How FDR Betrayed European Jews

Before Barack Obama appeared on the scene American Jews worshipped at the altar of Franklin Roosevelt. They accepted him as their Messiah and believed that he showed the path to secular salvation.

When Hitler grew stronger in Europe, while the persecution and genocide of Jews proceeded apace, FDR did his best to ensure that European Jews could not resettle in the United States. While Japan was trying to find a way to resettle European Jews within the its empire, FDR was refusing to allow the St. Louis, filled with nearly a thousand Jewish refugees, to dock in America.

The Roosevelt record was abysmal, to say the least. FDR’s apologists have happily shifted the blame to Republicans, and have declared that, given the political calculus, FDR could have done no other. One might note that the silence coming from the White House must surely have influenced public opinion and that a great communicator like FDR could have at least tried to rally the nation to help save European Jews. He did not. As a moral leader, he failed miserably.

Now, thanks to an excerpt from a new book by Steven Usdin, we have a clearer idea of the answer. We know that Roosevelt was not just motivated by political expediency. His actions reflected his attitude-- which was racist and anti-Semitic.

Usdin raises the important question:

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?

At a time when Jews were systematically being persecuted, FDR was concerned about post-war resettlement. His personal files and his correspondence expose the truth:

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.

Considering that the Wannsee Conference, which detailed the “final solution” to the Jewish problem occurred in January, 1942, FDR’s concern for migration seems to be slightly off kilter. Consider the “M Project” which FDR kicked off in the summer of 1942:

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.

The people FDR chose to lead the project were clearly racists:

Roosevelt’s first choice to head the M Project was Aleš Hrdlička, curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History…. 

A prominent public intellectual who had dominated American physical anthropology for decades, Hrdlička was convinced of the superiority of the white race and obsessed with racial identity. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack he’d written to Roosevelt expressing the view that the “less developed skulls” of Japanese were proof that they were innately warlike and had a lower level of evolutionary development than other races. The president wrote back asking whether the “Japanese problem” could be solved through mass interbreeding….

Outlining the president’s charge for the committee, Carter told Hrdlička it was expected to “formulate agreed opinions as to problems arising out of racial admixtures and to consider the scientific principles involved in the process of miscegenation as contrasted with the opposing policies of so-called ‘racialism.’ ” The instructions were consistent with views Roosevelt had expressed for decades.

Roosevelt wanted to disperse Jewish refugees around the world. He wanted above all else that they not be allowed to congregate in any single locate.

Roosevelt’s goals for the committee were consistent with the views he had expressed in 1925. He wanted it to identify “the vacant places of the earth suitable for post-war settlement” and the “type of people who could live in those places.” Initial work was to focus on South America and Central Africa. Roosevelt wanted the committee to explore questions such as the probable outcomes from mixing people from various parts of Europe with the South American “base stock.”…

Roosevelt “also pointed out,” Carter informed Hrdlička, “that while most South American countries would be glad to admit Jewish immigration, it was on the condition that the Jewish group were not localized in the cities, they want no ‘Jewish colonies,’ ‘Italian colonies,’ etc.” Keeping with this theme, the president also tasked the committee with determining how to “resettle the Jews on the land and keep them there.”

The topic had been on Roosevelt’s mind since 1938.

Bowman understood what Roosevelt was trying to achieve through the M Project. Years earlier, in November 1938, he had undertaken research for FDR about the prospects for European settlement in South America. Requesting the research, Roosevelt wrote to Bowman: “Frankly, what I am rather looking for is the possibility of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited good agricultural lands to which Jewish colonies might be sent.” Roosevelt added that “such colonies need not be large but, in all probability, should be large enough for mutual cooperation and assistance—say fifty to one hundred thousand people in a given area.”

The Holocaust was proceeding apace and FDR was telling Winston Churchill about his plans for resettling the Jews:

Settlement contingencies for a wide range of peoples were studied, but when Roosevelt described the M Project to Churchill during a lunch at the White House in May 1943, he focused on one particular group. FDR described it as a study about “the problem of working out the best way to settle the Jewish question,” Vice President Henry Wallace, who attended the meeting, recorded in his diary. The solution, which the President endorsed, “essentially is to spread the Jews thin all over the world,” rather than allow them to congregate anywhere in large numbers.

It is all beyond horrifying. But, it shows clearly that a president revered in the Jewish community was a stone-cold anti-Semite. FDR's lack of concern for the Jews who were being persecuted and annihilated in Europe—the dog that didn’t bark—is beyond deplorable. He is talking as though it is not happening, and as though the real problem was not the millions who were being killed, but the survivors. Had FDR been a Republican, his statues would have long since been pulled down and destroyed.