Ah, history ....

In my last post, I tried to share something of the remarkable efforts of communal activist Setty Kuhn in addressing the needs of her community, ranging across musical, educational, religious, international, and racial concerns.

But ah, history. As much as I admire Setty, it is impossible to simply ignore the troubling social attitudes and certainties -- inherent in her life and that of her community -- that come too starkly into view from our early 21st-century perspective. We are forced to censure those we would admire, with the all too certain awareness that we too, in all our earnestness and/or cynicism, will be brought up short by those who someday may look back at us.

Setty lived in a broad world that spanned continents and communities, but her intimate world was a very narrow one. This world consisted almost entirely of Cincinnati’s German Jewish elite – and she was related by blood or marriage to many of its most prominent members. She was even the founder of the country club that came to define the parameters of this community. It was a community defined both by its love of Christmas and its shared devotion to communal betterment.

Setty Kuhn particularly was recognized for addressing the needs of those less fortunate. As one Cincinnati columnist observed, although she always lived amidst privilege, she chose to use those privileges in the interests of a better world. In pursuing her special passion – housing reform – she became instrumental in the passage of municipal, state, and national legislation to address the growing decay of America’s inner cities and its impact upon the least fortunate.

But yesterday’s cutting edge reforms can become the cramped and destructive forces of today. “Slum eradication” as a way to improve neighborhoods often meant the replacement of human scaled neighborhoods with soulless housing projects that did little to foster opportunity and bred much of the destructive behavior they were meant to prevent. It would be hard to argue that Cincinnati’s housing projects did much to advance the fortunes of the African American population they were intended to serve. An easier argument would be that they worked well in keeping that community segregated and marginalized, while opening space for more of the kind of downtown industrial expansion desired by the municipality.

Setty Kuhn worked harder and with more effectiveness for the broader community (across class, religious, and racial lines) than I shall ever hope to be able to do. Yet the responsible American Jewish historian in me feels the need to make the obvious point that Setty Kuhn grew up in an indelibly racist society. She could not have avoided reflecting these views even as she addressed issues that most individuals in privileged white Cincinnati would have avoided.

Her letters as a young woman deployed the derogatory language and patronizing racial attitudes of the world she lived in. These certainly faded with time, but it’s clear from some of the papers in her collection that the Yiddish word “schwartzer” as a negative term for black people was sustained even within her cultured German Jewish circle.

Let me share one example which is so shocking, I think, not because we live in a society that has driven out racism. Rather, because most of us who would now identify with the political activism and social consciousness embodied by Setty, could never imagine deploying racist terms in the interest of our own amusement. It’s hard even to imagine just how close we are in time and identification to those able to do so quite easily and with great aplomb.

The following comes from one of the many song and tributes written over the years by friends and family in Setty’s honor. This one comes from the last verse of a poem written to mark the 20th anniversary (in 1913) of the marriage of Setty Swarts to Simon Kuhn. Here it is, make of it what you will:

“So Si he knew he’d met his fate,
And they were married soon,
For is it not most proper that,
A Schwartz should wed a Kuhn?”

source: Setty Kuhn Papers, American Jewish Archives