Good Will to Men
VOLUME 162
NUMBER 6
DECEMBER 1938
BY ALVIN JOHNSON
WORDS, so often and justly treated as a symbol of futility, do nevertheless sometimes clothe themselves with undying power over human hearts. Good will to men: who can estimate the part these simple words have played in the creation of whatever is true and enduring in modern civilization? There had been mighty empires before our era, empires erected by blood and violence, perpetuated — no, merely prolonged — by ruthless force. Those empires were not altogether inhuman. They punished their enemies, but they rewarded their friends. There was good will in them, as in all things mortal, but good will only to one’s family, one’s party, one’s country. All else was enemy, to be paid out in full with ill will.
It remained for Christianity to set up a moral law enjoining good will to all men, irrespective of social or political status, irrespective of nationality or color. Good will to the slave and peasant and artisan, to the scholar and the noble, to the Lord’s anointed on his throne and the prisoner in his dungeon. The Roman Emperor could say, ‘Let them hate me, so they fear me.’ Henry V of England, absolute under the divine right of kings, expresses himself otherwise. ‘Speak freely. We are no tyrant, but a Christian king.’
There have been tyrants who called themselves Christian, but the pervasive force of the principle of good will has worked relentlessly toward a social order based upon consent, until finally democracy became a practical possibility. It is true, we have never yet realized perfect democracy. We have never been wholly free from ill will toward individuals and groups we do not understand. Even in the democracies we have sometimes had instances of the tyrannical technique of setting brother against brother, of capitalizing ill will. But few intelligent democrats fail to realize that all such practices are dangerous excrescences upon the body politic, needing to be excised before they spread from organ to organ until democracy perishes.
Democracies can stand securely only on one foundation, good will to men: good will to all men. Tyrannies may endure for a time on the basis of ill will to men: race against race, language against language, class against class. But no tyranny endures forever.
On what charge will future historians particularly condemn this generation of ours? They will describe our wars, unexampled in horror and cruelty, our tyrannical governments resting on the Roman emperor’s maxim. But they will lay chief emphasis upon the world-wide abrogation of the principle of good will to all men, the vain attempt to build a system of good will upon a basis of favored groups and the exclusion of other groups — to-day particularly the Jews. It is a vain attempt, for, once the rule is breached, its binding quality is gone. Exclude the Jews — next you will exclude other aliens and the sons and daughters of aliens, the men of different religious beliefs, of different political views, of different economic status. Instead of the peace that flows from the principle of good will you will have the war of all against all. Instead of democracy you will have the totalitarian state, to create a desert and desolation and call it peace.
Copyright 1938, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.
There are complacent persons, priding themselves on their common sense, who will say that this is to exaggerate the importance of the Jewish problem. True, Jews are being beaten and robbed, hounded down and often murdered, in regions once dominated by modern civilization. True, they are being thrust out of their homes toward an outside world that refuses to receive them. True, for millions of Jews to-day the only homeland to which they can look forward with confidence is the grave. But what of the millions of Chinese noncombatants who are perishing miserably under the terror from the skies, from flood and fire and famine? What of the noncombatants of Spain ?
These same common-sense philosophers might as well argue that a judicial murder, the execution of an innocent man after a corrupt trial, is only one among the multitudinous murders we always have with us. A thug may kill me. I was born to die, but not like that. I have a just grievance, if the police have been negligent. But if I and my kind are being condemned to death on perjured evidence by corrupt judges the whole system of life under which I live as long as I can, and my children and my children’s children after me, is being poisoned at the roots.
The Jewish problem — not the problem of the Jews alone, but of us all — is not one to be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders or a quip on the Chosen People. It is a poison that penetrates to the heart of democracy, a cumulative poison. If in this year of our Lord 1938 we in America exclude the people of Christ from His principle of good will to men, our democracy is on its road to a heavy reckoning.
Need I state that in recent years there has been a marked increase in antiSemitism in America? Everyone knows that this is true. Need I attempt to recount the causes of this hideous phenomenon? Everyone knows that there has been an active anti-Semitic propaganda carried on, in part by sympathizers with Nazi Germany, in part by gullible individuals who take seriously such myths as that of the ‘great Jewish conspiracy’ of international bankers and Bolsheviks, to ruin the world and establish the empire of David on its ashes. There are four million natural-born morons in the United States, and probably twice as many who have become virtual morons through defect of education or through the stupefying effect of a scatterbrained environment. If someone were to prove to me that the present anti-Semitic following amounts to two million I would say, ‘Astonishing! Is that all?’
To a democrat, what the morons think and feel is by no means a matter of indifference. We are all of limited intelligence, and in the eyes of God the difference between the philosopher and the moron is no doubt immaterial. The morons, too, are capable of good will, and if this has become corrupted to ill will and anti-Semitism, that is the fault of the rest of us who pride ourselves on our superior intelligence.
It is, however, not the organized antiSemitism prevalent among the people of low intelligence that really signifies, but the growing antagonism to the Jews, the growing indifference to the wrongs heaped upon the Jewish race, among people who are otherwise intelligent and public-spirited, people who are endowed with conscience and humanity. How are we to account for this? And, what is more important, what are we Christians and Jews going to do about it?
A learned rabbi has pointed out that anti-Semitism is a symptom of a sick world. The world has been sick ever since the Great War. Before the war there were in every country great numbers of individuals who thought they had their lives ordered to the end. They had apparently secure positions with retirement pensions in sight, or they had property or business that could be counted on to produce a steady income. Economically they were at peace with the world, and, being at economic peace, they were also more or less subject to the sway of moral peace. Toleration was possible in such a world. But the war and the post-war disorders shattered all these assumed economic certainties. Embittered anxiety succeeded to the mood of peace, and infections like intolerance found a fertile soil to grow in.
No one will doubt that there is a high measure of validity in this analysis. In a sick world the Jewish problem will assume an aggravated condition; but there was a Jewish problem, developing according to laws of its own, even when the world was comparatively well. To press the pathological metaphor a little farther, wo have normally in the body politic a quiescent lesion, a disposition to carp at the Jews, to exclude them from social organizations, occasionally to erect property restrictions against them and to throw difficulties in their way when they attempt to gain entry to professions regarded as privileged. These fairly harmless discriminations are capable of flaring up dangerously in times of social stress, involving all sorts of adjacent tissues.
An extreme example is that of Germany. The flaring up of anti-Semitism involved with it not only Communism, — promptly identified with Jewry through the accident that Marx and a prominent Communist minority were Jews, — but also the Social Democratic Party, in our time as little socialistic as Roosevelt or Landon; also all liberal parties; also all democratic groups; also the ‘international bankers’; also pacifism and internationalism; also all recent tendencies in art, music, literature, education, particularly religious education. The Jewish problem in Germany behaved just like a malignant cancer neglected too long and now sending cell colonies everywhere through the circulatory system.
We all believe that nothing like that could happen here. We have a far stronger Constitution than that of Weimar. Nevertheless, who can say what may happen in fifty years, or a hundred years, if we presume too much on the quiescence of the anti-Semitic lesion ?
II
What, then, is the nature of the Jewish problem of normal times? It is certainly not a matter of religion. We have a long tradition of religious tolerance, and, except in a relatively small number of benighted localities, we exhibit respect toward every man’s religion. To be sure, we have had anti-Catholic crusades. But Catholicism was popularly supposed to control the political action of its adherents. It was supposed to be hostile to democracy. With the realization that Catholics divide on questions of politics, each worth-while individual following his own convictions, the popular opposition to them has faded out. Every decent Protestant treats the convictions of his Catholic neighbors with respect. So does every decent American, even though tinged with anti-Semitism, treat respectfully the Jewish religion. And if there are small and thoughtless persons who bring up the crucifixion of Jesus, a Jew, by Jews, it is merely to find effective material for expressing an antecedent anti-Semitism.
Neither is it a matter of race. There are those who argue gravely that the Jews are Orientals, and that it is forever true of East and West that never the twain shall meet. Anyone who has eyes and good sense besides can see that there is no unity of racial type among the Jews. Look at the tall Spanish or Portuguese Jew with the high narrow Iberian head; look at the blue-eyed, long-headed Jews of Holland and the Rhine Valley, the stolid faces of Polish Jews, the mercurial, curly-haired round heads from the Ukraine. Any competent anthropologist can match any type of Jew, feature for feature, with non-Jews from our own authentic population.
There is something wrong here, the reader will say. I always know a Jew when I see one — nearly always. But so can one always tell a farmer, a building worker, a railroad man, a traveling salesman, a doctor, a professor. Persons of a similar range of experience acquire similar earmarks, and in our popular anthropology it is earmarks that tell.
It is not a question of differential ability. You hear it endlessly repeated that Jews are apt imitators, not original thinkers. Look at Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Weil, Ehrlich, Haber, Brandeis, Cardozo, Picasso, Matisse. In the arts they are said to be mere middlemen. Mendelssohn a middleman? Heine? If Epstein is a middleman, whose goods is he selling? The fact is that no group produces many original thinkers. Gentile or Jew, we are nearly all imitators, middlemen. I must confess that the Jews have produced no Shakespeare. The whole non-Jewish world, outnumbering the Jews four thousand times, has produced only one.
Neither is it a question of character. There are square Jews and crooked Jews, as is the case with other groups, and anyone who has a wide acquaintance with both races knows that the crooks are an insignificant if disastrous minority among either Jews or Gentiles. There are shy Jews and aggressive Jews, as with the rest of us. It was a Jew who first bearded the lion, but it was Sir Francis Drake who set out to singe the beard of the King of Spain. I could go on indefinitely with these parallels, and yet the reader will reassert, ‘Nevertheless I know a Jew when I see one.’
What, then, is the heart of the Jew’s offending? First of all, he composes a compact minority group, and compact minorities are always subject to peculiar social laws. If you are of the majority and produce a notable achievement, the credit is yours. Your work is judged in terms of the individual character it expresses. If you are of a compact minority the achievement is still yours, but the critic will stretch every point to give it a racial interpretation. Of all living Americans the one most like Abraham Lincoln is Mr. Justice Brandeis. Both men’s work exhibits a veneration for the law, but a sense of the moral law behind the statute from which the latter derives its essential validity. Both men’s thought is premised upon the democratic rights of man and the democratic responsibilities of man. In the case of Brandeis these characteristics are said to be Jewish.
But if we do occasionally impute to the minority virtues and achievements that actually are of all mankind, what we do infallibly is to impute to the minority outstanding instances of vice and crime. If a Gentile pulls off a gigantic swindle, we impute it to him alone. If a Jew perpetrates a similar misachievement, it is a Jewish swindle, tarring in some measure the whole race.
Three fourths of the Jews in the United States are either immigrants who fled from the pogroms of Tsarist Russia or the children of such immigrants, brought up in solid immigrant communities. Like all immigrant stocks, these Jews are imperfectly assimilated after so brief a lapse of time as is represented by two generations. They are inadequately assimilated in language, gesture, and manners, and occasionally in law and in the customs that are more binding than law. Exactly the same charge of persistent alienism was once brought against the slightly earlier Italian groups, the German and Scandinavian immigrants of the seventies and eighties, the Irish of the forties and fifties, the colonial immigration of Scotch, Irish, Germans, and French. Always America has made a wry face over the ingestion of a new alien group. But we tend to impute Jewish alienism to fundamental Jewishness.
Alienism as a rule mends itself with time. Most minority groups are absorbed into the majority. This is not true of the Jews, because the Jewish religion embraces a whole cultural system, resistant to assimilation not only through its spirit but through external observances, such as the Jewish holidays and Jewish dietary rules. Many Jews, to be sure, have abandoned these distinguishing customs, but so long as the central core of the group holds to them, all Jews will be treated as a compact minority, credited grudgingly with the achievements of the virtuous and able, credited generously with the peccadillos and vices and crimes of the foolish and wicked. So it is written in the irrevocable laws of the modern Modes and Persians, the sociologists.
So it is written, but this does not mean that there is nothing to do about it. Of that, later. Just now we must consider the bearing of another characteristic of this particular compact minority, the Jews.
Once the Jews, like all other peoples, were pastoral and agricultural, and even under the Roman Empire they were known not for their business capacity, their competence in money matters, but for their skill as gardeners and craftsmen — was there a business man among the followers of Christ except Judas, and he too afflicted with a conscience? But the occupational restrictions of mediæval and early modern times urbanized almost the whole body of the Jews. There was room for an occasional Jewish rural cattle trader, or manorial superintendent, but almost the whole Jewish population was confined to the Ghetto, to live if it could by trade and the industrial operations immediately attached to trade, though there was within the group a privileged minority set apart for the rabbinate and related professional activity, law and medicine.
Jewish emancipation in the liberal era made possible the escape of increasing numbers of Jews from the Ghetto, but not from the Ghetto tradition of the means of livelihood. The Ghetto trader mushroomed out into the Jewish merchant, the pawnbroker into the banker, the learned man into the professor, journalist, author, lawyer, accountant, or physician. The Jew was liberated, after a fashion, as to his head, but his feet clung to the city pavement.
Well, why should this count against the Jews? Were they not performing a valuable function here? Certainly. Any historian can prove that the quickening of commerce, in which the Jewish merchant and banker played a large and honorable part, was the most powerful force making for economic progress in the western world. He can also prove that the Jewish contribution to the advance of the arts and sciences is of inestimable value.
Business and the professions are the fields in which competition is most severe, animosities most bitter. Not so with manual labor. Rarely does a bricklayer hate another for laying bricks. A man can lay sixteen hundred bricks a day; a union man may lay only eight hundred at most. In times of building activity the number of bricks to be laid is astronomical, and what one man can do is an insignificant part of the whole. So with other trades and factory work. Through years I have inquired diligently for instances of racial jealousy between Jewish and Gentile craftsmen and factory workers. I have found none. Similarly, what one farmer brings to market is never enough to sink the price. No farmer hates another for competent farming; rather, he reserves his hatred for the farmers who seed up the whole neighborhood with weeds. There are sixteen thousand Jewish farmers in the United States. I have yet to hear of any that are persecuted by their neighbors.
Business and the professions, however, are another story. A grocer, we will say, has established himself on a frequented corner, and for a time docs a comfortable business. Another grocer sets up on the opposite corner. Either could do all the business in sight. Now the business has to be divided between two, and the first comer is far from happy. True, the two, with their competing displays, may pull business away from other street corners; conceivably they may attract so much of this business that, paradox of paradoxes, their last state will be better than their first. But no merchant is so optimistic at the outset as to expect any such result. He hates his rival whole-heartedly; he detests him besides, if the rival is a Jew.
Similarly, competition is keen among doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists. In the long run, and as a general rule, professional services are capable of expanding into a more important place in society. Any able worker may open up new fields of great value to other workers. But the immediate effect of additional personnel is to split the business and render life more difficult for men already finding it hard to make ends meet. Professional men do not like rivals; and their dislike is intensified if the rival can in any sense be regarded as an alien.
III
A fatality appears to dog the steps of the Jewish people. When the world was young and wide fertile lands beckoned, in the east and north and over the sea, what did they choose for their homeland? The favorite battlefield of the competing empires of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Hittites of Asia Minor. They might sow and build, but almost every generation saw alien armies, numerous as locusts, marching in to reap and burn. In their present-day attempt to restore their homeland they find themselves again on a battlefield where Arab nationalism, British and Italian imperialism, are in perennial conflict. And in these times of universal unrest they set up their tents in the most venomously competitive of fields, business and the professions. These are the very fields that suffer first and most grievously when the world turns sick.
To sum up the sociological analysis: the Jewish religion, particularly by its external observances, sets the Jewish people apart as a permanent minority; a minority as a whole is held responsible for the misbehavior and misdeeds of its individual members; the Jewish minority, following its traditions, takes its stand in the most savagely competitive field of modern life. What more is needed to explain anti-Semitism, to demonstrate the hopelessness of the problem?
Only the last part of this statement is wrong. Granted that the spirit of good will to men still lives among us, — and if it does not we die, — the problem is one that admits of solution.
There is room on the broad bosom of the earth for minorities, compact minorities living their own lives, maintaining their own values. There are endless examples of the long survival of such minorities. The Druses continue to live on the slopes of Lebanon, having defied Arab and Turk and Christian imperialism; the Albanians have held their own in their barren hills since Agamemnon was a puling infant; the Kutzo-VIachs still hold the slopes of the Pindus range; low Latin survives among the Ladins of Switzerland. But in all these instances the minority stands squarely on the soil. Though its polity is primitive, all vocations necessary to survival have their fair representation in it.
