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There are more Bolsheviks in the United States than there are in Soviet Russia. Their aim is the same and their racial character is the same. If they are not able to do here what they have done there, it is because of the greater dissemination of information, the higher degree of intelligence and the wider diffusion of the agencies of governmental authority, than obtains in unhappy Russia.
The power house of Bolshevik influence and propaganda in the United States is in the Jewish trade unions which, almost without exception, adhere to a Bolshevik program for their respective industries and for the country as a whole.
This fact is proving most embarrassing to the Jewish leaders at the present moment. It is bad enough that Russian Bolshevism should be so predominantly Jewish, but to confront the same situation in the United States, is a double burden of which Jewish leaders do not know how to dispose.
Yet it is difficult to see how the International Jew can be absolved either from the necessity of being confronted with it, or from the necessity of bearing sole responsibility for it. Russian Bolshevism came out of the East Side of New York where it was fostered by the encouragement—the religious, moral and financial encouragement—of Jewish leaders. Leon Trotsky (Braunstein) was an East Sider. Whether he was a member of the New York Kehillah is not known. But the forces which fostered what he stood for centered in the Kehillah, and both the Kehillah and its associated American Jewish Committee were interested in the work he set out to do, namely, the overthrow of an established government, one of the allies of the United States in the recent war. Russian Bolshevism was helped to its objective by Jewish gold from the United States. And now that it is found to be numerically much stronger in the United States than it is in Russia, the fact causes no little embarrassment.
Denial is useless, for the thing is too blatant and has advertised itself too long. What amazes the student of the Jewish Question in the United States is the stupidity which permitted Jewish Bolshevism to flaunt itself so openly during the past few years. The only explanation that seems at all adequate is that the Jews never dreamed that the American people would become sufficiently awake to challenge them. The present widespread exposure of Jewish tactics in the United States has doubtless come as a surprise to the Jewish leaders, and this cannot be accounted for otherwise than that they thought they had gained too strong a grip on the American mind to make a challenge possible.
It remains to be seen whether the Jewish leaders shall be able to control the Frankenstein that their false policies have created.
Following exactly the program which the Jewish leaders approved for Russia, the organized Jews of New York are exhibiting a zeal and a directness which Jewish leaders would like to curb for the present, if we are to judge from some of the complaints that the Bolshevik Jews are making.
Benjamin Schlessinger, president of the International Garment Workers’ Union, whose membership numbers 150,000, and which is a part of the New York Kehillah, is one of the complainants. His union, of course, is not the regular American labor union formed for the betterment of working conditions and wages; it is a revolutionary union for the complete change of the social system, involving also a change of government. In an interview printed in the Jewish Forward of April 8, Schlessinger complains against the manner in which Jewish judges have recently come to interfere with Jewish strikes:
“‘And Jewish judges come to their assistance. They issue injunctions; and it is said that they do it to save the Jewish name, so that it shall not be said that “all Jews are Bolshevists.” So the injunctions become a Jewish affair. . . .
“‘We have a gigantic wide-branched Kehillah in New York. In all corners, Jews! All over, what you see and what you hear—Jews. And, of course, also dress; politicians and greater ones.’
“But only we may say this. And I understand Schlessinger . . . . Schlessinger explains it this way: Several reasons are given why judges like (here a Jewish judge is named) twist the law . . . . The real purpose is to break our strike . . . . But, then, after all, there is a reason, a Jewish reason. He wants to demonstrate to the American community, he claims, that not all Jews are Bolshevists.”
This excerpt shows several things: that only “we” may say certain things; that Jewish authority is trying to cover the blemish of Bolshevism; and that this is done in order to demonstrate to “the American community” a certain desirable thing. The Jewish community, it is presumed, is not so easily impressed. The Kehillah is apparently trying to call in its kites but they have apparently flown too high in the rarefied atmosphere of revolutionism.
Another big union which makes part of the New York Kehillah is the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, whose membership is about 200,000. It is officered by Russian Jews whose pronounced Bolshevik utterances have been widely reported in the Jewish press of New York, until plain and unprivileged Americans have wondered how far treason to the United States Government could go on our own soil.
Sidney Hillman, the president, is one of the most radical Socialists in the United States—so radical that he would probably spurn the name of Socialist as ordinarily used. He is a Sovietist. He is so far “advanced” that to him the regular type of American labor union is “a scab union.” The purpose of the American labor union is stated to be the improvement of the workers’ condition in industry and the establishment of their industrial rights, whereas the object of Hillman’s union is the overthrow of industry and its communization in the hands of the radical element. That is to say, Russia over again. Hillman was born in Russia. He personally knows most of the Bolshevik Jews now ruining that great land.
