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[MUSIC PLAYING] BETH FRIEND: Fannie Schanfield was just out of Minneapolis's South High School, and she needed a job. The $1.50 a week Fannie could earn casting gold inlays for a dentist wasn't enough. Neither was the sporadic work at the dry goods stores on Franklin Avenue. The short brown-haired 19-year-old needed money in her pocket.

FANNIE SCHANFIELD: I wanted to attend a specific business machine school about 1936.

BETH FRIEND: Fannie lived with her family of eight on the south side of Minneapolis. Her parents were immigrants from Romania. The depression was easing. More and more people were finding jobs. She'd heard that work on the comptometer, an adding machine of the day, paid well.

FANNIE SCHANFIELD: In those days, if a girl finished comptometer school, she earned $35 a week. Big money.

BETH FRIEND: So Fannie excitedly hopped on the streetcar and went to apply.

FANNIE SCHANFIELD: I was received by this lovely-looking Nordic. I'm being polite. And she had my name on there and asked me to sit down, and start asking me questions about experience and grades and schools and what I hope to do. Then she said, I have just one last question to ask you. Are you Jewish?

And I said yes. And after a pause, she said to me, we don't have any Jewish students. And I said, I'm sorry about that. I don't mind being the only one. She said, we don't place Jewish students. And I said, you don't have to place me, just train me. I'll get my own job.

And she paused. And pretty soon she said, I'm sorry. But I can't accept you or your money. And that was the end of the conversation. My money was returned to me, pushed back across the desk. And I was asked to leave the office.

BETH FRIEND: A half century ago, Jews were largely unwelcome in gentile life. Fannie Schanfield's experience was typical. But in 1946, nationally prominent journalist and lecturer, Carey McWilliams, argued that in its treatment of Jews, Minneapolis stood out from the rest of the country. After visiting the Twin Cities, McWilliams wrote:

CAREY MCWILLIAMS: One might even say with a measure of justification that Minneapolis is the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States. In almost every walk of life, an Iron Curtain separates Jews from non-Jews in Minneapolis. Nor is this Iron Curtain a matter of recent origin. On the contrary, it seems to have always existed.

BETH FRIEND: McWilliams' article in the left of center magazine Common Ground embarrassed Minneapolis's political and corporate leadership. But his conclusion was not surprising to Jews.

RUTH BRIN: Well, I just thought, for once, it's being acknowledged that this is an anti-Semitic area. I thought, good. Now the whole world will know it because we certainly knew it.

JOE BARD: You couldn't get a job at a bank. You couldn't get a job in an insurance company. Won't hire Jews. That was point blank in those days. We knew that.

ROSE SCHWARTZ: On 36th & Humboldt, there were lots for sale. And we wanted to buy, but they would not sell to Jewish people.

SPEAKER: They'd catch you going to school or catch you coming home from school. They'd call you Kike. They'd call you Sheeny.

ROSALYNN LOCKETT: There were buildings like the Calhoun Beach Club. They had a little plaque in the front. No Jews, peddlers, dogs allowed.

HAROLD SKLAR: No Jews allowed. NJA.

BETH FRIEND: To be labeled America's capital of anti-Semitism was damning indeed. Because in the 1930s and '40s, anti-Jewish prejudice was rampant. It was shouted by demagogues like Gerald L.K. Smith, William Dudley Pelley, and Charles Coughlin.

CHARLES COUGHLIN: I dared you and challenged you to organize so that the people if not their president would drive the money changers from the temple and you did it.

[CROWD CHEERING]

BETH FRIEND: Father Charles Coughlin could fill stadiums, but his real power was over the airwaves speaking to 30 million Americans each week from WJR in Detroit. His fame and influence as the radio priest is hard to imagine now. No modern TV preacher comes close. Coughlin's populist message about the injustices of capitalism had tremendous appeal to a nation devastated by the depression. Fannie Schanfield.

