|
Article Excerpt
Louis Marshall served as president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) from 1912 until his death in 1929. In that capacity, he became the man to whom "all Jewish issues of the time" were referred. (1) He brought to that task both a passionate commitment to the well-being of the Jewish people and a blend of principle and pragmatism that reflected his long experience as a lawyer, his faith in America's constitutional democracy, and a deeply considered view of the status of Jews in America. American born, he felt confidently at home both as an American and a Jew. He moved easily between his role as a busy and successful lawyer and his representation of Jewish institutions and the causes they embodied.
Most notably, in a period of increasingly outspoken antisemitism, Marshall gave vigorous expression to the view that the protection and promotion of Jewish interests in America required neither self-ghettoization nor self-denial but rather the skillfull and tenacious invocation of undeniably American values--freedom of speech, freedom of religion, respect for human equality and diversity. Articulating Jewish communal interests in terms that resonated with America's self-proclaimed aspirations, he was neither timid nor insecure but vociferously refused to recognize any legitimate distinction between the rights of Jews and all the other minorities of which America is composed. In doing so he shaped the strategy that guided the Jewish community through the 20th century and down to the present day. Marshall's response to a particularly dramatic antisemitic challenge, the campaign against American Jews by Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent, provides an illuminating case study.
On May 22, 1920, the Dearborn Independent, a weekly journal owned by Ford, published the first of the extended series of antisemitic articles for which it soon became infamous. The first two issues were on Marshall's desk almost immediately. The gravity of the situation was clear to him. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had recently surfaced in the United States, broadcasting its paranoid fantasy of a Jewish cabal orchestrating international banking, Bolshevism, and Zionism in a diabolic plot to take over the world. (2) The Dearborn Independent disseminated the main themes of this potent myth and domesticated it for an American audience.
More ominous still, the Dearborn Independent appeared under the aegis of Henry Ford, a man who not only had virtually unlimited financial resources and a vast marketing organization at his disposal, but was himself a titanic and quintessentially American figure. Emblematically, in the novus ordo secularum of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the years would be counted "A.F."--after Ford. That this renowned avatar of modernity should be the sponsor of what Marshall was to call "a recrudescence of ancient superstition" was deeply shocking--more shocking indeed than the tsarist forgery on which it drew. And to Marshall, who believed in American exceptionalism, it was in some ways more startling than the ongoing antisemitic outrages of eastern Europe with which he and the founders of the AJC had been occupied from the time of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.
Marshall was not one to mince words. On June 3 he sent off a telegram to Henry Ford, as follows:
In the issues of May twenty-second and May twenty-ninth of the Dearborn Independent which is understood to be your property or under your control there have appeared two articles which are disseminating antisemitism in its most insidious and pernicious form.... The statements which they contain are palpable fabrications and the insinuations with which they abound are the emanations of hatred and prejudice.... They constitute a libel upon an entire people who had hoped that at least in America they might be spared the insult, the humiliation and the obloquy which these articles are scattering throughout the land and which are echoes from the dark middle ages.... On behalf of my brethren I ask you from whom we had believed that justice might be expected whether these offensive articles have your sanction, whether further publications of this nature are to be continued and whether you shall remain silent when your failure to disavow them will be regarded as an endorsement of them by the general public.... Three million of deeply wounded Americans are awaiting your answer. (3)
Two days later Marshall got the answer. A telegram signed only "The Dearborn Publishing Co." replied:
Your rhetoric is that of a Bolshevik orator.... You evidently much mistake the persons whom you are addressing.... These articles shall continue and we hope you will continue to read them and when you have attained a more tolerable state of mind we shall be glad to discuss them with you. (4)
Marshall at once understood that Ford fully endorsed the Dearborn Independent's antisemitic program and was not going to be dissuaded by discussion or appeals to reason. He sent copies of the exchange to a number of his colleagues at the AJC and called for an early meeting of the organization's executive committee. "It may be desirable," he said, "to bring an action against Ford and the Dearborn Independent for the purpose of forcing the hand of our enemies. It is better that this whole matter be brought out in the open rather than to allow this poison to circulate under the surface as it now does." (5)
Marshall's colleagues, however, were of a different mind. Indeed, they were not entirely pleased by Marshall's hasty telegram. The ailing Jacob H. Schiff wrote to Marshall: "If we get into a controversy we shall light a fire which no one can foretell how it will become extinguished, and I would strongly advise therefore that no notice be taken and the attack will soon be forgotten." (6)
Cyrus Adler, chairman of the AJC's executive committee, was, as he wrote Schiff on June 15, "a little troubled by the exchange of telegrams." He went further:
While I hate to "lay down" under the attack, I think that ... such a controversy in the American press would exaggerate what is already too much exaggerated there--Jewish affairs. The Jewish people, my dear Mr. Schiff, are somewhat to blame, in my opinion, for the attacks. We have made a noise in the world of recent years in America and England and probably elsewhere, far out of proportion to our numbers. We have demonstrated and shouted and paraded and congressed and waved flags.... I believe that if the American Jewish Committee is to take any real step to ward off such attacks in the future, it must give some constructive advice to the Jews of the United States which will help to obviate these attacks rather than to simply meet them on the defensive when they occur. (7)
Marshall also received counsel from outside the AJC fold. Leo Franklin, a prominent Detroit rabbi and former neighbor of Henry Ford, went so far as to tell him that he had persuaded Ford to back down, but that Ford had become infuriated and unbending upon the receipt of Marshall's telegram in the rabbi's very presence. A friendly conversation with Ford could still produce a retraction, Franklin urged. (8)
Marshall dismissed Franklin's views as "puerile and amateurish." He could not, however, so readily disregard his colleagues at the AJC. Marshall asserted that the way to deal with Ford's program was to "come out into the open and hit it as hard as possible." He complained of his associate's "timid counsels." They, however, insisted that a public attack on Ford "would only give publicity to these articles which they would not otherwise have." (9) Though hardly lacking self-confidence, Marshall was deeply respectful of Schiff and strongly disposed to defer to him. Further, as Schiff's biographer has observed, Marshall did not "share Schiff's almost religious belief that his leadership was ordained by a higher power." (10) Accordingly, Marshall reluctantly temporized.
The AJC's executive committee met on June 23,...
|
