7
At the end of World War I, Americans faced two domestic issues and several foreign policy questions related to the situation of the Jews. In domestic politics, the issues were first, whether the United States would continue to offer its Jewish residents the equality that George Washington had promised now that the American Jewish population numbered in the millions rather than in the thousands. The second, related question, was how would the United States treat Jewish immigration in an era when all immigration was becoming controversial.
In the realm of foreign policy, one question had little to do directly with the Jewish people, but would have major implications for the future both of Zionism and of Jewish diaspora communities in Europe: What strategy would the United States pursue to avoid a new world war? Would it join institutions like Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and use its power to promote democracy, human rights, and peace abroad? In that case American diplomatic muscle might become a defense for Jewish minorities in European countries where they suffered discrimination and persecution. Would the United States withdraw entirely from international affairs, trusting in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to protect it from the troubles of the Old World? Finally, what attitude would the American government take toward the Balfour Declaration, the promise that the British cabinet made in 1917 to allow the construction of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, a province seized from the defeated Ottoman Empire and awarded to Britain under the League of Nations mandate system?
Some of the answers America gave to these questions were necessary and wise; others have been severely criticized by later generations. But in every case, the decisions were immensely consequential for the future of the Jewish people in the United States and abroad, and we still live with their consequences.
The debate over immigration restriction was one of the longest and most bitter debates in American history. Nativism, or as people might put it today, “white nationalism,” was not enough to shift the long-established national consensus in favor of open immigration. The agricultural economy of small farms might be in crisis, but American factories were booming and the onset of the automobile age only increased the demand for factory labor. For factory owners, immigrant labor was close to ideal. Penniless foreign immigrants who spoke little or no English, had only the most basic education if that, and were used to low wages and hard work at home made for malleable and willing workers. Better still, a multilingual and multicultural working class was difficult to organize into labor unions. Belonging to different ethnic communities, worshipping in different churches or synagogues, divided by language and history, the large pool of industrial labor was less capable of supporting a strong labor movement or socialist party than the working class of most European countries at the time. Urban politicians also benefited from the presence of a large population of workers who could be converted into loyal voters for political machines. Given the economic and political forces in support of unlimited migration, the nativist reaction of rural America was unable to stop the tide.
But the nativists found unexpected allies among the nation’s Progressives, a movement of upper-middle-class moral and political reformers then at the peak of their influence. Progressive intellectuals worried that masses of ignorant and, in some cases at least, anarchistic and socialist immigrants would cement the power of big-city political machines, block needed urban reforms, and doom the United States as a whole to the rule of the most backward and benighted political forces. In their fights with machines like Tammany Hall, Progressives learned that the newest immigrants were often the best recruits for the machine politicians: penniless “greenhorns,” as fresh-off-the-boat immigrants were called, were much less concerned about municipal governance and civil service reform than about finding powerful political patrons who could help them get jobs. Progressive intellectuals well understood that the kind of patron-client relationships that were fostering corruption in the New World had deep roots in Old World politics and social structures. They did not just fear that organizations like the Mafia would bring Italian criminal organizations to the United States. They feared that the mass of immigrants who had grown up under quasi-feudal relations of dependency with powerful patrons and godfathers would reproduce the political structures of the Old Country in American cities.
There were some Progressives who had other, deeper fears where the new migrants were concerned. The period between 1880 and the 1920s was the apogee of the deeply perverse set of misguided ideas that, at the time, went by the name of “scientific racism.” Based in part on a misunderstanding of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, many Progressive intellectuals tried to explain the differences between human cultural groups on the basis of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Like past generations, and like many Americans to this day, they believed that Great Britain and the United States were the most advanced societies of their time. Why was this so? It must, they argued, be that the “Anglo-Saxon” race had better genes than other human races and cultures. The Progressives were for the most part not so stupid as to fail to understand that both Britain and the United States are countries with long histories of ethnic mixing. They were, however, deeply worried about the mass migration into the United States of Asians, Greeks, Jews, Italians, Arabs, and others that their racial theories labeled as inferior and in some cases as “degenerate.”[1]
The immigrants from the imperial zone, worried these eminent scientists, professors, civil society activists, foundation executives, public intellectuals, and politicians, would dilute the American “race.” Beyond their presumed racial unsuitability was the question of culture. A number of leading Protestant clergy and intellectuals were also concerned that too great an infusion of Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish immigrants would undermine the Protestant culture of ordered liberty and civic virtue that, they felt, lay at the foundation of American prosperity.[2]
The Progressives were realistic enough to understand that the new immigrants were here to stay. Their responses were sometimes constructive, sometimes reprehensibly misguided, and sometimes a curious mix of both. Among these initiatives, Progressives sought to “Americanize” the new immigrants by increasing support for public education and the establishment of “settlement houses” to inculcate healthy American values in poor urban neighborhoods. Simultaneously, they looked to police the unruly behavior of the immigrants by promoting prohibition, mandating sterilization for the unfit, legalizing and encouraging birth control to keep their burgeoning numbers in check, and above all by limiting the numbers of new immigrants and testing new entrants more aggressively for infectious diseases like tuberculosis and mental defects likely, in the view of Progressive eugenicists, to create a breed of subnormal hereditary paupers.
Labor unions, including unions many of whose members were themselves foreign-born, also came to support immigration restriction. As they reflected on the reasons why the owners of factories supported immigration, union members and leaders, despite their own immigrant roots, came to feel that restricted migration would offer those already in the United States a greater opportunity to advance. Blue-collar opposition to immigration was a powerful political force for many decades in the United States.
The coalition that ultimately put an end to the long era of open immigration to the United States was a strange one. Pro-labor Democrats, frank racists who believed that America should stay “white,” populist farmers, and the Progressives were divided on many issues, but gradually their different concerns about the effects of mass immigration brought them together into what was ultimately an irresistible movement.
