Antisemitism Before the Holocaust: Re-Evaluating Antisemitic Exceptionalism in Germany and the United States, 1880–1945 2022052479, 2022052480, 9781032210131, 9781032210162, 9781003266372

Citation preview

Antisemitism Before the Holocaust

This book examines the history of antisemitism in the United States and Germany in a novel way by placing the two countries side by side for a sustained comparison of the anti-Jewish environments in both countries from the 1880s to the end of World War II. Author Richard E. Frankel shatters the widely held notion of exceptionalism in Germany and America: the belief that antisemitism in Germany was uniquely murderous and led inevitably to the Holocaust and that antisemitism in the United States was uniquely benign, making an American Holocaust all but unthinkable. In a series of new and previously published essays that have been revised, updated, and expanded, the book relates antisemitism to issues including Jewish and Chinese immigration, discrimination and exclusion, World War I and its aftermath, Hitler and Henry Ford, Nazis, the American Right, and the Roosevelt Administration, and a German Ku Klux Klan. Taken together, these essays reveal that antisemitism in Germany was less aberrant than commonly believed and that American antisemitism was indeed dangerous and more similar to what existed in Germany during the same period. Antisemitism Before the Holocaust is an essential volume for students and scholars alike interested in European and American history, the history of the Holocaust and World War I. Richard E. Frankel is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His interests include antisemitism, nationalism, and political culture. Frankel’s other books include Bismarck’s Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898–1945 (2005) and States of Exclusion: A New Wave of Fascism (2019).

Routledge Studies in Modern History

Defrosting the Cold War and Beyond An Introduction to the Helsinki Process, 1954–2022 Richard Davy Narratives of Dictatorship in the Age of Revolution Emotions, Power and Legitimacy in the Atlantic Space Moisés Prieto Political Power and Colonial Development in British Central Africa 1938–1960s Alan H. Cousins How the Church Under Pius XII Addressed Decolonization The Issue of Algerian Independence Marialuisa Lucia Sergio Overseas Economic Relations and Statehood in Europe, 1860s–1970s Shaping the World, Making the Nation Gerold Krozewski Khoesan and Imperial Citizenship in Nineteenth Century South Africa Jared McDonald Antisemitism Before the Holocaust Re-Evaluating Antisemitic Exceptionalism in Germany and the United States, 1880–1945 Richard E. Frankel Labour in the Suburbs Political Change in Croydon During the Twentieth Century Michael Tichelar For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Rout ledge-Research-in-Modern-History/book-series/MODHIST

Antisemitism Before the Holocaust Re-Evaluating Antisemitic Exceptionalism in Germany and the United States, 1880–1945 Richard E. Frankel

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Richard E. Frankel The right of Richard E. Frankel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Frankel, Richard E., author. Title: Antisemitism before the Holocaust : re-evaluating antisemitic exceptionalism in Germany and the United States, 1880–1945 / Richard E. Frankel. Other titles: Reevaluating antisemitic exceptionalism in Germany and the United States, 1880–1945 Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge studies in modern history | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: A Transnational Jewish Question: Exploring Antisemitism in the United States and Germany Through the Lens of Global History, 1880– — ‘No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives’: Comparing Anti-Jewish Discrimination in Late-Nineteenth-Century Germany and the United States — An Exceptional Hatred? Re-Examining Antisemitism in Germany and the United States in a Time of War and Upheaval, 1914– — The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism: Comparing Coverage of the ‘World Jewish Conspiracy’ in the Völkischer Beobachter and the Dearborn Independent, 1920– — One Crisis Behind? Rethinking Antisemitic Exceptionalism in the United States and Germany — Klansmen in the Fatherland: A Transnational Episode in the History of Weimar Germany’s Right-Wing Political Culture. Identifiers: LCCN 2022052479 (print) | LCCN 2022052480 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032210131 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032210162 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003266372 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Antisemitism—United States—History—19th century. | Antisemitism—United States—History—20th century. | Germany— United States—History—19th century. | Germany—United States—History—20th century. | Exceptionalism—United States. | Exceptionalism—Germany. Classification: LCC DS145 .F726 2023 (print) | LCC DS145 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/4—dc23/eng/20221028 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052479 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052480 ISBN: 978-1-032-21013-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-21016-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-26637-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003266372 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvi Introduction

1

1 A Transnational Jewish Question: Exploring Antisemitism in the United States and Germany Through the Lens of Global History, 1880–1914

8

2 “No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives”: Comparing AntiJewish Discrimination in Late-Nineteenth-Century Germany and the United States

30

3 An Exceptional Hatred? Re-Examining Antisemitism in Germany and the United States in a Time of War and Upheaval, 1914–1923

41

4 The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism: Comparing Coverage of the “World Jewish Conspiracy” in the Völkischer Beobachter and the Dearborn Independent, 1920–1923

75

5 One Crisis Behind? Rethinking Antisemitic Exceptionalism in the United States and Germany

85

6 Klansmen in the Fatherland: A Transnational Episode in the History of Weimar Germany’s Right-Wing Political Culture

121

Bibliography134 Index146

Acknowledgments

There have been so many outstanding and inspiring scholars who’ve helped me as I developed my ideas, presented them in public, and ultimately wrote the essays that appear in this book. Thank you, Joseph Bendersky, Tobias Brinkmann, Christopher Browning, Catherine Chatterley, Barry A. Jackisch, Larry Eugene Jones, Markus Krah, Steven J. Pfaff, Uwe Puschner, Till van Rahden, Dirk Rupnow, Helmut Walser Smith, Daniel Soyer, Gerhard Weinberg, Jonathan Wiesen, Mirjam Zadoff, and Noam Zadoff. Thanks as always to Konrad Jarausch, my mentor, for always being there to provide positive reinforcement. At the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, I had the amazing fortune to meet three colleagues: Chad Parker, Sara Ritchey, and John Troutman. You have truly become family. I must thank the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University in Berlin specifically. Werner Bergmann, Klaus Richter, Marija Vulesica, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, and all the rest at the Center made my stays in Berlin so much more valuable and enjoyable. In particular, I want to thank Tim Buchen and Ulrich Wyrwa—colleagues and true friends. I also want to thank all who’ve made my research possible, including the archivists, librarians, and staff at the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Prussian Secret State Archive, Berliner Staatsarchiv, Prussian State Libraries, including the newspaper branch at Westhafen, the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin, and the libraries at Tulane University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Lousiana at Lafayette, especially the invaluable folks at ILL. Research for this work has been aided by the Holocaust Educational Foundation and the Jamie and Thelma Guilbeau Charitable Trust at UL Lafayette. Thank you, Louise Ingham, Robert Langham, and Max Novick at Routledge for supporting the project and helping see it through to completion. Thanks, of course, to my family, and in particular my wonderful daughter, Carmen, who inspires me every single day. Unfortunately, my mother, Selma, is no longer here to see me finish this project. She instilled in me a lifelong love of reading, and it’s to her that I dedicate this book. Thanks to the publishers who’ve permitted the re-publication of revised, updated, and expanded versions of these essays:

Acknowledgments vii “ ‘No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives’: Comparing Anti-Jewish Discrimination in LateNineteenth-Century Germany and the United States.” Copyright © 2019 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. This essay first appeared in Antisemitismus im 19. Jahrhundert aus internationaler Perspective, Mareike König and Oliver Schulz, eds. Published with permission by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. “An Exceptional Hatred? Re-Examining Antisemitism in Germany and the United States in a Time of War and Upheaval, 1914–1923.” Copyright © 2019 Indiana University Press. This article first appeared in Antisemitism Studies, Volume 3, Issue 2, Fall 2019, pages 191–231. Published with permission by Indiana University Press. “The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism: Comparing Coverage of the ‘World Jewish Conspiracy’ in the Völkischer Beobachter and the Dearborn Independent, 1920–1923.” Copyright © 2013 edition lumière Bremen. This essay first appeared in Judenfeindschaft und Antisemitismus in der deutschen Press über fünf Jahrhunderte: Ercheinungsformen, Rezeption, Debatte und Gegenwehr/Five hundred years of Jew-Hatred and Antisemitism in the German Press: Manifestations and Reactions, Michael Nagel and Moshe Zimmermann, eds. Published with permission by edition lumière Bremen. “One Crisis Behind? Rethinking Antisemitic Exceptionalism in the United States and Germany.” Copyright © 2013 Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in American Jewish History, Volume 97, Number 3, July, 2013, pages 235–258. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. “Klansmen in the Fatherland: A Transnational Episode in the History of Weimar Germany’s Right-Wing Political Culture.” Copyright © 2013 Michigan State University Press. This article first appeared in Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2013, pages 61–78. Published with permission by Michigan State University Press.

Introduction

In the late 1970s, Boston University Professor of Social Work Ralph Kolodny observed that “time in some cases softens perceptions.” He was reflecting on the attitudes of his younger Jewish colleagues toward American Jews of the 1930s and 1940s. “The sharp edge of earlier ethnic and religious antagonisms,” he continued, “becomes dulled as once important socio-political issues become a dead letter.” Kolodny was thinking about the chasm in perception separating young Jews growing up decades after World War II from those of his generation, who experienced an environment so permeated by radical antisemitism that “[n]ever far from the consciousness of even the least sensitive of our fellow-Jews . . . was the feeling that we were beleaguered.” The passage of time prevented late-twentieth-century American Jews from truly appreciating the danger that shaped the experiences of the older generation. “How easy it is in retrospect to explain away the anti-Semitic activity of former political leaders like Coughlin,” Kolodny wrote. At the time, however . . . those Jews who listened to Coughlin’s broadcasts and who read what he and his supporters wrote were neither in the position nor the mood to accept explanations of why he was behaving in this manner. What they understood was the sound of his rich baritone on the radio every Sunday mouthing theories which by direction or inuendo held Jews to be responsible for the twin evils of atheistic communism and unfettered capitalism and their attendant miseries, while all the while, the horrors of Naziism were being visited on Europe’s Jews, as Hitler devoured Central Europe piecemeal. Kolodny’s insight goes to the heart of this book—postwar generations have not properly understood the danger of antisemitism in the United States before the Holocaust, though not only because of time.1 If the widening chasm of time softens our understanding of antisemitism in America before the Holocaust, the Holocaust itself distorts our understanding DOI: 10.4324/9781003266372-1

2  Introduction of the prewar antisemitic environment in both the United States and Germany. That distortion has led to certain assumptions about the extent and the danger of antisemitism in both countries before 1945. On the one hand, there is the assumption that, because Germany committed the Holocaust, antisemitism there was aberrant and murderous, leading naturally to the Third Reich. In the case of the United States, the assumption is that, having not committed a Holocaust, antisemitism during the same period was largely benign, so that people like Father Coughlin and his Christian Front go down as cranks, or fringe elements with little real significance. Through the chapters in this book, I argue that both of these assumptions are wrong and that the commonly understood pictures of antisemitism in Germany and the United States do not stand up to scrutiny when placed side by side in a truly comparative study. In addressing those incorrect assumptions, we must recognize the critical importance of contingency and the need to look at history going forward, not backward over that chasm of time or through that distorting lens of the Holocaust. Hitler was not inevitable. In fact, there are few better examples that demonstrate the importance of contingency than the career of Adolf Hitler. And without Hitler, there would have been no Holocaust. And without the Holocaust, would German antisemitism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have looked much different from other countries? And if things had turned out just a bit differently in the United States, those very same ingredients that existed in Germany and contributed to the rise of Hitler, and which, as I demonstrate, also existed in the United States, might have contributed to a rather different outcome in America. Not surprisingly, antisemitism has been a lively topic of debate among scholars of German history for many years now. In terms of its relationship to the Holocaust, Daniel Goldhagen in Hitler’s Willing Executioners assigns it the central causal role, while others recognize its importance but place greater stress on structural factors.2 Yet more recently others, such as Helmut Walser Smith, in The Continuities of German History, have sought to look at antisemitism beyond the Holocaust, both within the longue durée of German history and in the broader European climate of anti-Jewish hostility.3 Along with other recent works exploring antisemitism in Central and Eastern Europe, these studies have made clear the importance of assessing transnational patterns and regional variations in understanding the role of antisemitism in politics and society.4 They reveal larger waves of violence, boycotts, and other actions directed at Jews on the global, state, and local levels at particular times, in particular locations, and as the result of multiple motivations. Yet scholars to date have failed to apply the insight offered by this new wave of scholarship to anti-Jewish hostility in both Germany and the United States. Treating both the genocidal antisemitism of Nazi Germany and the perceived light-handedness of antisemitism in the United States as exceptional and beyond comparison, scholars of Germany and the American Jewish experience generally have ignored or refused to acknowledge common antisemitic threads that were woven through the social and cultural fabric of both countries during this period.

Introduction 3 This is why a comparative approach is so crucial. After all, can one truly speak of a unique German antisemitism, for example, without considering the nature, extent, and function of that prejudice in other national contexts? In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen argued that Germans possessed a unique form of antisemitism—what he labeled “eliminationist”—which allegedly made them natural Jew killers.5 While widely and justifiably criticized, he inadvertently raised that vitally important question. In Rethinking the Holocaust, Yehuda Bauer suggested that one way to approach the question of comparison is to juxtapose Germany with another country whose antisemitism was more widespread, virulent, and violent, such as that found in Russia with its waves of ever-more violent pogroms.6 Yet the benefits of such comparative analysis need not stop at one end of the spectrum. By comparing the antisemitism of Germany to that of the United States, this project heeds Bauer’s call for comparative study, but moreover, asks us to explore more of the antisemitic spectrum: at what points did the anti-Jewish tenor found within the United States resemble that found in Germany, and at what points and in what ways did it differ? The comparison is an intriguing one because we have come to take for granted Germany’s supposed predilection for authoritarianism, nationalism, and intolerance, which is contrasted with the United States’ tendency toward democracy, liberalism, and inclusion. But starting in the late nineteenth century, antisemitism in both Germany and the United States grew increasingly widespread. In both countries, Jews were successful in many areas of society, culture, and the economy. And yet at the same time, American Jews faced limitations on university enrollments and faculty appointments and exclusion from social clubs and housing. In the 1890s, they found themselves demonized by the Populist movement, in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan and Henry Ford, and in the 1930s and 1940s by Father Charles Coughlin and the Christian Front. Political entrepreneurs attempting to mobilize antisemitism reached tens of millions, directly or indirectly, thereby contributing substantially to the growing antisemitic coloring of American politics, culture, and society. I view antisemitism along a spectrum based on degrees of intensity. On the mild end of the spectrum, there exists a sense of difference, perhaps a degree of discomfort that is not typically articulated in concrete expression. This is better thought of as anti-Jewish prejudice, as it doesn’t rise to the level of systematic beliefs. Beyond that there are expressions of hostility that are more concrete, that blame Jews for one or more of a variety of ills. These involve complaints about the alleged nefarious role of Jews in the economy and finance, culture, society, or politics. This prejudice is based on stereotypes. The complaints involve a kernel of truth that is then extended out to the group as a whole. Certainly, there have been Jews involved in the economy and finance; Jews have played a role in the film industry, in newspapers, and in the arts; and Jews have been involved in liberal, socialist, communist, and other political movements. They just don’t play the all-powerful roles that this form of antisemitism attributes to them. What’s been described up to this point I view as

4  Introduction xenophobic antisemitism, and in that sense it’s not much different from other forms of prejudice against other outsider groups. At the far end of the spectrum, the most extreme form of antisemitism leaves the realm of reality entirely and becomes what Gavin Langmuir has termed “chimeric antisemitism.”7 In medieval times, chimeric antisemitism involved fantastical accusations of ritual murder, desecration of the host, the poisoning of wells, as well as the infamous blood libel—the accusation that Jews abduct Christian children and drain them of their blood to be used for ritual purposes. While the blood libel, remarkably, has continued on into the twentieth century, at least two new forms of chimeric antisemitism have emerged during the modern period, one of which can be said to operate on the micro-level, the other on the macro. On the one hand, there is the belief that Jews form a distinct and inferior racial group defined by their blood and through their deliberate mixing with the host race they weaken it, “polluting” the allegedly “pure” blood of the “superior” race, causing its degeneration and making it vulnerable to Jewish conquest. Moving from the micro to the macro, the other expression of chimeric antisemitism in the modern world involves the claim that Jews are in charge of a massive global conspiracy, in which they use a wide range of tools and methods to bring about the collapse of Western Christian civilization and ultimately replace it with Jewish world domination. In the modern world, the clearest expression of this most extreme form of antisemitism is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is the type of antisemitism subscribed to by the Nazis and helps explain the extremes to which they went in order to deal with what Hitler saw as a global struggle between Germany and “International Jewry.” It was a form of antisemitism subscribed to by a small fraction of Germans overall and even within the National Socialist Party was not universal. And in the United States, such prominent national figures as Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin gave The Protocols their stamp of approval and helped promote the forgery across the country and, in the case of Ford, across the world. As in Germany, though, most Americans did not subscribe to such a radical form of Jew hatred. The significance of these latter two forms of antisemitism lies in their relationship to one another—in the way xenophobic antisemitism prepares the ground in which the chimeric form can take root and grow. Xenophobic antisemites “till the field,” so to speak, creating an environment that is already accepting of negative depictions of Jews. When extreme antisemites emerge with their warnings of global Jewish conspiracies or the threat that racially inferior Jewish immigrants pose to the health of the nation, there is already an audience at least inclined to listen. Most of them may not come to believe those extraordinary tales or believe them in full, but their already-existing belief in the notion that Jews do represent some form of nefarious danger can help ease their way into the orbit of individuals or groups espousing such radical ideas. What I consider necessary for a campaign of extreme anti-Jewish violence, therefore, is not a country full of Nazis. In Germany, by the early 1930s, there existed a small group of chimeric antisemites in a country where more

Introduction 5 common xenophobic antisemitism was increasingly widespread. People voted for or joined the National Socialist Party for a variety of reasons, hostility toward Jews being one of many. So, when considering the situation in the United States, I evaluate the presence of individuals and movements animated by a chimeric form of antisemitism and the extent of xenophobic antisemitism among the wider population. And when looked at this way for the period before 1933, the antisemitic environments in Germany and the United States look quite similar. My interest is mainly in public expressions of anti-Jewish prejudice. Primarily, I’m looking at political expressions of antisemitism but I also explore social and cultural forms as well as concrete instances of exclusion including discrimination and violence. Hence, my sources are overwhelmingly products of the public sphere, including newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, flyers, and speeches that I’ve collected in archives and libraries in Germany and the United States as well as a number of extremely helpful online newspaper collections. As a study that aims to reevaluate current assumptions and conclusions, I also use the existing scholarship on antisemitism in both countries. With the advantage of placing the cases side by side, I’m able to provide new insights and a new appreciation of the significance and danger of antisemitism in Germany and the United States. The chapters that follow are organized into three sections, each dealing with a particular time period—one of the three major waves of antisemitism that swept both countries between 1880 and 1945—and focus on a specific issue related to antisemitism. The first section covers the period from 1880 to 1914 and deals with an environment marked by a dramatic level of globalization and increasing nationalism. The second section deals with the period from 1914 to 1924 and looks at an extreme environment of war and crisis, both political and economic. The final section covers the period from 1933 to 1945 and centers on the struggle between democracy and dictatorship. At the end of each section, there is a shorter piece that delves deeper into a particular element of the history of antisemitism in Germany and the United States. The first chapter, “A Transnational Jewish Question: Exploring Antisemitism in the United States and Germany Through the Lens of Global History, 1880–1914,” examines the relationship between globalization and antisemitism. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the world experienced a period of globalization that rivals our own era. New communication and transportation technologies enabled the creation of a truly global labor market as tens of millions of people were on the move, seeking work in other countries and on other continents. Among these millions of labor migrants were Jews and Chinese. Their movement either through or to Germany or the United States, or even their rumored movement, gave rise to debates in both countries involving questions of immigration, labor, borders, citizenship, racial and national health, and more. What we will see is a confluence of actions and reactions, fears, and hatreds—back and forth across borders, continents, and oceans—all a product of late-nineteenth-century globalization,

6  Introduction resulting in the growth and radicalization of antisemitism in both Germany and the United States. Chapter  2 examines the specific issue of what’s commonly come to be known as “social antisemitism” in the late nineteenth century but probably better referred to as “anti-Jewish discrimination.” At that time, Jews in the United States found themselves increasingly excluded from hotels, resorts, country clubs, and residential neighborhoods while facing limits on access to higher education and jobs. In this chapter, I explore whether there were particular areas in which exclusion was more extensive in one country than the other; whether there were forms of discrimination that were unique to either Germany or America. I examine what such a comparative approach to this specific area can tell us about the anti-Jewish environments of these countries at this time and assess the potential dangers of antisemitism in Germany and America. The next chapter, “An Exceptional Hatred? Re-Examining Antisemitism in Germany and the United States in a Time of War and Upheaval, 1914–1923,” covers a time of severe crisis. For four years, Germany fought and lost an unimaginably bloody war, experienced a revolution that toppled the Second Empire and replaced it with a new democratic republic, suffered complete economic collapse in the hyperinflation of 1923, and survived coup attempts from both left and right. For the United States, the war was relatively brief, but nevertheless it served to heighten nationalism and xenophobia, and in the postwar period there was a serious economic downturn, and even more intense nationalism with the campaign for 100-percent Americanism and the violence of race riots and the First Red Scare. In both countries, this environment of extreme crisis proved highly favorable for a renewed wave of antisemitism. In this chapter, we will see that despite a crisis situation that most would agree was more extreme in Germany, antisemitism in the United States reached levels that looked remarkably similar to that of the Weimar Republic. What does that tell us, then, about the allegedly murderous nature of antisemitism in Germany and the allegedly benign form of the prejudice in the United States? The fourth chapter explores the language and argumentation of two decidedly anti-Jewish newspapers: the official Nazi organ, the Völkischer Beobachter, and Henry Ford’s paper, The Dearborn Independent. Both saw “the Jew” as the source of all evil and both tried to convince their readers of the dangers of the “international Jewish conspiracy.” However, they were substantially different in their frequency and reception, and not in the way most people today might assume: the Völkischer Beobachter at this time was quite a marginal paper of what was still a small, regional party, whereas The Dearborn Independent was for a time the second largest paper in the country with a circulation of 700,000 and published by one of the most famous men in America. What can this look at two extremely antisemitic newspapers tell us about the antisemitic potentials of both countries during a period of extreme crisis? Chapter 5, “One Crisis Behind? Rethinking Antisemitic Exceptionalism in the United States and Germany,” covers the third major wave of antisemitism. In particular, it uses the antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration

Introduction 7 in both countries as a lens through which we can evaluate the significance of antisemitism during the most dangerous period for Jews in the twentieth century. Radical antisemites in both countries used strikingly similar rhetoric in attacking the Roosevelt administration. In both countries, they depicted FDR as somehow foreign, a tool of an alleged Jewish cabal, and a man who obeyed “International Jewry” (if not a Jew himself). Both American and German antisemites described his policies as “socialistic” or “communistic” and serving the interests of the Soviet Union. Each group also claimed to see in Roosevelt’s machinations an effort to drag both America and Germany into a world war that would result in the destruction of both and ultimately benefit only the Jews themselves. What we find through this examination of anti-FDR rhetoric and the context in which it emerged is that many of the same ingredients that enabled a radical antisemitic movement to come to power in Germany also existed in the United States. It argues, therefore, for the vital importance of contingency in understanding why two surprisingly similar antisemitic environments resulted in only one antisemitic government. The sixth and final chapter, “Klansmen in the Fatherland: A Transnational Episode in the History of Weimar Germany’s Right-Wing Political Culture,” explores a rather odd chapter in the world of right-wing extremism in Germany with a significant contribution from the American Right. In the early 1920s, the Berlin police uncovered a new right-wing group that espoused a brand of antisemitism similar in most ways to the many other völkisch groups that had sprung up after World War I. The differences between this group and the others, however, were quite striking, for these German racists wore white sheets and hoods, called themselves the “Knights of the Fiery Cross,” and were led by three Americans. What was this Ku-Klux-Klan-like organization doing in Germany and how could it have been led by Americans? This chapter uses the rather unusual story of the “German Klan” to explore issues of right-wing, antisemitic political culture in the immediate interwar period.

Notes 1 Ralph L. Kolodny, “Father Coughlin and the Jews: A Reminiscence for Younger Colleagues,” Journal of Jewish Communal Service, Vol. 53, No. 4 (1977): 311, 317. 2 Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). 3 Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2008). 4 See, for example, Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky, eds., Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918 (Waltham, 2014); Tim Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin, 2012). 5 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). 6 Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, 2001). 7 Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1990).

1 A Transnational Jewish Question Exploring Antisemitism in the United States and Germany Through the Lens of Global History, 1880–1914 In the early 1890s, the German government began screening the health of Eastern European Jews migrating west from the Russian and Habsburg Empires in search of better economic opportunities. By 1894, the two major German steamship firms, the Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG) and North German Lloyd (NdL), had taken over the process. On Germany’s eastern border, they built special facilities to clean the migrants and check for disease; built a sealed train station outside of Berlin and outfitted special trains for the journey west; and at the ports of Hamburg and Bremen they built separate housing for the Jews, complete with kosher dining services.1 They did all this in response to decisions made across the Atlantic. The US government, trying to restrict entry of “inferior” immigrants like Jews from Eastern Europe, had established strict health requirements to enter the country. Those tighter requirements represented the further development of a process that began in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act— the first step in the racialization of American immigration policy. The effort to exclude the Chinese in the United States would in turn inspire antisemites in Germany to try and close the eastern border to those same Jewish labor migrants mentioned earlier. What started in America with the Chinese had made its way to Germany, influencing its own approach to Jews while also working itself out across the Atlantic as various groups of Americans, in responding to the rise of the global labor market and other major changes that were affecting their own livelihoods, turned to antisemitism as they tried to deal with what they saw as the country’s own “Jewish question.” And when Prussian landowners proposed solving a pressing labor shortage in the late nineteenth century by bringing in Chinese laborers to work their estates in the east, nationalists and antisemites responded with language that blended anti-Chinese with anti-Jewish imagery. Why bring up German shipping companies, health inspections on the Prussian border, and Chinese labor migration in an essay that seeks to understand the development of modern antisemitism in Germany and the United States? Is it not enough to focus on the two individual countries themselves and the antisemites and Jews within them? For much of the work on antisemitism over the years, the answer has been yes. The study of modern anti-Jewish prejudice in general has often been conducted within the confines of the nation-state.2 But the particular nature of antisemitism lends itself to other approaches as well. DOI: 10.4324/9781003266372-2

A Transnational Jewish Question 9 Considering the many ways in which the idea, its advocates, and the consequences of anti-Jewish incidents have crossed national and imperial borders, antisemitism is also especially suited to a transnational approach, and scholars have indeed viewed it as such.3 Recently, works that explore the region of Central and Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that do so from a local, ground-level perspective have provided fascinating new insights into the dynamics of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence.4 But beyond the transnational, there’s another approach—one that has yet to be applied to this area—that can further help us understand the development of modern antisemitism. That approach is global history.5 To be clear, a global history of antisemitism is not a history of antisemitism everywhere. Instead, a global approach to the study of antisemitism would involve an analysis of specific global conditions of the period in question— structural changes, challenges, or problems resulting from those global conditions—and then how antisemitism became a way for people to deal with those global conditions in various local settings.6 The question here then is how the emergence of a global capitalist labor market in the second half of the nineteenth century influenced the development of antisemitism in two of the countries most significantly affected by that structural change. While there are no works that use global history as an approach to the study of antisemitism, Sebastian Conrad did point to some of its potential in his book Nationalism and Globalization in Imperial Germany.7 There he argues for a fundamental relationship between nationalization and globalization. Rather than the two developing in stages, with the former giving way to the latter, Conrad shows how the two evolved together, with nationalization fostering globalization and globalization stimulating nationalization. If this is so, and since there is also a fundamental relationship between nationalism and antisemitism, then should we not consider the possibility that there is also a significant relationship between antisemitism and globalization? This chapter represents an early effort to explore this relationship. Using the discussion of Jewish and Chinese migration in Germany and the United States as its focus, it argues that global history can provide valuable insights that can help us better understand the evolution of modern antisemitism, and that globalization was, indeed, a significant factor in its development. When looked at from a broader, global perspective, the experiences of Germany and the United States during the latter third of the nineteenth century appear much more similar than one might typically assume. Both countries were just emerging from military conflicts, each fought over fundamental questions about the nature of each nation, marking this period as a liminal phase in the development of notions of Germanness and Americanness. This was accompanied by a financial and economic crisis that engulfed both Germany and the United States beginning in 1873 and continuing with varying intensity for the next two decades. Politically, by the end of the 1870s, both countries experienced a nearly simultaneous shift to the right with Bismarck’s “second founding of the empire” and the American government’s ending of

10  A Transnational Jewish Question Reconstruction.8 On top of all this, Germany and the United States industrialized at a remarkably rapid pace. Industrialization on such a scale led to a massive demand for labor, a demand that could only be satisfied from abroad. In the last decades before World War I, in fact, the United States and Germany had become the two largest importers of labor in the world—a development facilitated by transformations beyond the borders of both countries.9 By the second half of the nineteenth century, transportation and communication technologies were transforming the world in fundamental ways. Trains and transoceanic steamships enabled the movement of goods over enormous distances more quickly and at much lower cost than was previously possible. Meanwhile, the telegraph and eventually the telephone allowed for the even faster movement of information. The result was an unprecedented expansion of world trade and economic growth. No location now was too distant to become enmeshed in the growing global economic network. At the same time, the new transportation technologies meant that people too were on the move like never before, and with the telegraph transmitting instantaneous information on wages and demand, the result was the emergence of a truly global labor market. From 1846 to 1940, between fifty-five million and fifty-eight million people moved from Europe to the Americas, and more than sixty-five percent headed to the United States.10 As impressive as those numbers are, they tell only part of the story, since even more people were on the move but were not crossing oceans. By the middle of the nineteenth century, half of Europe’s population was moving internally, traversing borders, regions, and the rural/urban divide.11 And among the late-nineteenth-century labor migrants, Eastern European Jews were one element. The millions of Jews who left Eastern Europe for points west were very much a part of this global labor migration. While earlier accounts told of Jews leaving the east to escape persecution and pogroms, newer work has reshaped our understanding, depicting this migration now as primarily economic in nature. In much the same way as it was for most of the other groups on the move at this time, it was the pull of economic opportunity that led so many Jews to cross the Atlantic and find their place within the global labor market.12 Meanwhile, those same years that saw so many Europeans on the move also saw a similarly large migration of people from and within Asia. More than forty-eight million people left India and Southern China for Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean rim, and the South Pacific between 1846 and 1940. Of these, more than nineteen million were Chinese. Two and a half million people from India, China, Japan, and Africa were destined for the United States.13 While exhilarating for some, this modern mass movement of people proved highly disturbing for those concerned about the racial health of their nation. Previously, according to such thinking, the rigors of long-distance travel meant that only the strong and vigorous could make the journey and thus their arrival meant a benefit to the race. But now, with steam power, anyone could make the trip, no matter how weak and/or “defective” they were, and thus their arrival represented a potentially disastrous weakening of the race.14 Considering the

A Transnational Jewish Question 11 internal factors discussed earlier, the growing global migration of labor through and to both Germany and the United States, therefore, made the process of self-definition that much more intense. As millions of Jews, Chinese, and other laborers were on the move, talk of restriction, exclusion, and expulsion was entering the national dialogue in both countries. It was, in fact, as Adam McKeown argues, the desire to exclude certain racial groups that led to the development of the various mechanisms involved in border control and identification and not as a requirement created by the global movement of labor itself.15 First among those racial groups that inspired the development of restrictive immigration mechanisms was the Chinese. Chinese workers comprised one of the largest segments of migrants on the move in the nineteenth century. They began moving to the Western United States in the 1850s, initially seeking wealth in the California gold rush. Many went on to work construction on the transcontinental railroad, as domestics in the homes of white Californians, and some started their own businesses, including shoe and cigar manufacturing, as well as laundries. And with the rise of California as a major produce supplier, the need for cheap agricultural labor led employers to the Chinese. So much so that by 1886, Chinese made up seven-eighths of all California farm labor.16 But no matter how hard they worked, many Americans viewed them as fundamentally un-American and ultimately an existential threat to the survival of a white America. Many of the same qualities that evoked admiration among white Americans brought condemnation and fear when displayed by the Chinese. Their willingness and ability to work hard, physically demanding jobs, along with their frugality, enabled them to work for less money, allegedly driving down wages and taking jobs from whites. White workers saw them as a threat to their freedom—low wages to them meant an inability to live a financially independent life.17 When Chinese workers made the transition from laborer to entrepreneur, likewise, they aroused fear among “native Americans” that certain abilities the Chinese were said to possess made them nearly invincible in the world of trade, leading inevitably—unless checked—to Chinese domination.18 In 1873, for example, the New York Times described the “sharp practice” of Chinese who drove their former employers out of business through unfair competition.19 Five years later the danger only increased. In 1878, a writer at the North American Review described how [t]he swarm of Chinese, in San Francisco particularly, and their monopolization of many branches of industry, from which, by their wonderful manual skill, their highly-developed and intelligent imitative faculties, their tireless industry, and their abnormal frugality, . . . have driven out the white.20 But how dangerous were they really? How did they compare to that other immigrant group that Americans would also come to fear for its alleged potential to dominate American business? Former President Ulysses S. Grant had

12  A Transnational Jewish Question some thoughts on the subject. The most remarkable thing he’d seen during his world tour in 1887, he said, “was that wherever the Chinaman had come in contact with the Jew in trading the Chinaman had driven out the Jew.”21 Just a few years later, General Arthur MacArthur, commander of United States troops in the Philippines, summed up the danger posed by Chinese migration when he warned how, [i]ndividually . . . the Chinaman represents a unit of excellence that must always command respect and win admiration, but in their organized capacity in the Philippines the Chinese represent an economical army. . . . [T]hey are bent on commercial conquest.22 But it was not only work that set them apart. The Chinese in America separated themselves physically in the towns in which they settled. Newspapers carried stories that described an environment of unimaginable filth, overcrowding, and disease. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, where “the streets are seldom cleaned,” most residents reportedly “sleep in under-ground dens beside which a dog-kennel would be clean, spacious and comfortable.”23 In Tacoma, Washington, they were said to live in “surroundings absolutely impossible to the white man. . . . They were a menace to public health and safety, with their habits, vices, and diseases, and the ever-present probability of a conflagration breaking out in their tinder-box rookeries.”24 What they did in these hellish quarters also marked them as dangerous. The link in the public imagination between Chinese and crime was common. In general, their alleged attitude toward the law—toward the entire system of government and of justice, in fact—led many to see them as a real threat. Not only were they accused of ignoring American law and readily lying under oath in American courts, but there was said to exist an entire system of government— secret, all-powerful, with its own laws, courts, and executioners—that made the Chinese community a state within a state.25 In their section of town, drugs, gambling, and prostitution were all said to flourish. One of the milder indictments described the Chinese as “shrewd and indefatigable petty thieves, hardly ever rising to the dignity of audacious crimes.”26 The New York World was more typical, describing these “Asiatics” as “cunning, treacherous and vicious.”27 In discussing his bill to completely end all Chinese immigration, Senator John H. Mitchell of Oregon said of them that “perjury was a crowning virtue,” and that hypocrisy, deception, and fraud were normal for them.28 The cellars beneath their homes were said to be “either opium dens or the quarters of the only women in Chinatown, the prostitutes who minister to the apathetic passions of this laboring population.”29 Both the presence of Chinese prostitutes and the belief that Chinese men lured white women and girls into prostitution raised fears about the health and future of the nation. At its heart, the “Chinese problem” involved a fundamentally alien and extraordinarily dangerous people, which, according to many Americans, was both unable and unwilling to assimilate and become part of the American

A Transnational Jewish Question 13 national community. In the North American Review, George F. Seward described how people would complain that the Chinese will not assimilate with our people; that they do not care to become citizens; that they are not fit to become citizens; that our civilization makes no impress upon them; that they remain, and will remain forever, an alien and indigested element in our body politic.30 That there were hundreds of millions more allegedly threatening to “flood” the country only added to the fears of many white Americans. One result was Congress’ passage of legislation in 1882 restricting the entry of Chinese laborers into the country and the beginnings of the racialization of the US immigration policy. Ten years later, as Congress moved from restriction to exclusion of Chinese workers, John B. Weber, the United States Commissioner of Immigration, looked back on that milestone in American immigration policy. In an article in the North American Review, he described the “best justification for the prohibition of the Chinese” being that not only are they of a different race and in no wise beneficial to us in the assimilative process, but they are so numerous that if once the ball is set in motion they will pour in upon us in such vast numbers as to “China-ize” America.31 But of course the Chinese were not the only group that took part in the global labor migration. Already by the late 1870s, Jews began leaving the crushing poverty in the Russian Pale of Settlement and moving west in search of better economic conditions. The majority would end up in the United States, but before that, many had to make their way through Germany before reaching the ports of Hamburg and Bremen for their journey across the ocean. Despite the fact that Germany served primarily as a transit land, nationalists and antisemites warned of a coming “flood” of “millions” of Jews from the east that would overwhelm the country and, through their extraordinary abilities in business and finance, ultimately conquer it.32 Opponents of Eastern Jewish entry into Germany stressed their foreign and dangerous characteristics. In an essay published in the November 1879 issue of the Preußische Jahrbücher, the country’s leading historian (though by no means a leading antisemite), Heinrich von Treitschke, contrasted them with the Jewish populations of Britain and France—populations he said were too small to have any real impact on the national culture. But over our eastern border invades year after year from the inexhaustible Polish cradle a horde of striving, trouser-selling youth, whose children and grandchildren will control our stock exchanges and newspapers; the

14  A Transnational Jewish Question immigration grows visibly, and ever more serious becomes the question, how can we blend this foreign people with ours.33 Just a year later, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s press secretary, Moritz Busch, described the eastern migrants as a people with “disgusting morals and inclinations,” with “hate toward the goyim,” a “deep lack of culture,” and a “greedy and insatiable appetite for gain.”34 Their “talmudic hate toward everything that is not Jewish,” he wrote, shaped their attitude toward the law. And with their “talmudic legal concepts and talmudic cleverness” they would transform “our” laws in their own interest. As such, these “leeches” constituted a “state within a state.”35 But it was not only their ideas and their attitudes that set them apart. In terms of their appearance, many Germans (and not only antisemites) stressed not simply the caftans and beards, but what they described as the filth of the women and children and even the smell they believed to be endemic to the group as a whole. They were repulsed by such imagery and feared that this “flood” of Polish Jews would bring their living conditions with them, including crime and disease, if they were to settle in the Empire.36 They were so foreign, in fact, that Busch described them as “a people . . ., that stands outside European culture.”37 And while German fears of being overrun by poor, “dirty,” “disease-ridden” Jews were growing, the American push to prevent what they worried was a coming flood of poor, “dirty,” “disease-ridden” Chinese was already well underway—and German antisemitic entrepreneurs took note.38 Just 1 year before Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, German antisemites presented Bismarck with a petition containing some 250,000 signatures that called for, among other things, the ending or at least the reduction of Jewish immigration.39 As Heinz Gollwitzer pointed out in his study of “The Yellow Peril,” “[t]hey designated the Jews as the Chinese of Europe,” and took their inspiration from the American exclusion effort to demand similar measures against the Jews.40 In 1882, the Neue deutsche Volkszeitung reported that Welcome parallels can be drawn from the North American immigration ban for Chinese to the required Jewish immigration ban. The freest state has shown that justice and freedom can be limited if the common interest demands it.41 In December 1888, the Antisemitische Correspondenz quoted from a book on the situation in the United States, which noted that [t]he anti-Chinese movement in America is old and has a certain justification in so far as the son of the celestial empire almost never comports to his new environment, but rather remains always a foreigner among foreigners with wholly different ways of living and outlooks, which stand at an exceedingly low level as compared to those of western culture.42

A Transnational Jewish Question 15 One need only replace “anti-Chinese movement,” they noted, with “antisemitic movement” and “western” with “aryan” and the similarity with the situation in Germany would be clear.43 As it turns out, this would not be the last instance in which globalization would lead to similar experiences in both countries with regard to labor migration and questions of exclusion. In the latter third of the nineteenth century—and particularly, though not exclusively, in the east—German landowners faced significant challenges, thanks to the decline in prices for agricultural products that resulted from the global market in agricultural goods. That decline in prices led to a decline in wealth and in the pay of their farm workers contributing to an overall drop in living standards in the east. At the same time, industrialization was transforming German cities, leading to a massive internal migration that pulled German and Polish agricultural workers from the large estates of the east into the factories of Western Germany, drawn by the promise of better pay and a new, more modern lifestyle. But it was not only the pull of the cities that contributed to the difficulties in finding adequate numbers of people to work the land. Nationalism also played a vital role. Concerns that growing numbers of Polish agricultural laborers would, over time, lead to the “Polonization” of the land motivated the government to carry out a series of expulsions of Russian Poles and Polish Jews in the 1880s. The additional decision to close the border to Russia and Austria-Hungary further dried up the pools of available labor. By the end of the decade, the government had deported so many Poles that, in March 1889, the Catholic newspaper Germania quipped, they might need to bring in “heathen Chinese” to make up for the shortage.44 As it turns out, what may have started as a humorous observation became part of a serious policy debate within a matter of months. In the fall of 1889, the Prussian Ministry of Agriculture received a rather unusual request. Landowners in Greifswald and Stettin asked the Ministry to allow Chinese laborers to work on their estates.45 In early 1890, the Regierungspräsident of Danzig asked local agricultural societies to report on the desirability of using Chinese labor—an idea that received public support from numerous large landowners. In 1895, the Foreign Ministry asked the German Ambassador in Beijing to report on the feasibility of recruiting Chinese workers after an estate owner in East Prussia inquired about it.46 Even the Kaiser himself asked the Agriculture Ministry to look into it. And periodically through the 1890s and into the first decade of the twentieth century, the question of importing Chinese labor made its way into the proceedings of both the Reichstag and the Prussian House of Deputies as well as the pages of numerous national and regional newspapers. As a response to the agricultural labor crisis, tapping into the global migration of Chinese workers made economic sense. Advocates described the Chinese as “a sober and industrious race with few needs.”47 They were known for their willingness to work for many years at the same task—an important quality considering the landowners’ complaints of Polish labor moving from

16  A Transnational Jewish Question one job to another for the best deal.48 But what promised to solve a purely economic problem for the landowners, nationalists viewed as a threat to Germany itself. Critics attacked the idea of importing Chinese labor with a litany of complaints that closely resembled those made by Americans seeking to exclude the Chinese earlier in the decade. They had a reputation as remarkably good workers, opponents acknowledged, able to work long hours in difficult conditions without complaint. This seemingly positive quality, however, led to a particular problem—their minimal demands. For all the work they did, they required very little in return. This translated into the most horrific, inhuman living conditions (with San Francisco’s Chinatown serving as a key example), and the danger of disease that such an environment made ever-present. Whatever little they earned, they saved. Their frugality was notorious. Other objections to the use of Chinese “coolie” labor appeared to blend with the kinds of complaints made about Jews. The antisemites at the Deutsch-Soziale Blätter, for example, described them as greedy. “The Chinese has only one ideal: money, only one topic of conversation: money.”49 And they were allegedly very good at making it. Concern about their “innate commercial skill . . . which far exceeds anything known to us” motivated many of those who opposed plans to import Chinese workers into Germany.50 Echoing the sentiment of Ulysses S. Grant in 1888, some even claimed they were more skilled than Jews.51 Others claimed they acquired their money through dishonest methods.52 Their membership in secret societies fed suspicion of the Chinese as conspiratorial. Through unimaginable wealth, these secret societies allegedly wielded fabulous power. So strong and intimidating were they that, “in the face of these societies, the American authorities are completely powerless.”53 Chinese men were said to prey on young German women and girls, who allegedly found them irresistible.54 Many of these young Germans were allegedly destined for the world of prostitution.55 German antisemites—but by no means only German antisemites—had recognized a similarity between the ongoing “Chinese Question” in the United States and the potential introduction of a “Chinese Question” in their own country. And in the “answer” Americans found, they saw a model to be borrowed. The American example shows how the relationships can intensify so much that the state, in the interest of the native worker and further in the interest of the native culture, decides in the need to change it, to enact an immigration ban.56 They also recognized a similarity between their own ongoing “Jewish Question” and the potential “Chinese Question” in Germany, and the images and tropes they used in one they would borrow and adapt for use against the other. A similar conjuncture can be seen back across the Atlantic. Over the course of three nights in New York’s Chinatown in early May 1903, there occurred a rather fascinating coming together of two immigrant groups

A Transnational Jewish Question 17 with a common history of persecution and exclusion. Chinese residents staged a series of benefit performances in order to raise money for the Jewish victims of the horrific Kishinev Pogrom in Russia.57 At the banquet that followed on May 11, one speaker denounced the atrocities against the Jews in Russia while also bringing up the suffering endured by the Chinese in America, a topic that “seemed to greatly interest the Jews in the audience.”58 A representative of the Chinese community told the guests that they held the event “to show the good feeling of the Chinese toward the Jews, as the former considered themselves as much persecuted as the latter, and there should necessarily be much sympathy between them.”59 Those people who met that evening and the many, many more who donated money to help the victims recognized in the experiences of each a common humanity that brought them closer together. Others, however, saw something quite different when they looked at the two groups. Antisemites and nativists in the country also believed there were significant similarities between the Jews and Chinese in America. But rather than lead to a sense of sympathy and fellow feeling with the immigrants, the similarities they identified evoked fear and disgust and inspired them to persecute and work to exclude them from their American national community. One of the commonalities that linked the Chinese and Jews in America was their primary reason for coming: both were part of the same network of global labor migration that had been developing during the second half of the nineteenth century. If, in the late 1840s, it enabled millions of Chinese to travel across the Pacific, in the late 1870s it did the same for Jews from the Russian Pale and Austrian Galicia to travel across the Atlantic. It just happened that these same Eastern European Jews whose travels through Germany aroused so much fear among the nationalists and antisemites of the Second Reich were landing in New York just as the anti-Chinese atmosphere in America was reaching new levels of intensity. The arrival of tens of thousands of alien-looking, unassimilated Eastern European Jews had to be unsettling to the members of America’s alreadyestablished German Jewish community. They recognized that the language and imagery as well as the exclusionary immigration measures deployed against the Chinese could fairly easily be re-directed at these newly arriving coreligionists.60 In March 1882, for example, the Indianapolis Journal carried an editorial, in which it noted “much similarity in the reasons for the persecution of the Jews in Russia and the Chinese in California. They live off the country and leave nothing to it. They are clannish, do not assimilate, hoard money and spend nothing.”61 Commenting on what it called the “Chinese Craze,” Scientific American provided a more extensive description of the similarities. “The reasons for abusing and excluding the Chinese,” it noted, are curiously like those given in Europe for similarly treating the Jews. At first it was said that they were poor, and filthy, and ignorant; that they were religiously perverse; that they were incapable of becoming good citizens; that they did not, or would not, or could not “blend” socially and vitally

