thought it more prudent not to make it a Jewish issue, lashed out at the dis-
criminatory ruling. Theodore Roosevelt was also alerted, and the ex-
president’s spirited response was highlighted in a newspaper article entitled
“All Loyal Citizens Alike To Roosevelt.” As a result of the publicity and
pressure, the War Work Council of the Red Cross rescinded the order.^48
The Jewish community in general found little reason to dispute the
banker’s activities with respect to integration or discrimination. Certainly,
they had no cause to take issue with the ongoing pressure applied by him
and the AJC against the immigration bills of 1915 and 1917 that included
the objectionable literacy test. Despite Schiff’s personal pleas to Congress
and Wilson—”Woe to the land where cities grow and men degenerate,” he
intoned—the 1917 bill passed over the president’s veto. In those matters,
American Jews recognized the familiar Schiff, the protagonist of
Americanization and the defender of free immigration.^49
For a small segment of the community a new element of disaffection with
elitist leadership did emerge. During the war years the militant pacifists
among the Jewish Socialists saw the banker not only as the undemocratic
steward but as the symbol of a capitalistic and imperialistic war. Schiff in
turn was shocked by the thought of “bellicose pacifism” on the part of any
American Jews. He had scant patience with the radicals; socialism was un-
American by definition, and when joined with pacifism during a war, it
spelled virtual treason. Nor could the dissenters seek refuge behind consti-
tutional liberties. Addressing a Jewish audience, he said in the spirit of the
newly passed Espionage Act: “Free speech, and those who demand free
speech that has as its purpose to hinder the President or retard prosecution
of the war have no rightful place in the country today.” Jews were hardly
the only pacifists, but since such Jews, irrespective of numbers, menaced
the security of the entire group, he assumed the responsibility of damage
control.^50
Jewish workers on New York’s Lower East Side constituted a dominant
force within Socialist ranks. Despite divided loyalties with respect to the
belligerents, their vote for the party mounted noticeably between 1914 and
- They stood for pacifism (until 1918) and, in some circles, against
American hypernationalism, which was seen as “coercive” conformity
without regard for the values of the ghetto. Socialist opposition to the war
translated in 1917 into resistance to the draft, or what Meyer London, the
first Socialist to sit in Congress, called “the democracy of the cemetery and
the equality of the slaughterhouse.” Not even the March 1917 revolution
in Russia changed the mind of the pacifists, who attempted to turn a public
celebration of the revolutionary change into an unruly demonstration for
peace.^51
The World at War 205