men” abroad are doing terrible things; yet even while the press declares them to be “American” we cannot understand how Americans could do such things—and we never get the key to the matter, nor see the solution, until we stumble on to the fact that these so-called “Americans” are not Americans at all, but alien Jews. Over in Canada the name “American” is becoming a stigma because it is borne by men who are not Americans. What Canadians point out in the United States as definitely “American” is mostly Jewish, but how are the Canadians to know? The national name suffers. The whole cause of evil is camouflaged and a nation pays the price of a racial group’s misdeeds. There should be some method of protecting this forging of national names.
Thus Tammany became a synonym for what was not characteristically Tammany at all, but what was characteristically Jewish.
The exposure of 1894 disclosed that vice was really a thing of cold blood. Evil that springs from passion and impulse really amounts to far less than is commonly supposed. It is when passion is deliberately cultivated and impulse stimulated, that the great bulk of the world’s social evil occurs. And this stimulation is undertaken in cold blood by those who make profit out of providing the means of gratification—like the old-fashioned bar keepers who served very salty free lunches to stimulate the sale of beer.
This kind of vice is not a thing to be shamed by exposure as can be done with involuntary vice, as it might be called. This cold-blooded merchandising of human weakness was merely a matter of profits, and if business had been interfered with by a Lexow Committee it was rather unfortunate, but good business required that operations be resumed at the earliest possible moment. And so, though the investigations of 1894 were successful and the exposure duly made, it was not to be expected that mere oratory and printer’s ink would suffice to keep the serpent down.