America? If certain tendencies continue, as they are certain to do, what
form will the feeling toward the Jew take? Not that of mass violence, we
may be sure. The only mass action visible now is that of the Jewish
agencies themselves against any person or institution that dares bring
the Jewish Question to public attention.
1. Anti-Semitism will come to America because of the habit which
emotions and ideas apparently have of making their way westward around
the world. North of Palestine, where the Jews have been longest settled
and where they are now in great numbers, anti-Semitism is acute and
well-defined. Westward, in Germany, it is clearly defined but, until the
seizure of German revolutionary agencies, was devoid of violence. Still
farther westward, in Great Britain, it is defined, but because of the
comparatively small number of Jews in the British Isles and their
coalition with the ruling class, it is more a feeling than a movement.
In the United States it is not so definite, but shows itself in a
restlessness, a questioning, a sensible friction between the traditional
tendency of the American to fair-mindedness and his respect for the cold
facts.
Because the Question will assume more and more pressure in America it
behooves everyone of foresight to disregard the shortsighted protests of
the Jews themselves and see to it that the Question shall not present
itself among us as it has done among other people, in its most
distressing and confusing forms. It is a public duty to seize this
problem at its beginning and train it up, so to speak; that is, so
prepare for it that it may be handled here in a manner which will form a
model for all other countries, which will indeed supply all other
countries with the essential materials for a permanent solution. And
this can be done only by exposing and recognizing and treating with the
serum of publicity the conditions before which, heretofore, the nations
have helplessly floundered because they lacked either the desire or the
means to get at the great root of the difficulty.
2. Another cause of the Question appearing here will be the great influx
of Jews which is planned for America. There will probably be a million
Jews enter the country this year, increasing our Jewish population to
nearly 4,500,000. This does not mean merely an immigration of persons,
but an immigration of ideas. No Jewish writer has ever told us, in
systematic fashion, just what is the Jews' idea of non-Jews, how they
regard the Gentiles in their private minds. But there are indications of
it, although one would not attempt to reconstruct the Jewish attitude
toward Gentiles. A Jew ought to do this for us, but he would probably be
cast out by his own people if he discharged his task with rigorous
jealousy for the exact fact.
These people are coming here regarding the Gentile as an hereditary
enemy, as perhaps they have good ground for doing, and so believing they
are going to model their behavior in a manner that will show it. Nor
will these Jews be so helpless as they appear. In stricken Poland, where
the Jews are represented as having been stripped of everything during
the war, there are hundreds daily appearing before the consulate to
arrange their passage here. The fact is significant. In spite of their
reputed suffering and poverty, they are able to travel a great distance
and to insist on coming. No other people are financially able to travel
in such numbers. But the Jews are. It will readily be seen that they are
not objects of charity. They have been able to keep afloat in a storm
that has wrecked the other people. They know it and they joy in it, as
is natural. And they will bring here the same thoughts toward the
majority which they have harbored in their present lands of domicile.
They may hail America; they will have their own thoughts about the
majority of the American people. They may be in the lists as Russians or
Poles or what not, but they will be Jews with the full Jewish
consciousness, and they will make themselves felt.
All this is bound to have its effect. And it is not race prejudice to
prepare for it, and to invite American Jews themselves to consider the
fact and contribute to the solution of the problem which it presents.
3. Every idea which has ruled Europe has met with transformation when it
was transplanted in America. It was so with the idea of Liberty, the
idea of Government, the idea of War. It will be so with the idea of
anti-Semitism. The whole problem will center here and if we are wise and
do not shirk it, it will find its solution here. A recent Jewish writer
has said: "Jewry today largely means American Jewry . . . . . . . . . .
all former Jewish centers were demolished during the war and were
shifted to America." The problem will be ours, whether we choose it or
not.