FANNIE SCHANFIELD: At first, he was marvelous. And my husband's father even sent money to his cause. Yes, until he found out he was the biggest anti-Semite and he's out to kill the Jews. He was so shocked. He says, turn the radio off!

CHARLES COUGHLIN: The system of international finance, which has crucified the world to the cross of depression was evolved by Jews for holding the peoples of the world under control. This official paper prints the names of the Jewish bankers who helped to finance the Russian Revolution. I was shocked that the--

BETH FRIEND: Coughlin's rhetoric was contradictory, accusing Jews of both capitalist and communist conspiracies. But when it reached into kitchens and living rooms, it reinforced the commonly held prejudices of the day. According to a Princeton University survey in 1938, the majority of Americans believed that Jews did not deserve equal standing and treatment in the country. Hy Berman is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota.

HY BERMAN: It was a reflection of the uncertainties of the depression and the desire on the part of a segment of the population to find scapegoats. And there's always a good scapegoat around the Jews or the Blacks or whoever.

BETH FRIEND: Minneapolis mirrored the national sentiment, but took the bigotry a step further. In many American cities, Jews were barred from corporations, neighborhoods, and country clubs. But in Minneapolis, Jews were also refused membership in the American Automobile Association and in service clubs. Historians say Minneapolis had more anti-Semitic preachers than most cities. And its chapter of the fascist hate group, the Silver Shirts, was believed to be one of the nation's largest.

All of this discrimination was directed at a Jewish community of only 16,000 or about 3% of the city's population. Most of Minneapolis's Jews lived on the north side, in a tightly-knit neighborhood centered on Plymouth Avenue North. Malcoff's delicatessen, Fidelman's butcher shop, the Zeesman Mortuary, and a shul, a synagogue every few blocks. Jack Solomon.

JACK SOLOMON: We were all very fortunate to having grown up on the north side. There was a protective enclave there that I don't know how we would have made it without it.

BETH FRIEND: North side kids were safe within the neighborhood's borders. But they had to leave their turf for sports contests. That's why Coach Dutchy Strauss taught his boys boxing. Strauss took special precautions when the Talmud Torah or Hebrew school basketball team played for the church league championship at the north east neighborhood house. Joe Bard played guard on Dutchy's team.

JOE BARD: He told us that for 3/4, we'd have to play four or five points behind. Because if you were ahead, they would throw different things from the gallery-- bottles and everything. And it would create a disturbance. So if you were behind, they didn't bother you. So he timed us and told us when we should put the pressure on.

So for about over 3/4, we played anywhere from 4 to 6 points behind the northeast group of players. And so everything was fine. And then the last three minutes, we put the pressure on. We beat them. And immediately, he had arranged with some police to give us some protection. We ran out of the gym and went to the store. Put our clothes on and went home.

[JOYFUL MUSIC]

BETH FRIEND: Joe Bard went to North High School. In the '30s, one-fourth of the students at North were Jewish, which was enough to get it called the Jew school by gentile kids around the city. Former North High student Harold Sklar remembers the special chant that Roosevelt High School cheerleaders brought out for their games with North.

HAROLD SKLAR: Slapped them in the face, slapped them in the jaw, slapped them to the rabbi, rah, rah, rah. Now this is their way of signifying to us that they didn't admire the Jews.

BETH FRIEND: Given that kind of hostility among gentiles, imagine being one of the few Jewish kids who lived and went to school outside of North Minneapolis. Rosalynn Lockett remembers one of many painful experiences at Roosevelt High in the early 1930s.

ROSALYNN LOCKETT: Mr. Phillip Carlson was the principal. At Easter time, which is the worst time of the year, he had a movie shown called King of Kings. And there's a scene there where Jesus is carrying the cross and Jews are pelting him with rocks.

Up in the balcony were some kids. And they started stamping their feet and saying, "Down with the Jews!" I just cringed inside of me. I was the only Jew at that time in the whole school.

BETH FRIEND: Minneapolis Jews had often been the victims of spontaneous name calling and attacks. But in the mid-1930s, the Jewish community faced a new kind of organized anti-Semitism, a local chapter of the fascist group, the Silver Shirts. Members wore military uniforms and prepared to defend the nation's Christian culture against what they called Communist Jews.

