American today recognize any movement to organize race intolerance as a movement bought and paid for by some foreign propagandist whose interest is to undermine the United States, A. A. Berle, Jr., Assistant Secretary of State told the closing session of the Williamstown Institute of Human Relations which met here under the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
“I am not speculating about this,” Berle told the more than 800 delegates attending the Institute. “I see the documents. Only the other day I was reading the report of a German agent operating from a neighboring country. He was boasting that he had done two things for his Nazi masters. He had, he thought, inflamed certain American groups against Negroes. And he also claimed to have taught Negroes in certain areas to hate Jews. Actually, the United States has been beyond any other country the great sanctuary within which race hatred has been unable to live. From this we have drawn that wealth of diverse talent which, taken together, has given us world leadership.
“There are occasionally groups which disgrace the American scene by cultivating intolerance,” he continued, “and there are sometimes politicians unscrupulous enough to trade on race dislikes. But these sporadic movements have never had more than momentary success. The anti-Semites of the Ku Klux Klan are forgotten men.”
An intensified attack by labor, business groups, churches, schools, and youth groups upon discrimination and intolerance was urged by the Institute at its final session. The campaign against intolerance was urged upon American leaders by the entire Institute in the form of reports, giving the recommendations of round tables which met daily for five days. The round tables comprised practically the entire membership of the Institute.
“So long as God and morality are exiled from international relations and each peace-treaty is an act of war treachery, so long will the hope of peace and a better post-war order go glimmering,” Rabbi Louis Mann of the Chicago Sinai Congregation told the closing session. Denying that religion had failed the world and had become “antiquated” Rabbi Mann declared that “on the contrary, the chaos raging today was a verification of the edict of religion that ‘as ye sow that also shall ye reap’.” Moral laws, he said, can be broken with no more impunity than the law of gravity.
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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.
