Theodore Roosevelt was the twenty-sixth president of the United States and was perhaps more multi-faceted than any other man to have held the office. Among his less-known attributes, unusual for his day, was philo-Semitism. His philo-Semitism was initially based less on idealism than on necessity, for Roosevelt was foremost a politician, one whose base was New York, a city, then as now, with a large Jewish population.
The nature of Roosevelt’s relationship with the Jews, and in particular with his Jewish constituents, is set out in lucid detail in Andrew Porwancher’s American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews. The title comes from the Maccabees, the Jewish warriors who reconquered the Temple in Jerusalem during the Seleucid Empire. Before the advent of the state of Israel, which had its own impressive army, the Maccabees supplied the main military tradition among the Jews. Porwancher places Roosevelt within that tradition.
Roosevelt began his political days in New York City as police commissioner, an office for which he needed, and received, Jewish support. He would call on the Jewish vote again when he ran for and won the state’s governorship in 1898. Earlier that same year, he had led a volunteer cavalry regiment during the Spanish–American War, which widened his fame, gave him the sobriquet Rough Rider, and doubtless had much to do with William McKinley’s choosing him as vice president for the Republican ticket in the presidential election of 1900. When McKinley was assassinated in 1901 at the beginning of his second term, Roosevelt became at forty-two the youngest president in the history of the United States. Owing to his efforts to help end the Russo-Japanese War, he would also in 1906 be the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
In each one of the offices Roosevelt held, Jews played a role. When he was police commissioner, a notably anti-Semitic character named Hermann Ahlwardt visited New York and was to give a speech on the Lower East Side. Roosevelt determined, in Porwancher’s words, that “he would provide Ahlwardt a police detail comprised entirely of Jewish officers.” These officers had not only to be Jewish but also to look the part. As Roosevelt told a subordinate, “Don’t bother yourself to hunt up their religious antecedents; take those who have the most pronounced Hebrew physiognomy—the stronger their ancestral marking, the better.” As Roosevelt himself later recalled, “Ahlwardt delivered his violent harangues against the men of Hebrew faith, owing his safety to the fact that he was scrupulously protected by men of the very race which he was denouncing.” He was not without a sense of humor, irony division, Teddy Roosevelt.
Throughout his time in public life, Roosevelt chose and duly promoted Jewish associates. When president, he appointed Oscar Straus as his secretary of commerce and labor, the first American Jew to attain cabinet rank. He told Straus, “I don’t appoint you because you are a Jew, but I am mighty glad that you are one.” Yet Roosevelt could also on occasion lapse into anti-Semitic tropes, referring to “Jew moneylenders” and, in connection with his appointment of Straus, write, “I want the Jewish young man who is born in this country to feel that Straus stands for his ideal of the successful man rather than some crooked Jewish money-maker.”
Somehow this brings to mind the old Jewish joke, sometimes attributed to the Jewish Isaiah Berlin, that “an anti-Semite is someone who hates the Jews more than is absolutely necessary.” The subtlest anti-Semites, as the better Jewish jokes demonstrate, have always been Jews themselves. Think only of jokes about Jewish women: “What does a Jewish woman say when making love? ‘Harry, isn’t it time we had the ceiling painted?’” Or “A thief stole my wife’s purse with all her credit cards inside, but I’m not going after him. He’s spending less than she does.” Or “What does a Jewish wife make for dinner? Reservations.” These jokes and others of their ilk can only, of course, be told by Jews.
Every ethnic group has its sub-groups, rivaling groups, minority groups within minority groups. The émigré Jews of Roosevelt’s time were no different. Porwancher delivers an excellent description of the main division between the fairly recently arrived American Jews of the Gilded Age, whom he terms “uptown” and “downtown” Jews:
Uptown Jews luxuriated in expensive townhouses on fashionable streets; downtown Jews crowded into East Side tenements. Uptown Jews originated from Central Europe, often Germany; downtown Jews came from Eastern Europe, typically Russia. Uptown Jews practiced Reform Judaism; downtown Jews gravitated toward Orthodoxy. Uptown Jews had migrated to America in the middle decades of the nineteenth century; downtown Jews were fresh arrivals. Uptown Jews were Americanized; downtown Jews were still learning the ways of their adopted homeland. Uptown Jews met with success in banking and law; downtown Jews subsisted in sweatshops and hawked goods from pushcarts. Of course, exceptions abounded to the neat divisions enumerated above.
What Porwancher describes as the differences between German and Eastern European Jews in New York extended across America. At its center the conflict entailed the assimilationist desires of the former, which were put at risk by what they took as the coarseness of the latter. Much bad blood ensued, the German Jews looking down upon Eastern Jews as peasants, the Eastern Jews upon German Jews as snobs and betrayers of their common religion. Well into my own time, the distinction between Eastern European and German Jews prevailed, illustrated more emphatically in Chicago than in New York by certain city and country clubs that were exclusively German Jewish. I once mentioned one such German Jewish country club in a short story of mine, which brought a phone call from Allen Katz, the television director, producer, and comic writer. “Lake Shore Country Club?” he remarked. “Are you kidding me? The only Jewish event ever celebrated there was Kristallnacht.”
