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THE CAUSES OF ANTI-SEMITISM
IN THE UNITED STATES
A STUDY IN GROUP AND SUB-GROUP
A THESIS
IN PHILOSOPHY
PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT
OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
L
F
LEE Jf“ LEVINGER
PHILADELPHIA
1925
02$ 534 2'5
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY
LEE J. LEVINGER
E
V54
-14
LM1
Printed in the United States
Q
gwwlwéd-Mk
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ca-M7-1714*
TO MY PARENTS
WHO FIRST TAUGHT ME THE MEANING OF TOLERANCE
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, 01" Jew;
Whe¢e Mewy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.
WILLIAM BLAKE.
PREFACE
This study, which was submitted as one of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of
Pennsylvania, has meant the assembling of personal and
theoretical interests of various types. It has two chapters of
pure theo-ry on which the practical application is based. To the
student of social philosophy or sociology, then, chapters 1 and 2
will contain the essentials of the study. The general reader, not
interested in the technical basis but in the conclusions, may
prefer to omit these chapters from the reading, and to proceed
from the introduction directly to the applications of this theory
in American history and specifically to the problem of the Jew
in America, as developed in chapters 3 to 9.
Grateful acknowledgments are due to Professor Edgar A.
Singer, J r., of the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Julius
Drachsler of the College of the City of New York, and Mr.
Leon L. Lewis, Secretary of the Anti-Defamation League, for
their very stimulating aid, both prior to and during the writing
of this study, and to my wife for her assistance in the preparation
of the manuscript.
LEE J. LEVINGER,
Wilmington, Delaware, May, 1925.
CONTENTS ~
CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction: A STATEMENT or THE PROBLEM. . . . 9
I. THE “GRoUP MIND,” A DEFINITION AND A
DEsoR1:PT1oN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
II. GROUPS IN CoNTAoT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
III. INTOLERANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
IV. AMERICAN HIsToRY, A DEVELOPMENT OF GRoUPs. . . 56
V. THE WORLD WAR AND ITs AFTERMATH . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
VI. THE KU KLUX KLAN AND OTHER GRDUP REACTIONS. 74
VII. ANTI-SEMITISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
VIII. THE RETDRT T0 ANTI-SEMITISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
IX. THE FUTURE or THE AMERICAN MIND . . . . . . . . . . .. 111
INTRODUCTION
A STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The existence of an anti-Semitic movement in the United
States of America since the World War is a paradox that
attracts attention at ‘once. The most ancient and most pervasive
form of intolerance is now at home in a nation founded by
revolution and dedicated to the principles of freedom and toler-
ance. How can such a movement exist in such a nation‘! The
apparent contradiction leads us at once into the many contradic-
tions of the psychology of large groups of human beings, which
both parallels and contradicts the simpler psychology of their
constituent individuals. This is a leading question, to answer
Evhich we must go as deeply as we can into the mind of the
group, into the relation of groups to 2the smaller groups of which
they are composed and of those smaller groups to each other,
into the genesis and implications of tolerance and intolerance.
This theoretical study completed, we shall then have to verify
the principles there worked out by application to the difficult
and crucial problem of the present study. If a theory of group
and sub-group can explain the existence and the development of
anti-Semitism in America, it will have solved a problem of
exceptional complexity and significance, one central to the whole
field. This will involve a study of the mind of the American
people, in brief outline, with its various movements of intoler-
ance in their bearing on the present one. It will also necessitate
a slight study of the various anti-Semitic examples, historic and
contemporary, from which the American movement derives in
part. It will conclude with a consideration of the future of the
American people as‘ a united group, taking into view the
tendencies of the sub-groups‘ within the bounds of their common
nation, or over-group.
{Anti-Semitism_xis the modern form of the ancient prejudice
against the Jew; it began in Germany in 1871, directly after the
Franco-Prussian ‘War, and bases its opposition to the Jews on
/
9 .
10 , Anti-Semltlsm in the United States
lg ll T» 3-LL; 1‘:
the race theory. A,n1i-.¢I1J.daism..,is, of course, much older, as
old as the people against whom it was directed. In most ancient
times, as represented by the Egyptian taskmasters and the
Haman of the Bo‘o1?‘of,\I{lsther, i'E__l1'@_S__,.1_i_.k.§_?_l_I;X_Q1;ll£%r.l<n~alti$),.LliLl
hatred or prejudice. Later\it_ took on a distinctly, religious
c__(_)¢l_o_,r_i_n_g,_so that we find a Philo gloirig-~tQfiRome to appeal for the
Jewish colony in Alexandria or a J osephi1“s»~ riting a defense
of his people against Apion. With the growth “of»,,Christianity
into a persecuting body, anti-Judaism became strictlylamreligious
_rn_a_t_igggg,__based on the lflmnlestament-.story »that.th“ei:few§nwere
responsible for th_e__ death of J etsutspm Medieval laws on the Jews
were, then, often based on the principle of expiation, such as the
yellow badge which distinguished the wearer when he left the
compulsory shelter of the Ghetto. A different form of religious
motivation was shown in the frequent accusations of desecrating
the Host or of using the blood of a Christian child in preparing
the unleavened bread of Passover, which appears in the Canter-
bury Tales and was revived as recently as 1911 in the notorious
Beilis case at Kiev, Russia. Along with this went occasional
mob outbreaks such as occur against the negroes in our Southern
states, and still more rarely decrees of expulsion, which drove
the entire Jewish population from England in.1294, from Spain
in 1492, and from other countries at other times, for a longer
or shorter period.
The actual applications of this religious anti-Judaism were
far too many to enumerate here, ranging from the prohibition of
tilling the soil to compulsory attendance at a Christian sermon,
as in Browning’s “Holy Cross Day.” Counteracting it were
the frequent /intercourse and occasional intermarriage through
the Middle Ages, the paid protection of the Holy Roman
Emperor for his Kammerhnechte, the toleration of the Moors
and later of Holland, finally the emancipation of the French
Revolution on abstract grounds of the Rights of Man. Religious
discrimination was forbidden in the American Constitution, so
that anti-Judaism of the religious type had no footing in the
new nation, strong as it had previously been in several of the
colonies. In addition, the number of Jews in America was very
small, so that discrimination against them might exist in prin-
Anti-Semttism /in the United States 11
ciple but could have little exercise in practise. And those few
were often wealthy and cultured descendants of the old Spanish
Jewry. During the most of the nineteenth century the Jews
entering the country met the same difficulties as other immi-
grants, with very little variation.
But then the problem changed; the number of Jews increased
from 3,000 in 1800 to 250,000 in 1880. Some of these achieved
wealth and began to associate with non-Jewish social circles:
The opposition to them now became largely social. They were
gxliluded from many hotels and summer ¥€§E§£'£s, from clubs,
college fraternities and the like. This phase of the problem was
often acute but never important, and is here mentioned merely
in passing, though it will have its bearing on the theory to be
developed. In addition, the religious prejudice continued,
similar to that between Christian denominations but stronger,
owing to the frequent teaching of Jewish responsibility for the
crucifixion. These two aspects of anti-Judaism persisted as the
only ones in America until after the World War, and these
were sporadic, and often opposed by the tendency of our political
' emocracy and by various groups of religious liberals. /
Meanwhile, modern racialism had been born and with it
modern anti-Semitism, the attack on the Jew as a member of a
different race, inferior or at least unassimilable by the Aryan.l
Writers against the Jew no longer turned for their weapons to
Eisenmenger’s “Endecktes Judentum” of 1701, with its relig-
ious criticism and personal strictures. The new classics are
Werner Sombart’s “Die J uden und das Wirtschaftsleben” and
Drum,ont’s “La France Juive.” An elaborate scientific basis
has been constructed, on which a movement of opposition was
erected, apparently much the same as that of the Inquisition or
of Apion. One of the conclusions of the present study will be
that it is in fact the same, and that the racial theory can be
almost overlooked in estimating the actual causes and processes
of anti-Semitism. It would be an interesting, though not essential
task, to examine this racial tltfory in detail and determine how
much scientificauthenticity it may possess. In Russia the con-
ditions of autocracy- threatened by liberalism and war led to
official anti-Semitism, with pogroms or massacres of the Jews

12 Anti-Semttvlsm in the United States
actually led by army officers. In Germany the officialism and
social stratification led to discrimination against Jews in the
appointment of judges, university professors and army officers.
In France anti-Semitism became a part of royalism and clerical-
ism, and from the military and royalist group came the Dreyfus
case. In England anti-Semitism was chiefly liter: _y; Hillaire
Belloc proves the Jews to be aliens who should all be sent to
Palestine, while Gilbert K. Chesterton visits Palestine and re-
ports that the Jews there are terrible creatures and ought to be
excluded from the Holy Land!
But all this time there was no anti-Semitism, as a literary,
political or economic movement in the United States. That was
' a product of the period after the World War. There was merely
' religious prejudice of the orthodox and social ostracism of the
elite among gentile society. The Jew had not even attracted the
special attention of the various anti-alien movements in Ameri-
can history, owing to his small numbers and frequent rapid
Americanization. It seemed as though anti-Semitism was a
movement foreign to American life and institutions. Now, how-
ever, the movement exists and may be considered briefly in four
phases. NW A M J
1. The first to be considered is the attempt to limit the per-
centage of Jews in American universities. The “numerus claus-
us,” ypical of Russia under the Czars, has been one of the
;favorite projects of the anti-Semitic parties in various European
countries, working either through their representatives in the
parliaments or through their sympathizers in the universities
themselves. Whether the motive was to brand the Jew as inferior
mentally, or to make him so through lack of education, is hard
to say—probably it is merely another manifestation of the
process which this paper aims to trace.
In American institutions of higher learning there has been
a growing problem of the increase of entering classes, as well
as a growing perplexity at the number of Jewish immigrants
who seek an advanced education. These young people often lack
American manners and background, standing out from the great
mass of the student body, whether for good or bad is immaterial.
What more natural than that some would attempt to solve the
Anti-Semitism in the United States 13
two problems at once b_yvepx~c_l,ud_i~11g_~a _certain_percentage of these
objectionable persons, at the same time cutting down enroll-
_mr_:§r1rt,‘.l'Wl[ Lido not speak of rumors that this purpose has been
achieved in certain institutions by personal interviews, psy-
chological tests, and the like, even though statistics seem to bear
out this interpretation. I consider only the Harvard incident,
which is public and ofiicial.
In June 1922 President Lowell of Harvard, in his address at
the graduation exercises drew‘ attention to the double phase of
the problem, the increase of registration and the danger to the
social and personal standard of the university, and recommended
its full investigation by committees of the faculty and board
of trustees of the university. The sensation caused by this
bringing into the open of a subject long covertly agitated,
especially in view of the large Jewish population of Boston, and
fairly large registration at Harvard, was extreme. The matter
came to an end April 9, 1923, when the committee recommenda-
tion was accepted by the Board of Overseers for the University.
The report recommended:
In the administration of rules for admission'Harvard College maintains
its traditional policy of freedom from discrimination on grounds of race
or religion. Concerning proportional representation, your committee is
unanimous in recommending that no departure be made from the policy
that has so long approved itself——the policy of equal opportunity for all,
regardless of race or religion. Any action liable to interpretation as an
acceptance of the principle of racial discrimination would, to many seem
like a dangerous surrender of traditional ideals.
The report even avoids recommending any test of personal
fitness which might be interpreted as a cover for racial or relig-
ious discrimination.
2. A further expression of anti-Semitism appeared in the
form of books and magazine articles. “The Cause of World
Unrest,” an English book, was reprinted in 1920 by G. P. Put-
nam’s Sons of New York; “The Protocols of the Meetings of
the Zionist Men of Wisdom” by Small, Maynard and Co. of
Boston in the same year; “The Jews in America” by Burton
J . Hendrick, appeared as a series of articles in the World ’s
Work, and was issued later as a book by Doubleday Page and Co.
14 Anti-Semitism in the United States
of New York in 1923. Periodicals such as “The Searchlight”
of Atlanta, the “Fellowship Forum” of Washington, D. C., and
“The American Standard” of New York City (to mention only
a few of a large number) conducted an active campaign against
Jews and Catholics, which still continues.
Most conspicuous of all was the long series of articles on the
Jewish problem carried by the Dearborn Independent of Dear-
born, Mich., the personal organ of Mr. Henry_Ford, This series
began in May, 1920; the four booklets containing their reprinted
form are dated, t e__first on November, 1920; the fourth, May
1922: Tmhey _t,a_l,_§_e,_r3,,s_1;ent:s_‘i,a,b:,li‘y',_th,e_ position that international finance,
under the _l_e’a~d_,er§l;ii;pw_hol;'m,cert\ain Jews, is endeavoring to rule
the Actually, however, they use any anti-Semitic theme
that comes to hand, from the race theory to articles on the “Jew-
ish liquor trust” and “the Jewish aids of Benedict Arnold.”
Their chief arsenal of material is the Protocols of the Learned
Elders of Zion, referred to above, a purported record of secret
meetings held by leaders of world Jewry with the object of over-
throwing the gentile nations and ruling the world themselves.
This work first saw the light in Russia in 1901 and was utilized
in 1905 as part of the propaganda against the abortive revolu-
tion of that year; it was the work of one Serge Nilus. Later
study has shown it to be a forgery, largely copied from a French
political pamphlet directed against Napoleon III and published
in Brussels in 1865 by Maurice Joly under the title, “Dialogues
in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu”! The Russian
editions of this work, and those in German, as well, included
virulent attacks on Britain and America as representatives of
liberalism, and therefore of Judaism; naturally, these have been
omitted from the English versions.
3. This agitation could not remain theoretical—in fact, prob-
' ably the theory was itself a late product of a broader tendency.
The J ohnson fiimwmigration act, setting the quota of immigrants to
be adiliitted tdtlie United States on the basis of their proportion
in this country in 1890, was avowedly planned on a racial basis
to encourage immigrants from northern and western Europe,
and exclude those from eastern and southern Europe and from
other continents. Secretly there seems to have been both anti-
Anti-Semitism in the United states 15
Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiment involved, as certain partisan
publications boast quite openly.
By far the most significant expression of anti-Semitism in the
United States is the Ku Klux Klan, which will later be consid-
ered in some detail. At this point it is sufficient to point out
that the Klan was organized in 1915 by William J . Simmons of
Atlanta, Ga., and became a national movement in 1920. Its
name and much of its ritual are taken from the Ku Klux Klan
of 1867-71, but its motives are quite difierent, for the old Klan
was a local movement intended to protect the defeated Con-
federacy, to overawe the negroes and to oppose the North; while
the modern Klan is not sectional, but in every section opposes
the negro, the Jew, the Catholic and the foreign-born. Its mem-
bership is exclusively “white, gentile, Protestant American”
and it therefore claims to be the only “one hundred per cent.
Americans”. The Klan defends its purpose and attacks the
proscribed groups by business boycott, political opposition,
sometimes even by threats or by physical violence. The Klan
is the most important symptom at hand of the nature of anti-
Seinitism in the United States, beside being a most significant
type of social grouping and of social motive.
~ 4,. A final type of anti-Semitism in America was a direct
imprirtatiorilfrom Europe through a group of Russian emigrés,
some of them living in this country as private citizens, others
as employees of the section on Russia of the Department of
State. These men were bitterly anti-Soviet, anti-radical, and
(whether for propaganda purposes, or through the convictions
of the Russian aristocracy as a whole) bitterly anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semitism is an article in the creed of every reactionary
movement in Europe, (vv~it~lr»tlre—singie“exception* of- the Itaiian
,%sc:isl;i, and is strongest of all among the Russians. It seems
to have been these people who persuaded Mr. Henry Ford of
the authenticity of the Protocols, and introduced these to Amer-
ica as a whole. They seem also to have been active in the anti-
radical agitation of the post-war period, which twrjefldptgwiderntify
foreigner, radical and Jew in theflmind of the American people,
and £6".'.i£‘£ri“i5‘ii£t=, tiié Russian revolution, the Bolshevist govern-
16 Anti-Semitism in the United States
ment and the radical groups in America, alike to insidious
Jewish influence.
As this tendency was not as public as the others, I give some
proof of its existence. It was discussed in Hearst ’s Interna-
tional Magazine in 1923 in a series of articles by the editor,
Norman Hapgood; and in the Bnai Brith Magazine of October
and November, 1924, in two articles by Jacob Spolansky, a
former agent of the United States Department of Justice, who
was employed to hunt down radicals and if possible to find Jews
among them. As the most official statement, I quote Mr. Louis
Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, in his
annual report to that body, delivered November 13, 19211.
The committee conducted an investigation with a view to discovering
the identity of those who instigated the attacks against the Jews of
America. It was found that they consistefl. of a group of Russian emigrés
who had wormed themselves into the confidence of some Americans who,
in turn, had succeeded in securing the assistance of others whose co-opera-
tion was given either because they were gullible and believed the fantastic
inventions of men schooled in intrigue in the Russian police system, or
because they already cherished ill-will against Jews and were ready to
assist in any movement through which they could satisfy real or fancied
grudges.
In the report of the same body, October 19, 1919,2 reference is
made to the hearing before the sub-committee of the Judiciary
Committee of the United States Senate in February 1919,
when—-
Dr. George Simons, who had been for a number of years in Russia, testi-
fied regarding the alleged activities of Jews in the Bolshevist movement in
Russia and stated that the present conditions there are due, in large part,
to the activities of Yiddish agitators from the East Side of New York City
who went to Russia immediately following the overthrow of the Czar.
Dr. Simons stated further that the Bolshevist movement in Russia was
being supported financially and morally by certain elements on the East
Side of New York City.
There is, then, an anti-Semitic movement in America, and
has been since 1919 or 1920. Its philosophy of racialism, ex-
clusiveness and “hundred per cent.” Americanism, is derived
1American Jewish Yearbook, volume 24, page 343.
3Yearbook, Vol. 22, pages 410-11.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 17
largely from the Voelkische parties of Germany and other
nations of Europe, which lay great stress on Aryan race and
especially on its Nordic or Teutonic branch. The extreme of
this position is found in the apparently well reasoned position
of Burton J . Hendricks, who attempts to prove that the Spanish
and German Jews were desirable because white, but that the
Russian Jews are undesirable immigrants because they are de-
scended from the Chazars, a Tartar tribe which embraced Juda-
ism in the ninth century. The premises of this writer seem
untenable, and the conclusions do not necessarily follow on them.
Much of this anti-Semitic literature and public action seems to
be based on similar rationalizations of intolerance, of group
prejudice.
In studying this anti-Semitic movement in America as a
crucial example of the relations of group and sub-group, I stand
in the contrary danger, that of rationalizing the inferiority com-
plex of a persecuted group. My only justification for facing
this danger is that nobody can approach this type of problem
without one danger or the other, and the subject is too vital
to be entirely neglected. I can only hope that my analysis of
the underlying problem of the nature of human groups and of
their interrelations may be made in such a scientific spirit that
the application of my theory to the special problem of anti-
Semitism in the United States may be of some value in the clear-
ing up of this great field of human action.
CHAPTER I.
THE “GROUP MIND’
A DEFINITION AND A DESCRIPTION
The causes of intolerance rest, not in what men say but in
what they do. The reasons alleged for dislike or suspicion of
the Jew are valuable merely for showing a state of mind in the
anti-Semite himself, not for revealing the actual reasons for
his attitude. For that reason I shall disregard these reasons
very largely in searching for the causes of anti-Semitism in
America. Instead, I shall turn to the field of social study to
find out how groups of men act toward one another, and why
and under what circumstances intolerance is one of their by-
products. I shall apply to the phenomena of group life the
method of behaviorism, now being adopted by sociology from
its original field of psychology, in such definitions as that of
E. C. Lindeman:1 “Sociology is the science of collective
behavior.”
1.
The prevailing view of students of society seems now to be
that society is a natural phenomenon on the mental plane.
Human society is not now regarded, as by Buckle, as a reflection
of environment, even though the importance of physical back-
ground and racial constitution must be recognized. As Charles
A. Ellwood says,1 “Society is a group of psychically interacting
individuals.” “The essential element in the social process is
the psychical element.”2 That is to say, mental material—in-
stincts, emotions, feeling, and ideas—are the plane on which
groups of individuals combine into social structures, operate in
social functions, develop to social progress. Relations between
individuals (except for the limited biological function) are
1Social Discovery, 1). 21.
1 Sociology in its Psychological Aspects, p. 13.
’ibid, p. 94.
18
Anti-Semitism in the United States 19
mental relations, carried on through physical media such as
postures, speech and writing.
These mental interactions of human beings are not an arti-
ficial construct from primitive egoism by the social contract or
any other method. William MacDougall is almost alone in hold-
ing that the social sentiments are derived from the self-regard-
ing ones through the operation of the tender emotion and the
parental instinct. Hobhouse says :1 “The conception of a prim-
itive egoism on which sociality is somehow overlaid is without
foundation in either biology or psychology.” John Dewey puts
this view most forcibly:
’ The fact is that the life, the experience, of the individual man, is
already saturated, thoroughly interpenetrated, with social inheritance and
references. . . . Education, language, and other means of communication
are infinitely more important categories of knowledge than any of those
exploited by absolutists. And as soon as the methodological battle of
instrumentalism is won . . . the two services that will stand to the credit
of instrumentalism will be calling attention first to the connection of
intelligence with a genuine future, and second, to the social constitution of
personal, even of private experience, above all of any experience that has
assumed the knowledge form.
And Ellwood adds—-expressing here the general opinion of both
sociologists and modern social philosophers——“All human con-
sciousness is socially conditioned . . . . This is as true of the
racially inherited aspects of consciousness—-the feeling-instincts
—-as it is dfihe acquired traits.” Man is a social animal and
his sociality is one of the_ few unescapable things about him.
He is born in some kind of a social group; he gets the most of
his ideas from his association with others; his whole developinent
is a give-and-take in which the take is from the first, and often
remains, the greater element.
But the recognition of this fact does not bind us to any one
explanation of it. We do not need to accept the “consciousness
of kind” of Giddings, the “herd instinct” of Trotter, or the
“imitation” of Tarde,——in fact, we may very well consider that
there is no one principle to explain so universal and complex a
1Hobhouse: Morals in Evolution, p. 339.
"‘The Philosophical Review, 1912, vol. 21, p. 81.
20 Anti-Semitism in the United States
phenomenon; that these terms and others like them are in no
sense explanations, but merely different words for the same fact,
that man is a naturally gregarious or social being. We may
rather turn to the more generalized modes of expressing this
conception, the group mind or general will, as developed by
Durkheim, Wundt and in our day by Baldwin, MacD_ougall,
and others.
2.
Before attacking this problem directly, I must clear away
several misconceptions of the “group mind,” which I cannot
accept as a part of this theory. First, this thesis need not ex-
clude the operation of physical and biological forces on social
groups, any more than it excludes their operation on any in-
dividual, who is also a psychological unit. Society may well
be a unit, just as the individual is, in a world of varying forces
——climate, birth rates, and the like. Second, a theory of group
mind may be empirical, and need not necessarily rest on an idea-
listic conception of the Volhsgeist. By adopting the historical
method, rather than the statistical, relying on values to indicate
our problem rather than trying to express it in terms of natural
science, we shall find ourselves treating the theory of the group
in a realistic and empirical way, eschewing the dogmatism of
applying a priori principles to human material, and the equal
fallacy of considering minds in the same terms as chemical
elements.3
Third, a modern social psychology need not be a literal tran-
scription of Durkheim or Wundt, relying on an antiquated
psychology for its analogies and its basic conceptions. A theory
of group mind today must recognize that personality is not
always a unity, that it is never a complete unity; the vast field
of the unconscious in mental life has just been opened to view.
Both of these conceptions apply to the mental life of men in great
masses as truly as when alone. Neither the individual nor the
group is something hard, fixed and static; neither can be summed
up as a group of faculties or a system of ideas. Both individual
3See Dennes: Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology, especially
Chap. IX.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 21
and group must be conceived in process, to take the words of
Lindemann,4 as “the total equipment with which man responds
to his environment, all that enters into behavior from the side of
human nature.”
Some views of group mind are vitiated for our present pur-
pose by the narrow limits they impose, or by the one-sided way in
which they arrive at their definitions. This applies especially to
those who use the mob as the typical group and consider “ crowd-
mindedness’ ’ (to use Everett Dean Martin ’s term) as a synonym
of sociality. The crowd, the herd, the mob are various terms
for an exceptional type of group of human beings, bound to-
gether by physical presence, transformed by a powerful emo-
tion, launched finally into unified and often violent action. But
as Baldwin says :5 “The mind of the crowd is essentially a tem-
porary, unorganized, ineffective thing . . . . The mob is a by-
product of society, it is the exaggeration of the normal.”
Finally, the group mind need not be expressed entirely in terms
of instinctive adaptation, any more than the mind of the indi-
vidual; either may have many types, may be instinctive or im-
pulsive or rational, may have a growing sense of rationality and
a growing power of independent, deliberate action. In opposi-
tion to MacDougall, with his elaborate system of instincts and
sentiments, we may place the vast majority of students of the
problem, Cooley, Platt, Ellwood, Baldwin, and so on. Even
when the members of a group all use reason to a very high
degree, they still constitute a group if they have organization
and some method of reaching a general decision, as in a congress,
a national association of scientists, or a business corporation.
