Quest for Inclusion

Jews and Liberalism in Modern America

Marc Dollinger

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400823857
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

For over sixty years, Jews have ranked as the most liberal white ethnic group in American politics, figuring prominently in social reform campaigns ranging from the New Deal to the civil rights movement. Today many continue to defy stereotypes that link voting patterns to wealth. What explains this political behavior? Historians have attributed it mainly to religious beliefs, but Marc Dollinger discovered that this explanation fails to account for the entire American Jewish political experience. In this, the first synthetic treatment of Jewish liberalism and U.S. public policy from the 1930s to the mid-1970s, Dollinger identifies the drive for a more tolerant, pluralistic, and egalitarian nation with Jewish desires for inclusion in the larger non-Jewish society.The politics of acculturation, the process by which Jews championed unpopular social causes to ease their adaptation to American life, established them as the guardians of liberal America. But, according to Dollinger, it also erected barriers to Jewish liberal success. Faced with a conflict between liberal politics and their own acculturation, Jews almost always chose the latter. Few Jewish leaders, for example, condemned the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, and most southern Jews refused to join their northern co-religionists in public civil rights protests. When liberals advocated race-based affirmative action programs and busing to desegregate public schools, most Jews dissented. In chronicling the successes, limits, and failures of Jewish liberalism, Dollinger offers a nuanced yet wide-ranging political history, one intended for liberal activists, conservatives curious about the creation of neo-conservatism, and anyone interested in Jewish communal life.

CHAPTER ONE

“What Do We Owe to Peter Stuyvesant?”
The New Deal in the Jewish Community

SOON AFTER Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration, Cornell University economist Isaac Rubinow posed a rhetorical question to the National Conference of Jewish Social Service: “What do we owe to Peter Stuyvesant?” Rubinow’s query recalled a well-known seventeenth-century squabble between Stuyvesant, the governor of New Amsterdam, and his employer, the Dutch West Indies Company. When the colonial leader sought the expulsion of a small group of Brazilian Jewish immigrants in 1654, his European governors, intent on using the new arrivals to bolster the local economy, flinched. Their compromise, termed “the Stuyvesant Pledge,” allowed the Jews to remain in exchange for a promise that the settlers would take care of their own social welfare needs. American Jews could not, they all agreed, look to the government for relief.¹

While the Stuyvesant Pledge never actually defined Jewish nor even U.S. social welfare policy, it proved a powerful metaphor for a community struggling to maintain its traditional collectivist orientation in the midst of the nation’s worst economic depression. Governor Stuyvesant’s accommodation anticipated what Jews would learn in their American experience: that the social welfare system in the United States depended upon private and often times religious philanthropic institutions. While nearly three centuries separated Rubinow’s speech from the “Stuyvesant Pledge,” the American Jewish impulse to “take care of its own” survived well into the twentieth century. Respecting the traditional American social welfare ethic of voluntarism, the Jewish community developed a sophisticated network of private philanthropic organizations. Jewish Federation Councils emerged in most major American cities and served as the umbrella organization for a variety of social service groups, while local synagogues solicited members for their own philanthropic appeals. As late as 1914, Jacob Schiff, the famed German-American banker and leader of the American Jewish Committee, remarked that “a Jew would rather cut his hand off than apply for relief from non-Jewish sources.”²

The New Deal proved a critical turning point in American Jewish politics. Between FDR’s first inauguration in March 1933 and U.S. entry into World War II in December 1941, American Jews blazed an unmistakable liberal path. They helped forge the New Deal coalition and provided much of the glue that kept it together for three generations. Roosevelt brought crucial relief to an American Jewish community reeling from the economic depression and, for the first time in their American experience, invited Jews to help write public policy. Not only did many American Jews occupy prominent positions in the Roosevelt administration, but thousands more filled the rolls of local New Deal agencies, determined to leave an unmistakable Jewish imprint on the national landscape. For Jews whose historic political ties ran the gamut from Republican to Communist, the Democratic party of the 1930s promised input on the most important public policy questions of the day and realization of a generation-long American Jewish dream: integration into the mainstream.

Jewish calls for increased federal intervention, whether from the ranks of FDR’s own administration, front-line Jewish social workers, or the millions of American Jews suffering the ill effects of the Depression, helped create the greatest government expansion in U.S. history. A religious minority in a Christian nation and an ethnic subculture within the larger society, Jewish leaders demonstrated how a massive federal relief program could extend American civic protections, insure the survival of Jewish life in the United States, and encourage a tolerant and pluralist national political culture.

