In recent weeks, notable figures on the right have tried to either mainstream anti-Semitism or look away. Many conservatives and Christians find themselves put to the test, no longer able to ignore the problem metastasizing before them. Nearly a century ago, in a small upstate New York factory town, Americans faced a similar test—and passed. That story is worth revisiting today.

On Saturday, September 22, 1928, four-year-old Barbara Griffiths disappeared in Massena, New York, a rural factory town along the St. Lawrence River, which divides America and Canada. Frantic search parties of police, firefighters, and townspeople scoured the woods, fields, and streets, peering through storefront windows looking for Barbara.

As day gave way to night, fear gave way to speculation and scapegoating when one Massena resident told law enforcement that Jews were rumored to kidnap and ritually sacrifice children in the region that the resident had immigrated from. The blood libel, an ancient pagan and Christian pretext for violence against Jews, had come to America.

The blood libel, the charge that Jews kidnap, kill, and eat non-Jews, was first documented in the first century. The charge of ritual cannibalism was also made against early Christians. The blood libel resurfaced in the Middle Ages and has since been used as a pretext for Jewish persecution. The week Barbara disappeared, a New York Times headline noted “Anti-Jewish Agitation” in Europe over “Ritual Murder Rumors.”

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Barbara’s disappearance came during what was perhaps the most contentious and consequential presidential campaign since the Civil War. Two days earlier, New York Governor Al Smith, the Democratic presidential nominee, witnessed firsthand the burning crosses of the Ku Klux Klan, in protest of Smith’s own nomination as the first Catholic candidate. Smith’s candidacy, and his Jewish advisers, fed Anglo-Protestant fears that America was being replaced by Catholics and Jews who, as Walter Russell Mead has noted, brought “communitarian social values very much at odds with the individualism of Anglo-Saxon culture.”

Immigration, the Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution had recast America from the rural, agrarian, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant country Tocqueville witnessed into an increasingly urban, industrialized, and ethnically diverse nation. By 1920, America was more urban than rural for the first time. Between 1880 and 1920, the population doubled to 106 million as 20 million mostly Catholic and Jewish immigrants arrived in the “Great Wave.”

In the early 1920s, however, Congress halted most immigration through legislation. The House Committee on Immigration included a report from senior State Department officials who said that Jews should be denied entry to America because they were “unassimilable,” “abnormally twisted,” and “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.” Such views were not merely held but safe to utter in polite circles.

At the same time, “scientific” racial theories were popular among Anglo-Protestant elites. These ideas spread rapidly in the golden age of print media. Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, which published the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, rivaled the New York Times in circulation.

Even the Ku Klux Klan found respectability in the 1920s. Four million people, 1 in 25 Americans, were members: lawyers, businessmen, politicians, journalists, and academics. Millions more were sympathetic. The resurgent Klan, sociologist Digby Baltzell wrote, was primarily “a Protestant crusade against the un-Americanism of Catholics and Jews.”

Massena was in many ways America in microcosm. A few hundred Anglo Protestants in 1875, Massena after the Great Wave and industrialization grew to 10,000 people—still a rural town but with a sizeable factory that employed hundreds. Many workers were so-called New Immigrants, a contemporary term that distinguished them from the “Old,” British immigrants, and later “white ethnics,” and still later just “ethnics”: Greek Orthodox Christians, Catholics from Poland, Italy, and neighboring Quebec, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, and others.

Massena’s demography was typical for small factory towns in rural upstate New York, some of which had witnessed violent clashes between the Klan and Catholics after Smith’s nomination. Catholic immigrants in one upstate town, many Italian and Irish employees of the Erie Railroad, clashed with the Klan after the Klan stoned a Catholic convent.

This was the America into which Barbara Griffiths disappeared in 1928.

The search continued through the night, into the next morning and throughout that Sunday afternoon. Sundown marked the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish year. The source who “tipped” off police about the blood libel apparently alleged that children were taken around Jewish holy days.

That source was most likely a Greek Orthodox or Quebecois Catholic immigrant, the only two communities in which the blood libel was popularly spread. As historian Edward Berenson noted in The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town, the Klan would’ve eagerly seized upon the blood libel had they known it but never did so prior to 1928.

The Klan was present and active in Massena, as it was across much of America in the 1920s, having undergone a resurgence after an American Jew, Leo Frank, was accused and convicted on specious evidence of murdering a girl in his factory in Atlanta in 1913. A Georgia mob, fearing that Frank might be pardoned, stormed the jail where he was held and lynched him in 1915. However, as many have noted, even though the details of the Frank case might have invited the blood libel, it wasn’t alleged: In all likelihood, Frank’s accusers were unfamiliar with it.

