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Article Excerpt
Louis Marshall and Stephen S. Wise are, in many ways, a study in contrasts. They were so dissimilar in character, temperament, and even appearance as to seem natural antagonists. Marshall was born in Syracuse, New York, a decade prior to the Civil War. A product of the German-speaking Jewish immigrant milieu, he was short and rotund, with an intense gaze, a penetrating intellect, and a distinct preference for congress gaiters, brass-collar buttons, and bowties. Marshall was by nature an autodidact--in addition to English and German, he mastered French, Latin, Greek, and eventually Yiddish. He was also an excellent strategist and knew how to get things done. Wise was born in Budapest, Hungary, in the era of the Italian Risorgimento and the unification of Germany. He was brought to the United States as a small child. Possessed of a warm and gregarious nature, he was reared in a traditional German household but his life was shaped early on by the fast-paced, cosmopolitan, English-speaking environment of New York City. Tall and handsome, sporting a thick mane of dark hair and his signature Prince Albert coat, he had a talent for being at the center of the action. A man of deep intelligence, Wise was an extraordinary orator, a natural politician, and a master builder of institutions.
Marshall and Wise despised one another. Marshall's "capacity for invective was astounding," recalled his son, James, "but there were limits on this, too, and ... when ladies and children were present, he would splutter, 'He's a, he's a--.' So in the family quite a number of persons became known as 'Heezas.' The best known Heezas were Theodore Roosevelt and Stephen Wise." (1) For his part, Wise late in life described Marshall as "so much of a master or dictator" of New York City's Temple Emanu-El, Reform's eastern flagship in the early twentieth century, that the congregation virtually "live[d] under Marshall law." What especially troubled Wise, he wrote, were not the differences between them, which surfaced quite dramatically in an early public clash over the Emanu-El ministry, but rather "that Mr. Marshall should have been willing to destroy the reputation of one as young as I then was, and what was even worse, that no member of the Board of Trustees ... was ready to tell the truth and by so doing brave Mr. Marshall's wrath." (2)
Perhaps at bottom theirs was an elemental clash of personal chemistry. Or perhaps it was a cultural divide--competing visions of American Jewish life that sprang from distinctive socioeconomic profiles and spiritual orientations. (3) Perhaps, too, it was a test of generational and political worldviews--the transition from Old World shtadlanut and the singular role of the "court Jew" to an Americanized form of ethnic Jewish politics. Marshall was in many respects an aristocrat. He was the heir apparent to Jacob Schiff, the architect of the Kuhn, Loeb banking empire, who was in turn the unquestioned leader of the central European Jewish elite and sustained close personal ties to the national G.O.P. leadership. Wise, on the other hand, was an idealistic democrat and a protege of Louis D. Brandeis, the distinguished Progressive lawyer, Zionist leader, and advisor to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Long before their mentors passed from the scene--in 1916 Brandeis became the first Jew appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, thereafter generally playing a muted public role in Jewish affairs, and in 1920 Schiff died--Marshall and Wise emerged as major figures in their own right. Marshall's path may have led to the doorway of Kuhn, Loeb, but his rise as one of the unrivaled leaders of the American Jewish establishment was nothing short of meteoric. From his humble origins in upstate New York to his perch at the law firm of Guggenheimer, Untermyer & Marshall, he swiftly emerged as the guiding force of the American Jewish Committee and a dominant figure in the American Jewish public arena. Combining remarkable intellectual talent, force of personality, and access to communal, economic, and political power, Marshall played a decisive role in a variety of high profile legal and political battles in the turbulent decades that spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of particular note was his leadership in the abrogation in 1911 of the U.S.-Russian Treaty of 1832, which hitherto required that American Jews interested in crossing into imperial tsarist territory first obtain special permission from the Russian ministry of the interior, the American blood libel and tragic courtroom failure of 1913 in which the "Yankee Jew" Leo Frank was wrongly accused of killing a Christian girl named Mary Phagan, and the case of the Dearborn Independent, which in 1920, under the ownership of American icon Henry Ford, printed a series of articles drawing their inspiration from the notorious antisemitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Wise, too, forged his reputation in the wake of the convulsive social and political upheaval that characterized the start of the new century. His political activity brought him into close contact with American Progressives and the left wing of the Democratic Party, where he developed close ties to Woodrow Wilson, Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He played a central role in virtually every significant public Jewish project of his day, dating back to his early participation in Zionism and direct personal contact with Theodor Herzl. He was responsible for establishing the Free Synagogue in New York City (1907); co-founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909); spearheading the campaign to establish the American Jewish Congress during World War I; securing American support for the Balfour Declaration of 1917; serving as a Zionist spokesman at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I; co-founding the American Civil Liberties Union (1920); leading the Zionist Organization of America, the United Palestine Appeal, and the American Zionist Emergency Council in the 1930s and 1940s; founding the Jewish Institute of Religion (1922), which later merged with Hebrew Union College; creating and spearheading the American anti-Nazi boycott of the 1930s and the World Jewish Congress (1936); and co-founding the American Jewish Conference (1943).
Wise's natural gifts and talents for institution building well suited him to the public arena and he seems to have briefly contemplated switching to a career in American politics. In 1906 his celebrated role as a maverick liberal minister, social activist, interfaith champion, and captivating orator, prompted Oregon's Democratic party leaders to ask him to run for the U.S. Senate. But his deep spiritual faith and appreciation for the unusual political dimensions of American religious life impelled him to chart a different course. Widely regarded as a rising star on the American religious scene, especially by fellow "churchmen" who admired his "fearless independence of character" and "broad-minded and liberal attitude toward all religions and creeds," Wise's opening came in the summer of 1915 when, in concert with the so-called Brandeis group, he emerged as a key actor in the pitched countrywide battle over the notion of establishing a representative American Jewish plenary. (4) He championed the principle of democratizing American Jewish life and played a critical role in mobilizing a variety of non-elite groups, including Yiddish-speaking labor groups, Zionist groups, women's groups, and others. He represented what millions of disenfranchised Jewish men and women of eastern European origin hoped for in a communal leader--an eloquent and persuasive spokesman who synthesized the American promise of liberty, democracy, and opportunity with an unapologetic blend of Jewish liberalism, social activism, Zionism, and appreciation for the variety of eastern European secular and religious forms of Jewish expression.
Marshall and other self-appointed leaders of the Jewish establishment who coalesced around the American Jewish Committee vigorously opposed the idea of a countrywide Jewish plenary. They viewed this enterprise as a threat to the Committee's hitherto untrammeled authority. As acculturated Jews of central European birth or parentage, they balked at the notion that eastern European Jews, who were on the whole inexperienced newcomers to American society, should determine the direction of American Jewish civic and political affairs. As time would prove, however, the fundamental shift in American Jewish scene wrought by the mass influx of eastern European Jewish immigrants and the exigencies of wartime could not be forestalled. In December 1918, following an intensive public battle that reached into every corner of American Jewish life, the American Jewish Congress convened in Philadelphia. Marshall and Wise--despite their mutual antagonism--assumed commanding positions at the head of the Congress and thereafter in the Paris Peace Delegation that accompanied President Woodrow Wilson to Versailles following the war.
Wise served as an important conduit to the White House by virtue of his close personal contact with Wilson and Brandeis. But an intriguing legal and political dynamic pushed Marshall to the fore of the Jewish delegation--even ahead of Julian W. Mack, the eminent Chicago jurist who enjoyed the confidence of the acculturated Jewish elite and the Zionist leadership. In the event, Marshall went on to play...
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