To the Editor:
I would like to express my views on Oscar Handlin’s article, “Freedom or Authority in Group Life?” which appears in the December 1952 issue.
I recognize that history dramatized or baked over in a moral sauce is entertaining and stimulating, while an objective historical analysis usually ends up as dull reading. I do not know what sources Mr. Handlin may have consulted for his sketch of the historical background but there is little indication in the article that Mr. Handlin read any other than the official documents issued by the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League for his information on the current National Community Relations Advisory Council problem. If he had studied only a small part of the voluminous material which is available on both sides of this controversy, he might not have been so positive about his premises nor would the issues appear to be as simple as he finds them to be.
It would seem to me that Handlin has used considerable literary license in dramatizing this issue as if it were a contest between the libertarians and freedom-lovers against “those impatient with the apparent disorder of spontaneous voluntary bodies”; those opposed to “secular control”; and those “holding nationalist sentiments” and the many others “propelled by a deep sense of insecurity.” There are undoubtedly many of our contemporaries whose motives could be so described and who might believe that the NCRAC issues reflected their sentiments. Such sentiments, however, were not really the motives of most of the persons like myself who participated in the many meetings and discussions that preceded and followed the Maclver Study. Most of us who agree with Mr. Handlin on the nature of voluntary association and would be inclined to withdraw from any authoritarian or pseudo-authoritarian organization fail to see how all this is applicable to the current problem. We believe that those who disagree with us are confusing the problem of authority with the problem of function.
The major and gross defect of the article is that nowhere does it deal with the real issue—namely, the effectiveness of the work of the agencies. Mr. Handlin makes only one reference to it, when mentioning the work of the AJC and ADL as having been “remarkably effective.” He says this is true because they can be flexible. But he gives not a particle of evidence to support this sweeping generalization.
In the same vein he dismisses the Maclver Study—which was at least a study, and not just a dissertation—as “arbitrary theoretical schemes of experts.” This can hardly measure up to scholarly standards—and the dismissal of experts is strange coming from one who is no mean “expert” as a researcher. The views of communities are castigated as “unrealistic community schemes of ideological revolutionaries.” That is so farfetched that one wonders what he is actually talking about.
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Mr. Handlin would appear to be judging the NCRAC’s action by comments in the Anglo-Jewish and Yiddish press. . . . That is a strange procedure. Would Mr. Handlin appraise the Roosevelt administration by the interpretations of the Chicago Tribune or the New York Mirror or the Daily Worker (when the Communists were supporting Roosevelt)?
Opinions about the nature of the controversy held by Mr. Handlin and by the American Jewish Committee are, I believe, based upon unfounded fears and misconceptions. The controversy did not really involve the attempt to establish “some kind of representative body that would speak for all Jews and impose discipline on them.” It was not designed as “the first step in the creation of an authoritative body representative of American Jews.” It did not seek “a large authoritative powerful body . . . a body strong enough to impose discipline within its own ranks and to stand up against the hostile forces outside them.” Mr. Handlin has only to read the resolutions finally adopted by the NCRAC plenary session in September 1952 to recognize that he can discover no evidence for such statements in the actual decisions reached by the NCRAC.
There is no point in going into the history of the American Jewish Congress for 1917, or of the American Jewish Conference of 1943, as a basis for evaluating the proposals for improving the effectiveness of the NCRAC recommended by Dr. Robert Maclver. As a historian, Mr. Handlin knows all about the pitfalls of equating historical parallels to any new situation with all of the variables it must involve. The NCRAC is a going organization established in 1944 for the purposes of establishing cooperation among its member agencies and to help in the coordination of their activities. It could have been examined on its own record and merits. Mr. Handlin says “it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the proposed reconstitution of the NCRAC was the first step in another of the successive attempts to impose the terms of unity upon American Jews.” I would say from my knowledge of the facts that I find it extremely easy to escape from such a conclusion.
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I can accept fully Mr. Handlin’s thesis of the nature of voluntary association and how it differs from official bodies. Voluntary associations are obviously voluntary in character and involve the right to dissent, withdrawal, secession. Four national Jewish organizations and twenty-seven local community-relations agencies have voluntarily consented to remain in the NCRAC on the revised basis for improving their efforts cooperatively. The American Jewish Committee and the ADL voluntarily exercised their right to dissent and their right of withdrawal. Mr. Handlin dramatizes and justifies this withdrawal as a defense of the principle of freedom and negation of an authoritarian planning for Jewish organizations. It would be more accurate, though less melodramatic, to describe the withdrawal as due to an unwillingness to accept certain procedures of association which others believed would add to the effectiveness of the programs undertaken by the various local and national organizations. It was the prerogative of the AJC and the ADL to disagree with the proposals and to withdraw from an association which had voted to set up procedures which were unacceptable to them. One can deplore or approve this decision. It would seem gratuitous to enlarge its meaning into a defense of the principle of freedom and a rejection of authoritarianism. We do not know as yet what changes in the procedures of the NCRAC would be required for the return of the AJC and ADL, and it is highly improbable that the changes or modifications required for this purpose could be dramatized as being a victory of freedom over authoritarianism. Actually the differences to some observers between the proposals made by the AJC-ADL and the “Barr” resolution adopted by the NCRAC were not too large and involved few basic principles. Mr. Handlin should have explained the differences.
