Anti-Semitism in the United States

by Lee J. Levinger

5.

One more question arises naturally in our minds before we can accept this analysis and use it as part of our daily thinking and acting; what is the effect of such toleration on our own loyalty to our own people? Does the philanthropist neglect his family, or the man without strong religious hatreds prove careless of his religion, or the lover of mankind prove a poor patriot? This is the usual opinion, and therefore a very effective argument against the position which I have here tried to establish. But this opinion is directly contrary to the facts of the case. Does family affection make for or against love of country? Naturally, the former, for loyal children are also loyal citizens. Should the man who would love his country on that account hate his city or his state? Of course not; love of his native land begins with the smaller unit, which he knows best, and then grows to the entire nation, which includes it. And in the same way loyalty to the cause of humanity need not mean, cannot mean disloyalty to the cause of the nation, which is so great and important a part of the human race. But, on the other hand, the patriotic American does not hate Illinois because he has moved to Indiana. Love of one’s own state persists without the hatred and intolerance of the other state, just because the two are members of the American nation, and the inclusive loyalty makes the other loyalties less bitter and less contentious against each other. Why, in the Balkans, states much smaller than Indiana and Illinois have their armies always ready for a cause of complaint against the other. That is because they have as yet no common loyalty. It is because the free intelligence has not yet broken through the inborn suspicion and intolerance of the human pack. Probably we can never expect all human beings actually and actively to love one another. That seems illusory in light of the history of human nature. But there is every prospect that tolerance will spread as world intelligence becomes more enlightened, and as more people in each generation share in that world intelligence. And this spread of tolerance will make always for larger and more ideal loyalties, including the warring nations and hating sects of today, even as nowadays the city includes the family or the nation includes the state. Hatred toward the Jew takes its place today in the hierarchy of hatreds as one of the strongest and most widespread of all. Therefore it will probably be one of the last to go as tolerance overcomes intolerance the world over. But every step toward the discovery of new truths or toward the dissemination of the truths already known is another step toward the destruction of all prejudice and toward the real liberation of the Jew. Naturally, the Jew himself will overcome his prejudices at the same time, as he has shown himself pathetically eager to do at several times of false security in the past.

The great hopeful fact of it all is this: tolerance begets tolerance. That hatred causes hatred is well known, for it is the normal course of every personal conflict or national war. Each unfriendly act of one side is followed by one of the other, until nations enter warfare all ready to hate one another, and leave it hating more than ever. But friendship, fairness, tolerance, have the same way of spreading by their own inner force. If America discriminates against Japanese immigrants, the Japanese think of ways to show their dislike of America. But if America gives back the Boxer indemnity to China, the Chinese send their students to America, then these return to their native land with an attitude of friendliness, and the process of tolerance and peace, once begun, grows by its own power. Lines of tolerance radiate from every true center of justice, of inquiry, of religion. Human growth is slow, but we can mark its methods and take part in its tremendous process.

CHAPTER IV.
AMERICAN HISTORY—A DEVELOPMENT OF GROUPS

All history may reasonably be regarded as a process of group minds in conflict and association, struggle and integration. Probably this method of study will bring out more genuine facts and a more fundamental order of causation than political or military or economic history alone; at the least, it presents one significant and important mode of studying human association in both the past and present. From this point of view, Greece was a congeries of competitive city states, which united only against an outside foe; Israel was the union of twelve different tribes, together with the Canaanites whom they subdued; Rome was a product of the various organizations, the patricians and plebeians; England the growth into each other of the successive waves of conquest—Celts, Romans, Saxons, Normans—and the more recent peaceful immigrants. From this point of view, the United States is conspicuous among all nations for the number and variety of its groups and for their union (on the whole) by a federal principle of agreement, rather than a forcible levelling and unification from without. And this process of group synthesis is not a modern one only, as it is sometimes erroneously considered; it is characteristic of the piece-meal, haphazard colonization from the very outset; it pervaded the Revolutionary army, and was the outstanding fact that confronted the framers of the Federal Constitution in 1787.

1.

E. B. Greene sums up the reasons for adopting the Constitution in this way:

[60]The movement for a more effective union was partly the work of far-sighted leaders who could look beyond state boundaries to the larger interests of the country as a whole ... another group were beginning to see that the weakness of Congress might have something to do with troubles nearer home.

Thus the causes of the Federal union were the need of external defense and the need of reconciling the many diverse groups in the population of the new nation. These groups are summarized by Carl R. Fish:

[61]There were thirteen distinct and separate state governments, and Vermont had its own local authority which defied the rest.... Differences in the original stock, emphasized by different physical conditions and by the isolated life of the colonial period, had created several great sections or divisions in the country, which had sufficient similarity within themselves and sufficient unlikeness to each other, to make them permanent entities, and to cause sectionalism to be a permanent factor in American history.