RUTHFULLY YOURS

EDWARD ALEXANDER: A DOUBLE REVIEW

Posted By Ruth King on October 19th, 2012

Publ. Chicago Jewish Star October 17, 2012.

Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel,  by Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff (Washington: Wyman Institute, 2012).Millions of Jews to Rescue, by Samuel Merlin (Washington: Wyman Institute, 2012).

One of my earliest childhood memories is politically tainted. In November 1944, when I was not yet eight, my father assigned me to distribute “Vote for FDR” leaflets near (probably illegally near) a Brooklyn polling station. It was not a task that required  courage.  In my Brownsville neighborhood,  it would have been easier to find  a Jew who ate pork than one who would begrudge Roosevelt a fourth term as president in favor of Republican Thomas Dewey.  Every segment of American Jewry  embraced Roosevelt.  From right to left,  east European to German,  working class to middle class,  Jews adored the Commander in Chief of the war against Hitler. Rabbi Stephen Wise, the most important American Jewish leader of the time, said that American Jews “rightly look up to [FDR], revere him, and love him…No one would more deeply sorrow than I…if this feeling of Jewish homage…should be changed.” Wise sycophantically (Jeremiah might have said, idolatrously) referred to FDR  as “the All Highest.”

Yet the record of his administration with regard to the plight of European Jews being hunted and murdered  by Nazism was shameful. Wise himself wrote to a colleague in 1933 that “FDR has not lifted a finger on behalf of the Jews of Germany.” Indeed, ever since the publication of David Wyman’s Paper Walls and Henry Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue, it has been common knowledge that although the U.S. under FDR admitted more Jewish refugees than other Western nations between 1933 and 1945 its record was actually worse than theirs. “American ability to absorb immigration,” Wyman wrote,  “was vastly greater than that of the small European countries …Viewed in relation to capacity, the English, Dutch, French and others …were more generous than the United States.”

The whole tangled question of the abandonment of European Jewry by Roosevelt’s administration and  American Jewish leadership  is the subject of two new books by the founding director of  the David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Rafael Medoff,  one of the most meticulous and imaginative historians of his generation.  In Herbert Hoover and the Jews,  Medoff and  co-author Sonja Wentling  demonstrate that it was Hoover (as little liked by Jews as Dewey) who “urged opening America’s doors to Jewish refugee children, and Roosevelt who kept those doors closed “; it was  Hoover who during the Holocaust years “repeatedly spoke out for the Jews, while Roosevelt repeatedly turned away.” Among Hoover’s efforts on behalf of the hunted European Jews was his public support  (as honorary chairman) of  the Bergson Group’s Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe in July 1943.  Millions of Jews to Rescue is the detailed story (edited, annotated, and illustrated by Medoff) of the desperate Bergson campaign, as told by Samuel Merlin, one of its leaders.

Taken together, the two books require crucial revisions of the accepted view of Roosevelt’s culpability for the Jewish catastrophe,  of the internecine warfare between rival American-Jewish organizations,  of the limits and  still unrealized possibilities of Jews’ relationship to the Republican Party

The usual rationalization offered by FDR’s apologists for his unwillingness to admit Jewish refugees to this country, or to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz  has been that, in the first instance, he was stymied by antisemites entrenched  in the State Department, or that, in the second,  winning the war against Nazism was the best way to rescue European Jewry.  It was not, they claim, FDR’s fault that by the time the war was won, there were relatively few Jews left to be rescued. But the documentary evidence adduced by Medoff suggests darker explanations.

Two examples should suffice.   In the Roosevelt Papers one finds the following “Memorandum for the President’s Files” on The Casablanca Conference of January 1943:

“The President stated that … the whole Jewish problem should be studied very carefully and that progress should be definitely planned … the number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions…should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population….The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews.”  Or this,  from the Diaries of Henry Morgenthau , Jan. 27, 1942: “Then Leo [Crowley] said that for no apparent reason whatsoever the President proceeded to give him the following lecture. ‘Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and the Jews are here on sufferance…It is up to both of you [Crowley and Morgenthau] to go along with anything that I want at this time.’”

When the results of the 1944 election were tallied President Roosevelt had won over 90 % of the Jewish vote. This seemed to prove that –to quote Irving Howe—“Jewish organizations lacked political leverage with the Roosevelt administration precisely because the American Jewish vote was so completely at the disposal of the president. Had they been able to threaten that, unless the government took more courageous steps to save the refugees, crucial swing votes in crucial states might be withdrawn, it is at least possible that they could have had some effect.”

But  Howe was misled by the wheedling voice of common sense. Medoff and Wentling present a more complicated,  perhaps optimistic, view of American Jewry’s relationship with the Republican Party.  Although Wise and  the Jewish “establishment” kept their distance from Hoover and Republican politicians generally, the Yiddish-language press began, in late 1943, to allege that “Roosevelt has betrayed the Jews,”  taken them and their votes for granted. Elements in the Republican Party , for  humanitarian and Christian as well as political reasons, responded with alacrity to this overture. Hoover himself, Senator Robert Taft and Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce espoused strongly pro-Zionist and pro-rescue planks that were incorporated into  the Republican convention’s  1944  platform. Only this threat to their monopoly of the “Jewish vote,”  Medoff and Wentling argue,  forced FDR and the Democrats to adopt similar planks , which have ever since remained unshakable for both parties. Republican cynics like James Baker may continue to  say  “Fuck the Jews; they don’t vote for us anyway.”  But  the importance of that initial long-ago concession to the Jewish vote  is clear when we remember that it is the reason why America remains,  even now under a president in whose  warm heart there is always a cold spot for the Jews,  Israel’s sole reliable ally.

Edward Alexander’s most recent book is THE STATE OF THE JEWS: A Critical Appraisal.

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