Polish animosity the Jewish leaders also urged Polish Jewry to cooperate in
good faith with the new government. Meanwhile, in the United States res-
olutions of sympathy and protest were passed by non-Jewish organizations
and by state legislatures and Congress. Jews staged mass meetings and
wrote memorials; the AJC and the American Jewish Congress sent dele-
gates to Washington to confer with Wilson, Secretary of State Robert Lan-
sing, and Senator Lodge, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee. Although the senator was patronizing, Wilson was sympathetic.
When he asked for practical suggestions, the AJC advised a public an-
nouncement warning nationalities that persecution jeopardized their claim
to independence. Nevertheless, the president, whose primary concern was
to gain American acceptance of a treaty with a League of Nations, offered
no substantive help.^7 In the end the goal of the Jewish delegates was
reached. Minority rights under the protection of the League and approved
by Wilson were incorporated into treaties with Poland, Romania, Yugosla-
via, and Czechoslovakia. But regardless of the strength of the League,
Schiff calculated that it would take many years to iron out all the trouble
spots for European Jewry. Cyrus Adler grimly predicted that the question
of minority rights would occupy the AJC for the next twenty-five years,
and as history soon proved, Wilson’s faith in the minority rights treaties
was sadly misplaced.^8
For the first time in over thirty years, Schiff was not center stage in Ameri-
can Jewish lobbying for eastern European Jews. Forced by physical prob-
lems to be a spectator rather than a player and never enjoying the same rela-
tionship with Wilson that he had had with Roosevelt and Taft—he once said
that the president did not like him—he depended on Louis Marshall and a
few others at the peace conference to keep him informed. For a while, Mar-
shall, representing the American Jewish Congress, led the multinational
Committee of Jewish Delegations that spoke at Versailles for minority
rights; and Cyrus Adler, the official representative of the AJC, also cooper-
ated. The attorney was the closest to a substitute for Schiff. Called a “big
force” in Jewry by the banker, Marshall also plotted Jewish strategy in the
United States. He loyally told Schiff of all moves, and the latter in turn took
care not to compromise his friend’s authority. When he was personally con-
tacted (e.g., a letter from Ignace Paderewski asserting Poland’s democratic
aims or a cable from European rabbis on Jewish suffering in Poland), Schiff
referred the matter to Marshall. Doubtless frustrated at being confined to
the sidelines, especially during the peace conference, he served as liaison
between the American delegation to Paris and individual European Jewish
leaders. It was a necessary task but an unexciting one for a man like Schiff.^9
The End of an Era 241one line short