Obviously, human beings form many kinds of groups, and
there would then, on an empirical basis, be many varieties of
group minds. Individuals fall into many classes, as we all know,
primitive and cultured, ignorant and educated, the infant, the
child and the adult, the moron and the genius. So with the
group. There are large and small groups, from families to
nations; temporary and permanent ones, from the theatre
"=Page 115.
-"Baldwin: Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 248.
22 Anti-Semitism in the United States
audience to the church; simple and complex, from town meet-
ing to a Federal union, comprising states, counties, cities and
townships; unorganized and organized; groups founded on
physical presence, like a baseball team, and international
bodies of scientists or philosophers who may form “a school
of thought” but may never hold a meeting. The study of these
various types is not only interesting in itself; it may help us
in formulating the principle of the mind of the group as a whole.
To begin with the definition of the primitive group by Franz
Boaz:
'' There are a number of primitive hordes to whom every stranger not a
member of the horde is an enemy, and where it is right to damage the
enemy to the best of one’s power and ability, and if possible to kill him.
This custom is based largely on the idea of the solidarity of the horde,
and on the feeling that it is the duty of every member of the horde to
destroy all possible enemies. . . . The feeling of the fellowship in the
horde corresponds to the feeling of unity in the tribe, to a recognition of
bonds established by a neighborhood of habitat, and further on to the
feeling of fellowship among members of nations.
“He who is not with me is against me,” 7 said Jesus for the
religious group. How far we have proceeded from the horde
in our civilized nations, and how near we are to it still in the
essential character of the mind of the group!
3.
Does the group mind exist? Not as a super-consciousness,
external to the individuals composing it—that view has been
discarded long ago. But as a category which is needed to ex-
plain manyphenomena, and which we can then proceed to study
and explain in greater detail, a term with pragmatic value, such
as “life’ or “mind.” “Life” is no longer used as a principle
of explanation, as a vital principle which is infused into dead
matter, but life exists, for all that, and we can see its edects
and study them. “Mind” is not something separate and distinct
from the body in which it dwells or from the world in which
it acts, but we know that mind is a useful and necessary category
°Bpaz: Mind of Primitive Man, p. 207.
7 Matthew, 12 :30.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 23
in which to include a whole phase of living being, especially of
human life. “Group Mind” is the same sort of category as
these. Just as mind inheres in the neurones and is coincident
with the chemical chzinges in them, and yet cannot be summed
up by chemical changes; so group mind inheres in the brains
of individuals and is coincident with individual ideas and acts,
yet cannot be summed up as so many individual responses but
as the unified response of a group of persons at once.
Morris Ginsberg, in his Psychology of Society, opposes any
type of group theory, as he sees only individuals in a social
environment; he holds that the group may have unity of content
but not of process, of ideas and ideals but not of mind. Floyd
H. Allport speaks of “The group fallacy,” 8 “the error of sub-
stituting the group as a whole as a principle of explanation in
place of the individuals in the group,” to which Emory S.
Bogardus replies in his discussion that 9 “if there is a group
fallacy, there is also an individual fallacy.”
On the other hand, so radical a behaviorist as E. C. Lindeman
remarks, 1° “The group is a plurality of individuals, but what
the group does is not plural but singular. ’ ’ 11 “From the purely
descriptive point of view, the group becomes a new quality.”
Dr. M. M. Davis puts it this way: 12 “Millions of brain cells
are co-ordinated to think as one brain. Psychology tries to
tell how. Millions of brains co-ordinate themselves and function
in many ways as one brain. The how of that marvel is for
sociology.” Giddings calls the group mind “the concert of
thought, emotion and wil ” of individual minds. Cooley says:
13 “The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but
in organization.” Ellwood phrases it somewhat differently:
1‘ The only unity we have in society is a unity of process. The individual
consciousness is unified both structurally and functionally. . . . There is 0
a collective mental life, but no social mind in the same sense in which
there is an individual mind.
8Allport: American Journal of Sociology, May 1924, p. 691.
9Bogardus: American Journal of Sociology, May 1924, p. 703.
1° Lindeman: Social Discovery, p. 44.
11Lindeman: Social Discovery, p. 120.
1‘Davis: Psychological Interpretations of Society, p. 9.
18Cited in Elwood, p. 330.
1‘ Ellwood, p. 330.
24 Anti-Semitism in the United States
Dr. Baldwin sums up his view in the last sentences of the Social
and Ethical Interpretations:
1‘ Society is the form of natural organization which ethical personalities
come into in their growth. Ethical personality is the form of natural
development which individuals grow into who live in social relationships.
The true analogy, then, is not that which likens it to a physiological
organism, but rather that which likens it to a psychohogical organization.
And so, if this were primarily a historical study, I might go
over many similar and differing theories, which consider the
group as a unity on the mental plane, that is, in one sense or
another, as a group mind.
The material is still being collected for this study, the essential
points of view-still being defined, and such important factors
as instinct and intelligence are still being redefined with the
rapid progress of science today. As several of the terms cited
above suggest, the difference between the individual as a mind
and the group of individuals as a mind is always given and
must always be given in terms of structure. In the words of
Lindeman:
1‘ The individual may be viewed as an integration of functioning organs,
and the group merely an integration of functions. . . . There can be noth-
ing organic about society or a group; there can be only a series of rela-
tions, the results of specific responses to specific situations.
Not to cite more opinions on a point on which there seems
general agreement, we may take it for granted that the chief,
perhaps the only difference historically pointed out between
the mind of one man and of a group of men is that the man has a
brain and a nervous system, while the group has neither, but
operates apparently through the brains and nervous systems of
its members. But in their functioning, in their activities, the
mind of the man and of the nation or other group are so similar
as to be almost indistinguishable.
Of course, this distinction depends, finally, on the definition
of mind which we are prepared to accept. Dennes gives an
adequate summary and criticism of Durkheim, for instance,
who considered collective mind to consist of the collective ideas
1‘ Baldwin, p. 571.
1° Lindeman, p. 136.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 25
or representations of a society; and of Wundt, who considered
mind an integration of processes, not of ideas, and therefore
sought for the group mind in the collective results of group
mental process, in speech, religion and custom. But Dennes
himself seems confused by the need of defining mind without
regard to bodily structure. He says: 17 “Individual minds or
persons have oi produce bodies as well as objective mental
products. But social groups are not minds and have no bodies.
They are associations of minds.” MacDougall defines mind as
18 “An organized system of mental or purposive forces,” and
continues, “In the sense so defined, every highly organized
human society may be properly said to possess a group mind.”
While MacDougall’s definition seems circular in nature, it still
recognizes that a functional definition of mind can make no
distinction of structure, whether any particular mind is asso-
ciated with one or many bodies. Lindeman calls mind 19 “the
total equipment with which man responds to his environment”,
which seems more than one can accept, for “total equipment”
would include hands and feet, as well as mind. A more precise
statement of the same general tenor appears in Dr. Singer ’s
Mind as Behavior:
2° Consciousness is not something inferred from behavior; it is behavior.
Or, more accurately, our belief in consciousness is an expectation of
probable behavior based on an observation of actual behavior, a belief to be
confirmed or refuted by more observation, as any other belief in a fact
is to be tried out.
1
Thus, any functional definition of mind that has no reference}
to brain or nervous system, must apply and does apply in the}
group of persons in exactly the same sense as to the single2
individual. If there is “unified behavior,” if there is “organ-'
ized system of purposes,” if there is “response to environment,“-,
then we have mind, whether the behavior, response, or purpose/5
dwell in one or two or many bodies. /
One question remains, and a most perplexing one. How can
1" Dennes: Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology, p. 145.
18MacDougall: Group Mind, p. 12.
1° Lindeman, p. 115.
3° Singer, p. 10.
26 Anti-Semitism in the United States
one distinguish between a group mind and a group purpose, or
the accidental coincidence of many minds and many purposes?
A flock of migrating birds has no group mind—each bird would
travel south at the same time and the same rate of speed, were
there no flock at all. Or still lower forms, such as unicellular
organisms, may move simultaneously to warmer waters. On the
other extreme, the hordes of Huns led by Attila had a group
purpose in their migration; the leader gave the word, and the
followers leaped together to their horses’ backs to ride from
Asia into Europe. But when a half million negroes migrate
from the southern to the northern states in a few years, coming
family by family, as the opportunity affords, yet with a steady
tendency of drift, is that a group mind or the accidental agree-
ment of many individuals? Is it mind or minds? And the
same problem is present in a declaration of war, or the victory
of a foot-ball team, or the adoption of a new fashion of clothes.
When does the group act and when the individual members?
When do we have the mind of all, when the mind of each?
To this crucial problem I must present one qualification and
one answer. The qualification is: the group never acts except
through its constituent individuals, any more than the mind
acts without its brain cells and bodily organs. The difference
between the act of all and the act of each is not a complete dis-
junction but a difference of emphasis, of interpretation, of pur-
pose. When the army marches, every soldier goes ahead; when
the nation elects its president, the millions of voters cast their
ballots; when the church adopts a creed or reforms its ritual,
the many believers experience a change in their faith and their
hope. Not that group opinion need be unanimous; it is rather
a mode of general consent by which unified action can arise out
of conflicting opinions, by which many individuals are absorbed
into a group mind. Thus in many, perhaps in most cases we
cannot say definitely: this is group mind, not personal prefer-
ence, or this is individual action, and the group has nothing to
do with it. The problem is much like that which faced Kant
in defining moral action, when the demands of the universal
law may often coincide with personal preference, perhaps even
with the greatest and most appealing happiness.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 27
And our answer may be similar to his. Kant turned to the
test case. We know we have morality, said he, when duty and
pleasure are opposed, and the man obeys the voice of duty.
Similarly, we can say: we know that we have group mind and
purpose when the pleasure of the individual is opposed to the
will of the group, and the individual gives up his purpose for
that of the army, the nation, the church. When the soldier or
the martyr gives up his urge for self-preservation and offers his
body to the bullets of the enemy or the stake of the persecutor,
then we know that he has abdicated his individuality and is
acting only as a member of the greater whole. Lindeman, whose
study is based on observation of farmers’ co-operative societies,
presents a contrary view:
“It was formerly asserted that the chief significance of a group con-
sisted in the fact that the individuals comprising it had sacrificed certain
individual prerogatives, rights, privileges, etc., in order to achieve the larger
collective end. But it could not be discovered that the farmers who became
members of the co-operative associations had done anything of the sort. On
the contrary, they were chiefly interested in enhancing their own individual
interests; they desired a larger income from the sale of their'f>roducts and
the co-operative movement promised exactly this.
If this were true, these associations would constitute merely a
set of books, not a group of persons. But we see further on
in the same book that the co-operative associations demanded
loyalty even at the cost of whim or momentary interest; they
enforced their contracts with the farmer by which he agreed
to sell only through the association. If he got tired of waiting
for his money, or if a dealer placed a financial premium on dis-
loyalty, still he was expected to be loyal to the group. Finally,
the group had to take cognizance of other aspects of the human
life of its members besides the sale of their cotton or tobacco;
it built up personal and social groupings for the entire family;
it became a truly unified group mind, through the slow process
of integration of individuals and of local groups, resting on
a basis of personal friendship. Thus, even in an interest group,
21Lindeman, p. 170.
28 Anti-Semitism in the United States
a true group mind is developed through participation and
sacrifice.
4.
We are now ready to define group mind in the sense in which
it will be understood in this essay. A group mind is the common
purpose of two or more persons, which they accept as their own
purpose. The mode of this acceptance or identification is in
behavior, which includes the reasons given by the individuals-
their rationalizations—as well as their overt acts. The test of
this in any particular case is the test of sacrifice, whether the
man acts as a self-preserving being, an individual pacifist, or as
a citizen and soldier, a member of a group at war; whether the
church member acts as an individual thinker, or subordinates
his judgment to the interpretation and the practice of the
church; whether the son acts as a loyal son, a member of the
family, to his own hurt, or goes ofi to marry against his parents’
will, leaving them perhaps to suffer want. I have purposely
taken examples where opinion may be divided, as it is not my
purpose to attach moral right or wrong to either group loyalty
or individual freedom; either may be right under given circum-
stances, or judged by certain standards.
The group mind may be conscious, as a deliberative assembly;
or instinctive and unconscious, as the racial group or the partly
hypnotized mob. The ancient Israelite identified himself with
his people; he did not even expect personal immortality, but
desired sons to carry on his name so that his family and his
people might be immortal. Parents are willing sacrifices for
their children, but sacrifices nevertheless. The patriot volun-
teers for dangerous duty consciously, or leaps over the parapet
in the blind enthusiasm of a charge; whether conscious or un-
conscious of the meaning of his act, he acts as a soldier, not
a self-seeking person. The varieties of the group mind are
almost innumerable. The group mind may be as instinctive
and unorganized as a religious revival, as natural as a nation
with its bonds of language, land, custom and government, as
artificial as a military company without even a name, with only
a number, and yet with a definite morale, a tradition, a person-
Anti-Semitism in the United States 29
ality of its own. The theater audience has a group mind, while
the restaurant crowd has not; for it is an axiom in the theater
that each audience‘ has a character of its own, that only a full
house really abandons itself at a comedy, while even a smaller
crowd may be carried away by a tragedy, and so on; the indi-
vidua1’abandons his own judgment and his inhibitions at least
in part, to react to the performance as a member of the group.
hlrécording to this definition, the individual also may have a
group mind, as his diverse purposes are summed up in one
supreme purpose, or as he has inner conflicts, the far-sighted
against the narrow view, the better ideal against the worse. The
reasons or motives which animate the various members of a
group mind need not always be the same; they may range from
deliberate choice to compulsion by public opinion or the blind
following of herd instinct, the desire to “run with the crowd,”
to “be on the band wagon.” There is always a margin of un-
assimilated purpose in either the individual or the group;
neither mind ever quite attains perfect unity. Durkheim makes
the pregnant suggestion, (not without its critics, it is true,)
that the most unified m‘ind was that of the primitive horde,
where unity was achieved by identity; while developed societies
achieve unity through organization and division of function,
thus including the most diverse elements in a genuine unity of
co-operation and purpose.
The group mind, then, is an empirical fact, which can be
perceived in many practical ways. The intellectual content, the
emotional coloring, group habits which we call custom, group
ideas which we call tradition, group organization by which a
consensus of opinion is ascertained for the purpose of unified
action--all are characteristics of the group mind, just as the
parallel factors of ideas, emotion, and will are the phases into
which we analyze the mind of the individual. There is a differ-
ence in every one of these factors between the group mind of
America and of China, between that of ancient Greece and of
medieval Italy. And the difference lies not only in factors such
as language, religion and history, which are constitutive to the
group, but external to the individual. It lies also in subtler
matters of opinion, of emotions, which seem to be within the
30 Anti-Semitism in the United States
individual and yet must be absorbed from the environment, be-
cause they differ so strikingly from group to group. I shall go
carefully into the reasons further on which impel me to con-
sider that the Jewish people possess a group mind, even though
they have no common government, language or land, and have
even many divisions on questions of faith and religious prac-
tice. Here it is sufficient to note that the Jewish people act as
one under attack; that a pogrom in Russia arouses the very
different Jews of France, England and America to a feeling
of unity and acts of relief and of defense. Labor and capital
are becoming “class conscious” in opposition to each other;
that is, group minds are in process of formation. The group
mind appears in the behavior of the group through its constit-
uent individuals, whether the group be a static one, dominated
by the fixed habits of custom, or a dynamic one, with a great ‘
wave of progress; for behavior includes both custom and prog-
ress.
One more point comes properly under the definition of the
group mind——the wide-spread conception of a general will, or
more precisely a common will. According to the viewpoint of
this study, the general will is no mystical entity, overpowering
the wills of the individuals; nor is it an arithmetical average,
in which personal opinions cancel each other out. Neither of
these theories covers a willing mind. The group will is a resul-
tant, not an average; one element in it is tradition, another is
leadership, a third is the interaction of the various sub-groups.
In the final result, the negative element is often actually erased,
the wavering members accept the winning opinion as a whole,
and the consequent group action is a unity, almost a unanimity
of response. After war is declared the peace party practically
disappears. In less clear-cut issues, we see the workings of com-
promise, which again appears in the behavior of the group as
a whole.
Group consciousness exists when the individuals identify
themselves with the group, not merely accepting its purpose but
losing their own purposes in it. Consciousness implies also in-
telligence, as it does in the individual; it may co-exist with a
high emotional tone but must have a rational element as well.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 31
MacDougall utters a view in consonance with that held here
when he says:
22It is the extension of the self-regarding sentiment of each member to
the group as a whole that binds the group together and renders it a col-
lective individual capable of collective volition.
But when he holds 2"’that groups are self-conscious according to
the degree that the idea of them is present in the minds of the
individuals composing them, then we must agree with Dennes
that:
“to say that a group mind possesses self-consciousness in the sense that
its nature is consciously apprehended by individual minds distinct from it,
is the utterance of a contradiction.
It will then be necessary to posit group consciousness as we
posit individual consciousness, not distributively but collec-
~ tively. We have group mind and group will when the group
acts as one or behaves as one; but we have group consciousness
when the group thinks as one. Not that this action can possibly
take place outside of the individual minds; MacDougall is un-
doubtedly right in his citation of E. Barker: 25“There is no
‘group mind existing apart from the minds of the members of
the group; the group mind exists only in the minds of its mem-
bers. But nevertheless it exists.” Yet the group mind must in-
clude the individual minds in a unified purpose, to which they
relinquish their own wills, willingly or with a struggle, whose
ideas are their ideas, whose consciousness is, to a certain extent
at least, their consciousness. If it is possible, in ordinary
speech, to recognize that a man acts now personally, again as a
churchman, a citizen, or a committee member, it should be pos-
sible to accept this fact as a part of our theory and to embody
it as one phase of the theory itself. The individual and the
group are not mutually exclusive; neither exists without the
other; the group is a part of the individual mind as much as
the individual is a part of the group mind.
“MacDougall: Group Mind, p. 78.
28MacDougall: Group Mind, p. 158.
2‘Dennes: Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology, p. 120.
25Barker: Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present
Day.
CHAPTER II.
GROUPS IN CONTACT
1.
Theoretically, the individual might be independent of other
individuals and of groups as well. He might be his own alter,
so that through the active and reflective standpoints working on
each other the individual himself might constitute a group
mind, and might produce many, if not all, the characteristic
products of the group. 1 But practically in society, the exact op-
posite is invariably the case. According to Baldwin ’s dialectic
of the individual development: 2“ The sense of self always in-
volves a sense of the other.” 3 “The real self is always the bi-
polar self, the social self.” Empirically, not only are civiliza-
tion, history and government the products of social heredity;
the individual himself as we have him owes his mental content,
many of his feeling and motor responses, and his ultimate ideals,
to the group in which he was born and has developed. On this
basis the ancient conflict between the isolated individual and
the group domination becomes unimportant, if not meaningless
from the empirical point of view. As Joseph K. Hart remarks:
4 Membership in the group establishes in the members a set of habits
which are the personal counterpart of the customs of the group; the group
is not outside and around him; it is inside him; what is custom in the group
has become habit in him.
Why, then, the eternal conflict between the individual and
the group? Why does a Schiller or an Ibsen proclaim, “The
strongest man is he who stands most alone”? Why do we have
the group portrayed so often as the oppressor, the individual as
the hero, genius, and martyr to the conventional ideas of the
mass? Because the group has more fixed habits than the indi-
vidual, or at least than the exceptional individual; because in
most individuals the group factor is the dominant one by pref-
1 Singer: Mind as Behavior, chapter on The Man Without a Fellow.
3Baldwin: Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 22. S‘p. 30.
MHart: The Survey,_March 15, 1924.
32
Anti-Semitism in the United States 33
erence, and the struggle against it is both rare and mild; be-
cause, finally, the group mind does involve a sacrifice of the
individual purpose on many occasions, and these are the test
cases of the strength of the group itself. There are really two
types of individuals who stand out from the group—the genius,
or social discoverer; the criminal, or social rebel. Platt sug-
gests that 5“Man has never become entirely socialized”; his
biological heredity always lags behind the social heredity of the
group and leaves a residuum of conflict. Baldwin gives a
broader theory, which may include this: 6“The individual is
the particularizing social force; society is the generalizing so-
cial force.” That is, the individual produces variations, which
are then stamped out by social disapproval, or generalized by
social acceptance. The genius thinks for the race; the mass of
individuals have their thinking done for them by the prepared
reactions of the group. Without the social group the indi-
vidual would be as unformed mentally, as helpless ethically,
as is the single bee without the hive. In Baldwin’s words:
7“A man is a social outcome rather than a social unit.”
All this by the way; if I were to take up the problem of the
individual and group, it would occupy this entire study. I
merely want to show its bearing on the central thesis here
brought forward, which concerns the relation between group
and group, rather than that between individual and group.
2.
The problem of group and sub-group can be approached
either descriptively or genetically. If we take the former angle,
we see every large group divided indefinitely into small, con-
flicting, overlapping, and infinitely various sub-groups. Much
of the complexity of our society consists in this overlapping,
by which the individual belongs to many groups at once, so
that his mind cannot attain complete unity, and none of his
groups can possess him wholly. A man belongs to a family,
a city, a profession, a church, a school alumni body, a nation
‘Platt: The Psychology of Social Life, p. 188.
‘Baldwin, p. 462.
‘Baldwin, p. 96.
34 Anti-Semitism in the United States
and an international peace society. In addition, he may join
a labor union, a chamber of commerce, or a half dozen fraternal
orders. His mind is a perfect maze of group attitudes; he shifts
from one group to another as interests or contiguity impel him.
In the same way, a large group such as a political party includes
members from difierent sections of the country, different eco-
nomic strata, different churches, and so on. The group mind, as
a category in this situation, is purely a functional unity, which
works in and through its individual members and through its
smaller groups of individuals in exactly the same way. I quote
Dr. Singer: 8“My world is highly organized—groups within
groups, and groups within these, ” for that is the scientific, real-
istic view of the social world.
Various classifications of groups have been devised by stu-
dents of the problem, useful for their different purposes. Cooley
speaks of primary and secondary groups, those in which men
and women are born and grow, and the larger integrations into
which the smaller, more natural groups enter. Miller prefers
9“Vertical and horizontal groups, ” the former being the natural
divisions which include all classes, such as the nation; the latter
a caste or class grouping. Hayes calls them personal and im-
personal groups, apparently meaning much the same as Pro-
fessor Cooley by the terms primary and secondary. Probably
the most useful mode of classification is the genetic, beginning
with the family, and then expanding according to the particu-
lar situation in view—in the primitive group to the clan, tribe
and confederacy; in the civilized to the school, the interest
group, the religious affiliation, the political nation, the inter-
national ideals and bonds of union.
Whatever be the more or less arbitrary mode of classification,
we see that, except for the supposititious primitive horde, groups
are never single nor simple. They resemble rather the physical
organism or the mind of the individual, either of which is neces-
sarily complex. Group minds exist and grow by progressive
integration of the lesser into the greater, from the individual
up to the greatest possible bodies of human beings.
8 Singer: Modern Thinkers and Present Problems, p. 289.
°Mi1ler: Raches, Nations and Classes, p. 14.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 35
The group mind comes into being only through contact with
other groups. We may go so far as to conclude that there must
be two groups in order that there may be one group. If an iso-
lated island possessed a few people so unorganized that they felt
no difference of groupings among themselves, then there would
be no sense of a total group, either. Under those circumstances
that would be attained only in case of an invasion by people
from without the land, or a rebellion within, when group unity
of the islanders would at once appear. If my previous iden-
tification of mind in the individual and the group is exact, not
merely an analogy, then this follows from Baldwin ’s genetic
study of the individual. The mind of the individual grows by
constant reference to the alter—for in the thought of the child
the ego and alter are one—and even in the highest reaches of
moral judgment there remains an element of social approval,
of what would be the judgment of the ideal group or the ideal
comrade. 1°“We do right by habitually imitating a larger self
whose injunctions run counter to the tendencies of our particu-
lar selves.”
To quote a few applications of this viewpoint to particular
problems: Sumner applies it to the primitive horde:
*1 The relationship of comradeship and peace in the we-group and that of
hostility and war toward others-group are correlative. War and peace have
reacted on each other and developed each other, one within the group, the
other in the inter-group relation. Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it,
hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without
—all grow together, common products of the same situation.
In Ellwoods ’s words :
” While the stimuli afforded by the struggle with the physical environ-
ment are conceivably sufficient to bring about the highest degree of co-
ordination, unity and solidarity in the larger human social groups, yet
historically they have not done so. Rather, it has been the stimuli arising
from the conflict and competition of one human group with another which
has chiefly developed conscious social solidarity in the larger human group.
1° Baldwin, p. 61.
