Interview with Scott D. Seligman, author of “The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906”
Scott D. Seligman is a historian who has written many books, but his newest is The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906: Antisemitism and the Battle over Christianity in the Public Schools (Potomac Books, 2025). After a Presbyterian principal in Brooklyn, Frank Harding, began proselytizing among his students, the Jewish community and Orthodox Jewish activist, Albert Lucas, pushed back. Things went to the Board of Education and beyond, when some Jews in New York staged boycotts of Christmas pageants in 1906. Seligman was kind enough to grant us an interview and we discussed the new book and this interesting moment in history.
How would you explain the subject of this book to someone who had never heard of it?
I would say that The Great Christmas Boycott of 1906 is about an important but overlooked chapter in the perennial dispute over the presence of religion in American public schools. It marks the entry of the Jewish community into what, in the nineteenth century, had been an intramural struggle between established Protestants and later-arriving Catholics.
Why did things happen in 1906, not 1904 or 1910? What was special about that year?
First of all, why did it take until the twentieth century for it to happen? I think it was because the explosive growth in the number of Jews in the United States had given them a voice that could no longer be ignored. There had been occasional objections to Christian influences in the schools by Jews in the nineteenth century, but their numbers had made it easy to disregard them. The mass migration of Jews that began in the 1880s and continued until the 1920s, however, made them a force to be reckoned with at the ballot box. A good example can be found in the aftermath of the 1902 riot on the Lower East Side of New York that I chronicled in an earlier book, The Chief Rabbi’s Funeral. It was the single largest antisemitic incident in American history, and because the then-mayor of New York owed his election to strong Jewish support, he gladly repaid the political debt by commissioning a civilian investigation into the event that placed the blame where it belonged. Nothing like that had ever happened before.
Why 1906? The issue had actually been smoldering for several years, and what probably brought it to a head was a 1903 address by Albert Lucas, the secretary of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America – the Orthodox Union – to his membership. Lucas was already doing battle with Christian settlement houses on the Lower East Side that made no bones about their intention to bring Jewish children to Christ, and he began to suspect that the public schools were also being used as a vector for conversion efforts. When Frank Harding, principal of P. S. 144 in Brownsville, an overwhelmingly Jewish community, told his students in the run-up to Christmas in 1905 that he wished them all to be more like Jesus, and that Jesus blessed all but those who did not believe in him, it was just the trigger Lucas had been waiting for. What followed was a yearlong battle with the Board of Education that culminated in the 1906 boycott of school Christmas pageants by the Jewish community.
Can you tell me a little bit more about Frank Harding and Albert Lucas?
New York-born Frank Harding (1853– 1925) had just become the principal of P. S. 144 when it opened its doors in 1904. He had spent his entire career as an educator and was, by all accounts, a dedicated professional. Raised in the Presbyterian church, he believed deeply in the redemptive power of Jesus Christ and thought his savior’s message of truth and love would benefit those who might not have heard it. So in December of 1905, he took advantage of an assembly in the school auditorium to pass it along to his charges. Harding may well have simply been overzealous and it is not clear that he was actually attempting to convert his students. But he soon found himself at the epicenter of a controversy when the local Jewish community, outraged at his behavior, called for his removal for illegal proselytizing.
Albert Lucas (1859– 1923), a Sephardic Jew born and educated in London, was a plucky man of strong convictions and never shy about expressing his opinions forcefully and publicly. He emigrated to the United States in 1888 and when the Orthodox Union was organized a decade later to defend traditional Judaism against all threats, he was named secretary of the organization. Lucas’s career was spent trying to make the world safe for Jews to live Jewish lives, and he was ever alert for impediments imposed by individuals and governments. When Frank Harding spoke to his students at the end of 1905, he gave Lucas the opportunity to challenge the Christian influences in the public schools that he found so troubling.
We keep having debates about Christmas and about schools and religion, so that is consistent. Do you think the aims of public education are the same now as they were in 1906? Has that remained consistent?
I think they have become quite different, and not always for the good. There was much more emphasis on promoting civic responsibility and Americanization at the turn of the 20th century, especially for immigrant students. In fact, it was precisely the conflating of Americanization and patriotism with Christian values and practices that had a lot to do with the conflict chronicled in this book.
Your book is also about Jewish organizations. How would you explain the role they’ve played historically in America? What role do Jewish organizations play in America now?
Actually, most of the action in The Great Christmas Boycott takes place before there were any national Jewish organizations in the United States. The various issues that confronted the Jewish community, such as in the 1902 kosher meat boycott (which I wrote about in The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902) and the 1904 rent strikes, were all handled by ad hoc committees that lasted only as long as the problem festered. Just a month before the Christmas boycott, the American Jewish Committee was set up, and it was followed by the Anti-Defamation League and, eventually, by the American Jewish Congress. Those organizations continue to play an important role in combating antisemitism and promoting Jewish equality, although their missions have expanded over the years to encompass, in some cases, promoting civil rights more broadly, facilitating interfaith dialog, tracking and fighting extremism and supporting American-Israel relations.
Do you think more people should be interested in legal history? Or at least that historians should be better at writing about it?
Despite my late father’s fondest wishes, I did not go to law school or become an attorney, and my penchant for writing about legal issues and court cases, topics traditionally left to lawyers, surprises even me. But yes, I think it’s important for people to understand not only our laws, but the reasons they were enacted and the struggles over them that have taken place in the past. I think America has dropped the ball on civics education, and we are certainly not the better for it. There is definitely a need to write about these topics in ways that don’t require a legal education to understand.
What effect do you hope this book will have?
If the past is any guide, the debate over religion in the public schools will continue to be a perennial feature of our American life. But as this book shows, the arguments marshalled are too often emotional, not fact-based and dismissive of the law. Personally, it has always seemed patently obvious to me that public schools are no place for Christmas trees or dreidels, much less nativity scenes, crucifixes, carols, menorahs, Islamic stars or crescents. I believe that people have a right to free expression of religion, but to my mind, that’s what houses of worship, parochial schools and homes are for. Public schools are in a different category precisely because organized devotional activities in them risk putting the government’s imprimatur on a particular brand of worship, which is precisely the goal of modern proponents of Christian nationalism. I’d like to see the debate conducted with a respect for facts and for the law, and not with specious arguments based on condescension, patriotism, racism or tradition.
Was this book something you had been wanting to do for a while, or was there something “this book, right now” about it?
I was the kid who always wondered why Christmas should be a legal holiday in the United States, and why we read the Bible and recited the Lord’s Prayer in elementary school. Both struck me as violations of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, which prevents government from establishing an official religion or favoring one faith over another. Christianity has always been and remains the majority faith in the United States, but that doesn’t make it the national religion, nor should it. So it was easy for me, in this age of Christian nationalist activism, to embrace this topic when I first discovered it during the research I did for my previous books. I knew I wanted to explore it further and write about it.
So, when people start talking about “the war on Christmas”—do you have a typical comment or do you abstain from entering the conversation, or what?
I’ll usually speak up. I don’t have a set line, but I know a specious comment when I hear it. An effort to keep organized state-sanctioned religious activities out of the public schools is not a war on Christmas. It’s simply a battle to ensure that no particular religious tradition enjoys pride of place over others in our civic life, which is exactly what the founders intended. I have a similar reaction when I hear someone characterize America as a “Christian nation.” It never was, and the framers were quite clear that they did not wish for it to be.
Whether people enjoy or celebrate Christmas or not, it’s kind of culturally unavoidable. The music, especially, is just everywhere and often for over a month. Do you have a Christmas song that drives you crazy? Do you have a Christmas song you enjoy?
I actually enjoy all of them. I know the words to pretty much all of the traditional Christmas carols, and I like hearing them in the department stores and on television. Learning to appreciate other people’s faiths and traditions is not a trial; it’s actually a benefit that comes from living in a pluralistic society. I don’t begrudge Christians their holiday, whose celebrations can be quite moving and beautiful. I just reserve the right not to have someone else’s religion forced on me by the government. Just like Albert Lucas in 1906.
You’ve written a lot of books How do you get things done and how do you choose your subjects?
Most of my books fall into the category of historic, narrative nonfiction. And I have a special interest in the history of what one might call “hyphenated Americans.” I think one measure of a free, robust democracy is how it treats its minorities, and until recently the history of American minorities was largely overlooked. I take special pleasure in unearthing little-known stories about them that have wider significance.
When I consider a new topic, I set about finding out everything I can about it, and nothing pleases me more than consulting primary sources. I don’t think many people fully appreciate how much the Internet has brought to the party in this area. Newspapers from the beginning of the American republic are now online and keyword searchable. This is worlds apart from searching individual publications on microfilm readers in the public library, a time-consuming, hit-or-miss process required before twenty or so years ago. The web has made the research process much faster and easier. I can do a good deal of searching sitting at my desk, and I can easily identify a couple thousand relevant articles in just a week of work. It makes the process much more efficient and enables me to get a book done in a year or two.
