[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help] [Register]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
|
Immigration See other Immigration Articles Title: Culture of Critique Chapter 7: Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Pohcy 239 Chapter 7: Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Pohcy Today,... the immigrants — above all the Jewish immigrants — seem more American than [the WASP] does. They are the faces and voices and inflections of thought that seem most familiar to us, literally second nature. [The WASP] is the odd ball, the stranger, the fossil. We glance at him, a bit startled and say to ourselves, "Where did he go?" We remember him: pale, poised, neatly dressed, briskly sure of himself And we see him as an outsider, an outlander, a reasonably noble breed in the act of vanishing... He has stopped being representative, and we didn't notice it until this minute. Not so emphatically, anyway. What has happened since World War II is that the American sensibility has become part Jewish, perhaps as much Jewish as it is anything else . . . The literate American mind has come in some measure to think Jewishly. It has been taught to, and it was ready to. After the entertainers and novelists came the Jewish critics, politicians, theologians. Critics and politicians and theologians are by profession molders; they form ways of seeing. (Walter Kerr 1968, Dl, D3) Immigration policy is a paradigmatic example of conflicts of interest between ethnic groups because immigration policy determines the future demographic composition of the nation. Ethnic groups unable to influence immigration policy in their own interests will eventually be displaced by groups able to accomplish this goal. Immigration policy is thus of fundamental interest to an evolutionist. This chapter discusses ethnic conflict between Jews and gentiles in the area of immigration policy. Immigration policy is, however, only one aspect of conflicts of interest between Jews and gentiles in the United States. The skirmishes between Jews and the gentile power structure beginning in the late nineteenth century always had strong overtones of anti-Semitism. These battles involved issues of Jewish upward mobility, quotas on Jewish representation 240 The Culture Of Critique in elite schools beginning in the nineteenth century and peaking in the 1920s and 1930s, the anti-communist crusades in the post- World War 11 era, as well as the very powerful concern with the cultural influences of the major media extending from Henry Ford's writings in the 1920s to the Hollywood inquisitions of the McCarthy era and into the contemporary era {SAID, Ch. 2). That anti-Semitism was involved in these issues can be seen from the fact that historians of Judaism (e.g., Sachar 1992, 620ff) feel compelled to include accounts of these events as important to the history of Jews in the United States, by the anti-Semitic pronouncements of many of the gentile participants, and by the self-conscious understanding of Jewish participants and observers. The Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy in the United States is especially noteworthy as an aspect of ethnic conflict. Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy has had certain unique qualities that have distinguished Jewish interests from the interests of other groups favoring liberal immigration policies. Throughout much of the period from 1881 to 1965, one Jewish interest in liberal immigration policies stemmed from a desire to provide a sanctuary for Jews fleeing from anti-Semitic persecutions in Europe and elsewhere. Anti-Semitic persecutions have been a recurrent phenomenon in the modem world beginning with the Russian pogroms of 1881 and continuing into the post- World War 11 era in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As a result, liberal immigration has been a Jewish interest because "survival often dictated that Jews seek refuge in other lands" (Cohen 1972, 341). For a similar reason, Jews have consistently advocated an internationalist foreign policy because "an internationally-minded America was likely to be more sensitive to the problems of foreign Jewries" (p. 342). There is also evidence that Jews, much more than any other European- derived ethnic group in the United States, have viewed liberal immigration policies as a mechanism of ensuring that the United States would be a pluralistic rather than a unitary, homogeneous society (e.g., Cohen 1972). Plurahsm serves both internal (within-group) and external (between-group) Jewish interests. Pluralism serves internal Jewish interests because it legitimates the internal Jewish interest in rationalizing and openly advocating an interest in overt rather than semi-cryptic Jewish group commitment and nonassimilation, what Howard Sachar (1992, 427) terms its function in "legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst of a majority's host society." Both Neusner (1993) and Ellman (1987) suggest that the increased sense of ethnic consciousness seen in Jewish circles recently has been influenced by this general movement within American society toward the legitimization of cultural pluralism and minority group ethnocentrism. This trend toward overt rather than the semi-cryptic forms that have characterized Judaism in twentieth-century Western societies is viewed 241 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy by many as critical to the continuity of Judaism (e.g., Abrams 1997; Dershowitz 1997; see SAID, Ch. 8). Reform Judaism, the least overt form of contemporay Judaism, is becoming steadily more traditional, including a greater emphasis on religious rituals and a deep concern to prevent intermarriage. A recent conference of Reform rabbis emphasized that the upsurge in traditionalism is partly the result of the increasing legitimacy of ethnic consciousness in general {Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1998, A26). Ethnic and religious pluralism also serves external Jewish interests because Jews become just one of many ethnic groups. This results in the diffusion of political and cultural influence among the various ethnic and religious groups, and it becomes difficult or impossible to develop unified, cohesive groups of gentiles united in their opposition to Judaism. Historically, major anti-Semitic movements have tended to erupt in societies that have been, apart from the Jews, religiously or ethnically homogeneous (see SAID). Conversely, one reason for the relative lack of anti-Semitism in the United States compared to Europe was that "Jews did not stand out as a solitary group of [religious] non-conformists" (Higham 1984, 156). Although ethnic and cultural pluralism are certainly not guaranteed to satisfy Jewish interests (see Ch. 8), it is nonetheless the case that ethnically and religiously pluralistic societies have been perceived by Jews as more likely to satisfy Jewish interests than are societies characterized by ethnic and religious homogeneify among gentiles. Indeed, at a basic level, the motivation for all the Jewish political and intellectual activity reviewed throughout this volume is intimately linked to fears of anti-Semitism. Svonkin (1997, 8ff) shows that a sense of "uneasiness" and insecurify pervaded American Jewry in the wake of World War II even in the face of evidence that anti-Semitism had declined to the point that it had become a marginal phenomenon. As a direct result, "The primary objective of the Jewish intergroup relations agencies [i.e., the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL] after 1945 was... to prevent the emergence of an anti-Semitic reactionary mass movement in the United States" (Svonkin 1997, 8). Writing in the 1970s, Isaacs (1974, I4ff) describes the pervasive insecurify of American Jews and their hypersensitivify to anything that might be deemed anti- Semitic. Interviewing "noted public men" on the subject of anti-Semitism in the early 1970s, Isaacs asked, "Do you think it could happen here?" "Never was it necessary to define 'it.' In almost every case, the reply was approximately the same: 'If you know history at all, you have to presume not that it could happen, but that it probably will,' or 'It's not a matter of if; it's a matter of when'" (p. 15). Isaacs, correctly in my view, attributes the intensify of Jewish involvement in politics to this fear of anti-Semitism. Jewish activism on immigration is merely one strand of a multipronged movement directed at preventing the development 242 The Culture Of Critique of a mass movement of anti-Semitism in Western societies. Other aspects of this program are briefly reviewed below. Explicit statements linking immigration policy to a Jewish interest in cultural pluralism can be found among prominent Jewish social scientists and political activists. In his review of Horace Kallen's (1956) Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea appearing in Congress Weekly (published by the AJCongress), Joseph L. Blau (1958, 15) noted that "Kallen's view is needed to serve the cause of minority groups and minority cultures in this nation without a permanent majority" — the implication being that Kallen's ideology of multiculturalism opposes the interests of any ethnic group in dominating the United States. The well-known author and prominent Zionist Maurice Samuel (1924, 215), writing partly as a negative reaction to the immigration law of 1924, wrote, "If, then, the struggle between us [i.e., Jews and gentiles] is ever to be hfted beyond the physical, your democracies will have to alter their demands for racial, spiritual and cultural homogeneity with the State. But it would be foolish to regard this as a possibility, for the tendency of this civilization is in the opposite direction. There is a steady approach toward the identification of government with race, instead of with the political State." Samuel deplored the 1924 legislation as violating his conceptualization of the United States as a purely political entity with no ethnic implications. We have just witnessed, in America, the repetition, in the peculiar form adapted to this country, of the evil farce to which the experience of many centuries has not yet accustomed us. If America had any meaning at all, it lay in the peculiar attempt to rise above the trend of our present civilization — the identification of race with State... America was therefore the New World in this vital respect — that the State was purely an ideal, and nationality was identical only with acceptance of the ideal. But it seems now that the entire point of view was a mistaken one, that America was incapable of rising above her origins, and the semblance of an ideal-nationalism was only a stage in the proper development of the universal gentile spirit. . . To-day, with race triumphant over ideal, anti-Semitism uncovers its fangs, and to the heartless refusal of the most elementary human right, the right of asylum, is added cowardly insult. We are not only excluded, but we are told, in the unmistakable language of the immigration laws, that we are an "inferior" people. Without the moral courage to stand up squarely to its evil instincts, the country prepared itself, through its journalists, by a 243 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy long draught of vilification of the Jew, and, when sufficiently inspired by the popular and "scientific" potions, committed the act. (pp. 218-220) A congruent opinion is expressed by prominent Jewish social scientist and ethnic activist Earl Raab, who remarks very positively on the success of American immigration policy in altering the ethnic composition of the United States since 1965.'^** Raab notes that the Jewish community has taken a leadership role in changing the Northwestern European bias of American immigration policy (1993a, 17), and he has also maintained that one factor inhibiting anti-Semitism in the contemporary United States is that "an increasing ethnic heterogeneity, as a result of immigration, has made it even more difficult for a political party or mass movement of bigotry to develop" (1995, 91). Or more colorfully: The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country. We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible — and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever. (Raab 1993b, 23) Positive attitudes toward cultural diversity have also appeared in other statements on immigration by Jewish authors and leaders. Charles Silberman (1985, 350) notes, "American Jews are committed to cultural tolerance because of their belief — one firmly rooted in history — that Jews are safe only in a society acceptant of a wide range of attitudes and behaviors, as well as a diversity of religious and ethnic groups. It is this belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads an overwhelming majority of U.S. Jews to endorse 'gay rights' and to take a liberal stance on most other so-called 'social' issues."'"*' Similarly, in listing the positive benefits of immigration, the director of the Washington Action Office of the Council of Jewish Federations stated that immigration "is about diversity, cultural enrichment and economic opportunity for the immigrants" (in Forward, March 8, 1996, 5). And in summarizing Jewish involvement in the 1996 legislative battles over immigration, a newspaper account stated, "Jewish groups failed to kill a number of provisions that reflect 244 The Culture Of Critique the kind of political expediency that they regard as a direct attack on American ^hixaMsm"" {Detroit Jewish News, May 10, 1996). Because liberal immigration policies are a vital Jewish interest, it is not surprising that support for liberal immigration policies spans the Jewish political spectrum. We have seen that Sidney Hook, who along with the other New York Intellectuals may be viewed as an intellectual precursor of neoconservatism, identified democracy with the equality of differences and with the maximization of cultural diversity (see Ch. 6). Neoconservatives have been strong advocates of liberal immigration policies, and there has been a conflict between predominantly Jewish neoconservatives and predominantly gentile paleoconservatives over the issue of Third World immigration into the United States. Neoconservatives Norman Podhoretz and Richard John Neuhaus reacted very negatively to an article by a paleo-Conservative concerned that such immigration would eventually lead to the United States being dominated by such immigrants (see Judis 1990, 33). Other examples are neoconservatives Julian Simon (1990) and Ben Wattenberg (1991) both of whom advocate very high levels of immigration from all parts of the world, so that the United States will become what Wattenberg describes as the world's first "Universal Nation." Based on recent data, Fetzer (1996) reports that Jews remain far more favorable to immigration to the United States than any other ethnic group or religion. It should be noted as a general point that the effectiveness of Jewish organizations in influencing U.S. immigration policy has been facilitated by certain characteristics of American Jewry that are directly linked with Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, and particularly an IQ that is at least one standard deviation above the Caucasian mean (PTSDA, Ch. 7). High IQ is associated with success in a broad range of activities in contemporary societies, including especially wealth and social status (Hermstein & Murray 1994). As Neuringer (1 97 1, 87) notes, Jewish influence on immigration policy was facilitated by Jewish wealth, education, and social status. Reflecting its general disproportionate representation in markers of economic success and political influence, Jewish organizations have been able to have a vastly disproportionate effect on U.S. immigration policy because Jews as a group are highly organized, highly intelligent and politically astute, and they were able to command a high level of financial, political, and intellectual resources in pursuing their political aims. Similarly, Hollinger (1996, 19) notes that Jews were more influential in the decline of a homogeneous Protestant Christian culture in the United States than Catholics because of their greater wealth, social standing, and technical skill in the intellectual arena. In the area of immigration policy, the main Jewish activist organization influencing immigration policy, the AJCommittee, was characterized by "strong leadership [particularly Louis Marshall], internal 245 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy cohesion, well-funded programs, sophisticated lobbying techniques, well-chosen non- Jewish alhes, and good timing" (Goldstein 1990, 333). Goldberg (1996, 38- 39) notes that presently there are approximately 300 national Jewish organizations in the United States with a combined budget estimated in the range of $6 billion — a sum, Goldberg notes, greater than the gross national product of half the members of the United Nations. The Jewish effort toward transforming the United States into a pluralistic society has been waged on several fronts. In addition to discussing legislative and lobbying activities related to immigration policy, mention will also be made of Jewish efforts in the intellectual-academic arena, the area of church-state relationships, and organizing African Americans as a political and cultural force. (1) Intellectual-academic efforts. Hollinger (1996, 4) notes "the transformation of the ethnoreligious demography of American academic life by Jews" in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, as well as the Jewish influence on trends toward the secularization of American society and in advancing an ideal of cosmopolitanism (p. 11). The pace of this influence was very likely influenced by the immigration battles of the 1920s. Hollinger notes that the "old Protestant establishment's influence persisted until the 1960s in large measure because of the Immigration Act of 1924: had the massive immigration of Catholics and Jews continued at pre- 1 924 levels, the course of U.S. history would have been different in many ways, including, one may reasonably speculate, a more rapid diminution of Protestant cultural hegemony. Immigration restriction gave that hegemony a new lease of life" (22). It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the immigration battles from 1 88 1 to 1965 have been of momentous historical importance in shaping the contours of American culture in the late twentieth century. Of particular interest here is the ideology that the United States ought to be an ethnically and culturally pluralistic society. Beginning with Horace Kallen, Jewish intellectuals have been at the forefront in developing models of the United States as a culturally and ethnically pluralistic society. Reflecting the utility of cultural pluralism in serving internal Jewish group interests in maintaining cultural separatism, Kallen personally combined his ideology of cultural pluralism with a deep immersion in Jewish history and literature, a commitment to Zionism, and political activity on behalf of Jews in Eastern Europe (Sachar 1992, 425ff; Frommer 1978). Kallen (19 15, 1924) developed a "poly centric" ideal for American ethnic relationships. Kallen defined ethnicity as deriving from one's biological endowment, implying that Jews should be able to remain a genetically and culturally cohesive group while participating in American democratic institutions. This conception that the United States should be organized as a set of 246 The Culture Of Critique separate ethnic -cultural groups was accompanied by an ideology that relationships between groups would be cooperative and benign: "Kallen lifted his eyes above the strife that swirled around him to an ideal realm where diversity and harmony coexist" (Higham 1984, 209). Similarly in Germany, the Jewish leader Moritz Lazarus argued in opposition to the views of the German intellectual Heinrich von Treitschke that the continued separateness of diverse ethnic groups contributed to the richness of German culture (Schorsch 1972, 63). Lazarus also developed the doctrine of dual loyalty, which became a cornerstone of the Zionist movement. Already in 1862 Moses Hess had developed the view that Judaism would lead the world to an era of universal harmony in which each ethnic group retained its separate existence but no group controlled any area of land (see SAID, Ch. 5). Kallen wrote his 1915 book partly in reaction to the ideas of Edward A. Ross (1914). Ross was a Darwinian sociologist who beheved that the existence of clearly demarcated groups would tend to result in between-group competition for resources — clearly a perspective that is highly congruent with the theory and data presented in SAID. Higham 's comment is interesting because it shows that Kallen's romantic views of group coexistence were massively contradicted by the reality of between-group competition in his own day. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Kallen was a prominent leader of the AJCongress. During the 1920s and 1930s the AJCongress championed group economic and political rights for Jews in Eastern Europe at a time when there was widespread ethnic tensions and persecution of Jews, and despite the fears of many that such rights would merely exacerbate current tensions. The AJCongress demanded that Jews be allowed proportional political representation as well as the ability to organize their own communities and preserve an autonomous Jewish national culture. The treaties with Eastern European countries and Turkey included provisions that the state provide instruction in minority languages and that Jews have the right to refuse to attend courts or other public functions on the Sabbath (Frommer 1978, 162). Kallen's idea of cultural pluralism as a model for the United States was popularized among gentile intellectuals by John Dewey (Higham 1984, 209), who in turn was promoted by Jewish intellectuals: "If lapsed Congregationalists like Dewey did not need immigrants to inspire them to press against the boundaries of even the most liberal of Protestant sensibilities, Dewey's kind were resoundingly encouraged in that direction by the Jewish intellectuals they encountered in urban academic and literary communities" (Hollinger 1996, 24). "One force in this [culture war of the 1940s] was a secular, increasingly Jewish, decidedly left-of-center intelhgentsia based largely... in the disciplinary communities of philosophy and the social sciences... The leading spirit was the aging John Dewey himself, still contributing occasional articles and addresses to 247 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy the cause (p. 160). (The editors oi Partisan Review, the principal journal of the New York Intellectuals, published work by Dewey and called him "America's leading philosopher" {PR 13:608, 1946]; Dewey's student. New York Intellectual Sidney Hook [1987, 82], was also unsparing in his praise of Dewey, terming him "the intellectual leader of the liberal community in the United States" and "a sort of intellectual tribune of progressive causes.") Dewey, as the leading American secularist, was allied with a group of Jewish intellectuals opposed to "specifically Christian formulations of American democracy" (Hollinger 1996, 158). Dewey had close links with the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were Trotskyists, and he headed the Dewey Commission that exonerated Trotsky of charges brought in the Moscow trials of 1936. Dewey was highly influential with the public at large. Henry Commager described Dewey as "the guide, the mentor, and the conscience of the American people; it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for a generation no issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken" (in Sandel 1996, 36). Dewey was the foremost advocate of "progressive education" and helped estabhsh the New School for Social Research and the American Civil Liberties Union, both essentially Jewish organizations (Goldberg 1996, 46, 131). As with several other gentiles discussed in this volume, Dewey, whose "lack of presence as a writer, speaker, or personality makes his popular appeal something of a mystery" (Sandel 1996, 35), thus represented the public face of a movement dominated by Jewish intellectuals. Kallen's ideas have been very influential in producing Jewish self- conceptualizations of their status in America. This influence was apparent as early as 1915 among American Zionists, such as Louis D. Brandeis.'^° Brandeis viewed the United States as composed of different nationalities whose free development would "spiritually enrich the United States and would make it a democracy /7flr excellence" (Gal 1989, 70). These views became "a hallmark of mainstream American Zionism, secular and religious alike" (Gal 1989, 70). Cultural pluralism was also a hallmark of the Jewish-dominated intergroup relations movement following World War 11, although these intellectuals sometimes couched these ideas in terms of "unity in diversity" or "cultural democracy" in an effort to remove the connotation that the United States should literally be a federation of different national groups as the AJCongress advocated in the case of Eastern Europe and elsewhere (Svonkin 1997, 22). Kallen's influence extended really to all educated Jews: Legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst of a majority's host society, pluralism functioned as intellectual anchorage for an educated Jewish second generation, sustained its cohesiveness and its most tenacious communal 248 The Culture Of Critique endeavors through the rigors of the Depression and revived anti- semitism, through the shock of Nazism and the Holocaust, until the emergence of Zionism in the post- World War II years swept through American Jewry with a climactic redemptionist fervor of its own. (Sachar 1992, 427) As David Petegorsky, Executive Director of the AJCongress, stated in an address to the biennial convention of the AJCongress in 1948: We are profoundly convinced that Jewish survival will depend on Jewish statehood in Palestine, on the one hand, and on the existence of a creative, conscious and well-adjusted Jewish community in this country on the other. Such a creative community can exist only within the framework of a progressive and expanding democratic society, which through its institutions and public policies gives full expression to the concept of cultural pluralism. (In Svonkin 1997, 82; italics in text) Besides the ideology of ethnic and cultural pluralism, the ultimate success of Jewish attitudes on immigration was also influenced by intellectual movements reviewed in Chapters 2-6. These movements, and particularly the work of Franz Boas, collectively resulted in a decline of evolutionary and biological thinking in the academic world. Although playing virtually no role in the restrictionist position in the congressional debates on immigration (which focused mainly on the fairness of maintaining the ethnic status quo; see below), a component of the intellectual Zeitgeist of the 1920s was the prevalence of evolutionary theories of race and ethnicity (Singerman 1986), particularly the theories of Madison Grant. In The Passing of the Great Race Grant (1921) argued that the American colonial stock was derived from superior Nordic racial elements and that immigration of other races would lower the competence level of the society as a whole as well as threaten democratic and republican institutions. Grant's ideas were popularized in the media at the time of the immigration debates (see Divine 1957, 12ff) and often provoked negative comments in Jewish publications such as The American Hebrew (e.g., March 21, 1924, 554, 625). Grant's letter to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization emphasized the principle argument of the restrictionists, that is, that the use of the 1 890 census of the foreign bom as the basis of the immigration law was fair to all ethnic groups currently in the country, and that the use of the 1910 census discriminated against the "native Americans whose ancestors were in this country before its independence." He also argued in favor of quotas from Western 249 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy Hemisphere nations because these countries "in some cases furnish very undesirable immigrants. The Mexicans who come into the United States are overwhelmingly of Indian blood, and the recent intelligence tests have shown their very low intellectual status. We have already got too many of them in our Southwestern States, and a check should be put on their increase."'^' Grant was also concerned about the unassimilability of recent immigrants. He included with his letter a Chicago Tribune editorial commenting on a situation in Hamtramck, Michigan, in which recent immigrants were described as demanding "Polish rule," the expulsion of non-Poles, and use of only the Polish language by federal officials. Grant also argued that differences in reproductive rate would result in displacement of groups that delayed marriage and had fewer children — a comment that reflects ethnic differences in life history strategy (Rushton 1995) and clearly indicating a concern that as a result of immigration his ethnic group would be displaced by ethnic groups with a higher rate of natural increase. Reflecting his concerns about immigrants from Mexico, recent data indicate that adolescent women of Mexican background have the highest birthrate in the United States and people of Mexican background will be a majority of the state of California by 2040. In 1995, women aged 15-19 of Mexican origin had a birth rate of 125 per 1000 compared to 39 per 1000 for non-Latina Whites and 99 per 100 for non-Latina blacks. The overall birthrate for the three groups is 3.3 for Latina women, 2.2 for non-Latina black women, and 1.8 for non-Latina white women {Los Angeles Times, Feb. 13, 1998, pp. Al, AI6). Moreover, Latino activists have a clearly articulated policy of "reconquering" the United States via immigration and high birth rates. '^^ In Chapter 2 I showed that Stephen Jay Gould and Leon Kamin have presented a highly exaggerated and largely false account of the role of the IQ debates of the 1920s in passing immigration restriction legislation. It is also very easy to overemphasize the importance of theories of Nordic superiority as an ingredient of popular and congressional restrictionist sentiment. As Singerman (1986, 118-119) points out, "racial anti-Semitism" was employed by only "a handful of writers;" and "the Jewish 'problem'... was a minor preoccupation even among such widely-published authors as Madison Grant or T. Lothrop Stoddard and none of the individuals examined [in Singerman' s review] could be regarded as professional Jew-baiters or full-time propagandists against Jews, domestic or foreign." As indicated below, arguments related to Nordic superiority, including supposed Nordic intellectual superiority, played remarkably little role in Congressional debates over immigration in the 1920s, the common argument of the restrictionists being that immigration policy should reflect equally the interests of all ethnic groups currently in the country. There is even evidence that the Nordic superiority argument had little favor with the 250 The Culture Of Critique public: A member of the Immigration Restriction League stated in 1924 that "the country is somewhat fed up on high brow Nordic superiority stuff (in Samelson 1979, 136). Nevertheless, it is probable that the decline in evolutionary and biological theories of race and ethnicity facilitated the sea change in immigration policy brought about by the 1965 law. As Higham (1984) notes, by the time of the final victory in 1965, which removed national origins and racial ancestry from immigration policy and opened up immigration to all human groups, the Boasian perspective of cultural determinism and anti-biologism had become standard academic wisdom. The result was that "it became intellectually fashionable to discount the very existence of persistent ethnic differences. The whole reaction deprived popular race feelings of a powerful ideological weapon" (Higham 1984, 58-59). Jewish intellectuals were prominently involved in the movement to eradicate the raciahst ideas of Grant and others (Degler 1991, 200). Indeed, even during the earlier debates leading up to the immigration bills of 1921 and 1924, restrictionists perceived themselves to be under attack from Jewish intellectuals. In 1918 Prescott F. Hall, secretary of the Immigration Restriction League, wrote to Grant, "What I wanted... was the names of a few anthropologists of note who have declared in favor of the inequality of the races... I am up against the Jews all the time in the equality argument and thought perhaps you might be able offhand to name a few (besides [Henry Fairfield] Osbom) whom I could quote in support" (in Samelson 1975, 467). Grant also believed that Jews were engaged in a campaign to discredit racial research. In the introduction to the 1921 edition of The Passing of the Great Race, Grant complained that "it is well-nigh impossible to publish in the American newspapers any reflection upon certain religions or races which are hysterically sensitive even when mentioned by name. The underlying idea seems to be that if publication can be suppressed the facts themselves will ultimately disappear. Abroad, conditions are fully as bad, and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was prevented by Jewish influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation in France" (pp. xxxii-xxxiii). Boas was greatly motivated by the immigration issue as it occurred early in the century. Carl Degler (1991, 74) notes that Boas's professional correspondence "reveals that an important motive behind his famous head- measuring project in 1910 was his strong personal interest in keeping the United States diverse in population." The study, whose conclusions were placed into the Congressional Record by Representative Emanuel Celler during the debate on 251 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy immigration restriction {Cong. Rec, April 8, 1924, 5915-5916), concluded that the environmental differences consequent to immigration caused differences in head shape. (At the time, head shape as determined by the "cephalic index" was the main measurement used by scientists involved in racial differences research.) Boas argued that his research showed that all foreign groups living in favorable social circumstances had become assimilated to the United States in the sense that their physical measurements converged on the American type. Although he was considerably more circumspect regarding his conclusions in the body of his report (see also Stocking 1968, 178), Boas (1911, 5) stated in his introduction that "all fear of an unfavorable influence of South European immigration upon the body of our people should be dismissed." As a further indication of Boas's ideological commitment to the immigration issue, Degler makes the following comment regarding one of Boas's environmentalist explanations for mental differences between immigrant and native children: "Why Boas chose to advance such an adhoc interpretation is hard to understand until one recognizes his desire to explain in a favorable way the apparent mental backwardness of the immigrant children" (p. 75). The ideology of racial equality was an important weapon on behalf of opening immigration up to all human groups. For example, in a 1951 statement to Congress, the AJCongress stated, "The findings of science must force even the most prejudiced among us to accept, as unqualifiedly as we do the law of gravity, that intelligence, morality and character, bear no relationship whatever to geography or place of birth."'^'' The statement went on to cite some of Boas's popular writings on the subject as well as the writings of Boas's protege Ashley Montagu, perhaps the most visible opponent of the concept of race during this period.'^"* Montagu, whose original name was Israel Ehrenberg, theorized in the period immediately following World War II that humans are innately cooperative, but not innately aggressive, and there is a universal brotherhood among humans (see Shipman 1994, I59ff). In 1952 another Boas protege, Margaret Mead, testified before the President's Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN) (1953, 92) that "all human beings from all groups of people have the same potentialities... Our best anthropological evidence today suggests that the people of every group have about the same distribution of potentialities." Another witness stated that the executive board of the American Anthropological Association had unanimously endorsed the proposition that "[a]ll scientific evidence indicates that all peoples are inherently capable of acquiring or adapting to our civilization" (PCIN 1953, 93) (see Ch. 2 for a discussion of the success of the political efforts of the Boasians to dominate the American Anthropological Association). By 1965 Senator Jacob Javits (Cong. Rec, 111, 1965, 24469) could confidently announce to the Senate during the 252 The Culture Of Critique debate on the immigration bill that "both the dictates of our consciences as well as the precepts of sociologists tell us that immigration, as it exists in the national origins quota system, is wrong and without any basis in reason or fact for we know better than to say that one man is better than another because of the color of his skin." The intellectual revolution and its translation into public policy had been completed. (2) Church-state relationships. One aspect of the Jewish interest in cultural pluralism in the United States has been that Jews have a perceived interest that the United States not be a homogeneous Christian culture. As Ivers (1995, 2) notes, "Jewish civil rights organizations have had an historic role in the postwar development of American church-state law and policy." In this case the main Jewish effort began only after World War II, although Jews opposed linkages between the state and the Protestant religion much earlier. For example, Jewish publications were unanimous in their opposition to Tennessee's law that resulted in the 1925 Scopes trial in which Darwinism was pitted against religious fundamentahsm (Goldfarb 1984, 43): It matters not whether evolution is or is not true. What matters is that there are certain forces in this country who insist that the Government shall see to it that nothing is taught in this country which will in any way cast a doubt on the infallibility of the Bible. There you have the whole issue boiled down. In other words, it is a deliberate un-American attempt to unite Church and State. . . And we go even further than that and assert that it is an attempt to unite State with Protestant Church. {Jewish Criterion 66 [July 10, 1925]; italics in text) The Jewish effort in this case was well funded and was the focus of well- organized, highly dedicated Jewish civil service organizations, including the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL. It involved keen legal expertise both in the actual litigation but also in influencing legal opinion via articles in law journals and other forums of intellectual debate, including the popular media. It also involved a highly charismatic and effective leadership, particularly Leo Pfeffer of the AJCongress: No other lawyer exercised such complete intellectual dominance over a chosen area of law for so extensive a period — as an author, scholar, public citizen, and above all, legal advocate who harnessed his multiple and formidable talents into a single force capable of satisfying all that an institution needs 253 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy for a successful constitutional reform movement. . . That Pfeffer, through an enviable combination of skill, determination, and persistence, was able in such a short period of time to make church-state reform the foremost cause with which rival organizations associated the AJCongress illustrates well the impact that individual lawyers endowed with exceptional skills can have on the character and life of the organizations for which they work... As if to confirm the extent to which Pfeffer is associated with post-Everson [i.e., post- 1946] constitutional development, even the major critics of the Court's church-state jurisprudence during this period and the modem doctrine of separationism rarely fail to make reference to Pfeffer as the central force responsible for what they lament as the lost meaning of the establishment clause. (Ivers 1995, 222-224) Similarly, Jews in nineteenth-century France and Germany attempted to remove education from control by the Catholic and Lutheran churches respectively, while for many gentiles Christianity was an important part of national identity (Lindemann 1997, 214). Because of such activities, anti-Semites commonly viewed Jews as destroyers of the social fabric. (3) Organization of African Americans and the intergroup relations movement in the post-World War II era. Finally, Jews have also been instrumental in organizing African Americans as a political force that served Jewish interests in diluting the political and cultural hegemony of non- Jewish European Americans. Jews played a very prominent role in organizing blacks beginning with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and, despite increasing black anti-Semitism, continuing into the present. By mid-decade [c. 1915], the NAACP had something of the aspect of an adjunct of B'nai B'rith and the American Jewish Committee, with the brothers Joel and Arthur Spingam serving as board chairman and chief legal counsel, respectively; Herbert Lehman on the executive committee; Lillian Wald and Walter Sachs on the board (though not simultaneously); and Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg as financial angels. By 1920, Herbert Seligman was director of public relations, and Marha Greuning served as his assistant. . . Small wonder that a bewildered Marcus Garvey stormed out of NAACP headquarters in 1917, muttering that it was a white organization. (Levering-Lewis 1984, 85) 254 The Culture Of Critique Wealthy Jews were important contributors to the National Urban League as well: "Edwin Seligman's chairmanship, and the presence on the board of Felix Adler, Lillian Wald, Abraham Lefkowitz, and, shortly thereafter, Julius Rosenwald, principal Sears, Roebuck Company stockholder, forecast significant Jewish contributions to the League" (Levering-Lewis 1984, p. 85). In addition to providing funding and organizational talent (the presidents of the NAACP were Jews until 1975), Jewish legal talent was harnessed on behalf of African American causes. Louis Marshall, a prominent player in the Jewish efforts on immigration (see below), was a principal NAACP attorney during the 1920s. African Americans played little role in these efforts: For example, until 1933 there were no African American lawyers in the NAACP legal department (Friedman 1995, 106). Indeed, a theme of revisionist historians reviewed by Friedman is that Jews organized African Americans for their own interests rather than in the best interests of African Americans. In the post- World War II period the entire gamut of Jewish civil service organizations were involved in black issues, including the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL: "With professionally trained personnel, fully equipped offices, and public relations know-how, they had the resources to make a difference" (Friedman 1995, 135). Jews contributed from two thirds to three quarters of the money for civil rights groups during the 1960s (Kaufman 1997, 110). Jewish groups, particularly the AJCongress, played a leading role in drafting civil rights legislation and pursuing legal challenges related to civil rights issues mainly benefiting blacks (Svonkin 1997, 79-112). "Jewish support, legal and monetary, afforded the civil rights movement a string of legal victories... There is little exaggeration in an American Jewish Congress lawyer's claim that 'many of these laws were actually written in the offices of Jewish agencies by Jewish staff people, introduced by Jewish legislators and pressured into being by Jewish voters"' (Levering-Lewis 1984, 94). Harold Cruse (1967, 1992) presents a particularly trenchant analysis of the Jewish-black coalition that reflects several themes of this volume. First, he notes, "Jews know exactly what they want in America" (121; italics in text). Jews want cultural pluralism because of their long-term policy of nonassmilation and group solidarity. Cruse notes, however, that the Jewish experience in Europe has shown them that "fwo can play this game" (i.e., develop highly nationahstic solidary groups), and "when that happens, woe be to the side that is short on numbers" (p. 122; italics in text). Cruse is here referring to the possibility of antagonistic group strategies (and, I suppose, the reactive processes) that form the subject matter of SAID (Chs. 3-5). Correspondingly, Cruse observes that Jewish organizations view Anglo-Saxon (read Caucasian) nationalism as their greatest potential threat 255 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy and they have tended to support pro-black integration (i.e., assimilationist, individuahst) pohcies for blacks in America, presumably because such policies dilute Caucasian power and lessen the possibility of a cohesive, nationalist anti- Semitic Caucasian majority. At the same time, Jewish organizations have opposed a black nationalist position while pursuing an anti-assimilationist, nationalist group strategy for their own group. Cruse also points out the asymmetry in black- Jewish relations: While Jews have held prominent roles in black civil rights organizations and have been actively involved in funding these organizations and in making and implementing the policies of these organizations, blacks have been completely excluded from the inner workings and policy-making bodies in Jewish organizations. To a considerable extent, at least until quite recently, the form and goals of the black movement in the United States should be seen as an instrument of Jewish strategy with goals very similar goals to those pursued in the arena of immigration legislation. The Jewish role in African American affairs must, however, be seen as part of the broader role of what participants termed the "intergroup relations movement" that worked to "eliminate prejudice and discrimination against racial, ethnic, and religious minorities" in the period following World War II (Svonkin 1997, 1). As with the other movements with strong Jewish involvement, Jewish organizations, particularly the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL, were the leaders, and these organizations provided the major sources of funding, devised the tactics, and defined the objectives of the movement. As was also the case with the movement to shape immigration policy, its aim was the very self- interested aim of preventing the development of a mass anti-Semitic movement in the United States: Jewish activists "saw their commitment to the intergroup relations movement as a preventive measure designed to make sure 'it' — the Nazis' war of extermination against European Jewry — never happened in America" (Svonkin 1997, 10). This was a multi-faceted effort, ranging from legal challenges to bias in housing, education, and public employment; legislative proposals and efforts to secure their passage into law in state and national legislative bodies; efforts to shape messages emanating from the media; educational programs for students and teachers; and intellectual efforts to reshape the intellectual discourse of academia. As with Jewish involvement in immigration policy and a great many other instances of Jewish political and intellectual activity in both modem and premodem times (see SAID, Ch. 6), the intergroup relations movement often worked to minimize overt Jewish involvement (e.g., Svonkin 1997, 45, 51, 65, 71-72). 256 The Culture Of Critique As in the nineteenth-century attempt to define Jewish interests in terms of German ideals (Ragins 1980, 55; Schmidt 1959, 46), the rhetoric of the intergroup relations movement stressed that its goals were congruent with American self-conceptualizations, a move that stressed the Enlightenment legacy of individual rights while effectively ignoring the republican strand of American identity as a cohesive, socially homogeneous society and the "ethnocultural" strand emphasizing the importance of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity in the development and preservation of American cultural forms (Smith 1988; see Ch. 8). Liberal cosmopolitanism and individual rights were also conceived as congruent with Jewish ideals originating with the prophets (Svonkin 1997, 7, 20), a conceptualization that ignores the negative conceptualizations of outgroups and discrimination against outgroups and a pronounced tendency toward collectivism that have been central to Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy. As Svonkin notes, Jewish rhetoric during this period relied on an illusory view of the Jewish past that was tailor-made to achieve Jewish objectives in the modem world, where the Enlightenment rhetoric of universalism and individual rights retained considerable intellectual prestige. Of critical importance in rationalizing Jewish interests during this period were the intellectual movements discussed in this volume, particularly Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School of Social Research. As also indicated in Chapter 5, Jewish organizations were involved in funding research in the social sciences (particularly social psychology), and there developed a core of predominantly Jewish academic activists who worked closely with Jewish organizations (Svonkin 1997, 4; see Ch. 5). Boasian anthropology was enlisted in post- World War II propaganda efforts distributed and promoted by the AJCommittee, the AJCongress, and the ADL, as in the film Brotherhood of Man, which depicted all human groups as having equal abilities. During the 1930s the AJCommittee financially supported Boas in his research; and in the postwar era, the Boasian ideology that there were no racial differences as well as the Boasian ideology of cultural relativism and the importance of preserving and respecting cultural differences deriving from Horace Kallen were important ingredients of educational programs sponsored by these Jewish activist organizations and widely distributed throughout the American educational system (Svonkin 1997, 63, 64). By the early 1960s an ADL official estimated that one-third of America's teachers had received ADL educational material based on these ideas (Svonkin 1997, 69). The ADL was also intimately involved in staffing, developing materials, and providing financial assistance for workshops for teachers and school administrators, often with involvement of social scientists from the academic world — an association that undoubtedly added to the scientific 257 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy credibility of these exercises. It is ironic, perhaps, that this effort to influence the public school curriculum was carried on by the same groups that were endeavoring to remove overt Christian influences from the public schools. '^^ The ideology of intergroup animosity developed by the intergroup relations movement derived from the Studies in Prejudice series described in Chapter 5. It explicitly viewed manifestations of gentile ethnocentrism or discrimination against outgroups as a mental disease and thus literally a public health problem. The assault on intergroup animosity was likened to the medical assault on deadly infectious diseases, and people with the disease were described by activists as "infected" (Svonkin 1997, 30, 59). A consistent theme of the intellectual rationale for this body of ethnic activism emphasized the benefits to be gained by increased levels of intergroup harmony — an aspect of the idealism inherent in Horace Kallen's conceptualization of multiculturalism — without mentioning that some groups, particularly European-derived, non- Jewish groups, would lose economic and political power and decline in cultural influence (Svonkin 1997, 5). Negative attitudes toward groups were viewed not as the result of competing group interests but rather as the result of individual psychopathology (Svonkin 1997, 75). Finally, while gentile ethnocentrism was viewed as a public health problem, the AJCongress fought against Jewish assimilation. The AJCongress "was explicitly committed to a pluralistic vision that respected group rights and group distinctiveness as a fundamental civil liberty" (Svonkin 1997, 81). JEWISH ANTI-RESTRICTIONIST POLITICAL ACTIVITY Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity in the United States up to 1924 Jewish involvement in altering the intellectual discussion of race and ethnicity appears to have had long term repercussions on U.S. immigration policy, but Jewish political involvement was ultimately of much greater significance. Jews have been "the single most persistent pressure group favoring a liberal immigration policy" in the United States in the entire immigration debate beginning in 1881 (Neuringer 1971, 392-393): In undertaking to sway immigration policy in a liberal direction, Jewish spokespersons and organizations demonstrated a degree of energy unsurpassed by any other interested pressure group. Immigration had constituted a prime object of concern for practically every major Jewish defense and community relations organization. Over the years, their spokespersons had 258 The Culture Of Critique assiduously attended congressional hearings, and the Jewish effort was of the utmost importance in establishing and financing such non-sectarian groups as the National Liberal Immigration League and the Citizens Committee for Displaced Persons. As recounted by Nathan C. Belth (1979, 173) in his history of the ADL, "In Congress, through all the years when the immigration battles were being fought, the names of Jewish legislators were in the forefront of the liberal forces: from Adolph Sabath to Samuel Dickstein and Emanuel Celler in the House and from Herbert H. Lehman to Jacob Javits in the Senate. Each in his time was a leader of the Anti-Defamation League and of major organizations concerned with democratic development." The Jewish congressmen who are most closely identified with anti-restrictionist efforts in Congress have therefore also been leaders of the group most closely identified with Jewish ethnic political activism and self-defense. Throughout the almost 100 years prior to achieving success with the immigration law of 1965, Jewish groups opportunistically made alliances with other groups whose interests temporarily converged with Jewish interests (e.g., a constantly changing set of ethnic groups, religious groups, pro-communists, anti- communists, the foreign policy interests of various presidents, the political need for presidents to curry favor with groups influential in populous states in order to win national elections, etc.). Particularly noteworthy was the support of a liberal immigration policy from industrial interests wanting cheap labor, at least in the period prior to the 1924 temporary triumph of restrictionism. Within this constantly shifting set of alliances, Jewish organizations persistently pursued their goals of maximizing the number of Jewish immigrants and opening up the United States to immigration from all of the peoples of the world. As indicated in the following, the historical record supports the proposition that making the United States into a multicultural society has been a major Jewish goal beginning in the nineteenth century. The ultimate Jewish victory on immigration is remarkable because it was waged in different arenas against a potentially very powerful set of opponents. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, leadership of the restrictionists was provided by Eastern patricians such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. However, the main political basis of restrictionism from I9I0 to 1952 (in addition to the relatively ineffectual labor union interests) derived from "the common people of the South and West" (Higham 1984, 49) and their representatives in Congress. Fundamentally, the clashes between Jews and gentiles in the period between 1900 and 1965 were a conflict between Jews and this geographically centered group. "Jews, as a result of their intellectual energy and economic resources, 259 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy constituted an advance guard of the new peoples who had no feeling for the traditions of rural America" (Higham 1984, 168-169), a theme also apparent in the discussion of the New York Intellectuals in Chapter 6 and in the discussion of Jewish involvement in political radicalism in Chapter 3. Although often concerned that Jewish immigration would fan the flames of anti-Semitism in America, Jewish leaders fought a long and largely successful delaying action against restrictions on immigration during the period from 1891 to 1924, particularly as they affected the ability of Jews to immigrate. These efforts continued despite the fact that by 1905 there was "a polarity between Jewish and general American opinion on immigration" (Neuringer 1971, 83). In particular, whereas other religious groups such as Catholics and ethnic groups such as the Irish had divided and ambivalent attitudes toward immigration and were poorly organized and ineffective in influencing immigration policy, and whereas labor unions opposed immigration in their attempt to diminish the supply of cheap labor, Jewish groups engaged in an intensive and sustained effort against attempts to restrict immigration. As recounted by Cohen (1972, 40ff), the AJCommittee's efforts in opposition to immigration restriction in the early twentieth century constitute a remarkable example of the ability of Jewish organizations to influence public policy. Of all the groups affected by the immigration legislation of 1907, Jews had the least to gain in terms of numbers of possible immigrants, but they played by far the largest role in shaping the legislation (Cohen 1972, 41). In the subsequent period leading up to the relatively ineffective restrictionist legislation of I9I7, when restrictionists again mounted an effort in Congress, "only the Jewish segment was aroused" (Cohen 1972, 49). Nevertheless, because of the fear of anti-Semitism, efforts were made to prevent the perception of Jewish involvement in anti-restrictionist campaigns. In 1906 Jewish anti-restrictionist political operatives were instructed to lobby Congress without mentioning their affiliation with the AJCommittee because of "the danger that the Jews may be accused of being organized for a political purpose" (comments of Herbert Friedenwald, AJCommittee secretary; in Goldstein 1990, 125). Beginning in the late nineteenth century, anti-restrictionist arguments developed by Jews were typically couched in terms of universalist humanitarian ideals; as part of this universalizing effort, gentiles from old-line Protestant families were recruited to act as window dressing for their efforts, and Jewish groups such as the AJCommittee funded pro-immigration groups composed of non-Jews (Neuringer 1 97 1, 92). As was the case in later pro-immigration efforts, much of the activity was behind-the-scenes personal interventions with politicians in order to minimize public perception of the Jewish role and to avoid provoking the opposition 260 The Culture Of Critique (Cohen 1972, 41-42; Goldstein 1990). Opposing politicians, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, and organizations like the Immigration Restriction League were kept under close scrutiny and pressured by lobbyists. Lobbyists in Washington also kept a daily scorecard of voting tendencies as immigration bills wended their way through Congress and engaged in intense and successful efforts to convince Presidents Taft and Wilson to veto restrictive immigration legislation. Catholic prelates were recruited to protest the effects of restrictionist legislation on immigration from Italy and Hungary. When restrictionist arguments appeared in the media, the AJCommittee made sophisticated replies based on scholarly data and typically couched in universalist terms as benefiting the whole society. Articles favorable to immigration were published in national magazines, and letters to the editor were published in newspapers. Efforts were made to minimize the negative perceptions of immigration by distributing Jewish immigrants around the country and by getting Jewish aliens off public support. Legal proceedings were filed to prevent the deportation of Jewish aliens. Eventually mass protest meetings were organized. Writing in 1914, the sociologist Edward A. Ross believed that liberal immigration policy was exclusively a Jewish issue. Ross quotes the prominent author and Zionist pioneer Israel Zangwill who articulated the idea that the United States is an ideal place to achieve Jewish interests. America has ample room for all the six millions of the Pale [i.e., the Pale of Settlement, home to most of Russia's Jews]; any one of her fifty states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future persecution. (Israel Zangwill, in Ross 1914, 144) Jews therefore have a powerful interest in immigration policy: Hence the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration policy of the United States. Although theirs is but a seventh of our net immigration, they led the fight on the Immigration Commission's bill. The power of the million Jews in the Metropolis lined up the Congressional delegation from New York in solid opposition to the literacy test. The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by 261 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains. (Ross 1914, 144-145) Ross (1914, 150) also reported that immigration officials had "become very sore over the incessant fire of false accusations to which they are subjected by the Jewish press and societies. United States senators complain that during the close of the struggle over the immigration bill they were overwhelmed with a torrent of crooked statistics and misrepresentations of Hebrews fighting the literacy test." Zangwill's views were well known to restrictionists in the debates over the 1924 immigration law (see below). In an address reprinted in The American Hebrew (Oct. 19, 1923, 582), Zangwill noted, "There is only one way to World Peace, and that is the absolute abolition of passports, visas, frontiers, custom houses, and all other devices that make of the population of our planet not a co-operating civilization but a mutual irritation society." His famous play. The Melting Pot (1908), was dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt and depicts Jewish immigrants as eager to assimilate and intermarry. The lead character describes the United States as a crucible in which all the races, including the "black and yellow" races, are being melted together.'^'' However, Zangwill's views on Jewish-gentile intermarriage were ambiguous at best (Biale 1998, 22-24) and he detested Christian proselytism to Jews. Zangwill was an ardent Zionist and an admirer of his father's religious orthodoxy as a model for the preservation of Judaism. He believed Jews were a morally superior race whose moral vision had shaped Christian and Muslim societies and would eventually shape the world, although Christianity remained morally inferior to Judaism (see Leftwich 1957, 162ff). Jews would retain their racial purity if they continued to practice their religion: "So long as Judaism flourishes among Jews there is no need to talk of safeguarding race or nationality; both are automatically preserved by the religion" (in Leftwich 1957, 161). Despite deceptive attempts to present the pro-immigration movement as broad-based, Jewish activists were aware of the lack of enthusiasm of other groups. During the fight over restrictionist legislation at the end of the Taft administration, Herbert Friedenwald, AJCommittee secretary, wrote that it was "very difficult to get any people except the Jews stirred up in this fight" (in Goldstein 1990, 203). The AJCommittee contributed heavily to staging anti- restrictionist rallies in major American cities but allowed other ethnic groups to 262 The Culture Of Critique take credit for the events, and it organized groups of non-Jews to influence President Taft to veto restrictionist legislation (Goldstein 1990, 216, 227). During the Wilson Administration, Louis Marshall stated, "We are practically the only ones who are fighting [the literacy test] while a "great proportion" [of the people] is "indifferent to what is done" (in Goldstein 1990, 249). The forces of immigration restriction were temporarily successful with the immigration laws of 1921 and 1924, which passed despite the intense opposition of Jewish groups. Divine (1957, 8) notes, "Arrayed against [the restrictionist forces] in 1921 were only the spokespersons for the southeastern European immigrants, mainly Jewish leaders, whose protests were drowned out by the general cry for restriction." Similarly, during the 1924 congressional hearings on immigration, "The most prominent group of witnesses against the bill were representatives of southeastern European immigrants, particularly Jewish leaders" (Divine 1957, 16). Jewish opposition to this legislation was motivated as much by their perception that the laws were motivated by anti-Semitism and that they discriminated in favor of Northwestern Europeans as by concern that they would curtail Jewish immigration (Neuringer 1971, 164) — a view that is implicitly in opposition to the ethnic status quo favoring Northwestern Europeans. Opposition to biasing immigration in favor of Northwestern Europeans remained characteristic of Jewish attitudes in the following years, but the opposition of Jewish organizations to any restrictions on immigration based on race or ethnicity can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Thus in 1882 the Jewish press was unanimous in its condemnation of the Chinese Exclusion Act (Neuringer 1971, 23) even though this act had no direct bearing on Jewish immigration. In the early twentieth century the AJCommittee at times actively fought against any bill that restricted immigration to white persons or non-Asians, and only refrained from active opposition if it judged that AJCommittee support would threaten the immigration of Jews (Cohen 1972, 47; Goldstein 1990, 250). In 1920 the Central Conference of American Rabbis passed a resolution urging that "the Nation... keep the gates of our beloved Republic open. . . to the oppressed and distressed of all mankind in conformity with its historic role as a haven of refuge for all men and women who pledge allegiance to its laws" (in The American Hebrew, Oct. 1, 1920, 594). The American Hebrew (Feb. 17, 1922, 373), a publication founded in 1867, to represent the German- Jewish establishment of the period, reiterated its long- standing policy that it "has always stood for the admission of worthy immigrants of all classes, irrespective of nationality." And in his testimony at the 1924 hearings before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, the AJCommittee 's Louis Marshall stated that the bill echoed the sentiments of the 263 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy Ku Klux Klan; he characterized it as inspired by the raciahst theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. At a time when the population of the United States was over 100 million, Marshall stated, "[W]e have room in this country for ten times the population we have"; he advocated admission of all of the peoples of the world without quota limit, excluding only those who "were mentally, morally and physically unfit, who are enemies of organized government, and who are apt to become public charges."'^^ Similarly, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, representing the AJCongress and a variety of other Jewish organizations at the House Hearings, asserted "the right of every man outside of America to be considered fairly and equitably and without discrimination."'^^ By prescribing that immigration be restricted to 3 percent of the foreign bom as of the 1890 census, the 1924 law prescribed an ethnic status quo approximating the 1920 census. The House Majority Report emphasized that prior to the legislation, immigration was highly biased in favor of Eastern and Southern Europeans, and that this imbalance had been continued by the 1921 legislation in which quotas were based on the numbers of foreign bom as of the 1910 census. The expressed intention was that the interests of other groups to pursue their ethnic interests by expanding their percentage of the population should be balanced against the ethnic interests of the majority in retaining their ethnic representation in the population. The 1921 law gave 46 percent of quota immigration to Southern and Eastem Europe even though these areas constituted only 11.7 percent of the U.S. population as of the 1920 census. The 1924 law prescribed that these areas would get 15.3 percent of the quota slots — a figure actually higher than their present representation in the population. "The use of the 1890 census is not discriminatory. It is used in an effort to preserve as nearly as possible, the racial status quo of the United States. It is hoped to guarantee as best we can at this late date, racial homogeneity in the United States The use of a later census would discriminate against those who founded the Nation and perpetuated its institutions" {House Rep. No. 350, 1924, 16). After three years, quotas were derived from a national origins formula based on 1920 census data for the entire population, not only for the foreign bom. No doubt this legislation represented a victory for the Northwestem European peoples of the United States, yet there was no attempt to reverse the trends in the ethnic composition of the country; rather, the efforts aimed to preserve the ethnic status quo. Although motivated by a desire to preserve an ethnic status quo, these laws may also have been motivated partly by anti-Semitism, since during this period liberal immigration policy was perceived as mainly a Jewish issue (see above). This certainly appears to have been the perception of Jewish observers: Prominent Jewish writer Maurice Samuel (1924, 217), for example, writing in the 264 The Culture Of Critique immediate aftermath of the 1924 legislation, wrote that "it is chiefly against the Jew that anti-immigration laws are passed here in America as in England and Germany," and such perceptions continue among historians of the period (e.g., Hertzberg 1989, 239). This perception was not restricted to Jews. In remarks before the Senate, the anti-restrictionist Senator Reed of Missouri noted, "Attacks have likewise been made upon the Jewish people who have crowded to our shores. The spirit of intolerance has been especially active as to them" {Cong. Rec, Feb. 19, 1921, 3463). During World War 11 Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson stated that it was opposition to unrestricted immigration of Jews that resulted in the restrictive legislation of 1924 (Breitman & Kraut 1987, 87). Moreover, the House Immigration Committee Majority Report {House Rep. No. 109, Dec. 6, 1920) stated that "by far the largest percentage of immigrants [are] peoples of Jewish extraction" (p. 4), and it implied that the majority of the expected new immigrants would be Polish Jews. The report "confirmed the published statement of a commissioner of the Hebrew Sheltering and Aid Society of America made after his personal investigation in Poland, to the effect that 'If there were in existence a ship that could hold 3,000,000 human beings, the 3,000,000 Jews of Poland would board it to escape to America"' (p. 6). The Majority Report also included a report by Wilbur S. Carr, head of the United States Consular Service, that stated that the Polish Jews were "abnormally twisted because of (a) reaction from war strain; (b) the shock of revolutionary disorders; (c) the dullness and stultification resulting from past years of oppression and abuse...; Eighty-five to ninety percent lack any conception of patriotic or national spirit. And the majority of this percentage are unable to acquire it" (p. 9 see Breitman & Kraut [1987, 12] for a discussion of Carr's anti- Semitism). (In England many recent Jewish immigrants refused to be conscripted to fight the czar during World War 1; see note 14). The report also noted consular reports that warned that "many Bolshevik sympathizers are in Poland" (p. 11). Likewise in the Senate, Senator McKellar cited the report that if there were a ship large enough, three million Poles would immigrate. He also stated that "the Joint Distribution Committee, an American committee doing relief work among the Hebrews in Poland, distributes more than $1,000,000 per month of American money in that country alone. It is also shown that $100,000,000 a year is a conservative estimate of money sent to Poland from America through the mails, through the banks, and through the relief societies. This golden stream pouring into Poland from America makes practically every Pole wildly desirous of going to the country from which such marvelous wealth comes" {Cong. Rec, Feb. 19, 1921, 3456). As a further indication of the salience of Polish- Jewish immigration issues, the letter on alien visas submitted by the State Department in 1921 to Albert 265 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy Johnson, chairman of the Committee on Migration and Naturalization, devoted over four times as much space to the situation in Poland as it did to any other country. The report emphasized the activities of the Polish Jewish newspaper Der Emigrant in promoting emigration to the United States of Polish Jews, as well as the activities of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Society and wealthy private citizens from the United States in facilitating immigration by providing money and performing the paperwork. (There was indeed a large network of Jewish agents in Eastern Europe who, in violation of U.S. law, "did their best to drum up business by enticing as many emigrants as possible" [Nadell 1984, 56].) The report also described the condition of the prospective immigrants in negative terms: "At the present time it is only too obvious that they must be subnormal, and their normal state is of very low standard. Six years of war and confusion and famine and pestilence have racked their bodies and twisted their mentality. The elders have deteriorated to a marked degree. Minors have grown into adult years with the entire period lost in their rightful development and too frequently with the acquisition of perverted ideas which have flooded Europe since 1914 [presumably a reference to radical political ideas that were common in this group; see below]" {Cong. Rec, April 20, 1921, 498). The report also stated that articles in the Warsaw press had reported that "propaganda favoring unrestricted immigration" is being planned, including celebrations in New York aimed at showing the contributions of immigrants to the development of the United States. The reports for Belgium (whose emigrants originated in Poland and Czechoslovakia) and Romania also highlighted the importance of Jews as prospective immigrants. In response. Representative Isaac Siegel stated that the report was "edited and doctored by certain officials"; he commented that the report did not mention countries with larger numbers of immigrants than Poland. (For example, the report did not mention Italy.) Without explicitly saying so ("I leave it to every man in the House to make his own deductions and his own inferences therefrom" [Cong. Rec, April 20, 1921, 504]), the implication was that the focus on Poland was prompted by anti-Semitism. The House Majority Report (signed by 15 of its 17 members with only Reps. Dickstein and Sabath not signing) also emphasized the Jewish role in defining the intellectual battle in terms of Nordic superiority and "American ideals" rather than in the terms of an ethnic status quo actually favored by the committee: The cry of discrimination is, the committee believes, manufactured and built up by special representatives of racial groups, aided by aliens actually living abroad. Members of the committee have taken notice of a report in the Jewish Tribune 266 The Culture Of Critique (New York) February 8, 1924, of a farewell dinner to Mr. Israel Zangwill which says: Mr. Zangwill spoke chiefly on the immigration question, declaring that if Jews persisted in a strenuous opposition to the restricted immigration there would be no restriction. "If you create enough fuss against this Nordic nonsense," he said, "you will defeat this legislation. You must make a fight against this bill; tell them they are destroying American ideals. Most fortifications are of cardboard, and if you press against them, they give way." The Committee does not feel that the restriction aimed to be accomplished in this bill is directed at the Jews, for they can come within the quotas from any country in which they were born. The Committee has not dwelt on the desirability of a "Nordic" or any other particular type of immigrant, but has held steadfastly to the purpose of securing a heavy restriction, with the quota so divided that the countries from which the most came in the two decades ahead of the World War might be slowed down in order that the United States might restore its population balance. The continued charge that the Committee has built up a "Nordic" race and devoted its hearing to that end is part of a deliberately manufactured assault for as a matter of fact the committee has done nothing of the kind. {House Rep. No. 350, 1924, 16) Indeed, one is struck in reading the 1924 congressional debates by the rarity with which the issue of Nordic racial superiority is raised by those in favor of the legislation, whereas virtually all the anti-restrictionists raised this issue. '^' After a particularly colorful comment in opposition to the theory of Nordic racial superiority, restrictionist leader Albert Johnson remarked, "1 would like very much to say on behalf of the committee that through the strenuous times of the hearings this committee undertook not to discuss the Nordic proposition or racial matters" (Cong. Rec, April 8, 1924, 5911). Earlier, during the hearings on the bill, Johnson remarked in response to the comments of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise representing the AJCongress, "1 dislike to be placed continually in the attitude of assuming that there is a race prejudice, when the one thing 1 have tried to do for 11 years is to free myself from race prejudice, if 1 had it at all."'*'" Several restrictionists explicitly denounced the theory of Nordic superiority, including Senators Bruce (p. 5955) and Jones (p. 6614) and Representatives Bacon (p. 5902), Byrnes (p. 5653), Johnson (p. 5648), McLoed (pp. 5675-5676), 267 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy McReynolds (p. 5855), Michener (p. 5909), Miller (p. 5883), Newton (p. 6240), Rosenbloom (p. 5851), Vaile (p. 5922), Vincent (p. 6266), White, (p. 5898), and Wilson (p. 5671; all references to Cong. Rec, April 1924). Indeed, it is noteworthy that there are indications in the congressional debate that representatives from the far West were concerned about the competence and competitive threat presented by Japanese immigrants, and their rhetoric suggests they viewed the Japanese as racially equal or superior, not inferior. For example. Senator Jones stated, "We admit that [the Japanese] are as able as we are, that they are as progressive as we are, that they are as honest as we are, that they are as brainy as we are, and that they are equal in all that goes to make a great people and nation" {Cong. Rec, April 18, 1924, 6614); Representative MacLafferty emphasized Japanese domination of certain agricultural markets {Cong. Rec, April 5, 1924, p. 5681), and Representative Lea noted their ability to supplant "their American competitor" {Cong. Rec, April 5, 1924, 5697). Representative Miller described the Japanese as "a relentless and unconquerable competitor of our people wherever he places himself {Cong. Rec, April 8, 1924, 5884); see also comments of Representatives Gilbert {Cong. Rec, April 12, 1924, 6261), Raker {Cong Rec, April 8, 1924, 5892), and Free {Cong Rec, April 8, 1924, 5924ff). Moreover, whereas the issue of Jewish-gentile resource competition was not raised during the congressional debates, quotas on Jewish admissions to Ivy League universities were a highly salient issue among Jews during this period. The quota issue was highly publicized in the Jewish media, which focused on activities of Jewish self-defense organizations such as the ADL (see, e.g., the ADL statement published in The American Hebrew, Sept. 29, 1922, 536). Jewish-gentile resource competition may therefore have been on the minds of some legislators. Indeed, President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard was the national vice-president of the Immigration Restriction League as well as a proponent of quotas on Jewish admission to Harvard (Symott 1986, 238), suggesting that resource competition with an intellectually superior Jewish group was an issue for at least some prominent restrictionists. It is probable that anti-Jewish animosity related to resource competition issues was widespread. Higham (1984, 141) writes of "the urgent pressure which the Jews, as an exceptionally ambitious immigrant people, put upon some of the more crowded rungs of the social ladder" (Higham 1984, 141). Beginning in the nineteenth century there were fairly high levels of covert and overt anti-Semitism in patrician circles resulting from the very rapid upward mobility of Jews and their competitive drive. Prior to World War I, the reaction of the gentile power structure was to construct social registers and emphasize genealogy as mechanisms of exclusion — "criteria that could not be met my money alone" 268 The Culture Of Critique (Higham 1984, 104ff, 127). During this period Edward A. Ross (1914, 164) described gentile resentment for "being obliged to engage in a humiliating and undignified scramble in order to keep his trade or his clients against the Jewish invader" — suggesting a rather broad-based concern with Jewish economic competition. Attempts at exclusion in a wide range of areas increased in the 1920s and reached their peak during the difficult economic situation of the Great Depression (Higham 1984, 13 Iff). In the 1924 debates, however, the only Congressional comments suggesting a concern with Jewish-gentile resource competition (as well as a concern that Jewish immigrants were alienated from the cultural traditions of America and tended to have a destructive influence) that 1 have been able to find are the following from Representative Wefald: 1 for one am not afraid of the radical ideas that some might bring with them. Ideas you cannot keep out anyway, but the leadership of our intellectual life in many of its phases has come into the hands of these clever newcomers who have no sympathy with our old-time American ideals nor with those of northern Europe, who detect our weaknesses and pander to them and get wealthy through the disservices they render us. Our whole system of amusements has been taken over by men who came here on the crest of the south and east European immigration. They produce our horrible film stories, they compose and dish out to us our jazz music, they write many of the books we read, and edit our magazines and newspapers. {Cong. Rec, April 12, 1924, 6272) The immigration debate also occurred amid discussion in the Jewish media of Thorsten Veblen's famous essay "The intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in modem Europe" (serialized in The American Hebrew beginning September 10, 1920). In an editorial of July 13, 1923 (p. 177), The American Hebrew noted that Jews were disproportionately represented among the gifted in Louis Terman's study of gifted children and commented that "this fact must give rise to bitter, though futile, reflection among the so-called Nordics." The editorial also noted that Jews were overrepresented among scholarship winners in competitions sponsored by the state of New York. The editorial pointedly noted that "perhaps the Nordics are too proud to try for these honors. In any event the list of names just announced by the State Department of Education at Albany as winners of these coveted scholarships is not in the least Nordic; it reads like a confirmation roster at a Temple." 269 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy There is, in fact, evidence that Jews, hke East Asians, have higher IQ's than Caucasians (Lynn 1987; Rushton 1995; PTSDA, Ch. 7). Indeed, Terman had found that Chinese were equal in IQ to Caucasians — further indication that, as Carl Degler (1991, 52) notes, "their IQ scores could not have been an excuse for the discrimination" represented by the 1924 legislation. As indicated above, there is considerable evidence from the congressional debates that the exclusion of Asians was motivated at least partly by fears of competition with a highly talented, intelligent group rather than by feelings of racial superiority. The most common argument made by those favoring the legislation, and the one reflected in the Majority Report, is the argument that in the interests of fairness to all ethnic groups, the quotas should reflect the relative ethnic composition of the entire country. Restrictionists noted that the census of 1890 was chosen because the percentages of the foreign bom of different ethnic groups in that year approximated the general ethnic composition of the entire country in 1920. Senator Reed of Pennsylvania and Representative Rogers of Massachusetts proposed to achieve the same result by directly basing the quotas on the national origins of all people in the country as of the 1920 census, and this was eventually incorporated into law. Representative Rogers argued, "Gentlemen, you can not dissent from this principle because it is fair. It does not discriminate for anybody and it does not discriminate against anybody" {Cong. Rec, April 8, 1924, 5847). Senator Reed noted, "The purpose, 1 think, of most of us in changing the quota basis is to cease from discriminating against the native bom here and against the group of our citizens who come from northern and we stem Europe. 1 think the present system discriminates in favor of southeastem Europe" {Cong. Rec, April. 16, 1924, 6457) (i.e., because 46 percent of the quotas under the 1921 law went to Eastem and Southern Europe when they constituted less than 12 percent of the population). As an example illustrating the fundamental argument asserting a legitimate ethnic interest in maintaining an ethnic status quo without claiming racial superiority, consider the following statement from Representative William N. Vaile of Colorado, one of the most prominent restrictionists: Let me emphasize here that the restrictionists of Congress do not claim that the "Nordic" race, or even the Anglo-Saxon race, is the best race in the world. Let us concede, in all fairness that the Czech is a more sturdy laborer, with a very low percentage of crime and insanity, that the Jew is the best businessman in the world, and that the Italian has a spiritual grasp and an artistic sense which have greatly enriched the world and which have, indeed, enriched us, a spiritual exaltation and an artistic creative 270 The Culture Of Critique sense which the Nordic rarely attains. Nordics need not be vain about their own qualifications. It well behooves them to be humble. What we do claim is that the northern European, and particularly Anglo-Saxons made this country. Oh, yes; the others helped. But that is the fiill statement of the case. They came to this country because it was already made as an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. They added to it, they often enriched it, but they did not make it, and they have not yet greatly changed it. We are determined that they shall not. It is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something different. If there is any changing to be done, we will do it ourselves. {Cong. Rec, April 8, 1924, 5922) The debate in the House also illustrated the highly salient role of Jewish legislators in combating restrictionism. Representative Robison singled out Representative Sabath as the leader of anti-restrictionist efforts; without mentioning any other opponent of restriction, he also focused on Representatives Jacobstein, Celler, and Perlman as being opposed to any restrictions on immigration {Cong. Rec, April 5, 1924, 5666). Representative Blanton, complaining of the difficulty of getting restrictionist legislation through Congress, noted, "When at least 65 per cent of the sentiment of this House, in my judgment, is in favor of the exclusion of all foreigners for five years, why do we not put that into law? Has Brother Sabath such a tremendous influence over us that he holds us down on this proposition?" {Cong. Rec, April 5, 1924, 5685). Representative Sabath responded, "There may be something to that." In addition, the following comments of Representative Leavitt clearly indicate the salience of Jewish congressmen to their opponents during the debate: The instinct for national and race preservation is not one to be condemned, as has been intimated here. No one should be better able to understand the desire of Americans to keep America American than the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Sabath], who is leading the attack on this measure, or the gentlemen from New York, Mr. Dickstein, Mr. Jacobstein, Mr. Celler, and Mr. Perlman. They are of the one great historic people who have maintained the identity of their race throughout the centuries because they believe sincerely that they are a chosen people, with certain ideals to maintain, and knowing that 271 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy the loss of racial identity means a change of ideals. That fact should make it easy for them and the majority of the most active opponents of this measure in the spoken debate to recognize and sympathize with our viewpoint, which is not so extreme as that of their own race, but only demands that the admixture of other peoples shall be only of such kind and proportions and in such quantities as will not alter racial characteristics more rapidly than there can be assimilation as to ideas of government as well as of blood. {Cong. Rec, April 12, 1924, 6265-6266) The view that Jews had a strong tendency to oppose genetic assimilation with surrounding groups was expressed by other observers as well and was a component of contemporary anti-Semitism (see Singerman 1986, 110-111). Jewish avoidance of exogamy certainly had a basis in reality {PTSDA, Chs. 2-4), and it is worth recalling that there was powerful opposition to intermarriage even among the more liberal segments of early -twentieth-century American Judaism and certainly among the less liberal segments represented by the great majority of Orthodox immigrants from Eastern Europe who had come to constitute the great majority of American Jewry. The prominent nineteenth-century Reform leader David Einhom, for example, was a lifelong opponent of mixed marriages and refused to officiate at such ceremonies, even when pressed to do so (Meyer 1989, 247). Einhom was also a staunch opponent of conversion of gentiles to Judaism because of the effects on the "racial purity" of Judaism (Levenson 1989, 331). The influential Reform intellectual Kaufman Kohler was also an ardent opponent of mixed marriage. In a view that is highly compatible with Horace Kallen's multiculturalism, Kohler concluded that Israel must remain separate and avoid intermarriage until it leads humankind to an era of universal peace and brotherhood among the races (Kohler 1918, 445-446). The negative attitude toward intermarriage was confirmed by survey results. A 1912 survey indicated that only seven of 100 Reform rabbis had officiated at a mixed marriage, and a 1909 resolution of the chief Reform group, the Central Council of American Rabbis, declared that "mixed marriages are contrary to the tradition of the Jewish religion and should be discouraged by the American Rabbinate" (Meyer 1988, 290). Gentile perceptions of Jewish attitudes on intermarriage, therefore, had a strong basis in reality. Far more important than the Jewish tendency toward endogamy in engendering anti- Jewish animosity during the congressional debates of 1924 were two other prominent themes of this project: Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were widely perceived as unassimilable and as retaining a 272 The Culture Of Critique separate culture (see SAID, Ch. 2); they were also thought to be disproportionately involved in radical political movements (see Ch. 3). The perception of radicalism among Jewish immigrants was common in Jewish as well as gentile publications. The American Hebrew editorialized, "[W]e must not forget the immigrants from Russia and Austria will be coming from countries infested with Bolshevism, and it will require more than a superficial effort to make good citizens out of them" (in Neuringer 1971, 165). The fact that Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were viewed as "infected with Bolshevism... unpatriotic, ahen, unassimilable" resulted in a wave of anti- Semitism in the 1920s and contributed to the restrictive immigration legislation of the period (Neuringer 1971, 165). In Sorin's (1985, 46) study of immigrant Jewish radical activists, over half had been involved in radical politics in Europe before emigrating, and for those immigrating after 1900, the percentage rose to 69 percent. Jewish publications warned of the possibilities of anti-Semitism resulting from the leftism of Jewish immigrants, and the official Jewish community engaged in "a near-desperation... effort to portray the Jew as one hundred per cent American" by, for example, organizing patriotic pageants on national holidays and by attempting to get the immigrants to learn English (Neuringer, 1971, 167).^'^ From the standpoint of the immigration debates, it is important to note that in the 1920s a majority of the members of the Socialist Party were immigrants and that an "overwhelming" (Glazer 1961, 38, 40) percentage of the CPUSA consisted of recent immigrants, a substantial percentage of whom were Jews. As late as June 1933 the national organization of the CPUSA was still 70 percent foreign bom (Lyons 1982, 72-73); in Philadelphia in 1929, fully 90 percent of Communist Party members were foreign bom, and 72.2 percent of the CPUSA members in Philadelphia were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Lyons 1982,71). Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1924-1945 The saliency of Jewish involvement in U.S. immigration policy continued after the 1924 legislation. Particularly objectionable to Jewish groups was the national origins quota system. For example, a writer for the Jewish Tribune stated in 1927, "[W]e... regard all measures for regulating immigration according to nationality as illogical, unjust, and un-American" (in Neuringer 1971, 205). During the 1930s the most outspoken critic of further restrictions on immigration (motivated now mainly by the economic concems that immigration would exacerbate the problems brought on by the Great Depression) was Representative 273 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy Samuel Dickstein, and Dickstein's assumption of the chairmanship of the House Immigration Committee in 1931 marked the end of the ability of restrictionists to enact further reductions in quotas (Divine 1957, 79-88). Jewish groups were the primary opponents of restriction and the primary supporters of liberalized regulations during the 1930s; their opponents emphasized the economic consequences of immigration during a period of high unemployment (Divine 1957, 85-88). Between 1933 and 1938 Representative Dickstein introduced a number of bills aimed at increasing the number of refugees from Nazi Germany and supported mainly by Jewish organizations, but the restrictionists prevailed (Divine 1957, 93). During the 1930s concerns about the radicalism and unassimilability of Jewish immigrants as well as the possibility of Nazi subversion were the main factors influencing the opposition to changing the immigration laws (Breitman & Kraut 1987). Moreover, "Charges that the Jews in America were more loyal to their tribe than to their country abounded in the United States in the 1930s" (Breitman & Kraut 1987, 87). There was a clear perception among all parties that the public opposed any changes in immigration policy and was particularly opposed to Jewish immigration. The 1939 hearings on the proposed legislation to admit 20,000 German refugee children therefore minimized Jewish interest in the legislation. The bill referred to people "of every race and creed suffering from conditions which compel them to seek refuge in other lands. "'''^ The bill did not mention that Jews would be the main beneficiaries of the legislation, and witnesses in favor of the bill emphasized that only approximately 60 percent of the children would be Jewish. The only person identifying himself as "a member of the Jewish race" who testified in favor of the bill was "one-fourth Catholic and three-quarters Jewish," with Protestant and Catholic nieces and nephews, and from the South, a bastion of anti-immigration sentiment.'''^ In contrast, opponents of the bill threatened to publicize the very large percentage of Jews already being admitted under the quota system — presumably an indication of the powerful force of a "virulent and pervasive" anti-Semitism among the American public (Breitman & Kraut 1987, 80). Opponents noted that the immigration permitted by the bill "would be for the most part of the Jewish race," and a witness testified "that the Jewish people will profit most by this legislation goes without saying" (in Divine 1957, 100). The restrictionists argued in economic terms, for example, by frequently citing President Roosevelt's statement in his second inaugural speech "one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill- clad, ill-nourished" and citing large numbers of needy children already in the United States. The main restrictionist concern, though, was that the bill was yet another in a long history of attempts by anti-restrictionists to develop precedents that would eventually undermine the 1924 law. For example, Francis Kinnecutt, 274 The Culture Of Critique president of the Allied Patriotic Societies, emphasized that the 1924 law had been based on the idea of proportional representation based on the ethnic composition of the country. The legislation would be a precedent "for similar unscientific and favored-nation legislation in response to the pressure of foreign nationalistic or racial groups, rather than in accordance with the needs and desires of the American people. "''''* Wilbur S. Carr and other State Department officials were important in minimizing the entry of Jewish refugees from Germany during the 1930s. Undersecretary of State William Phillips was an anti-Semite with considerable influence on immigration policy from 1933 to 1936 (Breitman & Kraut 1987, 36). Throughout the period until the end of World War II attempts to foster Jewish immigration, even in the context of knowledge that the Nazis were persecuting Jews, were largely unsuccessful because of an unyielding Congress and the activities of bureaucrats, especially those in the State Department. Public discussion in periodicals such as The Nation (Nov. 19, 1938) and The New RepubUc (Nov. 23, 1938) charged that the restrictionism was motivated by anti- Semitism, whereas opponents of admitting large numbers of Jews argued that admission would result in an increase in anti-Semitism. Henry Pratt Fairchild (1939, 344), who was a restrictionist and was highly critical of Jews generally (see Fairchild 1947), emphasized the "powerful current of anti-foreignism and anti-Semitism that is running close to the surface of the American public mind, ready to burst out into violent eruption on relatively slight provocation." Public opinion remained steadfast against increasing the quotas for European refugees: A 1939 poll in Fortune (April 1939) showed that 83 percent answered no to the following question: "If you were a member of Congress would you vote yes or no on a bill to open the doors of the United States to a larger number of European refugees than now admitted under our immigration quotas?" Less than 9 percent replied yes and the remainder had no opinion. Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1946-1952 Although Jewish interests were defeated by the 1924 legislation, "the discriminatory character of the Reed- Johnson Act continued to rankle all sectors of American Jewish opinion" (Neuringer I97I, 196). During this period, an article by Will Maslow (1950) in Congress Weekly reiterated the belief that the restrictive immigration laws intentionally targeted Jews: "Only one type of law, immigration legislation which relates to aliens outside the country, is not subject to constitutional guarantees, and even here hostility toward Jewish immigration 275 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy has had to be disguised in an elaborate quota scheme in which eligibility was based on place of birth rather than religion." The Jewish concern to alter the ethnic balance of the United States is apparent in the debates over immigration legislation during the post- World War II era. In 1948 the AJCommittee submitted to a Senate subcommittee a statement simultaneously denying the importance of the material interests of the United States and affirming its commitment to immigration of all races: "Amer-icanism is not to be measured by conformity to law, or zeal for education, or literacy, or any of these qualities in which immigrants may excel the native-bom. Americanism is the spirit behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to people of all races, all religions, all nationalities" (in Cohen 1972, 369). In 1945 Representative Emanuel Celler introduced a bill ending Chinese exclusion by establishing token quotas for Chinese, and in 1948 the AJCommittee condemned racial quotas on Asians (Divine 1957, 155). In contrast, Jewish groups showed indifference or even hostility toward immigration of non-Jews from Europe (including Southern Europe) in the post- World War II era (Neuringer I97I, 356, 367-369, 383). Thus Jewish spokespersons did not testify at all during the first set of hearings on emergency legislation to allow immigration of a limited number of German, Italian, Greek, and Dutch immigrants, escapees from communism, and a small number of Poles, Asians, and Arabs. When Jewish spokespersons eventually testified (partly because a few of the escapees from communism were Jews), they took the opportunity to once again focus on their condemnation of the national origins provisions of the 1924 law. Jewish involvement in opposing restrictions during this period was motivated partly by attempts to establish precedents in which the quota system was bypassed and partly by attempts to increase immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. The Citizen's Committee on Displaced Persons, which advocated legislation to admit 400,000 refugees as nonquota immigrants over a period of four years, maintained a staff of 65 people and was funded mainly by the AJCommittee and other Jewish contributors (see Cong. Rec, Oct. 15, 1949, I4647-I4654; Neuringer I97I, 393). Witnesses opposing the legislation complained that the bill was an attempt to subvert the ethnic balance of the United States estabhshed by the 1924 legislation (Divine 1957, 117). In the event, the bill that was reported out of the subcommittee did not satisfy Jewish interests because it established a cutoff date that excluded Jews who had migrated from Eastern Europe after World War II, including Jews fleeing Polish anti-Semitism. The Senate subcommittee "regarded the movement of Jews and other refugees from eastern Europe after 1945 as falling outside the scope of the 276 The Culture Of Critique main problem and implied that this exodus was a planned migration organized by Jewish agencies in the United States and in Europe" {Senate Rep. No. 950 [1948], 15-16). Jewish representatives led the assault on the bill (Divine 1957, 127), Representative Emanuel Celler calling it "worse than no bill at all. All it does is exclude... Jews" (in Neuringer 1971, 298; see also Divine 1957, 127). In reluctantly signing the bill. President Truman noted that the 1945 cutoff date "discriminates in callous fashion against displaced persons of the Jewish faith" (Interpreter Releases 25 [July 21, 1948], 252-254). In contrast. Senator Chapman Revercomb stated that "there is no distinction, certainly no discrimination, intended between any persons because of their religion or their race, but there are differences drawn among those persons who are in fact displaced persons and have been in camp longest and have a preference" (Cong. Rec, May 26, 1948, 6793). In his analysis. Divine (1957, 143) concludes that the expressed motive of the restrictionists, to limit the program to those people displaced during the course of the war, appears to be a valid explanation for these provisions. The tendency of Jewish groups to attribute the exclusion of many of their coreligionists to anti-Semitic bias is understandable; however, the extreme charges of discrimination made during the 1948 presidential campaign lead one to suspect that the northern wing of the Democratic party was using this issue to attract votes from members of minority groups. Certainly Truman's assertion that the 1948 law was anti-Catholic, made in the face of Catholic denials, indicates that political expediency had a great deal to do with the emphasis on the discrimination issue. In the aftermath of this bill, the Citizens Committee on Displaced Persons released a report claiming the bill was characterized by "hate and racism" and Jewish organizations were unanimous in denouncing the law (Divine 1957, 131). After the 1948 elections resulted in a Democratic Congress and a sympathetic President Truman, Representative Celler introduced a bill without the 1945 cutoff date, but, after passing the House, the bill failed in the Senate because of the opposition of Senator Pat McCarran. McCarran noted that the Citizens Committee had spent over $800,000 lobbying for the bill, with the result that "there has been disseminated over the length and breadth of this nation a campaign of misrepresentation and falsehood which has misled many public- spirited and well-meaning citizens and organizations" (Cong. Rec, April 26, 1949, 5042-5043). After defeat, the Citizens Committee increased expenditures 277 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy to over $1,000,000 and succeeded in passing a bill, introduced by Representative Celler, with a 1949 cutoff date that did not discriminate against Jews but largely excluded ethnic Germans who had been expelled from Eastern Europe. In an odd twist in the debate, restrictionists now accused the anti-restrictionists of ethnic bias (e.g.. Senator Eastland, Cong. Rec, April 5, 1950, 2737; Senator McCarran, Cong. Rec, April 5, 1950, 4743). At a time when there were no outbreaks of anti-Semitism in other parts of the world creating an urgent need for Jewish immigration and with the presence of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Jewish organizations still vigorously objected to the continuation of the national origins provisions of the 1924 law in the McCarran-Walter law of 1952 (Neuringer 1971, 337ff). Indeed, when U.S. District Court of Appeals Judge Simon H. Rifkind testified on behalf of a wide range of Jewish organizations against the McCarran-Walter bill he noted emphatically that because of the international situation and particularly the existence of Israel as a safe haven for Jews, Jewish views on immigration legislation were not predicated on the "plight of our co-religionists but rather the impact which immigration and naturalization laws have upon the temper and quality of American life here in the United States. "'^^ The argument was couched in terms of "democratic principles and the cause of international amity" (Cohen 1972, 368) — the implicit theory being that the principles of democracy required ethnic diversity (a view promulgated by Jewish intellectual activists such as Sidney Hook [1948, 1949; see Ch. 6] at the time) and the theory that the good will of other countries depended on American willingness to accept their citizens as immigrants. "The enactment of [the McCarran-Walter bill] will gravely impair the national effort we are putting forth. For we are engaged in a war for the hearts and minds of men. The free nations of the world look to us for moral and spiritual reinforcement at a time when the faith which moves men is as important as the force they wield."'''^ The McCarran-Walter law explicitly included racial ancestry as a criterion in its provision that Orientals would be included in the token Oriental quotas no matter where they were bom. Herbert Lehman, a senator from New York and the most prominent senatorial opponent of immigration restriction during the 1950s (Neuringer 1971, 351), argued during the debates over the McCarran-Walter bill that immigrants from Jamaica of African descent should be included in the quota for England and stated that the bill would cause resentment among Asians (Neuringer 1971, 346, 356). Representatives Celler and Javits, the leaders of the anti-restrictionists in the House, made similar arguments {Cong. Rec, April 23, 1952, 4306, 4219). As was also apparent in the battles dating back to the nineteenth century, the opposition to the national origins legislation went beyond 278 The Culture Of Critique its effects on Jewish immigration to advocate immigration of all the racial-ethnic groups of the world. Reflecting a concern for maintaining the ethnic status quo as well as the salience of Jewish issues during the period, the report of the subcommittee considering the McCarran immigration law noted that "the population of the United States has increased three-fold since 1877, while the Jewish population has increased twenty-one fold during the same period" {Senate Rep. No. 1515 [1950], 2-4). The bill also included a provision that naturahzed citizens automatically lost citizenship if they resided abroad continuously for five years. This provision was viewed by Jewish organizations as motivated by anti-Zionist attitudes: "Testimony by Government officials at the hearings... made it clear that the provision stemmed from a desire to dissuade naturalized American Jews from subscribing to a deeply held ideal which some officials in contravention of American policy regarded as undesirable."'*'^ Reaffirming the logic of the 1920s restrictionists, the subcommittee report emphasized that a purpose of the 1924 law was "the restriction of immigration from southern and eastern Europe in order to preserve a predominance of persons of northwestern European origin in the composition of our total population" but noted that this purpose did not imply "any theory of Nordic supremacy" {Senate Rep. No. 1515 [1950], 442, 445-446). The argument was mainly phrased in terms of the "similarity of cultural background" of prospective immigrants, implying the rejection of theories of cultural pluralism (Bennett 1966, 133). As in 1924, theories of Nordic supremacy were rejected, but unlike 1924 there was no mention of the legitimate ethnic self-interest of the Northwestern European peoples, presumably a result of the effectiveness of the Boasian onslaught on this idea. Without giving credence to any theory of Nordic superiority, the subcommittee believes that the adoption of the national origins formula was a rational and logical method of numerically restricting immigration in such a manner as to best preserve the sociological and cultural balance in the population of the United States. There is no doubt that it favored the peoples of the countries of northern and western Europe over those of southern and eastern Europe, but the subcommittee holds that the peoples who had made the greatest contribution to the development of this country were fully justified in determining that the country was no longer a field for further colonization and, henceforth, further immigration would not only be restricted but directed to admit immigrants considered to be more readily assimilable 279 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy because of the similarity of their cuhural background to those of the principal components of our population. {Sen. Rep. No. 1515, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. 1950, 455) It is important to note that Jewish spokespersons differed from other liberal groups in their motives for opposing restrictions on immigration during this period. In the following I emphasize the congressional testimony of Judge Simon H. Rifkind, who represented a very broad range of Jewish agencies in the hearings on the McCarran-Walter bill in 195 1.''^'* 1. Immigration should come from all racial-ethnic groups: We conceive of Americanism as the spirit behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to people of different races, all religions, all nationalities. Americanism is a tolerant way of life that was devised by men who differed from one another vastly in religion, race background, education, and lineage, and who agreed to forget all these things and ask of a new neighbor not where he comes from but only what he can do and what is his spirit toward his fellow men. (p. 566) 2. The total number of immigrants should be maximized within very broad economic and political constraints: "The regulation [of immigration] is the regulation of an asset, not of a hability" (p. 567). Rifkind emphasized several times that unused quotas had the effect of restricting total numbers of immigrants, and he viewed this very negatively (e.g., p. 569). 3. Immigrants should not be viewed as economic assets and imported only to serve the present needs of the United States: Looking at [selective immigration] from the point of view of the United States, never from the point of view of the immigrant, I say that we should, to some extent, allow for our temporary needs, but not to make our immigration problem an employment instrumentality. I do not think that we are buying economic commodities when we allow immigrants to come in. We are admitting human beings who will found families and raise children, whose children may reach the heights — at least so we hope and pray. For a small segment of the immigrant stream I think we are entitled to say, if we happen to be short of a particular talent, "Let us go out and look for them," if necessary, but let us not make that the all-pervading thought, (p. 570) 280 The Culture Of Critique The opposition to needed skills as the basis of immigration was consistent with the prolonged Jewish attempt to delay the passage of a literacy test as a criterion for immigration beginning in the late nineteenth century until a literacy test was passed in 1917. Although Rifkind's testimony was free of the accusation that immigration policy was based on the theory of Nordic superiority, Nordic superiority continued to be a prominent theme of other Jewish groups, particularly the AJCongress, in advocating immigration from all ethnic groups. The statement of the AJCongress focused a great deal of attention on the importance of the theory of Nordic supremacy as motivating the 1924 legislation. Contrary to Rifkind's surprising assertion of the traditional American openness to all ethnic groups, it noted the long history of ethnic exclusion that existed before these theories were developed, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the gentlemen's agreement with Japan of 1907 limiting immigration of Japanese workers, and the exclusion of other Asians in 1917. The statement noted that the 1924 legislation had succeeded in preserving the ethnic balance of the United States as of the 1920 census, but it commented that "the objective is valueless. There is nothing sacrosanct about the composition of the population in 1920. It would be foolish to believe that we reached the peak of ethnic perfection in that year."'''^ Moreover, in an explicit statement of Horace Kallen's multicultural ideal, the AJCongress statement advocated "the thesis of cultural democracy which would guarantee to all groups 'majority and minority alike... the right to be different and the responsibility to make sure that their differences do not conflict with the welfare of the American people as a whole.' "'™ During this period the Congress Weekly, the journal of the AJCongress, regularly denounced the national origins provisions as based on the "myth of the existence of superior and inferior racial stocks" (Oct. 17, 1955, p. 3) and advocated immigration on the basis of "need and other criteria unrelated to race or national origin" (May 4, 1953, p. 3). Particularly objectionable from the perspective of the AJCongress was the implication that there should be no change in the ethnic status quo prescribed by the 1924 legislation (e.g., Goldstein 1952a, 6). The national origins formula "is outrageous now... when our national experience has confirmed beyond a doubt that our very strength lies in the diversity of our peoples" (Goldstein 1952b, 5). As indicated above, there is some evidence that the 1924 legislation and the restrictionism of the 1930s was motivated partly by anti-Semitic attitudes. Anti- Semitism and its linkage with anti-communism were also apparent in the immigration arguments during the 1950s preceding and following the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act. Restrictionists often pointed to evidence that over 90 281 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy percent of American Communists had backgrounds linking them to Eastern Europe. A major thrust of restrictionist efforts was to prevent immigration from this area and to ease deportation procedures to prevent Communist subversion. Eastern Europe was also the origin of most Jewish immigration, and Jews were disproportionately represented among American Communists, with the result that these issues became linked, and the situation lent itself to broad anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the role of Jews in U.S. politics (e.g., Beaty 1951). In Congress, Representative John Rankin, a notorious anti-Semite, without making explicit reference to Jews, stated: They whine about discrimination. Do you know who is being discriminated against? The white Christian people of America, the ones who created this nation... I am talking about the white Christian people of the North as well as the South. . . Communism is racial. A racial minority seized control in Russia and in all her satellite countries, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and many other countries I could name. They have been run out of practically every country in Europe in the years gone by, and if they keep stirring race trouble in this country and trying to force their communistic program on the Christian people of America, there is no telling what will happen to them here. {Cong. Rec, April 23, 1952, 4320) During this period mainstream Jewish organizations were deeply concerned to eradicate the stereotype of communist- Jew and to develop an image of Jews as liberal anti-communists (Svonkin 1997). "The fight against the stereotype of Communist- Jew became a virtual obsession with Jewish leaders and opinion makers throughout America" (Liebman 1979, 515). (As an indication of the extent of this stereotype, when the gentile anthropologist Eleanor Leacock was being screened for security clearance by the FBI in 1944, in an effort to document her associations with political radicals her friends were asked whether she associated with Jews [Frank 1997, 738].) The AJCommittee engaged in intensive efforts to change opinion within the Jewish community by showing that Jewish interests were more compatible with advocating American democracy than Soviet communism (e.g., emphasizing Soviet anti-Semitism and support of nations opposed to Israel in the period after World War II) (Cohen 1972, 347ff).'^' Although the AJCongress acknowledged that communism was a threat, the group adopted an "anti-anticommunist" position that condemned the infringement of civil liberties contained in the anti-communist legislation of the 282 The Culture Of Critique period. It was therefore "at best a reluctant and unenthusiastic participant" (Svonkin 1997, 132) in the Jewish effort to develop a strong public image of anti- communism during this period — a position that reflected the sympathies of many among its predominantly second- and third-generation Eastern European immigrant membership. This radical Jewish subculture and its ties to communism were much in evidence during riots in Peekskill, New York in 1949. Peekskill was a summer destination for approximately 30,000 predominantly Jewish professionals associated with socialist, anarchist, and communist colonies originally estabhshed in the 1930s. The immediate cause of rioting was a concert given by avowed communist Paul Robeson and sponsored by the Civil Rights Congress, a pro-communist group branded as subversive by the U.S. attorney general. Rioters made anti-Semitic statements at a time when the linkage between Jews and communism was highly salient. The result was an image-management effort on the part of the AJCommittee in which the anti-Semitic angle of the event was minimized — an example of the quarantine method of Jewish political strategizing (see SAID, Ch. 6 Note 14). This strategy conflicted with other groups, such as the AJCongress and the ACLU, who endorsed a report that attributed the violence to anti-Semitic prejudice and emphasized that the victims had been deprived of their civil liberties because of their communist sympathies. Particularly worrisome to American Jewish leaders was the arrest and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for spying. Leftist supporters of the Rosenbergs, many of whom were Jewish, attempted to portray the event as an instance of anti-Semitism, in the words of one prominent commentator, "The lynchings of these two innocent American Jews, unless stopped by the American people, will serve as a signal for a wave of Hitler-like genocidal attacks against the Jewish people throughout the United States" (in Svonkin 1997, 155). These leftist organizations actively sought to enlist mainstream Jewish opinion on the side of this interpretation (Dawidowicz 1952). However, in doing so they made the Jewish identities of these individuals and the connection between Judaism and communism even more salient. The official Jewish community went to great lengths to alter the public stereotype of Jewish subversion and disloyalty. Similarly, in its attempt to indict communism, the AJCommittee commented on the trial of Rudolph Slansky and his Jewish colleagues in Czechoslovakia. This trial was part of the anti-Semitic purges of Jewish communist elites in Eastern Europe after World War II, completely analogous to similar events in Poland recounted by Schatz (I99I) and discussed in Chapter 3. The AJCommittee stated, "The trial of Rudolph Slansky, renegade Jew and his colleagues, who betrayed Judaism in serving the Communist cause, should awaken everyone to the fact that anti-Semitism has become an open instrument of Communist policy. It is 283 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy ironical that these men who deserted Judaism, which is inimical to Communism, are now being used as an excuse for the Communist anti-Semitic campaign" (in Svonkin 1997, 282nll4). Jewish organizations cooperated fully with the House Un-American Activities Committee, and defenders of the Rosenbergs and other communists were hounded out of mainstream Jewish organizations where they had previously been welcome. Particularly sahent was the 50,000-member Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order (JPFO), a subsidiary of the International Workers Order (IWO), which was listed as a subversive organization by the U.S. attorney general. The AJCommittee prevailed on local Jewish organizations to expel the JPFO, a move staunchly resisted by the JPFO, and the AJCongress dissolved the affiliate status of the JPFO as well as another communist-dominated organization, the American Jewish Labor Council. Similarly, mainstream Jewish organizations dissociated themselves from the Social Service Employees Union, a Jewish labor union for workers in Jewish organizations. This union had previously been expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations because of its Communist sympathies. Jewish organizations successfully obtained a prominent role for Jews in the prosecution of the Rosenbergs, and, after the guilty verdicts, the AJCommittee and the American Civil Liberties Union were active in promoting public support for them (Ginsberg 1993, 121; Navasky 1980, 114ff). The periodical Commentary, published by the AJCommittee, "was rigorously edited to ensure that nothing that appeared within it could be in any way construed as favorable to Communism" (Liebman 1979, 516), and it even went out of its way to print extremely anti-Soviet articles. Nevertheless, the position of mainstream Jewish organizations such as the AJCommittee, which opposed communism, often coincided with the position of the CPUSA on issues of immigration. For example, both the AJCommittee and the CPUSA condemned the McCarran- Walter act while, on the other hand, the AJCommittee had a major role in influencing the recommendations of President Truman's Commission on Immigration and Naturalization (PCIN) for relaxing the security provisions of the McCarran- Walter Act, and these recommendations were warmly greeted by the CPUSA at a time when a prime goal of the security provisions was to exclude communists (Bennett 1963, 166). (Judge Julius Rifkind's remarks at the Joint Hearings on the McCarran- Walter Act [see p. 278 above] also condemned the security provisions of the bill.) Jews were disproportionately represented on the PCIN as well as in the organizations viewed by Congress as communist front organizations involved in immigration issues. The chairman of the PCIN was Philip B. Perlman and the staff of the commission contained a high percentage of Jews, headed by Harry N. Rosenfield (Executive Director) and Elliot Shirk (Assistant to the Executive Director), and 284 The Culture Of Critique its report was wholeheartedly endorsed by the AJCongress (see Congress Weekly, Jan. 12, 1952, 3). The proceedings were printed as the report Whom We Shall Welcome with the cooperation of Representative Emanuel Celler. In Congress, Senator McCarran accused the PCIN of containing communist sympathizers, and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) released a report stating that "some two dozen Communists and many times that number with records of repeated affiliation with known Communist enterprises testified before the Commission or submitted statements for inclusion in the record of the hearings... Nowhere in either the record of the hearings or in the report is there a single reference to the true background of these persons" {House Rep. No. 1182, 85th Cong., 1st Session, 47). The report referred particularly to communists associated with the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Bom (ACPFB), headed by Abner Green. Green, who was Jewish, figured very prominently in these hearings, and Jews were generally disproportionately represented among those singled out as officers and sponsors of the ACPFB (pp. 13-21). HUAC provided evidence indicating that the ACPFB had close ties with the CPUSA and noted that 24 of the individuals associated with the ACPFB had signed statements incorporated into the printed record of the PCIN. The AJCommittee was also heavily involved in the deliberations of the PCIN, including providing testimony and distributing data and other material to individuals and organizations testifying before the PCIN (Cohen 1972, 371). All its recommendations were incorporated into the final report (Cohen 1972, 371), including a deemphasis on economic skills as criteria for immigration, scrapping the national origins legislation, and opening immigration to all the peoples of the world on a "first come, first served basis," the only exception being that the report recommended a lower total number of immigrants than recommended by the AJCommittee and other Jewish groups. The AJCommittee thus went beyond merely advocating the principle of immigration from all racial and ethnic groups (token quotas for Asians and Africans had already been included in the McCarran-W alter Act) to attempt to maximize the total number of immigrants from all parts of the world within the current political climate. Indeed, the Commission (PCIN 1953, 106) pointedly noted that the 1924 legislation had succeeded in maintaining the racial status quo, and that the main barrier to changing the racial status quo was not the national origins system, because there were already high levels of nonquota immigrants and because the countries of Northern and Western Europe did not fill their quotas. Rather, the report noted that the main barrier to changing the racial status quo was the total number of immigrants. The Commission thus viewed changing the racial status quo of the United States as a desirable goal, and to that end made a major point 285 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy of the desirability of increasing the total number of immigrants (PCIN 1953, 42). As Bennett (1963, 164) notes, in the eyes of the PCIN, the 1924 legislation reducing the total number of immigrants "was a very bad thing because of its finding that one race is just as good as another for American citizenship or any other purpose." Correspondingly, the defenders of the 1952 legislation conceptualized the issue as fundamentally one of ethnic warfare. Senator McCarran stated that subverting the national origins system "would, in the course of a generation or so, tend to change the ethnic and cultural composition of this nation" (in Bennett 1963, 185), and Richard Arens, a congressional staff member who had a prominent role in the hearings on the McCarran- Walter bill as well as in the activities of HUAC, stated, "These are the critics who do not like America as it is and has been. They think our people exist in unfair ethnic proportions. They prefer that we bear a greater resemblance or ethnic relationship to the foreign peoples whom they favor and for whom they are seeking disproportionately greater immigration privileges" (in Bennett 1963, 186). As Divine (1957, 188) notes, ethnic interests predominated on both sides. The restrictionists were implicitly advocating the ethnic status quo, while the anti-restrictionists were rather more explicit in their desire to alter the ethnic status quo in a manner that conformed to their ethnic interests, although the anti-restrictionist rhetoric was phrased in universalistic and moralistic terms. The salience of Jewish involvement in immigration during this period is also apparent in several other incidents. In 1950 the representative of the AJCongress testified that the retention of the national origins system in any form would be "a political and moral catastrophe" ("Revision of Immigration Laws" Joint Hearings, 1950, 336-337). The national origins formula implies that "persons in quest of the opportunity to live in this land are to be judged according to breed like cattle at a country fair and not on the basis of their character fitness or capacity" {Congress Weekly 21, 1952, 3-4). Divine (1957, 173) characterizes the AJCongress as representing "the more militant wing" of the opposition because of its principled opposition to any form of the national origins formula, whereas other opponents merely wanted to be able to distribute unused quotas to Southern and Eastern Europe. Representative Francis Walter noted the "propaganda drive that is being engaged in now by certain members of the American Jewish Congress opposed to the Immigration and Nationality Code" (Cong. Rec, March 13, 1952, 2283), noting particularly the activities of Dr. Israel Goldstein, president of the AJCongress, who had been reported in the New York Times as having stated that the immigration and nationality law would place "a legislative seal of inferiority on all persons of other than Anglo-Saxon origin." Representative Walter then 286 The Culture Of Critique noted the special role that Jewish organizations had played in attempting to foster family reunion rather than special skills as the basis of U.S. immigration pohcy. After Representative Jacob Javits stated that opposition to the law was "not confined to the one group the gentleman mentioned" {Cong. Rec, March 13, 1952, 2284), Walter responded as follows: I might call your attention to the fact that Mr. Harry N. Rosenfield, Commissioner of the Displaced Persons Commission [and also the Executive Director of the PCIN; see above] and incidentally a brother-in-law of a lawyer who is stirring up all this agitation, in a speech recently said: The proposed legislation is America's Nuremberg trial. It is "racious" and archaic, based on a theory that people with different styles of noses should be treated differently. Representative Walter then noted that the only two organizations hostile to the entire bill were the AJCongress and the Association of Immigration and Nationality Lawyers, the latter "represented by an attorney who is also advising and counseling the American Jewish Congress." (Goldstein [1952b] himself noted that "at the time of the Joint House-Senate hearings on the McCarran bill, the American Jewish Congress was the only civic group which dared flatly to oppose the national origins quota formula.") Representative Emanuel Celler replied that Walter "should not have overemphasized as he did the people of one particular faith who are opposing the bill" (p. 2285). Representative Walter agreed with Celler's comments, noting that "there are other very fine Jewish groups who endorse the bill." Nevertheless, the principle Jewish organizations, including the AJCongress, the AJCommittee, the ADL, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, did indeed oppose the bill (Cong. Rec, April 23, 1952, 4247), and when Judge Simon Rifkind testified against the bill in the joint hearings, he emphasized that he represented a very wide range of Jewish groups, "the entire body of religious opinion and lay opinion within the Jewish group, religiously speaking, from the extreme right and extreme left" (p. 563).'^^ Rifkind represented a long list of national and local Jewish groups, including in addition to the above, the Synagogue Council of America, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Jewish War Veterans of the United States, and 27 local Jewish councils throughout the United States. Moreover, the fight against the bill was led by Jewish members of Congress, including especially Celler, Javits, and Lehman, all of whom, as indicated above, were prominent members of the ADL. 287 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy Albeit by indirection, Representative Walter was clearly calling attention to the special Jewish role in the immigration conflict of 1952. The special role of the AJCongress in opposing the McCarran-Walter Act was a source of pride within the group: On the verge of victory in 1965, the Congress hi-Weekly editorialized that it was "a cause of pride" that AJCongress president Rabbi Israel Goldstein had been "singled out by Representative Walter for attack on the floor of the House of Representatives as the prime organizer of the campaign against the measures he co-sponsored" (Feb. 1, 1965, 3). The perception that Jewish concerns were an important feature of the opposition to the McCarran-Walter Act can also be seen in the following exchange between Representative Celler and Representative Walter. Celler noted, "The national origin theory upon which our immigration law is based. . . [mocks] our protestations based on a question of equality of opportunity for all peoples, regardless of race, color, or creed." Representative Walter replied, "a great menace to America lies in the fact that so many professionals, including professional Jews, are shedding crocodile tears for no reason whatsoever" {Cong. Rec, Jan. 13, 1953, 372). And in a comment referring to the peculiarities of Jewish interests in immigration legislation, Richard Arens noted, "One of the curious things about those who most loudly claim that the 1952 act is 'discriminatory' and that it does not make allowance for a sufficient number of alleged refugees, is that they oppose admission of any of the approximately one million Arab refugees in camps where they are living in pitiful circumstances after having been driven out of Israel" (in Bennett 1963, 181). The McCarran-Walter Act passed despite President Truman's veto, and Truman's "alleged partisanship to Jews was a favorite target of anti-Semites" (Cohen 1972, 377). Prior to the veto, Truman was intensively lobbied, "particularly [by] Jewish societies" opposed to the bill; government agencies, meanwhile, including the State Department (despite the anti-restrictionist argument that the bill would have catastrophic effects on U.S. foreign policy) urged Truman to sign the bill (Divine 1957, 184). Moreover, individuals with openly anti-Semitic attitudes, such as John Beaty (1951), often focused on Jewish involvement in the immigration battles during this period. Jewish Anti-Restrictionist Activity, 1953-1965 During this period the Congress Weekly regularly noted the role of Jewish organizations as the vanguard of liberalized immigration laws: In its editorial of February 20, 1956 (p. 3), for example, it congratulated President Eisenhower for his "unequivocal opposition to the quota system which, more than any other 288 The Culture Of Critique feature of our immigration policy, has excited the most widespread and most intense aversion among Americans. In advancing this proposal for 'new guidelines and standards' in determining admissions, President Eisenhower has courageously taken a stand in advance of even many advocates of a liberal immigration policy and embraced a position which had at first been urged by the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish agencies." The AJCommittee made a major effort to keep the immigration issue alive during a period of widespread apathy among the American public between the passage of the McCarran- Walter Act and the early 1960s. Jewish organizations intensified their effort during this time (Cohen 1972, 370-373; Neuringer 1971, 358), with the AJCommittee helping to establish the Joint Conference on Alien Legislation and the American Immigration Conference — both organizations representing pro-immigration forces — as well as providing most of the funding and performing most of the work of these groups. In 1955 the AJCommittee organized a group of influential citizens as the National Commission on Immigration and Citizenship "in order to give prestige to the campaign" (Cohen 1972, 373). "All these groups studied immigration laws, disseminated information to the public, presented testimony to Congress, and planned other appropriate activities... There were no immediate or dramatic results; but AJC's dogged campaign in conjunction with like-minded organizations ultimately prodded the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to action" (Cohen 1972, 373). An article by Oscar Handlin (1952), the prominent Harvard historian of immigration, is a fascinating microcosm of the Jewish approach to immigration during this period. Writing in Commentary (a publication of the AJCommittee) almost 30 years after the 1924 defeat and in the immediate aftermath of the McCarran- Walter Act, Handlin entitled his article "The immigration fight has only begun: Lessons of the McCarran-Walter setback." The title is a remarkable indication of the tenacity and persistence of Jewish commitment to this issue. The message is not to be discouraged by the recent defeat, which occurred despite "all the effort toward securing the revision of our immigration laws" (p. 2). Handlin attempts to cast the argument in universalist terms as benefiting all Americans and as conforming to American ideals that "all men, being brothers, are equally capable of being Americans" (p. 7). Current immigration law reflects "racist xenophobia" (p. 2) by its token quotas for Asians and its denial of the right of West Indian blacks to take advantage of British quotas. Handlin ascribes the restrictionist sentiments of Pat McCarran to "the hatred of foreigners that was all about him in his youth and by the dim, recalled fear that he himself might be counted among them" (p. 3) — a psychoanalytic identification-with-the-aggressor argument (McCarran was Catholic). 289 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy In his article Handlin repeatedly uses the term "we" — as in "if we cannot beat McCarran and his cohorts with their own weapons, we can do much to destroy the efficacy of those weapons" (p. 4) — suggesting Handlin' s behef in a unified Jewish interest in liberal immigration policy and presaging a prolonged "chipping away" of the 1952 legislation in the ensuing years. Handlin's anti- restrictionist strategy included altering the views of social scientists to the effect "that it was possible and necessary to distinguish among the 'races' of immigrants that clamored for admission to the United States" (p. 4). Handlin's proposal to recruit social scientists in the immigration battles is congruent with the political agenda of the Boasian school of anthropology discussed above and in Chapter 2. As Higham (1984) notes, the ascendancy of such views was as an important component of the ultimate victory over restrictionism. Handlin presented the following highly tendentious rendering of the logic of preserving the ethnic status quo that underlay the arguments for restriction from 1921 to 1952: The laws are bad because they rest on the racist assumption that mankind is divided into fixed breeds, biologically and culturally separated from each other, and because, within that framework, they assume that Americans are Anglo-Saxons by origin and ought to remain so. To all other peoples, the laws say that the United States ranks them in terms of their racial proximity to our own 'superior' stock; and upon the many, many millions of Americans not descended from the Anglo-Saxons, the laws cast a distinct imputation of inferiority, (p. 5) Handlin deplored the apathy of other "hyphenated Americans" to share the enthusiasm of the Jewish effort: "Many groups failed to see the relevance of the McCarran- Walter Bill to their own position." He suggests that these groups ought to act as groups to assert their interests: "The Italian American has the right to be heard on these issues precisely as an Italian American" (p. 7; italics in text). The implicit assumption is that the United States ought to be composed of cohesive subgroups with a clear sense of their group interests in opposition to the peoples deriving from Northern and Western Europe or of the United States as a whole. Also, there is the implication that Italian Americans have an interest in furthering immigration of Africans and Asians and in creating such a multiracial and multicultural society. Handlin developed this perspective further in a book. Race and Nationality in American Life, published in 1957."^ This book is a compendium of psychoanalytic "explanations" of ethnic and class conflict deriving from The 290 The Culture Of Critique Authoritarian Personality school combined with the Boasian theory that there are no biological differences between the races that influence behavior. There is also a strong strand of the belief that humans can be perfected by changing defective human institutions. Handlin advocates immigration from all areas of the world as a moral imperative. In his discussion of Israel in Chapter XII, however, there is no mention that Israel ought to be similarly inclined to view open immigration from throughout the world as a moral imperative or that Jews should not be concerned with maintaining political control of Israel. Instead the discussion focuses on the moral compatibility of dual loyalties for American Jews to both the United States and Israel. Handlin's moral blindness regarding Jewish issues can also be seen in Albert Lindemann's (1997, xx) comment that Handlin's book Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America failed to mention Jewish slave traders and slave owners "even while mentioning by name the 'great Jewish merchants' who made fortunes in the slave trade." Shortly after Handlin's article, William Petersen (1955), also writing in Commentary, argued that pro-immigration forces should be explicit in their advocacy of a multicultural society and that the importance of this goal transcended the importance of achieving any self-interested goal of the United States, such as obtaining needed skills or improving foreign relations. In making his case he cited a group of predominantly Jewish social scientists whose works, beginning with Horace Kallen's plea for a multicultural, pluralistic society, "constitute the beginning of a scholarly legitimization of the different immigration policy that will perhaps one day become law" (p. 86), including, besides Kallen, Melville Herskovits (the Boasian anthropologist; see Ch. 2), Geoffrey Gorer, Samuel Lubell, David Riesman (a New York Intellectual; see Ch. 6), Thorsten Sellin, and Milton Konvitz. These social scientists did indeed contribute to the immigration battles. For example, the following quotation from a scholarly book on immigration policy by Milton Konvitz of Cornell University (published by Cornell University Press) reflects the rejection of national interest as an element of U.S. immigration policy — a hallmark of the Jewish approach to immigration: To place so much emphasis on technological and vocational qualifications is to remove every vestige of humanitarianism from our immigration policy. We deserve small thanks from those who come here if they are admitted because we find that they are "urgently" needed, by reason of their training and experience, to advance our national interests. This is hardly immigration; it is the importation of special skills or know-how, not greatly different from the importation of coffee or rubber. It 291 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy is hardly in the spirit of American ideals to disregard a man's character and promise and to look only at his education and the vocational opportunities he had the good fortune to enjoy. (Konvitz 1953, 26) Other prominent social scientists who represented the anti-restrictionist perspective in their writings were Richard Hofstadter and Max Lemer. Hofstadter, who did much to create the image of the populists of the West and South as irrational anti-Semites (see Ch. 5), also condemned the populists for their desire "to maintain a homogeneous Yankee civilization" (Hofstadter 1955, 34). He also linked populism to the immigration issue: In Hofstadter' s view, populism was "in considerable part colored by the reaction to this immigrant stream among the native elements of the population" (1955, 1 1). In his highly acclaimed America as a Civilization, Max Lemer provides an explicit link between much of the intellectual tradition covered in previous chapters and the immigration issue. Lemer finds the United States to be a tribalistic nation with a "passionate rejection of the 'outsider'" (1957, 502), and he asserts that "with the passing of the [1924 immigration] quota laws racism came of age in America" (p. 504). Lerner laments the fact that these "racist" laws are still in place because of popular sentiment, "whatever the intellectuals may think." This is clearly a complaint that when it came to immigration policy, Americans were not following the lead of the predominantly Jewish urbanized intellectual elite represented by Lemer. The comment reflects the anti- democratic, anti-populist element of Jewish intellectual activity discussed in Chapters 5 and 6. Lemer cites the work of Horace Kallen as providing a model for a multicultural, pluralistic America (p. 93), saying, for example, that he (Lemer) approves of "the existence of ethnic communities within the larger American community, each of them trying to hold on to elements of group identity and in the process enriching the total culture pattem" (p. 506). Correspondingly, while acknowledging that Jews have actively resisted exogamy (p. 510), Lemer sees nothing but benign effects of immigration and interbreeding: "Although some cultural historians maintain that the dilution of native stock is followed by cultural decadence, the example of the Italian city-states, Spain, Holland, Britain, and now Russia and India as well as America indicates that the most vigorous phase may come at the height of the mingling of many stocks. The greater danger hes in closing the gates" (p. 82). Lemer cites approvingly Franz Boas' s work on the plasticity of skull size as a paradigm showing the pervasiveness of environmental influences (p. 83), and on this basis he asserts that intellectual and biological differences between ethnic 292 The Culture Of Critique groups are entirely the result of environmental differences. Thus, "One can understand the fear of the more prolific birth rate of the minorities, but since they are largely the product of lower living standards the strategy of keeping the living standards low by enclosing the minorities in walls of caste would seem self- defeating" (p. 506). And finally, Lemer uses The Authoritarian Personality as an analytic tool in understanding ethnic conflict and anti-Semitism (p. 509). Handlin wrote that the McCarran-W alter law was only a temporary setback, and he was right. Thirty years after the triumph of restrictionism, only Jewish groups remained as persistent and tenacious advocates of a multicultural America. Forty -one years after the 1924 triumph of restrictionism and the national origins provision and only 13 years after its reaffirmation with the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, Jewish organizations successfully supported ending the geographically based national origins basis of immigration intended to result in an ethnic status quo in what was now a radically altered intellectual and political climate. Particularly important is the provision in the Immigration Act of 1965 that expanded the number of nonquota immigrants. Beginning in their testimony on the 1924 law, Jewish spokespersons had been in the forefront in attempts to admit family members on a nonquota basis (Neuringer 1971, 191). During the House debates on immigration surrounding the McCarran-Walter Act, Representative Walter {Cong. Rec, March 13, 1952, 2284) noted the special focus that Jewish organizations had on family reunion rather than on special skills. Responding to Representative Javits who had complained that under the bill 50 percent of the quota for blacks from the British West Indies colonies would be reserved for people with special skills, Walter noted, "I would like to call the gentleman's attention to the fact that this is the principle of using 50 percent of the quota for people needed in the United States. But, if that entire 50 percent is not used in that category, then the unused numbers go down to the next category which replies to the objections that these Jewish organizations make much of, that families are being separated." Prior to the 1965 law, Bennett (1963, 244) commenting on the family unification aspects of the 1961 immigration legislation, noted that the "relationship by blood or marriage and the principle of uniting families have become the 'open Sesame' to the immigration gates." Moreover, despite repeated denials by the anti-restrictionists that their proposals would affect the ethnic balance of the country, Bennett (1963, 256) commented that the "repeated, persistent extension of nonquota status to immigrants from countries with oversubscribed quotas and flatly discriminated against by [the McCarran-Walter Act] together with administrative waivers of inadmissibility, adjustment of status and private bills, is helping to speed and make apparently inevitable a change in 293 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy the ethnic face of the nation" (p. 257) — a reference to the "chipping away" of the 1952 law recommended as a strategy in Handlin's article. Indeed, a major argument apparent in the debate over the 1965 legislation was that the 1952 law had been so weakened that it had largely become irrelevant and there was a need to overhaul immigration legislation to legitimize a de facto situation. Bennett also noted that "the stress on the immigration issue arises from insistence of those who regard quotas as ceilings, not floors [opponents of restriction often referred to unused quotas as "wasted" because they could be given to non-Europeans], who want to remake America in the image of small- quota countries and who do not like our basic ideology, cultural attitudes and heritage. They insist that it is the duty of the United States to accept immigrants irrespective of their assimilability or our own population problems. They insist on remaining hyphenated Americans" (1963, 295). The family-based emphasis of the quota regulations of the 1965 law (e.g., the provision that at least 24 percent of the quota for each area be set aside for brothers and sisters of citizens) has resulted in a multiplier effect that ultimately subverted the quota system entirely by allowing for a "chaining" phenomenon in which endless chains of the close relatives of close relatives are admitted outside the quota system: Imagine one immigrant, say an engineering student, who was studying in the United States during the 1960s. If he found a job after graduation, he could then bring over his wife [as the spouse of a resident alien], and six years later, after being naturalized, his bothers and sisters [as siblings of a citizen]. They, in turn, could bring their wives, husbands, and children. Within a dozen years, one immigrant entering as a skilled worker could easily generate 25 visas for in-laws, nieces, and nephews. (McConnell 1988b, 98) The 1965 law also deemphasized the criterion that immigrants should have needed skills. (In 1986 less than four percent of immigrants were admitted on the basis of needed skills, whereas 74 percent were admitted on the basis of familial relatedness [see Brimelow 1995].) As indicated above, the rejection of a skill requirement or other tests of competence in favor of "humanitarian goals" and family unification had been an element of Jewish immigration policy at least since debate on the McCarran-Walter Act of the early 1950s and extending really to the long opposition to literacy tests dating from the end of the nineteenth century. 294 The Culture Of Critique Senator Jacob Javits played a prominent role in the Senate hearings on the 1965 bill, and Emanuel Celler, who fought for unrestricted immigration for over 40 years in the House of Representatives, introduced similar legislation in that body. Jewish organizations (American Council for Judaism Philanthropic Fund, Council of Jewish Federations & Welfare Funds and B'nai B'rith Women) filed briefs in support of the measure before the Senate subcommittee, as did organizations such as the ACLU and the Americans for Democratic Action with a large Jewish membership (Goldberg 1996, 46). Indeed, it is noteworthy that well before the ultimate triumph of the Jewish policy on immigration, Javits (1951) authored an article entitled "Let's open the gates" that proposed an immigration level of 500,000 per year for 20 years with no restrictions on national origin. In 1961 Javits proposed a bill that "sought to destroy the [national origins quota system] by a flank attack and to increase quota and nonquota immigration" (Bennett 1963, 250). In addition to provisions aimed at removing barriers due to race, ethnicity, and national origins, included in this bill was a provision that brothers, sisters, and married sons or daughters of U.S. citizens and their spouses and children who had become eligible under the quota system in legislation of 1957 be included as nonquota immigrants — an even more radical version of the provision whose incorporation in the 1965 law facilitated non-European immigration into the United States. Although this provision of Javit's bill was not approved at the time, the bill's proposals for softening previous restrictions on Asian and black immigration as well as removing racial classification from visa documents (thus allowing unlimited nonquota immigration of Asians and blacks bom in the Western Hemisphere) were approved. It is also interesting that the main victory of the restrictionists in 1965 was that Western Hemisphere nations were included in the new quota system, thus ending the possibility of unrestricted immigration from those regions. In speeches before the Senate, Senator Javits {Cong. Rec, 111, 1965, 24469) bitterly opposed this extension of the quota system, arguing that placing any limits on immigration of all of the people of the Western Hemisphere would have severely negative effects on U.S. foreign policy. In a highly revealing discussion of the bill before the Senate, Senator Sam Ervin {Cong. Rec, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 1965, 24446-51) noted that "those who disagree with me express no shock that Britain, in the future, can send us 10,000 fewer immigrants than she has sent on an annual average in the past. They are only shocked that British Guyana cannot send us every single citizen of that country who wishes to come." Clearly the forces of liberal immigration really wanted unlimited immigration into the United States. 295 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy The pro-immigrationists in 1965 also failed to prevent a requirement that the secretary of labor certify that there are insufficient Americans able and willing to perform the labor that the aliens intend to perform and that the employment of such aliens will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of American workers. Writing in the American Jewish Year Book, Liskofsky (1966, 174) noted that pro-immigration groups opposed these regulations but agreed to them in order to get a bill that ended the national origins provisions. After passage "they became intensely concerned. They voiced publicly the fear that the new, administratively cumbersome procedure might easily result in paralyzing most immigration of skilled and unskilled workers as well as of non-preference immigrants." Reflecting the long Jewish opposition to the idea that immigration policy should be in the national interest, the economic welfare of American citizens was viewed as irrelevant; securing high levels of immigration had become an end in itself The 1965 law is having the effect that it seems reasonable to suppose had been intended by its Jewish advocates all along: The Census Bureau projects that by the year 2050, European-derived peoples will no longer be a majority of the population of the United States. Moreover, multiculturalism has already become a powerful ideological and political reality. Although the proponents of the 1965 legislation continued to insist that the bill would not affect the ethnic balance of the United States or even impact its culture, it is difficult to believe that at least some proponents were unaware of the eventual implications. Opponents, certainly, quite clearly believed the legislation would indeed affect the ethnic balance of the United States. Given their intense involvement in the fine details of immigration legislation, their very negative attitudes toward the Northwestern European bias of pre- 1965 U.S. immigration policy, and their very negative attitudes toward the idea of an ethnic status quo embodied, for example, in the PCIN document Whom We Shall Welcome, it appears unlikely to suppose that organizations like the AJCommittee and the AJCongress were unaware of the inaccuracy of the projections of the effects of this legislation that were made by its supporters. Given the clearly articulated interests in ending the ethnic status quo evident in the arguments of anti-restrictionists from 1924 through 1965, the 1965 law would not have been perceived by its proponents as a victory unless they viewed it as ultimately changing the ethnic status quo. As noted, immediately after passage of the law, there was anxiety among immigration advocates to blunt the restrictive effects of administrative procedures on the number of immigrants. Revealingly, the anti-restrictionists viewed the 1965 law as a victory. After regularly condemning U.S. immigration law and championing the eradication of the national origins formula precisely because it had produced 296 The Culture Of Critique an ethnic status quo, the Congress bi-Weekly ceased publishing articles on this topic. Moreover, Lawrence Auster (1990, 3 Iff) shows that the supporters of the legislation repeatedly glossed over the distinction between quota and nonquota immigration and failed to mention the effect that the legislation would have on non-quota immigration. Projections of the number of new immigrants failed to take account of the well-known and often commented-upon fact that the old quotas favoring Western European countries were not being filled. Continuing a tradition of over 40 years, pro-immigration rhetoric presented the 1924 and 1952 laws as based on theories of racial superiority and as involving racial discrimination rather than in terms of an attempt to create an ethnic status quo. Even in 1952 Senator McCarran was aware of the stakes at risk in immigration policy. In a statement reminiscent of that of Representative William N. Vaile during the debates of the 1920s quoted above, McCarran stated, I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished. I take no issue with those who would praise the contributions which have been made to our society by people of many races, of varied creeds and colors. America is indeed a joining together of many streams which go to form a mighty river which we call the American way. However, we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain. The solution of the problems of Europe and Asia will not come through a transplanting of those problems en masse to the United States... I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation. (Senator Pat McCarran, Cong. Rec, March 2, 1953, 1518) 297 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy APPENDIX: JEWISH PRO-IMMIGRATION EFFORTS IN OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES The purpose of this appendix is to show that Jewish organizations have pursued similar pohcies regarding immigration in other Western societies. In France, the official Jewish community has consistently been in favor of immigration by non-Europeans. Recently the French Jewish community reacted strongly to pronouncements by actress Bridgette Bardot that "my country, France, has been invaded again by a foreign population, notably Muslims" {Forward, May 3, 1996, 4). Chaim Musiquant, executive director of CRIF, the umbrella organization for French Jewry, stated that Bardot's statement "skirt[ed] at the edge of racism." Jewish attitudes toward anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany can be seen by the following incident. A common (presumably self-deceptive) aspect of contemporary Jewish self-conceptualization is that Israel is an ethnically and culturally diverse society as a result of large scale immigration of Jews from different parts of the world (e.g., Peretz 1997, 8; Australia/Israel Review [issue 22.5, April 11-24, 1997]), so much so that it should be held up as a model of ethnic relations and pro-immigrant attitudes for the rest of the world. Recently B'nai B'rith, acting in response to what it viewed as indications of a resurgence of neo-Nazism and anti-immigration sentiment in Germany, received a grant from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization to bring German representatives to Israel because Israel is "a diverse, formative society, which, under strains of war, terrorism and massive, deprived, immigration, has strived to develop a just, democratic and tolerant society" ("Toleration and Pluralism: A Comparative Study; UNESCO Evaluation Report Request no. 9926). "Our view was that the multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi- religious and multi-fissured, democratic society of Israel... could provide a credible and worthwhile point of comparison for others coming from a similarly highly-charged society." In England, as in the United States, there was an ethnic battle beginning around 1900 in response to the influx of Eastern European Jews fleeing czarist anti-Semitism. Jewish political activity was instrumental in defeating an immigration restriction bill introduced by the Conservative government in 1904. In this case, the Anglo-Jewish political establishment represented by the Board of Deputies took a moderate stance, presumably because of fears that further immigration of Eastern European Jews would fan the flames of anti-Semitism. However, by this time the majority of the British Jewish community consisted of recent immigrants, and the Jewish Chronicle, the principle newspaper of the 298 The Culture Of Critique British Jewish community, campaigned vigorously against the bill (Cesarani 1994, 98). The anti-restrictionist forces won when Nathan Laski, president of the Manchester Old Hebrew Congregation, got Winston Churchill to oppose the bill. "Later Churchill freely admitted that, in the Grand Committee of the House of Commons, he had 'wrecked the Bill.' Led by Churchill, the Liberals, Evans- Gordon [a restrictionist Conservative MP] asserted, 'choked it [the Bill] with words until the time-limit was reached.'... A jubilant Laski wrote to Churchill: 'I have had over 20 years experience in elections in Manchester — & without flattery I tell you candidly — there has not been a single man able to arouse the interest that you have already done — thus I am sure of your future success'" (Alderman 1983, 71). In the following month Churchill won election from West Manchester, a district with a large Jewish electorate. Alderman (p. 72) shows that restrictionist legislation was popular except among the recent immigrants who had quickly become a numerical majority of the Jewish community, and, as indicated above, were already able to have a decisive influence on immigration legislation. However, a more moderate bill passed in 1905 despite Jewish opposition. In this case Jewish pressure succeeded in securing exemptions for victims of "prosecution" on religious or political grounds, but not "persecution" (p. 74). Again the Board of Deputies failed to make a major effort in opposition to the legislation, and Jewish Ministers of Parliament did not rise in opposition. However, for the recent immigrants, many of whom were on the electoral registers illegally, this was a major issue, and "at the general election of January 1906 these electorates wreaked a terrible vengeance upon those politicians who had supported the passage of the Aliens' Immigration Act" (p. 74). Jews overwhelmingly supported candidates who opposed the legislation, and in at least two districts their votes were decisive, including the West Manchester district that returned Winston Churchill. The new Liberal government did not repeal the legislation, but enforced it more leniently. Since the law was directed against "undesirables," there is considerable doubt that it prevented any significant number of Jews from entering, although it probably did encourage many Jews to go to the United States rather than England. It is noteworthy that in 1908 Churchill lost an election in his Manchester district when there were defections among his Jewish supporters displeased about his opposition to repealing the law as a prospective member of the cabinet and attracted to the Conservative position on support for religious schools. Churchill nonetheless remained a staunch supporter of Jewish interests until "in July 1910 Churchill, no longer dependent on Jewish votes, spoke in glowing terms of the 1905 legislation." As in the case of America, there are also indications that Jewish support for immigration extended beyond advocating Jewish immigration into England. The 299 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy Jewish Chronicle, the principle Jewish newspaper in England, opposed restriction on Commonwealth immigration in an editorial in the October 20, 1961 edition (p. 20). The editorial noted that Jews perceived the 1905 legislation as directed against them and stated, "all restrictions on immigration are in principle retrogressive steps, particularly for this country, and a disappointment to those throughout the world who would like to see the limitations on the freedom of movement reduced rather than increased. The issue is one of moral principle." During the 1970s the Conservative Party opposed immigration into Britain because, in the words of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain was in danger of being "swamped" by peoples who lacked "fundamental British characteristics" (Alderman 1983, 148). Conservative politicians attempted to obtain Jewish support on this issue, but the anti-immigration policy was condemned by official Jewish organizations, including the Board of Deputies, on the basis that "Since all British Jews are, or are descended from, immigrants, it was unethical — even immoral, for a Jew to support immigration control, or at least tighter immigration control" (Alderman 1983, 148-149). (In its editorial of February 24, 1978 [p. 22] the Jewish Chronicle supported a non-restrictionist immigration policy, but was careful to avoid framing the issue as a Jewish issue, presumably because a Conservative Jewish Minister of Parliament, Keith Joseph, had appealed to Jews as Jews to support restriction. The Chronicle was most concerned to deny the existence of a Jewish vote.) Jews who did support the government policy did so out of fear that increased immigration would lead to a fascist backlash and therefore increased anti-Semitism. In the case of Canada, Abella (1990, 234-235) notes the important contribution of Jews in bringing about a multicultural Canada and, in particular, in lobbying for more liberal immigration policies. Reflecting this attitude, Arthur Roebuck, attorney general of Ontario, was greeted "with thunderous applause" at a 1935 convention for the Zionist Organization of Canada when he stated that he looked "forward to the time when our economic conditions will be less severe than they are today and when we may open wide the gates, throw down the restrictions and make of Canada a Mecca for all the oppressed peoples of the world" (in M. Brown 1987, 256). Earlier in the century, there were conflicts between Jews and gentiles over immigration that were entirely analogous to the situation in England and the United States, including the anti-Semitic motivation of many attempting to restrict immigration (Abella & Troper 198 1, 52-55; M. Brown 1987, 239). As in the United States, Jews have strongly opposed majoritarian ethnocentric and nationalist movements, such as the Parti Quebecois, while remaining strong supporters of Zionism (M. Brown 1987, 260ff). Indeed, in the very close 1995 vote on Quebec separatism, the 300 The Culture Of Critique overwhelming support of Jews and other minorities for preserving links with Canada was blamed by separatist leader Jaques Parizeau for their defeat. It is remarkable that the sea change in immigration policy in the Western world occurred at approximately the same time (1962-1973), and in all countries the changes reflected the attitudes of elites rather than the great mass of citizens. In the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia public opinion polls of European-derived peoples have consistently shown overwhelming rejection of immigration by non-European-derived peoples (Betts 1988; Brimelow 1995; Hawkins 1989; Layton-Henry 1992). A consistent theme has been that immigration policy has been formulated by elites with control of the media and that efforts have been made by political leaders of all major parties to keep fear of immigration off the political agenda (e.g., Betts 1988; Layton-Henry 1992, 82). In Canada the decision to abandon a "White Canada" policy came from government officials, not from elected politicians. The White Canada policy was effectively killed by regulations announced in 1962, and Hawkins (1989, 39) comments, "This important policy change was made not as a result of parliamentary or popular demand, but because some senior officials in Canada, including Dr. [George] Davidson [Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and later a senior administrator at the United Nations] rightly saw that Canada could not operate effectively within the United Nations, or in the multiracial Commonwealth, with the millstone of a racially discriminatory immigration policy round her neck." In neither Australia nor Canada was there ever any popular sentiment to end the older European bias of immigration policy. The primary and identical motivation of Canadian and Australian politicians in trying to exclude first the Chinese, then other Asian migrants and finally all potential non-white immigrants, was the desire to build and preserve societies and political systems in their hard-won, distant lands very like those of the United Kingdom. They also wished to establish without challenge the primary role there of her founding peoples of European origin. . . Undisputed ownership of these territories of continental size was felt to be confirmed forever, not only by the fact of possession, but by the hardships and dangers endured by the early explorers and settlers; the years of back-breaking work to build the foundations of urban and rural life... The idea that other peoples, who had taken no part in these pioneering efforts, might simply arrive in large numbers to exploit important local 301 Jewish Involvement in Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy resources, or to take advantage of these earlier settlement efforts, was anathema. (Hawkins 1989, 23) Given the elite origins of the non-European immigration policies that emerged throughout the West during this period despite popular opposition, it is of considerable interest that very little publicity was given to certain critical events. In Canada, the Report of the Special Joint Committee of 1975 was a critical event in shaping non-European immigration policy of the 1978 immigration law, but "sad to say, since the press failed to comment on the report and the electronic media had remained uninvolved, the Canadian public heard little of it" (Hawkins 1989, 59-60). Looking back on this national debate on immigration and population which lasted for six months at most, it can be said now that it was a very effective one-time consultation with the immigration world, and with those Canadian institutions and organizations to whom immigration is an important matter. It did not reach "the average Canadian" for one simple reason: The Minister and Cabinet did not trust the average Canadian to respond in a positive way on this issue, and thought this would create more trouble than it was worth. As a result of this view, they did not want to commit the funds to organize extensive public participation, and made only a minimal effort to mobilize the media on behalf of a truly national debate. The principle benefit of this approach was that the badly needed new Immigration Act was on the statute book only a little later than Mr. [Robert] Andras [Minister of Manpower and Immigration] and his colleagues [Hawkins emphasizes Andras' Deputy Minister Alan Gotlieb as the second prime mover of this legislation] originally envisaged. The principle loss was what some would regard as a golden opportunity to bring a great many individual Canadians together, to discuss the future of their vast under-populated land. (Hawkins 1989, 63) Only after the 1978 law was in effect did the government embark on a public information campaign to inform Canadians of their new immigration policy (Hawkins 1989, 79). Hawkins (1989) and Betts (1988) make similar points about the changes in Australian immigration policy. In Australia the impetus for change in immigration policy came from small groups of reformers that began appearing in some Australian universities in the 1960s (Hawkins 1989, 22). Betts (1988, 302 The Culture Of Critique 99ff) in particular emphasizes the idea that the intellectual, academic, and media elite "trained in the humanities and social sciences" (p. 100) developed a sense of being a member of a morally and intellectually superior ingroup battling against Australian parochial nonintellectuals as an outgroup. As in the United States, there is a perception among Jews that a multicultural society will be a bulwark against anti-Semitism: Miriam Faine, an editorial committee member of the Australian Jewish Democrat stated, "The strengthening of multicultural or diverse Australia is also our most effective insurance policy against anti- semitism. The day Australia has a Chinese Australian Governor General I would feel more confident of my freedom to live as a Jewish Australian" (in McCormack 1994, 11). As in the United States, family unification became a centerpiece of immigration policy in Canada and Australia and led to the "chaining" phenomenon mentioned above. Hawkins shows that in Canada, family reunion was the policy of liberal Ministers of Parliament desiring higher levels of Third World immigration (p. 87). In Australia, family reunion became increasingly important during the 1980s, which also saw a declining importance of Australian development as a criterion for immigration policy (p. 150). Reflecting these trends, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry passed a resolution at its December 1, 1996, meeting to express "its support for the proposition that Australia's long term interests are best served by a non-discriminatory immigration policy which adopts a benevolent attitude to refugees and family reunion and gives priority to humanitarian considerations." The main Jewish publication, the Australia/Israel Review, has consistently editorialized in favor of high levels of immigration of all racial and ethnic groups. It has published unflattering portraits of anti-restrictionists (e.g., Kapel 1997) and, in an effort at punishment and intimidation, published a list of 2000 people associated with Pauline Hanson's anti-immigration One Nation party ("Gotcha! One Nation's Secret Membership List"; July 8, 1998). It seems fair to conclude that Jewish organizations have uniformly advocated high levels of immigration of all racial and ethnic groups into Western societies and have also advocated a multicultural model for these societies. 303 Chapter 8 ... Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Deasy (#0)
Jews are nutjobs.
A rainbow coalition against Jews doesn't require Whites or Pro-Whites. It can be just as brown or anti-white as you like.
Crazy like foxes. One whole standard deviation above Anglo-Saxons in terms of intelligence. Their Bat/Bar-Mitzvah is an intelligence test. Without passing it, you can't breed as a regular Jew. That's one reason MacDonald is interested in their self-directed evolutionary path.
The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country. We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible — and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever. (Raab 1993b, 23) And so we have THEIR immigration policy.
And an absolute grip on our overwhelmed demographics. This is nothing short of nation-wrecking. It's unforgivable.
|
||
|
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
[Register]
|
||