RUTHFULLY YOURS

NEW DOCUMENTS REVEAL FDR’S EUGENIC PROJECT TO ‘RESETTLE’ JEWS DURING WORLD WAR II By Steve Usdin
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/260862/m-project-franklin-delano-roosevelt-jews
As the Holocaust raged, the American president secretly asked his government to study the possible resettlement of remaining European refugees in Africa and South America. His goal: for Jews to be ‘spread thin all over the world.’

A new exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Americans and the Holocaust, explores Americans’ knowledge of and responses to Nazism, war, and genocide. An unstated question runs through the photographs, films, and artifacts: What explains FDR’s apparent indifference to the plight of the Jews? If he’d had complete freedom to act without concern for the political consequences, what would he have done? Visitors leave the museum without answers.

Roosevelt didn’t address these issues publicly, but confidential files kept in his personal safe in the White House and released to the public decades after his death, as well as correspondence in his personal files, provide valuable clues. They make it clear that the question of where to settle the Jews had been on FDR’s mind for years. While he was uncertain about whether they would be better off on the slopes of the Andes or the savannahs of central Africa, there was one place he knew he didn’t want them: the United States of America.

Among the files in Roosevelt’s safe were documents about the origins and goals of the “M Project,” a secret study he commissioned of options for post-war migration (hence “M”) of the millions of Europeans, especially Jews, expected to be displaced by the war. The President first discussed the project in the summer of 1942 with John Franklin Carter, a journalist, novelist, and former diplomat who ran an informal secret intelligence service for Roosevelt. Carter’s No. 2 was an anthropologist named Henry Field.

When President Harry S. Truman left office in January 1953, most Americans were glad to see him go. Since the introduction of presidential approval ratings, Truman’s 32 percent rating was the lowest for any departing president except for that of Richard Nixon, who 21 years later resigned amid the Watergate scandal.

Americans were tired of five consecutive Democratic presidential terms. The Depression and World War II were both over, and people wanted a different sort of leadership that could jump-start the economy.

The outsider Truman had been an accidental president to begin with. When an ailing President Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented fourth term in 1944, worried Democrat insiders panicked. They feared that far-left-wing Vice President Henry Wallace might end up president if Roosevelt died in office.

Party pros replaced Wallace with the obscure Truman, a Missouri senator. They assumed that if worse came to worse, the non-entity Truman would be a token caretaker president.

Earlier, Truman had been immersed in scandal, owing to his ties to corrupt Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast.

When Truman took office after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he knew relatively nothing about the grand strategy of World War II. No one had told him anything about the ongoing atomic bomb project.

But for the next seven-plus years, Truman shocked the country.

Over the objections of many in his Cabinet, he ordered the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan.