The Transfer Agreement (12 page)

In 1900, Wise became rabbi of a Portland congregation. He was soon involved in turn-of-the-century reform movements, including child labor, women's suffrage, and Negro rights. The governor of Oregon had even appointed him commissioner of Child Labor.
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In 1906, Rabbi Wise returned to New York, where scores of thousands of Jewish refugees from Russia, Poland, and Rumania were seeking shelter. He spurned an opportunity to serve at Temple Emanu-El, the fashionable synagogue of the elitist German Jews. Instead he founded the Free Synagogue, operating out of the Hudson Theatre, and later a branch on the Lower East Side. The Free Synagogue established a Social Service Division to aid the deprived and dispossessed—regardless of religion—as they struggled to remain warm, stay fed, and acquire an education. The Jewish masses saw this work as a social crusade. Later Wise joined with Christian counterparts—minister John Haynes Holmes, Jane Addams, and other reformers—to create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which fought for Negro rights and opportunity.
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Stephen Wise was an eloquent, feisty, determined, and often self-righteous fighter for the people, a man who found his inner strength and outer support most vitalized when struggling for the underdog against powerful adversaries. In his late twenties, his handsome roughhewn face became familiar on the national political scene. President Woodrow Wilson counted him as a key supporter, and friendships with several Supreme Court justices provided him access to virtually any portal in Washington. Wise's closeness to Woodrow Wilson and his advisers made the rabbi a factor in America's endorsement of Britain's Balfour Declaration. Just after the Great War, Wise was a leading advocate for guaranteed Jewish minority rights, a prime supporter of America's most important labor unions, and a cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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Wise took on the Jewish establishment as well, when in the early I920S he organized the Jewish masses into the permanent American Jewish Congress.
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During the mid-I920S, he supported unions in bitter labor disputes, undeterred by ax-handles and private armies. He fought the Ku Klux Klan throughout the North and the South and was a leader in the protest over the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Wise even shook off the wrath of almost every American Jew as press reports distorted his I925 sermon affirming that Jesus was a Jew whom "Christians deny in fact and Jews deny in name ... a man not myth, human not God, Jew not Christian."
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Wise thrived on controversy and the painful pursuit of his beliefs, no matter how bitter the consequences. He was a man who would sever a lifelong friendship because of a loose comment or cut himself off from his own people rather than retract a statement he believed to be true. And he was accustomed to rallying thousands in bitter, frequently violent battles to achieve a lasting principle.

And yet, as the hour pulled closer for the Madison Square rally, Stephen Wise experienced indecision. He weighed the moral imperative of standing up to Hitler against the risk of provoking the Nazis to unleash an organized pogrom that would leave Jews bloodied across Germany. Would the rally make a difference? Had the protest gone far enough, or was it only starting? Would delay merely provide the Third Reich with the breathing time it needed to organize its destruction of the Jews? Stephen S. Wise, who had stood alone on any issue, fought alone on any battle, could not alone make this decision.

On March 27, Rabbi Wise telephoned the one man in America whose judgment he valued perhaps more than his own—his dearest friend, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. They spoke briefly and Wise put it to his friend simply. Do it or not? Brandeis answered, "Go ahead and make the protest as good as you can." Wise hung up. His decision was now fina1.
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T
HE
RALLY
didn't start until after 8:00
P.M.,
but by 2:30
P.M.
on March 27, 1933, people were waiting outside Madison Square Garden. Once the doors were unlocked, a flow of people began that continued for hours. By
5:30,
traffic snarled as thousands more jammed the streets around Madison Square. People were backed all the way down the subway stairs. Six hundred policemen formed a blue-coat chain along the crosswalks just to allow pedestrians to pass.
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Suddenly, in the midst of the many, came distant sounds of drums and fifes that added distinctly American excitement to the scene. Those people nearest the Garden probably could not see the approaching formation, even as the marching staccato became louder and closer. But then, off on a side street, a drum and bugle corps appeared, all war veterans stepping proudly, with banners denouncing the Third Reich. By plan they were to enter the Garden in a dramatic flourish, but as the streets became thicker the marchers could not move. Up against barriers of mounted policemen, the veterans marched in place, waiting for an opening, their skirls and drumbeats continuing a cadence for the crowd.
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Inevitably the streets became chaotic as protesters tried to force through the doors of the Garden. But the aisles and balconies and lobbies of Madison Square Garden were already filled.
³

Orders went out. The doors were closed with
20,000
inside. But the crowds outside demanded entry and the police started to react. Superior officers rushed in to calm the frenzy. Public loudspeakers were hastily mounted to control an estimated
35,000
anxious citizens crammed into the streets around the Garden. Pleas by police and protest marshals diverted some of the thousands to a second ad hoc rally at nearby Columbus Circle. It wasn't enough. More overflow rallies were frantically set up along the nearby intersections. New York had never seen anything like it.
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Americans of all persuasions and descents were united against Adolf Hitler, and they wanted their country to do something about it. Decades later they would be accused of apathy and inaction. But on March
27, 1933,
the citizens of the United States were anything but apathetic.

