An excerpt from, "Presidential 'Thank you' note, 1904" The Rothschild Archive:
Lord Rothschild and Roosevelt shared similar political views; a muscular conservatism. Natty would have approved of Roosevelt’s accomplishments which included a commitment to conservation and the environment, and his expansion of the United States Navy. Roosevelt’s successful efforts to end the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 won him the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, and the approbation of the Rothschilds, who were only prepared to enter into business with Japan after the war had ended, issuing a major loan in Paris as well as London and the United States on behalf of the Japanese government in 1905.
Roosevelt was the first President to appoint a Jewish cabinet member, Secretary of Commerce and Labor, Oscar Solomon Straus (1850-1926), who served from 1906 to 1909. Concerned with the plight of European Jews, Natty warmly supported this appointment. On 2 July 1906, Natty wrote to his French cousins “Mr Oscar Strauss lunched with me: I have known him for many years, not personally, but we have corresponded together; he is a strong American, a great Hebrew by race, religion & feeling, and he is an intimate friend of Roosevelt, & although he does not wish it known, will probably soon be a member of Roosevelt's Government: at any rate he hopes and thinks so … it is very important that Mr Strauss should get the office Roosevelt wants to give him; because not only would it be a sign to Russia, but it would facilitate a great deal many questions connected with the immigration of Russians & Poles into America.”
An excerpt from, "Under Four Administrations: From Cleveland to Taft" by Oscar S. Straus, The Riverside Press, 1922, Chapter 9:
After luncheon, the President asked me to wait for him in the Red Room, as he wanted to have a talk with me. When the other guests had departed, he came back to me and with his face beaming with geniality he said: "I don't know whether you know it or not, but I want you to become a member of my Cabinet. I have a very high estimate of your character, your judgment, and your ability, and I want you for personal reasons. There is still a further reason: I want to show Russia and some other countries what we think of the Jews in this country."
Of course I was gratified, very much gratified. I told him I had heard from several persons that he had spoken of this intention, but that I had meant to take no notice of it until he should speak to me about it; that I should certainly esteem it the very highest honor to become a member of the Cabinet, and especially to have the privilege of working alongside of him.
"I knew you would feel just that way; therefore I was anxious to let you know of my intention as long in advance as possible," replied the President. He said all this in such a cordial and affectionate manner that I was profoundly touched with this manifestation of close friendship for me.
He then added that he could not see that it would do any good, and might do harm, to make further protests or utterances regarding the massacres in Russia under the disorganized conditions there; and he did not want to do anything that might sound well here and have just the opposite effect there. He thought it would be much more pointed evidence of our Government's interest if he put a man like me into his Cabinet, and that such a course would doubtless have a greater influence than any words with the countries in which unreasonable discrimination and prejudice prevailed.
. . .The Department of Commerce and Labor was the youngest of the nine departments of the Government, the bill creating it having been approved by President Roosevelt on February 14, 1903. Roosevelt had done much to establish the department and took great pride in it. The first Secretary of Commerce and Labor was George B. Cortelyou, who had been secretary to the President, and by reason of his intimate relations with the officials of the Government was admirably equipped to organize this department, which he did with great skill and administrative ability. After holding the office for about a year and a half, Secretary Cortelyou became Postmaster-General, and Victor H. Metcalf, Congressman from California, was appointed, thereby becoming the next Secretary of the Department on July 1, 1904; I was therefore the third.
The scope of the Department as constituted then was probably the largest of the nine branches of the Government. It was charged with the work of promoting the commerce, mining, manufacturing, shipping, and fishery industries of the country, as well as its transportation facilities and its labor interests; in addition it had jurisdiction over the entire subject of immigration. It had twelve bureaus: corporations; manufactures; labor; lighthouses; census; coast and geodetic survey; statistics, including foreign commerce; steamboat inspection; immigration and naturalization; and standards.
Oscar Solomon Straus (December 23, 1850 – May 3, 1926) was an American politician and diplomat. He served as United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt from 1906 to 1909. He was the first Jewish United States Cabinet Secretary.
. . .He first served as United States Minister to the Ottoman Empire from 1887 to 1889 and again from 1898 to 1899. Upon his arrival to Constantinople, he was said to have been given a "cordial welcome".
