Abstract
Excerpt from phone conversation on 13 January 1944 between Samuel Rosenman, President Roosevelt’s speechwriter and adviser, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the secretary of the Treasury.
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Notes
Lawrence H. Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe: Free Press, 1958), 99–107, 177–187.
That percentage (3.69) is taken from the government census of religious bodies conducted during 1936–1937. It counted 4,641,000 Jews concentrated in the larger cities of the eastern seaboard. See H. S. Linfield, “Jewish Communities in the United States,” American Jewish Yearbook (AJYB) 42 (1940), 216, 220.
For Jewish political activism see Alfred O. Hero Jr., American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy: Trends in Rank and File Opinion, 1937–1969 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1973), 21,39. See also Stephen Isaacs, Jews and American Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974); and Charles Kadushin, The American Intellectual Elite, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 319–320.
Fuchs, Political Behavior, 151–169; Albert J. Menendez, Religion at the Polls (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), 24–35, 115, 221–223 (tables 16–19).
Deborah D. Moore, At Home in America: Second Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 210–211. Raymond E. Wolfinger, “The Development and Persistence of Ethnic Voting,” American Political Science Review 59 (December 1965), 896–897.
Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 36–37; Fuchs, Political Behavior, 66.
James M. Burns: Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1956), 104; Mark R. Levy and Michael S. Kramer, The Ethnic Factor: How American Minorities Decide Elections (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 103. The eleventh was a Socialist.
Cyrus Adler and Aaron Margalith, With Firmness in the Right: American Diplomatic Action affecting Jews, 1840–1945 (New York Arno Press, 1977); Egal Feldman, The Dreyfus Affair and the American Conscience, 1845–1906 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981); Naomi Cohen, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee, 1906–1966 (Philadslphia. Jewish Publishing Society of America, 1972); Louis L. Gerson, The Hyphenate in Recent American Politics and Diplomacy (Law-rence: University of Kansas, 1964); Henry L. Feingold, “American Power and Jewish Interest in Foreign Affairs,” in A Midrash on American Jewish History (Albany. SUNY Press, 1982); Gary D. Best, American Jewish Leaders and the Jewish Problem in Eastern Europe, 1890–1914 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1982). Best generally overestimates the role of Jewish power holders.
The phrase is used first in Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 22–44. Similarly, Senator Tydings of Maryland introduced on 8 January 1934 a resolution calling for the Senate and the president to express “surprise and pain” at German treatment of Jews and to urge the German government to restore Jews’ civil rights. See Congressional Record, 73rd Cong., 2nd sess., 68, pt. 1, 176. The State Department opposed the resolution, and it was never reported out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. For a full examination of executive manipulation of private pressure groups, see Robert C. Hildebrand, Power and People: Executive Management of Public Opinion in Foreign Affairs, 1897–1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
See David Brody, “American Jewry, the Refugees, and Immigration Restriction, 1932–1942,” Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society (PAJHS) 45 (June 1956), 219–247.
Menendez, Religion at the Polls, 215; Werner Cohn, “The Politics of American Jews,” in The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group, ed. Marshall Sklare (New York: Free Press, 1958), 614–626; Lawrence Fuchs, “American Jews and the Presidential Vote,” American Political Science Review 49 (June 1955), 385–401; Burns, The Lion and the Fox, 104.
Quoted in Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 188. Under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, for example, only 8 of the 207 federal judges appointed were Jewish. The figure rose considerably under Roosevelt and even more under Truman, but Catholics, not Jews, received the lion’s share of federal judicial appointments. See Lubell, Future, 83–84.
Michael F. Parrish, Felix Frankfurter and His Time: The Reform Years (New York: Free Press, 1982), 229 (“the New Deal was a ‘lawyers deal’”); Auerbach, Unequal Justice, 159, 184–189. See also John W. Johnson, American Legal Culture, 1908–1940 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981), xi, 185, for the triumph of the socially conscious Brandeis-style brief; also Peter H. Irons, New Deal Lawyers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Random House, 1979), 212–221, 278–279, 288; Donald Fleming and Bernard Baylin, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930–1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Stephen Duggan and Betty Drury, The Rescue of Science and Learning: The Story of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars (New York: Macmillan, 1948); Abraham Flexner, I Remember (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940).
Henry DeWolf Smyth, Atomic Energy for Peaceful Purposes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).
Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); Jacob Fisher, The Response of Social Work to the Depression (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1980).