Frank’s murder was the event that reinvigorated the Klan in America. The ringleaders of Frank’s lynching, many prominent officials among them, met at Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, burned a cross, and proclaimed the rebirth of the Klan, which quickly spread across America.

Six years later, in 1921, Father James Coyle, a Catholic priest, was shot and killed by Edwin Roscoe Stephenson, a Protestant minister and Klansman. Coyle had married Stephenson’s daughter to a Puerto Rican hours earlier in a Catholic ceremony. That murder trial, like Leo Frank’s, brought national attention, but no justice. Stephenson’s lead defense attorney was a Klan member, as were many jurors and others in the courtroom. Stephenson left the courtroom a free man. His lawyer, Hugo Black, was later nominated to the Supreme Court by Franklin Roosevelt.

That same year, Irish journalist Phillip Graves exposed the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a Russian forgery. The Protocols, which warned of a global Jewish conspiracy, had plagiarized the fiction of author Maurice Joly. Nevertheless, the Protocols spread across the world. Nazis cited the Protocols in German textbooks, as did other countries. In America,  as mentioned, Henry Ford published the Protocols in his Dearborn Independent.

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Global and national events made the conditions in Massena ripe for anti-Semitic violence after Barbara went missing and the blood libel was alleged. Yet the outcome in Massena was different—perhaps exceptional in two millennia of blood libels.

The day Barbara went missing, law enforcement questioned at least two members of Massena’s Jewish community, one of whom was mentally impaired. The next day, they visited Rabbi Berel Brennglass at Adath Israel synagogue. The rabbi told them it was a holy day and that he would meet them at city hall. By the time he reached city hall, he was eager to confront the charge.

Taking his seat across from the mayor and the patrolman, he flipped the inquisition on his inquisitors, shaming them for entertaining a ritual murder charge in America without evidence. The men backpedaled, apologized, and blamed their source, whom they refused to reveal. After rebuking them, Rabbi Brennglass stood, informed them he was returning to his synagogue to prepare for Yom Kippur, and left without objection, a free man.

Around that time, Barbara Griffiths was discovered alive and unharmed near her home, having gotten lost in the woods and fallen asleep the day before. Her discovery concluded the search. Now, however, the mayor and patrolmen were under scrutiny: Al Smith, returning to New York with the image of burning crosses fresh in his mind’s eye, was not in a forgiving mood.

On September 20, 1928, two days before Barbara Griffiths went missing, Smith had traveled to Oklahoma, a rural Protestant stronghold, to respond to the many anti-Catholic sentiments and smears around the country, including Democrat strongholds. Prominent Protestant scholars argued in an otherwise respected journal that Catholics were unfit for high office due to their “peculiar allegiance” to the pope. Not one to dodge a fight, Smith ventured south to respond.

As Smith’s campaign train crossed the Great Plains, its passengers saw a horizon illumined by burning crosses. Burning crosses had become a fixture of the American landscape since Smith’s nomination, not only in the South. Smith was deeply shaken by the experience.

In his Oklahoma City speech, Smith defended his record and condemned the Klan, saying there was “no greater mockery in this world today than the burning of the Cross.” But his speech did little to prevent white Southerners from doing the unthinkable: voting Republican, the party of the hated Abraham Lincoln. Such was the contempt for Smith and what he represented. Roosevelt, a Yankee Protestant, would win most of those whites back in 1932.

Smith ordered an immediate investigation upon his return to Albany. The mayor and patrolman were then brought before a panel of inquiry, though both had already apologized in person and in writing to Rabbi Brennglass. (The mayor apologized a second time, after his first attempt was deemed inadequate.)

The patrolman was suspended for “conduct unbecoming.” Rabbi Stephen Wise, a friend of Smith’s, was actively involved and speculated that the officer, a Catholic, had been duped by local officials in the Klan into believing the ritual murder claim, though Berenson found no evidence for this. The mayor refused to resign, pointing the finger at underlings and sources who had misled him.

The Massena blood libel is often cited as a cautionary tale: It could happen here. But it should be remembered for what didn’t happen. It is rare if not unique in Jewish history. The rabbi not only scolded officials and left mid-interrogation, but he did so while the child in question was still missing. In the long history of the blood libel, Massena may be exceptional.

Massena’s Jewish community, though initially alarmed for their safety and outraged at the accusation, returned to their lives. Some said later that they’d scarcely been aware of the accusation and felt no anti-Semitism, though a few said they sensed suspicion from neighbors. Like the rest of America, it was probably a mixed bag.