And what course will it take? Much depends on what can be accomplished
before it becomes very strong. It may be said, however, that the first
element to appear will be a show of resentment against certain Jewish
commercial successes, more particularly against the united action by
which they are attained. Our people see the spectacle of a people in the
midst of a people, in a sense which the Mormons never were, and they
will not like it. The Mormons made an Exodus; Israel is going back into
Egypt to subjugate it.
The second element which will undoubtedly appear is prejudice and its
incitement. The majority may always be right, but they are not always
initially reasonable. That prejudice which exists now, and which is
freely admitted by both Jew and Gentile, may become more marked, to the
distress of both parties, for neither the subject nor the object of
prejudice can attain that freedom of mind which is happiness.
Then we may most confidently look for a reaction of Justice. It is here
that the whole matter will begin to bend to the genius of Americanism.
The innate justice of the American mind has come to the aid of every
object that ever roused American resentment. The natural reaction with
us is of very brief duration; the intellectual and ethical reaction
swiftly follows. The American mind will never rest with merely resenting
certain individuals. It will probe deeper. Already this deeper probe has
been begun in Great Britain and America. We characteristically do not
stop with persons when principles are in sight.
And upon this there will be an investigation of materials, part of which
may yet be presented in this series and which may possibly be
disregarded for a time, but which at a future date will be found to be
the clue to the maze. Upon this, the root of all the trouble will be
bared to the light, to die as all roots do when deprived of their
concealment of darkness, and then the Jewish people themselves may be
expected to begin an adjustment to the new order of things, not to lose
their identity or to curtail their energy or to dim their brilliance,
but to turn all into more worthy channels for the benefit of all races,
which alone can justify their claim to superiority. A race that can
achieve in the material realm what the Jews have achieved while
asserting themselves to be spiritually superior, can achieve in a less
sordid, a less society-defying realm also.
The Jews will not be destroyed; neither will they be permitted to
maintain the yoke which they have been so skillful in fastening upon
society. They are the beneficiaries of a system which itself will change
and force them to other and higher devices to justify their proper place
in the world.
[Issue of June 19, 1920.]
"We must force the Gentile governments to adopt measures which will
promote our broadly conceived plan already approaching its triumphal
goal by bringing to bear the pressure of stimulated public opinion which
has in reality been organized by us with the help of the so-called
'great power' of the Press. With few exceptions, not worth considering,
it has already fallen into our hands."
--The Seventh Protocol.
VI.
Jewish Question Breaks Into the Magazines
Once upon a time an American faculty member of an American university
went to Russia on business. He was expert in a very important department
of applied science and a keen observer. He entered Russia with the
average American's feeling about the treatment which the government of
that people accorded the Jew. He lived there three years, came home for
a year, and went back again for a similar period, and upon his second
return to America he thought it was time to give the American public
accurate information about the Jewish Question in Russia. He prepared a
most careful article and sent it to the editor of a magazine of the
first class in the Eastern United States. The editor sent for him, spent
most of two days with him, and was deeply impressed with all he
learned--but he said he could not print the article. The same interest
and examination occurred with several other magazine editors of the
first rank.
It was not because the professor could not write--these editors gladly
bought anything he would write on other subjects. But it was impossible
for him to get his article on the Jews accepted or printed in New York.
The Jewish Question, however, has at last broken into a New York
magazine. Rather it is a fragment of a shell hurled from the Jewish camp
at the Jewish Question to demolish, if possible, the Question and thus
make good the assertion that there is no such thing.
Incidentally it is the only kind of article on the Jewish Question that
the big magazines, whose mazes of financial controllers make most
interesting rummaging, would care to print.
Yet, the general public may learn much about the Question even from the
type of article whose purpose is to prove that the Question doesn't
exist.
Mr. William Hard, in the Metropolitan for June, has done as well as
could be expected, considering the use he was supposed to make of such
material as he had at hand. And doubtless the telegraph and letter
brigades, which keep watch over all printed references to the Jews, have
duly congratulated the good editors of the Metropolitan for their
assistance in soothing the public to further sleep.
