10

Aliens, Enemy Aliens, and Minors

Anti-Radicalism and the Jewish Left

Jeffrey A. Johnson

On July 23, 1892, twenty-two-year-old Alexander Berkman, armed with a revolver and a handmade dagger, arrived at the Pittsburgh office of famed Carnegie Steel executive Henry Clay Frick. Berkman was on a self-imposed mission to assassinate Frick, not only to retaliate for the industrialist’s role in cracking down on steelworkers in the recent Homestead Strike but also to get revenge against what Berkman perceived as American capitalism gone awry. In a scrum, Berkman managed to shoot and stab Frick. Frick survived the attack, and authorities quickly captured Berkman, who ultimately spent fourteen years in prison for the failed attempt on Frick’s life. Berkman, who was just starting a long career of radicalism, proudly declared his action to be “the first terrorist act in America.”

Of special note in the Frick-Berkman incident, though, is how Berkman’s ethnicity (and the subsequent fear of similarly radical and violent Jews) was featured prominently in news accounts. The day after the attack, the Pittsburg Dispatch described Berkman, who was already in custody, as a “Russian Hebrew Nihilist.” In addition, it portrayed him as a wild-eyed Jewish radical who “looked like a crank or a fanatic,” with a “dull and stolid” face, “bordering on the verge of stupidity.” This depiction is significant in how it associates Berkman’s Jewishness with radical and undesirable qualities. Criminality and radicalism intersected here, too, fueling the willingness of some to further generalize about American Jews. The Berkman example came to symbolize what many presumed to be a typical and prevalent radical Jewish American agitator.1

Alexander Berkman, of course, did not typify Jewish immigrants. Much is known about American immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the unwelcoming receptions certain ethnic and cultural groups sometimes received. Scholars have examined reactions to so-called radicalism in the early twentieth century, particularly the instances of restricted freedoms during and following World War I. Yet remarkably little work focuses on the intersection of anti-Semitism and anti-radicalism during these eras. One can make the case that fear of Jews and radical immigrants promoted the unprecedented anti-radical persecution of the first Red Scare. It is easy to surmise this cause because many on the American political left were not just radical but also considered by some to be Jewish rabble-rousers. Fear of these groups supported and drove, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, the widespread and undemocratic crackdown on political dissent. This chapter is perhaps too episodic to explain the entire political climate of the times. What is important to know, though, is that fears concerning Jewish radicalism colored American attitudes prior to and during the World War I era, a high point in history for fear-driven intersections of anti-radicalism and anti-Semitism.

Immigration and Nativism

The demographics of the United States changed dramatically during the Gilded Age (ca. 1877–1897). In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, 11.7 million immigrants came to the United States. The wave of immigration from early in this period, when many of the newcomers came from northern and western Europe, gave way to a larger group of immigrants later in the period who increasingly came from southern and eastern Europe. These later immigrants brought languages, customs, and religions that differed dramatically from the traditions of white American Christians. Some people regarded these later immigrants and their languages, customs, and religions as threatening.

Still, the United States has long celebrated its image as a melting pot society. At the time, many people were quick to celebrate the age of the new American immigrant. Norman Hopgood, writing in the Menorah Journal in 1916, announced, “Democracy will be more productive if it has a tendency to encourage differences. Our dream of the United States ought not to be a dream of monotony.” Hopgood was not alone. Leftist intellectuals such as Randolph Bourne and Horace Kallan echoed this sentiment, frequently celebrating the new American pluralism.2

Despite the positive sentiments expressed by some in support of immigration, anti-immigrant attitudes were becoming the rule in the United States. Since the mid-nineteenth century, American nativism, rooted in long-standing trepidation concerning the “other,” had colored the reception of immigrants in the United States. The Know-Nothing Party of this era stands as a prominent example of American nativism. Social scientist Richmond Mayo-Smith embodied a nativist attitude in his 1895 book on American immigration: “It is scarcely probable that by taking the dregs of Europe we shall produce a people of high social intelligence and morality.” By 1916, like-minded minister Josiah Strong had sold 175,000 copies (a notable number for the time) of his book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, a Protestant polemic on the new American immigrant. “The typical immigrant is a European peasant,” he wrote, “whose horizon has been narrow, whose moral and religious training has been meager or false, and whose ideas of life are low.” Strong gave voice to the widely held belief that among these undesirable immigrants were criminals and radicals. He continued that Europe “not only furnishes the greatest portion of our criminals, it is also seriously affecting the morals of the native population . . . Immigration complicates our moral and political problems by swelling our dangerous classes.” The sentiments expressed by Mayo-Smith and Strong stood well within typical stances on immigration.3