The political progress of the restrictionist movement was gradual and slow. The first victories came in the early 1880s. Of these, by far the most sweeping was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which ended a period of Chinese immigration, primarily to the West Coast. But those who were seeking similar measures against Eastern and Southern European immigration largely were stymied. A few bans on criminals, wards of the state, the insane, and the contagiously ill were passed, and Ellis Island was opened in 1892 to create a central depot to ensure that federal officials could screen the flow of new entrants. The idea was that the facility on Ellis Island (which only examined arrivals who traveled in “steerage”; better heeled travelers could land with less trouble) would sort out the sick and the unsuitable. In practice this did not significantly reduce immigration. While 20 percent of arriving passengers were quarantined or held for further examination, in the end only 2 percent of those who landed on Ellis Island were forced to return. Measures to impose substantial financial qualifications or literacy tests that would severely restrict the Great Wave immigration were defeated again and again, and similar measures at the state level were deemed unconstitutional by the courts.[3]
The pressure to limit immigration continued to grow. In 1907, Congress established the Dillingham Commission, which met from 1907 to 1910 and delivered an influential, strongly pro-restrictionist report based largely on the supposed science of eugenics.[4] Evidence of a changing approach to Irish immigrants can be found in a commission report on conditions in the coal mining industry. Workers of Irish ancestry were classified with other “old stock” Americans.[5] This marked a sharp break from decades of Anglo prejudice against the sons and daughters of St. Patrick, but the proponents of immigration restriction knew how to count. Only by separating the old immigrants from the new could a restrictionist consensus be forged. Had the Irish Americans thrown in their lot with the Great Wave immigrants and pro-immigration capitalists, the cause of restriction might never have prevailed.
After the Dillingham Report, the restrictionist cause gained momentum. Only presidential vetoes (1913 and 1915) prevented Congress from imposing a literacy test on would-be immigrants that would have excluded many immigrants from the imperial zone. Then World War I broke out and transatlantic passenger travel came largely to a stop. But there were widespread concerns that with the return of normal trade and travel patterns after the war, the torrent would resume. In 1917, Congress passed a law requiring a literacy test over President Wilson’s veto: opposition to immigration had reached super-majority status.
But the literacy test proved not to be enough of an impediment because the demographic pressure from a war-wracked Europe was huge. When it came to Jewish migration, the literacy test had little impact. Given the emphasis on literacy even in impoverished Jewish communities, only 3 percent of Jewish arrivals were rejected for illiteracy when immigration resumed under the new law in 1921.[6]
Once it was clear that millions of Europeans were desperate to escape the poverty and dislocation of post–World War I Europe by migrating to the United States, it was only a question of time before immigration would be effectively curtailed. Two acts of Congress shut the Golden Door. First, in 1921, an Emergency Quota Act limited immigration from each nation to a fixed proportion based on the percentage of the U.S. population from each nation recorded in the 1910 census. Then in 1924, came the decisive step: the Johnson-Reed Act dropped the cap to 2 percent of the number of immigrants from each nation that had been living in America in, crucially, the 1890 census—before the Great Wave had radically changed the demographics. This system, building on the findings of the Dillingham Commission, effectively split the descendants of the old waves of migrants from the latest arrivals. Countries like Ireland and Germany received much larger quotas than countries like Italy and Poland.[7]
Additionally, the act set an overall cap on immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere at 150,000 per year. This slammed the door shut with a vengeance: immigration fell more than 90 percent in the following few years, from 700,000-plus newcomers in 1924 to 29,500 in 1934.[8] Because of the nationality quota provisions, the decline in immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe was even sharper. The Great Wave was over and the American Jewish community was quick to note that many of the countries from which immigration was most drastically limited under the quota system were countries from which, before 1924, most of America’s Jewish immigrants came.
The American decision to slash migration from countries with large Jewish populations was partly, though not exclusively, motivated by antisemitism. Americans passed laws to ban whole groups of people: bans on Japanese and Chinese immigrants were the most conspicuous example. No such outright ban was adopted in the case of the Jews, and some of the restrictionist legislation, like the imposition of a literacy test, left Jewish migration largely untouched. However, there is no doubt that the presence of significant numbers of Jews among the waves of European migrants helped strengthen anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States.
Fundamentally, the decision to restrict immigration after 1924 reflected a decision by Americans of the time that migration to the United States, even by desperate refugees fleeing massacres and oppression in their homelands, could not be the solution to the humanitarian problems of the world. There were too many wars and there was too much oppression. To be open to the radically unsettled world of the time, they believed, was to risk losing America’s cohesion and unity at home.
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was the most important single act of legislation in American history from the standpoint of the State of Israel and the Zionist movement. If the United States had not voted to restrict immigration so drastically, it is probable that the country of Israel would not exist today.
Whatever the number of Jewish immigrants, the question remained as to whether they, along with long-established residents, would be considered fully “American” in a country riven by nativist discord and an activist Ku Klux Klan.
The Place of the Jews
By 1920, there were almost four million Jews in America[9] and among both Jews and non-Jews there was a real concern that the earlier American tradition of relative acceptance of Jews would fade away in the face of rising antisemitism. It was quite possible, after all, that the early American tolerance for Jews was due in part to the very small number of Jews living in the United States. As we have seen, in the 1770s, only an estimated one thousand Jews lived in the thirteen colonies; by 1800 there were still fewer than two thousand. As late as 1830, the Jewish population of the United States was still less than five thousand.[10] At such levels, many Americans had no personal contact with Jews. There were only a handful of Jewish synagogues, no large Jewish neighborhoods or any other conspicuous signs of a significant Jewish presence.
