The New Deal reconsidered: The Holocaust crisis

Another important corrective to the hazy nostalgia in which the FDR years were later enveloped is a look at the reaction, or failure of reaction, of the US to the Holocaust. As David Wyman recounts in his essential book on the subject, the nature and scope of the genocide were known in the US by late 1942. For fear of appearing "pro-Jewish," the War and State Departments, respectively, refused and blocked any action to stop it. Until his death, FDR was indifferent to both the genocide itself and the refugees in flight from it. The State Department, under the influence of the British Foreign Office, was also hostile to Zionism and declined to press for Jewish refugees to be allowed into Palestine. The contrast with Churchill is striking. Once he knew of it, he spoke publicly about the genocide and devised schemes for getting weapons to resistance movements in continental Europe. His complaint about Anglo-Jewry was its timidity and lack of organization. In spite of his courageous and public statements and actions in connection with the Holocaust, there were sharp limits on how far he push the rest of the British government on the issue. But there was no question where he stood.

It wasn't supposed to turn out that way. FDR's presidency, and especially his landslide victory in 1936, cemented the love affair of American Jews with the Democratic party. There have been periods of erosion of that affair (Eisenhower in 1956, Nixon in 1972, and Reagan in 1984, all received close to half of the American Jewish vote), but never a real prospect of dissolution. Although anti-discrimination laws before the late 1950s were more limited in scope, applying only to government, the influence of the New Deal's public hiring practices, and later their application through much of the US economy during the war, essentially started the modern civil rights era. The 1930s was not only the most isolationist decade in US history, it was the most nativist, a period of strong intergroup tensions and bigotry. The Depression itself, of course, was the largest single cause. But the message emanating from Germany also exerted a distinct influence. American Jews looked to FDR as "King of the Jews," the "good czar" who would protect them. American Jewish leaders like Rabbi Stephen Wise and Sam Rosenman acted as American versions of "court Jews" familiar from Europe.

And it was "court Jew" politics that failed in the war years. This influential establishment of lay and rabbinical leaders, allied with FDR, were determined to maintain the palace-intrigue approach to Jewish issues. Far from being a help, they seriously harmed Jewish self-interest in those years: for all their backroom dealings, they came up empty on antisemitism, Zionism, or rescuing European Jews.

Eventually, a new, more American type of "bottom-up" politics emerged in response to the Holocaust. Its emergence was too late for most of Europe's Jews. But it led to a stunning breakthrough for America's. After the end of the war, it became clear that, for all his greatness as a leader, FDR and his "court Jews" were the ultimate obstacles to progress on these issues. While he repeatedly used popular anti-semitism as an excuse for inaction, the circumstances of the war itself rapidly changed American opinion, and FDR was left behind by change he himself had helped to instigate. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau's plan to rescue Jewish refugees was largely drawn up by non-Jews. Former president Herbert Hoover, who first made his name leading war relief efforts during and after the First World War, offered to head up a refugee commission. It did form but failed to accomplish much, because of State Department and White House resistance. Even the State Department itself, once the war was over, relented enough to negotiate a settlement of refugee property claims with the Swiss government.*

A critical mass of Jewish groups finally gave up on palace intrigue, organizing and protesting publicly in 1943 and 1944, making Zionism and the rescue of Europe's remaining Jews broadly accepted, nonpartisan issues. By the 1944 election, both parties endorsed this platform, and within a few years, rapid political change led to dramatic changes in American acceptance of Jews and the start of the sharp decline in antisemitism that marked the postwar decades. This decisive change occurred in a space of a few years. Contrast with the 1940 election, where in spite of the bipartisan support for intervention in the war, America First and important isolationist leaders like Lindbergh made discreet but effective use of social prejudice against Jews to bolster their case. The America we live in now was made in those few short years by people (some of them returning from the war) who abandoned the 1930s politics of fear. Given FDR's opposition to Zionism and his stubborn refusal to do anything about the genocide in Europe, it's almost a miracle.**
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* Contrary to mythology pushed by the media in the 1990s, Switzerland had instituted the secret, numbered bank account system in the 1930s so that people fleeing Germany could move their assets to a safe place. It was generally less antisemitic than the rest of Europe and, in spite of the fact that much of its population was German-speaking, never fell for Hitler's Aryan vision. But most of the owners of the financial assets moved to Swiss banks perished, and several billions (in present dollars) were left unclaimed at the end of the war.

** Kenneth Levin's The Oslo Syndrome retraces Wyman's history in abbreviated form, then relates it to the return of Jewish self-ghettoization in the 1990s. Except that in a liberal democracy, self-ghettoization means self-defeat. "Court Jew" politics and palace intrigue don't work. While Clinton, unlike FDR, was not personally prejudiced against Jews, the political failure was similar, the Oslo "peace process" being the most damaging result.

The New Deal reconsidered: The war years

Dedicated to the memory of my parents

To organize a society for a cause means facing everyone in one direction, toward an external goal, and what better goal than crushing an enemy? If there is no foreign one, then, as FDR discovered, domestic ones have to be invented. After his 1936 landslide victory, FDR began to do just that, ultimately overreaching with his 1937 Supreme Court-packing scheme. This crisis proved the beginning of the end for the New Deal. And 1938 saw a recession, wiping out the partial recovery that had taken hold in 1935-36, and large losses in Congress for the New Dealers, who were replaced by Republicans and conservative Democrats. The court crisis set off a wave of disillusionment, as more and more voters realized how limited the New Deal's accomplishments were. Voters recoiled in horror at the blatant violation of separation of powers inherent in FDR's attempt to manufacture a Supreme Court that would rubberstamp what he wanted. America would not become a dictatorship.

