At 05:03 AM 9/27/99 -1000, Jonathan Gill wrote:
>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).
 
In 1896 Eliot was just 8 years old, and the letters he wrote to his mother
during the 1916 election (many years later, of course) indicate that the
Eliot family was solidly Republican. Furthermore, the bigots described in
that AP article were delegates to the Populist convention, not residents of
the city. But sure: if hatred of Jews was in the air of St. Louis, Eliot
must have breathed some of it in.
 
And incidentally, there's a useful discussion of the literary-historical
issue of antisemitism, mutatis mutandis, in a book many members of this
list are likely to own: Don Gifford's _Ulysses Annotated_, pp. 3-6.
 
Jonathan Morse