World of Our Fathers by Irving Howe

Author:Irving Howe [Howe, Irving]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2017-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Getting into American Politics

Of all the sectors of American life that were open to them, old-party politics was the one that immigrant Jews were the slowest to enter. Work was a necessity for survival, education seemed an entry to the future, but politics—it would take several decades before east European Jews could feel at home with the big-city machines, their strange skills, codes, corruptions, and vulgarities.

The east European Jews brought with them a skimpy political experience. To the Orthodox the idea of a secular politics was inherently suspect, to the radicals an untried if tempting possibility. In the political life of czarist Russia Jews had been allowed at most a token representation, more humiliating than enabling. Many were still in the grip of the traditional Jewish persuasion that it was best to keep as far away from politics as possible, since any involvement with the affairs of the gentiles would probably be dangerous and certainly degrading. Within east European Jewish life, secular politics was a novel experience; mostly, it was an “internal” politics, necessarily abstract and visionary, without much grounding in the realities of power or administration. Sharing this limited background in public life, both the Orthodox and the radical immigrants tended to look upon the politics of American cities as still another antic of the gentiles, an antic that a needy Jewish lawyer might have to join in, but which was not thereby any the more estimable. And last but hardly least among the reasons for the slowness with which the east European Jews entered American political life was the fact that by the 1880’s urban politics had come increasingly under the sway of the Irish. Themselves only several decades in this country, the Irish had shown a rare genius for improvising the styles and perquisites of the big-city machine, and they were hardly inclined to allow any latecomers, least of all Jews from Poland and Russia, to threaten their control.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, some immigrant Jews, mostly German, became prominent in the Republican party. Arriving in mid-century as sympathizers with the democratic spirit of ’48, the German Jews usually sided with the northern cause; it seemed only natural that they should rally to the banner of antislavery and the party of “Father Abraham.” In the decades after the Civil War their allegiance remained largely with the Republicans, and this no doubt played a certain role in prompting Republican administrations to make diplomatic representations in behalf of persecuted Jews in Europe. (When the Republican leader William Howard Taft spoke out against anti-Semitic excesses in Russia, the Orthodox Yiddish paper, the Tageblatt, wrote that “his goodness lies all over his face.”) With time, as the Republicans showed themselves to be the party of respectable conservatism, the German Jews, increasingly affluent and at ease in America, tended to drift in the same direction. They gained places of honor in the party’s ranks, some, like Edward Einstein and Israel Fisher, being sent to Congress by Republican majorities in New York.

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