18  A Transnational Jewish Question with the superior Caucasian. Now their great fault is that they will not keep down; that they actually aspire to dominate; and that when suffered to compete with their superiors, they show a capacity to come to the front that is positively alarming.62 Taking the example of one such diatribe in a San Francisco newspaper, the author noted that “Changing ‘Chinaman’ to ‘Hebrew,’ it might be mistaken for a literal translation of recent French, German, or Russian utterances arising from the peculiar though kindred race mania prevailing in Europe.”63 A correspondent from the Jewish World wrote, “The times are out of joint. Americans in Congress are legislating against the Chinese and handicapping their liberties. The phrase is already invented, ‘Chinese first, and Jews next.”64 At the American Hebrew, it was considered a real possibility “that the same jealousy of commercial success, the same unjust restiveness under competition, which animate the ‘Chinese Bill,’ may come some day to be applied to “limit” the in-coming and activity of the Hebrews.”65 And they had reason to worry. After all, it was only a few years earlier that American Jews began experiencing a significant degree of what’s come to be referred to as “social discrimination”—a form of exclusion that would mark even the most successful Jews as “undesirable.” The Grand Union Hotel at Saratoga Springs, New York, for example, made headlines when it refused to serve prominent banker Joseph Seligman in 1877 (the same year, as it happens, that New Hampshire finally granted Jews full political rights). Just two  years later, the president of the Manhattan Beach Corporation, Austin Corbin, likewise gained national attention when he announced he would no longer accept Jewish guests at Coney Island because, as he put it, Jews “are a detestable and vulgar people.”66 And then there were the less prominent but far more numerous instances of rejection by hotels and resorts across the country, the growing number of cases of exclusion from social clubs, housing developments, and education, all while Jews were being confronted with a formal movement of Christians to declare America officially a Christian nation. It was a time, in other words, in which Jews were finding their place within the national community increasingly called into question. When “native American” antisemites watched as the first waves of new Jewish immigrants entered the country, they saw a group that they considered remarkably similar to the Chinese, both in general characteristics and in the extraordinary abilities they were said to possess. Their reaction to the Jews, therefore, would closely resemble their reaction to the Chinese: fear of domination and conquest. We can see this, for example, in the economic characteristics attributed to Jews. They were said to be rapacious and unscrupulous, thrifty and greedy— superior in business to the gentile.67 According to Austin Corbin, Jews “were not safe people to deal with in business.”68 And in contrast to the Christian,

A Transnational Jewish Question 19 they were not productive members of society. “The Jew cultivates no land, follows no mechanical or useful manufacture.”69 Instead, [h]e crowds into the cities, and lives by trade. In Russia he is the butcher, the tavern keeper, the dealer in clothing, in jewelry, and in money. He aims at a monopoly of the articles in which he deals; and in such a country as Russia, reasonably attains it. And wherever he is able to do this, he uses his power to enrich himself without scruple and without mercy.70 One book of the late 1890s went so far as to call Jews, “the Chinese of our retail trade.”71 But fear of Jewish or Chinese control of business was not the only thing that kept many Americans up at night. It was also through their alleged power over the lives of ordinary Americans that Jews and Chinese were said to endanger the nation. As we’ve already seen, many Americans believed the Chinese to be part of an all-powerful secret society that placed them above the law. Within the Populist movement that was emerging around this time in response to some of those same global forces that were affecting Germany and America, there developed a similar understanding of Jews. Facing global economic and financial forces beyond their control or understanding, late-nineteenth-century populists found an explanation and a scapegoat in the image of Jews as “Shylocks” and “money kings”—an allpowerful and secretive force directing global financial conspiracies and possessing unheard-of wealth. That global element appeared in complaints about the Rothschilds, for example, who were “established at London and Paris and Frankfort and all the financial centers of the old world” and how these “money changers [were] practically masters of all European dynasties.”72 But their reach extended across the Atlantic. Warnings about the dangers Jews allegedly posed to the people of the United States became a notable element of Populist political culture.73 Enmeshed as it was within those global financial networks, America, too, was said to be “financially controlled by a few German speaking Jews.”74 According to Populists, the “Jew Bankers and money changers” controlled both political parties and “dictated the financial policy of the country ever since the war.”75 Within the hall at the Populist Party’s Omaha convention in July 1892, there hung a banner with the words, “In Goldt ve trusdt” over the head of a “long nosed Shylock.”76 During the next presidential campaign in 1896, when William Jennings Bryan assured his followers that they would not be “crucified upon a cross of gold,” The American Israelite described one of the “wild and unbridled passions” animating the populist movement as being “a spirit of the fiercest anti-semitism which has ever or anywhere cursed human society.”77 According to an Associated Press report that same year, [o]ne of the striking things about the Populist Convention [in St. Louis— RF] . . . is the extraordinary hatred of the Jewish race. It is not possible to

20  A Transnational Jewish Question go into any hotel in the city without hearing the most bitter denunciation of the Jewish race as a class and of particular Jews who happen to have prospered in the world.78 The influence of Bryan’s rhetoric could be seen in particular among those who campaigned for free silver—a group responsible, according to the Chicago Chronicle, for a “vicious crusade of anti-Jewish knownothingism.”79 Examples included the Indiana gubernatorial candidate B. F. Shively, who claimed that “every hook-nosed Shylock from Jerusalem to Omaha” opposed free silver, Mary Lease, who attacked “Christ-killing gold bugs,” and Ebenezer Wakeley, who warned of an “Anglo-Judean Conspiracy.”80 At the Chicago Convention, “swarms of Populists” brought all these themes together as they made their way through the hotels shouting, “Down with gold! Down with the hook-nosed Shylocks of Wall street! Down with the Christ-killing gold-bugs!”81 While many Americans noted and condemned the link between the Populist movement and anti-Jewish imagery and rhetoric, there happened to be a rather notable German visitor in the country at the time who embraced the connection and sought to magnify it as much as possible. That visitor was the notorious, radical German antisemitic agitator, Hermann Ahlwardt.82 Elected to the Reichstag in 1893, he left Germany for Brooklyn, New York, three years later hoping to spread his anti-Jewish message in the United States with the founding of the American Anti-Semite Association and the publication of a newspaper, Der Anti-Semit (its English version was titled, the Gentile News).83 Whatever Bryan may have thought about the German agitator, the fact that Ahlwardt clearly saw a kindred spirit in the man he called “the logical antiSemite candidate” is quite telling.84 The kinds of nefarious activities that the Populists attributed to Jews— financial manipulation, “hostage taking” through debt, etc.—could easily be understood as criminal. And here again we see a parallel with American perceptions of Chinese, with whom many associated illicit drugs, gambling, and prostitution. The involvement of Jews in each of these activities in addition to the larger scale financial maneuverings mentioned earlier was often something many Americans took for granted, thereby marking them both with the same stigma—a criminal people. In fact, the image of the Jewish criminal could be found throughout popular culture. In 1913, the Anti-Defamation League reported, [w]henever a producer wishes to depict a betrayer of the public trust, a hard-boiled usurious moneylender, a crooked gambler, a grafter, a depraved firebug, a white slaver or other villains of one kind or another, the actor is directed to represent himself as a Jew.85 The danger to innocent white Christian girls posed by the Jew’s alleged powers of seduction along with their widely reported upon role in (if not control of) the

A Transnational Jewish Question 21 so-called “white slave” trade, represented yet another mark against the Jew in America.86 The United States Immigration Office wrote of large numbers of Jews scattered throughout the United States . . . who seduce and keep girls. Some of them are engaged in importation, but apparently they prey rather upon young girls whom they find on the street, in the dance halls, and similar places, and whom, by the methods already indicated— love-making and pretenses of marriage—they deceive and ruin.87 The white slave trade was a global enterprise that impacted the image of Jews both in the United States and in Eastern Europe.88 Another image involving Jews in Europe was that of the ghetto. Just as popular depictions of Chinatowns both frightened and disgusted Americans, the understanding of Jewish ghettos first in Europe and then in the United States was not much different, leading many to the conclusion that both people were simply unsuited to the American way of life and therefore utterly unassimilable. Exposes of Jewish life in the ghettos of New York City added to this sense as they described an almost animal-like existence in unimaginably filthy, crowded, and unhealthy conditions. According to Dr. Manly H. Simons, the United States Navy Medical Director, [t]he poorer classes of Jews are very unsanitary; they work and live in dirty and badly ventilated quarters. Though special virtue is claimed for the Jewish method of killing the animals they use for food this is offset by the dirtiness of the shops in which the meat is sold.89 And out of such an environment, he wrote, came “the greatest proportion of the distorted forms and minds, the beggars, tramps, burglars and other perverts who make life burdensome and fill our prisons with criminals, our asylums with insane.”90 And as with the Chinese, the linkage to disease was but a natural next step. There were a number of diseases that came to be linked with Jewish immigrants in the public imagination around the turn of the twentieth century. In 1892, for example, the Detroit News warned that the areas of the city in which the newly arriving Jews were settling would become hotbeds for cholera.91 Tuberculosis was another such disease. According to Alan Kraut, nativists “equated the emaciated appearance of consumptives with the feeble appearance and behavior that [many of them] attributed to Jewish arrivals.”92 Trachoma, the contagious disease of the eyes, was also widely associated with Eastern European Jewish immigrants.93 In the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, one disease in particular would come to be associated with Jews and the results both reflected and contributed to the antisemitic climate of the United States. In early 1892, New York City was gripped by fear in the face of a typhus epidemic. Very quickly the focus of attention—negative attention—fell on newly

22  A Transnational Jewish Question arrived Russian Jews. In his study of the epidemic, Howard Markel noted that in accounts of the episode written by “native” Americans, “The East European Jewish immigrants were commonly portrayed . . . as less than human and a decided health threat to New York City and beyond.”94 Those appearing in the Yiddish press, however, contained “accounts filled with fear describing insensitive and rapid removal from one’s home, terrible unsanitary living conditions on isolated islands, and, for some, death.”95 Many observers saw the focus on Jews in the epidemic as a sign of a much larger problem. In March 1892, Getsl Zelikowitch, chief columnist for the conservative Yiddische Tageblatt, called it a “patriotic lie” that some sick Russian Jews were responsible for bringing Typhus to America. “The truth,” he wrote, “is that they simply don’t want us because we are Jews.”96 The singling out of Jews by the authorities was clear and was demonstrated just as the immigrants were arriving at port. On February 13, 1892, the health officer of the Port of the City of New York decreed that all Eastern European Jews were to be detained and quarantined regardless of their port of departure. And the following day, thirty Russian Jews arriving in the US Nevada were detained and quarantined, while ninetythree Scandinavians and others who had also traveled in steerage alongside the Jews were allowed to go on their way.97 On February 19, an editorial in The American Hebrew asked, Is then disease of a Jew more virulent and more prone to breed a contagion than that of follower [sic] of some other religious belief, that special Jewish Quarantine laws are necessary to protect the health of the nation? Are the general laws applicable to those of all faiths suspected of affliction with disease, ineffectual only against the Jewish immigrants?98 The stigma attached to Jews in America was there for all to see. But the network of global labor migration that had been developing meant that the effects of decisions made in the United States would also be felt across the Atlantic in Germany. Already before the typhus epidemic hit New York, American nativists had been working to follow up Chinese exclusion with restrictions on other groups through the use of health criteria to limit immigration. As a result, not all who set out from German ports would automatically gain entry to the United States. The admissions process now involved a medical inspection upon arrival. And according to regulations, those new arrivals deemed “unfit” were to be sent back to their country of departure. The desire to prevent the return of Eastern Jews to Germany meant that Berlin had an interest in ensuring the health of those who made the journey. As a result, the government began constructing medical inspection stations along Germany’s eastern borders with Russia and the Habsburg Empire. And since the American regulation required that the cost of the “unfit” migrants’ return trip be borne by the steamship companies, they too had an interest in keeping the number of returnees to a minimum. This community of interest led to an agreement in 1894 between the

A Transnational Jewish Question 23 Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG) and North German Lloyd and the German government whereby the companies would take over the whole migration process by constructing and operating new medical inspection stations, providing sealed trains to ship the migrants west, a sealed train station in Berlin to prevent Jews from getting out into the population, and special quarantine barracks with kosher dining facilities at the ports of Hamburg and Bremen to hold the Jews until their ship’s departure.99 The fact that Jews were forced to undergo this whole process, with all the special facilities and procedures—that Jews had to be sanitized—deloused—in order to enter the country—meant that the stigma of disease would attach to Jews in the minds of many Germans, just as it was doing in the minds of many Americans around this same time, and as it had done with Chinese in both countries. In fact, one can see the confluence of anti-Jewish and anti-Chinese imagery playing a role in the more general radicalization of antisemitism—in particular, the early stages of racializing Jews. In the development of race science, Jews came to play a significant role as examples of the danger allegedly posed by the race-mixing that some believed threatened both nations’ vitality in a time of massive immigration. What we see is the natural confluence of ideas on both sides of the Atlantic that justified segregation in the American South, violent, racist systems of rule and bloody suppression of resistance in the colonial empires of both Germany and the United States, and the potential for more radical forms of antisemitism in both areas. In 1909, US Army Major Charles E. Woodruff published a study titled Expansion of Races, which would play a significant role in shaping the worldview of generations of American Army officers.100 In it he described Jews as “a harmful parasite and a national disease” when their numbers get too high and pointed out how “European nations have repeatedly undergone a process of disinfection in this regard.” This process was based on the same law “as applies to a bacillus” which turns deadly when too numerous. According to Woodruff, then, the “eradication” of the Jew under such conditions “is not a persecution of the Jew as Jew, but an extermination of an invading disease.”101 Just prior to American entry into the war came the publication of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. Here, he wrote of the Polish Jews’ “dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration of selfinterest.”102 He discussed the new immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as including “the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races” from the Mediterranean and Balkan regions, along with “hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish Ghettos,” and how “this human flotsam” fills the country’s “jails, insane asylums and almshouses.”103 “The whole tone of American life,” he wrote, “social, moral and political has been lowered and vulgarized by them.”104 He also wrote about “old stock” Americans “being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews” and how they adopt all the outer trappings of the “native American” and “take his women,” but “they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals.”105 Grant’s book went through three editions

24  A Transnational Jewish Question with some 16,000 copies in the United States alone, while also being translated into multiple languages.106 It is important to keep in mind that men like Grant, Woodruff, and later Lothrop Stoddard and others were not fringe figures, but rather were highly educated men who were influential among the nation’s upper classes, and through the work of popularizers, their ideas were also to make their way into the discussion of ordinary Americans as well. There were some dissenting voices, particularly the noted anthropologist Franz Boas. But in 1916, writes Charles Alexander, “people like Boas . . . were in a definite minority in the American intellectual milieu. The generally favorable reception of The Passing of the Great Race in many respects reflected the growth of American racism.”107 All of the ideas described thus far led to one more descriptor increasingly being applied to Jews: “Asiatic.” In 1912, Alfred C. Reed, assistant surgeon at the United States Public Health and Marine Hospital in New York City, noted, “in origin, racial traits, instincts and point of view, the Hebrew race is essentially oriental, and altogether there is at least ground for objection to unrestricted Jewish immigration.”108 One year later, Mary and Lemuel Barnes, of the Council of Women for Home Missions, described Jews as “thoroughbred Asiatics.”109 In The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant wrote of Eastern Europeans as “western extensions of an Asiatic subspecies,” while one of America’s most prominent immigration restrictionists, Prescott Hall, also referred to Jews as “Asiatics.”110 This, and the fact they were the only other major non-Christian immigrant group, made it much easier to separate Jews from all other European immigrants. In fact, it became conceivable, going forward, to remove Jews from Europe altogether, thereby potentially placing them at some future point in the same category as Chinese: that is to say, excluded. Up until the eve of World War I, Jews continued to make the journey to America through Germany. Antisemites in both countries continued to rail against them by stoking fears of foreign conquest and dreaming of one day closing the border. Prussian landowners continued to float the idea of importing Chinese workers to solve their labor shortage. And nationalists and antisemites fought back with their anti-Chinese and anti-Jewish rhetoric. Each element influenced the other and was influenced in turn. And these are just some of the various interconnections, the shared awareness, the influences, and feedback that linked the United States, Germany, and China with Russian Poland and Austrian Galicia; that linked Jews and Chinese and “native” Americans with Germans and Poles in an increasingly globalized world. But those connections did not serve simply to bring people closer together. As I’ve shown here, they also served to separate and to isolate, to mark and to stigmatize different groups of people, and ultimately led some to seek their exclusion. Linked ever more closely to the global Chinese diaspora, Jews found themselves increasingly marked as a radical other, up to and including their racialization. Rather than weaken potential antisemitism in the United States—as most scholars of American antisemitism have asserted—the presence of other immigrants, in this case, specifically the Chinese, could actually

A Transnational Jewish Question 25 then have served to strengthen it and provided tropes for an increasingly radical, racial antisemitism in the United States.111 Staying within the boundaries of the nation-state, we miss these larger connections and key ingredients in the making of modern antisemitism. To fully understand that process, we need a global perspective.

Notes 1 Nicole Kvale Eilers, “Emigrant Trains: Jewish Migration through Prussia and American Remote Control, 1880–1914,” in Tobias Brinkmann, ed., Points of Passage: Jewish Transmigrants From Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880–1914 (New York, 2013), 63–84. 2 See, for example, Helmut Berding, Moderner Antisemitismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt a. M., 1988); Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1994); also Albert S. Lindemann’s, Esau’s Tears: Modern Antisemitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge, 1997), which is organized by country. 3 An excellent example of a transnational approach to antisemitism is “From Play to Act: Anti-Jewish Violence in German and European History During the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Helmut Walser Smith, ed., The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2008), 115–166. 4 See for example, Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky, eds., Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918 (Waltham, 2014); Tim Buchen, Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900 (Berlin, 2012). 5 A recent historiographical essay on Jewish migration history makes no mention of antisemitism in relation to global historical approaches: Libby Garland, “State of the Field: New Directions for American Jewish Migration Histories,” American Jewish History, Vol. 102, No. 3 (July 2018): 423–440. 6 Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, 2016), 65–89. 7 Sebastian Conrad, Globalization and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2010). 8 Jürgen Osterhammel notes the significance of this shift for the rise of antisemitism in both countries in, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2014), 871. 9 Conrad, Globalization and the Nation, 11. 10 Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal of World History, Vol. 15, No. 2 (June 2004): 156–157. 11 Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Conflict: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, 2002), 332. 12 Annemarie Steidl, On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire (West Lafayette, IN, 2015), 133–136. 13 McKeown, “Global Migration,” 156–157. 14 Daniel Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca, 2009), 74–80. 15 Adam M. McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008), 2–3. 16 Aristide Zolberg, “The Great Wall Against China: Responses to the First Immigration Crisis, 1885–1925,” in Aristide Zolberg, ed., How Many Exceptionalisms? Explorations in Comparative Macroanalysis (Philadelphia, 2008), 237. 17 Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 32.

26  A Transnational Jewish Question 18 On the idea of Americans’ fear of Chinese conquest, see Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go, 6. 19 Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1941 (Chapel Hill, 2003), 25. 20 M. J. Dee, “Chinese Immigration,” North American Review, Vol. 126, No. 262 (May–June 1878): 524. 21 Grant quoted in “Fiftieth Congress,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans), January 13, 1888. 22 MacArthur quoted in Rosanne Currarino, The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age (Urbana, 2011), 57. 23 “Among the Celestials,” St. Louis Globe Democrat, August 20, 1882. 24 George Dudley Lawson, “The Tacoma Method,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, March 1886. 25 See, for example, “About John: Secret Chinese Tribunals, Which Condemn and Execute Their Countrymen,” Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, January 4, 1878. 26 John Durst, “The Exclusion of the Chinese,” North American Review, September 1884. 27 New York World quoted in Miller, Unwelcome Immigrant, 159. 28 “Fiftieth Congress,” The Times-Picayune (New Orleans), January 13, 1888. 29 Durst, “The Exclusion of the Chinese.” 30 George F. Seward, “Mongolian Immigration,” North American Review, June 1882, 565. 31 John B. Weber (United States Commissioner of Immigration) and Charles Stewart Smith, “Our National Dumping Ground: A Study of Immigration,” The North American Review, April 1892. 32 The antisemites were also wildly premature with the numbers of Jews entering Germany during this period. In 1880, there were 17,000 Jews in Germany who were citizens of Eastern European states. With 45 million German citizens at that point, Eastern Jews comprised 0.35%. By 1910 foreign Jews increased to 70,000, but the overall population grew more dramatically so the percentage of Jewish citizens of Eastern European states dropped to 0.11%. Massimo Ferrari Zumbini, Die Wurzeln des Bösen: Gründerjahre des Antisemitismus: Von der Bismarckzeit zu Hitler (Frankfurt am Main, 2003), 477–478. 33 Heinrich von Treitschke, “Unsere Aussichten,” November 15, 1879, in Walter Boehlich, hrsg., Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (Frankfurt am Main, 1965, 2016), 9–10 [Emphasis mine]. 34 Moritz Busch, Israel und die Gojim: Beitrage zur Beurtheilung der Judenfrage (Leipzig, 1880), 175–176. 35 Busch, Israel und die Gojim, 224. 36 Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison, 1982), 60. 37 Busch, Israel und die Gojim, 222. 38 In 1882 and 1886, Georg von Schönerer, the Habsburg Empire’s most prominent antisemite, translated the American law into German, replacing “Chinese” with “Jew” where necessary. Heinz Gollwitzer, Die Gelbe Gefahr: Geschichte eines Schlagworts. Studien zum imperialistischen Denken (Göttingen, 1962), 175; Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel Hill, 1992), 37. 39 Zumbini, Wurzeln des Bösen, 194–199. 40 Gollwitzer, Die Gelbe Gefahr, 174. 41 Neue deutsche Volkszeitung quoted in, Kurt Wawrzinek, Die Entstehung der deutschen Antisemitenparteien (1873–1890) (Berlin, 1927), 44.

A Transnational Jewish Question 27 42 “Die Chinesen-Frage als Seitenstück der Semiten-Frage,” Antisemitische Correspondenz, Nr. 40, December 8, 1888. 43 “Die Chinesen-Frage als Seitenstück der Semiten-Frage.” 44 Matthew Fitzpatrick, Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871– 1914 (Oxford, 2015), 121–122. 45 Conrad, Globalization and the Nation, 203–208. 46 Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Hereafter as GStPK) I. HA Rep 77 Tit 922 Nr. 2, pp. 17–18: Abschrift. Königliches Ministerium der auswärtigen Angelegenheiten. An den Königlichen Staatsminister und Minister des Innern Herrn v. Köller und den Königlichen Staatsminister und Minister für Landwirtschaft Herrn Frhr. V. Hammerstein. April 19, 1895. 47 Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (Hereafter as BArch Berlin) R 8034 II/4040: “Einführung chinesischer Landarbeiter nach Deutschland,” Illustrierte Landwirtschaftliche Zeitung, January 6, 1897. 48 BArch Berlin R 8034 II/4040: “Zur Arbeiterfrage,” Deutsche Landwirtschaftliche Presse, October 30, 1895. 49 “Juden und Chinesen, II,” Deutsch-Soziale Blätter, September 1, 1898. 50 Stefan Kotze, quoted in Conrad, Globalization and the Nation, 238. 51 Conrad, Globalization and the Nation, 238. 52 “Juden und Chinesen, II.” 53 Curt Abel, Chinesen in Deutschland? Eine zeitgemäße Betrachtung (Berlin, 1890), 20–21; see also “Juden und Chinesen,” Deutsch-Soziale Blätter, August 25, 1898. 54 Conrad, Globalization and the Nation, 235. 55 See, for example, a pamphlet quoted in, Abel, Chinesen in Deutschland? 20. 56 GStPK, I. HA Rep 87 B Nr 211, p. 4: “Chinesische Arbeiter in Deutschland,” Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, January 19, 1890. 57 Steven J. Zipperstein discusses this event in the context of the Kishinev Pogrom and its impact in Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (New York, 2018), 101–103. 58 “Chinese Help for Jews,” The New York Times, May 12, 1903. 59 “Chinese Help for Jews.” 60 Zolberg points to this in, “The Great Wall Against China: Responses to the First Immigration Crisis, 1885–1925,” 226, 236. 61 Indianapolis Journal editorial quoted in, Indianapolis Sentinel, March 10, 1882. 62 “Chinese Craze,” Scientific American, March 25, 1882. 63 “Chinese Craze,” [Emphasis mine]. 64 Jewish World correspondent quoted in “Foreign Gleanings,” The Jewish Messenger, June 16, 1882. 65 American Hebrew, March 24, 1882. 66 Corbin quoted in “Reviving a Prejudice,” New York Daily Herald, July 22, 1879. 67 “Christian Virtues Seem Vices in Jews,” The Jewish Exponent, January 2, 1891. 68 Corbin quoted in “Reviving a Prejudice.” 69 Ambrose, “Unpopular Peoples,” New York Evangelist, April 13, 1882. 70 Ambrose, “Unpopular Peoples.” 71 Comment on the book America and the Americans in “About American Jews,” Nathan Maud, The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts, July 17, 1897. 72 Editorial, The Fort Scott Lantern (Kansas), May 20, 1892. 73 The question regarding the relationship between nineteenth-century Populism and antisemitism has settled into two interpretations. Those who connect the Populists with antisemitism include Richard Hofstadter in Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York, 1955), while Walter Nugent takes the opposite stance in The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism, 2nd edition (Chicago, 2013); in

28  A Transnational Jewish Question The Populist Persuasion, Michael Kazin dismisses the significance of antisemitism to Populists in a footnote: Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, 1995), 302, fn. 38; using a comparative approach, David Peal makes an excellent case for reevaluation in, “The Politics of Populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (April 1989): 340–362; I believe it is an issue that needs to be revisited and antisemitism given a much more prominent place in our understanding of Populism. 74 Editorial, The Fort Scott Lantern (Kansas). 75 Editorial, The Fort Scott Lantern (Kansas). 76 The Minneapolis Journal (Minneapolis, KS), July 14, 1892. 77 Editorial, The American Israelite, September 24, 1896. 78 “Are the Populists Anti-Semitic?” The American Israelite, August 20, 1896. 79 “The Jewish People in Politics,” The Chicago Chronicle, September 29, 1896. 80 “The Jewish People in Politics.” 81 “Popocrats Warring on the Jews,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville), September 19, 1896. 82 On Ahlwardt’s career as an antisemite in Germany, see Zumbini, Die Wurzeln des Bösen, 303–309; Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven, 1975), 77–81, 90–93, and for his visit to America, 190–191. 83 “Ahlwardt’s Brooklyn Paper,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 23, 1896. 84 “Jewbaiter is for Bryan,” The Sun (New York), September 16, 1896. 85 Anti-Defamation League quoted in Michael N. Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT, 1979), 68. 86 Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870–1939 (New York, 1983). 87 Quoted in Egal Feldman, “Prostitution, the Alien Woman and the Progressive Imagination, 1910–1915,” American Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 1967): 195. 88 See Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, 2015). 89 Simons quoted in Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (New York, 1994), 145. 90 Simons quoted in Kraut, Silent Travelers, 145. 91 Robert A. Rockaway, “Anti-Semitism in an American City: Detroit, 1850–1914,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 1 (September 1974): 45–46. 92 Kraut, Silent Travelers, 155. 93 Howard Markel, “ ‘The Eyes Have It’: Trachoma, the Perception of Disease, the United States Public Health Service, and the American Jewish Immigration Experience, 1897–1924,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 74, No. 3 (Fall 2000): 525–560. 94 Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore, 1997), 11. 95 Markel, Quarantine! 11. 96 Zelikowitch quoted in, Markel, Quarantine! 72. 97 Markel, Quarantine! 73–74. 98 “Shall There Be Religious Discrimination?” The American Hebrew, February 19, 1892. 99 Tobias Brinkmann, “Why Paul Nathan Attacked Albert Ballin: The Transatlantic Mass Migration and the Privatization of Prussia’s Eastern Border Inspection, 1886–1914,” Central European History, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2010): 47–83; “ ‘Travelling with Ballin’: The Impact of American Immigration Policies on Jewish Transmigration within Central Europe, 1880–1914,” International Review of Social History, Vol. 53, No. 3 (2008): 459–484.

A Transnational Jewish Question 29 100 On Woodruff and his influence within the United States Army, see Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S. Army (New York, 2000), 17–20. 101 Charles Edward Woodruff, Expansion of Races (New York, 1909), 382. 102 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race or The Racial Basis of European History (New York, 1916, 1922), 16. 103 Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 88. 104 Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 88. 105 Grant, Passing of the Great Race, 91. 106 Charles Alexander, “Prophet of American Racism: Madison Grant and the Nordic Myth,” Phylon, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1962): 77. 107 Alexander, “Prophet of American Racism,” 85. 108 Quoted in Robert Singerman, “The Jew as Racial Alien: The Genetic Component of American Anti-Semitism,” in David Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana, 1986), 110. 109 Quoted in Singerman, “The Jew as Racial Alien.” 110 On Grant, see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York, 2001), 162; on Hall, see Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882 (New York, 2005), 31. 111 See, for example, Gerald Sorin, A Time for Healing: The Third Migration, 1880– 1920 (Baltimore, 1992), 238.

2 “No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” Comparing Anti-Jewish Discrimination in Late-Nineteenth-Century Germany and the United States

In the late nineteenth century, one of America’s most prominent bankers was refused a room at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York. In the years to come, hotels and resorts across the country were posting ads that excluded Jews from their properties. Meanwhile, Jews were finding themselves increasingly barred from membership in many of the country’s leading social clubs and organizations. Job ads announcing “Christians Only” appeared in newspapers throughout America. When people think of an environment so saturated with anti-Jewish discrimination, most would turn to Germany, and even more specifically, to the twelve years of Hitler’s Third Reich. And while those twelve years unquestionably involved the most extreme and intense antisemitic campaign in history, it should not blind us to other periods and other places where antisemitism also proved to be intense and potentially dangerous. In the specific realm of discrimination, for example, the half-century before Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor witnessed much greater and more widespread social and economic exclusion of Jews in the United States than in Germany. If this is the case, what might we learn about antisemitism in both countries more generally? Would German antisemitism appear less aberrant, less murderous, than what people have come to assume? And considering the extent of Americans’ attempts to exclude Jews from society in the decades around the turn of the century, might we need to rethink the common picture of America as a “golden land” for Jews, free from the hatred and violence of “the old country”? That is precisely what this chapter argues: that both assumptions regarding antisemitism in Germany and the United States need to be reassessed. The growth of anti-Jewish discrimination in Imperial Germany and the United States occurred during a major wave of antisemitism that swept both countries beginning in the 1870s. It was taking place, therefore, within a much broader context of anti-Jewish activity. In Germany, this involved regional eruptions of anti-Jewish violence in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s, including a number that were linked to accusations of ritual murder.1 There was also the coalescing of antisemitism into a political and social movement as organized political parties formed and succeeded in sending at least a small contingent of members to the Reichstag. In the United States, Jews experienced significant levels of violence in a variety of forms beginning in the 1880s with DOI: 10.4324/9781003266372-3

“No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” 31 attacks in Louisiana, in the 1890s with a wave of Whitecapping incidents in Mississippi, and assaults throughout this period in numerous cities in the north and on both coasts.2 And while there was no direct analog to the formal antisemitic parties as they had developed in Imperial Germany during this period, antisemitism did come to animate one of the most significant political movements in nineteenth-century America, namely, Populism.3 And, of course, in both countries, tens of thousands of Jews were making their way west every year, from Germany’s eastern borders across the country to Hamburg and Bremen, and then across the Atlantic where most of them settled in the hopes of finding better economic opportunities. That influx (or through migration) of Eastern Jews would play a significant role in the development of antisemitism in both countries, though as we’ll see, it was often the already-established Jewish populations, and not the newcomers, that would feel the sting of social exclusion the most. This was also a crucial period in which national identities in both countries were particularly fluid. While the American Civil War and the Wars of German Unification may have settled the question of political organization, the questions involving the characteristics and qualities that would come to define notions of Americanness and Germanness were far from being resolved. Who could be a “real” German? Who could be a “real” American? In the early years of the newly unified Germany, Catholic and Social Democratic citizens felt the brunt of official state-level campaigns of demonization, violence, and exclusion. In the United States, formal citizenship for newly freed Blacks after the Civil War did not translate into equality of status as white Americans’ refusal to accept them as full members of the national community led them to limit the rights and therefore the position of African Americans in the country during the remainder of the nineteenth century. Where would Jews find themselves in this process of inclusion and exclusion? What answers would Protestant Germans give to the question of where Jews fit (if at all) within the national community? How would white Americans answer that same question? Practices of discrimination and exclusion are part of that process of determining who is in and who is out. German Jews experienced emancipation in stages during the nineteenth century, with full legal equality coming in July 1869, with the creation of the North German Confederation and then carried over into the newly founded Second Empire in 1871. But the direct connection between the monarch and the church in Germany prevented the achievement of complete equality on the national level. In addition, the federal system that defined the new empire meant that emancipation did not translate into equality at the state level throughout the country. Emancipation also did not translate into equality of opportunity as a result of traditions that meant certain areas would remain, if not off-limits, then certainly less than welcoming to Jews. These well-known areas included the officer corps, government service, and the judiciary. It is important to remember, though, that these restrictions were typically not official, legal barriers, but rather the result of tradition and continued resistance to complete equality.

32  “No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” In the case of the judiciary, for example, Prussia dropped its law barring Jews from becoming judges in 1866. Still, by 1914 there were some 200 Jewish magistrates, none of whom had a chance of promotion.4 There was also no law barring Jews as candidates for career officer positions in the Prussian army. But the anti-Jewish prejudice that inspired the military leadership’s refusal to accept Jews as officers was of a more traditional variety, based on common negative stereotypes about Jews’ abilities (or lack thereof) in the military sphere. Until late in the history of the empire, it was typically not the product of blind or fanatical ideological hatred. And while the Prussian officer corps remained closed to Jews, thanks to the federal system, things were somewhat better in Bavaria and Saxony where they could become reserve officers up until the turn of the century, and even, in rare cases, active officers.5 With regard to government service in Prussia, high political office was nearly as unattainable as a career officer position in the Prussian army, and those Jews who had been baptized, like Paul Keyser and Bernhard Dernburg at the top of the German Colonial Office, still had to deal with antisemitic attacks and criticism.6 But again, here too, the opportunities open to Jews seeking high political office varied from state to state so that for twenty-five years, from 1868 to 1893, a Jew could serve as Finance Minister in the southwestern state of Baden.7 It should also be remembered that Catholics faced only slightly better odds of attaining such positions. Of the ninety top political posts in the Reich between 1888 and 1914—Reich Chancellor, Reich State Secretaries, and State Ministers—only seven were Catholic.8 In describing the situation for American Jews in the 1920s, historian Henry Feingold wrote, “the anti-Semitism of the decade never was strong enough to deny Jews access to the good things, material and spiritual, offered by American society.”9 But as is well known to scholars of the German Jewish experience, it did not do so in Germany, either, whether we look at the 1920s or the decades around the turn of the century. If the traditional professions provided limited opportunities, many Jews entered the so-called “free professions” in large numbers and became successful journalists, physicians, and scientists, as well as businessmen and bankers. In other areas, Jews also made adjustments based on varied levels of acceptance and rejection. Jewish acceptance into the associational life of Germany actually preceded the formal emancipation that came with Bismarck’s founding of the Reich. For the first half of the nineteenth century, most all clubs refused them membership. In response, Jews founded their own clubs and created a social world that, in many respects, paralleled that of Gentile society. Starting in the 1850s, however, most clubs in Berlin, Königsberg, Frankfurt, Breslau, and other cities opened themselves up to Jewish membership. One example of this was the Schlesische Gesellschaft für Vaterländische Cultur. Founded in 1803, by the 1850s Jews were not only members but also playing leading roles in the club. Many of the new clubs established at this point featured Jews as founding members, including the Breslauer Dichterschule: “the gathering place of literary life in the city.”10

“No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” 33 With the antisemitic wave of the 1880s, resistance to this trend of openness appeared in the form of efforts to exclude Jews from cultural and civic organizations—efforts that ultimately failed. But the growth of an anti-Jewish atmosphere did leave its mark. In Breslau, for example, Till van Rahden notes that “associational life had become polarized over the ‘Jewish question’ ” during the last decades of the nineteenth century as antisemitism had diffused into what Shulamit Volkov has called a “cultural code.”11 One particular form of exclusion that grew in significance during the last decades of the nineteenth century in Germany is what came to be known as “resort antisemitism.” Perhaps the most famous example of this phenomenon is the case of Borkum in the North Sea, which even came complete with its own antisemitic song. People hung signs on their homes there that read, “Jews and dogs may not enter!” and “This house is Jew-free, damned shall every Jew be!” (“Dieses Haus ist judenrein, verdammt soll jeder Jude sein!”).12 The existence of publicly self-declared “judenfrei” resorts is certainly a noteworthy phenomenon, and as Frank Bajohr points out in his study of resort antisemitism, it reflected some of the social bases of antisemitism in late-nineteenthcentury Germany, where elements of the lower middle class (Mittelstand) found themselves falling behind in a rapidly changing social and economic environment. They watched as some of the newly emancipated Jews made dramatic advances up the social ladder into the higher ranks of the bourgeoisie (Bürgertum). And so it played out at the nation’s resorts—places where people made public displays of their social standing, including the nouveau riche of the Jewish faith. Jealous of Jewish success, lower middle-class Germans found a home in the newer, simpler (less “ostentatious”) resorts such as Borkum, located near the more established (and tolerant) resort of Norderney. In fact, many of the new and openly antisemitic resorts were located in the immediate vicinity of older establishments where Jews remained welcome. There developed, as Frank Bajohr described it, “a silent coalition of jealousy” between antisemitic resort visitors and the owners of certain resort establishments.13 Interestingly enough, as newly immigrated Jews from Eastern Europe began to arrive at German resorts after the turn of the century, they brought out an equal degree of revulsion among antisemites, but of an opposite nature. Rather than the flamboyance and ostentatiousness of the nouveau riche drawing their ire, here the rhetoric focused on filth, poor manners, and general appearance—this latter issue leading some locales, for instance, to ban the caftan.14 The process of acquiring civil and political rights for Jews in the United States was not the same as that of their co-religionists in Germany, though it was not as different as has traditionally been assumed either. Until very recently, most of the scholarship on American Jewish history has portrayed emancipation as a European phenomenon. Jews in the United States, according to this telling, did not go through such a process because it was unnecessary. The idea of separation of church and state enshrined in the Bill of Rights meant that on the federal level Jews enjoyed equal civil rights with their fellow Christian citizens from the start, though this would be challenged by groups of

34  “No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” American Christians from the mid- to late nineteenth century.15 State governments, however, extended political rights to Jews slowly, over the course of a century, with North Carolina and New Hampshire not doing so until after the Civil War.16 And rather than simply being granted these rights by the individual states, it was often through the deliberate efforts of Jews in the courts and the public sphere that, slowly and unevenly, they successfully acquired political rights. Because of this, historian David Sorkin, for example, argues that American Jews did, in fact, go through a process of emancipation that resembled the European experience in a way that scholars had not appreciated or even acknowledged before.17 In addition, during these same years, negative images and descriptions of Jews were common across the country, whether on stage, in print, or in church. Still, despite uncoordinated discrimination in places, by the mid-nineteenth century the small population of Sephardic and mainly German Jews were becoming increasingly successful in their careers, steadily moving up the social ladder, and finding acceptance in many areas of politics and society, including business and social clubs. This would begin to change, however, and over the final decades of the nineteenth century, the place of Jews in America grew increasingly precarious. Developments in the late 1870s seemed to indicate a new and potentially troubling situation for Jews in the United States. No doubt the most famous early indicator of trouble during those years involved the prominent banker Joseph Seligman and the refusal of Henry Hilton’s Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York, in 1877, to serve him. While it is widely cited, it was not the first such case of exclusion from such an establishment. One year earlier, a hotel in New Jersey placed an ad in the New York Times declaring, “Jews not admitted.”18 Two years after the Seligman case, Austin Corbin, President of the Manhattan Beach Corporation in Coney Island, New York, announced that his resort and his railroad would no longer accept Jewish guests. “We do not like Jews as a class,” he explained. “As a rule they make themselves offensive. They are a detestable and vulgar people.”19 The decade that followed, according to John Higham, would see discrimination against Jews at hotels and resorts “spread like wildfire” across New York and New Jersey.20 More and more hotels posted signs and published ads in newspapers and magazines announcing, for example, “No Dogs. No Jews. No Consumptives,” “Positively No Hebrews Taken,” or “no infants, no Hebrews.”21 There were even instances in which the Gentile wives of Jews found themselves excluded. In July 1880, for example, Mary Putnam Jacobi, physician and descendant of revolutionary-era Americans, was unable to book rooms for herself and her children at a hotel near New York, because her husband, also a physician but not present, was Jewish.22 And the “wildfire” of antisemitic discrimination would not remain an east coast phenomenon as Jews in the coming years could read ads in the Chicago Tribune, for example, making clear a preference for a “Christian” or “Gentile” clientele. Of course, the exclusion of Jews extended beyond just the realm of America’s vacation spots to other areas of life.

“No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” 35 As German Jews in America grew wealthier and rose into the middle class, they sought not only to vacation where well-off Gentiles vacationed but also to join them in their social clubs and on the boards of significant cultural institutions. In contrast to the situation in Germany, the response in America was increasingly one of rejection. In the 1880s and for the remainder of the century, for example, Jews found themselves excluded from the boards of directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the New York Zoological Society.23 Another incident involving a Seligman illustrated this particular form of exclusion and drew a great deal of public attention at the time. In this case, it was Theodore Seligman, who was rejected in his bid for membership in the influential, Republican-affiliated Union League Club in New York, in April 1893. The son of the prominent banker Jesse Seligman (and nephew of Joseph) had his application turned down, it was made clear, because he was Jewish. As one of the members explained it, “We have our principles, and our principles are not to let any more Jews into this club.”24 One of only four Jewish members of the club at the time, his father acted on his own principles and resigned immediately following the incident. “By the end of the century,” John Higham notes, “Jewish penetration into the most elite circles in the East had become almost impossibly difficult.”25 But it was not just in the East that Jews were finding the doors to social clubs closed to them. A similar process of exclusion unfolded in Portland, Oregon, starting in the late 1860s and in San Francisco soon after the turn of the century.26 Also in the South, Jews were banned from clubs of which they had once been members, including the Gentleman’s Driving Club in Atlanta and the Boston and Pickwick Clubs in New Orleans.27 In March 1893 in Detroit, Herman Freund was rejected by the Detroit Athletic Club—the most prominent and exclusive social club in the city. It proved to be the start of a trend. From eight Jewish members that year, there would be only one by 1913. By 1920, there were no more Jewish members despite a fourfold growth in overall membership since 1893. It was this incident at the Detroit Athletic Club that inspired Louis Brandeis, during a visit to the city in 1914, to conclude that “anti-Semitism seems to have reached its American pinnacle here.”28 While it was becoming increasingly clear that growing numbers of Gentiles did not want to vacation near or socialize with American Jews, another trend revealed a growing desire to avoid living in proximity to Jews. From the east coast to the west, whole neighborhoods worked to prevent Jews from moving in. They accomplished this through a number of techniques, including informal agreements among neighbors and formal obligations included in the very deeds to the property themselves. Such “restrictive covenants” barred the owner from selling to particular groups, with Jews and Blacks figuring prominently among the undesirables. In Baltimore, for example, the entry of Jews into a neighborhood resulted in the complete disappearance of its former Gentile residents. Antero Pietala, in his study of housing discrimination in that city, attributes this to “Baltimoreans’ embedded aversion to Jews.”29 Sales to Jews in Roland Park, just north of Baltimore stopped in 1913—a ban

36  “No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” that would continue for the next 50 years. Many other communities followed suit with the help of real estate brokers and through private agreements among homeowners.30 Opportunities for elite education for Jews also began to narrow during this period. Private schools—especially girls’ schools—started rejecting Jewish applicants in the 1880s. At the university level, the well-publicized efforts of Harvard and other elite schools to limit Jewish enrollment tend to draw people’s attention to the 1920s, but an anti-Jewish culture in academia had already developed by the late nineteenth century. An 1878 article in the Yale News, for instance, titled “Old Clothes Men” described Jews as “human vermin,” “vultures,” and “scourges,” while depicting one as “a remarkable creature,” a “dangerous beast,” and a “rapacious usurer.”31 A well-known collegiate song from the early twentieth century included the lines, Oh Harvard’s run by millionaires, And Yale is run by booze, Cornell is run by farmers’ sons, Columbia’s run by Jews, So give a cheer for Baxter Street, Another one for Pell, And when the little sheenies die, Their souls will go to hell.32 What such an atmosphere meant for Jewish students can be seen in the case of Josiah Moses, who entered Clark University as a graduate student in 1899. Despite an impressive record he failed to find a position. Hoping to improve his chances he changed his name from Moses to Morse in 1907, two and a half years after receiving his PhD. Through his letters of recommendation, his advisor tried to help Morse overcome the stigma of his Jewishness, though in doing so, he also revealed many of the anti-Jewish prejudices common in academia. In one, for example, he described him as having “none of the objectionable Jewish traits. He is sandy-haired, has no Jewish features, is genial, popular with students and colleagues, knows his place and keeps it and is extremely loyal to his superiors.”33 Individuals far more prominent than Moses also felt the sting of academic antisemitism. Oscar Straus, for example, who would later serve as Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce from 1906 to 1909 (the first Jew ever appointed to a cabinet position), found himself barred from his college’s undergraduate literary society in 1867. And since the fraternities at City College of New York had closed their doors to Jews in 1878, Bernard Baruch, financier and later advisor to President Woodrow Wilson, who attended in the 1880s, could not gain entry.34 Discrimination might seem a somewhat benign expression of antisemitism, certainly when compared with what was to come in the 1930s and 1940s. That is clearly the way it’s been understood in the scholarship on the American Jewish experience. And as historian Britt Tevis points out, that understanding

“No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” 37 is itself the product of how many Jews themselves came to think about it soon after the Seligman Affair in 1877. Then, in subsequent decades, it ultimately worked its way into the scholarship itself.35 At the time of Seligman’s rejection by the Grand Union Hotel, some Jews viewed the incident as a legal issue—as a violation of a number of laws designed to protect people’s civil rights—and one that could and should be fought in the courts. That interpretation was soon overtaken by the idea of “social antisemitism,” which implies that these incidents involved only the private actions of individuals. Such a view dismisses the role of the state in such acts of exclusion, enabling Jews at the time and historians subsequently to view the experiences of Seligman and so many others as less significant, and to argue therefore that antisemitism in America was less dangerous than what was to be found in Europe. Instead, Tevis argues that “social antisemitism” should really be seen as “legally sanctioned anti-Semitism: anti-Jewish discrimination enabled by state and federal legislation or permitted by the judiciary,” and it should be placed within the American context of resistance to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which applied to both Blacks and Jews. As decided by the Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Cases in 1883 and Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, whites could legally exclude Jews from their hotels and resorts. “Ultimately,” Tevis argues, “these episodes are connected by the fact that, in each case, non-Jews employed the legal system to institutionalize anti-Jewish bias.”36 From this perspective, “social discrimination” can be seen to have been anything but benign. In her work, Tevis points to “the psychological ramifications of exclusion—the fact that anti-Jewish discrimination in social spheres likely induced shame, embarrassment, and feelings of rejection.” Incidents of exclusion served as “reminders of [one’s] outsider status.” And beyond the psychological, they could have significant negative consequences on careers—the inability to socialize in establishments that barred Jews, for example, which limited opportunities for advancement.37 The stigmatizing effects of these exclusionary practices could also have life-and-death implications. We can see this, for example, in the response of white “native” Americans to the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth century. In particular, the growing association of Jews with disease led to numerous special measures being taken to deal with the perceived danger of these exotic migrants from the east. Following the successful campaigns against Chinese immigration, those looking for ways to limit the entry of other people they considered “undesirable”— namely, Jews—turned to the category of health and disease as a possible path forward. As a result, American officials developed a whole set of health criteria to determine who could enter the country and who would have to return to Europe. This then had implications for European efforts to deal with migration and border control. In Germany, for example, it led first government officials and then the country’s two major steamship companies to establish an entire infrastructure aimed at facilitating the movement of Jews across the eastern borders through Germany to the ports of Hamburg and Bremen. They built

38  “No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” special medical inspection and sanitizing facilities where the Jewish migrants would be deloused, and then closed trains that led to a sealed-off station in Berlin, and finally separate housing for Jewish transmigrants, all of which served to further isolate and stigmatize this population.38 And when they arrived in the United States, they faced measures not applied to other groups in similar situations. On February 13, 1892, for example, Dr. William Jenkins, health officer of the Port of the City of New York ordered all arriving East European Jews to be quarantined. The following day, the US Nevada arrived at New York harbor. Despite no evidence of typhus, authorities immediately placed thirty Russian Jews in quarantine. At the same time, ninety-three Scandinavians and others who had traveled in steerage just like the Jews were immediately released.39 From the “polite” discrimination of the Grand Union Hotel in 1877 to physical discrimination from New York’s public health officials in the 1890s, we can see how “legally sanctioned antisemitism” grew not only in scope but also in significance. In his study of resort antisemitism, Frank Bajohr argued that “judenrein” vacation spots provided German antisemitic propaganda an already-existing example of “Jewish-free zones” and therefore at least to some degree helped prepare the ground for Nazi efforts at exclusion after 1933.40 Of course, there was a great deal more that was required to produce a Third Reich, much less a Holocaust. And in the late nineteenth century, no one would have imagined Germans carrying out such an atrocity some four decades later. Looking forward, anti-Jewish discrimination in nineteenth-century Germany appears anything but exceptional. It fits into a much larger context that extended across the Atlantic. In fact, such exclusion was far more prevalent in the United States before World War I than in Germany prior to the Third Reich. Presumably, then, following Bajohr’s logic, such exclusion also provided Americans with an already-existing example of “Jewish-free zones.” Might this mean that the ground was also prepared for some potential future anti-Jewish campaign in the United States should the right conditions appear? Certainly, the further growth and radicalization of antisemitism in the decades that followed the outbreak of World War I did little to diminish such a potential. And yet scholars of American Jewish history have routinely downplayed the significance of antisemitism in the United States in relation to that of Germany.41 What we’ve seen here is how a comparative perspective can help us recognize the need to reevaluate such assessments in order to develop a better understanding of antiJewish prejudice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Notes 1 Christhard Hoffmann, “Political Culture and Violence Against Minorities: The Antisemitic Riots in Pomerania and West Prussia,” translated by A. D. Moses, in Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds., Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History (Ann Arbor, 2002), 67–92; also in the same volume, Helmut Walser Smith, “Konitz, 1900: Ritual Murder and Antisemitic Violence,” 93–122.

