government of man, but we do not hold meetings and designate men to accomplish our purpose by assassination. If we did that, we’d be in conflict with our own principles, for in making one of our number kill a ruler we would be taking away his freedom of action. I cease to be an anarchist when I request a brother anarchist to do something which will infringe upon his individual freedom, his individuality or his liberty.” Cohn said he and Goldman believed in peaceful means to accomplish the annihilation of law and government.
Arrested in Chicago, Goldman disclaimed all knowledge of Czolgosz and his crime.
“I do not; I never advocated violence. I scarcely know the man,” she said. She admitted having had a few words with him. She said when she heard what he had done, her reaction was, “You fool.”
“I am an anarchist,” she said, “a student of socialism, but nothing I ever said to Leon Czolgosz knowingly would have led him to do the act which startled everyone Friday. Am I accountable because some crackpot person put a wrong construction on my words? Leon Czolgosz, I am convinced, planned the deed unaided and entirely alone. There is no anarchist ring which would help him.” She concluded, “[He] may have been inspired by me, but if he was, he took the wrong way of showing it.”
After Goldman was arrested, she expected an attorney to arrive to bail her out. But the police dragnet had captured most of her anarchist friends, and she spent the next two weeks in jail.
The police, meanwhile, did everything they could to find evidence she was somehow involved. They tried to discover secret meetings at which she might have inspired Czolgosz. They failed.
Two men of the cloth, the Reverend Naylor of Washington, DC, and the Reverend Doctor T. De Witt Talmadge of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, called for the lynching of anarchists in retaliation for the president’s death.
An editorial in one of the conservative Brooklyn papers, the Independent, criticized the left-wing newspapers that had derided McKinley for being in the pocket of political boss Mark Hanna, charging that their constant making fun of the president had contributed to his death.
“We have seen, in papers which this week are full of his praise and of denunciation of the assassination, day after day, pictures which represent him as an insignificant monkey-like dwarf, submissively led by an obese, dollar-marked figure representing the trusts of Senator Hanna. We have all seen those pictures, and have read the editorials to match them. But they are all of the same criminal character as the speeches of Emma Goldman. To them we must look for the accursed inspiration that struck down the President.”
McKinley, a Republican president who was beholden to Big Business and held in little esteem by the public, was eulogized by Reverend D. B. James of the Central Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. The Reverend James described McKinley as one of our nation’s “greatest statesmen and one of the greatest minds this great country has ever produced.
“Like Lincoln, he had sensible Christian parents, and he was brought up on the Bible. His principles were founded on God’s word. He had this foundation. He had a clear head, a sound and broad mind…. Mr. McKinley had plenty of ability, but not much cultivation, and yet an Austrian paper ranked him with Bismarck as a great leader, a man of ability and a statesman.” He said McKinley was the most popular president ever, including George Washington.
“He was about as perfect a man as a man could be.”
James too blamed the left-wing newspapers for McKinley’s death. He called for a boycott of those papers. “The utterances of some of these papers have been as bad as those of Emma Goldman.”
On September 24, 1901, Emma Goldman was cleared of all charges in the murder of President McKinley. She would remain a voice for the workers against Big Business for the next twenty years. During that time she championed women’s suffrage and, along with Margaret Sanger, whose first clinic was opened in Brooklyn, advocated handing out birth control information and providing abortions to women.
Sanger’s mother had become pregnant eighteen times. Eleven of her children, including Margaret, lived. Margaret saw that controlling pregnancy was the only way for immigrant women to get out of poverty. Some of these poor women were desperate enough to seek illegal abortions.
Sanger’s first birth-control clinic—opened on October 16, 1916, in Brownsville, Brooklyn—charged five cents. She served five hundred women, when she was abruptly arrested and thrown in jail. It was an important event, contributing to the beginning of the women’s movement in America.
Goldman not only approved of birth control, she also opposed America’s entry into World War I. If ever there was a Jewish left-wing target running around America infuriating the right-wing white, male, Christian establishment, Emma Goldman was it.
The conservative Christians in the Congress sought to put a lid on Goldman and those like her with their radical ideas. In the name of a strengthened democracy, in 1917 Congress sought to curb them with the passage of the Sedition Act, a law that said if an immigrant was involved in immoral or criminal behavior or the espousal of radicalism within five years of entering the United States, he—or she—could be deported.
