The Order has not avoided the political field. The diplomatic history of the United States in the last 70 years is dotted all over with indications of B’nai B’rith activities. Oscar Straus, writing from the Legation of the United States at Constantinople in 1889, tells Sec¬ retary of State Blaine that the Jerushalaim Lodge of B’nai B’rith at Jerusalem was quite satisfied with the way in which the State Department had attended to a certain matter at the lodge’s request. Mr. Morgenthau in the midst of his investigation of the false pogrom rumors on Poland, goes to a B’nai B’rith lodge. In 1870 Brother Benjamin F. Piexotto was appointed “as United States consul at Bucharest for the express purpose of securing an amelioration of the condition of the shockingly persecuted Jews in Rumania.” The “persecution” in Rumania was the protest of the Ru¬ manian peasantry against the two greatest menaces to the peasant farmers—the Jew-controlled liquor and mortgage traffics.
But this special appointment was made “in pur¬ suance of suggestions made by the Order, and the negotiations were carried on chiefly by Brother Simon Wolf.”
Simon Wolf has been the official Jewish lobbyist at Washington, on fixed post, for fifty years. He could write an informative story of the relation of B’nai B’rith to diplomatic appointments, if he would. It was he who suggested to William Jennings Bryan, when the latter was Secretary of State, that a Jew be appointed Minister to Spain to show Spain that the United States did not approve Spain’s act of expulsion back in the fifteenth century. Jews are also suggest¬ ing to President Harding that a Jew be appointed Ambassador to Germany to rebuke the Germans’ resentment against Jewish control of finance, industry and politics. This conception of the United States Diplomatic Service as a convenient agency for the transaction of Jewish world affairs has been in exist¬ ence a long time, and has accounted for some of the strange appointments which have puzzled the people.