Et tu, FDR
Former NY mayor Ed Koch reveals new evidence of genuine anti-Semitism on the part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
The document which Dr. Medoff sent me last week, concerning FDR and the Holocaust, was frankly shocking. It had to do with the Allies’ occupation of North Africa, which they liberated from the Nazis in November 1942. At the time, President Roosevelt publicly pledged the Allies would do away with the anti-Jewish laws that had been in force in the region. But when FDR met in Casablanca with local government leaders in January 1943, he took a very different line. The transcript of those discussions, which Dr. Medoff cites, reveals what FDR said about the status of the 330,000 Jews living in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia: “The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) 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 toward 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.”
Did FDR also propose that “quota-system” for the U.S?
I don’t know, but such quotas were very common at the time. For instance, medical schools limited how many Jews they would admit, regardless of qualifications, and according to Isaac Asimov’s autobiography the chemical industry was largely closed to Jews.
Odd. My wife’s uncle, who was of Asimov’s generation, spent a career as a research chemist for a large chemical company. His last name was Cohen, so they probably suspected he was Jewish.
Well, is not affirmative action, in education and professionally the same? They do effectively limit the number of Asian-Americans admitted to many universities and federal contracts limit the number of caucasions, rigth?
Hmmmmm….looking at that list….”lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc.”…..
There’s no one racial group that dominates them today….but they are predominately leftist moonbats.
Maybe there should be a law that says, “The number of leftist moonbats engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the leftist moonbat population in the US bears to the whole of the US.”
That actually doesn’t sound like too bad of an idea…..though it wouldn’t work well for me, personally, ’cause my profession (accounting) is full of conservatives and libertarians (constantly preparing tax returns and dealing with regulations will do that to you).
uhm…i think that by your standards a leftist moonbat would be anybody who would ever consider non voting for an outright conservative, which would be at least 50%. So that number would be about right where it is now.
Also, yeah, FDR clearly hated Jews. His whole scheme of trying to get the US in the War to take down the Nazis was a big plan to oppress and harm the Jewish people.
This is the dumbest thing ever.
PS: I’m conservative, I just appreciate the application of common sense and don’t like libeling American presidents as anti-semites when their actions, whether it was fully intended to or not, provided for the destruction of Naziism and the fascist threat to Jews and the entire world.
What a bunch of unpatriotic louts
Had Roosevelt’s concern been the preservation of Europe’s Jews, he had plenty of opportunities. Hitler cynically offered to release the German Jews to any nation that would like to have them. He found few takers on either side of the Atlantic. I think it would be fair to say that FDR shared the prejudices of his class, although not the politics.
John –
The U.S. didn’t fight the Nazis to save the Jews.
No matter how many times the White House anti-Semitism is revealed the Jews who trust the Left continue to hold FDR as some sort of saint
They, like all of us who were told that FDR was a hero, were deluded.
It has been school teachers and college professors who continue to teach the wonders of FDR and how he defeated the Depression.
So, what was on FDR’s mind when he turned back that ship stuffed with Jews fleeing the Nazis?
Do any decent people reach the apexes of power, ever?
“Do any decent people reach the apexes of power, ever?”
Yes.
This could help explain why the Allies did nothing to slow the death camps. They had an idea what was going on there, and never bombed those facilities. Were they afraid of killing the prisoners, already sentenced to death?
What good would have come from bombing the camps? We certainly didn’t have “smart” bombs back then to target individual buildings like guard barracks, gate houses, etc. We would only have been killing several inmates for each guard.
you are right that bombing the cmaps themselves might have killed more prisoners than guards. But bombing the raklwats that led to them might have helped.
Churchill actually begged FDR to bomb the extermination camps, and the railways that led to them – at least this would have given Jews a fighting chance. But FDR said “Nein”, and NYT refused to talk about the Holocaust.
Leftism and anti-semitism come hand in hand.
I call BS.
Sounds like bunk, absolute bunk that Churchill begged FDR to bomb the camps.
The RAF had plenty of bombers — heavy, light and otherwise — itself. The Brits didn’t need the 8th Air Force to hit one sort of target if they really wanted to do so.
Show some evidence, please.
I agree that it is not historically correct to say that Churchill begged FDR. but, on the other hand, Bomber Command was not organized, trained and equipped to do a daylight attack on the camps, which were deep in German Occupied Poland. Nighttime attacks would have near worthless. The max lives saved came from using airpower to pave the way for total victory.
Regards — Cliff
Toward the end of the war we had come to rule the skies and could have bombed the RR tracks to save a least many of the Hungarian Jews, the last to come, BUT John J McCloy has been fingered as the guilty party in the FDR Administration, who would NOT OK the bombing.
This is a surprise? FDR hated the jew who ran his campaign in NYS and saw to it that no jews would be helped during the holocaust. The proof? The various conferences dealing with war refugees was designed to keep from actually helping jews escape Europe. The US consular demands to see state legal papers and character references from those running from the nazis was designed to kill jews. Imagine living with a false identity card and then going to a nazi controlled local government office asking for a copy of one’s papers. This was FDR’s way of dealing with the jewish problem. Also, not pressing Britain to let jews enter jewish palestine mandated lands cost the lives of tens of thousand jewish children.
As always, anti-Semitism [truly, just antagonistic atheism targeted at the most visible, successful SMALL group of theists] is the underpinning of so much of what the leftists espouse.
Well, sort of, Jeff H…. Anti-Semitism has been directed at Jews of all denominations, even (and often) atheist ones. Anti-Semites couldn’t be less interested in whether a Jew is theistic or not. Stalin killed almost all the Jews that worked for him… followed by the famous Plot Against the Doctors.
The left has always liked quotas. No matter how many times they tell you they aren’t racist, almost all their major policy ideas are based on their view of the differences between people of different races, whether you are talking about FDR back then, or Obama now.
And the idea that the percentage of Jews in professions should reflect the percentage of Jews in the population is different from our affirmative action policies exactly how?
It’s not. And it’s just as odious.
Those promoting affirmative action today have purer motives. You only need ask them. Duh.
Yet when Ed Koch went to Florida to campaign for Obama in 2008, he invoked FDR’s memory to the elderly Jewish population. I remember reading one Jewish woman’s response when asked who she would be voting for…it went something like this:- “I don’t like Obama’s advisors on Israel (Rice, Power, Malley, etc.), but to vote for a Republican would be a slap at FDR’s memory”.
I’d say this is less antisemitism and more “root causes” leftist pap, which would be more consistent with the intellectual heritage of which FDR is a part.
But I love FDR.
OsamaHusseinIslamObama 2012′
(the terrorist-Uighur-ACORN-media choice)
-It’s never too early to campaign-
I hate war,
But I hate Eleanor more!
I don’t think this reveals any particular strong anti-semetism on the part of FDR. A low grade, “genteel” anti-sematism, the idea that Jews were intrinsically alien and always the outsider, was simply part of the culture back then, especially among the upper class.
FDR actually had a pretty good track record towards the Jews, given the standards of the time. He was certainly more concerned about Jews in Europe than most of the Republican leaders of the day. Back then, it was the Republicans who were isolationist and didn’t want to be involved in European affairs.
I think this actually reveals FDR’s mania for using centralized government control to engineer society. FDR sees Jewish over representation as causing social problems so he simply proposes to use state power to prevent the over representation thus solving the problem. Of course, like most Leftists, FDR doesn’t bother to ask why the Jews were over represented in certain professions given that they had almost no political or social power in any society back then.
FDR believed in the overarching state. His original National Recovery Administration would have created a central government almost as powerful and invasive in economic matters as mid-1930s Germany. Virtually every stance he took needs to be evaluated from the perspective that he believed that centralized state power could solve any problem.
Frankly, for the sake of FDRs legacy, WWII came along and was the one even that really did require a highly centralized control over the economy and society to marshal the massive forces needed to win the war. Without that fluke of history, FDR would probably have gone down in history as an overreaching failure.
