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Title: Anti-Semitism in the United States
Its history and causes
Author: Lee J. Levinger
Release date: March 21, 2024 [eBook #73221]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Bloch Publishing Co., Inc, 1925
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE UNITED STATES ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Misspelled words have been corrected. These are identified by
the ♦ symbol in the text and are shown immediately below the
paragraph in which they appear. Archaic and alternate spellings are
left unchanged (e.g. neurones, synagog).
Other changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE
UNITED STATES
ITS HISTORY AND CAUSES
BY
RABBI LEE J. LEVINGER, Ph.D.
Author of “_A Jewish Chaplain In France_”
[Illustration (publisher logo)]
NEW YORK
BLOCH PUBLISHING CO., Inc.
“_THE JEWISH BOOK CONCERN_”
1925
Copyright, 1925, by
Lee J. Levinger
Printed in the United States
TO MY PARENTS
WHO FIRST TAUGHT ME THE MEANING OF TOLERANCE
_And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too._
William Blake.
PREFACE
This study, which was submitted as one of the requirements for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, has
meant the assembling of personal and theoretical interests of various
types. It has two chapters of pure theory on which the practical
application is based. To the student of social philosophy or sociology,
then, chapters 1 and 2 will contain the essentials of the study. The
general reader, not interested in the technical basis but in the
conclusions, may prefer to omit these chapters from the reading, and
to proceed from the introduction directly to the applications of this
theory in American history and specifically to the problem of the Jew
in America, as developed in chapters 3 to 9.
Grateful acknowledgments are due to Professor Edgar A. Singer, Jr.,
of the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Julius Drachsler of the
College of the City of New York, and Mr. Leon L. Lewis, Secretary
of the Anti-Defamation League, for their very stimulating aid, both
prior to and during the writing of this study, and to my wife for her
assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.
Lee J. Levinger
_Wilmington, Delaware, May, 1925._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction: A Statement of the Problem 9
I. The “Group Mind,” a Definition and a
Description 18
II. Groups in Contact 32
III. Intolerance 45
IV. American History, a Development of Groups 56
V. The World War and Its Aftermath 67
VI. The Ku Klux Klan and Other Group Reactions 74
VII. Anti-Semitism 85
VIII. The Retort to Anti-Semitism 96
IX. The Future of the American Mind 111
INTRODUCTION
A STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The existence of an anti-Semitic movement in the United States of
America since the World War is a paradox that attracts attention at
once. The most ancient and most pervasive form of intolerance is
now at home in a nation founded by revolution and dedicated to the
principles of freedom and tolerance. How can such a movement exist in
such a nation? The apparent contradiction leads us at once into the
many contradictions of the psychology of large groups of human beings,
which both parallels and contradicts the simpler psychology of their
constituent individuals. This is a leading question, to answer which
we must go as deeply as we can into the mind of the group, into the
relation of groups to the smaller groups of which they are composed
and of those smaller groups to each other, into the genesis and
implications of tolerance and intolerance.
This theoretical study completed, we shall then have to verify the
principles there worked out by application to the difficult and crucial
problem of the present study. If a theory of group and sub-group
can explain the existence and the development of anti-Semitism in
America, it will have solved a problem of exceptional complexity and
significance, one central to the whole field. This will involve a study
of the mind of the American people, in brief outline, with its various
movements of intolerance in their bearing on the present one. It will
also necessitate a slight study of the various anti-Semitic examples,
historic and contemporary, from which the American movement derives
in part. It will conclude with a consideration of the future of the
American people as a united group, taking into view the tendencies of
the sub-groups within the bounds of their common nation, or over-group.
Anti-Semitism is the modern form of the ancient prejudice against the
Jew; it began in Germany in 1871, directly after the Franco-Prussian
War, and bases its opposition to the Jews on the race theory.
Anti-Judaism is, of course, much older, as old as the people against
whom it was directed. In most ancient times, as represented by the
Egyptian taskmasters and the Haman of the Book of Esther, it was like
any other national hatred or prejudice. Later it took on a distinctly
religious coloring, so that we find a Philo going to Rome to appeal
for the Jewish colony in Alexandria or a Josephus writing a defense
of his people against Apion. With the growth of Christianity into a
persecuting body, anti-Judaism became strictly a religious matter,
based on the New Testament story that the Jews were responsible for
the death of Jesus. Medieval laws on the Jews were, then, often
based on the principle of expiation, such as the yellow badge which
distinguished the wearer when he left the compulsory shelter of the
Ghetto. A different form of religious motivation was shown in the
frequent accusations of desecrating the Host or of using the blood
of a Christian child in preparing the unleavened bread of Passover,
which appears in the Canterbury Tales and was revived as recently as
1911 in the notorious Beilis case at Kiev, Russia. Along with this
went occasional mob outbreaks such as occur against the negroes in our
Southern states, and still more rarely decrees of expulsion, which
drove the entire Jewish population from England in 1294, from Spain in
1492, and from other countries at other times, for a longer or shorter
period.
The actual applications of this religious anti-Judaism were far too
many to enumerate here, ranging from the prohibition of tilling the
soil to compulsory attendance at a Christian sermon, as in Browning’s
“Holy Cross Day.” Counteracting it were the frequent intercourse and
occasional intermarriage through the Middle Ages, the paid protection
of the Holy Roman Emperor for his {Kammerknechte}, the toleration
of the Moors and later of Holland, finally the emancipation of the
French Revolution on abstract grounds of the Rights of Man. Religious
discrimination was forbidden in the American Constitution, so that
anti-Judaism of the religious type had no footing in the new nation,
strong as it had previously been in several of the colonies. In
addition, the number of Jews in America was very small, so that
discrimination against them might exist in principle but could
have little exercise in practise. And those few were often wealthy
and cultured descendants of the old Spanish Jewry. During the most
of the nineteenth century the Jews entering the country met the same
difficulties as other immigrants, with very little variation.
But then the problem changed; the number of Jews increased from 3,000
in 1800 to 250,000 in 1880. Some of these achieved wealth and began to
associate with non-Jewish social circles. The opposition to them now
became largely social. They were excluded from many hotels and summer
resorts, from clubs, college fraternities and the like. This phase of
the problem was often acute but never important, and is here mentioned
merely in passing, though it will have its bearing on the theory to
be developed. In addition, the religious prejudice continued, similar
to that between Christian denominations but stronger, owing to the
frequent teaching of Jewish responsibility for the crucifixion. These
two aspects of anti-Judaism persisted as the only ones in America until
after the World War, and these were sporadic, and often opposed by the
tendency of our political democracy and by various groups of religious
liberals.
Meanwhile, modern racialism had been born and with it modern
anti-Semitism, the attack on the Jew as a member of a different
race, inferior or at least unassimilable by the Aryan. Writers
against the Jew no longer turned for their weapons to Eisenmenger’s
“Endecktes Judentum” of 1701, with its religious criticism and
personal strictures. The new classics are Werner Sombart’s “Die
Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben” and Drumont’s “La France Juive.” An
elaborate scientific basis has been constructed, on which a movement
of opposition was erected, apparently much the same as that of the
Inquisition or of Apion. One of the conclusions of the present study
will be that it is in fact the same, and that the racial theory can
be almost overlooked in estimating the actual causes and processes
of anti-Semitism. It would be an interesting, though not essential
task, to examine this racial ♦theory in detail and determine how much
scientific authenticity it may possess. In Russia the conditions
of autocracy threatened by liberalism and war led to official
anti-Semitism, with pogroms or massacres of the Jews actually led
by army officers. In Germany the officialism and social stratification
led to discrimination against Jews in the appointment of judges,
university professors and army officers. In France anti-Semitism became
a part of royalism and clericalism, and from the military and royalist
group came the Dreyfus case. In England anti-Semitism was chiefly
literary; Hillaire Belloc proves the Jews to be aliens who should all
be sent to Palestine, while Gilbert K. Chesterton visits Palestine and
reports that the Jews there are terrible creatures and ought to be
excluded from the Holy Land!
♦ “thory” replaced with “theory”
But all this time there was no anti-Semitism, as a literary, political
or economic movement in the United States. That was a product of the
period after the World War. There was merely religious prejudice of
the orthodox and social ostracism of the elite among gentile society.
The Jew had not even attracted the special attention of the various
anti-alien movements in American history, owing to his small numbers
and frequent rapid Americanization. It seemed as though anti-Semitism
was a movement foreign to American life and institutions. Now, however,
the movement exists and may be considered briefly in four phases.
1. The first to be considered is the attempt to limit the percentage
of Jews in American universities. The “numerus clausus,” typical of
Russia under the Czars, has been one of the favorite projects of the
anti-Semitic parties in various European countries, working either
through their representatives in the parliaments or through their
sympathizers in the universities themselves. Whether the motive was to
brand the Jew as inferior mentally, or to make him so through lack of
education, is hard to say—probably it is merely another manifestation
of the process which this paper aims to trace.
In American institutions of higher learning there has been a growing
problem of the increase of entering classes, as well as a growing
perplexity at the number of Jewish immigrants who seek an advanced
education. These young people often lack American manners and
background, standing out from the great mass of the student body,
whether for good or bad is immaterial. What more natural than that
some would attempt to solve the two problems at once by excluding
a certain percentage of these objectionable persons, at the same time
cutting down enrollment? I do not speak of rumors that this purpose
has been achieved in certain institutions by personal interviews,
psychological tests, and the like, even though statistics seem to bear
out this interpretation. I consider only the Harvard incident, which is
public and official.
In June 1922 President Lowell of Harvard, in his address at the
graduation exercises drew attention to the double phase of the problem,
the increase of registration and the danger to the social and personal
standard of the university, and recommended its full investigation by
committees of the faculty and board of trustees of the university.
The sensation caused by this bringing into the open of a subject long
covertly agitated, especially in view of the large Jewish population
of Boston, and fairly large registration at Harvard, was extreme. The
matter came to an end April 9, 1923, when the committee recommendation
was accepted by the Board of Overseers for the University. The report
recommended:
In the administration of rules for admission Harvard College maintains
its traditional policy of freedom from discrimination on grounds
of race or religion. Concerning proportional representation, your
committee is unanimous in recommending that no departure be made
from the policy that has so long approved itself—the policy of equal
opportunity for all, regardless of race or religion. Any action
liable to interpretation as an acceptance of the principle of racial
discrimination would to many seem like a dangerous surrender of
traditional ideals.
The report even avoids recommending any test of personal fitness which
might be interpreted as a cover for racial or religious discrimination.
2. A further expression of anti-Semitism appeared in the form of
books and magazine articles. “The Cause of World Unrest,” an English
book, was reprinted in 1920 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons of New York; “The
Protocols of the Meetings of the Zionist Men of Wisdom” by Small,
Maynard and Co. of Boston in the same year; “The Jews in America” by
Burton J. Hendrick, appeared as a series of articles in the World’s
Work, and was issued later as a book by Doubleday Page and Co. of
New York in 1923. Periodicals such as “The Searchlight” of Atlanta, the
“Fellowship Forum” of Washington, D. C., and “The American Standard” of
New York City (to mention only a few of a large number) conducted an
active campaign against Jews and Catholics, which still continues.
Most conspicuous of all was the long series of articles on the Jewish
problem carried by the Dearborn Independent of Dearborn, Mich., the
personal organ of Mr. Henry Ford. This series began in May, 1920; the
four booklets containing their reprinted form are dated, the first
on November, 1920; the fourth, May 1922. They take ostensibly the
position that international finance, under the leadership of certain
Jews, is endeavoring to rule the world. Actually, however, they use any
anti-Semitic theme that comes to hand, from the race theory to articles
on the “Jewish liquor trust” and “the Jewish aids of Benedict Arnold.”
Their chief arsenal of material is the Protocols of the Learned Elders
of Zion, referred to above, a purported record of secret meetings held
by leaders of world Jewry with the object of overthrowing the gentile
nations and ruling the world themselves. This work first saw the light
in Russia in 1901 and was utilized in 1905 as part of the propaganda
against the abortive revolution of that year; it was the work of
one Serge Nilus. Later study has shown it to be a forgery, largely
copied from a French political pamphlet directed against Napoleon III
and published in Brussels in 1865 by Maurice Joly under the title,
“Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu”! The Russian
editions of this work, and those in German, as well, included virulent
attacks on Britain and America as representatives of liberalism, and
therefore of Judaism; naturally, these have been omitted from the
English versions.
3. This agitation could not remain theoretical—in fact, probably the
theory was itself a late product of a broader tendency. The Johnson
immigration act, setting the quota of immigrants to be admitted to
the United States on the basis of their proportion in this country in
1890, was avowedly planned on a racial basis to encourage immigrants
from northern and western Europe, and exclude those from eastern and
southern Europe and from other continents. Secretly there seems to have
been both anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic sentiment involved, as
certain partisan publications boast quite openly.
By far the most significant expression of anti-Semitism in the United
States is the Ku Klux Klan, which will later be considered in some
detail. At this point it is sufficient to point out that the Klan was
organized in 1915 by William J. Simmons of Atlanta, Ga., and became a
national movement in 1920. Its name and much of its ritual are taken
from the Ku Klux Klan of 1867–71, but its motives are quite different,
for the old Klan was a local movement intended to protect the defeated
Confederacy, to overawe the negroes and to oppose the North; while
the modern Klan is not sectional, but in every section opposes the
negro, the Jew, the Catholic and the foreign-born. Its membership is
exclusively “white, gentile, Protestant American” and it therefore
claims to be the only “one hundred per cent. Americans”. The Klan
defends its purpose and attacks the proscribed groups by business
boycott, political opposition, sometimes even by threats or by physical
violence. The Klan is the most important symptom at hand of the nature
of anti-Semitism in the United States, beside being a most significant
type of social grouping and of social motive.
4. A final type of anti-Semitism in America was a direct importation
from Europe through a group of Russian emigrés, some of them living
in this country as private citizens, others as employees of the
section on Russia of the Department of State. These men were bitterly
anti-Soviet, anti-radical, and (whether for propaganda purposes,
or through the convictions of the Russian aristocracy as a whole)
bitterly anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism is an article in the creed of
every reactionary movement in Europe, with the single exception of
the Italian Fascisti, and is strongest of all among the Russians. It
seems to have been these people who persuaded Mr. Henry Ford of the
authenticity of the Protocols, and introduced these to America as a
whole. They seem also to have been active in the anti-radical agitation
of the post-war period, which tried to identify foreigner, radical
and Jew in the mind of the American people, and to attribute the
Russian revolution, the Bolshevist government and the radical groups in
America, alike to insidious Jewish influence.
As this tendency was not as public as the others, I give some proof
of its existence. It was discussed in Hearst’s International Magazine
in 1923 in a series of articles by the editor, Norman Hapgood; and in
the Bnai Brith Magazine of October and November, 1924, in two articles
by Jacob Spolansky, a former agent of the United States Department of
Justice, who was employed to hunt down radicals and if possible to find
Jews among them. As the most official statement, I quote Mr. Louis
Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, in his annual
report to that body, delivered November 13, 1921.[1]
The committee conducted an investigation with a view to discovering
the identity of those who instigated the attacks against the Jews
of America. It was found that they consisted of a group of Russian
emigrés who had wormed themselves into the confidence of some
Americans who, in turn, had succeeded in securing the assistance of
others whose co-operation was given either because they were gullible
and believed the fantastic inventions of men schooled in intrigue in
the Russian police system, or because they already cherished ill-will
against Jews and were ready to assist in any movement through which
they could satisfy real or fancied grudges.
In the report of the same body, October 19, 1919,[2] reference is made
to the hearing before the sub-committee of the Judiciary Committee of
the United States Senate in February 1919, when—
Dr. George Simons, who had been for a number of years in Russia,
testified regarding the alleged activities of Jews in the Bolshevist
movement in Russia and stated that the present conditions there are
due, in large part, to the activities of Yiddish agitators from the
East Side of New York City who went to Russia immediately following
the overthrow of the Czar. Dr. Simons stated further that the
Bolshevist movement in Russia was being supported financially and
morally by certain elements on the East Side of New York City.
There is, then, an anti-Semitic movement in America, and has been since
1919 or 1920. Its philosophy of racialism, exclusiveness and “hundred
per cent.” Americanism, is derived largely from the Voelkische
parties of Germany and other nations of Europe, which lay great stress
on Aryan race and especially on its Nordic or Teutonic branch. The
extreme of this position is found in the apparently well reasoned
position of Burton J. Hendricks, who attempts to prove that the Spanish
and German Jews were desirable because white, but that the Russian
Jews are undesirable immigrants because they are descended from the
Chazars, a Tartar tribe which embraced Judaism in the ninth century.
The premises of this writer seem untenable, and the conclusions do
not necessarily follow on them. Much of this anti-Semitic literature
and public action seems to be based on similar rationalizations of
intolerance, of group prejudice.
In studying this anti-Semitic movement in America as a crucial example
of the relations of group and sub-group, I stand in the contrary
danger, that of rationalizing the inferiority complex of a persecuted
group. My only justification for facing this danger is that nobody can
approach this type of problem without one danger or the other, and the
subject is too vital to be entirely neglected. I can only hope that my
analysis of the underlying problem of the nature of human groups and
of their interrelations may be made in such a scientific spirit that
the application of my theory to the special problem of anti-Semitism in
the United States may be of some value in the clearing up of this great
field of human action.
CHAPTER I.
THE “GROUP MIND”
A DEFINITION AND A DESCRIPTION
The causes of intolerance rest, not in what men say but in what
they do. The reasons alleged for dislike or suspicion of the Jew
are valuable merely for showing a state of mind in the anti-Semite
himself, not for revealing the actual reasons for his attitude. For
that reason I shall disregard these reasons very largely in searching
for the causes of anti-Semitism in America. Instead, I shall turn to
the field of social study to find out how groups of men act toward one
another, and why and under what circumstances intolerance is one of
their by-products. I shall apply to the phenomena of group life the
method of behaviorism, now being adopted by sociology from its original
field of psychology, in such definitions as that of E. C. Lindeman:[3]
“Sociology is the science of collective behavior.”
1.
The prevailing view of students of society seems now to be that society
is a natural phenomenon on the mental plane. Human society is not now
regarded, as by Buckle, as a reflection of environment, even though
the importance of physical background and racial constitution must
be recognized. As Charles A. Ellwood says,[4] “Society is a group of
psychically interacting individuals.” “The essential element in the
social process is the psychical element.”[5] That is to say, mental
material—instincts, emotions, feeling, and ideas—are the plane on which
groups of individuals combine into social structures, operate in social
functions, develop to social progress. Relations between individuals
(except for the limited biological function) are mental relations,
carried on through physical media such as postures, speech and writing.
These mental interactions of human beings are not an artificial
construct from primitive egoism by the social contract or any other
method. William MacDougall is almost alone in holding that the social
sentiments are derived from the self-regarding ones through the
operation of the tender emotion and the parental instinct. Hobhouse
says:[6] “The conception of a primitive egoism on which sociality
is somehow overlaid is without foundation in either biology or
psychology.” John Dewey puts this view most forcibly:
[7]The fact is that the life, the experience, of the individual
man, is already saturated, thoroughly interpenetrated, with social
inheritance and references.... Education, language, and other means of
communication are infinitely more important categories of knowledge
than any of those exploited by absolutists. And as soon as the
methodological battle of instrumentalism is won ... the two services
that will stand to the credit of instrumentalism will be calling
attention first to the connection of intelligence with a genuine
future, and second, to the social constitution of personal, even of
private experience, above all of any experience that has assumed the
knowledge form.
And Ellwood adds—expressing here the general opinion of both
sociologists and modern social philosophers—“All human consciousness
is socially conditioned.... This is as true of the racially inherited
aspects of consciousness—the feeling-instincts—as it is of the acquired
traits.” Man is a social animal and his sociality is one of the few
unescapable things about him. He is born in some kind of a social
group; he gets the most of his ideas from his association with others;
his whole development is a give-and-take in which the take is from the
first, and often remains, the greater element.
But the recognition of this fact does not bind us to any one
explanation of it. We do not need to accept the “consciousness of
kind” of Giddings, the “herd instinct” of Trotter, or the “imitation”
of Tarde,—in fact, we may very well consider that there is no one
principle to explain so universal and complex a phenomenon; that
these terms and others like them are in no sense explanations, but
merely different words for the same fact, that man is a naturally
gregarious or social being. We may rather turn to the more generalized
modes of expressing this conception, the group mind or general will, as
developed by Durkheim, Wundt and in our day by Baldwin, MacDougall, and
others.
2.
Before attacking this problem directly, I must clear away several
misconceptions of the “group mind,” which I cannot accept as a part
of this theory. First, this thesis need not exclude the operation of
physical and biological forces on social groups, any more than it
excludes their operation on any individual, who is also a psychological
unit. Society may well be a unit, just as the individual is, in a world
of varying forces—climate, birth rates, and the like. Second, a theory
of group mind may be empirical, and need not necessarily rest on an
idealistic conception of the {Volksgeist}. By adopting the historical
method, rather than the statistical, relying on values to indicate our
problem rather than trying to express it in terms of natural science,
we shall find ourselves treating the theory of the group in a realistic
and empirical way, eschewing the dogmatism of applying a priori
principles to human material, and the equal fallacy of considering
minds in the same terms as chemical elements.[8]
Third, a modern social psychology need not be a literal transcription
of Durkheim or Wundt, relying on an antiquated psychology for its
analogies and its basic conceptions. A theory of group mind today must
recognize that personality is not always a unity, that it is never
a complete unity; the vast field of the unconscious in mental life
has just been opened to view. Both of these conceptions apply to the
mental life of men in great masses as truly as when alone. Neither the
individual nor the group is something hard, fixed and static; neither
can be summed up as a group of faculties or a system of ideas. Both
individual and group must be conceived in process, to take the
words of Lindemann,[9] as “the total equipment with which man responds
to his environment, all that enters into behavior from the side of
human nature.”
Some views of group mind are vitiated for our present purpose by the
narrow limits they impose, or by the one-sided way in which they arrive
at their definitions. This applies especially to those who use the mob
as the typical group and consider “crowd-mindedness” (to use Everett
Dean Martin’s term) as a synonym of sociality. The crowd, the herd,
the mob are various terms for an exceptional type of group of human
beings, bound together by physical presence, transformed by a powerful
emotion, launched finally into unified and often violent action. But as
Baldwin says:[10] “The mind of the crowd is essentially a temporary,
unorganized, ineffective thing.... The mob is a by-product of society,
it is the exaggeration of the normal.” Finally, the group mind need
not be expressed entirely in terms of instinctive adaptation, any
more than the mind of the individual; either may have many types, may
be instinctive or impulsive or rational, may have a growing sense of
rationality and a growing power of independent, deliberate action. In
opposition to MacDougall, with his elaborate system of instincts and
sentiments, we may place the vast majority of students of the problem,
Cooley, Platt, Ellwood, Baldwin, and so on. Even when the members of
a group all use reason to a very high degree, they still constitute a
group if they have organization and some method of reaching a general
decision, as in a congress, a national association of scientists, or a
business corporation.
Obviously, human beings form many kinds of groups, and there would
then, on an empirical basis, be many varieties of group minds.
Individuals fall into many classes, as we all know, primitive and
cultured, ignorant and educated, the infant, the child and the adult,
the moron and the genius. So with the group. There are large and
small groups, from families to nations; temporary and permanent ones,
from the theatre audience to the church; simple and complex, from
town meeting to a Federal union, comprising states, counties, cities
and townships; unorganized and organized; groups founded on physical
presence, like a baseball team, and international bodies of scientists
or philosophers who may form “a school of thought” but may never hold
a meeting. The study of these various types is not only interesting in
itself; it may help us in formulating the principle of the mind of the
group as a whole. To begin with the definition of the primitive group
by Franz Boaz:
[11]There are a number of primitive hordes to whom every stranger not
a member of the horde is an enemy, and where it is right to damage
the enemy to the best of one’s power and ability, and if possible to
kill him. This custom is based largely on the idea of the solidarity
of the horde, and on the feeling that it is the duty of every member
of the horde to destroy all possible enemies.... The feeling of the
fellowship in the horde corresponds to the feeling of unity in the
tribe, to a recognition of bonds established by a neighborhood of
habitat, and further on to the feeling of fellowship among members of
nations.
