Former United States Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, addressing the mid-western anti-Nazi conference convoked by the Chicago Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, tonight denounced the Hitler regime in Germany as a menace to humanity and declared that “humanity cannot repress the hope that public opinion will demand every act of oppression shall be reversed and once more the Jews be permitted to stand erect, wearing the uniform of freedom.”
Fifteen hundred delegates, representing organizations in thirty-five cities in the states of Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana, attended the two sessions of the conference today in the Standard Club.
They adopted a series of resolutions, one reaffirming the resolution adopted at the stadium meeting last December when the boycott pledge was adopted; another supporting the Tydings resolution and asking the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pass it favorably; a third urging the United States Treasury to put into immediate effect the ruling compelling the marking of imported goods with the name of the country of origin: a fourth commending Mandel Brothers, Chicago department store, for their recent boycott announcement, and a fifth urging Congress to pass the Kenney bill to confer citizenship on Professor Albert Einstein.
A minimum pledge of $7,500 for the Sinai Temple to the boycott fund was announced by Joseph M. Krause, president of the Men’s Club of Sinai Temple. Jacob Siegal, president of the Boycott Committee against Nazi Germany, presented a check for $500 for the work.
Former Senator Reed bitterly assailed Hitlerism and the Hitler government.
“The most foolish of all animals is the man who because of temporary adversity, would tear down the temple of liberty and out of the ruins erect a citadel of tyranny,” he declared. “Certain it is the citadel will soon become a prison where he will languish in chains.
“All despotisms have certain attributes in common. They rise in times of adversity, wear the mask of benevolence and they always declare the ordinary machinery of government is inefficient and the people incapable of remedying wrongs by usual methods. Such is paternalism and paternalism is despotic whenever the government goes beyond the protection of fundamental rights and undertakes to control or interfere with their exercise.
“It is a government of tyranny and oppression equally destructive and debasing,” he asserted, “whether perpetrated by an Egyptian despot, a Roman emperor, a French Bourbon, a German Kaiser or an Austro-German Hitler, and quite as obnoxious if committed in the name of a republic.
“Hitler has not only attacked the liberty of the Jew but has assassinated the German Republic. When he told the Jewish people they could not freely exercise their religion he denied the principle of religious freedom and affirmed the right of the government to control in the domain of the conscience.
“The German people had more liberty under Bismarck and the Kaiser than they have under the so-called republic today. It is the Jew who is the particular victim but tomorrow the waves may break higher upon the shores until they engulf all lands and all peoples. Establish the right of the government to persecute the Jew and you concede the right of the government to persecute all races and religions.
“We are not discussing today the fate of the Jews alone, we are discussing the dangers to humanity. Because the Jew has steadfastly refused to abandon the faith of his fathers, he has been made the victim of the vilest fanaticism. The treatment of the Jew by Hitler is a brand of shame upon the brow of Germany.
“Humanity,” he declared, “can not repress the hope that public opinion of the world will demand every act of oppression shall be reversed and once more the Jews shall be permitted to stand erect wearing the uniform of freedom in a republic from which shall have been driven despotism and Hitlerism.
“That will be a bright day not only for the Jew, but for the German people,” he concluded.
Congressman Edward J. Kenney of New Jersey declared be regretted the necessity for liberty-loving Americans to gather in assembly to aid the protection of minorities and the defense of human rights. He urged passage of his bill to confer citizenship on Professor Einstein as “citizenship would be conferring the greatest gift of the United States on the most eminent. The American people,” he said, “would honor themselves by conferring citizenship on Einstein.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
