The name means “blessed” in Hebrew, Bernard M. Baruch never tired of telling acquaintances. He was a blessed man. Born in 1870, he was the son of a moderately prosperous physician who could provide him with the seed money for his speculations. And the young Baruch enjoyed the best sort of luck and timing: he entered Wall Street following the great depression of 1893-94, when prices were beginning an ascent that would continue almost unabated for the next thirty-five years. By the age of thirty-two he had accumulated a hundred thousand dollars for every year of his life.
There is no known accounting of his later worth, but Baruch himself acknowledged that he was a very rich man—although he insisted that much of what was written about his wealth was fabled. He had made it through the stock market and other means of investments that he conceded were gambles. Indeed, in many undertakings he was a hunch player, but people who knew him best knew that he seldom committed himself without insights that few other speculators possessed. Many people were born with talents, he liked to say; what talent a Fritz Kreisler had with the violin, Baruch had for making money.
And he was blessed to have been born a Jew. Baruch used his heritage to enhance his mystique. Being American in his time meant holding a faith in exceptionalism; an American Jew could double that exceptionalism. He could even make it appear that he had been chosen to enrich himself—Baruch often repeated the story about the time he was prevented from making a disastrous transaction because he had followed his mother’s wishes not to trade on Yom Kippur. Certain Gentiles were always impressed by the good fortune of the people of the Old Testament even if they knew that most Jews were not blessed as was Baruch. But Baruch’s special talent lay in convincing others that his Jewishness bestowed upon him a special role in society. Although he actually eschewed Judaism, Baruch subtly exploited his identity to achieve unusual visibility.
Being a Jew could be an asset for Baruch because he lived in an age of burgeoning liberalism. Americans in the early 20th century made a dogma out of the credo of equal opportunity. Progressives believed that it did not matter to what circumstances a man was born. Just as men should have the opportunity to amass wealth by dint of industry and intelligence, so aspirations should not be restrained by religion. In a material world, how a man worshipped was immaterial. All that inhibited Americans from attaining the ideal of equality of opportunity, progressives believed, was economics: in domestic America the obstruction to opportunity took the form of monopoly; in the world it assumed the shape of traditional imperialism. By ridding the world of monopolists, cartelists, and colonialists, progressives intended to raise a standard by which men and nations could be judged by their talents for creating wealth. Woodrow Wilson articulated this “practical idealism” in his New Freedom campaign for the Presidency in 1912—through which Baruch, in subscribing money, launched his career in national affairs.
In Wilson’s crusade against social discrimination, a Jew like Baruch was as useful as the issue of the eating clubs had been to Wilson while he was president of Princeton University. What better way to demonstrate the efficacy of liberalism than by proclaiming that the abilities of a Jew were more significant than his Jewishness? But it was not Baruch’s talent for making money that alone impressed Wilson; there were other rich Jews including his fund-raiser, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., whom Wilson could have singled out for prominence in his administration. What impressed the President was Baruch’s willingness to employ his money for public causes such as the election and reelection of Wilson and the crusade for American military preparedness nearly two years before Congress declared war. Wilson found in Baruch a businessman who was liberated from mere acquisitiveness, a pecuniary soul who possessed the “enlightened selfishness” Wilson preached for his materialistic spiritualism. Moreover, Baruch absorbed Wilson’s beliefs and regurgitated them with the enthusiasm of an acolyte. Baruch would always be useful to Wilson because of his sincere loyalty to everything the President represented. In return, Wilson raised Baruch from a rich speculator and political fat cat to real public prominence.
In 1916 Wilson made Baruch a member of the Allied Purchasing Commission and the raw-materials expert on the Advisory Commission to the Council on National Defense, positions to which his financial expertise and political advocacy entitled him. When the United States entered World War I, Baruch headed the raw-materials section of the War Industries Board until he became the board’s chairman in March 1918. In that post he effected a consolidation of authority that earned him the sobriquet of “czar” or “dictator” of America’s war industries. Less an administrator than a skillful organizer and publicist, Baruch emerged from the war effort with a fame rivaled only by the Food Administration’s leader, Herbert Hoover.
Following the war he could have been Secretary of the Treasury, but he chose instead to become one of President Wilson’s economic advisers at the Paris Peace Conference. Like Hoover, Baruch was an ambitious Wilsonian; both men knew that the focus of public attention had shifted from Washington to Paris, where the President hoped to orchestrate the peace of the world.
Besides, Baruch needed credentials as an expert statesman on the international scene. Already two ambitions had formed in Baruch’s mind: to use his wealth and influence to raise a Democratic political ally, such as Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, to the Presidency of the United States; and to establish international expertise that would qualify him to become the President’s first minister, the Secretary of State.
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II
Hoover could aspire to be President but Baruch knew he could not. Indeed, even Secretary of State might have been beyond Baruch’s reach. The Wilsonians were liberals, but many of them still disliked Baruch because he was a Jew; others merely feared the electorate was not ready to accept Jews in positions of authority. Baruch’s Jewishness, which gave him an advantage with Wilson, ironically engendered enough controversy in and out of the administration to delimit Baruch’s own aspirations. How could he seek to become Secretary of State when it seemed that so few Americans would tolerate him as chairman of the War Industries Board? As Colonel Edward M. House, Wilson’s closest adviser in 1917-18, succinctly put it, “I do not believe the country will take kindly to having a Hebrew Wall Street speculator given so much power.”
To Baruch’s face few men were willing to declare their own dislike or distrust of him as a Jew. He was a genial and engaging personality who could not possibly offend anyone, if only because he worked so hard at being liked. He was extraordinarily gregarious and charming. Baruch the man was trusted, even while Baruch the Jew was suspect.
Pejorative remarks about Jews were common in Woodrow Wilson’s Washington. A Jew who successfully negotiated a point was apt to be described as having traded well, “true to his race.” Jews were distasteful when they were poor and ambitious, odious when they were rich and ambitious. The young Eleanor Roosevelt, observing the Washington scene during the war while her husband was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, approved of the crusading Louis Brandeis and the genteel Morgenthau family, but these were exceptions. Invited in 1918 to a party for Baruch, she swore she would “rather be hung than be seen” there; still, she went and later reported, “The Jew party [was] appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels, and . . . sable mentioned again.” (In the 1930’s she discovered that Baruch’s money could be put to work for many of her causes and they became warm friends.) A progressive-minded journalist privately characterized Baruch’s wife as “a typical rich bounder of a Jew woman” (Baruch’s wife, Annie Griffen Baruch, was in fact born Episcopalian and raised their children in her church).
But Baruch was such an affable person that most people who knew him made of him an exception and excused his faults by attributing them to his background. Not even Baruch’s staunchest advocate in Washington, President Wilson, rose above that perspective. When Wilson once discussed a position for Baruch in his administration with Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, Daniels reminded him that Baruch was “somewhat vain,” to which Wilson responded, “Did you ever see a Jew who was not?”
In fact anti-Semitism was virulent in the early 1920’s, an era that had passed from the Red Scare of 1919 into the heydey of the Ku Klux Klan, immigration restriction, Protestant fundamentalism and xenophobia, and nativism of numerous varieties. Henry Ford warned Americans through his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to be wary of Baruch because he sought to become “America’s Disraeli.” At least, a friend puckishly wrote Baruch, “it assures to America a better-looking Disraeli than England had.”
To a degree Ford played into Baruch’s hands by making him a victim of bigotry. It almost martyred him and excused him from public activities in which others were obliged to participate. When the columnist Mark Sullivan demanded to know why a man of Baruch’s abilities did not take a leadership role in the Democratic party, Baruch declared he would “if it were not for anti-Semitism.” He hinted that his friendship with a public figure attracted Jew-baiting, and he urged his associates, “when I become a liability, please say so, and I shall become as quiescent as I have been active.” But Baruch enjoyed the public spotlight too much to lower his visibility, except when it was personally advantageous.
The vehicle of his ambition, William G. McAdoo, was probably the popular choice of delegates to the 1920 Democratic convention, but he mysteriously withdrew on the eve of its meeting. McAdoo made up for this in 1924 by carrying his candidacy through to a 103-ballot deadlock with Alfred E. Smith before they both withdrew in favor of a lackluster nominee, John W. Davis. Baruch vowed never again to commit himself publicly to a presidential candidate prior to the Democratic convention.