The next year, the U.S. government, using the Sedition Act, targeted the most popular left-wing causes. The Sedition Act outlawed the restriction of military recruiting, writing or publishing disloyal information, or expressing contempt for the government’s actions or in any way speaking out against the war. Under the act, the government could deport anyone who questioned the rise of Big Business, encouraged the use of strikes, or objected to the war.
This legislation, which was clearly unconstitutional, was upheld by the conservative U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Schenck v. United States in 1919, with the unanimous opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Charles Schenck had been found guilty of passing out pamphlets against the war. In another case, Eugene Debs, an outspoken socialist leader, was found guilty of supporting socialism and of opposing the war, and he was sentenced to ten years in prison. The Supreme Court said such speech was not protected by the First Amendment. (Debs would later be pardoned by President Warren G. Harding.) One man, Herbert Warner, was sentenced to six months in jail for pointing to a picture of Lenin and saying, “There is what I consider one of the brainiest men in the world.”
In Chicago, in 1919, eight members of the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series and were suspended for life by baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, even though a court had found them innocent. The same year, that same Judge Landis sentenced Wisconsin congressman Victor Berger and several others to twenty years in prison for sedition, but the convictions were later overturned by the Supreme Court on a technicality.
It’s hard to say how much of the backlash was anti-Semitism, but Albert Johnson, a Republican congressman from the state of Washington, gives us an idea. Johnson, the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration, argued that the country was being swamped by “abnormally twisted” and “unassimilable” Jews, who were “filthy, un-American,” and “often dangerous in their habits.”
The stated target of the Red Scare was not the Jews, however, but the Bolsheviks. When the Bolsheviks overthrew Czar Nicholas II in the spring of 1917, Americans approved. But when the Bolsheviks abolished private property, Americans—especially the conservatives and the wealthy—became horrified and afraid such a turn of events could happen in America. Rebellion seemed to boil up from the Russian Revolution of 1917, and with so many anti-czarist, left-leaning Jews fleeing Russia to live in the United States, the Christian right developed an anti-immigration fervor.
After World War I ended, the United States suffered through a depression, and many of those out of work were servicemen. There was a lot of talk about immigrants taking jobs from servicemen; from “Americans.” The workers, who had taken over Mother Russia, became people to be feared, especially by Big Business and the U.S. establishment.
According to historian Joel Kovel, it was not just a fear felt by the admitted target of the Bolsheviks—the rich—but it was something deeper: the stream of venom was such that all Americans, not just those with something to lose, felt the fear and loathing. The elites transmitted fear to the populace “by arousing the dread of the dark outsider, whose symbol was assigned to Communism.” The truth was, the real effect of communism on the United States has never been very great; it’s been rather negligible. Communism never did capture the imagination of the public, and its American leaders never did have much influence. But communism was—and still is—the perfect vehicle “for bringing the demonizing mentality up to full speed.” As intelligence expert Frank Donner explained it, “The great American nightmare of a foreign-hatched conspiracy had become a reality.”
Hysteria arises when the people fear the threat to the powers that be. Rumors about the foreign-sounding Bolsheviks abounded. The most outlandish: their intention was to nationalize our women as well as our private property. They were going to “slaughter the bourgeoisie, capture their women, and sell them into sexual slavery.” Though distorted and exaggerated, these rumors were believed as fact.
The anti-immigration hysteria was fed by Mrs. George Thatcher Guernsy, the president of the very Protestant Daughters of the American Revolution, founded in 1890 in an attempt to maintain the Christian identity and character of the nation, which they felt was being threatened. She said, “[Nothing] will save the life of this free Republic if these foreign leeches are not cut and cast out.”
The Society of Mayflower Descendants, another group that didn’t want anyone to forget how the nation was founded, was organized in December of 1894 in New York City by descendants of the Pilgrims to “preserve their memory, their records, their history, and all facts relating to them, their ancestors, and their posterity.”
In 1919 the American Legion was founded, organized to fight “extremists” seeking to overthrow the government, and by the end of the year, had more than a million members.
The goal was to get rid of the immigrants and the radicals. We had just fought the Germans in World War I, and Karl Marx, the father of communism, was German and Jewish.
