While largely unknown today, Florence Prag Kahn (1866-1948) stands as one of the most important and influential women in early American history. An American teacher and politician, she became the first Jewish woman (and the fifth woman) to serve in the United States Congress after winning a special election to fill the seat left vacant by her late husband, Congressman Julius Kahn, who had just been reelected to his thirteenth term. The Kahns were Republicans who were dedicated Reform Jews; they remained active members in Temple Emanu-El, where their sons were bar-mitzvahed, and they counted most influential San Francisco Jews as among their friends.
Florence was born in Salt Lake City, Utah to Polish Jews who emigrated to the United States and became early California settlers. Her father, Conrad, was a Jewish merchant born in Warsaw who traveled to gold rush country in 1849, sold supplies to miners, and became a close friend of Mormon leader Brigham Young. When the business failed, the family moved to San Francisco, where Conrad became a founder of San Francisco’s Congregation Sherith Israel.
As a child of five, Florence’s mother, Mary Goldsmith Prag, also Polish-born, had arrived in California in 1852, having crossed the Central American isthmus by mule and canoe before sailing by steamer to San Francisco. When the family returned to San Francisco, she served as a religious school (Congregation Emanu-El) teacher, taught history at a girls’ high school for over fifty years, was later elected to the San Francisco Board of Education in 1921, and wrote the well-received My Life Among the Mormons.
Florence, who was raised in a home that emphasized both Jewish and secular subjects, graduated from her mother’s school (1883) and earned a degree from the University of California, Berkley (1887) as one of only seven women in the graduating class. Her desire to study law was frustrated by her family’s poor financial situation, so, following in her mother’s footsteps, she made teaching her profession and made meaningful contributions to her family’s income. She taught high school English and history for ten years before marrying Julius Kahn (1899), a former Broadway actor, state legislator and, at the time, a first-term U.S. Representative from San Francisco. She accompanied him to Washington D.C. where, for the next 25 years, she served as his secretary, helped to manage his congressional workload, and acted as his aide and confidante, increasingly so as he fought a long illness late in his career while serving as chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs.
Julius, San Francisco’s first Jewish congressman, served continuously in the House (except for the 1902-1904 term) until his death in 1924. He was always highly responsive to the needs of his constituents in California’s Fourth Congressional District, including securing the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Expo of San Francisco, but he was particularly concerned with America’s military preparedness as chair of the Military Affairs Committee. It was he who introduced the bill authorizing the Selective Service Act establishing a draft following America’s entry into World War I in 1917.
However, he was also responsible for helping to pass an extension of the Chinese Expulsion Act, which prevented nearly all Chinese immigrants from gaining citizenship and denied them many basic rights, for which he has justifiably been subject to much contemporary criticism, including the removal of his name from a San Francisco playground in 2018. In contrast, Florence would later champion legislation to provide citizenship to immigrant wives of Chinese-born U.S. citizens and birthright citizenship for the children of Chinese and Japanese families living in the United States.
After his death in December 1924, Florence decided to seek his congressional seat, which she won in a special election on February 17, 1925 – only five years after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote – earning 48 percent of the vote against three opponents. She thereby became at age 58 the first Jewish woman elected to Congress, and she went on to win re-election with little opposition five times, serving from 1925-1937. Thanks to the columns she wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle – while a congressional wife needing to supplement the family income (1919-1920) – much is known about her views before she became a politician in her own right, and her articles supported her claim when running to succeed Julius that she had already spent years analyzing important public issues.
Although she represented a relatively conservative district, Florence fearlessly pushed many progressive social reforms, including campaigning to repeal the Volstead Act, which prohibited the sale of alcohol (Prohibition ended with the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in late 1933); opposing federal censorship laws; and fighting against “blue laws” that forced certain businesses to close on Sundays (and had a particularly adverse impact on businesses owned by Sabbath observers). In one delightful incident, when she was bitterly criticized for voting along with reactionary Senator Moses on a certain proposition, she quickly fired back: “Why shouldn’t I choose Moses as my leader? Haven’t my people been following him for ages?”
