RUTHFULLY YOURS

This illuminating book provides many new insights into Herbert Hoover’s political career. It examines his responses to the horrific pogroms in Poland immediately after World War I and to the Arab slaughter of Jews across Palestine in 1929. Most importantly, the book documents how Revisionist Zionists persuaded prominent Republicans, including former president Hoover, to join them in pressing for U.S. government action to rescue European Jews during the Holocaust. Hoover’s role administering European food relief sensitized him to Jews’ intense suffering after World War I, the result of savage anti-Semitic persecution and severe economic distress.

He enabled the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC) to evade Polish government restrictions on Jewish organizations sending aid to Polish Jewry by having his own relief organization funnel AJJDC funds into Poland. Hoover’s Jewish aide Lewis Strauss praised him as “the only U.S. government official to effectively press Poland and its prime minister to act against the pogromists” (14). The authors also show that Hoover’s empathy for Polish Jews was limited by his fear that they were not sufficiently enthusiastic about Polish nationalism. Hoover maintained an isolationist stance during the 1929 Palestine pogroms, the first serious foreign policy crisis of his presidency.

He neither intervened to protect Palestinian Jewry nor pressured the British to do so. The authors note, however, that he at least “remained steadfast in his support for the upbuilding of Jewish Palestine” (58). In 1928, Hoover extolled the work of Zionist settlers in transforming Palestine, which, in his words, had remained “desolate and neglected for centuries” (48). As president, he sent statements of support to the Zionist Organization of America and to the American Palestine Committee, a Christian Zionist organization, when it was established. Notably, days before leaving the White House, Hoover instructed U.S. ambassador to Germany Frederick Sackett “to exert every influence on the Hitler regime” to stop the persecution of German Jewry (64).

Although hundreds of thousands of Americans had already staged massive street demonstrations and rallies to protest Nazi anti-Semitism, President Roosevelt told his ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, appointed in June 1933, that Nazi persecution of Jews was not a matter with which the U.S. government should be officially concerned. After Kristallnacht, ex-president Hoover moved away from his earlier support for immigration restriction and endorsed the Wagner-Rogers bill to admit 20,000 refugee children from Germany into the United States, above the annual quota for Germany. He lobbied members of the House Immigration Committee to support the bill, which President Roosevelt did not endorse.

Hoover’s most important contribution during his post-presidential career was the backing he gave the Revisionist Zionists in their campaign to persuade the U.S. government to initiate immediate measures to rescue as many European Jews as possible from annihilation and to mobilize the public in that effort. Leading this effort was Hillel Kook (Peter Bergson), head of the Bergson Group, and Eliahu Ben-Horin and Benzion Netanyahu, directing the New Zionist Organization of America. President Roosevelt’s lack of interest in rescuing Jews led the Revisionists to turn to prominent Republicans for assistance. Roosevelt’s indifference was dramatized at the Bermuda Conference in April 1943, ostensibly called to address refugee issues.

The Roosevelt administration made no effort to relax immigration quotas for countries whose Jews were being annihilated. It would not even use troop ships returning empty from Europe to transport Jewish refugees to the United States. Hoover was willing to challenge the Roosevelt administration publicly on the refugee issue. As the nation’s only living ex-president during World War II, his views drew attention. Hoover’s contribution to the rescue campaign included signing an appeal that the Bergson Group placed in newspapers denouncing the Bermuda Conference as a “cruel mockery” and calling for immediate action to rescue as many European Jews as possible from the “Nazi Death-Trap.” He served as honorary chairman of the Bergson Group’s Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe. The ex-president delivered one of the conference’s keynote addresses, in which he endorsed the Bergson Group’s drive to find temporary havens for Jewish refugees.

Amity Shlaes reviews two new books about the former president and argues that the New Deal was simply a more intense, less constitutional version of Hoover’s policies—and both failed to yield recovery.

Imagine a U.S. president who could personally stare down spear-wielding warriors seeking to penetrate an undermanned Western compound in a remote city. A president who could map the mineral resources of Russia and organize the feeding of whole states or even countries following a disaster. A president who could match John Quincy Adams in his familiarity with the streets of London, Alexander Hamilton in mastery of finance, Dwight Eisenhower in administrative experience and Ronald Reagan in keen appreciation of the evils of communism.

