ANTI-SEMITISM
Anti-Semitism during the Depression and into World War II reached levels that had not been seen before in the United States and have not been seen since. The fear and insecurity that accompanied the severe economic downturn exposed and fueled a hostility and distrust of Jews that escalated as the economy tumbled. Moreover, the hatred in the United States was intensified by Adolf Hitler's assumption of power in Germany in 1933. The viciousness of hate mongering on both sides of the Atlantic grew throughout the 1930s, only to abate in the United States well after the fall of Hitler and the end of the World War II.
Anti-Semitism in the United States was not a new phenomenon. Immigrant Americans had not been immune to the prejudices of Christian Europe that saw the Jews as perverse and stubborn in their rejection of Christ and ultimately responsible for his death. These notions had led over the generations to all manner of discrimination, persecution, and outright violence. Yet the United States was different. Ancient prejudices had been submerged in the business of nation building. Although negative religious images had persisted, the promise of American democracy and opportunity had lured Jews and so many other immigrants to its shores. However, the levels of anti-Semitism escalated in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century as several million Jews from Eastern Europe came to the United States fleeing Russian persecution. Americans of various stripes, including Henry Ford, had raised their voices against Jews, who were increasingly seen as unassimilable and even a threat to the United States.
Yet the anti-Semitism of the 1920s was to pale in comparison to its shrillness in the 1930s. The Depression set the stage for the search for scapegoats and for extensive Jew baiting by a variety of demagogues, such as William Pelley, the leader of the Silver Shirts, who fancied himself the American counterpart of Hitler. Gerald B. Winrod headed up the Defenders of the Christian Faith, another of more than one hundred anti-Semitic organizations formed mostly after 1933. One of these organizations, the German American Bund, was directly financed by the Nazis. An exposé by Look magazine in 1939 indicated that there were sixty-two offices in the United States that were distributing material coming from Hitler's propaganda ministry in Germany.
The most popular anti-Jewish preacher of the era however, was a homegrown product, Father Charles Coughlin. Through his weekly radio program and his publication Social Justice, Coughlin reached millions of people. By 1938 he was attacking Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and claiming that the United States and Christianity were being threatened by a vast conspiracy of bankers and Communists whom he increasingly identified as Jews. His Christian Front organization urged sympathizers to "buy Christian," and his followers on occasion attacked Jews on the streets of
several cities and desecrated synagogues. Since Coughlin was not silenced by his Church superiors until after the war started, his words carried weight, particularly among many Catholics.
Jew baiting was not just a phenomenon of the streets; it was a practice in upper-class circles, in the halls of Congress, and in American political discourse in general. Anti-Roosevelt partisans, in their attack on the New Deal, blasted it as the "Jew Deal." Moreover, in what they deemed a smear on Roosevelt, they claimed he was of Jewish origin (which he was not). The 1936 presidential election and particularly the 1940 election were rife with allegations of a Jewish conspiracy and untold Jewish power endangering the United States. Charles Lindbergh and other members of the America First organization accused Jews, along with the British and the Roosevelt administration, of trying to push the United States into an unnecessary and illadvised war against Hitler.
Although card carrying anti-Semites numbered in the thousands rather than in the millions, their hate literature was widely disseminated in the United States. Jews were likened to octopuses controlling much of American government, industry, and public opinion. They were seen as Communist conspirators bent on takeover. The so-called "Jewish problem" became a topic in the general press. The
level of anti-Semitism reached such proportions that Fortune magazine in 1936 investigated the extent of "Jewish control." They found that, to the contrary, Jews had virtually no control in major manufacturing and banking sectors, and they represented no more than 15 percent of the members of the Communist Party. In fact, Jews faced discrimination in getting jobs in corporate America and there were quotas limiting the number of Jews in many institutions of higher learning.
But despite the reality of American Jewish life, suspicions persisted. In a public opinion poll in March 1938, 41 percent of Americans believed that Jews had too much power in the United States. When asked what to do about it, 18 percent were in favor of restricting Jews in business, 24 percent believed Jews should be kept out of government and politics, and 20 percent were ready to drive Jews out of the United States. By April 1940, the percentage of those in favor of restricting Jews in business had risen to 31 percent. In August 1940 the question was "what nationality, religious, or racial groups in this country are a menace to America?" Jews were cited by 17 percent of the respondents, whereas Germans were cited by 14 percent and the Japanese by 6 percent. Ironically even at the end of the war, after six million European Jews had been brutally murdered, 20 percent of Americans still believed that Jews in the United States had too much power.
For the 4.5 million American Jews, many of whom were immigrants or second-generation Americans struggling like other Americans to earn a living during hard times, the anti-Semitism that accompanied the Depression and the rise of the Nazis in Germany provoked profound anxiety. How different was the United States after all? Could the persecution evidenced in Europe take hold here? What did the future hold? How much would pushing for the cause of Jews overseas subject American Jews to charges of disloyalty and provoke an even greater anti-Semitic backlash in the United States?
The Jewish community in the United States faced serious challenges as it sought not only to respond to anti-Semitism at home, but to events overseas as the number of Jewish refugees desperately
trying to escape Hitler and find a new home dramatically escalated. Over a decade earlier, in response to what was perceived as unwanted hordes of Jews and Catholics coming in from Southern and Eastern Europe, Congress had passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which not only had sharply curtailed the total numbers of immigrants allowed into to the United States, but had specified where they had to come from. Countries from Eastern Europe were only allotted several thousand immigrants each, while the total German-Austria quota was about 27,000 places. There was no special allowance for refugees fleeing persecution. During the 1930s, when refugee advocates wanted to urge
Congress to liberalize the immigration law, they were warned that if anything, an unsympathetic Congress would act to cut the numbers, not increase them. Neither Congress nor the American public had an interest in increasing immigration into the United States, particularly if some of those immigrants would be Jews. Thus, the indifference, suspicion, and outright anti-Semitism palpable to so many American Jews in the 1930s had an impact on the country's response to Hitler and the Holocaust. Ultimately, American Jews were stymied in this cause by their own fears and impotence, and by the determined opposition of the American public to offering any more Jews a refuge in the United States.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dinnerstein, Leonard. Antisemitism in America. 1994.
"Jews in America." Fortune (February 1936): 79-144.
Mueller, William A. "Hitler Speaks and the Bund Obeys." Look (October 10, 1939).
Scholnick, Myron I. The New Deal and Anti-Semitism in America. 1990.
Shapiro, Edward S. "The Approach of War: Congressional Isolationism and Anti-Semitism, 1939–1941. American Jewish History 74, no. 1 (1984): 45-65.
Strong, Donald S. Organized Anti-Semitism in America: The Rise of Group Prejudice During the Decade, 1930–40. 1941. Reprint, 1979.
