6-23-05,10:27
When dealing with the historical background to the Jewish Holocaust, it is important to remember that anti-Semitism in Europe particularly was deeply intertwined with class struggle and political development. The political culture of all upper class groups was certainly anti-Semitic, but the forces of the left, broadly defined, had supported Jewish emancipation since the French revolution and demagogic attempts by so-called “Christian socialists” in Germany in the late 19th century to blame the evils of capitalism on Jews had been condemned by leaders of the Marxist SPD as “the socialism of fools.” That is, Jews were seen as instigators of change and scapegoated for the evils of the existing order at the same time, views that existed in varying degrees of virulence the traditionalist, nationalist, and often clerical right. However, there were large numbers of liberals, secularists, later socialists, who supported Jewish emancipation from the ghettos and eventually cultural pluralism. For many non Jews, where you stood on the “Jewish question” was important in understanding where you stood politically in general.
In the United States, anti-Black racism played this role primarily, although it interacted with and strengthened prejudice against Jewish American and other immigrant groups, particularly Slavic and Italian immigrants, who perceived themselves as “white” but were not necessarily seen that way in Anglo American conservative political culture. It is also of some significance to remember that the exclusionary quotas established in 1924 were racist quotas aimed at all of these groups and not only potential Jewish immigrants but immigrants and for that matter Polish and other Slavic peoples who, as “inferior races,” were treated with far greater brutality than Western Europeans by the Nazi war machine. These groups also suffered the effects of these quotas, although the larger 1930s world was one of general immigration restrictions and once the war began immigration really wasn’t feasible for significant numbers of people.
It is also important to remember that these quotas were not eliminated until 1965, when a civil rights movement political climate far more directly sensitive to the rights of minorities(one greatly aided by a liberalized judiciary that was one of the New Deal’s most important legacies) brought about. Roosevelt and the Republicans weren’t “one” on the issue of maintaining the racist quota system, although Roosevelt would not go to bat for an issue that he saw as uniting his enemies and weakening his own support, just as he would not support anti-lynching legislation for fear of alienating Southern Democrats.
“Genteel” or “Gentleman’s agreement” anti-Semitism was “normal “until long after WWII and frankly still is in the world of country clubs and elite societies…. For example, I had this experience at Rutgers University three decades ago, when I was embroiled in a battle to get tenure, which I eventually got. I had a discussion with an old guard tweedy individual who personally wasn’t against me and thought he was giving me some good advice. He told me that in the 1974-1975 recessions (which were the time); I might think of looking for another position because the economic climate and cutbacks “might force the administration to have to choose between a Jew and a white man.”
That statement was absurd in terms of the integration of Jewish Americans into the professions at the time, and the individual made it without any sense that he was saying anything offensive, but wouldn’t have been in absurd the establishment world of 1930s universities, and it wouldn’t have really been so remarkable had I been an African American at the time and that statement had been that the university would have to choose between “a white man and a Black man.”
Thanks most of all to the victory over fascism in World War II, anti-Semitism and racism are no longer “normal,” in the Euro-American world so much so that right-wingers pay their enemies a political compliment when they constantly bemoan the elimination of stereotypic language, attacks on ethnic humor, bans on hate speech, etc., as “political correctness,” as if they long for the “political correctness” of the past. Sexism is no longer “normal” either, although right-wingers are desperately trying to hold on to anti-gay prejudices as their last great fortress of separation and segregation.
How do you view Roosevelt? As, to borrow a term from Black militants and nationalists of the 1960s, a hypocritical “white liberal” on the issue? A realistic ship captain with a progressive vision guiding the nation to a better place through very treacherous waters with a divided crew and hostile forces always ready to mutiny?
Political anti-Semitism flourished in the 1930s and was used by both openly fascist elements and in a less direct way respectable anti-New Deal conservatives. Anti-Semitic insults and jokes directed against the New Deal by its enemies were legion. Roosevelt was called “Rosenfeld” and stories were spread that he was secretly Jewish. David Lillienthal, Ben Cohen, Henry Morgenthau Felix Frankfurter when he was appointed to the Supreme Court, and other Jewish Americans prominent in the administration were singled out for attack, both in the United States and in the larger global political atmosphere, where Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda, a fair amount of it targeted at the New Deal, was spread through World Service, the Nazi international press service.