Or take a nonterritorial minority group like the Scotch. There is, to be sure, a Scottish homeland of crag and glen and lough, where the stag noses his way through the cold mist, secure because the tough-limbed hunters have distributed themselves over the seven seas and the ten-times-seven lands. Wherever they may be they are Scotchmen still, peculiar and formidable. There is no walk in life where you will not meet them. Like the Jews, they exhibit an incurable intellectual interest, a canny sense of business. But, unlike the Jews, they have never permitted the white collar to become a yoke. They have a preference for business and the professions, but they also like to follow the plough and wield the axe and scythe.
Woven thus into the whole texture of economic life, the Scotchman finds the civilized world his homeland. The civilized world is the true homeland of the Jew. I say this without prejudice to Zionism, which I trust will succeed in establishing as solid a homeland in Palestine as the Scotch have among their ancestral moors. But Palestine and Scotland will accommodate only a symbolic fragment of the Jews and Scotch.
If the wide world is to become for the Jews a greater homeland, as it is for the Scotch, they too must weave themselves inextricably into the texture of economic life, occupying all vocations from the soil up. As I have indicated, there are Jewish farmers in America, but only sixteen thousand. There should be two hundred thousand, to give the Jews proportional representation in American agriculture. With such representation in agriculture we should not need to trouble ourselves about proportional representation in other fields. For the superfluous farm youth distributes itself naturally over the whole range of employments.
But Jews will not live in the open country, someone objects. Is it sufficiently taken into account that millions of Jews are now asking whether they shall be permitted to live at all? That among so philoprogenitive a race there are hundreds of thousands who do not dare to bring children into a world like this, hundreds of thousands of excellent vigorous stock whose seed appears fated to die with them? I refuse to believe that this vital and creative race can long withstand the lure of the fertile countryside.
In country as in city the Jews will remain a minority. They will be subject to the differential requirements that a permanent minority must meet. Among minorities, whether Danes in German Schleswig, Poles in Germany, or Germans in Pennsylvania, you encounter a rule of life which must have grown out of long experience. Their voices are soft and low, their manners unobtrusive. They leave noisiness and conspicuousness to the majority. The Jews of Europe, behind the walls of the Ghetto, were under no similar requirement. In their compulsory shelter they might compete to their heart’s content for the attention of their fellows. This habit of social competition can be lived down but slowly. Yet it must be lived down if a permanent minority is to exist happily in the modern state.
IV
I have apparently wandered far afield from the theme of good will to men. But it is only apparently that I have wandered, for, as we value good will and all that depends on it, we must understand and cope with the outstanding problem of ill will in our time, the Jewish problem.
It is a problem for Jew and Gentile alike. Were anti-Semitism to grow to the proportions of a movement for the banishment of the Jews, the first sufferers would be the Jews themselves. But we should all suffer the loss of our liberties that would inevitably follow such an unloosing of ill will. The Jews of Germany were the first victims of anti-Semitism. But in the progress of time the Nazi triumph made possible by the passions of anti-Semitism has victimized far more non-Jews than Jews. Many more non-Jews than Jews have experienced the miseries of the concentration camp; many more have perished there.
Is it an extravagant hope that men of good will, Jews and Gentiles alike, will presently awaken to the fact that we have too complacently permitted antiSemitism to go as far as it is safe for us to let it go, if we care about the survival and progress of American democracy? Is it not time for us to translate our good will into action in behalf of this sorely beset people? Good will unused spoils in the container. How many of us have fallen into anti-Semitic modes of thought and speech as a defense for our consciences against the reproach that we have seen our fellow man hunted and stripped and beaten while we did nothing about it? We never did think the Jews a desirable element in the state, we say. The Devil was bright when he invented the moral alibi.
We who value our civilization owe a tremendous debt to the Jews. In place of childish aggregations of gods mostly malevolent, in place of terrifying superstitions abated only for the elect by philosophy, they gave us religions of singular purity and splendor that yet could reach even the lowliest minds. The book of history is not yet closed, and it may be fated that our present civilization of aerial bombs and poison gas must once more go through an era of mediæval darkness. The Jews, however small a remnant, will manage to keep their lamps burning. Their mission has not come to an end. Indeed, one may say that even to-day, in the midst of the greatest of all persecutions, their mission stands out clearly: to awaken us from the stupor in which we dreamed that a civilized society might rest on some other basis than that which has been tested by time — good will to men.