The U.S. did once elect such a president—Herbert Hoover. Voters chose him in a landslide in 1928, and when the Crash of 1929 hit, Main Street sighed with relief at its own good fortune. The Great Engineer, as Hoover was known, could be counted on to engineer them out of trouble.
Herbert Hoover in the White House

By Charles Rappleye

Simon & Schuster, 554 pages, $32.50

Yet when the crash came, the Great Engineer failed. Hoover did not reverse the crash or prevent the years of Depression that followed. By the end of his first and only term, public esteem for Hoover had plummeted so far that the incumbent could not take even his home state, California, in the 1932 election. Soon a caricature of the 31st president began to take hold: that of an unimaginative, credentialed elitist who had permitted a catastrophe so great that it would take four terms for a kind and collectivist president, Franklin Roosevelt, to counter him. The caricature has only hardened down the decades. In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. found voters ranking Hoover 20th out of 33 presidents. In a 2015 poll he appeared near the bottom, 38th out of 44.
Herbert Hoover: A Life

By Glen Jeansonne

New American Library, 455 pages, $28
Over the years a number of writers have sought to lift Hoover’s ranking and status, including George Nash in several volumes of biography; Kendrick Clements in “The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary”; and Joan Hoff Wilson in “Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive.” Now two further revisionists are having a go. In “Herbert Hoover: A Life,” Glen Jeansonne portrays a president more centrist than extreme, a leader who might have succeeded in a second term. With “Herbert Hoover in the White House,” Charles Rappleye makes the case that though the Great Engineer represented “the embodiment of progress and competence,” his temperament and bad luck caused him to botch the job.

Any Hoover upgrade must start with his career, which rocketed skyward at a velocity warranting a Harvard Business School case study. The classic early adapter, Hoover while still in his teens placed a bet that studies in a little-known start-up college in “Polo Alta,” as one newspaper spelled it, might yield more than attendance at an established university. The knowledge Hoover garnered from his Stanford engineering professors helped to win him a position directing Australian mines. From Australia the youthful “doctor of sick mines” (he grew a beard and ’stache to look older) moved on to China, where he dug a harbor and surveyed and reorganized China’s mineral resources. It was in Tientsin that Hoover and his able wife, Lou, fended off an assault of rebellious warriors—the Boxers of the Boxer Rebellion.

Richard H. Schwartz accuses his fellow Orthodox Jews of stealing Judaism—even as he attempts to hijack it for his own environmentalist creed.

A man who fell in love with progressive politics first and Orthodox Judaism second, Schwartz married the two in his mind and is now frustrated that the shidduch—or love match—won’t take hold in the larger community. The roughly 10 percent of Jews who are Orthodox are stubbornly conservative. Schwartz laments that, while an overwhelming 78 percent of all Jews went for Barack Obama in 2008, an almost identical percentage of Orthodox Jews voted for John McCain. Given that Schwartz praises Judaism for its heritage of non-conformity (starting with Abraham), he might have celebrated the Orthodox for going their own way. But no, Schwartz seeks 100 percent Jewish support for the current pieties of the left wing of the Democratic Party.

Although Schwartz admits that “Judaism does not recommend any one type of economic system,” that doesn’t stop him from essentially arguing that it does—socialism. He quotes the famous passage where the Prophet Samuel warns the Israelites against a king who will “take your daughters as perfumers and bakers; he will seize your choice fields, vineyards, and olive groves and give them to his courtiers.” Schwartz asks the reader to substitute “international corporations” for “kings.” CEOs are the “corporate kings,” he says. But why not substitute “government” for “king”? Surely, that’s nearer to the original meaning of the text. After all, a CEO can’t conscript you, tax you, or claim eminent domain over your property. These are the types of powers to which Samuel refers.

But the issue that transcends all others for Schwartz is climate change. In apocalyptic fervor, he is right up there with Al Gore and Bill McKibben: Climate change is “the most urgent, immediate problem facing the world today,” with virtually all climate scientists agreeing that “climate change poses an existential threat to life as we know it—and that humans are the cause and the potential solution.” Schwartz invokes Talmudic and Biblical teachings on how mankind should care for the Earth to support his contention that Jews must take a leading role in fighting climate change.

While his citations may cast Judaism in an admirable light, they have nothing to do with climate change, an issue that is far from settled. Schwartz states over and over that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change “poses a major threat to humanity.” But that statistic has been thoroughly debunked. Expert opinion about the severity of climate change is far less uniform than it is typically portrayed.

Schwartz does not for a moment entertain the possibility that the global warming apocalypse (like all apocalyptic forecasts before it) may not materialize and, if it doesn’t, that his drastic efforts to fight it by making everyone a vegan and substituting expensive renewable energy for oil and gas would undercut his other political goals—above all, improving the lot of the poor worldwide.