They are best described in Irving Howe’s Decline of the New Deal (New York: Harcourt, 1970) and World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 598–603; Lewis S. Feuer, “The Stages in the Social History of Jewish Professors in American Colleges and Universities,” American Jewish History 71 (June 1982); Seymour M. Lipset and Everett C. Ladd, Jr., “Jewish Academics in the United States: Their Achievement, Culture, and Politics,” AJYB 72 (1971), 89–128; Seymour M. Lipset and Richard B. Dobson, “The Intellectual as Critic and Rebel with Special Reference to the United States and the Soviet Union,” Daedalus 101 (summer 1972), 137–198; Stephen Steinberg, The Academic Melting Pot: Catholics and Jews in American Higher Education (New York: McGraw, 1974); Charles Kadushin, The American Intellectual Elite (Boston: Little Brown, 1968); Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Imagination of Disaster: The Response of American Jewish Intellectuals to Totalitarianism,” Jewish Social Studies 42 (winter 1980), 1–20.
Charles H. Stember et al., Jews in the Mind of America (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 149.
Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 85, 1457–1458, 2338–2341; David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (Amherst: University of Massachusets, 1968), 78, 96–97, 244; Feingold, Politics of Rescue, 149–153.
Samuel Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1952); Samuel B. Hand, Counsel and Advise: A Political Biography of Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Garland, 1979); see also oral history interviews, Wiener Library (N.Y.C.), American Jewish Committee.
Joseph Proskauer, A Segment of My Time (New York: Straus, 1950), 12–13; Louis M. Hacker and Mark D. Hirsch, Joseph M. Proskauer: His Life and Time (Mobile: University of Alabama Press, 1978).
Jerold S. Auerbach, “Joseph M. Proskauer: American Court Jew,” American Jewish History 69 (September 1979), 103–114, 115.
Ibid.
Parrish, Frankfurter, 129–149; Bruce A. Murphy, The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of the Two Supreme Court Justices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); H. N. Hirsch, The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Joseph P. Lash, ed., From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter (New York: Norton, 1975); Harlan B. Phillips, ed., Felix Frankfurter Reminiscences (New York: Secker and Warburg, 1960).
J. L. Magnes to Brandeis, 25 July 1916, in Arthur A. Goren, ed., Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of judah L. Magnes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 22, 154–155, document no. 24. See also Yonatan Shapiro, Leadership of the American Zionist Organization, 1887–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 94–96; Parrish, Frankfurter, 131–132, 242. In 1938 Hugh Johnson again brought up the impropriety charge against Brandeis. Frankfurter insisted upon and received a written apology. Max Freedman, ed., Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928–1945 (Boston: Litde, 1967), 482.
Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1939); Parrish, Frankfurter, 204–205, 218; on the workings of the “brain trust,” see Eliot A. Rosen Hoover, Roosevelt and the Brain Trust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
Parrish, Frankfurter, 206; James E. Sargent, Roosevelt and the Hundred Days: Struggle for the Early New Deal (New York: Garland, 1981).
Between 1916 and 1938 Brandeis gave Frankfurter ca. $50,000 to cover incidental expenses. Murphy, Brandeis-Frankfurter, Parrish, Frankfurter, 6, 224, 248. On the differences in economic approach to the New Deal, see Nelson L. Dawson, Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and the New Deal (Hamden: Shoe String Press, 1980).
Parrish, Frankfurter, 210; Paul A. Freund, “Justice Brandeis: A Law Clerk’s Remembrance,” American Jewish History 68 (September 1978), 716–717; Frankfurter to Roosevelt, 21 November 1928, and Roosevelt to Frankfurter, 11 June 1934, in Freedman, Roosevelt and Frankfurter, 25, 39, 222. It was Frankfurter who was instrumental in bringing Roosevelt and Brandeis together in 1928 and convincing Roosevelt that “old Isaiah” was a “great soul.”
James Farley, Jim Farley’s Story: The Roosevelt Years (New York: Whitdesey, 1948), 161–162; Parrish, Frankfurter, 275.
Brandeis did direcdy intrude himself on the refugee crisis and the Zionist issue in a meeting with secretary of state Cordell Hull. (See Freund, “Brandeis”, 716–17). But there was in most members of the Brandeis group a curiously thin, almost part-time quality to their new-found Jewishness and their investment in Zionist activities. See Ben Halpern, “The Americanization of Zionism,” American Jewish History 69 (September 1979), 32–33. See also Thomas Karfunkel and Thomas W. Ryley, The Jewish Seat: Anti-Semitism and the Appointment of Jews to the Supreme Court (Hicksville: Exposition Press, 1978), 87–97.
Jan Karski, “Reaction of Frankfurter, Wise, and Goldmann to First Reports of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Beizen Death Camp,” in “The Impact of the Holocaust on Judaism in America” (colloquium, American University, Washington, D.C., 23 March 1980), 34 (unpublished).
John M. Blum, Roosevelt and Morgenthau: A Revision and Condensation of From the Morgenthau Diaries (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 520.
Ibid., xvi.
Ibid.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 257–258.