11 Sumner: Folkways, p. 12.
12Ellwood, p. 159.
36 Anti-Semitism in the United States
Dr. George E. Vincent wrote:
” Conflict, competition, rivalry, are the chief causes which bring human
beings into groups. and largely determine what goes on within them.
1‘ It is in conflict or competition with other nations that a country becomes
a vivid unity to the members of its constituent groups. It is rivalry which
brings out the sense of team work, the social consciousness.
“Races, Nations and Classes,” a recent work by Dr. Herbert
A. Miller, presents a series of studies of social relations in terms
of group conflicts, group oppression and group revolt, as these
exist in various crucial situations today.
Most of the treatments of the subject calmly assume that the
other group with which contact is established must necessarily
be parallel and competing with the first group. But in empiri-
cal situations that is not always, perhaps not often the case.
We may become conscious of our American unity in war with
an external foe, but we may become equally conscious of it in
inter-state relations; because an inter-state conflict may bring us
to the superior federal power; or in the division of powers be-
tween state and nation, or in the strong hand of the federal
government reaching out to detect groups of law-breakers within
the constituent states. That is, the two groups need not be par-
allel and exclusive; they may overlap, or one may enclose the
other entirely. I can become conscious of my international
Jewish loyalty in contrast to the Christian church, which also
is international; or I may become conscious of it through the
overlapping with my American citizenship; or even through
contrast with a family loyalty, which might conceivably be en-
hanced by‘disregarding the membership in the Jewish people,
with its frequent disabilities. The first is a case of two separate
groups; the second, two overlapping ones; the third, where one
is a sub-group of the other. In this sense it is conceivable,
though not usual, for the individual with his own “group
mind” to serve as a contrast to the group in which he is in-
cluded. For in every one of these instances there has been ac-
tual or potential relinquishment of purpose into the larger group
which includes the smaller, or into the one which overlaps and
1‘ Vincent: American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1912, p. 471.
1‘ ibid, p. 483.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 37
conflicts with the other; and in the case of two parallel groups
there is a conflict and contrast of purposes, hence of group
mind itself.
3.
The mode of group contacts has practically always been
viewed in terms of conflict and competition. In contrast to this,
I present the view that there are two modes of group contact--
competition and imitation. Competition strengthens and unites
each competing group. Imitation brings the different groups
together into an overgroup. The two together constitute the
social process (if we allow for the element of individual initia-
tive and leadership, which hardly comes within the special topic
of this study).
The classic presentation of group struggle is by Gumplowitz,
in his “Rassenkampf,” where he took Gobineau’s rather crude
theory of races and applied it to history and sociology, includ-
ing also groups smaller and of difierent origin than the races
themselves. To present Gumplowitz’s view in his own words:
1‘ History and the present day present us with a picture of almost un-
broken warfare of tribe against tribe, people against people, state against
state, nation against nation.
1" Every greater ethnic or social element strives to subdue to its purposes
every weaker group which lies within its sphere of influence or near it.
This is his “social law of nature,” which he compares to the
law of gravitation in its certainty. War is therefore necessary
for civilized as for primitive societies, and any talk of ideals or
of peace is but self-deception, if it be not deliberate masking of
warlike intentions. The race theory of Gobineau has gone on
until it is one of the important factors in American group op-
positions today. And surprisingly enough, the conflict theory
of Gumplowitz comes back also from time to time. In “Sur-
vival or Extinction,” a new work by Elisha M. Friedman, I
find this sentence: 17“The absorption of a scattered minority
people is the inexorable law of History. Can the Jews hope to
1‘ Gumplowitz, p. 176.
1' Gumplowitz, p. 161.
1" Friedman, p. 148.
38 Anti-Semitism in the United States
escape it?” This on the basis of Gumplowitz, whose treatment
of the Jewish problem is very different; he criticized the Jews .
ii‘
bitterly for being the one exception to his mexorable law,”
and said they should have obeyed it and been absorbed among
the nations, as were the Phoenicians two thousand years ago.
Certainly there is group struggle; it is a natural tendency
when two different groups come into contact; and it is a gross
and obvious phenomenon which nobody can help noticing. But
at the same time there goes on also a subtler but equally signifi-
cant movement of group imitation. The white settlers fought
the Indians in a way that everybody knew; many have missed
the adoption by the whites of maize and tobacco, names of rivers
and sites of cities; by the Indians of the horse, the rifle and the
religion of the conquerors. Rome conquered Greece in war, and
Rome imitated Greece in art and literature. Israel conquered
Canaan and imposed the one God, destroying the high places
where the earlier inhabitants had worshipped the powers of fer-
tility in nature; but Israel incorporated the harvest festivals of
the Canaanites into its own shepherd and nomad ritual. Group
imitation takes its place beside group competition in the spread
of culture elements about the earth, in the study of foreign lan-
guages and literature, in missionary efiort, in the adoption of
new inventions for warfare or' for industry. These are as im-
portant and as omnipresent as business competitions or terri-
torial rivalry, far more common than war.
The function of group conflict is to strengthen the separate
groups and bring them to recognizable group mind. Loyalty is
never so strong as when our group is under fire. War brings
millions to an acute sense of national loyalty who have hardly
felt they had a nation. The ancient loyalty of the Jew is largely
due to the persecutors who constantly reminded him that he had
no right to desert his people. There is definite survival value in
this, which can easily be connected with the historic and pre-
historic process which brought our present groups into being.
As Dr. Miller says: 18“Loyalty and patriotism are merely the
emotional side of the group impulse. They measure the identity
18 Miller: Races, Nations and Classes, p. 11.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 39
of the individual with his group.” Royce ’s “Philosophy of
Loyalty” is one long praise of these virtues of the loyal son
of his group. His somewhat exaggerated discussion of the value
of the “lost cause” for character development illustrates the
overemphasis on group struggle which is typical of all those who
long for group solidarity. For group struggle does bring soli-
darity and loyalty except in the limiting case, where the group
is destroyed in the struggle and there is nothing left to which
we can be loyal. And that is precisely the case envisaged by
Gumplowitz, the case of the stronger group crushing and then
absorbing the weaker one.
Dr. Miller has worked out a type of group pathology which
attacks both victor and victim of a group struggle. He calls
it the “Oppression Psychosis.” Its efiects on the victor are
found in such rationalizations as the “myth of superiority” and
other defense complexes, leading to “cultocracy” or class rule,
and finally if unchecked to the stagnation of caste. To quote:
1"Hundred per cent. patriotism and confidence in Nordic superiority are
the two most dangerous ideas in the world today, because they lead in
exactly the oppo ite direction from that which civilization must take if it
is to survive. €he fundamental objections to these ideas are, first, that
they have no asis in fact, and second that the emotions which they
organize, have far-reaching and disruptive consequencesb
The inferiority complex of the oppressed people has very dif-
ferent and still more disastrous consequences. Dr. Miller points
out that what are usually considered Jewish traits may be found
also among the Irish, the Poles, and the Negroes, all very dif-
ferent groups but all subject to oppression and therefore pre-
senting a psychological reaction to oppression.
2° What we have designated as Jewish characteristics are primarily based
on the nervous reactions which have resulted from more varieties and
longer oppression than those of any other group. The Jew is introspective,
analytical, aggressive and conspicuous. The Negro also has many of the
same characteristics, though he has not yet developed so many compensatory
values, such as religious solidarity and business technique. . . . The most
outstanding ‘result of the oppression psychosis is to create a group solidarity
which is far stronger than could have been created by any other means.
1° Miller, p. 135.
2° Miller, p. 35-6.
40 Anti-Semitism in the United States
And he goes on to show the use of symbols as compensatory
mechanism of the oppressed group, and thus to account for the
ardent clinging of such groups to their language or religion as
the real outlet of their self expression and of their will for re-
sistance.
So far with conflict. Imitation of individuals has attracted
much attention, especially through its exhaustive treatment by
Gabriel Tarde, but group imitation has passed by with much
less notice. However, we may fairly say that group imitation is
as universal a by-product of group contact as are rivalry and
conflict. The immigrant comes to America, and the result of
that transference of a group into a new environment can be ex-
pressed in terms of either imitation or conflict, but can be
summed up fully only by recognizing both processes at work
at once. The children attend public schools, where they learn
the English language, the salute to the flag, and some American
group customs. The father learns English at his work; the
mother copies American fashions in dress and household; both
become naturalized citizens—that is what we call Americanize-
tion. But at the same time they speak their native tongue in
the home, they read a foreign language newspaper, they keep
up their correspondence with the relatives back in the Old Coun-
try, they belong to a patriotic or revolutionary society with its
roots in the homeland. Often they even organize a school that
their children may learn the language, religion and other essen-
tials of their earlier group life. So the children often attend
two schools, an American one to assimilate them to the group
mind of America, a Polish or Russian or Jewish one to keep
them in touch with the group mind of their parents’ allegiance.
The hatreds of the central European peoples are transferred to
America. The political issues between Czarist and Bolshevist,
or between Fascismo and Socialism are perpetuated here. Some-
times the contrast between American and alien is emphasized,
and takes the place of the old-world conflicts in the center of
consciousness.
Conflict strengthens the fighting groups; imitation welds them
together into an overgroup. The American process is one of
forming a united people, an integrated, self-conscious group
Anti-Semitism in the United States 41
mind, out of the many diverse elements which enter this conti-
nent. And this goes on by conscious teaching and unconscious
imitation, through social, political and economic motives, every-
where except when interrupted by the counter process of op-
pression and resistance. We speak nowadays of a Greco-Roman
civilization, a direct recognition of the part that imitation
played in the Roman empire with all its warlike power. We
speak of modern European culture, recognizing that European
culture is one, with local variations indeed, and that art, science,
philosophy and religion are international, for every group imi-
tates every other. The trend of such a tendency can only lead
toward an eventual amalgamation, not by abolishing present
languages and parliaments, but by the growth of every sort of
international and supernational consciousness, beginning with
schools of literature or art, and culminating in a World Court
or a League of Nations.
4.
This suggests the ideal of society which is implicit in our
minds as we study its development by means of conflicting,
imitating and overlapping group minds. The desirable qual-
ities which this process evokes are heterogeneity and prog-
ress. We thus steer midway between the equal dangers of
uniformity and standardization, on the one hand, and the
isolation of castes, on the other. The caste system of India
provides plenty of heterogeneity, but because the groups are
isolated from each other physically and mentally, because of
the influence of “untouchability,” the mind of the group
has never unified, never presented the possibility of change.
The modern movement in India under Ghandi is precisely
of this type, to unify India and introduce the concept of
progress by a double process, by abolishing “untouchabil-
ity” within and bringing the caste groups to imitate and emu-
late each other; by strengthening loyalty through united oppo-
sition to the common oppressor. It is a most significant example
of the development of the group mind through union of sub-
groups and by contrast to another hostile group. On the other
hand, the beginning of modernity in Europe meant a radical op-
42 Anti-Semitism in the United States
position to the levelling influence of the Church universal, the
rise of vernacular tongues, of national governments, of na-
tional churches—that is, the dissociation of the medieval mind,
which was European, into the sub-groups, which are primarily
national. That the reverse movement is now taking place is sig-
nificant, for this reverse movement is a natural one by imitation
and common interests, not forced by the union of the Inquisi-
tion and the secular arm. As Bernard Shaw remarks in the
preface to “Saint Joan”:
21 Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is
founded on tolerance. 22We must persecute, even to the death; and all
that we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first, to be very
careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind that unless there is
a large liberty to shock conventional people, and a well informed sense of
the value of originality, individuality and eccentricity, the result will be
apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will
eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence.
We must then, conceive modern society, not as a simple unity
but as an integration of group minds, from that of the indi-
vidual, the family, the clique, up to that of the nation, with
a dawning international mind now in process. These group
minds struggle for domination and for existence; they learn
from each other at the same time. The double process constantly
in evidence is group conflict, resulting in the mind of the sub-
group, and group imitation, resulting in the integration of the
sub-groups into a larger and more inclusive mental entity. In
addition, the various groups are not all parallel, but very largely
crossing each other; one individual or sub-group may belong to
several of them. Economic classes cross national boundaries,
for both capital and labor are international. Most conspicuous
of all, religious groupings are international and interracial, so
that a man belongs to a church as well as a nation. In peace times
the national will to dominate and the church ideal of peace are
kept carefully as far apart in his mind as possible; the one com-
ing into the center of consciousness on Sundays, the other on
election day or similar occasions. In time of war, the two ac-
" Shaw: “Saint Joan,” p. lvii. ‘*2 Shaw, p. lxi.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 43
tively conflict within the group mind, and thus within the indi-
vidual minds which belong to the group.
The accumulation of knowledge and the advancement of rea-
son are accompanied by a progressive widening of the circle of
the group mind, to include an ever larger number and variety
of sub-groups. Dr. Baldwin suggests this process: 23“Group
selection gives rise to what may be called the law of the widen-
ing unit, that as the circle of co-operation widens the unit of
survival, the group, taken as a whole, becomes larger.” The
other side of the same process is the increasing complexity of
the mind of the individual and the sub-group because of the
richer world in which they exist——in Dr. Vincent ’s words,
24“The person has as many selves as there are groups to which
he belongs. He is simple or complex as his groups are few and
harmonious or many and conflicting.” The actual growth of
an international mind today is evident, through scientific, re-
ligious, artistic and economic influences; through the great al-
liances of the World War; through the ease of communication
and the spread of news and propaganda. A world-wide group
mind, if such is possible, cannot and should not eliminate its
sub-groups, but include them in a wider synthesis; even en-
riching the complexity of the sub-groups by its further ramifi-
cations and their further imitations.
But the easy and natural way for such an international group
mind is by conflict with a still different outside group. The
white races would easily attain unity if there were a real race
conflict against the colored races of the world; difierences be-
tween French and German, between Russian and American,
would be swallowed up in a day. Unity of the entire human race
would come instantly if we were invaded from Mars. The slo-
gans of our earth-wide unity would be the defense of our beloved
planet and the common descent of all human beings. In default
of such a threat from without, is the international mind an im-
possible hypothesis?
I suggest that actual contrasts exist which may make it pos-
sible for a world-wide group mind to grow through the normal
23 Baldwin, p. 191, footnote.
2‘ Vincent: American Journal of Sociology, p. 479.
44 Anti-Semitism in the United States
mode of group conflict and group imitation and co-operation.
Perhaps we can attain race unity by envisaging the forces of
nature as the rival group, conceiving the inroads of the insect
world as the threat against human domination which must make
us spring to arms in a sense of our common unity and our com-
mon nature. Perhaps we can conceive the national group as
the contrasting element, and the international group mind as,
not its enemy, but its synthesis. Finally, one all-inclusive mind
actually does exist in the faith of most of the race——the ideal
self of the group to which we give the name of God. The God-
idea of the group is not the group itself, but is its outgrowth,
its ideal self. Perhaps the future unity of mankind may come
at last through a summation of its highest ideals and the ra-
tional toleration of diverse interpretations, different personal-
ities, and widely contrasting group customs and manners. At
present, however, an outstanding phenomenon of the group mind
is intolerance, and through a study of intolerance we can per-
ceive much of group nature and of the actual life of human
societies.
CHAPTER III.
P
INTOLERANCE
1.
Tolerance is the characteristic virtue of the modern era, just
as intolerance has been typical of every age and almost every
people in days gone by. Tolerance, we feel is the golden key
which alone can open the door to the golden age. Tolerance is
the one thing that can possibly wipe out the evils of hatred,
warfare, and confusion, the age-old enemies of the progress of
the race. When men and women learn tolerance for each other ’s
race, nationality, religion, and general attitudes, then they will
be able to understand one another, and eventually to work with
one another, even to love one another. Without that tolerance,
we can never understand people of different race or religion or
nationality, because we never even stop to look at them fairly
and honestly. Certainly, without tolerance, co-operation, human
sympathy, the brotherhood of man are empty words without
possibility of realization.
But that only pushes the problem back a step. What is this
tolerance, and how-can it be attained? It is easy for us to be
tolerant on matters we do not care about, but hard on matters
that are deep in our hearts. Religious tolerance is growing be-
cause religious intensity of the old type is weakening. Religi-
ous wars, as practised in Europe three hundred years ago, will
never be repeated because Christians are no longer certain that
their fellow-Christians of different sects are going to burn in
everlasting flames. Thomas Jefferson was tolerant on religion
because he was fairly indifferent to the whole subject; his in-
tolerance was reserved for political opponents, and for the aris-
tocratic party in other lands as well. The rarest object in the
whole museum of history is the man who has profound convic-
tions of his own, and yet is tolerant of those who differ from
him-—-a Roger Williams, for example, who was a pious clergy-
man but allowed liberty of conscience in his settlement of Rhode
45
46 Anti-Semitism in the United States
Island even to Catholics and Jews. Such a man is a symbol of
what the whole world may become in the messianic age, a type
of our strictly modern ideal.
2.
The study of intolerance takes us at once out of the field of
individual psychology into the newer and less cultivated field
of social psychology, the mind of the group. For intolerance is
characteristically an attribute of groups. Intolerance is the white
against the black; the Christian against the Jew, the French-
man against the German——always one group lined up against
another. Intolerance nestles in the individual mind simply be-
cause every individual of us is a member of a nation, a religion,
a race, and has the typical prejudices of his own people. I may
think myself better than you, but that is merely egotism. If I
think my family better than your family and refuse to associate
with you, that becomes intolerance. And if I join an organiza-
tion of people with similar opinions to my own, and we decide
to keep you and all your kind from doing business or holding
public office or otherwise prospering and succeeding in a coun-
try which we both inhabit, then intolerance has attained its
growth and come to flower. Always one body of people against
another, animated by prejudice, and the reasons do not mat-
ter. For prejudice, literally, means prejudgment, opinion be-
fore the facts come in, and the facts are then selected to give
us reasons for our attitude.
.I.‘1_l.I.',Si5.-iQ!£-._a-.1_1A*_we must real_ize__that intolerance_i__s,_,t_l_1e"typic;1a1
and natural humaiifiattitiidflei From the beginning of history it
\T1"a"§"§6‘"d“éépI‘y"i"iit'ien&hed in every race and tribe that it seems
to have begun with the life of the race, and has its roots perhaps
in the pre-human life, among those wolves or bees that drive a
stranger out of the pack or hive and leave him to die alone.
For that happened times without number in the early human
packs of human hives. Every group of people knows that it is
the one proper, human group, and that all others are imitations
and second-rate. The foreign language always is gibberish to
us, not because it is inferior, but simply because we do riot un-
derstand it. The uneducated man always looks on a foreigner
Anti-Semitism in the United States 47
as somehow an imbecile, because he cannot understand a simple,
natural tongue like English! The ancient Greeks spoke of such
old, magnificent civilizations as those of Egypt and Persia as
barbarians, even though Greece was their pupil in every art
from war to letters. The Mohammedan calls others unbeliev-
ers, even though they may be fire-worshippers, or Buddhists, or
Christians; these people are not unbelievers, but merely dif-
ferent-believers. And the Christian calls the Mohammedan, in
turn, infidel, which means the same thing. In the Merchant-.of
Venice, the Jew is referred to as a pagan, which is exactly the
thing which the Jew is not historically, for Christianity repre-
sents a combination of Jewish and pagan elements. No matter-
everyone thinks that his people are right and other peoples
w;7£6‘1i'g'.\t'ivr;¥"E6{1ntry, right or wrong,” represents a conces-
sion to modernism, blatant as it is. The universal feeling has
always been, up to the threshold of our own age, “My own coun-
try, or tribe, or people, is always righ .”
Ipj_qle_r_anp_e, then,_is _not_ based on reasons, whether good or
hgdpw It grows out of the nature of groups of people. It means
merely that the other fellow is different, not at all that he is
wrong. Everett Dean Martin points out in his studies of the
crowd that the crowd is always dogmatic and egocentric. Every
nation has some crowd characteristics, is interested in its own
welfare, not in that of its colonies, or its competitors, or the
human race. Patriotism is as dogmatic as is religion. Every
state, every city has its local loyalty, which magnifies its advan-
tages and conceals its disadvantages, and especially cries down
its rival state or city. Even the scientist, the student of social
conditions, is apt to speak of higher and lower cultures, or
higher and lower races—meaning always that his culture is
higher and the Chinese lower, or the Anglo-Saxon is higher and
the Italian lower. At that point the scientist seems to be ani-
mated by a very unscientific intolerance. When a student of
society points out ways in which the Chinese culture is worthy
of our imitation, then I will feel that he is truly scientific and
not at all prejudiced. For who says that our occidental culture
is superior to the Chinese? ‘We say so. Who says the Chinese
is superior? The Chinese do, of course. But they are prej-
48 Anti-Semitism in the United States
udiced? Certainly, and so are we! The most that canbe said
with certainty is that the two cultures are different, and these
differences can then be studied in detail.
Prejudice is often racial because people of ‘different_-ap_p‘ear-
anceS~ Standi’>9lll54.';91f5-lily‘3S Very different’ froin us~indeed;..-~i.§l1t
they iibt be inferior. The current prejudice against the
Negro says that he is lazy, unintelligent, immoral-—but the same
intolerance operates against the many members of the colored
race who are more diligent, more intelligent, and quite as moral
as the average white. In all these characteristics the races over-
lap; the most that can be said statistically is that the whites
have the larger percentage of the higher intellectual persons. Un-
fortunately, much of that may be due to training rather than
to heredity, for in the army tests the northern negroes actually
averaged higher than the southern whites. But even if this in-
tolerance toward the black race were justified by facts after
we whites entertained it on natural instinctive grounds, why
then should we give directly opposite reasons for our dislike of
the Japanese? For the Japanese is called by his very enemies
shrewd, industrious and saving. If the lazy negro is our in-
ferior, then the hustling Japanese should be our superior. The
fact is that neither race is inferior in a way that can be .proved——
but both are different, and every group is naturally intolerant
of the group that is different from itself.
But weighty reasons of racial character are quite unneces-
sary in establishing prejudice. Probably no two peoples in Eu-
rope are more closely related in race than the Germans and the
English. A hundred years ago or more they were closest allies
against Napoleon; during the World War, when political and
economic conditions ranged them on opposite sides, each tried
to show that it was a superior race, with no connection at all
@with the other, so far beneath it. Religious prejudice may be
1
\based on genuine differences, as between Jew and Christian, or-
on comparatively trivial matters as between Methodists and
Baptists. The shifting nature of these prejudices and their
purely personal application appears distinctly in the latest
slogan of intolerance-—“~White, Protestant, Gentile, American.”
All others, not conforming to this criterion, cannot be one hun-
Anti-Semitism in the United States 49
dred per centers. This excludes the Negro, as well as the In-
dian, who is certainly American but is not white. It eliminates
the Jew, who is not a gentile; and the Catholic who is not a
Protestant. And it excludes a white Protestant gentile of Eng-
lish or German birth, who may be everything else but is not
American-born. Obviously, there is no logic in this, for classes
are excluded for exactly opposite reasons. There is nothing in
' it except the one fact which always animates every kind of in-
‘tolerance—the fact o_f_”difi:e,_re_n,ce.
Walter LE-'r_'n.a'Iiflin his “Public Opinion” presents a point
which no discussion of prejudice can ignore-—-1“that the way
we see things is a combination of what is there and of what we
expected to find.” He works out the process of the “mental
stereotype,” by which we have a preconception of the labor agi-
tator, the alien, the Harvard man, and see the individual always
in the light of the group to which we may attribute him. 2‘ ‘ One
factor, the insertion between man and his environment of a
pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment his behavior
is a response.” 3“The pictures inside people’s heads do not
automatically correspond with the world outside.”
‘ On some natures, stimuli from the outside, especially when they are
printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of stereotypes, so
that the actual sensation and the preconception occupy consciousness at the
same time. The two are blended, much as if we looked at red through
blue glasses and saw green. . . . If the experience contradicts the
stereotype, one of two things happens. If the man is no longer plastic,
or if some powerful interest makes it highly inconvenient to rearrange his
stereotypes, he pooh-poohs the contradiction as an exception that proves
the rule, discredits the witness, finds a flaw somewhere, and manages to
forget it. But if he still is curious and openminded, the novelty is taken
into the picture and allowed to modify it.
Thus acquaintance of one group with another is not enough in
itself to break down prejudice, for the white man may see the
Negro, or the Christian the Jew, not as the other really is but
as he thinks the other group ought to be. Only escape from
group thinking, the use of the individual intelligence about an
1Lippma.n, p. 115. 2p. 15. 3p. 31. 4p. 99.
