R. D. B. Speaks

For thirty years Editor-in-chief of the Daily Express in London, England’s most celebrated journalist and chairman of the Board of Directors of the London Daily Express

Here is a little homily which, on my departure from the United States, I would like the chosen people of this land, which is congested with milk and honey, to think about during the Christmas holidays. I purposely interpolate “Christmas holidays” because so many of the chosen people have done business and have, I hope, accrued profits there from. I hope that the lesson will be accepted and digested with benefit.

I am not a business man and so it is difficult for me to understand the psychological attitude of certain important Jewish commercial magnates towards the Jewish question which is perhaps, the most critical and most decisive question that has confronted Jewry in modern times. Since coming to America in November, I have made it a point to go, in various towns, to the principal retail stores controlled in the majority of instances by Jews or at any rate by people possessing Jewish names. In many of these shops, I have found a decisive attitude on German goods. “The Germans are oppressing the Jews”, appears to be their view, “and so we retaliate by oppressing the Germans and the only way in which we can demonstrate our form of oppression is to refrain from offering German goods to our customers.”

Now, that is a plain, understandable policy which should be respected even by a Frankfurter-filled Nazi. It is not at all necessary to be an official anti-German boycotter, not at all essential to carry a badge, so to speak, or belong to any vociferous organization which may or may not perform the functions for which it has been organized. All one does is to be consistent with and loyal to one’s principles. What I do not understand, however, is that a great merchant can be heart-stricken at home, at the thought that the people of his race and religion are insulted, derided, humiliated and oppressed by people who are not even their equals, express his horror and sympathy in words and perhaps prayers and then—in his business place, turn round and sell the goods made by those oppressors merely because they happen to be cheaper! Business is Business!

Out in Chicago the other day a great merchant engaged in the distributing business—not a Jew—said to me: “You will find in New York the leading Jewish business houses selling German goods which really need not have come from Germany. The proprietors are heart-sick with sympathy for the poor Jews of Germany who are being driven down and down until at last the Ghetto will be their only recourse, and yet they refuse to take the only consistent line. Can you wonder that people put all Jews in the same category and say that the dollar is thicker than blood?”

There you are! I hope the statistics of the Christmas trade will show a lot of those Nazi-produced goods still left on the counter.

That is one phase of Jewry which I have encountered here. The other is—and it is much more gratifying—that in this little tour through the Middle West I have met many people, all kinds, and all divergencies of humanity and my brightest memory of it is that the best minds among them all were Jewish. Which confirms my view that, after all, that is what one must expect from the Chosen People.

Only I wish they were not so stupid in the matter of organization and discipline.