Henry L. Feingold, “Roosevelt and the Resettlement Question,” in Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference. Jerusalem, April 11,1974. Ed. Yisrael Gutman and Efraim Zuroff (New York: Ktav, 1978). 123–181.
See Isaiah Bowman, Limits of Land Settlement A Report on Present-Day Possibilities (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1937); Blum, Morgenthau, 519.
Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 471.
Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Germany Is Our Problem (New York: Harper, 1945).
See Saul S. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy toward Jewish Refugees, 1938–1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973); and Yitshaq Ben Ami, Years of Wrath, Days of Glory: Memoirs from the Irgun (New York: Speller and Sons, 1982).
The best sources for details of Wise’s public life are his autobiography, Challenging Years: The Autobiography of Stephen Wise (New York: Putnam, 1949); Melvin L. Urofsky, A Voice That Spoke for Justice: The Life and Times of Stephen S Wise (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982); Carl Hermann Voss, Rabbi and Minister: The Friendship of Stephen S. Wise and John Haynes Holmes (Cleveland: World Publishers, 1964).
Selig Adler, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and Zionism: The Wartime Record,” Judaism 21, (summer 1972), 265–276.
That has been suggested by several researchers, including Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970) 2, 169–213, 255–262.
Moshe Gottlieb, “In the Shadow of War: The American Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement in 1939–1941,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 62 (December 1972), 146–161.
Stephen S. Wise, As I See It, (New York: Jewish Opinion Publishing Corporation, 1944), 101.
Wise to Rabbi Rosenau, 10,19 April 1933, quoted in Carl H. Voss, “Let Stephen Wise Speak for Himself,” Dimensions in American Judaism 3 (fall 1968), 37.
Fred L. Israel, ed., The War Diary of Breckinridge Long (Lincoln: Burns and MacEachery, 1966), 4 September 1941, 216–217; 17 April 1943, 332.
See Doreen Bierbrier, “The American Zionist Emergency Council: An Analysis of a Pressure Group,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 60 (September 1970), 84–85.
Shimon Rubinstein, “Did the Germans Set up Corpse Utilization Establishments during World War I?” (Jerusalem: 1977); Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s Final Solution (Boston: Weidfield and Nicholson, 1980), 8–9; H. C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939).
Feingold, Politics of Rescue, 237–239; Aaron Berman, “American Zionism and the Rescue of European Jewry: An Ideological Perspective,” American Jewish History 70 (March 1981), 310–330; Monty N. Penkower, “In Dramatic Dissent: The Bergson Boys,” American Jewish History, 70 (March 1981), 281–309.
Henry L. Feingold, “Stephen Wise and the Holocaust,” Midstream 29 (January 1983), 45–48. A similar analysis is also given by Louis Lipsky, Memoirs in Profile (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1975), 192–200.
For recent examples, see James A. Farley, “FDR the Man,” in David E. Kyvig, ed., FDR’s America (Arlington Heights, IL: Forum Press II, 1976), 23; Joseph Alsop, “Roosevelt Remembered,” Smithsonian 12 (January 1982), 39–48.
Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (New York: New American Library, 1973), 150–157; Burns, The Lion and the Fox, 10–11.
That is the view propounded by a rehabilitation psychologist, Richard T. Goldberg, The Making of Franklin D. Roosevelt: Triumph over Disability (Cambridge: Abt, 1982).
Ibid., 1, 36. Goldberg also presents some evidence of a well-developed sense of entitlement that prevented Roosevelt, during the rehabilitation process, from accepting the full reality of his illness and his subsequent handicap.
Paul K. Conkin, The New Deal (New York: Crowell, 1967), 5.
Ibid, 6–7,11.
Eliyho Matzozky, “An Episode: Roosevelt and the Mass Killing,” Midstream 26 (August–September 1980), 17–19.
Henry L. Feingold, “The Importance of Wartime Priorities in the Failure to Rescue Jews,” in Alex Grobman and Daniel Landes, eds., Critical Issues of the Holocaust (Los Angeles: Simon Wiesenthal Center, 1983), 300–307.
Sharon Lowenstein, “A New Deal for Refugees: The Promise and Reality of Oswego,” American Jewish History 71 (March 1982), 325–341.
Journal entry, 14 November 1938, in Nancy H. Hooker, ed., The Moffat Papers, 1919–1943, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 221–222.
For a probing of this dilemma, see Peter Lowenberg, “Walter Rathenau and Henry Kissinger: The Jew as a Modern Statesman in Two Political Cultures,” Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture No. 24, (Jerusalem: Leo Baeck Institute, 1980).
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Feingold, H.L. (1996). “Courage First and Intelligence Second”: The American Jewish Secular Elite, Roosevelt, and the Failure to Rescue. In: Newton, V.W. (eds) FDR and the Holocaust. The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Series on Diplomatic and Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-03764-0_4
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