Episode 5: Conspiracies

Mark Oppenheimer 

Support for Antisemitism, U.S.A. comes from the Henry Luce Foundation and the David Bruce Smith Foundation.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In 2018, wildfires were burning in California. 103 people lost their lives and nearly 25,000 homes and other buildings were destroyed. Marjorie Taylor Greene is writing articles for a website called American truth seekers. She's very active on social media. And she's not about to accept the straightforward explanation for these wildfires that well, forests catch fire, especially in these days of climate change and years of record drought. know she has a better answer, and she goes to Facebook and posts her explanation. The fires she says, are caused by Jewish space lasers. Greenbelt believed the fires were related to Pacific Gas and Electric. She had noticed that the company had some ventures in space and that its stock was fluctuating. She also noticed that a man named Roger Kimball was on the board of Pacific Gas and Electric Kimmel was also vice chairman of Rothschild Incorporated, which Greene referred to as quote an international investment banking firm. And then she wrote, there are too many coincidences to ignore. But what do I know? I just like to read a lot. Marjorie Taylor Greene later became a Republican congresswoman from Georgia. And a big part of her electoral appeal was her belief in Q anon and a host of other conspiracy theories, ranging from pizza gate to theories about the September 11 terrorist attacks. So it's worth understanding her somewhat garbled social media post about the forest fires. When green brought up the Rothschilds, she was connecting her theories about the wildfires back to a centuries old idea that much of what went wrong in the world could be traced to Jewish bankers. And here we get to a crucial point about anti semitism. When people stereotype Jews, they're usually drawing on ideas of Jewish superiority rather than inferiority. And that's a unique kind of bigotry. Unlike other racial and religious groups stereotyped as inferior. Jews are suspect because they are seen as somehow superior. They are too good with money or too smart or too wealthy. They have too much political power. They're too common in the media. They're too shrewd, too clever. You get the idea behind the stereotype that Jews have the brains to be sneaky. They're behind the scenes secretly controlling everything. Sadly, this idea can be found all over the place. It would be pretty hard to find a member of Congress more diametrically opposed to Marjorie Taylor Greene on policy issues. Then representative Ilhan Omar the Democrat of Minnesota, but in the matter of anti semitic conspiracy theories, the two politicians have a good bit in common. In 2012, Omar tweeted that, quote, Israel has hypnotized the world. And when she was asked about Israel's influence in the United States, she said it was about the Benjamins baby. In Omar's worldview, Jews, and in this case Israelis and their supporters were controlling the world through their money. It would be nice if we could dismiss green and Omar as fringe figures, but we can't. And we shouldn't. Once that someone has made it to Congress, she's mainstream and more important, even wacky conspiracy theories like Q anon pizza gate, and yes, Jewish space lasers are not an aberration in American politics.

Mark Oppenheimer 

I'm Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Antisemitism, U.S.A., a podcast about the history of antisemitism in the United States. Episode Five conspiracies. Conspiracy theories aren't new. Scholars have been studying them for a long, long time. In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter coined the term the paranoid style to refer to the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that permeated the history of American politics. As evidence he pointed to other historic events, including Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare of the 1950s. Before that, in the 1890s, the Populist Party thought there was a conspiracy between backers of the gold standard in Europe and America. Before that Americans believed there was a global international conspiracy by Catholics and especially the pope against democracy, even to the extent that they feared Catholics were kidnapping children. Before that Americans were desperately afraid of them. Bavarian Illuminati and the Masons. And before that they thought King George the III was trying to put an Anglican bishop over all the protestants in the 13 colonies. Here's journalist Yari Rosenberg, a staff writer for The Atlantic.