Prominent businessmen and elected state officials were active participants. 82-year-old lawyer and North Minneapolis native Joe Bard remembers how he and his friends responded to the Silver Shirts. Bard was a member of the 20 Club, a group of Jewish professionals and businessmen. It was in that club that he met Dr. Jack Shonkoff, the son of a pushcart peddler who had come to Minneapolis from New York City.

JOE BARD: He says these Silver Shirts, he says, do you see what they're doing? They're burning crosses. They're coming out with the anti-Jewish newspapers. He said, why do we have to sit and take it? He says, I think we ought to get together a group. And we ought to watch and find out where their meetings are and then destroy their meetings, upset them. I said, we can go to jail for that. He says, so what?

I said, but you're a doctor. And he says, got nothing to do with that, he says. Anyhow, he had six or seven of us to see. And he got us together. Then one night, he come in with brass knuckles. I never saw that in my life. I never knew what a brass knuckle was. Here in Minneapolis, we're nice kids. We go to the Talmud Torah. We don't do things like that.

BETH FRIEND: The group trained for two months, then struck a Silver Shirts meeting at a home on Lake Street.

JOE BARD: We waited until the middle of the meeting. And then with masks on, we charged in. And we had Magen Davids painted on our chest and broke them up and just swung at heads. And after we caused enough confusion, we ran.

[LAUGHS]

And the police came. And they never caught us, never caught us. We broke up at least three of these meetings. And then they gave up. Because every time they had a big meeting, we were there.

BETH FRIEND: But the Silver Shirts did not disappear. They and others injected anti-Semitism into the 1938 Minnesota gubernatorial campaign. Republican Harold Stassen was challenging farmer labor incumbent Elmer Benson. A group of Stassen supporters led by state auditor and former congressman Ray P. Chase waged a campaign of anti-Jewish innuendo.

They produced pamphlets and billboards insinuating Jewish control of Benson and state government. Ray P. Chase was corresponding with Silver Shirts leaders. They too campaigned against Benson in order to prevent Jewish communism. If it can't be done with ballots now, the Silver Shirts warned, there must be bullets later.

In this threatening atmosphere, the Minneapolis Jewish community decided it needed a new organization. So it formed the Minnesota Jewish Council to investigate complaints of discrimination, especially in employment. 77-year-old Minneapolis native Frank Schochet.

FRANK SCHOCHET: We accepted the fact that the Dayton company would not hire Jewish employees. I'm talking about the '30s now. That 3M company had one Jew working for them at the time. The banks in Minneapolis were run for the most part by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And Jews didn't have a chance there.

BETH FRIEND: We talked to many former executives of major corporations-- Pillsbury, General Mills, Norwest, NSP, Dayton's. Most of them deny that their companies ever excluded Jews. Some said Jews simply didn't apply at corporations because they were naturally entrepreneurial and preferred to work for themselves. Former northsider Jack Solomon says it was the other way around.

JACK SOLOMON: Most of us went into private practice, and we went into the merchandise business because we had no choice. They weren't choice. They were necessities.

BETH FRIEND: A recently retired personnel manager at 3M named John [? Dupuis ?] says corporate doors were mostly closed to Jews. When he joined the company in 1953, a few Jewish scientists were employed there. But top management made it clear that Jews were not to be hired for sales and other jobs that would put them in touch with the public.

[? JOHN DUPUIS: ?] 3M I think liked to think of itself as an Aryan sort of company, a Christian, a go to church, a family. The job is the second most important thing in your life. The family is first. This kind of philosophy was really behind the founders of the company. That up here in the land of sky-blue waters, this was a Christian company. And it was Christian to do what we were doing.

BETH FRIEND: In the '30s and '40s, employers often placed newspaper ads for job openings specifying gentiles only or Christian preferred. Landlords did the same. Jews were turned away from apartments or evicted when their Jewishness was discovered.

