It is a natural tendency to try to find some single key for the understanding of complex problems, and this tendency is perhaps especially understandable when the problem is the urgent and ugly one of anti-Semitism and racial prejudice. One of the more popular theses of our day is that which explains prejudice as an exploitative tool of capitalism; Oscar Handlin here subjects this economic view to appraisal, through a critical examination of three recent books which project and endeavor to document the theory. The best-known of the three is Carey McWilliams’ widely-discussed A Mask for Privilege (Boston; Little, Brown, and Company, 1948); the others, of comparable significance, are: Conception Matérialiste de la Question Juive, by A. Léon (Paris, Editions Pionniers, 1946) and Caste, Class, and Race by Oliver Cromwell Cox (New York, Doubleday, 1948).
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In the brief period of the past quarter-century we have seen a tragic succession of horrors—Smyrna to Auschwitz to Nagasaki—challenge the essential brotherhood of all people, and the assumption, upon which modem civilization rests, that personal dignity is inherent in the condition of human beings.
We have learned much about the role of race hatred in these brutal assaults upon our common heritage, and we have accumulated much information concerning the nature and effect of the various divisive doctrines that have attempted to create different categories of men. Yet, despite all the attention lavished on the problem by social scientists, we are still far from any satisfactory estimate of the weight of the various factors involved in the racist complex.
Serious students have approached this subject by three different avenues. Some have treated racism as a system of ideas, and have tried to discover the origin and to trace the formal development of such ideas in diverse times and places. Such studies have the virtue of simplicity and definiteness. Their shortcomings result from the fact that racism is important not so much for the manner in which it is expressed intellectually, as for the impulses which generate it. As philosophy, as history, as sociology, the works of Gobineau, Rosenberg, Chamberlain, and Stoddard have little significance. On the other hand, they are immensely valuable as reflections of deep social trends.
Another group of investigators has taken as its point of departure an analysis of the types of personality susceptible to racist influences. There have been very useful examinations of the character structure of individuals, of the channels through which racist conceptions are acquired, and of the agencies through which prejudice is generated and spread. But such studies are enlightening only within narrow limits. For personality is itself conditioned by social forces; in the last analysis, the search for understanding must reach into the broad social context within which personality is shaped.
Accordingly, a third approach concentrates upon the nature of the background against which prejudice develops, and seeks the causes of prejudice in the structure of society. Some analysts of the problem, from this point of view, proceed under the supposition that the condition is organic—that is, an unavoidable aspect of the harmonious operation of the social system. W. Lloyd Warner, Allison Davis, and John Dollard, for instance, describe the American South in terms of a series of necessary adjustments that involve prejudice but that enable Negroes and whites to live together. Other writers who also concentrate upon the background nevertheless regard prejudice as pathological, a manifestation of some failing in the social system.
Three recent books present striking statements of this conception of group prejudice as a social disease. Two of these volumes deal with the Jews, the other with the Negroes. From the point of view of subject matter, then, they offer an opportunity for significant comparison, since prejudice against Jews is generally believed to involve cultural or national differentiations, whereas prejudice against Negroes is conceived of as involving physical or racial differentiations. In addition, the three have in common an identical conception of the nature of the disease; all find it related to exploitation in Western capitalist society.
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Perhaps more than any other writer, Carey McWilliams has made popular the cause of America’s “minorities” and has exposed the dangers that lie in all the manifestations of prejudice. He enjoys a quick and easy pen; he has a knack for assimilating scholarly opinions and making them readable; and he has strong opinions—on the whole, good ones.
This work is, however, one of his weaker efforts. It labors under the burden of an untenable thesis and is all too often careless in matters of detail.
