As a protest against the refusal of the metropolitan press to print an advertisement offered them by Samuel Untermyer, president of the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights, The Nation, noted liberal weekly, today published the rejected advertisement, deeming it, “a matter of such public interest, that we here give space to Mr. Untermyer’s suppressed advertisement.”
Mr. Untermyer’s rejected advertisement was an answer to a full page advertisement in the New York morning newspapers, including the Yiddish dailies, in which Percy S. Straus, president of R. H. Macy and Company, states the position of his firm on the boycott of German goods.
In introducing the full text of Mr. Untermyer’s reply as well as a portion of the correspondence contained in the Macy advertisement, the Nation declares:
“The boycott against the Nazis which has grown spontaneously in many parts of the world attracted unprecedented public notice in New York City recently when R. H. Macy and Company, the city’s largest department store, decided to state its position in a full page advertisement published on October 2 in the New York daily press. This advertisement was apparently the result of many criticisms of Macy’s policy of buying in Nazi Germany, and of the consequent withdrawal of patronage by customers. The episode takes on its special interest because of the rejection by the leading New York morning papers of an advertisement offered in answer by Samuel Untermyer, as president of the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights, to statements contained in Macy’s advertisement.”
In the Macy advertisement Mr. Straus answered several of the letters he had received objecting to the sale of German goods. The president of Macy’s declared that as a loyal Jew, he resented the treatment of the Jews in Germany, but declared that in order to help the German Jews, Macy’s in buying German goods was buying them, wherever possible, only from Jewish manufacturers, and that to boycott such firms would merely make their plight worse.
In his reply, entitled “An Open Letter in Reply to the Advertisement of R. H. Macy and Company,” addressed to Mr. Straus, Mr. Untermyer, taking up the points raised by Mr. Straus, accused Mr. Straus of not having been frank with his anonymous customer, declared that Mr. Straus had no right to speak for the department stores in the United States and accused Macy’s of having bought “blocked marks” and of using them to purchase goods in Germany.
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.
