Joseph Freeman takes apart anti-Jewish tropes purveyed by the U.S. far right of the 1930s, which are essentially the same as they are today.
‘Anti-Semitism in America Today’ by Joseph Freeman from New Masses. Vol. 18 No. 6. February 4, 1936.
“Fortune” and the Jews
I HAVE before me a filthy little sheet called The National American. It claims to be the official organ of the American National Labor Party. The name is familiar. Hitler’s party calls itself the German National Labor Party. In case there might be any doubt about the connection, the sheet carries two swastikas on its masthead, and half of its contents is printed in German.
This is flagrant Nazi propaganda, published and circulated in New York City. You are therefore not surprised to read its hysterical outbursts against Jews, liberals, Socialists, Communists and the “Jew Deal,” headed by President Roosevelt and his “semitic” advisers. It is all in the finest Nazi traditions.
Here is a venomous attack on the Civil Liberties Union, with appropriate citations from The Chicago Tribune and the Lusk Committee. Here is an open letter to Secretary of Labor Perkins protesting against the proposal to admit 6,500 “Jewish and Christian refugees” from Germany, on the ground that they are “undesirables.” The Jewish race is responsible for the evils of banking. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis, the “unofficial presidential adviser,” is the father of the “communistic” New Deal. Senator Borah is another viper for having advocated American recognition of the Soviet Union. Christians are tortured in Russia. The League of Nations is a Jewish idea. Four people were killed in renewed outbreaks of anti-semitism in Poland–obviously a hint as to how America might solve its own Jewish problem. This kind of barbarous incitement to race hatred and violence is decorated with pro-Hitler propaganda.
The American Gentile, another filthy little sheet which lies before me, does not have this obvious Nazi origin, but its ideas are indistinguishable from those of Dr. Goebbels. Self-appointed champion of God, Home and Country, this paper stands “for the defense of gentile culture and civilization.” Its slogans are: Take America away from the Jews! Vote and buy Gentile! The Ameriican Gentile is published in Chicago by the Right Cause Publishing Company, whose presses pour out numerous pamphlets inciting hatred and violence against Jews.
These are only two examples of the rapidly increasing anti-semitic literature which is being freely circulated in this country. But it contains the essence of that world-wide Jew-baiting which fascism initiates, encourages and subsidizes for its own purposes.
The nature of this propaganda is too well known to need much exposition. In its attempt to save capitalism from collapse, fascism must deflect the discontent of the people, embittered by unemployment and hunger. It seeks to concentrate the hatred of the bankers upon the Jewish bankers. It seeks to counteract the growing influence of Communism upon the working and middle classes by painting it as a Jewish plot. In order to confuse and mislead the people, bitterly dissatisfied with the continuing economic crisis, fascism must have a scapegoat and a myth. The scapegoat is the Jew; the myth is the international Jewish conspiracy for the seizure of world power–a conspiracy which operates through the such unexpected channels as the League of Nations, the White House and the Kremlin!
For the most part, this anti-semitic propaganda appeals to the most primitive anxieties and passions. The American Gentile publishes lists of crimes committed by Jews, usually in a minor vein which a Dillinger or Al Capone would scorn as too petty to bother with. The Scottsboro motif is also raised. The Jews are accused of having a “racial program calling, wherever possible, for the seduction of a Shikse, any Gentile girl, young or unprotected to whom, as a class, they have applied that most opprobrious, significant and insulting epithet of “chicken.” The American Gentile goes further and accuses the Jews outright of “unspeakable bestial degeneracy.”
If you have traveled through the United States you know that, here as elsewhere, large sections of the rural population, isolated, steeped in superstitions centuries old, are susceptible to sinister myths of this kind. The ignorant southern white readily believes this falsehood about the Negro. Now the professional anti-semite would have all Gentile Americans believe it about Jewish Americans. You can imagine, too, if you have not already heard it, the whispering campaign which accompanies this kind of foul print.
THE educated classes for the most part do not believe such nonsense. But was it not only last year that a leading American novelist fell into an anxiety-neurosis which led him to share the credo of The American Gentile that Jews are guilty of “sharp practices, low cunning, insurance frauds and dishonest bankruptcy proceedings”? The professional Jew-baiter appeals to the poor man’s fear for his daughter’s virtue; it stirs the rich man’s fear for his property. This is the psychological basis of the fascist’s two main arguments: all Jews are Communists, all Communists are Jews, he says; and the Jews already dominate American social, economic and political life.
