ABSTRACT
During the Balkan war in 1912, Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia defeated Turkey and occupied areas in which 250,000 Jews lived. But while Marshall and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) were resigned to defeat on the literacy test in the House, they were infuriated by a public attack against their involvement in the literacy test legislative fight. The AJC, nevertheless, tried to ward off final defeat. Marshall, who had expected the veto, had begun to gather support for the President’s position, even before Wilson’s message was written. “If the bill becomes a law,” Marshall wrote anticipating defeat,”&it is as harmless so far as the people are concerned as it can possible (sic) be made.” Although the United States had failed to write a new Russian-American commercial treaty in 1916, the rapprochement between the two countries, evident in American investments in Russia and the President’s veto message, was a defeat for the interests of the AJC.