The key to the book is its title. For Mr. McWilliams, anti-Semitism in the United States has been always a “mask for privilege.” The development of industrialism between 860 and 1877 left patent injustices in the structure of American society. By the latter year, “the industrial bourgeoisie had triumphed.” Once triumphant, “the industrial tycoons discovered that they could not function within the framework of the social and political ideals of the early Republic. To insure their triumph, a new social order had to be established.” That new order involved the creation of a status system to protect the position of the privileged classes. “To trick a freedom-loving people into accepting industrial regimentation in the name of democracy, the tycoons of the period needed a diversionary issue.” They therefore devised a counter-tradition to oppose the democratic tradition, and they based that counter-tradition on the myth of anti-Semitism, first applying it in the social, then in the economic, and finally, in recent times, in the political sphere. A pattern of exclusion, first established in resorts, clubs, and colleges, restricts the opportunities open to Jews and drives them into marginal occupations. As capitalism approaches its crisis, concentration in undesirable trades leaves the Jews in an exposed position, increasingly open to attack by groups like the Columbians.
To prove his position, McWilliams must argue that a single line of development generated anti-Semitism in the United States. He therefore assumes throughout that all anti-Semitic forces grew up indigenously within the country. On the level of ideology, he fails to treat the influence of the works of Gobineau, Lapouge, Drumont, and Chamberlain. On the practical level, he does not mention the impact of German government propaganda in the 1930’s through such agencies as the Friends of New Germany, the German-American Bund, and George Sylvester Viereck.
Again, since he must attribute the whole to the activities of the tycoons, he consistently slurs over the influence of liberal thinkers tainted with anti-Semitic ideas. Yet in the total perspective, Edward A. Ross and John R. Commons, who meant well but who popularized racist conceptions, probably had a wider effect than did outright champions of “Aryanism” like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Bolstered by the prestige of academic position, of affiliation with worthy causes, and of good intentions, the books of the liberals were doubly dangerous because they did not carry the poison labels of the openly biased.
Similarly, Mr. McWilliams disregards the part played by organized farmers and laborers. There is not a reference to the fact that populist hatred of Wall Street sometimes fell into the anti-Semitic pattern. There is no recognition of the fact that trade unions also adopted exclusionist practices. No more vicious racist ideas were ever expressed than those spewed out by Samuel Gompers in the AFL campaign against the Chinese. If these same ideas were ultimately used against the Jews, that only illustrates further the complexity of the subject and the dangers of over-simplification.
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The most misleading implications of A Mask for Privilege arise from the proposition that the position of the Jews as objects of prejudice is unique in American society. McWilliams does not make clear, for example, that the prejudiced comments he quotes at one point (page 68) were directed against all new immigrants and not only against Jews. One would never learn from his book that Americans of Irish descent experience the same difficulties as Jews in penetrating the elite social clubs, that the sons of Italian parents also face quota barriers when they seek admission to medical and dental schools, and that the Ku Klux Klan between 1920 and 1928 was decidedly more hostile to Catholics than to Jews. It may offer no consolation to anyone, but it must certainly influence one’s estimate of the problem to realize that, until the 930’s, there was no anti-Semitic movement in the United States that was not also anti-Catholic.
To support the contention that the Jews occupy a unique position, McWilliams argues that they have been crowded, by prejudice, into a marginal and insecure role in the American economy: they are excessively concentrated in the professional and white-collar occupations; they engage in consumption and in distribution rather than in basic production, in light rather than in heavy industry. He sees the anomalous position of the Jews as basically due to their forced adjustment to exclusion from the more desirable places in the economy. Anti-Semitic bias, he points out, “more than any other single factor . . . has brought about the peculiar distribution of Jews on the checkerboard of our economic system.”
This line of reasoning rests upon two erroneous suppositions, first, that Jews could get the most desirable places if they were not thus handicapped, and second, that the conception of what are the most desirable places is the same among all people. To McWilliams the fact that only 33 of the 420 directors of New York banks are Jews, that only three of the mass-circulation magazines are owned by them, and that in “not a single sector of the heavy industry front” does their influence “amount to dominance or control” is evidence of discrimination. But it could just as well—or just as badly—be argued, in view of the recency of Jewish settlement and in view of the poverty of the Jews when they arrived, that to produce almost ten per cent of the bank directors in the financial capital of the nation is evidence of a lack of discrimination. It is certainly relevant to point out that the representation in banking and in heavy industry of other groups descended from recent immigrants is no larger.
Conclusive evidence on this point comes from the situation in agriculture. The American farm is individually owned. Prejudice can bar from this occupation no one who has the capital; and for more than half a century a melancholy succession of unsuccessful organizations have stood ready to provide Jews with the capital. If Jews have not become tillers of the soil in America, it is not because they could not but because they would not. Does this not indicate that such groups have their own occupational preferences?
Finally, McWilliams depends entirely upon the power of coincidence to explain the beginnings of anti-Semitism, and he endows the American capitalists with amazing foresight in relating social to economic discrimination. A prominent Jewish banker was excluded from a Saratoga hotel in 1877, the year of the triumph of the industrial bourgeoisie. That this “first overt manifestation of anti-Semitism in the United States took place in 1877 is to be explained,” McWilliams holds, “in terms of the corrosion which the industrial revolution had brought about in the American scheme of values.” That American values were so instantly and automatically corroded is itself rather far-fetched. More important, this explanation implies that those who excluded Seligman envisaged and consciously planned the subsequent development of the status system and of the pattern of economic discrimination that emerged thirty years later. This rational conspiracy, simple and all-embracing, is dubious on the face of it and does not square with the character of American capitalists at the turn of the century. But without such a conspiracy there is a fatal gap in McWilliams’ argument.
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The idea of economic marginality, applied in A Mask for Privilege to the American scene, was earlier applied by some thinkers to the role of the Jews in the European economy. Dov Ber Borochov, for one, believed that a normal distribution of occupations took the form of a pyramid, with the great mass of the population concentrated in agriculture and in the heavy industries, and tapering off in numbers through distribution, light industry, trade, and the professions. In the case of the Jews, the pyramid was reversed, and their difficulties were ascribed to the fact that they lacked the security of a proper base in the productive system. This theory accounted for the great effort by progressive Jewish leadership to “productivize” the Jews of Eastern Europe, and was also at the root of certain elements of Zionist ideology.
The question of how and why this situation came to exist has usually been skirted. McWilliams, too, passes the question by with the comment that it is interesting but irrelevant. But the importance of the problem did not escape the attention of a young Polish Jew who spent most of his short life in Belgium. As a member of Hashomer Hatzair—a left-wing Zionist group—Abram Léon absorbed Borochov’s interpretation of the Jewish situation, and his awareness of the problem must certainly have been sharpened during the war, when he became a member of the section of the anti-German underground allied with the Fourth International. Actively engaged in the resistance movement, he nevertheless found time to compose a shrewd analysis of the historical sources of the Jewish economic position, and had just about finished this book when he was arrested. In Auschwitz, at the age of 26, he met the fate of millions of his fellows.
Léon’s approach is that of the orthodox Marxist (by this, I do not mean to dismiss, but only to identify his point of view). His analysis, despite errors of detail, is refreshingly lucid and sensible, and it offers us the opportunity to examine a solid statement of the materialistic interpretation of the Jewish question.
Running through two and a half millenia of the Jewish past, Léon finds two points of crisis in the secular history of that people. The first crisis occurred at the point when the economy of the Roman empire broke down and gave way to the kind of natural economy associated in Western Europe with feudalism, a mode of production characterized by self-sufficient agriculture and the absence of commerce. This transformation coincided with the emergence, as state religions, first of Christianity and then of Islam. Léon believes that these developments set in motion a selective process that froze the Jews in commerce; that is, the settled Jewish farmers tended to be absorbed by the dominant creeds, and only those continued to adhere to Judaism who had the relative independence of the trader’s status.
At this stage, Léon continues, a rigid and exceptional occupational pattern was fixed upon the Jews. In the long period until the 13th century, while the whole of Europe lived by agriculture, the Jews engaged in itinerant trade. And since all those with whom the Jews dealt were self-sufficient, that commerce of necessity centered largely on the importation of luxuries and catered to the tastes of the nobility, who alone had the surpluses to pay for them. Of necessity also, the Jews engaged in usury to finance the feudal lords in the frequent intervals when the manors failed to produce sufficient surplus. Naturally, the status of the Jews was high and they enjoyed the protection of the highly-placed.
