(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies,
The Jews were not the only minority group whose abandonment by President Franklin D. Roosevelt was misrepresented and minimized in “The Roosevelts,” the recent Ken Burns documentary. Japanese-Americans, too, received short shrift in the 7-part PBS series. And there is a crucial connection between FDR’s response to the Holocaust and his mass internment of the Japanese.
In episode #6, Burns referred briefly to President Roosevelt’s decision to place more than 110,000 Japanese –most of them U.S. citizens– in internment camps during World War Two. But instead of examining the reasons for FDR’s actions, “The Roosevelts” quickly turned its attention to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who sympathized with the internees and visited one of the detention centers.
Burns used the same device in episode #5, when referring to the Roosevelt administration closing America’s doors to Jewish refugees who were trying to flee the Nazis. Instead of exploring the reasons for FDR’s attitudes toward immigration, Burns described the First Lady’s sympathy for Jewish refugees.
In effect, Burns used Mrs. Roosevelt as a cover for the president’s troubling actions. In doing so, Burns missed –or ducked?– an important aspect of FDR’s worldview, which had a direct impact on U.S. policy.
While living in Warm Springs, Georgia, in the 1920s, Roosevelt authored a number of overheated articles about Asian immigration to the United States. He warned against granting citizenship to “non-assimilable immigrants,” and opposed Japanese immigration on the grounds that “mingling Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.”
In another column, FDR said he favored the admission of some Europeans, so long as they had “blood of the right sort.” He argued that immigration should be restricted until the U.S. could thoroughly “digest” those foreigners who had already been admitted. He proposed limiting future immigration to those who could be most quickly and easily assimilated, including through dispersal around the country.
FDR viewed the Japanese, including Japanese-Americans, as having innate racial characteristics that made them unassimilable and untrustworthy. Prof. Greg Robinson (an American historian at the University of Quebec), who revealed Roosevelt’s articles in his 2001 book, By Order of the President, concluded that the president’s private views about the Japanese played a significant role in shaping his decision to intern them–a decision FDR reached even though no cases of treason or espionage by Japanese-Americans had been uncovered.
Roosevelt’s remarks about Jews bore a striking resemblance to what he said about Asians.
In a newspaper interview in 1920, when he was the Democratic candidate for vice president, FDR said that “the greater part of the foreign population of the City of New York” should have been “distributed to different localities upstate” so that they would feel pressured to “conform to the manners and the customs and the requirements of their new home.”
Roosevelt spoke privately, on numerous occasions, about the alleged racial characteristics of Jews, the danger of allowing Jews to concentrate in particular areas, and the pernicious Jewish influence on various economies.
In 1923, for example, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt helped institute a quota to limit the number of Jewish students admitted to the college. In a conversation with American Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in 1938, Roosevelt claimed that Jewish domination of the Polish economy was what caused antisemitism in Poland. In 1939, FDR told U.S. Senator Burton Wheeler he was glad that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins.” In 1941, the president remarked at a cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon.
Meeting with government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa in January 1943, FDR said that the number of local Jews practicing law, medicine, and other professions “should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population.” Otherwise, the president said, there would be a recurrence of “the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany” because of their alleged overrepresentation in various fields.
At a private White House luncheon later that year, President Roosevelt told Prime Minister Winston Churchill that “the best way to settle the Jewish question” was “essentially to spread the Jews thin all over the world.” Roosevelt said that this approach had been “tried out” in Meriwether County, Georgia, and in Hyde Park, New York “on the basis of adding four or five Jewish families at each place,” and “the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.”
FDR also exhibited a fondness for ‘Jewish jokes.’ Racially-tinged humor, of course, sometimes reflects the speaker’s genuine feelings of disdain toward the target of the joke. At the 1945 Yalta conference, when asked by Stalin whether he would make any concessions in his upcoming meeting with the king of Saudi Arabia, Roosevelt joked “that there was only one concession he thought he might offer and that was to give him the six million Jews in the United States.”