At the same time, there was the specter of rebellion by African-Americans. In 1919 race riots had left more than forty dead in Washington, DC. Who was responsible? The racists charged that it was “outside agitators” who were stirring up the blacks, as they were sure the blacks were incapable of raising their voices against injustice. Said the New York Times, “The worst of all despicable actions of the radicals is undermining the loyalty of the Negroes.”
The conservatives targeted resident aliens, those who had immigrated to the United States but who had not yet become citizens. They were the most vulnerable. They had no rights. They had no way to fight back even if the charges were untrue or unproven.
A. Mitchell Palmer. Library of Congress
In 1919 President Woodrow Wilson, a straight-laced Presbyterian, authorized U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to arrest and deport foreign-born radicals. At a cabinet meeting, Wilson told him, “Palmer, do not let this country see Red.”
Wilson distrusted the Jews, and that included Bernard Baruch, whom he had appointed chairman of the War Industries Board in 1916, giving him authority to mobilize industry and manpower. Baruch had made a fortune on Wall Street. Even so, Wilson had his right-hand man, Colonel Edward House, put spies on Baruch. Nothing suspicious, however, was discovered.
Palmer, who had presidential ambitions, had no name recognition. He needed a cause to jump-start his campaign, and his purge of the “radicals” made his face and name known all over the country. Palmer, who, like Richard Nixon fifty years later, was a militant Quaker, recklessly maintained that the Bolsheviks were planning to rise up and destroy the U.S. government “in one fell swoop.” The charge was ludicrous, and he never produced any evidence to back it up. When asked to substantiate the charges, he replied that his information was confidential. His fear tactics and his raids were part of a pattern of postwar bigotry that affected all radical, religious, and ethnic minorities and set the tone for fear campaigns that would be repeated throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Fear overcame justice. Two anarchists of Italian descent, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were executed in 1927 for a murder they could not have committed, after spending nearly seven years on death row and despite clemency pleas from the pope. During this period, membership in the militantly racist Ku Klux Klan rose dramatically.
Palmer’s campaign reflected the mood of the country. His sentiments melded with the anti-Semitic attitudes of such men as carmaker Henry Ford, who charged that Jewish settlement workers, social reformers, and public educators were ruining Christian America as they knew it. Ford and his sympathizers came from small towns in the middle of the country, conservative Protestants who wanted no part of a changing society. They didn’t want unions. They didn’t want justice for blacks. They didn’t want Jews teaching their kids. They complained that the big cities were dens of radicalism and sexual immorality, where Jews and Bolsheviks were plotting to overthrow the government.
Ford, who wrote a column in the paper he owned, the Dearborn Independent, attacked all Jewish influences in the United States. After eight members of the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, the press reported that the two men who masterminded the fix were gambler and gangster Arnold Rothstein and former featherweight boxing champion Abe Attell—two Jews. Henry Ford published two articles in his paper in September of 1921, describing Rothstein and Attell as “Jewish dupes” who conned gentile “boobs.” Ford accused Jews of trying to corrupt baseball and other “Anglo-Saxon institutions.” He would argue that Jews were “the conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization.”
It was Henry Ford who, in his Dearborn Independent, first published the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” in 1920, the czarist forgery that charged Jews in Russia with killing Christian children and drinking their blood during Passover services. It also linked the Jews to International Communism and other evils. When Ford learned the book was a forgery, his retraction was half-hearted, but a decade later his partner in anti-Semitism, Father Charles Coughlin, would cite “The Protocols of Zion” as proof the Jews intended a world conquest in an effort to destroy Christian civilization.
In April of 1919, a mail bomb went off in the home of Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia. The bomb blew off his maid’s hands. Hardwick, who hailed from Atlanta, had urged a reduction of immigration as a way to keep Bolshevism out of America. A postal clerk in New York City, who read the newspaper account of the Hardwick bombing, discovered sixteen similar packages addressed to federal officials and capitalists, including J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Weldell Holmes Jr., and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The bombs were dismantled by the police.
On June 2, 1919, a bomb went off outside A. Mitchell Palmer’s home, blowing a man—probably the bomber—to oblivion. A pamphlet was found nearby, signed by a group calling themselves “The Anarchist Fighters.” They threatened bloodshed.
Father Coughlin. Library of Congress
Who was responsible? According to Palmer and the conservatives, the Bolsheviks were behind it. There may well have been a handful of dangerous criminals plotting evil, but rather than go after the handful of criminals behind the plot, he decided to mount a campaign against thousands of immigrants.
