08/01/2025 12:02:48 PM
American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt & the Jews
By Robin Jacobson
President Theodore (“Teddy”) Roosevelt (1858-1919) is famous as a conservationist, a “trust-buster” of business monopolies, an advocate for consumer protections, and the inspiration for the beloved stuffed toy, the teddy bear. Yet historian Andrew Porwancher has chosen to look at Roosevelt through an unusual and fascinating lens.
Porwancher’s American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt & the Jews, focuses on Roosevelt’s close involvement with Jewish issues throughout his career. Roosevelt’s actions often elated American Jews and sometimes disappointed them. Many of the quandaries Roosevelt grappled with more than a century ago feel newly relevant and urgent – the limits of free speech, the place of diversity in hiring decisions, immigration, and the role of the United States in confronting humanitarian issues in foreign countries.
Free Speech & Antisemitism
After stints as a New York state legislator and U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, Roosevelt, only age 36, became Police Commissioner of New York City in 1895. As Porwancher recounts, Roosevelt regularly visited the Jewish Lower East Side, addressing packed halls about his police department reforms and encouraging Jews to apply for positions.
He won wide-spread admiration for cleverly undermining the anti-Jewish, hate-mongering Hermann Ahlwardt, visiting from Germany for a U.S. speaking tour. Some Jews asked Roosevelt to either bar Ahlwardt from speaking on the Lower East Side or to deny him police protection. Roosevelt refused, saying that Ahlwardt was entitled to free speech and that censoring him would only elevate his status. Instead, Roosevelt shrewdly assigned Ahlwardt a police detail comprised entirely of Jewish officers. These men conscientiously guarded Ahlwardt and kept him safe, thereby controverting his absurd accusations against Jews.
A Diverse Workforce
As Police Commissioner, as Governor of New York, and as President, Roosevelt deliberately appointed Jews to government positions to build a diverse workforce and to demonstrate that Jews were equal citizens. Nonetheless, he claimed that his appointment decisions were purely based on merit, without regard to religion.
As Porwancher shows, Roosevelt was “divided against himself,” torn between the “identity-driven ideal of pluralism and the identity-free ideal of merit.” When he appointed Oscar Straus as secretary of commerce and labor, the first Jewish cabinet member in American history, he told Straus, “I don’t appoint you because you are a Jew,” while admitting, “but I am mighty glad you are one.”
Immigration
From 1880-1914, more than 20 million European immigrants entered the United States, including some two million Eastern European Jews. Roosevelt held somewhat contradictory ideas about mass immigration. He was proud that America was a welcoming refuge for the world’s oppressed, but concerned that unrestricted immigration would make it harder for earlier immigrants to succeed. For a while, he supported a literacy test for would-be immigrants, but later changed his mind.
Roosevelt was an advocate for pluralism; he praised Jews for remaining “loyal to their faith” while still being fully American. Yet at other times, he promoted the idea of America as a “melting pot” where immigrants relinquish their foreign customs to become American.
Criticizing Foreign Governments
Roosevelt’s presidency (1901-09) coincided with a period of severe persecution of Jews by Eastern European governments. Reluctant to directly contravene the diplomatic protocol against meddling in another nation’s internal affairs (and possibly invite embarrassing criticism of American violence against Blacks), Roosevelt nonetheless found ways to publicly condemn the oppression of Jews by Romania and the Russian Empire.
Jews applauded Roosevelt for denouncing persecution, but were disappointed that he did not do more. They were also disheartened by his melting pot ideas and initial support of an immigrant literary test. Nonetheless, when Roosevelt died, Jewish newspapers universally extolled his virtues. The B’nai B’rith Messenger declared that “Jewish immigrants had no better friend than Theodore Roosevelt.”