American Jewish leaders helped design several of the most important New Deal programs. When Congress approved millions of dollars in relief, the Jewish community spearheaded the drive for community control, guaranteeing its clients the best possible care and defining a central feature of New Deal liberalism—the enfranchisement of local political leaders as a means to guarantee the success of Roosevelt’s national reform plan. Jewish clients could be served by their own social workers and Jewish agencies enjoyed a new lease on their communal life. New Deal liberalism meant that Jews could reap the benefits of government assistance without fearing its coercive power.³

Jewish communal leaders took issue with New Deal programs that threatened to marginalize Jews or failed to address issues of paramount concern to their community. When FDR limited New Deal reform measures to the narrow goal of economic recovery, Jewish social workers balked. For them, the Great Depression represented more than just a business downturn; it illustrated the failure of American social policy. The New Dealer’s goal of a fiscal quick fix did little to reverse a social Darwinist welfare policy that had plagued Jews and other working Americans for over fifty years. With the unemployment rate skyrocketing to 25 percent, Jewish social workers could not subscribe to the belief that the poor had created their own misfortune. Jewish communal workers, steeped in leftist politics or in traditional religious mandates to care for the poor, challenged established conceptions of American poverty that placed the primary responsibility for poverty on the individual and the main burden for recovery on private philanthropy or local government. Instead, they advanced models more in touch with the demands of modern industrial economies. Larger economic and social factors, they argued, punished hard-working Americans who could not find work. The continued integration of Jews into American life demanded that communal leaders split from their non-Jewish New Deal allies and combat the social welfare status quo.

In the short term, these efforts brought needed relief to many Jews and helped protect them from poverty, hunger, and homelessness. On a grander scale, it established American Jews as white America’s leading opponents of institutional discrimination and affirmed a tenet central to modern American Jewish liberalism: protection of individuals victimized by social factors beyond their control. By shifting social responsibility away from the unoffending individual, Jewish leaders protected their coreligionists from further social marginalization and pressed for a government committed to solving systemic economic problems instead of scapegoating its innocent victims.

While the expanding welfare state bolstered the Jewish community’s civic status in many ways, it also threatened to squash American Jewish cultural expression. Heads of Jewish social welfare organizations watched as government relief checks all but replaced private contributions. Jewish leaders worried that New Deal programs would challenge the legitimacy of their agencies and hasten the assimilation of their co-religionists. In a bid to preserve their distinctive ethnic identity, Jewish social workers took advantage of New Deal assistance to free Jewish funds for educational and cultural activities. At a time when New Deal programs placed all Americans under the same economic umbrella, Jews illustrated how the liberal state could promote ethnic differentiation and provide an even safer haven for minority groups.

In recent studies, historians such as Gary Gerstle and Lizabeth Cohen have argued that the overbearing economic demands of the era necessitated an abandonment of ethnic identity and the embrace of a more universal political culture. Contrary to Gerstle and Cohen, American Jews illustrated how ethnic and religious groups could redirect liberal government programs to benefit both educational and character-building programs. Whether by replenishing their nearly empty bank accounts with local and state government subsidies in the first years of economic depression or transferring their clients to federal agencies once FDR launched his New Deal, Jewish social workers took advantage of the government’s newfound relief commitment to bolster Jewish character-building programs.⁴

Eastern European American Jewish leaders, already influential by the time FDR became president, accelerated their drive for greater democratization, pressed for increased funding of Jewish educational programs, and sought alliances with the religious leadership of Christian America just as they resisted greater accommodation to American life. Proper Jewish acculturation to American life, they held, demanded basic knowledge of Jewish history, religion, and culture. A decade after Congress restricted most immigration from Eastern Europe, second-generation Jews crafted a liberal definition of Americanism founded upon their optimism for inclusion in public life, their desire to maintain a distinct ethnic culture, and their vision of a democratic nation respectful of religious difference. By cheering the liberal reform programs of the New Deal, American Jews could use government money to help protect their community’s long-term survival. Judaism would occupy a sacred place in American society and the liberal state would help pay for it.

THE STOCK MARKET CRASH OF 1929

When the stock market crashed on October 24, 1929, Jewish leaders, like most other Americans, expressed little fear. The American Jewish Committee, meeting just three weeks later, failed to mention the economic downturn in its proceedings. Jewish Family Welfare Agencies experienced only slight increases in expenditures and in the number of cases served. Fund-raising efforts by local Jewish Federation Councils continued unaffected throughout the 1930 campaign as relief costs among the largest Jewish agencies increased just 7 percent.⁵

By 1931, though, Jewish social welfare organizations felt the economic pinch. More Jews applied for aid than in any previous year. Jewish social workers witnessed vast increases in case loads, expenditures, and applications for service. The American Jewish Committee disclosed that “practically every local Federation in the country was compelled to reduce its budget.” For the first time in its history, the Chicago Jewish Charities ended the year with a deficit. In every relief category, Jewish agencies carried a greater burden. During the dark winter of 1931-32, relief figures reached a new high. Demand for social services mounted while contributions to Jewish philanthropic appeals plummeted. The Bureau of Jewish Social Research reported a 50 percent jump in relief and a steady decline in contributions. In 1933, Jewish social workers labored under an even heavier caseload while fund-raisers collected a third fewer dollars. With the nation sinking into economic collapse, Jewish agencies sought bank loans to cover their relief commitments and demanded that the government help them fund the nation’s social service programs.⁶

Figure 1. Jews on New York’s Lower East Side collecting tzedaka (charity) during the Great Depression. (Graduate School for Jewish Social Work, Records, nd 1925-1950, I-7, box 4 of 8, folder 66, American Jewish Historical Society, Waltham, Mass.)