The overwhelming majority of the radical Jewish immigrants—anarchists, communists, and socialists, were peaceful. They were fighting for social justice, union boosters who wanted no more than to improve the conditions of the workers, men and women who wanted peace and not war. Under the Sedition Act of 1918, however, being against Big Business or against war was enough to get you deported even if you didn’t do a thing.
Palmer was handed all the ammunition he needed by his youthful assistant, a fellow named John Edgar Hoover, a twenty-four-year-old from Washington, DC, who, in high school, was a top debater and the captain of his ROTC marching unit. Hoover began his public career working for the Library of Congress, and it was there that he discovered his passion for sifting and sorting through information. He attended George Washington Law School, where his mother was the unofficial “house mother.” After law school, he used his family’s contacts to get a job in the Justice Department. It was 1917, World War I was on, and a government job guaranteed him a deferment. Though disdainful of anyone who campaigned for peace, Hoover never saw any irony in the fact that he had sought—and found—a way to avoid military service himself.
J. Edgar Hoover . Library of Congress
At Justice, Hoover was in charge of gathering intelligence in A. Mitchell Palmer’s assault on alien “radicals.” Hoover, who was an anti-Semite and a stone-cold racist his whole life, attacked his job with a vengeance. He began by infiltrating left-wing organizations. His idea was to do to subversives what they wanted to do to “decent society.” And he did it with efficiency and thoroughness.
Before he was done, Hoover had compiled files of index cards on 450,000 Americans, every “radical” Hoover could think of, including Bolsheviks, socialists, communists, anarchists, homosexuals, Negroes, Negroes who were sexual deviants, as well as the friends, relatives, and coworkers of those radicals. Palmer was aided by a corps of volunteer citizen informers, called the American Protective League, whose task was to spy on and report the activities of their neighbors. When suspects were arrested, they hired lawyers, and Hoover added the names of their lawyers to his subversives index-card database.
Hoover’s “evidence of radicalism” invariably was flimsy or nonexistent. Possession of radical literature or guilt by association was sufficient for Hoover. Palmer and his henchmen, doing away with probable cause when making an arrest, should have been viewed as the thugs they were, but with Hoover inciting the public with accusations that these alien radicals were plotting against democracy and Western civilization, the press duly recorded what he was saying and the public accepted the justification at face value. Hoover used the media for his propaganda purposes every bit as effectively as Hitler and Mussolini did later.
The first of A. Mitchell Palmer’s raids took place in December of 1919. His announced solution was deportation. Even though:
- Most of the accused were American citizens
- The Justice Department had no authority to deport anyone
- It was not a federal crime to be a socialist, communist, or radical
Most of the six thousand foreign “radicals” were rounded up and arrested without warrants, and history would show that most were innocent of any crime and were not even connected to radical politics.
As the country metaphorically revisited the insane bloodlust of the Salem witch trials, the public cry arose: kick out the aliens anyway.
The most powerful voice for the government was J. Edgar Hoover, who with a straight face testified in front of Congress that they were all “avowed revolutionaries.” He talked of their “sly and crafty eyes” and their “lopsided faces, sloping brows, and misshapen features,” which marked them as “the unmistakable criminal type.”
First to get shipped out were 249 mostly Russian-born defendants, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Goldman had been sentenced to two years in prison and was deported after being found guilty of conspiring against the draft. In the deportation hearing, J. Edgar Hoover labeled Goldman “the Queen of the Reds” and America’s “foremost advocate of free love,” and he argued that she should be deported because she had inspired Leon Czolgosz to kill President McKinley. Nothing he said was factual, but the panel ordered her kicked out of the country anyway. In her final plea before she was deported, Goldman lamented the repressive climate in the United States, which, she said, made it indistinguishable from czarist Russia. Journalist H. L. Mencken commented more acerbically about the climate of the times: “…the Reds…were hailed by their supporters as innocents escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane.”
Even though anarchist bombs had brought on the Palmer raids, they were used as an excuse to go after not only anarchists and Bolsheviks, but communists as well. In January of 1920, members and supporters of the Communist Party were Palmer’s next targets. Rule 22 of the Immigration Act required that immigrants should be allowed to examine the warrants against them and be represented by counsel. The rules were suspended, as agents raided meeting halls and residences with little regard for due process. They seized literature, books, papers, and membership lists.
