issue and Jake Schiff is... spending money to rouse it, but he can’t frighten
me into a useless injury to our National interests, not to advance a princi-
ple but to gratify his vanity.” Taft stubbornly maintained that abrogation
was the wrong strategy; but in the face of the mounting public agitation
that was “growing like a weed,” he tried anew to press American demands
on Russia. By the fall, Schiff happily commented that it had become “fash-
ionable to be on our side.”^64
Seeking to circumvent executive opposition, the AJC pressed for a joint
congressional resolution calling for the termination of the treaty. Congress
obliged in December 1911, and when hearings were held on the resolu-
tion, Schiff was called to testify. The banker’s flair for dramatic words came
across in his presentation before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Leaving the legalist approach to Marshall and the others, he impassionedly
invoked principle:
Gentlemen, just think of it! If any of you who may happen to confess the
Jewish faith, any American who accidentally was born of Jewish parentage,
wants to go to the Far East to-day, and wants to take the shortest route, he
takes the Trans-Siberian Railway. When he comes to the Russian border he
is told “No thoroughfare.” Just think of it, gentlemen, just think of what that
means to an American.... Are you going to stand for this?^65The result was never in doubt. With only one dissenting vote in the
House, Congress went on record in favor of abrogation. The issue had
captured the nation’s approval; few Americans understood the legal or dip-
lomatic considerations, and even fewer had conflicting interests.
Schiff took the initiative toward a reconciliation with Taft. When he was
sure of victory in Congress, he asked the president for a private meeting.
He followed up his request by sending Taft medicines for his attacks of
gout and rheumatism! In mid-December, a day after the government noti-
fied Russia of the termination of the treaty, he wired congratulations to
Taft. But the latter was not that easily appeased. Shortly after his defeat for
reelection in 1912, he bitterly commented that he had been right all along
in opposing abrogation and that the joke was on Schiff and his “circum-
cised brothers.”^66 Russian resistance to American pressure hardened dur-
ing 1912, and both foreign and native Jews were threatened with added re-
strictions. In the United States resentment against abrogation was also
heard. Henry Ford played on the theme in the Dearborn Independent of
1921, and his anti-Semitic tirades highlighted abrogation under the words
“Frankfort-on-the-Main had won!”
Schiff hailed the abrogation victory in jubilant words: “For the first time,
150 Jacob H. Schiff