Yair Rosenberg 

Conspiracy theorists begin by rejecting mainstream explanations for social and political events in favor of supposedly suppressed knowledge and hidden hands. If you think about it, conspiracy theories share a lot of things in common. Antisemitism isn't unique, but it's a lot older than other conspiracy theories. So these people may not start out as antisemites. But antisemitism is out there, and it has a multi 1000 year head start on their crooked conception of the world. And it's produced centuries of material casting with Jews as the chief culprit. So once a person is convinced themselves that an invisible hand is manipulating the masses, there, just a couple of Google searches away from discovering that it belongs to an invisible Jew. If you see somebody who's willing to publicly fulminate about a morphus, they who is behind the scenes and causing social strife, causing whatever problems the person perceives in the world. They will inevitably land on the Jews at some point.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In the early years of the 20th century, a new conspiracy about Jewish power was created in Russia and became popular in Europe. It was called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and it has an obscure and bizarre history. Here's historian Victoria sacre wasty, author of Henry Ford's war on Jews and the legal battles against hate speech. It's a rather astounding document. It's a collection of mini essays that purport to read as if they are the collective thoughts of a group of Jewish elders, who are laying out their intent to take over world governments and establish a Jewish worldwide state. These Jewish elders allegedly controlled the banks and the global economy. They supposedly knew how to destroy morals through greed and pornography. They supposedly knew how to topple governments, and they were responsible for all sorts of evil. Like the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley. Portions of the protocols began appearing in a Russian newspaper in 1903. They were probably written that year or perhaps in 1902. The timing matters. In 1903, about 50 Jews were killed, and more than 1000 homes were damaged in the kitchen of pogrom in present day Moldova should have and other pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia encouraged hundreds of 1000s of Jews to emigrate. Many to the United States, the same people who wrote and published in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were fomenting violence against Jews. And what they wrote justified that violence. The version of the protocols that became well known around the world, was translated and published as an appendix to a book titled, The Great in the small, the coming of the Antichrist and the rule of Satan on Earth. To be clear, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion aren't true, not even a little bit true. They're just a hoax, plain and simple, with no grounding in facts or reality. The only reality is the very real harm that the protocols did in the world. And not only were the protocols a hoax, they weren't even original. In 1921, the Times of London revealed that the protocols had adopted an earlier French political satire that didn't even mention Jews. The protocols came to the United States after the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, which overthrew the Russian Tsar and led to the creation of a communist state in Russia. Left wing dissenters in Russia were rounded up and imprisoned by the state, and the government passed new laws to censor political speech. There were bomb scares created by anarchists. Americans were terrified of revolution and of an overthrow of our government. And it was in that context that the protocols arrived here. Enter Henry Ford, Ford had little formal education, but he had a knack for invention. His innovative use of the assembly line made automobiles plentiful and affordable, and made him one of the richest men in the country. And Ford helped make the protocols wildly popular.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

Once the Ford Motor Company was built, and production of the first automobile rolled off what was then a pretty rudimentary assembly line, the money started to roll in. And with that status came a great deal of public adulation, huge amount of public interest, media interest, everything that he said was news. He had this kind of folksy charm that people found appealing and By the time that World War One swings around, he has already become fairly outspoken on the issues of the day and on what he believes would be good for the country.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In the US, even wealthy powerful elite liked to cast their ideas as if they were just popular man of the people views. That was certainly true Ford, despite being incredibly wealthy, he liked to identify himself with farmers, and with views he thought would come from farmers, and especially what farmers worry about, which he believed was dead and begs.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

He styled himself as a populist, which in many ways was actually not that popular, so to speak, after the turn of the century, but there was still a great deal of working class farmer agitation over access to credit and the financial system in general. And that dovetails with a pretty standard antisemitic stereotypes, which is that bankers are all Jews, Jews control the money, and Jews are out to enrich themselves.

Mark Oppenheimer 

The thought process goes like this. Farmers are in debt and are likely to blame their financial problems on Jewish bankers. And since rich people's wealth is often tied up in companies, rather than in cash, they often have pretty substantial loans, which was the case for Ford and the Ford Motor Company.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

So as Ford becomes more and more of a sort of corporate entrepreneur, and more and more reliant on banks for his financing, he becomes more and more skeptical to the point of outright hostility towards the banking system. He doesn't begin to publicly accused Jews of controlling the nation's finances until much later until after the war.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Because of a public conflict between Ford and President Woodrow Wilson, over American involvement in World War One, the Chicago Tribune wrote an editorial calling for an anarchist and ignorant. Ford became convinced that not only were the banks out to get him but so were the newspapers. So Henry Ford sued the tribune for libel. And this part gets pretty funny. Ford probably would have won his case, if he had just sued the tribune for calling him an anarchist because he wasn't an anarchist. But he also sued the tribune for calling him ignorant. And he was in fact, ignorant.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