50 Anti-Semitism in the United States
individual, can possibly make any difference in our pre-con-
ceived notions of other peoples. ,
Moreover it is true, as Professor Shailer of Harvard pointed
out long ago in his book, “The Neighbor,” that this fact of dif-
ference operates most strongly when the two different groups
come into contact with each other. Prejudice is always strongest
on the frontier. The Nebraskan does not have the active preju-
dice against Mexico that animates the Texan, nor against Japan
that we find in California, nor against the Negro as in the solid
south. Not that Nebraska is a land favored peculiarly by jus-
tice, but that it has no direct contact with large numbers of
these different races. Naturally, this contact often opens the
way to real acquaintance, before which intolerance grows faint
and may even vanish. American soldiers in the occupied dis-
tricts of Germany brought enough German brides to show how
quickly prejudice breaks down on personal acquaintance. Chris-
tian scholars of the time of Humanism learned Hebrew from
-Jews whom their medieval predecessors would have avoided as
the plague, and a new respect for Judaism began to spread. But
as long as the contact of the two peoples is a frontier contact
only, a group contact, of class with class, directed by their dif-
ferent status in the world, such contact merely ministers to the '
intolerance which individual knowledge and friendship would
break down.
A striking instance of this group nature of intolerance oc-
curred within my own observation on the Western front dur-
ing the World War. In an attack one of our prisoners was a
German lad of eighteen, a harmless peasant boy who had de-
serted his machine gun and come in willingly as a prisoner; we
made him useful about the first aid post, and he carried water,
swept out the place, and even wrapped up German helmets to
send to America as souvenirs. But Hans had been a machine
gunner; if our soldiers had found him at his post they might
have shot him on sight. If they had found him with other
troops, they would have disarmed him, driven him back to the
prison camp. In the first case, he would have belonged to the
group of machine gunners, the greatest danger to the American
advance. In the second, he would have belonged to the group
Anti-Semitism in the United States 51
of German soldiers, and been fair prey for enmity and cap-
ture. As it was, he was regarded merely as Hans-—and the
hated German machine gunner acted as servant to the friendly
American bosses.
If these general principles of intolerance are true, we can
apply them at once to the peculiar situation of the J ew——every-
where at home, yet everywhere the creature of prejudice; not so
very different from the other white nations among whom he
lives, yet always distinct from them and always the target of in-
tolerance. Every movement of bigotry, aristocracy, militarism,
junkerism in every land makes anti-semitism one of its cardinal
shouting-cries, from the emigrés of Russia to the royalist anti-
Dreyfusards of France. The Jew Wha¢te_dmevery_where simply
it because he lives everywhere,'aii'd~i*sM everywhere a little different
‘Lfrom other people. The Jew has a distinct religion, a peculiar
tradition and appearance which can sometimes be distinguished
-—-he is difierent from other people. And the extreme bitter-
ness of this anti-Semitism, more than of any other anti-party
the world over, is simply because everywhere the Jew lives on a
frontier, in direct group contact with the intolerant of other
peoples} Every Jew lives on a Franco-German frontier, or a
Mexicari-American one. Even in the United States of Amer-
ica, with its proud tradition of tolerance written into the Fed-
Leral Constitution, there is now a movement of anti-Semitism.
The most obvious condition of its rise is the increase of the Jew-
ish community of America, that is, the extension of the frontier
line, the contact of more Americans with this “alien,” which
means different, people. Add to that the hatred of certain
foreign groups aroused during the war, the suspicion of certain
radical groups directly after it, the general unsettled condition
of world opinion, and the vast increase of European anti-
Semitism as the parties of reaction were thrown on the defensive
—-and the exact form of American anti-Semitism begins to show
itself.\
But all these local details do not obscure the real nature of
this prejudice which we face in America today. It is just an-
other form of the intolerance of everything difierent which
the wandering exiles have had to face during their two thousand
52 Anti-Semitism the United States
years of homeless persecution. Of course, all this has had its
effect on the Jew. Iillas driven the J_'61j,Y_uI:l_l.1_l‘)_(_)”_ml“l1130l8r3.IlC€‘_l~1l*l1lS
turn. His intolerance '1‘iéis“ never expressed itséii"ifi"iéim's of
persecution or violence, very seldom in terms of hatred. The
intolerance of the Jew became, in self-defense, a pride in the
Chosen People of God, in his ancient lineage, in his family
loyalty, in his glorious tradition. He then emphasized the fact
of difierence from other peoples, just as they did, and the Jew
looked down on the rude, ignorant heathens just as the Christian
despised the uncouth alien Jew. Intolerance has one virtue—
/it makes for loyalty to your own. It has many vices, beginning
with false and ignorant pride, culminating in bitter, malignant
hatred.
\ 4
If intolerance is this natural, universal force, what then is
tolerance? How can tolerance ever hope to succeed in a world
divided into so many hostile and suspicious groups? Tolerance
means the exercise of the individual intelligence. It means that
a man has dared to look at the facts and to say: “My people is
wrong. This foreigner is just as good as I am.” Or this Jew,
or Catholic, or negro, as the case may be. It means that a man
has the courage to defy the public opinion of his own group,
and to use his own brains instead of going along with the crowd.
It means that general principles of right and wrong, applicable
universally, have begun to replace the old tribal morality, of
sticking by your own through thick and thin. It represents the
growth of free inquiry, of science, of theunbiased use of the
human intellect, the broadening of the human sympathies. It
represents also the breaking down of group control, that instant
and unthinking emotional response of the crowd to that which
is congenial or against that which is difierent. Tolerance is the
typical virtue of the modern world because the modern world
is becoming increasingly self-conscious, intelligent and individ-
ualistic, and especially because the modern world is beginning
to afford opportunities for real acquaintance between members
of different peoples, not merely the superficial frontier contacts
which make for prejudice. Above all, tolerance marks the
Anti-Semitism in the United States 53
growth of the larger, more inclusive group which includes the
smaller ones, and outlaws intolerance between them. In the
American army during the ‘World War intolerance was at its
lowest, simply because all the various elements in our people
were acutely conscious of their common country. Old-time prej-
udices, left over from the Civil VVar, were forgotten. Religious
and racial intolerance were minimized because there was a com-
mon purpose, and a common intolerance of a common enemy.
The coming of tolerance between any two groups, then, means
that these two have been included, in the minds of their own
members, as parts of a larger, more inclusive body to which
they both owe loyalty. Such a tolerance between the nations
of the world, now so ready to make war at the slightest provoca-
tion, would imply an international or a supernational loyalty, a
genuine brotherhood of man, and a real fatherhood of God.
Tolerance means that intelligence has made inroads into the old
habit of following the group custom blindly through thick and
thin. It means that sympathy has succeeded hatred, that suspi-
cion has given way to bro_tgarhood and love. Tolerance is the
supreme challenge to the authority of the group to master the
thinking man. Treachery to one ’s own nation or faith is no such
challenge, for that simply means that the traitor preferred
another rule and another standard to the one in which he was
born. But tolerance is the challenge; it serves notice that no
absolute authority, no ancient usage of hatred or bigotry, no
instinct to fear the stranger, can forever dominate.
There is a fine summary of this whole question in “The Group
Mind” by Professor William MacDougall of Harvard. Dr.
MacDougall says of the modern world: 5
Instead of maintaining universal intolerance, we have made great strides
toward universal tolerance. . . . The religious tolerance and liberty of the
modern era are features of the general increase of tolerance and liberty,
and must be ascribed to the same causes as this wider fact. For long ages
men have felt sympathy and given considerate and just treatment to those
who have been nearest to them; at first, to the members of their own
immediate family; later to the fellow-members of their own small society;
and then, as societies expanded into complex caste societies, to the members
5 Chapter 20.
54 Anti-Semitism in the United States
of their own caste; later, as castes were broken down, to all their fellow
citizens; and later still in some degree to all men.
And he concludes the examination of the subject by saying:
The coming of religious toleration was due to the application of the spirit
of inquiry to religious systems; these inquiries produced irreconcilable-
sects, whose strife prepared the way for compromise and toleration.
5.
One more question arises naturally in our minds before we
can accept this analysis and use it as part of our daily think-
ing and acting; what is the effect of such toleration on our own
loyalty to our own peo”pIe?“"Does"t‘lie" philanthropist neglect his
family, "of the man without strong religious hatreds prove care-
less of his religion, or the lover of mankind prove a poor patriot?
This is the usual opinion, and therefore a very efiective
argument against the position which I have here tried to es-
tablish. But this opinion is directly contrary to the facts of
the case. Does family affection make for or against love of
country? Naturally, the former, for loyal children are also
loyal citizens. Should the man who would love his country on
that account hate his city or his state? Of course not; love of
his native land begins with the smaller unit, which he knows
best, and then grows to the entire nation, which includes it.
And in the same waylpyalty to the p_&_Luse,n£_h11manity_need not
mgan, cannot mean disloy__aj_ty t9,_t_h__e_,cagus_e__of the__nation, which
is so great and im qrtant a pagt of the hu_mag _race,_,,But, on
the other hand, the patriotic American does not hate Illinois be-
cause he has moved to Indiana. Love of one’s own state per-
sists without the hatred and intolerance of the other state, just
because the two are members of the American nation, and the-
inclusive loyalty makes the other loyalties less bitter and less
contentious against each other. Why, in the Balkans, states
much smaller than Indiana and Illinois have their armies al-
ways ready for a cause of complaint against the other. That is
because they have as yet no common loyalty. It is because the
free intelligence has not yet broken through the inborn suspi-
cion and intolerance of the human pack. Probably we can never-
expect all human beings actually and actively to love one an-
Anti-Semitism in the United States 55 ‘
I
other. That seems illusory in light of the history of human
nature. But there is every prospect that tolerance will spread
as world intelligence becomes more enlightened, and as more
people in each generation share in that world intelligence. And
this spread of tolerance will make always for larger and more
ideal loyalties, including the warring nations and hating sects
of today, even as nowadays the city includes the family or the
nation includes the state. Hatred toward the Jew takes its place
-today in the hierarchy of hatreds as one of the strongest and
most widespread of all. Therefore it will probably be one of
the last to go as tolerance overcomes intolerance the world over.
But) vary step toward the discovery of new truths or toward the
dissemtiriation of the truths already known is another step to-
ward the destruction of all prejudice and toward the real libe-
ration of the Jew. Naturally, the Jew himself will overcome his
prejudices at the same time, as he has shown himself pathetically-
eager to do at several times of false security in the past.
The great hopeful fact of it all is this: tolerance begets tol-
erance. That hatred causes hatred is well known, for it is the
"normal course of every personal conflict or national war. Each
unfriendly act of one side is followed by one of the other, until
nations enter warfare all ready to hate one another, and leave
it hating more than ever. But friendship, fairness, tolerance,
have the same way of spreading by their own inner force. If
America discriminates against Japanese immigrants, the Japa-
nese think of ways to show their dislike of America. But if
America gives back the Boxer indemnity to China, the Chinese
send their students to America, then these return to their native
land with an attitude of friendliness, and the process of tolerance
and peace, once begun, grows by its own power. Lines of tol-
erance radiate from every true center of justice, of inquiry, of
religion. Human growth is slow, but we can mark its methods
and take part in its tremendous process.
CHAPTER IV.
AMERICAN HISTORY-
A DEVELOPMENT OF GROUPS
All history may reasonably be regarded as a process of group
minds in conflict and association, struggle and integration.
Probably this method of study will bring out more genuine
facts and a more fundamental order of causation than political
or military or economic history alone; at the least, it presents
one significant and important mode of studying human associ-
ation in both the past and present. From this point of view,
Greece was a congeries of competitive city states, which united
only against an outside foe; Israel was the union of twelve dif-
ferent tribes, together with the Canaanites whom they subdued;
Rome was a product of the various organizations, the patricians
and plebeians; England the growth into each other of the suc-
cessive waves of conquest—Celts, Romans, Saxons, Normans——
and the more recent peaceful immigrants. From this point of
view, the United States is conspicuous among all nations for the
number and variety of its groups and for their union (on the
whole) by a federal principle of agreement, rather than a forci-
ble levelling and unification from without. And this process of
group synthesis is not a modern one only, as it is sometimes er-
roneously considered; it is characteristic of the piece-meal, hap-
hazard colonization from the very outset; it pervaded the Revo-
lutionary army, and was the outstanding fact that confronted
the framers of the Federal Constitution in 1787.
1.
E. B. Greene sums up the reasons for adopting the Constitu-
tion in this way:
1The movement for a more effective union was partly the work of far-
sighted leaders who could look beyond state boundaries to the larger inter-
1 Greene: Foundations of American Nationality, p. 579.
56
Anti-Semitism in the United States 57
ests of the country as a whole . . . another group were beginning to see
that the weakness of Congress might have something to do with troubles
nearer home.
Thus the causes of the Federal union were the need of external
defense and the need of reconciling the many diverse groups in
the population of the new nation. These groups are summarized
by Carl R. Fish:
2 There were thirteen distinct and separate state governments, and Ver-
mont had its own local authority which defied the rest. . . . Diiferences
in the original stock, emphasized by difierent physical conditions and by
the isolated life of the colonial period, had created several great sections or
divisions in the country, which had sufiicient similarity within themselves
and sufficient unlikeness to each other, to make them permanent entities,
and to cause sectionalism to be a permanent factor in American history.
He then goes on to enumerate the groups: New England, with
its Puritan English ancestry and its agriculture and fishing;
the South, with its English Episcopalians, its aristocratic ideals,
its plantation life; the piedmont country, with its independent
small farmers and self-governing townships; and in between the
commercial valleys of the Hudson, the Delaware and the Sus-
quehanna. These again had their local differences of charac-
ter:
8The Hudson had been settled by the Dutch, although many English,
New Englanders, Germans and others had mixed with them. The Delaware
region was largely occupied by English and German Quakers. The Susque-
hanna Valley contained a large proportion of Germans, still using their
native tongue, and also many Scotch, Irish and English. There existed
well defined interests, the mercantile, the agricultural; the German, the
Dutch and the Quakers; the city, the country.
Beyond all these was the frontier, with its own natural condi-
tions, type of inhabitants, and economic problems, a democratic
community separate from all the rest.
The Constitutional convention of 1787 in Philadelphia was
typical of this situation. Every problem found divergent inter-
ests and opinions; every solution was effected by compromise.
‘*There was state jealousy of all central authority; the opposi-
2Fish: The Development of American Nationality, p. 2-15.
8Fish, p. 10.
4 Greene, pp. 590-598.
58 Anti-Semitism in the United States
tion between large and small states; that between the industries
of the north and the agriculture of the south; the slave trade,
with its complex of moral and economic problems; the section-
alism of the settled east and the frontier west; the protection of
the property-holding class and the satisfaction of the radicals
with their demand for liberty and equality. Every one of these
conflicts had to be settled if possible, or at least (as with slavery)
brought to a temporary status to avoid sharp struggle. There
were, of course, certain unifying factors. The majority of the
settlers were English, and most of these Protestants. The non-
English speaking elements were very largely of Teutonic blood
and Protestant religion also. There was a common political ex-
perience, and a democratic urge typical of the frontier. Most
important of all, there was an eight-year war fought together
against a common enemy and under the same Commander-in-
Chief. The American government, then, with its new Consti-
tution, was not a simple unity from the outset. It was rather
a highly complex unity, containing within itself many minor
groups, many different viewpoints, and many integrations of
the sub-group for the benefit of the nation as a whole.
2.
An interesting illustration of this, and for our purpose a
crucial one, is in the religious life of the thirteen original states.
Before the Revolution, the states might be divided into four
groups as regards their religious organization: there were con-
gregational establishments in Massachusetts and Plymouth,
New Haven, Connecticut, and New Hampshire; Church of Eng-
land establishments in Virginia and the two Carolinas; four
states formerly under various régimes had had the Church of
England forced on them—Maryland,- at first under Catholic
rule, but with freedom of residence for all Christians; New York
and New Jersey, which had been dominated by the Dutch Re-
formed Church; and Georgia, founded with almost complete
religious liberty. Only three states had no established church-
Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and its ofishoot, Delaware. Of
these last, Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams in
1636. under the radical,, not to say revolutionary principle of
Anti-Semitism in the United States 59
complete separation of church and state, with right of residence
and citizenship for all persons, even including Jews and atheists.
Pennsylvania, chartered in 1681, was founded by William Penn,
the Quaker, with liberty of residence for all “believers in Al-
mighty God”; but the English government insisted on the con-
dition that all voters and office holders “shall be such as profess
faith in Jesus Christ” and the Protestant religion. What the
new nation had, then, was not religious liberty, but rather a
clash of many different points of view.
5 Massachusetts set up its theocratic state with its chief interest in the
Church; Virginia established its civil state, with the church as a subject
member; while Rhode Island boldly denied the purposes and premises of
both, placing an impassable gulf between the State and the Church and
relegating to the individual conscience and to voluntary association all
concern and action touching the Church and religious matters.
What, then, should be the upshot of this confusion of religious
groups, with their ancient hatreds and prejudices, ingrown with
history and overlaid with former strife and martyrdom? It was
obviously impossible to make the United States Calvinist or
Episcopal; it was necessary to have some sacrifice of each for
the good of all. But it might have been possible to make the
nation Protestant Christian, as was actually the case with the
state of New Hampshire until 1877. Various minor causes here
entered in. Warfare with England meant some opposition, at
least, to the Church of England. The distance from the actual
seat of old-world struggles, the character of the colonists and
their longing for every type of freedom, helped much. The new
theories of the French Encyclopedists, as adopted by J eiferson,
certainly had great influence. But most important of all was
the existence of the many minor sects, with the few important
ones, of which all longed to rule but none wished to be dominated
by any other.
The upshot was religious freedom, the separation of church
and state, according to Article VI, Section 3, of the Federal
Constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a
qualification to any office or public trust under the United
5 Cobb: Rise of Religious Liberty in America, p. 70.
60 Anti-Semitism in the United States
States.” This clause was opposed on both sides—by Massachu-
setts as being too liberal, by Virginia and Rhode Island as not
liberal enough. Virginia had two years before this overthrown
her state church and given complete freedom of conscience-
not toleration-—to all her people. The opposition even to tolera-
tion was becoming crystallized in the words of Thomas Paine:
“ Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance, but the counterfeit
of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right
of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.”
So the first amendment to the Constitution, adopted immediately
afterward by motion of the first Congress, and by the required
two-thirds of the states, was: “Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof.”
This was tremendously significant of the growing and newly
conscious group mind of the United States of America. It was
equally important for the future of the nation and its unity
in days to come. Religious liberty was not a matter of doctrine
in its inception; it was the product of the birth and development
of the group mind of the nation. It meant the relinquishment
of the racial habits, of the state laws, of the old urge to persecute
(common to almost every group, even those who were themselves
refugees from persecution), and the adoption of a national
standard to which every state, every church and every sect
should bring its sacrifice. And if this sacrifice was not of their
own right to live, but only of the right to make others miserable,
it was nevertheless the sacrifice of something so important that
the demand had convulsed France, Germany and England not
many years before. Religious liberty, indeed, however firmly
based on law and political ideals, never became the habit of
thought and action which intolerance had been. A recurrent
phenomenon of American life has been the breaking up into
religious, racial and sectional groups, with a further synthesis
of Americanization, through some common interest to unite
them. The conflict among the many groups prior to the adop-
tion of the Constitution, and its solution in that document with
its Bill of Rights, has been paralleled at least four times from
that period to the present day.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 61
3.
These four reactions against the immigrant correspond with
the four peaks of the curve of immigration into the United
States, with two great alterations in the process, corresponding
to the Civil War and the World \Var.
Up till 1830, immigration into the United States was small
in amount and fairly regular. The first wave stretched from
1831 to 1861, reaching its peak in 1855; its total amounted to
four millions of foreigners, of whom the largest group and the
first to come were the Irish, the second in number and date
of arrival the Germans. The growth of intolerance against these
newcomers was shown in the movement known as Know-Nothing-
ism or the American Party. The second wave, of similar nation-
alities, was from 1862 to 1877 ; the reply to this appeared in the
anti-alien planks in the political platforms of 1876. The third
wave, from 1878 to 1897, was larger than these earlier ones; it
included many Scandinavians and, after 1882, growing numbers
of Italians, Russians, and Austro-Hungarians, the two last being
composed in part of persecuted Jews, in part of impoverished
peasants. The Nativist reaction against this immigrant trend
appears rather in the form of religious opposition, for the
American Protective Association of those days was predomin-
antly anti-Catholic. The fourth wave began in 1898 and ex-
tended until 1914, when the outbreak of the World War in
Europe caused a sudden drop to almost nothing; in its highest
years, 1907 and 1913, more than 1,200,000 entered our ports an-
nually; and the greatest number of these new arrivals came
from Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia. The reaction against
these new immigrants was under way, but the war interrupted
its progress, and the Ku Klux Klan arrived at its full power
only after the war, when new conditions swayed the group mind
of America.
In each of these cases, the height of the movement against the
immigrant came just after the peak of the wave of immigration,
at the time when it had had time to impress itself on the native-
born. The philosophies of these four movements varied accord-
ing to the nationality of the immigrants against whom the
62 Anti-Semitism in the United States
natives were protesting, and according to the general philosophy
of life in vogue at the time. The first such movement, the Know-
Nothing or American Party, originated in New York State in
1852 “as a secret organization with passwords, oath, grip and
ritual.”6 Its creed was summed up in two words: Americanism
and Protestantism. Its special target was the two million Irish
who had come into the country; they were poor laborers, with
a low standard of living, ignorant, hereditary enemies of Eng-
land, and Catholics into the bargain. No wonder there were
anti-Irish riots in New York, Philadelphia and Boston; that
it was rumored the Pope would soon be dictator of America;
or that the secret anti-alien society was begun. But the course
of the movement was spectacular and brief. It entered national
politics, thus both making bitter enemies for itself and taking
0d the secrecy which was its chief source of power. Then came
the abolitionist movement, and the American party was split
into northern and southern branches. Most important of all,
the peak of immigration was passed, the Irish adopted the
American standard of living, became a part of communal life,
without any danger of Catholic overthrow of our cherished insti-
tutions—Othello’s occupation was gone, and the Know-Nothing
party disappeared.
The next wave of immigration and the next reaction against
it were minor ones. The immigrants met groups of their own
origin already absorbed into the common life of America, and
fitted in with little difficulty. The attempt in 1876 to prevent
the use of public funds for sectarian schools was itself com-
paratively slight.
But in between came the tremendous crisis of the Civil War.
Here the opposition was not between native and immigrant,
but between north.and south, an industrial society of free labor-
ers against an agricultural society of castes,—planters, poor
whites, and negro slaves. I shall not go further into this con-
flict, because it is too familiar and has comparatively little to
do with the particular application of my viewpoint. But, from
our point of view, it is important to see the place of the first
' Mecklin: The Ku Klux Klan, p. 183.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 63
Ku Klux Klan of 1865-71. This was again a secret organization,
adding the feature of disguise, for the terrifying efiect on the
negroes whom it was the object of the Klan to overawe. The
Klan was a partisan and sectional organization, of Southern
white men of Confederate sympathies, to maintain their group
supremacy over the newly freed negroes and the “carpet
baggers” from the North. The victors had, as usual, indulged
in oppression over the losers, and the grievance was a very real
one. The Klan was partially successful in its object, but at once
fell into numerous abuses, was used by partisans to vent personal
grudges, fell into the hands of a lawless element, and was
formally disbanded in 1871 by General Nathan B. Forrest, its
national commander or Grand Wizard. Its slogan of “white
supremacy” shows its animus against the negroes and the North,
not against the alien. Some of its partisans claim that the Klan
did not disband when it was formally ordered so to do, but
persisted in its underground activity until as late as 1877.7
However that may be, its character and purpose are very clear;
it was sectional, timely, and for the one aim of white supremacy.
It appealed to its members and frightened its enemies by its
methods of disguise and secrecy, no less than by the beatings,
burnings and other outrages which were carried on either under
its auspices or by the false use of its insignia and methods. Its
defiance of the law imposed by force, and its use of force in
reply, are the vestiges of war psychology. It was the legitimate,
if unlovely, ofispring of the Reconstruction. It had no function
left when the white South regained control of the states, but
its memory still lingers as part of the idealization of the “lost
cause” of the Confederacy.
The third reaction against immigration was primarily anti-
Catholic in trend. This was the A. P. A., or American Protec-
tive Association, another secret society, organized in 1887, which
reached its greatest popularity in 1894 and 1895. At this same
period there were several other societies with the same purpose,
notably the National League for the Protection of American In-
stitutions, which had a number of extremely prominent men
" Susan L. Davis: Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan.
