A brisk walk up South Clark Street, away from the bustling Democratic National Convention at McCormick Place, leads to an unusual sight on Chicago's beguiling Riverwalk : George Washington holding hands with two men.
Without those men—Robert Morris and Haym Salomon—the Continental Army's commander could not have fed and clothed and armed his brave but hungry and increasingly mutinous soldiers.
Robert Morris was a Founding Father and finance minister for the Continental Congress. Haym Salomon was a financier and a patriot to whom Robert Morris turned time and again when the nascent nation's treasure chest was bare.
Salomon was a Jewish immigrant, born in Poland. He had such a zest for freedom that he joined the Sons of Liberty and devoted himself to the dream of a nation free of monarchs and tyrants and ancient prejudices. Salomon pledged himself to a Declaration of Independence that stated all men were created equal—a pronouncement that did not include the caveat, "unless they are Jews."
In 1781, Haym Salomon kept the American Revolution on track when a distressed George Washington needed $20,000 to march his army from New York to Virginia, to lay siege at Yorktown, where General Cornwallis had a force of 8,000 men.
That final battle of the American Revolutionary War dissuaded King George from continuing the fight, even though 30,000 other British troops occupied the colonies' major seaports. Without that victory at Yorktown, Washington and his discouraged soldiers, and every other "traitor to the crown of England," would have continued to face the prospect of being captured and hanged.
That battle took place 243 years ago. Sadly, not a single year has passed without some mean act among the American people dishonoring the noble sentiment carved at the base of the statue of George Washington holding hands with a Jew.
They are Washington's words: "The government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."
The centuries of bigotry and persecutions against the Jews need not be enumerated; it is merely enough to walk back down South Clark Street to McCormick, where the representatives and followers of the political party currently at the helm of the American Republic are besieged by a mob demanding an increase of bigotry, an expansion of persecution.
Their demands are not antisemitic, they insist, not directed against Jews. They are against "land-grabbing" "Zionists" (who just happen to be Jews) and against the "apartheid" policies of the Israeli government, (which just happens to be run by Jews). The solution is to dismantle the nation of Israel and disperse (or..) the Jews, so Palestinian Arabs can rule "from river to sea."
The resurgence of such antisemitism, however cloaked, stems from master propagandists, mostly in the oil-rich Islamic nations, who spread throughout the internet a picture of "innocent Palestinian victims" persecuted by barbarous Jews. The decades of terror by Palestinian Arab terrorists against Israeli civilians are dismissed as "justified resistance."
The propagandists, whose forebears had allied with Adolph Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, created a reversal of the most horrible killing spree in history: turning the Jewish victims into the Nazis.
And it could only have been done with a fully receptive audience, as Hitler had with the people of Germany.
"How was it possible we so readily forfeited what our ancestors had fought for centuries to achieve?" wrote the German justice inspector Friedrich Kellner in his diary. "If the Jews--who have contributed real achievements over the centuries to our nation's development--can be made a people without rights, then that is an act unworthy of a cultured nation, and the curse of this evil deed will indelibly rest on the entire German people."
As a sergeant in the Kaiser's army in WWI, Kellner had fought in many battles. After the war, he campaigned as a Social Democrat against Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. When Hitler came to power, Kellner kept a diary (while under Gestapo surveillance) to record Hitler's crimes and the genocide of Europe's Jews. His blunt assessment of why Jews were targeted explains why Jews were outcasts in Haym Salomon's time and remain targets today at McCormick Place in Chicago.
"Nazis use the Jews as scapegoats to cover up their own atrocities--like throwing down a piece of meat to distract the beasts. And a great number of mentally inert people succumb to this cunning deception."
Despite unjust persecutions, Jews like Haym Salomon give their all to whatever country they live in. Unfortunately, after the successful war against England, the federal government of the United States of America was still broke and unable to reimburse its creditors.
But Salomon had no regrets. Falling ill at age 44, Haym Salomon died in poverty. Until his last breath, this Son of Liberty was still a dreamer. Perhaps he even envisioned that someday the American people would place him side by side with George Washington.
Robert Scott Kellner, a navy veteran, is a retired English professor who taught at the University of Massachusetts and Texas A & M University. He is the grandson of the German justice inspector and diarist Friedrich Kellner and is the editor and translator of My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner--A German against the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom.