Americans Who Discriminate Against Jews Are Nazis, Bishop Oxnam Says; Condemns Bigotry

A plea for Americans to beware of the seedlings of intolerance, bigotry and greed prevalent in the United States is made by Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, president of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, in a signed article in the October issue of The American Magazine.

Bishop Oxnam says he wishes it were so, as “we contentedly imagine now that Germany is destroyed and the vicious leaders of the Nazi party dead or imprisoned, that Nazism has perished from the face of the earth.” But, he writes: “Nazism is not merely a political philosophy or a system of government. It is a condition of the human heart, a state of mind. It is man’s inhumanity to man masquerading in a brown or a black shirt, or even in the white collar of respectability. This state of mind breeds sin, bigotry, intolerance, selfishness, greed, cruelty, Godlessness. In Germany we saw Nazism in full flower–a poisonous flower. We saw it in its organized form. In America we see only its little seedlings, here and there, unrecognized for what they are. Beware of them.

“The man who excludes a Negro from any of the privileges of this democracy, who connives with a real-estate agent to exclude a Jew from a neighborhood, who sets up barriers against any human being because of his race or his creed, is a Nazi. He is an oppressor of peoples, an enemy of freedom, a bigot. He is laying the foundation for lynchings, riots, and the enslavement of his fellow man.”