JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 12

 HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE U.S.A. BETWEEN  1800 AND
 WORLD WAR II ---- THE "JEWISH PROBLEM"  

   When the Association of New England Deans convened to consider the "Jewish problem" in the spring of 1918, it did so amid a rising wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. During the decade before America's entry into World War I in 1917, concerns hsd been growing about the unprecedented wave of immigrants pouring into the United States----a torrent that peaked at over 1.2 million in1914, when the war in Europe temporarily stemmed the flow. But the American decision to join the British and French in their battle against Germany gave new fuel to nativist sentiment, for it led to an obsession with "100 percent Americanism"---an obsession that cast a suspicious eye toward all Americans not of "Anglo-Saxon" origin. 
   In June 1917, just two months after Congress declared war, it passed the Espionage Act, which provided penalties of up to twenty years in prison for those who demonstrated, spoke, or wrote against the war. It was followed in May 1918 by the even more draconian Sedition Act, which, in the words of Eric Foner, "criminalized spoken or printed statements intended to cast 'contempt, scorn, contumely or disrepute' on the 'form of government' or that advocated interference with the war effort." Though Eugene Debs, the Indiana-born leader of the American Socialist Party, was sentenced to ten years in prison under these statutes, immigrants bore the brunt of the repression. Thousands of "enemy aliens" were arrested in 1918, and numerous foreign-language newspapers were banned from the mails. 
   But anti-immigrant sentiment had been rising even before the Wilson administration decided to enter the GreT War. In 1911, the famous Dillingham Commission [chaired by the Republican senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont] issued its 42-volume report, giving the restriction forces a legitimacy they had previously lacked. Among the many contributions of the Dillingham Report to the nativist cause was its seemingly scientific documentation of the inferiority of the heavily Catholic and Jewish immigrants of southern and eastern Europe compared to their sturdier, more industrious, and predominantly Protestant "Teutonic" predecessors from Britain, Scandinavia, Holland, and Germany. 
   Yet it was not until February 1917 --- two months before America entered the war---that the restrictionists had their first their first legislative victory. Overriding Woodrow Wilson's presidential veto, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, which imposed a literacy requirement on immigrants for the first time in American history. Though ostensibly a neutral act targeted at individuals, the legislation in fact applied the principle of group exclusion to European immigrants --- a status previously reserved to nonwhites. The real purpose of the act was to cut the number of "new" immigrants from eastern and southern Europe --- a point confirmed by Senator William P. Dillingham, the bill's chief architect, who acknowledged that he had endorsed the literacy test only after learning that it would reduce "new: immigrants by 30 percent while not cutting the flow of "old" immigrants at all. When the bill passed on February 5, 1917, the patrician members of the Immigration Restriction League, which had been founded by three Harvard-educated Boston Brahmins in 1894, were so pleased that they held a quiet celebration dinner in Boston's exclusive Union Club. 

SOCIAL UPHEAVAL AND THE RISE OF ANTI-SEMITISM

   Of all the immigrant groups streaming into the United States, none aroused greater antipathy than the Jews of eastern Europe. As early as 1913 William Barclay Parsons, a Columbia University trustee who was one of the early leaders of the movement to limit the number of Jews in elite private colleges, wrote of them :"In character they are terribly persistent. They realize that there has been for 2000 years or more a prejudice against  them, and they are always seeking after special privileges for themselves and their people. . . They form the worst type of our emigrants, they supply the leaders to anarchistic, socialist, and other movements of unrest. In the recent election the socialistic vote was confined largely to the East Side and to Brownsville, where they live." A year later, Parson's fears were seemingly confirmed when the Jews of New York City's Lower East Side elected Meyer London, the Socialist Party candidate, to Congress. 
   Among the most conspicuous public opponents of America's entry into the war was Victor Berger, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish congressman from Milwaukee, then one of the nation's socialist strongholds. Unlike Meyer London, who had reluctantly gone along with American intervention, Berger militantly opposed the war and was sentenced to twenty years in prison under the Sedition Act. Reelected to Congress while headed to jail, he was barred from his seat by his Congressional colleagues. Percy E. Quin of Mississippi [Democrat] called Berger "a more dangerous character. . . within the United States" than any other person and condemned the "colony of Germans . . . in Milwaukee" for reelecting "that enemy of the Government to the Congress."