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Already established as a major financial angel for Democrats during the Republican 1920’s, Baruch shifted to bankrolling candidates for the Senate in Southern and Western states where the primary was usually decisive and the likelihood for retaining power through seniority was high. Senate Democrats showed their gratitude: by 1929 Baruch could call Joe T. Robinson of Arkansas, Pat Harrison of Mississippi, and Key Pittman of Nevada—the Senate Democratic leader and the ranking Democrats on the Finance and Foreign Relations Committees respectively—his personal friends. They, along with Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky and James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, among others, were known in Washington as part of “Bernie’s string.” It is nearly impossible to measure Baruch’s tangible influence, but while Hoover was in the White House the press treated Baruch as the most powerful Democrat in the capital. He was consulted by Democrats on legislative strategy and consulted by Hoover on financial policies. Whatever the truth of his power, the popular perception of his influence built his reputation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was a believer in that reputation. Immediately after Roosevelt won the 1932 nomination in Chicago, Baruch, who had been publicly uncommitted to any candidate, offered the services of his protege, Hugh Johnson, for the Brain Trust; it was an offer that Roosevelt dared not refuse. Roosevelt’s election seemed to assure Baruch of enhanced influence. The New Dealers disliked the more conservative Baruch, but, as Roosevelt patiently explained to one adviser, Rexford Tugwell, Baruch “owned” sixty Congressmen and “that, he said, was power around Washington.” Later in the 1930’s the President explained to Frances Perkins why so much of his time was spent deferring to Baruch: “Baruch can raise rumpuses. He can put things in our paths. He’s got lots of influence on the Congress still. . . . He helps out tremendously in keeping the more wild members of Congress, the Southern members of Congress, kind of down and reconciled. . . . Barney’s a great help in keeping them in line.”
At this critical juncture Roosevelt denied Baruch the one post that might have fulfilled his ambition: Secretary of State. For years Baruch had bar-raged the press with articles and pronouncements on foreign affairs; he had hired John Foster Dulles to help ghostwrite a book under Baruch’s name on the economic questions of the Paris Peace Conference. None of this overcame the widespread opinion among policy-makers that Baruch was a lightweight in foreign affairs. Moreover, Roosevelt himself distrusted Baruch in politics and spread gossip that Baruch used unprincipled speculative tactics to enhance his already considerable wealth. Who would want a Wall Street gambler—and a Jewish one at that—running American foreign policy?
As a consolation prize, Baruch was asked to be a member of the planning group for the World Economic Conference to be held in London in 1933. A disciple of his, George Peek, was appointed head of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and Hugh Johnson was tendered the leadership of the National Recovery Administration. The appointments of his old cronies made it appear that Baruch indirectly controlled both key agencies. Both men, as Baruch anticipated, proved to be politically and administratively inept; they were eased out of the administration in 1934. Still, Roosevelt and Baruch astutely found other means by which they kept their relations sweet.
If the inescapable fact was that Baruch had failed to become “the American Disraeli,” World War II established him as the most visible Jew in American life. A major critic of Roosevelt’s mobilization and stabilization policies in 1940-41, Baruch found himself frozen out of the administration despite over twenty years of advocacy of industrial preparedness for war. He made his “office” a park bench in Lafayette Square across from the White House where the press and dissident officials could easily find him. His suite at the Carlton Hotel, another block away, was known as a headquarters for military officials who used Baruch as a spokesman and lobbyist for their causes. His friends in Congress made him a regular witness at hearings that addressed economic problems. Thus, out of Baruch’s frustration that his advice to President Roosevelt went unheeded, was born the reputation of America’s “Park Bench Statesman.”
In mid-1942, Roosevelt, confronted by a rubber shortage that demanded gasoline rationing and the creation of a synthetic-rubber industry, appointed Baruch to head a blue-ribbon panel consisting of James B. Conant and Karl T. Compton, presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Baruch Rubber Survey Committee effectively publicized the need for rationing. Through the war Baruch continued to operate as an informal liaison, turning down offers to head the Office of Economic Stabilization while operating unofficially as a self-appointed troubleshooter for agency heads who sought his services in their bureaucratic battles. Seldom was his name out of the news, for there were few more skilled publicists than this handsome, silver-haired, six-foot-four-inch erect septuagenarian. It seemed that everyone with a cause sought to enlist him in its behalf; who else was more of an elderly sage and oracle? Opinion polls confirmed what the press suspected, that Baruch’s judgments earned the public trust as much as those of the President. And among the causes seeking to attach itself to the Baruch name was that of Zionism.
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III
Baruch did not invite the attention of Jews by design. He was a cosmopolitan and a secularist who personally considered his Jewishness the least important thing about him while at the same time cultivating his image as—in the words of Judge Joseph Proskauer—“the leading Jew in America.” He had inherited his ambivalence toward Judaism from his parents. His mother, Belle Baruch, a daughter of the Confederacy, had been an observing Jew; his father, Dr. Simon Baruch, an immigrant, believed that he was an American before he was a Jew.
Bernard Baruch was a loving son who kept faith with both parents. He married an Episcopalian, allowed her to raise their three children in her church, and, good cosmopolitan that he was, professed strongly that he would rid the world of bigotry by forsaking his peculiar heritage. Partly out of love for his mother, he still closed his office and attended synagogue on the High Holy Days. But he was an agnostic and regarded any man with strong religious beliefs as either a charlatan or a fool. If he contributed generously to religious causes, he did so because he preferred their voluntary welfare activity to government-run welfare. If he favored Jewish philanthropic causes, he did so as a politician would, to maintain a base of support.
What sort of a Jew, then, was Baruch? A former associate answered the question by exclaiming, “A Jew? He was an anti-Semite.” This was hyperbole, induced by the fact that many of Baruch’s friends were themselves anti-Semites and because he avoided Jews who professed thir Jewishness in public. His Jewish Wall Street business associates were the Guggenheims and Eugene Meyer, Jr. Meyer, it has been written, “felt primarily American,” not at all Jewish, married a Gentile woman whose “qualities could be a passport to a broader, fuller life,” and associated with the German Jews in financial circles who disdained the Eastern European Jews on New York’s Lower East Side. Baruch’s Wall Street milieu also had trepidations about too many Jews concentrated in one seat of power. The investment banker, James P. Warburg, opposed Baruch’s inclusion in the American delegation to the London Economic Conference of 1933; not only did Warburg consider Baruch an unsavory short-seller, but his addition to the group along with Warburg and Henry Morgenthau, Sr. would make it look like “an International Jewish Congress.” Ironically, Baruch himself was so assimilated that he was nearly insensitive to the Jewishness of others unless they called it to his attention.
Baruch’s credo required that everyone forswear his national or religious origins for an American identity. He disdained the “hyphenate” vote in American politics, and he claimed to be an American before being a Jew. He told the pundit Mark Sullivan, “I am never denying, but always stating the fact that I am a full-blooded Jew . . . and I take second place to no one in being a pure American and in my pure Americanism.”
In his mind Americanism excluded bigotry, which he considered partly the product of benighted lower-class minds, best exemplified by the Ku Klux Klan, and partly due to the peculiarities of the victims themselves. (When cartoonists in hate sheets like Ford’s Dearborn Independent caricatured Baruch, he complained that they “depict me as a man with hat in hand . . . as the most ugly and disagreeable Jew that they possibly can.”) Among the higher classes, prejudice took the form of social discrimination, toward which Baruch was ambivalent. He could inquire as to the difference between anti-Semitism in the Harvard Club and that of the Klan and, in the same paragraph, approve the club’s discrimination: “Mind you, I don’t deny the right of any man to exclude from the club anybody he wishes. I do not quarrel with that whether they exclude the person for race, creed, color, fact, or fancy.” Social discrimination by the upper classes was tolerable if it did not infringe upon principles of economic and political opportunity.
Baruch’s faith in Americanism and liberal capitalism put the spirituality of the marketplace above that of any organized religion. But he valued church organizations that mobilized the voluntary welfare resources of the community. Some of his most fervent eulogies of Americanism and capitalism were delivered before Jewish or predominantly Jewish groups. Baruch used an invitation to address the launching of the United Jewish Appeal in 1946 to lecture Jews on why they ought to appreciate the United States. Their country, he said in the early cold war, was confronted with “a great political and philosophical issue—statism versus individualism.” Philanthropies like UJA preserved “the system of personal initiative.” It bothered him that so many Jews from Eastern Europe preferred government welfare services or even went so far as to embrace Communism or socialism. During the heyday of McCarthyism in the 1950’s, Baruch secretly enlisted as a financial backer of the right-wing American Jewish Anti-Communist League. His contributions to the League began in 1953 during the controversy over the pending execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; over the next decade he gave at least $10,000 to it without allowing himself to be publicly identified with the group. Yet he definitely believed that its vigorous anti-Communism ought to be endorsed by American Jews.