American Anti-Semitism

One ethnic group of immigrants that especially felt the sting of racism and reactionism was Jewish immigrants. Anti-Semitism in the United States was not a new phenomenon in the decades before World War I. Despite the claims of noted historian Oscar Handlin, who in 1951 contended that American anti-Semitism was trivial in the twentieth century (mainstream American attitudes toward Jews held “no hostility, no negative judgment,” he wrote), anti-Semitism was extraordinarily routine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4

Far from unique to the American experience, anti-Semitism had been cultivating unease among European Jews for decades. France’s notorious Dreyfus affair of 1894–1899 demonstrated not only how, even in fragilely liberal France, anti-Semitism was used as an acceptable tool of mass politics but also how hate-filled, anti-Jewish propaganda could alarmingly fill a nation’s mass media. In the 1880s and 1890s, Europe witnessed the rise of anti-Semitism in the forms of Adolf Stoecker’s crusade against a Jewish cultural conspiracy in Germany and Édouard Drumont’s overtly anti-Jewish newspaper, La Libre Parole, in France.

Anti-Semitism proliferated in the United States in the late nineteenth century, following, as it often did, these earlier European models. Around 1896, the American Anti-Semitic Association formed in Brooklyn. Its leadership, F. J. Gross, E. Augustus Lehuermann, and others, followed the typical German structure for such organizations. Greek immigrant Telemachus Timayenis, hoping to be on the front end of a methodical American anti-Semitism, authored many works on “the Jewish Question,” most notably 1888’s The Original Mr. Jacobs: A Startling Expose. An obvious Drumont devotee, Timayenis repeated the common refrain that the scheming Jew hoped not only to compromise the capitalist system through control but also to ultimately overthrow the system. Thus anti-Semitism came to American shores as soon as Jewish immigrants arrived; from the start, Jews experienced patterns of discrimination, both socially and politically.

Jewish immigrants to the United States tended to settle, as many ethnic groups did, in specific neighborhoods, often as a way to preserve their culture in a new land. In an urban environment such as New York or Chicago, it was not unusual for the Jewish quarter to be located near Chinatown or Greektown. Yet some suggested that Jews should be less “clannish.”5 At the same time, “the gentile majority” met these Jewish communities with institutionalized discrimination that included restriction of Jewish membership in certain clubs, resorts, employment, and even neighborhoods. Throughout a considerable period of US history, specifically the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, Jews also faced exclusion from private colleges and universities, hotels, hospitals, and law firms. As historian Hasia Diner has reminded us, the nation’s “Jewish problem” and explicit anti-Semitism remained “a centerpiece of the national conversation.”6

There are countless examples of rank discrimination against Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but most shocking is the vehement rhetoric and frankness voiced by some contemporary figures. In 1879, Austin Corbin, a head of banking, railroad, and hotel companies, publicly made it clear that Jews were not welcome as guests in his company’s Manhattan Beach Hotel. “Personally, I am opposed to Jews. They are a pretentious class,” he announced. Corbin made it plain how Jews hurt his business: “We must have a good place for society to patronize. I say we cannot do so and have Jews. They are a detestable and vulgar people.” Jewish residents of New York’s East Side complained for years about incidents of police violence. A 1902 New York Times story documented such grievances and a number of confrontations. In one instance, two young Jewish men were reciting poetry to three or four girls in Seward Park. A police officer told them the park was no place for public speaking. When the young men playfully pointed out the difference between poetry and a political speech, the police officer clubbed one of the young poets and took him to jail. Dr. Joseph Barsky reported seeing “many such attacks on Jews” on the East Side. In early 1902 he heard of a boy beaten “into insensibility” by an officer.7

