Theodore Roosevelt felt antsy amid the 1904 campaign season. He was up for reelection, but the inexhaustible TR couldn’t hit the trail. Custom dictated that a sitting president not actively electioneer on his own behalf; surrogates alone would have to carry his message. “I think it depresses you a little to be the only man in the country who cannot take part in the campaign for the presidency,” a fellow Republican wrote him. Indeed. A frustrated Roosevelt told his son, “I could cut [the Democratic nominee] into ribbons if I could get at him in the open. But of course a president can’t go on the stump . . . and so I have to sit still and abide by the result.” For Roosevelt, sitting still actually meant energetically orchestrating the campaign from behind the scenes. And top of mind for TR was winning the all-important Jewish vote.
Roosevelt was particularly well positioned to court the Jewish electorate. After all, his rise in politics had rested in part on his deep ties to the Jewish community. He had served as commissioner of the New York Police Department where his overtures to the Lower East Side—America’s largest Jewish neighborhood—led to numerous invitations to Jewish weddings. Roosevelt then famously led the Rough Riders into battle as he and Jewish recruits, including one nicknamed “Pork-chop,” faced down Spanish snipers in the hills of Cuba. And in his subsequent stint as New York’s governor, Roosevelt prioritized reform of the sweatshops where countless Jewish newcomers sweated over sewing machines in cramped confines. Roosevelt, in other words, ascended to the White House with a keener understanding of American Jewry than arguably any of his presidential predecessors.
In the 1904 race, Roosevelt made sure his campaign’s pitch to his Jewish constituents centered on what might be called his Jewish foreign policy. Jews back in Eastern Europe endured a brutal regime of second-class citizenship and mob violence known as pogroms. Roosevelt had taken bold stands on the world stage against the likes of Romania and Russia for their oppressive treatment of their Jewish subjects. In so doing, he bucked international norms that frowned on one nation remarking on the internal affairs of another—even for humanitarian reasons. Roosevelt pressed the keynote speaker at the Republican convention to trumpet his administration’s diplomatic endeavors for embattled Jewish communities overseas. In Roosevelt’s letter of acceptance for the party nomination, he fulminated against Democratic accusations that he had neglected Eastern European Jews. And most strikingly, he empowered the RNC chairman to declassify State Department records about his most recent gambit with Russia for Jewish rights.
Come Election Day, Roosevelt not only won the presidency but pulled off a breathtaking feat for a Republican: he notched a victory on the thoroughly Democratic turf of the Lower East Side. Notably Roosevelt outran all twelve down-ballot Republicans in that Jewish enclave. His fellow Republicans might not have quite rivaled Roosevelt’s appeal, but they rode his coattails with Lower East Siders all the same. Take the sixteenth assembly district, for instance, where Democrats had won the state legislative seat for thirty years without interruption. But with TR now at the top of the ticket, the GOP candidate for the statehouse managed to stage a dramatic upset. Roosevelt had singlehandedly upended Democratic dominance with the Jewish electorate.
To be sure, the Jewish vote was no more monolithic in Roosevelt’s day than it is in our own. But there is nonetheless a lesson to be gleaned from the remarkable support that our twenty-sixth president cultivated with his Jewish constituents—one that may still resonate today. Roosevelt understood that many Jews, perhaps more than most Americans, cast their ballots with an eye toward global affairs. Thanks to Roosevelt’s deep history with the Lower East Side, he grasped that Jewish newcomers—despite their daily struggles to overcome poverty—were mainly motivated at the polls by events transpiring thousands of miles from their crowded tenement houses. One Jewish newspaper backing Roosevelt’s reelection bluntly insisted, “Jews would be churlish ingrates if they did not recognize the efforts that the United States continues to put forward on behalf of their race.”
American Jewry has come a long way from the days of sweatshops and pushcarts. But that same focus on world events—over and above quotidian concerns—still defines much of the Jewish electorate today. For some Jews, that emphasis leads them to vote Republican; for others, Democratic. However the vote splits, it is little surprise that a people long scattered among many nations would pay heed to more than one.
Andrew Porwancher is a professor of history for the School of Civic & Economic Thought & Leadership at Arizona State University.
