with Germany and to the resurrection of “civilization” in that country.
Senator William Borah of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the
leader of the anti-Wilson irreconcilables, hinted darkly that Schiff and five
other financiers supported the treaty for private economic reasons, but
there is no evidence in the Schiff papers to substantiate that charge. In
1920, Schiff favored the nomination of Herbert Hoover on the Republican
ticket, doubtless because of Hoover’s reputation as an internationalist, but
his countrymen preferred the normalcy of Warren Harding.^2
From 1916 on, Schiff gave much thought to the postwar economic res-
toration of Europe. In a grand gesture reminiscent of the old Schiff, the
banker talked immediately after the armistice of a multimillion-dollar fund
for that purpose. He discussed the matter with an enthusiastic Julius Ro-
senwald, who agreed that he and Schiff would contribute $5 million each.
(Initially, they had talked of $1 million each.) Schiff also planned to invite
the participation of other wealthy men, like J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford.
Since Schiff and Rosenwald wanted American initiative to guide the pro-
ject, they thought of approaching Wilson and asking him to name an
American commission for restoration in Europe. The Schiff papers yield
little more on the nature of the plan—how it would be structured and the
respective roles of the private sector and the government. The president,
however, left for Paris before an interview was possible, and the scheme
collapsed.^3
Of all the issues that concerned Schiff after the war hardly any was more
nagging than the condition of the Jews in central and eastern Europe. In-
deed, his focus on Jewry in the new states about to be created in central
and eastern Europe antedated the armistice. He hinted broadly to Thomas
Masaryk, who would become the first president of Czechoslovakia, that
he, Schiff, agreed with Wilson’s ideal of national self-determination but
that he had no sympathy with the anti-Semitism of the Poles and Roma-
nians and, by implication, the Czechoslovakians. Invited to serve as a vice
president of the League of Small and Subject Nationalities, he refused,
saying that he first needed the assurance that Poland and Romania, who
wanted their own rights so badly, would grant rights to their Jews. He told
his friend Charles Eliot, however, that he expected nothing from Poland.
“My sainted mother often used to say that when servants became masters,
they generally became intolerant and despotic masters against their own
servants.”^4
Jews in the United States watched events in Poland with grave concern.
Since Americans generally favored an independent Poland, and indeed that
was one of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, efforts to relieve the Jewish situation
were made more difficult. Jewish leaders, for example, found reports by
The End of an Era 239