The Jews in America Trilogy (157 page)

Though she was only fifty-three, she now looked much older. Her famous mane of Titian hair had turned mousy and was streaked with gray, and she wore it carelessly, pulled back with pins and combs. She seemed to have lost all interest in her once-lovely appearance, and the wonderfully delicate and slender figure that
Harper's Bazar
had written so admiringly about in 1905 had gone heavy. Her face—she wore no makeup—was lined, and there were dark circles under her eyes. The face, though fuller, coarser, also seemed saddened and sunken from the weight of lost causes. She seemed to have been defeated by both love and time.

Though she had been called a traitoress and a seditionist, Rose was at heart a patriotic woman. Her patriotism—and that of her fellow founders of the American Communist party—was perhaps idealized, unrealistic, impractical. She saw American society as flawed, but the remedies she fought for were for all Americans, not just Jewish Americans. She had foreseen a social revolution in America, and of course her vision was faulty. In 1933, with fifteen million Americans out of work, the country was probably closer to a revolution than at any other point in its history. But it would not happen.

Once in Germany, her whereabouts were kept secret to protect her from harassment. But it was announced that she was sending home two trunkfuls of papers—an autobiography that she was writing. If the papers were sent, they never arrived. She died in Germany on June 20, 1933, and her crusade—which she herself may not have altogether understood—was ended.

On July 24, about four hundred of her fellow Communists met in a drab old hall called the New Star Casino on 107th Street and Park Avenue, at the seedy fringes of Harlem, for a memorial service. Though no note was made of it, it was just a few days past what would have been her twenty-eighth wedding anniversary to James Graham Phelps Stokes, whose Old New York name she had continued to wear so proudly, and her own fifty-fourth birthday. It was noticed that most of those in attendance were women. Rose's ashes had been flown home from Germany, and her urn was carried in a procession by a
special escort and placed on a red-draped card table on a platform. Two prominent members of the Party, Clara Zitkin and Sergei Gussev, made short speeches. A chorus sang revolutionary songs—“Meadowlands,” and “The Peat-Bog Soldiers.”

Then the audience stood at attention, in silence, for one full minute. The Romance of the Century, and the Cinderella Story of the Lower East Side, was over.

Later, it was announced that the writing of a biography of Rose Pastor Stokes was “in the hands” of a man named Cedric Belfrage, who was the author of a book called
South of God
. The biography has never appeared.

*
There were ways to make the claim subliminally, however. In 1941, an advertising campaign was headlined “Seven Yeats.” In smaller print, the copy revealed it meant seven years “since Repeal.”

†
Another somewhat misleading brand name. A number of European liquors, particularly brandies and cognacs, used initials following their names—“V.S.O.P.,” for example, which stands for Very Special Old Pale. Most people not in the know assumed that “V.O.” stood for “Very Old.” In fact, Sam Bronfman had inherited the label from old Joe Seagram's days in the nineteenth century, and he was said to have used the initials to stand for “Very Own.”

*
Interestingly, there was never a Jewish Man of Distinction.

12

WAR

As the news from Hitler's Germany grew more alarming, a number of American Jews wondered why no voices of protest had been raised from a number of important places. President Roosevelt had said nothing, and neither had Stalin, nor the Pope. It seemed to many people that a cry of outrage from at least one major world power might give Hitler pause, and persuade him to change his course, but the world powers remained strangely silent, pursuing some sort of policy of wait and see. Hitler, the Jews pointed out, was a man who had shown he could be cowed by much lesser men. Generalissimo Franco had stopped Hitler's army at the Spanish border with what amounted to no more than a lot of double-talk. And when the Germans had told the king of little Denmark that they could “cleanse” Denmark of its Jews, the king had replied firmly that the Danes would never stand for such a crime against humanity, nor would he. He himself had put on the identifying Jewish yellow armband, and urged his subjects to do the same. They did, and the Danish Jews were allowed to live. Why couldn't President Roosevelt take such a stand? If he wouldn't, it
behooved wealthy Jews in North America to do what they could on their own.

For the Jewish fraternity of motion picture producers in Hollywood, however, this was a very ticklish subject. They had so convinced themselves that the success of their movies depended on the movies' non-Jewish character that they were reluctant, no matter how it might trouble the conscience, to step forward and identify themselves with Jewish causes, no matter how urgent.

