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Friday April 20, 2007

Author ponders if FDR deserved all that Jewish love

by stephen mark dobbs
correspondent

No president of the United States was better supported by the American Jewish community than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at his peak commanded 90 percent of the Jewish vote. FDR was a hero to millions of Jews who revered the four-time president for his New Deal social programs and war leadership.

But in “Roosevelt and the Holocaust,” author Robert L. Beir confronts an agonizing question: Could the same iconic FDR who was universally admired by Jews have done more to save European Jewry from Hitler? Was FDR passive or indifferent to the grave peril faced by Jews? Could America have helped to save those lives?

Considerable scholarship has been expended on such queries. Historians accuse, as did David Wyman in “The Abandonment of the Jews” (1984), as well as defend, as in Michael Beschloss’ “The Conquerers.” More specific questions, such as “Should FDR have ordered the bombing of Auschwitz and its rail lines?” have been argued for 60 years.

Beir, who declares “I am a Rooseveltian” with a sense of reverence, is profoundly troubled by the accusations of culpability. Yet, while Beir’s findings are disturbing, it must be noted that there really isn’t anything new in his story. FDR’s failure to open America’s doors to refugees fleeing Nazi Europe — and a hands-off policy by his State Department and the military — are well documented.

The author embeds his narrative in a memoir of his own political awakening, and describes growing up in an America where nativist sentiment in the 1930s and ‘40s was so strong that anti-Semitism, racial and ethnic quotas and outright violence against minorities were deeply ingrained. It was the era of Father Coughlin, the Ku Klux Klan and the Japanese internment.

Did the president encourage the isolationism and nativist voices of the America Firsters and German American Bund through his silence about the plight of millions of Jews facing Hitler? Do we better understand why our nation and its leader failed to act more decisively in rescuing what proved to be doomed communities throughout occupied Europe?

Clearly America at war was never in an uproar over the boycott and pillaging of Jewish shops and businesses, book-burning bonfires, property confiscations and reports of beatings and executions that found their way into the press. Numerous attempts by Jewish leaders like Rabbi Stephen Wise and others were made to alert the president.

Yet even the media was divided over the extent of the menace. The Chicago Tribune reported “the shadow of a campaign of murder.” Meanwhile, the New York Times (Jewish-owned!) countered that “Nazi plans for massacre of the Jews are wild rumors.” Many Jews also stuck their heads in the sand, prompting Beir to ask: “Did our assimilation, our relative comfort, get in the way of a more effective response?”

Certainly one indictment of Roosevelt is that he allowed the State Department to evade and neglect the growing evidence. The department, whose rescue and refugee affairs were overseen by the decidedly unfriendly-to-the-Jews John Mc Cloy, vociferously opposed helpful legislation. It is an understatement to say that insufficient international diplomacy was expended.

For the warriors and their commander in chief, concentration on winning the war trumped all other considerations, even genocide. The American military adamantly opposed diverting the Air Force to bomb Auschwitz. This became a controversy in the Jewish community as well. David Ben-Gurion argued that “We should not ask the Allies to bomb places where there are Jews.” Roosevelt genuinely believed that the single best action to be taken in behalf of Hitler’s victims was to defeat Hitler.

Scholars will continue to examine these questions and debate whether President Roosevelt could have or ought to have done more.

In any case, Beir has produced a helpful study of inefficiency and inaction in America’s response to the Holocaust.

“Roosevelt and the Holocaust: A Rooseveltian Examines the Policies and Remembers the Times” by Robert L. Beir, (320 pages, Barricade Books, $26.95).

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