One of the few items in The American Gentile which has the semblance of human speech is a quotation from Irvin L. Potter, of Boston, author of The Cause of Anti-Jewism in the United States. Potter cries out to high heaven that the Jews
“control fifty percent or more of the meat-packing industry; upward of sixty percent of the shoe-making industry; jewelry; grain; the liquor business; the clothing industry; the loan business. Our thoughts are moulded by a large and powerful group of Jewish journalists. A large number of our department stores are held by Jewish firms, doing business under the cover of gentiles’ names. Jews are the largest and most numerous landlords of residential property in the country. They are supreme in the theatrical world. They absolutely control the circulation of publications throughout the country. The trusts and the banks, the natural resources and the agricultural products are under the control of Jewish financiers and their agents, who are associated with Jews in Europe.”
Potter himself is probably a crackpot or a charlatan. But his brand of nightmare is apparently shared by people who ought to know better, if one is to judge by the attention which Fortune is now giving to anti-semitism in the United States. As you know, Fortune is America’s best-looking and most expensive magazine. Only people with plenty of money can afford it at a dollar an issue. Almost every month it carries handsomely illustrated articles on the ownership of the leading banks, industries and publications of America. But do we know who really owns Fortune? I have heard it said that the magazine is controlled by the notoriously anti-semitic House of Morgan; but I have never seen proof of this assertion. You may be sure, however, that Fortune is in the most impeccable Aryan hands, controlled neither by “international Jewry,” the Freemasons, Moscow, the White House, Senator Borah or the Civil Liberties Union. Essentially it is the organ of the wealthiest and most cultured sections of America’s governing class.
All the more significant, then, is the anonymous piece in its current issue entitled Jews in America. The authors are impressed by the barbarous consequences of fascism wherever it has gained a foothold; and they have had the insight to see the connection between fascism and anti-semitism. They have therefore made a statistical survey, point by point, of the main charges advanced by the professional Jew-baiters.
TO BEGIN with, they show that there is no ground for anti-semitism in America in the increase in Jewish numbers. There are now 4,500,000 Jews in the United States. This is only one-thirty-second of our total population of 130,000,000. Furthermore, Fortune points out, the great mass of American Jews, like the great mass of American non-Jews, is made up of workers, employed and unemployed, to whom “the control of industry is a purely academic matter.”
The Jews do not run banking, as the anti-semites say. They play little or no part in the great commercial houses. In 1933, for example, there were nineteen firms in the New York Clearing House, with 420 directors. Only 30 of these were Jews, about half of whom were connected with the Commercial National Bank and Trust Company and the Public National Bank and Trust. There is not one Jew among the directors of the Bank of New York and Trust Company, the National City Bank, Guaranty Trust, Bankers’ Trust or the New York Trust. There are practically no Jewish employes of any kind in the largest commercial banks, though many customers are Jews.
The investment field contains Jewish houses, notably Kuhn, Loeb and Company, Speyer and Company, J. & W. Seligman; Ladenburg, Thalmann and Company, and Lehman Brothers. But their activities are negligible compared with those of the non-Jewish houses. On March 31 of last year, for example, 19.87 percent of all outstanding loans were made by the House of Morgan; 11.71 by the National City Company; 8.45 by Chase, Harriman, Forbes; 6.68 by Guaranty Trust; 6.18 by Bancamerica-Blaire; 4.23 by Lee Higginson and only 2.88 percent by Kuhn, Loeb. And even the so-called Jewish houses have many non-Jews in their executive leadership.
The Jews, Fortune concludes, have a subordinate place in finance and an even smaller place in heavy industry. They are almost wholly absent in automobile production, steel, rubber, coal and their role in shipping and transportation is negligible. “A vast continent of heavy industry and finance may be staked out in which Jewish participation is incidental or non-existent,” says Fortune on the basis of available statistics.
“To this may be annexed other important areas into which Jews have rarely penetrated, such as light and power and telephone and telegraph and engineering in general and heavy machinery and lumber and dairy products. In brief, Jews are so far from controlling the most characteristic of present-day American activities, that they are hardly represented in them at all.”