64 Anti-Semitism in the United States
among its members. At this time the so-called “new immigra-
tion” was growing strong, with its large numbers of Italian and
Austrian Catholics, added to those of German and Irish origin
already on the ground. The old fear of political domination
by the Papacy, expressed at the time of the adoption of the first
amendment to the Constitution, and then refuted, was again
revived. There was an orgy of purported “confessions” of
nuns and priests; there was circulated a forged oath of the
Knights of Columbus, in which the members agreed to place the
papal authority above their national allegiance; and a false
encyclical of Pope Leo XIII. Thousands of patriotic Americans
believed all this obvious nonsense, stirred up by the fear of a
dominant Church; the A. P. A. had as many as two million
members and threatened to drive out of public life the twelve
million Catholics then in the country, without regard to their
race, nation, service to America, or the number of generations
they had lived in the United States. The mob spirit, once
aroused, crystalized in the breaking of the Northern group mind
of Civil War days into various sub-groups, Catholic, anti-Catho-
lic and indifferent. But the financial panic of the 1890’s re-
sulted in a sudden drop in immigration; the older settlers
learned English and were absorbed into the American cultural
group; the A. P. A. had no reason for existence, and again
substantial unity was achieved by the mind of the American
people. ‘
In this connection we must give a passing glance to what is
still our single greatest problem of groups, the existence of a ten
per cent. negro minority in the United States. These people
were brought here by force as slaves; as a subject class they
were refused education, though at the same time their own
language, religion and customs were thrown into disrepute and
have been largely forgotten. Though freed from economic
slavery, they are still politically a subject class in our southern
states, while in northern and border states they are gaining a
political balance of power. Finally, they rest everywhere under
social disabilities, from the “Jim Crow” cars of the South to
the subtler distaste and ostracisms of the North. The result is
that they are forming complete, self-contained Negro com-
Anti-Semitism in the United States 65
munities within the larger cities of the North and South alike;
that they are growing increasingly self-conscious as a group;
and that the large number of mulattoes, who in the British and
French West Indies would rank as a third group, between the
racial divisions, are here forced to make common cause with
negroes. The negroes are thus a self-conscious group, though
their culture is imitative. The grouping of the negroes apart is
easy, on the whole, because of the gross external signs, such as
skin color and texture of hair, so that the mass of the whites of
the United States regard them definitely as a difierent and a
lower race. That anthropologists are not so certain of all this
makes little difference, because the group mind is based rather
on old habits of thought than on the understanding of new and
difficult facts. Here seems a problem of 'a different order, then,
than the racial and religious groupings of the sub-varieties of
the white race, which are constantly being overcome and re-
grouped in a larger union of social life. In this study it will
be impossible to do more than point out the existence of this
distinct problem, with its similar mental background to the rest
but its immeasurably more terrible implications.
The fourth wave of immigration was by far the greatest in
number of newcomers, and by far the most variegated in racial
and national composition. It brought a million a year or more
for six years during this period. And its members had 75%
of persons from southern and eastern Europe, while the immigra-
tion prior to 1890 had included only 20% of these races, and
had been chiefly the English, Irish, Germans and Scandinavians.
It is no wonder that the race theory began to be popular in
America, under the spectacular leadership of Lothrop Stoddard
and Grant Madison, and that many began to agitate for a
greater or less limitation of the flood of immigration. Even so
sober a student of society as Professor Edward A. Ross of
\Visconsin held that it was wise to assimilate people of different
group mind more slowly than we were doing at the time. He
said:
8 There have come among us in the last half century more than twenty
million European immigrants with all manner of mental background, many
8Ross: Overland Monthly, Feb. 1922.
66 Anti-Semitism in the United States
of them having tradition which will no more blend with American traditions
than oil will blend with water.
And he proceeded to point out their inexperience with dem-
ocratic institutions, their lack of respect for law and for
women, their disbelief in progress.‘ In addition, we need only
note that many of these people were Catholics and Jews; the
total number of the former in the United States in 1923 being
estimated at 18,000,000 and of the latter‘ at 3,600,000. And the
Jews were far more conspicuous than their numbers, on account
of their massing in the great cities and their concentration in
certain lines of industry. Thus the ground was fully prepared
for a new anti-alien movement, expressing itself this time in
the form of efforts to restrict immigration. This movement
was under way in 1914, and would probably have followed in
the course of its precursors. But world-shaking events ensued
which altered the course of groups in America as well. The
outbreak of the World War in 1914, the entrance of the United
States into the war in 1917, altered all groups, profoundly
affected the American group mind, and made the relation be-
tween the sub-groups and the mind of America very different
from what it had been. The results of this process are still
evident, and it is among them that we can look for anti-Semitism,
together with many other types of intolerance and group op-
position.
CHAPTER V.
THE WORLD WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH
1.
With the outbreak of the World War in August 1914, the
mind of America suddenly became strikingly distinct from that
of Europe. They were fighting; we were watching. President
Wilson appealed to the United States to be “neutral in fact as
in name . . . . impartial in thought as well as in action.” The
older American stock sympathized, on the whole, with England,
except for the Irish and Germans; the newer immigrants had‘
different racial and national affinities and memories, some hold-
ing allegiance to their former governments, some, like the op-
pressed Russian Jews, being especially bitter against their
former rulers. In this situation, American neutrality was the
,result, not of indifference, but of lack of understanding on the
part of many groups in our population and of a stalemate be-
tween the rest.
One definite result certainly was that all these diverse groups
of new and old immigrants began to feel themselves a unity, an
American people, They felt their distinction from the warring
nations overseas, their own interest, their own reaction to the
complex problems at issue. Meanwhile, however, both parties
were trying every means to bring the United States into the war
on their own sides. Germany tried to bring about an embargo on
munitions sold to the Allies and in default of that, to obstruct
their shipment by both peaceful and warlike means. Great
Britain, more especially, tried to influence American public
opinion in favor of the Allies and against Germany. Within,
there were pacifists and advocates of preparedness, both trying
to mold opinion. This formation of an American mind, and the
difficulty of determining its future direction, came to a head in
the election of 1916, when the German-Americans opposed Presi-
dent \Vilson, and when Hughes was supported by Roosevelt, the
arch-interventionist. During this period we experienced the
67
68 Anti-Seinitisin in the United States
first development of what we have since grown to know inti-
mately as “propaganda,” a deliberate, elaborate technique for
influencing the mind of the group.
The declaration of war by the United States in April, 1917,
unified the American mind in a manner and to a degree that
were almost inconceivable. Every immigrant group began to
pass resolutions favoring the government; the foreign language
newspapers commenced an intensive propaganda for the prosecu-
tion of the war. Volunteers came from every section of the
country and every type of origin, as many from the children of
Germans as from any other group. The draft law was passed
with apparent general approval; and its enforcement met with
surprisingly little difficulty. Huge loans were made to the
Allied governments. Tremendous bond issues were raised by
the American government, with general approval and the coer-
cion of any minority objectors. The National Council of De-
fense, founded in August, 1916, was able in many cases to over-
come the dominant profit-motive of our society in gaining self-
sacrificing patriotism of manufacturers and merchants.
Along with this voluntary and spontaneous unification of the
group mind, came repression and coercion directed to forcing
into agreement any unabsorbed minority groups. The Com-
mittee on Public Information was founded in September, 1917 ,
to exert propaganda through the sources of public information,
to send out favorable news and opinion, and even through censor-
ship to suppress material considered dangerous to the general
cause. The censorship exercised by the military forces. on war
bulletins, war correspondents and the personal letters of soldiers,
was applied less strictly to the general population. The secret
service, greatly expanded to cope with German spies, began
hunting out strikers, radicals or any others who-—in the minds
of the detectives or of any other government officials——might
possibly obstruct the war efforts. Emergency acts gave the
President unusual power in these and other directions.
This use of force was characteristic, not only of the govern-
ment, but of local groups as well. In one place a German
sympathizer (real or supposed) might be made to kiss the flag;
in another a strike leader might be lynched. In Milwaukee,
Anti-Semitism in the United States 69
where public opinion was sensitive on account of the large
number of German-Americans, a quota of Liberty Bonds was
assigned arbitrarily to every person, and he was practically
forced to purchase them, irrespective of his ability to do so, by
threats of ostracism, by influence of his creditors, by every sort
of social pressure,——in order that Milwaukee might rank as a
real American community and go “over the top” in every
“ drive.’ ’ The military language applied to these campaigns was
matched by a growing technique of organization. Professional
propagandists perfected a method of meetings, songs, card-cata-
logs, and quotas, by which any cause might be assured of huge
sums of money. The greater propaganda of our government
and foreign governments was matched by the little propaganda
of every subgroup, as long as this was not in conflict with the
general purpose.
A striking illustration of this is in the successful drives of
the various war-work agencies, the Red Cross, American Library
Association, Young Men ’s Christian Association, Jewish Welfare
Board, Knights of Columbus, and the rest; and especially in
their enormous joint campaign just after the signing of the
armistice. Every American felt that this joint campaign, first,
would help the soldiers and the common cause; and second, in-
dicated by its inclusiveness the complete unification of America. -
Along with this general unification came the similar process in
many of the immigrant groups themselves. Professor Miller 1
tells how this was reflected in the Czecho-Slovak group in Amer-
ica, so that bitter atheists united with Catholic priests on joint
committees for national freedom in their old home in Europe.
2.
This internal unification was accomplished by a high emotional
tension, a national and personal uncertainty, and a common hate.
The prejudice against the various immigrant groups, arising
as a result of the great wave of immigration, was abated for the
moment; all the little prejudices were summed up in one great
hatred of the common enemy, Germany. This was reflected in
1 Miller: Races, Nations, and Classes, p. 44.
70 Anti-Semitism in the United States
avoidance of everything German in this country as well; Ger-
man instruction was withdrawn from many high schools, German
music from the opera houses, German fried potatoes from the
restaurants. The term, “German-American,” formerly in good
repute, now became a byword, and with it every form of
“hyphen.” The demand now was for “hundred per cent.”
Americanism.
In the prevailing ignorance of foreign languages and peoples,
or even if this ignorance had not existed in its full measure, the
hatred against the Germans was transferred in part to other
groups as well, even those with most reason to be anti-German
or anti-Austrian. Foreign language newspapers fell under
popular suspicion and official censorship much heavier than
that of the English language periodicals. Some states passed
laws, later declared unconstitutional, forbidding teaching,
preaching or public meetings in languages other than English.
Foreign sounding names attracted suspicion, and were changed
in large numbers. Altogether, America begun to repeat the
oppression of subject groups which had caused permanent re-
sentment and sown the seeds of rebellion in almost every land
in Europe, to create her own Ireland, Alsace-Lorraine or Poland.
Americanization became a synonym for compulsory adoption of
American standards and group habits.
Americanization had had a long, if somewhat unsatisfactory,
trial before the war. It was the attempt, at that time, to bring
American culture to the supposedly uncultured immigrant
through settlements, night schools, and other cultural agencies.
The attempt was satisfactory in a comparatively small propor-
tion of the total immigrant population; and the earnest workers
blamed this fact on the poorness of their textbooks, the unsuit-
ability of their buildings, or the weariness of the people after
a day of arduous labor. Now, all of these were undoubtedly
true, but a more fundamental cause of the weakness of Ameri-
canization methods lay in the fact that they were all one-sided ;
they consisted in attempts to change the immigrant into an
American, rather than attempts to join many groups together
into a composite unity. Even the conference on Americaniza-
tion called by the Secretary of the Interior in 1918 passed
Anti-Semitism in the United States 71
friendly and practical resolutions, but still one-sided and con-
sequently superficial.
The few individuals who persisted in their individuality, who
refused to be absorbed in the group purpose, formed no clearly
marked group of themselves. They were the “conscientious
objectors,” who refused any type of activity that might help
the military machine; the “slackers,” who evaded the draft for
selfish reasons; various religious groups, such as the Quakers; a
few economic dissenters, such as the Industrial Workers of the
World. They received, as they must have expected, the violent
disapproval of the group, expressed in terms of mob attack,
legal imprisonment, or at least, extreme social disapproval.
They were the unassimilated residuum of personality in the gen-
eral unification of the American group under the pressure of
an external foe.
3.
Then came the armistice in November, 1918. As Dr. Drach-
sler remarks:
2 The war lasted long enough to make America painfully conscious of her
peculiar problem of nationalism, but was not of long enough duration to
fuse the divergent ethnic elements permanently.
The artificial unity of war-time had no longer a purpose, and
began instantly to dissolve into its component elements. But
the high emotional tone of the war-time remained. Men still
hated violently, but they could no longer release this hatred in
battle or in sending others to battle. The repressive agencies
remained in existence and in excellent running order; groups
had learned how to use propaganda as an instrument; the habit
of group pressure on subgroups and on different and opposing
groups had been strengthened. Most of all, great masses of
Americans had a new group consciousness of America as a
group, with the uniformity of habit, opinion and conduct char-
acteristic of their own subgroup taken as normal for the whole.
The first result, then, was that the original subgroups fell
apart and that their opposition was stronger and more open
2Drachsler: Democracy and Assimilation, p. 29.
72 Anti-Semitism in the United States
than before the war. This was due certainly to the heightened
emotional tone, not only of the American mind, but every group
mind the world over. During the war men and nations lived
habitually under conditions of excitement, uncertainty and ten-
sion. After the war the same emotional tone remained to color
whatever group ideas might become associated with its action.
So the whites who had drafted negroes to fight for them resented
these same negroes coming home with the new pride of soldiers,
remembering new equality of treatment they had received from
the French. The daughters of the rich no longer danced with
the poor, ignorant farm boys as they had in every cantonment.
Prejudice against the uniform returned, and girls of certain
classes would no longer care to be seen with soldiers or sailors; as
they had when those men were expressing the group purpose by
their very garments. And the hatred of the various immigrant
groups for each other—the hatred of the older American groups
against the immigrant, the Catholic and the Jew, returned with
redoubled force. As the present writer found occasion to note
directly after the close of the war:
3During the war we felt that prejudice between men of different groups
and difierent faiths was lessening day by day, that our common enthusiasm
in our common cause had brought Catholics, Protestants and Jews nearer
together on the basis of their ardent Americanism. Especially we who
were at the front felt this in the first flush of our co-operation, our mutual
interest and our mutual helpfulness.
This disappointment was common to many of us who had
allowed our hopes to run beyond our knowledge.
Another cause of this unusual strength of group hatreds was
the very repression of the war period. Individuals and sub-
groups had sacrificed their prejudices for the common purpose,
but they had done so without pleasure and as a sacrifice. Now
they resumed their group intolerance with redoubled zest due
to long repression, whether that had been voluntary or forced.
The “white, gentile, Protestant American” may have resented
fighting on an equality with the negro, or under the orders of a
foreigner—now that resentment had its vent. Never has group
“A Jewish Chaplain in France, p. 214.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 73
feeling run higher in America than in this reaction from the
sudden, violent and partially artificial unity during our partici-
pation in the World War.
One notable result of this sudden relaxation of unity, this
sudden predominance of the subgroups, appeared in the phenom-
ena of displacement. Displacement is a common matter among
paranoiacs, where one object is substituted for another with
the same meaning and the same feeling-tone of resentment or of
pleasure. It is also a common characteristic of mobs, which
may be called for this and other reasons, a sort of social parano-
iacs; the lynching mob will turn from its intended victim to hang
instead a public official or a bystander who objects even mildly
to its program.4 In this way the hatreds of war-time were dis-
placed. The hatred for the German was displaced to the alien
as a whole. The hatred and suspicion of Russia, aroused when
that nation drew out of the war, and intensified when it adopted
the radical economic program of the Bolsheviki and the novel
political rule of the Soviets, was displaced and applied to all
economic radicals, whether Russian or American. Finally, the
Jew was identified as a foreigner (even though he might be
American-born and a veteran of the war) ; and as a radical (even
though he might be an ultra-conservative capitalist). The
ancient, lingering anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism of ages past
appeared again; the Jew was not only a Christ-killer or a boor
or a Semite,——for no accusation was ever entirely dropped—
he was also an alien and a radical, an international banker and
an enemy of gentile civilization.
‘Martin: The Behavior of Crowds.
CHAPTER VI.
THE KU KLUX KLAN
AND OTHER GROUP REACTIONS
The outstanding phenomenon of the post-war period was the
Ku Klux Klan. Other events which accompanied it were the
new laws for the limitation of immigration and the general
suppression of civil liberties of many kinds. The Klan had
something to do with both of these as cause and as efiect. More-
over, all three-—Klan, anti-alien movement, anti-radical move-
ment—were largely anti-Semitic in sentiment; in addition to
which there was a separate movement of anti-Semitism based
on the imported anti-Semitism from Europe. Therefore in any
study of anti-Semitism as a group reaction we must also study
these three group reactions of the post-war period, all of them
partially anti-Semitic, and all of them associated with the same
group-ideas and the same group-will as anti-Semitism itself.
1.
The Ku Klux Klan of the present is not the one of the Recon-
struction period in any sense. It has taken over the name, the
garb and much of the high-sounding ritual. But it has a new
motive and a new psychology. The old Klan was sectional; the
new is national. The old was anti-Northern and anti-negro;
the new is anti-alien, anti-negro, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish.
The old met a certain emergency and was then disbanded by
compulsion of the Federal government and the action of its
own leaders; the new has expanded from the character of a
fraternal society to that of a nation-wide propaganda movement,
has entered politics, and become one of the leading political
issues of the campaign of 1924. In other words, its real ances-
tors are: not the Ku Klux Klan of the south in 1866-71, but
the Know-Nothing Party of the 50’s and the A. P. A. of the 90’s.
The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1915 in Atlanta, Ga., by
William J. Simmons, a former Protestant minister of strong
convictions, intense if narrow intellect, and great interest in
74
Anti-Semitism in the United States 75
the organization and spreading of fraternal orders. For five
years it grew slowly and inconspicuously, during the period of
the war and for two years thereafter; in June 1920 it had about
five thousand members and was in financial straits. At this
juncture it was taken up by Mr. Edward Young Clarke and
Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, who had had experience in the new tech-
nique of propaganda. Under their skilled hands the Klan at
once grew with astounding rapidity; paid organizers entered
state after state, organized “Klaverns, ” and reaped great profits
for themselves and for the heads of the organization. But the
commercial motive, while probably strong in a few persons,
was in no sense important in the actual membership of the Klan
and their acts. “Its official documents indicate that the Klan
originally was a purely fraternal and patriotic organization,
one of the hundreds of similar secret societies throughout the
country.”1 The New York World investigated the Klan in
1921, and a Congressional investigation followed in October of
that year, but both served rather to advertise than to harm the
organization. It spread rapidly throughout the Union, claiming
at one time as many as four million members, elected senators
and governors in a few instances, and in several became the out-
standing issue of state elections, sponsored or was accused of
innumerable acts of mob violence, ranging from warnings to
certain persons to discontinue their bootlegging or immorality,
up to beatings, tar-and-feather parties, and the notorious Mer
Rouge murders of 1922 in Louisiana.
We have already discussed the expansion of propaganda, so
that its enormous utilization by the Klan is quite comprehensible.
But even the constant reiteration of laudable motives and grand-
iloquent phrases about Americanism cannot account for this
sudden rise to power; two other elements must be included—-
group prejudice and secrecy. The Klan capitalized every
prejudice of its group, which was predominantly a small-town
one, of American birth, Protestant religion, and Anglo-Saxon
either in race or in their opinion of their race. And the Klan
met in utter secrecy, did not divulge the names of its members,
1Mecklin: The Ku Klux Klan, p. 20.
76 Anti-Semitism in the United States
paraded the streets in the disguise of robes and masks, and
carried out its deeds of violence in the same awe-inspiring
anonymity.
Clearly, the Klan is typical of the tendencies we have found
in the American mind after the war. It represents a subgroup
revolting against its voluntary sacrifices for the nation during
the war. It represents the anti-alien, anti-Catholic and now
also anti-Jewish sentiment, the reaction against the enormous
wave of immigration just at an end. It includes also the fear and
hatred of the negro, strongest in the old South but spreading
to the North with the northern migration of many negroes dur-
ing and after the war. On the Pacific coast the fear of the
Japanese immigration enters into the complex of hatreds. In
other words, the Klan is the third wave of Nativism. It is the
great reaction of the subgroup to the intense sacrifice for the
nation during the war.
2.
Various other motives are implicated in this general complex.
The South furnished the original soil of the Klan; its second
center was the middle west, the old home of the A. P. A. It was
weakest on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts (except Oregon)
where the various immigrant groups actually live. It was weak
in the heterogeneous masses of the cities with their aliens, Catho-
lies and Jews; strongest in the small town, where men may talk
of the Papal menace without actually knowing many Catholics,
of the Elders of Zion without seeing personally more than one
or two Jews a year. The attitude of Nativism, the reaction to
the immigration of huge masses of foreigners, is still strongest
where these foreigners themselves are not in evidence.
This suggests that other motives must enter in, that something
else in the small-town American must have made the Klan con-
genial. That something else is monotony, standardization (the
“Main Street” attitude), and the appeal of the Klan to these
people lay largely in its glamor of mystery, secrecy and hidden
power. The rise of fraternal orders is one of the note-worthy
movements in American life; there are now over six hundred of
these societies in the United States, of which four hundred
Anti-Semitism in the United States 77
ninety were organized between 1880 and 1895. Over seven per
cent. of our population is affiliated with these orders, and their
greatest strength is precisely in the small town, where they are
a bright spot in the dull social life, and give a factitious im-
portance to their “nobles” and “exalted rulers,” as well as to
the many who are permitted to enter into their secrets and to
parade in their regalia. Professor Mecklin2 classifies -secret
societies in three groups: the beneficial societies, with whom
secrecy is merely protective; the social organizations, devised
to give “variety and interest to our poverty-stricken American
life”; and finally, militant societies with a general program
which affects the entire nation, like the old Ku Klux Klan, the
Mafia, and the Fenians. He concludes that the present Klan,
while undoubtedly furnishing for many of its members the
release from monotony, the sense of power, the revolt against
repression, that is characteristic of the second class of organiza-
tions, has also the characteristics of the third type and is there-
fore a public problem. As he points out elsewhere in his book,
the disguise of the mask is a further danger, as it may be adopted
by members to persecute non-members in nameless ways, and
even presents an opportunity for non-Klansmen to indulge in
violence practically without fear of detection.
Professor Mecklin’s analysis of Klan psychology in Chapter
IV of his book presents several suggestive points. He says:
3 The strength of the Klan lies in that large, well-meaning, but more or
less ignorant and unthinking middle class, whose inflexible loyalty has pre-
served with uncritical fidelity the traditions of the original American stock.
‘Membership in a vast mysterious Empire means a sort of mystic glori-
fication of his petty self.
The Klan insists on like-mindedness, in the sense of adopting the
Anglo-Saxon ideals as the norm for America. Finally,
5 The Klan has literally battened upon the irrational fear psychology
that followed on the heels of the war.
Father John A. Ryan contributes an additional motive,
° There is a particular manifestation of public opinion which deserves
emphasis as a cause of the recent intolerance. This is the conviction which
2The Ku Klux Klan, p. 233. 3idem. p. 103. ‘p. 108. 5p. 122.
6Ryan: A1t., Intolerance, in Pub. Amer. Sociological Society, Vol. XVIII.
78 Anti-Semitisni in the United States
seized large and numerous groups of individuals that they were justified
in becoming extra legal agents for law enforcement. . . . Either the spirit
or the letter of the law is violated in the name of the law itself.
Frank Tannenbaum covers similar points in the first chapter of
“Darker Phases of the South,” where he deals with the Klan.
He holds, first, that
7 The Klan is an attempt to maintain static what has become dynamic.
8 The war left a common mood upon the world . . . the hate is generated
as a means of justifying the thrill to be derived from abusing the people
hated. The Klan is a reaction to boredom; it is a means of fulfilling the
millennial hopes frustrated by the outcome of the war; it gives vent to a
type of war hysteria. 9The idealization of the white women in the South
is partly the unconscious self-protection on the part of the white men from
their own bad habits, notions, beliefs, attitudes and practises, a matter of
over-compensation.
To his keen psychoanalytic study I must add a few words from
an article by Frank Bohn in the American Journal of Sociology.
1° Mr. Bohn points out that the Klan, once organized, had to
find something to do, that its violence was a natural outcome of
disguise, organization and aimlessness. He attributes its origin
chiefly to the disillusionment of the American people over the
break-down of their simple, democratic ideals when applied to a
huge nation of complex population; and to the changing char-
acter of the racial and social composition of the people, with
the revolt of the older stocks. He concludes:
The civilization of the United States is suffering rapid changes, not only
as regards its basic institutions, but also in the nature and quality of its
human composition. The hooded figures of the Ku Klux Klan are an
expression of pain, of sorrow and of solemn warning. Its methods arise
from anger and fear, not from knowledge and forethought.
3.
A word may be needed especially on our narrower topic, the
relation of the Ku Klux Klan to the Jew. Its preliminary ques-
tions to the candidate for “naturalization” include two that ex-
clude the Catholic, two the Jew, one the alien and one the negro.
7Tannenbaum: Darker Phases of the South, p. 20. 8p. 15. 9p. 33.
1° Bohn: American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1925, pp. 385-407.
. 0
v 90
4 ,‘
Anti-Semitism in the United States 79
The most inclusive is number 2: “Are you a native born, white,
Gentile American citizen?” Number 4 is: “Do you believe
in the tenets of the Christian religion?” Imperial Wizard H.
