That passage about anti-semitism in St. Louis is a classic, interesting
for at least two reasons.  First, I wonder if we depend on it too
much--are there any other views of the situation at that moment?  Also, I
wonder of some of that civic spirit touched T.S. Eliot, then an early
adolescent in
that city (if memory serves).
 
Jonathan Gill
Columbia University
 
 
 
On Thu, 23 Sep 1999, Jonathan Morse wrote:
 
> At the 1896 St. Louis convention of the People's Party, an Associated Press
> reporter wrote,
>
> One of the striking things . . . is the extraordinary hatred of the Jewish
> race. It is not possible to go into any hotel in the city without hearing
> the most bitter denunciation of the Jewish race as a class and of
> particular Jews who happen to have prospered in the world. (Leonard
> Dinnerstein, _Anti-Semitism in America_ [OUP, 1994] 50)
>
> And yes indeed, Bryan's "Cross of Gold" acceptance speech at that
> convention was a quintessence of anti-Jewish themes that can be traced all
> the way back to the Gospel of John. Here's the difference between Bryan and
> Pound, though: Bryan was articulating an ancient and normative part of
> Christianity, while Pound was a modern "scientific" racist in the
> nineteenth-century tradition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Wilhelm Marr
> (who coined the term "Antisemitismus" by way of dissociating his ideas from
> mere theological prejudice). And Chamberlain and Marr and Edouard Drumont
> and Charles Maurras and G.K. Chesterton and the rest of that antisemitic
> _galere_ had one more thing in common with Pound: their primary political
> medium was journalistic propaganda. I'd therefore suppose it's to them, not
> to Bryan, that we should look if we're interested in putting Pound's
> antisemitism in a context.
>
> For the rest, a look at Richard Hofstadter's classic _Social Darwinism in
> American Thought_ will show you a Bryan who comes pretty close to being a
> tragic hero. The sad debacle of the Scopes trial, for instance, had its
> origin during World War I, when Bryan interviewed some captured German
> officers and was shaken by their calm assumption that, as members of a
> superior race, they were only fulfilling biological destiny by killing off
> whoever they felt like killing off. From those interviews stemmed Bryan's
> visceral fear of Darwin, and his retreat into fundamentalist irrationality.
> Yet it was he that paid John Scopes's $100 fine after the Monkey Trial. As
> Hofstadter says (this is a paraphrase; I don't have the book at hand),
> Bryan's tragedy was that he had a great heart without a great mind.
>
> Jonathan Morse
> Co-editor, H-Net list H-Antisemitism
>