When that case went to court, he was the world's worst client. He refused to be prepared by his lawyers, they tried so hard to prep him for cross examination, and he would have none of it. And he embarrassed himself on the stand. And Ford at this trial was unable to distinguish the American Revolution from the War of 1812. And he thought Arnold was a writer could not identify him as a trader. So he proved himself to be as ignorant on the stand as the tribune had editorialized. And so, the jury found that he had been libeled because they called him an anarchist, but he had not been damaged, and they awarded him six cents. So that kind of really fried his innards, so to speak. And that had a lot to do with why he purchased a newspaper in 1918.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Ford felt like he needed some good press, and the quickest route to getting some was to buy a newspaper. So he bought the Dearborn Independent. And from the papers first issue under his ownership, the newspaper printed some pretty vile antisemitic ideas. Now, you might ask, When did Ford become an antisemite?

Victoria Saker Woeste 

He grew up in antisemite, the whole country was fused with antisemitic attitudes. It was in the literature, it's in the newspapers. It's in the common conversations that people have, especially in rural areas where Jews tended not to be. I mean, when Jews emigrated to this country, they tended to establish themselves in cities, you didn't tend to see too many of them out in the countryside. So there probably was a fair degree of suspicion and concern that was tinged with antisemitic beliefs.

Mark Oppenheimer 

It's the same idea that Jews control the banks, the idea had been pervasive. For centuries, no one had to tell an early 20th century American just as no one has to tell a 21st century American that Jews were associated with money and banks. By the time Ford bought the Dearborn Independent in late 1918, he may have read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and by the spring of none 1920 He had certainly read it.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

That document came into Ford's hands through his executive secretary Ernest Leibold, who was a descendant of German parents in Michigan and had come into Ford's employ because he had worked at the bank where Ford did business in the early 1900s. Very carefully and very quickly Leibold became the sort of century so no one could get to Ford except through Leibold. And Leibold was in communication with several Russian emigres who wanted to get Ford to contribute money to the cause of restoring the czarist regime. I saw no evidence that Ford ever gave money to the Russians. But he was clearly captivated by the chance to rewrite The Protocols for an American audience. And that was what became the mission of his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent beginning in 1920. What Ford's antisemitism consisted of was the belief that Jews were responsible for every social evil in the country, that Jews who worked in government did so for the purpose of insinuating themselves into the halls of power so that they could divert government to their own insidious purposes, and that the media could never be trusted to give accurate depictions of national and world affairs because of Jewish influence.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Starting in May 1920, the Dearborn Independent published antisemitic articles week after week, in Ford's first issue, the headline blazed The International Jew: The World's Problem, and text within the newspaper read.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

In America alone, most of the big business, the trust and the banks, the natural resources, and the chief agricultural products, especially tobacco, cotton and sugar, are in the control of Jewish financiers. Jews are the largest and most numerous landlords of residence property in the country. They are supreme in the theatrical world. They absolutely control the circulations of publications throughout the country.

Mark Oppenheimer 

For 92 weeks, Ford and his associates printed compelling articles that commented on excerpts from The Protocols. They then compile these articles and publish them as a four volume book, titled The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem. The title and the subtitle really say at all, according to Ford, American Jews weren't really American. They were part of an international Cabal. And they were the biggest threat to America and the world. Here's Victoria Saker Woeste

Victoria Saker Woeste 

We see the publication in a series of articles that ended up taking 92 weeks, from May of 1920 to January of 1922, essentially presented the protocols to an American audience and for mass produced everything. And he mass produced the Dearborn independent and sent it free of charge to schools and libraries and hospitals and any kind of institution you can imagine. They got a copy of it. And so he made it a linchpin, not just of his sort of side operation of a newspaper, but an integral part of his automobile sales, that people should be presented with this newspaper. I don't hesitate call it propaganda, it was propaganda. The front cover was always Jewish article. But inside you could also find a poem by Robert Frost, you could find essays on literature or art or anything along the lines of what you'd find in the Saturday Evening Post. That was really the aspiration was to make the Dearborn Independent arrival to that esteemed publication. And so the Jewish articles weren't the only thing in the newspaper, but they were the most important feature. For him. This was a method of spreading the news the unvarnished truth, so to speak, about the threat that Jews represented, to the American way of government to the American polity, and, frankly, to the idea that Jews should become citizens.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Ford pressured dealers to get multiple subscriptions to his paper to distribute to customers. Sometimes dealers stuffed copies of the Dearborn Independent into newly sold cars. Plenty of Americans were already primed to worry about the banks. They were already suspicious of international affairs and they already disliked the Jews. Henry Ford taught them to fear Jews by teaching them that Jews were behind every problem from banks to wars, unfortunately, alongside is automobiles, for to also mass produced antisemitic conspiracy theories. We asked Victoria Sake Woeste to describe one of the pages from the Dearborn Independent.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

