When General Grant Expelled the Jews

by Jonathan D. Sarna

  The next four years were something of an anticlimax. The landslide election made Republican politicians incautious, and, as so often happens in such cases, hubris bred maladministration, misconduct, corruption, and scandal. Men whom Grant trusted betrayed him. Journalists and critics had a field day. Jews joined in condemning “the corruption in official circles, which has largely corrupted all classes of society,” but did not blame the president more than others in positions of power. They understood perfectly well that, in Isaac Mayer Wise’s words, moral rot was no less pervasive among the “Democratic rulers of the city of New York” (Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall) than among “the national rulers in Washington.” The call therefore went out to ordinary citizens to effect reform. “In spite of all the extraordinary exertions of men in power, in spite of threats, bribes, espionage and denunciation … there is no cause of apprehension,” Wise reassured his readers. “This is a morally sound people.”36

  The presidential initiative that earned the most support from Jews during Grant’s scandal-plagued second term was his effort to strengthen church-state separation. Protestant efforts to Christianize the country and the Catholic campaign to win state funding for parochial schools had come to alarm religious liberals, who favored the high wall of separation that Thomas Jefferson so famously advocated. Jews, newly accepted as insiders by the president, were particularly fearful of seeing their gains reversed. As a result, historian Benny Kraut has shown, a “natural, pragmatic alliance” developed, uniting “Jews, liberal Christians, religious free thinkers, and secularists in common bond, their religious and theological differences notwithstanding.”37 Members of this alliance sought to shift away from Abraham Lincoln’s emphasis on Americans as a religious people, and toward a greater stress on government as a secular institution. Rabbi Max Lilienthal of Cincinnati, for example, elevated the separation of church and state into one of the central tenets of American Judaism:

  [W]e are going to lay our cornerstone with the sublime motto, “Eternal separation of state and church!” For this reason we shall never favor or ask any support for our various benevolent institutions by the state; and if offered, we should not only refuse, but reject it with scorn and indignation, for those measures are the first sophistical, well-premeditated steps for a future union of church and state. Sectarian institutions must be supported by their sectarian followers; the public purse and treasury dares not be filled, taxed and emptied for sectarian purposes.38

  Grant probably knew nothing of Lilienthal (though the rabbi had written to him in 1871 seeking to have his son, Jesse, appointed to a cadetship at West Point).39 In 1875, however, he threw his support behind a parallel vision of “strict separation,” insisting that religion be kept out of the public schools and that state aid be denied to parochial schools. “Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school supported entirely by private contribution,” Grant declared in an address in Des Moines to veterans of the Army of the Tennessee, the soldiers he had led when General Orders No. 11 was issued. The central point of his speech, one of the most important that he ever delivered, was “keep the church and state forever separate.” Subsequently, in his State of the Union message to Congress that year, Grant spoke out in favor of a constitutional amendment to require states to create free public schools for all children, “forbidding the teaching in said schools of religious, atheistic, or pagan tenets; and prohibiting the granting of any school funds or school taxes … for the benefit or in aid, directly or indirectly, of any religious sect or denomination.”40 Catholics and evangelicals were appalled, and some still charge him with secularism and anti-Catholicism; his amendment never won congressional approval. Jews who agreed with Grant, however, believed that his advocacy of this and related issues placed him “in the foremost rank of the statesmen of the Republic.” They congratulated him for having the courage to raise questions “upon the solution of which at no distant day probably the perpetuity of free institutions depends.”41

  Having argued that religion belonged firmly at the family altar and the church, Grant accepted the invitation of his friend Adolphus Solomons to attend the June 9, 1876, dedication of Adas Israel, the first Jewish house of worship in Washington to be built specifically as a synagogue. Adas was the smaller and more modest of Washington’s two Jewish congregations, and it was Orthodox. Simon Wolf and the bulk of the city’s German-Jewish elite worshipped in the larger and more outwardly impressive Washington Hebrew Congregation, founded in 1852, whose shorter and more liberal services took place in a former Methodist church.

  Grant made history by attending Adas Israel’s dedication. No American president had ever attended a synagogue dedication before (although potentates of countries far less sympathetic to Jews had). Since the event was carefully timed to coincide with the celebration of one hundred years of American independence, the president’s appearance was particularly laden with symbolism. It announced that Judaism was a coequal religion in the United States. Twenty years earlier, almost to the day, Congress had enacted special legislation to ensure that “all the rights, privileges, and immunities heretofore granted by law to the Christian churches in the city of Washington, be … extended to the Hebrew Congregation of said city.” Now, the man who had once expelled “Jews as a class” from his war zone personally came to honor Jews for upholding and renewing their faith.42