Much of what we know about FDR’s unpleasant jokes about Jews actually comes from the same historian who wrote the script for the Ken Burns documentary–Geoffrey C. Ward.
In his 1989 book, A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, Ward recounted a fishing trip that Roosevelt took with friends off the coast of Florida in 1923. One of his friends “hooked and landed a 42-pound Jewfish. ‘…I thought we left New York to get away from the Jews,’ [the friend’s] wife said, and Franklin thought the remark so good he included it in his log.”
Elsewhere in that log, according to Ward, FDR added a little Jewish joke of his own: “The tip end of Florida is where Jonah had his trying experience–he was a Hebrew and hence cast up.” Roosevelt’s friend and closest political adviser, Louis Howe, later presented FDR with an album of anecdotes, photos, and illustrations from the fishing trip, including a drawing of –as Ward describes it– “a Jewfish with a prominent nose and a sort of crest from which hung the triple balls of a pawnbroker’s sign.”
In the book, Ward also recounts (albeit in a footnote) a revealing interview that he conducted with Curtis Roosevelt, one of the president’s grandchildren. Curtis told Ward that he “recalled hearing the President tell mildly anti-Semitic stories in the White House.” According to Ward, “The protagonists [in FDR’s jokes] were always Lower East Side Jews with heavy accents…”
But Ward did not see fit to mention anything about FDR’s private remarks about Jews in his script for Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts.” That’s unfortunate, because it would have helped viewers better understand both Roosevelt’s refusal to open America’s doors to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, and his internment of the Japanese.
Neither Jews nor Japanese had what FDR considered “blood of the right sort.” He believed both groups possessed innate racial characteristics that made them untrustworthy. Keeping out as many as possible, dispersing the others around the country, putting the Japanese in detention camps during the war–all this was consistent with Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of how America should look and how it should treat potentially dangerous minority groups.
Thus, once again, when it came to understanding President Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust, Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts” got it wrong.
The Jews were not the only minority group whose abandonment by President Franklin D. Roosevelt was misrepresented and minimized in “The Roosevelts,” the recent Ken Burns documentary. Japanese-Americans, too, received short shrift in the 7-part PBS series. And there is a crucial connection between FDR’s response to the Holocaust and his mass internment of the Japanese.
In episode #6, Burns referred briefly to President Roosevelt’s decision to place more than 110,000 Japanese –most of them U.S. citizens– in internment camps during World War Two. But instead of examining the reasons for FDR’s actions, “The Roosevelts” quickly turned its attention to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who sympathized with the internees and visited one of the detention centers.
Burns used the same device in episode #5, when referring to the Roosevelt administration closing America’s doors to Jewish refugees who were trying to flee the Nazis. Instead of exploring the reasons for FDR’s attitudes toward immigration, Burns described the First Lady’s sympathy for Jewish refugees.
In effect, Burns used Mrs. Roosevelt as a cover for the president’s troubling actions. In doing so, Burns missed –or ducked?– an important aspect of FDR’s worldview, which had a direct impact on U.S. policy.
While living in Warm Springs, Georgia, in the 1920s, Roosevelt authored a number of overheated articles about Asian immigration to the United States. He warned against granting citizenship to “non-assimilable immigrants,” and opposed Japanese immigration on the grounds that “mingling Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.”
In another column, FDR said he favored the admission of some Europeans, so long as they had “blood of the right sort.” He argued that immigration should be restricted until the U.S. could thoroughly “digest” those foreigners who had already been admitted. He proposed limiting future immigration to those who could be most quickly and easily assimilated, including through dispersal around the country.
FDR viewed the Japanese, including Japanese-Americans, as having innate racial characteristics that made them unassimilable and untrustworthy. Prof. Greg Robinson (an American historian at the University of Quebec), who revealed Roosevelt’s articles in his 2001 book, By Order of the President, concluded that the president’s private views about the Japanese played a significant role in shaping his decision to intern them–a decision FDR reached even though no cases of treason or espionage by Japanese-Americans had been uncovered.
