Hush-Hush Ends

Whether anti-Semitism is growing in the U. S. is a question on which men disagree.* That talk about anti-Semitism has grown like a weed in the U. S. during the last decade is a fact that no well-informed U. S. citizen can truthfully deny. Yet the U. S. press has for the most part studiously, purposefully and almost universally ignored the subject. Though some segments of the press itself are not altogether free from anti-Semitic bias, its attitude in general has been a reflection of the belief of many influential Jews that to recognize anti-Semitism is to encourage it. Last week two publications made news by reversing this stand.

"Demand for Action." On the newsstands appeared Vol. 1, No. 1 of Equality, "A Monthly Journal to Defend Democratic Rights and Combat Anti-Semitism and Racism." Conceived by Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein (a Catholic), Equality has on its editorial council such prominent Jewish intellectuals as Publisher Bennett Cerf, Playwrights Moss Hart and Lillian Hellman, Anthropologist Franz Boas. Its first issue contains articles on anti-Semitism by such potent non-Jews as Columnist Dorothy Thompson, Author Donald Ogden Stewart, Warden Lewis E. Lawes, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick. Its credo:

"We believe that the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the United States--and we condemn those who ignore it for one reason or another--cannot be understood as a so-called religious or racial problem. We beg that the bitter lesson of Europe be learned: that where anti-Semitism triumphs, Fascism triumphs as well. . . . Equality will combat all those who attempt to cover up manifestations of antiSemitism. . . . It is becoming clear that all the forces in American life concerned with . . . combating anti-Semitism are veering from the hush-hush position to a demand for action."

Hooton on Jews. Harvard's Professor Earnest Albert Hooton is a popeyed, witty anthropologist who is noted for his pessimistic views on the state of mankind in general. Last week Anthropologist Hooton, no Jew, published in Collier's as outspoken and provocative an article on the Jewish question as the U. S. press has printed in many a day.

After postulating that facial characteristics set the Jews apart, that they are "a people representing the supersophisticated product of intensive selection and long-continued evolution," Dr. Hooton proceeds to embark upon "a discussion which will arouse the ire of many an idealistic democrat with an inferiority complex and of all scientists who labor under the delusion that only negative findings are sound." Says he:

"My thesis is that the highly evolved and special physiognomy so frequently characteristic of the Jew is correlated with certain equally highly evolved and specialized characteristics of mind, temperament and personality. . . . The purgative force of natural and social selection has been exerted continuously and with increasing severity upon the Jewish people, while it has been abated and nullified in large measure among our own non-Jewish stocks, which have been sheltered, pampered and fostered. . . . We go on merrily and righteously nurturing our 'Aryan' imbeciles, morons and criminals, encouraging them to breed more of their kind, and supporting them at public expense. On the other hand, we persecute the Jews and try to destroy them, and actually succeed in preventing the survival of those who are not superior in wits and in constitution. Thus we make them better and better, while we get worse and worse. . . .

"You cannot impose upon a people a brutal regime of selection by political and economic oppression, interspersed with periodic pogroms, without effecting a concentration in that people of all the mental and physical qualities which make for survival. . . .

"The Jews . . . have been freed from the onus of their own inferior elements. We have divested them of their morons. , . . They have had to learn that a Jew who is to survive must do what he does supremely well, whether in the realms of commerce, politics, science or scholarship. . . . Their involuntarily eugenic regime has been partly responsible for the astounding frequency with which they produce men of genius. . . . * "Why, then, have Jews been so constantly the objects of hatred on the part of their fellow men? ... If they are too clever for us and contrive to beat us in nearly every intellectual and commercial game, in spite of inferiority of numbers and dice consistently loaded against them, we have to fall back upon our numerical preponderance and upon our excess of brute force. Then we begin to envy and to hate them, and every one of their physical, psychological or sociological divergences from our own pattern becomes obnoxious."

Anthropologist Hooton's remedy for "this festering sore" of anti-Semitism is as bold as his thesis. "There is but one remedy," says he. "That is the assimilation of the Jewish minorities by intermarriage. . . .

"If we could get all of the Jews in this country and Europe to outmarry, it would leaven the lump of Gentile stupidity. There is enough ability concentrated in the few millions of Jews to raise the general average considerably if it were disseminated by intermixture. ... I do not know that they would be willing to do it, but, if they did, they would confer a great genetic boon upon mankind, and at the same time would solve their own problems.

"Most of us could do with a little Jewish blood and intelligence. I am sure that I could and I think that a little of that strain, at the very least, would have improved the shape of my nose."*

Newsworthy fact: not one Manhattan paper mentioned the Hooton article as news.

*FORTUNE'S April findings: 33.2% said yes; 45.7% said no; 21.1% did not know. *Professor Hooton has a pug nose.

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