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This relatively pleasant situation began to change in the era of the Crusades. The natural economy disintegrated as exchange developed. But now commerce and mercantile capital were directly connected with production; the objects of trade were no longer exotic luxuries, but the products of industry. (The famous Italian banking houses, for instance, established themselves in the woolen business.)
The Jewish merchants, unable to enter the new commerce, were gradually excluded from all trade. Consequently they were compelled to live by usury and by its ancillary occupations, pawnbrokering and dealing in secondhand goods. In this role they battened off the nobility and off the townspeople who ultimately became their bitter enemies. For a time the sovereign, who profited by extorting the wealth of his subjects through the Jews, offered some protection. But ultimately the hostility of the new middle class and the gentry led to harsh measures, to the growth of the ghetto, and finally to exclusion. A remnant of Jews saved themselves only by migrating eastward to Poland and Bohemia, less-developed regions still in the natural economy stage.
Thereafter the Jews hung on in the West only on a very marginal basis until the end of the 8th century, when emancipation loosed the old restrictions and assimilative forces began steadily to absorb the new citizens into the sprouting national states. But at that very moment the position of the Eastern Jews, which had been quite favorable until then, began to deteriorate through the workings of the same forces which had operated in the West several centuries earlier. In Poland and in Russia, a new middle class rising from the disintegration of the old economy was jealous of the place of the Jews in commerce and in the professions. Competition for status led to political restrictions upon the Jews and to emigration to France, Germany, and England, which only worsened the position of their co-religionists in the West.
At this point the internal contradictions of capitalism deprive the Jews, a marginal group at best, of the last vestiges of security. Excluded from the cartels of the great capitalists, the Jews are driven into speculation, a development which offers the monopolists an opportunity to divert the discontent of the masses to the Jews alone. Theorists begin to distinguish between “bad” (speculative) capital and “useful” (productive) capital, terms which Nazi economists eventually translate into parasitic-Jewish and productive-national. Ultimately the masses fall subject to a new ideology which identifies speculative capitalism with Judaism, and contrasts it with a planned national socialist economy, which is really war capitalism. Under the successive blows of persecution in the name of this ideology, the Jews are helpless and take refuge in a nationalism of their own.
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By this survey Léon attempts to demonstrate that the Jewish question is the outcome of an identification of the Jewish group, through definite historical circumstances, with certain limited occupations which the rest of the society finds inferior or degrading or hostile. The questions raised in specific form by Léon with reference to the Jews, are essentially the same as those treated by Oliver Cromwell Cox in a more general way: basically, both men are concerned with the phenomena of caste, class, and race, and of the relationships between them. Unfortunately, Mr. Cox’s enormously prolix volume, winner of the George Washington Carver award, falls far short of its goal.
The book is cluttered up with the deceptive paraphernalia of scholarship. But through it runs a very simple thesis, which must be understood before the mazes of the argument can be unravelled. The following quotations will make clear the author’s point of view and will also throw light upon his methods. In a discussion of the modern state, Cox writes: “From the standpoint of degrees of development of democracy in the three great nations of the world . . . the United States is probably most backward and Russia farthest advanced.” Of the New Deal, he writes: “Most of what [Franklin Roosevelt] said and did was really democratic and consequently socialistic or communistic.”
These sentences illustrate Cox’s peculiar use of language; words are divorced from their usual meanings and endowed with esoteric identities known only to the author. In the fantastic sequences of seeming inaccuracies it is hard to differentiate between what is only double talk and what is really error of fact. In the following mélange, the reader may decide for himself: The Hindus “never attained a conception of nationality.” There is only one political party in the United States “with two factions: Republicans and Democrats.” Mercantilism is state capitalism. A ruling class is always intolerant. “Businessmen constitute our ruling class.” Democracy “is in fact communism.” De Tocqueville was an advocate of democracy. “The bourgeoisie is unalterably opposed to democracy.” Russia is the only foe of fascism; most respectable Americans are fascists; southern poor whites are not hostile to the Negro; the late Senator Bilbo was a spokesman of capitalism. And no previous scholars revealed these truths because their “bread and butter” depended upon “avoiding the study of contemporary class conflict.”
