The part played by S. O. Levinson, Chicago lawyer, in the developments leading to the Consummation of the Kellogg Peace Pact, for which he has been suggested to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, is presented in an article in the current issue of the “World’s Work” by William Hard. Describing the efforts of Senators Knox and Borah, Col. Raymond Robins and others, Mr. Hard writes of Mr. Levinson:
“There is just simply no doubt whatever that the originating and devising and determining brain of the whole affair has been that of S. O. Levinson, of Chicago, a lawyer and a great reorganizer of ailing railroads and other large corporations. Levinson made an earthquake. Kellogg and Briand came along and trimmed the new landscape into a treaty,” the article states.
It was in 1919 that Levinson first began descending upon Washington. In “recurrent visits, Levinson brought what might be called a struggling ray of positivism. Levinson urged that it was not enough to be against the League. He insisted that it was necessary to greet the League with a counter-attack. The fundamental evil was war. The fundamental remedy was law, international law.”
Speaking of Mr. Levinson’s personality, Mr. Hard states: “He is a Jew. He has the Jewish faculty-so seldom seen among Gentiles-of being at once a man of dollars and cents and a man of dreams, of theories, of commandments from Sinai.
“Does he come of ‘a race of money-changers?’ Yes; and he knows the markets. Does he come of a race of prophets? Yes; and I shall freely say that I never realized what a fearsome thing an Old Testament Jewish prophet must have been, how aggressive, how inescapable, how overpowering, how uplifting, how irritating, how maddening, how good, how high, how infinitely annoying to human nature, how unforgettably appealing to it, till I knew Levinson.”
“There now stands the treaty. It bans war. It leaves self-defense intact-and undefined,” Mr. Hard concludes. “American history, from its beginning till now, gives us only one true native original Amercan philosophy of international peace organization. That is the philosophy initiated by William Ladd a hundred years ago and completed by Levinson. We Americans have that to offer to the fullness, or to the emptiness, of mankind’s imagined millennium; or else, distinctively, we have nothing.”
The twenty-fifth anniversary of Rabbi Frederick Cohn’s affiliation with Temple Israel of Omaha will be marked on Sunday at a banquet attended by representatives of Catholic and Protestant churches as well as members of the Temple.
Alan McDonold of the First Unitarian church, Mayor Dahlman, Dr. Frederick W. Clayton, rector of All Saints church; Rev. E. J. Flanagan of Father Flanagan’s Boys’ home: Dr. John F. Poucher, Irvin Stalmaster and Dr. Frank G. Smith, pastor of First Central Congregational church, will be the speakers.
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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.