At the outbreak of the Philippine–American War in 1899, Secretary of State John Hay asked Straus to approach Sultan Abdul Hamid II to request that the Sultan write a letter to the Moro Sulu Muslims of the Sulu Sultanate telling them to submit to American suzerainty and American military rule. The Sulu sultanate agreed, with Straus writing that the "Sulu Mohammedans ... refused to join the insurrectionists and had placed themselves under the control of our army, thereby recognizing American sovereignty."
President McKinley sent a personal letter of thanks to Straus and said that its accomplishment had saved the United States at least twenty thousand troops in the field."
An excerpt from, "Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880–1918" by Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky, Brandeis University Press, 2014, Introduction:
By the late nineteenth century, many European states had emancipated Jews, expanded suffrage, raised literacy rates, and begun to industrialize, urbanize, and colonize the globe. Yet the early 1880s also brought pogroms in Russia, a sensational blood libel case in Hungary, an Antisemitic League in Germany, and growing Jewish emigration to western Europe and beyond. The uneasy coexistence in Europe of a liberal modernity with antisemitic agitation would last through the First World War, which, to many observers, brought the liberal era to a close and opened the door to unprecedented levels of anti-Jewish violence and discrimination. This is a book about European antisemitism, but it does not cover all of Europe. Important regions, including Scandinavia, Iberia, and the Low Countries, are not addressed here. Nor does Germany have a chapter, in part because the historiography on antisemitism in Imperial Germany is so rich. Readers familiar with German scholarship will see its influence on this book in many areas, not least in our emphasis on local studies, attention to the ritual dimensions of violence, and insistence that study of the nineteenth century can provide insight into the violence of the twentieth century. With this volume, we have tried to bring together essays on places less often featured in surveys of European antisemitism. We also have tried to span the continent. By including essays ranging from Great Britain to Greece and from France to Lithuania, this book makes clear that antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence did not distinguish the “backward” regions of Europe. The authors read antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence as evidence that modern mass politics arrived in rural eastern Europe with little if any time lag compared to the more “advanced” central and western European states. We have chosen not to organize the book’s essays by geographic region or to follow a west-east gradient, as is often the case in volumes on European history. Rather, we have grouped the essays around common themes and questions, although, as the reader will recognize, the chapters are often in conversation with each other across these section divisions. The aim is to suggest connections, both historical and historiographical, between regions rarely viewed alongside one another.
Catholicism and modern politics link the first three essays, which cover Habsburg Galicia, France, and Italy. Daniel Unowsky’s close study of the 1898 anti-Jewish riots in Galicia shows that antisemitism ran deep in the new mass politics in the Polish-speaking countryside. Catholic institutions, journalists, and politicians posited anti-Jewish action as the key to modernizing the rural economy. The monarchy’s commitment to political reform and press freedom also contributed to the outbreak, course, and legacy of the 1898 events. Still, as Unowsky argues, local contexts and the mixed motivations of participants on the ground shaped the 1898 violence, which contributed to the increased isolation of Jews in Galician society. The events in Galicia were influenced by Catholic antisemitic activity in other regions of Europe. As chapters by Vicki Caron and Ulrich Wyrwa reveal, French and Italian Catholic publicists played a key role in legitimizing a wide range of antisemitic arguments and antisemitic politics. Through newspapers, pamphlets, essay contests, and books, Catholic activists made antisemitism the centerpiece of the case they built against liberal regimes, which they blamed for the emancipation of Jews, rampant secularism, and deadening materialism.How this new Catholic antisemitism related to the era’s racial theories of antisemitism is a matter of some dispute. But the importance of Catholic writers to the development and dissemination of antisemitic rhetoric, images, and arguments is not. In all three case studies, the authors expose deep anxieties held by many Catholic thinkers and activists about modern politics and society. In late nineteenth-century Europe, anti-Jewish violence (and efforts to understand that violence) was deeply intertwined with questions of national belonging and nationalist politics.