The “conspicuousness of Jewish wealth” further fueled fears that “Europe’s Shylocks” stood poised to take jobs and exploit American wage earners. After all, a “society of Jews and brokers,” claimed noted American commentator Henry Adams in 1893, left “no place” for him. This stereotype was fed by other sources, too. Intellectuals supported the notion of the money-hungry Jew. The presidents of three prominent institutions of higher learning (the University of Virginia, Vassar College, and Harvard University) declared in letters and in print that Jewish immigrants had gained “unfair” economic advantage through “questionable” business practices. At American universities, considerable WASP uneasiness with the changing face of student bodies emerged as well. “The Jew sends his children to college a generation or two sooner than other stocks, and as a result there are in fact more dirty Jews and tactless Jews in college than dirty and tactless Italians, Armenians, or Slovaks,” wrote one white Protestant.8

Not only were Jews considered to be shady and suspicious in business, they also were blatantly considered to be criminals. In August 1908, the New York Sun ran an article with the headline “Criminals among the Jews.” The exposé highlighted how New York’s Jews, most notably Russian immigrants, swelled crime statistics in the city. According to Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham, “Russian Jew criminals” consumed a majority of the police department’s work. A year earlier, Bingham estimated that “60 per cent” of the city’s criminals were Russian Jews. More “precise” data came from the deputy commissioner’s office, which claimed that of the department’s 189,202 arrests in 1906, “50 per cent [of those arrested] were of Jewish parentage.”9

At various points in the prewar years, anti-Semitism led to violence against Jews. One of the more notorious cases was that of Leo Frank, a Jewish executive at Atlanta’s Georgia Pencil Company who was charged and convicted of the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, during the summer of 1913. After being condemned to death, Frank’s sentence was commuted, and he was incarcerated in Milledgeville State Prison. A mob of twenty-eight kidnapped Frank from the prison and drove him 170 miles to Phagan’s hometown, where he was viciously beaten and lynched. The State of Georgia ultimately pardoned Frank in 1986, but in 1915, the Frank case typified anti-Semitic sentiments. Authorities and the angry mob that killed Frank thought of him as a Jewish interloper from the North. Editors in the Jewish press, not surprisingly, vehemently condemned the mob’s actions. “This crime stamps indelible obloquy upon the State of Georgia,” wrote Felix Gerson, editor of the Jewish Exponent. “This lynching is one of the most deplorable episodes in the history of our nation.”10

The patterns of distrust and the stereotypes applied to Jews, not surprisingly, drew resistance from members of the Jewish community. Dr. Stephen Wise, a rabbi for New York’s Free Synagogue congregation, took a public stand against such discrimination. He had been invited to an international peace conference, to be held at Lake Mohonk, New York. The host resort there, however, closed its doors to Jews during the summer months. As a sign of protest, Wise refused his invitation and spoke out against this discrimination in a May 22, 1911, speech at Carnegie Hall. “Land hunger and territorial greed,” Wise declared, paled in comparison to “religious and national hostility, of which anti-Semitism is a most persistent and Christless example.” Beginning in 1916, other prominent Jewish Americans formally undertook efforts to ensure civil rights and equality. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and others planned to establish what they called the “Conference of National Jewish Organizations” (later known as the American Jewish Congress, established in 1918) to fight against the “radical discrimination against the Jews of America.”11

World War I and Anti-Radicalism

By 1914, US involvement in World War I gave rise to a heightened sense of fear among immigrants, leftists, and radicals. Much of the 1916 presidential campaign between Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes centered on national loyalty, or “Americanism,” as it was called during the race. Both Democrats and Republicans used loaded language during the campaign to hint that those people on the other side may be weak in their patriotism. The phrases “100 percent Americanism” and “disloyal Americans” were used in the campaign, complete with the connotation that being anything other than a “loyal” patriotic American was suspect. As the United States moved from determined isolationism and neutrality to imminent involvement in the war in 1917, many Americans, according to historian Leonard Dinnerstein and other sources, grew suspicious of “anything that smacked of Germany and Germans.” Not insignificant, of course, was the fact that many German immigrants to the United States at that time were Jewish. As a movement, anarchism arrived in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Johann Most, a German immigrant, and his journal Die Freiheit (Freedom) disembarked in New York in 1882. Most established the anarchist branch of the International Working People’s Association, which proved exceedingly popular among other recent German immigrants. Dubbed “the prince of anarchists,” Most openly advocated and justified the assassination of politicians and monarchs.12

