Richard C. Rothschild
Oral History Memoir
William E. Weiner Oral History Library
of
The American Jewish Committee
Richard C. Rothschild, interviewed by Ethel C. Phillips.
Early Life 2
Yale 6
Advertising 8
World War I 11
Marriage 14
Return to advertising 15
First book of philosophy – “Paradoxy” 17
Europe 18
Second book of philosophy – “Reality and Illusion” 20
“Three Gods Give and Evening to Politics” 22
“Red herring” speech of Roosevelt 1936 22
Lecturer at New School for Social Research 23
Five Questions on Judaism 24
AJC campaign against anti-Semitism 27
Discard of early plans 29
Levels of anti-Semitism 30
Use of mass media 32
No more “defense” 32
The Six-Point Plan 33
Contemporary pessimism 35
True optimism 37
Sense of Jewishness 38
The wonder of things 38
The oneness of things 40
Tape 1-1. February 12, 1973.
ECP: Interview with Richard C. Rothschild for the William E. Wiener Oral History Library of The American Jewish Committee. Today is February 12, 1973, Lincoln’s birthday, and we’re sitting in Mr. Rothschild’s dining room on the roof of a building with a marvelous view of Midtown Manhattan, especially so on this sunny, clear winter afternoon. Mr. Rothschild isn’t just an interesting man of achievement, a subject, so to speak, of the American Jewish Committee’s living history project. He’s part of the living history of The American Jewish Committee itself. In fact, he helped make history at a time when the future not alone of the Committee or of Jews throughout the world but of democracy itself was hanging in the balance. The time, of course, was the Hitler era, and it was Dick Rothschild who conceived, conducted and carried to victory the battle against Nazi anti-Semitism in America. But before we get to that, Dick, let’s hear something about your early life, how you grew into this dramatic chapter of yours and the Committee’s and of all of our lives.
RCR: Don’t you think it would be more interesting to start with the story of the AJC fight on anti-Semitism itself?
ECP: We’ll get to that later, but, after all, you didn’t just fall into it out of the blue. Tell us a little something about your personal history first.
Early Life
RCR: Well, I was born in Chicago on March 24, 1895. My father, Charles Ernest Rothschild, I remember with great affection. He was a kindly man, fair-minded, patient, wholeheartedly devoted to his wife and children. He was not an intellectual, but his was a keen intelligence. I do not recall any ideological discussions with him on current affairs, but then it was not particularly an age of ideologies. He died when I was nineteen.
My mother, as they used to say, was of “a nervous disposition.” She also had a charming streak of vanity. In fact, I recall as a boy of eight that she was a little weepy on her thirtieth birthday because she was getting so old. Like most girls brought up in the 1870’s and 1880’s, she had somewhat less than a high school education. However, she did attend for a year or two a so-called finishing school in Bonn, now the capital of West Germany.
My grandparents on both sides came from Germany, my father’s parents settling in the Midwest, my mother’s in the East. My grandfather, Samuel Rothschild, went to Leavenworth, Kansas, before the Civil War, opening a sort of frontier general store there in what must have been pretty rough country. There is, for instance, a story my father used to tell, which I have repeated to my own children, of the Indian who barged in on a Sunday dinner of theirs and stole the roast off the table.
ECP: Well, at least he carved up the roast and left the family, didn’t he?
RCR: Yes, that was lucky (laugh) for me. Some time between 1875 and 1880 the family moved to Chicago.
My mother’s was a New Haven, Connecticut, family. Her grandfather, Bernard Shoninger, was one of the first manufacturers of organs and pianos in the country, producing the Shoninger Pianos, some years before Steinway, as a matter of fact, in a red brick factory which I can still see in my mind’s eye. He was born in 1828 and must have immigrated before 1850 and established the piano business while he was still in his twenties. When I knew him he was a short, white-bearded man with a great interest in all sorts of musical instruments. I remember in particular a large music box he had which played four songs including “Listen to the Mockingbird” by means of a rotating drum with raised spikes arranged to pluck metal keys. He also had one of the earliest Edison phonographs, with a large horn and fragile wax cylindrical records instead of today’s plastic discs.