I tend to agree. There was a lot of genteel antisemitism in that era and even beyond. It manifested itself in gentlemen’s agreement hiring policies. For example, I found it interesting that when I started in my profession the local offices of the national accounting firms- then the “Big Eight” – had only a few Jewish partners but the vast majority of the senior partners at biggest regional firms in the Chicago area were Jewish. I was told that was because when those partners first started in the business in the 1930s through the early 50s the national firms wouldn’t hire more than a couple of Jews each year. As a result, the Jews started their own firms. Many of the so called white shoe law firms of the era had similar hiring policies.
It is good to have some pushback in this debate, but this requires comment:
“FDR actually had a pretty good track record towards the Jews, given the standards of the time.”
Certainly given the European standards of the time … and even more given the Ivy League standards of the time.
“He was certainly more concerned about Jews in Europe than most of the Republican leaders of the day. Back then, it was the Republicans who were isolationist and didn’t want to be involved in European affairs.”
I am not qualified to defend the Republicans of the day (or in fact of any day) but I am skeptical about this. The Wannsee Conference was in January 1942. It is hard to argue that, before 1942, opposition to war was anti-Semitic: at best, one could say it was anti-Slavic, anti-Asian, or xenophobic in general.
It wasn’t anti-sematism, it was isolationism. Republicans were very sensitive to “hun stories” given the experiences of WWI and British anti-German propaganda. The other problem was that anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe were nothing new. Poland had one in the early 30s that claimed as many a 3,000 Jewish lives in the span of a few days. Republicans just didn’t see anything new in Nazi anti-sematism and didn’t think they could do much about it anyway. After all, we’d fought in WWI and that didn’t change European attitudes like anti-sematism much.
The vast majority of people only saw WWII as a replay of the geo-politics of WWI. Only a very few in America realized that the Nazis and the Communist represented a novel form of threat. Many of those where Jewish Americans who had relatives in Europe and really understood what was happening.
It’s important to remember that the pre-WWII leaders were a much more naive generation than we are. No one had really set out to exterminate entire people’s before and the idea that Germans, the best educated and most law abiding people in Europe, would do such a thing was largely unimaginable. In hindsight, we can see the signs but for most people back then, it was just the same old European weirdness they’d always had to deal with.
In the foreign policy of the era, the primary poles where the anti-military, isolationist Republicans versus the pro-military more interventionist Jacksonian Democrats. Most of the former where in the Northeast and Midwest while most of the later were from the South. The two just weren’t going to see eye to eye on just about anything. Many Republicans disconnected stories of Nazi mistreat of Jews and others as just attempts by the Jacksonian to whip up an interventionist hysteria.
The internal politics of the era are very interesting and more than a little disturbing. Frankly, Yamamoto did the world a favor by launching a surprise attack on Perl Harbor. Had the Japanese been more subtle, America would have entered WWII a very divided nation.
I’d say that no matter how far back you look, going all the way to Wilson, the basic philosophy of “progressivism” is revealed to be just as ugly and distasteful to decent people as is being revealed to us today. I believe that leftism will be judged by history as one of mankind’s, or at least Western Civilization’s, greatest self-inflicted curses.
An anti-capitalist turns out to be antisemitic … now, why am I not surprised?
Actually, as other comments have pointed out, there was previous evidence of FDR’s antisemitic tendencies. What this new document shows, is that FDR did not care about North Africans, either: depriving them of some of the best doctors and teachers? (And lawyers … well, some of my best friends are lawyers, but maybe North Africans could manage without lawyers.)
The best treatment Israel has received was under Republican presidents.
Democrats have taken the Jews and their money for granted. Many so called Jewish leaders have gone over to the dark side long ago, akin to
the abused spouse syndrome. The great desire by the German Jewish leadership in the US to assimilate has caused them to be blind to the
anti-Semitism of the left here and Europe. German Jews, in Germany were
sure that Hitler didn’t mean them because they were more German than the
Germans, after all the most decorated German in WWI was Jewish( the father of the actress Lili Palmer, who was smuggled out of Germany by
his friends).
The Harvard solution.
