It’s about time to quit fooling around with some of these boys and give them the works.
Take the case of Royal Scott Gulden, for instance. Take his associate, William Ingles. Take the Negro, Sufi Abdul Hamid, who gloats over seeing himself referred to in print as the “Black Hitler.” Take W. L. McLaughlin, editor and part publisher of that weekly excrescence, the Deutsche Zeitung.
What kind of people are the Jews, anyway, that they allow such irresponsibles as these to stick their necks up above the surface of the mud?
Two of the above-mentioned individuals were being called to account for their sins in court of justice yesterday. McLaughlin was attempting to justify his introduction of the racial issue into a printed attack, couched in guttersnipe language, on a Jewish lawyer. Hamid was being prosecuted for some amazingly disgusting street corner exhortations he had delivered up in Harlem.
Ingles, over the telephone, ruefully admitted that his attempt to gather together the required number of names on a petition nominating him as a Congressional candidate had fallen short of the mark.
To paraphrase a nursery rhyme, “Four little blackbirds looking for some fun. Along came a horse laugh, and then there was one.”
Not that Hamid, McLaughlin and Ingles are through, by any means. Whatever the outcome of the two court cases, the Negro agitator and the Irish-Catholic Nazi mercenary will be back again—sorry representatives of two races which in general are staunchly aligned with the Jews in a battle against bigotry. Ingles will continue to be active in the anti-Semitic campaign of the so-called Order of ’76, which acknowledges him as one of his leaders.
A curious point in each of these cases, and in the many similar ones, is that all these fellows invariably say, “Some of my best friends are Jews.”
Oddly enough, what they say is true. Some of their best friends are Jews—cringing Jews who are rotten enough at core to snicker with self-conscious pleasure when any low-born son of a miscegenation says to them, “Oh, I don’t mean you. I mean those other fellows—those typical Jews that you find here, there and everywhere.”
But there is a hidden connotation in that statement. “Some of my best friends are Jews,” that these persons who utter it don’t understand themselves.
Some of their best friends are Jews whom they’ve never even met or seen.
Among the staunchest friends of the Hamids and the McLaughlins and the Ingles are the what-business-is-it-of-mine Jews, who haven’t felt the squeeze themselves yet, or at least aren’t conscious of it.
These Jews yawn with smug self-satisfaction when they hear or read of various incidents which don’t seem to them to come close enough to home to make any difference to them as individuals.
But this Day Book is degenerating into ar editorial, which it never was meant to be. Let’s examine the case of Royal Scott Ingles, the fourth little blackbird, who sits perched on the fence smiling contentedly at the way things have been going for him.
Gulden, as you all probably know by now, is the organizer and leader of the Order of ’76, which pretends to be a “patriotic” American organization but which actually partakes of all the worst characteristics of the Ku Klux Klan and other mystic appeals to ignorance and bigotry.
Yesterday he announced that his Congressional nominating petition, containing more than the required number of names, had been submitted to the Board of Elections, and that he would be a candidate of the “Independent Party” for the House of Representatives.
This fellow, according to his own declaration, considers anti-Semitism something with which to have fun.
Gulden’s sense of humor is terrific. Another example of it was revealed in a statement to a magazine interviewer, in which he allowed the impression to be created that he is connected with the Gulden mustard manufacturing firm and that he is willing to see that company’s welfare sacrificed for the “cause.”
He admitted to a Jewish Daily Bulletin reporter yesterday that a statement made in yesterday’s issue of that paper by the mustard concern’s president is correct in every detail, and that he is in no way connected with the company, nor has he ever been at any time in the past.
Meanwhile the mustard manufacturers have felt the unfair repercussions of an irresponsible gabber’s idea of humor.
One of the incidental laughs in the situation is that some of the Nazi leaders who have half-promised Gulden their backing have been under the impression that he is “in the money.”
“Isn’t is true,” one of them asked yesterday, “that he is a member of a very wealthy family?”
Whatever the financial position of Gulden’s family may be, this reporter has established the fact that Gulden himself is stony broke, and is in the anti-Semitic business for what he can get out of it.
In any event, it is about time to quit regarding the fun of anti-Semitism, or the business of anti-Semitism, as something to be snickered at. These boys must be stamped on, with both feet, before somebody takes them seriously.
—M. F.
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.