His daughter, Ida Shoninger, my grandmother, was born in 1855 and married my grandfather, Michael Sonnenberg, I think it was 1871. Michael Sonnenberg came to the United States in 1854 at the age of about fourteen and went to a town in Michigan (I think it was Adrian) to start a new life for himself. When I come to think of it, I’m impressed by the courage and self-reliance of a boy of fourteen making his way to and in a strange land with only a few dollars in his pocket, not much formal education as we now know it, and certainly with very little knowledge of English language.
The Sonnenbergs had two children besides my mother. There was Louis who practiced law in New York with Arthur Spingarn, later a founder and president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. There was also a daughter, Hetty, married to Charles Studin, who later came to be known as the host of one of f New York’s best known literary solons. At his bi-weekly cocktail parties in the 1930’s and 1940’s one would meet countless distinguished figures, poets, columnists, critics, professors, journalists. I remember in particular Edwin Arlington Robinson, the poet, Franklin P. Adams, F. P. A., Dorothy Parker, Whit Burnett, Leonard Lyons, Woollcott, Robert Benchly.
ECP: It wounds like a Who’s Who of the good old days.
RCR: Well, as a matter of fact, the times weren’t so good. There were plenty of evils and injustices, some of them not yet even recognized as such, so that many of today’s social tensions had not even developed. Ecology and the population explosion hadn’t been heard of, and there were many things that needed changing. The young today complain of the world they have inherited, with the many evils and injustices that still exist. What they sometimes fail to recognize, or forget, are the enormous advances that have already come in the period of my own lifetime, let along the century since the England of Dickens; and I am referring here, not only to advances in science and technology, but to man’s increased sense of responsibility for this fellow men – Social Security, unemployment insurance, company pensions for retired workers, Medicare, welfare programs for the poor, federal aid to education, private philanthropies totaling billions of dollars a year replacing Lady Bountiful and her basket of food for the starving at Christmas, foreign aid for people in far-off lands, the names of whose countries we cannot even pronounce, anti-sweatshop legislation, consumer protection legislation, anti-discrimination laws. Much still needs to be done, not only in getting legislation on the books, but also in arousing the public, which, after all, is the final power in a democracy, to an awareness of the problems. But when reformers, rebels or protesters point with alarm to the unfinished business of society’s agenda, it may be well to remind them of the state of the world only a few years ago and of the struggles and sacrifices and occasional martyrdoms of some idealists who went before. In fact, I think a case could be made for the proposition that there has been more social progress in the past half-century than in the five centuries that went before.
But to get back to Chicago at the turn of the century. Not all city streets in those days, at least in Chicago, were paved. Automobiles were few and far between, and it was almost an event when one would come down the street, a Winton, a Pope Hartford, a Locomobile or some other now-forgotten make which in those days was owned only by the very rich. Perhaps there’s even an investment moral in this as an illustration of the fact that the first companies in a new and promising field are not always the ones that eventually prove to be the most profitable. Automobiles were bought without accessories, so the buyer had to get as extras such things as a windshield, a bulb horn, a canvas top for a touring car and so forth. Tires were made for seventy-pound pressures and it was not uncommon for two or three of them to blow out or get a puncture on a single afternoon’s trip. Each puncture required perhaps a half-hour job of removing a tire from the wheel and patching it from the inside. (There were no demountable rims or wheels in those days.) The roads between cities and towns were almost all dirt roads, with so few signs that one had to “know the way”, literally, from one place to another. One had to wear a duster to protect one’s clothes, and perhaps wear goggles in addition.
Sunday morning my brother and I went to religious school at Sinai Congregation, a Reform temple of which Emil Hirsch was the rabbi. I was, however, never confirmed. In general, my Jewish background at that time was exceedingly sketchy. The religious values for which I later came to have profound respect did not take root in me at that time.
Our summer were usually spent in the East with the Sonnenbergs, and it was during one such summer in Fairfield, Connecticut, that I saw my first balloon ascension. It was at a country fair in Westport and the balloon was filled with hot air from a kerosene flame. There was a trapeze suspended from it, and a circus performer went up on the trapeze doing stunts as the balloon ascended, finally dropping in a parachute. Little did I then realize that one day I should be doing something of that sort in World War One.
Another year, when I was six years old, that is, in 1901, I recall attending the bicentennial celebration of Yale University in New Haven, and I particularly remember watching the parade with Professor Lafayette Medel, and old “beau” of my mother’s, who taught physiological chemistry and later became famous os one of the discoverers of vitamins.