So at the top of the page in a box says all little pals together to save the American farmer, exclamation point. And then there are pictures of four prominent American Jews Albert Lasker, former head of the shipping board, Aaron Spiro, organizer of American farmers, Eugene Meyer, Jr, former head of the war Finance Corporation. And then finally, Bernard Baruch, former head of the War Industries Board. There were a number of Jews in important positions in Wilson's government. These three in particular Lasker, Meyer, and Baruch, helped with the war, they basically organized the financing of the US war effort. So under those pictures is a big headline, Jewish exploitation of farmers organizations, and to the story of the Sapiro boys. The first three articles were meant to be read continuously. It's funny, you think the Sapiro boys would refer to Sapiro and his brother who was also a lawyer, but it didn't, what it really meant was that Sapiro was linked to all of these nationally prominent Jews, when in fact, he wasn't. The Dearborn Independent wanted to insinuate that they not only knew each other, but were engaged in a collective conspiratorial effort to undermine the government. And that was one of the things in the complaint that Aaron Sapiro files in 1925 is that article in particular, because the sort of guilt by association inference was offence.

Mark Oppenheimer 

For Ford was against World War One and he targeted Jews who supported the war effort, including Aaron Sapiro. Sapiro, tried to help farmers get a better price for their crops by selling them as a cooperative rather than individually.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

What Aaron Sapiro saw as a real advantage for farmers, Ford saw as a kind of communistic approach, that could only lead to the defrauding of farmers by someone exactly like Aaron Sapiro, who had, after all, never been a farmer himself, and of course, was Jewish. So it kind of was a perfect storm of circumstances in the mid 20s. I see it as a kind of battle over you know, who was going to really gain the title of leader of the agricultural cooperative movement. And when Ford starts his agricultural series of articles in 1924, cooperative marketing and Aaron Spiro are the twin targets. And Aaron Sapiro, is just taking it on the chin, the hits in that magazine from week to week, were pretty devastating. And when this whole case gets to trial, he actually gets to document just how damaged his law practice was by the allegations that Ford was repeating every week, many of which were not, in fact, true. They actually accused him of organizing farmers and commodities that he had never been close to. He had never been anywhere near the first rule of publishing is never ever, ever publish anything that you're not completely sure that you can prove. And the Dearborn independent, hired a reporter, who was an alcoholic, who was basically just going and talking to a few people in you know, this city and then going to another city and talking to a few people and making up stuff that fit the narrative he was trying to construct. And unfortunately, the newspaper didn't realize how much of what they were publishing was not accurate, until Sapiro, sued them in 1925. And they had to try to retrace the reporters research, and he couldn't do it.

Mark Oppenheimer 

To Ford it as newspaper man there was a conspiracy of Jews around the world. And there was also a conspiracy here in the United States to unite farmers into cooperatives. And Aaron Sapiro, a Jewish lawyer was one American Jew, leading the farmers conspiracy.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In both instances, the claims that the Dearborn Independent made were false. But there's an important distinction. For one of those claims the claim against Sapiro there was a legal remedy. He could sue Ford and he could seek damages for the loss that his law practice sustained because of Ford's lies. But what about Jews collectively, today, we might call Ford's antisemitic statements a form of hate speech. In the 1920s, it was called group libel. But then as now, you can't be sued for libeling a group. Here, let's meet another character who played an essential role in the story. Lewis Marshall, he was one of the founders of the American Jewish Committee, and then its longtime president. He was a big deal lawyer. He may have argued more cases before the Supreme Court than anyone else in his day, you would be hard pressed to find a more prominent Jew in America. When Ford first started publishing the antisemitic columns in the Dearborn Independent, Marshall sent a telegram before asking him to cease and desist. He called the articles a libel upon an entire people. In response, Ford called Marshall, a Bolshevist orator.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