This began to change around 1840 as a wave of mostly Ashkenazi Jews from German-speaking Europe came to the United States. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the American Jewish population reached 150,000, and as the Jewish presence in the United States became more conspicuous, the signs of growing antisemitism were increasingly evident.[11]
Even in colonial times there was evidence that, despite a general lessening of anti-Jewish feeling in the United States compared to conditions in Europe, old stereotypes had crossed the ocean. Increase Mather wrote that Jews “have been wont once a year to steal Christian children and to put them to death by crucifying out of scorn and hatred against Christians.”[12] A century later, John Quincy Adams’s reaction on visiting a synagogue in Amsterdam was that “I never saw in my life such a set of miserable looking people, and they would steal your eyes out of your head if they possibly could.”[13]
Even as Jews gained voting rights and were elected to public office in the early American republic, antisemitic beliefs, caricatures, and abusive language continued to appear. Some of the most progressive figures of the day indulged in some of the ugliest rhetoric. William Lloyd Garrison loathed a prominent Jewish activist and writer, calling Mordecai Manuel Noah “the lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross….Shylock will have his ‘pound of flesh’ at whatever cost.”[14] A widely known Mother Goose rhyme of the era contained verses that would not have startled Chaucer:
Jack sold his egg
To a rogue of a Jew
Who cheated him out
Of half of his due.
The Rothschilds and the Jewish banking power they were believed to represent cast a long shadow in some American minds. Niles Weekly Register was the leading periodical of its time; published in Baltimore, it enjoyed a national distribution among business and political leaders. In 1829 it carried the “news” that the Rothschilds had purchased Jerusalem from the sultan and went on in 1835 to assert that the Jewish banking dynasty “govern[s] a Christian world. Not a cabinet meets without their advice. They stretch their hand with equal ease from Petersburgh [sic] to Vienna, from Vienna to Paris, from Paris to London, from London to Washington. Baron Rothschild, the head of the house, is the true king of Judah, the prince of the captivity, the messiah so long looked for by this extraordinary people. He holds the keys of peace of war, of blessing or cursing.” Even as it repeated conventional antisemitic fantasies about secret Jewish power and influence, the Register could not conceal its admiration for the financier. The baron “possesses more real force than David—more wisdom than Solomon. What do they care for the barren seacoast of Palestine?…We understand that an accomplished and beautiful daughter of this house, is married to an American, and intends soon to make New York her permanent residence. The beauty of Judah is not departed, nor is the strength of the house of Israel weakened.”[15]
Lydia Maria Child, like Garrison an abolitionist, and also one of the first women to carve out a solid place in American literary life, shared the Register’s awe at Rothschild power. “The sovereigns of Europe and Asia, and the republics of America, are their debtors to an immense amount. The Rothschilds are Jews; and they have wealth enough to purchase all Palestine if they choose; a large part of Jerusalem is in fact mortgaged to them.”[16] In Julia Ward Howe’s 1857 play The World’s Own, a wicked queen hires a nasty, usurious Jew to kidnap the innocent child of the play’s hero.[17] Describing New York’s notorious Five Points neighborhood, a popular guidebook of the era described the Jewish receivers of stolen goods operating there as possessing “the elasticity of flesh, the glittering eye sparkle…the hook of the nose which betrays the Israelite as the human kite, formed to be feared, hated and despised, yet to prey upon mankind.”[18] The attitude of James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the sensational and widely read New York Herald, also deserves comment; the Herald treated the Damascus blood libel of 1840 as straight news, accusing Syrian Jews of using the blood of Christians in their hellish feast, and blamed “Rothschild” for supposed efforts to cover up the affair.[19]
As the wave of Jewish immigration from German-speaking Europe made the Jewish presence in the United States more conspicuous, there was an increase in anti-Jewish activity. During the Civil War, a time when both North and South were swept by religious revivals, non-Jews in each section feared (mistakenly, on the whole) that the Jews in their region sympathized with the other side. That August Belmont, a Prussian-born Jewish immigrant who represented Rothschild interests in the United States from the 1830s onward, and who had supported the presidential candidacy of James Buchanan, was the national chairman of the Democratic Party during the Civil War attracted considerable comment and criticism. In 1864, The Chicago Tribune accused Belmont of buying Confederate bonds on behalf of the Rothschilds; the charges were false but widely disseminated.[20]
The presence of Judah P. Benjamin in Jefferson Davis’s cabinet led many northerners to conclude that Jews backed the South, while many southerners saw him as an evil genius deliberately leading the Confederacy to its destruction. General Grant’s infamous General Order Number 11, which specifically banned Jewish peddlers from Union lines was, as Grant himself came to realize, both wounding and unfair. Many of the German-speaking Jews who came to the United States began as itinerant peddlers and were not always highly thought of or warmly welcomed. However, Jewish peddlers were no worse, if also perhaps no better, than the many other itinerant sellers who followed the armies, and in an age of primitive commissaries and poor supplies, soldiers relied on private merchants for many essential goods.[21] John Wilkes Booth’s brother Edwin, perhaps the best-known Shakespearean actor of the time, compared Shylock to contemporary Jewish financiers like August Belmont, Judah P. Benjamin, and, of course, the Rothschilds.[22]
In any case, after the war, there was murmuring on both sides that few Jews had actually served in the front lines, while some Jewish businesses (like, it must be added, many more non-Jewish businesses) had grown conspicuously prosperous during the conflict. When Union veteran J. M. Rogers published an article in the prestigious North American Review in 1891 saying that he had served for eighteen months in the front lines and never saw a Jewish soldier in the battle zone, Simon Wolf published a book of names of Jews who served in the conflict, and the Hebrew Union Veterans Association was founded in 1896.[23]
The number of American Jews and the signs of American antisemitism both continued to grow in the years following the Civil War. In 1866 a group of leading insurance companies agreed not to insure Jewish businesses against fire out of a belief that Jewish business owners were setting fire to their own premises to collect insurance claims.[24] In 1877 Joseph Seligman, a prominent Jewish banker, was barred by the exclusive Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York.[25] This was the beginning of a long-term effort to exclude Jews from fashionable or desirable hotels and residential developments.
