Roosevelt Monument, Washington, D.C.
I struggled with how to entitle this piece. If we ask whether Franklin D. Roosevelt was influenced by anti-Semitism, the answer has to be “yes,” as the evidence is incontrovertible that this eminently talented political leader was sensitive to the prevailing winds of American public opinion — heavily biased against Jews until the horrors of Nazism became fully known. (It wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s that the quota bars to higher education and professional achievement, and the restrictive covenants in housing and at hotels & resorts were ended.) Alas, there is also evidence that Roosevelt shared, at least somewhat, the prevailing prejudices of his time.
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies held its ninth annual conference last month, Sept. 18, at Fordham University in Manhattan, on the theme of “While Six Million Lived: America and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1939.” This title is a play on While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, a searing book by Arthur D. Morse, first published in 1968.
The Institute is named for David S. Wyman, a historian who has dedicated his career to documenting the Nazi-era reactions and under-reactions of American Jews and the Roosevelt administration regarding the rescue of Jews. Wyman himself, showing signs of age at 82 but still very much alive, participated in the conference.
The Institute’s director, Dr. Rafael Medoff, co-author with Prof. Wyman of A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (New Press), led off with a lecture revealing that FDR apparently had some racist and anti-Semitic sentiments. But what is most damning is the failure of United States policies. As Dr. Medoff indicated, the very least that FDR could have done for the Jews was to order his State Department to fill the quota of legal immigration from Germany, as established by Congress after limitations were imposed in 1924. Instead, immigration policy was set by a political appointee, Breckenridge Long, who ordered U.S. consular officials to delay and obstruct Jewish visa applicants as much as possible. (I’ve written on how this policy almost cost my parents their lives early in 1941.) Approximately 190,000 slots from Germany and endangered or occupied European countries went unfilled.
The Roosevelt administration even rejected the offer advanced by both the legislature and governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1938, to accept 2,000 Jewish refugees without visas, to be kept until safely absorbed elsewhere, with their numbers replaced on a continuous basis by other stateless Jews as needed. The Virgin Islands’ current delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, Donna Christensen (a retired M.D.), spoke beautifully on this offer and the surprisingly significant Jewish history in her Caribbean home. (Dr. Christensen is a deputy whip of the Democratic House Caucus and deputy chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, but since her constituency is a U.S. territory and not a state, she does not have the right to vote on legislation.)
Wyman (the son of a Protestant clergyman) is a strikingly tall and stately-looking elderly gentleman; albeit somewhat unsteady in gait, he is still strong in voice and analytic acuity. He spoke about the scandalous inadequacy of U.S. and international efforts to meet the refugee crisis in the 1930s. One example was the offer by the British of a tract of 40,000 square miles of inaccessible jungle in their South American colony of Guyana, 250 miles from the coast, supposedly for 5,000 colonists. He believes that about 50 refugees made it there. At the same time, Palestine, which had the infrastructure to absorb great masses of additional Jews, was summarily restricted to a trickle by the British White Paper of May 1939.
Pres. Roosevelt’s adviser on political refugees, James G. McDonald, assessed the Dominican Republic’s capacity to absorb nearly 30,000 families. In the end, only about 500 Jewish refugees arrived in the agricultural community at Sosua, D.R.; their settlement was funded by the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Harold Ickes, FDR’s Interior Secretary, endorsed the previously-mentioned Virgin Islands plan for taking in 2,000 refugees, but was overruled by the State Department, claiming an undue risk of introducing enemy agents. The War Refugee Board was established by the U.S. as an executive agency in January, 1944.; it is credited with having helped 200,000 Jews — a significant number but clearly too few.
