than three times what it had been in 1900. Jews now constituted 3.4 per-
cent of the American population, compared to 1.4 percent twenty years
earlier. The number of new immigrants who arrived in 1921 totaled over
119,000 (it had peaked in 1914 with 138,000) but dropped dramatically
under the quota system introduced by Congress during that decade. While
large numbers of prewar immigrants were moving horizontally and
branching out from the urban ghettos into the second and third areas of
settlement, so too were they moving vertically up the economic ladder. As-
piring to middle-class status, many of them—and more of their children—
proceeded to exchange factory labor and the proletariat class for a higher
education and for white-collar jobs and the professions. Rapidly accultu-
rating, they ceased to be the wards of the establishment to be led “for their
own good.” The despotism of 52 William Street, no matter how benevo-
lent or well intentioned, became a vestigial reminder of the past.^26
Schiff himself had yielded more than once to the forces of rational or-
ganization and democratization. His experience with the federation move-
ment and with the kehillah and American Jewish Congress convinced him
of the need to adapt to changes within a rapidly maturing community.
Moreover, his support of elitist rule, by definition undemocratic and there-
fore un-American, logically contradicted his demands for total American-
ization on the part of his fellow Jews. To be sure, he foresaw the shift in
communal leadership from the Germans to the new immigrants years be-
fore World War I. But his predictions on the coming of age of the eastern
Europeans were borne out in the 1920s, perhaps even sooner than he had
expected.
Economic progress, larger numbers, and acculturation also made for
greater fragmentation. Despite the abundance of national organizations
alongside the local, self-directed religious, fraternal, and cultural institu-
tions that defied centralization, no single individual or agency could claim
to speak for the entire group. Marshall, the president of the AJC, who,
after Schiff’s death, came closest to being a Jewish national leader, died in
- In a divided community no successor was found or even sought, and
Schiff’s goal of a united Jewry, which often was effected through his per-
sona alone, steadily dimmed. Nor did the 1920s prove a time for social ex-
perimentation and Schiff-like designs of the magnitude of the Galveston
project, immigrant charities, or theological seminaries. For one thing, the
mood of bitterness and cynicism that followed the war successfully
quenched the optimism of a Schiff and faith in the powers of rational en-
lightenment. Moreover, although the war raised American Jewish power in
international Jewish affairs just as it set America center stage in world di-
plomacy, the government no longer considered appeals based on humani-
tarian diplomacy. When anti-Semitism swelled during the “Anglo-Saxon
decade”^27 —in the attacks of Henry Ford and the Ku Klux Klan, the debates
The End of an Era 249