All this and more had occurred when the Jewish population of the United States was still around 200,000. As harassed and impoverished Russian Jews fled persecution and violence in backward Russia, the American Jewish population began to soar, and the eastern Jews looked much less American or even assimilable than their German predecessors. Between 1880 and 1940 antisemitism in the United States would become a much more formidable force than at any time in our history, and while it never reached the depths struck in many European countries, in politics, business, and education antisemitism steadily and ominously grew.
A mix of sources contributed to the new antisemitism. Non-Jewish immigrants brought the prejudices of the Old Country with them. The embedded antisemitism in pre–Vatican II Catholic tradition became a stronger force in American life as Catholicism increased its presence and built up its institutional networks. Immigrant Jews lived in the same working-class neighborhoods as immigrant non-Jewish Poles, Russians, and other populations from countries where antisemitic sentiment was widespread. Jewish pupils often faced ostracism or bullying in public schools; Jewish workers might face similar problems in factories. Occasionally these tensions resulted in larger-scale violence; in 1911 in Malden, Massachusetts, a group of young Irish men attacked and beat up older Jewish men. As Jewish immigration began to change the character of New York’s Lower East Side, hundreds of Jews were beaten in what observers called a “police riot” led by members of the predominantly German American and Irish American police.[26]
At the other end of the social scale, the longtime genteel distaste with which many upper-class Americans had always viewed European Jews intensified after the Civil War and through the years of the Great Wave of immigration. It intensified partly because the new Jewish immigrants looked and acted more stereotypically “Jewish” than the assimilated, acculturated, and long-established Sephardic Jews who had been integrated into urban society in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston from the colonial period. At the same time, as the children of Jewish immigrants began to compete for places in universities and professions, and as Jewish Wall Street firms began to play a larger role in the world of finance, an element of economic competition came into play. The WASP ascendancy of well-established families exercising power through informal networks was coming under increasing pressure as American society grew more diverse. Measures to limit the number of Jewish students and faculty in colleges gradually spread throughout the educational system. College after college adopted formal or informal (but very real) limits on the number of Jews admitted. It was extremely difficult for any Jew, however accomplished, to get a faculty job at an American university. Hospitals, often run by nonprofit corporations under the control of long-established WASP families, limited the number of Jewish doctors they would hire. Prestigious WASP law firms and banks refused to hire Jews. The State Department was for much of this time a bastion of antisemitic sentiment.[27]
Finally, nativist anxiety about demographic and cultural change mixed with agrarian fears and resentment connected to the decline of the family farm to create a toxic form of antisemitism whose dim echoes can still be heard among some on the antisemitic far right. William Jennings Bryan’s cross of gold speech at the 1896 Democratic convention (“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold”) would have been heard by many listeners as what today would be called an antisemitic dog whistle: the Jews crucified Christ and their successors, the bankers, seek to crucify the innocent again today. The hatred of financial and moneyed interests that swept through hard-pressed farming states and communities in the 1890s frequently singled out Jews as the villains of the drama. A journalist reporting on the Populist convention held in St. Louis in the year of Bryan’s speech wrote that “one of the striking things about the Populist convention…is the extraordinary hatred of the Jewish race. It is not possible to go into any hotel in the city without hearing the most bitter denunciation of the Jewish race as a class and of particular Jews who happen to have prospered in the world.”[28]
Muckraking journalism, which later generations have somewhat uncritically assumed to have been entirely on the side of virtue and truth, often stoked the fires of antisemitism. George Kibbe Turner was a prominent writer much of whose work focused on the sensational subject of the white slave trade, which today would be called human trafficking. Turner claimed that Jews dominated the human trafficking business, relying on links to corrupt urban politicians in Tammany Hall to protect them. His allegations about Jews turned out to have little foundation; when questioned under oath he was forced to acknowledge that in fact he lacked any “personal knowledge” about their involvement.[29] Beyond the world of human trafficking, Jews were accused of committing a disproportionate number of crimes; in 1908 the commissioner of police in New York falsely stated that half of all the criminals in the city were Jews.[30]
To many at the time, including many Jews, it seemed as if the United States had lost any immunity to antisemitism that it may once have possessed, yet the remarkable thing about this period of rising antisemitism in the United States is that the civil and legal equality of Jewish Americans was never endangered. Jews continued to hold political office, to advance—slowly and against resistance—in the professions, to build and to operate businesses, to organize advocacy organizations, open schools and colleges, own property (except where prohibited by restrictive covenants), and otherwise participate in American life. Antisemitism was a social force in America without any significant legal power.
Even at the height of the nativist backlash leading up to immigration restriction, Jews were not the object of special legislation. Immigration from China was banned by law, and immigration from Japan was restricted by virtue of a “gentleman’s agreement” with that country, but no special legal test was ever imposed to exclude Jewish immigrants while letting others pass. The most important legislative act aimed at limiting migration before the quotas were introduced in the 1920s was the literacy test adopted over Woodrow Wilson’s veto; this literacy test, as we have seen, had less impact on Jewish immigration than on other groups. Similarly, the quota system acted even more drastically against some other ethnic groups than against Jews. Jews from Germany, for example, benefited from the relatively large quota that German emigrants enjoyed under the Johnson-Reed Act; non-Jewish Italians and Poles had a harder time getting permission to immigrate to the United States than Jewish citizens of Weimar Germany.
