“that we are going to see this thing through.... We must not let him off.”
Simultaneously, his differences with the administration over the Galveston
movement (see below) as well as Taft’s refusal to consider Louis Marshall
for the Supreme Court were also straining his relations with the president.
Despite two subsequent conferences at the White House, the banker was
not pacified. Perhaps the time had come to “build a fire in the rear of the
President” and to force Taft to act.^58
The hyperbole and intemperate remarks testify to Schiff’s belief that his
personal honor was on the line. The leading American Jew of his genera-
tion, whose loyalty to the country was unimpeachable, his position de-
manded uncompromising resistance to a policy that violated American
Jewish equality. As the would-be redeemer of Russian Jewry whose various
strategems had fallen short of the desired climax, he also felt that he was
racing against time. To effect the liberation of Russia Jewry, which had be-
come the most important mission of his life, he seized what appeared to be
the last chance. He directed his frustration and determination against the
Taft administration, gambling that Taft was an easier mark than Roosevelt.
Schiff, whose subsequent wires to the White House went unanswered,
understood that under the influence of the State Department and the am-
bassador to Russia, Taft had changed his mind on the need to conciliate the
Jews. A submissive president now acknowledged that Russia’s legal case
justified restrictions against foreign Jews, and he was fully convinced that
stern diplomatic measures would imperil American business interests in
Russia. Moreover, since Ambassador William Rockhill maintained that
Russian Jewish suffering was grossly exaggerated, the administration now
warned that anti-Russian action might worsen the Jewish condition.^59
Aware of the forces arrayed against the Jewish cause in both the executive
and the legislative branches of government, Schiff also knew that Russia
was more resistant to American pressure, both because of Jewish aid to
Japan in 1904–5 and because of its own recent rapprochement with Japan.
Despite the obstacles, the banker urged Louis Marshall to discuss the case
for abrogation in an address to a national Jewish audience, a meeting of the
Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), in January 1911. In-
deed, to ignore the matter might lead the government to infer that the
Jews were less concerned than they really were.^60 A public address was the
AJC’s final warning. Continued inaction by the government, the organiza-
tion was saying, could force it to run a public campaign that made abroga-
tion nonnegotiable.
A turning point both in the AJC’s decision to go public and the
Schiff–Taft rift came in February. Marshall’s impressive speech, followed
by the UAHC’s unanimous resolution calling for the termination of the
treaty, failed to convince the president, and he invited a small group of Jew-
ish leaders of the AJC, UAHC, and B’nai B’rith to a conference at the
Captivity and Redemption 147