It has been a long time since New York has witnessed such a display of brazen effrontery as that furnished by the German-American Conference in its ultimatum to the Staats-Zeitung, the German-language daily, to dismiss Jewish employes, including its editor-in-chief who has been with the paper for forty years. The only similar case in recent record was the visit the unsavory Spanknoebel made to the same newspaper office to tell the publishers that henceforth they would have to take his orders.
If any doubt remains at all as to the complete Nazification of the German-American Conference, this ultimatum must completely eradicate it.
The spectacle of an agency dominated by foreign elements daring to dictate to an American newspaper should give food for thought to those American journalists who find the Nazi system admirable. It is a pity that the Ridder brothers, so long the dominant figures in the German-American Conference until their ouster by the Nazis, have not seized the opportunity to administer the telling rebuke that the ultimatum offered them. By so doing they would have upheld the American tradition of a free and independent press and reminded these Nazis again that Hitlerite gangster methods are out of place on these shores.
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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.
