An amazing story of how a young American stumbled across the “Jewish problem” on a college campus is told by Vincent Sheean in his autobiography, “Personal History,” just published by Doubleday-Doran. It is a book crammed full of excitement, both physical and intellectual, but for a Jewish reader the initial chapter with its recital of the “grand tragic-comic episodes” remains the high point.
At the ripe old age of thirty-four this Sheean—newspaper correspondent, adventurer and man of letters—has crowded more action and more thinking into his life than less favored and less energetic men twice that age. Emerging from the shell of an American provincial childhood, he first struck Chicago, then New York, and soon thereafter all the capitals and many of the exotic by-ways of the world entire.
Everywhere he carried a naive provincialism which was subjected to shock after shock, until it reduced him (or raised him, if you prefer) to a sort of idealistic cynicism. It is the first of these shocks, on the campus of the University of Chicago, which interests us here.
Innocently he allowed himself, as a freshman, to be “pledged” by a Greek letter fraternity. He liked the frat house and the frat “brothers.” He stood in worshipful awe of one of these brothers, the editor of the college literary magazine, whom he considered a godlike creature, a prince of the world.
On the very day of the scheduled initiation, a girl friend took him for a long walk and broke the awful news to him. The fraternity, he learned, was a Jewish fraternity, and should he join it, he would share the discriminations and the ostracisms of the Jews!
“You can’t possibly belong to it and make anything out of your college life,” she informed him. “No girl will go out with you—no nice girl that is. And you’re barred from everything that makes college life what it is. Of course, I know you’re not Jewish, but everybody doesn’t realize that, and I think it’s a terrible shame.”
Thus Sheean was initiated not into a fraternity but into the most towering social fact in a great university—a towering social fact, as any man or woman who has tasted an American campus knows, in every American university.
“Incredible though it seemed afterwards,” Sheean writes, “I had never known a Jew in my life and had no idea that there were so many of them growing there under my eyes. I had only the romantic and provincial notions about Jews: thought of them as bearded old gentlemen with magic powers and vast stores of gold. Except for Rebecca in ‘Ivanhoe’ I had never made the acquaintance of a young Jew even in literature. I suppose I must have thought they had sprung full grown into the Middle Ages and thence vanished into the oblivion of Eastern Europe.”
And there he was, not merely among them, but under the same roof with them, about to become “brother” of theirs. Never before #ad life seemed to him so complex, so awful, so shivery.
“The shock would have been the same if they had all turned out to be Swedenborgians, or Spaniards, or vegetarians, or believers in the transmigration of souls. It made them a special caste, a marked and universal species, to which I could not possibly belong.”
Most distressing of all was the circumstance that the godlike creature whom he adored, that editor on whom he had an intellectual crush, even he was one of the Jews.
Of course, little Sheean sneaked out of the fraternity house, with another Gentile who had blundered into it. They broke the pledge—a big step on the campus—and after a period of waiting were invited into respectable Gentile fraternities.
But the memory of that humiliation burned deep into his soul. After seventeen years its marks are still fresh, though he has by this time outlived “the notion that the Jews are a sinister race, gifted in the black arts or banded together in sorcery.” He has learned the extraordinary fact that “when they are treated like anybody else they do not greatly differ from anybody else.”
Before attaining that mature wisdom, however, he became privy to the nature of the ostracism that operate in democratic colleges:
“The Jews, it seemed, could not possibly go to the ‘nice’ parties in college. They could not be elected to any fraternity except the two they had themselves organized; they could not dance with whom they pleased or go out with the girls they wanted to go out with; they could not even walk across the quadrangle with a ‘nice’ girl if she could possibly escape. . . . Hitler himself could not have invented a more savage and degrading system of anti-Semitism than that worked out by those little monsters, the undergraduates.”
That system applied not only to Jews but to those Gentiles who dared associate with Jews. They were considered contaminated. The particular fraternity into which he had been so innocently inducted and from which he made such a hasty get-away was one that had been formed to “reconcile” Jews and non-Jews. But “it had only succeeded in getting itself labelled as wholly Jewish.”
The story of the boys’ ignominious retreat from the Jewish frat house would be humorous were it not so moving as a symbol of the reality. They were like scared youngsters escaping from a leper colony or a cholera-infected area.
As a “case study” of the Jewish problem in the American colleges Sheean’s account is significant. There is little reason to believe that any real change has taken place since his day. Jewish boys and girls in all American colleges are still considered Jews first and Americans second.
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.
