Sol Bloom

Sol Bloom (March 9, 1870 – March 7, 1949) was an American songwriter, entertainment impresario, sheet music publisher, and politician who represented a Manhattan congressional district for fourteen terms in the United States House of Representatives. He also appeared on Broadway, with his 1903 credit in the musical Zig-Zag Alley coinciding with his relocation to New York City.

Bloom was born in Pekin, Illinois, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents who relocated the family to San Francisco shortly after his birth. In his early teens he was introduced to theater production, and he subsequently worked as a theater manager, staging boxing matches that featured James "Gentleman Jim" Corbett. A visit to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 exposed him to the dancers and acrobots of the "Algerian Village," an experience that shaped his later work as an impresario. He was also conversant in four or five European languages and adept in sign language.

At twenty-three, Bloom built his national reputation by developing the mile-long Midway Plaisance at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The committee had initially entrusted the midway to a Harvard anthropology professor before turning to Bloom, whose execution of the project was sufficiently successful that the word "midway" entered the permanent American lexicon. At the exposition's "Street in Cairo" attraction, Bloom composed the tune known as "The Streets of Cairo, or the Poor Little Country Maid," to which the North African belly dance was repackaged for American audiences as the "hootchy-kootchy dance." He did not copyright the tune, having composed it on a piano at the Press Club of Chicago. According to Rachel Shteir's book Striptease, The Untold Story of the Girlie Shows, Bloom earned from his exotic dance shows an amount equal to the salary of President Grover Cleveland. He also published and promoted "Coon, Coon, Coon," one of the most prominent entries in the coon song genre. His work developing the fair had been undertaken at the behest of Mayor Carter Harrison III, who was assassinated in the days before the exposition closed.

Following the fair, Bloom rose within Chicago's Democratic Party circles, associating with ward bosses John "Bathhouse" Coughlin and Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna. He became the Chicago branch manager of M. Witmark & Sons, then the largest sheet music publisher in the United States, and by 1896 he was publishing under his own name, introducing photolithographs to make scores more visually appealing. In 1897 he married Evelyn Hechheimer and established himself in a fashionable district on South Prairie Avenue, operating under the billing "Sol Bloom, the Music Man." Around the turn of the century he received, to considerable fanfare, the first musical copyright of the new century, awarded for "I Wish I Was in Dixie Land Tonight" by Raymond A. Browne.

Bloom moved to New York City in 1903, the same year he appeared in the Broadway musical Zig-Zag Alley. In New York he expanded his national chain of department store music departments, dealt in real estate, and sold Victor Talking Machines. He shifted his political affiliation from the Republican Party to Tammany Hall's Democrats, and when Representative-elect Samuel Marx of New York's 19th Congressional District died in 1922, Bloom was invited to run for the seat. He won the typically Republican Upper West Side district of Manhattan by 145 votes and held the seat until his death in 1949.

In Congress, Bloom oversaw the celebration of the George Washington Bicentennial in 1932 and presided over the U.S. Constitution Sesquicentennial Exposition in 1937. He chaired the House Committee on Foreign Affairs beginning in 1939, a position he held from 1939 to 1947 and again in 1949, during pivotal periods in American foreign policy. In the lead-up to World War II he managed high-priority Roosevelt Administration legislation, including authorization for the Lend-Lease Act in 1940, and he introduced the act to extend Lend-Lease for one year. A 1943 confidential analysis prepared by Isaiah Berlin for the British Foreign Office described Bloom as blindly loyal to the President's policies, politically friendly toward Britain, a consistent supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt's foreign policies, strongly anti-Nazi, and intensely patriotic, while also characterizing him as Europe-conscious given that he had been elected largely by Jewish and foreign-born constituents in his New York district.

A strong supporter of Zionism, Bloom worked in coordination with mainstream Jewish leadership, including World Jewish Congress executives Stephen Wise and Nachum Goldman, and actively opposed the Hillel Kook-led Emergency Committee for the Rescue of European Jewry, also known as the Bergson Group. In the fall of 1943 he initiated a Congressional hearing to investigate Kook and his organization's rescue-oriented activities and their demands that the United States take meaningful action to protect Jews in Europe. Shortly before Yom Kippur that year, Bloom attempted to dissuade approximately 400 Orthodox rabbis from marching to Washington to appeal to President Roosevelt, arguing that the march would appear unseemly. The march proceeded nonetheless, led by Kook. Despite Bloom's opposition to the Bergson Group's efforts, Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board in January 1944 as a result of that group's persistent lobbying and publicity.

Bloom served as a delegate to the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations in 1945, and he suggested the opening words of the Preamble to the United Nations Charter: "We, the Peoples of the United Nations." He was also a member of the American delegation at the Rio Conference in 1947. In January 1946 he represented the United States at the first meeting of the UN General Assembly in London, and he described his success in persuading a majority of the Assembly to allow the United Nations to assume the finances of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as "the supreme moment" of his life. Bloom died on March 7, 1949, two days before his seventy-ninth birthday.