Even on the far right, Jew-hatred never quite became a defining issue. Emanuel Steiner was a Jewish merchant who operated a store in Fairfield, Illinois. In 1924 he was startled and perhaps apprehensive to see a delegation from the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. According to one account of the proceedings, the delegation’s spokesman read the following declaration:
Mr. Steiner, we are [here] today as your friends. You have lived here 50 years. You have been an honest, upright man. The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan respect and revere you. It is the constitutional right of every man to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience. The Ku Klux Klan never has and never will try to violate that right. You have built up by your honesty, uprightness and integrity a successful business. As a citizen there is no better. You have always been behind every proposition for the community and its welfare. As American citizens the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan congratulate you for the many things that you have done for the flag and for the country.
The Klan delegation then presented the Jewish storekeeper with a bouquet of American Beauty roses.[31]
Not every Klan branch shared this attitude, of course, but it remains the case that even for the Ku Klux Klan, America’s Jews were, at worst, one of a number of problems that the country faced, and among those problems, they were neither the largest nor the most dangerous. Jews might be an unpopular minority, and they might, like many other American minorities at the time, find themselves the victims of discrimination, but their status as citizens, voters, and economic actors was never seriously threatened in the United States.
In the end, the American answer to the Jewish Question, that Jewish Americans were part of America and would be treated more or less like other Americans, stood the test of the twentieth century. They might be liked, they might be disliked, but American Jews were basically one more minority in a nation that was full of minorities. America was a tribe of tribes, and the Jewish tribe had a place under the big tent.
There are several reasons why antisemitism in the United States, despite its growth between 1860 and 1940, never became the kind of political force it sometimes became in Europe. Not all of these reflect credit on American society. One factor was clearly that the centrality of what W. E. B. Du Bois famously called “the color line” in American life and politics significantly reduced the difference between Jewish Americans and other Americans in the minds even of bigots. The Ku Klux Klansmen of Fairfield, Illinois, might have been less fond of Emanuel Steiner if they were not more concerned about Black Americans in the area.
Despite the occasional hostility between the groups, American Jews also benefited from the presence of American Catholics. Both demographically and religiously, Catholicism was a larger problem for Protestant nativism than Judaism was or could ever be. In the eighteenth century Jews enjoyed more freedom of worship and more political rights in most American colonies than Roman Catholics did. During the nineteenth century, right up through the end of mass immigration in 1924, Catholic immigration caused considerably more unease than Jews among both upper- and lower-class Protestants. With the Catholic Church officially at least committed to a set of political beliefs directly opposed to many key tenets of American democracy, right up through the 1960 election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy many Protestant intellectuals and social leaders worried that a rising tide of Catholicism might swamp the American republic.
But there was an additional factor, rooted both in the differences between the European and American approaches to Jewish emancipation, one which to some degree still today informs attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic. Max Nordau spoke at the First Congress of the World Zionist Organization about the degree to which Jewish emancipation cut across much popular feeling in Europe:
As the French Revolution gave to the world the metric system and the decimal system, so it also created a kind of normal spiritual system which other countries, either willingly or unwillingly, accepted as the normal measure for their state of culture. A country which claimed to be at the height of culture had to possess several institutions created or developed by the Great Revolution; as, for instance, representation of the people, freedom of the press, a jury system, separation of powers, etc. Jewish Emancipation was also one of these indispensable articles of a highly cultured state; just as a piano must not be absent from the drawing room of a respectable family even if not a single member of the family can play it. In this manner Jews were emancipated in Europe not from an inner necessity, but in imitation of a political fashion; not because the people had decided from their hearts to stretch out a brotherly hand to the Jews, but because leading spirits had accepted a certain cultured idea which required that Jewish Emancipation should figure also in the statute book.[32]
As Shlomo Avineri explains in The Making of Modern Zionism,[33] Nordau’s point was that the gap between “the formal, external norms of Emancipation and the real, concrete feeling toward the Jews in society” was a fertile environment in which new forms of antisemitism would and did grow. The French revolutionaries, said Nordau, formulated a syllogism: “Every man is born with certain rights; the Jews are human beings; consequently the Jews are born to own the rights of man.” The result, he argued, was that emancipation was decided, “not through a fraternal feeling for the Jews, but because logic demanded it. Popular sentiment rebelled, but the philosophy of the Revolution decreed that principles must be higher than sentiments. The men of 1792 emancipated us only for the sake of principle.”[34]
In the United States, both the Enlightenment itself and the emancipation of the Jews rested on different foundations. The ideas of the Enlightenment came to the United States, as to Great Britain, as a result of internal historical developments. The Anglo-American Enlightenment emerged in many places among many people at many different levels of society whose reflections on their own conditions of life led them to embrace as commonsense ideas that elsewhere burst out of a revolutionary thunder cloud or were carried on the bayonets of an invading revolutionary army. The Enlightenment in America was not the triumph of principle over popular sentiments; it was the expression in abstract form of widely felt popular sentiment.
Similarly, the place of Jews in American society rested less on abstract syllogisms about universal human rights than on a historical process that created the idea of ethnic and religious denominations existing peacefully in a common society. During and after the Great Wave, as both “old stock” and “new stock” Americans struggled to make sense of the new social reality in which they found themselves, the denominational model felt—and indeed still feels—to many Americans like the obvious, even self-evident approach. There are Irish-Americans; there are Mexican-Americans; there are Jewish-Americans; there are Polish-Americans. In every case, what comes before the hyphen is important to individuals and communities, but what comes after the hyphen is the foundation of the common life of the American people, still a tribe of tribes.
In the migration debates and in the domestic debates over the place of Jews in American life, Americans came to two conclusions. Abroad, Jews would be treated like other people; mass migration to the United States was not to be a solution for the Poles, the Greeks, the Armenians, or the Russians—or the Jews. The new quota system would not inflict any special penalties on Jewish immigrants, but neither would it offer them any special benefits. At home, Jewish Americans would be treated like other Americans. At the time, private discrimination was still legal and, for that matter, was widely accepted as natural and normal. Jews were no more exempted from its operation than were Italians, the Irish, or other ethnic groups. American Jews might not always be welcome at the High Table with the WASP ascendancy, but they were not going to be driven out from under the big tent of the American nation.
