Sol Bloom

• Born: March 9, 1870
• Birthplace: Pekin, Illinois
• Died: March 7, 1949
• Place of death: Washington, D. C.

Entertainer and politician

Bloom contributed to the development of the entertainment industry in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, although those efforts were overshadowed by the controversies in which he became embroiled as a member of Congress.

Early Life

Growing up in San Francisco, Sol Bloom (sawl blewm), the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, became involved in the entertainment industry as a teenager. Among other things, he worked as a theater manager and a promoter of boxing matches. The ambitious Bloom visited the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris in search of ideas for new attractions. At twenty-two, he organized the extremely popular Midway Plaisance exhibits at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The entertainment included the first Ferris wheel and an Algerian and Tunisian Village that introduced the American public to belly dancers and ignited a nationwide dance craze known as the hootchy-kootchy, to a tune Bloom had composed.

Bloom stayed in Chicago to become a branch manager for a sheet-music publisher. Later he began his own sheet-music line, calling himself “Sol Bloom, the Music Man.” Relocating to New York City in 1903, Bloom developed music departments in major department stores, and he also promoted Victor Talking Machines, an early phonograph. He parlayed some of the profits into a string of successful real-estate ventures.

Life’s Work

Bloom’s professional life took a dramatic and unexpected turn in 1922, when U.S. congressman Samuel Marx, who represented Manhattan’s Silk Stocking District, suddenly passed away. Local Democratic Party leaders enlisted Bloom to seek the vacant seat, choosing him, Bloom later joked, because he was “amiable and solvent.” Evidently they did not think that Bloom stood much of a chance in the usually Republican district, but he managed to eke out a victory by 145 votes. For someone with no political background, Bloom quickly warmed to his new profession, serving in the House of Representatives. Although undistinguished in his performance, Bloom was repeatedly reelected. He eventually acquired sufficient seniority to become, in 1938, chairman of the powerful House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

That same year brought the first of several controversies in which Bloom’s defense of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Jewish refugee policy caused conflicts with Jewish organizations. To deflect congressional and media criticism, the administration organized an international conference, in Evian, France, to consider the refugee crisis. The State Department, which regarded Bloom as “easy to handle,” named him to serve on the U.S. delegation to the conference. That prompted American Jewish Congress leader Rabbi Stephen S. Wise to privately complain that Bloom was picked because he could be counted on to serve the role of “the State Department’s Jew.” The Evian conference ultimately produced no concrete plans to resettle large numbers of refugees.

When privately approached by constituents to help individuals or small groups of refugees reach the United States, Bloom tried to be helpful. There were instances when he personally signed affidavits to facilitate immigrants’ entry. At the same time, Bloom was deeply loyal to the Roosevelt administration and fearful that Jewish agitation for rescue might stir anti-Semitism. He strongly supported the administration’s restrictionist refugee policy, and, at the State Department’s behest, he sponsored legislation in 1941, known as the Bloom-Van Nuys bill, that had the effect of tightening the policy even further.

To the dismay of Jewish leaders, Bloom was chosen in 1943 to serve on the U.S. delegation to an Anglo-American conference in Bermuda on the Jewish refugee problem. Although Bermuda, like Evian before it, failed to produce any serious U.S. intervention to help the refugees, Bloom said afterward, “I as a Jew am perfectly satisfied with the results.” His position prompted widespread criticism in the Jewish community. One periodical complained that Bloom had been “used as a stooge to impede Jewish protests against the nothing-doers of the Bermuda conference.”

In the autumn of 1943, Jewish activists known as the Bergson Group arranged for the introduction of a congressional resolution urging the president to create a government refugee rescue agency. Bloom, following the State Department’s lead, tried to undermine the resolution by insisting on full hearings. He was strongly criticized in New York’s Yiddish-language press for his stand on the resolution. Ultimately Bloom was able to persuade most members of the committee to shelve the measure. A major controversy soon erupted, however, when it was revealed that the behind-closed-doors testimony of Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long contained serious errors and distortions. These developments, a major embarrassment to Bloom, brought about the removal of Long from his post and contributed to Roosevelt’s decision to create unilaterally the rescue agency that the resolution demanded rather than risk further criticism.

Bloom sympathized with the Zionist goal of creating a Jewish state in British Mandatory Palestine, but he was reluctant to cross swords with the administration. He endorsed the State Department’s 1943 proposal to ban all public discussion of the Palestine issue for the duration of the war. At the behest of Roosevelt, Bloom also helped block a congressional resolution that Zionist leaders sought to have introduced in the autumn of 1944, expressing support for Jewish statehood.

An enthusiastic proponent of the United Nations, Bloom served as a U.S. representative to the founding convention of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 and to the first meeting of the U.N. General Assembly in London the following year. Bloom died of a massive heart attack in 1949, in the midst of his fourteenth consecutive term in the House of Representatives.

Significance

Bloom’s achievements in the entertainment industry might well have earned him a more prominent place in the annals of American Jewish cultural history had it not been for the public controversies that surrounded his political career. He is remembered primarily for his unpopular defense of the Roosevelt administration’s policies concerning the Holocaust and Zionism.

Bibliography

Bloom, Sol. The Autobiography of Sol Bloom. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1948. Bloom details his Horatio Alger rise to the halls of Congress.

Feingold, Henry L. The Politics of Rescue. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970. This book discusses the Roosevelt administration’s responses to the Holocaust, with many references to the efforts of Bloom.

Roth, Walter. “Sol Bloom, the Music Man.” Chicago Jewish History 24, no. 3 (Summer, 2000): 4-7. Colorful details about Bloom’s early career in the entertainment business.