Bystanders were swept up in the hysteria. Eight hundred men were accused of being communists because they had attended a dance or a class at Detroit’s Communist Party headquarters. They were arrested, held incommunicado, made to stay in the dark without food, bedding, or bathroom privileges for almost a week. Finally, 140 were arraigned, and when the press took their picture, they looked like the unkempt Bolshevik terrorists they were described as being.
A. Mitchell Palmer never got the nomination for president because he began to believe his own rhetoric. Palmer stoutly predicted that on May 1, 1920, there would be a communist revolution in the United States. His words created panic, but when his prediction turned out to be groundless, he was seen as the demagogue he had become.
After the hysteria died down, civil libertarians protested his unconstitutional actions so loudly that right-thinking people ultimately became angry and disgusted by his iron-fisted terror tactics. Louis Post, the assistant secretary of labor, began to reject most of Palmer’s immigrant cases brought before him. On September 16, 1920, a bomb went off at the House of Morgan on Wall Street, killing thirty-eight people and injuring four hundred. Anarchists and communists were suspected, but the bomber was never caught. But the Red Scare had played itself out, and, as they should have done with the earlier bombings, the feds limited their activity to catching the criminals involved in the bombing.
As for J. Edgar Hoover, his career was just beginning. Under Presidents Wilson and Harding, Hoover had been the number two man in charge at the Bureau of Investigation, under William J. Burns, founder of his detective agency, but after Harding died in 1924 of a heart attack, Calvin Coolidge appointed Harlan Stone as attorney general, and Stone, the former Columbia Law School dean, fired Burns. On May 10, 1924, Stone hired Hoover as “top dog.” It would not be long before the Federal Bureau of Investigation would become the personal fiefdom of J. Edgar Hoover, for the next half century.
Hoover and the conservatives learned one very important lesson from the Red Scare: even though much of their purge was unconstitutional and based on trumped-up charges, it was very effective. The Communist Party was forced to go underground. Antidemocratic repression was established as a precedent, union activity was scorned, and America again was made safer for Big Business.
The Red Scare also taught the conservatives a second, equally important lesson: if you want to ruin someone’s reputation, you need only accuse him of being a communist. Wrote historian Joel Kovel, “From then on, the term Communist became linked with anyone who challenged the order of things from a progressive direction, and at the same time he became associated with the Jew who killed Christ and the howling savage at the gates.”
Ordinary citizens also learned something from the Palmer raids: they could avoid being considered foreigners if they attacked their neighbor for being a communist. Fearing and hating the communists was proof you were a red-white-and-blue-blooded American.
The Palmer raids also resulted in the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union. The organization was founded by pacifist Roger Baldwin and other notable civil libertarians, such as Jane Addams, Felix Frankfurter, Clarence Darrow, and Upton Sinclair, all disgusted by the persecution of people for their political beliefs.
By then the country had decided it had its fill of European immigrants. The time had come to stop taking them. Between 1918 and 1921, almost a million and a half immigrants, mostly Jews and Italians, entered the United States, and this horde offended the Protestant Republican majority, who warned against the harmful effects of “abnormally twisted Jews…filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.”
The country, moreover, was turning to mechanization, and the need for unskilled labor was shrinking. Companies no longer needed to risk hiring an immigrant worker with “radical ideas” like seeking social justice or wanting to establish labor unions so the working man could earn a fair wage.
Senator William P. Dillingham, a Republican from Vermont, was a man who held dear the rural, literate, Anglo-Saxon Protestant way of life. He had begun his career as a prosecuting attorney and later became Vermont’s tax commissioner, and then was elected governor of the state in 1888.
Elected in 1900 to the Senate, Dillingham became chairman of the United States Immigration Commission. Spurred on by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was seeking “a solution to this immigration business,” Dillingham mounted a campaign designed to stop the tide of Jews, Italians (Catholics), and Japanese coming to this country. He ordered a study of the 2 million public school children in 1908 and found that 42 percent of the students were native-born and 58 percent of them were foreign-born. According to Dillingham’s study, the students who were the most “retarded” (meaning behind in class and studies) were the Polish Jews, at 66.9 percent. Second were the Italian kids, at 63.6 percent. The least retarded, said the study, were the children of British ancestry. Since it took time for the children of immigrants to learn a new language, the results were not surprising.