“He who is not with me is against me,”[12] said Jesus for the religious
group. How far we have proceeded from the horde in our civilized
nations, and how near we are to it still in the essential character of
the mind of the group!
3.
Does the group mind exist? Not as a super-consciousness, external to
the individuals composing it—that view has been discarded long ago. But
as a category which is needed to explain many phenomena, and which we
can then proceed to study and explain in greater detail, a term with
pragmatic value, such as “life” or “mind.” “Life” is no longer used as
a principle of explanation, as a vital principle which is infused into
dead matter, but life exists, for all that, and we can see its effects
and study them. “Mind” is not something separate and distinct from
the body in which it dwells or from the world in which it acts, but
we know that mind is a useful and necessary category in which to
include a whole phase of living being, especially of human life. “Group
Mind” is the same sort of category as these. Just as mind inheres in
the neurones and is coincident with the chemical changes in them, and
yet cannot be summed up by chemical changes; so group mind inheres in
the brains, of individuals and is coincident with individual ideas and
acts, yet cannot be summed up as so many individual responses but as
the unified response of a group of persons at once.
Morris Ginsberg, in his Psychology of Society, opposes any type of
group theory, as he sees only individuals in a social environment; he
holds that the group may have unity of content but not of process, of
ideas and ideals but not of mind. Floyd H. Allport speaks of “The group
fallacy,”[13] “the error of substituting the group as a whole as a
principle of explanation in place of the individuals in the group,” to
which Emory S. Bogardus replies in his discussion that [14]“if there is
a group fallacy, there is also an individual fallacy.”
On the other hand, so radical a behaviorist as E. C. Lindeman remarks,
[15]“The group is a plurality of individuals, but what the group does
is not plural but singular.” [16]“From the purely descriptive point of
view, the group becomes a new quality.” Dr. M. M. Davis puts it this
way: [17]“Millions of brain cells are co-ordinated to think as one
brain. Psychology tries to tell how. Millions of brains co-ordinate
themselves and function in many ways as one brain. The how of that
marvel is for sociology.” Giddings calls the group mind “the concert
of thought, emotion and will” of individual minds. Cooley says:
[18]“The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in
organization.” Ellwood phrases it somewhat differently:
[19]The only unity we have in society is a unity of process.
The individual consciousness is unified both structurally and
functionally.... There is a collective mental life, but no social
mind in the same sense in which there is an individual mind.
Dr. Baldwin sums up his view in the last sentences of the Social
and Ethical Interpretations:
[20]Society is the form of natural organization which ethical
personalities come into in their growth. Ethical personality is the
form of natural development which individuals grow into who live in
social relationships. The true analogy, then, is not that which likens
it to a physiological organism, but rather that which likens it to a
psychological organization.
And so, if this were primarily a historical study, I might go over many
similar and differing theories, which consider the group as a unity on
the mental plane, that is, in one sense or another, as a group mind.
The material is still being collected for this study, the essential
points of view still being defined, and such important factors as
instinct and intelligence are still being redefined with the rapid
progress of science today. As several of the terms cited above suggest,
the difference between the individual as a mind and the group of
individuals as a mind is always given and must always be given in terms
of structure. In the words of Lindeman:
[21]The individual may be viewed as an integration of functioning
organs, and the group merely an integration of functions.... There
can be nothing organic about society or a group; there can be only a
series of relations, the results of specific responses to specific
situations.
Not to cite more opinions on a point on which there seems general
agreement, we may take it for granted that the chief, perhaps the only
difference historically pointed out between the mind of one man and of
a group of men is that the man has a brain and a nervous system, while
the group has neither, but operates apparently through the brains and
nervous systems of its members. But in their functioning, in their
activities, the mind of the man and of the nation or other group are so
similar as to be almost indistinguishable.
Of course, this distinction depends, finally, on the definition of mind
which we are prepared to accept. Dennes gives an adequate summary and
criticism of Durkheim, for instance, who considered collective mind to
consist of the collective ideas or representations of a society;
and of Wundt, who considered mind an integration of processes, not
of ideas, and therefore sought for the group mind in the collective
results of group mental process, in speech, religion and custom. But
Dennes himself seems confused by the need of defining mind without
regard to bodily structure. He says: [22]“Individual minds or persons
have or produce bodies as well as objective mental products. But social
groups are not minds and have no bodies. They are associations of
minds.” MacDougall defines mind as [23]“An organized system of mental
or purposive forces,” and continues, “In the sense so defined, every
highly organized human society may be properly said to possess a group
mind.” While MacDougall’s definition seems circular in nature, it still
recognizes that a functional definition of mind can make no distinction
of structure, whether any particular mind is associated with one or
many bodies. Lindeman calls mind [24]“the total equipment with which
man responds to his environment”, which seems more than one can accept,
for “total equipment” would include hands and feet, as well as mind.
A more precise statement of the same general tenor appears in Dr.
Singer’s Mind as Behavior:
[25]Consciousness is not something inferred from behavior; it _is_
behavior. Or, more accurately, our belief in consciousness is an
expectation of probable behavior based on an observation of actual
behavior, a belief to be confirmed or refuted by more observation, as
any other belief in a fact is to be tried out.
Thus, any functional definition of mind that has no reference to brain
or nervous system, must apply and does apply in the group of persons
in exactly the same sense as to the single individual. If there is
“unified behavior,” if there is “organized system of purposes,” if
there is “response to environment,” then we have mind, whether the
behavior, response, or purpose dwell in one or two or many bodies.
One question remains, and a most perplexing one. How can one
distinguish between a group mind and a group purpose, or the accidental
coincidence of many minds and many purposes? A flock of migrating birds
has no group mind—each bird would travel south at the same time and
the same rate of speed, were there no flock at all. Or still lower
forms, such as unicellular organisms, may move simultaneously to warmer
waters. On the other extreme, the hordes of Huns led by Attila had a
group purpose in their migration; the leader gave the word, and the
followers leaped together to their horses’ backs to ride from Asia into
Europe. But when a half million negroes migrate from the southern to
the northern states in a few years, coming family by family, as the
opportunity affords, yet with a steady tendency of drift, is that a
group mind or the accidental agreement of many individuals? Is it mind
or minds? And the same problem is present in a declaration of war, or
the victory of a foot-ball team, or the adoption of a new fashion of
clothes. When does the group act and when the individual members? When
do we have the mind of all, when the mind of each?
To this crucial problem I must present one qualification and one
answer. The qualification is: the group never acts except through
its constituent individuals, any more than the mind acts without its
brain cells and bodily organs. The difference between the act of all
and the act of each is not a complete disjunction but a difference
of emphasis, of interpretation, of purpose. When the army marches,
every soldier goes ahead; when the nation elects its president, the
millions of voters cast their ballots; when the church adopts a creed
or reforms its ritual, the many believers experience a change in their
faith and their hope. Not that group opinion need be unanimous; it is
rather a mode of general consent by which unified action can arise
out of conflicting opinions, by which many individuals are absorbed
into a group mind. Thus in many, perhaps in most cases we cannot say
definitely: this is group mind, not personal preference, or this
is individual action, and the group has nothing to do with it. The
problem is much like that which faced Kant in defining moral action,
when the demands of the universal law may often coincide with personal
preference, perhaps even with the greatest and most appealing happiness.
And our answer may be similar to his. Kant turned to the test case.
We know we have morality, said he, when duty and pleasure are opposed,
and the man obeys the voice of duty. Similarly, we can say: we know
that we have group mind and purpose when the pleasure of the individual
is opposed to the will of the group, and the individual gives up his
purpose for that of the army, the nation, the church. When the soldier
or the martyr gives up his urge for self-preservation and offers his
body to the bullets of the enemy or the stake of the persecutor, then
we know that he has abdicated his individuality and is acting only
as a member of the greater whole. Lindeman, whose study is based on
observation of farmers’ co-operative societies, presents a contrary
view:
[26]It was formerly asserted that the chief significance of a
group consisted in the fact that the individuals comprising it had
sacrificed certain individual prerogatives, rights, privileges, etc.,
in order to achieve the larger collective end. But it could not be
discovered that the farmers who became members of the co-operative
associations had done anything of the sort. On the contrary, they
were chiefly interested in enhancing their own individual interests;
they desired a larger income from the sale of their products and the
co-operative movement promised exactly this.
If this were true, these associations would constitute merely a set of
books, not a group of persons. But we see further on in the same book
that the co-operative associations demanded loyalty even at the cost
of whim or momentary interest; they enforced their contracts with the
farmer by which he agreed to sell only through the association. If he
got tired of waiting for his money, or if a dealer placed a financial
premium on disloyalty, still he was expected to be loyal to the group.
Finally, the group had to take cognizance of other aspects of the human
life of its members besides the sale of their cotton or tobacco; it
built up personal and social groupings for the entire family; it became
a truly unified group mind, through the slow process of integration
of individuals and of local groups, resting on a basis of personal
friendship. Thus, even in an interest group, a true group mind is
developed through participation and sacrifice.
4.
We are now ready to define group mind in the sense in which it will
be understood in this essay. A group mind is the common purpose of
two or more persons, which they accept as their own purpose. The mode
of this acceptance or identification is in behavior, which includes
the reasons given by the individuals—their rationalizations—as well
as their overt acts. The test of this in any particular case is the
test of sacrifice, whether the man acts as a self-preserving being, an
individual pacifist, or as a citizen and soldier, a member of a group
at war; whether the church member acts as an individual thinker, or
subordinates his judgment to the interpretation and the practice of the
church; whether the son acts as a loyal son, a member of the family, to
his own hurt, or goes off to marry against his parents’ will, leaving
them perhaps to suffer want. I have purposely taken examples where
opinion may be divided, as it is not my purpose to attach moral right
or wrong to either group loyalty or individual freedom; either may be
right under given circumstances, or judged by certain standards.
The group mind may be conscious, as a deliberative assembly; or
instinctive and unconscious, as the racial group or the partly
hypnotized mob. The ancient Israelite identified himself with his
people; he did not even expect personal immortality, but desired
sons to carry on his name so that his family and his people might
be immortal. Parents are willing sacrifices for their children, but
sacrifices nevertheless. The patriot volunteers for dangerous duty
consciously, or leaps over the parapet in the blind enthusiasm of a
charge; whether conscious or unconscious of the meaning of his act,
he acts as a soldier, not a self-seeking person. The varieties of the
group mind are almost innumerable. The group mind may be as instinctive
and unorganized as a religious revival, as natural as a nation with
its bonds of language, land, custom and government, as artificial as
a military company without even a name, with only a number, and yet
with a definite morale, a tradition, a personality of its own. The
theater audience has a group mind, while the restaurant crowd has not;
for it is an axiom in the theater that each audience has a character
of its own, that only a full house really abandons itself at a comedy,
while even a smaller crowd may be carried away by a tragedy, and so on;
the individual abandons his own judgment and his inhibitions at least
in part, to react to the performance as a member of the group.
According to this definition, the individual also may have a group
mind, as his diverse purposes are summed up in one supreme purpose, or
as he has inner conflicts, the far-sighted against the narrow view, the
better ideal against the worse. The reasons or motives which animate
the various members of a group mind need not always be the same; they
may range from deliberate choice to compulsion by public opinion or the
blind following of herd instinct, the desire to “run with the crowd,”
to “be on the band wagon.” There is always a margin of unassimilated
purpose in either the individual or the group; neither mind ever quite
attains perfect unity. Durkheim makes the pregnant suggestion, (not
without its critics, it is true,) that the most unified mind was that
of the primitive horde, where unity was achieved by identity; while
developed societies achieve unity through organization and division of
function, thus including the most diverse elements in a genuine unity
of co-operation and purpose.
The group mind, then, is an empirical fact, which can be perceived in
many practical ways. The intellectual content, the emotional coloring,
group habits which we call custom, group ideas which we call tradition,
group organization by which a consensus of opinion is ascertained for
the purpose of unified action—all are characteristics of the group
mind, just as the parallel factors of ideas, emotion, and will are
the phases into which we analyze the mind of the individual. There is
a difference in every one of these factors between the group mind of
America and of China, between that of ancient Greece and of medieval
Italy. And the difference lies not only in factors such as language,
religion and history, which are constitutive to the group, but external
to the individual. It lies also in subtler matters of opinion, of
emotions, which seem to be within the individual and yet must be
absorbed from the environment, because they differ so strikingly from
group to group. I shall go carefully into the reasons further on which
impel me to consider that the Jewish people possess a group mind, even
though they have no common government, language or land, and have even
many divisions on questions of faith and religious practice. Here it
is sufficient to note that the Jewish people act as one under attack;
that a pogrom in Russia arouses the very different Jews of France,
England and America to a feeling of unity and acts of relief and of
defense. Labor and capital are becoming “class conscious” in opposition
to each other; that is, group minds are in process of formation. The
group mind appears in the behavior of the group through its constituent
individuals, whether the group be a static one, dominated by the fixed
habits of custom, or a dynamic one, with a great wave of progress; for
behavior includes both custom and progress.
One more point comes properly under the definition of the group
mind—the wide-spread conception of a general will, or more precisely a
common will. According to the viewpoint of this study, the general will
is no mystical entity, overpowering the wills of the individuals; nor
is it an arithmetical average, in which personal opinions cancel each
other out. Neither of these theories covers a willing mind. The group
will is a resultant, not an average; one element in it is tradition,
another is leadership, a third is the interaction of the various
sub-groups. In the final result, the negative element is often actually
erased, the wavering members accept the winning opinion as a whole, and
the consequent group action is a unity, almost a unanimity of response.
After war is declared the peace party practically disappears. In less
clear-cut issues, we see the workings of compromise, which again
appears in the behavior of the group as a whole.
Group consciousness exists when the individuals identify themselves
with the group, not merely accepting its purpose but losing their own
purposes in it. Consciousness implies also intelligence, as it does
in the individual; it may co-exist with a high emotional tone but
must have a rational element as well. MacDougall utters a view in
consonance with that held here when he says:
[27]It is the extension of the self-regarding sentiment of each
member to the group as a whole that binds the group together and
renders it a collective individual capable of collective volition.
But when he holds [28]that groups are self-conscious according to the
degree that the idea of them is present in the minds of the individuals
composing them, then we must agree with Dennes that:
[29]to say that a group mind possesses self-consciousness in the
sense that its nature is consciously apprehended, by individual minds
distinct from it, is the utterance of a contradiction.
It will then be necessary to posit group consciousness as we posit
individual consciousness, not distributively but collectively. We
have group mind and group will when the group acts as one or behaves
as one; but we have group consciousness when the group thinks as one.
Not that this action can possibly take place outside of the individual
minds; MacDougall is undoubtedly right in his citation of E. Barker:
[30]“There is no group mind existing apart from the minds of the
members of the group; the group mind exists only in the minds of its
members. But nevertheless it exists.” Yet the group mind must include
the individual minds in a unified purpose, to which they relinquish
their own wills, willingly or with a struggle, whose ideas are their
ideas, whose consciousness is, to a certain extent at least, their
consciousness. If it is possible, in ordinary speech, to recognize
that a man acts now personally, again as a churchman, a citizen, or a
committee member, it should be possible to accept this fact as a part
of our theory and to embody it as one phase of the theory itself. The
individual and the group are not mutually exclusive; neither exists
without the other; the group is a part of the individual mind as much
as the individual is a part of the group mind.
CHAPTER II.
GROUPS IN CONTACT
1.
Theoretically, the individual might be independent of other individuals
and of groups as well. He might be his own alter, so that through the
active and reflective standpoints working on each other the individual
himself might constitute a group mind, and might produce many, if not
all, the characteristic products of the group.[31] But practically
in society, the exact opposite is invariably the case. According to
Baldwin’s dialectic of the individual development: [32]“The sense of
self always involves a sense of the other.” [33]“The real self is
always the bipolar self, the social self.” Empirically, not only are
civilization, history and government the products of social heredity;
the individual himself as we have him owes his mental content, many
of his feeling and motor responses, and his ultimate ideals, to the
group in which he was born and has developed. On this basis the ancient
conflict between the isolated individual and the group domination
becomes unimportant, if not meaningless from the empirical point of
view. As Joseph K. Hart remarks:
[34]Membership in the group establishes in the members a set of habits
which are the personal counterpart of the customs of the group; the
group is not outside and around him; it is inside him; what is custom
in the group has become habit in him.
Why, then, the eternal conflict between the individual and the group?
Why does a Schiller or an Ibsen proclaim, “The strongest man is he who
stands most alone”? Why do we have the group portrayed so often as
the oppressor, the individual as the hero, genius, and martyr to the
conventional ideas of the mass? Because the group has more fixed habits
than the individual, or at least than the exceptional individual;
because in most individuals the group factor is the dominant one by
preference, and the struggle against it is both rare and mild;
because, finally, the group mind does involve a sacrifice of the
individual purpose on many occasions, and these are the test cases
of the strength of the group itself. There are really two types
of individuals who stand out from the group—the genius, or social
discoverer; the criminal, or social rebel. Platt suggests that [35]“Man
has never become entirely socialized”; his biological heredity always
lags behind the social heredity of the group and leaves a residuum
of conflict. Baldwin gives a broader theory, which may include this:
[36]“The individual is the particularizing social force; society is
the generalizing social force.” That is, the individual produces
variations, which are then stamped out by social disapproval, or
generalized by social acceptance. The genius thinks for the race; the
mass of individuals have their thinking done for them by the prepared
reactions of the group. Without the social group the individual would
be as unformed mentally, as helpless ethically, as is the single bee
without the hive. In Baldwin’s words: [37]“A man is a social outcome
rather than a social unit.”
All this by the way; if I were to take up the problem of the individual
and group, it would occupy this entire study. I merely want to show its
bearing on the central thesis here brought forward, which concerns the
relation between group and group, rather than that between individual
and group.
2.
The problem of group and sub-group can be approached either
descriptively or genetically. If we take the former angle, we see every
large group divided indefinitely into small, conflicting, overlapping,
and infinitely various sub-groups. Much of the complexity of our
society consists in this overlapping, by which the individual belongs
to many groups at once, so that his mind cannot attain complete unity,
and none of his groups can possess him wholly. A man belongs to a
family, a city, a profession, a church, a school alumni body, a nation
and an international peace society. In addition, he may join a
labor union, a chamber of commerce, or a half dozen fraternal orders.
His mind is a perfect maze of group attitudes; he shifts from one group
to another as interests or contiguity impel him. In the same way, a
large group such as a political party includes members from different
sections of the country, different economic strata, different churches,
and so on. The group mind, as a category in this situation, is purely
a functional unity, which works in and through its individual members
and through its smaller groups of individuals in exactly the same way.
I quote Dr. Singer: [38]“My world is highly organized—groups within
groups, and groups within these,” for that is the scientific, realistic
view of the social world.
Various classifications of groups have been devised by students of the
problem, useful for their different purposes. Cooley speaks of primary
and secondary groups, those in which men and women are born and grow,
and the larger integrations into which the smaller, more natural groups
enter. Miller prefers [39]“Vertical and horizontal groups,” the former
being the natural divisions which include all classes, such as the
nation; the latter a caste or class grouping. Hayes calls them personal
and impersonal groups, apparently meaning much the same as Professor
Cooley by the terms primary and secondary. Probably the most useful
mode of classification is the genetic, beginning with the family, and
then expanding according to the particular situation in view—in the
primitive group to the clan, tribe and confederacy; in the civilized
to the school, the interest group, the religious affiliation, the
political nation, the international ideals and bonds of union.
Whatever be the more or less arbitrary mode of classification, we see
that, except for the supposititious primitive horde, groups are never
single nor simple. They resemble rather the physical organism or the
mind of the individual, either of which is necessarily complex. Group
minds exist and grow by progressive integration of the lesser into the
greater, from the individual up to the greatest possible bodies of
human beings.
The group mind comes into being only through contact with other
groups. We may go so far as to conclude that there must be two groups
in order that there may be one group. If an isolated island possessed
a few people so unorganized that they felt no difference of groupings
among themselves, then there would be no sense of a total group,
either. Under those circumstances that would be attained only in case
of an invasion by people from without the land, or a rebellion within,
when group unity of the islanders would at once appear. If my previous
identification of mind in the individual and the group is exact, not
merely an analogy, then this follows from Baldwin’s genetic study of
the individual. The mind of the individual grows by constant reference
to the alter—for in the thought of the child the ego and alter are
one—and even in the highest reaches of moral judgment there remains an
element of social approval, of what would be the judgment of the ideal
group or the ideal comrade. [40]“We do right by habitually imitating
a larger self whose injunctions run counter to the tendencies of our
particular selves.”
To quote a few applications of this viewpoint to particular problems:
Sumner applies it to the primitive horde:
[41]The relationship of comradeship and peace in the we-group and
that of hostility and war toward others-group are correlative. War
and peace have reacted on each other and developed each other, one
within the group, the other in the inter-group relation. Loyalty
to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders,
brotherhood within, warlikeness without—all grow together, common
products of the same situation.
In Ellwoods’s words:
[42]While the stimuli afforded by the struggle with the physical
environment are conceivably sufficient to bring about the highest
degree of coordination, unity and solidarity in the larger human
social groups, yet historically they have not done so. Rather, it has
been the stimuli arising from the conflict and competition of one
human group with another which has chiefly developed conscious social
solidarity in the larger human group.
Dr. George E. Vincent wrote:
[43]Conflict, competition, rivalry, are the chief causes which bring
human beings into groups, and largely determine what goes on within
them.
[44]It is in conflict or competition with other nations that a country
becomes a vivid unity to the members of its constituent groups.
It is rivalry which brings out the sense of team work, the social
consciousness.
“Races, Nations and Classes,” a recent work by Dr. Herbert A. Miller,
presents a series of studies of social relations in terms of group
conflicts, group oppression and group revolt, as these exist in various
crucial situations today.
Most of the treatments of the subject calmly assume that the other
group with which contact is established must necessarily be parallel
and competing with the first group. But in empirical situations that is
not always, perhaps not often the case. We may become conscious of our
American unity in war with an external foe, but we may become equally
conscious of it in inter-state relations; because an inter-state
conflict may bring us to the superior federal power; or in the division
of powers between state and nation, or in the strong hand of the
federal government reaching out to detect groups of law-breakers within
the constituent states. That is, the two groups need not be parallel
and exclusive; they may overlap, or one may enclose the other entirely.
I can become conscious of my international Jewish loyalty in contrast
to the Christian church, which also is international; or I may become
conscious of it through the overlapping with my American citizenship;
or even through contrast with a family loyalty, which might conceivably
be enhanced by disregarding the membership in the Jewish people, with
its frequent disabilities. The first is a case of two separate groups;
the second, two overlapping ones; the third, where one is a sub-group
of the other. In this sense it is conceivable, though not usual, for
the individual with his own “group mind” to serve as a contrast to the
group in which he is included. For in every one of these instances
there has been actual or potential relinquishment of purpose into the
larger group which includes the smaller, or into the one which overlaps
and conflicts with the other; and in the case of two parallel
groups there is a conflict and contrast of purposes, hence of group
mind itself.
3.
The mode of group contacts has practically always been viewed in terms
of conflict and competition. In contrast to this, I present the view
that there are two modes of group contact—competition and imitation.
Competition strengthens and unites each competing group. Imitation
brings the different groups together into an overgroup. The two
together constitute the social process (if we allow for the element of
individual initiative and leadership, which hardly comes within the
special topic of this study).
The classic presentation of group struggle is by Gumplowitz, in
his “Rassenkampf,” where he took Gobineau’s rather crude theory of
races and applied it to history and sociology, including also groups
smaller and of different origin than the races themselves. To present
Gumplowitz’s view in his own words:
[45] History and the present day present us with a picture of almost
unbroken warfare of tribe against tribe, people against people, state
against state, nation against nation.