Florence had an acute sense of the importance of serving on congressional committees where she could be of service to her constituents and, as such, when she was assigned to the Indian Affairs Committee – a well-known dumping ground for congresswomen at the time – she protested publicly that “The only Indians in my district are in front of cigar stores.” Republican leaders finally relented, and in the 71st and 72nd Congresses (1929-1933), she was appointed to the Military Affairs Committee, becoming the first woman to serve on the panel, where she passionately advocated for expanded military budgets and pushed a defense position in Congress. She would later also serve on the influential Appropriations Committee, in which capacity she was invaluable in securing federal money for her district in the form of numerous military installations and financing for the San Francisco Bay Bridge.
Most early congressional widows served as mere temporary placeholders until party leaders could chose long-term, male successors, but Florence proved to be far more than merely a posthumous carrier of her husband’s legacy. With an insider’s keen knowledge of House operations and notable oratorical skills, she had the conceptual and strategic abilities to envision sweeping changes for the Bay Area and the political skills to implement them. She played a major role in shaping the economy and the geography of the San Francisco Bay Area; for example, in her annual report to her constituents in 1930, shortly after becoming the first woman to serve on the Military Affairs Committee, she discussed the military installations that she saw as good for her region and for the country. During her tenure in office, she introduced legislation that led to the creation of Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, Alameda Naval Air Station, and Hamilton Field, and she led the Congressional support for the building of the Bay Bridge linking Oakland and San Francisco.
Florence maintained a close relationship with leaders and members of the Republican Party, which no doubt played an important role in her effectiveness, as numerous newspaper accounts described her as successfully maneuvering to get her bills passed. According to FDR’s eldest daughter, Alice, “Mrs. Kahn, shrewd, resourceful, and witty, is an all-around first-rate legislator, the equal of any man in Congress and the superior of most.” Her sparkling wit frequently used touches of Jewish humor, and, as the daughter and granddaughter of founders of San Francisco and its Jewish community, she was particularly beloved by her Jewish constituents.
As one of the very few women in Congress, Florence, never considered herself a feminist and was never seen as a suffragette. She rejected the premise that women needed special legislation for their “issues;” asked about this, she replied: “I am not specifically interested in so-called women’s questions, as all national positions are sexless.” In the February 18, 1925 Oregonian, headlined “Mrs. Kahn Elected to Congress Seat, California Woman to Succeed Late Husband” (see exhibit), she is quoted as saying
I have always been too busy to have a fad or a hobby. Nor do I believe in all this “motherhood, feminist blah” when a woman enters politics. I shall try to do each day the little duties that arise just as any woman would in her home or a man in his home or office, or as either a man or woman should when elected to public office…
Nonetheless, she believed that women should actively participate in politics and she dedicated herself to women’s welfare. For example, she worked to institute pensions for army nurses, to establish a program honoring the mothers of fallen soldiers, and to increase the low wages paid to female government employees. Interestingly, as a deeply conservative woman, she had opposed women’s suffrage before California adopted it in 1911, but that position never appeared to have any adverse effect on her election prospects.
Florence supported Herbert Hoover’s unsuccessful campaign against FDR in the 1932 presidential election, and was herself defeated for re-election during the Roosevelt re-election landslide (1936). Returning to private life, she retired to San Francisco, where her Nob Hill home became a gathering place for the city’s political elite, and she became an active participant in Hadassah and the Council of Jewish Women. During the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition, she was named one of the twelve outstanding women in the state’s history and, until her death, she continued her civic work, particularly her efforts to not only involve women in the political process, but also to encourage them to seek elective office.
As a member of the House Military Affairs Committee, Florence played a leading role in increasing funding for the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation, to the point that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who served as a pallbearer at her funeral, lovingly characterized her as the “mother of the FBI.”
In this January 23, 1953 correspondence on his FBI letterhead, Hoover writes to his California pen pal, Elizabeth B. Ehrman née Bissinger (1883-1976), a married woman with seven sons who lived at the Oliver Acres estate in Atherton, California. At the beginning of the letter, he refers to Florence Kahn, their mutual friend, before going on to describe the weary but elated atmosphere in Washington, D.C. the day after the first inauguration of President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon on January 20, 1953 and how the crowds received former president Herbert Hoover. In particular, he describes “the religious note which attached to the actual swearing in of the President” which was “most impressive.” Eisenhower’s inauguration was more overtly religious than his predecessors, which J. Edgar Hoover approved; Ike was sworn in on two Bibles, the first a copy of the one George Washington used in 1789 and the second his own personal “West Point” Bible, and he substituted a personal prayer of his own composition in lieu of kissing the Bible, which had been a tradition of long standing
J. Edgar Hoover’s name is synonymous with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the intelligence agency that he helped to found in 1935. His appointment as FBI director came five years after he led the infamous Palmer Raids, an unconstitutional roundup of over six thousand leftwing immigrant activists, including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and numerous other Jews, more than two hundred of whom were deported. He served as director of the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI’s predecessor) from 1924-1935 and as director of the FBI from its inception until his death in 1972. While Hoover took many “liberties” (many of them unconstitutional) with the information he collected, critics agree that he also built up, enlarged, modernized, and legitimized the agency.