  The dedication, beginning at 4:00 p.m., lasted for three full hours. Grant, his son Ulysses Jr., and the president pro tempore of the Senate, acting vice president Thomas W. Ferry of Michigan, surprised the congregation by remaining until the end. American flags draped each side of the ark, and “flowers whose fragrance filled every part of the place” made the heat seem less oppressive. Patriotism, dignity, and decorum characterized the dedication; a special synagogue ordinance went so far as to ban “loud praying” during the event (on other occasions, the synagogue’s historian reports, such elevated standards of behavior “were seldom observed”). In a particularly “beautiful and impressive” ceremony, rarely seen before and much commented upon afterward, the synagogue’s eternal lamp was lowered on a silver cord and lighted. George Jacobs of Philadelphia, the officiating Jewish “minister,” then offered the requisite prayer “for the Government of the United States” and delivered a sermon linking the synagogue’s dedication to America’s centennial. When it was all over, the dignitaries in attendance responded generously. Senator Ferry, raised in the home of Presbyterian missionaries, commented that “he would gladly have waited another hour” had the sermon been further prolonged, “for much that was new was learned, and many prejudices removed.” Grant handed in a subscription card promising the congregation $10 (worth about $200 in today’s money), earning him its sincere thanks for his “munificence and liberality.”43

  Adas Israel Synagogue (illustration credit ill.30)

  One month later, Grant found himself in renewed contact with Jews. The annual convention of the Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, then a broad-based synagogue body established in 1873 to “preserve Judaism” and promote Jewish education, met in Washington to mark America’s centennial. Grant set aside an hour to meet and greet them, and to show them the inside of the White House. One of those who introduced themselves to the president on the tour was Isaac Mayer Wise, a central figure in the organization. “I know all about you, Doctor,” Grant was quoted as replying, “especially in connection with Order No. 11.” Wise himself properly appreciated the larger significance of the gathering: “[Judaism’s] existence as an element in this country has been made tangible and real to all by a representative body.” The fact that Grant used the occasion to recall his Civil War order banishing Jews, however, serves as yet another reminder that whenever he found himself in Jews’ company, the blot on his military record—the sense that in expelling “Jews as a class” he had failed to live up to his own high standard of what it meant to be an American—was never far from his mind.44

  As it turned o
ut, this was Ulysses S. Grant’s last major engagement with Jews during his presidency. The following March, after steering the country through one of its tightest-ever presidential elections as well as multiple postelection challenges, he turned power over to Rutherford B. Hayes. With that, a brief “golden age” in the history of the American Jewish community came to an end. The Grant years had brought Jews heightened visibility in the United States and new levels of respect. More Jews served in public office than ever before, and America, for the first time, had firmly committed itself, even in its relations with other nations, to human rights policies, “making no distinction … on account of religion or nativity,” with the aim of securing “universal liberal views.”

  Optimism suffused the American Jewish community at this time. A liberal Jewish magazine entitled, significantly, The New Era promised to “advance mankind in true religious knowledge and to unite all God’s children in a common bond of brotherhood.” A rabbi named Isidor Kalisch, speaking in “every important city east of the Mississippi River,” confidently proclaimed the approach of “the golden age of a true universal brotherhood.” City after city in the United States witnessed the construction of new synagogues, some of them, like Washington, D.C.’s Adas Israel, comparatively modest; others, like Rodeph Shalom in Philadelphia (1871) and Central Synagogue (Ahawath Chesed) in New York (1872), magnificently grand. The establishment of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873), the first successful American synagogue organization, and of Hebrew Union College (1875), the first successful American rabbinical school, underscored the progress made by American Jews during the Grant years. Among themselves and in relating to their non-Jewish neighbors, Jews had seemingly internalized the president’s watchword, “let us have peace.”45

  Clearly, Grant was not responsible for all of the progress that American Jews had made during his years in the White House. Nevertheless, his statements and actions, so starkly in contrast with what he had said and done during the Civil War, set a new national tone. Akin to the biblical seer Balaam, he had been expected to curse the Jews and ended up blessing them. Looking back some forty years later, Simon Wolf, while hardly a dispassionate observer, still recalled the Grant years as a unique era in American Jewish life. Having known every American president from James Buchanan to Woodrow Wilson, he concluded that “President Grant did more on behalf of American citizens of Jewish faith at home and abroad than all the Presidents of the United States prior thereto or since.”46

  * * *

  a Schuyler displayed little sympathy for Russia’s Jews. In a private letter to his sister describing the Jews of Paltava, he complained that “they go about in the dirtiest and greasiest of garments, with brutish and disagreeable faces, their disgusting elfish curls hanging down over their temples.” Richard J. Jensen, “The Politics of Discrimination: America, Russia and the Jewish Questions, 1869–1872,” American Jewish History 75 (March 1986): 286.

  b The patronymic Sneersohn asserted descent from the family’s rabbinic patriarch, Shneur Zalman. Family members over the years employed different English spellings for this name, including Sneersohn, the spelling used by Rabbi Haim Zvi Sneersohn; Schneersohn, the spelling used by the sixth Lubavitcher (“of Lubavitch”) rebbe, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn, when he arrived in the United States in 1940; and Schneerson, the spelling used by his son-in-law, the seventh and last rebbe, Rabbi Menahem Mendel Schneerson.

  c In 1874, Sneersohn himself returned to Tiberias in hopes of establishing a Jewish agricultural colony there. Jewish religious zealots in that city opposed his plan and excommunicated him. Subsequently, they physically attacked him, robbed him of his worldly possessions, stripped him stark naked, strapped him to the back of an ass, and paraded him through the streets and outside the city walls. To shocked onlookers, they explained that the rabbi was religiously delusional and considered himself to be the Messiah. Israel Klausner, Rabbi Hayyim Zvi Sneersohn (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1973), 108.

