26 Friday, February 7, 1986
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
PURELY COMMENTARY
Two Notables Of The Last Generation
Continued from Page 2
make a real survey of race condi-
tions here," he told Sherwood
Eddy. "Then we are going to -try to
liberalize the mind of the commu-
nity on race relations."
For the first time in his life
Niebuhr was rubbing elbows with
leaders of the secular world. He
had spent a decade moving up the
ladder of influence in the ecclesias-
tical sphere, and was intimate with
men of power in that realm. Now he
occupied a position of leadership
outside the church. Although he
had worked on the LaFollette
Presidential campaign in 1924, the
mayor's Interracial Committee
was the real starting point of his
career in secular politics.
Fred M. Butzel was named a member
of the new Interracial Committee. Niebuhr
commented that "the spirit of the commit-
tee" (in his eyes) was so good because of the
Jewish lawyer and philanthropist Fred M.
Butzel, who worked so closely with him
that in later years he always referred to
him erroneously as the committee's vice
chairman. "It was Butzel's plan that made
it possible for one with prophetic aspira-
tions to tolerate such a dignitary."
This leads the reader to an apprecia-
tion of the Butzel record in Detroit history
as recorded in Fox's Reinhold Niebuhr.
Here is the account as recorded in this
biography:
In the 1950s Niebuhr remem-
bered that he "was in many ways
the most remarkable man I have
ever encountered, either before or
since."
"He was the moving spirit in
every Jewish charity and the guid-
ing genius of the community fund.
But Butzel was no ordinary philan-
thropist ... (He) analyzed for me
without emotion, the realities of
power in the city and the foibles of
the powerful. Sometimes his cyni-
cism, which was absolutely with-
out malice, shocked even his young
parsonic friend who had learned
so much from him. While we were
working together on the race
commission the parsons of the
Negro 'store front' churches all
approached him for a contribu-
tion. He gave each applicant a
hundred dollars. I remonstrated
with him and told him that there
were some very good Negro
t
churches, who could makeore
creative use of his money an
these corybantic sects. "I d n't
know what corybantic means,"
said Fred, "but if you are a spe-
cialist in religion I am a specialist
in amusements and I know these
churches offer the laundresses the
rousements which are only
amusements in their dreary lives."
Niebuhr's retrospective ac-
count was a parable and an act of
Mystery of Longevity:
There Are Still Seven
Who Saluted Weizmann
In last week's Commentary on "The
Mystery of Longevity," there was a miscal-
culation. Of the 46 prominent Detroiters
who saluted Dr. Chaim Weizmann on his
1942 visit here, seven are still with us.
They are:
' Charles Feinberg, Rabbi Leon
Fram, Lawrence Michelson, Royal
Oppenheim, Judge Charles Rubiner,
Philip Slomovitz and Isidore Sobeloff.
•
contrition — a story of a hard-
nosed cynic who had more com-
passion than the religious "spe-
cialist." Butzel had no religious be-
lief, only "an ethical creed in which
charity and integrity were the
prime components; the charity was
at once so broad and so free of
condescension that he broadened
every religious and moral horizon
of the young parson who became
his friend." Butzel was the first
Jew Niebuhr knew intimately;
from that time on Niebuhr con-
stantly celebrated "the very great
resources that the Jewish commu-
nity has in their passion for practi-
cal justice." He rarely came across
a Protestant equivalent of Butzel:
unsentimental, unpretentious, be-
nevolently toughminded, gifted
and practical wisdom. He more
than anyone else gave Niebuhr his
lifelong conviction, as he ex-
pressed it in his journal in 1928, of
"the superior sensitiveness of the
Jewish conscience in social prob-
lems."
"The Jews are after all a mes-
sianic people, and they have never
escaped the influence of their mes-
sianic, or if you will, their utopian
dreami. The glory of their religion
is that they are really not thinking
so much of 'salvation' as of a saved
society."
The latter portion of the quotation is
important for the evaluation of the kindred
Niebuhr-Butzel spirits because of its em-
phasis on their joint devotion to justice in
the advancement of civil rights.
Butzel's image in his community is
splendidly defined in Fox's summation of
Niebuhr's diary. In the Jewish community
he was Loyer Bootsel to the incoming mig-
rants from Eastern Europe. He was the
wealthy progenitor of a generally con-
ceived assimilationist family. Unlike the
rest of that prominent group in Michigan
history, he never practiced law, refused to
accept appointments to judgeships, de-
voted his life to aiding the less fortunate, to
planning rehabilitative and constructive
lives for boys who had gone astray.
There was nothing unusual about
Loyer Bootsel attending the Yiddish-
speaking assemblies, responding to all in-
vitations to bar mitzvah parties and wed-
dings from newcomers to this country.
