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222 5 Avoiding the Guillotine of Immigration Restriction Untermyer The year 1912 opened with a major change in Marshall’s professional life when his partner Samuel Untermyer left their firm. “This will keep me very busy,” Marshall wrote to his father, in laconic understatement.1 Samuel Untermyer was a complicated man. A corporate lawyer who built up a thriving business, Untermyer served as guiding spirit and legal counsel on the 1912–13 Pujo Committee investigation of the banking “money trust.” While his work on the Pujo panel thrilled Progressives, Untermyer became notorious among members of America’s financial elite as a merciless demagogue allegedly responsible for causing J. P. Morgan to die from stress (Morgan’s son subsequently referred to Untermyer as “the beast”). All the same, the Jewish business lawyer’s social orbit had points of tangency with the house of Morgan (his pedigree collies had once beaten Pierpont ’s in a dog competition).2 Beyond blood ties, the Untermyers and Marshalls were friends—Florence and Louis would greet the Untermyers as they disembarked and returned from ocean journeys. Untermyer liked to laugh at Marshall’s neurotic fear of dogs.3 Actually, the fact that Untermyer trained dogs to compete with the pets of the city’s Gentile millionaires, while his partner sidetracked for dozens of blocks on his walks to avoid dogs and moralized about how dog ownership ought to be banned in New York City, perhaps symbolizes something more than just a long-standing running joke between the two professional partners. Marshall was a conservative who sought to preserve nature and Judaism intact, whereas Untermyer was a trainer, adapter, and conqueror who affiliated with the Zionist attempt to revolutionize Jewish life.4 Did Marshall feel victimized as “Samuel Untermyer’s partner,” especially since the President of the United States once mordantly suggested that he ought to? In fact, there is no strong evidence that Marshall regretted his partner’s Avoiding the Guillotine of Immigration Restriction • 223 confrontational style. Months after Untermyer’s devil-may-care defense of firm client Max Nathan’s position in the preventorium dispute damaged the viability of Marshall’s candidacy for the Supreme Court nomination, Marshall kindly invited Nathan to rejoin the Knollwood group, since Dan Guggenheim was selling his cottage.5 In other words, when Marshall traveled to his beloved retreat in the Adirondacks, he had many work pressures to escape from, but he was not fleeing from any reminder of Untermyer’s assertive advocacy. Immigration Politics before World War I Paradoxically, at the beginning of 1912, the abrogation triumph encouraged Marshall and the AJC to stay in the background in Capitol Hill, lobbying against the restrictionists and their literacy test proposals. “We should not be too much in the foreground” in the campaign against literacy tests, Marshall opined. He held that position “in view of the fact that the passport contest has been so recent, and we do not wish to have the suggestion made that we are trying to run the government.”6 This position stemmed from a semiformal “Conference on Immigration” Marshall had convened at his own home at the end of 1911, with Max Kohler (representing the Board of Delegates), Leon Sanders (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; HIAS), and Jacob Singer (B’nai B’rith). The delegates concurred that “opposition to the restriction of immigration should not emanate solely from the Jews.”7 Throughout 1912, Kohler and AJC member Cyrus Sulzberger would handle public work against immigration restriction via appearances at congressional hearings, publications, and speeches; Marshall, who became president of the AJC in autumn 1912 when Mayer Sulzberger retired, directed the campaign from behind the scenes.8 The hard-working Kohler burnished his credentials with potential allies, most importantly Charles Nagel, the secretary of commerce and labor. The son of a doctor who had fled Germany in the 1840s, Nagel won his appointment as a reward for his work on Taft’s 1908 campaign, but Schiff and his AJC associates , who had expected a pro-immigration orientation from a second-generation American, were disappointed by Nagel’s obstruction of the Galveston project for Jewish immigrants as well as his department’s policy of turning away immigrants who had less than $25 at the time of their arrival.9 Sensing that Nagel might nonetheless be flexible on immigration, Kohler maintained contact with the secretary of commerce and labor from late 1911. “I realize the truth of your statement that persons of my faith are almost necessarily advocates on these...

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