Stephen Wise records speech
One hundred years ago today … Stephen S. Wise, Rabbi of the Free Synagogue located at 30 West 68th Street (it is there still) recorded a speech in tribute to embattled U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, whose health and popularity were both fading at the time. Thanks to the Library of Congress, you can listen to the speech here:
Read the transcript here.
The record was eventually made available by the Columbia Gramophone Manufacturing Company. Wise’s stylized, bombastic delivery and round tones compose a kind of oratory that one supposes appealed to much of the 1920 population.
Here is a photo of Wise (right) from later that year with Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (left) and Nathan Struss.
New York Tribune, Sunday, June 20, p. 47. Newspapers.com
Wise was a progressive, in some ways radical example of the 1920 Jewish clergy. An early-1900s Zionist and leader of the Reform Judaism movement, he was also a civil rights advocate, part of a group of activists who had formed the NAACP in 1909. He had founded the Free Synagogue in 1910 after turning down the rabbinate of New York’s prestigious Temple Emmanu-El when he learned that his sermons there would undergo review by temple leadership before each service.
Unknown source. 1933. New York Public Library Images Collection.
In 1920, Wise’s name appeared in New York City’s English newspapers at least 150 times. (Newspapers.com). In 1933 a magazine feature (above) would call him “the best known Jew in the country.”