It was not unusual for Fred Butzel to
be induced, as an invitee by the "folksmen-
chen in the Yiddish speaking community"
at a bat, bar mitzvah or birthday or an-
niversary or wedding, to sit at an old dil-
lapidated piano that needed tuning, and
accompany the groups singing Yiddish
"lieder" or American folktunes. While al-
ways referred to as "Loyer Bootsel," as soon
as friendships were cemented he became
the intimate "Fred" in most salutations.
He provided loans'for poor students to
pursue college studies and it was estimated
that more than 200 benefited from such
assistance, "no extra questions asked."
Many of his proteges thus reached great
heights in many professions and on the
benches of numerous courts.
(Incidentally, it should be indicated
that his brother did practice law and
headed an important law office and became
Chief Justice Henry Butzel of the Michi-
gan Supreme Court.)
(When this reviewer needed help to
establish this newspaper, Fred was to first
to advance a $500 loan and 18 others joined
him. They were skeptical about collecting,
but in less than a year in the newspaper's
age all loans were refunded.)
Not only during his ministry in De-
troit at the Beth El Evangelical Church
Above all there were the three
figures of such significance in his
Detroit experience that they took
on mythic stature. For the rest of
his life, when his thoughts turned
to Detroit they turned to Bishop
Williams, Fred Butzel, and Henry
Ford. Charles Williams, the high-
church bishop who despite his
ceremonial robes condescended to
no one and excoriated the exploit-
ers of human labor; lawyer Fred
Butzel, the ostensibly cynical, sec-
ular Jew who was in fact a selfless
seeker after justice; Henry Ford,
the naive gentleman whose
idealism was so pure it was akin to
cynicism.
Williams was the transcendent
model, like his own father removed
so suddenly by death but his con-
stant inspiration thereafter. Butzel
was the ever-present alternative:
argued forcefully that Christians
had no business trying to convert
Jews, in part because of the secu-
lar fruits of Jewish piety.
The ironic essence of Ameri-
can culture was its curious com-
pound of piety and secularism,
parochialism and cos-
mopolitanism. Had he been in-
clined to autobiography he might
have added that Reinhold Niebuhr
was as paradoxical as America it-
self: he was the most religious of
secular figures and the most secu-
lar of religious ones. He was so
secular indeed, that he had his
doubts about going to church in
the midst of a religious revival;
easy piety perturbed him more
than ever.
His son, Christopher, he told
Jonathan Bingham, was very con-
ventional about attending church
every Sunday, though critical of
every church he went to. His
daughter, Elisabeth, now at
Radcliffe, rarely attended the
Harvard chapel — where Christ-
opher had been a fixture — be-
Henry Ford
Stephen Wise
the secular saint for whom reli-
gious trappings were superfluous.
In imagination he became
Niebuhr's secular "pole"; the
image of Butzel was a constant
challenge to his prophetic preten-
sions. The Butzel in him kept the
Williams in him from becoming
self-satisfied, grandiloquent.
Henry Ford was their an-
tithesis. They each had authority
which came from their office, their
profession, but both had a gift of
spirit which let them laugh at their
office while using it. Ford was the
man of limitless authority whose
spirit was as mechanical as his
product.
An interpretation of Butzel's "sec-
ularism" and the general Niebuhrian atti-
tude on Christian-Jewish relations vis-a-
vis secularism and religion has a specific
interest in Fox's biography. As he states:
America, he observed, was
more secular than any other na-
tion, but also more religious. The
best of its secularism drew on deep
religious roots — as in the civic vir-
tue of secular Jews like Fred But-
zel — while its popular religion
aped the worst of secularism, the
"frantic pursuit" of "success." The
most thoughtful essay in the book
—"The Relations of Christians and
Jews in Western Civilization" —
cause she found it boring.
Niebuhr sympathized with her
view. He was "more and more
skeptical" about "churchgoing per
se." Three years later he was still
seething at "the smugness of the
current piety," as he put it to Felix
Frankfurter. Piety "has been re-
duced to trivialty ....in this semi-
nary and indeed in the whole
church. You can imagine my state
of mind after having devoted all
these decades to the religious
enterprise."
As can be implied from the above,'
there was a strong Niebuhr-Frankfurter
friendship. Frankfurter was elated with
the support Niebuhr had given the Zionist
cause. Isaiah Berlin also highly com-
mended Niebuhr on that score. "Too many
liberals, as you indicate," Frankfurter
wrote, "are still inflated by their romantic
illusions and can not face your clean,
surgeon-like exposition of realities. I find
their essays as refreshing as cooling spring
waters to a parched throat."
The article referred to, a repudiation
of anti-Zionist Jews like I. F. Stone,
emerges as the Niebuhr credo on Zionism,
as Fox quotes his views in theNation:
but throughout his life, Niebuhr was influ-
enced by Butzel. There was also the Henry
Ford influence which was later somewhat
negated. About the Butzel influence, Fox
explained:
Pearl Harbor put an abrupt
and shocking end to the
interventionist-isolationist debate.
Nearly three thousand sailors