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4 Abrogation
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135 4 Abrogation The immigration struggle was waged without public demonstrations. Marshall shunned publicity in this sphere, fearing that any trumpeting of gains could cause the restrictionists to dig in their heels. Preemptive in purpose, the lobbying was a protracted and often thankless process. Since their accomplishment was to stave off a catastrophic closure of the doors, it was impossible for Marshall and his American Jewish Committee (AJC) associates to show the Downtown masses that they had attained something new and concrete. The magnitude of their achievement would not be measurable for years, until after the Nativists slammed shut America’s immigration doors in the early 1920s and catastrophe engulfed European Jewry. Only at that later date would it be possible to appreciate how many lives were saved because Marshall and the AJC, along with predecessors and associates such as Simon Wolf and the B’nai B’rith–Board of Delegates amalgam, helped stave off restrictive legislation in a way that allowed masses of East European Jews to reach the United States through World War I. Immigration advocacy appears, in hindsight, as a stellar item in Marshall’s personal career résumé and in the organizational record of the AJC, but its impact, and distinctive character in America’s early twentieth-century ethnic history , were not at the time apprehensible. Several months after it was founded amid considerable public debate, the AJC remained alienated from its main Jewish constituency, the immigrant masses on the Lower East Side, and it lacked a political action agenda to justify its existence. So long as it lacked an issue that would prove its capability as an ethnically empowering agency, the organization would continue to be defined by its character as a self-appointed body—and that issue of organizational democracy or stewardship was, for Marshall, exasperating from the start. The five-year period leading up to the eruption of the World War I witnessed changes and triumphs in Marshall’s legal career, along with its nadir (his nonselection for the Supreme Court), the circumstances of which have never been understood. His children were growing, and religious and educational reform projects, such as the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), to whose origins or 136 • A National Organization for the Jews rebirth Marshall had invested considerable effort in the previous phase of his Jewish activity, were flourishing. All these developments warrant mention, but they are of secondary import to the story of Marshall’s life as a miniature personification of the rise of a new type of ethnic Jewish identity and politics in the United States. From that biographical viewpoint, this phase of his life was dominated by Marshall’s search to designate an agenda for the AJC. It was a period when the scope, purposes, and operations of organized ethnic politics came to be better defined. Months into this five-year period, the AJC came to define itself via the struggle to abrogate America’s 1832 treaty of commerce and navigation with Russia, due to the czarist empire’s discriminatory treatment of Jewish possessors of American passports. Much in this definitional process can be questioned, both from the point of view of American interests1 and even the AJC’s own needs. Indeed, the historian Naomi Cohen, who published groundbreaking research on the abrogation struggle from a viewpoint largely sympathetic to the AJC, concluded rather dourly that on the eve of WWI, the anti-abrogation predictions that had been articulated months earlier by the Taft administration and the State Department “seemed to come true.” Abrogation, Cohen concluded, had brought about “an unfriendly Russia, a decline in trade, and anti-Semitic reprisals in Russia.”2 And, as we shall see, while Marshall and AJC colleagues were absolutely elated after their efforts produced the treaty’s abrogation, believing that their organization would now have authority and credibility in the eyes of Downtown immigrants, the relentless challenges leveled against the AJC during the war by the Zionists and the American Jewish Congress proponents would prove that the abrogation triumph did not really render Marshall’s organization immune to Downtown criticism. These points are legitimate, but they are somewhat off the mark. This issuedefinition phase is a noteworthy chapter in Marshall’s own career, and also, more broadly, in the history of ethnic politics in the United States, because it was, quite simply, proof of the possible. Marshall and the AJC proved that an ethnonational group had the right and, in the right circumstances, the wherewithal, to reshape the policy of...