“No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” 39 2 For anti-Jewish violence in the late 1880s, early 1890s Louisiana, see Michael R. Cohen, Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era (New York, 2017), 192–198; William F. Holmes, “Whitecapping: Anti-Semitism in the Populist Era,” American Jewish History, Vol. 63, No. 3 (March 1974): 244–261. 3 The classic study that emphasizes the significance of antisemitism to the Populist movement is Richard Hofstadter in his Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York, 1955); for the opposite position, see Walter Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism, 2nd edition (Chicago, 2013). 4 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellscahaftsgeschichte, Bd. III, 1849–1914 (Munich, 1995), 1065. 5 Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 31–33. 6 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Bd. III, 1027–1028; on Dernburg, see Steven Press, Blood and Diamonds: Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa (Cambridge, MA, 2021), 158–160. 7 Barkai, Wehr Dich! 15. 8 Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Bd. III, 1027. 9 Henry Feingold, “Anti-Semitism and the Anti-Semitic Imagination in America: A Case Study in the Twenties,” in A Midrash on American History (Albany, 1982), 177–192. 10 Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925, translated by Marcus Brainard (Madison, 2008), 71. 11 van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, 79. 12 Quoted in Frank Bajohr, “Unser Hotel ist judenfrei” Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a. M., 2003), 13. 13 Bajohr, “Unser Hotel ist judenfrei”, 35. 14 Bajohr, “Unser Hotel ist judenfrei”, 37–42. 15 During that time, Jews faced a movement pressing for a constitutional amendment to declare America a Christian nation: Naomi W. Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York, 1992), 65–92. 16 North Carolina in 1868 and New Hampshire in 1877. 17 David Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (Princeton, 2019), 1–4, 224–229. 18 Ad for Schooley’s Mountain Summer Resort, NJ, The New York Times, May 16, 1876. 19 Corbin quoted in “Reviving a Prejudice,” New York Daily Herald, July 22, 1879. 20 John Higham, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. (Baltimore, 1984), 128. 21 Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter With Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830–1914 (Philadelphia, 1984), 250; Twin Mountain House and Schoharie Lake in the Catskills, NY, in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 15, 1900; The Hill Cottage in Ulster, NY, in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 15, 1900; Locust Grove House, Centerport, Long Island: “Gentiles Only,” in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 2, 1894. 22 “American Fraternity and Equality,” The Indiana State Sentinel, July 7, 1880. 23 Morton Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, Defender of Jewish Rights (Detroit, 1965), 17. 24 “No More Jews in This Club,” The Sun (New York, NY), April 15, 1893. 25 Higham, Send These to Me, 130. 26 Robert W. Charny, “Patterns of Toleration and Discrimination in San Francisco: The Civil War to World War I,” California History, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Summer 1994): 138–139. 27 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, 2006), 54.

40  “No Jews, Dogs, or Consumptives” 28 Robert Rockaway, “The First Publicized Act of Social Exclusion Against a Jew,” Michigan Jewish History, Vol. 53 (Fall 2013): 37–39. 29 Antero Pietala, Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (Chicago, 2010), xi. 30 Pietala, Not in My Neighborhood, 36. 31 Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, 1985), 18. 32 Oren, Joining the Club, 40. 33 Shelly Tennenbaum, “The Vicissitudes of Tolerance: Jewish Faculty and Students at Clark University,” Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 5 (2003): 12–13. 34 Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 38; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York, 1976, 2005), 281. 35 Britt Tevis, “ ‘Jews Not Admitted’: Anti-Semitism, Civil Rights, and Public Accommodation Laws,” Journal of American History, Vol. 107. No. 4 (March 2021): 847–848. 36 Tevis, “ ‘Jews Not Admitted’,” 848. 37 Tevis, “ ‘Jews Not Admitted’,” 868. 38 See Nicole Kvale Eilers, “Emigrant Trains: Jewish Migration Through Prussia and American Remote Control, 1880–1914,” in Tobias Brinkmann, ed., Points of Passage: Jewish Transmigrants From Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880–1914 (New York, 2013), 63–84. 39 Howard Markel, Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore, 1997), 73–74. 40 Bajohr, “Unser Hotel ist judenfrei”, 166. 41 See the roundtable discussion in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, particularly the contributions of Hasia R. Diner, who viewed antisemitism as having placed few obstacles in the way of Jews during the period, noting how their “whiteness rendered the rhetoric, regardless of its breadth and its ugliness, unremarkable and of minor consequence,” and therefore, “anti-Semitism had little resonance in fact and as fact.” David S. Koffman, Moderator, “Roundtable on AntiSemitism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2020): 1–33.

3 An Exceptional Hatred? Re-Examining Antisemitism in Germany and the United States in a Time of War and Upheaval, 1914–1923 In September 1918, a new magazine appeared in Brooklyn called The AntiBolshevist. Here, one could read about how “Jewish traitors hastened our advent into the war,” how Bolshevik Russia was “[a] government of Jews, by Jews, and for Jews,” and how Bolshevism was “a Jewish scheme to despoil Christians of their property and of their government.”1 American Jewish Committee President Louis Marshall tried to get the Post Office to stop delivery of the paper, writing, [a] publication of this character necessarily leads to a breach of the peace. Similar publications in Poland and Russia have had the effect of producing pogroms or massacres, accompanied by the loss of life and the destruction of property. There is no reason for believing that a similar publication in this country, if long continued, may not be followed by the same evil consequences.2 Pogroms? Massacres of Jews? In America? What could he have meant? Marshall had said on previous occasions that the United States had no “Jewish Question.” And why not mention Germany when offering examples of dangerous antisemitic countries? The existence of a publication like The Anti-Bolshevist as well as Marshall’s response raises some important questions. Could Marshall have been acknowledging that perhaps, when it comes to antisemitism, America was not quite as different as is so often assumed?3 Could his omission of Germany indicate that it was not always considered such a dangerous country for Jews? If so, should we perhaps reassess our understanding of antisemitism, and in particular, its role on both sides of the Atlantic? Could the basic ideas and imagery that have animated anti-Jewish prejudice in Germany have been largely the same in America? Might it be possible that at particular times and under particular conditions, Jews in the United States could find themselves victims of exclusionary rhetoric and practices similar to those in Germany? This chapter argues precisely this. The idea that there existed a “German” antisemitism that was somehow fundamentally different and more dangerous than that of the United States is one that I argue no longer holds. The decade from the start of World War I into the immediate postwar years provides an opportunity to see why. DOI: 10.4324/9781003266372-4

42  An Exceptional Hatred? Thanks to the national framework that still largely structures historical study, scholars of American and German antisemitism are generally not in regular dialogue with one another. This makes an accurate assessment of uniqueness or exceptionalism, harmlessness or murderousness, difficult. There are a number of assumptions about Germany from American scholars that contribute to distorted comparisons. One often reads, for example, in accounts of American Jewish history, about the diverse nature of American society and how the presence of many potential “others” prevents bigots from focusing their attention on any one group for too long.4 But Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was itself a far more diverse and divided country than most American historians realize. Within its borders, for example, there lived French, Danes, Sorbs, and Poles. In fact, during the Empire, many Germans considered the Polish minority the greatest national enemy, while others saw Catholics as an existential threat.5 Almost immediately after founding the state, in fact, Bismarck launched a wide-ranging and violent attack on one-third of the population. “By the 1870s,” writes historian Michael B. Gross, “liberals in Germany conceived of the anti-Catholic campaign as nothing less than a war to save the new empire from its most powerful enemy within its own territorial borders.”6 Scholars also like to stress America’s liberal tradition of tolerance and democracy in explaining American exceptionalism with regard to Jews.7 While there’s no question that tolerance and democracy have been at the heart of the country’s self-image, the reality has often been quite different. Whether it was the treatment of Native Americans, African Americans, or Chinese, there’s been a noticeable gap between ideal and practice. What was to prevent Jews from experiencing similar treatment at particular times and under particular conditions? Among the leading scholars of the American Jewish experience, Jonathan Sarna has recognized the importance of taking a comparative approach to antisemitism but still argues for exceptionalism. Placed alongside Germany, however, it’s not an especially convincing argument. In his 1986 essay, “American Anti-Semitism,” for example, Sarna notes, “In America, Jews have always fought anti-Semitism freely.”8 But in Germany, one could make a similar assessment. Before 1933, Jews were formidable opponents of antisemitism. The Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith brought hundreds of cases before the courts, with more than 500 people charged with antisemitic activity.9 And this is not the only instance of important similarities in the experiences of Jews in both countries. Assessments of antisemitism in America, for example, must deal with the seemingly paradoxical reality of Jewish success in the face of a worsening antisemitic environment beginning in the late nineteenth century. One element of the Jewish experience in America is undoubtedly a story of success, whether in business, law, or politics. From Otto Straus’s appointment as the first Jewish cabinet member to Louis Brandeis becoming the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice in 1916, America truly was a land of opportunity for Jews. And such

An Exceptional Hatred? 43 success continued into the 1920s and 1930s even as antisemitism rose to new and frightening levels. But here again a similar story can be told of Germany. Jews enthusiastically embraced German culture as they rose into the educated and propertied middle classes, finding success in business, law, and politics. Two of the most significant figures in the business world of Germany’s Second Empire were Jews: Albert Ballin, who headed the country’s largest shipping firm, the HamburgAmerica Line (HAPAG); and Emil Rathenau, who founded the German General Electric Company, one of Germany’s largest industrial concerns. And in Weimar, the situation only improved. In those years, Jews experienced a level of freedom and opportunity unprecedented in German history. But at the same time that they could look with pride at the appointment of Walther Rathenau as Germany’s first Jewish Foreign Minister, the spread of antisemitism reached truly worrying levels. While we know that the crisis decade from 1914 to 1923 was followed just ten years later by the most intense period of antisemitism in modern history, it’s also important to remember that a significant wave of antisemitism preceded it as well. By the late nineteenth century, antisemitism grew noticeably in both countries. In Germany, it animated a number of political parties and radical nationalist organizations, though it failed as a political movement.10 This does not mean, however, that official policies of exclusion were not possible in Imperial Germany. For while calls by antisemites to eliminate or restrict Jewish rights went nowhere, Catholics and Socialists both experienced statesponsored campaigns of discrimination, exclusion, and violence. Jews did face periodic violence, though in contrast to the experience of Catholics and Socialists, the state actually protected them. Still, traditional forms of discrimination continued to exist—in the army, the judiciary, and the university. And, of course, the longest tradition of anti-Jewish hostility remained in the Protestant and Catholic churches. At services, in religious schools, or in popular culture, Germans regularly encountered pernicious images of Jews. In America, though Jews were technically equal on the federal level, they gained political rights in several states only after the Civil War. Such late and uneven achievement of equality was tied directly to the religious basis of anti-Jewish attitudes and practices in the country since before its founding.11 Whether in their church pews or at their school desks, Americans heard similar stories about evil Jews that Europeans did over the years.12 Populists demonized Jews as “money kings” and “shylocks” during the 1890s. Plays and novels commonly portrayed Jews as shifty, dishonest, criminal, or greedy. As they grew more successful, Jews found that social clubs and resorts increasingly closed their doors to them. Victims of violence in both small towns and cities, they came to expect little or no help from the police.13 And Jews watched in horror as Leo Frank was falsely convicted of murder and lynched just as America and Germany were entering a decade of war and upheaval. During the war’s early months, public antisemitism in Germany declined dramatically. Some papers continued to attack Jews despite the early spirit of

44  An Exceptional Hatred? unity, but they found themselves confronted by government censors.14 A degree of hopefulness marked this moment. In an interview with the New Yorker Staatszeitung in January 1915, German Ambassador to the United States Graf Bernstorff expressed his expectation that the war, and the evidence of Jewish contributions to it, would do away with antisemitism.15 And such hopes were not unfounded. The spirit of the Burgfrieden—the domestic peace proclaimed by Kaiser Wilhelm II at the outset of hostilities—combined with the needs of a government in the midst of a conflict of unprecedented scope, did, in fact, enable Jews to play a significant role in the war. This included the purchase of war bonds and the administration of welfare and financial agencies. Jews also served the government in advisory roles. Albert Ballin and Carl Melchior, for example, were involved with the Central Purchasing Department (Zentraleinkaufsgesellschaft); Julius Hirsch dealt with the regulation of food prices; Eduard Arnhold was part of the Imperial Coal Department (Reichskohlenamt); and Walther Rathenau inspired the creation of the War Raw Materials Section, which played a vital role in Germany’s ability to fight a long war against better-supplied foes.16 But this was not all. In addition to these vital home-front activities, Jews provided support for the war effort on the battlefield itself. German Jews fought and died alongside their non-Jewish comrades from the start of the war—and as with the home front, they did so in a noticeably more tolerant environment. Thanks to both the Burgfrieden and the army’s unimaginably heavy losses, Jewish contributions were recognized and rewarded. Not only did they receive medals and commendations but Jewish soldiers also earned promotion to officer status. Within the first two years, the military made officers of more than 700 Jews.17 Before the war, this was something that simply did not happen in the Prussian Army.18 Antisemitism was by no means new to Prussian military culture in 1914. In fact, it was fundamental to the Prussian officer corps. But it involved a more traditional anti-Jewish attitude, based on social and political beliefs along with the common stereotype that Jews simply made poor soldiers. As Martin Kitchen notes, The army never came out with anything like an anti-Semitic programme, indeed there was no need to do so, but it contented itself with crudely veiled anti-Semitic observations on the spiritual and physical attributes of Jews culled from so-called specialists in the field.19 And it was this informal set of assumptions and stereotypes, not any specific order or law, which kept Jews out of the Prussian officer corps until the outbreak of the war. But in the years leading up to the fighting, a modern, racial strain of antisemitism had begun to get a much more favorable reception particularly among middle-class reserve officers. During the war, they would help antisemitic organizations such as the Army League and the Reichshammerbund get

An Exceptional Hatred? 45 their literature distributed among the troops. But what effect did these efforts have on the ground? As it turns out, soldiers and rabbis did, in fact, report from the front about comradely relations.20 While there were expressions of antisemitism here and there among the troops, at least early in the war the common danger tended to squeeze these out as well.21 If we look at the newspapers that were produced specifically for, and often by, the soldiers themselves we find a realm not only remarkably free of antisemitic sentiment but one that also contained many examples of positive portrayals of Jews. For example, in his study of German soldier newspapers, Robert Nelson notes that “Jews appeared often in the many sketches of locals in and around Vilnius, and the journals put forward images of a Jewish population that was noble and respectable.”22 Many articles contained positive discussions of Yiddish and other aspects of Jewish culture, including theater, music, and religious customs. One could find descriptions of German Jews as a “Fatherland-loving people,” possessing “loyalty,” “honesty,” and “respect for the law.”23 Indeed, as Nelson observes, in “discussions of the plight of Jews in general, and in Eastern Europe specifically, the newspapers appear increasingly sympathetic and, at times, arguably ‘philo-Semitic.’ ”24 Of course, no one would argue that philo-semitism came to mark the attitude of most Germans during the war. The reality was more complicated than that. The encounters between German soldiers and officers with Eastern Jews, for example, produced a range of attitudes. In his study of the occupation of Lithuania during World War I, historian Vejas Liulevicius writes of German armies marching east as having been “pleasantly surprised” upon meeting Eastern Jews for the first time. He cites Victor Klemperer, working at the time in the press section of Ober Ost, who noted that the administration valued “a good relationship with the Jewish population, where it found German language skills, ties to German Kultur, and which it was inclined to make its ally.” Others, however, took a different view, with one officer describing Jews as “a cancerous wound of this land,” and another referring to them as “a disturbing, often unfathomable factor in every political calculation.” Ultimately, with regard to German military attitudes toward Eastern Jews, Liulevicius concludes, “The documentary sources yield an ambivalent record, showing both expressions of sympathy and interest as well as a range of anti-Semitic responses, including casual prejudices, slurs, and active hatred.”25 A similar ambivalence can be seen on the home front. In Freiburg, for example, Roger Chickering describes a situation in which public expressions of antisemitism were rare early on, but “[r]esentments and quiet discrimination persisted nevertheless.”26 As the war dragged on and privations increased, those resentments would come to the surface. And not just in Freiburg, but across the country, the long, costly war would raise concerns about the solidity of the German national community and the place of Jews within it. By the winter of 1915–1916, as the British blockade made itself increasingly felt, the warm feelings from 1914 were growing cold. War without end and casualties that never ceased combined with privation to create an environment

46  An Exceptional Hatred? of embitterment and mistrust. In seeking to understand their situation, Germans turned increasingly to Jews as a scapegoat. Many accused them of profiteering.27 The fact that Walther Rathenau, a prominent Jewish industrialist, played a key role in creating and initially heading up the War Raw Materials Section— a government office in charge of the efficient distribution of war-related resources—helped feed the suspicions of ordinary Germans and provided additional ammunition to the country’s professional antisemites. Understandably, the issue of food was paramount for most Germans on the home front.28 In Berlin, the imagined connection between Jews, food, and profiteering soon made its way into everyday parlance. The word “Jew” itself came to denote anyone as a profiteer. Historian Roger Chickering describes the situation in Freiburg in which “Frustrations over inflation and shortage fixed easily onto the figures of the usurer and shady manipulator, now in the guise of warprofiteers or ‘blood suckers.’ ”29 The other main allegation that German Jews faced was shirking. As the war continued, rumors circulated about Jews avoiding the draft or, if that proved impossible, using their “money and connections” to secure safer positions far from the front. The War Ministry, in fact, found itself under pressure to investigate it. In October 1916, the Ministry announced plans for what became known as the “Jew Count.” Until quite recently, historians have portrayed this as one of the most significant antisemitic measures carried out by the government and one that did great damage to Jews’ sense of national belonging at a time when so many were serving honorably and risking their lives for Germany. Recently, however, historians have begun to revise that interpretation. Taking into account the diversity of Jewish identities and viewpoints prior to the war leads to a more nuanced understanding of which Jews experienced the “Jew Count” in particular ways. In addition, looking at a wider selection of soldiers’ letters and other sources from the war has revealed that the “Jew Count” made much less of an impression on many Jewish soldiers as well as Jews on the home front than previously understood.30 Caution is also called for when assessing the “Jew Count” as the product of a dramatic increase in antisemitism among the population as a whole. The War Ministry was not actually responding to a groundswell of popular anger. Instead, antisemitic entrepreneurs had flooded the ministry with letters complaining of Jewish shirking.31 And even this was not enough. For some time, the head of the War Ministry refused to act. It took a change in leadership to finally start the process. And yet the real reason for the decision mainly involved selfinterest on the part of the German military elite. Concern that Jewish battlefield contributions might lead to calls for a more inclusive officer corps inspired them to question the loyalty of Jews and forestall such a possibility.32 So rather than the manifestation of a widespread and radicalized antisemitism, the “Jew Count” actually represented a much more traditional concern among a small group of German elites. Still, by the last year of the war, there was a growing fear among some Jews that Germany was on the brink of a “new antisemitism” that would burst upon

An Exceptional Hatred? 47 the scene after the fighting. “It is doubtless correct,” wrote Walther Rathenau in a letter of February 25, 1918, “that a great wave of antisemitic agitation is at hand.”33 He turned out to have been eerily prescient. First, in April 1918, the Prussian Minister of the Interior closed the eastern frontier to Jewish migrants. According to the decree announcing the closure, Polish-Jewish workers were “work-shy, unclean, morally unreliable . . . to a great extent infested with lice . . . especially apt carriers and spreaders of typhus and other infectious diseases.” As Helmut Berding noted, “This exceptional law against Jews showed the growing influence of antisemitism on German politics.”34 And then that September, Konstantin von Gebsattel, a leading antisemite, spoke before a group of radical nationalist Pan-Germans about using the Jews as a “lightening rod” for all the nation’s problems.35 Rathenau’s prophecy real would be realized soon enough. The United States entered World War I only in April 1917, and it would be many more months before its forces saw significant combat. Therefore, the American war experience was far briefer than Germany’s. The tensions that rent the social and political fabric of Germany simply would not have time to reach such levels across the Atlantic. And yet, antisemitism did make a significant appearance in America during the war. It was serious enough, in fact, that leading Jewish figures felt the need for a sustained effort to combat it. It also involved some strikingly similar tropes and imagery as in the much more warweary environment of Imperial Germany. America on the eve of its entry into the war was a country marked by deep divisions in society and politics. For some two decades, the country was roiled by turmoil on both fronts. Americans confronted Americans over issues including growing disparities in wealth, the power of corporations, labor disturbances, and immigration. It was this latter issue that led to public debate over the question of the loyalty of the country’s recent arrivals. It was a question President Wilson himself raised throughout his time in office. In his third State of the Union message in December 1915, for example, Wilson warned, There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. . . . Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out. . . . [T]he hand of our power should close over them at once.36 In fact, so significant was the issue for Wilson that he had serious concerns about American involvement in the war.37 The question of America’s interests in the conflict left many people uncertain. In addition to the Republican opposition, President Wilson faced a regional divide over the question of war or neutrality. The Northeast, for example, favored involvement, while the Midwest stood opposed.38 With echoes of the populist campaigns of the 1890s, many Midwesterners saw

48  An Exceptional Hatred? a conspiracy of Eastern plutocrats to once again exploit the common man for the benefit of big capital. It was a country trying to deal with the growing challenges and dislocations brought about by the transition to a modern, urban, industrial society. Already on the hunt for those supposedly responsible for these tectonic shifts, the addition of the war environment would mean still greater suspicion and fear as American xenophobia found even more fertile ground than before. As David Kennedy put it, “Americans went to war in 1917 not only against Germans in the fields of France but against each other at home.”39 The intensity of that internal American conflict rose to startling levels following the declaration of war in April 1917. Continuing his xenophobic message, President Wilson helped intensify Americans’ fears of subversion by German agents or other foreign elements within the country. With such messages coming from the highest levels of authority, one should not be surprised by the resulting widespread paranoia and extreme efforts to eliminate the alleged danger. It was within this overheated environment of extreme fear and xenophobia that we need to understand the outburst of wartime antisemitism, its surprising extent, and its significance for what was to come. For America’s Jews, the war marked the start of a new wave of antisemitism that would reach extreme levels only with the cessation of hostilities in Europe. The outbreak of war in 1914 found the American Jewish community divided over which side to support. The bulk of the Jewish masses favored Germany, largely because it was fighting Russia, which most considered their ultimate enemy. While some among the Jewish leadership also held pro-German sympathies, many of the older, established Jews supported the Allies. The fall of the Romanov Dynasty in early 1917 erased this division so that by the time of the American declaration of war, the country’s Jews overwhelmingly supported the Allied cause. From New York’s Yiddish newspaper editors to the American Jewish Committee, all proclaimed their loyalty to the United States. As these and other groups enthusiastically took up patriotic activities for the war effort, Rabbi Stephen Wise expressed the hopes of many Jews in America (while echoing Germany’s Jews during the August Days), when he exalted the first day of Selective Service registration as “the burial, without hope of resurrection, of hyphenism, and . . . the birth of a united and indivisible country.”40 As it turns out, such hopes would prove as illusory in America as those expressed by Ambassador Bernstorff back in 1915. Following American entry into the European conflict, Jews found themselves accused of opposition to the war. Elements of the press and government supported accusations of Jewish leadership in anti-war activities. According to a Justice Department report from New York City in the summer of 1917, the Yiddish press plainly shows that they are against the draft, the war and many of the other governmental movements to forward the cause of the European battlefields. . . . According to unofficial reports within the past month, all of the New York Yiddish papers are in the danger class.41

An Exceptional Hatred? 49 An August 1917 article in the New York World went beyond the accusation of opposition to claim that they were actually working with the Germans.42 As it had in Germany, the image of the Jewish shirker appeared often in wartime America. Whether it involved evading the draft or getting themselves safe positions behind the lines, the notion spread that they were naturally unpatriotic.43 In Brooklyn, for example, one draft board described Russian Jewish immigrants as “miserable specimens of humanity” in a telegram to President Wilson.44 At a patriotic gathering in New York, a member of another draft board joked that “There are three epochs in the life of the Jewish boy: first, at birth, circumcision; second, at 13, confirmation; third, at 21, exemption.”45 His dismissal came only after Jewish groups made a concerted effort.46 In June 1918, Life magazine described Russian Jews as having a type of mind totally different from any of the types to which our government owes its organization, our commercial system its development, our country its growth. It is the most destructive mind in the world, the most grasping and unabashed. . . . The Russian Jews . . . have no national feeling.47 Such imagery spread not only through the press and local officials but also via street-corner agitators who developed an increasingly radical and violent rhetoric with which to attack Jews. On the streets of New York, for example, one could listen as an Irish immigrant named Russell Dunne spread his message of hate. There he called for violence against Jews he portrayed as disloyal slackers. He described Jews as “the gefilte fish crowd and the stinking onion crowd, . . . the crowd that have no respect for their mothers and sell their daughters for the highest price.” Christopher Sterba makes clear that Dunne was “not just a crank.” He was popular. A partial boycott of Jewish businesses in Brooklyn, where Dunne did much of his work, told Jewish residents that their relationship with their Gentile neighbors had deteriorated.48 The US Army also subscribed to the idea that Jews actively sought to avoid military service. Major Charles E. Woodruff, in his 1909 Social Darwinist text Expansion of Races, wrote that “the Jew as a race will not fight for his existence, but he demands that other races shall sacrifice themselves for him and preserve him.”49 According to Woodruff, “Aryan civilization demands a high grade of altruism which the Jews do not possess.”50 In a particularly vicious letter to Louis Marshall in April 1918, Colonel George F. Weeks shared a common sentiment among the officer corps when he wrote the Jew never was and never will be a soldier. The Jew in the present war is nothing, but a dirty malingerer of the lowest degenerated speciment [sic], always looking for something easy to which no danger can possibly come. The Hebrew is a disgrace to the flag that protects him from slavery.51 Members of the General Staff received word in 1920 from an officer who recalled that New York divisions, containing as they did many foreign-born

50  An Exceptional Hatred? and men “mostly of the prevailing New York Semitic persuasion,” caused the most trouble due to the efforts of these draftees to escape combat duty for safer positions behind the lines. As it turns out, the prejudice expressed by these officers was just a hint of the true extent and depth of radical, racial antisemitism within the Army.52 According to the official manual for US Army medical advisory boards, “Foreign born, and especially Jews, are more apt to malinger than the native born.”53 President Wilson had the passage stricken following Jewish protests, but that did little if anything to address the problem of radical antisemitism, which had become so entrenched in the thinking of American Army officers, particularly, but by no means exclusively, those in the Military Intelligence Division. In fact, Joseph Bendersky has found that modern, radical, racist antisemitic attitudes reached “into the highest echelons of the army hierarchy,” “permeated all ranks of the officer corps,” and had come to serve as their worldview well before World War I and would remain so throughout the 1920s and beyond.54 In the years leading up to the war, West Point cadets read about the dominant role played by the “Aryan” element of the white race. The works of Lothrop Stoddard were among the standard readings for officers at the Army War College, while the Army manual Psychology of the Filipino recommended his book Rising Tide of Color. Officers read his works outside of class as well and recommended them to colleagues. The racist ideas at the heart of such books by Stoddard as well as Madison Grant helped shape the thinking of officers from the highest ranks on down. General Johnson Hagood, for example, wrote about how different animals had their own way of making war, “but we Americans, in our innocence, expect all the beasts in human form to behave themselves as we do.” “To officers trained in these ways of thinking,” writes Bendersky, “history appeared an unending saga of rising and falling nations and races.”55 Such a worldview represented a serious threat to the place of Jews in American society, and it would not go unopposed. Louis Marshall and the AJC stood ready to devote considerable time and effort in confronting the challenge throughout the war. The organized response to anti-Jewish prejudice in America during the war involved two issues: discrimination and antisemitic stereotypes. Following American entry into the conflict, the American Jewish Committee found itself flooded with examples of wartime discrimination. Such cases confronted the AJC at nearly all their meetings during the war. They involved instances of hazing in the army and at the Naval Academy, where a biographer of Admiral Hyman Rickover (one of the very few Jews to actually survive to graduate) wrote that the atmosphere at Annapolis in the 1920s was such that “the hazing of a Jew would seem to be inevitable.”56 Discrimination affected not only Jewish soldiers and sailors but also Jews seeking war-related employment, such as in military construction and shipbuilding. In November 1917, for example, one could read advertisements in the New York World in which the Army announced its need for “Christian” carpenters. It took a written protest from Louis Marshall to get the Secretary of War to forbid such ads in the future.57

An Exceptional Hatred? 51 The American Jewish Committee sought to counter wartime antisemitism through both a positive effort to proclaim the patriotism of American Jews and a negative effort to disprove antisemitic claims with evidence of Jewish participation in the fighting. The campaign began immediately with a declaration of loyalty to President Wilson. They followed this up with the establishment of a “Division of War Statistics” based in Washington, DC, which directed a costly effort to gather and publish information on Jewish involvement in the war. For the next 3 years, its reports contained the stories of individual Jewish soldiers as well as lists of combat decorations. Marshall justified his support of such an effort in a letter from November 1917, in which he explained Unfortunately the idea prevails in many quarters, that the Jew is disposed to be a slacker and that he is not doing his full duty. There have been covert allusions, and in many instances outspoken statements, to that effect in the press, it is whispered in the street, it is the subject of brutal witticisms, and the recent Hillquit campaign has contributed largely to the creation of a gradually increasing public sentiment which is not favorable to us. “My sole desire,” he continued, “is to prove to the American people that, taking all elements into consideration, no part of our population is more loyal or more patriotic than the Jews.”58 Despite such a wish, the war environment, with its poisonous mix of nativism and nationalism, meant that going forward, Jews would find their place within the national community increasingly precarious. And as in Germany, the transition from war to peace would provide no respite. Germany’s postwar environment appeared tailor-made for the paranoid style of the country’s radical antisemites. Thanks to events at home and abroad, their fantastical stories found a receptive audience among the country’s shellshocked middle and upper classes. The presence of Jews in prominent positions in the revolution and the republic helped make the paranoia seem real. And there to help make sense of a topsy-turvy world where the old outsiders had become insiders stood a whole cadre of antisemitic entrepreneurs ready to let loose a veritable tidal wave of propaganda. On February 17, 1919, in the midst of defeat and revolution, the radical nationalist Pan-German League announced its intention to continue its fight for Germandom and against Jewry into the postwar period with the publication of its Bamberg Declaration. “The power-political demands of national rebirth,” it read, “find their direct counterpart in the necessity to curb Jewish influence in domestic-political, moral, and cultural matters.”59 Out of the Bamberg meeting came not only a statement of purpose but also a new organization. The leaders of the League wanted to create a mass organization dedicated solely to the fight against Jews. The German Racial Defense and Defiance League (Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund) would be that organization. With 30,000 members by the end of 1919, it peaked near 170,000 in early 1922—the largest right-wing organization of the immediate postwar period. It was also the most prolific, flooding the country with millions of pamphlets, stickers,

52  An Exceptional Hatred? and other forms of antisemitic propaganda. Nevertheless, as Hans Mommsen cautioned, one should remember, “As a mass political movement it remained a conspicuous failure.”60 It was not, however, alone. A plethora of antisemitic groups emerged during the early postwar years. Among political parties, the largest anti-Jewish voice was the German National Peoples’ Party (DNVP)—home to much of the Imperial-era Right. The party’s inconsistent approach to Jews, however, led to secession, and the formation of a new, strictly antisemitic group, the German Racist Freedom Party (DVFP), which ultimately failed to catch on. The German Social Party (DSP) and its popular leader Richard Kunze (also known as “Knüppel-Kunze,” thanks to the rubber truncheon he liked to carry with him as “the best and most beautiful weapon against the Jews”) represented another outlet of radical antisemitism in the early postwar period.61 And among the various small racist groups that emerged in the revolutionary environment of postwar Munich, there arose the German Workers’ Party (DAP). Still, despite growing membership, a name change, and the rise of a young, charismatic Adolf Hitler, the Nazis remained just one of many such groups dedicated to antisemitism, and a regional one at best.62 One of the key issues for the antisemites of early Weimar was the ongoing “debate” over Jewish shirking. Though the army conducted its “Jew Count” in 1916, it never released the results. Some individuals, however, passed along bits and pieces to Alfred Roth, a leading figure in the Schutz- und Trutzbund, who then published his own “analysis.”63 He was far from alone, however. In the Deutsches Wochenblatt, for example, Richard Kunze “explained” the failure to publish the results: Jewish opposition.64 Max Warburg’s alleged threat that Jews would withhold their money from further war-bond drives, he claimed, was enough to prevent publication. But more important even than that, however, was the effect of the example Jews had set. Arguing that the Jews’ alleged avoidance of front-line duty sapped the desire of (presumably “real”) German soldiers to continue risking their own lives, Kunze connected shirking to the developing “stab-in-the-back” legend. “Jewry,” he wrote, “proved itself again here to be the spirit of subversion.”65 That notion—that Jews and other “subversives” stabbed the army in the back and prevented an imminent German victory—had just received substantial support the previous month when Paul von Hindenburg testified before the Reichstag committee investigating the country’s defeat. In fact, his arrival in Berlin in mid-November 1919 provided the Right an opportunity to use the image of the Field Marshall to attack not only the revolution and the republic but also Jews. The investigative committee itself, they claimed, was the result of Jewish efforts.66 Another issue crucial to Germany’s antisemites in the postwar period involved the fear that many thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe were threatening to “flood” the country. Nationalist newspapers bombarded their readers with horror stories in which the country was in danger of becoming

An Exceptional Hatred? 53 “a Jewish state where the Jews enjoy the privileges and the German is only a second-class citizen.”67 According to DNVP deputy Reinhard Mumm, speaking in December 1919, many of these caftan-wearing Jews came using false passports, often in “night and fog.”68 Once there, they threatened to take the jobs, apartments, and food that Germans desperately needed. They were said to have brought disease and a culture of deception and “all-around shady deals.”69 Perhaps most important of all, these “Galician vampires” allegedly played the “leading role in the preparation and execution of the crime of the revolution.”70 Despite the blatant antisemitism at the heart of the Right’s depiction of the immigration issue in early Weimar, the overall picture was a bit more complicated. Neither the national nor the Prussian government (where most Eastern Jews lived) took significant action against immigrants from the east. Antisemites called for the deportation or internment of Eastern Jews, and while the government did act in some cases, it did so in very few—certainly far fewer than what the Right wanted. Due to Germany’s federal structure and the lack of a unified national approach to immigration, the states retained a substantial role in dealing with newcomers. Prussia, for example, was more favorable toward granting Eastern Jews citizenship, while Bavaria was much less open to the idea. Even in the case of the latter, however, the situation was not so clear-cut. Annemarie Sammartino wrote about the fascinating case of Hermann Rieder in 1921, who successfully acquired citizenship from Bavaria, which based its decision on information provided by Baden, where Rieder had been living up to that point. From Baden, it learned of the successful request by Rieder’s son for citizenship, his daughter’s marriage to a German citizen, and his own work for Jewish aid organizations. As Sammartino observes, “Clearly if involvement in Jewish aid organizations could be considered a positive criterion for citizenship, then the meaning of a commitment to the German cultural community was more complicated than it appears at first glance.” And therefore the idea of even foreign Jewish inclusion in the German national community was also not completely unthinkable.71 Ultimately, for the country’s most radical antisemites, the greatest danger the Jews allegedly posed was in the direction of a massive international conspiracy aimed at the destruction of Germany. It was a plot, they claimed, that reached back even before the war. One of the most famous anti-Jewish tracts of the period, in fact, began by declaring, “The war was lost at the start of 1912.”72 That year’s “Judenwahl,” (Jew election) which made the Social Democrats the largest party in the Reichstag, set Germany on the path to war, a conflict engineered by the “Golden International.”73 Russian-Polish Jews who pass as Germans in the world, dominated not only us; they sat in London, Paris, New York, and other places, in order to take advantage of banks, stock exchanges, warehouses, the press, among other things, for themselves. Ruthlessly they trampled over everything that stood in their path to world domination.74

54  An Exceptional Hatred? With Germany standing astride that path, the Jews turned England against the Reich.75 And having engineered the conflict, Jews made certain to benefit from it, making billions in profit.76 Then, through skillful manipulation of the home front, they brought about the collapse of the Empire and, through the revolution, established a “Jewish dictatorship.”77 As a result, “the Jews possess complete political and economic power, although they do not make up one percent of our population.”78 And considering events in Russia and Munich, the image of the “Jewish Bolshevik” was to play a prominent role in postwar antisemitism. “Bolshevism is a Jewish movement, a national plague spread by the Jews.”79 Even before the war ended, the connection between Jews and Bolshevism in the minds of German antisemites had already begun to take root, for example, within the military. During the spring and summer of 1918, officials in German-occupied Lithuania observed a growing confidence and assertiveness among Jews in the region and attributed it to the influence of Bolshevik ideas.80 In October 1918, Army Group Kiev described the Jews as “our most serious enemy,” representing a growing threat, thanks to their “continuing attempts of bribery and revolutionary machinations.”81 In a letter to his wife only days after the German Revolution in November 1918, the new Chief of Staff Wilhelm Groener described Jews as the “string-pullers” of both revolutions in Russia.82 The image of the “Jewish Bolshevik” also took root in right-wing “intellectual” circles. Alfred Rosenberg, who would become the Nazis’ “chief ideologue,” provided added weight to his assertions regarding Jews and Bolshevism, thanks to his status as émigré and witness to the “horrors” of the “Jewish dictatorship.” In June 1918, he wrote about how on trips in Russia, at resorts, etc., I saw Jewish students with the Bolshevik “Pravda” under their arm giving lectures in soldiers’ hospitals. The Jew stands like a wall behind the instrument of social vandalism. And that is not only in Russia. Also in Germany he waits only for the water to become troubled.83 Dietrich Eckart, one of Hitler’s early mentors, also warned of the danger Germany faced. In March 1918, he wrote in his journal, Auf gut deutsch, “All in all: it involves Jewish world domination. It started in Russia, we are next in line. ‘Dictatorship of the proletariat,’ they scream, but what’s meant is the ‘dictatorship over the proletariat,’ better said over all non-Jews.”84 Events at home and abroad made their nightmares seem plausible. If Bela Kun’s brief experiment with a Soviet Hungary was frightening, at least it was relatively distant. Events in Munich during that same period, though, made a much deeper and more lasting impression. The revolutionary movement in Bavaria involved a number of people of Jewish descent, including the first leader of the republic, Kurt Eisner. After his assassination, Bavaria experienced a short-lived soviet republic (Räterrepublik), led by Eugen Leviné

An Exceptional Hatred? 55 and Max Levien, both Russian communists, though only Leviné was of Jewish descent.85 Its fall came only two weeks later at the hands of right-wing fighters furious after red forces killed members of the racist Thule Society they had been holding hostage. Having taken Munich, they exacted bloody vengeance, killing some 600 people in only two days.86 Although this massive blood-letting far exceeded the left’s violence, it was the experience of the latter that made the strongest impression on most Germans, including many early Nazis. The implications are hard to overstate. According to Ian Kershaw, “Not just the legend of the ‘stab-in-the-back,’ but the notion of an international Jewish conspiracy could be made to sound plausible in the light of the Munich Räterrepublik.”87 It was in this charged environment that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion first appeared. The forgery arrived, thanks to White Russian émigrés, who provided a copy to Ludwig Müller, editor of the antisemitic paper Auf Vorposten, who wrote under the pen name Gottfried zur Beek.88 Thanks to him, they made their German debut in 1920 as Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion (The Secrets of the Wise Men of Zion). The Protocols spread through postwar Germany in significant numbers. In one month, they had gone through two printings, and before the year was out they went through three more, with 120,000 copies sold.89 How many Germans truly believed what The Protocols described is difficult to know, though it’s likely a small number.90 But the fact that some did believe them would have real-world consequences that threatened the survival of the republic, for Weimar antisemitism by no means remained solely on the rhetorical level. Jews found themselves under assault not only in the pages of the antisemitic press or in the speeches of beer-hall politicians but also on the streets of German towns and cities. During the 1920 Kapp Putsch, for example, Jews were beaten on Unter den Linden after soldiers tossed Schutz- und Trutzbund fliers from their trucks. In Breslau, Jewish students were beaten after trying to remove antisemitic posters. In Charlottenburg, by contrast, military forces prevented a violent outbreak that nearly erupted after a speech by a street-corner antisemite.91 The largest outbreak of anti-Jewish violence during the Weimar Republic was the Scheunenviertal riots. On November 5, 1923, at the peak of the Ruhr Crisis and the hyperinflation, unemployed workers rampaged through the Scheunenviertal—Berlin’s Eastern Jewish “ghetto.” While only one Jewish resident was killed, many were injured and shops and homes were vandalized and looted. The violence extended beyond this one neighborhood, with attacks on shops in other parts of Berlin and other cities in Germany, though outside the Scheunenviertal, more Christian-owned shops were victimized than those owned by Jews, indicating the economic element of the rioters’ motivations. The Scheunenviertal riots and the attacks that corresponded to the Kapp Putsch represented violent outbursts—expressions of political and/or economic dissatisfaction—tied to moments of crisis. Though they tended to be taken advantage of subsequently by antisemitic entrepreneurs for their own political benefit, they were typically spontaneous in nature and tied to more general forms of “street politics.”92 And they were all limited in scope. As historian