The Lodge Consensus
As American society worked its way to an understanding of the place of Jewish American citizens, it also confronted questions about American policy toward Jews overseas. The answers to these questions naturally and inevitably depended on national debates about the role of the United States in the twentieth century. In the aftermath of World War I, now that the United States had clearly emerged as the greatest power in the world, and now that it was clear that political disturbances in the Old World could drag the United States into major conflicts, Americans needed to develop a vision about a new foreign policy for the postwar world. And of course, they also needed to decide how to respond to the British promise to allow the creation of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. To Americans at the time, the questions were related; most Americans saw their policy in Palestine as the natural application to the special condition of the Jewish people of the policies that guided American diplomacy worldwide.
In recounting this history and explaining why Americans thought as they did, it is not my intention to defend all of these decisions. With the clarity of hindsight it is evident that many features of American global policy after World War I were ultimately unsatisfactory. And it is also clear that American support of Zionist aspirations did not give the weight to the wishes of the Palestinian Arab community that by today’s standards we would seek to apply. That racism influenced the thinking of Americans in the 1920s is clear; in many ways, the United States at that time was a deeply racist society, with “scientific racism” enshrined as a serious academic subject in the minds of many prominent intellectuals, businesspeople, and politicians. Nevertheless, we will not understand American or world history unless we can learn to see the world at least to some degree as our predecessors saw it. What we will find is that even when they were wrong, our predecessors were for the most part serious and even earnest people who, within the limits of the ideas and values that shaped their mental horizons, did their best to puzzle out a course through world politics that would keep the United States safe while, as far as possible, promoting the emergence of a world that in the future would be more peaceful, more prosperous, and more just than the war-torn and staggering globe that they knew.
Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts Republican who was a close friend and associate of Theodore Roosevelt and an inveterate enemy of Woodrow Wilson, was one of the most influential American foreign policy actors of his times, and the framework within which the Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge administrations developed America’s post–World War I foreign policy owes enough to him that it is reasonable to call this framework by his name. Best known today for his opposition to Wilson’s version of the League of Nations, Lodge was also a leader in the movement to restrict immigration, a leading pro-Zionist, and both a lifelong proponent of a greater American role in world politics and a bitter enemy of what he saw as Wilson’s idealistic overstretch. Lodge embodied the virtues and the vices of a new era in American foreign policy. Had he not died in 1924, it’s likely that Lodge, an unabashed believer in the need for the United States to attend to the balance of power in Europe, would have fought the isolationist tide in the 1930s. As it happened, however, the policy mix he supported in the early 1920s was so solidly grounded in American opinion that it outlasted the circumstances that made it so appealing. In the end, the policies Lodge and his allies advocated contributed both to the Holocaust and to the success of the Zionist movement, a profoundly ambivalent legacy that reflects the uneasy relationship between American policy and Jewish history that marks the twentieth century as a whole.
Though often tagged as “isolationist” by later historians, the Lodge consensus was more of a transitional stage between what noted historian Walter McDougall has called the Old and New Testaments in American foreign policy. “Old Testament,” nineteenth-century American foreign policy presupposed a strong British Empire capable of maintaining both the European balance of power and the emerging global system of commerce and investment. After World War II, the United States embraced a much more ambitious global policy when it seemed clear that the maintenance of world order was a vital American interest and that Great Britain could no longer do its old job. In the era of the Lodge consensus, when British power was waning but Americans were not yet convinced that it was Washington’s job to replace the British colossus, Americans sought to minimize the costs and risks associated with their growing power and global interests while supporting efforts by Britain and its allies to maintain the global framework that offered both security and prosperity to the United States.
The Lodge consensus, the result of a maturing American view of the world that took shape between 1880 and the 1920s, sought to advance American interests in an unstable world while minimizing America’s exposure to the endless entanglements and unending wars that the seething hellscapes of the imperial zone seemed fated to produce. The horrors of World War I, the war’s disorderly aftermath in Europe, and the rise of communism tempered the optimism of earlier years, but Americans did not give up so easily on their hope for a better tomorrow. History might be more complicated than they had anticipated, and the road to a peaceful, democratic world might have more speed bumps and detours than they expected, but the American establishment and the progressive, educated middle classes of the post–World War I era were still convinced that history was on the side of American ideas, and that those ideas would carry the United States and the world to a triumphant post-historical utopia. Sustained by this belief, the Americans of that time wanted to see a world transitioning to a system of independent nation-states based on the principle of self-determination and self-rule. They wanted to see these nations, once established, operating under treaties, institutions, and disarmament agreements that would progressively reduce the risk of war. And they wanted all that to happen without a lot of heavy lifting on America’s part. American diplomats and bankers would go abroad, and American diplomacy would play a more conscious leadership role on issues like disarmament, but, with the exception of America’s immediate neighborhood in the Caribbean, American soldiers would mostly stay home—and America wouldn’t join clubs like the League of Nations whose rules might interfere with the democratic sovereign will of the people of the United States or compel the United States to intervene in foreign lands against its better judgment.
In the 1920s Americans no longer believed that the world would heal itself while the United States cheered from the sidelines. But they still hoped that with relatively limited intervention on America’s part the forces of progress could transform the world in line with our values and hopes. Writing with the grim hindsight that World War II provided, later generations of American historians would scoff at the naive optimism of the 1920s, but the diplomatic record of the 1920s was not all bad. Naval armaments were significantly reduced, the postwar chaos in Europe subsided, Germany began a process of rapprochement with the West, economic recovery was well under way, and Japan appeared to have embraced liberal domestic and foreign policy ideas. In 1929 the Lodge consensus seemed to have brought about a new and peaceful world order. Few anywhere guessed that a new mass slaughter even greater than the Great War of 1914–18 was about to be unleashed on the world.
