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xi Introduction The life of Louis Marshall (1856–1929) encapsulates the political history of the Jews in the United States during the first three decades of the twentieth century, up to the Great Depression. Born in Syracuse to immigrant parents of middle European ancestry, Marshall made his mark in Upstate New York as a successful lawyer with a special flair for constitutional issues. When he moved to Manhattan at the age of thirty-eight, nothing in his past necessarily foreshadowed the stature he would attain in the twentieth century: the premier figure in organized Jewish efforts in the United States whose name after World War I also became inextricably linked to the rights of Jewish communities overseas, and a lawyer of renown who is said to have argued more cases before the Supreme Court than any private attorney of his time. Marshall catapulted to prominence partly as a result of his association, as an insider-outsider, with Manhattan’s elite circle of German Jews, whose undisputed chief until his death in 1920 was the wealthy banker Jacob Schiff. Although Marshall ’s Jewish leadership position and influence was made possible by this access to the resources of New York’s powerful Uptown Jews, he became a figure of preeminent authority in Jewish affairs as a result of hard work, discerning intelligence , and compelling devotion to issues of concern to all Jews. By the 1920s, Jews in America were even said to be living under the rule of “Marshall law.” This association between an era of communal endeavor and the mostly beneficent, though sometimes imperious, wisdom and activity of one experienced organizational leader had no precedent in American Jewish history, nor could it possibly have been recapitulated in subsequent eras. Marshall’s peak period of impact in American Jewish affairs also has few parallels in the ethnic history of the United States as a whole. Marshall was the man who, for twenty years, led the fight to keep America’s doors of immigration open. In the absence of his legislative lobbying and the help of predecessors and colleagues in this immigration sphere, Hitler and the Nazis would have killed several hundred thousand more Jews. Marshall was the man to whom Henry Ford capitulated and apologized, after sponsoring a vitriolic hate xii • Introduction campaign against the Jews for several years in the 1920s. During the first decade of British Mandatory control in Palestine, Marshall was the man to whom the pioneer Zionists turned, seeking make-or-break support for their heroic attempt to re-create a Jewish national home. And Marshall was the man who drew up the papers, ironed out guidelines of structure and policy, and almost single-handedly orchestrated the signature public campaigns of leading Jewish organizations and institutions of his day. Marshall’s energetic vision was the prime component distinguishing the first quarter century of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the first organization in the history of the United States to be formed by an ethnoreligious group for the purpose of defending its rights and those of its brethren overseas. His intelligence and impassioned commitment left indelible marks as well on several other key Jewish religious, cultural, and philanthropic institutions ; some, like the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), continue to thrive today. In American affairs, Marshall’s major contributions toward what the country ’s twenty-first-century citizens cherish most about its recent past and guard most vigilantly with a worried eye toward its future are stunningly underappreciated . Upon his death, the country’s leading African American advocacy organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), noted that every single case of “any constitutional importance” it had handled for several years had been personally litigated by Marshall or carefully supervised and directed by him. One NAACP spokesman said simply, “no man has done more for the Negro.”1 Concurrently, Native American empowerment groups posthumously honored Marshall for the “great service” he had rendered to their cause in his final years. Marshall’s legal briefs and advocacy for Native American rights, they said, “had the quality of a trumpet challenge to the imagination and conscience.”2 Such encomia would dignify any American’s résumé. However, it is important to note that, apart from his ongoing work as the leader of the country’s Jewish community, Marshall’s most abiding interest as an advocate of rights did not attach to any human group. An impassioned conservationist, Marshall and his son Robert (a legendary...

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