The Jews befriended by Roosevelt were chiefly German Jews. I have already mentioned Straus. Others were Jacob Schiff, Lucius Littauer, and Simon Wolf, to whom Porwancher refers collectively as “Roosevelt’s Jewish kitchen cabinet.” These men called upon him when, early in the century, Russian pogroms against the Jews began, first in Kishinev in 1903, then elsewhere in Russia, then in Białystok in 1906, then in Siedlce in Poland that same year.
Pogrom translates from Russian to “devastation.” And Porwancher provides the details of this devastation. At Kishinev, for example, on Easter Sunday, forty-nine Jews were killed, their bodies left to rot in the streets, and more than one hundred children orphaned. Jewish women were gang-raped. Jewish businesses were destroyed. Property damage was estimated at about forty million dollars in today’s money. No one was apprehended, no one charged with a crime.
Russian leaders, from czars to communist commissars to Vladimir Putin, have always treated their people as a conquered nation. Under the czars, the Jews were treated even worse. As for the Jews in Kishinev, some, according to Porwancher, “enjoyed prosperity, but a majority were impoverished laborers and craftsmen. As with other places in the Pale [of Settlement] Kishinev’s Jews subsisted under special strictures. They were forbidden from purchasing land or serving in high government posts. And although Jews comprised nearly 40 percent of the population, state schools implemented quotas that kept Jewish enrollment at no more than 5 percent.”
The question facing Roosevelt, who had been called “the Moses of the Jews,” was what, if anything, could be done about these horrific pogroms. His Jewish constituents, and especially members of his Jewish kitchen cabinet, beseeched him to take action. Earlier he had aided the emigration of the ill-treated Romanian Jews to the United States. (Another Jewish joke: “Who is worse? The Romanians or the Hungarians?” Answer: “Each will sell you his grandmothers, but the Romanian won’t deliver.”) Yet problems immediately arose about the Russian pogroms and about the Russians’ refusal to allow American Jews to visit relatives in Russia on American passports.
The question arose: Could one country, the United States, interfere in what was essentially the domestic policy of another, Russia? Besides, was the United States itself in a condition of such moral purity to sit in judgement of Russia? What about lynching in the United States, a vile practice still all too common in the early years of the past century? Roosevelt himself denounced lynching, and, as Porwancher writes, he “would not let the scourge of racialized terror within America’s borders muzzle his protest against evil perpetrated beyond them.”
Roosevelt was basically sound on what became known as the Jewish Question, which had to do with emancipation and, in Porwancher’s words, “the removal of civil disabilities imposed on . . . Jewish subjects” in nations around the world. Yet he could also on occasion be hesitant, even passive, in his support of the Jews. As Porwancher notes, Roosevelt “had a talent for effortlessly inhabiting a contradiction.” Porwancher sets out these hesitations and conflicts, concluding that Roosevelt “felt torn throughout his career between his instinct to restrict immigration for the benefit of those already in the United States and his desire for America to serve as a refuge for the world’s oppressed.”
An advocate of the melting pot, Roosevelt felt that it was, in his own words, “necessary to Americanize the immigrants of foreign birth who settle among us” and criticized those who do not “heartily and in good faith throw in their lot with us, but cling to the speech, the customs, the ways of life, and the habits of thought of the Old World.” Most Jewish immigrants felt otherwise, fearful of losing their distinctiveness in mass American culture. But then Roosevelt himself, in response to a comedian who spelled his name “Tiddy Rosenfelt,” replied, “I wish I had a little Jew in me.”
American Maccabee is most impressive in avoiding an ideological taint. If Porwancher brought the least political bias to the writing of his book, I could not find it. He set out to discover Theodore Roosevelt’s relation to the Jews, and to do so in the most even-handed, which is to say truthful, way possible. The final paragraph of his last chapter, before his few pages of epilogue, nicely summarizes his findings:
His complicated history with Jewry reflected the countervailing forces acting on him at any given time. Roosevelt often felt himself caught between humanitarian crisis and diplomatic protocol, between philosemites and antisemites, between pluralism and assimilation. These tensions bespoke the complexities of the moment—and of the man. After all, Roosevelt was famously rife with incongruities. Here was the East Coast aristocrat who became a Dakota cowboy; the bookish intellectual who threw punches in the boxing ring; the combat-thirsty colonel who won a Nobel Peace Prize. There was perhaps no more fitting representative of a nation riddled with its own irresolvable contradictions.
Roosevelt predicted that one day there would be a Jewish president of the United States. This hasn’t, you will have noticed, happened yet. When, if ever, it does, our twenty-sixth president, were he still around, would warmly welcome him into the office.