Disarmament held a special place in the Lodge consensus. In an era before missiles and long-range jets, foreign powers could only threaten the United States and the Western Hemisphere with strong navies. Reducing the naval threat to American shores by global naval arms limitation treaties was a major goal of American policy during this era, and the Washington naval accords of the early 1920s succeeded brilliantly in doing just that—while they lasted. German submarine warfare had pulled the United States into World War I; policymakers in the postwar era devoted great attention to eliminating the danger that the naval forces of a rival nation could again compel the United States to go to war.
Accepting the idea that disarmament, and especially naval disarmament, could keep the United States out of harm’s way, the postwar consensus rejected the idea of permanent alliances or substantial American ground deployments beyond the hemisphere. Foreigners would have to solve their own problems in their own way. At the time, this looked like a good bet. Germany had been defeated and diminished by the war, Russia was consumed in the flames of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Japan had accepted the constraints of naval disarmament. Britain and France seemed ready and willing to defend the power balance in Europe, and Japan did not seem eager to disrupt it in Asia. A peaceful world based on a natural balance of power seemed well within reach.
Economic cooperation also played a major role in the American policy of the era. As is characteristic of Americans, the postwar policymakers believed that a restoration of stable prosperity was the key to creating a durable peace, and the 1920s saw unprecedented levels of American engagement with Europe. American statesmen developed the Dawes and Young plans that were widely credited with ending the succession of postwar economic crises that were crippling European recovery and poisoning political relations.
The promotion of the rule of law in international affairs was another lodestone of American policy at this time. Americans did not particularly want to join international organizations or be bound by international laws themselves, especially when it came to anything that might restrict or circumscribe America’s freedom of action in the Western Hemisphere, but (then as now) they very much wanted other people to join such groups and observe such laws. Winston Churchill once told an admirer who had praised him for being a “pillar of the Church” that he was more of a flying buttress, supporting it from outside. This was the policy the United States adopted toward the League of Nations, the World Court, and other international institutions of the time.
After the turmoil of a generation of mass immigration, world crisis, and the most brutal war up to that point in history, Americans wanted a quiet life. The postwar consensus was, first and foremost, about stability and risk management. Immigration restriction declared that the United States was no longer willing to serve as the global asylum of last resort; national and religious quarrels in foreign lands could no longer be resolved by unlimited immigration to the United States. The refusal to join the League of Nations was seen as a way to avoid any binding obligation to use American force outside the Western Hemisphere. The other elements of the consensus, many of which would continue to play a role in American foreign policy into the twenty-first century, were aimed at preventing foreign wars by preventing the causes of war: poverty, tyranny, arms races, and aggression.
The Lodge consensus was not, most Americans would later feel, a particularly effective or inspiring approach to twentieth-century problems, but it successfully incorporated what a generation of Americans saw as the lessons of their past. Its power and longevity came from the way that even as it prioritized American economic interests abroad it accommodated deep American beliefs in democracy and progress to the difficult circumstances of the times, enabling Americans to feel that they could advance their hopes for international peace and order without entangling themselves in risky commitments overseas.
The National Question
One of the questions that continued to pose problems for American policy after the Great War was the “national question,” the quest to build ethnic nation-states on the ruins of multinational empires. The Lodge-era American vision for the world’s future united three quite distinct ideas already well entrenched in American thought which had direct application to the case of the Jews: that every “people” deserved a state of its own choosing and design; that the causes of democracy and of ethnically based self-determination were ultimately aligned; and that the transition from a world order based on dynasties and multinational empires to a world of ethnically based nation-states would lead to a less-conflicted era in international politics. Intellectually, a strong case can be made against any and all of these ideas, and many in the U.S. and elsewhere have frequently attacked them. Politically, despite all the theoretical and practical problems these ideas entailed, they remained America’s default ideas about foreign policy for many years. They would be modified by America’s rise to superpower status, the Cold War, and the complex politics of decolonization and state building, but they remain to this day very powerful in the American public mind, and policymakers can never safely ignore the need to take these ideas into account when seeking public support for policy ideas.
World War I challenged the deeply rooted optimism that informed the way most Americans looked at historical trends, but there seemed to be a silver lining to the storm cloud. In particular, the collapse of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires and the rise of newly independent ethnic nation-states gave Americans reason to be hopeful about the future. Terrible as the war had been, its root cause could be seen as a crisis of the old imperial order, and its outcome reflected the triumph of exactly those forces that Americans hoped were remaking the world.
The fallen empires had all been nondemocratic, multinational polities. All suffered from erratic, incompetent, and warlike policymaking in the years leading up to the cataclysm. In every case, the nondemocratic structure of the imperial states was responsible, Americans believed, for the vainglorious and self-defeating policy choices that led to 1914, and in every case the nondemocratic power structure was connected to the denial of self-determination of the subject peoples of the imperial crowns. Offered free votes, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and others would have voted themselves out of the decaying imperial entities, and there would have been, could have been, no Great War.
Democracy based on ethnic nationalism was, it appeared, an antidote to the poison of great power wars. While the problem of drawing suitable frontiers between ethnic nation-states was a messy one, and while the new order might demonstrate teething pains in the form of bitter little wars and ethnic cleansing, quarrels between small countries were unlikely to metastasize into global conflagrations without jealous imperial powers using them as proxies.
The transformation of the imperial zone of jealous and undemocratic great powers into a zone of smaller, democratic nation-states looked like a very good thing from the standpoint of American interests. Small nation-states in Europe could never threaten the United States the way a large empire like Germany could. Better still, since this American goal coincided with what the peoples of the region desired, the reordering of the region wouldn’t require military efforts by the United States.