Furthermore, their attitude was reinforced by none other than the man whom Roosevelt had appointed as ambassador to the Court of St. James's in 1937—Joseph P. Kennedy. Just back from London, Kennedy had called a secret meeting with some fifty of Hollywood's leading motion picture men, including Goldwyn, Mayer, the Schencks, the Warners, Fox, and Zukor. In firm tones, Kennedy had told them that, as Jews, they must not protest what was going on in Germany, and must keep their Jewish fury out of print and off the screen. Any Jewish protests, Kennedy insisted, would make a victory over the Germans impossible. It would make the world—and the United States public in particular—feel that what was going on in Europe was “a Jewish war,” and a Jewish war would not be a popular idea, would actually increase anti-Semitic feeling in the United States. Kennedy delivered the same argument to a group of New York's Jewish businessmen in the banking and fashion industries. In New York and Hollywood, the leading Jews quietly agreed to Kennedy's plea for silence, and to keep any Jewish feelings, along with their Jewishness, under wraps. Whatever Kennedy's intentions may have been, it was curious, even chilling, advice.

But it was advice that many Hollywood men were probably somewhat relieved to hear. It eased them of some guilt they might have felt, and after all, it came from a very highly placed source. Not only was Kennedy very rich, but he was also a high government official. Furthermore, he was a power on Wall Street, where he had headed the Securities and Exchange Commission, and much in Hollywood rode on what Wall Street said. He was also a considerable force in the motion picture business, thanks to, of all people, David Sarnoff.

Back in the 1920s, Sarnoff had predicted that the radio and the phonograph would be combined, and that a national
network—or “chain,” as he called it—of radio stations would be created, whereby a program originating in, say, New York, could be transmitted simultaneously from a series of high-wattage towers across the country. With the advent of sound in motion pictures, Sarnoff saw that talking pictures meant business for RCA, too, since all the components that went into sound for movies were actually by-products of radio science. Sarnoff had proposed that RCA get a foothold in the movie business, and with that in mind he approached Joe Kennedy in 1927.

Kennedy owned a substantial piece of a small production company called Film Booking Office, which had a friendly relationship with the large Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of theaters. Kennedy also had an interest in another film company, called Pathé Pictures. At the time, however, Kennedy's interest in films seemed mostly to be based on his relationship with Gloria Swanson, and his desire to promote her career. David Sarnoff proposed to Kennedy that, with half a million dollars of RCA's money thrown into the pot to sweeten the deal, Film Booking Office, Pathé, and Keith-Albee-Orpheum might be merged to form a new studio that would rival the existing Big Five. Kennedy liked the idea, and the result of the merger was RKO Pictures (Radio-Keith-Orpheum). It was certainly a nice thing for Kennedy, who saw his RKO stock climb from twenty-one to fifty dollars a share just before the Crash, when he sold out at the top.

Later, Kennedy would claim that the idea for forming RKO was his own, but his biographer, Richard J. Whalen, in
The Founding Father
, refuted this, and called the creation of the new company “Sarnoff's grand design.” For such coups as this, Sarnoff was rewarded with the presidency of RCA in 1930. And in Hollywood, where Kennedy made himself president of RKO, there was awe. Adolph Zukor had asked, “A banker? A banker in this business? I thought this was a business for furriers.”

Kennedy, when not telling Hollywood producers what they should or shouldn't do, could also be very useful to his movie friends. As ambassador, he had made high-level connections in London, and England at the time was the second most important market for American-made films. In a confidential memo to Sam Goldwyn, Joseph M. Schenck in MGM's New York
office was able to report that, working through State Department channels—and in coded telegrams that Kennedy had let Schenck see—Kennedy was developing a formula whereby the film industry could withdraw, and transfer out of England, much more money than had been allowed by law. A five-million-dollar ceiling had been in force for such withdrawals, but Kennedy had assured Schenck that this ceiling could be raised to between twenty and thirty million. Furthermore, the money would come out of England in dollars, not English pounds, which was important since the pound was in a weakened, war-frightened state. Schenck warned Goldwyn not to try to interfere with Kennedy's plans since, as Schenck put it, Kennedy was a “tough customer and resents anyone who tries to go over his head or that of the State Department.” In his ambassadorial role, Kennedy would deal directly with the British chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon. Was any of this legal? Who knew? But it did seem an odd bit of extracurricular activity for our American ambassador. And it showed that Hollywood was more than a little frightened of Mr. Joseph P. Kennedy.

