ment that “half of the Friends of Germany’s members were teachers of the German language in New York City high schools,” officials at Board of Education headquarters said they have never heard of Emerson or his organization.
Howard A. Shiebler, secretary to the superintendent of schools, told the Jewish Daily Bulletin: “I know of many organizations to which New York high school teachers belong, but the ‘Friends of Germany’ is a new name to me. I am sure that no teachers of German, whether Jewish or Gentile, in the New York school system belongs to Mr. Emerson’s group.”
Jacob Greenberg, an official in the foreign language department of the Board of Education said: “So far as I know, no teacher in the New York school system has ever belonged to the Friends of Germany.”
Reports from Newark on June 20 stated that Mr. Emerson on that day addressed members of the local branch of the Friends of New Germany. “Jewish boycotting of German goods is not and never will be effective,” he stated. “The great German nation should be conceded the right to fashion its fate according to its own ideas. No man possessed of the least knowledge of the Hitler movement can speak of it as one lustful war. Hitler’s aims are, above all, German life and German culture.”
When the Friends of New Germany had its headquarters at 309 East 92nd Street, Mr. Emerson, who denied any affiliation with this group, was said, however, to have been instrumental in getting new members to join it. Information about the New Germany is freely dispensed and copies of the latest German publications are sold in Mr. Emerson’s office in the White-hall Building, where the German Consulate is also situated.
Writing in the Deutscher Beobachter, supplement of the Amerika’s Deutsche Post, Emerson said, describing the May Day parade here: “Early in the day the Jewish Communists and Socialists came straggling from the ghettos of New York’s East Side. They tramped in separate hordes, thousands — small swarthy men with thick lips and kinkly hair.”
Emerson is correspondent for several German Nationalist newspapers, which are now Nazi-controlled, and at his office these papers and other anti-Semitic literature can still be obtained by the public.
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.
