Just as Mr. Gompers and Justice Brandeis believe in “the secondary strike,” as a recent Supreme Court decision reveals, so the Jews who set out to punish the students of the Jewish Question believe in a secondary boycott. Not only do they pledge themselves (they deny this, but the newspaper reports assert it, as do unpublished telegraphic dispatches to some of the newspapers) not to use the specific product in question, but they pledge themselves to boycott anyone else who uses it. If the article is a hat (it is unlikely to be a hat, however, hats being largely Jewish) not only do the Jews pledge themselves to refrain from buying that kind of hat, but also to refrain from doing business with anyone who wears such a hat.
And then, when anything seems to occur at the hat works which indicates slackness, the Jews, forgetting all about their denial of a pledged boycott, begin to boast—“See what we did to him?”
The “whispering drive,” “the boycott,” these are the chief Jewish answers. They constitute the bone and sinew of that state of mind in non-Jews which is known as “the fear of the Jews.”
They do not always notify their victim. Recently the young sales manager of a large wholesale firm spoke at a dinner whose guests were mostly the firm’s customers. He is one of those young men who have caught the vision of a new honor in business. He believes that the right thing is always practicable, and, other things being equal, profitable as well. Among the guests were probably 40 Jewish merchants, all customers of the firm. In his address the young sales agent expressed his enthusiasm for morality by saying, “What we need in business is more of the principles of Jesus Christ.” Now, as a matter of fact, the young man knows very little about Jesus Christ. He has caught fire from the Roger Babson idea of religious principle as a basis of business, but he expressed it in his own way, and everybody knew what he meant; he meant decency, not sectarianism. Yet, because he used the expression he did, he lost 40 Jewish customers for his firm, and he doesn’t yet know the reason why. The agents of the firm which got the new trade know the reason. It was a silent, unannounced boycott.
This article is the story of a boycott which lasted
