III.
Now, which of these exhibitions of anti-Semitism will show itself in America? If certain tendencies continue, as they are certain to do, what form will the feeling toward the Jew take? Not that of ma.s.s violence, we may be sure. The only ma.s.s action visible now is that of the Jewish agencies themselves against any person or inst.i.tution 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 cla.s.s, 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 a.s.sume 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sage 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 ident.i.ty 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 a.s.serting 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 cla.s.s 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 sh.e.l.l hurled from the Jewish camp at the Jewish Question to demolish, if possible, the Question and thus make good the a.s.sertion 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 a.s.sistance 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 doc.u.ment 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 doc.u.ment 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 ma.s.s 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 n.o.blest 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 doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ments, 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 doc.u.ment that Mr. Hard writes, and yet he tells next to nothing about it. Discreditable doc.u.ments usually discredit themselves. But this doc.u.ment 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 doc.u.ments 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 doc.u.ments.
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--n.o.body 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 circ.u.mscribed by certain limited economic interests; but they are the most radical of radicals, they have pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sification, 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 pa.s.sed 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 ent.i.tled to say that Jews lead both divisions here in the United States.