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Groups such as the Immigration Restriction League, founded by a trio of Harvard alums, emerged to beat back the flood of foreigners, contending they imported disease, crime, and moral decay to American soil; stole jobs from American citizens; and became a burden on public resources. Careful not to portray themselves as anti-immigrant, the group’s members contended they merely wanted to prevent “undesirable” émigrés from taking root in the United States. Many of these undesirables, in the view of the Immigration Restriction League’s founders, which included a climatologist who dabbled in
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Though immigration opponents lost this round, the legislation did create a commission, chaired by Dillingham, to make a thorough study of the issue. Eventually, this panel paved the way for some of the harshest immigration restrictions of the twentieth century.
“Political Zionism places a lien upon citizenship,” he said, noting that the establishment of a Jewish state “creates a separateness which is fatal.”[10] He contended that Zionists “by their very movement are furnishing the Anti-Semites one of the strongest arguments for their nefarious attacks upon our race.”[11]
The Information Bureau made clear to Zangwill’s ITO that it sought only the most employable immigrants—laborers and tradesmen, preferably under forty. Controversially, the organization requested the ITO send no immigrants who kept the Sabbath (and would be unwilling to work on Saturdays).[15]
The estate, which Felix was constantly expanding as he bought up adjoining parcels (what he referred to as “squaring off the property”),
“white slavery,” as prostitution was sometimes called at the time,
“You act as if my organization and I were on trial! You, Mr. Secretary, and your department are on trial, and the country will rue it if this undertaking—so conducive to promoting the best interests of our country, as well as humanity—is throttled by your Department’s unreasonable obstacles!”
It is not because the Jews of the United States lay stress upon the admittance into Russia of a few hundred of their number who may annually wish to go there, but because of the conviction that the moment Russia is compelled to live up to its treaties and admit the foreign Jew into its dominion upon a basis of equality with other citizens of foreign countries, the Russian Government will not be able to maintain the pale of settlement against its own Jews. You see, it is a large question, involving the most sacred of human rights.[1]
It wasn’t just Schiff. The 1912 election marked the beginning of a transition by Jewish voters away from Republicans and toward Democrats, a trend that accelerated in the 1920s.
“The conditions which existed when the constitution was framed are no longer existent,” Seligman wrote. “During the last century…the development of the underlying economic and social forces has created a nation, and this development calls for uniform national regulation of many matters which were not dreamed of by the founders.” He noted, “Let us not make a fetich of ‘self-government,’ and let us not oppose central authority in those cases where self-government means retrogression rather than progress.”[11]
“I really don’t know who was the baby’s father, but, judging from the number of men who claim the honor, all I can say is that its mother must have been a most immoral woman,” Paul Warburg later joked of the Fed’s parentage.[55]
“I have three nationalities embodied in me,” he explained in 1913, during a speech at Cornell University, where he had just donated $100,000 to endow a foundation for the study of German culture. “My strongest nationality is that which I selected for myself, for which I am responsible. First, I am an American, a member of the nation I selected for myself many years ago. Then, my truest attachment is to my religion. I am not a national Jew, for the Jewish nation ceased to exist 900 years ago. But I am a Jew in religion. And I am proud of my German nationality.”[10]
“I am divided into three parts. I am an American, I am a German, and I am a Jew.” A Zionist agitator named Shmarya Levin rose from the audience and asked Schiff whether he divided himself horizontally or vertically. And if the former, which section belonged to the Jewish people?[11] The episode was prophetic, for during the war the three parts of Schiff’s identity came increasingly into bitter conflict.
“He who attempts the role of peacemaker where passions have been unloosed as they have been in Europe must needs be misunderstood, and must expose himself to vile attacks; nevertheless, I shall continue, with others, to labor unflaggingly in this direction, because I am convinced that that is my duty.”[23]
“I pointed out that the war had created entirely new conditions under which the Jewish question had now to be considered.” He told Schiff and the other AJC members that “in Germany there is the firm intention since the beginning of the war to solve a large number of historic social wrongs,” and he said the German government now gave “highest priority” to Jewish equality, both within its borders and in Russian-held territory to the east, in what is present-day Poland, which Germany hoped to conquer. The essence of his message: supporting Germany was supporting the cause of Jewish human rights.
It was a Saturday, when the pious banker would typically be found in the pews of Temple Emanu-El intoning his Shabbat devotionals, but the news had shaken him so thoroughly that he set aside his routine and went downtown to find Jack Morgan.