  6

  “Then and Now”

  Ulysses S. Grant left the White House on March 5, 1877. Ten weeks later, on May 17, he embarked on what became “perhaps the grandest tour an American couple had ever made.” The general had always loved to travel. Now, at age fifty-five, he took advantage of the wondrous improvements in transportation made possible by the steam engine, as well as the fabulous profits yielded by his successful investment in twenty-five shares of Consolidated Virginia Mining, the company that extracted silver from the Comstock Lode, to set forth with his wife, his son Jesse, and a small entourage upon a trip around the world. It lasted for almost a thousand days.1

  Several stops on the widely publicized journey proved of especial interest to Jews. When Grant arrived in Frankfurt, for example, one of those greeting him was his friend Henry Seligman. The short, stout, kindly entrepreneur, who was then running the Frankfurt branch of the family banking empire, had first befriended Grant back in 1848 in Watertown, New York, when the Seligmans were still in the dry goods business. Now, as one of the most powerful Jews in Frankfurt, he gallantly proposed a toast to “the health of General Grant,” eliciting a warm reply from his old friend thanking the entire German city for the confidence it placed in the Union during the Civil War. Later, in Paris, other members of the far-flung Seligman banking family likewise appeared at the station to greet and fete the former president. The Seligmans always believed in looking out for their friends, and had particularly good reason to do so in Grant’s case. They knew that as president he had directed substantial business in their direction. Moreover, in 1869, he had broadly hinted to the brothers that it would be advisable “to disassociate themselves” from banker Jay Gould, who was attempting to corner the market in gold, leading its price to skyrocket. When, on “Black Friday” (September 24, 1869), the price of gold as well as the stock market as a whole collapsed following unexpected government intervention, the Seligmans had made their money and “were entirely out of the market.” Most other bankers, as well as hordes of speculators, had not been nearly so fortunate.2

  After he left the White House, Grant maintained his friendship with the Seligmans. Indeed, according to Grant’s onetime aide-de-camp Adam Badeau, he not only enjoyed the company of his “Jewish friends” but was “quite as much at home with the Seligmans as if they had been princes.” This was especially significant since, less than a month before the Grants and the Seligmans fraternized in Frankfurt, Joseph Seligman, in New York, had traveled to Saratoga’s Grand Union Hotel and been abruptly turned away at the door. Judge Henry Hilton, the Grand Union’s new owner, had given strict instructions that “no Israelites shall be permitted in future to stop at this hotel.” The calculated insult avenged an earlier clash between Seligman and Hilton, drew a sharp response from Seligman (“a little reflection must show to you that the serious falling off in your business is not due to the patronage of any one nationality, but to want of the patronage of all, and that you, dear Judge, are not big enough to keep a hotel”), and outraged public opinion. But it proved an ominous portent of social trends.3

  Within a few years, “Jews as a class”—the same phrase Grant had used back in 1862—were declared unwelcome even at New York’s Coney Island, and social discrimination against Jews became commonplace across the country. A short-lived American Society for the Suppression of the Jews, established in 1879, pledged its members, among other things, not to elect Jews to public office, not to attend theaters where Jewish composers wrote the music or Jewish actors performed, not to buy or read books by Jewish authors, not to ride on Jewish-owned railroads, and not to do business with Jewish-owned insurance companies. Just as African Americans, in the years following Grant’s presidency, experienced the rise of discriminatory Jim Crow legislation and a tragic reversal of all the gains they had made during Reconstruction’s heyday, so, albeit not nearly to the same extent, the social status of Jews likewise declined. “The highest social element,” Coney Island developer Austin Corbin explained, “won’t associate wit
h Jews, and that’s all there is about it.” Against this background, Grant’s ongoing friendship with the Seligmans made a bold public statement. Others might discriminate against “Jews as a class,” but Grant, in his later years, interacted with them comfortably.4

  Puck caricatures the Grand Union Hotel’s antisemitic policies (1877). (illustration credit ill.31)

  Grant interacted with Jews again when his tour reached the Holy Land. Visits by Americans to the land then known as Palestine were becoming more and more common at that time, part of what one author describes as “Holy Land mania.” William Henry Seward, secretary of state under presidents Lincoln and Johnson, arrived in 1869; Grant’s friend William Tecumseh Sherman in 1872. Earlier, in 1867, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) had made the trip aboard the steamer Quaker City and memorialized his experiences in Innocents Abroad, which Grant (like thousands of other travelers) took with him to read on the way. The great writer had found little to praise in the land that would one day become modern Israel. He described it as “monotonous and uninviting … a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.” Even Jerusalem, in his eyes, was “mournful, and … lifeless.” Religious pilgrims might romanticize the land of the Bible, but Mark Twain sought to puncture its halo. He was “glad to get away.”5