American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews
By Andrew Porwancher
Princeton University Press, 368 pp.
Theodore Roosevelt had a thing about the Jews. Not just the uptown Manhattan Jews whose families had immigrated from Germany and Austria-Hungary in the middle years of the 19th century, people whose Reform Judaism was tidier to the gentile eye than were the shuls of the Lower East Side. These were Jews whose prosperity made many of them business colleagues and political bedfellows of Roosevelt and his Republican Party.
But Roosevelt’s philosemitism extended deeper, into the Lower East Side itself and its Yiddish-speaking, tenement-dwelling Jews whose crowded apartments and sweatshops drew the concern of social reformers such as the Danish-born pioneer photojournalist Jacob Riis.
Roosevelt befriended Riis, and as New York’s head police commissioner from 1895 to 1897, he spoke to downtown Jewish audiences, advocating the progressive cause of hiring by merit. As Andrew Porwancher writes in the new biography American Maccabee, “Roosevelt proudly told the East Side crowds that an immigrant Jew who was poorly connected but richly talented would confront no obstacle to gainful employment in the police department.”
Viewed through a cynical lens (through which we see so much of public life today), the bond between Roosevelt and the Jews might be dismissed as mere politics. He was a New Yorker, and New York City around the turn of the 20th century was rapidly becoming home to a huge Jewish immigrant population in need of jobs. He was a Republican and these Jews were typically Democrats, but his attention to their concerns made TR a remarkably successful vote-getter in Tammany Hall’s backyard. The connections he forged as police commissioner served him well when he ran for governor and, later, for president.
He recruited Jewish cops with an enthusiasm that nowadays would earn him lawsuits for practicing DEI.
But, as American Maccabee shows, there was something deeper to the relationship, not always politically satisfying to the Jews of his day, but something driven both by practical electoral concerns and a deeper devotion to the welfare of the Jews.
What was it? While Porwancher keeps his psychologizing to a minimum, he cannot help imagining what the New York City police commissioner saw in the ill-nourished children of the Lower East Side. Roosevelt had been the sickly, weakling child of a patrician family who later compensated by making a cult of physical fitness. At Harvard, he boxed. After college, he headed west to the South Dakota badlands, ranching and riding through the great American outdoors. As an adult, he celebrated the robust manliness he had achieved and probably saw his childhood self in those sons of the tenements who were derided by their gentile neighbors as weaklings. The remedy, he thought, was physical fitness, and for the most fit—whom TR described as “the Maccabee type”—jobs as policemen. Roosevelt took pride in assembling a force as diverse as the city it patrolled. He recruited Jewish cops with an enthusiasm that nowadays would earn him denunciations and lawsuits for practicing DEI and affirmative action.
Once, famously confronted with the task of providing security for a notoriously antisemitic German visitor—and mindful of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, even to advocates of odious causes—Commissioner Roosevelt ordered a security detail for the visitor composed entirely of Jewish cops, with special effort taken to use those who were most “semitic” in appearance. Roosevelt understood political theater.
After unexpectedly becoming president at age 42 upon the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, TR named the first Jewish cabinet secretary (Judah Benjamin of the Confederacy doesn’t count): Oscar Straus, a German-born, Columbia-educated lawyer turned diplomat who represented the United States as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire for four presidents. Straus, the banker Jacob Schiff and Simon Wolf, a politically well-connected lawyer and onetime president of B’nai B’rith, figure time and again as influential advisers to President Roosevelt on Jewish and other affairs.
As Porwancher tells it, Roosevelt as president was able to accomplish some of what his Jewish supporters hoped for, but not all.