Based on these “findings,” Dillingham then proposed a bill that would limit annual immigration for each ethnic group to 5 percent of the number of foreign-born of that group in the 1910 census. The House cut the percentage from 5 to 3 percent, and President Warren Harding signed it into law in 1921.
For some conservatives in the Congress, this was still letting in too many Jews and Italians. They wanted the law to be even stricter. Henry Ford’s lobbying, as well as that of violently anti-black, anti-Jewish, and anti-Catholic groups like the Ku Klux Klan, were able to spur Congress to virtually cut off the entry of Eastern European Jews and Italian Catholics in 1924.
W. P. Dillingham . Library of Congress
The House proposed a bill similar to the 1921 bill that would use the 1890 census as its guide, before most of the foreign-born arrived. The Senate said no. Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania came up with a more effective but less obviously discriminatory solution. He said the bill should tie the number of immigrants allowed to come in from any given country to the percentage of that nationality as measured against the entire U.S. population. The rest of the Republican-led Congress agreed.
In May of 1924, the Reed proposal became law. Under a quota system that was put into effect based mostly on guesswork, the law, which was written by Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington, allowed the admission of about 150,000 immigrants each year. Under the bill, most of the immigrants allowed in would come from Great Britain and Germany. The bill allowed 5,800 to come from Italy, 2,784 to come from Russia, and 307 from Greece. Most Asians were excluded, and no one was allowed in from Africa. The two groups not excluded were Mexicans and those from the Caribbean islands, who later would come in droves.
Three years after the bill was passed, Republican Congressman Albert Johnson, its author, wrote, “The United States is our land. We intend to maintain it so. The day of indiscriminate acceptance of all races has definitely ended.”
The 1924 law, called the National Origins Act, reduced the immigration of Jews from a hundred thousand a year to about ten thousand. Had the law not been passed, a lot more Jews would have found refuge in the United States and survived the Holocaust. It’s been estimated that in the fifteen years before World War II, 1,350,000 Jews would have been in America instead of ending up murdered by the Nazis in concentration camps.
In 1939 a bill was introduced in Congress to admit twenty thousand German-Jewish refugees under the age of fourteen. The bill was sponsored by Senator Robert F. Wagner, a liberal Democrat from New York, and Congresswoman Edith Rogers, a Republican from Massachusetts. News of German atrocities against Jews had reached the United States, and thousands of families responded with offers to adopt these children. The Quakers even offered to supervise resettlement procedures.
But anti-Semitism was so strong in Congress that the bill didn’t even come up for a vote. A series of objections were raised, including the scarcity of jobs and not wanting to separate children from their parents. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a Southern gentleman married to a Jewish woman, said it would set a bad precedent, and he complained about having to add more personnel and office space to do the job. President Franklin D. Roosevelt never said a word, never used the power of his office to pressure the newly conservative Congress.
Between the years 1933 and 1940, while half the quota for German immigrants went unused, more than 300,000 Jews who applied for visas were turned away.
On January 16, 1944, the staff of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who was Jewish, prepared what was called “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” Before the report was sent to President Roosevelt, the title was changed to “Personal Report to the President.”
The first sentence of the report stated: “One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated.” The report was an indictment of American policy in general and of the State Department in particular. It attacked the visa policy, which kept the quota levels under the guise of national security. It charged that some officials, including Breckinridge Long, the U.S. State Department official in charge of European refugees, had deliberately failed to try to rescue the Jews. A plan for rescuing the Jews had been brought to Long, a protégé of Woodrow Wilson, and he had sat on it for eight months.
Six days later, Roosevelt issued an executive order creating the War Refugee Board, whose job was to rescue survivors and give them aid. But the board was not authorized to bring a single Jewish refugee to America, only to other countries.
In all, the board ended up helping exactly 987 refugees, mostly Jews from refugee camps in Italy.
Roosevelt’s defenders say he was powerless, given the tenor of the times. Others are less charitable, looking to the words of his cousin Laura Delano, wife of Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization James Houghteling. During the 1939 debate over the bill that would have brought twenty thousand Jewish children under the age of fourteen to America, sparing them from death under the Nazis, Laura Delano opined to her guests at a cocktail party that the “twenty thousand charming children would all too soon grow into twenty thousand ugly adults.” Most of those twenty thousand Jewish children no doubt perished in the Holocaust.