Raymond Clapper, Scripps-Howard political commentator in Washington, said today in his World-Telegram column that anti-Semitism was rising in various localities as “a perverted form of objection to intervention in Europe.” The anti-Semitic feeling, he said, frequently takes the form of the question: “Are we going to fight a war to save the Jews in Germany?”
“Nobody likes Hitler,” Mr. Clapper said. “Nobody wants to defend his regime. We instinctively feel safer with England and France on top than with Germany and Italy on top. But we don’t want to face the logical conclusion of that feeling…So the tendency is to take refuge by putting the matter on some other ground. We hunt for some reason why we don’t want to become involved. That is, I suspect, an unconscious reason for the growth of racial bigotry in this country. It is a flight from reality.”
Mr. Clapper said one of the reasons that the Senate Military Affairs Committee last week questioned Hugh R. Wilson, Ambassador to Germany, was the rumor in Washington that he did not agree with the tactics of President Roosevelt in ordering him home from Berlin for “consultation and report” on the anti-Jewish excesses in the Reich.
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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.