FDR’s idea was a reenactment of the Russian tzars quota (5%) laws that applied in the Pale of Settlement. How enlightening!
With anti-Jews laws in Morocco 50% of people in professions were Jews. Moreover, sultans of Morocco Muhammed V and Hussan I defied both Vichy government and the Nazis by taking Jews under personal protection. Jews did not even have to wear a yellow star there. Today the King of Morocco is probably the only Arab leader who openly speaks against Holocoust deniers in the Arab world.
Dar: “What good would have come from bombing the camps? We certainly didn’t have “smart” bombs back then to target individual buildings like guard barracks, gate houses, etc. We would only have been killing several inmates for each guard.” My mother, after saying goodbye to her mother and about a dozen other relatives at the gates of Auschwitz was shipped to Hamburg to be part of a work commando. Their job was to clean up the rubble after the nightly raids by Bomber Command. She told me that they didn’t care about the danger of the bombings, they just prayed for the safety and success of the bomber crews.
1. This is worth knowing.
Otoh, I looked up FDR’s Brain Trust in Wikipedia and found a disproportionate (relative to the general population) number of Jewish surnames.
It’s my impression that FDR was not a nice person. It’s plausible that he shared the prejudices of his era’s privileged class. It’s plausible that he was a cynical player of coalition politics (and a very effective one: the domestic FDR coalition was dominant for almost fifty years).
2. We tend to deify our leaders, and then to demonize them when a flaw is revealed.
3. To Ed Koch’s measured assessment, I’ll add that a generation which has squandered its inheritance and is pillaging its children’s future should be slow to throw stones at its predecessors.
4. Personally, I’d be willing to take my chances in a performance-based meritocracy. If some groups became disproportionately concentrated in some fields, so be it. IMO there would still be a major net benefit to the nation–provided that, wherever possible, opportunities were allocated on the basis of objective metrics.
Not only do letters like this begin to unravel the legend of FDR’s greatness, but ironically the love affair of Keynesian economics vis-a-vis the Obama regime has also assisting in reevaluating FDR’s economic policies. And upon further review, the FDR historical successes were epic failures just like Obama’s dismal failures.
Even then, the dishonest media was shilling for the Left.
There is one exception to the rule about Dems and Jews, and that was Harry Truman, of my home state of Missouri. Truman did use some anti-Semitic language on occasion, as has been recorded, but he was in partnership with a man named Eddie Jacobson in Kansas City, in a haberdashery. Jacobson remained a lifelong friend of Truman’s, even after their business failed in the Depression.
Truman credited Jacobson with coming to Truman at a critical time in the decision to back the formation of the State of Israel. Truman would listen to no one else, but Jacobson was able to persuade Truman to spend an hour with Chaim Weizmann, and Weizmann was able to convince Truman to go against Truman’s own advisers and come out for Israel.
Truman was favorably disposed towards Israel, in large part, because he was sickened by the Holocaust. He wanted to do what he considered right, and also because it fulfilled Scriptural things for him.
He was a Democrat, somewhat to the Left, but he did the right thing by Israel and the Jews.
Eisenhower, on the other hand, a Republican, wasn’t always so good about Israel, screwed it over during the Suez war in ’56.
HOWEVER, that was then, this is now, and the repository of serious anti-Semitism and hate for Israel is in the Democratic party and on the Left, and I’m ASHAMED for many of my fellow Jews that they refuse to see this. I’m disgusted. I’m not supposed to say bad things about my fellow Jews, but when liberalism trumps the survival of Israel and the Jewish people, then I will call it what it is; suicidal and sickening.
I can guarantee Palin probably LOST Jewish support during her trip to Israel this last week, since she made what I consider some of the most pertinent and sharp and correct statements about Israel and the Palestinians that I’ve seen any politician make her…or for that matter, in Israel! But the liberal Jews in Israel and the U.S. will still side with the murderous Palestinians and their enablers, who all happen to be Jew haters.
Don’t ask why, I’m not clever enough to figure it out. I just know it’s been 66 years since my Dad was liberated from Bergen Belsen, and the Democrats have gone backwards since Truman, by-and-large, and the Republicans became the biggest defenders of Israel. My dad, who passed away in ’84, ALREADY recognized that trend before he died, and had started to vote Republican.