Donna Christensen, Virgin Islands Congressional Delegate
The conference went on to hear from a panel on the work of political cartoonists to publicize the plight of Jews during that time. Then, Laurel Leff — a professor of journalism at Northeastern University — spoke on how anti-Semitism in the medical profession prevented refugee Jewish doctors from being hired at U.S. medical school faculties or in hospitals. (She cited a number of cases where this cost the lives of outstanding medical professionals, who remained trapped in Europe.) Medical licensing standards were explicitly made impossible for foreign-trained practitioners, even those among the best in their fields. But she did credit the efforts of David L. Edsall, dean of the Harvard University School of Medicine and an exemplary liberal, for rising above the prejudices and callousness of his age to assist refugee doctors as best he could.
(Prof. Leff is probably best known as the author of Buried by the Times, on how the NY Times had relegated stories on the Holocaust to its back pages.)
Finally, University of Oklahoma historian Stephen Norwood spoke on the theme of his book, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Another damning example of the anti-Semitic tenor of American society prior to World War II was brought out in a brief newspaper article written by Dr. Medoff in 2007 and included within the conference packet. In 1939, the Wagner-Rogers bill was introduced in Congress to admit 20,000 refugee children from Germany. It was supported by such stalwart Americans as Grace Coolidge, widow of the former President, and New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. But it was defeated. As put not so daintily by a cousin of FDR, Laura Delano Houghteling, wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization at the time:
20,000 charming children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.
While FDR was morally flawed regarding anti-Semitism, it needs to be said that he was astute enough in international strategy to know that Nazi Germany was a greater threat to national security than Imperial Japan. Clearly, this judgement was not a reflection of pro-Jewish sentiment, but a cold calculation which still required courage.
Indeed, one wonders what would have happened had Hitler not done FDR “the favor” of declaring war on the United States a few days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. FDR would have been hard-pressed to do anything much to forestall the Nazi juggernaut while fighting a huge war in the Pacific. As it was, FDR made the decision to more-or-less abandon U.S. forces in the Philippines, trapped in Bataan and Corregidor, where they helplessly awaited relief that never came. If not simultaneously at war with Germany, the public pressure would surely have been enormous for the U.S. to attempt to save them, even though the U.S. Navy was probably incapable of doing so in the immediate wake of the debacle at Pearl Harbor.
American 'Grant' tanks at the Battle of El Alamein (painting by Peter McIntyre, http://warart.archives.govt.nz/node/80)
By coincidence, The Jewish Daily Forward recently published an article defending FDR: “How FDR Helped Save Jews of the Holy Land,” subtitled, “Facing Tough Choices, He Stopped Nazis From Spreading Holocaust.” It related how FDR’s shipment of over 300 tanks and other heavy weapons to the British in North Africa was critical to the defeat of the Germans at the pivotal Battle of El Alamein.
The article’s co-author is Robert Morgenthau, the retired Manhattan District Attorney whose father, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. served as FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury. It is noteworthy that his father assembled a team at the Treasury Department which compiled a damning report documenting how FDR’s State Department was acting against Jewish refugees. It is only when confronted by his father’s threat to make this report public that Pres. Roosevelt agreed to the creation of the War Refugee Board.
So yes, FDR’s strategic good sense saved Jewish lives in North Africa and Palestine, but his decision had nothing to do with any heartfelt desire to save Jews.
This is not entirely new, although it’s sad to look back upon it. When I was a kid, I was told that it was Cordell Hull, a known anti-Semite in the president’s administration, who had undue influence on FDR. The same vile attitudes were also expressed by diplomats in Canada (a wonderful book about this, “None is Too Many” is still worth reading).
Sadly, anti-semitism was still actively taught by many mainstream churches, and casual anti-Jewish attitudes were also built into the popular culture, such that Jewish entertainers had to change their names or downplay any ties to Judaism (Eddie Cantor was a rare exception– he changed his name, yes, but he was very public about being a Jew and spoke out against both Henry Ford and Adolph Hitler when other entertainers were reticent to do so). The dominant Protestant culture at Harvard and other Ivy League schools encouraged Jewish quotas too, and it was rare to see members of the mainstream press speak out against Father Coughlin the way people in the Jewish press did.