It is to be hoped, for the sake of the Question, that Mr. Hard's effort
will have a wide reading, for there is very much to be learned from
it--much more than it was anybody's intention should be learned from it.
It may be learned, first, that the Jewish Question exists. Mr. Hard says
it is discussed in the drawing-rooms of London and Paris. Whether the
mention of drawing-rooms was a writer's device to intimate that the
matter was unimportant and frivolous, or merely represented the extent
of Mr. Hard's contact with the Question is not clear. He adds, however,
that a document relating to the Question has "travelled a good bit in
certain official circles in Washington." He also mentions a cable
dispatch to the New York World, concerning the same Question, which that
paper published. His article was probably published too early to note
the review which the London Times made of the first document referred
to. But he has told the reader who is looking for the objective facts in
the article that there is a Jewish Question, and that it does not exist
among the riff-raff either but principally in those circles where the
evidence of Jewish power and control is most abundant. Moreover, the
Question is being discussed. Mr. Hard tells us that much. If he does not
go further and tell us that it is being discussed with great seriousness
in high places and among men of national and international importance,
it is probably because of one of two things, either he does not know, or
he does not consider it consonant with the purpose of the article to
tell.
However, Mr. Hard has already made it clear that there is a Jewish
Question, that it is being discussed, that it is being discussed by
people who are best situated to observe the matter they are talking
about.
The reading of Mr. Hard's article makes it clear also that the Question
always comes to the fore on the note of conspiracy. Of course, Mr. Hard
says he does not believe in conspiracies which involve a large number of
people, and it is with the utmost ease that his avowal of unbelief is
accepted, for there is nothing more ridiculous to the Gentile mind than
a mass conspiracy, because there is nothing more impossible to the
Gentile himself. Mr. Hard, we take it, is of non-Jewish extraction, and
he knows how impossible it would be to band Gentiles together in any
considerable number for any length of time in even the noblest
conspiracy. Gentiles are not built for it. Their conspiracy, whatever it
might be, would fall like a rope of sand. Gentiles have not the basis
either in blood or interest that the Jews have to stand together. The
Gentile does not naturally suspect conspiracy; he will indeed hardly
bring himself to the verge of believing it without the fullest proof.
It is therefore quite easy to understand Mr. Hard's difficulty with
conspiracy; the point is that to write his article at all, he is forced
to recognize at almost every step that whenever the Jewish Question is
discussed, the idea of conspiracy occupies a large part in it. As a
matter of fact, it is the central idea in Mr. Hard's article, and it
completely monopolizes the heading--"Great Jewish Conspiracy."
The search for basic facts in Mr. Hard's article will disclose the
additional information that there are certain documents in existence
which purport to contain the details of the conspiracy, or--to drop a
word that is unpleasant and may be misleading and which has not been
used in this series--the tendency of Jewish power to achieve complete
control. That is about all that the reader learns from Mr. Hard about
the documents, except that he describes one as "strange and horrible."
Here is indeed a regrettable gap in the story, for it is to discredit a
certain document that Mr. Hard writes, and yet he tells next to nothing
about it. Discreditable documents usually discredit themselves. But this
document is not permitted to do that. The reader of the article is left
to take Mr. Hard's word for it. The serious student or critic will feel,
of course, that the documents themselves would have formed a better
basis for an intelligent judgement. But laying that matter aside, Mr.
Hard has made public the fact that there are documents.
And then Mr. Hard does another thing, as well as he can with the
materials at hand, the purpose of the article being what it was, and
that is to show how little the Jews have to do with the control of
affairs by showing who are the Jews that do control certain selected
groups of affairs. The names are all brought forward by Mr. Hard and he
alone is responsible for them, our purpose in referring to them being
merely to show what can be learned from him.
Mr. Hard leans heavily on Russian affairs. Sometimes it would almost
seem as if the Jewish Question were conceived as the Soviet Question,
which it is not, as Mr. Hard very well knows, and although the two have
their plain connections, it is nothing less than well-defined propaganda
to set up Bolshevist fiction and knock it down by Jewish fact for the
purpose of the latter. However, what Mr. Hard offers as fact is very
instructive, quite apart from the conclusion which he draws from it.