[46] Every greater ethnic or social element strives to subdue to its
purposes every weaker group which lies within its sphere of influence
or near it.
This is his “social law of nature,” which he compares to the law of
gravitation in its certainty. War is therefore necessary for civilized
as for primitive societies, and any talk of ideals or of peace is but
self-deception, if it be not deliberate masking of warlike intentions.
The race theory of Gobineau has gone on until it is one of the
important factors in American group oppositions today. And surprisingly
enough, the conflict theory of Gumplowitz comes back also from time to
time. In “Survival or Extinction,” a new work by Elisha M. Friedman, I
find this sentence: [47]“The absorption of a scattered minority people
is the inexorable law of History. Can the Jews hope to escape it?”
This on the basis of Gumplowitz, whose treatment of the Jewish problem
is very different; he criticized the Jews bitterly for being the one
exception to his “inexorable law,” and said they should have obeyed
it and been absorbed among the nations, as were the Phoenicians two
thousand years ago.
Certainly there is group struggle; it is a natural tendency when two
different groups come into contact; and it is a gross and obvious
phenomenon which nobody can help noticing. But at the same time
there goes on also a subtler but equally significant movement of
group imitation. The white settlers fought the Indians in a way that
everybody knew; many have missed the adoption by the whites of maize
and tobacco, names of rivers and sites of cities; by the Indians of the
horse, the rifle and the religion of the conquerors. Rome conquered
Greece in war, and Rome imitated Greece in art and literature. Israel
conquered Canaan and imposed the one God, destroying the high places
where the earlier inhabitants had worshipped the powers of fertility in
nature; but Israel incorporated the harvest festivals of the Canaanites
into its own shepherd and nomad ritual. Group imitation takes its place
beside group competition in the spread of culture elements about the
earth, in the study of foreign languages and literature, in missionary
effort, in the adoption of new inventions for warfare or for industry.
These are as important and as omnipresent as business competitions or
territorial rivalry, far more common than war.
The function of group conflict is to strengthen the separate groups and
bring them to recognizable group mind. Loyalty is never so strong as
when our group is under fire. War brings millions to an acute sense of
national loyalty who have hardly felt they had a nation. The ancient
loyalty of the Jew is largely due to the persecutors who constantly
reminded him that he had no right to desert his people. There is
definite survival value in this, which can easily be connected with
the historic and prehistoric process which brought our present groups
into being. As Dr. Miller says: [48]“Loyalty and patriotism are merely
the emotional side of the group impulse. They measure the identity
of the individual with his group.” Royce’s “Philosophy of Loyalty”
is one long praise of these virtues of the loyal son of his group. His
somewhat exaggerated discussion of the value of the “lost cause” for
character development illustrates the overemphasis on group struggle
which is typical of all those who long for group solidarity. For group
struggle does bring solidarity and loyalty except in the limiting case,
where the group is destroyed in the struggle and there is nothing left
to which we can be loyal. And that is precisely the case envisaged by
Gumplowitz, the case of the stronger group crushing and then absorbing
the weaker one.
Dr. Miller has worked out a type of group pathology which attacks
both victor and victim of a group struggle. He calls it the
“Oppression Psychosis.” Its effects on the victor are found in such
rationalizations as the “myth of superiority” and other defense
complexes, leading to “cultocracy” or class rule, and finally if
unchecked to the stagnation of caste. To quote:
[49]Hundred per cent. patriotism and confidence in Nordic superiority
are the two most dangerous ideas in the world today, because they
lead in exactly the opposite direction from that which civilization
must take if it is to survive. The fundamental objections to these
ideas are, first, that they have no basis in fact, and second that
the emotions which they organize, have far-reaching and disruptive
consequences.
The inferiority complex of the oppressed people has very different and
still more disastrous consequences. Dr. Miller points out that what are
usually considered Jewish traits may be found also among the Irish,
the Poles, and the Negroes, all very different groups but all subject
to oppression and therefore presenting a psychological reaction to
oppression.
[50]What we have designated as Jewish characteristics are primarily
based on the nervous reactions which have resulted from more varieties
and longer oppression than those of any other group. The Jew is
introspective, analytical, aggressive and conspicuous. The Negro also
has many of the same characteristics, though he has not yet developed
so many compensatory values, such as religious solidarity and business
technique.... The most outstanding result of the oppression psychosis
is to create a group solidarity which is far stronger than could have
been created by any other means.
And he goes on to show the use of symbols as compensatory mechanism
of the oppressed group, and thus to account for the ardent clinging of
such groups to their language or religion as the real outlet of their
self expression and of their will for resistance.
So far with conflict. Imitation of individuals has attracted much
attention, especially through its exhaustive treatment by Gabriel
Tarde, but group imitation has passed by with much less notice.
However, we may fairly say that group imitation is as universal a
by-product of group contact as are rivalry and conflict. The immigrant
comes to America, and the result of that transference of a group
into a new environment can be expressed in terms of either imitation
or conflict, but can be summed up fully only by recognizing both
processes at work at once. The children attend public schools, where
they learn the English language, the salute to the flag, and some
American group customs. The father learns English at his work; the
mother copies American fashions in dress and household; both become
naturalized citizens—that is what we call Americanization. But at
the same time they speak their native tongue in the home, they read
a foreign language newspaper, they keep up their correspondence with
the relatives back in the Old Country, they belong to a patriotic or
revolutionary society with its roots in the homeland. Often they even
organize a school that their children may learn the language, religion
and other essentials of their earlier group life. So the children often
attend two schools, an American one to assimilate them to the group
mind of America, a Polish or Russian or Jewish one to keep them in
touch with the group mind of their parents’ allegiance. The hatreds of
the central European peoples are transferred to America. The political
issues between Czarist and Bolshevist, or between Fascismo and
Socialism are perpetuated here. Sometimes the contrast between American
and alien is emphasized, and takes the place of the old-world conflicts
in the center of consciousness.
Conflict strengthens the fighting groups; imitation welds them
together into an overgroup. The American process is one of forming a
united people, an integrated, self-conscious group mind, out of
the many diverse elements which enter this continent. And this goes
on by conscious teaching and unconscious imitation, through social,
political and economic motives, everywhere except when interrupted by
the counter process of oppression and resistance. We speak nowadays
of a Greco-Roman civilization, a direct recognition of the part that
imitation played in the Roman empire with all its warlike power. We
speak of modern European culture, recognizing that European culture is
one, with local variations indeed, and that art, science, philosophy
and religion are international, for every group imitates every
other. The trend of such a tendency can only lead toward an eventual
amalgamation, not by abolishing present languages and parliaments,
but by the growth of every sort of international and supernational
consciousness, beginning with schools of literature or art, and
culminating in a World Court or a League of Nations.
4.
This suggests the ideal of society which is implicit in our minds
as we study its development by means of conflicting, imitating and
overlapping group minds. The desirable qualities which this process
evokes are heterogeneity and progress. We thus steer midway between
the equal dangers of uniformity and standardization, on the one hand,
and the isolation of castes, on the other. The caste system of India
provides plenty of heterogeneity, but because the groups are isolated
from each other physically and mentally, because of the influence
of “untouchability,” the mind of the group has never unified, never
presented the possibility of change. The modern movement in India under
Ghandi is precisely of this type, to unify India and introduce the
concept of progress by a double process, by abolishing “untouchability”
within and bringing the caste groups to imitate and emulate each other;
by strengthening loyalty through united opposition to the common
oppressor. It is a most significant example of the development of the
group mind through union of sub-groups and by contrast to another
hostile group. On the other hand, the beginning of modernity in Europe
meant a radical opposition to the levelling influence of the Church
universal, the rise of vernacular tongues, of national governments,
of national churches—that is, the dissociation of the medieval mind,
which was European, into the sub-groups, which are primarily national.
That the reverse movement is now taking place is significant, for this
reverse movement is a natural one by imitation and common interests,
not forced by the union of the Inquisition and the secular arm. As
Bernard Shaw remarks in the preface to “Saint Joan”:
[51]Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is
founded on tolerance. [52]We must persecute, even to the death; and
all that we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first,
to be very careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind
that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional people,
and a well informed sense of the value of originality, individuality
and eccentricity, the result will be apparent stagnation covering a
repression of evolutionary forces which will eventually explode with
extravagant and probably destructive violence.
We must then, conceive modern society, not as a simple unity but as an
integration of group minds, from that of the individual, the family,
the clique, up to that of the nation, with a dawning international
mind now in process. These group minds struggle for domination and
for existence; they learn from each other at the same time. The
double process constantly in evidence is group conflict, resulting
in the mind of the sub-group, and group imitation, resulting in the
integration of the sub-groups into a larger and more inclusive mental
entity. In addition, the various groups are not all parallel, but very
largely crossing each other; one individual or sub-group may belong
to several of them. Economic classes cross national boundaries, for
both capital and labor are international. Most conspicuous of all,
religious groupings are international and interracial, so that a man
belongs to a church as well as a nation. In peace times the national
will to dominate and the church ideal of peace are kept carefully as
far apart in his mind as possible; the one coming into the center
of consciousness on Sundays, the other on election day or similar
occasions. In time of war, the two actively conflict within the
group mind, and thus within the individual minds which belong to the
group.
The accumulation of knowledge and the advancement of reason are
accompanied by a progressive widening of the circle of the group
mind, to include an ever larger number and variety of sub-groups. Dr.
Baldwin suggests this process: [53]“Group selection gives rise to
what may be called the law of the widening unit, that as the circle
of co-operation widens the unit of survival, the group, taken as a
whole, becomes larger.” The other side of the same process is the
increasing complexity of the mind of the individual and the sub-group
because of the richer world in which they exist—in Dr. Vincent’s words,
[54]“The person has as many selves as there are groups to which he
belongs. He is simple or complex as his groups are few and harmonious
or many and conflicting.” The actual growth of an international mind
today is evident, through scientific, religious, artistic and economic
influences; through the great alliances of the World War; through
the ease of communication and the spread of news and propaganda. A
world-wide group mind, if such is possible, cannot and should not
eliminate its sub-groups, but include them in a wider synthesis; even
enriching the complexity of the sub-groups by its further ramifications
and their further imitations.
But the easy and natural way for such an international group mind is
by conflict with a still different outside group. The white races
would easily attain unity if there were a real race conflict against
the colored races of the world; differences between French and German,
between Russian and American, would be swallowed up in a day. Unity
of the entire human race would come instantly if we were invaded from
Mars. The slogans of our earth-wide unity would be the defense of our
beloved planet and the common descent of all human beings. In default
of such a threat from without, is the international mind an impossible
hypothesis?
I suggest that actual contrasts exist which may make it possible for
a world-wide group mind to grow through the normal mode of group
conflict and group imitation and co-operation. Perhaps we can attain
race unity by envisaging the forces of nature as the rival group,
conceiving the inroads of the insect world as the threat against human
domination which must make us spring to arms in a sense of our common
unity and our common nature. Perhaps we can conceive the national group
as the contrasting element, and the international group mind as, not
its enemy, but its synthesis. Finally, one all-inclusive mind actually
does exist in the faith of most of the race—the ideal self of the group
to which we give the name of God. The God-idea of the group is not
the group itself, but is its outgrowth, its ideal self. Perhaps the
future unity of mankind may come at last through a summation of its
highest ideals and the rational toleration of diverse interpretations,
different personalities, and widely contrasting group customs and
manners. At present, however, an outstanding phenomenon of the group
mind is intolerance, and through a study of intolerance we can perceive
much of group nature and of the actual life of human societies.
CHAPTER III.
INTOLERANCE
1.
Tolerance is the characteristic virtue of the modern era, just as
intolerance has been typical of every age and almost every people in
days gone by. Tolerance, we feel is the golden key which alone can
open the door to the golden age. Tolerance is the one thing that can
possibly wipe out the evils of hatred, warfare, and confusion, the
age-old enemies of the progress of the race. When men and women learn
tolerance for each other’s race, nationality, religion, and general
attitudes, then they will be able to understand one another, and
eventually to work with one another, even to love one another. Without
that tolerance, we can never understand people of different race or
religion or nationality, because we never even stop to look at them
fairly and honestly. Certainly, without tolerance, co-operation, human
sympathy, the brotherhood of man are empty words without possibility of
realization.
But that only pushes the problem back a step. What is this tolerance,
and how can it be attained? It is easy for us to be tolerant on matters
we do not care about, but hard on matters that are deep in our hearts.
Religious tolerance is growing because religious intensity of the old
type is weakening. Religious wars, as practised in Europe three hundred
years ago, will never be repeated because Christians are no longer
certain that their fellow-Christians of different sects are going to
burn in everlasting flames. Thomas Jefferson was tolerant on religion
because he was fairly indifferent to the whole subject; his intolerance
was reserved for political opponents, and for the aristocratic party in
other lands as well. The rarest object in the whole museum of history
is the man who has profound convictions of his own, and yet is tolerant
of those who differ from him—a Roger Williams, for example, who was a
pious clergyman but allowed liberty of conscience in his settlement of
Rhode Island even to Catholics and Jews. Such a man is a symbol of
what the whole world may become in the messianic age, a type of our
strictly modern ideal.
2.
The study of intolerance takes us at once out of the field of
individual psychology into the newer and less cultivated field
of social psychology, the mind of the group. For intolerance is
characteristically an attribute of groups. Intolerance is the white
against the black; the Christian against the Jew, the Frenchman against
the German—always one group lined up against another. Intolerance
nestles in the individual mind simply because every individual of
us is a member of a nation, a religion, a race, and has the typical
prejudices of his own people. I may think myself better than you, but
that is merely egotism. If I think my family better than your family
and refuse to associate with you, that becomes intolerance. And if I
join an organization of people with similar opinions to my own, and we
decide to keep you and all your kind from doing business or holding
public office or otherwise prospering and succeeding in a country
which we both inhabit, then intolerance has attained its growth and
come to flower. Always one body of people against another, animated by
prejudice, and the reasons do not matter. For prejudice, literally,
means prejudgment, opinion before the facts come in, and the facts are
then selected to give us reasons for our attitude.
First of all, we must realize that intolerance is the typical and
natural human attitude. From the beginning of history it was so deeply
intrenched in every race and tribe that it seems to have begun with
the life of the race, and has its roots perhaps in the pre-human life,
among those wolves or bees that drive a stranger out of the pack or
hive and leave him to die alone. For that happened times without
number in the early human packs of human hives. Every group of people
knows that it is the one proper, human group, and that all others are
imitations and second-rate. The foreign language always is gibberish
to us, not because it is inferior, but simply because we do not
understand it. The uneducated man always looks on a foreigner as
somehow an imbecile, because he cannot understand a simple, natural
tongue like English! The ancient Greeks spoke of such old, magnificent
civilizations as those of Egypt and Persia as barbarians, even though
Greece was their pupil in every art from war to letters. The Mohammedan
calls others unbelievers, even though they may be fire-worshippers, or
Buddhists, or Christians; these people are not unbelievers, but merely
different-believers. And the Christian calls the Mohammedan, in turn,
infidel, which means the same thing. In the Merchant of Venice, the Jew
is referred to as a pagan, which is exactly the thing which the Jew is
not historically, for Christianity represents a combination of Jewish
and pagan elements. No matter—everyone thinks that his people are right
and other peoples wrong. “My country, right or wrong,” represents a
concession to modernism, blatant as it is. The universal feeling has
always been, up to the threshold of our own age, “My own country, or
tribe, or people, is always right.”
Intolerance, then, is not based on reasons, whether good or bad. It
grows out of the nature of groups of people. It means merely that the
other fellow is different, not at all that he is wrong. Everett Dean
Martin points out in his studies of the crowd that the crowd is always
dogmatic and egocentric. Every nation has some crowd characteristics,
is interested in its own welfare, not in that of its colonies, or
its competitors, or the human race. Patriotism is as dogmatic as
is religion. Every state, every city has its local loyalty, which
magnifies its advantages and conceals its disadvantages, and especially
cries down its rival state or city. Even the scientist, the student
of social conditions, is apt to speak of higher and lower cultures,
or higher and lower races—meaning always that his culture is higher
and the Chinese lower, or the Anglo-Saxon is higher and the Italian
lower. At that point the scientist seems to be animated by a very
unscientific intolerance. When a student of society points out ways
in which the Chinese culture is worthy of our imitation, then I will
feel that he is truly scientific and not at all prejudiced. For who
says that our occidental culture is superior to the Chinese? We say
so. Who says the Chinese is superior? The Chinese do, of course. But
they are prejudiced? Certainly, and so are we! The most that can be
said with certainty is that the two cultures are different, and these
differences can then be studied in detail.
Prejudice is often racial because people of different appearances
stand out clearly as very different from us indeed. But they need
not be inferior. The current prejudice against the Negro says that
he is lazy, unintelligent, immoral—but the same intolerance operates
against the many members of the colored race who are more diligent,
more intelligent, and quite as moral as the average white. In all
these characteristics the races overlap; the most that can be said
statistically is that the whites have the larger percentage of the
higher intellectual persons. Unfortunately, much of that may be due to
training rather than to heredity, for in the army tests the northern
negroes actually averaged higher than the southern whites. But even if
this intolerance toward the black race were justified by facts after we
whites entertained it on natural instinctive grounds, why then should
we give directly opposite reasons for our dislike of the Japanese? For
the Japanese is called by his very enemies shrewd, industrious and
saving. If the lazy negro is our inferior, then the hustling Japanese
should be our superior. The fact is that neither race is inferior in
a way that can be proved—but both are different, and every group is
naturally intolerant of the group that is different from itself.
But weighty reasons of racial character are quite unnecessary in
establishing prejudice. Probably no two peoples in Europe are more
closely related in race than the Germans and the English. A hundred
years ago or more they were closest allies against Napoleon; during
the World War, when political and economic conditions ranged them on
opposite sides, each tried to show that it was a superior race, with
no connection at all with the other, so far beneath it. Religious
prejudice may be based on genuine differences, as between Jew and
Christian, or on comparatively trivial matters as between Methodists
and Baptists. The shifting nature of these prejudices and their purely
personal application appears distinctly in the latest slogan of
intolerance—“White, Protestant, Gentile, American.” All others, not
conforming to this criterion, cannot be one hundred per centers.
This excludes the Negro, as well as the Indian, who is certainly
American but is not white. It eliminates the Jew, who is not a gentile;
and the Catholic who is not a Protestant. And it excludes a white
Protestant gentile of English or German birth, who may be everything
else but is not American-born. Obviously, there is no logic in this,
for classes are excluded for exactly opposite reasons. There is
nothing in it except the one fact which always animates every kind of
intolerance—the fact of difference.
Walter Lippman in his “Public Opinion” presents a point which no
discussion of prejudice can ignore—[55]“that the way we see things is
a combination of what is there and of what we expected to find.” He
works out the process of the “mental stereotype,” by which we have a
preconception of the labor agitator, the alien, the Harvard man, and
see the individual always in the light of the group to which we may
attribute him. [56]“One factor, the insertion between man and his
environment of a pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment his
behavior is a response.” [57]“The pictures inside people’s heads do not
automatically correspond with the world outside.”
[58]On some natures, stimuli from the outside, especially when
they are printed or spoken words, evoke some part of a system of
stereotypes, so that the actual sensation and the preconception
occupy consciousness at the same time. The two are blended, much as
if we looked at red through blue glasses and saw green.... If the
experience contradicts the stereotype, one of two things happens. If
the man is no longer plastic, or if some powerful interest makes it
highly inconvenient to rearrange his stereotypes, he pooh-poohs the
contradiction as an exception that proves the rule, discredits the
witness, finds a flaw somewhere, and manages to forget it. But if he
still is curious and openminded, the novelty is taken into the picture
and allowed to modify it.
Thus acquaintance of one group with another is not enough in itself
to break down prejudice, for the white man may see the Negro, or the
Christian the Jew, not as the other really is but as he thinks the
other group ought to be. Only escape from group thinking, the use of
the individual intelligence about an individual, can possibly make
any difference in our pre-conceived notions of other peoples.
Moreover it is true, as Professor Shailer of Harvard pointed out long
ago in his book, “The Neighbor,” that this fact of difference operates
most strongly when the two different groups come into contact with each
other. Prejudice is always strongest on the frontier. The Nebraskan
does not have the active prejudice against Mexico that animates the
Texan, nor against Japan that we find in California, nor against the
Negro as in the solid south. Not that Nebraska is a land favored
peculiarly by justice, but that it has no direct contact with large
numbers of these different races. Naturally, this contact often opens
the way to real acquaintance, before which intolerance grows faint and
may even vanish. American soldiers in the occupied districts of Germany
brought enough German brides to show how quickly prejudice breaks down
on personal acquaintance. Christian scholars of the time of Humanism
learned Hebrew from Jews whom their medieval predecessors would have
avoided as the plague, and a new respect for Judaism began to spread.
But as long as the contact of the two peoples is a frontier contact
only, a group contact, of class with class, directed by their different
status in the world, such contact merely ministers to the intolerance
which individual knowledge and friendship would break down.
A striking instance of this group nature of intolerance occurred within
my own observation on the Western front during the World War. In an
attack one of our prisoners was a German lad of eighteen, a harmless
peasant boy who had deserted his machine gun and come in willingly as a
prisoner; we made him useful about the first aid post, and he carried
water, swept out the place, and even wrapped up German helmets to send
to America as souvenirs. But Hans had been a machine gunner; if our
soldiers had found him at his post they might have shot him on sight.
If they had found him with other troops, they would have disarmed him,
driven him back to the prison camp. In the first case, he would have
belonged to the group of machine gunners, the greatest danger to the
American advance. In the second, he would have belonged to the group
of German soldiers, and been fair prey for enmity and capture. As
it was, he was regarded merely as Hans—and the hated German machine
gunner acted as servant to the friendly American bosses.
If these general principles of intolerance are true, we can apply
them at once to the peculiar situation of the Jew—everywhere at home,
yet everywhere the creature of prejudice; not so very different from
the other white nations among whom he lives, yet always distinct from
them and always the target of intolerance. Every movement of bigotry,
aristocracy, militarism, junkerism in every land makes anti-semitism
one of its cardinal shouting-cries, from the emigrés of Russia to the
royalist anti-Dreyfusards of France. The Jew is hated everywhere simply
because he lives everywhere, and is everywhere a little different from
other people. The Jew has a distinct religion, a peculiar tradition
and appearance which can sometimes be distinguished—he is different
from other people. And the extreme bitterness of this anti-Semitism,
more than of any other anti-party the world over, is simply because
everywhere the Jew lives on a frontier, in direct group contact with
the intolerant of other peoples. Every Jew lives on a Franco-German
frontier, or a Mexican-American one. Even in the United States of
America, with its proud tradition of tolerance written into the Federal
Constitution, there is now a movement of anti-Semitism. The most
obvious condition of its rise is the increase of the Jewish community
of America, that is, the extension of the frontier line, the contact
of more Americans with this “alien,” which means different, people.
Add to that the hatred of certain foreign groups aroused during the
war, the suspicion of certain radical groups directly after it, the
general unsettled condition of world opinion, and the vast increase of
European anti-Semitism as the parties of reaction were thrown on the
defensive—and the exact form of American anti-Semitism begins to show
itself.
But all these local details do not obscure the real nature of this
prejudice which we face in America today. It is just another form of
the intolerance of everything different which the wandering exiles
have had to face during their two thousand years of homeless
persecution. Of course, all this has had its effect on the Jew. It has
driven the Jew into intolerance in his turn. His intolerance has never
expressed itself in terms of persecution or violence, very seldom in
terms of hatred. The intolerance of the Jew became, in self-defense,
a pride in the Chosen People of God, in his ancient lineage, in his
family loyalty, in his glorious tradition. He then emphasized the fact
of difference from other peoples, just as they did, and the Jew looked
down on the rude, ignorant heathens just as the Christian despised the
uncouth alien Jew. Intolerance has one virtue—it makes for loyalty to
your own. It has many vices, beginning with false and ignorant pride,
culminating in bitter, malignant hatred.
