Four decades separated Russian Tsar Alexander II’s assassination from the convulsions of the 1917 Russian revolutions and ensuing civil war. During this span, more than two million Eastern European Jews fled pogroms and persecution, finding refuge on New York’s Lower East Side and in cities like Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Many people welcomed the newcomers, but large segments of American society saw them as a threat to the country’s Anglo-Saxon roots. During these perilous years, Jewish immigrants and more established families found an unlikely champion in Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, a member of the protestant elite.
In a new biography of Roosevelt, Andrew Porwancher, a professor of constitutional history at Arizona State University, details how America’s twenty-sixth president came to sympathize with Jewish causes against a rising tide of nativism. In just four years, Roosevelt served as New York police commissioner, New York governor, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, “Rough Rider,” vice president, and commander-in-chief after William McKinley’s assassination. Porwancher offers a blow-by-blow account of Roosevelt’s rise and his handling of Jewish issues, revealing a man every bit as contradictory as the nation he helmed from 1901 to 1909.
Although Roosevelt grew up in New York’s Gramercy Park neighborhood, he knew little of the nearby Lower East Side, whose harsh realities Porwancher reconstructs with striking fidelity. As police commissioner and governor, Roosevelt saw the tenements up close and advocated for reforms. He recruited Jewish men to New York’s police force so they could deal with the growing Yiddish-speaking public — and to show gentiles that Jews could be tough. He hailed these officers as modern-day Maccabees. He saw a reflection of himself in these new arrivals, many of them still malnourished. Roosevelt had been a sickly child before growing into an adult with “an obsession with masculine physicality.”
During the Spanish-American war, Roosevelt resigned from the Navy and formed the First Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the “Rough Riders.” He handpicked eight Jews to serve with him in the volunteer regiment that stormed Cuba in mid-1898. Their motivations included avenging the Spanish Inquisition. Among the amusing bits of color that Porwancher weaves throughout is an explanation for why there weren’t more Jews in Roosevelt’s fighting force: most candidates lacked experience on horseback. A soldier named “Pork Chop” had no trouble.
When he became president, Roosevelt’s Jewish allies expected sharp rebukes of Russia after the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 and growing waves of violence targeting the empire’s Jewish subjects. Romania’s mistreatment of its large Jewish population also posed one the biggest challenges for his administration vis-à-vis Jewish relations. But wielding his country’s diplomatic might would only draw attention to America’s own humanitarian record including the scourge of lynching.
Roosevelt proceeded anyway.
For some Jewish constituents, he didn’t go far enough. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources and private letters, Porwancher offers a fascinating window into the deliberations, backchannel talks, and input from key advisors that shaped Roosevelt’s calculus. As Porwancher shows, these decisions weren’t always driven by altruism. The Lower East Side was a Democratic stronghold and he was eager to secure Jewish votes for the GOP. In addition, at a time of relatively unrestricted immigration, Roosevelt sided with nativists by endorsing a proposed literacy test for anyone hoping to be admitted into the country. He later reconsidered.
Still, Porwancher makes a compelling case for why Roosevelt’s Jewish constituents were right to view him “with adoration.” He died in January 1919, just as America’s golden door to immigrants began to close, and with the Russian civil war raging across the former Pale.
Maksim Goldenshteyn is Seattle-based writer and the author of the 2022 book So They Remember, a family memoir and history of the Holocaust in Soviet Ukraine.
