The triennial convention of the British opened here today with the presentation of a number of recommendations by Frank Goldman, president of the organization, to the more than 1,000 delegates in attendance. Mr. Goldman, in his presidential address, recommended:
1. That the convention adopt a resolution demanding the revision of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act.
2. That the British establish a permanent department to aid the people of Israel.
3. That the organization continue to seek ratification by the United States of the United Nations Genocide Pact.
Mr. Goldman reported that one of the most successful activities of the Anti-Defamation League has been its “crack-the-quota” campaign to reduce discrimination in college admissions. He said that more than 300 universities have deleted discriminatory questions from their application blanks and that other schools have announced plans to abandon the quota system.
Henry Edward Schultz, national chairman of the British Anti-Defamation League, told the convention that President Eisenhower’s “outspoken stand against racial and religious bigotry has brought down upon him the violent diatribes of the most vicious hate mongers of the country.” The extreme right-wing attacks against the President began last year during the primary campaigns and have continued unabated, he reported.
The ADL leader described the McCarran-Walter Act as “an area in American law where the leader of the lunatic fringe, the anti-Semite and Fascist can look with pleasure upon what they see.”
“We are especially concerned with elimination of the provision which, as the President notes, makes second class citizens of those who have been naturalized,” he said. Communists are barred as totalitarians, yet Fascists and Nazis are allowed to enter the country “freely,” he charged.
Philip Klutznick, of Chicago, is considered assured of succeeding Mr. Goldman as president of the organization. Mr. Goldman has announced that he will not seek re-election. Mr. Klutznick is not expected to have important opposition. He served as Federal Housing Commissioner in the Roosevelt Administration.
In his address today, Mr. Goldman denounced the use by investigative agencies of “smear” or “guilt by association” techniques. “A tragic concomitant of the strain under which our nation lives today,” he said, “is the tacit acceptance by some of the smear, or guilt by association, and of the use of techniques of investigation which indiscriminately injure the innocent as well as the guilty.
“This pattern, I am sorry to observe, seems to have found a place in the American scene,” he continued. “In the triennial period just concluded, we saw as well increasing attacks on the United Nations and its agencies and on the various bipartisan plans to strengthen the western world. Reactionary trends deepened and were reflected in the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act.”
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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.