VV. Evans gave out an interview in Indianapolis early in 1924
when he made the following statement, repeated several time
later in other connections:
By deliberate election he (the Jew) is unassimilable. He rejects inter-
marriage. His religious and social rites and customs are inflexibly segre-
gative. Law-abiding, healthy, moral, mentally alert, energetic, loyal and
reverent in his home life, the Jew is yet by primal instinct a Jew, indelibly
marked by persecution, with no deep national attachment, a stranger to the
emotion of patriotism as the Anglo-Saxon feels it. Klansmen have no
quarrel with him, no hatred of him, no thought of persecuting him. As
Protestants are unavailable for membership in all-Jewish societies, so Jews
are unavailable for membership in an all-Protestant society like the Klan.
Moreover, their jealously guarded separatism unfits them for co-operation
in a movement dedicated to the thorough unification of the dominant strains
in American life.
Here are the same themes of racial superiority, like-minded-
ness of America, identification of Americanism and Protestant-
ism. But elsewhere we meet with direct attacks on the Jew, as
on the Catholic, negro and foreigner—not merely the assertion
of their inferiority. Speaking at Dallas, Texas, December 7, 1922,
Mr. Evans said:
The Jew produces nothing anywhere on the face of the earth. He does
not till the soil. He does not create or mariufacture anything for common
use. He adds nothing to the sum of human welfare. Everywhere he stands
between the producer and the consumer and sweats the toil of the one and
the necessity of the other for his gains.
This sounds like an economic motive, but it may be merely
repetition of stock charges of traditional anti-Semitism. Mr.
Bohn hints at such an economic purpose when he remarks:
One factor has been the recent invasion of the smaller western and
southern towns by Jewish retail merchants. These are disliked and opposed
by their native American competitors for purely commercial reasons.
These facts seem to me erroneous; there have always been Jewish
merchants and peddlers throughout the country, and they have
always had Christian competitors; probably they have merely
80 Anti-Semitism in the United States
been a point of vantage for the aroused prejudices of the group.
Dr. Mecklin says:
1‘ The Klan insists, in the published statements of its ideals, upon com-
plete religious toleration while in actual practise it encourages boycotts of
Catholic and Jew in business and social relations. 12 The eternal quarrel of
the Klan with the Jew and the Negro is that mental and physical difier-
ences seem to have conspired to place them in groups entirely to themselves.
. The Negro is granted a place in American society only upon his
willingness to accept a subordinate position. The Jew is tolerated largely
because native Americanism cannot help itself. The Jew is disliked because
of the amazing tenacity with which he resists absolute Americanization,
a dislike that is not unmingled with fear; the Negro is disliked, because
he is considered essentially an alien and unassimilable element in society.
4.
The Klan has now passed the zenith of its aggressiveness and
its influence. The campaign of exposure, while it made thou-
sands of members, also made thousands of enemies and robbed
the Klan of the secrecy which was so essential an element of its
strength. Many of its members lost interest, others were posi-
tively estranged by certain methods and ideals of the organiza-
tion. The trials for murder at Mer Rouge, La., brought the
Klan into bad odor generally. Most important of all, the Klan
went into politics, and in this followed exactly the cycle of the
Know-Nothings and A. P. A. ’s—-secrecy, growth, propaganda,
politics, enemies, decline. In 1924 the Klan was an element in
the national conventions of the two major parties. The Repub-
licans considered planks opposing and favoring the organization
and finally took no action. The Democrats had to take up the
issue because of the movement to nominate as their presidential
candidate Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York, and a pro-
fessing Catholic. While Mr. Smith had political supporters in
his own state of every religious denomination, still the entire
strength of the Klan was thrown against him. At the same time,
the many Irish Catholics belonging to the Democratic party
resented the attempt of the Klan to dictate the nomination and
11p. 168.
1’ p. 110.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 81
introduced a resolution attacking the Klan by name. The con-
flict of that convention is now historic, and resulted in
thoroughly disorganizing the Democratic party for the ensuing
campaign.
Finally, the passage of the immigration bills of 1921 and 1924
robbed the Klan of its chief reason for existence, its most potent
argument. Immigration was abruptly cut down. Not only that,
but its national origin was totally altered so as to favor the
peoples of northern and western Europe, and to keep out the
Italian Catholics and Russian Jews. It is no longer possible to
stimulate fear or hatred on such a large scale again, now that
immigration is no longer a large factor in American life, and
the group integration is once more proceeding at its accustomed
rate.
5.
The anti-immigration movement must not be regarded as a
result of the Klan but as a parallel phenomenon, with the same
motives and philosophy. The original political theory and eco-
nomic situation, by which all immigrants were welcomed into the
United States to help build up the country and to become full
Americans has been slowly altering. The first law of limitation,
passed in 1882, and followed up by later amendments, merely
excluded convicts, persons affected with contagious diseases,
persons likely to become public charges, and similar individuals
for individual reasons. Other legislation of economic trend ex-
cluded Chinese and later Japanese laborers, and contract labor.
In 1917 the demand to limit the numbers of common labor,
voiced by the American Federation of Labor, met the desire to
limit numbers and to select racial groups, and the literacy test
was embodied in the law, excluding all who could not read or
write in any language. But this was satisfactory to neither
the friends nor foes of immigration; it was merely a temporary
device. ~
In May 1921 a temporary law was passed limiting the number
of each nation to enter the United States annually to 3% of
natives of that nation residing here in 1910. This limited the
total immigration at once from the 1,285,349 of 1907, the peak
82 Anti-Semitism in the United States
year, to a total of 357,803. This total is in addition to immi-
grants from Canada, Mexico, Newfoundland, Cuba and Central
and South America; it does not deduct the emigrants who often
amount to as many or more than those entering the country.
It is simply a means of cutting down numbers and altering
proportions. It is directly a result of Klan preachments, of
Nordic theories, of the reaction of the native, gentile, Protestant
American to the growing complexity and heterogeneity of the
nation, and to the need of revising his mental stereotypes of the
United States. He must grow to think of his nation as a nation
of many elements, many beliefs, many backgrounds, most of
them different from his own—-to him America is a Protestant
country, a white man ’s country, a gentile country, and he in-
tends that it shall remain so.
Therefore the permanent immigration bill enacted in May,
1924, changed the percentage from three to two, and the date
on which the quota is to be estimated from 1910 to 1890. The
result of this double change is to alter radically the racial and
national composition of the immigration stream and hence the
total character of the United States. As Chairman Albert John-
son of the House Committee on Immigration, after whom the
bill was named, phrased its double purpose:
13 The committee took a very important step in recommending a perma-
nent percentage law and thus recognizing the principle that the United
States should never keep its doors wide open. Second, the percentage is
based on the census of 1890 instead of the census of 1910, as in the present
law. The new measure thus aims to change the character of our future
immigration by cutting down the number of aliens who can come from
southern and eastern Europe. In other words, it is recognized that, on the
whole, northern and western Europe furnish the best material for citizen-
ship.
The total immigration, therefore, was reduced from 357,000
to 164,667 and the emigrants have to be deducted from this to
ascertain the actual annual increase. The Italian quota was
reduced from 42,000 to 3,845; the Russian from 24,000 to 2,200;
the Polish from 30,000 to 6,000. On the other hand, the German
quota was reduced only from 67,000 to 51,000; the Norwegian
“3 Johnson: The Nation’s Business, July 1923, pp. 26-8.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 83
from 12,000 to 6,400; the British and Irish from 77,000 to 62,500.
The bill carried out radically the intentions of its sponsors, to
cut down the flood of immigration and to discriminate against
the racial and religious groups which they consider inferior
because they appear externally to be different. It is a group
reaction of the same order and motivation as the Ku Klux Klan.
6
A concurrent phenomenon, arising from the same group mind
but essentially different in manifestation, is the suppression of
civil liberties which began during the war and continued after-
ward, an expression of the same impulse toward compulsory
like-mindedness, but taking its criterion from the economic
rather than the cultural, religious or racial aspects of the differ-
ing groups. As Father Ryan put it:
1‘ These deplorable phenomena are three-fourths due to war legislation
and surviving war hysteria and one-fourth due to industrial factors. . . .
By means of clever, unscrupulous and wholesale propaganda, nine-tenths
of the American people were led to believe that the steel strike of 1919 was
revolutionary, bolshevistic, and aimed immediately at the overthrow of the
government. As a matter of fact, there was no more bolshevism in that
contest than in any one of a dozen important disputes that have occurred
in the last ten years. Attorney General Palmer asserted that there was an
organized attempt to overthrow the government of the United States
sufficiently widespread to merit the attention of Congress. As a matter
of fact, there was no such danger.
15 Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary, in the
same Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, has a fine
summary of the “Repression of Civil Liberties in the United
States (1918-23).” He enumerates the new Supreme Court
interpretation of the free-speech clause of the first amendment
to the Constitution, by which a “clear and present danger”
justifies its violation; the state laws on syndicalism or sedition
or anarchy; the attacks on the right of labor to strike; the use
of the Department of Justice of the United States to repress
radical economic movements; the mob violence increasingly wide-
1‘ Ryan, p. 124.
1‘ Ward: Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, Vol. XVIII.
84 Anti-Semttism in the United States
spread and regular; and the national organizations engaged in
repression, such as the National Civic Federation, the National
Security League, and the Better American Federation.
The material is too wide in range and too full of important
instances to be even cursorily examined here. The trend, how-
ever, was definitely a part of the post-war attitude of the Amer-
ican mind, the breaking up into violently opposing groups, each
claiming to assert the true American spirit. The same attitude
of repression appears in the churches in the form of heresy trials
and an aggressive Fundamentalism. It appears in the form
of legislative acts to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the
state universities of several Southern states (most of which
failed of passage). Dr. Ward feels that the
Mob attacks, lynchings and prosecutions involving the use of free speech
reached their peak at the end of 1922, declining rapidly in 19-23. Inter-
ference with meetings by public authorities and private groups reached a
peak at the end of 1921, fell sharply in 1922, and then went up again to
a midway point in 1923. . . . 1'’ We have a manifest abatement of post~
war repression, but that experience has left us a heritage of repressive
laws and ordinances and a technique of administrative illegality all ready
to be used on due occasion. It has also strengthened our lynching habit of
mind, with its determination to enforce its type of goodness, and our tra-
ditional demand for conformity already overstimulated by the increasing
standardization of life. The occasions for the use of those qualities and
instruments of repression are increasing rather than diminishing.
Attempts were made during the height of the anti-Russian and
anti-radical movement to connect Jews with Bolshevism in
Russia and with radicalism in the United States, so that this
movement also has its anti-Semitic phase. Thus anti-Semitism
is bound up with the Ku Klux Klan, with the immigration bills,
with the economic repression,—it is an integral part of the group
reaction from national unity, and appears in every phase of the
post-war group reactions.
1‘ Ward, p. 145.
CHAPTER VII
ANTI-SEMITISM
In “Loyalties” by John Galsworthy, there occur two state-
ments of anti-Semitism so powerful and so keen that they may
serve as a key to the whole situation. The young Jew has ac-
cused a Christian aristocrat of stealing his purse. The gentile
girl, naturally a liberal, has to choose her loyalty. She says:
“Oh! I know lots of splendid Jews, and I rather like little
Ferdie; but when it comes to the point——they all stick together;
why shouldn’t we‘? It ’s in the blood . . . . Prejudices—or are
they loyalties—I don ’t know-—criss-cross——we all out each other ’s
throats from the best of motives.” And later on an English
grocer of the lower middle class confesses: “To tell you the
truth, I don ’t like-well, not to put too fine a point on it-—
‘ebrews. They work harder; they ’re more sober; they ’re
honest; and they ’re everywhere. I’ve nothing against them,
but the fact is—they get on so.”
1.
Anti-Semitism is, then, a typical, because a violent ,group at-
titude. In America in its newest manifestation it is a part of
the complex of group revolts after the World War; it is in-
timately associated with the Ku Klux Klan, anti-immigration
movement, and repression generally, at the same time that it has
distinctive phases of its own. As Lewis S. Gannett wrote:
1 Because anti-Semitism is world-wide it is easy to assume that it has the
same causes everywhere; but conditions in America are very diiferent from
conditions in countries where religion is taught in the schools, where the
Jews are virtually all middlemen, where the Ghetto is an abiding place for
generations of the same family. . . . American anti-Semitism can largely
be explained without reference to the religious beliefs of Christians or Jews.
This last statement applies only to the immediate situation, not
the background.
1The Nation, March 21, 1923.
85
86 Anti-Sem1ltism in the United States
The two elements in American anti-Semitism, then, are the
imported prejudice from Europe and the American soil which
received it. The form of the prejudice was the importation; its
material backing and impulse was the native American reaction
against the apparently new or apparently different group. The
intensity of the movement at this particular moment in history
is a part of the post-war mental state of the American people.
In addition to the movements described in the last chapter there
are other manifestations mentioned in the introduction: such as
the attempt to limit the proportion of Jews in the colleges; the
anti-Semitic books and periodicals; and the activity of the
Russian emigrés constituting the immediate connecting link with
anti-Semitism in Europe and the world over. The agencies
which hunted down the radicals, whether as Russian sympathiz-
ers or from economic motives or merely as a different group,
tried assiduously to find Jews among their leaders and were
bitterly disappointed when economic radicalism turned out to
be an American movement in which Jews had merely a minority
share.
As we have seen, in 1919 the soil of the United States was
abundantly prepared for the imported seeds of anti-Semitism.
Group was arrayed against group, native and alien, Nordic and
South European, Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Jew.
In addition to the local and timely fact, we must also presuppose
an old inheritance of specific prejudice against the Jew of a
strictly religious nature. This is by no means the immediate
occasion of the present movement, as it may have been of
pogroms in Russia; but it is certainly an element in the national
subconsciousness and in the conscious thinking of certain more
orthodox Christian churches. Granted that Horace M. Kallen
exaggerates the importance of this factor, still he has done well
in pointing it out. He says:
2In the Christian system the Jews are assigned a central and dramatic
status. They are the villains of the Drama of Salvation. . . . Nowhere in
Europe could there be a village to whose inhabitants the word “Jew” did
not denote the people who had denied the Savior and crucified Him, who
2 The Nation, February 28, 1923.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 87
were thus the enemies of God and of mankind. . . . The word “Jew” became-
a stimulus which touched off this emotion. It was a word to curse with.
. . The root of the special Jewish difficulty is the position of the Jews in
the Christian religion. If you can end this teaching that the Jews are
enemies of God and of mankind you will strike anti-Semitism at its
foundations.
Certainly the teachings of infancy and childhood have left this‘?
residue of anti-Judaism in the minds of millions of persons
who would be the first to deny the possession of religious big-
otry; certainly the Christian church, as a group mind, contains
a tradition of anti-Judaism as one of its ideas. But this means
merely that religion to the Jew takes the place of skin color to
the Negro or language to the Czech. We have ancient warrant
that so trivial a matter as the mispronunciation of the word Shib-
boleth was sufficient identification for one sub-group of He-
brews to kill members of another group of their own people.
All that intolerance needs is some mark of identification, how-
ever irrelevant or petty, to set 0d the rival group.
2.
The European importation at this period was the race theory.
Originated in France by Gobineau, taken up in Germany by
scientific thinkers and made the rallying cry of political parties,
the theory was adapted to American conditions. In Germany
and France the “great race” was the Teuton, below whom were
ranged in order the Alpine, the Mediterranean, and the Semite.
The safety of the Teuton and therefore of civilization as " whole
depend on the purity of blood of the Teuton and his gr arding
from contamination by alien blood. The Semite, in part.cular,
is a menace by reason of his lower moral and social standards
and his inability ever to be assimilated by the higher races; he
must be driven out of power and if possible out of the “sacred
German land” itself. In the United States this theory was taken
over bodily by such writers as Lothrop Stoddard and Grant
Madison, with the trifling change that the word “Teuton” was
altered to “Nordic.” This was done in order to include the
many sub-varieties of the older immigration, most of whom
88 Antvl-Semqlt/ism in the United States
came at some time from northern and western Europe. The
Klan and the writers in the Dearborn Independent echoed them.
The Russians in the United States attacking the Soviet govern-
ment, many sub-groups of new Americans who imported their
anti-Semitism with them, and the constant flood of letters, peri-
odicals and books regarding the growth of mob violence, politi-
cal discrimination and social obloquy in Europe, furnished the
connecting link. The race theory became acclimatized.
Peculiarly enough, one of the most radical statements of the
race theory was by a Jew, Maurice Samuel in “You Gentiles,”
where he showed quite unintentionally how the theory is re-
versible to form opposite conclusions on the same premises. To
Samuel, Jew and gentile are two radically different sorts of
people, as the anti-Semite agrees; the difference he finds, how-
ever, is one of temperament, of viewpoint.
8 To you (gentiles) life is a game and a gallant adventure, and all life ’s
enterprises partake of the spirit of the adventurous. To us (Jews) life is
a serious and sober duty pointed to a definite and inescapable task. ‘We
know nothing of science for science ’s sake, as we know nothing of art for
art ’s sake. We know only of art for God ’s sake. . . . Art and science,
this is your gentile world, a lovely and ingenious world. . . . But not our
world, not for us Jews.
To this we may contrast the remark of Irwin Edman:
-" The Jews have been accused so often of impossible racial defects that
they have in self defense, ascribed to themselves wholly imaginary racial
virtues. . . . They have added to the unfavorable myths invented by out-
siders a whole folklore of favorable myths about themselves.
The, reorints from the Dearborn Independent can match this
sort of hasty generalization a hundred times over in the lan-
guagmof anti-Semitism.
° The Jew is against the Gentile scheme of things. What are the causes
of this disruptive tendency‘? First, his essential lack of democracy. Jewish
nature is autocratic. ‘In a sense the United States is private property.
It is the property of those who share the ideals of the founders of the
government. And those ideals were ideals held by a white race of Chris-
3Samuel: You Gentiles, p. 31. 4p. 175.
5 Menorah Journal, November 1924, p. 425.
° The International Jew, p. 88.
7Vol. 2, p. 249.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 89
tians. And with most of these the Jews not only disagree, but hold them in
contempt. 8 The fathers were the men of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic race . . .
who have given form to every government and a livelihood to every people
and an ideal to every century. They got neither their God nor their
religion from Judah, nor yet their speech nor their creative genius-—-they
are the Ruling People, Chosen throughout the centuries to Master the
world. . . . Into the camp of this race comes a people that has no civiliza-
tion to point to, no aspiring religion, no universal speech, no great achieve-
ment in any realm but the-realm of “get, ’ ’ cast out of every land that gave
them hospitality, and these people endeavor to tell the sons of the Saxons
what is needed to make the world what it ought to be.
3.
I shall devote very few words to showing that this race theory,
whether from the Nordic or any other angle, is composed of
hasty and unscientific generalizations, merely the rationaliza-
tion of the group prejudice whose actual background we are
tracing. In the first place, anthropologists are not at all agreed
either on the definition or the history of races. There seems,
however, to be fairly general agreement that there is no such
thing as a pure race—certainly not the English and probably
not the Jews either. All sub-varieties of the white race are
greatly mixed in blood. For the Jewish side of this problem,
an interesting study is that of M. Fishberg, “The Jews, a Study
of Race and Environment,” where the author has demonstrated
the many physical types which appear in the Jewish people the
world over, whether these are due to local and climatic influ-
ences, or as Dr. Fishberg holds, to interbreeding with other
racial stocks. In the second place, even such racial groupings
as can be roughly established vary indefinitely and overlap in-
definitely in every physical and mental characteristic. There
is no considerable body of people who conform to the Nordic
type——blond, tall, long-headed, and so on. No test has ever been
devised which can adequately compare the intelligence of dif-
ferent races, for every intelligence test yet invented presupposes
a certain cultural and language background, and is therefore
favorable to the group which has this background, and certain
8Vol. 4, pp. 50-1.
90 Anti-Semitism in the United States
I‘ to give a low intelligence quotient to any diiferent cultural
group, whatever be its race or its potential intellectual power.
As Jean Finot sums up the entire theory in his book, “Race
Prejudice ’_’ :
° The difierences among individuals belonging to the same human variety
are always greater than those perceived between races regarded as distinct
units. '
1° N 0 one has ever been able to show a single authentic Aryan. The
descriptions of him, both moral and physical, his measurements and also
the description of his inner life, are all purely fantastical. . . . Today
out of a thousand educated Europeans, nine hundred ninety-nine are per-
suaded of the authenticity of their Aryan origin. In the history of human
errors this doctrine will some day without doubt assume a place of honor.
1‘ When we go through the list of external differences which appear to
divide men, we find literally nothing which can authorize their division
into superior and inferior beings, into masters and pariahs. . . . The
science of inequality is emphatically a science of White people. In pursu-
ing this course the elementary commandments of experimental science are
transgressed.
1’ In a word, the term, race, is only a product of our mental activities,
and outside all reality. . . . They (races) exist in us but not outside us.
The eminence of certain European nations today is historical
and cultural, not racial. Otherwise, how explain the past emi-
nence of Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome‘! True, some try
to detect an admixture of Nordic, or at least of Aryan blood
in these nations as a cause of their once high civilization. But
to claim this is so to dilute the meaning of the word that alg-
most any blood may be considered “Aryan.” The fact is that
the Jew now in the United States did not kill Jesus but is still
accused of it; and is\not a Semite but is still accused of that.
The one accusation like the other is merely a rationalization of
the social trait of intolerance, now sprung to growth in the
United States.
4.
Minor accusations against the Jews need only summary con-
sideration. Needless to say, many of them are true but prob-
ably none of them are actual causes for hatred of the J ewh.
‘Finot: Race Prejudice, p. 88. 1° p. 221. 11p. 310. 12 p. 317.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 91
The theory of Burton J . Hendrick that the Russian Jews are
inferior racially to the west European ones is merely another
variety of the race theory and is worth no more than any va-
riety. The Jews are called materialists and money-grabbers,
which many of them are, as well as many non-Jews; they are
accused of having wealth and of being subverters of wealth,
and some Jews are in each of these categories. Some Jews are
bootleggers, as they are called. Possibly some Jews have been
traitors,/ though the writer in the Dearborn Independent seems
to have taken a great deal of trouble to prove that Benedict
Arnold may or may not have had some Jewish accomplices.
Certainly the complaint of the colleges that many of their Jew-
ish students are not socially acceptable is entirely correct. The
Jew is the only immigrant group whose poor boys attend insti-
tutionslof higher learning in any large numbers. Other groups
usually wait at least a generation until they have acquired both
prosperity and some American culture before their children
attend college. Besides, there are a number of Catholic uni-
versities which are attended by many Irish and Italian youths,
while there is no such school to divert the Jewish youth. Hence
there is no doubt that many young Jews attend college who are
externally uncouth, who speak English with an accent, who
wear shabby clothes, and who have no interest in athletics, danc-
ing or undergraduate activities. It is certain, however, that
these young people learn to conform very rapidly indeed; and
that, before they learn, they may be able to contribute a little
variety and interest to the montony of American youth.
A charge of great importance during the height of prejudice
against the Russian Soviet government was that the Jews were
responsible for that government, its success and its excesses. The
inevitable conclusion was, then, that the Jews were trying to
introduce the ideals of the Soviets into the United States. Even
when this conclusion was not drawn, the connection was so em-
phasized as to minister to anti-Semitic sentiment. John
Spargo 13 made a special effort to minimize this rather indirect,
but at the time very dangerous piece of propaganda. He showed
*3 Spargo: The Jew and American Ideals.
92 Anti-Semitism in the United States
that the number of Jews in high position in Russia was very
small, while the larger number of government clerks and simi-
lar functionaries was due to the larger percentage of educated
men among Jews than among the mass of Russians; that the
great commercial class of Jews were financially ruined by the
socialistic policy of the government; that the Jews of Russia
were divided among the several political parties for and against
the Communists; and finally that the Bolsheviki had suppressed
Jewish religious schools, like Christian ones, and estranged the
orthodox of both religions. But the anti-Semitic writers used
the Russian Revolution to show the growing menace of , h
power the world over. .~
Finally, the charge of the Dearborn Independent that there
is a Jewish world conspiracy to overthrow the governments of
the world in favor of an all-Judaic power. To the person who
knows Jewish life, broken into so many conflicting theories and
different cultural and economic groups, the whole viewpoint is
too ridiculous to require disproof. It is merely another sign
that the modern conception of social and economic process is
very new indeed and has made little headway into the group
mind. Every world process from the World War to the fall
of the German mark, from immodest clothing to vapid popular
songs, must be blamed on a person or race. In this case the
person disliked is the Jew, and everything is blamed on him.
But a different group prejudice could just as well ascribe these
same factors to the German (as during the war), to the Rus-
sian, to the international bankers, or to the Republican party.
Again, we are confronted by the rationalization of a group prej-
udice, and in this case the rationalization is merely unusually
fantastic.
As Ludwig Lewisohn sums up anti-Jewish prejudice:


1‘ J ew-baiting has nothing to do with the quality of Jewish character-
istics. We are hated for our wealth and for our poverty, for our plutocrats
and for our Reds, for display and for hard-headedness and warm-hearted
ness, for arrogance and servility, for pushingness and reserve, for speech
and silence, for political participation and nonparticipation. If we desire
1‘ The Nation, February 20, 1924.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 93
assimilation you drive us out of your universities by chicanery and insult;
if we do not strive after assimilation you say we ought to go where we
came from. '
To this we may compare the interesting if somewhat hasty
generalization of Friedman:
1“ Any unabsorbed social group generates the ill will of the majority.