He refused to stay stuck in the past, in that “Jews have to vote Democrat” nonsense, because he saw what was happening and what was going to happen, and I give him credit for his prescience.
Mo,
The Jews you can’t understand are “ethnically” Jewish, but their true religion is liberalism. Once you look at things that way, it all makes sense.
Jews are no different than any other leftist group. They are Socialists/Marxists first, Jews, Americans, Israelis, etc…second. Thus, it is worth repeating: ALL liberals, leftists, progressives, feminists, environmentalists, greens, social justice types, UN lovers, PC supporters, multiculturalists, antiwar activists, PETA members, One-worlders, and democrats only care about one thing, and absolutely one thing ONLY: the advancement of worldwide Socialism/Marxism/Communism. The Holocaust, 911, Soviet gulags, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, economic collapse–none of it matters a bit. Only advancing “the cause” matters. The most extensive brain-washing the world has ever devised couldn’t change these Leftist’s minds. They cannot be reasoned with, only defeated.
Sir, you need to be the head of the RNC.
Jews got off easy.
FDR really screwed the Ukrainians though.
In 1933, he ignore the reports of the Holodomor, the genocide that killed 10 million and instead, recognized the commies on the basis of Duranty’s glowing reports about the workers paradise.
Oh yeah, his son Elliot Roosevelt made a “commission” of millions in todays dollars for the sale of Fokker warplanes to the commies, made possible only because of his father’s official recognition of the USSR.
That recognition ended well – they went on to kill another 90 million until Reagan put an end to it.
The quota system in the chemical industry probably played a role in Jewish involvement in the cosmetic industry, since chemists were essential to developing new products.
That ‘quote’ is widely used and widely known and is hardly a suprise. In fact it is front and center on the somewhat stingy wikipedia page about the Casablanca Conference. It is supposed to be from conversation notes written down by FDR’s aide but the way it is ‘cited’ seems all wrong.
Maybe FDR didn’t like Jews, maybe he did, maybe he was indifferent. He for sure had more Jews in his administration than the U.S. population reflected.
I think FDR might have been talking to the French in this instance. For all we know FDR hated the French, gave over some bullshit they wanted to hear and rolled his eyes and laughed when he left the room.
Due to quotation marks, I’m having trouble understanding what the President said and didn’t say – the fifty per cent thing seems wrong in the way it’s cited and in any event is inaccurate. Also, why would FDR find anything “understandable” about a bunch of Nazis he was leading a coalition against? FDR empathized with Nazis?
I’ve always found the whole thing weird and the quotes and the way the sentences are parsed out of kilter. I wouldn’t hang my hat on it.
I think you’re on to something here and tend to agree with you.
RE: Bombing the camps. Auschwitz was well within the range of the B-24, partic;arly those flown by the 15th Air Force. I have a copy of a strike chart showing Auschwitz factories as targets that several bomb groups did hit. They avoided the barracks areas becase they had been briefed these were filled with displaced civilians.
The irony of those who criticize NOT bombing the camps would be among the shrillest crying about it had they actually been targeted. You all know the script:”evil, warmongering 22 year old bomber crews callously took innocent lives ..as nauseum”
This story is not new information but demonstrates the contradictory and complex attitude of FDR to the Jews. The question of Jewish refugees were low on his priority list. The Evian Conference of July 1938 is a classic example. The meeting was called for by Roosevelt to solve the problem of Jews and non-Aryans seeking to flee Germany and Austria after the Anschluss. However, the conference was constructed to fail. It was primarily a publicity ploy with hidden motives.
Why so surprised. This is for what affirmative action, equal opportunity, Title IX, etc., and yada, are all striving. FDR was just a man ahead of his times: the percentage of the pop must be represented in that percentage in the work force.
Everyone just thought that meant increasing the numbers of some groups; they never thought of it as being used to reduce the numbers of other groups.
Here’s something: Capitalism doesn’t discriminate–except in terms of ability.