Beyond these semantic diversions lies the central thesis: Cox views racial antagonism as one of the fundamental traits of the class struggle within the capitalist system. Prejudice is, to his mind, an attitude built up by the capitalists to keep control over the proletariat they exploit.
The point is made in a long, tortuous argument complicated by Mr. Cox’s difficulty in defining race in such a way as to take in the Negroes in the United States and not much more. What finally emerges, however, is somewhat broader than that. For if a race is “any group of people that is generally believed to be, and generally accepted as, a race in any given area of ethnic competition,” then the Chinese in California, the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Italians in Australia, the Mexicans in Texas, and the French-Canadians in Maine are also races.
But many of the groups just named found their most prejudiced persecutors not among the capitalists. Cox therefore must reason that any antagonisms not inspired by the capitalists, despite his definition, are not really race conflicts. He disposes thus of the anti-Oriental movement on the Pacific coast, which—inconveniently—was led by workingmen, indeed by the trade unions. Likewise, the Jews who faced hostility even before the rise of capitalism are, he says, never victims of race prejudice, only of intolerance.
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Similarly, to demonstrate that racial antagonism cannot exist without capitalism, a long section of the book is devoted to demolishing the thesis that the caste system of India was a product of pre-capitalist color prejudices. Cox’s refutation is convincing, although his own explanation of the causes is open to question. At the same time he seizes the occasion to lay a basis for comparison between the idyllic Hindus and the horrid capitalists. He manages, for example, to overlook the terrible punishments meted out to violators of the caste laws and thus finds no violence in the caste system; in his view, the depressed portions of society, by persuasion, happily grant privileges to their superiors. Later this description of India serves also as the point of departure for an unjustified attack upon Gunnar Myrdal, who uses the term caste in quite another sense.
Having tied race prejudice to Western capitalism, Cox proceeds to show, by another ingenious exercise in terminology, that prejudice is an aspect of the class struggle inherent in capitalism. He creates an entity, the “political class,” which, by definition, is a “power group” struggling for control of the state. In our day, then, there are two political classes, the challengers of the status quo and its defenders, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the Communists and the non-Communists.
Cox does not trouble to relate his “political class” to any social or economic groupings that can be shown to exist in the real world and which he variously denominates “estate,” “social class,” and “functional class.” Consequently he finds no difficulty in emerging with the conclusion that there can be no solution to prejudice short of the violent overthrow of the capitalist system by revolution, which, in view of the premises and of the methods employed, is not altogether surprising.
What is surprising is how close this position brings the author to the racist’s own picture of race relations. Like the most reactionary white southerner, although for different reasons, Mr. Cox argues that laws against lynching must necessarily be ineffective, that there can be no contact between races without either conflict or amalgamation, and that whites act as a unit in opposition to blacks.
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For all their differences, the three books before us have a basic element in common: all regard prejudice as an instrument used by capitalists to justify or to increase exploitation.
Such a theory must pass the test of one crucial question: why should one group rather than another be selected as the object of prejudice? And, indeed, each of the three books, in one way or another and in some degree, attempts to demonstrate that occupational peculiarity in the group singled out renders it particularly susceptible to its role as object of the exploiter’s prejudice.
Insofar as McWilliams confronts this problem, his solution is essentially the same as that of Abram Léon: that concentration in certain marginal employments leaves the Jews vulnerable. But the mere fact that Jews cluster in certain callings cannot explain the appearance of anti-Semitism. Faith in such an explanation rests on the questionable assumption that some occupations are, of their nature, undesirable. The distinction between productive and unproductive trades sometimes made by economists—Marxist as well as orthodox—is not one that greatly influences popular values; witness the attitudes towards movie stars and athletes. In modern times, at least, people have measured the agreeableness and the utility of any employment by the yardsticks of income and status, and, if Jewish callings seem less desirable than others, it is because they somehow fall short in terms of those criteria.
So far as income is concerned, there would seem to be no disabilities connected with Jewish occupations; no one has ever charged that Jews made too little money. But inferiority of status is undoubtedly attached to trades that are distinctively Jewish. That inferiority is not, however, inherent in the trade. On the contrary, it arises from the fact that Jews are in the trades; these are “Jewish businesses.”