56  An Exceptional Hatred? Avram Barkai points out, “In the confusion of the early postwar years, the radical Right did not succeed in stirring up the wider population to bloody pogroms against German Jews or even the Ostjuden living in Germany.”93 This was, of course, a clear contrast to the bloodbath that was unfolding in Ukraine during this same period. Still, the early years of Weimar did witness a new form of anti-Jewish violence that was not spontaneous and was connected much more closely to ideology: political murder. The more extreme forms of antisemitism coursing through postwar Germany tied into and inspired a new, anti-government brand of politics that marked the new Right in Weimar. The belief that Jews were responsible for the war, defeat, and revolution and were now the power behind the new republic meant that the Right was no longer a critic of the government as it had been in the empire, but an enemy dedicated to the total destruction of the regime. The danger they believed they faced had grown exponentially, and therefore the means to fight that danger would have to grow correspondingly more radical. Assassination of political opponents, representatives of the republic—that is, “traitors,” or the “November Criminals” as they called them—was now considered a legitimate element of right-wing political culture. Though right-wing terrorists failed in their attempts to kill Maximilian Harden and Philipp Scheidemann—both Germans of Jewish origin—they did manage to assassinate Walther Rathenau in 1922—a murder in which the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy played a significant part. Already demonized for his wartime activities, Rathenau’s role in the republic only added to the hostility. In particular, his appointment as Foreign Minister made German radical nationalists apoplectic. How could a Jew occupy the same office as Bismarck? Alfred Roth and the Schutz- und Trutzbund stood at the forefront of the antisemitic assault.94 As Martin Sabrow notes, “On every street corner racist posters announced that with Rathenau’s appointment the era of Jewish rule over Germany has dawned.”95 An open letter to the Mitteldeutsche Presse claimed Rathenau had been selected as Foreign Minister by the “lodges of the international-Jewish freemason alliance.”96 Fantasies of chimeric antisemitism had inspired a horrific act of terrorism. But that violence in turn inspired the supporters of the republic to act in its defense. Following a massive display of public mourning for the murdered Rathenau, the Reichstag passed the “Law for the Protection of the Republic,” through which the government was able to ban the Schutz- und Trutzbund. After the war, antisemitism in Germany had radicalized and spread to more of the population. It inspired violence and extreme anti-government politics. Germany’s antisemites shook the new system and nearly toppled it—nearly. For it must be remembered that those who saw not the Weimar Republic, but a “Jew Republic,” proved unable to destroy the government they considered a direct and fundamental threat to the nation. That government would survive, while antisemites faced an uncertain future as stability finally arrived in Germany.97

An Exceptional Hatred? 57 Less than a year after the armistice, the image of the Jew as a corrupting, criminal, and fundamentally un-American figure appeared in a prominent fashion before the whole country when it was discovered that the powerful gangster Arnold Rothstein had fixed the 1919 World Series. The Sporting News drove home the antisemitic dimension in its reporting of the “Black Sox Scandal,” noting how “[a] lot of dirty, long-nosed, thick-lipped, and strongsmelling gamblers butted into the World Series—an American event, by the way.”98 In 1925, that image worked itself even more deeply into the culture when F. Scott Fitzgerald cast Rothstein as “Meyer Wolfsheim”—a “smelly, flat-nosed Jew”—in The Great Gatsby.99 In one of America’s most popular novels, therefore, it was a Jew who served as Jay Gatsby’s mysterious connection to the world of organized crime. Between these two developments Americans experienced one of the most dangerous periods of antisemitism in the country’s history. Though brief, the American war experience helped solidify a predominant national identity centered on purity and undivided loyalty. The idea of the “one hundred percent” American had taken root and its advocates now sought to eliminate all challenges. The war helped fashion such a spirit of intolerance, and from the highest levels of government the message went forth. In his campaign for the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, President Wilson warned, “Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this republic.”100 The implications for Jews were ominous, as some of the ultra-nationalist “one hundred percenters” tended to conflate them with Germans and express fears that they were exerting undue influence at the highest levels of government. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and others, for example, would refer to “secret ties” between the President and Paul Warburg (of the Federal Reserve).101 Even before the end of the war, however, the German threat was giving way to a new one: the Bolshevik. The hyper-nationalism and extreme vigilance of the war years carried over into the postwar period to produce the First Red Scare. Americans experienced a jarring transition from war to peace as millions of demobilized soldiers sought work in a tight job market and a period of high inflation. Thousands of strikes involving more than four million workers, a wave of political violence targeting both local and national officials, and race riots that claimed hundreds of lives made 1919 a dark year in American history. Into this volatile atmosphere came another ingredient that would add significantly to the fear felt by many “one-hundred percenters”: the belief that millions of Eastern European Jews were preparing to arrive on America’s shores. In 1918, William Hornaday warned of having welcomed the lame and the lazy, the ignorant, the vicious, the veneered criminal and the “assisted” immigrant with envy in his eye, greed in his heart, and a knife inside his shirt, all coming to exploit America for their own benefit.102

58  An Exceptional Hatred? Mixing with such newcomers would mean the end of the “Anglo-Saxon stock” and “a nation of indecipherables, mongrels, with the mental handicaps and the vices of all contributors sharply accentuated.”103 Helped by this environment, while simultaneously feeding it further, was a new edition of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, which did much better than its original 1916 edition. The ideas of both Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, whose The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy was a best seller, were disseminated further, thanks to coverage in popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post.104 While Jews were not the only immigrant group, or even the majority of the new arrivals, the image of the Eastern European Jew played a significant role in the immigration debate and came to represent for many a particular danger to postwar America.105 As John Higham noted, “the Jews faced a sustained agitation that singled them out from the other new immigrant groups blanketed by racial nativism—an agitation that reckoned them the most dangerous force undermining the nation.”106 They were also the only non-Christian group among European arrivals. As they had during the late nineteenth century, opponents of Jewish immigration portrayed a population that, in almost every respect, was so antithetical to American ideals and culture as to be completely unassimilable. Consular reports entered into the record during Congressional debates over immigration in 1920 described Jews as “an undesirable class of immigrant,” representing an “immediate danger of carrying contagious diseases,” and exhibiting “signs of mental, physical, and moral depreciation.”107 In an official report, Wilbur Carr, head of the United States Consular Service, described potential Jewish immigrants from Poland as “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits . . . lacking any conception of patriotism or national spirit.”108 In 1922, Hugh Gibson, American Minister to Poland, described “awful” Jewish villages that he encountered there. “Never have I seen nigger villages at home so utterly shiftless and hopeless as the Jewish settlements along the road. The people are filthy and sullen and you wonder why they go on living.”109 These were the people journalist Kenneth Roberts called “human parasites” in his 1922 book Why Europe Leaves Home, warning about the danger facing America.110 In his four-part series on “The Jews in America,” in The World’s Work, muckraking journalist Burton Hendrick wrote, “As candidates for assimilation these Jews, as they land at Ellis Island, are about as promising as a similarly inflowing stream of Hindus or Syrian Druses.”111 He described “great mobs of Eastern Jews,” an “exotic mass that the steamships began dumping on the Atlantic seaboard forty years ago,” bringing with them their “Asiatic” ways.112 In the environment of immediate postwar America, however, an added threat posed by Eastern European Jewish immigrants was their alleged connection to Bolshevism. Burton Hendrick claimed to have found in this relationship “that insight into the mass mind of the Polish Jew.”113 He summed it up, writing, as he did throughout his series, about “the Jew:”

An Exceptional Hatred? 59 His newspaper reading is Socialistic, he votes for candidates whose canvass is based on violent hostility to the American Government, and his labor unions, alone of all American labor unions, seek to establish a Soviet system in place of the one established by Washington and Franklin.114 Elsewhere one could read stories with headlines like “Jews from America in the Bolshevik Oligarchy,” or the account of an anonymous New York businessman who described an excited scene at the Foreign Office in Leningrad.115 “What was being said,” he wrote, “was not half so interesting as how it was being said. These officials conversed almost exclusively in English and German. They were not Russians. They were Jews. They did not talk Russian— they talked Bowery.”116 The Jewish Bolshevik from New York City’s East Side became a common trope. In fact, simply using “East Side” was enough to convey the image of dangerous, revolutionary Jewish Bolsheviks. That image of the East Side Jewish Bolshevik was on display during the United States Senate Committee hearing on German propaganda during the war. In February 1919, some nine months before Hindenburg made his appearance before the Reichstag, Reverend George A. Simons testified in Washington, DC, about the alleged role of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution. As superintendent of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Petrograd between 1907 and October 1918, his testimony, similar to someone like Alfred Rosenberg in Germany, carried the additional weight of the witness. There were “hundreds of agitators,” he claimed, “who had followed the trail of Trotsky-Bronstein . . . from the lower East Side of New York,” and he personally saw “scores of such men walking up and down Nevsky.” So striking a sight was it, he told the committee, that he “was impressed with the strong Yiddish element in this thing right from the start.” In fact, more than half of all Bolshevik “agitators” he claimed were Jews. Simons was convinced that Bolshevism “is Yiddish” and that he did not “think the Bolshevik movement in Russia would have been a success if it had not been for the support it got from certain elements in New York, the so-called East Side.”117 Senator Josiah Wolcott of Delaware expressed his concerns about the alleged Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy, noting, “if the success of this monstrous thing in Russia is due to the men who came out of New York City, then this country has not anything to deal with that is trifling, at all.”118 In fact, Simons gave the senators good reason to worry about the danger closer to home. “I have no doubt in my mind,” he told them, “that the predominant element in this Bolsheviki movement in America is, you may call it, the Yiddish of the East Side.”119 And this was indeed no group to trifle with, he warned. Having been to the “People’s House,” also known as the Rand School of Social Science, in New York City, he described the literature he saw there as “some of the most seditious stuff I have ever found against our own Government,” adding, “19 out of every 20 people I have seen there have been Jews.”120

60  An Exceptional Hatred? The committee members appear to have accepted Simons’s assertions regarding the relationship between East Side Jews and Bolshevism. At no point, in fact, during Simons’s testimony did a single senator voice any objection to his assertions about Jews and Bolshevism. In fact, those assumptions could be seen during the questioning of other witnesses. On numerous occasions, senators would lead them through a series of questions regarding Bolsheviks they had encountered. First, the senator would ascertain where the person lived—“New York.” Then, “where in New York”—“the East Side.” And finally, “a Hebrew?”121 Responding to Simons’s testimony, Louis Marshall tried to convey to the committee members the damage that such talk could do and, in fact, already had done. It has become fashionable for newspaper men who desire copy to treat the East Side as a bugaboo. By this time the average citizen of other States imagines that the East Side is an inferno and the dwelling place wherein evils of every kind lurk. Consequently, for a stage setting and for dramatic effect, Bolshevism, with gnashing teeth and scraggly beard and dripping dagger, is pictured as stalking through the noisesome alleys in the imaginary East Side.122 It was an assumed relationship that many others in the government also took seriously. In February 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer wrote an article in the magazine Forum in which he linked Bolshevism in Russia, through Trotsky (“a disreputable alien—Leon Bronstein”), to Jews in America (“A small clique of outcasts from the East Side of New York”).123 The President, with qualifications, expressed essentially the same idea the year before at the Paris Peace Conference. “[T]he Bolshevist movement,” Wilson said, “had been led by the Jews.”124 As part of a directive he circulated in 1920, Colonel John M. Dunn of the army’s Military Intelligence Division wrote about how “[T]he intimate connection of the Jews and Jewry with Bolshevism is well established; it is also well known that the principal agents of dissemination of Bolshevistic as well as other radical propaganda in the United States are Jewish newspapers.”125 Ambassador Gibson put it bluntly when he wrote to the State Department, “the Soviet regime is in the hands of the Jews and their oppression is Jewish oppression.”126 With respect to the population at large, John Higham has noted that the “doctrine that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement echoed from public meetings and from the pulpits of many churches.”127 As they did in World War I, Louis Marshall and the American Jewish Committee fought back against the spread of the Jewish Bolshevik connection. They produced pamphlets and books to refute the charges. But, soon, another antisemitic publication would add significantly to the challenge.

An Exceptional Hatred? 61 On June 19, 1920, the Chicago Tribune published an article warning of “a world revolutionary movement other than Bolshevism” that sought “the establishment of a new racial domination of the world,” and was led by “Jewish radicals.”128 Although the Red Scare was winding down, the specter of the Jew remained. And the nature of the danger would grow ever wider, becoming global in scope. The enemy now was the “International Jew.”129 And with the appearance of The Protocols around the same time—brought to America, as it was to Germany, by White Russian émigrés—this image gained reinforcement from a range of sources, including government, the press, and radical nationalist organizations.130 It is important to remember, though, that this was by no means a new direction in American antisemitism. In his study of American Jewish Committee leader Louis Marshall, Morton Rosenstock observed that “In America, the Protocols reinforced the anti-Jewish stereotype that already stressed the international, conspiratorial, immoral, and Mammon-driven Jewish nature.”131 With financial assistance from the American Defense Society (ADS)—an organization John Higham called “the very quintessence of 100 per cent Americanism”—an American edition of The Protocols appeared in August 1920.132 The ADS then sent copies to its members as well as to US congressmen. A British book based on The Protocols—The Cause of World Unrest—also appeared in America, thanks to the publisher and ADS member George Haven Putnam.133 Already in February 1919, The Protocols came up during George Simons’s Senate testimony. The book, he said, “reflects a real organization.”134 “It is anti-Christian,” he continued, and it shows what this secret Jewish society has been doing in order to make a conquest of the world, and to make the Christian forces as ineffective as possible, and finally to have the whole world, if you please, in their grip.135 Rather than challenge such an incredible assertion, the Senators simply probed further. Asked if he had seen the original Protocols, Simons replied, “Yes. Some very finely educated Russian generals of note have told me that they considered this as an authentic thing, and they say the marvelous part of it is that nearly all of that is being executed under the Bolsheviki.”136 Soon, copies of The Protocols were making their way through the federal government, with at least one making it all the way to the top when fundamentalist preacher Mark Matthews sent a copy to President Wilson in 1919 in the hopes of preventing Jews from having any role in the government.137 Nowhere, however, did the notorious forgery find greater acceptance than within the army, particularly in the Military Intelligence Division. Since 1918, MID had developed a close relationship with Russian émigré and extreme antisemite Boris Brasol.138 He supplied its director, Marlborough Churchill, with a regular stream of reports containing the most fantastical, outlandish descriptions

62  An Exceptional Hatred? of conspiracies run by “International Jewry”—reports that Churchill and others took quite seriously. He also helped provide MID with a copy of The Protocols as early as 1918, and by late summer 1920 he published The Protocols and World Revolution, in which he “proved” that “international Jewry” was, in fact, operating a worldwide conspiracy.139 And MID could not get enough. In late summer and early fall 1920, officials across the country received copies. MID also received a request for copies from its military attaché in Switzerland, Col. William Godson. “I am following it up as best I can,” he explained, referring to the “Jewish Question,” “and this information from America may give me leads to follow up. I am so thoroughly convinced of the reality of a Jewish movement to dominate the world that I hate to leave a stone unturned.”140 It is important to remember that Godson, like Marlborough Churchill, was a seasoned intelligence officer, one of the department’s most “impressive,” according to the official MID history.141 The fact that someone like that could not only believe such fantasies but also feel comfortable expressing himself so openly is quite revealing of the Army’s extraordinary embrace of radical antisemitism. Such paranoid fantasies, however, would not only circulate among army officers. Beginning in 1920, they were broadcast across the country by one of the most famous and respected men in America. In 1919, automobile magnate Henry Ford purchased a small local newspaper called The Dearborn Independent in Michigan. On May 22, 1920, there appeared a front-page article titled “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” It marked the start of one of the most intense, widespread, and long-lasting antisemitic campaigns in American history. Articles detailing the dangers allegedly posed by the “International Jew” continued to appear until January  14, 1922—ninety-one consecutive issues. More articles appeared again beginning in November 1922 and continuing until 1925.142 Though it began as a small local paper, under Ford’s ownership circulation rose from 70,000 to 300,000 copies and peaked at 700,000, making it the country’s second largest newspaper.143 As impressive as those numbers appear, they fail to capture the full reach of Ford’s radical antisemitism. He also had the articles published in four volumes titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which were ultimately translated into sixteen languages, including an edition published by the father of German antisemitism, Theodor Fritsch. It went through six editions between 1920 and 1922. Estimates of total publishing numbers range from several hundred thousand up to ten million.144 In the United States, Ford produced reprints of 200,000 each. According to Norman Cohn, “The International Jew probably did more than any other work to make the Protocols famous.”145 And in doing so, it worked the image of the diabolical, un-American Jew even further into the national culture. Whether through The Dearborn Independent or The International Jew, Henry Ford introduced Americans to The Protocols—a document the newspaper described as “too terribly real for fiction, too well-sustained for speculation, too deep in its knowledge of the secret springs of life for forgery.”146 As a

An Exceptional Hatred? 63 result, they learned of a group with seemingly unlimited power, a people who holds the fate of nations—the fate of the world, in fact—in the palm of its hand. It can make war, it can make peace; it can command anarchy in stubborn cases, it can restore order. It holds the sinews of world power in its hand and it apportions them among the nations in such ways as will best support its plans.147 Those plans go back at least to World War I, which provided the opportunity to establish a “Jewish dictatorship” in the United States.148 Of course, Woodrow Wilson continued to serve as president, but he “delegated great power to Jews and to Jew-controlled Gentiles. He counseled continually with a secret cabinet of Jews.”149 This “Jewish government” had Trotsky released from custody so he could return to Russia and “fulfill his appointed task.”150 From this and other “facts,” “The conclusion . . . is irresistible, that the Bolshevik revolution was a carefully groomed investment on the part of International Jewish Finance.”151 Ford’s readers learned all the angles involved in the plot against America. Through “sport clothes” or jazz, Jews sought to corrupt America’s youth. On the stage, they replaced the “American feel” with “a dark, Oriental atmosphere.”152 Film, too, had become foreign. “The whole secret of the movies’ moral failure,” it declared, was due to the fact that “they are not American and their producers are racially unqualified to reproduce the American atmosphere. An influence which is racially, morally and idealistically foreign to America has been given the powerful projecting force of the motion picture business.”153 While several years’ worth of articles contains too many examples to include here, the nature of Ford’s antisemitism should still be clear. What, then, was its significance? While there was vocal opposition among prominent Americans, particularly in the larger urban areas, Ford’s paper found acceptance to varying degrees among many in the country. Feeling the effects of a changing America and agricultural decline, these Americans could hear echoes of late-nineteenthcentury Populism in Ford’s descriptions of the “International Jew.”154 As John Higham noted, “the anti-Jewish campaign excited nation-wide attention and met with much sotto voce approval.”155 In The Century Magazine, Herbert Gibbons wrote how “scarcely a day passes that someone does not write to me that the Jews are plotting to control the world.”156 But this should not be as surprising as it might sound. After all, though it represented some of the most extreme expressions of antisemitism in history, many of the images and tropes found in the Independent were already familiar to one degree or another to many Americans from before the war. In cautioning his readers not to dismiss Ford’s campaign as silly or insignificant, Gibbons observed, “if the minds of the American people were not ready for what the Dearborn ‘Independent’ has asserted, Mr. Ford’s ‘International Jew’ would have been laughed out of existence in the same way Mr. Ford’s peace ship was.”157

64  An Exceptional Hatred? And it would be wrong, as well, to dismiss the believers as being limited to small-town rubes and uneducated farmers seeing their way of life being left behind. The culture of antisemitism in America was of such a breadth and depth that receptivity to the ideas being spewed weekly by the Independent likely extended well beyond that segment of society. As Horace Kallen observed in The Nation in 1923, How many thousands of essentially free minds succumbed to it [antisemitism] when inundated at the expense of Henry Ford with floods of antiSemitic literature—forgeries so clumsy, inventions and lies so palpable that, with any other people as their theme, they would have been thrown into the waste-basket with a laugh! But because the Jews were their theme scores of friends and acquaintances of high intelligence, liberal spirit, radical interests and association have asked me, troubled, whether there could really not be anything in it.158 And beyond the fact of an already-existing antisemitic culture, there’s an additional dimension we need to remember when assessing the significance of Ford and American antisemitism, and that involves the man himself, and his place in the American and international consciousness. Henry Ford, after all, was one of the most famous, if not the most famous, and admired men in the country—far more famous in his own country than any major antisemite in Germany during the same period. In fact, it’s reasonable to say that he was even more popular in Germany than any domestic antisemite of the time. When Hitler’s Völkischer Beobachter was reaching a circulation of approximately 30,000 on the eve of his failed putsch in late 1923, for example, Ford’s paper was climbing through the hundreds of thousands.159 And whereas Hitler was at best a regional political figure at the time, Ford occupied a place on the national political stage. He nearly won a Senate seat without giving a single speech, and he was considered a serious candidate for President. In 1923, when Collier’s polled some 260,000 voters, more than one-third chose Ford as their man—a strikingly similar percentage to that which Hitler received nearly ten years later.160 In doing so, Leo Ribuffo notes how “They overlooked, if they did not endorse, his personal peculiarities, repression of labor, and sponsorship of anti-Semitism.”161 In other words, whether or not they shared Ford’s radical antisemitism, or shared it to the same degree, the knowledge of his extreme intolerance was not enough to make him unacceptable in their eyes, as could be said of many Germans who cast their ballots for Hitler and the Nazis in 1932. Ford therefore posed a danger that could not go unchallenged. The American Jewish Committee quickly fought back against this rising tide of antisemitism. At a meeting attended by all the major American Jewish organizations, Louis Marshall presented his own answer to the charges—a document to be released in December 1920 and published in major newspapers from coast to coast. “The ‘Protocols’, Bolshevism, and the Jews: An Address to Their Fellow-Citizens by American Jewish Organizations” garnered a

An Exceptional Hatred? 65 generally positive reception in the press. The AJC spent $10,000 to send some 250,000 copies in pamphlet form to prominent and influential figures across the country.162 But it was an uphill struggle. As Henry Feingold noted, “such counterpropaganda hardly neutralized the deluge of anti-Semitic publications warning of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.”163 Contributing to this deluge was America’s premier nationalist organization of the interwar period, the Ku Klux Klan. Reborn in 1915, it grew dramatically after the war, eventually achieving a membership of some five million. Undoubtedly, the Klan’s message, if not its manner, appealed to many millions more. With its targets now including not just African Americans, but Jews, Catholics, and immigrants generally, it was tapping into a rich vein of popular American intolerance in the postwar period. As H. L. Mencken put it, “the Klan was just what it pretended to be, an order devoted to the ideals most Americans held sacred.”164 Though Jews were not the sole focus of its hate, the organization forcefully promoted an image of 100 percent Americanism that was unquestionably white, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon. In America, the place of Jews was clear. According to Klan leader Hiram Evans, the Jews would always remain “a people apart.”165 In newspapers and speeches, the Klan placed the Jew clearly outside the boundaries of the American national community. But they were not only outsiders. They were, as Klan lecturer Samuel Campbell put it, “a national danger.”166 To the Klan, the Jews were actively working to undermine the country. Through culture, they used their “control” of the entertainment industry to “destroy the morals of the world.”167 Alma White complained of Jewish ownership of dance halls and department stores, their involvement in white slavery, as well as their employment of young, white Protestant women whom they could corrupt. The Jewish-controlled fashion industry sold women on increasingly revealing styles of dress.168 The Klan was also particularly concerned with the film industry, and again here, in the sense of Mencken’s observation, they also expressed only what much of America was already thinking. As Howard Brackman noted, “The Jewish movie producer, identified as a moral lecher who debauched innocent Christian girls much as Leo Frank was supposed to have corrupted Mary Fagan before he killed her, became a perfect symbol of Jazz Age decadence.”169 The Klan feared that “Hollywood Jews,” aided by Catholics, were using this most powerful media of the day to corrupt and ultimately destroy American culture. A 1924 pamphlet criticizing “sex plays” being produced by Paramount Pictures was titled “Jew Movies urging sex vice: Rome and Judah at work to pollute young America.”170 In 1925, the American Standard published an article about the establishment of the Federal Motion Picture Council of America under the headline, “Patriots make War on Jew Movies.” It told how “The poisonous flood of filthy Jewish suggestion, which has been paralyzing the moral sense of America’s children is going to be swept into the ocean,” along with “the rat-like anti-Christians who are responsible for this condition.”171 There were still other ways they saw Jews as fundamentally apart from the nation.

66  An Exceptional Hatred? Following the lead of Henry Ford and The Protocols, not to mention prewar American antisemites, the Klan depicted Jewish finance as a key element in the fight against Christian America. “The Jew,” Leroy Curry wrote, “has a monopoly on the monetary system of the commercial world,” and he follows the “doctrine that money is more powerful than the character of the nation.”172 Members of the Klan in Athens, Georgia heard how Jews “get rich and prosper off of what they make by cheating and swindling the Americans.”173 This opposition between “Jew” and “American” they made still more concrete by linking Jewish finance with Bolshevism to produce the “Jewish Bolshevik.” “Bolshevism,” warned the Imperial Night Hawk, “is a Jewish-controlled and Jewish-financed movement in its entirety.”174 Probably, none summed it up better than Reuben Sawyer, a leading figure in the Oregon Klan during the early 1920s, when he declared, Jews are either bolshevists, undermining our government, or are shylocks in finance or commerce who gain control and command of Christians as borrowers or employers. It is repugnant to a true American to be bossed by a sheenie. And in some parts of America the Kikes are so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk on the sidewalk. And where they are so thick, it is bolshevism they are talking, bolshevism, and revolution.175 What to do in the face of such an all-powerful threat? According to Georgia’s Grand Dragon, teaching “American nationalism” was needed to ward off the challenge of “Cosmopolitanism advocated by International Jewry.”176 By 1924, Germany entered a period of relative calm. The previous five years had seen extraordinary turmoil, including a lost war, a revolution, political violence, foreign invasion, and economic collapse. Now, however, the economy began to stabilize, diplomatic tensions were easing, and the country’s radical political forces were in full retreat. Adolf Hitler, for example, would spend most of 1924 in prison after his failed Putsch attempt. With Hitler out of the picture, the Nazis and the antisemitic right in general were in disarray. The possibility that Hitler could ever return and lead it to prominence, much less become Chancellor, appeared unlikely. Without Hitler there would have been no Holocaust. Without the Holocaust, how would scholars today assess the history of antisemitism in Germany? How different would antisemitism look from that found in other countries? Would it be seen as having been exceptional in any way? Certainly, there were more extreme examples during the period under investigation here, including Poland and Russia. There were also countries that are commonly believed to have been much more benign in terms of their antisemitism, like the United States. But is that what we really find when, as in this chapter, we place it side by side with Germany? By 1924, America also entered a period of relative calm. The immediate postwar years had seen a significant economic recession, violent labor unrest, horrific race riots, a red scare, and political violence directed at the highest

An Exceptional Hatred? 67 levels of government. But now many of these problems were fading and more prosperous years were on the horizon. And yet, unlike in Germany, America was still in the midst of an extraordinarily intense antisemitic campaign. Henry Ford’s newspaper was only now reaching its peak circulation numbers, becoming America’s second largest. The country’s biggest radical nationalist and racist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, was still going strong, with membership in the millions and political influence at all levels of government. The nation’s elite universities had succeeded in severely limiting the admission of Jewish students, while businesses were shutting Jews out from many areas of employment. Residential discrimination through housing covenants was reaching its greatest extent, establishing entirely “Jew-free” neighborhoods, while social and resort antisemitism produced similarly “Jew-free” recreational areas to an extent well beyond what would be seen in Germany until after 1933.177 And, finally, after years of antisemitic rhetoric, Congress passed the most sweeping immigration restriction legislation in American history, all but closing the door to further Jewish arrivals.178 Of course, we know the United States did not embark on a murderous campaign against the Jews. And that, I believe, has colored our understanding of antisemitism in American history, making it appear less dangerous than it actually was. Looking forward, not back through the distorting lens of the Holocaust, the future did not look nearly so promising for the country’s Jews. And Louis Marshall (at least at certain moments) recognized this. In a letter written shortly after immigration restriction passed he wrote, The people of this country need considerable education in humaneness and in common charity. . . . The step between civilization and bestiality is a very short one. . . . It is a pernicious state of mind on the part of bigots, fanatics, and uneducated and partly educated ignoramuses, with which the Jews have been confronted for many centuries. . . . Even if they should apologize they would remain unregenerate and would be only looking for another opportunity to vent their spleen.179 And he was correct. This particular antisemitic wave in America may have crested, but there was another, larger one still to come. In the early 1920s, John Spargo wrote, “There is no reason for believing that here in the United States we possess a special immunity from the worst forms of anti-Semitism.”180 Indeed, when we look at antisemitic rhetoric in both countries after the war, we see little difference when it comes to the radical, chimerical form exemplified by the idea of an “international Jewish conspiracy.” Both countries “imported” The Protocols from Russia. Both antisemitic cultures were already prepared to the extent that the ideas contained in the infamous forgery could be accepted to one degree or another by segments of both populations. Both countries experienced extensive campaigns of extreme antisemitism in the public sphere. While the organized political element—in terms of

68  An Exceptional Hatred? parties and organizations—was more developed and more violent in Germany than in the United States, the organization that did exist to promote an image of the Jew as an un-American, anti-Christian, international subversive—the Ku Klux Klan—had a membership that dwarfed that of all such organizations in Germany combined. And unlike the men who pushed the idea of an “international Jewish conspiracy” in Germany—men who, at this point, were still mainly marginal figures, with small regional bases of support—America’s biggest promoter of radical antisemitism was one of the most famous men in the country (and an inspiration for Hitler). As Theodore Roosevelt warned, “Many, many persons hardly as ignorant as Ford think him wise in all things and allow him to influence their views.”181 Looking ahead, the ground prepared by Ford, Hitler, and others would prove even more accepting of anti-Jewish hatred than the decade that ended in 1923. And while antisemitism in Germany after 1933 would far surpass the United States (and all other countries as well), it is important to keep in mind that without the particular conditions of the late 1920s and early 1930s—namely, a second major economic crisis combined with horrible and unnecessary decisions made by a small group of elites—Hitler likely would not have reemerged as he did, and would almost certainly not have come close to the chancellor’s office. And if that were the case, antisemitism in twentieth-century Germany and America would not appear to have been particularly exceptional after all.

Notes 1 Simons quoted in Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, II, The Impact of the 1919–1920 Red Scare on American Life (New York, 1974), 159. 2 Marshall quoted in Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, II, 160. 3 See, for example, Steven T. Katz, ed., Why Is America Different? American Jewry on Its 350th Anniversary (Lanham, MD, 2010). Tony Michels challenges that position in, “Is America ‘Different?’ A Critique of American Jewish Exceptionalism,” American Jewish History, Vol. 96 (September 2011): 201–224; on the trend toward a more critical approach, see Britt P. Tevis, “Trends in the Study of Antisemitism in United States History,” American Jewish History, Vol. 105 (January/April 2021): 255–284. 4 Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore, 1992), 238. 5 Dieter Gosewinkel wrote that the “Polish Question” “represented by far the most significant nationality conflict in the German Empire.” Dieter Gosewinkel, Einbürgern und Ausschließen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Göttingen, 2001), 263. 6 Michael B. Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor, 2004), 3 [Emphasis mine]. 7 John Higham, “Ideological Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age,” in Higham, ed., Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. (Baltimore, 1984), 109. 8 Jonathan Sarna, “American Anti-Semitism,” in David Berger, ed., History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia, 1986, 1997), 124. 9 Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933 (Detroit, 2003), 120.

An Exceptional Hatred? 69 10 Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven, 1975); in the case of Prussia, see Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge, 2006), 586. 11 For the challenges posed for Jews by the place of Christianity in America, see Naomi W. Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York, 1992). 12 David A. Gerber, “Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations in American Historiography and the American Past,” in Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana, 1986), 15. 13 On anti-Jewish violence and the police (lack of) response, see Stephen Norwood, “ ‘American Jewish Muscle:’ Forging a New Masculinity in the Streets and in the Ring, 1890–1940,” Modern Judaism, Vol. 29, No. 2 (May 2009): 167–193. 14 Avraham Barkai, “Wehr Dich!” Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, 1893–1938 (Munich, 202), 56–57; Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 1969), 516. 15 Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 516. 16 Pulzer, Jews and the German State, 196–197. 17 Brian E. Crim, Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response, 1914–1938 (Lanham, MD, 2014), 8. 18 The Bavarian and Saxon armies promoted Jews to reserve officer status until the turn of the century: Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 31–33. 19 Martin Kitchen, The German Officer Corps, 1890–1914 (London, 1968), 37–38. 20 Barkai, “Wehr Dich!”, 57; Michael Geheran, “Rethinking Jewish Front Experiences,” in Jason Crouthamel, Michael Geheran, Tim Grady, and Julia Barbara Köhne, eds., Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe (New York, 2019), 131–133. 21 Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 516. 22 Robert L. Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge, 2011), 229. 23 Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers, 232. 24 Nelson, German Soldier Newspapers, 232. 25 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000), 119–120. 26 Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life, 498. 27 Helmut Berding, Moderner Antisemitismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt a. M., 1988), 172–173. 28 Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, 2000), 132. 29 Chickering, The Great War and Urban Life, 498. 30 See, for example, Geheran, “Rethinking Jewish Front Experiences,” 111–143; Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton, 2013). 31 Werner Jochmann, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus in Deutschland 1914– 1923,” in Jochmann, ed., Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland 1870–1945 (Hamburg, 1988), 109; Berding, Moderner Antisemitismus, 168. 32 Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 531. 33 Rathenau quoted in Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 550. 34 Berding, Moderner Antisemitismus, 176. 35 Gebsattel quoted in Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 558–559. 36 Wilson quoted in David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (Oxford, 1980, 2004), 11–12; see also, William H. Thomas, Jr., Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent (Madison, 2008), 19–20.

70  An Exceptional Hatred? 37 Kennedy, Over Here, 24. 38 Thomas, Jr., Unsafe for Democracy, 21. 39 Kennedy, Over Here, 20, 22, 24, 41. 40 Morton Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, Defender of Jewish Rights (Detroit, 1965), 102–103; Wise quoted in Richard Slotkin, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York, 2005), 88. 41 Quoted in Michael N. Dubkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT, 1979), 221. 42 Christopher M. Sterba, Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants During the First World War (Oxford, 2003), 73. 43 Zosa Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism. Vol. 1. The Attitude of American Jews to World War I, the Russian Revolutions of 1917, and Communism (1914– 1945) (New York, 1972), 343. 44 Sterba, Good Americans, 73. 45 Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, I, 345. 46 Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, 156. 47 Life quoted in Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, 221. 48 Sterba, Good Americans, 28–29; Dunne quoted in Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, 222. 49 Charles Edward Woodruff, Expansion of Races (New York, 1909), 384. 50 Woodruff, Expansion of Races, 386. 51 Weeks quoted in Dobkowski, Tarnished Dream, 155. 52 Joseph W. Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S. Army (New York, 2000), 38, 100. 53 Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism. Vol. 1, 347. 54 Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”, xv. 55 Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”, 26–29. 56 Quoted in Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 75. 57 Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 74–75. 58 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 106; Naomi Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee 1906–1966 (Philadelphia, 1972), 100; Marshall quoted in Szajkowski, Jews, Wars, and Communism, 348. 59 Bamberg Declaration quoted in Barry A. Jackisch, The Pan-German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in Interwar Germany, 1918–1939 (Burlington, 2012), 21. 60 Wolfgang Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, translated by Elborg Forster (Chapel Hill, 1996), 157. 61 Kunze also sold truncheons at his speaking engagements. See Barkai, “Wehr Dich!”, 106–107. 62 Berding, Moderner Antisemitismus, 190. 63 Otto Arnim, Die Juden im Heere: Eine statistische Untersuchung nach amtlichen Quellen (Munich, 1919); Otto Arnim, Die Juden in den Kriegs-Gesellschaften und in der Kriegswirtschaft (Munich, 1921). 64 Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (hereafter BArch Berlin) R 8034 II/1484: Deutsches Wochenblatt, December 24, 1919. 65 BArch Berlin R 8034 II/1484: Deutsches Wochenblatt, December 24, 1919. 66 Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford, 2009), 65–72. 67 BArch Berlin R 8034 II/1485: Flugblatt, “Wohnungsnot und Juden-Einwanderung,” Deutsche Erneuerungs-Gemeinde, February 1920. 68 Mumm quoted in, BArch Berlin R 8034 II/1484: 166–167, Correspondenz der deutschnationalen Volkspartei, December 31, 1919. 69 BArch Berlin R 8034 II/1484: Deutsche Tageszeitung, December 10, 1919; BArch R 8034 II/1485: Flugblatt, “Wohnungsnot und Juden-Einwanderung.”

An Exceptional Hatred? 71 70 “Deutschland den Ostjuden!” Völkischer Beobachter, January 11, 1922. 71 Annemarie Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914– 1922 (Ithaca, 2010), 169. 72 Wilhelm Meister (Paul Bang), Judas Schuldbuch. Eine deutsche Abrechnung (München, 1919). 73 Bang, Judas Schulbuch, 11; Völkischer Beobachter, March 20, 1921. 74 BArch Berlin R 8034 II/1483: Flugblatt, “Von der Hohenzollern- zur Judenherrschaft.” 75 BArch Berlin R 8034 II/1483: DNVP Flugblatt, “Die Juden – Deutschlands Vampyre,” (1919). 76 BArch Berlin R 8034 II/1483: DNVP Flugblatt, “Die Partei des Judentums,” (1919). 77 Walter Liek, “Der Anteil des Judentums an dem Zusammenbruch Deutschlands,” Deutschlands Erneuerung, Vol. I (1919): 29–41. 78 BArch Berlin R 8034 II/1483: Flugblatt, “Deutschland in Judennot!” (1919). 79 BArch Berlin R 8034 II/1483: Deutsch-Völkische Blätter, April 4, 1919. 80 Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000), 210. 81 Brian Crim, Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response (Lanham, MD, 2014), 19. 82 Groener quoted in Crim, Antisemitism in the German Military Community, 19. 83 Rosenberg quoted in, Kai-Uwe Merz, Das Schreckbild: Deutschland und der Bolschewismus, 1917 bis 1921 (Berlin, 1995), 437. 84 Eckart quoted in Merz, Das Schreckbild, 440. 85 On their background, including the false assumption that Levien was Jewish, see Michael Brenner, In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism (Princeton, 2022), 66, 86–88. 86 Mommsen, Rise and Fall, 47–48. 87 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York, 1998), 116. 88 Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London, 1967, 1996), 138–163. 89 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 151. 90 Even the Pan-German Konstantin von Gebsattel had his doubts. In a letter to Heinrich Claß on March 7, 1919, he wrote, “Whether it is a fake or not—in any case it corresponds to reality.” Quoted in Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus: die Geschichte des Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutz-Bundes, 1919–1923 (Hamburg, 1970), 394, fn. 8. 91 Barkai, Wehr Dich! 117. 92 David Clay Large, “ ‘Out with the Ostjuden’: The Scheunenviertal Riots in Berlin, November 1923,” in Christard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds., Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History (Ann Arbor, 2002), 126. 93 Barkai, Wehr Dich! 104. 94 Uwe Lohalm, Völkischer Radikalismus: die Geschichte des Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutz-Bundes, 1919–1923 (Hamburg, 1970), 203–210. 95 Martin Sabrow, Die verdrängte Verschwörung: Der Rathenau-Mord und die deutsche Gegenrevolution (Frankfurt, 1998), 30. 96 Mitteldeutsche Presse quoted in Sabrow, Die verdrängte Verschwörung, 30. 97 Ian Kershaw noted that after the second Reichstag elections of 1924, “the völkisch Right had by then been all but obliterated as a serious factor in German politics.” Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 223. 98 Quoted in Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews (Princeton, 2001), 16. 99 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York, 1925), 69. 100 Wilson quoted in Kennedy, Over Here, 82.

72  An Exceptional Hatred? 101 Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (New York, 1994), 279. 102 William T. Hornaday, Awake! America. Object Lessons and Warnings (New York, 1918), 106–107. 103 Hornaday, Awake! America, 107. 104 E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (New Haven, 1987 (1964)), 200–201; Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, 2006), 125, 137. 105 In numerous articles ostensibly addressing immigration generally, Jews are often the only group specified by name. See, for example, “Immigration and the Next Administration,” The World’s Work, Vol. 40 (1922). 106 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 278. 107 “Additional State Department Reports Concerning Immigration,” December 11, 1920, 4561–4562. 108 Carr quoted in, Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, 2006), 246. 109 Gibson quoted in Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat.” Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S. Army, 96. 110 Kenneth Roberts, Why Europe Leaves Home (New York, 1977, 1922), 15. 111 Burton Hendrick, “The Jews in America. III. The ‘Menace’ of the Polish Jew,” The World’s Work, 367. 112 Hendrick, “The Jews in America. III,” 368. 113 Burton Hendrick, “Radicalism Among the Polish Jews,” The World’s Work, 594. His subtitle: “Their Destructive Political Activities as Shown in Their Newspapers, Their Votes, and Their Labor Unions.” 114 Hendrick, “Radicalism,” 601. 115 “Jews From America in the Bolshevik Hierarchy,” Literary Digest, March 1, 1919. 116 “The Bolsheviki, Who They Are and What They Believe,” The World’s Work, October 1918, 621. 117 “Bolshevik Propaganda,” Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate, Sixty-Fifth Congress, Third Session, February 11, 1919 to March 10, 1919, 113. 118 “Bolshevik Propaganda,” 114. 119 “Bolshevik Propaganda,” 115. 120 “Bolshevik Propaganda,” 115. 121 Examples can be found in, “Bolshevik Propaganda,” 207, 254–255, 269. 122 Letter from Marshall, February 15, 1919, in “Bolshevik Propaganda,” 379. [Emphasis mine] 123 A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the Reds,” Forum, Vol. LXII, No. 2 (February 1920): 175. 124 Wilson quoted in Szajkowski, Jews, War, and Communism, II, 153. 125 Dunn quoted in, Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”, 133. 126 Gibson quoted in Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”, 154. 127 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 279. 128 Tribune quoted in Szajkowski, Jews, War, and Communism, II, 149. 129 John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York, 1975), 281. 130 Robert Singerman, “The American Career of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” American Jewish History, Vol. LXXI (September 1981): 48–78. 131 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 127. 132 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 281. 133 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 281.

An Exceptional Hatred? 73 134 135 136 137

“Bolshevik Propaganda,” 135. “Bolshevik Propaganda,” 136. “Bolshevik Propaganda,” 137. Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 126. 138 Bendersky, The Jewish Threat, 54–61. 139 Bendersky, The Jewish Threat, 141. 140 Godson quoted in Bendersky, The Jewish Threat, 141–142. [Emphasis mine] 141 Bendersky, The Jewish Threat, 85. 142 Leo Ribuffo, “Henry Ford and The International Jew,” American Jewish History, Vol. 4 (June 1980): 444–447. 143 Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 81. 144 Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York, 1998), 144–146; Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York, 1980), 14, fn. 37; Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 152. 145 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 145. 146 “Does a Jewish World Program Exist? An Introduction to Documents Which Are Now Being Circulated as the Jewish World Program,” Dearborn Independent, July 10, 1920. 147 Ford, “Germany’s Reaction Against the Jew,” The International Jew, Vol. I (May 29, 1920): 26. 148 “Jewish Dictatorship of the United States During War,” Dearborn Independent, December 4, 1920. 149 “Jewish Dictatorship of the United States During War.” 150 “Jewish Testimony in Favor of Bolshevism,” Dearborn Independent, October 2, 1920. 151 “Jewish Testimony in Favor of Bolshevism.” 152 Ford, “Jewish Control of the American Theater,” The International Jew, Vol. II: 89. 153 Ford, “The Jewish Aspect of the Movie Problem,” The International Jew, Vol. II: 125–126. 154 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 148. 155 Higham, Strangers in the Land, 285. 156 Herbert Adams Gibbons, “The Jewish Problem: Its Relation to American Ideals and Interests,” The Century Magazine, 1921. 157 Gibbons, “The Jewish Problem.” 158 Horace M. Kallen, “The Roots of Anti-Semitism,” The Nation, Vol. 116, February 28, 1923. 159 Oron Hale, The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton, 1964), 30. 160 Ford defeated Warren Harding 88,865 to 51,000 in a straw poll by Collier’s Weekly in July 1923. Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews, 8. 161 Ribuffo, “Henry Ford and The International Jew,” 477. 162 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall: Defender of Jewish Rights, 161–164. 163 Feingold, A Time for Searching, 7. [Emphasis mine] 164 Mencken quoted in, Feingold, A Time for Searching, 3. 165 Evans quoted in, Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill, 1991), 20–21. 166 Curry quoted in, Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1994), 137. 167 Reverend Dr. Samuel Campbell quoted in, Shawn Lay, Hooded Knights on the Niagara: The Ku Klux Klan in Buffalo, New York (New York, 1995), 47. 168 Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley, 1991), 75.

74  An Exceptional Hatred? 169 Howard Brackman, “The Attack on ‘Jewish Hollywood’: A Chapter in the History of Modern American Anti-Semitism,” Modern Judaism, Vol. 20, No. 1 (February 2000): 4. 170 Tom Rice, “Protecting Protestantism: The Ku Klux Klan vs. the Motion Picture Industry,” Film History, Vol. 20, No. 3, Studio Systems (2008): 371. 171 Rice, “Protecting Protestantism,” 374. 172 Curry quoted in, MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 136. 173 MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 136. 174 MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 137. 175 Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement (Chapel Hill, 1994), 25. 176 MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 138. 177 Antero Pietala, Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (Chicago, 2010); Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 84–93; Frank Bajohr, ‘Unser Hotel ist judenfrei’: Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 2003). 178 In 1922, Burton Hendrick wrote, “Congress has passed and the President has signed an immigration law chiefly intended – it is just as well to be frank about the matter – to restrict the entrance of Jews from eastern Europe.” Hendrick, The Jews in America, 2. 179 Marshall quoted in Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 238. 180 Spargo quoted in Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 150, fn. 42. 181 Roosevelt quoted in Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, 145, fn. 39.