Statism, collectivism, socialism–whatever you wish to call it–does in all other categories. Had we not had discriminatory *laws* post Civil War, businesses (and most people) would have been hiring and serving blacks, women, etc., long before 1964.
Don’t believe it, do you. Then consider that in the West, psot Civil War, the railroads–surely we know as bastions of bigotry–happily hired newly freed slaves, because their labor was cheaper than yet as efficient as collie labor.
If that happened in the 1870s, where would we have been by the 1920s? Had not the government made laws forcing segregation on Main Street and had not those same sorts segregated blacks in housing projects on Elm Sreet, the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age would have solved the issue of race long ago.
FDR is no anomaly, either. The Democratic Party was and still is the party of that segregates. In the late 19th Century, it was Jim Crow in the solidly Democratic South. During the middle decades of the 20th, it was the separate but equal alternative; today, having run out of options, the Dems insure their lily white gated communities stay lily white by means of eminent domain and land use (evironmental) restrictions. (For examples, see the peninsula on which sits avant garde San Francisco.)
The Democratic Party has never shed its stripes. That Party has never been the Party of Jefferson–unless you mean Jefferson Davis.
Slavery is (was) wrong, and Washington and Jefferson’s slaveholding was wrong. But their attitudes need to be seen and judged in the cultural context in which they lived. And it would have taken enormous courage and strength (more than they possessed) to act contrary to the social norms. In my mind this does not mean that Washington and Jefferson were terrible evil people, but of course they were not as perfect and great as some would like to see them. They were great and admirable men, but men and with the common frailties of men.
I see FDR’s attitude toward Jews in this same context. FDR’s accomplishments can be seen as accomplishments (or argued about as accomplishments). And this failing (in 2011 terms anti-semitism) needs to be viewed in the context of a culture in which this attitude was “normal” or widespread. Resisting the cultural norms of the day requires courage that almost no one has, and it is too high a standard to expect our Presidents to meet.
The post starts with what is almost cetainly a bogus claim: that 50% of doctors, lawyers, and even schoolteachers in pre-war Germany were Jews. Perhaps 50% of professionals in North Africa were, but certainly not Germany. Consider that a 1933 German census put the Jewish population at around 0.75% (505,000 out of 67 million) – a lower percentage than what it is today in the US. Consider that the Third Reich managed to wage war quite effectively without much benefit from its Jewish population, except possibly in slave camps. Consider the rapidity with which the German economy rebounded after the war, with its Jewish population eradicated along with a large number of its working age men.
If pre-war Germany were so dependent on Jewish professionals that would indicate that the remainder of its population were damn near dumb as bricks. Its economy would never recover from their loss. But the German economy did recover, and today remains one of the most dynamic on the planet, with a trade surplus only recently surpassed by China.
Jews were almost certainly over-represented amongst the educated professions in Germany, as Ashkenazi Jews always are, but they were not 50% of anything.
In Crusade in Europe, Eisenhower wrote about the difficulties presented by the Jewish question in North Africa.
American liberals wanted instant abolition of all the invidious restrictions on Jews, but Eisenhower had to worry about the effect on the rest of the population, especially the Arabs. An Arab revolt was possible, and could be disastrous for Allied forces locked in battle with the Germans.
Axis propaganda described the Allied forces as serving Jewish interests, and the Allies wanted to avoid confirming that allegation.
This paraphrase of a a transcript sounds very much like FDR giving lip service to the “genteel” antisemitism which was annoyed by overwhelming Jewish prominence. The loyalties of the French officials who had previously served Vichy were doubtful; FDR was throwing them a bone.
As for “bombing the death camps” – Auschwitz was the furthest west. The others were well out to the east. Allied bombers could strike that far only with reduced bombloads, and without fighter escort (meaning very heavy losses). And even if Allied bombers destroyed the gas chambers, or managed to break the rail lines, there was nothing to prevent the Germans from slaughtering the Jews where they were with machine guns and rifles.
Most of the killing was done in 1942, before the U.S. had many bombers available in Europe, and the British had all they could do bombing Germany by night.