The Arc of a Covenant, page 21
Finally, nativist anxiety about demographic and cultural change mixed with agrarian fears and resentment connected to the decline of the family farm to create a toxic form of antisemitism whose dim echoes can still be heard among some on the antisemitic far right. William Jennings Bryan’s cross of gold speech at the 1896 Democratic convention (“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold”) would have been heard by many listeners as what today would be called an antisemitic dog whistle: the Jews crucified Christ and their successors, the bankers, seek to crucify the innocent again today. The hatred of financial and moneyed interests that swept through hard-pressed farming states and communities in the 1890s frequently singled out Jews as the villains of the drama. A journalist reporting on the Populist convention held in St. Louis in the year of Bryan’s speech wrote that “one of the striking things about the Populist convention…is the extraordinary hatred of the Jewish race. It is not possible to go into any hotel in the city without hearing the most bitter denunciation of the Jewish race as a class and of particular Jews who happen to have prospered in the world.”[28]
Muckraking journalism, which later generations have somewhat uncritically assumed to have been entirely on the side of virtue and truth, often stoked the fires of antisemitism. George Kibbe Turner was a prominent writer much of whose work focused on the sensational subject of the white slave trade, which today would be called human trafficking. Turner claimed that Jews dominated the human trafficking business, relying on links to corrupt urban politicians in Tammany Hall to protect them. His allegations about Jews turned out to have little foundation; when questioned under oath he was forced to acknowledge that in fact he lacked any “personal knowledge” about their involvement.[29] Beyond the world of human trafficking, Jews were accused of committing a disproportionate number of crimes; in 1908 the commissioner of police in New York falsely stated that half of all the criminals in the city were Jews.[30]
To many at the time, including many Jews, it seemed as if the United States had lost any immunity to antisemitism that it may once have possessed, yet the remarkable thing about this period of rising antisemitism in the United States is that the civil and legal equality of Jewish Americans was never endangered. Jews continued to hold political office, to advance—slowly and against resistance—in the professions, to build and to operate businesses, to organize advocacy organizations, open schools and colleges, own property (except where prohibited by restrictive covenants), and otherwise participate in American life. Antisemitism was a social force in America without any significant legal power.
Even at the height of the nativist backlash leading up to immigration restriction, Jews were not the object of special legislation. Immigration from China was banned by law, and immigration from Japan was restricted by virtue of a “gentleman’s agreement” with that country, but no special legal test was ever imposed to exclude Jewish immigrants while letting others pass. The most important legislative act aimed at limiting migration before the quotas were introduced in the 1920s was the literacy test adopted over Woodrow Wilson’s veto; this literacy test, as we have seen, had less impact on Jewish immigration than on other groups. Similarly, the quota system acted even more drastically against some other ethnic groups than against Jews. Jews from Germany, for example, benefited from the relatively large quota that German emigrants enjoyed under the Johnson-Reed Act; non-Jewish Italians and Poles had a harder time getting permission to immigrate to the United States than Jewish citizens of Weimar Germany.
Even on the far right, Jew-hatred never quite became a defining issue. Emanuel Steiner was a Jewish merchant who operated a store in Fairfield, Illinois. In 1924 he was startled and perhaps apprehensive to see a delegation from the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. According to one account of the proceedings, the delegation’s spokesman read the following declaration:
Mr. Steiner, we are [here] today as your friends. You have lived here 50 years. You have been an honest, upright man. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan respect and revere you. It is the constitutional right of every man to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience. The Ku Klux Klan never has and never will try to violate that right. You have built up by your honesty, uprightness and integrity a successful business. As a citizen there is no better. You have always been behind every proposition for the community and its welfare. As American citizens the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan congratulate you for the many things that you have done for the flag and for the country.
The Klan delegation then presented the Jewish storekeeper with a bouquet of American Beauty roses.[31]
Not every Klan branch shared this attitude, of course, but it remains the case that even for the Ku Klux Klan, America’s Jews were, at worst, one of a number of problems that the country faced, and among those problems, they were neither the largest nor the most dangerous. Jews might be an unpopular minority, and they might, like many other American minorities at the time, find themselves the victims of discrimination, but their status as citizens, voters, and economic actors was never seriously threatened in the United States.
In the end, the American answer to the Jewish Question, that Jewish Americans were part of America and would be treated more or less like other Americans, stood the test of the twentieth century. They might be liked, they might be disliked, but American Jews were basically one more minority in a nation that was full of minorities. America was a tribe of tribes, and the Jewish tribe had a place under the big tent.
There are several reasons why antisemitism in the United States, despite its growth between 1860 and 1940, never became the kind of political force it sometimes became in Europe. Not all of these reflect credit on American society. One factor was clearly that the centrality of what W. E. B. Du Bois famously called “the color line” in American life and politics significantly reduced the difference between Jewish Americans and other Americans in the minds even of bigots. The Ku Klux Klansmen of Fairfield, Illinois, might have been less fond of Emanuel Steiner if they were not more concerned about Black Americans in the area.