In a 1946 survey, Minneapolis real estate firms reported that 40% of their new subdivisions contained restrictive covenants that prohibited the sale of houses to Jews or Blacks. In 1946, Ruth Brin and her husband, a uniformed Army officer, wanted to buy a story and a half bungalow on 3624 in Aldridge in South Minneapolis.

RUTH BRIN: The woman said the neighbors would not allow their child to play with our child. She said that they would be angry with her, and they were her dear friends if she sold to Jews. Agent said, here is this man who spent four years in the service of his country. And you're refusing to sell to him?

And she said, well, it wouldn't be fair to him. And this is, of course, the great excuse for anti-Semitism. You wouldn't be happy here. We won't hire you because our employees would be nasty to you. We won't sell you this house because the neighbors wouldn't be kind to you and so forth.

BETH FRIEND: These excuses were repeated across the country. In this sense, Minneapolis was no different from other American cities. But as writer Carey McWilliams found, there were forms of exclusion unique to the City of Lakes.

CAREY MCWILLIAMS: So far as I know, Minneapolis is the only city in America in which Jews are as a matter of practice and custom ineligible for membership in the service clubs. In fact, Jews have never been accepted into membership in the local Kiwanis, Rotary, Lions, or Toastmasters organizations. Even the Automobile Club in Minneapolis refuses to accept Jews as members.

BETH FRIEND: The AAA's exclusion of Jews is richly documented in a two-inch thick file gathered by the Minnesota Jewish Council in the 1940s and '50s. Here's a statement from businessman Sam Maciejewski dated March 1945. He says a representative of the Auto Club came to his office to sign him up as a member and said one of the nice features of our club is that we do not admit Jews to membership.

January 1950, Dr. David Lippman complains that he applied for AAA membership six months ago, but has had no reply. When he asks the reason for the delay, he's told he's still being investigated. The last item in the file, 1954, Mr. Joe Gordon and two of his employees fill out applications to join the AAA.

Only one of the three, the only non-Jew is accepted. The other two receive letters informing them that the club quote, "does not wish to act upon your application for membership at this time."

DENNIS BLENIS: I believe at that time, there were 15 persons that served on the board.

BETH FRIEND: The AAA's current president, Dennis Blenis.

DENNIS BLENIS: And they were mostly outstanding businessmen around town that were representing the interest of the membership. They were representing the membership and determining the policies of the club.

BETH FRIEND: The AAA's board members were businessmen like Edgar Zelle, president of the Jefferson Transportation Company and member of the board of directors of Minneapolis's first national bank. And George Belden. He was president of the Citizens Alliance, a Minneapolis employers organization which had a long record of combating unions. Belden also attended Silver Shirts meetings.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

It may seem curious. But while the Minneapolis AAA was excluding Jews from membership, just across the river in Saint Paul, the Auto Club had a Jewish president, Gus Axelrod. To many local Jews, that was indicative of a dramatic difference between the two cities. Minneapolis natives [? Gita ?] Gordon and Rose Schwartz.

GITA GORDON: Saint Paul was not anti-Semitic. There were Jews who were accepted. They became the merchandisers. The big stores Schuneman and Mannheimer's, I don't remember the names. But there was always a feeling that Saint Paul was not anti-Semitic. Minneapolis was.

ROSE SCHWARTZ: Minneapolis is more a Protestant community. Let's put it that way. Saint Paul are Catholics. And they are Mexicans and more ethnic groups than there would be in Minneapolis. And I think that the establishment here in Minneapolis was very uppity.

BETH FRIEND: Historians basically agree with Rose's analysis. They say politics and business in Minneapolis were dominated by a few Protestant families originally from New England. Carey McWilliams hypothesized that these elite families used anti-Semitism as a means of opposing any threat to their status.

The pattern of discrimination then was imitated, says McWilliams, by middle and working class Germans and Scandinavians. Historian Marilyn Chiat suggests another possible factor.

