Louis Marshall and the Rise of Jewish Ethnicity in America by Silver Matthew;Silver M M;

Author:Silver, Matthew;Silver, M M;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2021-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

The 1917 New York City Mayoral Race

Just days after these arrangements were made for the retention of the Forward’s mail privileges, Marshall faced a problem he considered still more threatening to Jewish interests in America. As in his battle with Magnes’s pacifism, this was another publicly explosive ideological contest with an idealistic Jewish leader layered over obvious affinities in the background and daily pursuits of Marshall and his antagonist, this time the Jewish Socialist Morris Hillquit.

Before his famous candidacy in New York City’s mayoral race in 1917, Hillquit had been involved in an effort identical to Marshall’s advocacy for Abraham Cahan and the Forward. He applied his lawyerly skills and credentials in efforts to stave off the closure of papers like the American Socialist, the Call, and the Milwaukee Leader by Postmaster General Burleson under the Espionage Act. A socialist with a prominent international reputation, Hillquit was a partly Americanized character (the ambiguity of his situation is reflected by his technical situation; it was widely believed that he ended up in the New York mayoral race because the most natural political option available to him, nomination as the Socialist Party of America’s candidate for president of the United States, was precluded because of his foreign birth in Riga). Like Marshall, he was genuinely distressed by the repressively un-American character of the post office’s closure policies, and so he represented the threatened socialist media organs as a constitutional matter of civil liberties.281 Not entirely unlike Marshall’s, Hillquit’s personal background combined economic success and hardship. His modern-oriented father had owned a prospering factory but lost it in 1884, and brought his family two years later to New York City, where the seventeen-year-old Morris met years of poverty on the East Side. Though he proposed socialist remedies to Downtown suffering, Hillquit’s no-nonsense outlook toward East Side life bore resemblance to Marshall’s—from their differing standpoints, both men associated success with the ascent out of the Jewish ghetto. Hillquit literally left fellow Jewish socialists gasping for air when he shunned all Yiddishkeit in his unromantic and unsparing critiques of Downtown life:

In no other part of the United States are the social conditions of the inhabitants so pitiable. . . . Our [East Side] district covers a territory of barely one square mile, and it contains a population of over 200,000. It is a cold, cheerless existence that these people lead. The [East Side] is the Home of the Tenements, Pushcarts, Paupers and Consumption.282

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