CIVIL LIBERTIES: Jew-Baiting

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Last week freedom-loving U.S. citizens —heirs of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and a great host of heroes—had genuinely good reason to fear that Freedom might perish from their land. For last week Charles Augustus Lindbergh and Gerald Prentice Nye cast aside all but the last veil of pretense and, in the pattern established by Adolf Hitler years ago, sought to make the Jews a public national issue in the U.S.

Hitler showed how attacks on the Jews can be used as a prime device for promoting discord, inciting bitterness, destroying tolerance and ultimately overthrowing the basic principles of civil liberties and personal freedom. Last week, continuing to divide the nation, Hero Lindbergh attacked the Jews as being one of the "three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war.'' The other two groups: the British and the Roosevelt Administration.

It is no news that Jews heartily dislike Hitler and would gladly see him frazzled. They would be less than human if they did not. Hero Lindbergh, piously declaring that "no person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany," offered U.S. Jews advice: they should suppress their natural opinion. He added: "The Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it [war] ... for they will be among the first to feel its consequences." The plain implication was that the Jews will be blamed for war if it comes and will be persecuted because of it when opportunity arises. If this was not a threat it was the next thing to it.

Next to blaming the Jews for a war (especially if lost), the most effective anti-Jew talk is to accuse Jews of having more than their share of wealth and influence. Hero Lindbergh did not accuse the Jews of financial and industrial dominance. That charge, as he may have learned from his late father-in-law, Morgan Partner Dwight Morrow, is too easily disproved. But Lindbergh did accuse the Jews of undue success in other fields: "Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government."*

Men of all faiths rose in protest against Lindbergh's attack. White House Secretary Stephen T. Early made his own semiofficial answer: "You have seen the outpourings of Berlin in the last few days. You saw Lindbergh's statement last night. I think there is a striking similarity. . . ."

Republican Isolationist Thomas E. Dewey called Lindbergh's speech "an inexcusable abuse of the right of freedom of speech." New York's Alfred E. Smith said it "strikes at the very basis of our national unity." Hearst's isolationist New York Journal-American gave much of its front page and two inside pages to statements by Catholic and Protestant leaders unanimously denouncing or deploring Lindbergh's views. "Un-American" was the word universally used. Said the New York Herald Tribune: "On Thursday night at Des Moines Mr. Charles A. Lindbergh departed from the American way. . . . Those isolationists who have whistled up Old World racial hatreds here . . . have sinned against the American spirit. Let that spirit rebuke them."