At the same time, the New Deal was the first administration in which significant numbers of Jewish Americans played an important role, the economic and political changes the New Deal wrought led to a real decline in institutional anti-Semitism and set the stage for the postwar victories against anti-Black racism
In the postwar period, even with the development of the cold war, non-Jewish people of the New Deal generation in the arts, sciences and professions fought and won the battles that led to the integration of Jewish Americans into these areas.
However, it can’t be ignored that saving Europe’s Jewish population was not a significant priority for any of the states engaged in the war against Hitler and his fascist allies and collaborators, while murdering Europe’s Jewish population was a high priority for the Hitler regime.
The most important way to save millions of Jewish and non Jewish lives from the fascist murder machine was to open a successful second front in Western Europe earlier and end the war earlier. This the Roosevelt administration supported, only to have it vetoed by the British. Although many may disagree with this statement, the failure to open a second front earlier, even the failure to take military action against the railroads leading to camps or bomb the camps, can’t for me be separated from the cold war that was in effect developing during the war itself. The railroads particularly were crucial to the German war against the Soviets on the Eastern Front and particularly after the victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, British policy particularly became one of looking for ways to slow a Soviet advance into Europe.
Anti-Jewish racism or anti-Semitism was a significant force in the United States in the 1930s, associated with the enemies of the New Deal. Had a conservative Republican “isolationist” oriented government been in power in 1940, who knows what the outcome of WWII would have been? The defeat of fascism was also a defeat for the forces of racism and anti-Semitism globally and in the United States. Although the Soviet Union, led by the subsequently demonized Joseph Stalin, made the most important contribution on the battlefields to the defeat of the European Axis powers, the U.S. contribution was also invaluable. In this regard it is important to remember that the most important single act to save Jewish lives undertaken by a government was Joseph Stalin’s order to give preference to Soviet Jewish civilians in the evacuation from areas under Nazi attack on the ground that the Nazis were murdering Soviet Jews as matter of policy. Also, early accounts of the Nazi mass murder in the East was dismissed by some British intelligence sources as Soviet inspired propaganda to open up a second front.
The U.S. under Franklin Roosevelt made a central contribution, in providing aid to the Soviets and the British until 1944, in the bombing campaigns and eventually in the Second Front that completely sealed Hitler’s doom. Without that contribution we might be living in a very different world and many of us who belonged to the “inferior races” that Hitler once called “useless eaters” might not be living. Roosevelt, ever the politician, the juggler as my former colleague Warren Kimball called him, did many things for which he deserves criticism.
The tangible progress and progressive vision of the New Deal government won the support of the great majority of Jewish Americans during the New Deal era because it resonated with their ideals. In a sense, the continued high level of support that Jewish Americans give to liberal and progressive causes and politicians shows that it still does. If history were different, Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech had become the basis for policy after 1937, France and Britain joined the Soviets in supporting the Spanish Republic instead of the appeasement oriented non-intervention policy, the war begun over the Sudetenland under more favorable conditions with the British, French and Soviets allied instead of the Munich appeasement and betrayal, there might not have been the genocide or its numbers would have been a small fraction of what they were to be. However, that was the history that we got, and, given the fact that it was the British who really were calling the shots under Chamberlain and who resisted an early second front under Churchill, I don’t place primary blame on the administration, whose State Department and Foreign Service did include Gentleman’s Agreement anti-Semites like Breckinridge Long, and whose actions blocked thousands of Jewish Europeans from escaping the Nazis and ultimately cost them their lives.
The conservative coalition isolationists who during the period denounced pro-allied policies as part of a “Jewish-Communist” conspiracy, those rightwing politicians who even after the war used their influence in the Republican 80th Congress to try to block Jewish survivors in Displaced Persons camps from coming to the United States as they had fought earlier against lifting the discriminatory quotas against immigration from Eastern Europe should be condemned. The corporations who did business with Hitler before and even during the war, the law firms which represented Nazi interests in the United States, and all who fought and in some instances continue to fight to deny their liability to the families of victims should be condemned.
The New Deal government which did largely through the work of the left hugely strengthen labor’s rights, did in response to left activism pursue policies to reduce racism and anti-Semitism at a time when anti-Semitism represented a greater threat to the survival of Jewish people than every before in history, and made a central contribution to the victory over fascism that a conservative government would very likely not have made deserves criticism of its failures along with praise, but understanding of the historical context in which it operated.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. Reach him with your comments at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
