Anti-Defamation League

ADL: 1900–1940s

In 1913, Leo Frank, a Jewish factory executive and president of the B'nai B'rith lodge in Atlanta, was wrongly convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl and was then lynched by an angry mob shortly after the judge commuted his death sentence. The trial and related incidents of injustice and prejudice gave impetus to the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the formation of the ADL as the first organization to explicitly address anti-Semitism. Sigmund Livingston, a young Chicago lawyer, started the ADL with $200 and the sponsorship of the Independent Order of B'nai B'rith, a Jewish service organization established in 1843.

At the onset of the 20th century, the United States was home to approximately 1 million Jews and the third largest Jewish population center in the world. Substantial anti-Semitic hostility and discrimination contributed to resorts featuring signs warning “No dogs! No Jews!” and magazines publishing derogatory caricatures of Jewish people. The ADL promoted and ensured fair, accurate, and inclusive representations on stage, in film, and in print media as a means of eliminating anti-Semitism and discrimination. Adolph Ochs, New York Times publisher and an ADL executive committee member, contributed toward a vast reduction in defamatory cultural representations by sending letters to newspaper editors throughout the United States discouraging the use of objectionable and vulgar references to Jews in the media.

Throughout the 1920s, the ADL sought to address the public bigotry and anti-Semitism of the Ku Klux Klan, whose membership numbered in the millions. Henry Ford's distribution of the anti-Semitic and literary forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alleging a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination, became another focus of attention for the ADL, which was able to debunk the widely circulated text as a hoax. Livingston circulated pamphlets, and the ADL solicited the aid of President Woodrow Wilson and others to denounce Ford's anti-Semitism. After years of censure, Ford publicly apologized and expressed hope that hatred of the Jews, commonly known as anti-Semitism, and hatred against any other racial or religious groups shall cease for all times.

...