Now, take his Russian line-up first. He says that in the cabinet of
Soviet Russia there is only one Jew. But he is Trotsky. There are others
in the government, of course, but Mr. Hard is speaking about the cabinet
now. He is not speaking about the commissars, who are the real rulers of
Russia, nor about the executive troops, who are the real strength of the
Trotsky-Lenin regime. No, just the cabinet. Of course, there was only
one Jew prominent in Hungary, too, but he was Bela Kun. Mr. Hard does
not ask us to believe, however, that it is simply because of Trotsky and
Kun that all Europe believes that Bolshevism has a strong Jewish
element. Else the stupid credibility of the Gentiles would be more
impossible of conception than the idea of a Jewish conspiracy is to Mr.
Hard's mind. Why should it be easier to believe that Gentiles are dunces
than that Jews are clever?
However, it is not too much to say that Trotsky is way up at the top,
sharing the utmost summit of Bolshevism with Lenin, and Trotsky is a
Jew--nobody ever denied that, not even Mr. Braunstein himself (the
latter being Trotsky's St. Louis, U.S.A., name).
But then, says Mr. Hard, the Mensheviks are led by Jews, too! That is a
fact worth putting down beside the others. Trotsky at the head of the
Bolsheviks; at the head of the Mensheviks during their opposition of the
Bolsheviks were Leiber, Martov and Dan--"all Jews," says Mr. Hard.
There is, however, a middle party between these extremes, the Cadets,
which, Mr. Hard says, are or were the strongest bourgeois political
party in Russia. "They now have their headquarters in Paris. Their
chairman is Vinaver--a Jew."
There are the facts as stated by Mr. Hard. He says that Jews, whose
names he gives, head the three great divisions of political opinion in
Russia.
And then he cries, look how the Jews are divided! How can there be
conspiracy among people who thus fight themselves?
But another, looking at the same situation may say, look how the Jews
control every phase of political opinion in Russia! Doesn't there seem
to be some ground for the feeling that they are desirous of ruling
everywhere?
The facts are there. What significance does it bring to the average mind
that the three great parties of Russia are led by Jews?
But that does not exhaust the information which the matter-of-fact
reader may find in Mr. Hard's article. He turns to the United States and
makes several interesting statements.
"There is Otto Kahn," he says. Well, sometimes Otto Kahn is there, and
sometimes he is in Paris on important international matters, and
sometimes he is in London advocating certain alliances between British
and American capital which have to do in a large way with European
political conditions. Mr. Kahn is rated as a conservative, and that may
mean anything. A man is conservative or not according to the angle from
which he is viewed. The most conservative men in America are really the
most radical; their motives and methods go to the very roots of certain
matters; they are radicals in their own field. The men who controlled
the last Republican Convention--if not the last, the most recent--are
styled conservatives by those whose vision is circumscribed by certain
limited economic interests; but they are the most radical of radicals,
they have passed the red stage and are white with it. If it were known
what is in the back of Mr. Kahn's mind, if he should display a chart of
what he is doing and aiming to do, the term which would then most aptly
describe him might be quite different. Anyway, we have it from Mr. Hard,
"There is Mr. Kahn."
"On the other hand," says Mr. Hard, "there is Rose Pastor Stokes." He
adds the name of Morris Hillquit. They are, in Mr. Hard's
classification, radicals. And to offset these names he adds the names of
two Gentiles, Eugene V. Debs and Bill Haywood and intimates that they
are much more powerful leaders than the first two. Students of modern
influences, of which Mr. Hard has long appeared as one, do not think so.
Neither Debs nor Haywood ever generated in all their lives a fraction of
the intellectual power which Mrs. Stokes and Mr. Hillquit have
generated. Both Debs and Haywood live by the others. To every informed
person, as to Mr. Hard in this article, come the Jewish names to mind
when the social tendencies of the United States are passed under
reflection.
