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After the war, the league pursued more activist tactics. It smuggled a hooded journalist into the Ku Klux Klan to keep the public informed of the anti-Semitic and anti-Negro activity that went on behind the sheets. It infiltrated the German-American Bund with a league informant who became Führer Fritz Kuhn's personal chauffeur.
The A.D.L. won a public apology from Industrialist Henry Ford, whose newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, had for years spouted off about an "international Jewish conspiracy." The Ford family views changed so completely that by 1951 the A.D.L. could give Henry Ford II its highest award for "distinguished contributions to the enrichment of our democratic heritage." In 1954 the Ford Foundation won a league award too.
Cremation's Example. A turning point in the league's campaign came with the ordeal of World War II, when the stark example of the Nazi cremation camps showed where the roads of group hatred might lead. After the war, the league increasingly made not only antiSemitism, but all of civil rights its concern. It filed a brief in the historic 1954 Supreme Court school integration case, has worked in cooperation with the N.A.A.C.P. in the South. League posters appeal for nondiscriminatory treatment of all minorities. Today the A.D.L. has an annual budget of $3,000,000, a fulltime staff of some 150 specialists in law. publicity and social science, 26 regional offices.
Much remains to be done. The league is working to erase informal Jewish "quota systems" in college admissions, estimates that nearly 1,000 colleges recently have dropped questions about religion and race in admission forms. It found that 67% of 1,152 social clubs it surveyed across the nation practice religious discrimination, mostly against Jews (although another 90 clubs, mostly Jewish dominated, bar Christians or impose quotas on Christians). As league members arrived at the organization's 50th anniversary dinner in Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel last week, a band of Lincoln Rockwell's kooky American Nazis paraded near by with such signs as "Communism Is Jewish."
At the dinner, President Kennedy received the league's Democratic Legacy Award for his efforts to "assure the application of constitutional principles of freedom to all Americans." He also laughed when folk singers burst into a song called We Want No Irish Here. Summing up the league's progress, its outgoing national chairman. New York Lawyer Henry Edward Schultz, declared: "Blatant, outright, overt anti-Semitism is less manifest today in this country. We've made real progress in the 50 years. But now we're getting into the more difficult areas of discrimination. We're on, you might say, the ten-yard line. The goal lies just ahead. But the going is getting much tougher."
* B'nai B'rith translates as "Sons of the Covenant" and refers to the covenant between God and Abraham upon which the Jews base the claim that they are God's chosen people.