To enlist Jews in the global warming crusade and other progressive causes, Schwartz enlists the concept of tikkun olam (literally “world repair”). Since the 1950s, this Hebrew phrase has been seized on by Jews who want to make radical ideas more palatable to other Jews.

Below is Richard Baehr’s review of David Horowitz’s new book, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama (reprinted from American Thinker with permission). The book is volume 7 of The Black Book of the American Left, a multi-volume collection of David Horowitz’s conservative writings that will, when completed, be the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.) We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com which features Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1-7 of this 9-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.

Every year, there is some report of the blissful ignorance of American history demonstrated by the supposedly best and brightest at elite American universities. Suffice it to say the collected writings of David Horowitz on the American Left, which constitute part of a solid foundation for understanding the last half century of American politics, are nowhere to be found on any college or high school reading list.

Horowitz’s latest book, The Left in Power: Clinton to Obama, is the seventh volume in his nine-volume collection, The Black Book of the American Left. This new volume provides a collection of his writings over the last quarter century, focusing primarily on the Left’s control in our government and culture. As Horowitz reveals, even during the Bush years, conservatives were on the defense and leftists controlled the narrative as they attempted to destroy Bush and his chances for re-election in 2004. Their primary mode of attack was to undermine America’s efforts in Iraq almost from the start of the conflict, when just months earlier a majority of Senate Democrats and near half of House Democrats had supported the President. The Left then destroyed Bush’s second term with bogus charges of racist neglect in the handling of Hurricane Katrina. There was plenty of incompetence in the response to Katrina, but local and state officials — all Democrats, of course, and many of them African American — were the principal operators on the ground during the crisis.

The immediate abandonment of support for the Iraq war effort was a signal event in American history, sending a message that a large part of the Democratic Party was not remotely concerned about the morale of our men and women fighting overseas. The weak effort by some Democrats to hold onto an ounce of patriotic resolve — “end the war, support the troops” — was designed more for campaign speeches than any meaningful attempt to convey national unity for the effort underway by our armed forces. So too, the obsession with Abu Ghraib gave the lie to the Democrats’ “support our troops” message, as a broad brush was used to paint the incident as somehow what you would expect from our military on a routine basis.

Horowitz outlines this narrative, faulting the Bush administration for failing to fight harder to present its story of why we went into Iraq and the risks if we had done nothing. Regrettably, the Bush administration never had a chance to get a better defense of the Iraq war out to the media. Most in the media considered the Bush administration illegitimate due to its narrow victory in the 2000 presidential contest, a lie to be sure. Unfortunately, it is almost certainly true that the media today are far more in the bag for the left than ten or twenty years ago and work harder at pushing the left’s agenda. The soft liberalism of Walter Cronkite has been replaced by cable and national network anchors who routinely bury stories embarrassing to their side and focus on those that can do damage to the other side. During the current Presidential election cycle, we have seen the most prestigious media organs explain why it is necessary and appropriate for them to be biased this year. It is a special time, they argue, because Trump is, in their view, a unique threat to the Republic.

On the other hand, the media have been loath to consider the damage to the country caused by Barack Obama — the loss of respect abroad for America’s will to fight, the degradation of our military readiness, the fraying of ties with allies, and the near obsessive outreach to America’s enemies that led to agreements such as the nuclear deal with Iran, best described as an abject surrender of American interests that will lead to the funding of fanatical nuclear regime. About 85% of those supposedly sensible pro-Israel Democrats walked the plank behind their great leader on that deal, with no visible regrets to date. There was simply too much political risk to oppose the first black president of their party. The media were happy to parrot the administration’s talking points for the nuclear deal, something the manipulators crowed over at the White House.

At least in the propaganda use of Abu Ghraib, the Left was honest in revealing what it thinks about the military. As Horowitz outlines in article after article, the Left is fighting a war that most Americans do not see, disguising its intentions through its aggressive, unceasing promotion of “progressive” policies “to make America a better place.” This commitment to deception emerges, Horowitz reveals, from the allegiance to the ideology of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” a formative doctrine for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The progressive goal is to achieve a new society that has never been seen before in this country, though it has been promised and has catastrophically failed in many places around the globe. In America, the Left is not only unconcerned with selling their program to the public, but also, Horowitz argues, it is fearful of the result of voters knowing what it is pursuing. One prime example was the admission of MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber that health care law would never have made it through Congress if it had been presented honestly.