The Seven-Branched Candlestick Part 13

"Honestly. If there's one Jew in the freshman cla.s.s, there are fifty.

And such Jewy-looking Jews!"

"Gee whizz, it's a disgrace. It was bad enough when they used to come in four or five--or even ten--in a cla.s.s. But fifty! Are there really fifty?"

"Oh, easily! Maybe a hundred--I don't know. They are swarming all over the place! Gosh, we'll have to do something to get rid of them. It just simply ruins the college name to have so many of them around."

"You bet! A campaign for ours!"

I watched them going off together, arm in arm, towards "fraternity row"--and wondered what that campaign would be.

It did not take me long to investigate the real state of affairs. There were some thirty members of the freshman cla.s.s listed in the dean's office under the designation of "Jew," "Hebrew" or "Ethical Culturist."

And the faces that I met under freshman caps were certainly Semitic, to a large percentage.

At first it annoyed me. Annoyed me more, too, when the first member of the freshman cla.s.s to be expelled for ungentlemanly conduct was a Jew.

There were one or two others, I noticed, who would sooner or later reach the same end if they did not keep away from the city at night--and from the things the city teaches.

These one or two gradually became scape-goats for the rest of the Jewish boys in the cla.s.s. They were sons of rich fathers; they paraded their automobiles about the campus--and thus broke the rule number one in the "freshman bible." They had unbridled tongues, and used them ungraciously. One of them, a big, swaggering chap, "went out" for his cla.s.s football team--and, having been selected to play in a minor game, developed a dying aunt overnight and disappeared for the day. When he came back, on Sunday night, he was caught and hazed. His automobile was dumped on its side in the middle of the campus. His face, when I saw him the next day, was a network of plaster strips. Three days after that he left college--and I, for one, was devoutly thankful for his resigning.

He did not belong in our college, had done nothing to fit himself into its environment, had talked loudly, acted the cad and the coward--and had reaped the reward of such a person, Jew or Gentile, in whatever community.

The persecution--for it had taken on proportions worthy of that name--went forward, however. There was an annual "freshman parade," for instance, when the entering cla.s.s was dressed in grotesque costumes and sent marching in and out a lane of laughing spectators to the football field. In my own freshman year this was a good-natured affair--and each cla.s.s, including the victimized one, took it for the boisterous joke that it was.

But this year, when the parade was starting at the gymnasium, and the big, card-board placards were being lifted to the marchers' shoulders, I noticed that all the Jewish boys were being put conspicuously into one group. They would march together. And those placards! The sickening succession of them was only a repet.i.tion of "Oi oi" and the p.a.w.nbroker's symbol--and humor of that high order. And these Jewish freshmen went down the street amid the jeering--and I had to stand by and see them, some with heads high and eyes blazing with pride, others stumbling and bowed, one of them with tears running inanely down his cheeks--had to stand there and watch it all, and curse myself for a coward because I would not, could not, go out into the middle of the road and tear down, one by one, the daubed, cheap jests that they had to carry.

A few weeks later there was another such celebration. There were speeches to be made. The cla.s.s wits--and what cla.s.s is without them?--were to have their turn.

And their wit--what did it consist of? One after another, they made blunt, exaggerated references to the "invasion of the Huns," to the "Jews coming unto Jordan," to "the lost Ten Tribes ..." and hoots of applause went up to the night sky like the roar of a Philistine army!

One of the men who spoke was a cla.s.smate of mine--a fellow-member of the joke paper's board. I knew him well, for he had been to see me often. It was only a few nights ago that he had told me he was chosen to speak at this celebration, and had promised me he would make no reference to the Jewish influx.

"I don't agree with you about it," he had said. "You're too sensitive, all you Jews--and anyhow, you know perfectly well we're not aiming this campaign at you personally. It's against this big bunch of them in the freshman cla.s.s."

"So it's a regular campaign, is it?" I demanded.

He evaded the question--but satisfied me with his promise.

But when I heard him break it--heard him, more than any other speaker, launch one smiling epithet after another against the "sons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," I lost all the gnawing consciousness that I had had as to the justice of this remark about Jewish sensitiveness--and I went forward to the cart-end from which he was speaking. I meant to pull him down and get up there in his place, and to speak hotly, straight from the shoulder--I didn't care what I said so long as I put them all to disgrace!

But when I was within a few feet of him in the jostling, laughing crowd, I could go no further. I tried to cry out, but that was denied me. My courage gave me only the power to glare and sneer at him--and once, as he spoke, he looked down and saw my face, I think. For his own grew paler in the light of the gas lantern which flared windily beside him, and he faltered in his speech.

Later on he came over to my room and asked to speak to me. I heard him through; listened to his smooth explanation about the committee of arrangements demanding that he put something into his speech about the Jews--and he was sorry he had broken his word to me--only, of course, I was to consider myself an exception to all this sort of thing. Everybody knew I was a good fellow and was doing bully work for the name of the college--and what right had I to cla.s.s myself with these insignificant little Jews in the Freshman cla.s.s? and he didn't want it to break up our friendship, because he thought the world of me.

