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79 3 The Origins of Organized Activism The founding of the American Jewish Committee (AJC; also hereafter referred to as the committee) in 1906 marked a turning point in Marshall’s career and created new options for the organized life and identity of the American Jewish community . To be sure, habits and assumptions of the previous moral reform phase lingered in this new stage of Marshall’s life. In administrative and communicative (though not financial) senses, he took charge of affairs for an Uptown elite that continued to demand a large share of control of Jewish affairs in America and that deeply distrusted radical or foreign-seeming currents of Jewish life in Manhattan ’s Downtown neighborhoods. Indeed, in the perspective of the East European immigrants, presumed differences between the earlier stage of Marshall’s career and the new era symbolized by the birth of the AJC were specious. From one year to the next, Marshall and his Uptown associates kept telling them what they had to do to become real Americans. Downtown objections to Uptown’s heavy-handed paternalism certainly remained discernible throughout this new second stage in Marshall’s career, but his confrontation with them did not become the primary component of his Jewish work until the volatile World War I years, analyzed in Part Three of this study. In ways that remained mostly opaque to the Downtown immigrants, he took steps in this second transitional phase of his career that dramatically transformed the organized capabilities of American Jews. These moves did not exactly promote unity between settled elite and poor immigrant Jewish groups (the romantic ideal of unity was, and would remain, chimerical), but they provided a steady lever for coordinated action between disparate Jewish subgroups on issues of obvious, overwhelming concern to all Jews. Given the mindset of the German Jewish Uptown group, establishing a national Jewish organization posed a formidable conceptual challenge. Potentially , such an organization belied Uptown’s endlessly repeated incantations about the American loyalty of Jews, about how Jews had no distinctive issues or concerns of their own in the public domain. For Uptown, it was unmistakably Marshall who grabbed these conceptual reins and who was entrusted with the 80 • A National Organization for the Jews task of explaining how the advent of a new national Jewish organization, the AJC, did not contradict all that generations of Jews in the United States had said about themselves. His job was to explain that the birth of the committee reinforced rather than undermined the existential requirement holding that members of the community were Americans in public and Jews privately in the religious worship of their homes and synagogues. From the start, there was no doubt the articulate Marshall would find some rhetorical formula that would effectively allay loyalty concerns attendant to the formation of the AJC, certainly among members of his own Uptown group and also among many in outlying Jewish and non-Jewish circles. Verbal formulas were not the problem, however. Instead, the issues related both to daily activity and internalized self-perception. The new organization needed to set a work agenda whose items constituted credible concerns to a sufficient portion of America’s Jewish community and whose handling enhanced whatever hard-won status the struggling immigrant Jews and their comfortably settled peers had attained. A survey of Marshall’s activity in this period provides a fascinating glimpse of how this agenda materialized for the AJC—and since the committee was a groundbreaking endeavor both for American Jews, and for ethnic groups in the United States on the whole, this portion of his biography warrants close scrutiny. No less significant than the AJC’s agenda is the issue of how its founding members felt about setting it. How did this precedent-setting organizational occurrence affect their evolving internal perceptions of what it meant to be Jewish in the open democracy of the United States? However they looked at it, the committee ’s founders had to admit—at least to themselves—that they shed a layer of inhibition about being “too Jewish” in America when they established a national Jewish organization to deal with matters that had obvious social and political, as opposed to religious, characteristics. But what did this internal identity transition really mean? • For Louis Marshall, it meant that the personally fulfilling journey from Upstate to Uptown in the first phase of his career had not satisfied his sense of public responsibility. Heretofore he had preached the gospel of American constitutionalism to the immigrants...

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