say." Speaker Rayburn defended Rankin, ruling that "the gentleman from Mississippi is not subject to a point of order... referred to the Negro race and they should not be afraid of that designation." American Jews Rankin was antisemitic and frequently combined racism against African Americans with invective against American Jews. In a 1943 speech on the floor of the House quoted in both The Jewish News of Detroit and the antisemitic magazine The Defender of Wichita he said, In a paper by William L. Strickland, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he observes that "Rankin was an equal opportunity bigot" as he once—on the floor of the House of Representatives—called the Jewish newspaper columnist Walter Winchell "the little kike." This incident, reported by Time magazine in its February 14, 1944 issue, inspired the novelist Laura Z. Hobson to write her story about antisemitism, Gentleman's Agreement (1947). Rankin claimed that the Immigration and Nationality Act was opposed solely by American Jews: They whine about discrimination. Do you know who is being discriminated against? The white Christian people of America, the ones who created this nation ... I am talking about the white Christian people of the North as well as the South ... Communism is racial. A racial minority seized control in Russia and in all her satellite countries, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and many other countries I could name. They have been run out of practically every country in Europe in the years gone by, and if they keep stirring race trouble in this country and trying to force their communistic program on the Christian people of America, there is no telling what will happen to them here. In late 1945, Albert Einstein backed calls for the United States to break off diplomatic relations with Spain's leader Francisco Franco, because the Spanish dictator had been an ally of Adolf Hitler. Rankin condemned Einstein on the floor of Congress, calling him a "foreign-born agitator" who sought "to further the spread of Communism throughout the world." An article in an ADL Bulletin, entitled "The Plot Against Anna M. Rosenberg", attributed the attacks on Rosenberg's loyalty to "professional anti-Semites and lunatic nationalists," including the "Jew-baiting cabal of John Rankin, Benjamin H. Freedman and Gerald Smith." During the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were charged and convicted of passing information about the atomic bomb to the