Taft had been beaten, and all the men who had stood beside him ran in out of the storm. John Hays Hammond was represented as having been sympathetic with the Russian view of the Jews—as most of the American representatives were. As late as 1917, William Howard Taft, then a private citizen, wrote to the principal Jewish lobbyist at Washington asking that Mr. Hammond be not held up in Jewish histories as one who had opposed the breaking of the Russian treaty.
The President had really done what he could to prevent the Jewish plan going through. On February 15, 1911, he withstood them face to face. On December 13, 1911, they had whipped him.
And yet in the next year, 1912, a peculiar thing occurred; the high officials of the B’nai B’rith went to the White House and there pinned on the breast of President Taft a medal which marked him as “the man who had contributed most during the year to the welfare of the Jewish cause.”
There is a photograph extant of President Taft standing on the south portico of the White House, in the midst of a group of prominent Jews, and the President is wearing his medal. He is not smiling.
But even after that, the Jews were not sure of President Taft. There was a fear, expressed by private letters between prominent Jews, and also in the Jewish press, that President Taft, while officially abrogating the treaty, would consent to some working agreement which would amount to about the same thing. There were cables from Jews in Russia, stating that Taft would do that. The President was closely watched. Whenever there was an open chink in his daily program, he was approached on the matter. It was made utterly impossible for him to do anything to patch up the differences. Frankfort was to have the handling of American trade with Russia, and Jewry was to have that club over Russia. Money, more and more money, always accompanies every Jewish plan for racial or political power. They make the world pay them for subjugating it. And their first cinch-hold on Russia they won in the United States. The end of that American influence was the rise of
