PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Craftsmen Printers, Chicago
FOREWORD
Let us reason together. What proof have we that the people of one race are better or to be considered with favor above those of another?
It is true there was a time when the word “stranger” or its equivalent in other languages than the English had the same meaning as enemy. Each savage tribe, the early ancestors of all civilized peoples, for want of knowledge and experience, considered all other tribes enemies, and even as civilization grew and boundaries began to be established an imaginary line made enemies of those dwelling on opposite sides of rivers and channels. With more reason, seas came to be recognized as territorial limitations, and it has required centuries to break down notions of enmity and antagonism between dwellers of different localities. Indeed, it can hardly be contended that this spirit of enmity and antagonism has been overcome, when we see not only peoples of different countries, but those of a common citizenship harboring animosities sometimes approaching the malignant, and giving expression both in speech and action to their hatred for those who differ from them in race or color or creed.
Victor Rubin in the following pages deals with this question of racial and religious antagonism in a fascinating but most effective manner. Perhaps no one will be able to speak more impressively of Mr. Rubin’s book “Tar and Feathers” and at the same time give an intimation of its contents than has the great scholar and traveler, Israel Zangwill:
“Mr. Victor Rubin, with the courage of youth, faces in his first novel the full blast of the actual. What Mr. C. E. Montague’s fine book, Disenchantment, expresses for the British soldier, Mr. Rubin’s Tar and Feathers expresses for the American. All America—of all creeds and races—went to the great war as one man, as depicted in Tar and Feathers. The young Southerner, Hamilton, has actually been dragged from death on the battlefield by a negro and brought back to life and health by a Jewish surgeon. Yet the cannon have scarcely cooled before the old racial and religious prejudices reassert themselves. They resurge even in Hamilton, who cannot bear to touch the colored hand of his saviour. It is his struggle with them, and his final mastery over them, that constitutes the theme of Mr. Rubin’s novel. When Hamilton goes back to his narrow Southern home, he even under the pressure of the milieu becomes a paid agent of the Ku Klux Klan with its crusade against Catholics, Jews and Negroes.” (Mr. Rubin prudently calls it the “Trick, Track Tribe.”)
That the book possesses a broad appeal is indicated by many other commendations of able readers as expressed in scores of periodicals, a few of which we quote:
“A cogent, common-sense appeal for liberality of view, for a realization that all humanity is intrinsically similar, that the great teachers of mankind all breathed love and unity ... a book which any man concerned with the interesting presentment of truth would do well to read.”—William R. Langfeld in the Philadelphia Sunday Record.
“Mr. Rubin has succeeded in analyzing the psychological effects of the war upon those who participated in it as few writers have done. He has depicted the ethical and moral metamorphosis with commendable accuracy and understanding.”—Boston Transcript.