Despite the occasional hostility between the groups, American Jews also benefited from the presence of American Catholics. Both demographically and religiously, Catholicism was a larger problem for Protestant nativism than Judaism was or could ever be. In the eighteenth century Jews enjoyed more freedom of worship and more political rights in most American colonies than Roman Catholics did. During the nineteenth century, right up through the end of mass immigration in 1924, Catholic immigration caused considerably more unease than Jews among both upper- and lower-class Protestants. With the Catholic Church officially at least committed to a set of political beliefs directly opposed to many key tenets of American democracy, right up through the 1960 election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy many Protestant intellectuals and social leaders worried that a rising tide of Catholicism might swamp the American republic.
But there was an additional factor, rooted both in the differences between the European and American approaches to Jewish emancipation, one which to some degree still today informs attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic. Max Nordau spoke at the First Congress of the World Zionist Organization about the degree to which Jewish emancipation cut across much popular feeling in Europe:
As the French Revolution gave to the world the metric system and the decimal system, so it also created a kind of normal spiritual system which other countries, either willingly or unwillingly, accepted as the normal measure for their state of culture. A country which claimed to be at the height of culture had to possess several institutions created or developed by the Great Revolution; as, for instance, representation of the people, freedom of the press, a jury system, separation of powers, etc. Jewish Emancipation was also one of these indispensable articles of a highly cultured state; just as a piano must not be absent from the drawing room of a respectable family even if not a single member of the family can play it. In this manner Jews were emancipated in Europe not from an inner necessity, but in imitation of a political fashion; not because the people had decided from their hearts to stretch out a brotherly hand to the Jews, but because leading spirits had accepted a certain cultured idea which required that Jewish Emancipation should figure also in the statute book.[32]
As Shlomo Avineri explains in The Making of Modern Zionism,[33] Nordau’s point was that the gap between “the formal, external norms of Emancipation and the real, concrete feeling toward the Jews in society” was a fertile environment in which new forms of antisemitism would and did grow. The French revolutionaries, said Nordau, formulated a syllogism: “Every man is born with certain rights; the Jews are human beings; consequently the Jews are born to own the rights of man.” The result, he argued, was that emancipation was decided, “not through a fraternal feeling for the Jews, but because logic demanded it. Popular sentiment rebelled, but the philosophy of the Revolution decreed that principles must be higher than sentiments. The men of 1792 emancipated us only for the sake of principle.”[34]
In the United States, both the Enlightenment itself and the emancipation of the Jews rested on different foundations. The ideas of the Enlightenment came to the United States, as to Great Britain, as a result of internal historical developments. The Anglo-American Enlightenment emerged in many places among many people at many different levels of society whose reflections on their own conditions of life led them to embrace as commonsense ideas that elsewhere burst out of a revolutionary thunder cloud or were carried on the bayonets of an invading revolutionary army. The Enlightenment in America was not the triumph of principle over popular sentiments; it was the expression in abstract form of widely felt popular sentiment.
Similarly, the place of Jews in American society rested less on abstract syllogisms about universal human rights than on a historical process that created the idea of ethnic and religious denominations existing peacefully in a common society. During and after the Great Wave, as both “old stock” and “new stock” Americans struggled to make sense of the new social reality in which they found themselves, the denominational model felt—and indeed still feels—to many Americans like the obvious, even self-evident approach. There are Irish-Americans; there are Mexican-Americans; there are Jewish-Americans; there are Polish-Americans. In every case, what comes before the hyphen is important to individuals and communities, but what comes after the hyphen is the foundation of the common life of the American people, still a tribe of tribes.
In the migration debates and in the domestic debates over the place of Jews in American life, Americans came to two conclusions. Abroad, Jews would be treated like other people; mass migration to the United States was not to be a solution for the Poles, the Greeks, the Armenians, or the Russians—or the Jews. The new quota system would not inflict any special penalties on Jewish immigrants, but neither would it offer them any special benefits. At home, Jewish Americans would be treated like other Americans. At the time, private discrimination was still legal and, for that matter, was widely accepted as natural and normal. Jews were no more exempted from its operation than were Italians, the Irish, or other ethnic groups. American Jews might not always be welcome at the High Table with the WASP ascendancy, but they were not going to be driven out from under the big tent of the American nation.