There are many forms of inter-agency association among voluntary associations designed to promote improvement of programs. Manufacturers’ associations, chambers of commerce, community chests, councils of social agencies, federations, welfare funds, and a host of other types of inter-agency associations have been established for the purpose of improvement of function and for common planning. The history of many such associations is not free from fears and anxieties which have been engendered in the NCRAC controversy—fears of one’s own autonomy, of power drives upon the part of one’s associates, that undue influence or authority might be exercised by some individuals or agencies in such an association. . . . However, we do not make progress by insisting on separate isolated organizations for fear that an association of agencies requires some adjustment or modification of our traditional procedures. And whether we are dealing with official or voluntary agencies, we must frequently proceed to arrive at a consensus by the process of voting.
Mr. Handlin states that a majority doesn’t rule in a university, a church, a business, or a hospital. That is a strange fiction. That is the only way a board of such institutions determines policy. And a majority of stock ownership likewise makes policy and basic decisions in a business. Even in the American Jewish Committee, it is the majority of the Board and the Executive Committee that makes decisions. This attempt to write out of existence majority action as incompatible with voluntary associations is quite fantastic. The fact that majorities in a voluntary organization frequently adjust their actions to minority views is well known, but on some issues the majority view is maintained in spite of the dangers of the sharp dissent and withdrawal of some members. We may question the wisdom of such decisions but we must recognize their validity as a possible procedure in voluntary associations.
Majority action is the method used for determining the views of members in voluntary as well as in governmental bodies; the only difference is that an official agency can enforce its majority decisions, a voluntary agency cannot. This fact was clearly recognized by all parties to the NCRAC controversy and was reaffirmed time and again. To have overlooked this fact, as Mr. Handlin has done, is to make nonsense out of the whole experience.
Mr. Handlin states that “spontaneity, flexibility, versatility have no place in the calculations of planners.” That is something he could only have dreamed up himself—he has no basis in fact for it at all. On the contrary, the experience of community organizations and federated programs has demonstrated ample opportunity for experiment and change—and very great experimentation and change are taking place under such arrangements. Planning in fact has often stimulated much greater experimentation and change than the bodies themselves engaged in when left to themselves.
Inter-agency associations and councils of agencies are important and useful only if the member organizations share some basic common interests or purposes. The common interests of the NCRAC membership are many and profound. In his concluding paragraph Mr. Handlin says that “These voluntary organizations in turn will function only so long as those who came together to found them wish to continue maintaining communal ends and aspirations.” Mr. Handlin does not stop to define what he means by American Jewish communal ends and aspirations. It was, however, the assumption made by Dr. Maclver and by the majority of the members of the NCRAC that the various agencies were all engaged in trying to fulfill American Jewish communal ends and aspirations (whatever these may be) and they have an added obligation to seek the fullest basis of cooperation with other organizations similarly engaged. An association that serves only its own membership, and makes no pretense to serving the entire community, might be absolved from many of the requirements of inter-agency cooperation, but in this field of defense work there is scarcely a function assumed by any organization that does not affect many more Jews than the constituency of the functioning agency.
Incidentally, Mr. Handlin might be interested in knowing that the Chicago Jewish Welfare Fund was one of the original members of the Large City Budgeting Conference and that it has continued this membership, that the LCBC is an independent association not subject to the authority of the CJFWF staff, Board of Directors, or General Assembly, that the LCBC was organized at the request of Baltimore. Like all of the member agencies of the CJFWF, the group of cities constituting the LCBC are served by the staff of the CJFWF. As for the more extreme and sweeping statements such as the charge that the CJFWF “is using financial sanctions to secure to its majority the right to act for the entire Jewish community” and that the CJFWF is “already acting as if they were the fiscal arm of a representative congress”—Mr. Handlin, I am certain, would not want to base his reputation for scholarship upon such fantastic and unsubstantiated pronouncements.
In general, the article deals with ghosts and fears. It never gets down to an examination of what the Barr Plan is, what its purposes are, what its sponsors say it is, what its limitations are, what conditions led to its formulation and adoption, why the other national agencies and almost all local community relations agencies participating voted for it (and in that respect the communities are not outside theoreticians, as he implies, but participants in this work, doing a basic job where people live and attitudes are molded). In fact, if Mr. Handlin wants to live up to the reputation of being “a close student of the evolution of the communal life of the Jewish and other religious and ethnic groups in America” which you say he is, and an authority on the current NCRAC issue as well, I would suggest that he spend some time in studying the NCRAC in actuality. I am assuming of course that the current article was not intended to be a chapter in the “official” history of the American Jewish Committee.
H. L. Lurie
Executive Director
Council of Jewish Federations
and Welfare Funds
New York City
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