Kennedy would prove helpful to his Hollywood colleagues in still other ways. Following Repeal, like others in the liquor trade, Kennedy had become a legitimate importer, and an important new source of Kennedy wealth became the importation of a Scotch whiskey called Black Tartan. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Scotch became a very difficult commodity to obtain in the United States. While other American distillers experimented with something called “Scotch-type whiskey,” a very poor imitation, those who had connections with Ambassador Kennedy never had any trouble getting the real thing. It was said that the Beverly Hills Hotel was one of the few places in the country where, throughout the war, good Scotch was always available, and it was always Black Tartan. How it arrived, other than by diplomatic pouch, has never been made clear.

Hollywood's Jews reacted to Kennedy's edict of silence on the subject of Hitler's treatment of the Jews in different ways. Sam Goldwyn, for example, rationalized that reports of concentration camps and mass murders were “probably exaggerated,” and others took this comforting view. But at least one man decided not to be daunted by Kennedy and to be vocal on
the subject—the volatile screenwriter Ben Hecht. Born in New York of Russian immigrant parents, Hecht had become something of a Hollywood maverick and gadfly. In various articles for newspapers and in the
Reader's Digest
, Hecht had begun to complain about the process of “de-Semitization” he was observing in the popular arts, and “the almost complete disappearance of the Jew from American fiction, stage, and movies.” It was a process, he claimed, that was designed to stifle any outrage over Hitler's Jewish policies, and to minimize, as much as possible, the human connotations of the word
Jew
. In Hollywood, however, Ben Hecht was considered a little crazy, as, indeed, all writers were. (“No writers at story conferences!” had been one of Sam Goldwyn's famous rules.)

But Hecht's protestations had brought him to the attention of a young Jewish activist named Peter Bergson. Bergson, a Palestinian, was a member of the Irgun Tzevai Leumi, the armed, anti-British organization that had been founded by Menachem Begin to aid Israel's struggle for freedom. Members of the Bergson group had come to the United States to raise money for the Jewish forces in Palestine. Bergson himself had been a disciple of a militant Zionist named Vladimir Jabotinsky, who had been born in Odessa but grew up in Italy, where he had been strongly influenced by the risorgimento. In Palestine, Jabotinsky had organized a Jewish legion, which had done a great deal to bolster Jewish morale, but which had come on the scene too late to do much damage to the Turks or to dislodge the British presence. Jabotinsky was convinced that Jewish armed forces were essential to the creation of a Jewish state, much to the displeasure of more conservative Zionists, such as Chaim Weizmann and Louis Brandeis. The trouble was that Zionists were divided as to priorities. Some felt that the creation of the State of Israel should come first, in order to give Europe's Jews a place to which to emigrate. Others felt that the more pressing task was saving Jewish lives at any cost.

Early in 1940, Jabotinsky came to the United States, and before a cheering audience of thousands of Jews at Madison Square Garden, urged that the only solution to the plight of Europe's Jews was the creation of a Jewish army to fight alongside the Allies as an independent unit, like the Free French. Such an army, Jabotinsky asserted, would put the lie forever to the claim that Jews made poor soldiers. Though Jabotinsky
thrilled his audience in New York, the British Foreign Office was less pleased with his crusade. In London, it was feared—with some justification, as it turned out—that what Jabotinsky really had in mind was a Jewish brigade formed, trained, paid for, and equipped by Britain, which would later be used to seize Palestine from British guardianship. Already, in Palestine, the British had enacted a number of anti-Semitic laws. For one thing, it had been stipulated that only one Jew could volunteer for His Majesty's army for each Arab who enlisted. Since no Arabs were joining, this meant that no Jews could, either. In London, Jabotinsky had been labeled a “Jewish Fascist.” A few months after his Madison Square Garden appearance, however, Jabotinsky died of a heart attack. The banner for a Jewish army was taken up by Peter Bergson.