MARILYN CHIAT: In Saint Paul, the Jews came in the 1850s just when everybody else was coming and established themselves as one of the pioneer groups in the city. Whereas in Minneapolis, the Jews really arrived a generation after the city was founded and were seen as intruders.

[SINGING]

BETH FRIEND: Jews were certainly seen as intruders by some of the clergy in Minneapolis. The renowned fundamentalist William Bell Riley was pastor of the 3,000 member first Baptist church in downtown Minneapolis from 1897 to 1942. The tall, charismatic Riley, whose portrait still hangs in the church's lobby, gained a national reputation opposing the theory of evolution.

Starting in the 1930s, Riley took up a new issue-- international Jewish conspiracy theories. One of his successors, Kurt Atkinson, admits Riley held repugnantly anti-Semitic views, but says critics should remember the time and place in which Riley was preaching.

KURT ATKINSON: Minneapolis is a city, was quite substantially anti-Semitic. So a casual reference that was something less than complimentary to Jewish people would probably not startle any congregation.

BETH FRIEND: Riley's comments in printed opinions were anything but casual. In articles like The Jewish Web for the Gentile Fly, he claimed that Jews were atheistic communists who wanted to enslave the gentile world. He viewed Hitler as an instrument of God and repeated the centuries old charge that Jews bore eternal guilt for the death of Christ.

Riley was only one of about 10 Jew baiting preachers who were active in the city. Perhaps the nastiest was Luke Rader of the River Lake Tabernacle in South Minneapolis. He reportedly said in a sermon, "When Jesus comes again, he will kill every Jew on Earth. That day is soon to come." When Rader ran for mayor in 1939, he finished third in a field of 18 candidates. Historian Marilyn Chiat.

MARILYN CHIAT: I don't remember anybody-- I don't remember the newspaper. I don't remember anybody other than the Jewish community protesting what these men were preaching. Riley was a leader in this community. The Raders were highly regarded in this community.

BETH FRIEND: Anti-Semitic Minnesotans like Riley and Rader had a world spokesman in Adolf Hitler, J D. Holtzerman who owned a department store near Seven Corners in Minneapolis visited Germany in the mid-1930s and came back praising Hitler publicly. Aviation hero and Minnesota native Charles Lindbergh in effect placed a seal of approval on Nazism. He received an award from the Hitler government and talked admiringly of the German military.

[GERMANS SINGING]

In Lindbergh's view, the so-called Jewish lobby and other forces were trying to push America into a war against Germany, a war the US couldn't win.

CHARLES LINDBERGH: These wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder. There is no Genghis Khan or Xerxes marching against our western nations. This is simply one more of those age-old struggles within our own family of nations.

ROSALYNN LOCKETT: People dropped comments. You could see--

BETH FRIEND: Rosalynn Lockett.

ROSALYNN LOCKETT: I remember being on the Minnehaha streetcar. And there was a headline about Hitler and people were discussing it. Oh, he's fine. They got to put those Jews in their place. Jews were the enemy.

BETH FRIEND: As the enemy, Jews were often directly harassed. Schoolchildren and junk dealers were assaulted by teenage gangs. In 1939, a Jewish real estate salesman named Benjamin Barron was taken to jail because he didn't have enough pocket money to pay a $3 parking ticket. He later said that the jailer made an anti-Semitic remark then beat him up with the help of another policeman. Charges were filed against the jailer, but a jury acquitted him.

[SOMBER MUSIC]

BETH FRIEND: That same year, World War II started with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. German Jews had lost all their rights of citizenship and their property in an orchestrated campaign of terror. Many had fled. The fear among Jews reached all the way to Minneapolis. Florence Segal was a young woman at that time.

FLORENCE SEGAL: I had nightmares when I went to bed at night thinking I heard marching feet. Someone coming to attack us, knowing that we were Jewish. And they were marching on the house and they were going to attack us. When Hitler was in his ascendancy and had won everything and was winning every battle and every place he went, and people were just falling before him, I thought he was going to rule the world. I really did.