4.
If intolerance is this natural, universal force, what then is
tolerance? How can tolerance ever hope to succeed in a world divided
into so many hostile and suspicious groups? Tolerance means the
exercise of the individual intelligence. It means that a man has dared
to look at the facts and to say: “My people is wrong. This foreigner
is just as good as I am.” Or this Jew, or Catholic, or negro, as the
case may be. It means that a man has the courage to defy the public
opinion of his own group, and to use his own brains instead of going
along with the crowd. It means that general principles of right and
wrong, applicable universally, have begun to replace the old tribal
morality, of sticking by your own through thick and thin. It represents
the growth of free inquiry, of science, of the unbiased use of the
human intellect, the broadening of the human sympathies. It represents
also the breaking down of group control, that instant and unthinking
emotional response of the crowd to that which is congenial or against
that which is different. Tolerance is the typical virtue of the modern
world because the modern world is becoming increasingly self-conscious,
intelligent and individualistic, and especially because the modern
world is beginning to afford opportunities for real acquaintance
between members of different peoples, not merely the superficial
frontier contacts which make for prejudice. Above all, tolerance marks
the growth of the larger, more inclusive group which includes the
smaller ones, and outlaws intolerance between them. In the American
army during the World War intolerance was at its lowest, simply because
all the various elements in our people were acutely conscious of their
common country. Old-time prejudices, left over from the Civil War, were
forgotten. Religious and racial intolerance were minimized because
there was a common purpose, and a common intolerance of a common enemy.
The coming of tolerance between any two groups, then, means that these
two have been included, in the minds of their own members, as parts
of a larger, more inclusive body to which they both owe loyalty.
Such a tolerance between the nations of the world, now so ready to
make war at the slightest provocation, would imply an international
or a supernational loyalty, a genuine brotherhood of man, and a real
fatherhood of God. Tolerance means that intelligence has made inroads
into the old habit of following the group custom blindly through
thick and thin. It means that sympathy has succeeded hatred, that
suspicion has given way to brotherhood and love. Tolerance is the
supreme challenge to the authority of the group to master the thinking
man. Treachery to one’s own nation or faith is no such challenge,
for that simply means that the traitor preferred another rule and
another standard to the one in which he was born. But tolerance is the
challenge; it serves notice that no absolute authority, no ancient
usage of hatred or bigotry, no instinct to fear the stranger, can
forever dominate.
There is a fine summary of this whole question in “The Group Mind” by
Professor William MacDougall of Harvard. Dr. MacDougall says of the
modern world:[59]
Instead of maintaining universal intolerance, we have made great
strides toward universal tolerance.... The religious tolerance and
liberty of the modern era are features of the general increase of
tolerance and liberty, and must be ascribed to the same causes as
this wider fact. For long ages men have felt sympathy and given
considerate and just treatment to those who have been nearest to them;
at first, to the members of their own immediate family; later to the
fellow-members of their own small society; and then, as societies
expanded into complex caste societies, to the members of their
own caste; later, as castes were broken down, to all their fellow
citizens; and later still in some degree to all men.
And he concludes the examination of the subject by saying:
The coming of religious toleration was due to the application of the
spirit of inquiry to religious systems; these inquiries produced
irreconcilable sects, whose strife prepared the way for compromise and
toleration.
5.
One more question arises naturally in our minds before we can accept
this analysis and use it as part of our daily thinking and acting; what
is the effect of such toleration on our own loyalty to our own people?
Does the philanthropist neglect his family, or the man without strong
religious hatreds prove careless of his religion, or the lover of
mankind prove a poor patriot? This is the usual opinion, and therefore
a very effective argument against the position which I have here tried
to establish. But this opinion is directly contrary to the facts of
the case. Does family affection make for or against love of country?
Naturally, the former, for loyal children are also loyal citizens.
Should the man who would love his country on that account hate his city
or his state? Of course not; love of his native land begins with the
smaller unit, which he knows best, and then grows to the entire nation,
which includes it. And in the same way loyalty to the cause of humanity
need not mean, cannot mean disloyalty to the cause of the nation,
which is so great and important a part of the human race. But, on the
other hand, the patriotic American does not hate Illinois because he
has moved to Indiana. Love of one’s own state persists without the
hatred and intolerance of the other state, just because the two are
members of the American nation, and the inclusive loyalty makes the
other loyalties less bitter and less contentious against each other.
Why, in the Balkans, states much smaller than Indiana and Illinois have
their armies always ready for a cause of complaint against the other.
That is because they have as yet no common loyalty. It is because the
free intelligence has not yet broken through the inborn suspicion
and intolerance of the human pack. Probably we can never expect all
human beings actually and actively to love one another. That seems
illusory in light of the history of human nature. But there is every
prospect that tolerance will spread as world intelligence becomes more
enlightened, and as more people in each generation share in that world
intelligence. And this spread of tolerance will make always for larger
and more ideal loyalties, including the warring nations and hating
sects of today, even as nowadays the city includes the family or the
nation includes the state. Hatred toward the Jew takes its place today
in the hierarchy of hatreds as one of the strongest and most widespread
of all. Therefore it will probably be one of the last to go as
tolerance overcomes intolerance the world over. But every step toward
the discovery of new truths or toward the dissemination of the truths
already known is another step toward the destruction of all prejudice
and toward the real liberation of the Jew. Naturally, the Jew himself
will overcome his prejudices at the same time, as he has shown himself
pathetically eager to do at several times of false security in the past.
The great hopeful fact of it all is this: tolerance begets tolerance.
That hatred causes hatred is well known, for it is the normal course
of every personal conflict or national war. Each unfriendly act of
one side is followed by one of the other, until nations enter warfare
all ready to hate one another, and leave it hating more than ever.
But friendship, fairness, tolerance, have the same way of spreading
by their own inner force. If America discriminates against Japanese
immigrants, the Japanese think of ways to show their dislike of
America. But if America gives back the Boxer indemnity to China, the
Chinese send their students to America, then these return to their
native land with an attitude of friendliness, and the process of
tolerance and peace, once begun, grows by its own power. Lines of
tolerance radiate from every true center of justice, of inquiry, of
religion. Human growth is slow, but we can mark its methods and take
part in its tremendous process.
CHAPTER IV.
AMERICAN HISTORY—A DEVELOPMENT OF GROUPS
All history may reasonably be regarded as a process of group minds
in conflict and association, struggle and integration. Probably
this method of study will bring out more genuine facts and a more
fundamental order of causation than political or military or economic
history alone; at the least, it presents one significant and important
mode of studying human association in both the past and present.
From this point of view, Greece was a congeries of competitive city
states, which united only against an outside foe; Israel was the
union of twelve different tribes, together with the Canaanites whom
they subdued; Rome was a product of the various organizations, the
patricians and plebeians; England the growth into each other of the
successive waves of conquest—Celts, Romans, Saxons, Normans—and the
more recent peaceful immigrants. From this point of view, the United
States is conspicuous among all nations for the number and variety of
its groups and for their union (on the whole) by a federal principle
of agreement, rather than a forcible levelling and unification from
without. And this process of group synthesis is not a modern one only,
as it is sometimes erroneously considered; it is characteristic of the
piece-meal, haphazard colonization from the very outset; it pervaded
the Revolutionary army, and was the outstanding fact that confronted
the framers of the Federal Constitution in 1787.
1.
E. B. Greene sums up the reasons for adopting the Constitution in this
way:
[60]The movement for a more effective union was partly the work of
far-sighted leaders who could look beyond state boundaries to the
larger interests of the country as a whole ... another group were
beginning to see that the weakness of Congress might have something to
do with troubles nearer home.
Thus the causes of the Federal union were the need of external defense
and the need of reconciling the many diverse groups in the population
of the new nation. These groups are summarized by Carl R. Fish:
[61]There were thirteen distinct and separate state governments,
and Vermont had its own local authority which defied the rest....
Differences in the original stock, emphasized by different physical
conditions and by the isolated life of the colonial period, had
created several great sections or divisions in the country, which had
sufficient similarity within themselves and sufficient unlikeness to
each other, to make them permanent entities, and to cause sectionalism
to be a permanent factor in American history.
He then goes on to enumerate the groups: New England, with its Puritan
English ancestry and its agriculture and fishing; the South, with
its English Episcopalians, its aristocratic ideals, its plantation
life; the piedmont country, with its independent small farmers and
self-governing townships; and in between the commercial valleys of the
Hudson, the Delaware and the Susquehanna. These again had their local
differences of character:
[62]The Hudson had been settled by the Dutch, although many English,
New Englanders, Germans and others had mixed with them. The
Delaware region was largely occupied by English and German Quakers.
The Susquehanna Valley contained a large proportion of Germans,
still using their native tongue, and also many Scotch, Irish and
English. There existed well defined interests, the mercantile, the
agricultural; the German, the Dutch and the Quakers; the city, the
country.
Beyond all these was the frontier, with its own natural conditions,
type of inhabitants, and economic problems, a democratic community
separate from all the rest.
The Constitutional convention of 1787 in Philadelphia was typical of
this situation. Every problem found divergent interests and opinions;
every solution was effected by compromise. [63]There was state jealousy
of all central authority; the opposition between large and small
states; that between the industries of the north and the agriculture
of the south; the slave trade, with its complex of moral and economic
problems; the sectionalism of the settled east and the frontier west;
the protection of the property-holding class and the satisfaction of
the radicals with their demand for liberty and equality. Every one of
these conflicts had to be settled if possible, or at least (as with
slavery) brought to a temporary status to avoid sharp struggle. There
were, of course, certain unifying factors. The majority of the settlers
were English, and most of these Protestants. The non-English speaking
elements were very largely of Teutonic blood and Protestant religion
also. There was a common political experience, and a democratic
urge typical of the frontier. Most important of all, there was an
eight-year war fought together against a common enemy and under the
same Commander-in-Chief. The American government, then, with its new
Constitution, was not a simple unity from the outset. It was rather a
highly complex unity, containing within itself many minor groups, many
different viewpoints, and many integrations of the sub-group for the
benefit of the nation as a whole.
2.
An interesting illustration of this, and for our purpose a crucial
one, is in the religious life of the thirteen original states.
Before the Revolution, the states might be divided into four groups
as regards their religious organization: there were congregational
establishments in Massachusetts and Plymouth, New Haven, Connecticut,
and New Hampshire; Church of England establishments in Virginia and
the two Carolinas; four states formerly under various regimes had had
the Church of England forced on them—Maryland, at first under Catholic
rule, but with freedom of residence for all Christians; New York and
New Jersey, which had been dominated by the Dutch Reformed Church; and
Georgia, founded with almost complete religious liberty. Only three
states had no established church—Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and its
offshoot, Delaware. Of these last, Rhode Island was founded by Roger
Williams in 1636, under the radical, not to say revolutionary principle
of complete separation of church and state, with right of residence
and citizenship for all persons, even including Jews and atheists.
Pennsylvania, chartered in 1681, was founded by William Penn, the
Quaker, with liberty of residence for all “believers in Almighty God”;
but the English government insisted on the condition that all voters
and office holders “shall be such as profess faith in Jesus Christ”
and the Protestant religion. What the new nation had, then, was not
religious liberty, but rather a clash of many different points of view.
[64]Massachusetts set up its theocratic state with its chief interest
in the Church; Virginia established its civil state, with the church
as a subject member; while Rhode Island boldly denied the purposes and
premises of both, placing an impassable gulf between the State and the
Church and relegating to the individual conscience and to voluntary
association all concern and action touching the Church and religious
matters.
What, then, should be the upshot of this confusion of religious groups,
with their ancient hatreds and prejudices, ingrown with history and
overlaid with former strife and martyrdom? It was obviously impossible
to make the United States Calvinist or Episcopal; it was necessary to
have some sacrifice of each for the good of all. But it might have
been possible to make the nation Protestant Christian, as was actually
the case with the state of New Hampshire until 1877. Various minor
causes here entered in. Warfare with England meant some opposition, at
least, to the Church of England. The distance from the actual seat of
old-world struggles, the character of the colonists and their longing
for every type of freedom, helped much. The new theories of the French
Encyclopedists, as adopted by Jefferson, certainly had great influence.
But most important of all was the existence of the many minor sects,
with the few important ones, of which all longed to rule but none
wished to be dominated by any other.
The upshot was religious freedom, the separation of church and state,
according to Article VI, Section 3, of the Federal Constitution:
“No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any
office or public trust under the United States.” This clause
was opposed on both sides—by Massachusetts as being too liberal, by
Virginia and Rhode Island as not liberal enough. Virginia had two years
before this overthrown her state church and given complete freedom of
conscience—not toleration—to all her people. The opposition even to
toleration was becoming crystallized in the words of Thomas Paine:
“Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance, but the counterfeit
of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right of
withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it.” So the
first amendment to the Constitution, adopted immediately afterward by
motion of the first Congress, and by the required two-thirds of the
states, was: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
This was tremendously significant of the growing and newly conscious
group mind of the United States of America. It was equally important
for the future of the nation and its unity in days to come. Religious
liberty was not a matter of doctrine in its inception; it was the
product of the birth and development of the group mind of the nation.
It meant the relinquishment of the racial habits, of the state laws,
of the old urge to persecute (common to almost every group, even those
who were themselves refugees from persecution), and the adoption of a
national standard to which every state, every church and every sect
should bring its sacrifice. And if this sacrifice was not of their
own right to live, but only of the right to make others miserable,
it was nevertheless the sacrifice of something so important that
the demand had convulsed France, Germany and England not many years
before. Religious liberty, indeed, however firmly based on law and
political ideals, never became the habit of thought and action which
intolerance had been. A recurrent phenomenon of American life has been
the breaking up into religious, racial and sectional groups, with a
further synthesis of Americanization, through some common interest to
unite them. The conflict among the many groups prior to the adoption of
the Constitution, and its solution in that document with its Bill of
Rights, has been paralleled at least four times from that period to the
present day.
3.
These four reactions against the immigrant correspond with the four
peaks of the curve of immigration into the United States, with two
great alterations in the process, corresponding to the Civil War and
the World War.
Up till 1830, immigration into the United States was small in amount
and fairly regular. The first wave stretched from 1831 to 1861,
reaching its peak in 1855; its total amounted to four millions of
foreigners, of whom the largest group and the first to come were the
Irish, the second in number and date of arrival the Germans. The growth
of intolerance against these newcomers was shown in the movement known
as Know-Nothingism or the American Party. The second wave, of similar
nationalities, was from 1862 to 1877; the reply to this appeared in the
anti-alien planks in the political platforms of 1876. The third wave,
from 1878 to 1897, was larger than these earlier ones; it included
many Scandinavians and, after 1882, growing numbers of Italians,
Russians, and Austro-Hungarians, the two last being composed in part
of persecuted Jews, in part of impoverished peasants. The Nativist
reaction against this immigrant trend appears rather in the form of
religious opposition, for the American Protective Association of those
days was predominantly anti-Catholic. The fourth wave began in 1898
and extended until 1914, when the outbreak of the World War in Europe
caused a sudden drop to almost nothing; in its highest years, 1907 and
1913, more than 1,200,000 entered our ports annually; and the greatest
number of these new arrivals came from Italy, Austria-Hungary and
Russia. The reaction against these new immigrants was under way, but
the war interrupted its progress, and the Ku Klux Klan arrived at its
full power only after the war, when new conditions swayed the group
mind of America.
In each of these cases, the height of the movement against the
immigrant came just after the peak of the wave of immigration, at
the time when it had had time to impress itself on the native-born.
The philosophies of these four movements varied according to the
nationality of the immigrants against whom the natives were
protesting, and according to the general philosophy of life in vogue at
the time. The first such movement, the Know-Nothing or American Party,
originated in New York State in 1852 “as a secret organization with
passwords, oath, grip and ritual.”[65] Its creed was summed up in two
words: Americanism and Protestantism. Its special target was the two
million Irish who had come into the country; they were poor laborers,
with a low standard of living, ignorant, hereditary enemies of England,
and Catholics into the bargain. No wonder there were anti-Irish riots
in New York, Philadelphia and Boston; that it was rumored the Pope
would soon be dictator of America; or that the secret anti-alien
society was begun. But the course of the movement was spectacular and
brief. It entered national politics, thus both making bitter enemies
for itself and taking off the secrecy which was its chief source of
power. Then came the abolitionist movement, and the American party was
split into northern and southern branches. Most important of all, the
peak of immigration was passed, the Irish adopted the American standard
of living, became a part of communal life, without any danger of
Catholic overthrow of our cherished institutions—Othello’s occupation
was gone, and the Know-Nothing party disappeared.
The next wave of immigration and the next reaction against it were
minor ones. The immigrants met groups of their own origin already
absorbed into the common life of America, and fitted in with little
difficulty. The attempt in 1876 to prevent the use of public funds for
sectarian schools was itself comparatively slight.
But in between came the tremendous crisis of the Civil War. Here the
opposition was not between native and immigrant, but between north and
south, an industrial society of free laborers against an agricultural
society of castes,—planters, poor whites, and negro slaves. I shall
not go further into this conflict, because it is too familiar and
has comparatively little to do with the particular application of
my viewpoint. But, from our point of view, it is important to see
the place of the first Ku Klux Klan of 1865–71. This was again a
secret organization, adding the feature of disguise, for the terrifying
effect on the negroes whom it was the object of the Klan to overawe.
The Klan was a partisan and sectional organization, of Southern white
men of Confederate sympathies, to maintain their group supremacy over
the newly freed negroes and the “carpet baggers” from the North. The
victors had, as usual, indulged in oppression over the losers, and the
grievance was a very real one. The Klan was partially successful in its
object, but at once fell into numerous abuses, was used by partisans
to vent personal grudges, fell into the hands of a lawless element,
and was formally disbanded in 1871 by General Nathan B. Forrest, its
national commander or Grand Wizard. Its slogan of “white supremacy”
shows its animus against the negroes and the North, not against the
alien. Some of its partisans claim that the Klan did not disband when
it was formally ordered so to do, but persisted in its underground
activity until as late as 1877.[66] However that may be, its character
and purpose are very clear; it was sectional, timely, and for the one
aim of white supremacy. It appealed to its members and frightened its
enemies by its methods of disguise and secrecy, no less than by the
beatings, burnings and other outrages which were carried on either
under its auspices or by the false use of its insignia and methods. Its
defiance of the law imposed by force, and its use of force in reply,
are the vestiges of war psychology; It was the legitimate, if unlovely,
offspring of the Reconstruction. It had no function left when the white
South regained control of the states, but its memory still lingers as
part of the idealization of the “lost cause” of the Confederacy.
The third reaction against immigration was primarily anti-Catholic
in trend. This was the A. P. A., or American Protective Association,
another secret society, organized in 1887, which reached its greatest
popularity in 1894 and 1895. At this same period there were several
other societies with the same purpose, notably the National League
for the Protection of American Institutions, which had a number of
extremely prominent men among its members. At this time the
so-called “new immigration” was growing strong, with its large numbers
of Italian and Austrian Catholics, added to those of German and Irish
origin already on the ground. The old fear of political domination
by the Papacy, expressed at the time of the adoption of the first
amendment to the Constitution, and then refuted, was again revived.
There was an orgy of purported “confessions” of nuns and priests; there
was circulated a forged oath of the Knights of Columbus, in which
the members agreed to place the papal authority above their national
allegiance; and a false encyclical of Pope Leo XIII. Thousands of
patriotic Americans believed all this obvious nonsense, stirred up by
the fear of a dominant Church; the A. P. A. had as many as two million
members and threatened to drive out of public life the twelve million
Catholics then in the country, without regard to their race, nation,
service to America, or the number of generations they had lived in
the United States. The mob spirit, once aroused, crystalized in the
breaking of the Northern group mind of Civil War days into various
sub-groups, Catholic, anti-Catholic and indifferent. But the financial
panic of the 1890’s resulted in a sudden drop in immigration; the older
settlers learned English and were absorbed into the American cultural
group; the A. P. A. had no reason for existence, and again substantial
unity was achieved by the mind of the American people.
In this connection we must give a passing glance to what is still our
single greatest problem of groups, the existence of a ten per cent.
negro minority in the United States. These people were brought here
by force as slaves; as a subject class they were refused education,
though at the same time their own language, religion and customs were
thrown into disrepute and have been largely forgotten. Though freed
from economic slavery, they are still politically a subject class in
our southern states, while in northern and border states they are
gaining a political balance of power. Finally, they rest everywhere
under social disabilities, from the “Jim Crow” cars of the South to
the subtler distaste and ostracisms of the North. The result is that
they are forming complete, self-contained Negro communities within
the larger cities of the North and South alike; that they are growing
increasingly self-conscious as a group; and that the large number of
mulattoes, who in the British and French West Indies would rank as a
third group, between the racial divisions, are here forced to make
common cause with negroes. The negroes are thus a self-conscious group,
though their culture is imitative. The grouping of the negroes apart is
easy, on the whole, because of the gross external signs, such as skin
color and texture of hair, so that the mass of the whites of the United
States regard them definitely as a different and a lower race. That
anthropologists are not so certain of all this makes little difference,
because the group mind is based rather on old habits of thought than
on the understanding of new and difficult facts. Here seems a problem
of a different order, then, than the racial and religious groupings
of the sub-varieties of the white race, which are constantly being
overcome and regrouped in a larger union of social life. In this study
it will be impossible to do more than point out the existence of this
distinct problem, with its similar mental background to the rest but
its immeasurably more terrible implications.
The fourth wave of immigration was by far the greatest in number of
newcomers, and by far the most variegated in racial and national
composition. It brought a million a year or more for six years during
this period. And its members had 75% of persons from southern and
eastern Europe, while the immigration prior to 1890 had included only
20% of these races, and had been chiefly the English, Irish, Germans
and Scandinavians. It is no wonder that the race theory began to
be popular in America, under the spectacular leadership of Lothrop
Stoddard and Grant Madison, and that many began to agitate for a
greater or less limitation of the flood of immigration. Even so sober a
student of society as Professor Edward A. Ross of Wisconsin held that
it was wise to assimilate people of different group mind more slowly
than we were doing at the time. He said:
[67]There have come among us in the last half century more than twenty
million European immigrants with all manner of mental background, many
of them having tradition which will no more blend with American
traditions than oil will blend with water.
And he proceeded to point out their inexperience with democratic
institutions, their lack of respect for law and for women, their
disbelief in progress. In addition, we need only note that many of
these people were Catholics and Jews; the total number of the former
in the United States in 1923 being estimated at 18,000,000 and of the
latter at 3,600,000. And the Jews were far more conspicuous than their
numbers, on account of their massing in the great cities and their
concentration in certain lines of industry. Thus the ground was fully
prepared for a new anti-alien movement, expressing itself this time in
the form of efforts to restrict immigration. This movement was under
way in 1914, and would probably have followed in the course of its
precursors. But world-shaking events ensued which altered the course of
groups in America as well. The outbreak of the World War in 1914, the
entrance of the United States into the war in 1917, altered all groups,
profoundly affected the American group mind, and made the relation
between the sub-groups and the mind of America very different from what
it had been. The results of this process are still evident, and it is
among them that we can look for anti-Semitism, together with many other
types of intolerance and group opposition.
CHAPTER V.
THE WORLD WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH
1.
With the outbreak of the World War in August 1914, the mind of America
suddenly became strikingly distinct from that of Europe. They were
fighting; we were watching. President Wilson appealed to the United
States to be “neutral in fact as in name ... impartial in thought
as well as in action.” The older American stock sympathized, on the
whole, with England, except for the Irish and Germans; the newer
immigrants had different racial and national affinities and memories,
some holding allegiance to their former governments, some, like the
oppressed Russian Jews, being especially bitter against their former
rulers. In this situation, American neutrality was the result, not of
indifference, but of lack of understanding on the part of many groups
in our population and of a stalemate between the rest.
One definite result certainly was that all these diverse groups of
new and old immigrants began to feel themselves a unity, an American
people. They felt their distinction from the warring nations overseas,
their own interest, their own reaction to the complex problems at
issue. Meanwhile, however, both parties were trying every means to
bring the United States into the war on their own sides. Germany
tried to bring about an embargo on munitions sold to the Allies and
in default of that, to obstruct their shipment by both peaceful and
warlike means. Great Britain, more especially, tried to influence
American public opinion in favor of the Allies and against Germany.
Within, there were pacifists and advocates of preparedness, both trying
to mold opinion. This formation of an American mind, and the difficulty
of determining its future direction, came to a head in the election
of 1916, when the German-Americans opposed President Wilson, and when
Hughes was supported by Roosevelt, the arch-interventionist. During
this period we experienced the first development of what we have
since grown to know intimately as “propaganda,” a deliberate, elaborate
technique for influencing the mind of the group.
The declaration of war by the United States in April, 1917, unified
the American mind in a manner and to a degree that were almost
inconceivable. Every immigrant group began to pass resolutions
favoring the government; the foreign language newspapers commenced
an intensive propaganda for the prosecution of the war. Volunteers
came from every section of the country and every type of origin, as
many from the children of Germans as from any other group. The draft
law was passed with apparent general approval; and its enforcement
met with surprisingly little difficulty. Huge loans were made to the
Allied governments. Tremendous bond issues were raised by the American
government, with general approval and the coercion of any minority
objectors. The National Council of Defense, founded in August, 1916,
was able in many cases to overcome the dominant profit-motive of our
society in gaining self-sacrificing patriotism of manufacturers and
merchants.
Along with this voluntary and spontaneous unification of the group
mind, came repression and coercion directed to forcing into agreement
any unabsorbed minority groups. The Committee on Public Information was
founded in September, 1917, to exert propaganda through the sources of
public information, to send out favorable news and opinion, and even
through censorship to suppress material considered dangerous to the
general cause. The censorship exercised by the military forces on war
bulletins, war correspondents and the personal letters of soldiers, was
applied less strictly to the general population. The secret service,
greatly expanded to cope with German spies, began hunting out strikers,
radicals or any others who—in the minds of the detectives or of any
other government officials—might possibly obstruct the war efforts.
Emergency acts gave the President unusual power in these and other
directions.
This use of force was characteristic, not only of the government,
but of local groups as well. In one place a German sympathizer (real
or supposed) might be made to kiss the flag; in another a strike
leader might be lynched. In Milwaukee, where public opinion was
sensitive on account of the large number of German-Americans, a quota
of Liberty Bonds was assigned arbitrarily to every person, and he was
practically forced to purchase them, irrespective of his ability to do
so, by threats of ostracism, by influence of his creditors, by every
sort of social pressure,—in order that Milwaukee might rank as a real
American community and go “over the top” in every “drive.” The military
language applied to these campaigns was matched by a growing technique
of organization. Professional propagandists perfected a method of
meetings, songs, card-catalogs, and quotas, by which any cause might be
assured of huge sums of money. The greater propaganda of our government
and foreign governments was matched by the little propaganda of every
subgroup, as long as this was not in conflict with the general purpose.
A striking illustration of this is in the successful drives of the
various war-work agencies, the Red Cross, American Library Association,
Young Men’s Christian Association, Jewish Welfare Board, Knights of
Columbus, and the rest; and especially in their enormous joint campaign
just after the signing of the armistice. Every American felt that this
joint campaign, first, would help the soldiers and the common cause;
and second, indicated by its inclusiveness the complete unification of
America. Along with this general unification came the similar process
in many of the immigrant groups themselves. Professor Miller[68] tells
how this was reflected in the Czecho-Slovak group in America, so that
bitter atheists united with Catholic priests on joint committees for
national freedom in their old home in Europe.
2.
This internal unification was accomplished by a high emotional tension,
a national and personal uncertainty, and a common hate. The prejudice
against the various immigrant groups, arising as a result of the
great wave of immigration, was abated for the moment; all the little
prejudices were summed up in one great hatred of the common enemy,
Germany. This was reflected in avoidance of everything German in
this country as well; German instruction was withdrawn from many high
schools, German music from the opera houses, German fried potatoes from
the restaurants. The term, “German-American,” formerly in good repute,
now became a byword, and with it every form of “hyphen.” The demand now
was for “hundred per cent.” Americanism.
In the prevailing ignorance of foreign languages and peoples, or even
if this ignorance had not existed in its full measure, the hatred
against the Germans was transferred in part to other groups as well,
even those with most reason to be anti-German or anti-Austrian.
Foreign language newspapers fell under popular suspicion and official
censorship much heavier than that of the English language periodicals.
Some states passed laws, later declared unconstitutional, forbidding
teaching, preaching or public meetings in languages other than English.
Foreign sounding names attracted suspicion, and were changed in large
numbers. Altogether, America begun to repeat the oppression of subject
groups which had caused permanent resentment and sown the seeds of
rebellion in almost every land in Europe, to create her own Ireland,
Alsace-Lorraine or Poland. Americanization became a synonym for
compulsory adoption of American standards and group habits.
Americanization had had a long, if somewhat unsatisfactory, trial
before the war. It was the attempt, at that time, to bring American
culture to the supposedly uncultured immigrant through settlements,
night schools, and other cultural agencies. The attempt was
satisfactory in a comparatively small proportion of the total immigrant
population; and the earnest workers blamed this fact on the poorness
of their textbooks, the unsuitability of their buildings, or the
weariness of the people after a day of arduous labor. Now, all of these
were undoubtedly true, but a more fundamental cause of the weakness of
Americanization methods lay in the fact that they were all one-sided;
they consisted in attempts to change the immigrant into an American,
rather than attempts to join many groups together into a composite
unity. Even the conference on Americanization called by the Secretary
of the Interior in 1918 passed friendly and practical resolutions,
but still one-sided and consequently superficial.
The few individuals who persisted in their individuality, who refused
to be absorbed in the group purpose, formed no clearly marked group of
themselves. They were the “conscientious objectors,” who refused any
type of activity that might help the military machine; the “slackers,”
who evaded the draft for selfish reasons; various religious groups,
such as the Quakers; a few economic dissenters, such as the Industrial
Workers of the World. They received, as they must have expected, the
violent disapproval of the group, expressed in terms of mob attack,
legal imprisonment, or at least, extreme social disapproval. They were
the unassimilated residuum of personality in the general unification of
the American group under the pressure of an external foe.
3.
Then came the armistice in November, 1918. As Dr. Drachsler remarks:
[69]The war lasted long enough to make America painfully conscious
of her peculiar problem of nationalism, but was not of long enough
duration to fuse the divergent ethnic elements permanently.
The artificial unity of war-time had no longer a purpose, and began
instantly to dissolve into its component elements. But the high
emotional tone of the war-time remained. Men still hated violently,
but they could no longer release this hatred in battle or in sending
others to battle. The repressive agencies remained in existence and in
excellent running order; groups had learned how to use propaganda as an
instrument; the habit of group pressure on subgroups and on different
and opposing groups had been strengthened. Most of all, great masses of
Americans had a new group consciousness of America as a group, with the
uniformity of habit, opinion and conduct characteristic of their own
subgroup taken as normal for the whole.
The first result, then, was that the original subgroups fell apart and
that their opposition was stronger and more open than before the
war. This was due certainly to the heightened emotional tone, not only
of the American mind, but every group mind the world over. During the
war men and nations lived habitually under conditions of excitement,
uncertainty and tension. After the war the same emotional tone remained
to color whatever group ideas might become associated with its action.
So the whites who had drafted negroes to fight for them resented these
same negroes coming home with the new pride of soldiers, remembering
new equality of treatment they had received from the French. The
daughters of the rich no longer danced with the poor, ignorant farm
boys as they had in every cantonment. Prejudice against the uniform
returned, and girls of certain classes would no longer care to be seen
with soldiers or sailors; as they had when those men were expressing
the group purpose by their very garments. And the hatred of the various
immigrant groups for each other—the hatred of the older American
groups against the immigrant, the Catholic and the Jew, returned with
redoubled force. As the present writer found occasion to note directly
after the close of the war:
[70]During the war we felt that prejudice between men of different
groups and different faiths was lessening day by day, that our common
enthusiasm in our common cause had brought Catholics, Protestants
and Jews nearer together on the basis of their ardent Americanism.
Especially we who were at the front felt this in the first flush of
our co-operation, our mutual interest and our mutual helpfulness.
This disappointment was common to many of us who had allowed our hopes
to run beyond our knowledge.
Another cause of this unusual strength of group hatreds was the very
repression of the war period. Individuals and sub-groups had sacrificed
their prejudices for the common purpose, but they had done so without
pleasure and as a sacrifice. Now they resumed their group intolerance
with redoubled zest due to long repression, whether that had been
voluntary or forced. The “white, gentile, Protestant American” may
have resented fighting on an equality with the negro, or under the
orders of a foreigner—now that resentment had its vent. Never has
group feeling run higher in America than in this reaction from the
sudden, violent and partially artificial unity during our participation
in the World War.
One notable result of this sudden relaxation of unity, this sudden
predominance of the subgroups, appeared in the phenomena of
displacement. Displacement is a common matter among paranoiacs, where
one object is substituted for another with the same meaning and the
same feeling-tone of resentment or of pleasure. It is also a common
characteristic of mobs, which may be called for this and other reasons,
a sort of social paranoiacs; the lynching mob will turn from its
intended victim to hang instead a public official or a bystander who
objects even mildly to its program.[71] In this way the hatreds of
war-time were displaced. The hatred for the German was displaced to
the alien as a whole. The hatred and suspicion of Russia, aroused when
that nation drew out of the war, and intensified when it adopted the
radical economic program of the Bolsheviki and the novel political rule
of the Soviets, was displaced and applied to all economic radicals,
whether Russian or American. Finally, the Jew was identified as a
foreigner (even though he might be American-born and a veteran of the
war); and as a radical (even though he might be an ultra-conservative
capitalist). The ancient, lingering anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism of
ages past appeared again; the Jew was not only a Christ-killer or a
boor or a Semite,—for no accusation was ever entirely dropped—he was
also an alien and a radical, an international banker and an enemy of
gentile civilization.
CHAPTER VI.
THE KU KLUX KLAN AND OTHER GROUP REACTIONS
The outstanding phenomenon of the post-war period was the Ku Klux Klan.
Other events which accompanied it were the new laws for the limitation
of immigration and the general suppression of civil liberties of many
kinds. The Klan had something to do with both of these as cause and as
effect. Moreover, all three—Klan, anti-alien movement, anti-radical
movement—were largely anti-Semitic in sentiment; in addition to which
there was a separate movement of anti-Semitism based on the imported
anti-Semitism from Europe. Therefore in any study of anti-Semitism as
a group reaction we must also study these three group reactions of
the post-war period, all of them partially anti-Semitic, and all of
them associated with the same group-ideas and the same group-will as
anti-Semitism itself.
1.
The Ku Klux Klan of the present is not the one of the Reconstruction
period in any sense. It has taken over the name, the garb and much
of the high-sounding ritual. But it has a new motive and a new
psychology. The old Klan was sectional; the new is national. The old
was anti-Northern and anti-negro; the new is anti-alien, anti-negro,
anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish. The old met a certain emergency and
was then disbanded by compulsion of the Federal government and the
action of its own leaders; the new has expanded from the character of
a fraternal society to that of a nation-wide propaganda movement, has
entered politics, and become one of the leading political issues of the
campaign of 1924. In other words, its real ancestors are: not the Ku
Klux Klan of the south in 1866–71, but the Know-Nothing Party of the
50’s and the A. P. A. of the 90’s.
The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1915 in Atlanta, Ga., by William J.
Simmons, a former Protestant minister of strong convictions, intense
if narrow intellect, and great interest in the organization and
spreading of fraternal orders. For five years it grew slowly and
inconspicuously, during the period of the war and for two years
thereafter; in June 1920 it had about five thousand members and was
in financial straits. At this juncture it was taken up by Mr. Edward
Young Clarke and Mrs. Elizabeth Tyler, who had had experience in the
new technique of propaganda. Under their skilled hands the Klan at once
grew with astounding rapidity; paid organizers entered state after
state, organized “Klaverns,” and reaped great profits for themselves
and for the heads of the organization. But the commercial motive,
while probably strong in a few persons, was in no sense important
in the actual membership of the Klan and their acts. “Its official
documents indicate that the Klan originally was a purely fraternal
and patriotic organization, one of the hundreds of similar secret
societies throughout the country.”[72] The New York World investigated
the Klan in 1921, and a Congressional investigation followed in October
of that year, but both served rather to advertise than to harm the
organization. It spread rapidly throughout the Union, claiming at one
time as many as four million members, elected senators and governors
in a few instances, and in several became the outstanding issue of
state elections, sponsored or was accused of innumerable acts of mob
violence, ranging from warnings to certain persons to discontinue their
bootlegging or immorality, up to beatings, tar-and-feather parties, and
the notorious Mer Rouge murders of 1922 in Louisiana.
We have already discussed the expansion of propaganda, so that its
enormous utilization by the Klan is quite comprehensible. But even the
constant reiteration of laudable motives and grandiloquent phrases
about Americanism cannot account for this sudden rise to power; two
other elements must be included—group prejudice and secrecy. The Klan
capitalized every prejudice of its group, which was predominantly a
small-town one, of American birth, Protestant religion, and Anglo-Saxon
either in race or in their opinion of their race. And the Klan met in
utter secrecy, did not divulge the names of its members, paraded
the streets in the disguise of robes and masks, and carried out its
deeds of violence in the same awe-inspiring anonymity.
Clearly, the Klan is typical of the tendencies we have found in the
American mind after the war. It represents a subgroup revolting against
its voluntary sacrifices for the nation during the war. It represents
the anti-alien, anti-Catholic and now also anti-Jewish sentiment, the
reaction against the enormous wave of immigration just at an end. It
includes also the fear and hatred of the negro, strongest in the old
South but spreading to the North with the northern migration of many
negroes during and after the war. On the Pacific coast the fear of
the Japanese immigration enters into the complex of hatreds. In other
words, the Klan is the third wave of Nativism. It is the great reaction
of the subgroup to the intense sacrifice for the nation during the war.
2.
Various other motives are implicated in this general complex. The
South furnished the original soil of the Klan; its second center was
the middle west, the old home of the A. P. A. It was weakest on the
Atlantic and Pacific coasts (except Oregon) where the various immigrant
groups actually live. It was weak in the heterogeneous masses of the
cities with their aliens, Catholics and Jews; strongest in the small
town, where men may talk of the Papal menace without actually knowing
many Catholics, of the Elders of Zion without seeing personally more
than one or two Jews a year. The attitude of Nativism, the reaction to
the immigration of huge masses of foreigners, is still strongest where
these foreigners themselves are not in evidence.
This suggests that other motives must enter in, that something else
in the small-town American must have made the Klan congenial. That
something else is monotony, standardization (the “Main Street”
attitude), and the appeal of the Klan to these people lay largely in
its glamor of mystery, secrecy and hidden power. The rise of fraternal
orders is one of the note-worthy movements in American life; there are
now over six hundred of these societies in the United States, of which
four hundred ninety were organized between 1880 and 1895. Over
seven per cent. of our population is affiliated with these orders, and
their greatest strength is precisely in the small town, where they are
a bright spot in the dull social life, and give a factitious importance
to their “nobles” and “exalted rulers,” as well as to the many who are
permitted to enter into their secrets and to parade in their regalia.
Professor Mecklin[73] classifies secret societies in three groups:
the beneficial societies, with whom secrecy is merely protective; the
social organizations, devised to give “variety and interest to our
poverty-stricken American life”; and finally, militant societies with
a general program which affects the entire nation, like the old Ku
Klux Klan, the Mafia, and the Fenians. He concludes that the present
Klan, while undoubtedly furnishing for many of its members the release
from monotony, the sense of power, the revolt against repression, that
is characteristic of the second class of organizations, has also the
characteristics of the third type and is therefore a public problem.
As he points out elsewhere in his book, the disguise of the mask
is a further danger, as it may be adopted by members to persecute
non-members in nameless ways, and even presents an opportunity for
non-Klansmen to indulge in violence practically without fear of
detection.
Professor Mecklin’s analysis of Klan psychology in Chapter IV of his
book presents several suggestive points. He says:
[74]The strength of the Klan lies in that large, well-meaning, but
more or less ignorant and unthinking middle class, whose inflexible
loyalty has preserved with uncritical fidelity the traditions of the
original American stock.
[75]Membership in a vast mysterious Empire means a sort of mystic
glorification of his petty self.
The Klan insists on like-mindedness, in the sense of adopting the
Anglo-Saxon ideals as the norm for America. Finally,
[76]The Klan has literally battened upon the irrational fear
psychology that followed on the heels of the war.
Father John A. Ryan contributes an additional motive,
[77]There is a particular manifestation of public opinion which
deserves emphasis as a cause of the recent intolerance. This is the
conviction which seized large and numerous groups of individuals
that they were justified in becoming extra legal agents for law
enforcement.... Either the spirit or the letter of the law is violated
in the name of the law itself.
Frank Tannenbaum covers similar points in the first chapter of “Darker
Phases of the South,” where he deals with the Klan. He holds, first,
that
[78]The Klan is an attempt to maintain static what has become
dynamic. [79]The war left a common mood upon the world ... the hate
is generated as a means of justifying the thrill to be derived
from abusing the people hated. The Klan is a reaction to boredom;
it is a means of fulfilling the millennial hopes frustrated by
the outcome of the war; it gives vent to a type of war hysteria.
[80]The idealization of the white women in the South is partly the
unconscious self-protection on the part of the white men from their
own bad habits, notions, beliefs, attitudes and practises, a matter of
over-compensation.
To his keen psychoanalytic study I must add a few words from an article
by Frank Bohn in the American Journal of Sociology. [81]Mr. Bohn
points out that the Klan, once organized, had to find something to do,
that its violence was a natural outcome of disguise, organization and
aimlessness. He attributes its origin chiefly to the disillusionment
of the American people over the break-down of their simple, democratic
ideals when applied to a huge nation of complex population; and to the
changing character of the racial and social composition of the people,
with the revolt of the older stocks. He concludes:
The civilization of the United States is suffering rapid changes, not
only as regards its basic institutions, but also in the nature and
quality of its human composition. The hooded figures of the Ku Klux
Klan are an expression of pain, of sorrow and of solemn warning. Its
methods arise from anger and fear, not from knowledge and forethought.
3.
A word may be needed especially on our narrower topic, the relation of
the Ku Klux Klan to the Jew. Its preliminary questions to the candidate
for “naturalization” include two that exclude the Catholic, two the
Jew, one the alien and one the negro. The most inclusive is number
2: “Are you a native born, white, Gentile American citizen?” Number 4
is: “Do you believe in the tenets of the Christian religion?” Imperial
Wizard H. W. Evans gave out an interview in Indianapolis early in 1924
when he made the following statement, repeated several time later in
other connections:
By deliberate election he (the Jew) is unassimilable. He rejects
intermarriage. His religious and social rites and customs are
inflexibly segregative. Law-abiding, healthy, moral, mentally alert,
energetic, loyal and reverent in his home life, the Jew is yet by
primal instinct a Jew, indelibly marked by persecution, with no deep
national attachment, a stranger to the emotion of patriotism as the
Anglo-Saxon feels it. Klansmen have no quarrel with him, no hatred of
him, no thought of persecuting him. As Protestants are unavailable
for membership in all-Jewish societies, so Jews are unavailable for
membership in an all-Protestant society like the Klan. Moreover,
their jealously guarded separatism unfits them for co-operation in a
movement dedicated to the thorough unification of the dominant strains
in American life.
Here are the same themes of racial superiority, like-mindedness of
America, identification of Americanism and Protestantism. But elsewhere
we meet with direct attacks on the Jew, as on the Catholic, negro and
foreigner—not merely the assertion of their inferiority. Speaking at
Dallas, Texas, December 7, 1922, Mr. Evans said:
The Jew produces nothing anywhere on the face of the earth. He does
not till the soil. He does not create or manufacture anything for
common use. He adds nothing to the sum of human welfare. Everywhere he
stands between the producer and the consumer and sweats the toil of
the one and the necessity of the other for his gains.
This sounds like an economic motive, but it may be merely repetition of
stock charges of traditional anti-Semitism. Mr. Bohn hints at such an
economic purpose when he remarks:
One factor has been the recent invasion of the smaller western and
southern towns by Jewish retail merchants. These are disliked and
opposed by their native American competitors for purely commercial
reasons.
These facts seem to me erroneous; there have always been Jewish
merchants and peddlers throughout the country, and they have always had
Christian competitors; probably they have merely been a point of
vantage for the aroused prejudices of the group. Dr. Mecklin says:
[82]The Klan insists, in the published statements of its ideals, upon
complete religious toleration while in actual practise it encourages
boycotts of Catholic and Jew in business and social relations. [83]The
eternal quarrel of the Klan with the Jew and the Negro is that mental
and physical differences seem to have conspired to place them in
groups entirely to themselves.... The Negro is granted a place in
American society only upon his willingness to accept a subordinate
position. The Jew is tolerated largely because native Americanism
cannot help itself. The Jew is disliked because of the amazing
tenacity with which he resists absolute Americanization, a dislike
that is not unmingled with fear; the Negro is disliked, because he is
considered essentially an alien and unassimilable element in society.
4.
The Klan has now passed the zenith of its aggressiveness and its
influence. The campaign of exposure, while it made thousands of
members, also made thousands of enemies and robbed the Klan of the
secrecy which was so essential an element of its strength. Many of its
members lost interest, others were positively estranged by certain
methods and ideals of the organization. The trials for murder at Mer
Rouge, La., brought the Klan into bad odor generally. Most important
of all, the Klan went into politics, and in this followed exactly the
cycle of the Know-Nothings and A. P. A.’s—secrecy, growth, propaganda,
politics, enemies, decline. In 1924 the Klan was an element in the
national conventions of the two major parties. The Republicans
considered planks opposing and favoring the organization and finally
took no action. The Democrats had to take up the issue because of the
movement to nominate as their presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith,
governor of New York, and a professing Catholic. While Mr. Smith had
political supporters in his own state of every religious denomination,
still the entire strength of the Klan was thrown against him. At
the same time, the many Irish Catholics belonging to the Democratic
party resented the attempt of the Klan to dictate the nomination and
introduced a resolution attacking the Klan by name. The conflict
of that convention is now historic, and resulted in thoroughly
disorganizing the Democratic party for the ensuing campaign.
Finally, the passage of the immigration bills of 1921 and 1924 robbed
the Klan of its chief reason for existence, its most potent argument.
Immigration was abruptly cut down. Not only that, but its national
origin was totally altered so as to favor the peoples of northern and
western Europe, and to keep out the Italian Catholics and Russian
Jews. It is no longer possible to stimulate fear or hatred on such a
large scale again, now that immigration is no longer a large factor in
American life, and the group integration is once more proceeding at its
accustomed rate.
5.
The anti-immigration movement must not be regarded as a result of
the Klan but as a parallel phenomenon, with the same motives and
philosophy. The original political theory and economic situation, by
which all immigrants were welcomed into the United States to help build
up the country and to become full Americans has been slowly altering.
The first law of limitation, passed in 1882, and followed up by later
amendments, merely excluded convicts, persons affected with contagious
diseases, persons likely to become public charges, and similar
individuals for individual reasons. Other legislation of economic trend
excluded Chinese and later Japanese laborers, and contract labor. In
1917 the demand to limit the numbers of common labor, voiced by the
American Federation of Labor, met the desire to limit numbers and to
select racial groups, and the literacy test was embodied in the law,
excluding all who could not read or write in any language. But this was
satisfactory to neither the friends nor foes of immigration; it was
merely a temporary device.
In May 1921 a temporary law was passed limiting the number of each
nation to enter the United States annually to 3% of natives of that
nation residing here in 1910. This limited the total immigration at
once from the 1,285,349 of 1907, the peak year, to a total of
357,803. This total is in addition to immigrants from Canada, Mexico,
Newfoundland, Cuba and Central and South America; it does not deduct
the emigrants who often amount to as many or more than those entering
the country. It is simply a means of cutting down numbers and altering
proportions. It is directly a result of Klan preachments, of Nordic
theories, of the reaction of the native, gentile, Protestant American
to the growing complexity and heterogeneity of the nation, and to the
need of revising his mental stereotypes of the United States. He must
grow to think of his nation as a nation of many elements, many beliefs,
many backgrounds, most of them different from his own—to him America is
a Protestant country, a white man’s country, a gentile country, and he
intends that it shall remain so.
Therefore the permanent immigration bill enacted in May, 1924, changed
the percentage from three to two, and the date on which the quota is to
be estimated from 1910 to 1890. The result of this double change is to
alter radically the racial and national composition of the immigration
stream and hence the total character of the United States. As Chairman
Albert Johnson of the House Committee on Immigration, after whom the
bill was named, phrased its double purpose:
[84]The committee took a very important step in recommending a
permanent percentage law and thus recognizing the principle that the
United States should never keep its doors wide open. Second, the
percentage is based on the census of 1890 instead of the census of
1910, as in the present law. The new measure thus aims to change the
character of our future immigration by cutting down the number of
aliens who can come from southern and eastern Europe. In other words,
it is recognized that, on the whole, northern and western Europe
furnish the best material for citizenship.
The total immigration, therefore, was reduced from 357,000 to 164,667
and the emigrants have to be deducted from this to ascertain the actual
annual increase. The Italian quota was reduced from 42,000 to 3,845;
the Russian from 24,000 to 2,200; the Polish from 30,000 to 6,000.
On the other hand, the German quota was reduced only from 67,000 to
51,000; the Norwegian from 12,000 to 6,400; the British and Irish
from 77,000 to 62,500. The bill carried out radically the intentions of
its sponsors, to cut down the flood of immigration and to discriminate
against the racial and religious groups which they consider inferior
because they appear externally to be different. It is a group reaction
of the same order and motivation as the Ku Klux Klan.
6.
A concurrent phenomenon, arising from the same group mind but
essentially different in manifestation, is the suppression of civil
liberties which began during the war and continued afterward, an
expression of the same impulse toward compulsory like-mindedness,
but taking its criterion from the economic rather than the cultural,
religious or racial aspects of the differing groups. As Father Ryan put
it:
[85]These deplorable phenomena are three-fourths due to war
legislation and surviving war hysteria and one-fourth due to
industrial factors.... By means of clever, unscrupulous and wholesale
propaganda, nine-tenths of the American people were led to believe
that the steel strike of 1919 was revolutionary, bolshevistic, and
aimed immediately at the overthrow of the government. As a matter
of fact, there was no more bolshevism in that contest than in any
one of a dozen important disputes that have occurred in the last ten
years. Attorney General Palmer asserted that there was an organized
attempt to overthrow the government of the United States sufficiently
widespread to merit the attention of Congress. As a matter of fact,
there was no such danger.
[86]Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary, in the same
Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, has a fine summary
of the “Repression of Civil Liberties in the United States (1918–23).”
He enumerates the new Supreme Court interpretation of the free-speech
clause of the first amendment to the Constitution, by which a “clear
and present danger” justifies its violation; the state laws on
syndicalism or sedition or anarchy; the attacks on the right of labor
to strike; the use of the Department of Justice of the United States
to repress radical economic movements; the mob violence increasingly
widespread and regular; and the national organizations engaged
in repression, such as the National Civic Federation, the National
Security League, and the Better American Federation.
The material is too wide in range and too full of important instances
to be even cursorily examined here. The trend, however, was definitely
a part of the post-war attitude of the American mind, the breaking
up into violently opposing groups, each claiming to assert the true
American spirit. The same attitude of repression appears in the
churches in the form of heresy trials and an aggressive Fundamentalism.
It appears in the form of legislative acts to prohibit the teaching of
evolution in the state universities of several Southern states (most of
which failed of passage). Dr. Ward feels that the
Mob attacks, lynchings and prosecutions involving the use of free
speech reached their peak at the end of 1922, declining rapidly in.
1923. Interference with meetings by public authorities and private
groups reached a peak at the end of 1921, fell sharply in 1922,
and then went up again to a midway point in 1923.... [87]We have a
manifest abatement of post-war repression, but that experience has
left us a heritage of repressive laws and ordinances and a technique
of administrative illegality all ready to be used on due occasion.
It has also strengthened our lynching habit of mind, with its
determination to enforce its type of goodness, and our traditional
demand for conformity already overstimulated by the increasing
standardization of life. The occasions for the use of those qualities
and instruments of repression are increasing rather than diminishing.
Attempts were made during the height of the anti-Russian and
anti-radical movement to connect Jews with Bolshevism in Russia and
with radicalism in the United States, so that this movement also has
its anti-Semitic phase. Thus anti-Semitism is bound up with the Ku Klux
Klan, with the immigration bills, with the economic repression,—it is
an integral part of the group reaction from national unity, and appears
in every phase of the post-war group reactions.
CHAPTER VII.
ANTI-SEMITISM
In “Loyalties” by John Galsworthy, there occur two statements of
anti-Semitism so powerful and so keen that they may serve as a key to
the whole situation. The young Jew has accused a Christian aristocrat
of stealing his purse. The gentile girl, naturally a liberal, has to
choose her loyalty. She says: “Oh! I know lots of splendid Jews, and
I rather like little Ferdie; but when it comes to the point—they all
stick together; why shouldn’t we! It’s in the blood.... Prejudices—or
are they loyalties—I don’t know—criss-cross—we all cut each other’s
throats from the best of motives.” And later on an English grocer of
the lower middle class confesses: “To tell you the truth, I don’t
like—well, not to put too fine a point on it—‘ebrews. They work harder;
they’re more sober; they’re honest; and they’re everywhere. I’ve
nothing against them, but the fact is—they get on so.”
1.
Anti-Semitism is, then, a typical because a violent group attitude.
In America in its newest manifestation it is a part of the complex of
group revolts after the World War; it is intimately associated with the
Ku Klux Klan, anti-immigration movement, and repression generally, at
the same time that it has distinctive phases of its own. As Lewis S.
Gannett wrote:
[88] Because anti-Semitism is world-wide it is easy to assume that it
has the same causes everywhere; but conditions in America are very
different from conditions in countries where religion is taught in the
schools, where the Jews are virtually all middlemen, where the Ghetto
is an abiding place for generations of the same family.... American
anti-Semitism can largely be explained without reference to the
religious beliefs of Christians or Jews.
This last statement applies only to the immediate situation, not the
background.
The two elements in American anti-Semitism, then, are the imported
prejudice from Europe and the American soil which received it. The
form of the prejudice was the importation; its material backing and
impulse was the native American reaction against the apparently new
or apparently different group. The intensity of the movement at this
particular moment in history is a part of the post-war mental state of
the American people. In addition to the movements described in the last
chapter there are other manifestations mentioned in the introduction:
such as the attempt to limit the proportion of Jews in the colleges;
the anti-Semitic books and periodicals; and the activity of the Russian
emigrés constituting the immediate connecting link with anti-Semitism
in Europe and the world over. The agencies which hunted down the
radicals, whether as Russian sympathizers or from economic motives or
merely as a different group, tried assiduously to find Jews among their
leaders and were bitterly disappointed when economic radicalism turned
out to be an American movement in which Jews had merely a minority
share.
As we have seen, in 1919 the soil of the United States was abundantly
prepared for the imported seeds of anti-Semitism. Group was arrayed
against group, native and alien, Nordic and South European, Catholic
and Protestant, Christian and Jew. In addition to the local and timely
fact, we must also presuppose an old inheritance of specific prejudice
against the Jew of a strictly religious nature. This is by no means
the immediate occasion of the present movement, as it may have been
of pogroms in Russia; but it is certainly an element in the national
subconsciousness and in the conscious thinking of certain more orthodox
Christian churches. Granted that Horace M. Kallen exaggerates the
importance of this factor, still he has done well in pointing it out.
He says:
[89]In the Christian system the Jews are assigned a central and
dramatic status. They are the villains of the Drama of Salvation....
Nowhere in Europe could there be a village to whose inhabitants the
word “Jew” did not denote the people who had denied the Savior and
crucified Him, who were thus the enemies of God and of mankind....
The word “Jew” became a stimulus which touched off this emotion. It
was a word to curse with.... The root of the special Jewish difficulty
is the position of the Jews in the Christian religion. If you can end
this teaching that the Jews are enemies of God and of mankind you will
strike anti-Semitism at its foundations.
Certainly the teachings of infancy and childhood have left this,
residue of anti-Judaism in the minds of millions of persons, who would
be the first to deny the possession of religious bigotry; certainly the
Christian church, as a group mind, contains a tradition of anti-Judaism
as one of its ideas. But this means merely that religion to the Jew
takes the place of skin color to the Negro or language to the Czech. We
have ancient warrant that so trivial a matter as the mispronunciation
of the word Shibboleth was sufficient identification for one sub-group
of Hebrews to kill members of another group of their own people.
All that intolerance needs is some mark of identification, however
irrelevant or petty, to set off the rival group.
2.
The European importation at this period was the race theory. Originated
in France by Gobineau, taken up in Germany by scientific thinkers and
made the rallying cry of political parties, the theory was adapted to
American conditions. In Germany and France the “great race” was the
Teuton, below whom were ranged in order the Alpine, the Mediterranean,
and the Semite. The safety of the Teuton and therefore of civilization
as a whole depend on the purity of blood of the Teuton and his guarding
from contamination by alien blood. The Semite, in particular, is a
menace by reason of his lower moral and social standards and his
inability ever to be assimilated by the higher races; he must be driven
out of power and if possible out of the “sacred German land” itself.
In the United States this theory was taken over bodily by such writers
as Lothrop Stoddard and Grant Madison, with the trifling change that
the word “Teuton” was altered to “Nordic.” This was done in order to
include the many sub-varieties of the older immigration, most of whom
came at some time from northern and western Europe. The Klan and
the writers in the Dearborn Independent echoed them. The Russians in
the United States attacking the Soviet government, many sub-groups
of new Americans who imported their anti-Semitism with them, and the
constant flood of letters, periodicals and books regarding the growth
of mob violence, political discrimination and social obloquy in Europe,
furnished the connecting link. The race theory became acclimatized.
Peculiarly enough, one of the most radical statements of the race
theory was by a Jew, Maurice Samuel in “You Gentiles,” where he showed
quite unintentionally how the theory is reversible to form opposite
conclusions on the same premises. To Samuel, Jew and gentile are two
radically different sorts of people, as the anti-Semite agrees; the
difference he finds, however, is one of temperament, of viewpoint.
[90]To you (gentiles) life is a game and a gallant adventure, and
all life’s enterprises partake of the spirit of the adventurous. To
us (Jews) life is a serious and sober duty pointed to a definite and
inescapable task. [91]We know nothing of science for science’s sake,
as we know nothing of art for art’s sake. We know only of art for
God’s sake.... Art and science, this is your gentile world, a lovely
and ingenious world.... But not our world, not for us Jews.
To this we may contrast the remark of Irwin Edman:
[92]The Jews have been accused so often of impossible racial defects
that they have in self defense, ascribed to themselves wholly
imaginary racial virtues.... They have added to the unfavorable myths
invented by outsiders a whole folklore of favorable myths about
themselves.
The reprints from the Dearborn Independent can match this sort of hasty
generalization a hundred times over in the language of anti-Semitism.
[93]The Jew is against the Gentile scheme of things. What are the
causes of this disruptive tendency? First, his essential lack of
democracy. Jewish nature is autocratic. [94]In a sense the United
States is private property. It is the property of those who share the
ideals of the founders of the government. And those ideals were ideals
held by a white race of Christians. And with most of these the
Jews not only disagree, but hold them in contempt. [95]The fathers
were the men of the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic race ... who have given form
to every government and a livelihood to every people and an ideal to
every century. They got neither their God nor their religion from
Judah, nor yet their speech nor their creative genius—they are the
Ruling People, Chosen throughout the centuries to Master the world....
Into the camp of this race comes a people that has no civilization
to point to, no aspiring religion, no universal speech, no great
achievement in any realm but the realm of “get,” cast out of every
land that gave them hospitality, and these people endeavor to tell the
sons of the Saxons what is needed to make the world what it ought to
be.
3.
I shall devote very few words to showing that this race theory,
whether from the Nordic or any other angle, is composed of hasty and
unscientific generalizations, merely the rationalization of the group
prejudice whose actual background we are tracing. In the first place,
anthropologists are not at all agreed either on the definition or the
history of races. There seems, however, to be fairly general agreement
that there is no such thing as a pure race—certainly not the English
and probably not the Jews either. All sub-varieties of the white race
are greatly mixed in blood. For the Jewish side of this problem, an
interesting study is that of M. Fishberg, “The Jews, a Study of Race
and Environment,” where the author has demonstrated the many physical
types which appear in the Jewish people the world over, whether these
are due to local and climatic influences, or as Dr. Fishberg holds,
to interbreeding with other racial stocks. In the second place, even
such racial groupings as can be roughly established vary indefinitely
and overlap indefinitely in every physical and mental characteristic.
There is no considerable body of people who conform to the Nordic
type—blond, tall, long-headed, and so on. No test has ever been devised
which can adequately compare the intelligence of different races, for
every intelligence test yet invented presupposes a certain cultural and
language background, and is therefore favorable to the group which has
this background, and certain to give a low intelligence quotient
to any different cultural group, whatever be its race or its potential
intellectual power.
As Jean Finot sums up the entire theory in his book, “Race Prejudice”:
[96]The differences among individuals belonging to the same human
variety are always greater than those perceived between races regarded
as distinct units.
[97]No one has ever been able to show a single authentic Aryan. The
descriptions of him, both moral and physical, his measurements and
also the description of his inner life, are all purely fantastical....
Today out of a thousand educated Europeans, nine hundred ninety-nine
are persuaded of the authenticity of their Aryan origin. In the
history of human errors this doctrine will some day without doubt
assume a place of honor.
[98]When we go through the list of external differences which
appear to divide men, we find literally nothing which can authorize
their division into superior and inferior beings, into masters and
pariahs.... The science of inequality is emphatically a science of
White people. In pursuing this course the elementary commandments of
experimental science are transgressed.
[99]In a word, the term, race, is only a product of our mental
activities, and outside all reality.... They (races) exist in us but
not outside us.
The eminence of certain European nations today is historical and
cultural, not racial. Otherwise, how explain the past eminence of
Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome? True, some try to detect an admixture
of Nordic, or at least of Aryan blood in these nations as a cause of
their once high civilization. But to claim this is so to dilute the
meaning of the word that almost any blood may be considered “Aryan.”
The fact is that the Jew now in the United States did not kill Jesus
but is still accused of it; and is not a Semite but is still accused
of that. The one accusation like the other is merely a rationalization
of the social trait of intolerance, now sprung to growth in the United
States.
4.
Minor accusations against the Jews need only summary consideration.
Needless to say, many of them are true but probably none of them
are actual causes for hatred of the Jews. The theory of Burton
J. Hendrick that the Russian Jews are inferior racially to the west
European ones is merely another variety of the race theory and is
worth no more than any variety. The Jews are called materialists and
money-grabbers, which many of them are, as well as many non-Jews; they
are accused of having wealth and of being subverters of wealth, and
some Jews are in each of these categories. Some Jews are bootleggers,
as they are called. Possibly some Jews have been traitors, though
the writer in the Dearborn Independent seems to have taken a great
deal of trouble to prove that Benedict Arnold may or may not have
had some Jewish accomplices. Certainly the complaint of the colleges
that many of their Jewish students are not socially acceptable is
entirely correct. The Jew is the only immigrant group whose poor boys
attend institutions of higher learning in any large numbers. Other
groups usually wait at least a generation until they have acquired
both prosperity and some American culture before their children attend
college. Besides, there are a number of Catholic universities which
are attended by many Irish and Italian youths, while there is no such
school to divert the Jewish youth. Hence there is no doubt that many
young Jews attend college who are externally uncouth, who speak English
with an accent, who wear shabby clothes, and who have no interest in
athletics, dancing or undergraduate activities. It is certain, however,
that these young people learn to conform very rapidly indeed; and that,
before they learn, they may be able to contribute a little variety and
interest to the ♦monotony of American youth.
♦ “montony” replaced with “monotony”
A charge of great importance during the height of prejudice against the
Russian Soviet government was that the Jews were responsible for that
government, its success and its excesses. The inevitable conclusion
was, then, that the Jews were trying to introduce the ideals of the
Soviets into the United States. Even when this conclusion was not
drawn, the connection was so emphasized as to minister to anti-Semitic
sentiment. John Spargo [100]made a special effort to minimize this
rather indirect, but at the time very dangerous piece of propaganda.
He showed that the number of Jews in high position in Russia was
very small, while the larger number of government clerks and similar
functionaries was due to the larger percentage of educated men among
Jews than among the mass of Russians; that the great commercial
class of Jews were financially ruined by the socialistic policy
of the government; that the Jews of Russia were divided among the
several political parties for and against the Communists; and finally
that the Bolsheviki had suppressed Jewish religious schools, like
Christian ones, and estranged the orthodox of both religions. But the
anti-Semitic writers used the Russian Revolution to show the growing
menace of Jewish power the world over.
Finally, the charge of the Dearborn Independent that there is a Jewish
world conspiracy to overthrow the governments of the world in favor
of an all-Judaic power. To the person who knows Jewish life, broken
into so many conflicting theories and different cultural and economic
groups, the whole viewpoint is too ridiculous to require disproof.
It is merely another sign that the modern conception of social and
economic process is very new indeed and has made little headway into
the group mind. Every world process from the World War to the fall of
the German mark, from immodest clothing to vapid popular songs, must
be blamed on a person or race. In this case the person disliked is the
Jew, and everything is blamed on him. But a different group prejudice
could just as well ascribe these same factors to the German (as during
the war), to the Russian, to the international bankers, or to the
Republican party. Again, we are confronted by the rationalization of
a group prejudice, and in this case the rationalization is merely
unusually fantastic.
As Ludwig Lewisohn sums up anti-Jewish prejudice:
[101]Jew-baiting has nothing to do with the quality of Jewish
characteristics. We are hated for our wealth and for our poverty, for
our plutocrats and for our Reds, for display and for hard-headedness
and warm-heartedness, for arrogance and servility, for pushingness
and reserve, for speech and silence, for political participation and
nonparticipation. If we desire assimilation you drive us out of
your universities by chicanery and insult; if we do not strive after
assimilation you say we ought to go where we came from.
To this we may compare the interesting if somewhat hasty generalization
of Friedman:
[102]Any unabsorbed social group generates the ill will of the
majority.... It is characteristic for the superior culture to
absorb the inferior.... The seeming slowness of this movement is an
irritant to the non-Jewish world and the persistence of the Jews as a
distinctive cultural group is resented by the dominant group. It is an
implied challenge to the supremacy of the culture of the lands where
Jews dwell.
And Shailer speaks of [103]“This most striking and universal of ethnic
judgments,” that the Jews are an unpleasant people. The Semite to him
is “the ablest type of man the world has known, but a type that is
somewhat archaic” because religious rather than scientific in mental
trend. He feels that Jew and Aryan are different in their mode of
meeting the stranger, the Jew is more impulsive due to swifter mental
processes, which invariably causes bad first impressions to be later
overcome. And so on. These reasons seem hardly better than those of the
anti-Semites themselves—for the Jew today is not a Semite; Dr. Shailer
compared him with the rather repressed New Englander at Harvard, not
with the Aryan of Germany or Italy or Russia; since he wrote seven
Jews have received the Nobel prize for scientific distinction; and
finally, the challenge to the superior race (of Dr. Friedman) is simply
the fact of difference. No characterization of the Jew accounts for
anti-Semitism, whether it be formulated by friend or foe; the only
genuine causes are those that can be found in the group mind itself.
5.
In addition to the background of American group mind, already studied,
and the imported theory of anti-Semitism, there are certain facts which
affect the situation in its special manifestations. The most important
of these is the great increase of Jewish population in the United
States. At the time of the Know-Nothings there were not over 50,000
Jews in this country, and many of them had lived here since before
the Revolution, possessing fine patriotic records; there was thus no
motive to single them out for the anti-alien agitation of that period.
At the time of the A. P. A., there were about 500,000 Jews, but these
were still not a large enough group to attract special attention; they
were widely scattered through the south and west; and the agitation
against the larger numbers of Catholic immigrants passed them by. In
1925, however, the number of Jews in the United States is estimated
at 3,600,000, of whom 1,735,000 have immigrated into America in the
last 25 years, and 900,000 of these in the last 15. Here, then, is a
tremendous body of Jews who are also foreigners, who speak the Yiddish
language, adhere to traditional Jewish religious practices, and who are
massed in great bodies in certain cities and in certain industries. The
foreign Jew is thus more conspicuous today than any other immigrant
group, even than those much larger in number. New York City alone has
1,500,000 Jews, such a huge number of whom are of obviously foreign
origin that they are a conspicuous attraction for the intolerance of
other groups in America. As Mecklin says:
[104]The Jew, who has recently been coming to this country mainly from
Russia and Southeastern Europe by hundreds and thousands, and who,
true to his urban traits, has crowded into New York and other large
cities where his native characteristics are thrust into the face of
the native American on the street, in the hotel or department store,
has also come in for his share of the prevalent fear psychology. Henry
Ford ... has voiced the fears of the native American brought into
close contact with the unassimilated and disagreeably alien Jewish
population of our large centers.
A special feature of this present Jewish immigration is that much of
it comes from a belated civilization. The Jew of Poland or Ukrainia or
Rumania steps from an agricultural society into an industrial one; from
an aristocratic class society into a democratic one; from an isolated
Jewish Ghetto life into a maelstrom of races and cultural groups,
among whom he must grope his way. No wonder that his adjustment is not
always a correct one, still less often the same adjustment as that
of the ♦standardized, typical American. Many of them become radicals in
economics, religion and politics as a reaction against their former
experience of oppression; some of them were pro-German during the World
War to oppose their former Russian tyrants; for all of them the problem
is doubly difficult because it involves not only a personal adjustment
to new economic and social conditions, but also the group adjustment
into the life of the United States. Many of them in their new-found
freedom become super-patriots, take America to their hearts, and are
thus doubly disappointed when America also repulses them.
♦ “standarized” replaced with “standardized”
But Jewish immigration also has been largely stopped and the foreign
aspect of American Jewry is rapidly disappearing. In 1914, the
Jewish admissions to the United States numbered 138,000 or 11.3%;
when departures are taken into account, the Jews became 14.3% of the
total. During the war the Jewish immigration was negligible; but in
1921 it again amounted to 119,000 or 14.7% of the total, or deducting
departures, 21.2%. The passage of the quota law of 1921 resulted in
reducing the total Jewish admissions to 53,000 and 49,000 in the next
two years; or 17.3% and 9.5% of the total admissions. As 1922 was
a year of many departures among Greeks, Italians and several other
groups, the net Jewish immigration of that year actually amounted to
47.5% of the total net immigration. The effect of the 1924 immigration
act has already been noted by social workers and others in touch with
immigration, but it is still too early to show by statistics what
has occurred, namely the practical cessation of this great Jewish
immigration into the United States. It is obvious that this fact
will alter the animus and the nature of anti-Semitism, just as all
anti-alien sentiments, even though it will not eradicate the other
causes and therefore will not stop anti-Semitism completely.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE RETORT TO ANTI-SEMITISM
There are two kinds of answers possible to a movement like
anti-Semitism, the explicit refutation of its doctrines and teachings,
whether by Jews or non-Jews; and the response by adjustment and by
psychological traits. It is a commonplace that Jewish loyalty is always
strengthened by anti-Semitism; it is equally true that the Jewish
inferiority complex is conditioned, if not caused, by anti-Semitism.