While women and children starved, soldiers were being sent to battle without rifles and ammunition, expected to forage for their own weapons among the corpses littering the Eastern Front.
Nina eventually persuaded her husband to come around, and not yet twenty-one, Jimmy headed off to the air station at Hampton Roads, where he trained to become a fighter pilot and, after his first near crash, hired a prostitute to ensure he would not die a virgin.[12]
“It is a pity to write history at this time, when it is so much more satisfactory to do one’s share in making it.”[33]
Otto Kahn, meanwhile, announced that he would donate his annual income, after living expenses and taxes, to “charity and war purposes” for the conflict’s duration.[40] (Left unmentioned was the grandiose scale on which Kahn and his family lived and that he was then in the process of constructing a hundred-thousand-square-foot estate, Oheka Castle, on Long Island’s North Shore.)
Scouts sold hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of war bonds and savings stamps, planted “war” gardens to feed the troops, and volunteered as air-raid spotters. Part of the goal of this effort was to prepare boys on the cusp of manhood to trade one uniform for another when they came of age.
He learned the Spartacus League, a movement of German revolutionaries that would later become the Communist Party of Germany, was plotting an imminent uprising.
“The depression which prevailed, he says, in the minds of the people of some education and the hopelessness that drives the masses to follow any orator or agitator while dressed in paper, imitation suits and eating all kinds of worthless substitutes, is beyond description.”
Odder still, he suddenly caved on many of the issues he had recently fought against so ardently, including imposing staggering reparations and a treaty clause, pushed by Clemenceau, that forced Germany to formally accept the blame for starting the war.[6]
“If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp,” he wrote.
There was also another reason for his visit. Earlier that summer members of an ultra-nationalist paramilitary group had gunned down Max’s friend Walther Rathenau, a Jewish politician then serving as Germany’s foreign minister, as he drove through Berlin in his chauffeured NAG convertible.
Ford fell ill with the flu during the trip and spent much of the voyage in his cabin. Shortly after arriving in Europe, he abruptly and mysteriously abandoned his compatriots and returned home to Michigan, dooming the effort.[8]
Could Wilson and Ford turning mysteriously ill at such a time be the reason for WW2?
It was a nesting doll of fraudulence—forged document reinforcing forged document.
Ford sought a platform for his populist message, unfiltered by media skeptics and naysayers. The paper’s tagline captured its Ford-inspired ethos: “Chronicler of the Neglected Truth.” Only it would become the nation’s leading tribune of antisemitic lies.
The Independent’s barrage of libels reached an increasingly wide audience. With Ford’s substantial backing, its initial circulation of seventy thousand rose to a peak of nine hundred thousand, making it one of the largest papers in the country. The Independent was ubiquitous in Ford dealerships, which were pressured to hawk the publication alongside the latest Model Ts.
Apple Town at APA Hotels
“better all around to take preventative measures than to have, later on, when the threatened mischief has been done, to endeavor to take curative action.”
As World War II loomed, Ford continued to decry “international financiers” for causing labor unrest and fueling “war scares” for profit. He was typically careful to omit the word Jewish from his fulminations against the “Wall Street crowd.” But in June 1940, the year before the United States entered World War II, the mask slipped during a conversation with an Associated Press reporter, and Ford remarked: “I still think this is a phony war made by the international Jewish bankers.”[58]
It is impossible to know what thoughts flickered through his mind in the moments before he was afflicted, but Gomon believed he was deeply disturbed by the footage. Finally, Ford “saw the ravages of a plague he had helped to spread,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. “The virus had come full circle.”[59]
Jeff had come downtown to witness the pandemonium, like some disaster tourist. But the presence of the prominent banker, who was spotted taking in the spectacle with serene detachment, temporarily seemed to calm the market, one paper noted at the time.[19]
“Philanthropy is nothing more than a returned penny for a stolen dollar,”
The intermarriage, uniting separate social and business spheres, would have been almost unthinkable decades earlier. And it’s probable that Jacob, had he been living, would have fiercely opposed the union, fearing, as did many observant Jews, it would dilute his family’s Jewish faith. Such concerns would not have been meritless: today the Schiff family, while appreciating their Jewish roots, are Episcopalians.
Max Warburg, center, is pictured in a Nazi propaganda image titled, “Jews as rulers of the money markets. 4 Jews in the directorate of the German banking industry.”