BETH FRIEND: By 1943, news organizations reported that the Nazis were killing massive numbers of European Jews. Still in 1944, students at Minneapolis Roosevelt High School chanted at their football games against North High, "Come you sons of Moses with your crooked noses. Fight, fight, fight for Palestine!"

[SOMBER MUSIC]

But in the aftermath of World War II, Minneapolis began to confront its prejudices. The capital of anti-Semitism accusation by Carey McWilliams in 1946 shocked community leaders. The city's new mayor led a strong effort to change the status quo.

MARILYN CHIAT: Hubert Humphrey, bless his heart, who the Jews in the state will always worship. Hubert Humphrey was the one who really said it was OK to be Jewish in Minneapolis.

BETH FRIEND: Historian Marilyn Chiat points to a study ordered by Humphrey in 1946 detailing discrimination in jobs and housing. He then passed the first city ordinance in the country to make such discrimination illegal. At the same time, Minneapolis Jews themselves were surfacing.

Several Jewish men had achieved such economic and professional success that the local business elite could no longer ignore them. Men like grain trader Ijjas Joseph and liquor tycoon Jay Phillips used their new cloud to push open the doors of the city's clubs and boardrooms. But some local Jews say the change that helped them the most came from thousands of miles away on May 14, 1948.

JOE BARD: We got treated 100% better after we got our independence in Israel and won the first battles over there.

BETH FRIEND: Joe Bard.

JOE BARD: The respect for the Jews in my book went up. They said it's about time you guys got up and fought. That was all the gentile friends I had here said. They were 100%.

BETH FRIEND: The most dramatic example of Minneapolis Jews getting up and fighting was their collective effort in the late '40s to build a hospital. Jewish doctors had been routinely denied staff privileges in most of the city's hospitals. The new institution, Mount Sinai, prided itself on hiring doctors regardless of race or religion. Joe Bard was one of thousands who contributed to the hospital drive.

JOE BARD: Though I didn't have much money, I lived in a one bedroom, Murphy bed apartment with two children. I donated $1,000 to the Mount Sinai Hospital because I knew what my friends were going through. Walked my feet off and got donations. It took me six years to pay off the $1,000. But we won.

[JOYFUL MUSIC]

BETH FRIEND: Many Minneapolis Jews saw Mount Sinai as a victory. By building the hospital, they circumvented discrimination and at the same time called dramatic attention to it. It was a bold act, one that the Minneapolis Jewish community would not have felt secure enough to carry out 10 years earlier.

Jews of Fannie Schanfield's generation had grown up being told by poor immigrant parents, keep a low profile. Don't make trouble. But with the end of the war and the horror of the Holocaust, many Jews felt they had to be willing to rock the boat. Fannie, now 75, says the new approach paid off.

FANNIE SCHANFIELD: It's because we rocked the boat. In America today, that Jews are able to say what they feel. We're able to live where we want to live. We're able-- we don't need your stinking teller jobs at the bank. Our girls are professionals now. We wouldn't take your lousy job. We can get a job. We'll make a job. We can do what we want to do.

[JOYFUL MUSIC]

BETH FRIEND: Most of the discrimination that Jews faced in the 1930s and '40s has ended. But anti-Semitic stereotypes persist. There are Minnesotans who cling to the notion that Jews own all the banks, control the media, and are a subversive force in the country.

There are people who comfortably use the phrase "Jew 'em down" to describe tough, cheap bargaining. Minneapolis may not be the capital of anti-Semitism anymore, but that part of our past is not as distant as we might think.

MARILYN CHIAT: But, of course, there is anti-Semitism today. I don't know what's going to make. Not in my lifetime, it won't go away.

[JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING]

BETH FRIEND: No Jews Allowed was produced by John Biewen and Beth Friend. Technical director Craig Thorson. Thanks to the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest, Minnesota Historical Society, to Mort [? Ryewich ?] and to historians Jane Tang, Charles [? Ayling, ?] and Mary Christine Athans. This is Beth Friend.

[JAZZ MUSIC PLAYING]