Digby Baltzell called the 1920s “the Anglo-Saxon decade,” a time when America’s White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs (an acronym he popularized), reasserted their dominion over institutions, largely excluding non-WASPs from public administration, academia, business, and finance. In his essay “The Revenge of the Yankees,” Michael Lind observed, “While there were some important Jewish financiers, Jews along with Catholics were kept out of many snobbish Wall Street firms until well after World War II.”

In the 1930s, the Klan lost respectability, influence, and numbers. But the Depression was also marked by the anti-Semitic tirades of Father Charles Coughlin, “the radio priest,” whose show was heard by 1 in 4 Americans at the height of his popularity—numbers Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens can only regard with envy. Whatever harm Coughlin might’ve done was doubtless cured by the experience of American Catholics who fought in World War II.

America’s current racial and religious challenges are less serious than those of a century ago, but there are similarities: anti-immigration sentiments, fears of replacement, and conspiracies about Jewish power. Similar to the situation in America a century ago, anti-Semitism can be found today among both those born in the U.S. and immigrants—on podcasts and social media, however, instead of radio and print media.

By contrast, the New York Times, critical of the blood libel a century ago, routinely publishes claims about Israel that are often discredited. Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent is gone, but his charitable foundation funds anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist groups. The Protocols, meanwhile, are accessed by millions online and in textbooks worldwide.

Instances of anti-Semitic violence and rhetoric have skyrocketed. Those places now most plagued by anti-Semitic violence—coastal cities and elite campuses—have long since been at odds with the rest of America. Polling data consistently show that Americans support Israel and view the Jewish people favorably, even if young people are increasingly hostile to both. And, unsurprisingly, youth on the left and right who share anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist views also tend to be anti-American. How much of this is caused by their shared experience of life through technology, online encounters, impersonal and disembodied, we can only guess. More human contact and experience offline might help.

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Last year I traveled to Massena. The old towns along the St. Lawrence feel like New England and nearly are: walls of fieldstone pulled by hand from soil where corn and wheat sway in an August breeze; alluvial banks that fall into the river. Across the river is Quebec. There’s the occasional derelict barn or factory, but there are many more well-loved historic homes and active farms and businesses, including Massena’s factory, an Alcoa plant, the world’s oldest continuously operating smelter.

The redbrick Greek Revival that was once Adath Israel Synagogue is long in disuse, its Star of David removed. The decline of Massena’s small Jewish community followed the pattern of rural upstate towns and much of rural America, where “brain drain” and economic decline prompted young people, especially college graduates, to pursue better opportunities in big cities, often out of state.

When the 1928 incident comes up, there’s the familiar sense of shame one observes when a family name or a place is widely known for a single infamous incident. No one seems able to find the words to describe what happened. It’s as if they’re searching for the term “blood libel” but can’t recall it or don’t know how to define it—which most Americans and most Christians doubtless can’t. Others haven’t even heard about what happened in 1928.

Maybe if the residents of Massena knew the broader history of the blood libel, of two millennia of persecution and bloodshed, they might reflect with gratitude and perhaps a little pride that their ancestors forged a different history. The people of Massena also chose a history different from that of Atlanta and Birmingham in the last century, where officials accommodated the murder of the innocent and let the murderers walk free.

Massena’s most embarrassing episode—the momentary indulgence of a weak mayor and gullible officer—still compares favorably with the conduct of many elite universities and state and city governments since 2023, where contemporary blood libels are not merely countenanced but encouraged. In Massena, the ancient blood libel failed, gaining no traction in the decades that followed, at least in America, among non-elites.

If Massena had little memory of the blood libel incident, Barbara Griffiths had still less. She lived a long life in the region where she grew up, graduating from St. Lawrence University with a degree in physics in 1947, marrying in Massena the following year, and passing away in 2019 at age 94.

Al Smith was defeated in a landslide just over a month after Barbara was found. He was succeeded as governor by Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1932, borrowed (with little attribution) Smith’s policies—which became the New Deal—as well as his top adviser, Belle Moskowitz. The political coalition of Catholics, blacks, and Jews that Smith forged remained the Democratic base for decades. But Smith never recovered from his defeat or his encounter with the Klan, which left his idealized sense of America shaken for the remainder of his life.

José Correia da Serra may have been the first to observe that a special providence guides children and America, though various attributions abound. Whatever the aphorism’s origin or wisdom, Massena and America were “twice blessed” on Yom Kippur 1928: There was no violence, and Barbara was found alive.

In 1928, an upstate New York town rejected the blood libel. It’s impossible to know whether American history might’ve gone differently had they embraced it. As it is, no mobs formed, no one was killed, and a rabbi walked home to prepare for Yom Kippur. Nearly a century later, as old hatreds find new voices and new platforms, it’s worth recalling what happened—and didn’t happen—in Massena.

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