The Jew and American Ideals — Text and Context

here was not then, as there is not now, the slightest doubt in my mind that the pro-German propagandists resorted to this trick in order to weaken the morale of the principal Allied nations.

IS SOCIALISM A JEWISH CONSPIRACY?

Upon the strength of statements made in this collection of documents of mysterious and suspicious origin, a number of papers, including the _Dearborn Independent_ and the _London Morning Post_, have attempted to account for and explain the international Socialist movement as part of this Jewish imperialistic conspiracy. Neither in the protocols themselves nor in the newspapers making this particular charge has any shred of authentic evidence been adduced in its support. True, a great deal has been made of the undeniable fact that Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Wilhelm Liebnecht, and other noted Socialists belonged to the Jewish race. Against this fact might very well be set the equally undeniable fact that the foremost opponents of these men, and of Socialism, were also of the Jewish race. Apparently, therefore, we are to believe that the leaders of this Jewish conspiracy set up the Socialist movement and fostered it, while at the same time they enlisted their ablest minds to defeat it. Surely for the normal mind that is not obsessed this is a theory too absurd for belief.

Only those who are entirely ignorant of the history of Socialism and Socialist theories can possibly hold this view of its Jewish origin. Long before Karl Marx appeared upon the scene of action Socialism had already made an impress upon European thought. Marx was a boy of fifteen when the word Socialism first appeared in print as designating the doctrines preached by Robert Owen, the Welshman, for almost twenty years before that time. Was Owen the tool of Jewish conspirators? I have read most of the literature relating to Owen's life and teaching, including his own voluminous writings, and the innumerable controversies in which he was engaged throughout his life. I have not discovered in all this mass of material a single trace of Jewish influence. He had no Jewish friends or associates during the formative years, the period in which the Socialist ideas and ideals shaped themselves. His Socialism was the direct outcome of his experience as a successful manufacturer. He was not in any sense a man of books. From time to time he required large sums of money for his enterprises. Surely, if those enterprises, and his life's work as a whole, formed part of a great Jewish conspiracy which had behind it the vast financial resources of Jewry, it would not have been difficult for him to secure the financial support he needed. It is a fact of cardinal importance, therefore, that Owen never did receive Jewish financial support. Those who would have us believe that Socialism originated as a part of the great world-wide conspiracy of Jewish imperialism must first of all explain Robert Owen.

Nor does Owen stand alone in the history of Socialism among the Anglo-Saxon peoples. It is a well-known fact, one to which he himself has called attention, that the most important of the economic and sociological theories of Marx were held and promulgated before his time by a number of British writers. As Professor Foxwell and others have shown, the roots of what is called Marxian Socialist theory lie deep in the soil of British political economy. Karl Marx devoted his typically Jewish genius to the exposition of Socialist theories, but the theories themselves were not of Hebraic origin. William Godwin, Charles Hall, William Thompson, John Gray, and John Francis Bray all preceded Marx, and not one of them was a Jew, nor can we find in their writings any trace of Jewish influence. It is the same with Bronterre O'Brien, the first to call himself a Social Democrat. If any or all of these men were the agents of such a conspiracy, it is remarkable that there should be an entire absence of evidence of that fact. It is quite unbelievable that there was any sort of conspiracy which affected them. For the most part they were poor and their books were published in pitifully small editions at great sacrifice to themselves. Incidentally, it is worthy of note, Karl Marx, the Jew, suffered terrible poverty. Certainly, all this does not suggest an international conspiracy backed by the Jewish leaders of the financial world.