The Lodge Consensus
As American society worked its way to an understanding of the place of Jewish American citizens, it also confronted questions about American policy toward Jews overseas. The answers to these questions naturally and inevitably depended on national debates about the role of the United States in the twentieth century. In the aftermath of World War I, now that the United States had clearly emerged as the greatest power in the world, and now that it was clear that political disturbances in the Old World could drag the United States into major conflicts, Americans needed to develop a vision about a new foreign policy for the postwar world. And of course, they also needed to decide how to respond to the British promise to allow the creation of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. To Americans at the time, the questions were related; most Americans saw their policy in Palestine as the natural application to the special condition of the Jewish people of the policies that guided American diplomacy worldwide.
In recounting this history and explaining why Americans thought as they did, it is not my intention to defend all of these decisions. With the clarity of hindsight it is evident that many features of American global policy after World War I were ultimately unsatisfactory. And it is also clear that American support of Zionist aspirations did not give the weight to the wishes of the Palestinian Arab community that by today’s standards we would seek to apply. That racism influenced the thinking of Americans in the 1920s is clear; in many ways, the United States at that time was a deeply racist society, with “scientific racism” enshrined as a serious academic subject in the minds of many prominent intellectuals, businesspeople, and politicians. Nevertheless, we will not understand American or world history unless we can learn to see the world at least to some degree as our predecessors saw it. What we will find is that even when they were wrong, our predecessors were for the most part serious and even earnest people who, within the limits of the ideas and values that shaped their mental horizons, did their best to puzzle out a course through world politics that would keep the United States safe while, as far as possible, promoting the emergence of a world that in the future would be more peaceful, more prosperous, and more just than the war-torn and staggering globe that they knew.
Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts Republican who was a close friend and associate of Theodore Roosevelt and an inveterate enemy of Woodrow Wilson, was one of the most influential American foreign policy actors of his times, and the framework within which the Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge administrations developed America’s post–World War I foreign policy owes enough to him that it is reasonable to call this framework by his name. Best known today for his opposition to Wilson’s version of the League of Nations, Lodge was also a leader in the movement to restrict immigration, a leading pro-Zionist, and both a lifelong proponent of a greater American role in world politics and a bitter enemy of what he saw as Wilson’s idealistic overstretch. Lodge embodied the virtues and the vices of a new era in American foreign policy. Had he not died in 1924, it’s likely that Lodge, an unabashed believer in the need for the United States to attend to the balance of power in Europe, would have fought the isolationist tide in the 1930s. As it happened, however, the policy mix he supported in the early 1920s was so solidly grounded in American opinion that it outlasted the circumstances that made it so appealing. In the end, the policies Lodge and his allies advocated contributed both to the Holocaust and to the success of the Zionist movement, a profoundly ambivalent legacy that reflects the uneasy relationship between American policy and Jewish history that marks the twentieth century as a whole.
Though often tagged as “isolationist” by later historians, the Lodge consensus was more of a transitional stage between what noted historian Walter McDougall has called the Old and New Testaments in American foreign policy. “Old Testament,” nineteenth-century American foreign policy presupposed a strong British Empire capable of maintaining both the European balance of power and the emerging global system of commerce and investment. After World War II, the United States embraced a much more ambitious global policy when it seemed clear that the maintenance of world order was a vital American interest and that Great Britain could no longer do its old job. In the era of the Lodge consensus, when British power was waning but Americans were not yet convinced that it was Washington’s job to replace the British colossus, Americans sought to minimize the costs and risks associated with their growing power and global interests while supporting efforts by Britain and its allies to maintain the global framework that offered both security and prosperity to the United States.
The Lodge consensus, the result of a maturing American view of the world that took shape between 1880 and the 1920s, sought to advance American interests in an unstable world while minimizing America’s exposure to the endless entanglements and unending wars that the seething hellscapes of the imperial zone seemed fated to produce. The horrors of World War I, the war’s disorderly aftermath in Europe, and the rise of communism tempered the optimism of earlier years, but Americans did not give up so easily on their hope for a better tomorrow. History might be more complicated than they had anticipated, and the road to a peaceful, democratic world might have more speed bumps and detours than they expected, but the American establishment and the progressive, educated middle classes of the post–World War I era were still convinced that history was on the side of American ideas, and that those ideas would carry the United States and the world to a triumphant post-historical utopia. Sustained by this belief, the Americans of that time wanted to see a world transitioning to a system of independent nation-states based on the principle of self-determination and self-rule. They wanted to see these nations, once established, operating under treaties, institutions, and disarmament agreements that would progressively reduce the risk of war. And they wanted all that to happen without a lot of heavy lifting on America’s part. American diplomats and bankers would go abroad, and American diplomacy would play a more conscious leadership role on issues like disarmament, but, with the exception of America’s immediate neighborhood in the Caribbean, American soldiers would mostly stay home—and America wouldn’t join clubs like the League of Nations whose rules might interfere with the democratic sovereign will of the people of the United States or compel the United States to intervene in foreign lands against its better judgment.
