Chapter 3

Only those who are entirely ignorant of the history of Socialism and Socialist theories can possibly hold this view of its Jewish origin. Long before Karl Marx appeared upon the scene of action Socialism had already made an impress upon European thought. Marx was a boy of fifteen when the word Socialism first appeared in print as designating the doctrines preached by Robert Owen, the Welshman, for almost twenty years before that time. Was Owen the tool of Jewish conspirators? I have read most of the literature relating to Owen's life and teaching, including his own voluminous writings, and the innumerable controversies in which he was engaged throughout his life. I have not discovered in all this mass of material a single trace of Jewish influence. He had no Jewish friends or associates during the formative years, the period in which the Socialist ideas and ideals shaped themselves. His Socialism was the direct outcome of his experience as a successful manufacturer. He was not in any sense a man of books. From time to time he required large sums of money for his enterprises. Surely, if those enterprises, and his life's work as a whole, formed part of a great Jewish conspiracy which had behind it the vast financial resources of Jewry, it would not have been difficult for him to secure the financial support he needed. It is a fact of cardinal importance, therefore, that Owen never did receive Jewish financial support. Those who would have us believe that Socialism originated as a part of the great world-wide conspiracy of Jewish imperialism must first of all explain Robert Owen.

Nor does Owen stand alone in the history of Socialism among the Anglo-Saxon peoples. It is a well-known fact, one to which he himself has called attention, that the most important of the economic and sociological theories of Marx were held and promulgated before his time by a number of British writers. As Professor Foxwell and others have shown, the roots of what is called Marxian Socialist theory lie deep in the soil of British political economy. Karl Marx devoted his typically Jewish genius to the exposition of Socialist theories, but the theories themselves were not of Hebraic origin. William Godwin, Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, and John Francis Bray all preceded Marx, and not one of them was a Jew, nor can we find in their writings any trace of Jewish influence. It is the same with Bronterre O'Brien, the first to call himself a Social Democrat. If any or all of these men were the agents of such a conspiracy, it is remarkable that there should be an entire absence of evidence of that fact. It is quite unbelievable that there was any sort of conspiracy which affected them. For the most part they were poor and their books were published in pitifully small editions at great sacrifice to themselves. Incidentally, it is worthy of note, Karl Marx, the Jew, suffered terrible poverty. Certainly, all this does not suggest an international conspiracy backed by the Jewish leaders of the financial world.

Because of the prominence of a few individual Jews in the American Socialist movement in recent years, the writer of the anti-Semitic articles in the _Dearborn Independent_ regards as proven the theory that American Socialism originated in Jewish conspiracy. It is another evidence of his entire ignorance of the subject concerning which he writes. If there is anything which can be said about Socialism with certainty, it is that its fundamental theories are mainly of Anglo-Saxon origin. Karl Marx was a boy of nine years when Robert Owen reprinted in England an American Socialist pamphlet, written by an American workingman and published in America a year or two earlier. At about the same time Thomas Cooper, of Columbia, South Carolina, published his book in which the fundamental economic theories of modern Socialism were clearly expounded. When Marx was no more than ten years old we find O.A. Brownson, editor of the Boston _Quarterly Review_, vigorously preaching here in America the theory of the class war, the abolition of the wage system, and the necessity for a triumph of the proletariat. We find such men as Thomas Skidmore, R.L. Jennings, and L. Byllesby preaching thoroughgoing Socialism. In 1829 these men and others were exercising a notable and considerable influence upon American thought. In vain shall we search their writings and the meager accounts of their lives for any trace or suggestion of Jewish influence or control.

I skip a decade and turn to the Fourierist period of American Socialism. The profound influence of Charles Fourier upon Karl Marx is well known and has been the subject of much learned writing. But if the Frenchman inspired the German Jew, so likewise did he inspire many American non-Jews, the very flower of our race. It was Albert Brisbane who began the Fourierist agitation here, and soon he had associated with him Horace Greeley, Parke Godwin, George Ripley, Charles A. Dana, John S. Dwight, William Henry Channing, Margaret Fuller, John Orvis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and many others. Other distinguished Americans who were brought into more or less sympathetic association with the movement included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and Theodore Parker, among others. Certainly it would be difficult to name a body of men and women more truly representative of the highest and best of American life and genius. To suggest that these were all the agents of a Jewish conspiracy, either consciously or unconsciously, is to invite and deserve ridicule. In truth, Socialism is as Anglo-Saxon as Magna Charta and as American as the Declaration of Independence, and we might as well attribute either or both of these to Jewish intrigue as Socialism. It is true that the organized Socialist movement in America has long spoken with a foreign accent and borne the imprint of an alien psychology, but that psychology, as I have elsewhere pointed out, is German and not Hebraic.

It would take us too far afield to discuss the origin of French Socialism, even in this sketchy fashion, but I can state with the assurance that is born of intimate knowledge that French Socialism shows as little sign of having been inspired by alien influences, Jewish or other, as British and American Socialism. I stress this point not because I would defend the Jews against the charge that they have manifested unusual sympathy for Socialism (which, indeed, if true, I should hold to be a virtuous distinction), nor to apologize for or to deny the splendid contributions of individual Jews to the Socialist movement. My concern is to enter protest against the charge that the Socialist movement of the world originated in the ambitions of Jewish imperialists and is neither more nor less than part and parcel of a great international Jewish conspiracy. That is a stupid travesty of history, and a dangerous one.

I have spent the greater part of my life in the Socialist movement, in close and intimate comradeship with both Jews and Gentiles belonging to nearly every civilized nation. I am as proud of the comradeship of my Jewish comrades as I am of that of any others. My readers will perhaps understand that I deeply resent the implication that through all the years of struggle and sacrifice I have been either the unconscious dupe or the willing agent of any kind of selfish conspiracy, Jewish or other. It is, of course, difficult to disprove such an accusation brought against a great movement, and, therefore, by implication against the individuals belonging to that movement. If I should charge that Mr. Henry Ford is engaged in this anti-Semitic propaganda for purely selfish and mercenary reasons, that he has become the spokesman and agent of great unscrupulous capitalist interests who seek to destroy their Jewish competitors and to profit thereby, he would find it difficult to establish the contrary by definite and concrete proof. As a matter of justice, nothing of the sort should be expected. The burden of proof rests upon the person making the accusation. In like fashion, when the _Dearborn Independent_ charges that the international Socialist movement is one of the agents of a vicious Jewish conspiracy against Christian civilization, it is in honor bound to submit proofs. This it has not done, nor has any other paper making the charge. I _know_ that the charge is a cruel and cowardly falsehood, a libel upon millions of honest and honorable men and women, to utter which is an infamy and degradation.

The charge is one that has been leveled against practically every movement of protest that has been developed in modern times. It was leveled against the Protestant Reformation; against the French Revolution; against Mazzini and his followers in Italy; against the German Revolutionists of 1848; against British Trade-Unionists. I have no doubt that a little research would reveal the fact that the same charge was directed against the Abolitionists in this country. Vicious interests are never very scrupulous in their choice of weapons. In those Protestant countries in which the number of Catholics is much larger than the number of Jews it is a common practice to charge that movements of protest and revolt are instigated and led by the Catholic hierarchy. Where the number of Jews is very great the appeal is made to racial hatred. In Catholic countries, in the same way, accusation is directed against Protestantism or Judaism, according to circumstance.

Wherever and by whosoever made, appeals to racial and religious prejudices and hatreds in defense of vested interests merit the condemnation of all honest and righteous men. When made in a country which, like the United States, possesses millions of peoples of many diverse lands and races not yet welded into national homogeneity, who must live and work together, such accusations become the most dangerous form of treason. Whoever propagates in this country antagonism to any race or creed represented in our citizenship, whether it be against Jews, Poles, Germans, Irish, English, or negroes; or against Judaism, Catholicism, or Protestantism, assails the very foundation of our most cherished and characteristic American institutions.

V

THE JEWISH SOCIALISTS AND BOLSHEVISM

The anti-Semitic press of both hemispheres charges that Bolshevism in Russia and elsewhere is a movement instigated and led by Jews, as part of a great conspiracy to bring about the Jewish domination of the world. The reasons for making this charge are only too obvious. Bolshevism is repugnant to the great mass of civilized mankind, by whom it is rightly regarded as a sort of moral leprosy. Whatever may be thought of the possibility of Sovietism in industry and government, Bolshevism, the spiritual dynamic as distinguished from the mechanical agent, is the negation of every virtuous principle which mankind holds in reverence. It frankly bases government upon brute force wielded by the few, and denies the ideal toward which all nations are striving, the ideal of government based upon the sanction of the governed. It unites in a terrible synthesis all the worst agencies and methods of tsarism and of militarism. To persuade the people of this or any other civilized country that Bolshevism is essentially a Jewish movement, part of a conspiracy to reduce civilization to chaos, and so prepare the way for a Jewish supergovernment of the world, would mean the rapid organization of the rest of the population against the Jews in every phase of life--politics, commerce, industry, education, social intercourse, and so on.