In 1907 the family moved to Toledo, Ohio. It was naturally a wrench for all of us, as such things usually are, with new friends to be made, schools to be changed and so forth. We did, however, adjust, and I have the pleasantest memories of school and friends in Toledo. After one remaining year in grade school I went to Toledo Central High School, the only one in the city at that time, and a particularly good one. I remember one teacher in particular, a Mr. Haas, who taught botany and who was able to inspire the whole class with a love of the subject, with field trips, gathering specimens, classifying mushrooms and the like. Such teachers have always been rare, and no amount of pedagogical “method” can quite make up for a lack of them, however important method may be in raising the general level of instruction.
It was about this time that my brother and I became avid readers. Our reading, however, was not too well guided, so that we were pushovers for every book salesman who rang our doorbell. In those days such door-to-door salesmen sold sets of books, and we would save up from our allowances and money earned cutting the grass and other household chores to buy Mark Twain, Stevenson, Kingsley and so forth. One set I remember in particular; it was R. Dpath’s History of the World, in seventeen big volumes that looked like the Encylclopaedia Britannica on the shelf. It had pictures on every page, a liberal education in itself. Who R.Dpath was I never knew, but he had collected a lot of fascinating material in his History and we would devour the sections on paleontology, archeology, astronomy and the rest of it with real excitement.
ECP: And when did you move to New York?
RCR: In 1910, I think it was, we moved to New York, where all of the family on my mother’s side had settled. My school here was the De Witt Clinton High School, then a comparatively new school located at Fifty-Ninth Street and Tenth Avenue, to which I transferred as a junior. I was never a good enough athlete to make any of the teams. I did, however, go out for the monthly school magazine and became literary editor, contributing short stories and articles, things like that, and editing the stories of others. It was my first experience with writing for publication. I also remember that I won a bronze medal for debating, my first try at the art of persuasion.
In the Summer of 1911… and for five summers after that, I went to a boys’ camp, Camp Wigwam. We had a good bunch of boys and some of them became distinguished in later life – Charlie Wyzanski, then about ten years old, later a federal judge in Boston and chairman of Harvard’s Board of Overseers; Preston Dickenson, a well-known American Painter, who died at an early age; Dick Rodgers, of Rodgers-and-Hart and then Rodgers-and-Hammerstein fame, then fourteen, who composed the music to a camp song. I thing the first song he ever wrote, for which I wrote the words; and finally Arthur Loesser, a counselor and distinguished concert pianist, brother of Frank Loesser, composer of Guys and Dolls.
Yale
ECP: And what about the good old days at Yale?
RCR: In 1912…I entered Yale. Colleges in those days were not what they are today. There were few if any seminars; personal contact between student and professor was only an occasional thing. This is not to say that all instruction was dull and uninspired. In particular I recall some brilliant lectures by Chauncey Brewster Tinker in English Lit.; Albert Galloway Keller, the successor of William Graham Sumner, in anthropology and societology (as he insisted on calling it in protest against the sociology of the day); and William Lyon Phelps on Tennyson and Browning,l a sentimental old dodo who, nevertheless, had the knack of getting off a stimulating and amusing talk. My major was in economics, which I think has been of some slight use in my life despite the fact that it’s a long way from being the science it sometimes pretends to be. My minor was in anthropology, even less of a science. I did take a few courses in philosophy, although my interest in the subject had not yet fully developed. In general, it is unfortunate, it seems to me, that professors of philosophy teach it so badly. In fact, their courses on things like German idealism or French rationalism or British empiricism, are usually only dead chronologies, neither stimulating nor revealing. On the other hand, true philosophy in my view is an exciting thing, not so much a roster of names as a process of discovery, not a catalogue of dead men’s writings but a thinking through of living issues. It is not a static but a dynamic thing, not a compilation of beautiful thoughts as they call them, but a perpetual unfolding of man’s relationships to other men and his world. Philosophy, as I now see it should be the unifying element in an education, the thread of meaning between disciplines, the source of personal orientation, the begetter of a ranging mind. Most of the other departments of learning yield only the raw material of knowledge or aesthetic perceptions. It is philosophy which should be what puts it all together in a pure synthesis. The educational ideal of stuffing the mind has today bee largely discarded. What is still too often lacking, as it was lacking in Yale philosophy courses in the first decade of the century, is a prior vision of a general kind of person it is hoped the educational process will produce.