The secretary of the Amalgamated is Joseph Schlossberg, also born in Russia. Schlossberg has a very free gift of words. One of his promises to his Jewish followers, publicly made at Madison Square Garden, is this:
“The clothing industry is ours. We are not going to permit the employer to determine where his factory shall be, or how many hours we shall work.”
Abraham Shiplacoff, a Socialist member of the New York board of aldermen, and next to Sidney Hillman in command of the Amalgamated, is also a free speaker, as the following excerpt will show:
“We are going to move heaven and earth to educate our people that they and they alone are the owners of industry. The workers of Russia have found it out, God bless them!
“If I knew old Sammy Gompers knew as much as that, I would tell you to go and do what the workers did in Turine. Ten thousand of them marched to the factory with music and a flag, and they opened the doors and went to work and said, ‘To hell with the owners of the factory.’
“Everybody knows it is war. We are going to control the industry.”
Always the omission, of course, that the factories so spectacularly captured, cease to run soon after. The Hillmans and the Schlossbergs and the Shiplacoffs are heroic figures on the platform, but in manufacturing the common commodities of life and making both ends meet so that the consumer may be served and the producer rewarded, they have been the most tragic failures. “The workers of Russia have found it out, God help them!”
As a matter of fact, besides the I. W. W., the Amalgamated is the only organization which not only preaches Bolshevism but actually practices it—all in the United States, and all apparently in perfect consistency with its membership in the Kehillah and under the officership of the high gentlemen of the American Jewish Committee. The Amalgamated actually does run the industry which has mulcted such a heavy tax from the American public since 1914.
They tell the factory manager where the factory is to be located.
They have a minimum wage of $12 a day, independent of skill or production.
They enforce that rule, that an employe who has worked for two weeks has thereafter a job for life.
No improved machinery can be introduced without the union’s permission.
The employer cannot hire even a cartage firm that the union has not first approved.
The employer cannot withdraw from business unless he goes into bankruptcy, else the whole force of the union and its allies will be marshaled against him and his. He must inform the union of all his plans in advance.
This, of course, is part of the endowment of Trotsky to the East Side. He did great missionary work there while waiting to go across and take the Czar’s place. Even to this day in the Jew-controlled theaters that crowd Broadway, the picture of Trotsky brings wild delirious cheering, while the portrait of the President of the United States is hissed. A favorite state scene is the Star of David high over all flags. The recent debate between Senators King and France, said to have been organized with the assistance of two rabbis, developed into such an outrageously anti-American pro-Soviet demonstration, that prudence intervened to prevent a vote. Recently when pro-Jewish Germans endeavored to stir up trouble by holding a great mass meeting to protest the alleged “Black horror on the Rhine,” the audience was packed with Jews. Not that they love Germany more, but they love any regular government less. While a few days later, at a great American meeting, the Jews of New York, according to the testimony of incredulous observers, were most conspicuous by their absence.
Now, the Jewish leaders must admit that the Jewish Question does not consist in American citizens uncovering these facts and helping other American citizens to become aware of them; the Jewish Question inheres in the facts themselves and in Jewish responsibility for the facts. If it is “anti-Semitism” to say that Bolshevism in the United States is Jewish, so be it; but to unprejudiced minds it will look very like Americanism.
There is not a single, solitary American-born citizen serving as officer or director of those great unions which form part of the New York Kehillah. These men have not the faintest idea of what America stands for. They are not here to become Americanized, but to change America to their own model. In this they have the articulated support of most of the Jewish rabbis who have been very keen to explain that Americanization does not at all mean what the American means by it.
America will have become what these people want it to be when America is sovietized with Jewish radicals in control, and that is the objective toward which they are working now.
The other officers of the Amalgamated are Jacob Petowsky, secretary, who is a Russian Jew, and J. B. Salutsky, who is also a Russian Jew and “National Director of the Educational Department,” which means that he is the propagandist of the union in the United States.
Regarding the assertion that the great radical unions are not officered by native-born citizens (the statement has been made that Russian Jews do not usually complete their citizenship but stop short at the “declaration of intention”), there is some interesting material in a study of 2,000 presidents of Jewish organizations in New York City.
