Theodore Roosevelt: The Protestant President Who Protected an Antisemite with Jewish Police Officers

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. As an icon of the Protestant elite, Theodore Roosevelt was an unlikely ally of the waves of impoverished Jewish newcomers who crowded the docks at Ellis Island. Here to tell the story is Arizona State History Professor Andrew Porwancher. Andrew is the author of “American Maccabee, Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews.” Let’s take a listen.

00:00:37
Speaker 2: “I wish I had a little Jew in me,” Theodore Roosevelt once mused to a friend. Not a drop of Jewish blood coursed through his veins. If anything, Roosevelt was the ultimate insider of the Protestant elite that dominated American life in his era. His father descended from a New York political dynasty whose eminence in Manhattan dated back to the days of Dutch colonial rule. His mother was a Southern belle of such renown that many believed her to be the inspiration for the character of Scarlett O’Hara. Theodore lived a life consistent with his patrician pedigree, enrolling at Harvard, serving as a military officer, and seizing the grandest prize of all: the Oval Office. Roosevelt was a silver-spoon statesman who had grown up in the fashionable neighborhood of Gramercy Park in New York. He had little in common with the Yiddish-speaking immigrants moistening their brows in the sweatshops of the Lower East Side just a short walk away. Roosevelt’s privileged path was even further removed from the dreadful subsistence of Jews struggling to survive in Eastern Europe. And yet, for all the differences between T.R. and battled Jews on both sides of the Atlantic, their causes became pivotal to his life. He would shape their lives, and they, in turn, his legacy. As the enterprising Police Commissioner, the thirty-six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt barnstormed this Jewish enclave, giving speeches to packed halls of Jewish immigrants where he espoused his egalitarian ethos. He became so revered that Roosevelt was often a guest of honor at Jewish weddings. Jews particularly appreciated his willingness to stand up to anti-Semitism. The most vivid example of Commissioner Roosevelt’s fight against Jew-hatred came during Hanukkah. In his first year leading the force, a vicious Jew-hater from Germany named Hermann Alvart was planning a trip to New York City to spread his invidious message. Alvart was cartoonishly villainous. In the late 1880s, he had been sacked as a school headmaster after the revelation that he had stolen funds designated for the children’s Christmas party. The disgraced Alvart sought public redemption through anti-Semitism, winning a seat in the German Parliament by persuading farmers in a rural district that Jews had secretly orchestrated the global downturn in crop prices. When Alvart set his sights on an American speaking tour, including a planned lecture on the Lower East Side, anxious Jews approached Commissioner Roosevelt. They asked T.R. to bar Alvart from speaking, or at least to deny him police protection, but Roosevelt could not grant their request without violating the principle of free speech, and even absent that constitutional right, T.R. believed that government censorship would only serve to turn Alvart into a martyr. To that end, T.R. devised an exceedingly clever scheme. He would provide Alvart a police detail comprised entirely of Jewish officers. Roosevelt summoned a subordinate on his force and instructed him, “I wish a list made of thirty good, trusty, intelligent men, all Jews.” It was crucial to Roosevelt that these officers look unmistakably Jewish, as he told the subordinate, “Don’t bother yourself to hunt up their religious antecedents. Take those who have the most pronounced Hebrew physiognomy. The stronger their ancestral marking, the better.” The Jewish policemen selected for duty were brought to the Commissioner for inspection. With his blue eyes and golden glasses, Roosevelt surveyed the assemblage, announcing, “Now I am going to assign you men to the most honorable service you have ever done: the protection of an enemy and the defense of religious liberty and free speech in the chief city of the United States. You all know who and what Doctor Alvart is. I am going to put you in charge of the hall where he lectures, and hold you responsible for perfect good order there throughout the evening. I have no more sympathy with Jew-baiting than you have. But this is a country where your people are free to think and speak and act as they choose in religious matters, as long as you do not interfere with the peace and comfort of your neighbors. And Doctor Alvart is entitled to the same privilege. It should be your pride to see that he is protected. That will be the finest way of showing your appreciation of the liberty you yourselves enjoy under the American flag.” On the second night of Hanukkah, around 150 people gathered at Cooper Union, an iconic venue on the Lower East Side, to hear Alvart’s much-anticipated speech. The press estimated that fully a third of those in attendance were policemen and detectives, another third were Jews who had come in protest, and the last third consisted of gentiles of varying nationalities who were presumably amenable to the speaker’s agenda. Alvart took the stage at 8 that evening. His remarks inevitably veered into anti-Semitism, and the Jews in the crowd taunted him in turn with, quote, “a perfect Niagara of hisses and cries,” in the words of The New York Times. Despite the heckling, the galling grin plastered on Alvart’s face remained unbroken. The night’s greatest drama unfolded when Alvart denounced Jews for their odious peculiarities, in his words, which prompted an East Sider named Lewis Silverman to cock his arm. Egg in hand, a reporter recounted, “a nice white egg performed a graceful parabola through the air in the direction of Alvart’s smiling face.” He danced aside with a degree of agility not indicated by his portly form, and the egg smashed and spluttered on the chair behind him. This episode would become part of Roosevelt’s lore with the Jewish community. With great pride, he would routinely recall how Alvart delivered his violent tirades against the men of Hebrew faith, owing his safety to the fact that he was scrupulously protected by men of the very race which he was denouncing. Roosevelt understood that the sight of Jewish policemen selflessly guarding the German Jew-hater did far more to undermine Alvart’s repugnant ideas than preemptive censorship ever could have. Reflecting on the incident years later in his autobiography, Roosevelt remarked, “It was an object lesson to our people, whose greatest need it is to learn that there must be no division by class hatred, whether a creed against creed, nationality against nationality, section against section.”

00:08:31
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Arizona State History Professor Andrew Porwancher. Andrew is the author of “American Maccabee, Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews.” And what a story this is and what an abject lesson and what it means to be an American. Roosevelt craftily asks, as Police Commissioner, the Jews not only to protect him, but they protect this awful Neo-Nazi and his right to speak freely. And this is one of our favorite free speech stories, right up there with David Gardiner and his defense of Neo-Nazis in Illinois leading to the Skokie case. Gardner was himself Jewish. And of course, our favorite free speech story: John Adams defending the Redcoats in the Boston Massacre trial, the story of Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews. Here on our American Stories.