. It is characteristic for the superior culture to absorb the inferior.
. The seeming slowness of this movement is an irritant to the non-
Jewish world and the persistence of the Jews as a distinctive cultural group
is resented by the dominant group. It is an implied challenge to the
supremacy of the culture of the lands where Jews dwell.
d Shailer speaks of 16 “This most striking and universal of
eth ic judgments,” that the Jews are an unpleasant people, The
Semite to him is “the ablest type of man the world has known,
but a type that is somewhat archaic” because religious rather
than scientific in mental trend. He feels that Jew and Aryan
are difierent in their mode of meeting the stranger, the Jew is
more impulsive due to swifter mental processes, which invariably
causes bad first impressions to be later overcome. And so on.
These reasons seem hardly better than those of the anti-Semites
themselves—-for the Jew today is not a Semite; Dr. Shailer
compared him with the rather repressed New Englander at Har-
vard, not with the Aryan of Germany or Italy or Russia; since
he wrote seven Jews have received the Nobel prize for scientific
distinction; and finally, the challenge to the superior race (of
Dr. Friedman) is simply the fact of difference. No charac-
terization of the Jew accounts for anti-Semitism, whether it be
formulated by friend or foe; the only genuine causes are those
that can be found in the group mind itself.
5.
6
In addition to the background of American group mind, al-
ready studied, and the imported theory of anti-Semitism, there
are certain facts which afiect the situation in its special mani-
festations. The most important of these\is the great increase of
15Friedman: Survival or Extinction, p. 110. 1 -
1‘ Shailer: The Neighbor.
94 Anti-Semitism in the United States.
I
f wi ‘ ' the United ~States. At the time of the
MKnow-Nothings there were not over 50,000 Jews in this coun-
try, and many of them had lived here since before the Revolu-
tion, possessing fine patriotic records; there was thus no motive
to single them out for the anti-alien agitation of that period.
At the time of the A. P. A., there were about 500,000 Jews,
but these were still not a large enough group to attract special
attention; they were widely scattered through the south and
west; and the agitation against the larger numbers of Catholic
immigrants passed them by. In 1925, however, the number of
Jews in the United States is estimated at 3,600,000, of whom
1,735,000 have immigrated into America in the last 25 years,
and 900,000 of these in the last 15. Here, then, is a tremendous
body of Jews who are also foreigners, who speak the Yiddish
language, adhere to traditional Jewish religious practices, and
who are massed in great bodies in certain cities and in certain
industries. The foreign Jew is thus more conspicuous today
than any other immigrant group, even than those much larger
in number. New York City alone has 1,500,000 Jews, such a
huge number of whom are of obviously foreign origin that they
are a conspicuous attraction for the intolerance of other groups
in AmericaL As Mecklin says:
1’ The Jew, who has recently been coming to this country mainly from
Russia and Southeastern Europe by hundreds and thousands, and who, true
to his urban traits, has crowded into New York and other large cities where
his native characteristics are thrust into the face of the native American
on the street, in the hotel or department store, has also come in for his
share of the prevalent fear psychology. Henry Ford . . . has voiced the
fears of the native American brought into close contact with the unassimi-
lated and disagreeably alien Jewish population of our large centers.
A special feature of this present Jewish immigration is that
mu_chpf it comes from a belated civilization. The Jew of Poland
bi‘ Ukr\ainia"o_fRumania eteeerrem an agricultural society into
an industrial one; from an aristocratic class society into a demo-
cratic one; from an isolated Jewish Ghetto life into a maelstrom
of races and cultural groups, among whom he must grope his
way. No” wonder that his adjustment is not always a correct
"'\-<-—‘, ..-
44"
1" Mecklin: The Ku Klux Klan, p. 125.
., Anti-Semitism in the United States 95
one, still less often the same adjustment as that of the stand-
arized, typical American. Many of them become radicals in
economics, religion and politics as a reaction against their
former experience of oppression; some of them were pro-Ger-
man during the World War to oppose their former Russian
tyrants; for all of them the problem is doubly difficult because
it involves not only a personal adjustment to new economic and
social conditions, but also the group adjustment into the life
of the United States. Many of them in their new-found free-
dom become super-patriots, take America to their hearts, and
are thus doubly disappointed when America also repulses them.
But Jewish immigration also has been largely stopped and
the foreign aspect of American Jewry is rapidly disappearing.
In 1914, the Jewish admissions to the United States numbered
138,000 or 11.3%; when departures are taken into account, the
Jews became 14.3% of the total. During the war the Jewish
immigration was negligible; but in 1921 it again amounted to
119,000 or 14.7% of the total, or deducting departures, 21.2%.
The passage of the quota law of 1921 resulted in reducing the
total Jewish admissions to 53,000 and 49,000 in the next two
years; or 17.3% and 9.5% of the total admissions. As 1922
was a year of many departures among Greeks, Italians and
several other groups, the net Jewish immigration of that year
actually amounted to 47.5% of the total net immigration. The
efiect of the 1924 immigration act has already been noted by
social workers and others in touch with immigration, but it is
still too early to show by statistics what has occurred, namely
the practical cessation of this great Jewish immigration into
the United States. It is obvious that this fact will alter the
animus and the nature of anti-Semitism, just as all anti-alien
sentiments, even though it will not eradicate the other causes
and therefore will not stop anti-Semitism completely.
CHAPTER VIII
THE RETORT TO ANTI-SEMITISM
There are two kinds of answers possible to a movement like
anti-Semitism, the explicit refutation of its doctrines and teach-
ings, whether by Jews or non-Jews; and the response by adjust-
ment and by psychological traits. It is a commonplace that
Jewish loyalty is always strengthened by anti-Semitism; it is
equally true that the Jewish inferiority complex is conditioned,
if not caused, by anti-Semitism. In fact, we may well conclude
that Jewish characteristics are greatly influenced and molded
by the adverse forces of the environment. Both these types of
response, the explicit and the implied, exist in this particular
case, whether as counterpart or as results of anti-Semitism it-
self. and both can be traced in the United States in connection
with the present movement.
1.
Defense of Jews by non-Jews is a notable phenomenon of
modern times, associated with the general growth of tolerance.
Beginning with the Renaissance there have been a few hardy
spirits in every generation who were willing to espouse the cause
of these pariahs of Christendom, chiefly the liberals who were
challenging group standards in many directions. Such advo-
cates as Mirabeau, Lessing, Jefferson and Macaulay endeavored
to remove Jewish disabilities and to defend the Jews against
the attacks of the intolerant groups. Here in America we have
seen the same result; the use of the individual intelligence has
drawn many non-Jews out of the unified group mind of the
persecutors; many entire groups, in fact, of Catholics, liberals,
and others had never entered into it. Even before the World
War the Reverend Madison Peters of Brooklyn was widely
known for his book, “Justice to the Jew,” and several similar
volumes. More recently, as a definite reply to the anti-Semitic
writers there have appeared “The Jew and American Ideals,”
by John Spargo; “The Jew and Civilization” by Ada Sterling;
96
Anti-Semitism in the United States 97
“The Truth about the Jews, by a Gentile,” by Walter Hurt;
and “Patriotism of the American Jew” by Samuel W. McCall.
These works and others like them, of varying merit, were defi-
nitely apologetic in nature. A number of periodicals published
articles either avowedly in defense of the Jew, or purporting to
examine the Jewish problem fairly and without intolerance.
Such were the brilliant series by able thinkers, which I have
quoted so frequently, in the Nation; by Norman Hapgood in
Hearst ’s International; by William Hard in the Metropolitan
Magazine; by Arthur Brisbane in his syndicated newspaper
column, and many others. Former President William Howard
Taft, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, during the in-
terval between these high offices, wrote a speech on “Anti-Sem-
itism in the United States,” which he delivered in many parts
of the country and which was printed by the Anti-Defamation
League.
Several actions of larger bodies of non-Jews lent even more
dignity to this counter-movement. On December 5, 1920, the
Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the
great Protestant federation, passed the following resolution in
its national convention in Boston:
Whereas, for some time past there have been in circulation in this country
ppblications tending to create race prejudice and arouse animosity against
our Jewish fellow-citizens and containing charges so preposterous as to be
unworthy of credence, be it resolved that the Federal Council of the
Churches of Christ in America, impressed by the need at this period of our
national existence for unity and brotherhood, deplores all such cruel and
unwarranted attacks upon our Jewish brethren and in a spirit of good-will
extends to them an expression of confidence in their patriotism and their
good citizenship and earnestly admonishes our people to express disapproval
of all actions which are conducive to intolerance or tend to the destruction
of our national unity through arousing racial division in our body politic.
It is a peculiar commentary upon the nature of groups and
group leadership that the very churches thus addressed by their
great national leaders should have furnished so much material
for the recruiting officers of the Ku Klux Klan.
On January 16, 1921, a protest against anti-Semitism was
issued under the initiative of John Spargo, signed by one hun-
98 Anti-Semitism in the United States
dred nineteen distinguished American Christians from every
walk of life, headed by the names of President Woodrow Wil-
son, former President William Howard Taft, and William Car-
dinal O’Connell. I quote a few sentences from this interesting
document:
The loyalty and patriotism of our fellow citizens of the Jewish faith
is equal to that of any part of our people, and requires no defense at our
hands. . . . Anti-Semitism is almost invariably associated with lawlessness
and with brutality and injustice. It is also invariably found closely inter-
twined with other sinister forces, particularly those which are corrupt,
reactionary and oppressive. We believe that it should not be left to men
and women of Jewish faith to fight this evil, but that it is in a very special
sense the duty of citizens who are not Jews by ancestry or faith.
The most practical work of this kind was undertaken in De-
cember, 1924, when a joint committee of the Federal Council
of the Churches of Christ in America and of the Central Con-
ference of American Rabbis met in Washington, D. C., to con-
sider the problem of good will between Christians and Jews.
Their statement follows in full:
We, of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, and
the Central Conference of American Rabbis, as represented in a joint
session of their respective committees on good will between Jews and Chris-
tians, realizing the necessity for a truer interpretation of Americanism and
religion, and in order to advance both on the highest plane of good will
and fellowship, herewith declare:
1. The purpose of our committees is to promote mutual understanding
and good will in the place of suspicion and ill will in the entire range of
our inter-religious‘and social relations.
2. Because of our mutual respect for the integrity of each other ’s
religion and our desire that each faith shall enjoy the fullest opportunity
for its development and enrichment, these committees have no proselytizing
purpose.
3. We endorse the statement of the Federal Council of the Churches of
Christ in America, made by its Administrative Committee in the resolution
of September 22, 1922, declaring that the “rise of organizations whose
' members are masked, oath-boun/(lg and unknown,mmdJ£h0§e activities have
the effect of arousing teligieusa prejpQiqes__an<l_raqial antipathie , is fraught
with grave consequences to the church and to society_ at large.” To this
statement we add our conviction that such organizations violate the funda-
mental principles and ideals of our country and of religion, and merit
our condemnation.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 99
4. We realize, further, that we best reveal our fellowship by practical
co-operation in common tasks, and it is our endeavor to formulate a program
by which to realize the high purposes and noble endeavors of mutual
good will and helpfulness.
2.
While some non-Jews were trying to break up the group ideas
which were expressed in anti-Semitism, whether through draw-
ing away individuals by argument, or through diverting groups
by the prestige of great names, the Jews themselves were far;
f_r_gm idle. There was a flood of books, articles, speeches, de-
sigpgcl to____s_h_ow_tha1_;_ the Jews have had a proud share in Amer-
ican history in the past, are now patri_o_tic pitizgpns, padrernbweieng
_i__i;r'o“_1_ige Why ‘I-.aiIfi£fih5f, "a"£E1'"j s~_i}:'_o:ii&.W‘WMost of these were quite
v%B?thi€§é""f6£ ntheirrpurpose, for anti-Semitism was not caused
by the arguments against the Jews at all; moreover, they were
plainly apologetic and would not have impressed a prejudiced-
person in the least. 1-li_1.trt.he nork- of sever.al..great- Jewishmr-r
ganiggticzpspwgs of“ aktdifiberent or;g1_er.
Amoiig a number of these organizations I select three which
have, from their inception, made this one of their prime pur-
poses of existence. The oldest of these is the American Jewish
Committee, of which Mr. Louis Marshall of New York City is
-president. This organization was founded in 1906 with the
purpose of defending Jewish rights at home and abroad; its
immediate occasion was the Kishineff massacre in Russia, with
the consequent strengthening of Jewish group loyalty in tlié“
United States as well. The annual reports of this body, pub-
lished in the various volumes of the American Jewish Yearbook,
reveal, besides other activities, a variety of defense methods-—a
personal protest to the head of a publishing firm which was pro-
ducing the “Protocols”; efforts on behalf of newly arrived im-
migrants; the completion and publication in summary form of
the record of American Jews in the army, navy and marine
corps during the World War; attempts to befriend persecuted
Jews in foreign lands. On December 1, 1920, this committee
published an “Address to their Fellow Citizens on the Proto-
cols, Bolshevism and the Jews,” which was signed also by rep-

100 Anti-Semitism in the United States
resentatives of nine other Jewish organizations——rabbinical con-
ferences, unions of congregations and the like. This statement
rehearsed the proofs against the current charges of anti-Semi-
tism and appealed to the American public, with the evident hbpe
of breaking up the group mind that was then filled with the
image of anti-Semitism. It ends in this fashion:
We have an abiding confidence in the spirit of justice and fairness that
permeates the true American, and we are satisfied that our fellow-citizens
will not permit the campaign of slander and libel that has been launched
against us to go unreproved. . . . Let not hatred and misunderstanding
arise where peace and harmony, unity and brotherliness, are required to
perpetuate all that America represents, and to enable all men to know that
within her wide boundaries there is no room for injustice and intolerance.
The Anti-Defamation League, with its headquarters at _C_hi-
ca‘g_o,_was founded in _1913 undermthe auuspiéesiofi :the,I:ndepen-
dent Order B’nai B’rith to_ carry on a somewhat difierent work.
Its executive secretary for almost this entire period was Mr.
Leon L. Lewis, now Grand Secretary of the Order. Its first__ac-
tivity, which it has continued thro}1_fi'g;l~1¢o‘1_i_t,u__v,i1,a“smt9w_ias__s“u*e_,“ii1di-
M1 P‘-Ft鑧t"é m-g‘-*'-Ynie.?j-eetees,~-e.e@9.te.@ttr-
“producers, Q vaudeville” managers, : etc., H as _ allowed _ anti-Semitic
tkendenciersuto creep into their productions. In many cases a
friendly protest was enough to stop the propaganda; in some
extreme instances, no result whatever could be achieved, as the
work in question was a direct expression of intolerance. Since
the actual anti-Semitic movement began in the United States,
the Anti-Defamation League has broadened its activities, l_1g.§
plrblishedwsorne mgaterial refuting “charges against the LJ cw, has
circlifated this through the country, has investigated ya,r,ious
anti-Jewish organizations and so on. It lids rendered great ser-
vice in diverting from the anti-Semitic sub-group such indi-
viduals as drifted into it more or less by accident but who were
not definitely aligned with it. '
Finally, the i-‘é-s1ari@ei1-JsWiSh .Q9ssr.ess..e0rsa.1'1.iZed in l’.hila-



" '‘ '‘‘~‘-~.. -....~.-..
delphia on December 15, 1919, has passed.-certain resolutigns
of interest to the general public. Its chief work, however, was
the appointment of delegates to represent the American Jws
at Paris during the Peace Conference. Largely through the
Anti-Semitism in the United States 101
efiorts of this delegation and similar ones from the Jews of
other countries, the rights of Jewish and other minorities in the
newly constituted countries of eastern Europe were protected
by, treaty, and Palestine was made a British mandatory, with
sp“ecial rights of settlement for the Jews. This work, which has
proved so important with regard to anti-Semitism abroad, has
comparatively little direct influence on its American phase.
3.
This direct propagandammmay have some_ influence, bu,t,_o,nly,as
propaganda, not as argumentito refute arguments from the
other side. The fact of diiference is the primary fact on which
anti-Semitism, like all other intolerance, is based.‘ This can be
transcended only by an inclusive loyalty and an inclusive pur-
pose in which both sub-groups lose their own purposes and con-
sequently their opposition. The most direct reaction to anti-
Semitism appears in the intensification of Jewish loyalty. Con-
flict makes the group mind vigorous and self-conscious, espe-
cially in the defeated group. The power of the “lost cause”
over the minds of men has been beautifully developed by Royce
in his “Philosophy of Loyalty”; and the cause of Jewry has
been for two thousand years such a “lost cause” among the
oppressors of the world.
,Th__u~s opp1:_e‘s's_i_<)”r~1__wo_f_danti-Semitism in any part of thflee
ggrpgnts Jews eyewrywwhere into one body,\forces the‘ group mind
of th_e__J_ew i_ntqunity hapdld;ire_c;fip_I_1;m As Dr. lme'i'_p_(_)in_ts_"


01113 :
1 Two sets of factors are of significance here: those making for identi-
fication with the general American community and those making for segre-
gation and isolation. The attractive features of the American environment
have their roots in and are nourished by the equality of social and eco-
nomic opportunity that is America ’s most precious heritage.
It is anti-Semitic propaganda that constitutes one of the segregative
forces of the American environment. . . . To these inner strains and
stresses, making for an increase in group self-consciousness, are added
those outer crises arising out of the trials and tribulations of J ewries in
other lands. The problem of civil disabilities of Jews in many European
1Jewish Social Service Quarterly, Nov. 1924, pp. 19-21.
102 Anti-Semitism in the United States
countries and the romantic ups and downs of Zionism have kept alive a
steady interest among great masses of Jews in the United States.
The group loyalty of world Jewry has shown itself in the
United States in the form of certain agencies\that have been
particularly active during and since the World War. The pov-
erty, persecution and devastation of the great Jewish commu-
nities of eastern Europe occasioned the formation vof“theq_"J__oi1“i_t_
Distribution Committee in America, in which--for the first time
-—reform, orthodox, and radical Jews sat together and labored
in a common cause; the sixty-five million dollars they collected
in America and disbursed abroad are less important to us than
the group mind they developed in this common purpose. The
Zionist movement, both as an attempt to provide a home in
Palestine for the oppressed Jews of eastern Europe, and as a
hope for the revival of Jewish nationality and culture in the
Holy Land, has furnished a mode of resistance and a source of
Jewish pride to many who felt themselves persecuted, either in
their own persons or by proxy, in America. Such a distin-
guished American Jew as Justice Louis D. Brandeis of the
United States Supreme Court felt his first call to Jewish alle-
giance or action in middle age, when he became an active Zionist
and the president of the Zionist Organization of America. This
influence operated on great numbers of Jews in the United
States during the time of anti-Semitism abroad, and on still
more during the period of anti-Semitism here. Anti-Semitism
is a great incentive to Jewish loyalty, even as it disrupts the
mind of the American people into conflicting groups.
4.
T,l§_1n__()_s_’t_irn_p_or_t_ant reaction to anti-Semitism is the ur_1p_o_r_r-
suc_i_o_u~shn5iofi1wemof response which we call the infgriourity complex.
Certainly the ;i"e‘€v"“i{5.§ such awcvomplexg Iie__a_lti1_'_nates boldness
and timidity, because he is self-consci_o_11isw#i_1_qw_t_hge~pr_~es_e_11mc:_e"6f’—t_hek
£65-Jew?‘ and thereii(>_”d1'"_e_M,1;,incer,1;nz,i*i,r\1 p__of__fiq hims_el_f__._ Jews change their


mfrom land to land, assuming the Russian “witz” or the
Polish “sky” for the previous German “sohn” as a patronymic
—for all Jewish names were originally in the Hebrew form,of
."\
/ \
Anti-Semitism in the United States { 103‘
Isaac ben (son of) Abraham; but when they come to the United
States the “witz” and “sky” are foreign and many of them
are dropped in turn. The Hebrew Moses becomes the German
Morris, and then the English Montague. This is partly due to
the adoption of the standard of taste of the new environment,
partly to the desire not to be too aggressively Jewish in exter-
nals. As Friedman shows:
2The Jew is the underdog of society . . . he has acquired a social
sympathy and has become spiritually attuned to the harmonics of a juster
social order. 3 Anti-Semitism is a challenge to Jewry to revivify its ideals.
‘Danger strengthens family ties. Perhaps the pure and devoted family
life for which the Jews have been noted may be due to the fact that they
preserved this defensive reaction of a group under persecution. ‘Persecu-
tion has left the mark of fear on the psychology of the J ew. . . . The
Jew retired into himself, or to the society of his kind.
In the present state of ignorance, I cannot state how much
of the Jewish character is hereditary and how much environ-
mental, or how much of the latter is due to the inferiority com-
plex and hence to anti-Semitism. Certainly there must be many
traits of this origin. Thomas Babington Macaulay made this
discovery in 1833, when he argued in the House of Commons
in favor of removing civil disabilities from the Jews of Eng-
land.
. . If all the red-haired people in Europe had, during centuries, been
outraged and oppressed, banished from this place, driven from that . .
if, when manners became milder, they had still been subject to debasing
restrictions and exposed to vulgar insults . . . what would be the patriot-
ism of gentlemen with red hair‘?
Ludwig Lewisohn finds exactly such an artificial case in the
German-Americans during the World War:
‘I (the German) know exactly now why you (the J ew) and your people
are accused of bad manners. How can one ’s manners be good when all
agreement and social certainties are lacking? Whatever one does will be
considered an excess. . . . So I am beginning to understand the voluntary
and yet involuntary segregation of Jewry.
2Friedman: Survival or Extinction, p. 112. 3p. 121. 4p. 131. I-‘p. 134.
6The Nation, Feb. 20, 1924.
104 Anti-Semitism in the United States
To which the Jew retorts:
The worst of it is that we are all super-sensitive because we are neuras--
thenic. . . . There is scarcely a Jewish family in which there isn’t either
madness or genius. Commonly both.
Professor Miller generalizes this into a theory of “oppression
psychosis,” mentioned above:
7 A technique is developed by the group and the individuals in it to meet
the situation and retain the self-esteem necessary to life . . . the Jewish
capacity to trade was developed under a necessity for survival in which
-trade ofiered the only possibility. 8 The patriotism of an oppressed people
is full of pathological elements. The symptoms vary slightly, but there is
always hypersensitiveness and self-consciousness. The classic example is
the Jew, and the Jewish problem wherever it exists can never be solved
until most of the Jewish characteristics are diagnosed as the pathological
result of the experience to which they have been subjected. . . . A very
large portion of the peoples of the world‘ are sufiering from present or
past experiences of oppression and therefore cannot be expected to act as
normal groups. ‘’ The conspicuousness of the Jew is in large part due to his
psychopathic adjustment to his environment. It is further due to the
necessary technique for survival. 1° The peculiarity of the Jew is that be-
cause he has been made self-conscious by his experience, he has acquired a
solidarity which has been kept vivid through adherence to the Law.
Besides the pathology of the case, Miller here indicates two
modes of adjustment, the success motive and the religious mo-
tive. The former can be seen clearly in the Jewish students,
who are largely excluded from social and athletic leadership in
the colleges, and whose response is to excel wherever possible
in scholarship. It appears in the medieval Jew who was placed
outside the feudal system and consequently had no feudal loy-
alties, but established the first international financial connec-
tions; or in the Jew of some of the modern hyper-nationalistic
countries of Europe, who is excluded from public life and finds
his outlet in Zionism. Finally, and most important of all his-
torically, the Jew has found his compensation in his religion.
He was the Chosen People, he had the sacred Torah, he kept the
festivals, obeyed the commandments of God; in the home and
the synagog he was priest and king, whatever might be his
"'Miller: Races, Nations and Classes, Chapter II, p. 36. 8p. 182. ‘p. 97.
10
p. 95.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 105
beatings or his cringings without. Conversely, the growing in-
difference to Judaism today is both an adaptation to the new
modes of thought the world over, and a relaxing of intensity
of Jewish loyalty in the countries where the penalties for that
loyalty are themselves relaxed.
The religious interpretation of this status is very ancient.
The Bible speaks of the Jews as a “peculiar people”; “a king-
dom of priests and a holy nation.” And the Talmud says:
God selected as His sacrifices not the pursuer but the pursued; not the
lion but the bullock, not the wolf but the lamb, not the eagle but the dove.
In the same way Israel, the pursued of all the heathen, the weakest of the
nations of the world, is the Chosen People, the fitting sacrifice of the Lord.
The famous fifty-second chapter of Isaiah with its marvelous
conception of the Sufiering Servant of the Lord, is again a pic-
ture of the Jewish people, persecuted and oppressed, but finding
its purpose and its compensation in its religious message, which
in the Messianic age was to convince and to overawe the world.