The rise of this reactive brand of American anarchism in the prewar years was not surprising. At no other time in US history (i.e., before the first part of the twentieth century) had capital and labor come into such marked conflict. The nation had seen labor violence at every turn. Violent discontent seemed to be spreading—for instance, the bombings at the Los Angeles Times building in 1910 and the San Francisco Preparedness Day parade in 1916. The prewar years had been a time of very active leftist labor agitation; therefore federal, state, and local governments had begun to enact legislation and to act out of profound fear of this emerging radical left. The argument can be made that subtexts of ethnic and religious discrimination surrounded many of these anti-radical sentiments. The most commonly persecuted and singled-out group within the radical fringe was leftist Jewish Americans. The political climate of France’s notorious Dreyfus affair from two decades earlier, it seemed, had moved to the United States. Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and other prominent Jewish Americans on the political fringe, more than any other immigrant group, had been on the receiving end of a wave of anti-radicalism that was not so thinly enveloped in xenophobia.

Emma Goldman had long been one of the most recognizable faces of the radical Jewish left in the prewar years. She came from a Lithuanian Orthodox Jewish family. Her radicalism extended beyond mere talk. Authorities had arrested her in Chicago in 1901 for her alleged role in a conspiracy to assassinate President William McKinley. Labeled by the press as “the high priestess of anarchy,” Goldman had come to symbolize the leftist Jewish agitator in the early twentieth century. The press happily reported that during her interrogation by police, Goldman showed weakness and “became a woman, pure and simple, and cried.” Police ultimately released her because authorities could not connect her to anything beyond inspiring Leon Czolgosz to assassinate President McKinley. Goldman retreated briefly from her public life of radicalism. She founded Mother Earth magazine in 1906 and proceeded to crisscross the United States on speaking tours on behalf of anarchism and labor militancy. At each event, Goldman took the podium only after downing a routine shot of whiskey to settle her nerves. Once she was onstage, however, any anxieties she might have had quickly gave way to her espousals of anarchism.

Goldman’s longtime political partner (and lover) was none other than the failed assassin and anarchist Alexander Berkman. Upon assuming the editor’s chair of Mother Earth in 1907, Berkman began thinking of publishing a radical journal of his own. He “longed for something of his own making, something that would express his own self,” Goldman recalled. By the winter of 1915, at the urging of friend Eric Morton, he acted on the longing and founded The Blast in San Francisco. He had been so enthusiastic about the project that he created a letterhead, which he shared with friends, well before securing funding for the periodical or officially launching it. The Blast, not surprisingly, became a key forum for the expression of leftists’ antiwar positions.13 The mainstream press not so subtly associated both Berkman and Goldman with the image of the money-hungry Jew when considering the publications each had launched. For the New York Sun, Berkman was a “jack-in-the box . . . who bobs up in every kind of radical movement that promises financial returns,” and Goldman was described as a “shrewd [individual] . . . who for many years has made anarchy a well paying profession.” The article spoke of the pair’s “money grabbing proclivities.”14

The social and political left, with which Jewish immigrants were often associated, felt the quick rebuke of pro-war forces. From the start of the war, American socialists objected to the conflict, as did their comrades worldwide. After all, they claimed, all wars were imperialist wars that benefited only capitalists; the working class would do the bulk of the fighting. Amid opposition to the war, the unfolding political situation in Russia, and the accompanying Red Scare in the United States, if a person were identified as part of the nation’s left or in any way associated with the “radicalism” label, it could lead to disastrous political and personal implications.15

Jewish Socialists remained an important part of this leftist opposition to the war. Since 1901, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) had been a constant radical presence on the American political landscape. Established in July 1912, the Jewish Federation of the SPA organized dozens of branches, primarily on the East Coast. By the next year, it boasted 2,700 members. Leftist (specifically, Jewish) agitators spoke against US intervention in the affairs of Europe. Indeed, Jewish members of the American left stood in unyielding and vocal support of antiwar causes. In 1917, the Jewish Socialist Federation (JSF) Convention endorsed the larger SPA convention’s war resolutions. “Participation of America in the war is unjustifiable,” the JSF resolved during its five days of sessions. These types of public objections to the war, however, came at a heavy price, politically speaking. The government targeted radicals—in particular, the perceived disloyalty of immigrants—to halt antiwar agitation. The Espionage Act (1917), the Trading with the Enemy Act (1917), and the Sedition Act (1918) all combined to restrict speech and repress “disloyalty.”16