So what Marshall did was write a statute that made it a crime to publish an allegation or characterization based on race, religion, and national origin. So that if you cast aspersions, in an advertisement that you published against Catholics, for instance, you would be liable under this group libel law.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Marshall lobbied the New York legislature to pass a group libel law. But the proposal failed. The Anti Defamation League supported a similar campaign in other states, but they were also unsuccessful. But Aaron Sapiro he as an individual could sue Ford for libel in Michigan, he had a pretty slam dunk case. His law practice had taken a hit there were clearly monetary damages. And most of the things Ford had printed about him simply were not true. You can throw in some ineptitude by Ford's attorney, and it looked like Sapiro was going to win for sure.

Mark Oppenheimer 

But that's when things took a turn. Henry Ford got in an automobile accident. He may even have deliberately gotten in such an accident to buy some time with the judge. And then Ford's bodyguard got a juror to speculate to a newspaper reporter that Ford had deliberately caused the accident.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

Henry Ford's sort of mob affiliated bodyguard, Harry Bennett, plants an interview with one of the jurors a woman as turned out in the Detroit News. And so the reporter gets her to say, on the record, that she is suspicious about Ford's accident and thinks that that somebody, she says is trying to keep the case from going to the jury, which may have been true, she may have had reason to think that but it was absolutely terrible that she said that to a reporter. Because the reporter then published that statement, and as soon as Ford's lawyers put that newspaper in front of the judge, the judge declared a mistrial. It was like game over. Even though Aaron Sapiro and William Gallagher objected strenuously and offered to proceed with 11 jurors, the judge refused to let that happen. And so, mistrial was declared.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Ford was willing to go to any lengths to avoid testifying in a second trial. At this point, Ford wanted to make the problems he had created go away. He discontinued the newspaper, and his people reached out to Lewis Marshall. And remarkably, they asked Marshall to draft an apology for what Ford had been publishing for seven years. Marshall was willing to play ball. He was pleased that Ford would admit that he'd been publishing lies. And he also wanted to avoid a public debate about whether or not Jews were, quote, the world's foremost problem.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

Marshall writes the statement, which essentially ignores everything that had been entered into evidence at trial for gets to express astonishment, that employees at the newspaper published all these statements without his knowledge or approval, he had no idea that American Jews thought he was responsible for this. He was appalled that anyone would think that he would harbor such biases and prejudices, and he was determined to make good on this opportunity to apologize and to reset his relationship with American Jews. And that was what Marshall cared about. It wasn't any particular plaintiff who had legitimate libel claims. It was about the group libel interests of American Jews. And so the apology apologizes for the one thing that Ford could never have lost in court on which was the group libel claim. And Aaron Sapiro and the other plaintiff, Herman Bernstein, do not merit a mention. They're not mentioned in the subpoena. Ajit and the statement gets blasted all over media all over the newspapers and everyone thinks oh Ford has apologized. And some Jewish newspapers are happy to see it and others are skeptical that Ford means it. But most of the sort of mainstream press thinks that Ford has learned his lesson and that he's been sufficiently embarrassed now that he won't do it again.

Mark Oppenheimer 

So Sapiro both won and lost. He lost in the sense that he never got damages for the very real harm that Ford had done to him. On the other hand, he had forced Ford to apologize. And perhaps Louis Marshall had won and lost to he got what he wanted an acknowledgement from Ford, however insincere, that his claims about an international Jewish conspiracy were false. He even got forward to promise that he would withdraw the Dearborn independence articles and take the international Jew out of circulation.