And so I showed him the door.

The next day I began to pay for that stroke of arrogance. The cla.s.smates who belonged to that man's fraternity snubbed me on the street.

It didn't matter much, I thought--but in reality, it did. Because these men, as it happened, had been my closest friends. I was beginning to worry myself into a maudlin state, and no doubt did attribute hostility to altogether too many of the undergraduates. But it is hard to choose and distinguish surely in a land that is generally hostile and strange.

I began to stay more and more within the shelter of my room, working at my studies and at those activities which had already given me recognition. I wanted to be plucky about it. I wanted to keep on smiling--but there were times, I must confess, when I wished that I were through with college and all its rough-and-tumble boyishness.

I did not care so much myself. There were all these freshmen who were probably ten times lonelier than I was, ten times more bewildered and disheartened by the welcome they had had. I tried to visit as many of them as lived in dormitories. I wanted to talk things over with them, to help them in some possible way. But it wasn't much of a success--I could make no progress out of condonement and asking them to wait patiently until the foolish campaign had dwindled away.

Then, one day, as I crossed the campus to a first recitation, I saw that the brick walls of the oldest of the dormitories had been adorned with huge painted letters:

"OUT WITH THE JEWS."

I went into a telephone booth and called up the house of one of the professors with whom I had become friendly. He was a kindly, well-meaning man, and an alumnus of the college.

His telephone line was busy when I called it. I heard him talking with some one. I was about to ring off when suddenly I heard my own name mentioned.

The professor was an alumnus member of one of the college fraternities.

And this other man--evidently an undergraduate, though I never tried to identify him--was asking the professor what he thought of offering me an election to this fraternity.

And I heard the professor sigh in his patient way.

"I like him--I like him very much, mind you," I heard him say, "but--er, er--I do think it would be disastrous--nothing short of disastrous to elect a Jew to any of our fraternities in the present situation."

I rang off. It was something to know that I was even being considered for membership--but it was disastrous, that was all--disastrous!

When I was out upon the campus again I saw that painters were already at work obliterating the sign. They had whitewashed the "_Out With the_"

away, and there was nothing left upon the wall but a huge, red

"JEWS."

And thank G.o.d, I could laugh at the incident!

XVII

MANY IMPULSES

Fair play comes first--and reasoning follows it. For fair play is always an impulse. It comes when least expected.

That is how it was at the university. The incident of the big, painted sign was practically the last demonstration against the influx of Jewish boys. Waters, who made capital of everything, attempted to found a formal organization dignified by the t.i.tle of the Anti-Hebrew Collegiate League, but when, at the first meeting, he was not elected to the presidency, abandoned the project with bitter complaints against the ingrat.i.tude of his fellow members. A little later on, when the tide had turned in the opposite direction, he became the head of the Helping Hand League, and was atop the wave of contrition.

For the tide did turn. Men are always afraid to carry their propaganda beyond the point of the ridiculous. When tomfoolery turns to foolishness its perpetrators are only too anxious for a chance to abandon it.

It was impossible to keep the thing out of the newspapers. The day after that sign incident, there was a lurid story to be read at each of the city's breakfast tables and in the evening subways. New York took it up and made it a matter of shocked debate for a day and a half. The president of the university, in his quarterly sermon in chapel, spoke fervently of toleration and the gentle spirit.

The reaction was almost as hysterical as the movement itself. The little Jewish freshmen--timid, frightened little mice, who had been going about their cla.s.sroom work and scurrying home and out of reach for so many months--suddenly found themselves lauded as martyrs, as the best of fellows.

One evening a deputation of them were waiting for me when I came in from supper. They had formed a Jewish fraternity, and wished me to join with them. Appeal to a Jewish philanthropist had brought them enough money to lease a house near the campus. They were sure that they would have sanction and support from the rest of the college, now that the prejudice had abated. And since they could not join any of the other fraternities, why should they not have one of their own?

I thought it over carefully. I wanted to be fair to myself as well as to them. That same old repugnance of being identified with a distinctly Jewish propaganda troubled me and made me turn from them. And yet it wasn't only that, either. For when I thought it out, I knew that, according to my point of view, theirs was not the proper solution. Fire can fight fire, perhaps--in proverbs, anyhow--but discrimination is not to be overpowered by a like amount of secularity. If Jewish college men objected to that unwritten rule of fraternities; if they contended that fraternities should be democratic; if they wanted equal rights in those fraternities ... how, then, were they justified in standing apart and founding a fraternity of their own--a brotherhood which should be open only to Jews?

That is what I thought. I may have been wrong--and the excellent records of the Jewish fraternity chapters in various colleges and universities do perhaps prove me wrong--but I could not bring myself to join them. I was heartily glad the whole heated question of race and race prejudice was abated. I asked, for myself, only that I be given something of the fair-play that other men had. I was working hard for the college. I was doing all that my talents enabled me to do and I was sure that, sooner or later, there would be the reward.