Although he may not have been a dyed-in-the wool Jew hater, Hoover was a major proponent of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. He estimated that Jews constituted 50% to 60% of the American Communist Party and, at the very least, his vehement anti-Communism may have bled into antisemitism. He blamed antisemitism not on his own anticommunist witch hunts, which disproportionately targeted Jews and frequently relied on antisemitic imagery, but on the Communists he targeted, and internal FBI documents and records demonstrate assumptions about Jews and communism as well as strategic sympathy for anti-Jewish prejudice. For example, when an informant told an FBI agent that all Jews were Communists, the agent was instructed to keep it out of his written report so that the bias could not discredit the informant; it did not appear to concern Hoover that the bias meant that the informant might be untruthful.
Hoover saw Jewish support of black civil rights as an immoral challenge to his attempt to undermine and destroy the Civil Rights movement, and he characterized Jewish intermarriage as being part of the anti-Christian culture threatening American culture and American life. In particular, he railed against the alleged promotion of Communism and anti-Americanism of the film industry, which he believed was predominantly controlled by the “barbarian invaders” eastern European Jews. Due in no small part to Hoover, “subversive” Hollywood Jews soon became the target of vicious antisemitic attacks.
In a striking exhibition of cognitive dissonance, Hoover believed that Jews played a foundational part in sustaining American values while also simultaneously believing that Jews were un-American. On one hand, antisemitism and Cold War ideologies combined to create suspicion of Jewish leftists, as the antagonistic relationship between Hoover’s FBI and Hollywood demonstrated, but, on the other hand, Judeo-Christian rhetoric and the embrace of a Judeo-Christian tradition became an essential part of what differentiated America from the godless USSR. As one commentator cogently put it, to Hoover “Judaism is fine, but actual Jews are a problem.”
Before and during the Holocaust, when Jewish refugees needed American assistance and support the most, the U.S. government refused to take them in, but when the scope of the Shoah became apparent after World War II, American attitudes shifted and, under President Truman, the United States supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael. However, that did not deter Hoover: he promoted the idea of German-Jewish agents infiltrating refugee ranks, which caused great confusion at relief agencies; he dismissed the horrific war crimes the Nazis committed during the war as “Soviet propaganda;” and he protected several Nazi war criminals from deportation after World War II and put them to work as FBI informants. He sought to destroy the reputations of Albert Einstein (Einstein’s “leftist” political convictions attracted FBI attention as early as the 1930s and he was denounced as a “Communist spy”), J. Robert Oppenheimer, and several other progressive Jewish scientists. He targeted American Jewish civic organizations and activists for heightened surveillance, and, in violation of the First Amendment, he monitored pro-aliyah and other Jewish organizations – including particularly the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) – which he believed were fronts for the Communist Party of the United States.
In a May 1945 document, the FBI reported that a confidential informant had claimed in March 1937 that the ZOA “was very friendly with the Communist Party.” The FBI maintained informant coverage and other forms of intelligence-gathering targeting ZOA throughout the 1930s and 1940s, with a clear emphasis on looking for evidence of collusion with the U.S. Communist Party and monitoring the financial and other support flowing from ZOA to Jews in Eretz Yisrael under the British Mandatory government. Moreover, other FBI records show a clear record of FBI investigations from the 1940s through at least the mid-1970s which sought to establish whether ZOA was acting as an agent of a foreign power – the government of Israel – in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Needless to say, no evidence was ever presented to indicate that the ZOA had violated the Act or any other law. Hoover was also preoccupied with the Jewish Defense League and its passionate leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane and, characterizing Kahane as an FBI “priority 1” subject, he ordered aggressive infiltration and surveillance of the group out of concern that the group’s protests and violent action could hurt fragile diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