By attaining prominence in American public life, Baruch did become something of a Disraeli to his fellow Jews. His accomplishments reflected well upon them. As early as World War I the estimable Jacob Schiff told Baruch, “To me personally the luster you are shedding upon our people is a source of personal satisfaction.” There were then not many Jews in public life with whom other Jews could identify; a young Harry Golden knew when he met Baruch in the early 1920’s that he was “in the presence of a great Jew.” Anti-Semites made Baruch more important to Jews when they used him as an object for their tirades. Similarly, Baruch’s Jewishness was turned to his advantage when Gentiles attributed the wisdom in his political pronouncements to his heritage. Thus, ordinary Americans urged Presidents to follow Baruch’s advice because he sounded so much “like an ancient prophet of Israel”; a New York publisher found Baruch’s wisdom “talmudic.”
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Nothing tested Baruch’s Jewishness as much as Zionism. On the one hand he dared not oppose it lest he appear unsympathetic to a great Jewish cause; on the other hand, his attitude toward it defined his Americanism. An American, he believed, could not be a Zionist. This sharply separated him from American Jews who considered hostility to Zionism tantamount to indifference to the fate of world Jewry.
Baruch always was concerned with the safety and welfare of European Jews, but he sought an American resolution to these concerns. He actually had been a contributor to Zionist organizations during 1914-18 because they were then among the few groups organized to give relief to the multitude of Jews uprooted by World War I. At that time he followed the lead of Jacob Schiff in eschewing the anti-Zionism of certain American Jews, and gave a well-publicized contribution of 10,000 to the Palestine Restoration Fund. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 he told a Polish delegate of his concern with “the Jewish question,” warning him that “the Polish government should take some steps to stop the anti-Semitism” then rampant in that newly recreated country. He rejoiced in the British Balfour Declaration that promised to open Palestine to Jewish immigration, though he surely did not envision a Jewish state there. When Albert Einstein came to America in 1921 to raise funds for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Baruch, who was invited by the scientist to a meeting, responded that he had to be out of town that day but added, “However, may I not come in some other time?” He could not, then, be accused of shunning Zionist causes.
Nevertheless, during the period of the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis and the drive to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, American Zionists could never count upon Baruch to close ranks with them. In general, they doubted his identification with Jewish causes. “I know that Bernie’s an upstanding Jew,” Felix Frankfurter once told Baruch’s long-time friend, Herbert Bayard Swope, “but I sometimes wonder whether he isn’t slightly kidding himself that he is in a different category, say, from Stephen Wise or Julian Mack. Have I ever told you the offhand answer I made when Walter [Lippmann] and I had adjoining desks in Newton Baker’s office, and Walter, resenting the charge that Baker was surrounded by Jews, asked ‘What is a Jew anyhow?’; ‘Let me offer you this, Walter,’ I replied, ‘as a working definition: a Jew is a man whom non-Jews regard as a Jew.’”
Baruch always brought out the self-righteousness in Frankfurter, but it was true enough that Baruch was a Jew because the world defined him as one and because he sometimes valued the heritage. But other Jews could not be certain when it would suit Baruch to be considered one of them. In the words of a Jewish writer during the Holocaust, “From the Jewish point of view, Baruch has been what might be called a sleeper, not denying his Judaism, but making only glancing references to it.”
In the late 1930’s Baruch dabbled heavily in foreign affairs, but his ideas on resettlement of refugees from the Nazis called neither for opening America’s gates to Europe’s persecuted Jews nor for relocating them in Zion. He certainly was not about to add them to the rolls of America’s unemployed during the depression. He helped a few Jewish professionals find homes in America, and he gave aid to his father’s family still living in Europe.
In 1937 it appeared to Baruch that Hitler’s only solution to the Jewish question was “to try to throw three million Jews out of Poland!” and the magnitude of that project did not seem to him to necessitate an immediate American response. Roosevelt convened meetings with Baruch and other advisers on the refugee question in the White House during the spring of 1938, but nothing was forthcoming aside from expressions of official concern. Baruch’s closest political friend then, Senator Jimmy Byrnes, urged the President to seek legislation to increase German immigration quotas as “the best evidence we could give to Hitler of our sincerity” in protesting his racial policies and giving Jews something more than “mere expressions of our sincerity.” But Baruch kept hmself aloof from protests and action which he feared would “only make things worse for Jews over there.” Although he wanted to save the Jews of Europe, he did not want to bring them here. In this he was not alone among prominent American Jews.
Baruch’s solution to the refugee crisis conformed to his Americanism. He advocated the creation of a “United States of Africa” as a haven for all of Europe’s victims of oppression and poverty. Consisting of the Belgian Congo, Portuguese Angola, Kenya, and Tanganyika, the “United States of Africa” would be a British protectorate, thereby adding to Whitehall’s control of central Africa. Baruch pointedly did not advocate a Zionist homeland in Africa, even though most of Europe’s refugees in the late 1930’s were Jewish; his pioneers in Africa would be “all kinds of people [and] not Jews alone.” (It should be observed that this concept of a non-Zionist sanctuary also appealed to presidential counsel Samuel Rosenman, who did not want a “world ghetto” for Jews.)
The scheme was doomed when such right-wing Republicans as Representative Hamilton Fish of New York picked up the plan in an effort to embarrass the White House. Nevertheless, Baruch did not abandon it so easily, and even after World War II he revived the idea of a “United States of Africa” as the most likely way of bringing both liberal capitalism and Europe’s displaced persons to the dark continent.
As Louis Brandeis once commented, Baruch “would be more likely to consider colonization by Jews on some undiscovered planet than Palestine.” Still, since he was one of America’s most prominent Jews, Zionists sought his support by appealing to his conscience. David Ben-Gurion once had the temerity to tell Baruch that as a Jew he was obligated to support the state of Israel; Baruch retorted that he was “more concerned with the Stars and Stripes than the Star of David.” Likewise, Baruch told Chaim Weizmann that he would not help Zionists because “I do not think myself a Jew.” (Weizmann retorted, “Come Armageddon, you will be counted only as a Jew.”)
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Despite this evident hostility to Zionism, Baruch kept Zionists returning to him for potential aid to their cause in the form of influence or contributions. They often had to endure his lectures on how their purposes or methods were in error, but they were shrewd enough to recognize that he would not entirely reject their pleas. Thus, in 1943, after Baruch had given a million dollars to various war relief agencies, Rabbi Stephen Wise appealed to him to earmark a contribution to resettle Jewish refugees in Palestine. Baruch eventually gave Wise a thousand dollars, but not before lecturing him on the importance of succoring refugees “who want to work out their destiny, not segregated, but alongside others working for civilization.”
During the war the Zionists wanted Roosevelt to bring pressure upon the British to ease restrictions upon Jewish immigration to Palestine, but the situation there was complicated by Arab resistance, British ambitions for Near Eastern oil, and State Department reluctance to incur Arab wrath by assisting Zionists. Roosevelt himself was unsympathetic. Before Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud of Saudia Arabia in 1945, Baruch contacted the Zionist publicist Ben Hecht and urged that he “call off further criticisms of President Roosevelt and his administration—until you hear from me again.” He asserted that Roosevelt’s forthcoming trip abroad “will settle the Jewish problems in the Near East to my satisfaction—and yours.” However, Roosevelt’s utterances following the Ibn Saud meeting were so pro-Arab as to alienate both the Zionists and Baruch. Hecht then called Baruch to inform him that the moratorium on Zionist agitation was ended. Baruch responded, “I have had a two-hour talk with President Roosevelt about the Jews and the Jewish problem. I have spoken also to Governor Dewey on the same subject. I can only tell you as a result of these talks that, despite my having been a lifelong Democrat, I would rather trust my American Jewishness in Mr. Dewey’s hands than in Mr. Roosevelt’s.”
