On the topic of how antisemitic America was in the 1920s-1930s this wikipedia page attempts to expain... If necessary I can bring other sources also.. I know that my parents parents who were the 2nd generation American citizens witnessed anti-Jew sentiment. I remember stories about how they were denied membership in organizations because they were Jewish...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism_in_the_United_States1920s[edit]Antisemitism in America reached its peak during the interwar period.[citation needed] The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, the antisemitic works of Henry Ford, and the radio speeches of Father Coughlin in the late 1930s indicated the strength of attacks on the Jewish community.
One element in American antisemitism during the 1920s was the identification of Jews with Bolshevism where the concept of Bolshevism was used pejoratively in the country. (see article on "Jewish Bolshevism").
Immigration legislation enacted in the United States in 1921 and 1924 was interpreted widely as being at least partly anti-Jewish in intent because it strictly limited the immigration quotas of eastern European nations with large Jewish populations, nations from which approximately 3 million Jews had immigrated to the United States by 1920.
Discrimination in education and professions[edit]Further information: Numerus clausus
In 1922, educational discrimination became a national issue when Harvard announced it was considering a quota system for Jewish students. Although it was eventually dropped, the quota was enforced in many colleges through underhanded techniques (as late as 1945 Dartmouth College openly admitted and defended a quota system against Jewish students). To limit the growing number of Jewish students, a number of private liberal arts universities and medical and dental schools instituted a quota system referred to as Numerus clausus. These included Harvard University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Boston University[citation needed]. In 1925 Yale University, which already had such admissions preferences as "character", "solidity", and "physical characteristics" added a program of legacy preference admission spots for children of Yale alumni, in an explicit attempt to put the brakes on the rising percentage of Jews in the student body. This was soon copied by other Ivy League and other schools[citation needed], and admissions of Jews were kept down to 10% through the 1950s. Such policies were for the most part discarded during the early 1960s although the last vestiges were not eliminated at Yale University until 1970.
Jews encountered resistance when they tried to move into white-collar and professional positions. Banking, insurance, public utilities, medical schools, hospitals, large law firms and faculty positions, restricted the entrance of Jews. This era of “polite” Judeophobia through social discrimination, underwent an ideological escalation in the 1930s.
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1930s[edit]According to Gilman and Katz, antisemitism increased dramatically in the 1930s with demands being made to exclude American Jews from American social, political and economic life.[20]
During the 1930s and 1940s, right-wing demagogues linked the Depression of the 1930s, the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt, and the threat of war in Europe to the machinations of an imagined international Jewish conspiracy that was both communist and capitalist. A new ideology appeared which accused “the Jews” of dominating Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, of causing the Great Depression, and of dragging the US into WW2 against a new Germany which deserved nothing but admiration. Roosevelt's "New Deal" was derisively referred to as the "Jew Deal".[20]
Father Charles Coughlin, a radio preacher, as well as many other prominent public figures, condemned "the Jews," and Henry Ford reprinted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper.[21] Gerald L.K. Smith, a Disciples of Christ minister, was the founder (1937) of the Committee of One Million and publisher (beginning in 1942) of The Cross and the Flag, a magazine that declared that "Christian character is the basis of all real Americanism." Other antisemitic agitators included Fritz Julius Kuhn of the German-American Bund, William Dudley Pelley, and the Rev. Gerald Winrod. In the end, promoters of antisemitism such as Coughlin, Smith, Kuhn and Winrod achieved no more than a passing popularity as the threat of Nazi Germany became more and more evident to the American electorate. Steven Roth asserts that there was never a real possibility of a "Jewish question" appearing on the American political agenda as it did in Europe; according to Roth, the resistance to political antisemitism in the United States was due to the heterogeneity of the American political structure.[22]
American attitudes towards Jews[edit]Antisemitism in the United States was also indicated by national public opinion polls taken from the mid nineteen thirties to the late nineteen forties. The results showed that over half the American population saw Jews as greedy and dishonest. These polls also found that many Americans believed that Jews were too powerful in the United States. Similar polls were also taken, one of which posed that 35-40 percent of the population was prepared to accept an anti-Jewish campaign.
In a 1938 poll, approximately 60 percent of the respondents held a low opinion of Jews, labeling them “greedy,” “dishonest,” and “pushy.”[23] 41 percent of respondents agreed that Jews had "too much power in the United States," and this figure rose to 58 percent by 1945. In 1939 a Roper poll found that only thirty-nine percent of Americans felt that Jews should be treated like other people. Fifty-three percent believed that "Jews are different and should be restricted" and ten percent believed that Jews should be deported.[24] Several surveys taken from 1940 to 1946 found that Jews were seen as a greater threat to the welfare of the United States than any other national, religious, or racial group.[25]
Although only 0.6 percent of the nation's 93,000 commercial bankers in 1939 were Jewish,[citation needed] the idea that Jews controlled the banking system remained a popular myth. Political antisemitism also was high during the war years, with 23 percent of respondents in one 1945 survey saying they would vote for a congressional candidate if the candidate declared "himself as being against the Jews" and as many as 35 percent saying it would not affect their vote. Jews also noted the influence of antisemitism when the U.S. State Department opposed efforts to lower immigration barriers to admit Jews and other refugees fleeing the Holocaust and Nazi-occupied Europe.
Thus, antisemitism was fairly widespread in the U.S, a sentiment which reduced the inclination of Americans to help the Jews in Europe.[citation needed].
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Apparently Jew hatred was a problem in America in the 1920-1930s...
Topic: Michele Bachmann Tells The Truth About American Jewry (Read 2491 times)