Jews had long had a “radical” reputation, and the stereotypically restless and revolutionary Jew became something to be feared by the time World War I had begun. Association with “radical” Jewish organizations and other known Jewish agitators often drew a mistrustful eye. Take, for example, Dr. Max Goldfarb of the leftist paper the Jewish Daily Forward, who attended the 1917 Socialist Peace Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, reportedly without a passport. His attendance, documented in the press, raised suspicions because Goldfarb was a former secretary of the Jewish Workingman’s Committee and, according to the New York Tribune, “was conspicuously connected with the celebrated Jewish revolutionary organization known as the Bund and was one of its most gifted spokesmen.” He and a fellow delegate to the conference, David Davidovitch, were “well known in Jewish circles.” Thus a distinctive feature, if not the distinctive feature, of Goldfarb’s and Davidovitch’s identities in this newspaper account was clearly their Jewish ethnicity as part of a radical ideology. Only a month earlier, Dr. Goldfarb had addressed the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers of North America convention in New York. Well received with applause, Goldfarb delivered his speech, it was noted importantly in the convention minutes, “in Jewish.” This is revealing for two reasons: first the ethno-religious identification was significant to the editors, and second, the identifier was inaccurate (the proceedings were often held in Yiddish, of course).17

When the first efforts to establish Marxism in Russia erupted in 1917, many on the American left praised the events. On March 20, 1917, at least 11,000 people from the Jewish Socialist Federation of America and other Jewish newspaper and trade associations filled Madison Square Garden. Organizers planned the event to celebrate the Russian Revolution and the toppling of the tsar. The New York Times headline, though, read, “10,000 Jews Here Laud Revolution,” and the story described how the speakers’ tone turned radical and called for a socialist revolution in the United States. New York socialist Morris Hillquit presided at the event and proclaimed how “the fall of Russian absolutism is the doom of political oppression all over the world.” Perhaps more than even the war in Europe, according to historian Michael Dobkowski, “The Bolshevik Revolution . . . haunted Americans and intensified fears of an encroaching influence dedicated to the destruction of Western democratic life. In their search for a single, comprehensive explanation for these developments and in their desire to weed out the ‘Red’ from the ‘true blue,’ they converged upon the Jew, that symbol of ancient, hidden enemies.”18

Abraham Cahan, a fixture among leftist Jewish socialists, similarly embraced the recent political upheaval in Russia. In a piece that originally appeared in the Yiddish paper the Jewish Daily Forward (and was translated into English for readers of the New York Call) titled “A Dream No Longer,” Cahan celebrated the revolution. “The hope of seeing Socialism established all over the world is no longer a piece of remote idealism but something on the threshold of realization,” he enthusiastically wrote. For skeptical onlookers, it would have undoubtedly been true to expected form for radical Jews in America to celebrate the anti-capitalist events in Russia with such praise. Speaking to the immediate negative reaction to Marxism in the United States, Cahan asked, “Is it not time for all of us to cast off our former bitterness and venom . . . and wish our victorious comrades in Russia further success and happiness?” Cahan’s question represented the Jewish left’s sympathy with fear-inducing international developments. The editor of Boston’s Revolutionary Age, Nicholas Hourwich, also embraced the historic moment, which he called “the greatest of revolutions.” Marxism, the editor wrote, had “stepped out of the bulky volumes [of ideology] and become realized in life.”19 Hourwich was the son of famed radical Jewish lawyer—and immigrant from tsarist Russia—Isaac Hourwich.