In early 1946 Baruch’s sole acknowledgment of Europe’s Jewish remnant was a declaration that “a place must be found for all displaced peoples of every religion and race who cry out from hunger and from despair of their future.” He did not then suggest a place—or agree with the Zionists on Palestine. Even so, he was not about to ignore an idea that was making history without him. He advised the Zionist leader Abba Hillel Silver that if he wanted Washington’s support for a Jewish homeland he would have to “get the Jews of Brooklyn and the Bronx muttering in their beards” against a Truman administration that vacillated in its Near East policy. Democratic setbacks in 1946 elections, along with Zionist petitions in behalf of free Jewish migration to Palestine, provided the sort of “mutterings” that showed Jews were prepared to fight for a homeland. Baruch was impressed. Once the Zionists had gone pleading to the great Baruch; now it was he who went to Ben Hecht to declare, “I’m on your side. . . . The only way the Jews will ever get anything is by fighting for it. I’d like you to think of me as one of your Jewish fighters in the tall grass with a long gun. I’ve always done my best work that way, out of sight.”
Although it was true that he certainly had a talent and a record for effective lobbying in the corridors of Washington, Baruch seldom could resist using his prestige as America’s oracular elder statesman, and he knew that it would be most useful then to Jewry. “As an American and, after that, as a Jew—I have been shocked to the heart by the treatment accorded the pre-war and postwar refugees, particularly the Jews,” he told an audience in late 1946. “I am not a political Zionist. But. . . I deplore and condemn the shilly-shallying and weathervaning of the British and, too, the American government regarding the right of haven that was to be accorded these unfortunates under the Balfour Declaration.”
Baruch’s outrage was sincere enough, as was his concern for refugees. But his public condemnation was mostly targeted against the Labor government in Britain that had inherited the protectorate in Palestine. In part Baruch was employing the issue of Palestine as an ideological weapon. The Laborites, who in 1945 had ousted the Conservative government of Winston Churchill, Baruch’s close friend since World War I, were bent upon nationalization of British industries and instituting other plans which Baruch categorized as a pattern of worldwide “totalization.” He was never hesitant to chastise Britain’s socialist leadership. And his espousal of refugee havens, whether in Zionist Palestine or his never-wholly-abandoned “United States of Africa,” was also intended to bring “civilization”—i.e., capitalism—to undeveloped areas of the world. Finally, such refugee havens might serve as a positive lure for “those left behind the Iron Curtain.”
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When the United Nations partitioned Palestine and guaranteed the establishment of a Jewish state, Rabbi Silver acclaimed Baruch one of “the leaders of American public opinion who have given their support to this noble cause.” Baruch increasingly lived up to Silver’s praise. “I know the arguments, pro and con, for Palestine,” he told an old friend. “The arguments now are of no avail because the Rubicon has been crossed.” Baruch did not mind being on the losing side of a controversy over economic policy when he was right, but on social and political issues he was apt to land eventually on the winning side—lest he cease to be a leader of public opinion. Impressed by the Zionists’ determination and their ability to muster political support, he privately warned Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, who was afraid of alienating Arab oil producers, that the Democrats would lose politically if they played the British game of arming Arabs to crush the Jews in Palestine. Baruch also used his influence with Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who owed him political debts, to gain United States backing for extending Israeli territory to the Negev desert despite British objections.
So moved was Silver by Baruch’s 1948 activities in behalf of Zionism that he sought to make the elder statesman UJA’s honorary chairman; but Baruch, never one to accept such use of his name by any organization, declined on the ostensible grounds that he could “be of more help oh the outside.” The Israelis and their American friends sought him out for lobbying in behalf of bills to aid the fledgling government, but Baruch resisted their blandishments. American Jews were told that Baruch considered Israel just another foreign government.
His belated assistance to the Zionist cause had been predicated upon humanitarian sympathy for the refugees and an expedient willingness to hector British socialists. In the 1950’s, however, he partially reversed himself as he began to claim that he had been a long-time supporter of Israel, which he now praised as “the greatest spiritual adventure for 2,000 years.” But he never wholeheartedly succumbed to the American Jewish community’s enthusiasm for Israel. Disliking the sectarianism of Jews, he considered himself an enlightened universal humanist. To the end of his days “the leading Jew in America” would eschew direct public identification with most Jewish causes.