Perhaps I can best summarize this view in the words of Ana-
tole Leroy-Beaulieu, whose “Israel among the Nations” some
thirty years ago marked a new treatment of the Jewish ques-
tion by a Christian writer. This book contains a chapter on
the Psychology of the J ew, in which he develops the idea of
the influence of the milieu on the Jewish character:
11 The Jew has kept his energy, but he has kept it within him, out of
sight. His tenacity is now concealed by artfulness and masked beneath
humility. . . . Deprived of the weapons of the strong, he resorted to the
devices of the weak, to cunning, trickery and deceit. . . . Unable to com-
mand respect for his frail personality, the Jew took refuge in a collective
pride; he was proud of his people, his religion, and his God. Never has he
lost faith in the superiority of Israel. . . This explains why for cen-
turies they were able to bear such a burden of contempt without breaking
down beneath its weight. The mainspring of Israel’s inner life was not
broken; it remained intact, ready to be set in motion again on the day of
deliverance. Bowed as he was, the Jew was always ready for the time of
upraising.
11Beaulieu: Israel among the Nations.
106 Anti-Semitism in the United States
5.
The various theories and groupings of Jewry today may be
regarded from the viewpoint of responses to the total environ-
ment, of which anti-Semitism is one of the important factors.
On this basis neither Zionism nor reform Judaism can be re-
garded directly as a reply to anti-Semitism, but both are this
among other things, for both are modes of response to the en-
vironment, with its Jewish and its non-Jewish factors. Two
such responses are _rreligious-—the orth(_)_<_i_o_xfl~a_P1:_1_d, qthgreform; two
are_ racial and natio_nal_-Tthe as__si—II1'ilatiq11WistM_a,~n*d_wthe‘_ Zionist.
From anouthelrl standpoint, two are modes of adjustmentmtbmthe
environment——assimilat_ion and reform; two are modes of re-
sistance to the environmenti-Zionism and orthodoxy. Or, more
precisely, assimilation is a racial adjustment to the non-Jewish
environment; reform Judaism a religious adjustment; Zionism
is a racial and national resistance to the environment; and or-
thodoxy a religious resistance. Obviously, the four are not un-
related, but many individuals adopt more than one of them as
guides in various fields of thought and behavior.
~_A_s“s_in,1_i,lation of the Jew to his environment, which involves
abandonment of the group life, is “an, indiyiplugl, not a ,group
1l9.§P..Ql.1Se. It attracts individuals in considerable numbers from
the extreme right and left wings of American Jewry, from the
very wealthy who may adopt Christianity for social distinction,
and from the proletarians who adopt an international economic
and political theory. It cannot be a group response because if
great masses of Jews were to join any other church, or any other
national or social grouping, they would do it as Jews still—-we
would then have churches of Hebrew Christians, or a Jewish
Wing for the Socialist party (as in Russia), but not the absorp-
tion in the environment which the assimilationist considers the
solution of the Jewish problem. Qn_ewpp_i,,n2t_=isMtMrue,,iJ;..the assimi-
lationist theory——if there were no Jewish group, there would be
no anti-Semitism. _l_t_i§_e_qually__t_r_u_e that ifnthere wer.e-no groups
of‘ human beings, there -would be no intolerance. But such a
condition is impossible. Man is a social being, and the tra-
Anti-Semitism in the United States 107
dition, the ideals, and the life of his own group hold him too
firmly to be escaped except by the smallest minority.
12 Assimilation may be social or biological in character, and
the radical adoption of it would involve both phases. Inter-
marriage, the biological side of assimilation, is actually going
on now, but to a much smaller extent among the Jews than
among any other immigrant group in America. Drachsler
worked out the proportion of intermarriages among 100,000
marriages in New York City of all races, and found that ap-
proximately 14 per cent. of these were intermarriages. Among
all white groups, however, the Jews presented the smallest pro-
portion of intermarriages, 1.17 per cent., ranging from less than
half of 1 per cent. among Rumanian Jews, to 5 per cent. among
German Jews, and 6.5 per cent. among French Jews. The age-
old tradition against marriage outside of the group, together
with the anti-Semitic spirit without, have conspired to prevent
this type of assimilation even now. And while the second genera-
tion of Jews in America shows far more intermarriages than
the first, the proportion is still extremely low—.64 per cent. for
the first generation, and 4.5 per cent. for the second. And for
a more assimilated section of Jewry, such as the German Jews,
the difierence between first and second generations is much less
marked.
The directly opposite theory to assimilation ismgipnism, the
attempt to revive Jewish group life in the ancient homeland of
the J ew, to restore the Hebrew tongue, erect a Jewish educa-
tional system, Jewish culture, and Jewish agriculture and in-
dustry as well. The connection of this movement with anti-
Semitism is evident from its origin in the mind of Theodore
Herzl, a Viennese correspondent in Paris, directly after he had
observed the Dreyfus case, and his whole Weltanshaunng was
thereby transformed. Zionism is the same answer to the prob-
lems of internationalism and civilization that we see in all the
new nationalities of Europe, in Ireland, Czecho‘-Slovakia and
Poland. It has achieved a measure of success that is really as-
tonishing in view of the slight resources and organization be-
“Democracy and Assimilation, Chapter IV.
108 Anti-Semitism in the United States
hind it. At the same time, it makes no pretension toward fur-
nishing an eventual home for all the Jewish people, especially
not for those of the United States and other lands of freedom.
Zionism aims to save the persecuted Jews by finding for many
of them a shelter; it aims, moreover, to solve the double prob-
lem of anti-Semitism and the inferiority complex by giving the
; Jewry of the world a source of pride in the form of a national
i home. To many thinkers this seems the only answer under pres-
‘ ent conditions.
Friedman ’s whole thesis is that Zionism is the logical and
final solution.
” The conflict between the Jew and his environment must be eliminated.
By what means may this aim be reached? Either the incongruous elements
must be removed or else they must be made compatible. 1‘ Only in their
historic land where the Jews will be in the majority, where they can without
fear of peculiarity assert their culture, is a Jewish mode of life possible.
1‘ Zionism at bottom is an attempt to preserve the remnant of Israel, that
will make of Palestine its home. It alone promises to save the Jewish
people, when the processes of assimilation, now at work in Western Europe
and in the United States, shall extend to a liberalized Eastern Europe.
1‘ The Jew today is a bundle of conflicts. Not only does he in the present
dispersed state suffer from the external, objective and social anti-Semitism,
but also from an internal, subjective and psychological slavery. The Zion-
ist insists on the maintenance of Jewish distinctiveness, of Jewish per-
onality.
~()__r_1;_ho_ol_qx_ymi_r_1'_J_1’1_d,_a0is\r_n_isgthaattempt to maintain the Jewish
group by means of the religious and customary behavior which
has operatedsuccessfully for that end since the destruction of
~th'eMJ~e_wish commonwealth in 70 A. D. It is conservative; it
finds its chief values, not in the national, but in the religious
life; and it endeavors to hold its group intact by a traditional
ritual which possesses a profound emotional appeal and estab-
lishes certain habits of life. It is the appeal to loyalty and to
group stability, and parallels similar conservative movements in
many Christian denominations, though with the stronger urge
of a longer and more bitter history of persecution.
1' Friedman: Survival or Extinction, p. 140. 1‘ p. 106. 1‘ p. 166. 1‘ p. 190.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 109
Finally, thgreis a theory of group adaptation, best developed
institutionally by the reform and conservative synagogs, but
also in many non-religious organizations-—social clubs, Young
Men ’s Hebrew Associations (the very name an imitation), labor
unions, and the like. Not that these various parties are identi-
cal; as a matter of fact, they have practically nothing in com-
mon except the incorporation in their philosophies of the two
elementS——J_§Jli_Sl_1__tradition and modern adaptation; but the con-
servative and reform statements-—of adaptation, of tradition, and
of the relation between the two-—present profound difierences
both in theory and in practical details of application. This ad-
justment is not as yet entirely successful, but has developed a
number of useful responses, by which Jews are managing to
preserve_“t_h_e_ir group) identity add? atjthefisame time to enter as
cbiistituent members into the American groiip rhind. Q It is still
in ah-;”1'ansition period, but the synthesis is being worked out
clearly enough for our purposes. In the synagog it involves
the reading of part of the prayers in English, as well as He-
brew, the beautification of the service by modern music, both
vocal and instrumental, the incorporation of a sermon in En-
glish, a modern system of religious education, and a development
of the social life of the young people by clubs, classes and recre-
ational means. Without the synagog, it involves a type of ‘
“Modernism, ’ ’ intellectual and moral. Even in the group which
endeavors to be most orthodox, it is finding its way in the form
of social surveys, modern methods in Hebrew education, and
some sort of working compromise with the community custom of
Sunday observance, the English language and the eating of
non-kosher food. The nature of this adjustment is clear from
the fact that every separate item has a difierent solution. The
great majority of Jews work on the traditional Sabbath, due to
the combined social and economic pressure; they universally are
adopting English as their daily speech, but the majority of them
have not yet admitted English into the ritual of the synagog;
all those who really care to do so maintain the Jewish dietary
laws in their own homes, though very few (comparatively) go
so far as to refuse to enter a restaurant where the dishes are
washed with soap, or to refuse to drink wine made by gentiles
110 Anti-Semitism in the United States
of which a libation might have been made to idols. At the same
time, the Hebrew education, so long an integral part of Jewish
life, has been completely revolutionized from the unsystematic
private or charity instruction of Russia to the large, well or-
ganized schools for daily Hebrew instruction at the close of the
public school day, whose method is largely copied from that
of the American public school 17.
We are witnessing before our eyes a group adjustment on a
large scale to modern thought, to American customs, to the non-
Jewish group. Some of this adjustment is systematic, based on
a theory of Jewish life as a distinct religion among Americans
of other religions. Some of it is economic and social, either
without theory or directly against the orthodox theory of the
adjusters themselves. At the same time, we are witnessing or-
thodoxy fighting for group solidarity; Zionism establishing a
Jewish group in a distant land; the assimilationists who escape
as individuals from the burden and the odium of being Jews.
Each theory is today being tried out in practice, and the results
of each will in time be demonstrated. At the same time, each
theory of Jewish life implies a corresponding conception of
America and of human groups as a whole.
1" See Gamoran: Changing Conceptions in Jewish Education.
CHAPTER IX.
THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN MIND
1.
The ideal of most social thinkers has been that of uniformity,
absence of parties and swallowing of groups in a common loy-
alty.
Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great;
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold;
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.1
Uniformity and unity within, hostility and spoils from with-
out—this is the old ideal of the happy society, founded on the
patriotism of the little Greek cities in their petty isolation.
But now this point of view of the state, appropriate in its
origin, is applied uncritically to a great modern nation, with
a hundred cities larger than any one of ancient Greece, with its
inhabitants drawn from the ends of the earth--such a nation
shall also present a uniformity of blood, speech and loyalty.
What is‘ the method by which such an end can be achieved?
What is the theory by which such an end can be justified?
Dr. I. Berkson in his “Theories of Americanization” has de-
veloped in detail four types of theory for the relation of the
sub-groups, especially the immigrant sub-groups, to the Amer-
ican nation. Of these the first two imply uniformity, “Ameri-
canization” by imposing the social and cultural standards of
the Anglo-Saxon group on the newer arrivals; the “Melting-
Pot” by which uniformity is to be achieved through a general
admixture and intermingling, racial or social. The viewpoint
of Americanization has been mentioned previously in this study
——the view that the United States ought to be a homogeneous
1Macaulay: Lays of Ancient Rome.
111
112 Anti-Semitism in the United States
people, and that the proper standard of homogeneity is that of
the white, Protestant, gentile group, of Anglo-Saxon origin.
The newer arrivals are expected to forget their native languages
and habits, to throw off their former loyalties, to copy the stand-
ards of life which they see already established in this country.
The new loyalty is conceived as antagonistic to the old; the de-
mands of democracy that the new citizen also shall express him-
self are quite disregarded. The rapidity of the process of in-
termarriage among many immigrant groups, and the still greater
speed of social adaptation and assimilation are evidences that
this theory has something in its favor. The awakening group
loyalties which its repressive methods arouse show definitely that
it has not the final word. As Lewis S. Gannet put it:
2We are forcing the Jew to choose between assimilation with complete
loss of group identity, and the establishment of entirely independent cul-
tural institutions—and we are shoving him more and more toward the
latter choice. . . . It is not so much anti-Semitism, Christian theology, or
Jewish traits that stand in the way as the smug Anglo-Saxon tradition of
exclusiveness and self-sufficiency.
A variation of this, which posits uniformity, but not the uni-
formity of one group imposed on all the rest, is the Melting-
Pot theory. The term was fathered by Israel Zangwill, who
made the young Jewish immigrant exclaim:
‘America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races
of Europe are melting and reforming!—-Here you stand, good folks, think
I, when I see you at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with
your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries.
But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God
you come to—these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and your
vendettas! German and Frenchman, Irishman and English, Jews and Rus-
sians, into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American!
Something of the same view seems to be voiced by John J .
Smertenko:
‘ Unless it be the Indian, there is no American type; the future American
will be the result of a synthesis of all the people that have poured their
life-blood into the veins of our nation. Hence it is impossible for the Jew
—-and the same principles apply to Irishman, German, Italian, and the
2The Nation, March 21, 1923.
'Zangwill: The Melting Pot, Act I.
‘The Nation, April 11, 1923.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 113
others—to become a hundred per cent. American until America is at least
three per cent. Jewish.
The Melting Pot theory marks an advance over the Ameri-
canization theory in its treatment of the immigrant, not in its
conception of the United States. Uniformity, physical or social
or both, is taken as the sine qua non of group unity, like-mind-
edness as its minimum. But many ethnic groups, religious
groups and others, wish to maintain their identity in their new
home. Democracy would allow them to do so. The group theory
of American life—which I have already elaborated historically
and in the present, would not merely allow this, but take it as
the only normal way in which an over-group of a hundred mil-
lion people can ever hope to attain the unity of a group mind.
2.
The first form of such a theory is called by Dr. Berkson the
“Federation of Nationalities.” It is modelled after the Federal
government, which is a union of self-governing states. In the
same way, as geographical units grow steadily less important
and functional units more important in our national life, the
same conception of federation was applied to these. The Soviet
government has taken national control as a function of a fed-
eration of economic interests; the federation of nationalities
view takes it as a federation of ethnic and religious groups. Our
greater cities are now beginning to establish this sort of an ap-
pearance. They have Italian quarters, Jewish quarters, Negro
quarters, even an American quarter, restricted to families whose
acceptability can be approved and vouched for. The advocate
of this theory holds that races are unchangeable—“a man can-
not change his grandfather,” they say-—the best that they can
do is to live in amity within the same general national boun-
daries. Now, it is true that groupings based on heredity and
on interest are growing increasingly important, as compared
with the geographical groupings which once meant so much.
Only in the old families, whose associations with a particular
state have persisted for generations, is much state sentiment left
among us. On the other hand, the Catholic, the Bohemian, the
114 Anti-Semitism in the United States
German, the J ew—-every national and religious group has en-
during loyalties. And the new economic groupings, labor, capi-
tal, the commercial class, the trade association, are developing
their own group minds more rapidly than we can easily note.
The danger of this theory, however, is as obvious as its par-
tial justification. It would make for the stability of what is
actually fluid. All groups take more than they give when they
enter a great mass of other groups, such as the United States.
Immigrant communities in the United States are changing con-
stantly, due to imitation—the Federation theory would estab-
lish them in the fixity of conflict and opposition. It would result,
on the one hand, in permanent immigrant groups, with lit-
tle participation in the general American group mind; on the
other, in permanent groups of protest, such as the Ku Klux
Klan. Carried to its logical extreme, it would give us the situ-
ation of the Levant, where a half dozen different races and reli-
gions, represented in the same village, preserve their isolation
and their enmity for a thousand years.
3.
Both the old Americans, who insist on American unity, and
the newer immigrants, who see and love their own group iden-
tity, have taken hold of real elements in the total situation, but
neither has envisaged the social process as a whole. It is true
that ethnic and religious groups are distinct in America, both
racially and socially; on the whole, the Jew refuses to inter-
marry with the gentile, the white with the Negro, a prohibition
that in the Southern states is reenforced by law. Similarly, the
Irishman preserves his loyalty and his interest in the struggle
for Irish liberty; the Italian and Greek reservists return to their
native lands when called for military duty; the Jew raises huge
sums for the relief of his fellow-Jews across the seas. But at
the same time, all these groups were ready to unite in a com-
mon purpose when the United States was at war. Every im-
migrant group, as every native group, daily sacrifices its own
purpose in a crucial problem for the greater welfare of the
United States. The double process, which we have traced in
Anti-Semitism in the United States 115
the formulation of the Constitution of the United States and in
subsequent history, is constantly going on-—the entrance of new
groups into the United States, and their incorporation into the
American group. This is what Dr. Berkson calls the “commu-
nity” theory, Professor Miller, “proportional loyalty,” and
many other thinkers by other terms, a point of view toward
which social theory and political thought is constantly tending;
one which we may call, in the terms employed in this study, the
integration of sub-groups into the American group mind by the
sacrifice of their own purpose for that of the United States as
a whole.
This theory recognizes the necessary and proper existence of
the sub-groups, whether family, religious, racial or ethnic units.
Human beings live naturally in comparatively small units, which
can be easily recognized and whose loyalty is habitual (some
would even claim, instinctive). These groups then join with
others into larger units of synthesis, by accepting the common
purpose of the whole in place of the conflicting purposes of
each. Just as the individual becomes a loyal member of a family,
the family of a Protestant church or a Jewish people, so that
church or ethnic unit becomes, in turn, a unit in the larger whole
of the American people. Group intolerance is thus sacrificed to
America in increasing proportion and scope; while group indi-
viduality preserves the democratic ideal by which a man is an
end in himself. The personal satisfactions and welfare of the
immigrants themselves cannot be advanced by compelling them
to give up everything they hold dear-—instead, the attempt will
prove subversive of the hoped-for unity by the usual result of
group resistance. But all these values can be retained in a
higher synthesis, a gradation of loyalties, an integration of minds
in a true group mind.
The traditional Hebrew phrases for the Jewish people are Am
Israel, the People of Israel, and Keneseth Israel, the Congrega-
tion of Israel—-grasping thus both the racial and spiritual ele-
ments in one conception. To quote Berkson:
5 This conception which identifies the Jewish people with its cultural and
spiritual aspirations comes very close to the view that nationality is essen-
116 Anti-Semitism in the United States
tially a psychological force. ‘‘ The “Community” theory would make the
history of the ethnic group, its aesthetic, cultural and religious inheritance,
its national self-consciousness the basic factor. " The “Community”
theory endeavors to meet all the justifiable considerations presented in each
of the other proposals. It seeks especially to avoid such a scheme of ad-
justment as would tend to force the individual to accept one solution as
against another. It leaves all the forces working; they are to decide what
the future is to be.
Professor Dewey put the matter similarly:
'‘ The way to deal with hyphenism is to welcome it, but to welcome it
with the sense of extracting from each people its special good, so that it
shall surrender into a common fund of wisdonrm and experience what it
especially has to contribute. All of these surrenders and contributions
taken together create the national spirit of America. The dangerous thing
is for each factor to isolate itself, to try to live off its past, and then to
attempt to impose itself upon other elements, or at least, to keep itself
intact and thus refuse to accept what other cultures have to offer, so as
thereby to be transmuted into authentic Americanism.
Dr. Drachsler represents the same point of view:
’ To hope for a rich, composite civilization in America through biological
fusion merely is to chase a will-o’-the-wisp. Nothing short of conscious
social control of the transmission of the cultural heritage will achieve the
result. 1° The function of the cultural groups would be to foster through
voluntary cultural community organization their cultural uniqueness, while
the function of the State would embrace the harmonization of these cul-
tural difierences, the unification of distinctive contributions into a rich and
variegated whole. 11 America with her unique experience of multiform
contacts of races and peoples is in a. position to invest the concept of
democracy with a broader and richer meaning than any nation has done
thus far. She can, if she will, develop the principle of tolerance as no
people has yet dared to do. She can, if she will, encourage the search for
the unique and the distinctive in social life, side by side with a strong
emphasis on the basic human interests.
But, many will say, does this theory erect conflicting loyalties‘!
Can they be reconciled? The answer to this is in terms of pro-
portional loyalties. I quote Professor Miller ’s summary:
1' The real problem of society is the living together of individuals and
groups in such a way that both the individual and the group can attain
I‘Berkson: Theories of Americanization, p. 101. ‘p. 98. 'p. 117.
“Dewey: Addresses and Proceedings of the Nat. Ed. Assn. Vol. LIV, p. 185.
‘Drachsler: Democracy and Assimilation, p. 236. 1° p. 188. up. 222.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 117
the highest degree of self-realization. 1* One of the greatest obstacles to
truth and progress is the preaching of one hundred per cent. Americanism.
. . Reality demands that we begin to advocate ten to twenty-five per cent.-
patriotism. This proportion will account for the peculiarly provincial
values that our particular fatherland has contributed to our development.
. The seventy-five to ninety per cent. of loyalty that is left belongs to
values in our lives that are international rather than national.
Among these international values he finds the religious, eco-
nomic and cultural ones, all of which transcend the nation, either
by being wider or narrower, belonging to a sub-group or to hu-
manity.
4.
This integration of groups need not stop at the nation as at
present constituted, as is hinted in the last citation. The
nation is itself an integration of groups, and can enter into
other integrations, which include it or which cross it with dif-
ferent lines of interest and of grouping. In the words of U. G-
Weatherly:
1‘ Loyalty to a particular unit with a well defined function in no way
collides with allegiance to other bodies with quite other outlooks. . . .
Men may still remain good national patriots while loyally accepting the
controls exercised by world standards in science, art or music. 1‘ Both race
and nation must be preserved because they have certain permanent and
necessary functions, and because they are the natural centers of that
loyalty which can never be swallowed up in world-loyalty, since human
nature cannot live wholly in universals. . . . Between these two sets of
loyalties there is a clear distinction; the one is local and particularistic, the
other is human. A well-rounded social organization, whether within the
single group or between groups, will give practical scope to each. .
In a'practical way men must recognize that since they have multiple inter-
ests, they may have multiple allegiances.
To return to Miller for another phrase:
1‘ The nation is a growth from innumerable simpler social forms, and’
the growth to internationalism is relatively little more complex than the
growth of nationalism. 1" The old patriotism means stultification; an adap-
12Miller: Races, Nations and Classes, p. 169. 13 p. 186.
‘4 Racial Pessimism, in Pub. Amer. Sociol. Soc. Vol. XVIII, p. 13. 1‘ p. 14-
1‘ Miller, p. 181. 1" p. 191.
118 Anti-Semitism in the United States
tation of loyalty to meet actual present conditions ineans enlargement of
character and the possibility of a new world.
There is no beginning and no end to the growth and the or-
ganization of the mind. Beginning with the individual and the
family, we may analyze the elements which enter into these
elementary mental units, or we may observe the mounting syn-
thesis to the city, state and nation; or, following other lines
of interest and of affiliation, to the movements of world culture,
religion and economic organization, in their world-wide bearing.
The nation is formed by a synthesis of its sub-groups; and the
nation, in turn, enters into a wider synthesis to form the nas-
cent but still growing conception of mankind. The mind of
the many groups of Americans yield up their purposes, when
called upon, for the greater unity—greater not only in size, but
in richness, variety and tradition-—-that constitutes the mind
of America. The future will mark the growing unity in diver-
sity of the American group mind; the mounting beauty of its
many-colored canvas, the increasing harmony of its many-
throated symphony. At the same time, America will become
more and more a part of a still greater synthesis, the group
mind that will ~transcend the selfish purpose of the nation in
such common purposes as the struggle against the adverse forces
of nature; the organization of men for welfare and for culture;
the prevention of that ancient group intolerance, which means
the destruction of many small groups and the standardization
and impoverishment of many great ones. The fulfillment of
the prophet ’s vision will be at hand when groups of men will
not strive to destroy each other but to fulfill each other, when
the sub-group will not undermine but serve the greater unity,
when the ultimate vision of every struggling group of men, be
it small or great, will be to serve the purpose of the whole, to
enter into the mind of humanity, the ideal of God.
Anti-Semitism in the United States 119
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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PAUL BARTH, Die Philosphie der Geschichte als Soziologie.
I. BERKSON, Theories of Americanization.
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WILLIAM DURANT, Philosophy and the Social Problem.
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WILLIAM RAY DENNES, Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology.
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- MAX RAISIN, History of the Jews in Modern Times.
MELVIN G. RIGG, 2d, Theories of the Obligation of Citizen to State.
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-JOHN SPARGO, The Jew and American Ideals.
120 Anti-Semitism in the United States
NATHANIEL S. SHAILER, The Neighbor.
MAURICE SAMUEL, You Gentiles.
OSCAR STRAUS, The American Spirit.
PHILIP SCHAFF, Church and State in the United States.
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Hearst ’s International Magazine, 1922 and ’23.
A series on anti-Semitism; another on the Ku Klux Klan.
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The Menorah Journal, Nov. 1924.
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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