History of the Jews (82 page)

Not that the Jewish community in inter-war America should be seen as embattled. Numbering over four and a half million by 1925 it was in the rapid process of becoming the largest, richest and most influential Jewish community in the world. Judaism was America’s third religion. The Jews were not merely accepted, they were becoming part of the American core and already making decisive contributions to shaping the American matrix. They never had the financial leverage which, from time to time, they secured in some European countries, because by the 1920s the American economy was so enormous that no one group, however large, could become dominant in it. But in banking, stockbroking, real estate, retail, distribution and entertainment, the Jews occupied positions of strength. More important, perhaps, was the growing Jewish success in the professions, made possible by the enthusiasm with which Jewish families seized on the opportunities open to them in America to secure a higher education for their children. Some colleges, especially in the Ivy League, ran Jewish quota limitations. But in practice there were no numerical restraints on the expansion of Jewish higher education. By the early 1930s, nearly 50 per cent of all college students in New York City were Jewish, and their national total, 105,000, was over 9 per cent of the entire college enrolment.

Hence for the first time since antiquity, Jews were able to deploy, for the benefit of general society, the creative lawmaking talents they had nurtured for so long through the rabbinical tradition. In 1916, after a four-month confirmation battle, Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) became the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court. He was another prodigy, the youngest child of a family of Jewish liberals from Prague. At Harvard Law School he achieved the highest grades so far recorded there, and by the age of forty his practice had brought him a fortune of over $2 million. It was a characteristic of American Jewry that its
establishment figures always felt secure enough to embrace Zionism, as soon as they saw it was viable, and Brandeis became the leading US Zionist. But more important was his effort to change the direction of American jurisprudence. Even before he joined the Court, he wrote ‘the Brandeis brief’ in
Muller
v.
Oregon
(1908), in which he defended a state law limiting the working hours of women. In this he relied not primarily on legal precedents but on general moral and social arguments as to the law’s desirability, including over a thousand pages of statistics. This reflected both the creative interpretative philosophy of the liberal cathedocrats, and the industrious energy with which they backed it.

As a Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis was able to push the doctrine of ‘sociological jurisprudence’ to the centre of America’s federal philosophy of law, and thus to turn the Court, under the Constitution, into a creative lawmaking body. As a liberal Jew with a classical education, who saw the American public spirit as a blend of Athens and Jerusalem—a modern Philo, indeed!—he thought that the Court should uphold plurality not just of religions but of economic systems, and still more of opinion. He held it to be true, he ruled in
Whitney
v.
California
(1927), ‘that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope or imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil councils is good ones.’
⁷⁵

In 1939 he was joined on the Court by an important follower, Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965), who had immigrated to the Lower East Side at twelve, progressed upwards through the City of New York College to Harvard, and spent most of his professional life debating, in a modern secular context, one of the central problems of Judaic law—how to balance the demands of individual freedom against communal necessities. It was a comforting reflection of the maturity of American Jewry, as a part of the Commonwealth, that Frankfurter sided with the state against a dissenting minority (Jehovah’s Witnesses) in the question of saluting the flag: ‘One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedom guaranteed by our Constitution…. But as Judges we are neither Jew nor gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic…. As a member of this Court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them.’
⁷⁶