Of this number, 1,054 were born in Russia, 536 in Austro-Hungary, 90 in Rumania, 64 in Germany and four in Palestine. These countries produced 89.1 per cent of Jewish leaders in New York.
Of this number, 531 entered the country between the ages of 14 and 21, and 977 entered over the age of 21.
Of this number, 1,270 are still under 50 years of age.
These figures include all organizations from synagogues to trade unions.
How far they have been Americanized, or wish to be, can only be judged by the policies and activities of the organizations which they direct.
The big Jewish labor organizations are the direct offspring of the Jewish Socialist Bund of Russia. It is due to the propaganda of the Bund in the United States that the united Hebrew trades have gone over to the ranks of radicalism. Bundists swarmed to the United States after the abortive revolution of 1905 at which time they failed to put Bolshevism over in Russia, and these Bundists gave their time to the Bolshevizing of the Hebrew Trade Unions in this country. An Agitation Bureau was formed which propagated radical Socialism through the medium of the Yiddish language, which is one of the official languages of the New York Kehillah, made so by the demands of the Kehillah’s overwhelming radical constituency.
The Bundists incorporated in 1905 in New York an organization known as “The Workmen’s Circle” and “swelled the ranks of the Jewish trade unions,” to quote the Kehillah’s Register. After a brief attempt to propagate Socialism without reference to the Jewish Question, it was given up, and in 1913 a resolution was adopted declaring that the whole purpose of the work was Jewish. This is attributed, in the Kehillah record, to the spread of “the idea of Jewish nationalism.”
Now, care would have to be exercised to avoid confusion between the Hebrew labor unions, radical as they are, and the avowed communistic bodies, if it were not the fact that the unions and the Communists are so inextricably interlocked as to make distinctions unnecessary.
That this is not a judgement dictated by mere adverse attitude may be seen from the following facts:
The Workmen’s Circle has 800 branches throughout the United States and is officered by Jews throughout. The membership is 98 per cent foreign-born and is Jewish in like portion.
Among the higher officers of this organization are Joseph Schlessinger, Sydney Hillman, Benjamin Schlossberg, Sam Feinstein and J. B. Salutsky. The names will probably have become familiar to the reader by this time. They form part of the interlocking directorate so commonly found among Jewish organizations, a system which finally heads up in the executive committee of the Kehillah which also composes the leaders of the American Jewish Committee, of which the great public lights of Jewry are members.
Schlessinger is president of the Union of Ladies’ Garment Workers, and made a trip to Russia in behalf of communism in the United States, to finance which the members of the Communist party were assessed $1.50 each.
Hillman is president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
Schlossberg is secretary of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
Feinstein is secretary of the United Hebrew Trades.
Salutsky is food commissar to the striking Amalgamated, and is national director of Bolshevik propaganda carried on by his crowd.
They are, of course, all Jews.
The line-up is this: Hebrew trade union leaders are also members of the Workmen’s Circle and of the Communist party, and the majority of their trade union followers go with them into the other associations. The reverse process is this: Communism and radical Bolshevism then find their way to the consciousness of the American public by the Bolshevik demands of the so-called trade unions of Jewry.
An extreme defense of all this activity might be that these Jewish leaders and workers are only enamored of the idea of Bolshevism, are playing with it academically, and are not to be considered as actively the proponents of a form of government contrary to the Constitution of the United States and to be established by “direct action.”
This defense, however, appears insufficient when confronted by another set of facts in which these same union leaders and Communists are shown to be in communication with the Soviet government in the United States—and the Soviet government in the United States is not a mere idea, it is a program. Moscow has repeatedly stated that the purpose of the Lenin-Trotsky government has been World Revolution. And one reason for the colossal economic failure of the Soviet governmental experiment has been the Jewish Soviet leaders’ neglect of their proper work to follow this fetish of World Revolution. If one-tenth the effort had been made to govern and feed Russia that has been made to sow Bolshevik ideas in other countries, Russia might today have been in a less unhappy plight. Propaganda is the sole art which the Bolsheviks have mastered.
This Soviet government in the United States, therefore, must be regarded as an advance post of World Revolution. It is so regarded by those who know anything about it. It is so regarded by those who ordered the deportation of L. C. A. K. Martens, the “Soviet Ambassador.” Martens was announced to be here for the purpose of opening up trade relations with the United States. He had a vast fund of gold—indeed, it was to explain his gold hoard that he used the story about trade relations. The Government of the United States judged, however, that his purpose here was World Revolution—and the government was right.