Victoria Saker Woeste 

The really meaningful thing is that the one thing Marshall really wanted was to get forward to retract all the copies of the International Jew, which wasn't impossible ask. Ford only had control over the Dearborn publishing company, he didn't have control over the Argentinian and German and Spanish publishers who were churning this pamphlet out

Mark Oppenheimer 

Ford's antisemitic publications never really went away. If you hang out on social media long enough, somebody will post a passage from them. And Ford never stopped being an antisemite. But our story is not entirely negative. By fighting back through the courts, Sapiro managed to make one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the country apologize for his antisemitism. After the break, we'll examine a government organization that took the International Jew too seriously.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Let's look at a group that took the conspiracy theory that Jews control the world very, very seriously. And it wasn't some fringe group. It was the United States Army. After World War One, the US Army officer corps was generally antisemitic. Officers were gentleman after all, and gentleman disliked Jews. Besides antisemitism as conspiratorial thinking and antisemitism is racism. There was a lot of old fashioned looking down on Jews by white Protestant elites, because they came from different classes. But the army really took it up another notch to the point of drawing up strategic plans about what to do when the Jews tried to take over the world. Here's Joseph Bendersky author of the book, the Jewish threat.

Joseph Bendersky 

So he offers a course that is the crucial institution. They're the ones who make the decisions. What I discovered was a deep seated pervasive and institutionalized anti semitism that had a negative impact on policies, not just within the Army, both in the US government and society. Regarding Jewish Americans immigration in the 1920s. The term Jewish threat is not an interpretive at my part, that's an actual term that they use. And they spoke and wrote frequently about a Jewish threat in its various dimensions.

Mark Oppenheimer 

To become an officer in the army before World War One, you had to be part of the white Anglo Saxon Protestant elite. And to be part of that elite was to hold to a genteel antisemitism, the country club version of the rural populist antisemitism that motivated Henry Ford.

Joseph Bendersky 

What we have here is a convergence of traditional Christian cultural antisemitism. And that was still there, it was still surfaced in certain reports. Jews as Christ killers, anti Christians, and like the canards about Jewish businessmen, and how Jews are insidious, they are selfish, they have no loyalty to any country, show your traditional antisemitism to have a better route or a way that works its way in there that converges with this modern form of sort of scientific antisemitism, where Jews are defined as a separate race with characteristics that are inherited. And therefore, the old solutions to antisemitism, conversion to Christianity, assimilation are no longer viable. They are, in fact, dangerous, because they would undermine the civilization pollute the gene pool, and in that respect, be a threat to civilization.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Now, Army officers have a particular set of worries that most people don't have. Army officers worry about threats to national security, and about planning for the next war. In their view, Jews were already not the right kind of Americans. But when they learned that Jews were supposed recently engaged in an international conspiracy to topple states. They took it very seriously.

Joseph Bendersky 

By the 20th century, Jews are perceived as not just acted in concert, but acting in concert now against European and Western civilization, in general in the role and interest, and this is gives rise to a variety of conspiracy ideas, which the publication of the translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, served perfectly at that time, because similar ideas were surfacing. And now you had this document that appeared to confirm it. And the army and the State Department did the studies on these. And for the most part, we're convinced that this document either was completely correct, or at least had a strong semblance of truth in it, about the activities of Jews internationally. And they translated it they sent out copies of the protocols to all military attache is to assist them in studying the so called Jewish problem by which they met the Jewish threat.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In our last episode, we talked about John Trevor, who worked in the Military Intelligence Division surveilling Jews whom he regarded as a security threat. Trevor, you'll remember was particularly fearful of the Jews of Manhattan, thinking they would lead a communist uprising in the US like the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Trevor was probably the most notorious of the bunch, but his fears were widespread. And so the army formulated plans about Jewish threats based on what they thought they had learned from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Joseph Bendersky 

During World War One, we had military intelligence, or really bosses, with hundreds of officers and a couple of 1000s individuals working in there as bureaucrat, they expand this tremendous investigative network, looking at all kinds of threats. And within that, their surfaces now of course, Jews, and they develop a separate category for the study of Jews separate classification, file 245, which was a systematic way of keeping track of Jews. Later, the early 20s, when the protocol surface, they developed the separate classification, for the examination of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So all this accumulated tremendous amount of information. And this information was coming from atta Shea's was coming from agents, others reporting across the United States, it was all accumulating in the headquarters in Washington, and on a daily basis, getting constant reports. The atmosphere was one well, if there's this much smoke, there must be somewhere fire behind it all the salt to reinforce this attitude about a real conspiracy out there. And so it took what had been before prejudice. And then, of course, what appeared to be scientific fact about Jews and now raise the level of an actual concrete threat that had to be combated. Military aftershaves for a couple of decades, are setting back these reports on Jews, and in some cases, claiming that they actually have proof that, let's say the takeover of the Soviet Union, the Russian Revolution is actually an international conspiracy of Jews. This is very wide ranging very often contradictory. But there's very little effort except for a few officers to challenges or counteract this. It all seems to fit together and ultimately it creates a vision of an actual threat. That has to be combated.