Jews in America, however, were engaged not merely in fundamentally modifying existing institutions, like jurisprudence, but in intro
ducing and transporting new ones. In Paris and Vienna Jewish musicians, ranging from Halévy through Offenbach to the Strausses, had created new ranges of musical spectacles for the stage, and the theatres, opera-houses and orchestras which made them possible. The same combination of talents soon established itself in New York. Oscar Hammerstein
I
(1847-1919) arrived there in 1863, working first (like countless other Jews) in a cigar factory. Twenty years later his son Oscar Hammerstein
II
(1895-1960) went on to play a major part, as librettist, in making the American ‘musical play’ a new form of integrated drama. From
Rose Marie
(1924) and the
Desert Song
(1926), he joined Jerome Kern (1885-1945), another New Yorker, to create the quintessential American musical,
Show Boat
(1927), and then from the early forties he joined with Richard Rodgers (1902-79) to raise the genre, perhaps the most characteristic of all American art-forms, to a new peak, with
Oklahoma
(1943),
Carousel
(1945),
South Pacific
(1949),
The King and I
(1951) and
The Sound of Music
(1959). These American musical writers came to composition by diverse routes. Rodgers studied at Columbia and the Institute of Musical Art. Irving Berlin (b. 1888), the son of a Russian cantor, came to New York in 1893 and got a job as a singing waiter, had no musical training and never learned to read music. George Gershwin (1898-1937) started as a hack pianist in a musical publishing firm. What they all had in common was ferocious industry and completely new ideas. Kern wrote over 1,000 songs, including ‘Ol’ Man River’ and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, for 104 stage-shows and films. Berlin produced over 1,000 songs too, and scores ranging from
Top Hat
to
Annie Get Your Gun
. His ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ (1911) effectively opened the jazz era. Thirteen years later, Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue
, performed by the Paul Whiteman orchestra, made jazz respectable. Frederick Loewe’s
My Fair Lady
, Frank Loesser’s
Guys and Dolls
, Harold Arlen’s
Wizard of Oz
and Leonard Bernstein’s
West Side Story
were in the same tradition of perpetual innovation within strict box-office conventions.
⁷⁷

American Jews brought the same show-business talents of ideas and organization to the new technologies as they developed. In 1926 David Sarnoff (1891-1971) created the first radio chain, the National Broadcasting System, as the service-arm of the Radio Corporation of America, of which he became president in 1930. At the same time, William Paley (b. 1901) was putting together the rival Colombia Broadcasting System. In due course these two introduced black-and-white television, then colour. Jews also supplied much of the first generation of performing talent for these innovatory media—Sid
Caesar and Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Al Jolson and Jack Benny, Walter Winchell and David Susskind.
⁷⁸
The Broadway musical, radio and
TV
were all examples of a fundamental principle in Jewish diaspora history: Jews opening up a completely new field in business and culture, a
tabula rasa
on which to set their mark, before other interests had a chance to take possession, erect guild or professional fortifications and deny them entry.

The outstanding example, however, was the movie industry, which was almost entirely put together by Jews. It is a matter of argument, indeed, whether or not it was their greatest contribution to shaping the modern age. For if Einstein created the cosmology of the twentieth century and Freud its characteristic mental assumptions, it was the cinema which provided its universal popular culture. Yet there were ironies in this. Jews did not invent the cinema. Thomas Edison, who developed the first effective cinecamera, the kinetoscope, in 1888, did not design it for entertainment. It was to be, he said, ‘the foremost instrument of reason’, designed for an enlightened democracy, to show the world as it is and to display the moral force of realism as opposed to ‘the occult lore of the east’.
⁷⁹
Such an exercise in rationalism might well have appealed to Jewish pioneers. In fact they turned it into something quite different. For Edison’s vision of the cinema did not work. The educated middle class ignored it. It made little progress in its first decade.

Then, at the end of the 1890s, poor, immigrant Jews married the cinema to another institution they were creating for people like themselves, the amusement arcade. In 1890 there was not a single arcade in New York. By 1900 there were over 1,000, and fifty of them already contained nickelodeons. Eight years later there were 400 nickelodeons in New York alone and they were spreading all over the northern cities. They cost five cents and appealed to the poorest of the urban poor. The hundreds of movie shorts now being made for them were silent. That was an advantage. Most of the patrons knew little or no English. It was entirely an immigrant art-form. So it was the ideal setting for Jewish enterprise.

At first the Jews were not involved on the inventive and creative side. They owned the nickelodeons, the arcades, the theatres. Most of the processes and early shorts were made by American-born Protestants. An exception was Sigmund Lublin, operating from the great Jewish centre of Philadelphia, which he might have turned into the capital of the industry. But when the theatre-owners began to go into production, to make the shorts their immigrant patrons wanted, Lublin joined with the other patent-owners to form the giant Patent
Company, and extract full dues out of the movie-makers. It was then that the Jews led the industry on a new Exodus, from the ‘Egypt’ of the Wasp-dominated north-east, to the promised land of California. Los Angeles had sun, easy laws, and a quick escape into Mexico from the Patent Company lawyers.
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Once in California, the Jewish skill at rationalization went into effect. There were more than one hundred small production firms in 1912. They were quickly amalgamated into eight big ones. Of these, Universal, Twentieth-Century-Fox, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Columbia were essentially Jewish creations, and Jews played a major role in the other two, United Artists and
RKO
Radio Pictures.
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Nearly all these Jewish movie men conformed to a pattern. They were immigrants or of immediate immigrant stock. They were poor, some desperately poor. Many came from families of twelve or more children. Carl Laemmle (1867-1939), the first of them, was an immigrant from Laupheim, the tenth of thirteen children. He worked in clerical jobs, as a bookkeeper and a clothing-store manager, before opening a nickelodeon, turning it into a chain, creating a movie-distribution business, and then founding Universal, the first big studio, in 1912. Marcus Loew (1872-1927) was born in the Lower East Side, the son of an immigrant waiter. He sold papers at six, left school at twelve to work in printing, then furs, was an independent fur-broker at eighteen, had been twice bankrupted by the age of thirty, founded a theatre-chain and put together Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. William Fox (1879-1952) was born in Hungary, one of twelve children, and came through New York’s Castle Garden Immigrant Station as a child. He left school at eleven for the garment industry, set up his own shrinking business, then progressed through Brooklyn penny-arcades to a movie-chain. Louis B. Mayer (1885-1957) was born in Russia, the son of a Hebrew scholar, and also came through Castle Garden as a child, went into the junk trade at the age of eight, had his own junk-business by nineteen, a theatre-chain by twenty-two, and in 1915 made the first big adult movie,
Birth of a Nation
. The Warner Brothers were among the nine children of a poor cobbler from Poland. They worked selling meat and ice-cream, repairing bicycles, as fairground barkers and travelling showmen. In 1904 they bought a film-projector and ran their own show, with their sister Rose playing the piano and twelve-year-old Jack singing treble. In Hollywood they made the breakthrough into sound. Joseph Schenck, co-founder of United Artists, ran an amusement park. Sam Goldwyn worked as a blacksmith’s assistant and a glove salesman. Harry Cohn, another Lower East Sider, was a trolley conductor, then in Vaudeville. Jesse Lasky
was a cornet player. Sam Katz was a messenger boy but owned three nickelodeons in his teens. Dore Schary worked as a waiter in a Jewish holiday-camp. Adolph Zukor, from a family of rabbis, worked as a fur salesman. So did Darryl Zanuck, who made his first money with a new fur-clasp. Not all the pioneers kept the fortunes and studios they created. Some went bankrupt; Fox and Schenck even went to gaol. But Zukor summed up for them all: ‘I arrived from Hungary an orphan boy of sixteen with a few dollars sewn inside my vest. I was thrilled to breathe the fresh strong air of freedom, and America has been good to me.’
⁸²

These men were underdogs, creating for underdogs. It was a long time before the New York banks would look at them. Their first big backer was a fellow California immigrant, A. P. Giannini, whose Bank of Italy eventually became the Bank of America, the world’s biggest. They had centuries of deprivation behind them, and they looked it. They were small in stature. As the film historian Philip French puts it: ‘One could have swung a scythe five and a half feet off the ground at a gathering of movie moguls without endangering many lives: several would scarcely have heard the swish.’
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They were impelled by a strong desire to carry the poor with them in their upward ascent, both materially and culturally. Zukor would boast of turning the proletarian arcades into middle-class palaces: ‘Who swept out your dirty nickelodeons? Who put in your plush seats?’ he would demand. Goldwyn defined his cultural aim as to make ‘pictures built upon the strong foundation of art and refinement’. Their new cinema-culture was not without traditional Jewish characteristics, especially in critical humour. The Marx Brothers provided an underdog view of the conventional world, rather in the way Jews had always seen majority society. Whether examining Wasp society in
Animal Crackers
, culture in
A Night at the Opera
, the campus in
Horse Feathers
, commerce in
The Big Store
or politics in
Duck Soup
, they represented a disconcerting intrusion on established institutions. They disturbed the peace and plunged ‘normal’ people into confusion.
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