This is most instructive indeed, that in naming the leaders of so-called
conservatism and radicalism, Mr. Hard is driven to use Jewish names. On
his showing the reader is entitled to say that Jews lead both divisions
here in the United States.
But Mr. Hard is not through. "The man who does more than any other
man--the man who does more than any regiment of other men--to keep
American labor anti-radical is a Jew--Samuel Gompers." That is a fact
which the reader will place in his list--American labor is led by a Jew.
Well, then, "the strongest anti-Gompers trade union in the country--The
Amalgamated Clothing Workers--and very strong indeed, and very large--is
led by a Jew--Sidney Hillman."
It is the Russian situation over again. Both ends of the movements, and
the movement which operate within the movement, are under the leadership
of Jews. This, whatever the construction put upon it, is a fact which
Mr. Hard is compelled by the very nature of his task to acknowledge.
And the middle movement, "the Liberal Middle" as Mr. Hard calls it,
which catches all between, produces in this article the names of Mr.
Justice Brandeis, Judge Mack and Felix Frankfurter, gentlemen whose
activities since Armistice Day would make a very interesting story.
For good measure, Mr. Hard produces two other names, "Baron Gunzberg--a
Jew" who is "a faithful official" of the Russian Embassy of Ambassador
Bakhmetev, a repesentative of the modified old regime, while the Russian
Information Bureau, whose literary output appears in many of our
newspapers is conducted by another Jew, so Mr. Hard calls him, whose
name is familiar to newspaper readers, Mr. A. J. Sack.
It is not a complete list by any means, but it is quite impressive. It
seems to reflect importance on the documents which Mr. Hard endeavors to
minimize to a position of ridiculous unimportance. And it leads to the
thought that perhaps the documents are scrutinized as carefully as they
are because the readers of them have observed not only the facts which
Mr. Hard admits but other and more astonishing ones, and have discovered
that the documents confirm and explain the observations. Other readers
who have not had the privilege of learning all that the documents
contain are entitled to have satisfaction given to the interest thus
aroused.
The documents did not create the Jewish Question. If there were nothing
but the documents, Mr. Hard would not have written nor would the
Metropolitan Magazine have printed the article here discussed.
What Mr. Hard has done is to bring confirmation in a most unexpected
place that the Question exists and is pressing for discussion. Someone
felt the pressure when "The Great Jewish Conspiracy" was ordered and
written.
[Issue of June 26, 1920.]
"What are you prating about? As long as we do not have the Press of the
whole world in our hands, everything you may do is vain. We must control
or influence the papers of the whole world in order to blind and deceive
the people."
--Baron Montefiore.
VII.
Arthur Brisbane Leaps to the Help of Jewry
Once more the current of this series on the Modern Jewish Question is
interrupted to give notice of the appearance of the Question in another
quarter, the appearance this time consisting of a more than two-column
"Today" editorial in the Hearst papers of Sunday, June 20, from the pen
of Arthur Brisbane. It would be too much to say that Mr. Brisbane is the
most influential writer in the country, but perhaps he is among the
dozen most widely read. It is, therefore, a confirmation of the
statement that the Question is assuming importance in this country, that
a writer of Mr. Brisbane's prominence should openly discuss it.
Of course, Mr. Brisbane has not studied the Question. He would probably
admit in private conversation--though such an admission would hardly be
in harmony with the tone of certainty he publicly adopts--that he really
knows nothing about it. He knows, however, as a good newspaper man, how
to handle it when the exigencies of the newspaper day throw it up to him
for offhand treatment. Every editorial writer knows how to do that.
There is something good in every race, or there have been some notable
individuals in it, or it has played a picturesque part in history--that
is enough for a very readable editorial upon any class of people who may
happen to be represented in the community. The Question, whatever it may
be, need not be studied at all; a certain group of people may be salved
for a few paragraphs, and the job need never be tackled again. Every
newspaper man knows that.