Samuel Dickstein

Lithuanian-born New York Supreme Court Justice and U.S. congressional representative from New York

• Born: February 5, 1885
• Birthplace: near Vilna, Russian Empire (now near Vilnius, Lithuania)
• Died: April 22, 1954
• Place of death: New York, New York

Dickstein had a long political career that included service as a congressman in the House of Representatives and as a state supreme court justice. He was influential in the creation of legislation relating to immigration.

Early Life

Samuel Dickstein (DIHK-stin) was born in Vilna, in the Russian Empire, in 1885, the oldest child of Rabbi Israel Dickstein and Slata Gordon. The family moved to New York when Dickstein was about six years old and settled on the lower East Side of Manhattan, where his father served as a cantor at the Orthodox Norfolk Street Synagogue. Growing up, Dickstein attended the local public schools, and upon graduation he attended the City College of New York with the goal of pursing a career in law. He received his training in law at the New York Law School. He graduated in 1906, and he was admitted to the bar in 1908.

Over time he became closely associated with John Ahearn, leader of the Tammany Hall district, and it is partly because of this relationship that Dickstein was appointed to the position of special deputy attorney general for the state of New York, a position he held from 1911 to 1914. He was then elected as a member of the city’s Board of Aldermen in 1917 and as a member of the New York State Legislature in 1919. He served the legislature until 1922. That year, Dickstein ran on the Democratic Party ticket and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he represented New York’s Twelfth District. During much of his time in Congress, Dickstein served as chairman of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He held his position in the U.S. Congress until 1945, when he resigned, and later he became a state supreme court justice.

Life’s Work

While serving his first elected position as a state legislator, Dickstein gained national prominence with the sponsorship and passage of the New York State’s first kosher law, later adopted by twenty-two states. He also initiated the state’s Sabbath law, which allowed Jewish merchants to remain open for business on Sunday. In addition, he sponsored legislation on housing and the removal of wooden cars from the city’s elevated train system. Following World War I, he managed the cases of thousands of tenants who had been affected by unfair rent increases. For these cases, he prepared all of his own briefs and argued all of the appeals.

When he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, he was appointed to the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. The experience he got from working with New York City’s rapidly increasing immigrant population, when he served as a state legislator, proved to be invaluable for his new position on the committee. He quickly became regarded as the expert on immigration, and in 1931 he became the chairman of the congressional committee. In this position, he became aware of the vast number of immigrants living illegally in the country and of anti-Semitism and anti-American literature that had begun circulating in the United States. Because of his personal interest in the matter, Dickstein launched an investigation into neo-Nazi and Fascist groups in the United States, and his investigation proved to be so significant that, in November of 1933, official hearings of Nazi activities were held by Dickstein’s committee.

On the opening day of the seventy-third session of Congress, in January of 1934, Dickstein introduced a resolution calling for a revitalized congressional drive against subversive activities in the country. As a result, the Dickstein Resolution was passed in March of 1934, which resulted in the establishment of the Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities. The special committee conducted hearings and investigations; it concluded in 1935 that, while Nazi Germany was giving financial and ideological support to the American Bund, the American Bundists were not in violation of any federal law.

From as early as 1937, Dickstein was outspoken about the actions of Adolf Hitler in Germany, and Dickstein proclaimed that the German fuhrer was attempting to start a world war. Dickstein was particularly concerned about the mass killings of Jews throughout Europe at the hands of the Nazis and spoke out publicly and frequently.

Significance

Upon leaving the U.S. Congress, Dickstein was elected to serve as a New York State supreme court justice in 1945, after polling more than half a million votes from the First District. He served in this position until his death in 1954. Dickstein’s national prominence reached its highest level during the mid-1930’s, when he served in Congress and became well recognized as a strong opponent of Nazi activities in Europe. Time after time, he called for punishment for the subversive activities of Nazi supporters in the United States.

Bibliography

Berlet, Chip, and Matthew Nemiroff Lyons. Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. New York: Guilford, 2000. The authors show how religious, racial, social, and economic issues are ingrained in America’s history. References to Dickstein are listed in the index.

“Justice Dickstein Dies at Age of Sixty-Nine.” The New York Times, April 23, 1954, p. 27. Includes a review of Dickstein’s career in politics.

Morrison, David. Heroes, Antiheroes, and the Holocaust: American Jewry and Historical Choice. Jerusalem: Gefen, 1999. This book discusses the efforts made by Dickstein and other Americans to raise national awareness of the Holocaust occurring overseas.