In support of this most serious charge not a single shred of credible evidence has ever been adduced by any anti-Semitic writer or organ. For the universally known fact that there are Jews among the leaders of Bolshevism, in Russia and elsewhere, is not evidence that Bolshevism is _essentially_ or _primarily_ a Jewish movement; neither is it evidence that Bolshevism is a part of a Jewish conspiracy to obtain world domination. All that it proves is that which needs no proof--that there are Jews among the Bolsheviki. I repeat that in support of the charge not a shred of credible evidence has ever been adduced. In that shameful book, _The Cause of World Unrest_, consisting of articles reprinted from the _London Morning Post_, the anonymous author gives a list of fifty names of "persons who either are the actual governing powers in Soviet Russia now or were responsible for the establishment of the present regime there." There is both guile and cowardice in the latter part of this charge. It is easy to argue, with a certain plausibility, that every person who helped in the revolution of March, 1917, must be held "responsible for the establishment of the present regime." I have heard many Russians make the charge that Kerensky, the anti-Bolshevist, was "responsible" for the establishment of the Bolshevist regime. I have heard others charge the same thing against such men as Rodzianko, Prince Lvov, and Professor Miliukov. What these Russians meant was that the failure of these men and others to deal properly with the situation existing at the time of the March revolution made the triumph of Bolshevism possible. In that sense, we might as well go back a stage farther and present the names of Tsar Nicholas II and all his responsible Ministers as "persons who ... were responsible for the establishment of the present regime." This, however, is not what the _Morning Post_ desires to convey to the mind of the reader. It insinuates, in a most cowardly fashion, that the fifty persons named by it are Bolsheviki and falsely alleges that of the fifty no less than forty-two are Jews.

Concerning this list of names a few observations are necessary. The compiler of the list was not honest; he did not intend to place the reader in possession of the truth. This is evidenced by several facts. In the first place, many influential leaders of the Bolsheviki whose names are familiar to all who have given even ordinary attention to the subject are conspicuously absent. The reason for the omission is that these men are non-Jews. _Their inclusion in the list would have destroyed the author's charge._ He has suppressed important facts in the interest of his wretched case. I searched the list in vain for the names of such prominent leaders of the Bolshevist movement as Bucharin, Rakovsky, Miliutin, Raskolnikov, Shliapnikov, Latzis, Rykov, Stalin, Krestinsky, Bonch-Brouyevich, Dybenko, Dzerzhinsky, Krylenko, Gorky, Andreyeva, Nogin, Platakov, Kalinin, Boky, and many others less well known. Anyone who is at all familiar with the subject will recognize in the names I have here given some of the most active and influential leaders of the Bolsheviki. Not one of them is a Jew, and I submit that to omit them from a list of names which pretends to be representative is as dishonest as it is cowardly.

The list is thoroughly dishonest, moreover, in that it sets down as Jews men who are well known to be Gentiles. For example, Manouilsky, number forty-six on the list, is described as a Jew, whereas it is well known that he is a Gentile, a Ukrainian. Bogdanov, number ten on the list, is likewise wrongfully described. His real name is not Silberstein, as alleged, but Malinovsky. Neither is he a Jew, as alleged, but a Gentile, a Russian. These two illustrations will serve to show how little reliance can be placed upon the list. Whether there are other misrepresentations of the same kind I am unable to say, for the reason that the list contains many names of persons who do not hold and have not held any important position in Russia, either under the Bolsheviki or the earlier Provisional Government headed by Kerensky. These persons are absolutely unknown to me, even by name, and they are equally unknown to every Russian revolutionary leader to whom I have submitted them. It is quite probable, therefore, that these names of alleged Jews hide the identity of men who are not Jews at all.

Not only does this precious list studiously omit many of the principal leaders of the Bolshevist regime simply because they are not Jews, and misrepresent well-known Gentiles as Jews; quite as bad is the fact that it includes many names of men who are not only not supporters of the Bolshevist regime, but actually leaders of the most determined opposition to it. Here is a list which is submitted in proof of the charge that "nearly all the Bolshevist leaders are Jews," and in that list I find the names of ten men who are known to me to be among the most active leaders of the struggle against the Bolsheviki, men who have made heroic sacrifices and risked their lives in that fight. I say that the list includes the names of ten men known to me to be bitter opponents of Bolshevism; there may be others concerning whom I am not informed.