The second set of essays usefully reminds us that local episodes of anti-Jewish violence took place within the framework of nation-states and multinational empires. Both political structures posed risks and rewards for Jews, and they also influenced how antisemitism functioned. In culturally cohesive states such as Romania—or France or Italy—where one ethnoreligious group dominated public life, Jews were often seen as “foreigners,” no matter what level of integration they had attained. This emerges clearly from Iulia Onac’s study of anti-Jewish violence in Romania. Peasants and parliamentarians agreed that Jews (even if native born) were foreigners who did not deserve human rights; indeed, expulsion was the frequent consequence of this antisemitic logic. Things were more complicated in the Habsburg Monarchy. Throughout central and eastern Europe, Jews often found themselves caught between competing national movements. Michal Frankl demonstrates that Czech activists in Moravia stirred antisemitism into the cauldron of national tensions. Here Jews were increasingly seen as an “internal” enemy, in many ways more threatening and insidious than the Czechs’ traditional (and “external”) antagonist, the Germans.
In Marija Vulesica’s account of antisemitism in Croatia, the Croatian press explained away local attacks on Jewish shops, homes, and synagogues as justifiable responses to Hungarian oppression. Like other case studies in this volume, Vulesica’s work serves as a reminder that neither a large Jewish population nor the sanction of state authorities was required for widespread antisemitic activity. Like a virus, antisemitism continued to mutate and spread in the years around 1900. The third section demonstrates the wide geographic reach of antisemitism, as well as the many forms it could take. In Sam Johnson’s chapter on London’s East End, the immigration of East European Jews into Great Britain triggered an antisemitic reaction. Her analysis of the British Brothers League shows how readily antisemitic agitators adopted liberal forms of political organization (voluntary associations, mass meetings, and marches) and media (newspapers, posters, and manifestos). Alison Rose’s chapter on the bigamy trial of a Jewish woman in rural Austria offers a similar lesson. Here antisemitic prosecutors, journalists, and spectators turned what should have been unremarkable legal proceedings into an antisemitic spectacle, in which the defendant’s Jewishness and gender took on outsized roles.
Mary Margaroni’s study of Greek antisemitism examines the infamous Corfu blood libel case of 1891 and adds other, lesser-known incidents to the list of anti-Jewish ritual murder charges. The posture of the state and its officials mattered greatly, as many of these essays demonstrate. Shaken by frequent riots and revolutions, nineteenth- century European governments placed a high premium on public order. With this in mind, scholars have shown that even in Russia, where antisemitism had a wide following, the regime did not incite the pogroms of the early 1880s, as had long been believed. Across Europe, state officials kept their distance from antisemitic activities. This did not prevent rioters from acting in the name of the state, nor were all state and regional authorities removed from local acts against Jews. As the final group of essays makes evident, the revolutions and wars of the early twentieth century not only raised the level of antisemitic violence, but often complicated relations between authorities and agitators. Klaus Richter’s study of Lithuania analyzes how the revolution of 1905 provided new opportunities for peasants in one village to exact their “revenge” on local Jews, whom they viewed as allies of the Tsarist regime.
Approaching the same events from a different perspective, Gerald Surh shows how army units, committed to the defense of the regime, were just as likely to attack as to defend Jews. The First World War put similar pressure on officials and officers in all European states, even as it revealed the resilience of Jewish communities across the continent. In Robert Nemes’s chapter on Hungary, the insistence of many state and local officials that wartime Jewish refugees were “foreigners” opened the door to attacks on all Hungarian Jews.
Taken together, the essays reveal how antisemitism mobilized surprising numbers of men and women across the continent. Antisemitism could be tacked onto a wide range of grievances, from peasant anger about land to nationalists’ worries about jobs and schools. Antisemitic accusations echoed from pulpits and the streets, as they had in the past, but they also appeared in newspapers, parliaments, town halls, and election campaigns. If antisemitism added something new to European political culture, it was the aggression that so frequently accompanied antisemitism: the heated words, broken windows, and angry boycotts. What the contemporary Austrian writer Stefan Zweig called the “invasion of brutality into politics” had many causes, but antisemitism was prominent among them. The constellation of antisemitism and local violence would characterize many of the political movements that would help shape the first half of Europe’s twentieth century.