Martens has departed but the Soviet Embassy remains. As stated in a former article, Martens’ successor is Charles Recht, who is a Russian Jew about 36 years of age. In the same building with Recht is Isaac A. Hourwich, another Russian Jew and attorney, whose office is supposed to be the headquarters whence proceeds much of the Russian Bolshevik propaganda.
Now, the people who go to the offices of Recht and Hourwich are the same people whose names we have been tracing all through this interlocker, with some notable additions. Into the sanctum of ambassadorial Bolshevism in the United States, come, of course, Recht the representative and Hourwich the attorney for Lenin and Trotsky in this country.
Another caller is Judah L. Magnes, head of the New York Kehillah. He is a rabbi without a synagogue, an extreme extremist, a master of the language of agitation, and pro-Bolshevist in his influence and associations. He is credited with being the mediator between rich Jews and radicals when the latter are in need of funds. This is the Judah L. Magnes, head of the Kehillah, who tried to tell New York newspaper reporters what a weak and innocent foundling the New York Kehillah is; the same Judah L. Magnes whom the American Hebrew tried to picture as a diaphanous idealist broken-hearted because the ghetto doesn’t fall in with his educational schemes. The Kehillah is not an educational institution; it is not a welfare institution in the charitable sense; it is a nerve-center of Jewish power; in Rabbi Magnes’ own words, “a clearing house”; and if it amounted to nothing politically and nationally, the men who are now prominent in it would soon desert it. Kehillah is just what the word signifies—the whole Jewish Community.
Then, of course, there are Benjamin Schlessinger again, president of the Ladies’ Garment Workers, and Sydney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and Joseph Schlossberg, another Amalgamated official whose Bolshevik utterances were quoted earlier in this article, and others of the Hebrew trades crowd whose radical relationships have been shown.
In addition, there are certain immigration inspectors from Ellis Island—all Jews, of course; occasionally a courier from Russia who has slipped into the country for a secret purpose; occasionally also a courier to Russia bearing messages from Recht and Hourwich.
Then I.W.W. leaders—Jews. Among them Baletin, secretary of the I.W.W. Metal Machinery Workers’ Branch, and Peltner, joint secretary of the I.W.W. branches in New York.
In close touch with these Jewish radicals are a number of revolutionists of other countries, representing various violent programs against the established order.
It is through the office of Charles Recht that passports, issued by the State Department of the government of the United States, are being viséed. This statement refers to a regular practice known to have been followed until a few days preceding this writing, and there is no reason to believe it has since been altered. Ambassador Recht, or Acting Ambassador Recht, or whatever he may be called, is in close touch with Soviet authorities and has full notice of all their intentions regarding American affairs.
A frequent subject of conferences in Recht’s office is the Soviet propaganda in America. Men like Hillman and Schlossberg and Schlessinger are merely liaison officers between the Soviets and the Hebrew trades unions. The orders received from Moscow are thus transmitted to the Jews in America, and are obeyed along perfectly defined lines.
Of course, Rabbi Magnes, head of the New York Kehillah, could hardly be expected to remain in ignorance of what the whole Kehillah knows. And that Magnes is temperamentally a radical, any two-minute perusal of his speeches will show. He is head of what Schlessinger calls the “gigantic, wide-branched Kehillah,” the foremost political racial organization in this country, a close community of a single racial type which has its own code and its own customs and its own method of gaining its ends.
This is not the whole story by any means. Schlessinger and Schlossberg and Hillman and the rest are leaders, but they are not the higher-ups. The connections run straight up to the lofty heights of those who dwell in palaces and sway the finances of the nation, and to those who play large parts in the government of the United States. The Jews who finance radical publications—good conservative Jews who form the standing illustration in the argumentative question, “What possible gain can they hope from Bolshevism?” Jews who pull official wires to gain immunity and privilege for known traitors and revolutionists. Jews who replenish the coffers of dangerous elements. It is a long story, and all of it does not require telling, for the point to be gained is not that everyone should be told, but that the involved persons should be aware that it is known, proved, safely put away, in hope that the occasion to use it may never come. However, it is due the public to tell at least a part of it.
The Jewish leaders never played so stupid a card as when they endeavored to minimize the Kehillah and the place it fills. Nor did their Gentile echoes ever fall for so miserable an imposition.
[THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT, issue of 23 April 1921]