Included in the list I find the name of Izgoev (forty-three), for instance. His real name is alleged to be Goldman, when in fact it is Landau. Not only is he not a Bolshevik, but, as everybody familiar with the Russian movement knows, one of the active publicists of the Russian Constitutional Democratic party. Orthodoks, number thirty-five on the list, is not a Bolshevik, but one of the most active members of the group of so-called Socialist Patriots, the "Unity" group organized by the late George Plechanov to support the Allied war aims, an organization that did much to strengthen Russian morale in the early stages of the war and which has vigorously and bitterly opposed Bolshevism and all its ways. Bounakov, number forty-five on the list, is also a leader of the anti-Bolshevist forces. When I was in Paris recently he was there actively engaged with other Socialists in carrying on anti-Bolshevist propaganda. Kamkov, number fifteen on the list, was one of the leaders of the Socialists-Revolutionists party, a determined opponent of the Bolsheviki. According to the best information at my command, he was one of the men responsible for the assassination of the German ambassador, Count von Mirbach, which was a protest against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and was put to death by the Bolsheviki. Gorev, number eleven on the list, has consistently opposed Bolshevism with the rest of his colleagues of the Mensheviki. The same thing is true of Abramovich (twenty-four), of Dan (seventeen), of Martinov (twenty-one), of Martov (four), and of Meshkovsky (eighteen).

The anonymous author of _The Cause of World Unrest_ says of this list that it is "the result of much labor and the work of several hands." I do not need to characterize it, in the light of the foregoing analysis. The facts to which I have called attention can be very readily verified. I submit that most abject apology is due to the reader from everybody concerned in the preparation and circulation of this book--from the anonymous author, the compiler of the list, the London _Morning Post_, and the publishers. There is nothing more contemptible than such poisoning of the wells of public information.

For the present I have finished with the _Morning Post_. Let us turn now to Mr. Ford's _Dearborn Independent_. In its issue of May 29, 1920, this organ of American anti-Semitism desperately tries to bolster up the charge that nearly all the leaders of the Bolsheviki are Jews by a clumsy invention of its own. It says:

Every commisar in Russia to-day is a Jew. Publicists are accustomed to speak of Russia as if it were in disorder, but the Jewish government of Russia is not. From a mass of underlings, the Jews of Russia came up in a perfect phalanx, a flying wedge through the superinduced disorder, as if every man's place had been previously prepared for him.

For these statements there is no justification in fact. They are absolutely and unqualifiedly untrue, as every person familiar with the facts must know. It is not true that "every commissar in Russia to-day is a Jew." Not even a majority of the members of the Council of People's Commissars are Jews. Lenin, who is at the head of the government, is not a Jew. Tchitcherin, who is in charge of foreign affairs, is not a Jew. Krassin, who is in charge of the trade negotiations with the British government, is not a Jew. These three men wield greater power and influence in Soviet Russia than all the Jewish officials combined. Dzerzhinsky, head of the infamous Extraordinary Commissions, is not a Jew. Lunarcharsky, who has charge of public education, is not a Jew. Rykov, chairman of the Economic Council, is not a Jew. Bonch-Brouyevich, secretary of the Council of People's Commissars, is not a Jew. Kolontai is not a Jewess. There are many other Gentile Commissars. How completely the London _Morning Post_ and the _Dearborn Independent_ misrepresent the essential facts I have already shown by my analysis of the pretentious list of fifty names published by the former. I have before me the official list of the members of the _Sovnarkom_--that is, the Council of the People's Commissars of the Soviet government. As is well known, the elaborate and intricate governmental system of Soviet Russia centers ultimate authority in this Council of People's Commissars, which consists of seventeen members. A most striking refutation of the statement made by the _Dearborn Independent_ is found in the fact that of the seventeen members of this supreme Bolshevist authority only one, Trotzky, is a Jew. The official list speaks for itself.

_Official Name_ _Real Name_ _Department_

1. N. Lenin[1] Oulianov President 2. G. Tchitcherin[1] G. Tchitcherin Foreign Affairs 3. L. Trotsky[2] Bronstein War 4. E. Raskolnikov[1] E. Raskolnikov Navy 5. G. Petrovsky[1] G. Petrovsky Interior 6. N. Krestinsky[1] N. Krestinsky Finance 7. L. Krassin[1] L. Krassin Industry and Commerce and Ways of Communication 8. S. Sereda[1] S. Sereda Agriculture 9. N. Bruchanov[1] N. Bruchanov Supply 10. A. Lunarcharsky[1] A. Lunarcharsky Public Instruction 11. V. Stuchka[1] V. Stuchka Justice 12. A. Kolontai[1] A. Kolontai Public Welfare 13. V. Smidt[1] V. Smidt Labor 14. A. Rykov[1] A. Rykov Chairman, Economic Council 15. K. Stalin[3] Djugashvili National Affairs 16. Dr. N. Semashko[1] Dr. N. Semashko Public Health 17. V. Bonch-Brouyevich[1] V. Bonch-Brouyevich Executive secretary of the Council of People's Commissars [1] Russian [2] Jew [3] Georgian