Fifty-five thousand were gathered in and around Madison Square Garden. Supportive rallies were at that moment waiting in Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Houston, and about seventy other American cities. At each supportive rally, thousands huddled around loudspeakers waiting for the Garden event, which would be broadcast live via radio relay to
200
additional cities across the country. At least
I
million Jews were participating nationwide. Perhaps another million Americans of non-Jewish heritage stood with them.
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Hundreds of thousands more were waiting in Europe. Congress president Bernard Deutsch had sent out last minute cables to Jewish protest leaders in Latvia, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere throughout the Continent. Anti-Reich activists across the Atlantic had agreed to hold their protests in abeyance until signaled from New York. When the go-ahead was received, plans were put into effect. Poland was typical. A national day of fasting was authorized by rabbinical bodies. The Warsaw Stock Exchange shut down early. Poland's government even released an order dissolving a large portion of the Polish Hitlerites. Anti-Hitler parades and meetings were granted approval, while police banned counterdemonstrations by Nazi sympathizers.
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Inside the Garden itself, the guest speakers were delayed. People were shouting, feet were stamping, chairs were banging. The din was equaled outside, where loudspeakers pleaded for order as the program organizers tried to start. Abruptly in the midst of the tumult, when it seemed the crowd would wait no longer, an eighty-year-old orthodox rabbi, M. S. Margolies, approached the lectern and touched the microphone. The audience came to a sudden silence. The hush spread outside as people strained to hear. Rabbi Margolies chanted a plaintive Hebraic prayer of chilling power, his voice beseeching God in the name of humanity that the persecutions in Germany stop. The chant was heard around the world.
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Among the first to speak was Alfred E. Smith, former New York governor and popular Catholic figure. Smith, in his plain-folks style, declared that of all the times he had addressed the public in Madison Square Garden, no rally could give him greater satisfaction because the opportunity to stand up against bigotry was both a duty and a right. He admitted there had been great pressures to keep him from speaking: "I got all kinds of telegrams ... telling me there wasn't any reason for a meeting, that nothing had taken place [in Germany], that we wanted to avoid the possibility of hysteria at a time like this. Well, all I can say about that is ... drag it out into the open sunlight and give it the same treatment that we gave the Ku Klux Klan .... it don't make any difference to me whether it is a brown shirt or a night shirt." The crowd cheered its approval repeatedly as Smith used down-home lingo, puns, and sarcasm to ridicule der Fuhrer and his Storm Troopers. But before Smith finished, he became stern and in sober tones warned the German nation not to descend into a barbaric war against the Jews.
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Bishop John J. Dunn of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, because of State Department and American Jewish Committee assurances, had reneged on his promise to appear. But other clergymen, including Bishop Francis
T.
McConnell, refused to back down. Bishop McConnell warned, "People say, 'Why not let Germany run things to suit herself?' My friends, that is just the quickest way to plunge the world into war again.
If
there is no protest at all against so completely out-of-date a thing as the anti-Semitic movement ... [then] after a while ... the situation becomes intolerable and then we resort to force." He added that anti-Nazi rallies and protest actions must continue, even if persecutions in Germany temporarily ceased, until the Nazis were out of power.
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The applause and cheers for Bishop McConnell's words were followed by a procession of politicians and clergymen, each likewise committing his supporters to the struggle against Hitlerism. And then the crowd heard from the most experienced economic battle group in America—organized labor.

William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, pledged the active involvement of
3
million American unionists.
"I
come tonight in the name of Labor," Green declared, "protesting in its sacred name against the atrocities ... perpetrated upon the Jewish population of Germany.
I
transmit to the ... German trade unions, the masses of the people, the hosts of labor in Germany, and to the Jewish people an expression of sympathy .... We pledge to them our moral and economic support ... [to] do all that lies within our power" to end "the campaign of persecution against the Jewish people in Germany."
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Labor's involvement could make any boycott almost totally effective, especially if longshoremen refused to off-load German merchandise at the docks. So Green's words were powerful threats. "We will not remain passive and unconcerned when the relatives, families, and brethren of the Jewish members of our great organization are being persecuted and oppressed," Green promised.
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Other eminent figures continued to enthrall the rally, including crusading minister John Haynes Holmes, New York Senator Robert Wagner,
Der
Tog
editor Samuel Margoshes, Joseph Tenenbaum of the American Jewish Congress, and Chaim Greenberg of the Labor Zionists. Many more wishing to address the meeting could not, and sent telegrams instead: the Speaker of the House, the governor of Illinois, a senator from California, the governor of Iowa, the Senate majority leader, the governor of Oregon, scores of civic, social, commercial, labor, fraternal, and religious organizations. All condemned the Third Reich in explicit language and expressed solidarity with the movement to overturn Hitler.
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The protest rally received such vocal support that the thousands ignored the nonappearance of the American Jewish Committee and B'nai B'rith. Nor did they notice the absence of any message from the one man the nation expected to sympathize—President Roosevelt.

Then, with the audience primed and anxious, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise stepped forward to the most thunderous ovation he had ever received. After many attempts, the crowd finally quieted, and Dr. Wise began. He surprised many by discarding some of the dramatic techniques he often employed. At first he spoke in conciliatory tones, in the hopes of communicating with the people in Germany, "Not out of the bitterness of anger, but out of the ... spirit of compassion do we speak tonight .... We are not against Germany. . . . We are the friends of and believers in Germany—Germany at its highest, Germany at its truest, the German nation at its noblest."
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The other speakers had threatened and ridiculed the Nazis. Wise was showing the route away from conflict: cessation of anti-Semitism. He made
it
clear that even that demand was not an attempt to interfere with Germany's domestic affairs, but simply an insistence upon fundamental human rights or, as he called them, "axioms of civilizations." His manner was calm, steady.
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But then he began to build. "To those leaders of Germany who declare that the present situation in Germany is a local German question, we call attention to the words of Abraham Lincoln. Defenders of slavery urged and excused slavery on the ground that it was
local.
Lincoln's answer was slavery is local but freedom is
national!"
The crowd burst into excited approval. Wise kept building, as he demanded "the immediate cessation of anti-Semitic activities and propaganda in Germany, including an end to the racial discrimination against and economic exclusion of Jews from the life of Germany. . . . the human rights of Jews must be safeguarded .... Whatever be the threat of reprisal, none of these [demands] can be withdrawn or altered or moderated."
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