Fate Plays Mean Trick on Canadian Anti-semites As Windsor Elects David Croll, 30-year Old Jewish Law

Fate, in the words of Dryden, “flung the dice” and played an awfully mean trick on the anti-Semites in Canada.

When, three weeks ago, Camillien Houde, mayor of Montreal, at a public meeting derided and attacked the Jewish people, telling them to go back to Palestine and endorsing a cry from the audience that they go to Hades, at least two of the five candidates for the office of mayor in Windsor, Ontario, the important Canadian industrial center bordering on Detroit, pleaded with their constituents not to elect a Jew mayor of a Christian community. Christian pulpits heard this plea, and radio audiences.

YOUNGEST MAYOR ELECTED

Then came the day of judgment. And at the approach of midnight on Monday, December 1, what was hitherto considered the impossible occurred in the Dominion of Canada: David Arnold Croll, 30-year old Jewish barrister, ran far ahead of his four opponents and was elected mayor of Windsor, today the first large city in Canada to elect a Jew to the chief executive’s chair. On top of that, mayor-elect Croll is today the youngest man to be elected mayor of a Canadian city.

This briefly is the story of David Arnold Croll’s triumph in his first campaign for political office. But there is more to it than these simple facts. In the first place Barrister Croll is a foreign-born and a naturalized citizen of Canada, and his constituents knew it. His opponents made sure that they should learn of it if they did not know it. Then again, he is a Jew, and a devoted leader of the Jewish community. His fellow-citizens could not help knowing that because for several years he has been president of the Windsor Talmud Torah. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim. He is a Zionist. To top it all, his opponents broadcast the fact that he was born near Moscow, Russia. One “crime” after another: a multitude of sins for which many candidates have gone down in defeat. But Windsor, Ontario, emerged above prejudice, and the Border Cities Star, one of the leading daily newspapers in Ontario, summed the election up editorially in this fashion:

EXAMPLE OF TOLERANCE

“The Star regards the result as a commendable example of the fact that racial and religious tolerance abounds in Windsor. Mr. Croll was attacked in some quarters, we regret to say, on the ground that he happens to be a member of the Jewish faith, also that he was born near Moscow, Russia. The result of the vote shows what the people of Windsor think of tactics of that kind.”

This newspaper knew whereof it spoke because for years it sold newspapers to the mayor-elect who peddled them as a newsboy on the streets of Windsor and thus helped support himself through school and assisted his family.

Mr. Croll came to Windsor, from Russia, with his parents and four brothers in 1906. Theirs was the typical struggle of a typical immigrant group. But the four brothers emerged from the shackles of poverty and the obstacles that hold the foreign-born down and have triumphed professionally.

And now David is mayor of Windsor! No wonder that the press in this part of the country plays David’s triumph up as if it were as much that of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hillel Croll!