When Jewish leaders called for greater government relief, they incurred the wrath of many Americans intent on keeping the social welfare system private. The shift from private to public aid in the United States developed slowly and revealed profound fears about involving government in the traditional sphere of private philanthropy. “Care of the poor,” one New Dealer affirmed, “has been recognized from earliest colonial days as fundamentally a function of local government.” Social conservatives warned that public assistance would create a nation full of dependents. This attitude, borrowed from the English economist Malthus, “held that the poor were responsible for their own misery and destitution, that they had no ‘right’ to public relief.” Former Progressives such as Herbert Hoover feared that government aid would undermine the spirit of rugged individualism, while southerners opposed any federal action that might encroach on state’s rights.⁷

Opponents of activist government dominated American politics throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. Critics of government relief spending insisted that success or failure in the economic world reflected an individual’s moral fitness. Invoking the memory of the late nineteenth-century industrial giants who opposed government regulation, opponents of the New Deal adhered to the principle that the economic cycle rewarded those most fit for advancement and punished those lacking the appropriate human qualities. Bright, keen, and intelligent Americans would find a way to prosper. Those who were lazy and uninterested would end up impoverished. The federal government could not be held responsible for problems created by individual vices.⁸

In 1931 Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma wrote that “you could no more relieve the depression by legislation than you can pass a resolution to prevent disease.” Fiscal conservatives remained skeptical of government involvement as well. “Opponents of federal relief,” wrote Josephine Brown, an assistant to New Deal administrator Harry Hopkins, “claimed that it would seriously impair the credit of the federal government and make it impossible to balance the budget. They claimed that this would retard the restoration of normal business and serve to increase unemployment.” Tinkering with the cycles of the economy, they reasoned, could only unbalance the natural rhythm of supply and demand, production and unemployment, growth and recession. Economic downturns, like physical ailments, could best be remedied by following nature’s course, and government action was not natural.⁹

Most Christian religious leaders accepted the laissez-faire critique. In the nineteenth century, traditional social Darwinist ideology dominated the sermons of leading Protestant clergy, including Henry Ward Beecher, who claimed that responsibility for poverty rested with the individual. Many of the Progressive Era’s most important social reformers rooted their Alger-like appeals in Protestant theology. They justified their support for Theodore Roosevelt’s activist program on its middle-class Protestant focus and could not embrace the communitarian ideology espoused by many of that era’s Jewish labor, political, and religious leaders. “Social conservatism, sometimes of an extreme sort,” one religious historian noted, “continued to flourish in the great middle-class denominations in which liberal advocacy was most audible.”¹⁰

The market crash did little to change their attitudes. While a few Protestant denominations backed a New Deal-style approach to government in the early 1930s, most refused to challenge the laissez-faire system. Almost all the editorial boards of leading Protestant periodicals favored the incumbent Hoover in the 1932 presidential election, while the clergy focused their efforts on maintaining Prohibition and checking the influence of Catholics after Al Smith’s 1928 presidential campaign. Most Protestant church members continued to back the Republican party by supporting Alf Landon’s unsuccessful 1936 bid for the presidency. In 1938, the Southern Baptist Convention declared capitalism the “best [economic system] in the world.”¹¹

The Catholic Church intertwined its opposition to public relief with its own impressive history as one of the nation’s leading private philanthropies. It maintained a traditional approach to social welfare, stressing the saintly responsibility of Catholics to care for the poor, feed the hungry, and shelter the homeless. In Chicago, the Catholic Church convinced the local political leadership to name its welfare organizations as constituents of the state relief organization. It became a representative of the Illinois government, distributing federal and state relief. By maintaining strict control, the Chicago archdiocese ensured that needy Catholics would receive public assistance while remaining accountable to the Catholic charities, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and their local priests. While Jews would also seek cooperative arrangements with government, they did not use their operational autonomy as a means to maintain traditional social welfare practices.¹²

In Jewish America, social workers rejected the prevailing individualist ideology and embraced a collectivist stance that acknowledged systemic inequalities. They refused to equate unemployment and its effects with moral weakness and called for government-sponsored welfare years before the New Deal pressed the issue into the national spotlight. As early as 1918, the Reform movement called for a government-sponsored unemployment insurance program as well as a pension fund for elderly Americans. In 1923, Jewish social service agencies questioned “the need, desirability, and propriety of separ...