3. This agitation could not remain theoretical—in fact, probably the theory was itself a late product of a broader tendency. The Johnson immigration act, setting the quota of immigrants to be admitted to the United States on the basis of their proportion in this country in 1890, was avowedly planned on a racial basis to encourage immigrants from northern and western Europe, and exclude those from eastern and southern Europe and from other continents. Secretly there seems to have been both anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiment involved, as certain partisan publications boast quite openly.
By far the most significant expression of anti-Semitism in the United States is the Ku Klux Klan, which will later be considered in some detail. At this point it is sufficient to point out that the Klan was organized in 1915 by William J. Simmons of Atlanta, Ga., and became a national movement in 1920. Its name and much of its ritual are taken from the Ku Klux Klan of 1867–71, but its motives are quite different, for the old Klan was a local movement intended to protect the defeated Confederacy, to overawe the negroes and to oppose the North; while the modern Klan is not sectional, but in every section opposes the negro, the Jew, the Catholic and the foreign-born. Its membership is exclusively “white, gentile, Protestant American” and it therefore claims to be the only “one hundred per cent. Americans”. The Klan defends its purpose and attacks the proscribed groups by business boycott, political opposition, sometimes even by threats or by physical violence. The Klan is the most important symptom at hand of the nature of anti-Semitism in the United States, beside being a most significant type of social grouping and of social motive.
4. A final type of anti-Semitism in America was a direct importation from Europe through a group of Russian emigrés, some of them living in this country as private citizens, others as employees of the section on Russia of the Department of State. These men were bitterly anti-Soviet, anti-radical, and (whether for propaganda purposes, or through the convictions of the Russian aristocracy as a whole) bitterly anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is an article in the creed of every reactionary movement in Europe, with the single exception of the Italian Fascisti, and is strongest of all among the Russians. It seems to have been these people who persuaded Mr. Henry Ford of the authenticity of the Protocols, and introduced these to America as a whole. They seem also to have been active in the anti-radical agitation of the post-war period, which tried to identify foreigner, radical and Jew in the mind of the American people, and to attribute the Russian revolution, the Bolshevist government and the radical groups in America, alike to insidious Jewish influence.
As this tendency was not as public as the others, I give some proof of its existence. It was discussed in Hearst’s International Magazine in 1923 in a series of articles by the editor, Norman Hapgood; and in the Bnai Brith Magazine of October and November, 1924, in two articles by Jacob Spolansky, a former agent of the United States Department of Justice, who was employed to hunt down radicals and if possible to find Jews among them. As the most official statement, I quote Mr. Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, in his annual report to that body, delivered November 13, 1921.[1]
The committee conducted an investigation with a view to discovering the identity of those who instigated the attacks against the Jews of America. It was found that they consisted of a group of Russian emigrés who had wormed themselves into the confidence of some Americans who, in turn, had succeeded in securing the assistance of others whose co-operation was given either because they were gullible and believed the fantastic inventions of men schooled in intrigue in the Russian police system, or because they already cherished ill-will against Jews and were ready to assist in any movement through which they could satisfy real or fancied grudges.
In the report of the same body, October 19, 1919,[2] reference is made to the hearing before the sub-committee of the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate in February 1919, when—
Dr. George Simons, who had been for a number of years in Russia, testified regarding the alleged activities of Jews in the Bolshevist movement in Russia and stated that the present conditions there are due, in large part, to the activities of Yiddish agitators from the East Side of New York City who went to Russia immediately following the overthrow of the Czar. Dr. Simons stated further that the Bolshevist movement in Russia was being supported financially and morally by certain elements on the East Side of New York City.
There is, then, an anti-Semitic movement in America, and has been since 1919 or 1920. Its philosophy of racialism, exclusiveness and “hundred per cent.” Americanism, is derived largely from the Voelkische parties of Germany and other nations of Europe, which lay great stress on Aryan race and especially on its Nordic or Teutonic branch. The extreme of this position is found in the apparently well reasoned position of Burton J. Hendricks, who attempts to prove that the Spanish and German Jews were desirable because white, but that the Russian Jews are undesirable immigrants because they are descended from the Chazars, a Tartar tribe which embraced Judaism in the ninth century. The premises of this writer seem untenable, and the conclusions do not necessarily follow on them. Much of this anti-Semitic literature and public action seems to be based on similar rationalizations of intolerance, of group prejudice.
In studying this anti-Semitic movement in America as a crucial example of the relations of group and sub-group, I stand in the contrary danger, that of rationalizing the inferiority complex of a persecuted group. My only justification for facing this danger is that nobody can approach this type of problem without one danger or the other, and the subject is too vital to be entirely neglected. I can only hope that my analysis of the underlying problem of the nature of human groups and of their interrelations may be made in such a scientific spirit that the application of my theory to the special problem of anti-Semitism in the United States may be of some value in the clearing up of this great field of human action.