Legislating and Codifying Fear

America’s post-Bolshevik attitudes, according to immigration historian Roger Daniels, “helped push anti-immigrant sentiment to perhaps its highest peaks in American history.” Of course, those in the United States who supported the Russian Revolution and its ideology faced criticism and suspicion. The New York Sun ran a long wartime piece under the headline “Bolsheviki Here Are Anything But American in Spirit.” Based on an extensive interview with Assistant US Attorney Harold Content, the piece aimed to profile and discredit “agitators.” In addition to multiple insinuations that “Emma and Alex” (i.e., Goldman and Berkman) and other anarchists benefited financially from their political agitation, clear statements were made about the ethnic origins of such leftists. “These radicals . . . are not American. The majority of these people come from Eastern Europe,” the newspaper revealed.20

Morris Hillquit, a Jew, ran for mayor of New York at possibly the most unfavorable time ever for a candidate who was both Jewish and socialist—at the height of wartime anti-Semitic and anti-radical paranoia, in November 1917. The New York Tribune, with sneering accusations, covered his platform and campaign through a lens of suspicion. Running “under the guise of socialism,” the Tribune charged, Hillquit was the embodiment of the suspicious Jewish agitator. In its curt profile, the paper described him as “a Jew, born in Riga (the Milwaukee of Russia), forty-eight years ago. He is now rich and lives on Riverside Drive.” First, Hillquit’s Jewishness stood as a liability. At the same time, his opposition to the war marked him as a candidate to be feared. (Not by accident, this Hillquit profile also included a sketch of him wearing a Prussian helmet.) Running on what the paper called an “anti-war, anti-conscription, and quick peace platform,” Hillquit was in accord with many of the left’s standard positions at the time. Still, this exposé on “Comrade Hillquit” ran under the headline “Who’s Who against America,” which clearly spelled out how the Tribune’s editors viewed his patriotism. Derogatorily called the “Pacifist-Socialist Candidate” in newspapers, Hillquit was scrutinized again the following year by Dr. Harry Best. Best closely tracked the neighborhoods where Hillquit had enjoyed the most success and reported his findings. Hillquit received 22.1 percent of the vote in the mayoral race, a rather strong showing for a third-party candidate. His candidacy, however, was quickly marginalized. According to Best, Hillquit’s party, after all, had adopted a platform that included a stance in opposition to the war that was inconsistent with “the nation as a whole.” Hillquit and the socialists, the piece made clear, remained political outliers. “The Hillquit vote,” Best explained, “was packed into certain . . . sections of the city. The population of these sections is predominantly alien in origin, and unassimilated.” The piece made clear that any electoral success Hillquit enjoyed had rested on the popular support of undesirable immigrant voters. Russian, German, and Austrian voters led the way in the neighborhoods that backed Hillquit, and they supported the Socialist Party of America, an “alien organization on American soil.” This depiction, in short, made clear that people it called the “unassimilable immigrants” were to be feared, particularly as an influential voice in politics.21

During the World War I era, the government unambiguously legislated anti-radicalism. The February 1917 immigration restriction bill, despite some previous protest from President Woodrow Wilson, now saw support, and the statute contained significant anti-radical elements. Jewish antiwar dissent—and a broader fear of “alien radicals”—was greeted firmly by anxious citizens and lawmakers. The darkest moments came with the passage of the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918), both of which drastically restricted free-speech rights. Minnesota’s Labor World documented restrictions of speech during the war. The paper cited seven attacks in ninety days on the “liberty of the working class press” in the United States. Authorities arrested Margaret Sanger for “misuse of the mails.” The arrests of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Emma Goldman followed, as did the suppression of two radical papers, Revolt and the Alarm. Also suppressed was the “last issue” of Berkman’s The Blast. For Labor World, this period marked “an era of commercial imperialism backed by the bayonets of ‘preparedness.’” In April 1918, the secretary of the Washington State Socialist Party, Emil Herman, was arrested for sedition after police confiscated approximately 700 pieces of “disloyal” literature and seven cases of correspondence, mailing lists, stickers, and receipt books from his office. A federal grand jury in Seattle charged Herman with seven counts of sedition and claimed that he had “willfully and feloniously attempted to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, and refusal of duty.” As wartime paranoia reached its apex, two Jewish socialists, Victor Berger and Louis Waldman, were refused installation in seats to which they had been elected in the US Congress and the New York State Assembly, respectively. The Red Scare of 1919–1920 culminated in hundreds of deportations, typified by the voyage of the Buford (nicknamed “the Soviet Ark”) that left New York harbor on December 21, 1919, bound for Europe with 249 leftists aboard, including Berkman and Goldman.22