In fact, we may well conclude that Jewish characteristics are greatly
influenced and molded by the adverse forces of the environment. Both
these types of response, the explicit and the implied, exist in this
particular case, whether as counterpart or as results of anti-Semitism
itself, and both can be traced in the United States in connection with
the present movement.
1.
Defense of Jews by non-Jews is a notable phenomenon of modern times,
associated with the general growth of tolerance. Beginning with the
Renaissance there have been a few hardy spirits in every generation
who were willing to espouse the cause of these pariahs of Christendom,
chiefly the liberals who were challenging group standards in many
directions. Such advocates as Mirabeau, Lessing, Jefferson and Macaulay
endeavored to remove Jewish disabilities and to defend the Jews against
the attacks of the intolerant groups. Here in America we have seen
the same result; the use of the individual intelligence has drawn
many non-Jews out of the unified group mind of the persecutors; many
entire groups, in fact, of Catholics, liberals, and others had never
entered into it. Even before the World War the Reverend Madison Peters
of Brooklyn was widely known for his book, “Justice to the Jew,” and
several similar volumes. More recently, as a definite reply to the
anti-Semitic writers there have appeared “The Jew and American Ideals,”
by John Spargo; “The Jew and Civilization” by Ada Sterling; “The
Truth about the Jews, by a Gentile,” by Walter Hurt; and “Patriotism
of the American Jew” by Samuel W. McCall. These works and others like
them, of varying merit, were definitely apologetic in nature. A number
of periodicals published articles either avowedly in defense of the
Jew, or purporting to examine the Jewish problem fairly and without
intolerance. Such were the brilliant series by able thinkers, which I
have quoted so frequently, in the Nation; by Norman Hapgood in Hearst’s
International; by William Hard in the Metropolitan Magazine; by Arthur
Brisbane in his syndicated newspaper column, and many others. Former
President William Howard Taft, now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,
during the interval between these high offices, wrote a speech on
“Anti-Semitism in the United States,” which he delivered in many parts
of the country and which was printed by the Anti-Defamation League.
Several actions of larger bodies of non-Jews lent even more dignity to
this counter-movement. On December 5, 1920, the Federal Council of the
Churches of Christ in America, the great Protestant federation, passed
the following resolution in its national convention in Boston:
Whereas, for some time past there have been in circulation in this
country publications tending to create race prejudice and arouse
animosity against our Jewish fellow-citizens and containing charges
so preposterous as to be unworthy of credence, be it resolved that
the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, impressed
by the need at this period of our national existence for unity and
brotherhood, deplores all such cruel and unwarranted attacks upon
our Jewish brethren and in a spirit of good-will extends to them
an expression of confidence in their patriotism and their good
citizenship and earnestly admonishes our people to express disapproval
of all actions which are conducive to intolerance or tend to the
destruction of our national unity through arousing racial division in
our body politic.
It is a peculiar commentary upon the nature of groups and group
leadership that the very churches thus addressed by their great
national leaders should have furnished so much material for the
recruiting officers of the Ku Klux Klan.
On January 16, 1921, a protest against anti-Semitism was issued under
the initiative of John Spargo, signed by one hundred nineteen
distinguished American Christians from every walk of life, headed by
the names of President Woodrow Wilson, former President William Howard
Taft, and William Cardinal O’Connell. I quote a few sentences from this
interesting document:
The loyalty and patriotism of our fellow citizens of the Jewish faith
is equal to that of any part of our people, and requires no defense
at our hands.... Anti-Semitism is almost invariably associated with
lawlessness and with brutality and injustice. It is also invariably
found closely intertwined with other sinister forces, particularly
those which are corrupt, reactionary and oppressive. We believe that
it should not be left to men and women of Jewish faith to fight this
evil, but that it is in a very special sense the duty of citizens who
are not Jews by ancestry or faith.
The most practical work of this kind was undertaken in December,
1924, when a joint committee of the Federal Council of the Churches
of Christ in America and of the Central Conference of American Rabbis
met in Washington, D. C., to consider the problem of good will between
Christians and Jews. Their statement follows in full:
We, of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, and
the Central Conference of American Rabbis, as represented in a joint
session of their respective committees on good will between Jews and
Christians, realizing the necessity for a truer interpretation of
Americanism and religion, and in order to advance both on the highest
plane of good will and fellowship, herewith declare:
1. The purpose of our committees is to promote mutual understanding
and good will in the place of suspicion and ill will in the entire
range of our inter-religious and social relations.
2. Because of our mutual respect for the integrity of each other’s
religion and our desire that each faith shall enjoy the fullest
opportunity for its development and enrichment, these committees have
no proselytizing purpose.
3. We endorse the statement of the Federal Council of the Churches
of Christ in America, made by its Administrative Committee in the
resolution of September 22, 1922, declaring that the “rise of
organizations whose members are masked, oath-bound and unknown, and
whose activities have the effect of arousing religious prejudices and
racial antipathies, is fraught with grave consequences to the church
and to society at large.” To this statement we add our conviction that
such organizations violate the fundamental principles and ideals of
our country and of religion, and merit our condemnation.
4. We realize, further, that we best reveal our fellowship by
practical co-operation in common tasks, and it is our endeavor to
formulate a program by which to realize the high purposes and noble
endeavors of mutual good will and helpfulness.
2.
While some non-Jews were trying to break up the group ideas which were
expressed in anti-Semitism, whether through drawing away individuals by
argument, or through diverting groups by the prestige of great names,
the Jews themselves were far from idle. There was a flood of books,
articles, speeches, designed to show that the Jews have had a proud
share in American history in the past, are now patriotic citizens, are
being wronged by calumny, and so on. Most of these were quite worthless
for their purpose, for anti-Semitism was not caused by the arguments
against the Jews at all; moreover, they were plainly apologetic and
would not have impressed a prejudiced person in the least. But the work
of several great Jewish organizations was of a different order.
Among a number of these organizations I select three which have, from
their inception, made this one of their prime purposes of existence.
The oldest of these is the American Jewish Committee, of which Mr.
Louis Marshall of New York City is president. This organization was
founded in 1906 with the purpose of defending Jewish rights at home and
abroad; its immediate occasion was the Kishineff massacre in Russia,
with the consequent strengthening of Jewish group loyalty in the United
States as well. The annual reports of this body, published in the
various volumes of the American Jewish Yearbook, reveal, besides other
activities, a variety of defense methods—a personal protest to the
head of a publishing firm which was producing the “Protocols”; efforts
on behalf of newly arrived immigrants; the completion and publication
in summary form of the record of American Jews in the army, navy and
marine corps during the World War; attempts to befriend persecuted
Jews in foreign lands. On December 1, 1920, this committee published
an “Address to their Fellow Citizens on the Protocols, Bolshevism and
the Jews,” which was signed also by representatives of nine other
Jewish organizations—rabbinical conferences, unions of congregations
and the like. This statement rehearsed the proofs against the current
charges of anti-Semitism and appealed to the American public, with the
evident hope of breaking up the group mind that was then filled with
the image of anti-Semitism. It ends in this fashion:
We have an abiding confidence in the spirit of justice and fairness
that permeates the true American, and we are satisfied that our
fellow-citizens will not permit the campaign of slander and libel
that has been launched against us to go unreproved.... Let not
hatred and misunderstanding arise where peace and harmony, unity and
brotherliness, are required to perpetuate all that America represents,
and to enable all men to know that within her wide boundaries there is
no room for injustice and intolerance.
The Anti-Defamation League, with its headquarters at Chicago, was
founded in 1913 under the auspices of the Independent Order B’nai
B’rith to carry on a somewhat different work. Its executive secretary
for almost this entire period was Mr. Leon L. Lewis, now Grand
Secretary of the Order. Its first activity, which it has continued
throughout, was to issue individual protests to such magazines,
newspapers, motion picture producers, vaudeville managers, etc., as
allowed anti-Semitic tendencies to creep into their productions. In
many cases a friendly protest was enough to stop the propaganda; in
some extreme instances, no result whatever could be achieved, as
the work in question was a direct expression of intolerance. Since
the actual anti-Semitic movement began in the United States, the
Anti-Defamation League has broadened its activities, has published some
material refuting charges against the Jew, has circulated this through
the country, has investigated various anti-Jewish organizations and so
on. It has rendered great service in diverting from the anti-Semitic
sub-group such individuals as drifted into it more or less by accident
but who were not definitely aligned with it.
Finally, the American Jewish Congress, organized in Philadelphia on
December 15, 1919, has passed certain resolutions of interest to
the general public. Its chief work, however, was the appointment of
delegates to represent the American Jews at Paris during the Peace
Conference. Largely through the efforts of this delegation and
similar ones from the Jews of other countries, the rights of Jewish
and other minorities in the newly constituted countries of eastern
Europe were protected by treaty, and Palestine was made a British
mandatory, with special rights of settlement for the Jews. This work,
which has proved so important with regard to anti-Semitism abroad, has
comparatively little direct influence on its American phase.
♦ “Jws” replaced with “Jews”
3.
This direct propaganda may have some influence, but only as propaganda,
not as argument to refute arguments from the other side. The fact of
difference is the primary fact on which anti-Semitism, like all other
intolerance, is based. This can be transcended only by an inclusive
loyalty and an inclusive purpose in which both sub-groups lose their
own purposes and consequently their opposition. The most direct
reaction to anti-Semitism appears in the intensification of Jewish
loyalty. Conflict makes the group mind vigorous and self-conscious,
especially in the defeated group. The power of the “lost cause” over
the minds of men has been beautifully developed by Royce in his
“Philosophy of Loyalty”; and the cause of Jewry has been for two
thousand years such a “lost cause” among the oppressors of the world.
Thus oppression of anti-Semitism in any part of the world cements Jews
everywhere into one body, forces the group mind of the Jew into unity
and direction. As Dr. Drachsler points out:
[105]Two sets of factors are of significance here: those making for
identification with the general American community and those making
for segregation and isolation. The attractive features of the American
environment have their roots in and are nourished by the equality
of social and economic opportunity that is America’s most precious
heritage.
It is anti-Semitic propaganda that constitutes one of the segregative
forces of the American environment.... To these inner strains and
stresses, making for an increase in group self-consciousness, are
added those outer crises arising out of the trials and tribulations of
Jewries in other lands. The problem of civil disabilities of Jews in
many European countries and the romantic ups and downs of Zionism
have kept alive a steady interest among great masses of Jews in the
United States.
The group loyalty of world Jewry has shown itself in the United
States in the form of certain agencies that have been particularly
active during and since the World War. The poverty, persecution
and devastation of the great Jewish communities of eastern Europe
occasioned the formation of the Joint Distribution Committee in
America, in which—for the first time—reform, orthodox, and radical
Jews sat together and labored in a common cause; the sixty-five
million dollars they collected in America and disbursed abroad are
less important to us than the group mind they developed in this common
purpose. The Zionist movement, both as an attempt to provide a home
in Palestine for the oppressed Jews of eastern Europe, and as a hope
for the revival of Jewish nationality and culture in the Holy Land,
has furnished a mode of resistance and a source of Jewish pride to
many who felt themselves persecuted, either in their own persons or by
proxy, in America. Such a distinguished American Jew as Justice Louis
D. Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court felt his first call to
Jewish allegiance or action in middle age, when he became an active
Zionist and the president of the Zionist Organization of America. This
influence operated on great numbers of Jews in the United States during
the time of anti-Semitism abroad, and on still more during the period
of anti-Semitism here. Anti-Semitism is a great incentive to Jewish
loyalty, even as it disrupts the mind of the American people into
conflicting groups.
4.
The most important reaction to anti-Semitism is the unconscious mode
of response which we call the inferiority complex. Certainly the Jew
has such a complex. He alternates boldness and timidity, because he is
self-conscious in the presence of the non-Jew and therefore uncertain
of himself. Jews change their names from land to land, assuming the
Russian “witz” or the Polish “sky” for the previous German “sohn” as
a patronymic—for all Jewish names were originally in the Hebrew form
of Isaac ben (son of) Abraham; but when they come to the United
States the “witz” and “sky” are foreign and many of them are dropped in
turn. The Hebrew Moses becomes the German Morris, and then the English
Montague. This is partly due to the adoption of the standard of taste
of the new environment, partly to the desire not to be too aggressively
Jewish in externals. As Friedman shows:
[106]The Jew is the underdog of society ... he has acquired a social
sympathy and has become spiritually attuned to the harmonies of a
juster social order. [107]Anti-Semitism is a challenge to Jewry to
revivify its ideals. [108]Danger strengthens family ties. Perhaps the
pure and devoted family life for which the Jews have been noted may
be due to the fact that they preserved this defensive reaction of a
group under persecution. [109]Persecution has left the mark of fear on
the psychology of the Jew.... The Jew retired into himself, or to the
society of his kind.
In the present state of ignorance, I cannot state how much of the
Jewish character is hereditary and how much environmental, or how
much of the latter is due to the inferiority complex and hence to
anti-Semitism. Certainly there must be many traits of this origin.
Thomas Babington Macaulay made this discovery in 1833, when he argued
in the House of Commons in favor of removing civil disabilities from
the Jews of England.
... If all the red-haired people in Europe had, during centuries, been
outraged and oppressed, banished from this place, driven from that
... if, when manners became milder, they had still been subject to
debasing restrictions and exposed to vulgar insults ... what would be
the patriotism of gentlemen with red hair?
Ludwig Lewisohn finds exactly such an artificial case in the
German-Americans during the World War:
[110]I (the German) know exactly now why you (the Jew) and your people
are accused of bad manners. How can one’s manners be good when all
agreement and social certainties are lacking? Whatever one does will
be considered an excess.... So I am beginning to understand the
voluntary and yet involuntary segregation of Jewry.
To which the Jew retorts:
The worst of it is that we are all super-sensitive because we are
neurasthenic.... There is scarcely a Jewish family in which there
isn’t either madness or genius. Commonly both.
Professor Miller generalizes this into a theory of “oppression
psychosis,” mentioned above:
[111]A technique is developed by the group and the individuals in it
to meet the situation and retain the self-esteem necessary to life
... the Jewish capacity to trade was developed under a necessity
for survival in which trade offered the only possibility. [112]The
patriotism of an oppressed people is full of pathological elements.
The symptoms vary slightly, but there is always hypersensitiveness
and self-consciousness. The classic example is the Jew, and the
Jewish problem wherever it exists can never be solved until most of
the Jewish characteristics are diagnosed as the pathological result
of the experience to which they have been subjected.... A very large
portion of the peoples of the world are suffering from present or past
experiences of oppression and therefore cannot be expected to act as
normal groups. [113]The conspicuousness of the Jew is in large part
due to his psychopathic adjustment to his environment. It is further
due to the necessary technique for survival. [114]The peculiarity
of the Jew is that because he has been made self-conscious by his
experience, he has acquired a solidarity which has been kept vivid
through adherence to the Law.
Besides the pathology of the case, Miller here indicates two modes of
adjustment, the success motive and the religious motive. The former can
be seen clearly in the Jewish students, who are largely excluded from
social and athletic leadership in the colleges, and whose response is
to excel wherever possible in scholarship. It appears in the medieval
Jew who was placed outside the feudal system and consequently had no
feudal loyalties, but established the first international financial
connections; or in the Jew of some of the modern hyper-nationalistic
countries of Europe, who is excluded from public life and finds his
outlet in Zionism. Finally, and most important of all historically,
the Jew has found his compensation in his religion. He was the Chosen
People, he had the sacred Torah, he kept the festivals, obeyed the
commandments of God; in the home and the synagog he was priest and
king, whatever might be his beatings or his cringings without.
Conversely, the growing indifference to Judaism today is both an
adaptation to the new modes of thought the world over, and a relaxing
of intensity of Jewish loyalty in the countries where the penalties for
that loyalty are themselves relaxed.
The religious interpretation of this status is very ancient. The Bible
speaks of the Jews as a “peculiar people”; “a kingdom of priests and a
holy nation.” And the Talmud says:
God selected as His sacrifices not the pursuer but the pursued; not
the lion but the bullock, not the wolf but the lamb, not the eagle but
the dove. In the same way Israel, the pursued of all the heathen, the
weakest of the nations of the world, is the Chosen People, the fitting
sacrifice of the Lord.
The famous fifty-second chapter of Isaiah with its marvelous conception
of the Suffering Servant of the Lord, is again a picture of the Jewish
people, persecuted and oppressed, but finding its purpose and its
compensation in its religious message, which in the Messianic age was
to convince and to overawe the world.
Perhaps I can best summarize this view in the words of Anatole
Leroy-Beaulieu, whose “Israel among the Nations” some thirty years ago
marked a new treatment of the Jewish question by a Christian writer.
This book contains a chapter on the Psychology of the Jew, in which
he develops the idea of the influence of the milieu on the Jewish
character:
[115]The Jew has kept his energy, but he has kept it within him,
out of sight. His tenacity is now concealed by artfulness and
masked beneath humility.... Deprived of the weapons of the strong,
he resorted to the devices of the weak, to cunning, trickery and
deceit.... Unable to command respect for his frail personality, the
Jew took refuge in a collective pride; he was proud of his people, his
religion, and his God. Never has he lost faith in the superiority of
Israel.... This explains why for centuries they were able to bear such
a burden of contempt without breaking down beneath its weight. The
mainspring of Israel’s inner life was not broken; it remained intact,
ready to be set in motion again on the day of deliverance. Bowed as he
was, the Jew was always ready for the time of upraising.
5.
The various theories and groupings of Jewry today may be regarded
from the viewpoint of responses to the total environment, of which
anti-Semitism is one of the important factors. On this basis neither
Zionism nor reform Judaism can be regarded directly as a reply
to anti-Semitism, but both are this among other things, for both
are modes of response to the environment, with its Jewish and its
non-Jewish factors. Two such responses are religious—the orthodox and
the reform; two are racial and national—the assimilationist and the
Zionist. From another standpoint, two are modes of adjustment to the
environment—assimilation and reform; two are modes of resistance to the
environment—Zionism and orthodoxy. Or, more precisely, assimilation is
a racial adjustment to the non-Jewish environment; reform Judaism a
religious adjustment; Zionism is a racial and national resistance to
the environment; and orthodoxy a religious resistance. Obviously, the
four are not unrelated, but many individuals adopt more than one of
them as guides in various fields of thought and behavior.
Assimilation of the Jew to his environment, which involves abandonment
of the group life, is an individual, not a group response. It
attracts individuals in considerable numbers from the extreme right
and left wings of American Jewry, from the very wealthy who may
adopt Christianity for social distinction, and from the proletarians
who adopt an international economic and political theory. It cannot
be a group response because if great masses of Jews were to join
any other church, or any other national or social grouping, they
would do it as Jews still—we would then have churches of Hebrew
Christians, or a Jewish wing for the Socialist party (as in Russia),
but not the absorption in the environment which the assimilationist
considers the solution of the Jewish problem. One point is true in the
assimilationist theory—if there were no Jewish group, there would be
no anti-Semitism. It is equally true that if there were no groups of
human beings, there would be no intolerance. But such a condition is
impossible. Man is a social being, and the tradition, the ideals,
and the life of his own group hold him too firmly to be escaped except
by the smallest minority.
[116]Assimilation may be social or biological in character, and the
radical adoption of it would involve both phases. Intermarriage, the
biological side of assimilation, is actually going on now, but to a
much smaller extent among the Jews than among any other immigrant group
in America. Drachsler worked out the proportion of intermarriages
among 100,000 marriages in New York City of all races, and found that
approximately 14 per cent. of these were intermarriages. Among all
white groups, however, the Jews presented the smallest proportion of
intermarriages, 1.17 per cent., ranging from less than half of 1 per
cent. among Rumanian Jews, to 5 per cent. among German Jews, and 6.5
per cent. among French Jews. The age-old tradition against marriage
outside of the group, together with the anti-Semitic spirit without,
have conspired to prevent this type of assimilation even now. And while
the second generation of Jews in America shows far more intermarriages
than the first, the proportion is still extremely low—.64 per cent. for
the first generation, and 4.5 per cent. for the second. And for a more
assimilated section of Jewry, such as the German Jews, the difference
between first and second generations is much less marked.
The directly opposite theory to assimilation is Zionism, the attempt
to revive Jewish group life in the ancient homeland of the Jew, to
restore the Hebrew tongue, erect a Jewish educational system, Jewish
culture, and Jewish agriculture and industry as well. The connection
of this movement with anti-Semitism is evident from its origin in the
mind of Theodore Herzl, a Viennese correspondent in Paris, directly
after he had observed the Dreyfus case, and his whole {Weltanshauung}
was thereby transformed. Zionism is the same answer to the problems
of internationalism and civilization that we see in all the new
nationalities of Europe, in Ireland, Czecho-Slovakia and Poland. It has
achieved a measure of success that is really astonishing in view of the
slight resources and organization behind it. At the same time,
it makes no pretension toward furnishing an eventual home for all the
Jewish people, especially not for those of the United States and other
lands of freedom. Zionism aims to save the persecuted Jews by finding
for many of them a shelter; it aims, moreover, to solve the double
problem of anti-Semitism and the inferiority complex by giving the
Jewry of the world a source of pride in the form of a national home. To
many thinkers this seems the only answer under present conditions.
Friedman’s whole thesis is that Zionism is the logical and final
solution.
[117]The conflict between the Jew and his environment must be
eliminated. By what means may this aim be reached? Either the
incongruous elements must be removed or else they must be made
compatible. [118]Only in their historic land where the Jews will be
in the majority, where they can without fear of peculiarity assert
their culture, is a Jewish mode of life possible. [119]Zionism at
bottom is an attempt to preserve the remnant of Israel, that will
make of Palestine its home. It alone promises to save the Jewish
people, when the processes of assimilation, now at work in Western
Europe and in the United States, shall extend to a liberalized Eastern
Europe. [120]The Jew today is a bundle of conflicts. Not only does he
in the present dispersed state suffer from the external, objective
and social anti-Semitism, but also from an internal, subjective and
psychological slavery. The Zionist insists on the maintenance of
Jewish distinctiveness, of Jewish personality.
♦ “peronality” replaced with “personality”
Orthodoxy in Judaism is the attempt to maintain the Jewish group by
means of the religious and customary behavior which has operated
successfully for that end since the destruction of the Jewish
commonwealth in 70 A. D. It is conservative; it finds its chief values,
not in the national, but in the religious life; and it endeavors
to hold its group intact by a traditional ritual which possesses a
profound emotional appeal and establishes certain habits of life. It
is the appeal to loyalty and to group stability, and parallels similar
conservative movements in many Christian denominations, though with the
stronger urge of a longer and more bitter history of persecution.
Finally, there is a theory of group adaptation, best developed
institutionally by the reform and conservative synagogs, but also in
many non-religious organizations—social clubs, Young Men’s Hebrew
Associations (the very name an imitation), labor unions, and the like.
Not that these various parties are identical; as a matter of fact,
they have practically nothing in common except the incorporation in
their philosophies of the two elements—Jewish tradition and modern
adaptation; but the conservative and reform statements—of adaptation,
of tradition, and of the relation between the two—present profound
differences both in theory and in practical details of application.