Most important of all, concentration in a limited number of occupations is characteristic of all ethnic groups and not simply of those, like the Jews and Negroes, who suffer from prejudice. Some, like the Quakers in the United States and the Scots in England, to name only two, display a markedly eccentric occupational pattern and still attain an exceptionally high social status. In our society, there is a kind of hereditary element in occupation as in every other aspect of culture; skills, training, values, and opportunities are, to some extent, handed down from fathers to sons, even in the most fluid economies. No ethnic group is normal, because normality in this sense can only be an average of many ethnic groups.
But if our society comprehends a multitude of ethnic groups, all differentiated to some degree in economic structure, then prejudice cannot be explained simply in terms of exploitation. Why should the exploiter direct his prejudice against one group rather than another? Neither McWilliams nor Léon can, in these terms, explain why the Jews should be the “chosen people.” And Mr. Cox cannot explain why Americans did not single out the white as well as the black unfree servants.
Nor is there any accounting for the difference in tastes of the capitalists of other countries. Why should the Brazilians and Frenchmen not have picked on the Negroes? Why should color be a bar to a Hindu in India but not in England? Why should capitalist prejudice anywhere not have taken a quite different form?
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These are important questions. It may not be possible to answer them now. But neither is it possible to evade them. If we can do no more than point to the elements that must enter into the answers, that will still be better than to act as if the questions did not exist.
It is significant that such problems have so far yielded more readily to the insight of the novelist than to the analysis of the social scientist. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, for instance, is more “true” as an account of prejudice than any of the books before us. One factor in its superiority is undoubtedly the willingness of its author to deal with the phenomenon as a complex and intricate reaction; he is not bound by the scientist’s compulsion to reduce all the facts to a single, simple formula. Forster is free to find that prejudice is not the rational expression of the will of the person who holds the bias, that it arises out of a total situation of which the prejudiced and the object of his prejudice are both victims.
Economic exploitation is somehow involved in the creation of that situation. In rejecting the schematic economic determinism that links prejudice directly with exploitation, we need not also reject the older Marxist hypothesis that economic factors set the underlying conditions for group hatreds. There is evidence enough that, in some way, exploitation, an expression of economic ill-being, meshes in with prejudice, an expression of cultural ill-being. The difficulty is to define the relationship.
A clue to the solution may lie in the fact that exploitation creates a sense of social uneasiness in which there is room for, and psychological and political utility in, prejudiced behavior. It would certainly be worthwhile to explore the nature of that uneasiness and its connection with the whole life of a culture—religious, ideological, esthetic, as well as economic. It is very likely that this is the most fertile area for future study in this field.
Some aspects seem clear already. A society weighed down by such uneasiness finds relief by dividing against itself, in other words, by sanctioning the hatred by some of its members of others. When depression or political crisis exacerbates uneasiness, the impulse to seek such relief becomes more compelling and the cathartic hatreds more intense.
Those hatreds are, of course, not always oriented along ethnic lines. Sometimes people bear prejudices against “reds” and “unions,” against “capitalists” and “Wall Street.” But at other times that bias takes an ethnic direction, and then acquires a special depth, or, perhaps, an entirely different quality.
It will not be enough, in explanation, to say that an ethnic group exists, has a distinctive character, and therefore becomes an object of prejudice. The qualities of Jews and Negroes before those peoples became the objects of prejudice are, for instance, only slightly relevant: the “non-Aryans” against whom Hitler acted and the colored people who are segregated in Louisiana are not groups that could have been defined in any economic, cultural, religious, or physical terms that existed in advance of the onset of prejudice. Those groupings are themselves the outcome of the prejudice situation.
It is not the difference, real or fancied, between the object and the subject of prejudice that is significant, but rather the condition of a whole society of which both are components, necessary to each other. Persecuted and persecutors are intimately alike in their condition as human beings. Isolated from each other in the cities amid the machines, men can no longer recognize the brotherly gesture. Out of desperate uncertainty comes a longing for alikeness, and then the dreadful consummation: to find oneness, the brothers divide, some through hatred against their father’s other sons, others through being hated. And not these or those made the hatred come, but the trouble that enveloped all.
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