Only in the light industries are the Jews represented to any extent, and even here not so much in production as in distribution. The most striking example of this is the clothing business. Tobacco comes next. Department stores are Jewish chiefly in New York. The further West you move, the more non-Jewish these stores become in ownership and control. By and large, Fortune concludes, the case for Jewish control of American industry falls flat.
BUT what of Jewish control in the moulding of public opinion? The interest of Jews in the newspaper field is small, Fortune’s investigation has found. There are only four important Jewish newspaper chains in America. The Ochs interests own The New York Times and The Chattanooga Times; J. David Stern owns The New York Post, The Philadelphia Record and The Camden (New Jersey) Courier and Post; Paul Block owns The Newark Star-Eagle, The Toledo Blade and Times and The Duluth News Tribune; Emanuel P. Adler owns several newspapers in Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri and Nebraska. But all four of these chains combined do not reach even one-half of Hearst’s daily circulation. Nor can they be compared with such chains as Patterson-McCormick or Scripps-Howard.
In the magazine field, Jewish influence is even smaller, being confined chiefly to The New Yorker, The American Mercury, Esquire and The Nation. In the advertising agencies, Jewish ownership is estimated at from one to three percent. A similar situation prevails in the publishing field. Jewish-owned houses like Viking, Simon and Schuster, Knopf, Covici-Friede and Random House do not rank in size of annual list with such non-Jewish houses as Macmillan, Scribner’s, Harper’s, Houghton-Mifflin, Appleton-Century and Doubleday-Doran.
In radio, the Columbia network is under Jewish control; the National Broadcasting Company, although headed by David Sarnoff, is owned by the Radio Corporation of America and is predominantly non-Jewish. In the New York theater, Jewish control is prominent, but Fortune explains this on the ground that Jews constitute 30 percent of the city’s population. Actually, if we disregard special companies like the Theater Guild, the Group Theater and the Theater Union, there are fifty-six Jewish and fifty-eight non-Jewish producers. In the films, Jewish control is smaller today than it used to be. “At the very most,” Fortune concludes, “half the opinion-making and taste-influencing paraphernalia in American is in Jewish hands.”
In agriculture, Jewish influence is so negligible that even the professional anti-semites do not talk about it. It is estimated that there are only about 80,000 Jews in a total farm population of 30,500,000.
Now one of the most persistent accusations–in America as in Germany–is that the Jews over-run the learned professions, particularly law and medicine. The anti-semites claim that from one-third to one-half of New York City’s lawyers and doctors are Jewish. To this Fortune replies that one-third of New York’s population is Jewish. Besides, 50 percent of New York’s lawyers does not mean 50 percent of New York’s lawyer power. The most important office law business in America, according to Fortune, is in the hands of non-Jewish firms, many of which have Jewish clients but no Jewish partners. This business includes legal work incidental to banking, insurance, trust company operation, investment work, railroading, patents, admiralty and large corporation matters in general. Jewish legal activity is found most frequently in the bankruptcy courts, real-estate law, negligence, divorce, collections and litigation in general, that is in those branches of law which for good economic reason do not interest non-Jewish lawyers.
What is true of law, is true of medicine. New York City, Fortune asserts, has “numerous good Jewish doctors and a few very great Jewish doctors. But Jews do not occupy a position of power corresponding to their abilities or their numbers in the profession.”
If the alleged Jewish advantage in the professions is shadow rather than substance, Jewish importance in politics is even smaller. Despite Barney Baruch and Henry Morgenthau, the role of Jews in Roosevelt’s Washington is minor. The fascist would have you believe that a mystical entity called “the Jews” at one and the same time dominate the capitalist state and seek to overthrow it. The “Jew Deal” in the White House and the Red bogey are supposed to be part of a single conspiracy. On this score, Fortune points out that the 27,000 members of the Communist Party of the United States only three or four thousand are Jews. It might have added that the outstanding leaders of the party–people like Earl Browder, William Z. Foster, Robert Minor, Mother Bloor, Clarence Hathaway and others–are as “Aryan” as Herbert Hoover. It does, however, indicate one good reason why Jewish workers and intellectuals take to Communism. Is it any wonder when people who are persecuted repudiate the status quo? The same holds true of all oppressed minorities.
