but since “I do not hesitate to admit that my sympathies are specially in be-
half of the members of my own race,” he wrote a lengthy defense of the
Jewish newcomers.^3
Regarded by associates as second to none in the championship of liberal
immigration, Schiff insisted that exclusion was “un-American,” in violation
of both America’s best interests and its mission as a haven for the op-
pressed. He also decried the “narrowness” of restrictionists who had found
their opportunity in the United States but now denied the same opportu-
nity to would-be immigrants. All Americans, they themselves or their
fathers or grandfathers, had been immigrants. “If we are going to reverse
the immigration policy which has prevailed since times immemorial,... we
had better first proceed to Plymouth Rock and blast it into fragments, for it
is there where the first immigrants... proclaimed the policy, towards
which they in fact pledged themselves and all those who were to come after
them.”^4 Schiff’s knowledge of colonial history may have been less than ac-
curate, but as he presented it, the desire for religious freedom on the part
of Russian Jewish immigrants was akin to the Pilgrim spirit.
Alert to the mounting agitation for restriction in the new century, the
banker publicly reiterated time and again that the United States had ample
room to absorb those able and willing to do manual labor. Especially impa-
tient with those Jews who sided with the restrictionists and thereby stirred
up non-Jewish ill-feeling, he warned against leading Russia to believe that
American Jews opposed immigration. An anti-immigration stand, he main-
tained, served only to justify czarist anti-Semitism.^5
Certain seeming inconsistencies ran through Schiff’s thinking. Harping
on the desirability of manual laborers, he opposed the entry of physical
hardship cases. Shortly after the Kishinev pogrom, however, he told the
Jewish Chautauqua Society that it was better for the strong, who could care
for themselves, to remain in Russia and for the weaker to emigrate. He ex-
plained, “I mean the weakest in the struggle for existence, such as the man
of science or the student, who is much respected in Russia, but not appre-
ciated in the United States, where he has a hard struggle.” He still called
distribution outside the eastern ports the safety valve for keeping America’s
doors open and for maximizing the desirability of the immigrants. But at
the same time, he admitted that the masses of immigrants in need of assis-
tance would remain in the large urban centers like New York and Chicago.
Schiff was ambivalent too about how many Jews in Russia could be relo-
cated. On countless occasions he stated that over five million could not em-
igrate, but he supported immigration to America as well as to lands outside
both Europe and the United States. Nor was his warning to Witte, after the
failure of the 1905 revolution, that Jews would be forced to leave en masse
made lightly. As discussed below, his own projections in connection with
the Galveston movement on how many could ultimately find refuge in the
In Search of a Refuge 155