When one reads accounts produced during this time of heightened paranoia, it is easy to see how the terms Jewish and radical were often used interchangeably and with obvious negative connotations. When the New York Times announced a wartime meeting of the Jewish Socialist Federation of America in early 1918, for example, the headline referred to the event as a “great meeting of radicals.” Some people within the Jewish community had tried to counter this reputation for radicalism. “Jews Not Bomb Throwers” was the headline of an essay that ran in the New York Daily News. The essay quoted a recent speech delivered by Rabbi Dr. Judah Magnes at Temple Emanu-El on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Rabbi Magnes stated that “Jews, as a people, were the most ardent advocates of peace, industry, and love, and that there was no class of people who were so strongly opposed to violence.” Even “radical Jews,” he maintained, stood committed to peace, justice, and non-violence.23

During World War I, many Jewish Americans demonstrated a keen sense of loyalty to the United States and its role in the war. On March 22, 1918, for example, in the New York Times, the Jewish Socialist Federation of America called on its members to support the war effort “Now is the time,” the group declared, “when all parties and all beliefs should be united with a common purpose in the defense of the world.” Further, Jews served in the military during the war at rates higher than their proportional numbers in the US population. About 250,000 Jewish soldiers served during World War I, which constituted about 5 percent of the fighting force at a time when Jews numbered about 3 percent of the US population. The New York Sun covered a mass demonstration of Americanism on Manhattan’s East Side, in “a quarter, which, of the whole city, needed it most.” Upon the occasion of the government issuing its third Liberty Bond in April 1918, thousands took to the streets to show their support for the war effort. “Jewish patriarchs” and “Jewish women” participated, according to this report in the New York Times, because Jewish children in this usual “hotbed of Bolshevikism [sic]” had been teaching their parents and grandparents the virtues of “Americanism.” The Sun rejoiced, reporting, true or not, that “the red flag of socialism and anarchy has been chucked into the garbage pails.” In addition, the Anglicization of Jewish surnames during the war was celebrated. The paper reported a rush to “adopt the gentile system” by those with names such as Rosenthal, Greenberg, and Goldstein. “Dislike . . . for everything with a sauerkraut flavor” reportedly precipitated about one name change per day in New York County. An old name, after all, “made its wearer the object of ridicule” and “hinders the petitioner’s business.”24

Conclusion

In the end, this culture of fear had profound implications for the political left. Both the Socialist Party of America and the accompanying anarchist movements sputtered after the war as a consequence of the government crackdown on leftist speech. The mood of anti-radicalism and its interconnectedness with anti-Semitism offers powerful lessons about racism, discrimination, and unfounded alarm—and just how far fear can drive political reactions that restrict prized freedoms. Leftist agitators and opponents of US participation in World War I, particularly Jewish organizers, faced a climate of fear and condescension. In 1916, Emma Goldman chaired a gathering of what the New York Times dubbed “socialists, anarchists, and other ‘ists.’ ” Words used to describe the meeting included some with negative connotations, such as “tumult,” “contentious,” and “belligerent.” The meeting, attended by “eighty organizations, representing every radical party,” featured two hours of speakers “in five different languages.” The paper, which clearly played to anti-immigrant feelings, took special care to point out that some of the speakers, such as Bernard Seneken, “talked in Yiddish” as they spoke about the war and critiqued preparedness.25

This World War I era of paranoia and targeting of radicals ushered in what historian John Higham called a “new golden age of American anti-Semitism.” The mind-set behind Europe’s “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which apocryphally outlined a Jewish plot of worldwide dominance, inspired the postwar fears of Jews that matriculated into disturbing trends, such as the “new” Ku Klux Klan and the anti-Semitic crusades of public figures such as Henry Ford.26 Still, the image of the Jewish wild-eyed anarchist or leftist assassin, akin to Alexander Berkman in 1892, remained the exception to the rule. The broadly anti-radical and specifically anti-Jewish hysteria of the early twentieth century and the World War I era is a powerful reminder of how wartime anti-radicalism, often predicated on latent and outward anti-Semitism, can stereotype people and limit liberties.

Notes

Bibliography