- Oct 6, 2008
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FDR's troubling view of Jews
What FDR said about Jews in private
His personal sentiments about Jews may help explain America's tepid response to the Holocaust.
President Franklin Roosevelt sits at the steering wheel of his automobile… (Associated Press )
In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called "the best way to settle the Jewish question."
Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman) "to spread the Jews thin all over the world." The diary entry adds: "The president said he had tried this out in [Meriwether] County, Georgia [where Roosevelt lived in the 1920s] and at Hyde Park on the basis of adding four or five Jewish families at each place. He claimed that the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that."
Roosevelt's "best way" remark is condescending and distasteful, and coming from anyone else it would probably be regarded as anti-Semitism. But more than that, FDR's support for "spreading the Jews thin" may hold the key to understanding a subject that has been at the center of controversy for decades: the American government's tepid response to the Holocaust.
Here's the paradox. The U.S. immigration system severely limited the number of German Jews admitted during the Nazi years to about 26,000 annually — but even that quota was less than 25% filled during most of the Hitler era, because the Roosevelt administration piled on so many extra requirements for would-be immigrants. For example, starting in 1941, merely leaving behind a close relative in Europe would be enough to disqualify an applicant — on the absurd assumption that the Nazis could threaten the relative and thereby force the immigrant into spying for Hitler.
Why did the administration actively seek to discourage and disqualify Jewish refugees from coming to the United States? Why didn't the president quietly tell his State Department (which administered the immigration system) to fill the quotas for Germany and Axis-occupied countries to the legal limit? That alone could have saved 190,000 lives. It would not have required a fight with Congress or the anti-immigration forces; it would have involved minimal political risk to the president.
Every president's policy decisions are shaped by a variety of factors, some political, some personal. In Roosevelt's case, a pattern of private remarks about Jews, some of which I recently discovered at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem and from other sources, may be significant.
In 1923, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at the college and helped institute a quota to limit the number admitted. In 1938, he privately suggested that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were therefore to blame for provoking anti-Semitism there. In 1941, he remarked at a Cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon. In 1943, he told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions "should be definitely limited" so as to "eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany."
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Why do you feel the need to use debunked lies to support your argument? I mean I used plain fact. Basic things that are proven. Here you have the quota (actually there was never one put on paper anywhere according to a study buy Richard Breitman and Alan J Lichtman). So why do you feel the need to keep reusing lies that have not been found to be true.
Why do you keep saying what someone says in private is more important than their actual actions they take? Did he follow through with the "lets spread them out" Idea? Of course not. Oswego and NYC became two large spots where they were allowed to choose to live together. But hey, he said "lets spread them out" so that's what matters, right? Not the reality of him choosing to do the opposite?
By your belief system, Bill Cosby could be a nice guy as long as at some point in his private life someone said he said he respects women. Then all the rapes don't matter anymore because it's right there in a diary.
In what way is "severely limiting" the Jewish Refugees actually taking in a full quarter of them. That's right, more than any other allied or neutral country by far. But because it wasn't unlimited, lets call the LARGEST intake of refugees a severe limitation right? The US has taken in about 19,000 syrian Refugees out of 5 million. FDR took in over 130,000 Jewish Refugees out of just over 500,000. I mean we've taken in less than .4% of Syrian refugees. He took in about 25% of Jewish Refugees despite his isolationist leanings.
You are saying that's proof he was a racist. Ok, what refugee crisis has the US answered better? What foreign refugee crisis did a president step up and say "we'll take more than FDR took"?? Because if the LARGEST refugee adoption in US history (though not the largest worldwide refugee crisis) was FDR taking in the jews, it's not making him look anti-semitic is it?
WHEN YOU HAVE TO CREATE OR RE-USE LIES TO SUPPORT YOUR ARGUMENT IT RUINS YOUR ARGUMENT.
Yeah- it is pretty odd.
In order to support there argument that FDR was an anti-semite- they want to portray him as blocking Jewish refugees from Europe.
But Donald Trump ran on a platform of blocking Muslim refugees from the Middle East- and they will argue on and on that that is not bigoted at all.
Donald Trump said that Mexicans are rapists. FDR never called Jews rapists.
"....of blocking Muslim refugees...."
I know you're an imbecile...but equating Jewish folk who wanted nothing more than being allowed to live with 7th century savages who dedicate their existence to the slaughter of innocent human being....'
Point out the '7th century savages who dedicate their existence to the slaughter of innocent human beings in this photo:
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