ghetto world that Schiff hadn’t known, and it gave him a keener insight
into the area and its residents.^30
Schiff and Wald agreed on the nonsectarian and nonracial character of
the Visiting Nurses’ Service and the settlement. “One God has made us
all,” he assured her when she informed him that she was treating Blacks.
He disapproved generally of settlements with a religious purpose, and ac-
cordingly, the Henry Street house made no provision for marking Jewish
holidays or customs. Schiff even proposed on one occasion that a non-Jew
be chosen for president, reasoning that an emphasis on nonsectarianism
would broaden the base of public support. That comment alone, besides
Wald’s accounts of the participants in the house’s activities, indicated, how-
ever, that the settlement was known as a Jewish agency.^31
His emphasis on nonsectarianism notwithstanding, Schiff drew the line
at the celebration of Christmas. The substitution by Jews of Christmas for
Hanukkah was “both thoughtless and faithless.” Worse still, it exposed
Jewish youngsters in the settlement to a religion that they might come to
regard as superior to their own. One year he ordered Wald to remove the
tree that she had set up for the nursery, which then included only Jewish
children. If Jews were a minority in the nursery, it might be different, he
said, “but it is both unpardonable and unjustifiable to tempt little children
into the customs of a religion foreign to theirs, innocent as this may appear
to be, and this must not be tolerated.” His personal feelings aside, the
banker was well aware of rampant immigrant suspicions of Christianizing
influences in settlement houses.^32
The quarrel over Christmas celebrations exposed a deeper problem. To
be sure, the settlement houses, even those without formal classes in En-
glish or civics, worked to Americanize the immigrant, but did American-
ization include acceptance of or conformity with Christian practices? Most
Americans would have said yes. At the turn of the century they did not ac-
knowledge religious or cultural pluralism, and despite the rapid strides of
secularization, the United States was still very much a Protestant nation.
Thus, if Christian usages were American as much as Christian, why
shouldn’t Jews celebrate Christmas too? Wald obviously did not find the
prospect offensive, but Schiff did. Yet he and his fellow philanthropists
failed to come up with guidelines for balancing the needs of both Jewish
identity and Americanization. The issue strained uptown-downtown rela-
tions, and it continued to haunt Jewish philanthropies for many years.
Wald and her work, more than anything else, drew Schiff closer to the
environmentalist approach to reform. Reformers like Wald believed that
ghetto conditions rather than the residents created the social and moral
problems. A champion of the causes of women, children, and organized
labor, Wald and her eyewitness reports of housing and factory conditions
that called for legislative remedies elicited her patron’s compassion. His
94 Jacob H. Schiff