4 The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism Comparing Coverage of the “World Jewish Conspiracy” in the Völkischer Beobachter and the Dearborn Independent, 1920–1923 Not long after the close of World War I, a story appeared in a small newspaper warning of the danger posed by the “International Jew.” Further stories continued to appear every week for the next two years, each dealing with particular aspects of the “world Jewish conspiracy.” In a time marked by frustration over recent involvement in the war, economic crisis, and fears of a Bolshevik takeover fueled by recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, the paper’s circulation grew dramatically, from 72,000 copies per week to a high of 700,000 by 1924, making it the nation’s second largest newspaper. This campaign was not, however, directed by the political agitator Adolf Hitler through his Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter in Germany, but rather, by the automobile magnate Henry Ford through the Dearborn Independent, published just outside Detroit, Michigan, in the United States. The immediate postwar environment provides a valuable opportunity to study antisemitism in the press from a comparative and transnational perspective— in particular, the period from 1920, when Ford began his campaign and the Nazis purchased the Völkischer Beobachter, through 1923, and the failure of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch. In seeking to compare antisemitism in the press of both countries, this chapter will focus in particular, on the idea of a “world Jewish conspiracy” and how each paper described and understood this phenomenon. In the end, it will argue that placing these two papers side by side within their particular historical context reveals a far greater realm of commonality between the two than one might anticipate and a far more dangerous culture of antisemitism in the United States than is generally assumed. Both Germans and Americans experienced the period immediately following World War I as years of uncertainty and crisis. The war itself heightened a sense of nationalism in both countries and with it, a greater suspicion directed toward the “other.” If things went further in Germany with the Army’s infamous “Jew Count” of 1916, similar accusations of shirking and profiteering were heard in America during and after the war (and such assumptions regarding Jewish behavior, and its basis in racial makeup, became deeply embedded in certain sections of the American military).1 A serious recession in the United States and a growing problem of inflation in Germany added economic concerns to the mix. And after 1917, a new threat arose for both countries in DOI: 10.4324/9781003266372-5

76  The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism the form of a potential Bolshevik takeover. Bourgeois Germans experienced the horror of the Bolshevik Räterrepublik (Councils Republic) in Munich in 1919. Americans had their first Red Scare, including left-wing terrorism in New York City, and then the curtailment of civil liberties not only by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer but also by local efforts to exclude anyone who smacked of leftist tendencies. In both cases, the concern was with un-German/ un-American influences, particularly in the form of recent Eastern European, Jewish immigrants. What the two nations also shared was a particular aspect of political culture—a political “style,” which Richard Hofstadter has called “the paranoid style.” Of primary concern to the practitioners of the paranoid style is “a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life.”2 The operative word here is “vast,” for the political paranoiac does not simply see plots or conspiracies here and there, but rather, conspiracy is “the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy.”3 The conflict, then, is seen to be for the ultimate stakes, all or nothing, to be fought with all means and to the bitter end. Compromise is unacceptable. The paranoid style, however, is not ever-present. It is dependent upon circumstances. “Catastrophe,” Hofstadter suggests, “or the fear of catastrophe is most likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric.”4 It was in just such an atmosphere—postwar uncertainty, economic dislocation, and political subversion—that there was introduced into both countries an additional, explosive ingredient. Though its origins pre-dated World War I, it was only after the conflict that the infamous forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion made its first significant impact.5 Purported to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders discussing their ongoing plans to control the world through the undermining of Western, Christian civilization, the text provided all the evidence needed to confirm for the political paranoiac the reality of all of his or her worst fears. Carried along by White Russian émigrés, The Protocols made their way westward across Europe to Germany and ultimately to the United States where they first circulated in manuscript form until published in numerous editions. While they would provide valuable “evidence” and therefore support for antisemites in both Germany and the United States, The Protocols certainly did not introduce antisemitism in either country. In fact, Henry Ford’s antisemitic campaign in the Dearborn Independent began before its writers had even seen a copy. It was the combination of the pre-existing American antisemitism with the “confirmation” and further revelations provided by The Protocols that made Ford’s campaign so noteworthy and so dangerous. And the ease with which the two could come together is quite revealing as to the nature and the significance of the anti-Jewish prejudice in the United States. Henry Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent, a small weekly newspaper, in 1919 in order to get his ideas across without what he considered the distortion of other possible (in other words “Jewish”) channels. Though he discussed the topic of Jews with those around him, it would not be until

The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism 77 the middle of May the following year before the first article solely devoted to the topic appeared. The Independent’s first editor, E. G. Pipp, appears to have resisted, and then ultimately resigned once it was clear that the issue would in fact be aired. The writing would mainly be done by his successor, William J. Cameron. Materials for the articles came from a variety of sources, including detectives based in New York City and a number of former officers from the Army’s Military Intelligence Division (which was also obsessed with the “Jewish Question” and The Protocols at this time). The first article appeared on May 22, 1920, with the bold headline, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” In addition, the paper also included “Jewish World Notes” as a regular feature. The campaign would continue until January 14, 1922—91 consecutive issues—and then, after a short break, the paper resumed publishing articles on the “Jewish Question” in November 1922 and continued until 1925.6 The Independent certainly framed the “Jewish Question” as a world problem. Early on it described the Jew as “the world’s enigma.”7 “Poor in his masses,” it continued, he yet controls the world’s finances. Scattered abroad without country or government, he yet presents a unity of race continuity which no other people has achieved. Living under legal disabilities in almost every land, he has become the power behind many a throne.8 The Jew directs a “super-capitalism” and a “super-government.”9 At the same time, “the socially and economically disruptive elements abroad in the world today are not only manned but also moneyed by Jewish interests.”10 It controls and shapes the news that the people of the world consume and therefore how they think.11 It can make war, it can make peace; it can command anarchy in stubborn cases, it can restore order. It holds the sinews of world power in its hand and it apportions them among the nations in such ways as will best support its plans.12 But if the Jew was the world’s problem, it was also a cause of concern much closer to home. Much of the coverage in The Dearborn Independent involved the danger Jews posed for America specifically. From one week to the next, the reader would learn how the Jew controlled most of big business in the United States, the trusts and the banks, the country’s natural resources, its chief agricultural products, journalism and most publications, property, the theater and film, most major department stores, immigration, industrial relations, as well as New York City itself (through its control of Tammany Hall), and even, during World War I, the government of the United States (through Bernard Baruch, described as “the Jewish high governor of the United States in war affairs” or simply as dictator).13

78  The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism The Jewish danger as described in The Dearborn Independent was not simply the fact of control of resources or institutions. It was much more fundamental. The Jews posed a danger to the essence of the nation itself—what it meant to be American. From issue to issue, one is confronted with a contrast between the Jew and the American, and while there may be mention of possible assimilation, it appears to be intended more to make clear the utter impossibility of such an outcome. The sheer scope of the chasm that separated the two and the ultimate danger that the Jew represented was simply too great. Even before the founding of the country, the Jews allegedly proved themselves anti-American, as one could read about how the Rothschilds helped pay for the Hessian troops that fought against the American colonists.14 In the present day, they worked through a variety of means to corrupt American youth, whether it was “sport clothes,” movies, or jazz (“moron music rubbish”).15 “It is possible,” one reads, to take the showy young men and women of trivial outlook and loose sense of responsibility, and tag them outwardly and inwardly, from their clothing and ornaments to their hectic ideas and hopes, with the same tag, “Made, introduced and exploited by a Jew.”16 On the stage, “the American feel has gone out of the Theater,” replaced by “a dark, Oriental atmosphere.”17 Through movies too, the Jew posed a danger. Dominated as they allegedly were by the Jews, they could not effectively portray aspects of “American” life. The contrast between Jew and American as seen in film is clear, the one involving sensuousness, intrigue, and a fixation on sex, while the other involving “interior qualities of faith and quietness.” And here, according to the Independent, lies the whole secret of the movies’ moral failure: they are not American and their producers are racially unqualified to reproduce the American atmosphere. An influence which is racially, morally and idealistically foreign to America, has been given the powerful projecting force of the motion picture business.18 The contrast between American and Jew is also portrayed concretely as a regional conflict—the coast versus the rest of the country. In particular, New York City—“an unassimilated province on the outskirts of the nation”— comes in for special condemnation.19 The paper describes American cities as having become “Semite cities,” “recruiting grounds of the world’s Bolshevism,” and “the home of anti-American propaganda, of pro-Jewish hysteria, a confusion of mind that passes in some quarters as a picture of America.” But America—“real” America—is to be found further west. The lesson, then, is extreme vigilance in assessing whatever comes out of New York because “it comes from the center of that Jewish government which desires to guide and color the thoughts of the people of the United States.”20

The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism 79 Once again, the distinction between “Jew” and “American” is crystal clear, as “Jews” are seeking to direct “the people of the United States.” And what is the United States but “the property of those who share the ideals of the founders.” Ideals “fundamentally Christian” and “held by a white race of Europeans.” Ideals with which most Jews “not only disagree, but hold . . . in contempt.”21 The Jewish desire to eliminate any and all public expression of Christianity revealed the true nature of the Jew and struck at the heart of “Americanism.”22 More than a year after Henry Ford acquired The Dearborn Independent, the nascent Nazi Party purchased the Völkischer Beobachter to serve as its party organ. Unlike the Independent, however, the Völkischer Beobachter was not new to the world of antisemitism. Starting in 1887, it was renamed the Völkischer Beobachter in 1919 after having been acquired by Freiherr Rudolf von Sebottendorf, a leading figure in the Thule Society and other right-wing völkisch organizations of the period. It served as a sounding board for a variety of antisemitic groups, including the German Racial Defense and Defiance League (Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund). The young Nazi party gained controlling interest in December 1920. Initially edited by Dietrich Eckart, it would come under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg in March 1923, as it moved from a twice weekly, to a daily paper.23 Surveying the Völkischer Beobachter from the time of its acquisition by the Nazis at the very end of 1920, until the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, one finds no shortage of antisemitism, if not in the same style of presentation as with the Independent. In the sense of a sustained, consistent, thematic, weekby-week campaign against “the International Jew” like the one that marked Ford’s publication during this period, the Nazi paper does not compare. The only thing that comes close is the serialization of Alfred Rosenberg’s edition of The Protocols, which ran from July 10 through August 29, 1923. Instead, one finds a steady stream of antisemitic images and motifs that informed stories scattered throughout the paper, from blaring headlines to the smaller storylines that appeared within. In terms of the antisemitism itself, there was nothing that distinguished it in any significant way from the many other antisemitic organizations of the time in Germany, or even from what had appeared in the paper before the Nazi acquisition.24 For the Nazis, just as it was for Ford, the “Jewish Problem” was a world problem.25 One finds Jewish activities—by definition pernicious—reported on in countries across Europe and the wider world. These involved smaller nations like Hungary and Poland, or Central Europe more broadly.26 The larger countries understandably received a great deal more attention. The purported connection between Jews and Bolshevism was revealed in stories on “The Jewish Soviet Paradise” or “The Jewish Dictatorship in Russia.”27 The paranoid style revealed itself, as well, in such coverage, which often included the supposed links between such “seemingly” opposed movements as Bolshevism and Capitalism.28 In fact, one learns that Bolshevism was merely the system by which particular groups in society are stripped of their wealth for the benefit

80  The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism of international big capital and “Greater Jewry” which pulls the strings from behind the scenes.29 If Bolshevism, representing half the danger facing the world, received significant coverage, so too did the United States, as the home of international finance Capitalism. Based in many instances on information in Ford’s International Jew, the Völkischer Beobachter kept its readers up to date on “Jewish Domination in America” and the brave exploits and unjust treatment of America’s “Champion of Antisemitism,” Henry Ford.30 The Nazis described Ford as a “leading spirit” who had recognized Jewry as the source of evil. If Bolshevism in the Soviet Union served as a tool through which international Jewry could unleash its evil on the world, Freemasonry too was believed to be an additional means for the Jews to carry through their plans in the United States. There the Jewish-Masonic danger reached all the way to the highest levers of power—to President Warren Harding himself. In an article intended to show “that Harding is the single best servant of international Jewry and capitalism,” the American president was also revealed to be “recognized by international Freemasonry as the man most suited to set in motion a clamor for disarmament in order to accelerate the pan-Jewish world power plans.”31 These “world power plans”—the international Jewish conspiracy—lay at the heart of much of the coverage in the Völkischer Beobachter. Here, one finds stories on particular aspects of the Jews’ conspiratorial activities: “The Jew Press and Reparations,” “The Jews and Human Trafficking;” or the conspiracy more broadly: “The Jewish World Domination,” “The Pan-Jewish International,” “The Jewish World Syndicate,” etc. The paper also ran a number of series on the conspiracy, including Heinrich Pudor’s “International Familial Relations of Jewish High Finance.”32 Such discussions did not always make explicit mention of The Protocols. Some did, but in many cases one could see the stories having been informed by them in a general sense.33 Of course, as it did with Henry Ford, the Nazis’ interest in the “world Jewish conspiracy” involved concerns much closer to home. Much of the coverage involved the relationship between Jewish developments abroad and events in Germany. Concern regarding the “bolshevization of Germany,” “Germany’s Delivery to Jewish-International Stock Market Capital,” or German Freemasonry informed many of the stories. Not surprisingly, World War I represented a recurring theme. From the Jews’ alleged responsibility for its outbreak, to their supposed avoidance of service and profiteering during the conflict, to their rumored undermining of the German war effort and thus their contribution to German defeat through the “stab in the back,” to their purported role at the Paris Peace Conference and the production of the Treaty of Versailles—all could be found within the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter and all served as “proof” of the Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany. And an event which brought back memories of World War I—the Ruhr Crisis, with its initial feelings of national unity and the disillusionment that followed the capitulation— also resulted in a similar use of the Jew as the key to understanding the course of events. Whether it was “Jewish high finance” that brought about the

The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism 81 occupation of the Ruhr or the “stab in the back”—this time by the “September criminals”—that ended it, the Jew was the driving force.34 What do we find when we place the work of Henry Ford and his underlings alongside that of Adolf Hitler and his party comrades? Clearly, these are two virulently antisemitic newspapers. In each, the Jews are presented as a racial group. Each paper clearly displays characteristics of the “paranoid style,” portraying as they do the Jewish danger as both a threat to their own nation and at the same time part of a larger “world Jewish conspiracy.” Here, The Protocols play a similar role for both. In each case, they are depicted as real—if not in all particulars, then in the sense that they reflect the reality they see unfolding around them. “They represent the Jewish program,” one reads in the Independent from November 1920, “ideal and real, at every stage of modern history.”35 In discussing “the Jew” as some undifferentiated mass—a force of virtually unlimited power, capable of making or breaking entire civilizations, both represent examples of radical, chimeric antisemitism.36 If the antisemitism in these two papers differs little in terms of its virulence, what can be learned from this comparison? The significance lies in the broader context and what that reveals about the danger of antisemitism in both countries, and not just Germany, which one would expect. In fact, to properly assess antisemitism in this instance, one must be careful not to let our knowledge of subsequent developments in Germany cloud our judgment. In the period under investigation here, the Nazis were a small, regional movement that did not stand out in any way in terms of its ideas from the many other movements of the radical, völkisch Right in postwar Germany.37 And their paper was a small, regional, party-affiliated paper. On the eve of the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, the Völkischer Beobachter had achieved a daily circulation of only 30,000.38 The Dearborn Independent, on the other hand, was published by one of the most famous men in America at the time—a man who had run as a candidate for the US Senate (and nearly won without delivering a single speech) and was considering a run for the presidency.39 The paper’s circulation climbed from 72,000 to 300,000 and ultimately to 700,000, making it the second largest newspaper in the country.40 On top of that, the articles in the Independent were collected and published in four volumes under the title The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, with frequent reprints. Estimates of the total copies printed in the US range from the hundreds of thousands to as high as ten million.41 They were also translated into sixteen languages and sold by the millions around the world, including Germany, where it was published by the “father” of German antisemitism, Theodor Fritsch and his Hammerverlag. The influence of an effort of such scope, under the imprimatur of a man such as Henry Ford, should not be underestimated. This is particularly true of Germany, where he was without doubt far more popular than Hitler at the time. Both Baldur von Schirach and Hitler himself, who discussed him in Mein Kampf and had a picture of the American on his office wall, acknowledged the inspiration Ford provided Germany’s young postwar antisemites.42 From a

82  The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism global perspective, Norman Cohn has concluded, “The International Jew probably did more than any other work to make the Protocols famous.”43 Nor was it underestimated at the time. Theodore Roosevelt, in fact, warned, “Many, many persons hardly as ignorant as Ford think him wise in all things and allow him to influence their views.”44 What should also be clear is that the antisemitism on display in The Dearborn Independent was no European import, as was believed by some of America’s leading Jewish figures of the time.45 Of course, considering the fact that, in a sense, America itself is a European import, it should not be surprising to find a rather widespread Western phenomenon playing a role in the United States. What may be surprising to some is the depth and the intensity of American antisemitism as displayed in the Independent. But it should not be. As John Spargo warned at the time in a piece he wrote in condemnation of Ford’s campaign, “There is no reason for believing that here in the United States we possess a special immunity from the worst forms of anti-Semitism.”46 The question is not whether most of those who read the Dearborn Independent believed every word and espoused a radical, chimeric form of antisemitism. We know that most Germans did not share the extreme views of Hitler and the Nazis. The formula for genocide in Germany was a core of extreme, radical antisemites surrounded by a wider populace that—in a time of crisis— felt enough hostility or unease toward the Jews that they could at best overlook the Nazis’ vicious racism or at worst, embrace it. National assumptions about America’s liberal and tolerant tradition notwithstanding, Henry Ford’s campaign against the Jews revealed evidence of a similar mix of ingredients in the United States, if still at an early stage. It would get much worse. In the 1930s, in the midst of the nation’s worst economic crisis and the election of Franklin Roosevelt with a plan for dramatic change, the seeds planted by Henry Ford and The Dearborn Independent would begin to bear fruit as American antisemitism reached unprecedented proportions and would not reach its peak, amazingly, until the 1940s, while Ford’s America battled Hitler’s Germany in World War II.

Notes 1 See Joseph Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S. Army (New York, 2000). 2 Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in Hofstadter, ed., The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York, 2008), 29. 3 Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style,” 29. 4 Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style,” 39. 5 Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York, 2006); for the most recent, fascinating account of the origins of The Protocols, see Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (New York, 2018). 6 Leo Ribuffo, “Henry Ford and the International Jew,” American Jewish History, Vol. 4 (June 1980): 444–447.

The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism 83 7 This essay makes use of the Dearborn Independent articles as collected and published in four volumes as Henry Ford, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem (Dearborn, 1920–1922). 8 Ford, “The Jew in Character and Business,” International Jew, Vol. 1 (May 22, 1920): 10. 9 Ford, “The Jew in Character and Business,” 22. 10 Ford, “Does a Definite Jewish World Program Exist?” International Jew, Vol. 1 (July 10, 1920): 89. 11 Ford, “Does a Definite Jewish World Program Exist?” 85. 12 Ford, “Germany’s Reaction Against the Jew,” International Jew, Vol. 1 (May 31, 1920): 26. 13 Ford, “The Jew in Character and Business,” 10–11; Ford, “Arthur Brisbane to the Help of Jewry,” International Jew, Vol. 1 (July 3, 1920): 81; Ford, “How the ‘Jewish Question’ Touches the Farm,” 175; Ford, “Does this Explain Jewish Political Power?” International Jew, Vol. 1 (September 18, 1920): 204; Ford, “Jew Versus Jew in New York Finance,” International Jew, vol. 2 (November 13, 1920): 32; Ford, “The Scope of Jewish Dictatorship in the US,” International Jew, Vol. 2 (December 4, 1920): 67, 69; Ford, “How the Jews Ruled and Ruined Tammany Hall,” International Jew, Vol. 3 (September 24, 1921): 141–153. 14 Ford, “The High and Low of Jewish Money Power,” International Jew, Vol. 2 (November 20, 1920): 44. 15 Ford, “ ‘Jewish Protocols’ Claim Partial Fulfillment,” International Jew, Vol. 1 (August 7, 1920): 136; Ford, “Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music,” International Jew, vol. 3, 70 (August 6, 1921). 16 Ford, “ ‘Jewish Protocols’ Claim Partial Fulfillment,” 136. 17 Ford, “Jewish Control of the American Theater,” International Jew, Vol. 2 (January 1, 1921): 89. 18 Ford, “The Jewish Aspect of the Movie Problem,” International Jew, Vol. 2 (February 12, 1921): 125–126. 19 Ford, “How the ‘Jewish Question’ Touches the Farm,” 177; Ford, “The Jewish Demand for ‘Rights’ in America,” International Jew, Vol. 2 (March 5, 1921): 152. 20 Ford, “When Editors Were Independent of the Jews,” International Jew, Vol. 2 (February 5, 1921): 219. 21 Ford, “The Present Status of the Jewish Question,” International Jew, Vol. 2 (January 29, 1921): 249. 22 Ford, “The Jewish Aspect of the Movie Problem,” 123. 23 Oron Hale, The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton, 1964), 17–21; for Eckart’s and Rosenberg’s role in the paper’s early years, see Ernst Piper, Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe (München, 2005), 76–82. 24 See, for example, Ernst Piper’s description of a meeting of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund on January 7, 1920, in the Munich Kindl-Keller. The evening’s theme? “Die Judenfrage,” with all the common motifs. Piper, Alfred Rosenberg, 47. 25 For the place of the “world Jewish conspiracy” in Nazi propaganda, see Wolfram Meyer zu Uptrup, Kampf gegen die “jüdische Weltverschwörung”: Propaganda und Antisemitismus der Nationalsozialisten 1919–1945 (Berlin, 2003). 26 “Kritische Lage in Ungarn?” Völkischer Beobachter, February  22, 1921, 1; “Pilsudski von Judas Gnaden Präsident von Polen,” Völkischer Beobachter, February 8, 1921, 1; “Mitteleuropa im Kampf gegen den Juden,” Völkischer Beobachter, March 20, 1921, 1. 27 “Das jüdische Sowjetparadies,” Völkischer Beobachter, January 27, 1921, 1; “Die jüdische Diktatur in Rußland,” Völkischer Beobachter, September 16/17, 1923, 1; on the history of the “Judeo-Bolshevik Conspiracy,” see Paul Hannebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, 2018).

84  The Paranoid Style in Antisemitic Journalism 28 “Bolshewistischer Kapitalismus,” Völkischer Beobachter, November 16, 1921, 1; “Börianisch-bolschewistischer Verbrüderung in Moskau,” Völkischer Beobachter, November 22, 1922, 1. 29 “Die jüdische Diktatur in Rußland,” 1. 30 “Judenherrschaft in Amerika,” Völkischer Beobachter, August 28, 1921, 1; “Geheimorganisation der Juden in Amerika,” Völkischer Beobachter, October 1, 1921, 3; “Milliardär Ford gegen das Börsenkapital,” Völkischer Beobachter, March 13, 1921, 1; “Jüdischer Feldzug gegen Henry Ford,” Völkischer Beobachter, March 24, 1921, 3; “Henry Ford,” Völkischer Beobachter, March  1, 1922, 1; “Edison und Ford für die Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft,” Völkischer Beobachter, July 22, 1922, 1; “Das jüdische Problem in Amerika,” Völkischer Beobachter, February 20, 1923, 1; “Henry Ford,” Völkischer Beobachter, March 11/12 1923, 2–3. 31 “Präsident Harding,” Völkischer Beobachter, January 11, 1922. 32 “International Verwandtschaftliche Beziehungen der jüdischen Hochfinanz,” Völkischer Beobachter, November 1921, January 11, 1922. 33 “Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und die jüdische Weltpolitik,” Völkischer Beobachter, July 10 to August 29, 1923 (Serialization of Alfred Rosenberg’s edition of The Protocols); “Ein jüdisches Weltprogram aus dem Jahre 1905,” Völkischer Beobachter, May 29, 1921, 3; “Die Weisen von Zion an der Arbeit,” Völkischer Beobachter, June 29, 4. July 7, 1923. 34 “Die jüdische Hochfinanz läßt das Ruhrgebiet erobern!” Völkischer Beobachter, January 24, 1923, 1; “Der Dolchstoß für die Ruhrkämpfer,” Völkischer Beobachter, September 11, 1923, 1; “Angesagte jüdische Weltherrschaft. Der französische Shylock im Ruhrgebiet,” Völkischer Beobachter, April 5, 1923, 1. 35 Ford, “Jews Use the Peace Conference to Bind Poland,” The International Jew, Vol. 2 (November 6, 1920): 239. 36 On ‘chimeric’ antisemitism, see Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1996); on ‘redemptive antisemitism,’ see Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Vol. I, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1998). 37 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 1889–1936 (New York, 1998), 317. 38 Hale, Captive Press, 30. 39 Ford defeated Harding 88,865 to 51,000 in a straw poll by Collier’s Weekly in July 1923. Albert Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York, 1980), 8. 40 Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1994), 81. 41 Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York, 1998), 144–146; Lee, Henry Ford and the Jews, 14. 42 Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, 172–173. 43 Norman Cohn quoted in Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, 145. 44 Roosevelt quoted in Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, 145. 45 For example, in July 1918, Louis Marshall wrote that antisemitism was a “Prussian invention and importation and should be weeded out from our soil before the insidious poison contaminates it.” Marshall, quoted in Morton Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, Defender of the Jews (Detroit, 1965), 108. 46 Spargo, quoted in Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 150.

5 One Crisis Behind? Rethinking Antisemitic Exceptionalism in the United States and Germany

In September 1921, Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, declared, “We do not recognize the existence of a Jewish question in the United States.”1 Yet, only three years later he remarked to noted African American scholar W. E. B. du Bois that Hitler’s policies toward Jews were “identical with those of the Ku Klux Klan.” Both aimed for “the elimination of the Jews socially, economically, politically, and even physically.”2 How could a country with a radical nationalist, racist movement whose membership numbered in the millions, and whose intent toward the Jews was, according to Marshall, “identical” with Hitler’s, not have a Jewish question?3 Was his not uncommon faith in the idea that America was somehow “different” from Europe blinding him to their similarities? Might antisemitism in the United States in fact have been really not so different from that of Germany? If so, was the possibility of a right-wing antisemitic movement gaining power in America and carrying out some kind of violent anti-Jewish campaign as real a potential danger as in Germany? Could an “American Führer” have come to power in the United States?4 If Hitler’s appointment and the subsequent Nazi “seizure of power” resulted not only from long-term historical trends but also from a series of unforeseen and unnecessary contingent events, including two major economic and political crises, could not something similar have occurred in America? If some of the same “ingredients” that made an antisemitic regime possible in Germany also existed in the United States, can we say with confidence that a similar outcome could not have occurred there, too? Radical antisemites in both America and Germany used strikingly similar rhetoric in attacking the Roosevelt administration during its twelve years in power, and their language suggests a rethinking of our understanding of antisemitism in both countries. In both cases, they depicted Franklin Roosevelt as somehow foreign, a tool of a Jewish cabal, and a man who obeyed “International Jewry.” Both American and German radical antisemites described his policies as “socialistic” or “communistic” and serving the interests of the Soviet Union. Each group also claimed to see in Roosevelt’s machinations an effort to drag both America and Germany into a world war that would result in the destruction of both and benefit only the Jews themselves. DOI: 10.4324/9781003266372-6

86  One Crisis Behind? Those antisemitic charges against the Roosevelt Administration in Germany and America can be used as lenses through which we can reevaluate this history. When placed in a broader context that takes into account the more general environment of antisemitism in both countries over the course of the early twentieth century, such remarkably similar depictions of the Roosevelt Administration demand a renewed effort at explanation. One depiction was produced by the right-wing dictatorship of Nazi Germany, the other by groups and individuals in liberal, democratic America. In hindsight, it is easy to dismiss the latter as the deranged rantings of a lunatic fringe. After all, the radical right did not gain power in America and thus was not able to carry through on the implications of its dire warnings about “International Jewry.” In Germany, however, the radical right did establish an explicitly antisemitic regime. But should we let hindsight blind us to a fuller understanding of antisemitism? Knowing that Germany carried out the Holocaust should not lead us to think it was inevitable, or the result of a uniquely German pathology; nor should the fact that it did not happen in America lead us to think that an antisemitic regime could not have come to power here. Equally important, our knowledge of the Holocaust should not limit our thinking to expect that an anti-Jewish campaign in the United States would look the same with, for example, an American version of Auschwitz. Such hindsight has led to two commonly held assumptions about antisemitism in both countries: that American antisemitism never posed a serious threat, and that German antisemitism was uniquely murderous.5 Both assumptions, however, neglect the vital importance of contingency. No pre-ordained path determined antisemitism’s route in Germany or the United States. The very real possibility of an illiberal and anti-democratic movement coming to power existed in both countries. Can we imagine, for example, what might have resulted if America had experienced a second major crisis soon after the Depression? If the Depression had continued to worsen, leading to still more misery and desperation, the American antisemitic movement could have found an even more receptive audience. Such a conceivable turn of events could have prevented Roosevelt from winning a second term. And in 1942, with Germany in control of Europe from the Atlantic coast of France to the outskirts of Moscow, many people expected Germany’s continued military success. If the war had not turned in America’s favor, people might very well have focused their anger on Jews and thus been more open to an illiberal solution to the crisis. In Germany, any number of possible small changes in circumstance could have led to significantly different outcomes. Hitler, for example, could have been forced to serve his entire five-year sentence after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch (not to mention getting a more appropriate sentence for an attempted coup), which means he would have had to start rebuilding his party in 1929. This would have left almost no time to take advantage of the Depression. Or imagine a scenario in which the power brokers who convinced Hindenburg to appoint Hitler in January 1933 had waited just a little longer. After all, the Depression was already easing in Germany. The Nazis were exhausted from

One Crisis Behind? 87 years of constant electioneering with no final victory in sight. There was frustration with Hitler’s “all or nothing” strategy toward gaining the chancellorship. Some within the party feared that it was campaigning itself to death and on the verge of fracturing.6 And if not for the fortuitous Reichstag fire in late February 1933, Hitler would not have had such a ready excuse to suspend civil liberties only weeks after his appointment. In other words, if Hitler had not been named Chancellor, or fell from power only months later (also a realistic possibility considering the fact that he was Germany’s fourth Chancellor in one year), would we today think that German antisemitism was more radical and dangerous than that of, say, Imperial Russia or 1930s Poland? This comparison of radical antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration in Germany and America raises a number of critical questions about the potential danger antisemitism posed in two of the world’s most advanced countries during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, it asks whether it might be better to think in different terms when trying to understand the significance of antisemitism in America. During the 1930s, antisemitism rose to new, unprecedented levels of intensity. More than 100 political pressure groups and numerous influential individuals arose to spread a radical anti-Jewish message. In the end, of course, they all failed. America’s liberal democracy survived (though not in the South, where its overtly racist regime outlived the Third Reich by some two decades), while Gerald Winrod and Charles Coughlin and others of their ilk went down in history as curiosities— loud, perhaps a bit frightening, but generally harmless voices from the lunatic fringe. But does this really diminish the significance, and thus the potential danger, of American antisemitism? Or does it speak more to the particular conditions in place at a particular time and asks what is actually required to bring a radical, anti-Jewish movement to power? After all, if it was not one major crisis that helped Hitler become Chancellor, but two, I would argue that it would be more useful to think of America as being “one crisis behind” in terms of its antisemitism. Many scholars of American Jewish history downplay the significance of antisemitism in the United States by pointing to what they call America’s “liberal tradition” of tolerance and democracy.7 While that liberal tradition is certainly a significant element of American identity, it clearly had its limits in practice. It did not prevent the annihilation of Native Americans. Nor did it impede half the country from establishing a system of racial domination, enforced by law and backed by both the threat and use of force. The fact that the primary focus of American racism has been Blacks throughout most of its history does not mean that at particular times and under particular conditions, other outsider groups could not be targeted. Why would America, whose primary racial focus had been on a large black minority, be immune from committing similar barbarities against Jews? As John H. Holmes declared in New York in 1933, “A people which can break out in furious orgies of lynching in Maryland, Missouri and California is a people not unripe for the fierce horrors of a Jewish terror.”8

88  One Crisis Behind? Looking at Germany, we can see something similar. Just as Jews traditionally were not the primary targets in America, Blacks were not in Germany. Nonetheless, one should not forget the fierce uproar after World War I over the “Black Horror on the Rhine”—the presence of Black African soldiers among the French occupation forces in the Rhineland. The German press covered the issue extensively, while books, pamphlets, and films helped intensify Germans’ racial fears. The government played a significant role as well, including the Reichstag and the Interior Ministry, in order to deal with what the Social Democratic (!) Foreign Minister Adolf Köster called a “black plague,” thereby associating anti-Black racism in Germany with the authority of the state.9 And Raffael Scheck has described German soldiers committing a series of massacres of Black Africans fighting in the French Army in Europe during World War II—killings that were clearly racially motivated.10 And all this followed Imperial Germany’s genocidal campaign against the Herrero and Nama of Southwest Africa in 1904. Historians of the American Jewish experience also point to the country’s ethnic diversity in seeking to diminish the significance of antisemitism in the United States. In such a diverse country, they argue, xenophobic hostility gets diffused and is thus unable to focus the majority’s wrath on a single target.11 Certainly, America was diverse. But so, too, was Germany, and therefore the brief, casual comparisons of a diverse America with a supposedly homogenous Germany fail to capture the complexity of the issue. Bismarck’s Reich contained Danes, Poles, French, Sorbs, Jews, and Catholics.12 And while antisemitic parties in the 1880s and 1890s sought to strip German Jews of their newly gained rights, they never came close to succeeding. The same could not be said, though, for Germany’s Catholics, who became targets of a governmentled campaign of demonization and victims of a whole package of exclusionary legislation during the Kulturkampf of the 1870s. Finally, American historians also tend, when seeking to prove the overall mildness of American antisemitism, to compare it to the full-fledged barbarity of Nazi Germany. But is that really a fair comparison? In the sense of an environment with an extreme and pervasive antisemitism backed by the full force of the state, America in the 1930s was not its equal. But then, no other state was either. That comparison clarifies the distance America still had to go to reach the most extreme situation, but it also obscures the ways in which antisemitism in Germany and America were comparable prior to Hitler’s dictatorship, and thus blinds us to its potential dangers in the United States. A broader view that takes into account the development of antisemitism in Germany in the decades before the Third Reich provides a better understanding. Before 1933, antisemitism did not have the full backing of the German state. In fact, the state protected Jews in the Empire, as in the case of the ritual murder affair in Konitz in 1900.13 And Weimar presents an even more positive picture of government protection of Jews, despite the continuing problem of antisemitism.14 The reality, then, of antisemitism in Germany before 1933 does not provide the kind of clear-cut picture presented for purposes of comparison by scholars trained in

One Crisis Behind? 89 the history of Jews in America. For a more nuanced and accurate understanding, we must take a longer-range view of the situation in both countries. Antisemitism in America originally had the same religious foundation as it did in Europe.15 As a result, Jews found their political rights limited by some state governments as late as 1877.16 Religion also helped perpetuate diabolical images of Jews through schoolbooks and the arts.17 Negative depictions of Jews were widespread in magazines and newspapers, in articles written by some of the country’s most respected journalists and scholars.18 World War I and its aftermath intensified American nationalism, which then heightened antisemitism. Even before American involvement, the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915 represented one of the worst outbreaks of antisemitism in American history. During the war, charges of Jewish shirking emerged and constituted a basic assumption within certain circles of the Army, which was itself becoming a repository of extremely radical, racist antisemitism.19 So concerned were Louis Marshall and the American Jewish Committee that they produced a whole range of research refuting the allegations.20 The Bolshevik Revolution helped radicalize antisemitism—a process aided by Russian émigrés, who brought with them the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.21 Henry Ford played the most important role in introducing The Protocols to America through his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.22 He also had the Independent’s articles published in a four-volume series called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. The campaign’s significance, in terms of both the dissemination of radical antisemitic ideas to wide segments of the population and the stamp of legitimacy provided by its distinguished publisher, should not be underestimated.23 If Henry Ford represented the most prominent individual antisemitic entrepreneur of the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan represented the largest American nationalist and antisemitic organization, with a membership as high as five million. Extending well beyond the South, it found enemies among Catholics and Jews in addition to Blacks. The very fact that the Klan saw America as a white, Protestant nation meant that Jews were, by definition, outsiders—“a people apart”—as the Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans put it.24 Not only were Jews outsiders, however. As fundamentally corrupting and dangerous elements, they were enemies who needed to be actively combated. The practical effects of American antisemitism in the 1920s could be seen far beyond the efforts of Ford or the Klan. The purported connection between Jews and Bolsheviks placed the image of the Jew at the heart of the First Red Scare. The belief that Jews constituted a distinct race combined with progressive-era concern over immigration led many “native Americans” to focus on the Jews, questioning their “adaptability” and seeking to exclude them—an effort that succeeded in 1924. Jews already in America experienced many forms of discrimination, for example, in employment, housing, and education.25 By the late 1920s, the postwar wave of antisemitism began to crest. University quotas had been established, Jews were no longer entering the country in

90  One Crisis Behind? significant numbers, the Klan had been damaged by scandal and corruption, and Henry Ford ended his campaign following a lawsuit. But while some of the outward manifestations of antisemitism appear to have diminished, the ideas themselves remained. Though there would be occasional flare-ups, as with the Blood Libel in Massena, New York, in 1928, it would take a major crisis to fully resurrect it.26 Looking at Germany, we find many significant similarities in terms of antisemitism and some important differences as well. Stretching back to medieval times, the German lands are integral to the history of a broader European anti-Jewish prejudice, the intensity of which varied in time and shifted from one end of the continent to the other, though religion remained its foundational element.27 National unification in 1871 brought with it the emancipation of Germany’s Jews. This was soon followed, however, by the rise of a newly energized and partially transformed anti-Jewish prejudice, which now took the form of a social and political movement. Nevertheless, before 1933, neither antisemitism nor anti-Jewish violence in Germany ever reached the levels of intensity that they did in its neighbors to the east or west. Antisemitism after 1871 existed on a number of levels. There was the populist form represented by Otto Böckel, who agitated among the peasants of rural Hesse.28 But in 1879, when the highly respected Berlin historian Heinrich von Treitschke declared, “the Jews are our misfortune,” antisemitism gained an important level of intellectual and social legitimacy. Antisemitism also animated a number of political parties in the 1880s and 1890s— something not seen in America—though they ultimately disappeared without achieving their goals.29 The outbreak of World War I marked the start of a decade of crisis. The strains of war soon led to the breakdown of Kaiser Wilhelm’s civic truce (Burgfrieden) and the deliberate attempts by Pan-Germans and other radical nationalist groups to re-energize antisemitism. One conspicuous example of this effort was the growing chorus of complaints about Jewish shirking and the response from the army with its infamous 1916 “Jew Count.”30 The fact that the census was carried out at all, combined with the partial postwar publication of the results, served to spread the belief in Jewish disloyalty into the early years of the Weimar Republic. More than this, however, it was the shocking defeat and revolution that raised antisemitism to new levels of intensity and spread it to broader segments of the population. Out of this cauldron of seething resentments emerged the German Racial Defense and Defiance League, an effort to reach a broader audience with radical antisemitism. But while it attracted some 170,000 members and flooded the country with propaganda before being banned by the government, it turned out to be, as Hans Mommsen put it, “a conspicuous failure.”31 Still, its influence could be felt in other ways. For example, its relentless propaganda assault on Germany’s first Jewish Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, helped create the climate that led to his assassination in 1922. In addition, its members helped spread the message as they moved from the League to other groups, including the Nazis.32

One Crisis Behind? 91 By 1924, Germany’s crisis decade ended. It was a traumatic time for most Germans, involving political, military, and economic collapse. The fact that so many found comfort in the “stab-in-the-back” legend, blaming the defeat on Jews and other “un-German” elements, certainly did not bode well for the future. Nor did the attacks on the Eastern Jews (Ostjuden) in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel only days before Hitler’s failed adventure in Munich. Still, when compared to the orgy of violence that claimed tens of thousands of Jewish lives in Ukraine at the end of World War I, its significance should not be exaggerated.33 And just as the heightened antisemitism faded in America, so too did it decline in Germany during the so-called “years of stability.” It did not, however, disappear—if many of the organizations had been smashed, the ideas remained, now spread more broadly throughout the population, and with a new crisis, they could once again be exploited.34 That new opportunity for exploitation would come for both countries in the environment created by the World Economic Crisis and would last until the end of World War II. The third major wave of antisemitism to sweep the United States since the late nineteenth century began with the Great Depression. In October 1929, a Jewish newspaper in Milwaukee published an overview of the previous twelve months. It described America as “the greatest, safest, most prosperous, and hopeful Jewish homeland the Jewish people have had in all history.” The only evidence of antisemitism it found was some social exclusion, which it quickly dismissed since it “causes few people much damage.” Overall, it announced triumphantly, “there is no external Jewish problem in America.” Just one year later, however, the annual assessment was far less glowing. Now, “gloomy prospects are in the offing.” Thanks to the Depression, Jews were experiencing “one of the most dangerous periods in their history.” Where just one year ago, there was no antisemitism to speak of, now “[o]rganized anti-Jewish feeling . . . has assumed threatening proportions.” Where just one year ago, social exclusion was said to cause “few people much damage,” now “[e]verywhere the feeling has grown that social and economic discrimination against the Jew seriously menaces his place in the American community.”35 One of the most serious concerns among Jews at the outset of the Depression involved the dramatic growth of employment discrimination. In her book on New York Jews during the Depression, Beth Wenger described the ubiquity of “Christians only” want ads in mainstream newspapers.36 The municipal telephone and gas companies, insurance agencies, banks, and law offices, she wrote, were all but closed to Jewish job seekers.37 In January 1930, the Council of Jewish Women reported at its annual meeting that 10,000 Jewish women in New York City alone could not find work because they were Jews.38 In assessing the situation with regard to employment and education, the American Jewish Congress in October 1930 announced discrimination against Jews “has assumed dangerous proportions.”39 One indication of the extent of antisemitism in the job market was the notable increase in Jewish name-changing among job seekers during these years, particularly young women.40 Overall, this widespread discrimination led to serious concerns about the closing down

92  One Crisis Behind? of opportunities for Jewish youth and therefore the future place of Jews in America. But despite an environment that already led observers to foresee “gloomy prospects” for the future, there was still more to come that would make this period the most dangerous for Jews in American history. While the Depression certainly helped stimulate the further growth of antisemitism in America, two additional developments increased the danger it posed to Jews. First, the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German Chancellor on January 30, 1933, provided inspiration for antisemites in America.41 Second, the election of Franklin Roosevelt and the start of his administration in March of the same year provided a focus for the country’s antisemites. Beginning in 1933, America witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of antisemitic groups. From a mere handful in the 1920s, by the following decade there appeared more than one hundred, though not all of equal size and significance.42 Radical antisemites came and went over the course of the Roosevelt era. But while some individuals and their organizations did decline and fade from the scene throughout those twelve years, there were always more that arose to replace them, on either the local or national level. This means that radical antisemitism maintained a continual presence in America between 1933 and 1945, even if particular names and faces did not. Among the people who made up the antisemitic movement in the United States during the Roosevelt era, those who were explicitly religious made up a significant portion. Among the earliest of the radical antisemites to stake a position, in fact, was a man who in 1936 called for every Christian patriot who has had enough of Jewish influence . . . to rally at the sign of the cross and support an all-Christian constitutional party that will have no Jew in any government department, or in any place of civic responsibility.43 William Dudley Pelley combined Christianity and mysticism with antisemitism as the basis for his new organization, the Silver Legion, or the “Silver Shirts,” which he founded on January 31, 1933—the day after Hitler’s appointment. Through his weekly newspaper, the Silver Ranger, he warned his followers of the dangers they faced in what he liked to call the “Jewnited States,” with its “Jewish administration in Washington.” In his 1933 book No More Hunger: The Compact Plan of the Christian Commonwealth, Pelley promised a “permanent Solution to the Jewish Problem.” That “permanent solution” involved the concentration of Jews into one city in every state. A “secretary of Jewry” would administer these ghettos, where escaping Jews were to be executed.44 With their fascist-inspired silver-shirt uniform, the Silver Legion emerged in a number of regions across the country, with its strongest presence on the West Coast. The East San Diego Silver Shirts, for example, called themselves the Storm Troopers and met in full Nazi uniforms. They received weapons training and held military exercises and target practice. Just for a sense of how extreme their antisemitism was, in February 1934, the San

One Crisis Behind? 93 Diego Silver Shirts published a story accusing the local Jews of the ritual murder of two 7-year-old children.45 Out of Kansas came the fundamentalist preacher Gerald B. Winrod and his Defenders of the Christian Faith. Through his magazine the Defender and his travels throughout the country, the “Jayhawk Nazi” spread his message of anti-modernism, his attacks on evolution, and his warnings about the “Jewish threat.” Upon his return from a trip to Europe in 1935, he expressed his admiration for Hitler and Nazi Germany, describing the Führer as “law-abiding, living quietly in a Christian way that not even his enemies can find fault with.”46 He was a “real man’s man” who didn’t drink, smoke, or swear. “Real religion,” Winrod said, “has no better friend.” Nazi Germany, he proclaimed, was “the best country in Europe.” His idolization of Hitler and the Third Reich, however, contrasted with his concern over the threat his own country faced in the form of Jewish Communism. “America,” he warned, “must choose eventually between the Statue of Liberty and the Jewish Kremlin of Moscow!”47 Gerald L. K. Smith got his start as one of Huey Long’s lieutenants in Louisiana. Following the murder of the Kingfish, Smith went out on his own to cash in on his dynamic and passionate speaking style, creating the “Committee of One Million” in 1936, to preach his anti-communist, Christian nationalist, and extreme antisemitic message. Raised in a religious family in rural Wisconsin, his antisemitism was likely influenced by that environment and the populist movement of the late nineteenth century. It was an environment similar to the one in which Henry Ford was raised and perhaps it’s no coincidence that Smith idolized the automobile magnate. He read The Dearborn Independent and The International Jew. He also learned about The Protocols from Ford, who, for a time, provided Smith with financial assistance once he established his base of operations in Detroit.48 Not all of America’s explicitly religious antisemites were leaders of organized political movements like Pelley, Winrod, and Smith. Some of the most radical, in fact, remained in their everyday role as pastors or preachers within the church. And because of their institutional position and already-existing following, their reach, and therefore their impact, extended at least as far as some of the country’s organized political antisemites. One of the most extreme antisemitic figures in the fundamentalist movement of the 1930s was the Minneapolis preacher William Bell Riley. In his book, God’s Empire, William Trollinger, Jr. describes Riley as “the dominant figure in American fundamentalism in the first half of the twentieth century.”49 His antisemitism was also among the most radical. According to Trollinger, The Protocols served as his “guidebook.”50 In 1934, Riley wrote in Protocols and Communism that The Protocols “contains a full program by which it is proposed to subjugate the nations of the earth to Jewish control; and, strange to say, history is now running into the mold of the Protocol program.” He explained World War I as having been “the product of Jewish machinations” in all the countries involved, with the “desired objective being the near extinction of the Gentile or so-called Christian nations.”51

