The striving for knowledge for its own sake, love of justice verging on fanaticism and struggle for personal independence—these are the motifs in the tradition of the Jewish people which make me feel my belonging to it a gift of fate.
Those who today work against the ideals of wisdom and individual liberty and wish by means of brute force to effect a spiritless state slavery rightfully see in us their unforgivable enemies. History has imposed a weighty struggle upon us; but as long as we remain faithful servants of truth, justice and liberty we shall not only endure as the oldest of living nations, but also as heretofore in productive work create treasures which contribute to the ennoblement of mankind.
A. Einstein.
THE PHILADELPHIA SHIRT RACKET
The flight of their self-styled Commander, Art J. Smith, the arrest of twenty-five “officers” and men and the seizure of two bushelsful of arms writes Finis to the short-lived story of the Khaki Shirts of America, which was going to seize the government and tell President Roosevelt what to do.
It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. “General” Smith seems to have taken a very short time in which to justify the contemptuous definition of his “Khaki Shirts” as a shirt racket. For the major concern of the “general” seems to have been the sale of memberships at two dollars per, and shirts, caps and similar paraphernalia at what were called rock-bottom prices. Philadelphia, the “seat” of the army, laughed at the antics and the blood-and-thunder pronouncements of the general who rarely opened his mouth except to put his foot in it. The “General” is supposed to have escaped with several thousands of dollars, extracted from his poor misguided “privates,” most of them discontented and unemployed men, who, at the present time, have only the desire to put their none-too-gentle hands on him.
The story of the Khaki Shirts is the story of Fascism as a racket. An Art Smith is capable of turning Fascism into a mean little racket, but there are others in the United States who are plotting to put the American accent on European Fascism and Hitlerism and who cannot be laughed off so easily as the illiterate and artless Art.
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.