By the way, historians like David S. Wyman are my cultural heroes– their efforts to tell the truth about what really happened are praiseworthy; there is a mythology that people in the 1930s and early 40s spoke out against the Holocaust, when in fact, denial was everywhere; and as a media historian, I can document (as did Laurel Leff) how few mainstream publications had anything to say about the anti-Jewish attitudes in the culture.
FDR’s administration was begged by Jewish leaders to at the very least bomb the railway tracks used to transport the victims, mostly Jews, to the various concentration camps. Germany would never have diverted the resources desperately needed in warfare to repair that damage and the transportation of large numbers of captives could not have continued. The response was that it would divert effort from the direct battle against the enemy. This was nonsense and the number of lives that could have been so simply saved literally went up in smoke!
There is nothing in this Tikkun article that warrants either its title or
its concluding paragraph. All the incidents mentioned can be more convincingly explained by factors other than personal bias on the part of President Roosevelt.
Yes, in retrospect, it appears that some officials in the FDR
administration were less than kindly disposed toward Jews. But in
evaluating incidents than can be adduced in favor of this proposition, we
must beware of the anachronistic fallacy, i.e. the notion that events
taking place during WWII and before can be judged by today’s standards.
First and foremost, the world of 1944 and even 1945 did not know, pace the
unheeded testimony of my late colleague Rudolf Vrba, that a Holocaust was
going on.
Second, the FDR administration was not elected nor saw itself as being
primarily responsible for saving the Jews. The White House at the time,
no less than the White House today, had many domestic and international
pressures, none of which are addressed in this Tikkun article.
Third, none of the incidents related in this article support a conclusion
about FDR’s subjective state of mind. Actually I think it is quite
unlikely that FDR was anti-Semitic or influenced by anti-Semitism in any
reasonable sense of the word. Think just of the many top-level Jewish
officials in his administration …
I personally do not think that FDR was as great a man as the Jews of his
time thought he was; he was, first and foremost, a politician, and an
extremely effective one at that. Any adequate appraisal of his
Jewish-related policies would have to examine these in the context of the
politics of his time. ( For what it’s worth, I think that without the
war-time leadership of FDR and Winston Churchill, the world would be far
worse off today than in fact it is.)
Of course Tikkun magazine is not a professional historical journal, far
from it; so perhaps we should not expect history from it. But it should
be careful to charge others with being under the influence of
anti-Semitism. Its own record, for instance in its treatment of the
Goldstone Report, suggests that it lives in something of a glass house in
that particular neighborhood. In any case, this historical question —
FDR and the Jews — is much too complex to lead itself to less than a
scholarly treatment.
Perhaps I should have provided more detail on evidence of FDR’s antisemitic and racist attitudes, as discussed by Dr. Medoff, but as I wrote, “… what is most damning is the failure of United States policies.” Medoff cited a published article by FDR in 1925 warning against mixing with “Asian blood,” and some callous comments about Jews were noted by his refugee policy adviser James McDonald and by Vice President Henry Wallace.
It is the policies that I focused upon, not FDR’s beliefs or state of mind. If Werner Cohn wants to defend the tardy and inadequate response of the US to the Holocaust, he’s entitled. But it’s an odd position to take. Since the amply documented antisemitic policy of FDR’s State Dept. almost succeeded in getting my parents killed, I see this differently.
Yet FDR was not rabid or Nazi-like in his prejudices. I never claimed that his “polite” or softer version of antisemitism was the sole reason for US policy failures in the face of the Holocaust. Still, it’s correct to cite this as a moral failing. And, along with Mr. Cohn, I still applaud FDR’s strategic foresight in the fight against Nazi Germany.
On another point, Mr. Cohn ignores the fact that my writing on the blog is not a “Tikkun” article, as such. It is not pre-approved and edited by Tikkun staff.