94  One Crisis Behind? While thousands of people heard his sermons at the First Baptist Church of Minneapolis, his reach was far more extensive. Through ministers he trained and who read his writings and attended his summer institutes, Riley influenced a whole network of churches across the upper Midwest. On a national level, Riley was part of a network that included some of the most prominent and extreme antisemites in the country. He supported fellow fundamentalist, Gerald Winrod, writing articles for his magazine, The Defender. In his own newspaper, The Pilot, Riley published articles by the isolationist and extreme antisemite Elizabeth Dilling, whom he described as having “[o]ne of the most brilliant minds . . . as well as one of the bravest souls that free America has yet produced.”52 He also supported Pelley. The Minneapolis chapter of the Silver Legion, it turns out, was one of the country’s biggest, and many Silver Shirts attended his church. Clearly, a man of Riley’s standing within the growing fundamentalist movement lent an important degree of legitimacy to his extremist views on the “Jewish threat.”53 Another prominent fundamentalist who contributed to the antisemitic environment of the 1930s was Arno C. Gaebelein from New York. His 1933 book The Conflict of the Ages, which reportedly sold 25,000 copies in its first year, contained the same kinds of radical antisemitic images and tropes as in Riley’s work.54 As with Riley, Gaebelein directly tied Jews to Communism, noting that “Most of the leaders of the Russian revolution of 1917–18 and the years following were Jews.”55 He looked back to the Overman Committee of 1919, which investigated the role of Jews in the Russian Revolution, and vouched for the reliability of Reverend George A. Simons, the missionary who stressed the alleged connection between “East Side Jews” and the Bolsheviks in Russia. Not surprisingly, then, Gaebelein, like Simons and Riley, found The Protocols extremely significant and genuine. “A painstaking and deeper study of the Protocols,” he wrote, compared with present day world conditions, must lead, and does lead, to the conviction, that the plan of the Protocols, whoever concocted it, is not a crude forgery. Behind it are hidden, unseen actors, powerful and cunning, who follow the plan still, bent on the overthrow of our civilization.56 Not only did he believe The Protocols were genuine, but they were published by “a true believer in the Word of God, in prophecy . . . a true Christian.”57 One of the most well-known and perhaps the most significant religious figures during this period was Father Charles E. Coughlin from Royal Oak, Michigan. Thanks to his nationwide radio show, tens of millions of Americans heard him speak on the most pressing issues of the day during one of the most tumultuous times in the nation’s history. What they heard increasingly over the course of the 1930s was a message permeated with the most radical antisemitism. As early as 1931, in fact, in a speech that, according to biographer Donald Warren, “signaled his emergence as an orator without peer in America’s national public life,” Coughlin blamed the Depression on “international

One Crisis Behind? 95 financiers” and the ideas of “Karl Marx, a Hebrew.”58 It was a theme he would return to again. After another episode in which Coughlin singled out a number of Jewish bankers and financiers, including Bernard Baruch, Kuhn Loeb, and the Rothschilds, Rabbi Stephen Wise spoke to his congregation in the Free Synagogue and over WNEW radio in New York and asked Coughlin “whether he desires to make himself responsible for a terrible anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish outbreak in America.”59 According to Wise, the “Radio Priest,” while not using the word Jew, essentially said that “a group of Jewish bankers are chiefly and principally responsible for the present economic disaster of the nation.” Looking across the Atlantic, Wise warned of the very real danger that Coughlin’s rhetoric posed, pointing out that “Nazism began its assault upon Jews by iterating ten thousand times, directly and indirectly, that Jewish bankers were destroying the German nation.”60 In March 1936, Coughlin started his own weekly, Social Justice, which played a role in the dissemination of radical antisemitism in the 1930s and 1940s similar to what Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent did in the 1920s. Like Ford, Coughlin started including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in July 1938, thereby further reinforcing its presence in American public culture. But even before The Protocols made their appearance in his paper, Boris Brasol was already contributing articles. Writing under the name Ben Mancin, the White Russian émigré who played such a central role in the American dissemination of The Protocols after World War I had been sent by Ford himself to contribute to Coughlin’s Social Justice.61 Coughlin’s antisemitic demagoguery radicalized in late 1938, following Kristallnacht, the greatest outburst of antisemitic violence in modern German history. While the general reaction in the United States was swift and severe, Coughlin went in the other direction, delivering an antisemitic radio address that blamed “the Jew” for all of Germany’s and America’s problems. After a firestorm of protest, Coughlin took to the airwaves once again to try and explain himself. In doing so, he blamed antisemitism on Jews, saying [t]here is evidence that Jewry is silent on Communism and is reluctant to oppose it. There is the question of so-called anti-Semitism which is really anti-Communism. If Jews persist in supporting Communism directly or indirectly, that will be regrettable. By their failure to fight Communism as vigorously as they fight Nazism, they invite the charge of being supporters of Communism.62 Perhaps it’s not surprising then that Otto Tolischus, in Berlin writing for the New York Sunday Times, reported that “the German hero in America for the moment is the Rev. Charles E. Coughlin.”63 The Spanish Civil War also helped move Coughlin further to the right. He grew increasingly concerned by what he believed to be the mass killing of Christians by the Republican forces in Spain. He spoke to his followers of tens of millions of Christians being massacred by the forces of “Jewish

96  One Crisis Behind? Bolshevism.” Coughlin saw the need for a Christian Front to counter Europe’s Popular Front. It proved to be the country’s most extreme antisemitic organization of the Roosevelt era. With Coughlin as its inspiration, the Front espoused an antisemitism that went beyond the traditional Catholic anti-Judaism. As dangerous as that ideology could be, it still retained the belief in the humanity of Jews, and therefore the acceptance of Jewish conversion. During the 1930s, the Front embraced the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. And the Jews they claimed to focus on were secular Jews—“atheistic Jews” as Coughlin liked to say—meaning that their pernicious, evil qualities were not a result of their religion, but rather, were inherent to their Jewishness. But despite this shift from the traditional Catholic view, they still linked that idea of Judeo-Bolshevism with Catholic theology. In his recent book, Nazis of Copley Square, Charles Gallagher writes that the leaders of the Front “sacralized anti-Communism and anti-Semitism, casting the fight against the Judeo-Bolshevist menace as a theological necessity.”64 Fronters “saw themselves as the advance guard in a holy war against Communists and Jews—groups whom they perceived as one and the same.”65 The Front was extraordinarily dangerous because it translated its extreme antisemitic ideology into practice, unleashing wave after wave of violence, which members believed to be theologically permissible, against American Jews. Beginning in late 1938 Coughlin’s followers established Christian Front groups and other affiliated organizations in cities across the country, including Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Denver, Atlantic City, Miami, and Los Angeles.66 Francis Moran led the Front in Boston. In describing him, the journalist Luther Conant wrote, “Moran, in his office, was a quiet-spoken, wellmannered person. Moran, on the platform of a Christian Front meeting, was evil incarnate, with the ability and technique to arouse his audience to a frenzy and a fanaticism of hate.”67 Heading up the New York Front organization was John Cassidy, who was alleged to have told an FBI spy that “the Jews should be put into ghettoes, and advocated overthrow of ‘the Jewish Government.’ ”68 It was Cassidy and his group of Fronters, including members of the National Guard, that were arrested in 1940 and tried for their plot to overthrow the government—a plot that was to begin with a violent attack on Jews in New York. Still more extreme was the Christian Mobilizers, a radical offshoot under the leadership of Joe McWilliams (“Joe McNazi” to his opponents), who boasted that his personal security detail consisted entirely of former members of the Irish Republican Army. Irish-Americans, in fact, made up the largest percentage of Christian Front members, and one indication of just how extensive and how established antisemitism was within that immigrant community is the fact that the Front became, as Charles Gallagher describes it, “a dominant force in mainstream institutions.”69 In addition to their presence in the National Guard, thousands of Front members served as police officers in cities like New York and Boston, while many fellow officers were sympathizers. With such a presence in

One Crisis Behind? 97 law enforcement, it’s no wonder Jewish victims of Christian Front violence had little if any reason to expect help from the local police. The Front also enjoyed the endorsement of prominent figures—both Irish and non-Irish—not just within the church but also in politics. And it continued to enjoy support even after the arrests and trial of those New York Fronters with their violent plans against Jews and the government.70 Overall, New York and Boston were the largest and most active centers of Christian Front activity. In New York City, this included accosting and assaulting subway passengers who looked “Semitic,” vandalizing the windows of Jewish shops with antisemitic stickers, developing a “Christian Index” for their “Buy Christian” boycott campaign, and picketing radio stations that refused to air Coughlin’s program. It was with their street-corner rallies, in particular, that they were especially active and that got them much attention. According to Theodore Irwin, who wrote an expose on the Christian Front for Forum magazine in March 1940, there were on average between forty and fifty such gatherings per week in New York City between 1939 and early 1940.71 At these rallies, hundreds of people heard the Christian Front’s hateful and violent anti-Jewish message. On August 29, 1939, at Columbus Circle and 59th Street, for example, Joe Leveque spoke to a crowd of about one hundred. “The Jews stink,” he said, “and anything that stinks we have to get out of the way so let’s get the Jews out of the country. . . . They should have the gas turned on them. We want no Jews in America.”72 At that same meeting, Oklahoma native Joe Gallagher told the audience, “All the dirty Jews should be hung from a tree.”73 In September, Leveque told a group in New York City, “We Christians, especially Catholics, should exterminate the Jews just like Hitler did in Germany and is now doing in Poland.”74 Also in September, in St. Paul’s Church, in New York City, Charles Hahn spoke of “Thousands of Jews pouring into the US from every direction . . . I’ll tell you that there is only one thing to do and that is to kill all the Jews.”75 While figures such as Pelley, Winrod, Smith, Coughlin, and others tend to capture most of the attention of those looking to understand American antisemitism, there were many other smaller figures across the country who came and went, though not before making their own contributions to the widespread anti-Jewish atmosphere in America during the Roosevelt era. The country’s most prolific antisemite of the 1930s, for example, was Robert Edward Edmonson. Martha Neumark described his Edmonson Economic Service as “the most flourishing anti-Semitic publishing house in the United States.”76 Between 1934 and 1936, he produced and distributed more than five million pieces of anti-Jewish literature—leaflets, pamphlets, and full-length books—including an updated version of The Protocols, and other works with titles such as Invisible Government, Capitalist Jews Backing Communism?, America’s JewishRadical “Masters,” and The Communistic Jew Deal.77 Then, there was the extremely violent rhetoric of James True, who distributed his Industrial Control Report across the country and to politicians in Washington, DC. He also developed and patented a nightstick-style weapon he called a “Kike-Killer”

98  One Crisis Behind? and publicly argued against driving the Jews out of the country in favor of a general massacre in the United States—what he referred to as a “Jew Shoot.”78 In the Midwest, there was Court Asher of Muncie, Indiana. In the spring 1942, he wrote in his newspaper, X-Ray, that the war was a result of “the secret manipulations of the Jew money powers,” while in another issue he asked in a headline whether a Red Cross blood drive was really “A JEW SCHEME TO MIX THE BLOOD OF THE RACES?”79 In seeking to get the paper banned from the mail, the US Attorney General pointed out that Asher’s paper reached more than fifteen states, and therefore “it is not unreasonable to assume that a substantial number of persons, including not only civilians, but also actual and potential draftees and enlistees, are reached and influenced by it.”80 In Wichita, Kansas, E. J. Garner published a newspaper called Publicity in which he wrote, among other things, about America’s “Sovietized form of government,” with “all the key positions filled by Mongolian-Jews exercising absolute control for the benefit of Jewry.”81 Also quite significant, if less well known today, were the groups of female anti-war activists known collectively as the Mothers’ Movement, with a membership between five and six million people. As its most prominent leader, Elizabeth Dilling won the approval and admiration of many of America’s leading right-wing figures through works such as Roosevelt’s Red Record and The Octopus. In the latter, she “revealed” the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith as the driving force behind a conspiracy to undermine Christianity and overthrow the US government. Dilling and other leaders in the movement espoused a remarkably radical, paranoid, and vicious antisemitism. Ethel Groen, leader of the Cincinnati group, for example, described the movement’s goal as “the downfall of the British and the elimination of the Jews,” while Philadelphia’s Bessie Burchett suggested that Hitler target New York Jews by dropping a bomb in “the right place” and implying that the seven million lampposts in the country were just enough to hang every Jew.82 In the 1930s and 1940s, America’s radical antisemites did not remain limited to the sphere of extra-political organizations, pressure groups, and churches. The Roosevelt era saw extremists spreading their anti-Jewish paranoid fantasies from both houses of Congress. Early on, their numbers were small, with Pennsylvania Representative Louis T. McFadden being the loudest voice. Not only did McFadden quote from Ford’s Dearborn Independent in his House speeches but the Independent articles he quoted from also contained material from The Protocols. America, he warned, was in a dire situation, having “fallen into the hands of the international money changers.”83 He saw The Protocols playing out, for example, in the appointment of Henry Morgenthau as Secretary of the Treasury. “It is not by accident, is it,” he asked during a House speech in January 1934, “that a representative and a relative of the money Jews of Wall Street and foreign parts has been so elevated?”84 While the voters turned him out after one term, there would be others following him to warn Americans of the “Jewish danger,” and by the late 1930s and early 1940s, their numbers would grow further.

One Crisis Behind? 99 From North Carolina, Senator Robert R. Reynolds had wide and deep connections to the country’s antisemitic movement.85 His newsletter, American Vindicator, published the likes of Gerald Smith and Gerald Winrod. He also employed a Nazi agent associated with German-American Bund leader Fritz Kuhn. Needless to say, the North Carolina Senator opposed the WagnerRogers bill that would have admitted 20,000 children, mostly Jews, from Germany.86 Montana Democrat Burton K. Wheeler was one of the most outspoken isolationists in the Senate. In opposing Lend Lease, Wheeler did not simply bring up “international bankers.” He named them. In a radio address in early March 1941, he denounced “The Rothschilds, the Sassoons and the Warburgs” for their alleged role in pushing for war.87 Though his Republican colleague, Oregon Senator Rufus C. Holman did not name Jewish bankers, the name he did cite in a speech in Congress the following day was troubling in its own way. He praised Hitler for having “broken the control of the international bankers over the wages and savings of the common people of Germany,” and he thought it would be “good” if that same Jewish control was broken in the United States.88 In Senator Theodore Bilbo and Congressman John Rankin, Mississippi had the distinction of sending to the nation’s capital what Edward Shapiro called “the two most vitriolic anti-Semitic national politicians in recent American history.”89 For both men, deeply concerned as they were with preserving white supremacy, the northern or “New York Jew” as supporters of civil rights represented the ultimate danger. Both made sure to distinguish between what they considered “good” and “bad” Jews. Rankin, for example, liked to divide them between southern Jews, or patriotic American Jews, on the one hand, and international Jews, the Rothschilds, and the like, “who own or control the gold supply of the world” and “are now crucifying civilization on a cross of gold.”90 Bilbo, for his part, distinguished between “good” Jews and “New York Jew ‘Kikes.’ ”91 Among Rankin’s antisemitic colleagues in the House of Representatives, there was Jacob Thorkelson, Republican Congressman from Montana. A favorite of the Christian Front, he defended Father Coughlin on the House floor in early 1940. “Why all this venom against Father Coughlin?” he asked his colleagues. “Surely Father Coughlin is a Christian and his only offense is to denounce those who are Communists or who are engaged in Communistic activities.”92 Not only was Thorkelson popular with the Christian Front and Christian Mobilizers, but Silver Shirt leader William Dudley Pelley thought so highly of him that he considered him a possible candidate for president.93 In Congress, he made a habit of inserting his own speeches into the Congressional Record—speeches in which he spoke of Communist Jewish bankers and an “invisible government” of “international Shylocks.” He also inserted other pro-fascist literature, which was then reproduced and disseminated widely in a variety of forms by various American fascists and antisemites.94 Thorkelson was by no means alone in this practice.

100  One Crisis Behind? In May 1941, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that “defeatist and isolationist Congressional speeches” were being sent out “in enormous quantities through pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic mailing lists” at taxpayer expense. Omaha antisemite Charles B. Hudson sent out such speeches under the Congressional franks of Senators Worth Clark, Champ Clark, and Burton K. Wheeler along with Representatives Oliver and Bolton.95 Other Congressmen who did this included Representative Lewis D. Thill of Wisconsin, some of whose material came from the German Library of Information, a Nazi propaganda organization, and Martin L. Sweeney, a Democrat from Cleveland, who inserted material from Father Coughlin’s Social Justice. There was also John C. Schafer, Representative from Wisconsin, who had direct ties to radical antisemitic groups including the Silver Shirts and believed that “a small non-Christian minority controls the United States.”96 The attacks on Roosevelt and his administration by America’s radical antisemites fit within the larger narrative that had been developing in the country since before World War I and received such a tremendous boost in the 1920s through Henry Ford’s popularization of The Protocols in both his newspaper and the four volumes of The International Jew—an alleged conspiracy directed by “International Jewry” aimed at undermining America’s values and institutions in order to gain total control. But whereas the enemy in the 1920s took the form of the “East Side” Jew—the Eastern European immigrant/revolutionary Bolshevik—by the 1930s that image had transformed into the New Dealer.97 So while antisemites in the 1920s largely saw themselves as defending the government from the outside threat of the “International Jew,” in the following decade they believed the agents of the “international Jewish conspiracy” had successfully established themselves within the institutions of the American government. This represented a dangerous radicalization of antisemitism in the space of a decade, now motivating groups no longer to support the state in the face of a “Jewish onslaught,” but to oppose the state they now believed to be under the control of “the Jews.” We can see this in the case of American fundamentalists and their approach to the new administration. Fundamentalists were among the first to see in Roosevelt and his policies the complete negation of “American” and “Christian” ideals. According to historian Matthew Avery Sutton, fundamentalists “began to view their president and his administration not as God’s emissaries on earth but as tools of the devil. For the faithful living in the 1930s, to support Roosevelt was to support the coming antichrist.”98 Already in 1934, William Bell Riley was delivering public lectures discussing “the program of President Roosevelt and the Protocols, alleged minutes of proceedings of the learned elders of Zion, showing points of parallelism between the two programs.”99 But while they were among the earliest antisemitic opponents of Roosevelt, they were soon joined by many others who also believed they saw Jews everywhere they looked within the new administration. In the 1930s and 1940s, American antisemites never seemed to run out of examples—real or imagined—of Jews in the various offices and agencies of

One Crisis Behind? 101 government. According to Lyrl Clark van Hyning, leader of the Chicago Mothers’ organization, 52 percent of FDR’s advisors and 86 percent of all Washington officials were Jews.100 In 1933, Gerald Winrod claimed that “a very large per cent of the Roosevelt appointments are prominent Jews, gentlemen who could hardly be expected to share sympathetically, the Christian view point, of the founders and perpetuators of our government and institutions.”101 Before an audience of more than 2,000 people at an “Americanization rally” in Battle Creek, Michigan, Gerald L. K. Smith said he would not label Roosevelt a communist. Actually, he said, “he is worse than a communist because he has lent the dignity of his office to the support of 2,500 communists who are on the payroll of the federal government.”102 The prolific antisemitic publisher Robert Edward Edmonson accused Roosevelt in March 1934, of bringing “more Jewish revolutionary Socialistic radicals” into “political key positions” than any president in American history. He also accused FDR of having “jeopardized the constitutional liberties of the American people by listening to advice from International Reds . . . 75 to 90 percent Jewish Radical.”103 In November 1935, he produced a leaflet titled “Roosevelt’s Supreme Council: Alien-Asiatic Revolutionaries Control U.S. Politico-Economic Power Centers—Washington and New York.” It graphically depicted the nature of “Roosevelt’s Personal Government” by placing the “leaders” of various divisions around a Star of David. Among them were four Jews, including Bernard Baruch (“Unofficial President”), Felix Frankfurter (“Director of the New Deal”), Henry Morgenthau (“International Banker”), and Louis Brandeis (“Father of the New Deal”).104 While calling Roosevelt America’s “first Communist president,” William Dudley Pelley revealed Bernard Baruch to be “the real leader of international Jewry in the western hemisphere” and the man who would eventually “replace Roosevelt (‘another Kerensky’) with an openly Jewish dictatorship.”105 Not only did the antisemites criticize the Jews surrounding Roosevelt, but many accused the President himself of being Jewish. For Gerald Winrod, this explained his “natural bent toward radicalism . . . and proves unmistakably, that the Roosevelt Administration offers a biological, as well as political problem.”106 Roosevelt’s genealogy found its way into the propaganda of most of the country’s radical antisemites. Robert Edward Edmonson put out a broadside called “Blame the Roosenvelts,” while Pelley often referred to FDR as the “Kosher President” and Winrod summed up the issue for the 1936 presidential campaign, exclaiming “HE IS NOT ONE OF US!”107 The assertion that Jews were in key positions surrounding Roosevelt—quite possibly a Jew himself— served as the foundational element for all other claims about the alleged danger he posed. One such consequence of this imaginary “Jewish cabal” surrounding Roosevelt, according to his antisemitic opponents, was the New Deal, or as many preferred, the “Jew Deal.”108 According to Arnold Forster, “[i]t was an article of faith” at the many antisemitic street-corner rallies he observed in 1937 “to condemn Franklin Roosevelt for driving the country toward socialism.”109 Gerald Winrod warned Americans in 1933 that the “dangerous

102  One Crisis Behind? experimentation” by the Roosevelt Administration threatened “time worn ideals and governmental methods, that have stood the test of several generations. . . . The New Deal has plunged us into a program which is nothing short of a Socialistic experiment.”110 Notorious antisemite Merwin K. Hart went further, writing that “New Dealism is nothing but the American form of Communism.”111 Elizabeth Dilling agreed, claiming the President took the New Deal right from the Communist Manifesto.112 Colonel Eugene Nelson Sanctuary, head of the antisemitic American Christian Defenders, wrote in 1939 that [t]he Roosevelt “New Deal”, is not sincere; it is not a recovery movement; it is . . . sabotage . . . with the idea of bringing about . . . the world Jewish state where only Jews will own property and reap profits.113 The possibility of war, and then its outbreak, helped further intensify antisemitism, which expressed itself in accusations of Jewish involvement in a behind-the-scenes effort to drive America into war. In a column in The Minneapolis Star, in early 1939, Raymond Clapper discussed the general opposition among Americans to providing financial assistance to France and Britain as tensions on the continent increased. “Running through all this,” he wrote, is a subject, avoided in print but quite frankly discussed by word of mouth—anti-Semitism. Rapid growth of this feeling is reported in some localities. The feeling frequently takes the form of a question, “Are we going to fight a war to save the Jews in Germany?”114 North Carolina Senator Robert Reynolds, for one, had an answer—an answer the Nazis quoted in their main party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, saying, “I am absolutely against the United States waging war for the purpose of protecting Jews anywhere in the world.”115 In The Present International Crisis, published in 1939, Gerald Winrod spelled out this concern more concretely when he invited his readers to visualize “a nationwide occult and racial organization, the members of which are prominent in social, financial and business circles across the continent” and which controls virtually all the news, broadcasting, and advertising in the country.116 For Winrod, the implication was clear. “That there are minority groups at work among us who hope to involve the nation in Europe’s coming struggle, every informed person must readily admit.”117 Isolationists in Congress increasingly spoke out against the role Jews were allegedly playing in pushing the nation to war. Mississippi Congressman John Rankin, for example, returned repeatedly to this theme. In November 1939, he expressed this very concern on the floor of the House when he claimed that “99 percent of the Christian people of America” wanted to avoid the war. But despite such overwhelming opposition, Rankin said, “a certain international element that has no sympathy for Christianity was spending money by the barrel” to get the country to help England.118 In another instance, the

One Crisis Behind? 103 Representative from Mississippi claimed, “Wall street and a little group of our international Jewish brethren are still attempting to harass the president and the congress of the United States into plunging us into the European war unprepared.”119 In the Senate, Burton Wheeler expressed his opposition to American involvement in a telegram he sent to Mrs. Barbara Winthorp, the national president of We, the Mothers, Mobilize for America. “If the 85 per cent of this country who are opposed to war would have one tenth of the courage our forefathers had when they threw the tea into Boston harbor,” he wrote, “the international bankers and this administration could not drag us into another bloody European conflict.”120 Another Senator, Gerald Nye, focused on the role Hollywood allegedly played in shaping public opinion against Germany and in favor of the British. In a speech he delivered in September 1941, Nye named various leaders of Hollywood studios. There is Harry and Jack Cohn, of Columbia Pictures. There is Louis B. Mayer, of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. There is George Schaefer, of R.K.O. There is Barney Balaban and Adolph Zucker, of Paramount. There is Joseph Schenck and Daryl Zanuck, of Twentieth Century Fox, dominated by Chase National Bank. There is Murray Silverstone, of United Artists, and the great Sam Goldwyn, of Samuel Goldwyn, Inc. There are the three Warner brothers, Arthur Loew, Nicholas Schenck, Sam Katz, and David Berstein, of Loew’s, Inc.121 As was clear to many at the time, Nye’s concern was not spread evenly, but seemed to be focused on a particular group among the top figures in the film industry. The largest and most well-known isolationist organization was, of course, the America First Committee. Though not founded as an antisemitic organization, the Committee did gain the support of prominent anti-Jewish figures, including the two most significant American antisemites of the twentieth century, Henry Ford and Charles Coughlin. In fact, in Brooklyn, the local America First Committee and Coughlin’s Christian Front were essentially one and the same.122 Indelibly linked to this group was Charles Lindbergh, whose September 1941 speech in Des Moines, Iowa, summed up some of the key charges of America’s radical antisemites. In addition to stressing the role of Jews in driving the United States to war, he said, “Their greatest danger to the country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government.”123 Though the public reaction to Lindbergh’s speech was overwhelmingly negative, the theme of Jewish responsibility for Roosevelt’s alleged push to war would continue to be propagated for the next several years. Across the Atlantic, there was a delay of several years before Germany’s National Socialists caught up with America’s radical antisemites in warning of the danger Roosevelt allegedly posed. As a matter of fact, the Nazis’ initial public assessments of Roosevelt were generally positive. Early on, they made

104  One Crisis Behind? favorable comparisons between the New Deal and National Socialism. Discussing the President’s book Looking Forward in June 1933, the Völkischer Beobachter commented, If not with the same words, then still in the same sense, he demands “public need must go before private greed.” A National Socialist could have written many sentences. In any case, one can assume that Roosevelt possesses a great deal of understanding for the ideas of National Socialism.124 Such sympathetic accounts would continue for several years. As late as November 1936, in Der Angriff, Joseph Goebbels could still congratulate the newly re-elected Roosevelt, writing that “one recognizes in him his unshakeable energy and his beaming American optimism, which nothing can restrain.”125 As for their view of America more generally, antisemitism made an early appearance in the National Socialist press, and fit within their larger narrative of a conspiracy to destroy Germany directed by “International Jewry.”126 This allowed the Nazis to depict themselves as responding defensively to the “Jewish threat.”127 Their first coordinated nationwide anti-Jewish action, in fact—the boycott of April 1, 1933—justified in precisely these terms, declaring “Jewry has thrown down the gauntlet to 65 million Germans, now it shall be struck in its most sensitive spot!”128 And the American branch of the alleged Jewish conspiracy figured prominently in this early instance. In fact, the press reported regularly on the (allegedly nefarious) activities of Jews in the United States, while also pointing out the strong presence of antisemitism throughout American society and the growing voice of America’s radical antisemites.129 They reported quite frequently on their speeches, activities, and revelations, while also making use of their materials, all to help “prove” the truth of their own assertions. Thus, Robert Edward Edmonson’s Star of David depicting the roles of the Jews around FDR made an appearance in the German press.130 As it turns out, Edmonson and Pelley were in contact with the Amt Auslandspresse in Munich.131 But this was not simply a case of the Nazis funneling antisemitism to America. It was an exchange that often went both ways.132 While the Nazis certainly smuggled copious amounts of propaganda into the United States, it was at most an aggravating factor. As with The Protocols in the 1920s, it did not ignite antisemitism in America or provide any images or tropes not already present. Instead, it reveals a remarkable confluence of imagery resulting from the logic of two similar, deep-seated antisemitic political cultures. With this confluence, we see the image of the Roosevelt Administration itself fitting within the broader Nazi narrative of alleged Jewish influence in the United States—now in the form of an American government supposedly riddled with Jews. The Völkischer Beobachter made this point graphically in January 1939 through a photo array under the question, “Roosevelt’s Jewish Friends?”133 In a tactic that would become common, the Nazis used the most unflattering pictures they could find, adding to the sinister, repellent image they sought to depict. In addition to revealing the Jews around FDR—men like

One Crisis Behind? 105 Felix Frankfurter (“the son of a Vienna Rabbi”), Louis Brandeis, Cordell Hull’s wife (“daughter of the Jew Isaac Witz”), Bernard Baruch, etc., the paper contrasted them with far more flattering photos of “his opponents from the Republican camp.” In April 1939, the Nationalsozialistische Parteikorrespondenz declared that “President Roosevelt had assembled around himself the biggest Jew-government a country had ever experienced outside the Soviet Union.”134 This “Jew-government” included “B. Mannes Baruch” as “secret president of the USA” and, parroting American antisemites, Frances Perkins as the Jew “Mrs. Perkins-Wutsky.”135 A series of articles in early January 1942 ran in Die Innere Front, each focusing on one of Roosevelt’s “Court Jews,” including Frankfurter, Morgenthau, and Baruch.136 The question of Roosevelt’s own Jewish origins was somewhat muddled. In 1942, in his annual speech in Munich to mark the anniversary of the failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler referred to “this half-Jew Roosevelt.”137 In some cases, the same genealogy used by America’s radical antisemites appeared in Nazi papers.138 Elsewhere they described him as a tool of the Jews. On July 23, 1941, for example, the Völkischer Beobachter announced in a major headline “Roosevelt revealed as primary tool of Jewish World-Freemasonry.” In this sense, the question of his Jewish origins is moot. Having surrounded himself with Jews, so the argument went, having been taken into the highest levels of “International Freemasonry,” “His thinking is completely judaized—can his dealings be otherwise? The tool of the Jewish secret circle can think and want nothing other than that of Jewry itself. The goal of both is—the extermination of the German people.”139 Of all the ways in which Roosevelt allegedly served as a “tool” of the Jews, his supposed role in pushing America into war would understandably come to take on great significance for the Nazis. The idea of a relationship between “International Jewry” and the war was fundamental to Hitler’s thinking. In his famous Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939, he made this relationship clear when he threatened “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” should “international finance Jewry” cause another World War.140 The function of Hitler’s “prophecy” in providing guidance for all those “working toward the Führer” was critical for the unfolding of the Final Solution. It also provides a context within which the depictions of the Roosevelt Administration can be seen to fit, and through which its actions could be explained. The National Socialists’ understanding of “International Jewry” helped them explain why America was moving ever closer to war despite widespread opposition among the American people.141 “World Jewry and international Freemasonry wanted the war. Their most important tool, the high-level Freemason and USA President surrounded by Jewish ‘advisers,’ pulled out all the stops in order to give it to them.”142 The war, they claimed, was a conscious choice by Roosevelt in order to distract attention from the failure of the New Deal. Preparation involved an economic and press campaign (directed by the Jews, who supposedly controlled both sectors) against Germany—the “scapegoat” for all of America’s problems.143 Once in the war, it was, they wrote, “the Jews in Washington, particularly in the White House, who will be the actual

106  One Crisis Behind? string-pullers.”144 According to this understanding, the United States was, in reality, “a power instrument of world Jewry, whose actual goal, the reconquest of Europe, is hidden behind American imperialism. The ‘American century,’ whose beginning the Jewish press in America triumphantly announced, shall be the century of world Jewry.”145 What lay in store for the Germans should “International Jewry” and its primary tool, Franklin Roosevelt, prove victorious, was dire indeed—enslavement and ultimately annihilation through the plan devised by Roosevelt and the Jew Henry Morgenthau.146 In the end, of course, it was the Jews who suffered enslavement and annihilation—the very real result of a series of irrational and delusional ideas taken seriously by a relative few, but tolerated by far too many. It is this environment—a fanatical core surrounded by a general population ranging in attitude from indifference to hatred—that is critical to understanding the genocidal dynamic in Nazi Germany and the latent potential for something similar in the United States. In interwar Germany, there existed a widespread, low-level antisemitism among the bulk of the population—what could be called “xenophobic antisemitism,” ranging from unease to outright hostility.147 This was not, however, Nazi antisemitism. Instead, the National Socialist Party—and even more accurately a core element within the Party—constituted the repository of radical antisemitism, what Gavin Langmuir has described as “chimeric antisemitism,” with its fantastical notions of global conspiracies directed by “International Jewry.”148 Hitler’s antisemitism also contained at its core an apocalyptic element—a struggle of pure good versus pure evil—with the triumph of “Jewry” leaving behind a world void of life, while the triumph of the “Aryans” meant the salvation of mankind. It was not, however, this most extreme vision—what Saul Friedländer calls “redemptive antisemitism”—that attracted all those who joined or voted for the party.149 As William Sheridan Allen observed, the people he studied in the town of Northeim “were drawn to anti-Semitism because they were drawn to Nazism, not the other way around.”150 Neither would an explanation of perpetrator motivations during the Holocaust that relied too heavily on a pre-existing murderous antisemitism suffice. As has been shown in both the historical and social science literature, a range of factors are needed to understand why the killers did what they did.151 These range from the impact of six years of Nazi propaganda to peer pressure and other group dynamics, from career ambition to an antisemitic attitude picked up after the initial violence as a means of mitigating the cognitive dissonance that resulted from the shooting of unarmed men, women, and children. Still, it must be noted— enough Germans were willing to tolerate a party that publicly espoused such a vicious form of antisemitism and make it the largest party in the country by 1932. “That fact alone,” Christopher Browning has written, “makes the history of Germany and German anti-Semitism different from that of any other country in Europe.”152 Several aspects of the German experience during the early twentieth century certainly were extreme. The depth and extent of the crisis decade, and particularly the five years that began with the defeat in World War I followed by

One Crisis Behind? 107 the revolution, attempted coups from right and left, the political violence of the civil war, and the unimaginable trauma of the hyperinflation all set Germany apart from the United States. And yet it must be remembered—despite all this, Germany’s radical antisemites failed to gain power. The liberal, democratic republic—though only a few years old—survived. Had this been the last of the crises, one could easily imagine Hitler fading into obscurity, ending up as nothing more than a curiosity from the lunatic fringe of German history, which, after all, was precisely the fate of all the other (at the time) equally plausible leaders of the antisemitic Right. Instead, there was a second earth-shaking crisis which resuscitated the fortunes of radical antisemitism in Germany. In the end, it was this second crisis, along with some poor and unnecessary decisions made by a few cynical members of the German elite, that enabled the Nazis to come to power and establish a regime with a radical, chimeric antisemitism as its central ideology, thereby setting Germany on a course that makes this period in its history unique.153 From this perspective, in which America is one crisis behind, the image of the Roosevelt Administration can be seen to have served a similar function for America’s radical antisemites in the 1930s and 1940s as the image of the Weimar Republic did for those in Germany in the 1920s. Both were viewed as being dominated by Jews and Socialists or Communists and other “un-American/ un-German” elements. The very legitimacy of each regime was rejected by both groups as a result of this perception. In terms of the antisemitic “ingredients” present in Germany during the 1920s that facilitated the rise of the Nazis, a similar mix can be seen in America during the 1930s. Having described the paranoid fantasies some Americans dreamed up about the Roosevelt Administration, and the notable place of The Protocols in the public culture of the country’s antisemitic entrepreneurs, it is clear that there existed a core of extreme, or “chimeric,” antisemites. Following the implications of their accusations to their logical conclusions, in terms of the existential danger that Jews were said to pose to America and Christian civilization, one could even suggest the existence of “redemptive” antisemitism.154 But what about the other key ingredients: the lower-level, but widespread “xenophobic” antisemitism that allowed for the toleration of the Nazis’ extremist ideology? Certainly, the ideas were present in America: the Christian tradition that made itself felt in schoolbooks, popular culture, and the law, stretching back into the nineteenth century; the increasingly racialized images of Jews that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the image of Jews in the immigration debate, in the First Red Scare, and on the pages of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent and The International Jew and then again in Father Coughlin’s Social Justice the following decade; and the attitudes that led to widespread discrimination and exclusion of Jews from university admissions, whole areas of the professions, residential areas, social clubs and resorts, etc. Was all of this, as some historians have described it, merely “private antisemitism,” and therefore somehow distinct, and less dangerous than the antisemitism that coursed through German society?155 There are good reasons to question such an understanding.

108  One Crisis Behind? Perhaps if American antisemitism had remained primarily within the realm of ideas and rhetoric, one could argue that it was less dangerous than what existed in Germany. The fact is, however, it did not. Violence against Jews in the United States, it turns out, was a very real and remarkably extensive phenomenon stretching back into the nineteenth century. The story of anti-Jewish violence in America is not new. Scholars have written about it to one degree or another—often in connection with some other aspect of American Jewish history—but not in any truly sustained fashion that takes a wide-ranging view over both time and space.156 This provides at least part of the explanation, I would argue, for the scholarly and public tendency to downplay the danger of antisemitism in general in American history. After all, if the general assumption is that American antisemitism has been less significant and dangerous than in Germany, one assumes then that there isn’t much to look for in terms of anti-Jewish violence, and when individual cases are found, they get labeled as such—as exceptions that prove the rule. But when we bring together what we do know about violence against Jews in the United States and place it within the context of a long-term and comparative history of antisemitism, we get a different impression. We begin to see the true significance of the phenomenon and the need for more work on the subject.157 With some exceptions, anti-Jewish violence in America was not typically deadly. But what it lacked in lethality, it more than made up for in duration and geographical spread. Physical attacks on Jews, either as individuals or as groups, occurred during most of the Roosevelt era, though not with the same frequency throughout. And assaults took place in most parts of the country, though some cities and regions saw more than others. The victims included men and women, children and the elderly. At times attacks were individual and scattered: a bomb planted at the house of a Jewish man in Philadelphia in 1939; a cross-burning outside the house of a rabbi on Long Island in 1941.158 At other times they were larger scale and part of a wider pattern of violence affecting a whole area: a 14-year-old junior high school student in Baltimore attacked by a mob of 40 kids who cut an “H” into his neck after asking if he was Jewish.159 This was just one in a wave of antisemitic incidents at Baltimore schools that led to two local investigations and one federal probe ordered by Texas Congressman and House Un-American Activities Committee head Martin Dies, who said he had information that convinced him of the existence of “a widespread secret anti-Semitic organization in operation in the city.” Commenting on the bigger picture, he added “[t]his feeling of anti-Semitism is apparently sweeping the country and since I have been down here [in Houston—RF] there has been a campaign conducted in my own district.” While they were not all coordinated or directed from a single center, as Dies’ observation indicates, overall they were both a reflection of and a stimulus for the dangerous antisemitic environment that so marked this period in American history.160 In the spring 1937, Arnold Forster and his fellow young attorneys used to meet regularly on New York City’s upper west side to listen to each other’s stories about “anti-Semitic gangs roaming city subways and beating up Jewish

One Crisis Behind? 109 passengers.”161 He estimated that there were around thirty-five antisemitic gatherings taking place every week in the city that year—gatherings that were often accompanied by violence.162 For a sense of how the people were roused to violence, in late 1938, one of the street-corner speakers told the crowd that Jews “murdered little Christian girls in order to drain their blood for ritualistic purposes.”163 By the end of the decade, violent, public antisemitism had reached a new level. In early 1940, looking back on the previous year in New York, Theodore Irwin wrote that “the new anti-Semitism has been a domestic stormtroop mob running amok, spewing racial hatred, fomenting violence, staging street scenes never before witnessed in the city’s history.”164 Focusing only on the Christian Front between 1939 and early 1940, Irwin wrote that there were an average of forty to fifty street gatherings a week in the city, where crowds were “exhorted to liquidate the Jews in America.”165 Fights at these meetings led to at least 250 arrests and more than 100 convictions.166 In just a single police precinct in the Bronx, a New York City investigation in 1939 found eighty-six outdoor and seven indoor gatherings of the Christian Front had taken place, while in that very same precinct the numbers for the more radical Christian Mobilizers were forty-two and twenty-three. According to the investigation, “rarely did a night pass that the popular corners . . . were not all simultaneously being used as a forum” for the Front and the Mobilizers.167 In one example of this anti-Jewish violence in New York City, a “Buy Christian” street corner meeting of the Christian Mobilizers in August 1939—“one of a series” of such meetings held in the Bronx in the hopes of organizing an anti-Jewish boycott—drew a crowd of 500. Mobilizer supporters there beat a heckler and then others who protested. Supporters then staged a march to the police station after five of their own were arrested. Just the previous week, a meeting of the Christian Mobilizers in Brooklyn also ended in a “near riot” that “required the calling out of large detachments of police.” It was just part of a much larger wave of anti-Jewish terror unleashed in New York. “Street fighting and demonstrations,” it was reported, “have become increasingly prevalent in various parts of the city in recent weeks as a result of the activities of pro-Coughlin groups.”168 It was so bad, Congressman Dickstein of New York City is reported to have described the city as being “overrun with organizations engaged in spreading racial hatred,” and predicted “mass rioting” unless steps were taken to stop the perpetrators.169 In the case of Philadelphia, Theodore Irwin described a city in which street fights were common. In one case members of a Jewish men’s club were beaten. Christian Fronters stormed a religious tolerance meeting at a local Y, which had also received bomb threats. Sections of the city, Irwin wrote, were “terrorized, swamped with anti-Semitic propaganda,” while vandals smashed synagogue windows.170 In October 1943, the country learned about a wave of violence against American Jews in Boston—part of a longer stretch of frequent anti-Jewish beatings and vandalism in Massachusetts and elsewhere that stretched back

110  One Crisis Behind? three years.171 Because of a preference within the Jewish community not to bring threats or incidents of violence or vandalism to the police or the public for fear of stimulating even more antisemitism, and an apparent lack of interest by the press, those earlier years of terror had gone unreported in the news.172 Now Jewish organizations began to abandon that quiet approach and conduct their own investigations and bring news of the terror out into the open. And the reports were truly shocking. One report on a case of vandalism described a large group chanting “Let’s kill the Jews!” as they shattered synagogue windows.173 The Yiddish newspaper The Day described the experience in Dorchester as “a series of small pogroms.”174 Not long after the news of violence in Boston broke, New Yorkers could read about a similar wave of anti-Jewish terror in their own city. In late December 1943, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith released a report on incidents of violence against Jewish boys and girls along with “vandalism and desecration of synagogues with swastikas and obscenities,” primarily in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan but also in Queens as well as Flatbush in Brooklyn. In Washington Heights, they said “nearly every temple and synagogue in the area had been desecrated.”175 With regard to the beatings, the League reported that the attacks followed a particular pattern. “In each case the hoodlum demands to know the religion of his intended victim. If the victim admits he is Jewish, or if the hoodlum concludes that this is the fact, an assault ensues.” In one case of violence, a 16-year-old who was beaten on the way home from his job said the police there “told him to keep quiet about the Jew-baiting part of the fight.”176 Only days after the Anti-Defamation League released its report, news broke that the New York police were themselves conducting an investigation of antisemitic incidents. A committee consisting of Jewish students at Yeshiva College provided the impetus for the investigation when they asked Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to stop “outrageous attacks on decent and loyal citizens solely because they are Jewish.” The students told the Mayor about “many so-called incidents involving the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, disfigurements of synagogue walls, many broken windows and Nazi swastikas painted on places of holy worship, and numerous ‘Storm Troop style’ attacks on Jewish boys and girls.”177 Yet another investigation revealed further evidence of the terrifying environment in which New York’s Jews found themselves. New York Investigation Commissioner William B. Herlands had looked at sixty-nine complaints prior to March 16, 1943, while also noting that seventy additional complaints starting in March 1943 were currently under investigation.178 The investigators determined that much of the violence, while not directly organized, was inspired by the Christian Front and the Christian Mobilizers as well as those hawking Coughlin’s Social Justice on the streets of the city. According to the report, a lieutenant of Mobilizers leader Joe McWilliams had made his home “virtually a school for violent anti-Semitism.”179 And yet, despite the official investigations of late 1943 and early 1944 as well as the greater public

One Crisis Behind? 111 awareness of the plight of Jewish Americans, the extreme anti-Jewish environment remained throughout the rest of 1944 and into 1945. That extreme antisemitic environment of the 1940s involved a number of other elements beyond physical assaults. Cemetery and synagogue desecrations took place in cities across the northeast, including Hartford, Bridgeport, Boston, Lake Placid, and Saranac Lake, with headstones toppled and/ or defaced and windows smashed.180 Cities were also hit with veritable tidal waves of antisemitic flyers, leaflets, and stickers. In Philadelphia, for example, a “deliberate, underhand campaign of vilification against Jews,” involving the “distribution of scurrilous leaflets and handbills handed out in subways and on street corners” occurred in spring 1939. It was so extensive that Dr. Solis-Cohen, chairman of the Anti-Defamation Committee, described “a state approaching that of war propaganda” existing in the city.181 An organized campaign involving the regular distribution of antisemitic materials at the Boston Navy Yard began in September 1942. Printed on US Navy presses, the literature included “America’s Fighting Jew,” which contained the familiar accusation of Jewish shirking.182 Less than two years later, Boston again found itself inundated with antisemitic pamphlets described by post office officials and police as “well-written and requiring considerable research work.”183 The four-page pamphlets traced the history of Chelsea, Roxbury, and Dorchester— a history, however, that blamed Jews for all the regions’ troubles. Making their appearance just before Easter, officials noted that they “appeal[ed] directly to Christians to drive Jews from the community.”184 As disturbing as the violence and vandalism against Jews in the United States during the Roosevelt Era was, in terms of its geographical extent, its duration, and its intensity, there’s another element that adds to its significance with regard to the danger of antisemitism in America. With each year that passed and more and more Jews found themselves victims of physical assault, saw their synagogues and cemeteries desecrated, the storefront windows of their businesses smashed, their children beaten and slashed and tormented, the more Americans came to learn about the genocidal violence that the Germans were unleashing on the Jews of Europe. If all the precise details of the Holocaust were not known to Americans during the war, there was no question that Jews were being slaughtered across the continent. And it was not as if this was something that was difficult for Americans to discover. Anyone with access to a newspaper could read about it. And yet, despite that knowledge of the awful suffering of European Jews at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, antisemites and those inspired by them continued up until the very end of the war to victimize American Jews at a level never before seen in the history of the country. When we think about what might have been possible in an America under the political control of extreme antisemites, the violence of the 1930s and 1940s should make one extremely reluctant to declare, “it couldn’t happen here.” Polling data from the time, for example, taken in conjunction with the pogrom-like atmosphere in numerous American cities, points to a rather distressing possibility.