THE figures gathered by Fortune ought to destroy forever the criminal accusations of the Jew-baiters–if anti-semitism had a rational basis. Unfortunately, as Germany has shown, race hatred, deliberately promoted for political purposes, stirs not the mind but the viscera. In Germany, too, the Jews constituted a very small part of the population; their role in finance, industry and politics was as minor as it is here. This did not prevent the Nazis from inflating a few surface manifestations into a monstrous myth.
The hatred of the Jew is so old, so deep, so irrational, that it retains its hold unconsciously even upon liberal minds. You notice with surprise that the anonymous writers in Fortune, who are obviously anxious to combat fascism and anti-semitism, fall into thoughtless but significant phrases. In spite of themselves, they talk of the “Talmudic” mind of the Jew–as do The National American and The American Gentile. The Fortune writers honestly believe that the “second-generation Jewish intellectual with his background of Talmudic dialectic is mentally predisposed to Marxism to a degree which he himself rarely appreciates.” For all their hatred of Jew-baiting, they do not stop to think that with the exception of Karl Marx nearly all the leading Marxists have been non-Jews with no “Talmudic” background.
But so subtle is the poison that has filtered through the western mind through centuries, that even Sinclair Lewis, in a novel whose most striking feature is its animosity toward a fascist dictatorship, cannot help making his Communist characters Jews with foreign accents. The anonymous writers in Fortune even believe that the “attachment of men of other blood to the earth on which they were born is sometimes incomprehensible to the traditionally earthless Jew.” I have deliberately emphasized the words blood and earth. They are the precise though unintentional English equivalent of Hitler’s Blut und Boden.
It is too bad that Fortune’s article is exclusively illustrated with pictures of the Ark of the Covenant, the ceremonies of Atonement Day and Passover and temple interiors. These symbols of an ancient faith concern. the modern Jew little. Reproduced in a general study of Jews in America, they only serve to support the provocative myth that the Jew is an exotic and mystical alien.
THE problem of race prejudice rises not mind, which in turn arise out of social-economic relationships. Jew-baiting is different in origin but not in essence from Negro-lynching or the massacre of Armenians by Georgians in pre-revolutionary Russia. Fascism can stimulate race hatred and violence because capitalism as a system of society is based upon the exploitation of class by class and race by race. The capitalist state will not make lynching a crime, but it will make the expression of progressive ideas a crime. It will arrest the editor of a labor paper for championing the interests of the workers, but will, in the name of a “free press,” permit the circulation of sheets like The National American and The American Gentile.
Fortune’s investigation deals an effective blow against the false allegations of the anti-semites. But the Jewish question will continue to be a painful one so long as the Jew is either attacked or defended as a social, political and economic entity. Jews, like other peoples, are divided into antagonistic classes; and the Jewish workers and lower middle-classes have as little use for Bernard M. Baruch as the Gentile workers and lower middle-classes have for J.P. Morgan.
Fortune believes that “there is no reason for anxiety.” Organized anti-semitism in this country “is a poor thing indeed.”
It was only yesterday that we heard similar consolations about the Nazis. They were pictured as ineffectual madmen. But it happened in Germany and presumably it could happen anywhere else. The anonymous liberals in Fortune assert that “any nation which permits a minority to live in fear of persecution is a nation which invites disaster.” But it is even more true to say that any governing class which faces disaster instigates the persecution of minorities on the principle of divide and conquer. The more critical the condition of capitalism, the more the exploiting group incites to group hatred and violence against Jew, Negro, Catholic as reactionary political interests may require. Far better, then, to ring the alarm too
loudly than not to ring it at all. Today, there cannot possibly be too much anxiety about fascism in any of its manifestations. The fact that the authorities last year arrested no less than 5,000 men and women for their progressive views, while permitting virulent Jew-baiting sheets to circulate freely is itself something to disturb all who oppose the spread of fascism in this country.
Fortune’s “solution” for the problems of growing anti-semitism is “mutual toleration and respect” between Jew and Gentile, the first condition of which must be “the quieting of Jewish apprehensiveness and the consequent elimination of the aggressive and occasionally provocative Jewish defensive measures.
This seems too simple. Jew-baiting is only one aspect of the general drive for fascism conducted by tories as picayune as the National American and as powerful as the Liberty League. Against this menace all progressive forces, Jews and Gentile, Negro and white, proletarian and middle class, must unite in a broad People’s Front for the defense of civilization.
The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.
PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1936/v18n06-feb-04-1936-NM.pdf
