THE ACCUSATION

Blood Libel in an American Town

By Edward Berenson

There’s nothing like a presidential campaign to awaken dormant hatreds. In the fall of 1928, the Republican Herbert Hoover ran against the Democrat Al Smith, a flamboyant former New York governor who had the effrontery to be Catholic and a son of immigrants. Hoover was too cautious to bash Catholics himself, but his Protestant supporters — ministers, politicians, journalists — had no such qualms.

The wrath of the antipapists soon poured out on immigrants in general, including Jews. Jews made up 10 percent of all Europeans who came to the United States between 1880 and the early 1920s. They were ripe for the scapegoating. Henry Ford, America’s most eminent anti-Semite, had been publishing the conspiracy-mongering “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in his newspaper for years. Its editorials had called Jews “the conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization.” The anti-Smith faction couldn’t hold the Jews responsible for the Catholic candidate, but they could point out that Jews were part of “the incoming mob,” as Berenson puts it. The Ku Klux Klan, in the ascendant during the early 1920s but losing membership by 1928, saw in the Smith-Hoover race a chance to revive its fortunes, and piled on.

In the middle of all this, 4-year-old Barbara Griffiths walked into the woods outside Massena, a village in upstate New York, and didn’t walk out. The police and firefighters organized a search. It went on all night. At some point, someone proposed a theory: Jews had kidnapped and slaughtered little Barbara to use her blood in their rituals. By dawn, town officials and hundreds of villagers had concluded that that was the correct explanation.

That day, which happened to be the day before Yom Kippur, the mayor and a state trooper summoned the local rabbi. According to the rabbi’s notes, they asked: “Have you a holiday tomorrow?” and “Could you inform me if your people in the old country are offering human sacrifices on a holiday?”