Roosevelt’s remarks about Jews bore a striking resemblance to what he said about Asians.
In a newspaper interview in 1920, when he was the Democratic candidate for vice president, FDR said that “the greater part of the foreign population of the City of New York” should have been “distributed to different localities upstate” so that they would feel pressured to “conform to the manners and the customs and the requirements of their new home.”
Roosevelt spoke privately, on numerous occasions, about the alleged racial characteristics of Jews, the danger of allowing Jews to concentrate in particular areas, and the pernicious Jewish influence on various economies.
In 1923, for example, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt helped institute a quota to limit the number of Jewish students admitted to the college. In a conversation with American Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in 1938, Roosevelt claimed that Jewish domination of the Polish economy was what caused antisemitism in Poland. In 1939, FDR told U.S. Senator Burton Wheeler he was glad that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins.” In 1941, the president remarked at a cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon.
Meeting with government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa in January 1943, FDR said that the number of local Jews practicing law, medicine, and other professions “should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population.” Otherwise, the president said, there would be a recurrence of “the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany” because of their alleged overrepresentation in various fields.
At a private White House luncheon later that year, President Roosevelt told Prime Minister Winston Churchill that “the best way to settle the Jewish question” was “essentially to spread the Jews thin all over the world.” Roosevelt said that this approach had been “tried out” in Meriwether County, Georgia, and in Hyde Park, New York “on the basis of adding four or five Jewish families at each place,” and “the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.”
FDR also exhibited a fondness for ‘Jewish jokes.’ Racially-tinged humor, of course, sometimes reflects the speaker’s genuine feelings of disdain toward the target of the joke. At the 1945 Yalta conference, when asked by Stalin whether he would make any concessions in his upcoming meeting with the king of Saudi Arabia, Roosevelt joked “that there was only one concession he thought he might offer and that was to give him the six million Jews in the United States.”
Much of what we know about FDR’s unpleasant jokes about Jews actually comes from the same historian who wrote the script for the Ken Burns documentary–Geoffrey C. Ward.
In his 1989 book, A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, Ward recounted a fishing trip that Roosevelt took with friends off the coast of Florida in 1923. One of his friends “hooked and landed a 42-pound Jewfish. ‘…I thought we left New York to get away from the Jews,’ [the friend’s] wife said, and Franklin thought the remark so good he included it in his log.”
Elsewhere in that log, according to Ward, FDR added a little Jewish joke of his own: “The tip end of Florida is where Jonah had his trying experience–he was a Hebrew and hence cast up.” Roosevelt’s friend and closest political adviser, Louis Howe, later presented FDR with an album of anecdotes, photos, and illustrations from the fishing trip, including a drawing of –as Ward describes it– “a Jewfish with a prominent nose and a sort of crest from which hung the triple balls of a pawnbroker’s sign.”
In the book, Ward also recounts (albeit in a footnote) a revealing interview that he conducted with Curtis Roosevelt, one of the president’s grandchildren. Curtis told Ward that he “recalled hearing the President tell mildly anti-Semitic stories in the White House.” According to Ward, “The protagonists [in FDR’s jokes] were always Lower East Side Jews with heavy accents…”
But Ward did not see fit to mention anything about FDR’s private remarks about Jews in his script for Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts.” That’s unfortunate, because it would have helped viewers better understand both Roosevelt’s refusal to open America’s doors to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, and his internment of the Japanese.
Neither Jews nor Japanese had what FDR considered “blood of the right sort.” He believed both groups possessed innate racial characteristics that made them untrustworthy. Keeping out as many as possible, dispersing the others around the country, putting the Japanese in detention camps during the war–all this was consistent with Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of how America should look and how it should treat potentially dangerous minority groups.
Thus, once again, when it came to understanding President Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust, Ken Burns’ “The Roosevelts” got it wrong.