This adjustment is not as yet entirely successful, but has developed
a number of useful responses, by which Jews are managing to preserve
their group identity and at the same time to enter as constituent
members into the American group mind. It is still in a transition
period, but the synthesis is being worked out clearly enough for
our purposes. In the synagog it involves the reading of part of the
prayers in English, as well as Hebrew, the beautification of the
service by modern music, both vocal and instrumental, the incorporation
of a sermon in English, a modern system of religious education,
and a development of the social life of the young people by clubs,
classes and recreational means. Without the synagog, it involves a
type of “Modernism,” intellectual and moral. Even in the group which
endeavors to be most orthodox, it is finding its way in the form of
social surveys, modern methods in Hebrew education, and some sort of
working compromise with the community custom of Sunday observance,
the English language and the eating of non-kosher food. The nature
of this adjustment is clear from the fact that every separate item
has a different solution. The great majority of Jews work on the
traditional Sabbath, due to the combined social and economic pressure;
they universally are adopting English as their daily speech, but the
majority of them have not yet admitted English into the ritual of
the synagog; all those who really care to do so maintain the Jewish
dietary laws in their own homes, though very few (comparatively) go
so far as to refuse to enter a restaurant where the dishes are washed
with soap, or to refuse to drink wine made by gentiles of which a
libation might have been made to idols. At the same time, the Hebrew
education, so long an integral part of Jewish life, has been completely
revolutionized from the unsystematic private or charity instruction
of Russia to the large, well organized schools for daily Hebrew
instruction at the close of the public school day, whose method is
largely copied from that of the American public school.[121]
We are witnessing before our eyes a group adjustment on a large scale
to modern thought, to American customs, to the non-Jewish group. Some
of this adjustment is systematic, based on a theory of Jewish life
as a distinct religion among Americans of other religions. Some of
it is economic and social, either without theory or directly against
the orthodox theory of the adjusters themselves. At the same time,
we are witnessing orthodoxy fighting for group solidarity; Zionism
establishing a Jewish group in a distant land; the assimilationists who
escape as individuals from the burden and the odium of being Jews. Each
theory is today being tried out in practice, and the results of each
will in time be demonstrated. At the same time, each theory of Jewish
life implies a corresponding conception of America and of human groups
as a whole.
CHAPTER IX.
THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN MIND
1.
The ideal of most social thinkers has been that of uniformity, absence
of parties and swallowing of groups in a common loyalty.
Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great;
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold;
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.[122]
Uniformity and unity within, hostility and spoils from without—this is
the old ideal of the happy society, founded on the patriotism of the
little Greek cities in their petty isolation.
But now this point of view of the state, appropriate in its origin, is
applied uncritically to a great modern nation, with a hundred cities
larger than any one of ancient Greece, with its inhabitants drawn from
the ends of the earth—such a nation shall also present a uniformity of
blood, speech and loyalty. What is the method by which such an end can
be achieved? What is the theory by which such an end can be justified?
Dr. I. Berkson in his “Theories of Americanization” has developed
in detail four types of theory for the relation of the sub-groups,
especially the immigrant sub-groups, to the American nation. Of these
the first two imply uniformity, “Americanization” by imposing the
social and cultural standards of the Anglo-Saxon group on the newer
arrivals; the “Melting-Pot” by which uniformity is to be achieved
through a general admixture and intermingling, racial or social.
The viewpoint of Americanization has been mentioned previously in
this study—the view that the United States ought to be a homogeneous
people, and that the proper standard of homogeneity is that of
the white, Protestant, gentile group, of Anglo-Saxon origin. The newer
arrivals are expected to forget their native languages and habits,
to throw off their former loyalties, to copy the standards of life
which they see already established in this country. The new loyalty is
conceived as antagonistic to the old; the demands of democracy that
the new citizen also shall express himself are quite disregarded. The
rapidity of the process of intermarriage among many immigrant groups,
and the still greater speed of social adaptation and assimilation are
evidences that this theory has something in its favor. The awakening
group loyalties which its repressive methods arouse show definitely
that it has not the final word. As Lewis S. Gannet put it:
[123]We are forcing the Jew to choose between assimilation with
complete loss of group identity, and the establishment of entirely
independent cultural institutions—and we are shoving him more and
more toward the latter choice.... It is not so much anti-Semitism,
Christian theology, or Jewish traits that stand in the way as the smug
Anglo-Saxon tradition of exclusiveness and self-sufficiency.
A variation of this, which posits uniformity, but not the uniformity of
one group imposed on all the rest, is the Melting-Pot theory. The term
was fathered by Israel Zangwill, who made the young Jewish immigrant
exclaim:
[124]America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the
races of Europe are melting and reforming!—Here you stand, good folks,
think I, when I see you at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty
groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood
hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for
these are the fires of God you come to—these are the fires of God. A
fig for your feuds and your vendettas! German and Frenchman, Irishman
and English, Jews and Russians, into the Crucible with you all! God is
making the American!
Something of the same view seems to be voiced by John J. Smertenko:
[125]Unless it be the Indian, there is no American type; the future
American will be the result of a synthesis of all the people that
have poured their life-blood into the veins of our nation. Hence it
is impossible for the Jew—and the same principles apply to Irishman,
German, Italian, and the others—to become a hundred per cent.
American until America is at least three per cent. Jewish.
The Melting Pot theory marks an advance over the Americanization theory
in its treatment of the immigrant, not in its conception of the United
States. Uniformity, physical or social or both, is taken as the sine
qua non of group unity, like-mindedness as its minimum. But many ethnic
groups, religious groups and others, wish to maintain their identity in
their new home. Democracy would allow them to do so. The group theory
of American life—which I have already elaborated historically and in
the present, would not merely allow this, but take it as the only
normal way in which an over-group of a hundred million people can ever
hope to attain the unity of a group mind.
2.
The first form of such a theory is called by Dr. Berkson the
“Federation of Nationalities.” It is modelled after the Federal
government, which is a union of self-governing states. In the same
way, as geographical units grow steadily less important and functional
units more important in our national life, the same conception of
federation was applied to these. The Soviet government has taken
national control as a function of a federation of economic interests;
the federation of nationalities view takes it as a federation of
ethnic and religious groups. Our greater cities are now beginning to
establish this sort of an appearance. They have Italian quarters,
Jewish quarters, Negro quarters, even an American quarter, restricted
to families whose acceptability can be approved and vouched for. The
advocate of this theory holds that races are unchangeable—“a man
cannot change his grandfather,” they say—the best that they can do is
to live in amity within the same general national boundaries. Now, it
is true that groupings based on heredity and on interest are growing
increasingly important, as compared with the geographical groupings
which once meant so much. Only in the old families, whose associations
with a particular state have persisted for generations, is much state
sentiment left among us. On the other hand, the Catholic, the Bohemian,
the German, the Jew—every national and religious group has
enduring loyalties. And the new economic groupings, labor, capital, the
commercial class, the trade association, are developing their own group
minds more rapidly than we can easily note.
The danger of this theory, however, is as obvious as its partial
justification. It would make for the stability of what is actually
fluid. All groups take more than they give when they enter a great
mass of other groups, such as the United States. Immigrant communities
in the United States are changing constantly, due to imitation—the
Federation theory would establish them in the fixity of conflict and
opposition. It would result, on the one hand, in permanent immigrant
groups, with little participation in the general American group mind;
on the other, in permanent groups of protest, such as the Ku Klux Klan.
Carried to its logical extreme, it would give us the situation of the
Levant, where a half dozen different races and religions, represented
in the same village, preserve their isolation and their enmity for a
thousand years.
3.
Both the old Americans, who insist on American unity, and the newer
immigrants, who see and love their own group identity, have taken hold
of real elements in the total situation, but neither has envisaged the
social process as a whole. It is true that ethnic and religious groups
are distinct in America, both racially and socially; on the whole,
the Jew refuses to intermarry with the gentile, the white with the
Negro, a prohibition that in the Southern states is ♦reinforced by law.
Similarly, the Irishman preserves his loyalty and his interest in the
struggle for Irish liberty; the Italian and Greek reservists return to
their native lands when called for military duty; the Jew raises huge
sums for the relief of his fellow-Jews across the seas. But at the same
time, all these groups were ready to unite in a common purpose when the
United States was at war. Every immigrant group, as every native group,
daily sacrifices its own purpose in a crucial problem for the greater
welfare of the United States. The double process, which we have traced
in the formulation of the Constitution of the United States and in
subsequent history, is constantly going on—the entrance of new groups
into the United States, and their incorporation into the American
group. This is what Dr. Berkson calls the “community” theory, Professor
Miller, “proportional loyalty,” and many other thinkers by other terms,
a point of view toward which social theory and political thought is
constantly tending; one which we may call, in the terms employed in
this study, the integration of sub-groups into the American group mind
by the sacrifice of their own purpose for that of the United States as
a whole.
♦ “reenforced” replaced with “reinforced”
This theory recognizes the necessary and proper existence of the
sub-groups, whether family, religious, racial or ethnic units. Human
beings live naturally in comparatively small units, which can be easily
recognized and whose loyalty is habitual (some would even claim,
instinctive). These groups then join with others into larger units
of synthesis, by accepting the common purpose of the whole in place
of the conflicting purposes of each. Just as the individual becomes
a loyal member of a family, the family of a Protestant church or a
Jewish people, so that church or ethnic unit becomes, in turn, a unit
in the larger whole of the American people. Group intolerance is thus
sacrificed to America in increasing proportion and scope; while group
individuality preserves the democratic ideal by which a man is an end
in himself. The personal satisfactions and welfare of the immigrants
themselves cannot be advanced by compelling them to give up everything
they hold dear—instead, the attempt will prove subversive of the
hoped-for unity by the usual result of group resistance. But all these
values can be retained in a higher synthesis, a gradation of loyalties,
an integration of minds in a true group mind.
The traditional Hebrew phrases for the Jewish people are {Am Israel},
the People of Israel, and {Keneseth Israel}, the Congregation of
Israel—grasping thus both the racial and spiritual elements in one
conception. To quote Berkson:
[126]This conception which identifies the Jewish people with its
cultural and spiritual aspirations comes very close to the view that
nationality is essentially a psychological force. [127]The
“Community” theory would make the history of the ethnic group,
its aesthetic, cultural and religious inheritance, its national
self-consciousness the basic factor. [128]The “Community” theory
endeavors to meet all the justifiable considerations presented in each
of the other proposals. It seeks especially to avoid such a scheme
of adjustment as would tend to force the individual to accept one
solution as against another. It leaves all the forces working; they
are to decide what the future is to be.
Professor Dewey put the matter similarly:
[129]The way to deal with hyphenism is to welcome it, but to welcome
it with the sense of extracting from each people its special good, so
that it shall surrender into a common fund of wisdom and experience
what it especially has to contribute. All of these surrenders and
contributions taken together create the national spirit of America.
The dangerous thing is for each factor to isolate itself, to try to
live off its past, and then to attempt to impose itself upon other
elements, or at least, to keep itself intact and thus refuse to accept
what other cultures have to offer, so as thereby to be transmuted into
authentic Americanism.
Dr. Drachsler represents the same point of view:
[130]To hope for a rich, composite civilization in America through
biological fusion merely is to chase a will-o’-the-wisp. Nothing
short of conscious social control of the transmission of the
cultural heritage will achieve the result. [131]The function of
the cultural groups would be to foster through voluntary cultural
community organization their cultural uniqueness, while the function
of the State would embrace the harmonization of these cultural
differences, the unification of distinctive contributions into a rich
and variegated whole. [132]America with her unique experience of
multiform contacts of races and peoples is in a position to invest
the concept of democracy with a broader and richer meaning than any
nation has done thus far. She can, if she will, develop the principle
of tolerance as no people has yet dared to do. She can, if she will,
encourage the search for the unique and the distinctive in social
life, side by side with a strong emphasis on the basic human interests.
But, many will say, does this theory erect conflicting loyalties? Can
they be reconciled? The answer to this is in terms of proportional
loyalties. I quote Professor Miller’s summary:
[133]The real problem of society is the living together of individuals
and groups in such a way that both the individual and the group can
attain the highest degree of self-realization. [134]One of the
greatest obstacles to truth and progress is the preaching of one
hundred per cent. Americanism.... Reality demands that we begin to
advocate ten to twenty-five per cent. patriotism. This proportion
will account for the peculiarly provincial values that our particular
fatherland has contributed to our development.... The seventy-five to
ninety per cent. of loyalty that is left belongs to values in our
lives that are international rather than national.
Among these international values he finds the religious, economic and
cultural ones, all of which transcend the nation, either by being wider
or narrower, belonging to a sub-group or to humanity.
4.
This integration of groups need not stop at the nation as at present
constituted, as is hinted in the last citation. The nation is itself
an integration of groups, and can enter into other integrations, which
include it or which cross it with different lines of interest and of
grouping. In the words of U. G. Weatherly:
[135]Loyalty to a particular unit with a well defined function in
no way collides with allegiance to other bodies with quite other
outlooks.... Men may still remain good national patriots while loyally
accepting the controls exercised by world standards in science, art or
music. [136]Both race and nation must be preserved because they have
certain permanent and necessary functions, and because they are the
natural centers of that loyalty which can never be swallowed up in
world-loyalty, since human nature cannot live wholly in universals....
Between these two sets of loyalties there is a clear distinction; the
one is local and particularistic, the other is human. A well-rounded
social organization, whether within the single group or between
groups, will give practical scope to each.... In a practical way men
must recognize that since they have multiple interests, they may have
multiple allegiances.
To return to Miller for another phrase:
[137]The nation is a growth from innumerable simpler social forms,
and the growth to internationalism is relatively little more complex
than the growth of nationalism. [138]The old patriotism means
stultification; an adaptation of loyalty to meet actual present
conditions means enlargement of character and the possibility of a new
world.
There is no beginning and no end to the growth and the organization
of the mind. Beginning with the individual and the family, we may
analyze the elements which enter into these elementary mental units,
or we may observe the mounting synthesis to the city, state and
nation; or, following other lines of interest and of affiliation, to
the movements of world culture, religion and economic organization,
in their world-wide bearing. The nation is formed by a synthesis of
its sub-groups; and the nation, in turn, enters into a wider synthesis
to form the nascent but still growing conception of mankind. The mind
of the many groups of Americans yield up their purposes, when called
upon, for the greater unity—greater not only in size, but in richness,
variety and tradition—that constitutes the mind of America. The future
will mark the growing unity in diversity of the American group mind;
the mounting beauty of its many-colored canvas, the increasing harmony
of its many-throated symphony. At the same time, America will become
more and more a part of a still greater synthesis, the group mind
that will transcend the selfish purpose of the nation in such common
purposes as the struggle against the adverse forces of nature; the
organization of men for welfare and for culture; the prevention of that
ancient group intolerance, which means the destruction of many small
groups and the standardization and impoverishment of many great ones.
The fulfillment of the prophet’s vision will be at hand when groups of
men will not strive to destroy each other but to fulfill each other,
when the sub-group will not undermine but serve the greater unity, when
the ultimate vision of every struggling group of men, be it small or
great, will be to serve the purpose of the whole, to enter into the
mind of humanity, the ideal of God.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Franz Boaz, The Mind of Primitive Man.
Paul Barth, Die Philosphie der Geschichte als Soziologie.
I. Berkson, Theories of Americanization.
James Mark Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations.
Sir Martin Conway, The Crowd in Peace and War.
Sanford H. Cobb, The Rise of Religious Liberty in America.
Susan L. Davis, Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan.
William Durant, Philosophy and the Social Problem.
Julius Drachsler, Democracy and Assimilation.
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy.
William Ray Dennes, Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology.
Charles A. Ellwood, Sociology in Its Psychological Aspects.
M. Fishberg, The Jews, a Study in Race and Environment.
C. R. Fish, Development of American Nationality.
Elisha M. Friedman, Survival or Extinction.
Jean Finot, Race Prejudice.
Morris Ginsberg, The Psychology of Society.
Gumplowitz, Der Rassenkampf.
E. B. Greene, Foundations of American Nationality.
Paul Goodman, The Synagog and the Church.
Burton J. Hendrick, The Jews in America.
The International Jew, 4 vol.
Joseph Jacobs, Contributions of the Jew to Civilization.
Aurel Kolnai, Psychoanalysis and Sociology.
B. Lazare, Anti-Semitism.
Walter Lippman, Public Opinion.
Le Bon, Le Foule.
E. C. Lindeman, Social Discovery.
John M. Mecklin, The Ku Klux Klan.
Everett D. Martin, The Behavior of Crowds.
Herbert A. Miller, Races, Nations and Classes.
William MacDougall, Introduction to Social Psychology.
William MacDougall, The Group Mind.
Charles Platt, Psychology of Social Life.
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.
Max Raisin, History of the Jews in Modern Times.
Melvin G. Rigg, 2d, Theories of the Obligation of Citizen to State.
J. H. Robinson, The Mind in the Making.
Edward A. Ross, Social Control.
Josiah Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty.
The Reference Shelf: Ku Klux Klan.
The Reference Shelf: Restriction of Immigration.
John Spargo, The Jew and American Ideals.
Nathaniel S. Shailer, The Neighbor.
Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles.
Oscar Straus, The American Spirit.
Philip Schaff, Church and State in the United States.
Edgar A. Singer, Jr., Mind as Behavior.
Edgar A. Singer, Jr., Modern Thinkers and Present Problems.
Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation.
W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War.
Frank Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South.
J. M. Williams, Principles of Social Psychology.
Peter Wiernick, History of the Jews in America.
Lucien Wolf, The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs.
Israel Zangwill, The Voice of Jerusalem.
American Journal of Sociology, May 1924.
Allport: Group Fallacy in Relation to Social Science.
Kantor: Institutional Foundation of a Scientific Social Psychology.
American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1925.
Bohn: The Ku Klux Klan Interpreted.
American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1911.
George E. Vincent: The Rivalry of Groups.
B’nai B’rith Magazine, Oct., Nov. 1924.
J. Speransky: My Adventures with Radicals.
B’nai B’rith Magazine, 1922 and ’23.
A series on the Ku Klux Klan, with statements by its Grand Wizard.
Hearst’s International Magazine, 1922 and ’23.
A series on anti-Semitism; another on the Ku Klux Klan.
Jewish Social Service Quarterly, Nov. 1924.
Drachsler: Jewish Communal Life in the United States.
The Menorah Journal, Nov. 1924.
Erwin Edman: Race and Culture. Frequent articles on similar topics.
The Nation, 1923 and ’24.
A series of 10 articles on anti-Semitism.
Publications of the American Sociological Society, Vol XVIII.
U. G. Weatherly: Racial Pessimism.
Harry F. Ward: Repression of Civil Liberties.
John A. Ryan: Intolerance: Causes and Lessons.
Footnotes.
[1] American Jewish Yearbook, volume 24, page 343.
[2] Yearbook, Vol. 22, pages 410–11.
[3] Social Discovery, p. 21.
[4] Sociology in its Psychological Aspects, p. 13.
[5] ibid., p. 94.
[6] Hobhouse: Morals in Evolution, p. 339.
[7] The Philosophical Review, 1912, vol. 21, p. 81.
[8] See Dennes: Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology,
especially Chap. IX.
[9] Page 115.
[10] Baldwin: Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 248.
[11] Boaz: Mind of Primitive Man, p. 207.
[12] Matthew, 12:30.
[13] Allport: American Journal of Sociology, May 1924, p. 691.
[14] Bogardus: American Journal of Sociology, May 1924, p. 703.
[15] Lindeman: Social Discovery, p. 44.
[16] Lindeman: Social Discovery, p. 120.
[17] Davis: Psychological Interpretations of Society, p. 9.
[18] Cited in Elwood, p. 330.
[19] Ellwood, p. 330.
[20] Baldwin, p. 571.
[21] Lindeman, p. 136.
[22] Dennes: Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology, p. 145.
[23] MacDougall: Group Mind, p. 12.
[24] Lindeman, p. 115.
[25] Singer, p. 10.
[26] Lindeman, p. 170.
[27] MacDougall: Group Mind, p. 78.
[28] MacDougall: Group Mind, p. 158.
[29] Dennes: Method and Presuppositions of Group Psychology, p. 120.
[30]Barker: Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the
Present Day.
[31] Singer: Mind as Behavior, chapter on The Man Without a Fellow.
[32] Baldwin: Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 22.
[33] p. 30.
[34] Hart: The Survey, March 15, 1924.
[35] Platt: The Psychology of Social Life, p. 188.
[36] Baldwin, p. 462.
[37] Baldwin, p. 96.
[38] Singer: Modern Thinkers and Present Problems, p. 289.
[39] Miller: ♦Races, Nations and Classes, p. 14.
♦ “Raches” replaced with “Races”
[40] Baldwin, p. 61.
[41] Sumner: Folkways, p. 12.
[42] Ellwood, p. 159.
[43] Vincent: American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1912, p. 471.
[44] ibid., p. 483.
[45] Gumplowitz, p. 176.
[46] Gumplowitz, p. 161.
[47] Friedman, p. 148.
[48] Miller: Races, Nations and Classes, p. 11.
[49] Miller, p. 135.
[50] Miller, p. 35–6.
[51]Shaw: “Saint Joan,” p. lvii.
[52] Shaw, p. lxi.
[53] Baldwin, p. 191, footnote.
[54] Vincent: American Journal of Sociology, p. 479.
[55] Lippman, p. 115.
[56] p. 15.
[57] p. 31.
[58] p. 99.
[59] Chapter 20.
[60] Greene: Foundations of American Nationality, p. 579.
[61] Fish: The Development of American Nationality, p. 2–15.
[62] Fish, p. 10.
[63] Greene, pp. 590–598.
[64] Cobb: Rise of Religious Liberty in America, p. 70.
[65] Mecklin: The Ku Klux Klan, p. 183.
[66] Susan L. Davis: Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan.
[67] Ross: Overland Monthly, Feb. 1922.
[68] Miller: Races, Nations, and Classes, p. 44.
[69] Drachsler: Democracy and Assimilation, p. 29.
[70] A Jewish Chaplain in France, p. 214.
[71] Martin: The Behavior of Crowds.
[72] Mecklin: The Ku Klux Klan, p. 20.
[73] The Ku Klux Klan, p. 233.
[74] idem. p. 103.
[75] p. 108.
[76] p. 122.
[77] Ryan: Art., Intolerance, in Pub. Amer. Sociological Society, Vol.
XVIII.
[78] Tannenbaum: Darker Phases of the South, p. 20.
[79] p. 15.
[80] p. 33.
[81] Bohn: American Journal of Sociology, Jan. 1925, pp. 385–407.
[82] p. 168.
[83] p. 110.
[84] Johnson: The Nation’s Business, July 1923, pp. 26–8.
[85] Ryan, p. 124.
[86] Ward: Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, Vol. XVIII.
[87] Ward, p. 145.
[88] The Nation, March 21, 1923.
[89] The Nation, February 28, 1923.
[90] Samuel: You Gentiles, p. 31.
[91] p. 175.
[92] Menorah Journal, November 1924, p. 425.
[93] The International Jew, p. 88.
[94] Vol. 2, p. 249.
[95] Vol. 4, pp. 50–1.
[96] Finot: Race Prejudice, p. 88.
[97] p. 221.
[98] p. 310.
[99] p. 317.
[100] Spargo: The Jew and American Ideals.
[101] The Nation, February 20, 1924.
[102] Friedman: Survival or Extinction, p. 110.
[103] Shailer: The Neighbor.
[104] Mecklin: The Ku Klux Klan, p. 125.
[105] Jewish Social Service Quarterly, Nov. pp. 19–21.
[106] Friedman: Survival or Extinction, p. 112.
[107] p. 121.
[108] p. 131.
[109] p. 134.
[110] The Nation, Feb. 20, 1924.
[111] Miller: Races, Nations and Classes, Chapter II, p. 36.
[112] p. 182.
[113] p. 97.
[114] p. 95.
[115] Beaulieu: Israel among the Nations.
[116] Democracy and Assimilation, Chapter IV.
[117] Friedman: Survival or Extinction, p. 140.
[118] p. 106.
[119] p. 166.
[120] p. 190.
[121] See Gamoran: Changing Conceptions in Jewish Education.
[122] Macaulay: Lays of Ancient Rome.
[123] The Nation, March 21, 1923.
[124] Zangwill: The Melting Pot, Act I.
[125] The Nation, April 11, 1923.
[126] Berkson: Theories of Americanization, p. 101.
[127] p. 98.
[128] p. 117.
[129] Dewey: Addresses and Proceedings of the Nat. Ed. Assn. Vol. LIV,
p. 185.
[130] Drachsler: Democracy and Assimilation, p. 236.
[131] p. 188.
[132] p. 222.
[133] Miller: Races, Nations and Classes, p. 169.
[134] p. 186.
[135] Racial Pessimism, in Pub. Amer. Sociol. Soc. Vol. XVIII, p. 13.
[136] p. 14.
[137] Miller, p. 181.
[138] p. 191.
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