Mark Oppenheimer 

It wasn't just the army, Bendersky was cautious to point out that we can know how much the army worried about this fictitious International Jewish conspiracy, because we have their documentation. The Army's response to this alleged threat survived. The same documentation doesn't survive from other branches of government. But that doesn't mean there wasn't antisemitism. In fact, we have hints that antisemitism was widespread throughout the government. Here's Joseph Bendersky talking about naval intelligence at the start of World War Two.

Joseph Bendersky 

I have this long report from the director of Naval Intelligence in which he identifies Jews with all of these negative characteristics. And you cannot admit these people to the United States even though they are suffering, but they brought it on themselves that you have to protect America against it. Moreover, he goes so far as to claim that Jews are acting as agents and therefore The security grounds should not be admitted to the US. This was something that showed up in a lot of the literature, refugee policy, where there was a fear of a fifth column of Nazi agents, including German Jews, refugees who were being blackmailed, and would serve as Nazi agents. He was totally in favor of this, all of that affected Roosevelt's decisions.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Okay, let's pull this all together. At the very beginning of the 20th century, some antisemites in Russia created a fake document a hoax, saying that an international Jewish conspiracy was trying to destroy humanity. By World War One, US Army intelligence had studied the matter exhaustively, and concluded that the protocols were real. And by World War Two, naval intelligence was worried that refugee Jews fleeing persecution were a real threat to the United States, because Jews were part of an international conspiracy.

Mark Oppenheimer 

And that's where the real harm of the US military's antisemitism becomes apparent. US Army officers want Nazis. By and large, they disliked Nazis, and they thought that their treatment of Jews was inhumane and unChristian. But they blamed the Jews for causing their own persecution, and they wanted to stay out of war with Germany. And once the war started, the antisemites and the officer corps were the same ones deciding what to do about Jewish refugees from the war and from the Holocaust. They ended up being opposed to doing anything to help Jewish refugees.

Mark Oppenheimer 

We'll talk more about the ways the United States failed Jewish refugees after the war. But it's important to note that even after the war, even after the Holocaust, US Army officers continued some of the same antisemitic thought patterns that they had learned by studying the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Antisemitism is a shapeshifting problem. In the early US, Christian antisemitism was at the forefront, especially in determining questions about citizenship. By the end of the 19th century, racial science created a new form of antisemitism, one that played into the hands of people who wanted to restrict immigration. By the 1920s, antisemitism was still both of those things, and updated conspiracy theories about Jewish financial power and worldwide revolution made antisemitism even more potent. But by then, antisemitism was also a conspiracy theory. We have to understand this history of antisemitism as a conspiracy theory because of how it affects the present. Consumer conspiracy theories are not just cooky nonsense, they don't just stoke bigotry. Conspiracy theories also pose a threat. They encourage those who believe in them to take action. And some of those true believers respond with violence. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the International Jew aren't true. Not even a little bit. But a century after Henry Ford lost his lawsuit. People are still reading them and they still believe the lies.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Thank you for listening to Antisemitism, U.S.A. it's a production of R2 Studios part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Visit R2 studios.org for a complete transcript of today's episode and for suggestions for further reading. I'm your host Mark Oppenheimer. Antisemitism, U.S.A. is written by John Turner and Lincoln Mullen. Britt Tevis is our lead scholar Jim Ambuske is our producer Jeanette Patrick is our executive producer. We'd like to thank Zev Eleff for being our lead advisor and we'd like to thank our advisory board members, Laura Shaw Frank, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan Sarna. Rachel Birch, Alexandra Miller, and Amber Pelham are our graduate assistants. Our thanks to Yair Rosenberg, Victoria Saker Woeste, and Joseph Bendersky for sharing their expertise in this episode. We're able to bring you this show through the generosity of the Henry Luce Foundation, the David Bruce Smith Foundation, and many individual donors like you. Thank you for listening, and we hope you'll join us for the next episode.