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1st edition. No outer paper wrappers, as issued, 8vo, 16 pages. Sabin 40756. Wolf 167. Lewis Charles Levin (1808-60) was the first Jew elected to the U. S. House of Representatives. He was "an American politician, newspaper editor and anti-Catholic social activist. He was one of the founders of the American Party in 1842 and served as a member of the U. S. House of Representatives representing Pennsylvania's 1st congressional district from 1845 to 1851. Levin supported the nativist Americanism ideology espoused by some northern Protestants at the expense of Catholics. He was a dynamic orator on temperance and political issues.Levin was born on November 10, 1808, in Charleston, South Carolina to parents who had emigrated from England.He briefly taught school in Woodville, Mississippi, but left town after being wounded in a duel. By 1838 Levin was in Philadelphia and giving public lectures on the evils of alcohol. He founded and edited a journal called the Temperance Advocate and Literary Repository. In 1842 he staged an immense public 'bonfire of booze' to draw attention to his campaign against taverns and for local control of liquor licensing. Levin's anti-alcohol crusade proved to be excellent preparation for his next cause, a campaign against Catholic political power, which he carried on as editor of The Daily Sun.Levin became the leader and chief spokesman for a start-up political movement calling itself the American Republican Party (later the Native American Party). Shortly after the 1844 Philadelphia riots, Levin ran for Congress and was elected on his party's platform: (1) to extend the period of naturalization to twenty-one years; (2) to elect only native born to all offices; (3) to reject foreign interference in all institutions, social, religious, and political. He was the first Jewish member elected to the United States House of Representatives. Levin was returned to Congress in 1846 and 1848. He served as chairman of the United States House Committee on Engraving during the Thirtieth Congress, 1847-48.After leaving Congress in 1851, Levin continued to campaign for the Native American or Know-Nothing movement, as it became known.Levin and other Nativists helped tilt the 1852 Presidential election toward Democrat Franklin Pierce and away from the Whigs' candidate, the popular Mexican-American War leader General Winfield Scott. Levin was enraged and disgusted by the new Republican Party's nomination of John C. Frémont for president at the convention in Philadelphia in June 1856. He wrote a lengthy diatribe against Frémont, which he delivered at a rally in Philadelphia's National Hall (now Independence Hall) shortly after Millard Fillmore had been nominated by both the Know Nothings and the Whigs. However, Frémont partisans pulled him off the stand. Levin never hid his religious identity and was self-described as 'by descent an Israelite'.Levin was one of the most popular public speakers of his era, often quoted and anthologized. In 1905 a veteran Pennsylvania journalist and politician, Alexander Kelly McClure, recalled Levin as one of the shrewdest and most persuasive politicians of the period" (Wikipedia). OCLC 1370249940, though OCLC-Worldcat lists only digital copies, no actual paper copies anywhere. Some foxing, Very Good Condition. (B) (KH-8-47-D!-'kk+).
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