112  One Crisis Behind? Between August 1940 and February 1946, the Gallup poll asked Americans which “nationality, religious or racial group in this country are a menace [threat]” to the United States. In seven of the nine polls conducted during this period, Jews were first, ahead of both Germans and Japanese, with figures ranging from a low of fifteen percent in February and December 1942, to a high of twenty-four percent in June 1944.185 Considering that America was actually at war with the home countries of two of these groups, this suggests a deep-seated antisemitism, and leads to further disturbing revelations. In 1945, when explicitly asked whether Jews had too much power and influence in the country, sixty-seven percent answered “yes.” But when asked to name groups they considered to have too much power and influence, only four percent answered “Jews.” In seeking to explain these two seemingly divergent figures, Charles Herbert Stember wrote, [t]he lower figure indicates that Americans did not, by themselves, tend to be preoccupied with “Jewish power”; it accords with the fact that no widespread campaign against Jews materialized. The higher figure, on the other hand, shows how ready large numbers were to accept the myth of the all-powerful Jew when it was suggested to them. It thus illustrates the extent of latent or potential anti-Semitism at the time: while spontaneous resentment was focused in part on groups other than Jews, it could be refocused on the Jew with disturbing ease.186 Considering this, then, perhaps it should be less surprising that, when asked whether they thought a “widespread campaign against the Jews” was likely in America, twenty-six percent of those polled responded “yes” in March 1938, and over the course of twelve more polls, the figures ranged from a low of nineteen percent to a high of thirty percent in March 1945.187 In seeking to determine levels of support, indifference, and active opposition to such an antisemitic campaign, polls taken between April 1940 and March 1945 indicated support or sympathy at thirty-one to forty-eight percent of the population, active opposition at about thirty percent, with indifference marking the remainder.188 Possibly as many as eighty percent of the American people, then, would have supported a nationwide anti-Jewish campaign or stood aside. With such widespread attitudes, one might expect a degree of sympathy toward, or even approval of, the steps taken against the Jews in Nazi Germany. And yet, when asked in 1938 about the Third Reich’s anti-Jewish policies and practices, eighty-eight percent disapproved, while eighty-four percent said they did not want a Nazi-style government in America. When one adds to this the overwhelmingly negative American reactions toward Kristallnacht as well as Lindbergh’s 1941 Des Moines speech, the notion of a deep-seated antisemitic culture that bears any resemblance to Germany would seem hard to sustain. Closer examination, however, yields some different insights. Only a tiny fraction of those who rejected a Nazi-style government for the United States said they did so out of concern for the mistreatment of minorities.189

One Crisis Behind? 113 Perhaps this signaled a recognition on the part of Americans of the racial discrimination prevalent in their own country. Rather, I would argue that many white Americans appear to have been afflicted by a kind of blind spot that prevented them from recognizing the striking similarities between their own system of anti-Black racism and Jim Crow segregation and the antisemitic racist system of Nazi Germany that Louis Marshall alluded to in the opening of this chapter. In a comparative study of Nazi Germany and the American South in the 1930s, Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins concluded that “for the most part, white southern newspaper editorials condemned Nazi racism but refused to acknowledge the obvious similarities between the German racial system and that of the South in the 1930s.”190 In a particularly egregious example of this blind spot, a 1933 editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser asserted, “Americans are against persecution of minority groups. . . . Hitler will only gain respect in the U.S. if he stops persecuting the minority.”191 With such staggering blindness afflicting a good portion of the white American public in terms of its own anti-Black racism, is it so hard to imagine a similar blindness when it came to the ominous rise of antisemitism in the United States? I believe that the notion of some kind of exceptionalism in the history of American antisemitism in the first half of the twentieth century no longer holds—that the cases of Germany and the United States are, in fact, comparable. This is especially true when one considers the much more favorable environment for radical antisemitism that existed in Germany as opposed to the United States. After all, Germany lost World War I and experienced a political revolution that overthrew historic dynasties and introduced a wholly new governing system. And Germany experienced complete economic collapse by 1923. Arguably, the two should not have been even close in terms of their antisemitism. And yet, it was America, the victor of the war in political and economic terms, that produced a Henry Ford. It was in America that fear of a “Jewish flood” helped lead to immigration restriction. And it was in America that everyday social discrimination against Jews achieved a breadth and intensity in the 1920s that would not be seen in Germany until the height of the Third Reich. What I have shown here is the importance of not simply looking back through the lens of the Holocaust, but rather, forward as antisemitism in both countries developed and spread. It is only then that one can truly see the openness of the paths that stretched out before both societies and the ways in which those paths paralleled each other. Having recognized that, one can then truly appreciate the critical importance of contingency in creating an environment in Germany that made a Hitler dictatorship possible, with all that followed from it, and in placing the United States just one crisis behind.

Notes 1 Marshall quoted in Morton Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, Defender of Jewish Rights (Detroit, 1965), 38. 2 Marshall quoted in Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 39.

114  One Crisis Behind? 3 In fact, the issue was discussed in numerous magazines and journals in America, including Forum, which declared in 1926, “That a Jewish Question exists is a fact which nearly all sane men and women, whether Jew or Gentile, will readily admit.” Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, 2006), 120. 4 For a fascinating fictional treatment of one such scenario, see Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (New York, 2004). 5 For the exceptionalist position, see Steven T. Katz, ed., Why Is America Different? American Jewry on Its 350th Anniversary (Lanham, MD, 2010). Tony Michels challenges that position in, “Is America ‘Different?’ A Critique of American Jewish Exceptionalism,” American Jewish History, Vol. 96 (September 2011): 201–224. Arguing for a uniquely murderous German antisemitism: Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). 6 Henry A. Turner, Jr., Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933 (Reading, MA, 1996), 58. 7 John Higham, “Ideological Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age,” in Higham, ed., Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. (Baltimore, 1984), 109. 8 “Assails Anti-Semitism. John Haynes Holmes Warns Against Danger of Flare-Up Here,” New York Times, December 18, 1933. 9 Köster quoted in Keith L. Nelson, “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 42 (December 1970): 616. 10 Raffael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (Cambridge, 2006). 11 Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore, 1992), 238. 12 Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge, 2006), 169. 13 Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York, 2002). 14 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York, 1997), 105. 15 Leonard Dinnerstein stresses the significance of religion in his study of antisemitism in the United States, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1994). 16 On the very real obstacles Christianity placed before Jews in America, see Naomi W. Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York, 1992). 17 David A. Gerber, “Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations in American Historiography and the American Past,” in Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana, 1986), 15; Michael N. Dobkowski, The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism (Westport, CT, 1979). 18 Matthew Baigell, The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877–1935 (Syracuse, 2017); Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 58–66. 19 Joseph Bendersky, The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S. Army (New York, 2000), 38. 20 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 106. 21 Robert Singerman, “The American Career of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” American Jewish History, Vol. LXXI (September 1981): 48–78. 22 Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 80–81. 23 Henry Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream (Baltimore, 1992), 13. 24 Evans quoted in, Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill, 1991), 20–21.

One Crisis Behind? 115 25 Feingold, A Time for Searching, 13–24. 26 Edward Berenson, The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town (New York, 2019). 27 See Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2008). 28 Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany & Austria (Cambridge, MA, 1964, 1988), 102–110. 29 Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven, 1975). 30 Werner T. Angress, “The German Army’s Judenzählung of 1916. GenesisConsequences-Significance,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, Vol. 23 (1978): 117–137. 31 Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, translated by Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones (Chapel Hill, 1996), 157. 32 Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 1889–1936 (New York, 1998), 317. 33 On the violence in Ukraine, see Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (New York, 2021). 34 Heinrich August Winkler, “Die deutsche Gesellschaft der Weimarer Republik und der Antisemitismus – Juden als ‘Blitzableiter’,” in Wolfgang Benz und Werner Bergmann, eds., Vorurteil und Völkermord: Entwicklungslinien des Antisemitismus (Freiburg, 1997), 358. 35 “5689 in America,” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (Milwaukee, WI), October 4, 1929; Joseph Salmark, “The Year 5690 In Retrospect,” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (Milwaukee, WI), September 26, 1930. 36 Beth S. Wenger, New York Jews and the Great Depression (New Haven, 1996), 22. 37 Wenger, New York Jews, 22. 38 Meyer W. Weisgal, “Charges Racial Bias Bars 10,000 Jewish Girls from Employment,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 19, 1930. 39 “Anti-Semitism in U. S. Declared ‘Dangerous’,” The St. Louis Star and Times, October 20, 1930. 40 Kirsten Fermaglich, “ ‘Too Long, Too Foreign . . . Too Jewish’: Jews, Name Changing, and Family Mobility in New York City, 1917–1942,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring 2015): 39. 41 While those who came to make up the German-American Bund certainly were inspired by Hitler, I do not include them in this discussion. Instead, I focus on those who were not created by Nazi Germany (even if they did receive support), since America’s “domestic” antisemites were more than capable of inspiring an extraordinarily widespread and dangerous anti-Jewish environment on their own, which is, after all, a key part of my argument. 42 Donald Strong, Organized Anti-Semitism in America: The Rise of Group Prejudice During the Decade 1930–1940 (Washington, DC, 1941). 43 “Silver Shirt Leader Behind New Movement to Form Anti-Jew Party in Spokane,” Spokane Chronicle, March 19, 1936. 44 Pelley quoted in, Steven J. Ross, Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against America (New York, 2017), 81–82. 45 Henry Schwartz, “The Silver Shirts: Anti-Semitism in San Diego, 1930–1940,” Western States Jewish History, Vol. XXIV, No. 1 (October 1992): 54–57. 46 Winrod in, “Bible School Park Minister Defends Hitler,” Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, NY), July 26, 1935. 47 Gerald B. Winrod, “An Experience With Communists in New York,” Mennonite Weekly Review (Newton, KS), January 30, 1935. 48 Glen Jeansonne, “Combatting Anti-Semitism: The Case of Gerald L. K. Smith,” in David A. Gerber, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana, 1986), 154– 155; on Smith’s potential for right-wing leadership, see Glenn Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate (Baton Rouge, 1988), 6–7.

116  One Crisis Behind? 49 William Trollinger, Jr. God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison, 1990), 4. 50 Trollinger, God’s Empire, 71. 51 Riley, Protocols and Communism (Minneapolis, 1934), 3–4, 13–14. 52 Riley, Protocols and Communism, 15. 53 Trollinger, God’s Empire, 75–78. 54 William R. Glass, “Fundamentalism’s Prophetic Vision of the Jews: The 1930s,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter 1985): 75, fn. 69. 55 Arno Clemens Gaebelein, The Conflict of the Ages: The Mystery of Lawlessness: Its Origin, Historic Development and Coming Defeat (New York, 1933), 95. 56 Gaebelein, The Conflict of the Ages, 100. 57 Gaebelein quoted in Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 126. 58 Coughlin quoted in, Donald I. Warren, Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio (New York, 1996), 34–35. 59 “Fr Coughlin Replies to Gen Johnson,” The Boston Globe, March 12, 1935; “Fr. Coughlin Denies Charge of Rabbi Wise,” Daily News (NY), March 25, 1935. 60 Wise quoted in, “Fr. Coughlin Denies Charge of Rabbi Wise.” 61 Alex Goodall, Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion From World War II to the McCarthy Era (Urbana-Champaign, 2013), 192–193. 62 Coughlin quoted in, “Coughlin Raps Atheistic Jews and Attackers,” The Pittsburgh Press, November 28, 1938. 63 “Persecution—BUT,” The Morning Post (Camden, NJ), November 30, 1938. 64 Charles R. Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front (Cambridge, MA, 2021), 35. 65 Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square, 1. 66 Theodore Irwin, Inside the Christian Front (Washington, DC, 1940), 2–6. 67 Conant quoted in, Warren, Radio Priest, 280. 68 “Sedition Case Key Witness Taken Ill,” The Baltimore Sun, April 11, 1940. 69 Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square, 4–5. 70 Ronald H. Bayor, “Klans, Coughlinites and Aryan Nations: Patterns of American Anti-Semitism in the Twentieth Century,” American Jewish History, Vol. 76, No. 2 (December 1986): 184. 71 Irwin, Inside the Christian Front, 2. 72 Leveque quoted in, Gene Fein, “For Christ and Country: The Christian Front in New York City, 1938–1951,” Dissertation (CUNY, 2006), 241. 73 Gallagher quoted in, Fein, “For Christ and Country,” 306. 74 Leveque quoted in Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square, 49. 75 Hahn quoted in, Fein, “For Christ and Country,” 38. [Emphasis mine] 76 Martha Neumark, “Lights of New York,” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, March 27, 1936. 77 Dov Fisch, “The Libel Trial of Robert Edward Edmonson: 1936–1938,” American Jewish History, Vol. LXXI (September 1981): 80. 78 George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933–1939 (New York, 1969), 69–70. 79 “Enemies Within,” The Atlanta Constitution, March  2, 1942; “Some Midwest Papers Ape Hitler, Revile Jews,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 18, 1942. [All caps in original] 80 Attorney General quoted in “Steps Are Taken to Ban ‘X-Ray’ From the Mails,” The Star Press (Muncie, IN), May 2, 1942. 81 “Enemies Within.” 82 Glenn Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II (Chicago, 1996), 23–25, 101, 123.

One Crisis Behind? 117 83 Speech from May 29, 1933: “In the United States Today, The Gentiles Have Slips of Paper While the Jews Have the Gold and Lawful Money,” in Louis T. McFadden, ed., Collective Speeches of Congressman Louis T. McFadden as Compiled from the Congressional Record (Hawthorne, CA, 1970), 385; for more on McFadden, see Philip Jenkins, Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 117–124. 84 Speech from January 24, 1934: “Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Apostle of Irredeemable Paper Money,” in McFadden, ed., Collective Speeches, 413. 85 On his connections to Gerald L. K. Smith, see Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith, 87. 86 Leonard Rogoff, Homelands: Southern Jewish Identity in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Tuscaloosa, 2001), 169. 87 “Bankers Push U. S. Into War, Says 1776 Foe,” Daily News (NY), March 5, 1941. 88 “Bankers Push U. S. Into War,” Daily News, March 5, 1941. 89 Shapiro, “Anti-Semitism Mississippi Style,” 130. 90 Rankin quoted in, Shapiro, “Anti-Semitism Mississippi Style,” 133. 91 Bilbo quoted in, Shapiro, “Anti-Semitism Mississippi Style,” 140. 92 Thorkelson quoted in, John L. Scanlan, Assistant Publicity Director, Christian Front, Brooklyn, Letter to the Editor, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 21, 1940. 93 “Congressman Thorkelson Attacks Jews in Address to Mobilizers,” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (Milwaukee), March  8, 1940; “Pelley Urges Thorkelson as Presidential Candidate,” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (Milwaukee), March 22, 1940. 94 Fein, “For Christ and Country,” 290. 95 “Anti-Semitic Lists Used by Appeasers,” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (Milwaukee), May 2, 1941. 96 “Silvershirt Legion and Bund Join Forces in Milwaukee,” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (Milwaukee), May 13, 1938. 97 Goodall, Loyalty and Liberty, 187. 98 Matthew Avery Sutton, “Was FDR the Antichrist? The Birth of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism in a Global Age,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 98, No. 4 (March 2012): 1052–1053. 99 “Six Churces Unite Services,” The Minneapolis Journal, July 14, 1934. 100 Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 89. 101 Gerald Winrod, Communism and the Roosevelt Brain Trust (Wichita, 1933), 13. 102 “New Deal Is Attacked For ‘Harboring’ Reds,” Battle Creek Enquirer, December 12, 1939. 103 Edmonson quoted in Fisch, “The Libel Trial of Robert Edward Edmonson: 1936– 1938,” 80–81. 104 Fisch, “The Libel Trial of Robert Edward Edmonson: 1936–1938,” 80–81. 105 Pelley, quoted in Scott Beekman, William Dudley Pelley: A Life in Right-Wing Extremism and the Occult (Syracuse, 2005), 111. 106 Winrod, quoted in Wolfskill and Hudson, All but the People, 67. 107 Wolfskill and Hudson, All but the People, 68. 108 See, for example, Franklin Thomson, America’s Ju-Deal (New York, 1935). 109 Forster, Square One, 41–42. 110 Winrod, Communism and the Roosevelt Brain Trust, 8. 111 Hart quoted in, “Villard Changes Mind On Christian Front,” The Herald (Miami, FL), March 25, 1940. 112 Jeansonne, Women of the Far Right, 23. 113 Sanctuary, quoted in Wolfskill and Hudson, All but the People, 75. 114 “F. R. Foreign Policy Distrust Is Growing,” The Minneapolis Star, February 20, 1939. 115 Völkischer Beobachter quote in, Rogoff, Homelands, 169. 116 Gerald Winrod, The Present International Crisis (Wichita, 1939), 8.

118  One Crisis Behind? 117 Winrod, The Present International Crisis, 11. 118 Rankin quoted in, Shapiro, “Anti-Semitism Mississippi Style,” 132. 119 Rankin quoted in, “18 Leaders Rap Rankin’s Statement. Compare Declaration With Nazi Avowals,” Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS), June 6, 1941. 120 “Wheeler Urges Union of Peace Groups,” The Sacramento Bee, February 18, 1941. 121 Gerald P. Nye, “War Propaganda: Our Madness Increases As Our Emergency Shrinks,” Radio address, delivered in St. Louis, August 1, 1941. Vital Speeches of the Day. September 15, 1941. 122 Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 129–132. 123 Lindbergh, quoted in Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 129. 124 Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde (hereafter BArch): RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 III, 399, #168: Völkischer Beobachter, June 7, 1933. 125 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 III, 399, #154: Der Angriff, November 4, 1936. 126 Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2006); Wolfram Meyer zu Uptrup, Kampf gegen die ‘jüdische Weltverschwörung’: Propaganda und Antisemitismus der Nationalsozialisten 1919–1945 (Berlin, 2003); Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933–1945 (Stuttgart, 1997). 127 See, for example, “Das Judentum im Ausland ruft zum Mord auf,” Völkischer Beobachter, March 16, 1933, in BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 1491, #90a; “Entlarvung des Weltjudentums,” Neue Preussische Zeitung, March 28, 1933, in BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 7153, #94a; “Politische Entlarvung der Greul-Propaganda,” Der Tag, March 28, 1933, in BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 1491, #95. 128 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 1491, #100a: Völkischer Beobachter, March 29, 1933. 129 See, for example, “Judentum und Kommunismus in Amerika,” Nationalsozialistische Korrespondenz, October 25, 1934, in BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 1494, #46; “Zuviel jüdische Mediziner in U. S. A.” Völkischer Beobachter, December 2, 1934, in BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 1494, #77. 130 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 1505, #189: Völkischer Beobachter, September 25, 1941. 131 Alton Frye, Nazi Germany and the American Hemisphere, 1933–1941 (New Haven, 1967), 55. 132 Frye, Nazi Germany, 55; Beekman, William Dudley Pelley, 99. 133 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 7153, #87: Völkischer Beobachter, January 7, 1939. 134 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 7159, #124: NS Parteikorrespondenz, April 27, 1939. 135 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 7159, #124. 136 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 1506, #13–15. 137 Hitler quoted in, “Fuehrer Failed to Arouse Crowd; Vague Hint Gas to Be Last Resort,” The Boston Globe, November 9, 1942. 138 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 7159, #124: NS Parteikorrespondenz, April 27, 1939; BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 III, 399, #88: “Roosevelts jüdische Abstammung,” Völkischer Beobachter, May 9, 1942. 139 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 III, 399, #119: Völkischer Beobachter, July 23, 1941; also BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 II, 1506, #7: “Der Judenpräsident,” in Die Innere Front, December 17, 1941. 140 Hitler quoted in Herf, The Jewish Enemy, 52.

One Crisis Behind? 119 141 Hans Schadewaldt, Was Will Roosevelt? (Düsseldorf, 1941). 142 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 III, 399, #119: Völkischer Beobachter, July 23, 1941. 143 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 III, 399, #80: Völkischer Beobachter, September 4, 1942. 144 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 III, 399, #89: Völkischer Beobachter, March 22, 1942. 145 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 III, 399, #75: H. Ballensiefen, “Roosevelt führt Judas Krieg,” in “Roosevelt gegen Europa – Europa gegen Roosevelt,” Sonderausgabe der Nationalsozialistische Parteikorrespondenz, December 13, 1942. 146 BArch Berlin: RLB Pressearchiv, R8034 III, 399, #40, #20, and #19: “Roosevelts Traum: Weltherrschaft durch ein Ueber-Versailles,” Völkischer Beobachter, 9 January 1943; “Roosevelt als Vater des Morgenthau-Plans,” Völkischer Beobachter, November 15, 1944; “Roosevelt & Morgenthau,” Völkischer Beobachter, October 24, 1944. 147 Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Bavaria 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1983, 2002); David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford, 1992). 148 Gavin Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1990). 149 Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1, 73–112. 150 William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922–1945 (New York, 1965, 1984), 84. 151 Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber, eds., Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust (Oxford, 2002); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Germany (New York, 1992, 1998). 152 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (Lincoln, 2004), 8. 153 Turner, Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power, 166–172. 154 Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1, 73–112. 155 Sorin, A Time for Building, 240. 156 On Roosevelt-era anti-Jewish violence, see Stephen H. Norwood, “Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York During World War II,” American Jewish History, Vol. 91, No. 2 (June 2003): 233–267; for earlier periods, see Patrick Q. Mason, “Anti-Jewish Violence in the New South,” Southern Jewish History, Vol. 8 (2005): 77–119; William F. Holmes, “Whitecapping: Anti-Semitism in the Populist Era,” American Jewish History, Vol. 63, No. 3 (March 1974): 244–261. 157 Britt P. Tevis points to the need for a new focus on anti-Jewish violence in American history: “Trends in the Study of Antisemitism in United States History,” American Jewish History, Vol. 105, Nos. 1/2 (January/April 2021): 283–284. 158 “House Is Damaged by Bomb in Phila,” Courier-Post (Camden, NJ), April 7, 1939; “Fiery Cross Burned Outside Rabbi’s Home,” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, August 22, 1941. 159 “Anti-Jewish Acts in School Here Charged,” The Baltimore Sun, June 13, 1939. 160 “Dies Orders Probe of Boy’s Branding,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 13, 1939. 161 Forster, Square One, 41. 162 Forster, Square One, 41. 163 Quoted in, Forster, Square One, 44–45. 164 Irwin, Inside the Christian Front, 1–2. 165 Irwin, Inside the Christian Front, 2. 166 Irwin, Inside the Christian Front, 2.

120  One Crisis Behind? 167 Norwood, “Marauding Youth,” 242. 168 “Coughlinites Fight Police in New York,” The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (Milwaukee), August 18, 1939. 169 “Dickstein Predicts Race Riots in N. Y.,” The Evening Sun (Baltimore), August 17, 1939. 170 Irwin, Inside the Christian Front, 3. 171 Norwood, “Marauding Youth,” 250. 172 That reluctance to go public also means that it’s all but impossible to determine the true number of anti-Jewish incidents, though they must be well above what’s been reported. 173 Norwood, “Marauding Youth,” 235. 174 The Day quoted in, Norwood, “Marauding Youth,” 233. 175 “Charge Attacks on Jews in New York,” The Times Record (Troy, NY), December 30, 1943. 176 “Sees Organized Anti-Semitism on Rise In City,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 30, 1943. 177 Student appeal quoted in, “New York Police Probe Anti-Semitic Vandalism,” Star-Gazette (Elmira, NY), January 3, 1944. 178 “N. Y. Police Declared Lax Fighting Anti-Semitic Acts,” Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY), January 11, 1944. 179 “Investigator Reports on Anti-Semitism,” The Pittsburgh Press, January 11, 1944. 180 “Jewish Grave Stones Overturned,” The Berkshire Eagle (MA), April  9, 1942; “Vandals Smash Tombstones in Melrose Jewish Cemetery,” The Boston Globe, October 28, 1943; “N. Y. Governor Orders Vandalism Against Jews Investigated,” The Boston Globe, December 23, 1942. 181 “Friends Report Denounces Drive Here Against Jews,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 30, 1939. 182 Norwood, “Marauding Youths,” 249–250. 183 “Investigate Anti-Semitic Pamphlets Here,” The Boston Globe, April 8, 1944. 184 “Investigate Anti-Semitic Pamphlets Here” [Emphasis mine]. 185 Charles Herbert Stember, et al., Jews in the Mind of America (New York, 1966), 128. 186 Stember, et al., Jews in the Mind of America, 122. 187 Stember, et al., Jews in the Mind of America, 129–130. 188 Stember, et al., Jews in the Mind of America, 132–133. 189 Stember, et al., Jews in the Mind of America, 137. 190 Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 58 (November 1992): 668. 191 Quoted in Grill and Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South,” 684.

6 Klansmen in the Fatherland A Transnational Episode in the History of Weimar Germany’s Right-Wing Political Culture

This chapter explores a little-known episode that occurred during the middle years of Germany’s Weimar Republic. It involves the discovery in 1925 of a small, right-wing secret society that differed in some rather significant and startling ways from the many other such groups that came and went during the short, tumultuous life of Germany’s first experiment in democracy. While dedicated to defending Germandom and fighting Jewry, this group was led by three Americans and modeled itself after the American Ku Klux Klan—and it called itself the Order of the Knights of the Fiery Cross. While it turns out this group was not the terrifying murder organization feared by the Left when its existence was first made known, neither was it simply a group of harmless, carnivalesque buffoons as portrayed by the Right. What, then, is one to make of such an odd episode in the history of Weimar Germany? Does it have anything to teach us, any broader significance despite its rather brief existence? How might it help us better understand the world of Germany’s radical Right and the course that ultimately led to Hitler and the Third Reich? Considering the role played by the American Ku Klux Klan, what might it teach us about the culture of the radical Right from a transnational and comparative perspective? This chapter will show that the existence of the Knights provides further evidence of the fragile and fractured state of the German Right during Weimar’s so-called “years of stability,” while at the same time demonstrating its still-dangerous potential for destruction that had not gone away with the end of the civil war period in 1923. The story of the Knights, therefore, sheds valuable light on a number of important issues relating to German right-wing political culture and nationalism. And thanks to the American dimension, it does so from a broader, transnational, and comparative perspective. As a result, we will see striking similarities between the German and the American world of the radical Right—similarities that, at first glance, would often be dismissed, but upon closer examination reveal a great deal about the commonly assumed exceptionalism of both countries. During the summer of 1925, the police in Berlin stumbled upon a new right-wing secret society as a result of two separate and unrelated investigations. In early August, an official in the police department reported his son— 20-year-old Fritz Siebert—missing since July 30. Originally reported to the DOI: 10.4324/9781003266372-7

122  Klansmen in the Fatherland missing-persons division, the case was transferred to the political police when the father expressed concerns that the disappearance might have been politically motivated. Fritz Siebert belonged to the right-wing paramilitary organization, Frontbann (a front group for the SA and other paramilitaries led by Ernst Röhm). That was not, however, the only group of which he may have been a member. Siebert’s father revealed that a few weeks previously, a letter had arrived at his home containing information on a gathering in a restaurant in Charlottenburg. The organization holding the gathering called itself “R.z.f.S.”1 About a month later, while investigating a political murder involving the Black Reichswehr—the secret army established by the Weimar government to circumvent the troop limits set down in the Treaty of Versailles—the police arrested 20-year-old Wilhelm Weckerle. At the time, he had in his possession a letter with the heading “R. F. K.” dated August 15, 1925, and a membership card with the same initials. When asked about this organization, he said he could not discuss it because he had taken an oath upon becoming a member of what he called “The Knights of the Fiery Cross.” Weckerle remained true to his oath for about the length of time it took the police to explain to him that if he did not tell them truthfully what they wanted to know, he would be subject to punishment for membership in a secret organization. He immediately agreed to tell them everything he knew. He did request, however, that he be in no way drawn into the affair and that they should not reveal his name to the others, for he feared consequences for himself.2 As a result of these two unrelated events, the Berlin political police opened an investigation of the mysterious Order of the Knights of the Fiery Cross on suspicion of violating paragraphs 128 and 129 of the Criminal Code—the laws against secret oaths and membership in secret societies.3 What did they find? They received their first impressions of the organization from Weckerle himself as he described in some detail the ceremony through which he became a member. Like the missing Siebert, Weckerle was a member of the Frontbann and it was a fellow Frontbann comrade, Walter Brandt, who invited him to join a new group, the purpose and goals of which, he told Weckerle, were to maintain Germandom and to fight Jewry. Sometime in June, Brandt told him to bring five additional Frontbann comrades to the Café Gärtner to be sworn in.4 The initiation ceremony took place in a side room of the restaurant.5 About twenty members were there that evening to be sworn in along with Weckerle. Waiting in one room, black masks over their eyes, they were called into a second room in groups of three. Once they had entered, the door was closed behind them. A voice then called to them, “What do you want and where do you want to go?” To which the one who led them in answered, “To Wotan, the loyal old one, to report for the battle.” Awaiting them in the room were the leaders of the Order, each wearing a white robe with a red cross on the chest and a white hood, with two holes cut out for their eyes.6 Some of these robed members then took the initiates by the hand and led them into another room. They then stood before a table, on top of which rested a bible, a skull, an American flag, and a red cross.7 In front of the table stood a man dressed like

Klansmen in the Fatherland 123 a minister, with a black mask over his face. At each corner of the table stood two robed members, each carrying an officer’s sword. Weckerle then swore the following oath: “I swear by God that I will not speak about the association and the proceedings therein; otherwise I am obligated to turn my weapon against myself, or the weapon of a brother will be turned against me.” In particular, Weckerle noted, several members stressed to him—repeatedly—that they were to stay completely silent in the face of the police. After one of the masked men called out “more light!” the masks were removed from those newly sworn-in and they were led back into the second room, where they were told about the various forms of greeting and given their membership cards. In the days that followed Weckerle’s arrest and interrogation, the police searched the group’s meeting place in Charlottenburg and confiscated a variety of items including ritual objects and a membership list but very few weapons. They then proceeded to bring in 19 members of the Order for questioning. Fairly quickly a general picture of the organization began to emerge. The group was founded in February 1925 by three men: a German-born American pastor named Otto Strohschein, his son Gotthard, who had been born in Germany but was a naturalized American, and his son’s friend, Don Gray, an American who spoke no German. Together these three belonged to Asgard—the highest level of leadership in the Order. Some fourteen Germans—primarily those involved in the founding meetings in February and known to Strohschein through his involvement with the antisemitic German Social Party (Deutsch-soziale Partei)—made up the next level in the Order, known as the Senate. The rest of the membership was distributed among three initial levels. There were three branch lodges—Germania, Siegfried, and Wiking—based in different sections of the city and all under the control of the mother lodge. Members did say that plans were in development for further expansion beyond Berlin, though there were already a number of members from other parts of Germany. Of the 350 members on the list confiscated by the police, 179 fell into the category of “worker and salaried employee” (Arbeiter und Angestellte), 110 were “craftsman and manufacturer” (Handwerker und Gewerbetreibende), thirty-five “official/clerk” (Beamte), three “pensioner” (Pensionaere), twenty-one “students and academic occupations” (Studenten und akademische Berufe), and two “others.” Slightly more than half (almost 53%, or 185 members) were thirty-one or older.8 At the time of their interrogations, the members claimed to have no current affiliation with any political party or movement. At one time, however, most of the leading figures had been members of Richard Kunze’s radical antisemitic Deutsch-soziale Partei, while the younger members had come mainly from the Frontbann, but also some from the right-wing veterans’ organization Stahlhelm as well as the Bismarck Youth (Bismarckjugend).9 Rather than any change of heart regarding the substance of their politics, their withdrawal from Kunze’s party reflected frustration and disillusionment with the party system itself.10 In their depositions, in fact, they still asserted a strong dislike of Jews and foreigners and rejected any mixing with them. All those questioned claimed to reject violence, pointing to their own statutes as proof. Coming

124  Klansmen in the Fatherland as they did from such a violent milieu, however, their unanimous assurances of non-violent intent given during police questioning need to be taken with circumspection. A turning point for the Knights came in June 1925, when the elder Strohschein and the other two Americans were expelled from the Order they themselves had founded. Two separate factors led to the expulsion. The first issue involved a charge of personal misconduct. Members accused Otto Strohschein of bilking them out of some 4,000 M.11 This was a plausible charge considering what we know about the Knight’s founder, though a good deal remains unclear, including just what he was doing in Germany at this time. Suspicions regarding Strohschein go back as far as his teens—before he first left for the United States—as a nephew believed him to have possibly been arrested by the police.12 The picture only gets muddier when we learn that the reason Strohschein gave for returning to Germany in 1921 was to acquire a patent and begin production on a steam-powered airplane he claimed his son had invented. That was not all he was doing in Germany at that time, however. He also traveled to different parts of the country and even into Poland, preaching in various towns.13 In a number of cases, both locals and police suspected him of being either a swindler or a spy.14 He joined and delivered speeches for the radical antisemitic German Racial Freedom Party (Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei) but left it in December 1924 and began to associate with the Deutsch-soziale Partei, speaking at a party meeting in Breslau in April 1925, he claimed, at the personal invitation of party leader Richard Kunze.15 Just what Strohschein’s motives were in founding the Order of the Knights of the Fiery Cross are therefore unclear, but the possibility certainly exists that he was more of a swindler than a devoted fighter for the völkisch cause. The other issue that resulted in his ouster provides some insight into the thinking of the other Knights and sheds some light on this episode as a whole. Richard Brandt, who would take over the Order from Strohschein, noted how, as it came to concern them that an American was a member of their order, it appeared to them also “unbearable” that he named himself as the highestranking member of the order. It also proved “unbearable” that he had taken his son and the “thorough American” (Stockamerikaner) Don Gray with him into Asgard—the highest level of the Order and the one which commanded absolute authority from the other members. “The leadership of our Order would have thereby been placed completely in the hands of foreigners. In the interest of Germandom we determined to dissociate ourselves from Strohschein.”16 The final straw came when, according to several members, Strohschein announced his intent to make the Order of the Knights of the Fiery Cross a branch of the American Ku Klux Klan.17 During his interrogation by the police, Strohschein denied any such intent. He also denied having been a member of the Klan in America, though he would later confess to the police his suspicions that Don Gray had a relationship with the Klan and that his father may have been a member.18 At this point, Brandt took over the leadership of the Order. The group drew up a new set of regulations and eliminated Asgard, making the

Klansmen in the Fatherland 125 Senate the highest-ranking body. They also informed their interrogators of their intent to register themselves officially with the proper authorities, which they did, in fact, do.19 The Knights would continue on after their run-in with the authorities in September 1925. The police dropped the case against them in early 1926, thanks to a general amnesty granted by President Hindenburg.20 What they were truly up to at this point is not much clearer than it was during their months under Strohschein’s leadership. It appears they settled down into a more traditional fraternal order, though they did not drop their ties to the world of the radical Right entirely.21 It is even possible that they did not cut ties completely to their early days, either. A flyer announcing an “educational evening” in 1926 identifies the group as the “Order of the Knights of the Fiery Cross” and “German Ku Klux Klan!”22 They remained in the public eye (if only to a minimal degree), thanks to the attacks by some on the radical Right against the police vice-president Friedensburg, who had been in charge of the investigation of the Knights. The issue came to a head in 1931 in a libel case brought by Friedensburg against a right-wing publisher, in which the defense attorney, Roland Friesler, sought, unsuccessfully, to call Adolf Hitler as a witness in order to deny any connection between the Knights and the Nazis.23 By this point, with crisis once more racking the country, membership had dwindled significantly as more and more members left the Order seeking a more dynamic environment elsewhere, including the Nazis.24 It would make the decision to dissolve itself in 1930.25 As for the founders of the Order, Don Gray had returned to the United States already before the police began their investigation. Gotthard Strohschein, being an American citizen, was deported and returned to America where he apparently continued on with his quest to build a steam-powered airplane.26 As for his father, despite having traveled on an American passport, it was determined that he was, in fact, never naturalized and therefore remained a German citizen. He was still in Germany as late as February 1926, when he asked the authorities to stop the Knights from using their name and rituals, which he claimed to be his own intellectual property.27 Just what happened to him after the episode of the Knights is unclear. So what can one say about this peculiar, yet brief chapter in the history of the Weimar Republic? In fact, the episode of the Knights raises some rather interesting and important questions. Why did several hundred Germans, whose nationalism was extreme enough to lead them into some of the most radical völkisch parties and organizations in Weimar, join a group founded and led by three Americans, one of whom did not even speak any German, and modeled after an American nationalist movement? Why did they do so at this particular time? What does this episode reveal about right-wing German and American political culture? To answer these questions, an understanding of the environment in which the Knights first emerged and then were discovered is crucial. Beginning in 1925, a rash of Fememord cases hit the German courts and received widespread coverage in the press.28 Fememord, or Feme murder, was

126  Klansmen in the Fatherland a tactic of the radical Right, particularly in the republic’s early years. Hearkening back to medieval frontier justice with its declaration that “traitors fall to the Feme,” it was, in fact, a perversion of justice in which kangaroo courts passed death sentences on political opponents or former comrades whom they suspected of having revealed valuable secrets. Groups of former Freikorps militia members, many of whom joined the underground Organization Consul, or OC, carried out a wave of killings across Germany, including the spectacular murders of leading Center Party politician and former Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger in 1921 and the country’s first Jewish Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, in 1922. It was the investigation of the Pannier Fememord that led to the arrest of Wilhelm Weckerle and thus the exposure of the Knights of the Fiery Cross.29 In this atmosphere, the initial response of the left-leaning press was to wonder aloud whether another of Germany’s violent Feme groups had just been uncovered. In fact, an early (and wildly inaccurate) press release from the Wolff Telegraph Office reported that the Order had been founded back in 1923 and connected it with the Kustrine Putsch and the murders related to it, claiming that the leader of the Putsch, Major Buchrucker, was a member.30 The right-wing press, too, made a point of linking the newly discovered Knights to the Feme phenomenon. Their motivation, however, did not involve fear. In its coverage, the German national Kreuzzeitung asked of the “German Ku-KluxKlan,” “Carnival-Association or Feme-Organization?” and stressed that “in no way is this Order to be taken seriously.”31 As the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts rightly pointed out, by conflating the Feme groups with the buffoonish Knights, the Right hoped to create the impression that both were of no consequence, and certainly not the terrible danger depicted by the Left.32 The explosion of Feme cases at this time helps us understand the excitement, uncertainty, and concern within some quarters that accompanied the announcement of the Knights’ unmasking. The investigations of both the Knights and the true murder organizations provided a stark reminder of the violence and chaos of the Republic’s early years and equally sobering evidence that the forces of destruction from that time had not disappeared. While it is certainly true that the forces dedicated to the destruction of Weimar democracy were still present, they were not in quite the same shape as before. The German Right experienced Weimar’s middle years as a period of flux and reorientation.33 The stabilization that followed the end of the Ruhr Crisis and the domestic threats to the regime forced the Republic’s enemies, at least for the time being, onto the defensive. Already in 1922, the government had dissolved the nation’s largest antisemitic organization, the German Racial Defense and Defiance League (Deutschvölkische Schutz- und Trutzbund). While many of its members would find their way to the National Socialists, that party was in only somewhat better shape. With Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in November 1923, the Nazi Party lay fractured. He would spend the next several years following his release from prison under a government-imposed ban on public speaking, while at the same time working to rebuild his shattered movement. Its paramilitary force, too, experienced a

Klansmen in the Fatherland 127 period of transition and uncertainty. Ernst Röhm created the Frontbann as a means of preserving the SA along with the various fighting groups of the Right in some kind of temporary “holding company.” This organization, too, would crumble around April 1925.34 Though it benefited to some degree from the Nazis’ misfortune, Richard Kunze’s Deutsch-soziale Partei also faced internal challenges and the potential fracturing of the party during this same period.35 And the country’s largest bourgeois, right-wing party, the German National Peoples’ Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP) experienced an internal crisis of its own as a result of the Reichstag vote over the Dawes Plan in 1924—an episode that further eroded the already negative German attitude toward political parties as little more than defenders of narrow economic interests at the expense of the national good. What the experience of the Right shows us is that Weimar’s so-called “years of stability” were at best, years of “relative stability.” The decline in support for the Republic that already registered with the Reichstag elections of 1920 continued on during these years as anti-party sentiment only grew in both breadth and intensity. In discussing this widespread feeling at this particular time, Hans Mommsen noted “its corollary was the growing tendency to replace liberal forms of public civic association with a variety of political leagues, which under a variety of labels such as Order, Ring, Bund, or Club were reminiscent of pre-constitutional structures.”36 The episode of the Knights fits well within this context and provides further evidence of the unstable state of German right-wing political culture at this point. This context of crisis and flux within the world of the German Right also helps us understand, at least in part, why the Order of the Knights of the Fiery Cross formed at this time and why people might have joined it. It is in such fluid environments that political entrepreneurs can step and offer new visions and new opportunities for prospective followers. But the environment only explains part of the story, since the success or failure of such an enterprise depends on the degree to which the political entrepreneur grounds his or her vision in culturally familiar territory.37 This was only partly accomplished in the case of the Knights. When Otto Strohschein proposed a new organization to maintain Germandom, fight Jewry, and remain above the party political atmosphere that was poisoning the country, his message struck familiar chords within the world of German right-wing political culture. In designing the ritual elements of the organization, he tapped into the culture of right-wing occultism that had been developing in Germany since before World War I.38 Whether it was the symbols he chose, the initiation ceremony, or the organizational structure he established, much of it would have at least been familiar to many who joined the Knights from other groups on the Right. He also wisely recruited from among a milieu already familiar to him through his prior association with the Deutsch-soziale Partei. And we know from the deposition of Wilhelm Weckerle and others that the following grew through the cultivation of existing social networks mainly in both Kunze’s party and the Frontbann. This has been shown to be a successful strategy in the growth of religions and

128  Klansmen in the Fatherland cult-like organizations from antiquity to the present.39 But when Strohschein’s vision came clothed in the white sheets of the American Ku Klux Klan, its chances of success declined.40 The uncertainty, disorientation, and frustration felt by radical nationalists at this time may have made them initially willing to consider something as seemingly incongruous as a German Ku Klux Klan. But the dissonance involved in such a compromise, combined with the nature of the man they entrusted with the leadership of their new organization, was likely too much and led ultimately to Strohschein’s failure and his ouster from the Order. This episode then also offers the opportunity to examine right-wing radical nationalism from both a comparative and transnational perspective. And placing the United States alongside Germany allows us to recognize similarities that might otherwise go unnoticed or unappreciated. The early 1920s was a period of heightened nationalist sensibilities not just in Germany but in the United States as well, where the stress on 100-percent Americanism and anti-hyphenism reached a fever pitch. The sense of danger to the nation that accompanied America’s involvement in the world war continued on into the postwar years as the country faced a number of perceived new threats.41 The Bolshevik Revolution made concrete the nightmare possibility of communist upheaval in the United States, while a wave of bombings and strikes struck fear into the hearts of many Americans that such a revolution was not only possible but also imminent. The resulting red scare unleashed the repressive powers of state and national governments to crush the supposed left-wing danger to the nation. Fundamentally related to the perceived Bolshevik threat to the United States was the emergence of an energized and intensified antisemitism that connected the image of the communist with that of the Jew for increasing numbers of Americans.42 This owed a great deal to the efforts of Henry Ford, who serialized the ideas contained within the newly arrived Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.43 While his paper achieved a circulation of 700,000 at its peak, making it the nation’s second largest paper, a collection of the Independent’s articles published in four volumes titled The International Jew, reached an international audience with publication figures numbering in the millions. With the stamp of approval of one of the most famous and well-respected figures in the country, the impact of such virulent antisemitism should not be underestimated. To many Americans, the danger posed by Jews and Bolsheviks represented not just a political challenge but, thanks to the growing popularity of Social Darwinism and Eugenics, a racial danger as well. Such ideas sprang not from the rantings of the lunatic fringe but rather from the writings of prominent and respected figures in the United States, including Burton Hendrick’s articles for McClure’s Magazine, “The Great Jewish Invasion” (1907) and “The Jewish Invasion of America” ’ (1913), E. A. Ross’ book The Old World in the New (1914), and Madison Grant’s, The Passing of the Great Race (1916). The resulting fears played out in the intense debates over immigration and the supposed threat to the health of the good national stock posed by a flood of Jews from Eastern

Klansmen in the Fatherland 129 Europe. Out of this came the immigration restriction legislation of 1924, all but shutting America’s doors to further Jewish arrivals.44 It was in this environment that the new Ku Klux Klan was reaching its peak. It had been re-founded back in 1915 at least partly in response to the antisemitic Leo Frank Affair in Georgia—but really only took off beginning in 1920. From this point, it grew dramatically—garnering national attention from a 3-week-long special report in the New York World in September 1921, which, along with congressional hearings, had the unintended consequence of boosting its membership and prestige still further among millions of Americans. At its peak, it would come to dominate a number of state and local governments and play a role in national politics as well during the 1924 presidential elections.45 Also in the spirit of the times, this second Klan added Jews to its list of enemies, with complaints that meshed with the ideas appearing every week in Henry Ford’s newspaper. In contrast to its Reconstruction-era forerunner, the new Klan came to resemble the radical Right in Europe generally and in Germany specifically in a number of respects. It portrayed itself as a “movement” and not a party, reflecting a similar attitude toward politics being expressed in Germany at the same time. As one could read, for example, in the Klan newspaper Fiery Cross in 1923, “The people are disgusted to exasperation with hollow shams. They have lost interest in parties without character, courage or program. Politics must be born again. The people require justice instead of expediency. They scorn administrations controlled by predatory interests.”46 The Klan saw itself as the truest embodiment of the national essence and sought to purify the nation of any and all foreign elements, including Jews, Blacks, and Catholics. Violence played a fundamental role as it positioned itself as the defender of “law and order,” forcefully dealing with what it saw as the subversive and degenerative threats to the nation. It opposed the labor movement as the supposed tool of Marxist socialism. It sought to uphold traditional gender roles in modern society.47 And, of course, race stood front and center in the Klan’s worldview, just as it did with Germany’s radical Right. And just as the collapse of the radical Right in Germany by the end of 1923 did not mean that the ideas that had animated it had been discredited or abandoned, one should be careful in assessing the collapse of the Klan around that very same time. Its downfall, by the middle of the decade, resulted not from a lack of resonance for its ideas among the American people but rather from scandal and corruption (thus marking another element it shared with Strohschein in his efforts to export the Klan to foreign shores). So on one level we see a number of rather significant commonalities between American and German radical nationalism. In terms of ideology, this involved intense racism, antisemitism, nationalism, hostility to organized labor, and a glorification of violence in pursuit of the cause. We can also see some significant differences as well. For example, the size of the main right-wing organization in one country dwarfed that of the other. At its peak, the Klan numbered around five million members, both men and women, while the largest radical nationalist organization in Germany’s early postwar years, the German Racial

130  Klansmen in the Fatherland Defense and Defiance League, had a peak membership of 180,000.48 Taking into account the particular national contexts in which they operated reveals the limits of just how much the two movements could share. The existence of the first Ku Klux Klan from the days of Reconstruction provided a template upon which the new version could model itself. It had a ready-to-use cultural tool kit of recognizable symbols, rituals, and, of course, clothing that it could make use of. The Nazis and related groups had their own cultural arsenal on which to draw for symbolism and ritual, though there was at least one area in which they had no precedent from recent German history. While the second Klan could draw on the symbols and rituals of its nineteenth-century forerunner, it also carried forward one of the most important features of Klan culture, and that was violence. Borrowing as they did from groups like the Pan-German League, the Deutschbund, the Reichshammerbund, and the Thule Society, the Nazis and others had no such precedent for the kind of violence that they were to unleash upon Germany. Political violence was simply not a part of the older prewar world of the radical Right. It took the war and the collapse of the empire to introduce an element already long present in the United States to German political culture. So now, the German Right, armed with all the weapons—not just ideological but also physical—that it needed, felt little affinity or desire for the additional trappings of the premier mass movement of the American Right. Guns, brass knuckles, and clubs were more than enough for Germany’s radical nationalists. They would leave the bed sheets and burning crosses to the Americans. In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the men who joined the Order of the Knights of the Fiery Cross were at least in part akin to the carnivalesque buffoons depicted in the right-wing press. They bought into the charades of someone who was likely a two-bit American huckster able to take advantage of the language and symbolism of the German völkisch Right: the disillusionment, the continuing desire for a leader, for revenge, for action, all clothed in the exotic white robes of the Ku Klux Klan. But this is as far as one can agree with the Right’s interpretation, for their dismissal of the Knights as buffoons was meant to apply as well to the other, much more real and much more dangerous threat of the murderous Feme organizations. That is simply untenable, since these groups certainly were, in fact, deadly serious, and wreaking real havoc on Germany’s young democracy. But if the Feme groups represented the truer threat at the time, one should take little comfort in the foolishness that marked an element of the episode with the Knights. The Order included, after all, many men from the violent world of the Frontbann, Ernst Röhm’s successor to the SA. And Wilhelm Weckerle (a man himself being investigated for a particularly violent case of Fememord) was sufficiently frightened to ask the police to shield him from the “consequences” of discussing the Knights publicly. The dispersal of some of the members into other more dangerous organizations means that a group like the Knights should be seen as a kind of way station. In the turbulent world of the mid-20s radical nationalist Right, such small groupings could provide a continued opportunity to commune with like-minded

Klansmen in the Fatherland 131 men, to maintain or even reinvigorate their radicalism, until something more promising came along. This is something the Nazis proved very successful at taking advantage of. And what we now know about the Knights helps us better understand this phenomenon and thus the group’s larger significance. Their willingness to follow one who promised a way forward, a path to healing the nation, and the elimination of their enemies, points to an ominous potential for Germany if one looks forward only a few years into the future when the years of relative stability would give way once again to years of crisis.