On the positive side of the ledger, in 1902 Roosevelt’s State Department composed, at his initiative, a diplomatic note instructing a U.S. diplomat in Bucharest to present Washington’s concerns about Romania’s treatment of its Jews. Porwancher doubts that the diplomat presented the note in full, or even its central complaint, to the Romanians, but it was leaked to the Jewish press, and then released, with the president’s enthusiastic blessing. A key passage protests a wave of discriminatory and violent measures against that country’s Jews. “In the overcrowded cities they are forced to dwell and engage, against fearful odds, in the desperate struggle for existence,” the note said, alluding as well to the Romanian Jews’ “enforced degradation” and “state of wretched misery.” The note raised questions of interference in a foreign country’s affairs, and both the Romanians and, later, the Russians would respond by citing lynchings of Blacks in the American South.
Roosevelt sincerely but wrongly believed that the pogroms in Eastern Europe claimed far more lives than American lynchings. The opposite was true: As Porwancher writes in a footnote, between the end of the American Civil War and 1903 “the total number of Jewish deaths from pogroms was almost certainly less than the annual death count of American Blacks from lynching between 1889 and 1898.”
In preparing the Romanian note, Roosevelt’s Jewish brain trust came up with a novel rebuttal to the charge of meddling in Romanian affairs: Romanian antisemitism, it was argued, led to Jewish emigration, and most of those who fled went to the United States. Hence, it was an international issue.
What Roosevelt could not or at least would not do, despite his sensitivity to antisemitism at home and in Tsarist Russia (the one place with more Russian Jews than New York City), was deploy the diplomatic power of the United States to make the tsar crack down on anti-Jewish violence in his domains. To be fair to Roosevelt, the worst of the Russian pogroms during his time in office came after the notorious Kishinev pogrom of 1905 in present-day Moldova and after the United States actually did express its concerns about the mass killings of Jews. There was no guarantee that U.S. criticism of what the Russians claimed were domestic matters would not make the situation even worse for the Jews, and some evidence that it would.
Roosevelt also combined, or confused, two views of American pluralism, sometimes angering his Jewish allies and supporters. He was a huge fan of Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot, which was a great success on Broadway but, on the Lower East Side, was regarded as dramatic treif. In the play, the immigrant Jewish son of victims of the Kishinev pogrom falls in love with the immigrant Christian daughter of the man who killed his family, and they find true love and unity in the great melting pot of America, putting Old World conflicts behind them. This plot infuriated many Jews, who saw in the melting pot image a trade-off: American-ness gained in exchange for Jewishness abandoned.
To be fair, the image of America’s immigrant society as a “melting pot” was not just widely accepted; it entered the language as a metaphor for assimilation that was widely accepted and that survived both Roosevelt and Jewish dissent. TR, observing from the outside, never quite sorted out the conflict between minorities’ desire to assimilate and their rightful attachment to much of what assimilation asked them to give up.
Porwancher tells the story of The Melting Pot at some length, but given the limits of his book, which ends with the end of Roosevelt’s presidency in 1909, he does not write much about Roosevelt’s post-presidential thinking about minorities and the majority culture. During World War I, when Americans debated intervention, Irish Americans and German Americans were less keen on entering the war (or were at least feared to be) since the former would be aiding England and the latter would be opposing Germany. Woodrow Wilson denounced the notion of the “hyphenated American.” “Any man who carries about a hyphen with him,” he said, “carries a dagger he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.” Many Russian Jewish Americans were equally unenthusiastic about fighting as allies of Tsarist Russia. Roosevelt the elder statesman echoed Wilson: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.” TR was describing an attitude, not a family origin, but the sentiment was of a piece with the nativism that shut the doors to immigration after the war was over.
In many ways Theodore Roosevelt was limited by the ideas of his times. For example, his love of war as a test of manly courage today feels antique if not batty. But his embrace of New York City’s poor Jews and his understanding of their desire to be welcomed in their new land—and also to call attention to the atrocious treatment of cousins in their old lands—bespeak a genuine virtue, especially at a time when the nativism of supposedly beleaguered Anglo-Saxons was on the rise.
Robert Siegel is Moment’s special literary correspondent.
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