And there was an additional factor. While the American consensus to restrict immigration was deep and strong, many Americans still felt a humanitarian responsibility about developments in the rest of the world. Supporting national self-determination struck many Americans as an excellent way to balance realism about American interests with a humanitarian and even a Christian solicitude for the well-being of people abroad. Why, Americans asked, had Poles, Irish, Jews, and others flocked into the United States in such overwhelming numbers? The answer was oppression at home. An independent Ireland would have handled the potato famine better than the distracted British; without Russian, German, and Austrian occupation the Poles could have solved their problems at home without streaming into the United States. Let every people govern themselves, Americans reasoned, and the need for mass migration would largely disappear. And if foreign self-governing nations made poor political and economic choices and got into trouble, Americans could keep their doors closed with a clear conscience. We had done everything we could to give those peoples the chance to run their own affairs in their own way. Now they must live with the consequences of the choices they made.
Two generations of increasing turmoil in the old imperial zone convinced educated Americans that ethnic and religious disputes were intractable, and in many cases insoluble. They were also unavoidable. Nationalist passions were so strong, and the influence of nationalist politics on the international situation so significant, that it was idle to hope that the national question would fade away on its own. Vociferous advocates for national groups, each convinced that his or her own little nationality was the moral center of the universe, each claiming to be acting on the highest principles, and each accusing rival nations of the most unspeakable crimes were to be found at every international gathering. Their stubborn preoccupation with the grievances, real or perceived, of their suffering people was a fact that could not be changed. Their ability to whip up the passions of millions and create violent new facts on the ground could not be ignored. They were irrational, they were bloody-minded, they were obstinately unwilling to consider things from the other side’s point of view, they were monstrously selfish and epically egotistical—and they could neither be ignored nor wished away.
There was also a sense of weary despair about the ability of well-intentioned outsiders to mandate decent treatment for minorities through diplomatic means. European diplomatic archives contained masses of solemn agreements to protect this or that endangered minority in the Ottoman Empire. The first dated back to the eighteenth century in a treaty between Russia and the Ottomans. The sultans had signed agreement after agreement during the nineteenth century. None of these agreements had done much good. Americans could look back at decades of diplomatic pressure on Russia for its antisemitism with nothing to show for it. They could look at the inability of the European great powers to force Romania to live up to its promises concerning better treatment of Romanian Jews. Or they could look at the stacks of diplomatic correspondence with the Ottoman government about the fate of the Armenians.
The U.S. would support the rights of minority groups through diplomatic pressure falling well short of threats of force or official boycotts, but without much confidence that such pressure would actually work. Decades of experience by the 1920s had taught American diplomats and policymakers that little short of war, and perhaps not even that, would provide effective protection for ethnic or religious minorities caught up in the miserable conflicts of the day. Given that the American people lacked the will to go to war in places like Armenia or Transylvania to protect minority rights, diplomats were left to craft elegant but empty notes, communications that both the American diplomats who crafted them and the foreign diplomats who received them knew meant little and would accomplish less.
One red line was clear: after World War I, Americans were not going to intervene in national quarrels overseas. At various points during the Paris peace negotiations in 1919, Wilson expressed an interest in American mandates over what is now Turkey and Armenia, and proposals for an American rather than a British mandate over Palestine were also discussed. But even Wilson quickly realized the impracticality of a Turkish mandate, and the possibility of a major American presence in the Middle East died along with the League treaty.[35] American officials were not going to take on the thankless tasks of administering overseas territories where mixed national groups contended for power, and American troops would not defend them. Americans believed that every national group should have a state, but also believed that every people was responsible for its own defense and well-being.
As nationalist and anticolonial movements spread around the world, Americans responded by supporting an extension of these ideas to a global rather than a European scale. Americans sympathized with Gandhi in the 1930s in the same way they sympathized with Polish nationalists in the 1830s. In both cases most Americans didn’t want to do much to help them concretely, but wished them well and believed that historical forces favored their ultimate triumph. Americans would not cross the street to win their independence for them, but to the degree that the United States had some influence over their future it would be used, when not too inconvenient, to support their aspirations.
Where ethnic groups weren’t “ready” for self-rule, the League of Nations promoted the establishment of mandates as a kind of halfway house for independence. Nations entrusted with mandates for foreign territories were at least theoretically expected to see themselves as trustees and guardians rather than as colonial overlords. Their rule was justified insofar as they promoted economic and social development that would lead to a smooth transition to full independence.
From the perspective of many progressive-minded Americans, the emerging postwar order of the 1920s looked significantly better than the prewar system. The dynastic despots of the imperial zone had been driven from their thrones, more of the peoples of Europe were free, disarmament treaties were limiting the dangers of war, and the mandate system promised a gradual and peaceful end to imperial rule. The age of mass immigration into the United States had been brought to an end, but Americans could feel they had kept faith with oppressed people overseas by supporting the establishment of independent ethnic nation-states in which the peoples of the world would be free to build a better future on their own.
The American approach to the problems of foreign peoples had evolved during a generation in which as the world’s problems became more urgent, as America’s power in the international system grew, and as Americans increasingly saw connections between conditions overseas and the security and prosperity of the United States. When Alexander II was murdered in 1881, Americans still saw themselves as disinterested spectators watching the unfolding catastrophe of the imperial zone from a safe distance. By the end of World War I, Americans had learned just how costly to their own peace and security that catastrophe could become. They were not yet ready to assume the vast responsibilities that came to them in the 1940s, but they hoped that the ideas embedded in the Lodge consensus would keep the world peaceful and America safe. In the meantime, the Jewish Question was exactly the kind of question that the Lodge consensus sought to address, and the application of the principles of the Lodge consensus to the problems of the Jewish people would guide American policymakers through the most terrible and tumultuous era in the modern history of the Jews.