Notes 1 Landesarchiv Berlin (hereafter cited as LAB): A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, pp. 1–2. Initial report (August 6, 1925) on missing person: Fritz Siebert. 2 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, p. 5. Note—September 7, 1925. Black Reichswehr involvement mentioned during police press conference on 10 September 1925. See LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, pp. 54–56. 3 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, p. 9. 4 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, no page numbers given. Deposition of Wilhelm Weckerle (not dated, presumably September 7, 1925). 5 The following description comes from Wilhelm Weckerle’s deposition: LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646. 6 For the detail of the red cross, see deposition of Erich Schmidt on 9 September: LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, pp. 109–110. 7 According to the police and other members, other flags were also used, including a swastika flag and, according to one highly implausible claim, the black-red-gold flag of the republic. The claim about a black-red-gold flag was made by Johannes Engel in his September 10 deposition: LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, p. 116. 8 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, p. 266. 9 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, p. 56. One of the leading figures in the Order, Richard Brandt, an official with Siemens, had once been active with the German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei, DVP), but switched allegiance, moving further right to the Deutsch-soziale Partei. 10 See, for example, the deposition of Johannes Engel, LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, p. 115. 11 See the statement given the police by Alfred Köhler on September 11, 1925: LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, pp. 207–211. 12 See the deposition of his nephew, Ernst Doll: LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, p. 181. 13 One of these preaching jobs was rather short-lived. With the local pastor’s permission, Strohschein delivered a sermon in the Johanneskirche in Alt-Moabit, but since it supposedly had little religious content, the pastor denied any further speaking opportunities. LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, p. 42. 14 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, pp. 40–43. 15 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, pp. 34–35. 16 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, p. 105. 17 For statements about Strohschein’s intent to turn the Order into a branch of the Klan, see the depositions of Brandt (LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, pp. 100– 108) and Köhler (LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21647, pp. 109–111). Köhler goes so far as to assert that Gotthard Strohschein, during their final appearance, exclaimed, “We are from the Ku-Klux-Klan and have worked for it as such.” 18 On Strohschein’s denial of any intent to join the Order to the American KKK, see his own deposition, LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646, specifically, p. 34, where

132  Klansmen in the Fatherland he also denies having been a member of the American Klan. Part of his explanation was that he could not have been a member because he was not “100% American.” This seems a reasonable assertion, though Wyn Craig Wade, in his book The Fiery Cross, does say that in some communities with high proportions of immigrants the Klan would accept foreign-born members, “so long as they were respectable and Protestant.” This is questionable, however, and since his brief coverage of the episode of the Knights is riddled with inaccuracies and unsubstantiated claims, it must be taken with a great deal of skepticism. Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (New York, 1987), 266–267; on Strohschein’s suspicions regarding Don Gray, see LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21647, p. 108. 19 The documentation regarding their registration can be found in LAB B Rep. 042, Nr. 9025. 20 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21647, p. 78. 21 See the protocol of a meeting of the Senate on September 15, 1925, which indicates a relationship between the Order and the Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei. LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21647, pp. 69–70. 22 LAB: Pr. Br. Rep. 030 Nr. 21647, p. 136. 23 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21648, pp. 47–49. 24 Johannes Engel, one of the Order’s founding members, joined the NSDAP and was a city council representative in 1931. LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21648, p. 59. 25 LAB: B Rep. 042, Nr. 9025, p. 35, 43. The official liquidation of the order was completed by August 1931. 26 An article in Time Magazine from July 18, 1927 mentioned Gotthard Strohschein, “Chicago Preacher But Now an Inventor in Jersey City” as having leased a site on Staten Island where he planned to build his airplane. “The Flying World,” Time, July 18, 1927. 27 LAB: B Rep. 042, Nr. 9025, p. 12: Note to Amtsgericht, February 5, 1926. 28 Arthur D. Brenner, Emil J. Gumbel: Weimar German Pacifist and Professor (Boston, 2001), 84–85; on Fememord generally, see Irmela Nagel, Fememorde und Fememordprozesse in der Weimarer Republik (Köln, 1991); see also Douglas G. Morris, Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor, 2005). 29 For the Pannier Fememord, see Bernhard Sauer, Schwarze Reichswehr und Fememorde: Eine Milieustudie zum Rechtsradikalismus in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, 2004), 117–145. 30 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646: Berliner Tageblatt, “Ein neuer Verschwörerbund entdeckt. Ku-Klux-Klan in Deutschland,” September 10, 1925. For the Kustrine Putsch, see Robert G. L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany 1918–1923 (New York, 1952), 247–254. 31 BA Lichterfelde, R8034 II, Nr. 8872: Kreuzzeitung, “Der deutsche ‘Ku-KluxKlan.’ Karnevals-Vereinigung oder Femeorganisation?” 32 LAB: A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 21646: Vorwärts, “Maskenrummel und Fememord. Vergebliche Ablenkungsversuche,” September 11, 1925. 33 For the dynamics of the German Right in Weimar and Nazi Germany, see Barry A. Jackisch, The Pan-German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in Interwar Germany, 1918–39 (Burlington, 2012). 34 James Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany (Bloomington, 1977), 161; on the Frontbann, see also Dieter Fricke, Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte: Die bürgerliche und kleinbürgerliche Parteien und Verbände in Deutschland, 1789– 1945, Bd. II (Köln, 1984), 716–717. 35 On dissension within the Deutsch-soziale Partei, see BAL, R8034 II, 4373, p. 43: “Zersetzung der Deutsch-Sozialen Partei,” Berliner Lokal Anzeiger, June 12, 1925; on the Party generally, see Fricke, Lexikon, II, 538–539.

Klansmen in the Fatherland 133 36 Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, translated by Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones (Chapel Hill, 1989), 193. 37 For the case of political entrepreneurs leading a successful movement based on familiar cultural ground, see Richard E. Frankel, Bismarck’s Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898–1945 (Oxford, 2005). 38 On right-wing occultism in Germany, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York, 1992). 39 Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (San Francisco, 1996), 18. 40 See for example Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2002). 41 In keeping with the comparative and transnational aspects of this project, it is interesting to note that while the Klan imagery seems so incongruous, with its clear association with the United States, German occultism actually developed at least in part out of ideas and groups in nineteenth-century America. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 18–27. 42 Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right From the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia, 1983), 10. 43 Ribuffo, “Henry Ford and the International Jew,” 444–447. 44 Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1994), 58–66. 45 On the new Ku Klux Klan, see David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965 (New York, 1965); Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill, 1991); Rory McVeigh, The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics (Minneapolis, 2009). 46 Quoted in McVeigh, Rise of the Ku Klux Klan, 1. 47 See Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1994). 48 For Defense and Defiance League membership number, see Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, 157; for the Klan number, see Moore, Citizen Klansmen, xii. The Indiana Klan alone had nearly 300,000 members.

Bibliography

Archives and Libraries Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin-Dahlem) Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz Potsdamer Straße Unter den Linden Westhafen Staatsarchive Berlin Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung University of Lousiana at Lafayette Dupré Library Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University

Secondary Sources Alexander, Charles. “Prophet of American Racism: Madison Grant and the Nordic Myth,” Phylon, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1962). Alexander, Michael. Jazz Age Jews. Princeton, 2001. Allen, William Sheridan. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922–1945. New York, 1965, 1984. Angress, Werner T. “The German Army’s Judenzählung of 1916. Genesis-ConsequencesSignificance,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, Vol. 23 (1978): 117–137. Aschheim, Steven. Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923. Madison, 1982. Baigell, Matthew. The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877–1935. Syracuse, 2017. Bajohr, Frank. ‘Unser Hotel ist judenfrei’: Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt, 2003. Baldwin, Neil. Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate. New York, 1998. Baltzell, E. Digby. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. New Haven, 1964, 1987. Bankier, David. The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism. Oxford, 1992.

Bibliography 135 Barkai, Avraham. “Wehr Dich!” Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (C. V.) 1893–1938. München, 2002. Barkun, Michael. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. Chapel Hill, 1994. Bauer, Yehuda. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, 2001. Bayor, Ronald H. Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941, 2nd edition. Urbana-Champaign, 1988. ———. “Klans, Coughlinites and Aryan Nations: Patterns of American Anti-Semitism in the Twentieth Century,” American Jewish History, Vol. 76, No. 2 (December 1986): 181–196. Beekman, Scott. William Dudley Pelley: A Life in Right-Wing Extremism and the Occult. Syracuse, 2005. Bender, Daniel E. American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry. Ithaca, 2009. Bendersky, Joseph W. The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U. S. Army. New York, 2000. Berding, Helmut. Moderner Antisemitismus in Deutschland. Frankfurt a. M., 1988. Berenson, Edward. The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town. New York, 2019. Berkowitz, Michael. The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality. Berkeley, 2007. Birnbaum, Pierre. “Political Antisemitism, ‘State Jews’ and Roosevelt’s New Deal,” in Anthony McElligott and Jeffrey Herf, eds. Antisemitism Before and Since the Holocaust: Altered Contexts and Recent Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland, 2017. Blee, Kathleen M. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley, 1991. Brackman, Howard. “The Attack on ‘Jewish Hollywood’: A Chapter in the History of Modern American Anti-Semitism,” Modern Judaism, Vol. 20, No. 1 (February 2000). Brenner, Arthur D. Emil J. Gumbel: Weimar German Pacifist and Professor. Boston, 2001. Brenner, Michael. In Hitler’s Munich: Jews, the Revolution, and the Rise of Nazism. Princeton, 2022. Bright, Charles and Michael Geyer. “Where in the World is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age,” in Thomas Bender, ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley, 2002. Brinkmann, Tobias, ed. Points of Passage: Jewish Transmigrants From Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880–1914. New York, 2013. ———. “Why Paul Nathan Attacked Albert Ballin: The Transatlantic Mass Migration and the Privatization of Prussia’s Eastern Border Inspection, 1886–1914,” Central European History, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2010): 47–83. ———. “ ‘Travelling with Ballin’: The Impact of American Immigration Policies on Jewish Transmigration within Central Europe, 1880–1914,” International Review of Social History, Vol. 53, No. 3 (2008): 459–484. Bristow, Bristow J. Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870–1939. New York, 1983. Browning, Christopher. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939—March 1942. Lincoln, 2004. ———. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Germany. New York, 1992, 1998.

136  Bibliography Buchen, Tim. Antisemitismus in Galizien: Agitation, Gewalt und Politik gegen Juden in der Habsburgermonarchie um 1900. Berlin, 2012. Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965. New York, 1965. Charny, Robert W. “Patterns of Toleration and Discrimination in San Francisco: The Civil War to World War I,” California History, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Summer 1994). Chickering, Roger. The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918. Cambridge, 2009. Churchwell, Sarah. “Behold, America”: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream”. New York, 2018. Clark, Christopher. Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947. Cambridge, 2006. Cohen, Michael R. Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era. New York, 2017. Cohen, Naomi W. Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality. New York, 1992. ———. Encounter With Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830–1914. Philadelphia, 1984. ———. Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee 1906–1966. Philadelphia, 1972. Cohn, Norman. Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. London, 1967, 1996. Conrad, Sebastian. Global Geschichte: Eine Einführung. Munich, 2013. ———. Globalization and the Nation in Imperial Germany. Cambridge, 2010. Conrad, Sebastian and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds. Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914. Göttingen, 2006. Crim, Brian. Antisemitism in the German Military Community and the Jewish Response. Lanham, 2014. Cromier, Emmanuelle. “The Street,” in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis, eds. Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919. Vol. 2. A Cultural History. Cambridge, 2007. Currarino, Rosanne. The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age. Urbana, 2011. Daniels, Roger. Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since 1882. New York, 2005. Davis, Belinda J. Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin. Chapel Hill, 2000. Diehl, James. Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany. Bloomington, 1977. Diner, Hasia. Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way. New Haven, 2015. Diner, Hasia and Gennady Estraikh, eds. 1929: Mapping the Jewish World. New York, 2013. Dinnerstein, Leonard. The Leo Frank Case, rev. Athens, 2008. ———. Antisemitism in America. New York, 1994. Dubkowski, Michael N. The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism. Westport, CT, 1979. Eilers, Nicole Kvale. “Emigrant Trains: Jewish Migration through Prussia and American Remote Control, 1880–1914,” in Tobias Brinkmann, ed. Points of Passage:

Bibliography 137 Jewish Transmigrants from Eastern Europe in Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain 1880–1914. New York, 2013. Ermakoff, Ivan. Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications. Durham, 2008. Fein, Gene. “For Christ and Country: The Christian Front in New York City, 1938– 1951,” Dissertation. CUNY, 2006. Feingold, Henry. A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream. Baltimore, 1992. ———. “Anti-Semitism and the Anti-Semitic Imagination in America: A Case Study in the Twenties,” in Henry Feingold, ed. A Midrash on American History. Albany, 1982. Feldman, Egal. “Prostitution, the Alien Woman and the Progressive Imagination, 1910– 1915,” American Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 1967): 192–206. Fermaglich, Kirsten. “ ‘Too Long, Too Foreign . . . Too Jewish’: Jews, Name Changing, and Family Mobility in New York City, 1917–1942,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring 2015): 34–57. Fisch, Dov. “The Libel Trial of Robert Edward Edmonson: 1936–1938,” American Jewish History, Vol. LXXI (September 1981). Fitzpatrick, Matthew P. Purging the Empire: Mass Expulsions in Germany, 1871–1914. Oxford, 2015. Frankel, Richard. Bismarck’s Shadow: The Cult of Leadership and the Transformation of the German Right, 1898–1945. Oxford, 2005. Frederickson, George M. Racism: A Short History. Princeton, 2002. Fricke, Dieter. Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte: Die bürgerliche und kleinbürgerliche Parteien und Verbände in Deutschland, 1789–1945, Bd. II. Köln, 1984. Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews: Vol. I, The Years of Persecution, 1933– 1939. New York, 1998. ———. “Die politischen Veränderungen der Kriegszeit und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Judenfrage,” in Werner E. Mosse, hrsg. Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und Revolution, 1916–1923. Tübingen, 1971. Friedman, Saul. The Incident at Massena: The Blood Libel in America. New York, 1978. Frye, Alton. Nazi Germany and the American Hemisphere, 1933–1941. New Haven, 1967. Gallagher, Charles R. “Adopting the Swastika: George E. Deatherage and the American Nationalist Confederation, 1937–1942,” in Kevin P. Spicer and Rebecca CarterChand, eds. Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars. Montreal, 2022. ———. Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front. Cambridge, MA, 2021. Garland, Libby. “State of the Field: New Directions for American Jewish Migration Histories,” American Jewish History, Vol. 102, No. 3 (July 2018): 423–440. Gassert, Philipp. Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933–1945. Stuttgart, 1997. Geheran, Michael. “Rethinking Jewish Front Experiences,” in Jason Crouthamel, Michael Geheran, Tim Grady, and Julia Barbara Köhne, eds. Beyond Inclusion and Exclusion: Jewish Experiences of the First World War in Central Europe. New York, 2019. Gerber, David A. “Anti-Semitism and Jewish-Gentile Relations in American Historiography and the American Past,” in David A. Gerber, ed. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana, 1986.

138  Bibliography Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, 2001. Glass, William R. “Fundamentalism’s Prophetic Vision of the Jews: The 1930s,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter 1985). Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York, 1996. Goldstein, Eric. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. Princeton, 2006. Gollwitzer, Heinz. Die Gelbe Gefahr: Geschichte eines Schlagworts. Studien zum imperialistischen Denken. Göttingen, 1962. Goltz, Anna von der. Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis. Oxford, 2009. Goodall, Alex. Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War I to the McCarthy Era. Urbana-Champaign, 2013. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. New York, 1992. Gordon, Linda. The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. New York, 2017. Gosewinkel, Dieter. Einbürgern und Ausschließen: Die Nationalisierung der Staatangehörigkeit vom Deutschen Bund bis zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Göttingen, 2001. Gregory, Adrian and Annette Becker. “Religious Sites and Practices,” in Jay Winter and Jean-Louis, eds. Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919. Vol. 2. A Cultural History. Cambridge, 2007. Grill, Johnpeter Horst and Robert L. Jenkins. “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?” The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 58 (November 1992). Gross, Michael B. The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Ann Arbor, 2004. Grover, Warren. Nazis in Newark. New Brunswick, 2003. Hale, Oron. The Captive Press in the Third Reich. Princeton, 1964. Hanebrink, Paul. A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Cambridge, MA, 2018. Hart, Bradley W. Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States. New York, 2018. Hecht, Cornelia. Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik. Bonn, 2003. Herf, Jeffrey. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust. Cambridge, 2006. Higham, John. “Ideological Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age,” in Higham, ed. Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America, rev. ed. Baltimore, 1984. ———. Strangers in the Land: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America. New York, 1975. Hoerder, Dirk. Cultures in Conflict: World Migrations in the Second Millennium. Durham, 2002. Hoffmann, Christhard. “Political Culture and Violence Against Minorities: The Antisemitic Riots in Pomerania and West Prussia,” translated by A. D. Moses, in Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds. Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History. Ann Arbor, 2002. Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in Hofstadter, ed. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. New York, 2008.

Bibliography 139 ———. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR. New York, 1955. Holmes, William F. “Whitecapping: Anti-Semitism in the Populist Era,” American Jewish History, Vol. 63, No. 3 (March 1974): 244–261. Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. New York, 1976, 2005. Jackisch, Barry A. The Pan-German League and Radical Nationalist Politics in Interwar Germany, 1918–1939. Burlington, 2012. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917. New York, 2001. Jarausch, Konrad H. and Michael Geyer. Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories. Princeton, 2002. Jeansonne, Glenn. Women of the Far Right: The Mothers’ Movement and World War II. Chicago, 1996. ———. Gerald L. K. Smith: Minister of Hate. Baton Rouge, 1988. ———. “Combatting Anti-Semitism: The Case of Gerald L. K. Smith,” in David A. Gerber, ed. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana, 1986. Jenkins, Philip. Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950. Chapel Hill, 1997. Jochmann, Werner. “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus in Deutschland 1914–1923,” in Jochmann, ed. Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland 1870– 1945. Hamburg, 1988. Jones, Larry Eugene. The German Right, 1918–1930: Political Parties, Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle Against Weimar Democracy. Cambridge, 2020. Katz, Steven T., ed. Why Is America Different? American Jewry on Its 350th Anniversary. Lanham, MD, 2010. Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Ithaca, 1995. Kenez, Peter. “Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War,” in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds. Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge, 1992. Kennedy, David. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. Oxford, 1980, 2004. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris. New York, 1998. ———. Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, Bavaria 1933–1945. Oxford, 1983, 2002. Kitchen, Martin. The German Officer Corps, 1890–1914. London, 1968. Klier, John D. and Shlomo Lambroza, eds. Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge, 1992. Koffman, David S., Moderator. “Roundtable on Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, (2020): 1–33. Kolodny, Ralph L. “Father Coughlin and the Jews: A Reminiscence for Younger Colleagues,” Journal of Jewish Communal Service, Vol. 53, No. 4 (1977): 309–319. Korn, Bertram W. American Jewry and the Civil War. Philadelphia, 1951; Bellum Editions, 1995. Kovel, Joel. Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America. New York, 1994. Kraut, Alan M. Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace”. New York, 1994.

140  Bibliography Lambroza, Shlomo. “The Pogroms of 1903–1906,” in Shlomo Lambroza and John D. Klier, eds. Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge, 1992. Langmuir, Gavin. Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. Berkeley, 1990. Large, David Clay. “ ‘Out with the Ostjuden’: The Scheunenviertal Riots in Berlin, November  1923,” in Christard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds. Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History. Ann Arbor, 2002. Lay, Shawn. Hooded Knights on the Niagara: The Ku Klux Klan in Buffalo, New York. New York, 1995. Lee, Albert. Henry Ford and the Jews. New York, 1980. Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882– 1941. Chapel Hill, 2003. Levy, Richard S. The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany. New Haven, 1975. Lew-Williams, Beth. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. Cambridge, MA, 2018. Lindemann, Albert S. Esau’s Tears: Modern Antisemitism and the Rise of the Jews. Cambridge, 1997. Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel. War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge, 2000. Lohalm, Uwe. Völkischer Radikalismus: die Geschichte des Deutschvölkischen Schutzund Trutz-Bundes, 1919–1923. Hamburg, 1970. MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. New York, 1994. Markel, Howard. “ ‘The Eyes Have It’: Trachoma, the Perception of Disease, the United States Public Health Service, and the American Jewish Immigration Experience, 1897–1924,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 74, No. 3 (Fall 2000): 525–560. ———. Quarantine! East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892. Baltimore, 1997. Mason, Patrick Q. “Anti-Jewish Violence in the New South,” Southern Jewish History, Vol. 8 (2005): 77–119. McKeown, Adam M. Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders. New York, 2008. ———. “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal of World History, Vol. 15, No. 2 (June 2004). McVeigh, Rory. The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics. Minneapolis, 2009. Merz, Kai-Uwe. Das Schreckbild: Deutschland und der Bolschewismus, 1917 bis 1921. Berlin, 1995. Michels, Tony. “Is America ‘Different?’ A Critique of American Jewish Exceptionalism,” American Jewish History, Vol. 96 (September 2011): 201–224. Miller, Stuart Creighton. The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882. Berkeley, 1969. Mommsen, Wolfgang. Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy. Translated by Elborg Forster. Chapel Hill, 1996. Moore, Leonard J. Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928. Chapel Hill, 1991.

Bibliography 141 Morris, Douglas G. Justice Imperiled: The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor, 2005. Nagel, Irmela. Fememorde und Fememordprozesse in der Weimarer Republik. Köln, 1991. Nelson, Keith L. “The ‘Black Horror on the Rhine’: Race as a Factor in Post-World War I Diplomacy,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 42 (December 1970): 606–627. Nelson, Robert L. German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War. Cambridge, 2011. Nemes, Robert and Daniel Unowsky, eds. Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918. Waltham, 2014. Newman, Leonard S. and Ralph Erber, eds. Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust. Oxford, 2002. Norwood, Stephen H. “ ‘American Jewish Muscle’: Forging a New Masculinity in the Streets and in the Ring, 1890–1940,” Modern Judaism, Vol. 29, No. 2 (May 2009): 167–193. ———. “Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York During World War II,” American Jewish History, Vol. 91 (June 2003): 233–267. Nugent, Walter. The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism, 2nd edition. Chicago, 2013. Oren, Dan A. Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale. New Haven, 1985. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, 2014. Osterhammel, Jürgen and Niels P. Peterson. Globalization: A Short History. Princeton, 2005. Pauley, Bruce F. From Prejudice to Persecution: A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism. Chapel Hill, 1992. Peal, David. “The Politics of Populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (April 1989): 340–362. Penslar, Derek J. Jews and the Military: A History. Princeton, 2013. Pietala, Antero. Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City. Chicago, 2010. Piper, Ernst. Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe. München, 2005. Porter, Brian. When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland. Oxford, 2000. Press, Steven. Blood and Diamonds: Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa. Cambridge, MA, 2021. Pulzer, Peter. Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848– 1933. Detroit, 2003. ———. “The First World War,” in Michael Meyer, ed. German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol 3: Integration in Dispute, 1871–1918. New York, 1997. ———. The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany & Austria. Cambridge, MA, 1964, 1988. Rahden, Till van. Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925. Translated by Marcus Brainard. Madison, 2008. Ribuffo, Leo. The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Philadelphia, 1983.

142  Bibliography ———. “Henry Ford and The International Jew,” American Jewish History, Vol. 4 (June 1980). Rice, Tom. “Protecting Protestantism: The Ku Klux Klan vs. the Motion Picture Industry,” Film History, Vol. 20, No. 3, Studio Systems (2008). Rockaway, Robert. “The First Publicized Act of Social Exclusion Against a Jew,” Michigan Jewish History, Vol. 53 (Fall 2013): 37–40. ———. “Anti-Semitism in an American City: Detroit, 1850–1914,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 1 (September 1974): 42–54. Rogoff, Leonard. Homelands: Southern Jewish Identity in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Tuscaloosa, 2001. Rosenstock, Morton. Louis Marshall, Defender of Jewish Rights. Detroit, 1965. Rosenzweig, Laura B. Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles. New York, 2017. Ross, Steven J. Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against America. New York, 2017. Sabrow, Martin. Die verdrängte Verschwörung: Der Rathenau-Mord und die deutsche Gegenrevolution. Frankfurt, 1998. Sammartino, Annemarie H. The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922. Ithaca, 2010. Sarna, Jonathan D. When General Grant Expelled the Jews. New York, 2012. ———. “American Anti-Semitism,” in David Berger, ed. History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism. Philadelphia, 1986, 1997. Sauer, Bernhard. Schwarze Reichswehr und Fememorde: Eine Milieustudie zum Rechtsradikalismus in der Weimarer Republik. Berlin, 2004. Scheck, Raffael. Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940. Cambridge, 2006. Schoeps, Julius H. and Joachim Schlör, eds. Bilder der Judenfeindschaft: Antisemitismus Vorurteile und Mythen. Augsburg, 1999. Schwartz, Henry. “The Silver Shirts: Anti-Semitism in San Diego, 1930–1940,” Western States Jewish History, Vol. XXIV, No. 1 (October 1992). Shapiro, Edward S. “Anti-Semitism Mississippi Style,” in David A. Gerber, ed. AntiSemitism in American History. Urbana, 1986. ———. “John Higham and American Anti-Semitism,” American Jewish History, Vol. 76, No. 2 (December 1986): 201–213. Sieg, Ulrich. “ ‘Nothing More German Than the German Jews’? On the Integration of a Minority in a Society at War,” in Rainer Liedtke and David Rechter, eds. Towards Normality? Acculturation and Modern German Jewry. Tübingen, 2003. Singerman, Robert. “The Jew as Racial Alien: The Genetic Component of American Anti-Semitism,” in David Gerber, ed. Anti-Semitism in American History. Urbana, 1986. ———. “The American Career of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” American Jewish History, Vol. LXXI (September 1981): 48–78. Slotkin, Richard. Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality. New York, 2005. Smith, Helmut Walser. The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, 2008. ———. The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town. New York, 2002.

Bibliography 143 ———. “Konitz, 1900: Ritual Murder and Antisemitic Violence,” in Christhard Hoffmann, Werner Bergmann, and Helmut Walser Smith, eds. Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History. Ann Arbor, 2002. Sorin, Gerald. A Time for Building: The Third Migration, 1880–1920. Baltimore, 1992. Sorkin, David. Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries. Princeton, 2019. Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. San Francisco, 1996. Stauter-Halsted, Keely. The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland. Ithaca, 2015. Steidl, Annemarie. On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire. West Lafayette, IN, 2015. Stember, Charles Herbert, et al. Jews in the Mind of America. New York, 1966. Sterba, Christopher M. Good Americans: Italian and Jewish Immigrants During the First World War. Oxford, 2003. Strong, Donald. Organized Anti-Semitism in America: The Rise of Group Prejudice During the Decade 1930–1940. Washington, DC, 1941. Sutton, Matthew Avery. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Cambridge, MA, 2014. ———. “Was FDR the Antichrist? The Birth of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism in a Global Age,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 98, No. 4 (March 2012): 1052–1074. Szajkowski, Zosa. Jews, Wars, and Communism, Vol. II, The Impact of the 1919–1920 Red Scare on American Life. New York, 1974. ———. Jews, Wars, and Communism. Vol. I. The Attitude of American Jews to World War I, the Russian Revolutions of 1917, and Communism (1914–1945). New York, 1972. Tennenbaum, Shelly. “The Vicissitudes of Tolerance: Jewish Faculty and Students at Clark University,” Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 5 (2003). Tevis, Britt P. “Trends in the Study of Antisemitism in United States History,” American Jewish History, Vol. 105, Nos. 1/2 (January/April 2021): 255–284. ———. “ ‘Jews Not Admitted’: Anti-Semitism, Civil Rights, and Public Accommodation Laws,” Journal of American History, Vol. 107, No. 4 (March 2021): 847–880. Thomas, Jr., William H. Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department’s Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent. Madison, 2008. Trollinger, Jr., William Vance. God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism. Madison, 1990. Turner, Jr., Henry A. Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933. Reading, MA, 1996. Uptrup, Wolfram Meyer zu. Kampf gegen die “jüdische Weltverschwörung”: Propaganda und Antisemitismus der Nationalsozialisten 1919–1945. Berlin, 2003. Ury, Scott. “Introduction: Jewish Migration in Modern Times: The Case of Eastern Europe,” in Semion Goldin, Mia Spiro, and Scott Ury, eds. Jewish Migration in Modern Times: The Case of Eastern Europe. London, 2019. Veidlinger, Jeffrey. In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust. New York, 2021. Verhey, Jeffrey. The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany. Cambridge, 2000. Volkov, Shulamit. Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation. Cambridge, 2006.

144  Bibliography Wade, Wyn Craig. The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America. New York, 1987. Waite, Robert G. L. Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany 1918–1923. New York, 1952. Warren, Donald I. Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, the Father of Hate Radio. New York, 1996. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Deutsche Gesellscahaftsgeschichte, Bd. III, 1849–1914. Munich, 1995. Weindling, Paul. Health, Race and Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945. Cambridge, 1989. Wenger, Beth S. New York Jews and the Great Depression. New Haven, 1996. Wette, Wolfram. The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality. Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider. Cambridge, 2006. Wigger, Iris. Die “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein”: Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse. Münster, 2006. Wilson, Ross J. New York and the First World War: Shaping an American City. London, 2014. Winkler, Heinrich August. “Die deutsche Gesellschaft der Weimarer Republik und der Antisemitismus—Juden als ‘Blitzableiter’,” in Wolfgang Benz and Werner Bergmann, eds. Vorurteil und Völkermord: Entwicklungslinien des Antisemitismus. Freiburg, 1997. Zechlin, Egmont. Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg. Göttingen, 1969. Zimmerman, Andrew. Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. Princeton, 2010. Zipperstein, Steven J. Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. New York, 2018. Zolberg, Aristide R. “The Great Wall Against China: Responses to the First Immigration Crisis, 1885–1925,” in Aristide Zolberg, ed. How Many Exceptionalisms? Explorations in Comparative Macroanalysis. Philadelphia, 2008. ———. A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Cambridge, 2006. Zumbini, Massimo Ferrari. Die Wurzeln des Bösen: Gründerjahre des Antisemitismus: Von der Bismarckzeit zu Hitler. Frankfurt, 2003.

Published Primary Sources Abel, Curt. Chinesen in Deutschland? Eine zeitgemäße Betrachtung. Berlin, 1890. Arnim, Otto. Die Juden in den Kriegs-Gesellschaften und in der Kriegswirtschaft. Munich, 1921. ———. Die Juden im Heere: Eine statistische Untersuchung nach amtlichen Quellen. Munich, 1919. Boehlich, Walter, hrsg. Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit. Frankfurt am Main, 1965, 2016. “Bolshevik Propaganda,” Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate, Sixty-Fifth Congress, Third Session, February 11, 1919 to March 10, 1919. Busch, Moritz. Israel und die Gojim: Beitrage zur Beurtheilung der Judenfrage. Leipzig, 1880. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York, 1925.

Bibliography 145 Ford, Henry. The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. 4 volumes. Dearborn, 1920–1922. Gaebelein, Arno Clemens. The Conflict of the Ages: The Mystery of Lawlessness: Its Origin, Historic Development and Coming Defeat. New York, 1933. Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race or The Racial Basis of European History. New York, 1916, 1922. Hornaday, William T. Awake! America. Object Lessons and Warnings. New York, 1918. Irwin, Theodore. Inside the Christian Front. Washington, DC, 1940. McFadden, Louis T. Collective Speeches of Congressman Louis T. McFadden as Compiled from the Congressional Record. Hawthorne, CA, 1970. Meister, Wilhelm. (Paul Bang). Judas Schuldbuch. Eine deutsche Abrechnung. München, 1919. Riley, William Bell. Protocols and Communism. Minneapolis, 1934. Roberts, Kenneth. Why Europe Leaves Home. New York, 1922, 1977. Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America. New York, 2004. Schadewaldt, Hans. Was Will Roosevelt? Düsseldorf, 1941. Thomson, Franklin. America’s Ju-Deal. New York, 1935. Wawrzinek, Kurt. Die Entstehung der deutschen Antisemitenparteien (1873–1890). Berlin, 1927. Winrod, Gerald. The Present International Crisis. Wichita, 1939. ———. Communism and the Roosevelt Brain Trust. Wichita, 1933. Woodruff, Charles Edward. Expansion of Races. New York, 1909.

Index

100-percent Americanism 65, 79, 128 African Americans 31, 42, 65, 85 Ahlwardt, Hermann 20 America First Committee 103 American Jewish Committee (AJC) 41, 48, 50 – 51, 60 – 61, 64 – 65, 89 Americanism, 100-percent 65, 79, 128 Anti-Defamation League 20, 98, 110 anti-Jewish discrimination 30 – 38; see also discrimination Bajohr, Frank 33, 38 Baruch, Bernard 36, 77, 95, 101, 105 Bauer, Yehuda 3 Beer Hall Putsch 66, 75, 79, 81, 86, 105, 126 Bilbo, Theodore 99 blood libel 4, 90 Bolshevik Revolution 59, 63, 89, 100, 128 borders 5, 8 – 15, 22, 24, 31, 37 – 38, 42 boycotts 2, 49, 97, 104, 109 Brandeis, Louis 35, 42 – 43, 101, 105 Brasol, Boris 61 – 62, 95 Burgfrieden 44, 90 Catholics, Catholicism 15, 31 – 32, 42 – 43, 65, 88 – 89, 96 – 97 chimeric antisemitism 4 – 5, 56, 81 – 82, 106 – 107 Chinese Exclusion Act 8, 14 Chinese immigration 8, 11 – 14, 16 – 18, 21 – 24, 37 Christian Front 2 – 3, 96 – 97, 99, 103, 109 – 110 Christian Mobilizers 96, 99, 109 – 110 citizenship 5, 31, 53 communism 93 – 102, 128

conspiracies 4, 20; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 98, 100, 104; and antisemitic journalism 75 – 76, 80 – 81; “international Jewish conspiracy” 55 – 56, 67, 80, 100; “International Jewry” 7, 62, 66, 80, 85 – 86, 100 – 101, 104 – 106; “Jewish cabal” 85, 101; in war and crisis 48, 55 – 56, 59, 62, 65, 67 – 68 contingency 2, 7, 86, 113 Corbin, Austin 18, 34 Coughlin, Father Charles 1 – 4, 87, 94 – 97, 99 – 100, 103, 107, 109 – 110; see also Christian Front; Social Justice coup attempts 6, 86, 107 crisis 9, 15, 55, 68; and the American Right in Germany 125 – 127, 131; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 85 – 87, 90 – 91; and antisemitic journalism 75, 80, 82; crisis decade 43, 91, 106 – 107 Dearborn Independent, The 62, 75 – 82, 89, 93 – 95, 98, 107, 128 democracy 3, 5, 42, 87, 121, 126, 130 demonization 3, 31, 43, 56, 88 dictatorship 5, 86, 88, 113; “Jewish dictatorship” 54, 63, 79, 101 Dilling, Elizabeth 94, 98, 102 discrimination 30 – 31, 34 – 38, 43 – 45, 50, 91, 107; “social discrimination” 18, 37, 113 disease 8, 12 – 16, 21 – 23, 37, 47, 53, 58; see also health Eckart, Dietrich 54 economic collapse 6, 66, 91

Index  147 exceptionalism see antisemitic exceptionalism exclusion 11 – 18, 22 – 24, 30 – 38, 43, 91, 107 Fememord 125 – 126, 130 First Red Scare 57, 76, 89, 107 Ford, Henry 3 – 4, 62 – 64, 66 – 68; and the American Right in Germany 128 – 129; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 89 – 90, 93, 95, 100, 103; and antisemitic journalism 75 – 76, 79 – 81; see also Dearborn Independent, The Frank, Leo 43, 65, 89, 129 Frankfurter, Felix 101, 105 Frontbann 122 – 123, 127, 130 fundamentalists (Christianity) 61, 93 – 94, 100 Gaebelein, Arno C. 94 German National Peoples’ Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP) 52 – 53 German Racial Defense and Defiance League 51, 79, 90, 126 German Social Party (Deutsch-soziale Partei, DSP) 52, 123 globalization 5, 9, 15, 24 Goldhagen, Daniel 2 – 3 Grant, Madison 24 Grant, Ulysses S. 11, 16 Great Depression 86, 91 – 92, 94 – 95 Hamburg-America Line (HAPAG) 8, 23, 43 health 8, 12, 21 – 22, 24, 37 – 38, 128 – 129; disease 8, 12 – 16, 21 – 23, 37, 47, 53, 58; national health 4 – 5, 10; racial health 5, 10 higher education 3, 6, 36, 43, 67, 107 Hitler, Adolf 1 – 2, 4, 52, 64, 66, 68; and the American Right in Germany 125 – 126; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 85 – 88, 91 – 93, 97 – 99, 105 – 107, 113; and antisemitic journalism 75, 81 – 82 hostility 2 – 3, 5, 43, 56, 59, 82, 88, 106, 129 hotels and resorts 20, 33, 43, 54, 67, 107; Grand Union Hotel 18, 30, 34, 37 – 38 housing 3, 8, 18, 35, 38, 67, 89

immigration see Chinese immigration; Jewish immigration inclusion 3, 31, 53 Innere Front, Die 105 International Jew, The 62, 82, 107 “international Jewish conspiracy” 55 – 56, 67, 80, 100; see also conspiracies “International Jewry” 7, 62, 66, 80, 85 – 86, 100 – 101, 104 – 106; see also conspiracies intolerance 3, 57, 64 – 65 Irwin, Theodore 97, 109 “Jew Count” 46, 52, 75, 90 “Jewish cabal” 85, 101; see also conspiracies “Jewish dictatorship” 54, 63, 79, 101 Jewish immigration 4 – 5; and the American Right in Germany 128 – 129; and anti-Jewish discrimination 33; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 89, 96, 100, 107; and antisemitic journalism 75 – 77; and globalization 8, 11 – 14, 16 – 18, 21 – 24; in war and crisis 47 – 49, 53, 57 – 58, 65 – 67 “Jewish question” 33, 41, 62, 77, 85 jobs 57, 91; see also labor journalism 75 – 82 Kapp Putsch 55 Knights of the Fiery Cross see Order of the Knights of the Fiery Cross Ku Klux Klan 65 – 68, 85, 89 – 90, 121, 128 – 130; “German Ku Klux Klan” 125 – 126, 128 Kunze, Richard 52, 123 – 124, 127 Kustrine Putsch 126 labor 5 – 6, 91, 129; and globalization 9 – 11, 13, 15 – 17, 22, 24; in war and crisis 47, 57, 59, 66 Langmuir, Gavin 4, 106 legislation 13, 37, 67, 88, 129 Lindbergh, Charles 103, 112 Marshall, Louis 41, 49 – 51, 60 – 61, 64, 67, 85, 89, 113 McWilliams, Joe 96, 110 Morgenthau, Henry 98, 101, 105 – 106 Mothers’ Movement 98

148 Index national health 4 – 5, 10 nationalism 75; and the American Right in Germany 121, 125, 128 – 131; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 89 – 90, 93; and globalization 8 – 9, 15 – 17, 24; in war and crisis 43, 47, 51 – 53, 56 – 57, 65 – 67 National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) see Nazis, Nazi Party, Nazism Nationalsozialistische Parteikorrespondenz 105 Native Americans 42, 87 “native Americans” 11, 18, 23, 89 Nazis, Nazi Party, Nazism 1 – 2, 4 – 5, 52 – 55, 64 – 66; and the American Right in Germany 125 – 127, 130; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 85 – 86, 88, 90, 92 – 93, 95, 99 – 100, 102 – 107, 110 – 113; and antisemitic journalism 75, 79 – 82; see also Völkischer Beobachter New Deal 100 – 102, 104 – 105 North German Lloyd 8, 23 Order of the Knights of the Fiery Cross 121 – 128, 130 – 131 Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) 56, 91

Rathenau, Walther 43 – 44, 46 – 47, 56, 90, 126 Reichshammerbund 44, 130 Reichstag 52 – 53, 87 – 88, 127 residential neighborhoods 35, 67 resorts see hotels and resorts revolution 61 – 63, 89 – 90, 94; Bolshevik 59, 63, 89, 100, 128; German 51 – 54, 56, 66, 90, 107, 113 Reynolds, Robert 99, 102 Riley, William Bell 93 – 94, 100 Roosevelt, Franklin (FDR) see Roosevelt (FDR) Administration Roosevelt, Theodore 36, 68, 82 Roosevelt (FDR) Administration 85 – 87, 92, 96 – 98, 100 – 108, 111 Rosenberg, Alfred 54, 59, 79 Roth, Alfred 52, 56 Rothschilds 19, 78, 95, 99 Rothstein, Arnold 57 Ruhr Crisis 55, 80, 126 Russia, Russians 13, 15, 17 – 19, 22, 38, 76; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 87, 89, 94 – 95; in war and crisis 41, 48 – 49, 54 – 55, 59 – 61, 63, 66 – 67 Second Empire 6, 31, 43 Seligman, Joseph 18, 34 – 35, 37 Shapiro, Edward 99 Shylock 19 – 20, 43, 66, 99 Silver Shirts 92 – 94, 99 – 100 Simons, George A. 59 – 61, 94 Smith, Gerald L. K. 93, 99, 101 Smith, Helmut Walser 2 “social antisemitism” see anti-Jewish discrimination social clubs 3, 18, 30, 34 – 35, 43, 107 socialism 3, 101 – 107 Social Justice 95, 100, 107, 110 Soviet Union 7, 80, 85, 105 stereotypes 3, 32, 44, 50, 61 Stoddard, Lothrop 24, 50, 58

Pan-German League 51, 130 paranoid style 75 – 82 Pelley, William Dudley 92 – 94, 97, 99, 101, 104 pogroms 3, 17, 41, 56, 110 – 111 Populist movement 3, 19 – 20, 27n73, 31, 43, 47, 63, 93 prejudice 3 – 5, 32, 36, 38, 41, 45, 50, 76, 90 propaganda 51 – 52, 59 – 60, 90, 100 – 101, 104 – 106 Protestants, Protestantism 31, 43, 65, 89 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The 4, 128; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 89, 93 – 95, 97 – 98, 100, 104, 107; and antisemitic journalism 76 – 77, 79 – 82; in war and crisis 55, 61 – 62, 66 – 67

Third Reich 2, 30, 38, 87 – 88, 93, 112 – 113, 121 Thorkelson, Jacob 99 Thule Society 55, 79, 130

race riots 57, 66 racial health 5, 10 radicalization 23, 38, 46, 56, 89, 95, 100 Rankin, John 99, 102

United States Army 23, 49 – 50; Military Intelligence Division (MID) 50, 60 – 62, 77 universities 3, 6, 36, 43, 67, 107

Index  149 vandalism 54, 109 – 111 violence 2 – 5, 43, 49, 55 – 57, 66 – 67; and the American Right in Germany 129 – 130; and anti-Jewish discrimination 30 – 31; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 90 – 91, 95 – 97, 106 – 111 Völkischer Beobachter 64, 75, 79 – 82, 102, 104 – 105 völkisch groups 7, 79, 81, 124 – 125, 130 Warburg, Max 52 Warburg, Paul 57 Weckerle, Wilhelm 122 – 123, 126 – 127, 130 Weimar Republic 43, 52 – 56, 88 – 90, 107, 121 – 122, 125 – 127

Wheeler, Burton K. 99 – 100, 103 Wilhelm II (Kaiser) 44, 90 Wilson, Woodrow 36, 47 – 51, 57, 60 – 61, 63 Winrod, Gerald 87, 93 – 94, 97, 99, 101 – 102 “world Jewish conspiracy” 75 – 82; see also conspiracies World War I 38, 41 – 51, 53 – 54, 57, 60, 64; and antisemitic attacks on the Roosevelt Administration 88 – 91, 93, 95, 100, 106, 113; and antisemitic journalism 75 – 77, 80 World War II 1, 82, 88, 91 xenophobia 4 – 5, 48, 88, 106 – 107