And then international crisis came. The 1930s was the most isolationist decade in American history (check out Little Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks). For much of the decade, FDR not only went along with it, he helped to destroy the world trading system by leaving the gold standard. Central planning is a lot easier with a closed economy, after all. With the New Deal on the way out, however, Roosevelt, like many presidents frustrated with domestic stalemate, turned to foreign affairs. The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) gave a preview of coming attractions, so to speak, not only with fascist Italy and Germany supporting Franco, but the Soviets trying to control the anti-fascist opposition for their own purposes. Roosevelt's distant cousin, Winston Churchill, then on the outs of British politics, was already sounding the warning about Germany. By 1940, the war was underway, and American shipping was being attacked by German submarines in the Atlantic.

But there was nothing close to approaching consensus about whether the US should enter or even support the Allies. Bad memories of Wilson and the "war to end all wars" twenty years earlier were still fresh. The largest peace movement in American history, America First, was formed in 1939 to head off American intervention. These isolationists were a motley collection: opponents of the New Deal and FDR mixed with labor, church, and pacifist leaders. Even with the New Deal gone, modern "total" war would mean a large and possibly permanent increase in federal and presidential power. In the Middle West, Republicans of German and Scandinavian extraction looked favorably upon the Third Reich. Democrats of Irish background (like Kennedy père) looked unfavorably upon Britain. At the fringe were a small but vocal (if embarrassing) group of Nazi fellow-travelers. With the Soviet Union an ally of Germany after August 1939 and the fall of France in June 1940, the anti-German cause looked lost anyway. Only after Britain refused to fold in the summer and fall of 1940, did American public opinion begin to change. Even so, while most Americans in 1941 hoped for an Allied victory, until Pearl Harbor, most were still unwilling to intervene directly. Only the attack on Pearl Harbor banished, at least for a while, the antiwar and anti-FDR voices.

Popular historian Thomas Fleming's witty, readable, and controversial The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II details the suspension of normal politics "for the duration" and how FDR and his administration kept grumbling and discontent at bay. The result was remarkable: the US reached a level of consensus on international affairs in those years that, while attacked from various directions afterward, did not fully dissipate until the 1990s. This in spite of serious deception (hiding how ill FDR was in the 1944 election) and strong illusions in some quarters about Stalin's designs on postwar Europe.

The full disillusionment with the New Deal never had time to sink in before America began to turn its attention in 1940 to war. The economic build-up finally did what the New Deal never could, namely, end the Depression. In less than two years, the US economy went from idle capacity and high unemployment to shortages. International crisis - preparing for war, then hot war, the start of the Cold War - delayed the reaction against the New Dealers until the 1950s, in fact. Invented domestic bogeymen were not necessary; for a while at least, there were real ones, on the outside.*

Moral inequivalencies. In spite of the similarities of the different collectivist tendencies, comparison is not equation. In the 1930s, the United States had no concentration camps, no liquidation of political or class enemies, no genocides, no destruction of the Constitution. It did experience under FDR an astonishing transformation of presidential power: compared to the handful of 19th century executive orders, and the hundreds of Wilson, we got thousands in the 1930s and 40s. Congress alienated an entire chunk of its law-making power to executive agencies. Ordinary freedoms were partly suspended "for the duration," and a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans were put into temporary camps. But the political system mostly remained in place, limiting presidential reach. Towards the end of the war, as the nature of the fascist enemy become clear to Americans, an even sharper disillusionment with the all-powerful state set in. Whatever problems a free society suffered from, the modern omni-state had turned out to be the most lethal weapon ever created. Deeper awareness a few years later of the Stalinist system reinforced the lesson. This was era when everyone started reading Orwell's Animal Farm and Hayek's Road to Serfdom, both published in Britain in the war's last years.

Follow the yellow brick road. For FDR's subsequent reputation, the war years made all the difference. The New Deal ended on an ambiguous and largely negative note. It had, in all probability, prolonged the Depression and certainly not ended it. But if FDR is counted among the greatest presidents, it is because of his skillful leading of Americans into the largest conflict in history, one that it was not initially obvious could be won.

When we compare successful war presidents (FDR, Lincoln, Washington, as well as other democratic leaders like Churchill and De Gaulle) to less successful ones (McKinley, Wilson, Bush), the obvious thing that leaps out is the degree to which the political ground was properly prepared before the conflict was engaged. Pearl Harbor, like the attack on Fort Sumter and the battles at Concord and Lexington, was the culmination of a process, not its beginning. The other key to successful war leadership is that, however indispensable they might seem at the start, great democratic leaders, by evoking popular initiative and enthusiasm, make themselves superfluous in the end. Churchill and Roosevelt were indispensable at the outset. Yet the war ended successfully without them, one dead, they other turned out of office by voters. This is far removed from a cult figure like Hitler, whose suicide just a few weeks after FDR's death, marked the end of his entire regime and movement.

Two years before Americans went to war in 1941, they sat in theaters and watched the film version of The Wizard of Oz. In the story that everyone knows, Dorothy and her friends set off to receive prized human virtues from the mysterious and powerful Wizard, who turns out, after his booming, amplified voice is turned off, to be less than imposing. From him, they receive the courage, love, and intelligence they seek, but come to realize that they actually had them all along. After all, they defeated the Wicked Witch of the West and done other marvels without the Wizard's gifts. After the Wicked Witch, even Hitler would seem like a piece of cake.
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* Several hundred Soviet agents working in Washington in the late 1930s and during the war have been firmly identified from Soviet records available to historians after the Cold War ended. However, the defection of two of them (Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers) in 1945 caused the Soviets to shut down their espionage operations. By 1948, there was nothing left of it. Leading liberal lights, however, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and President Truman, could not bring themselves to admit that such things had been going on and that establishment figures such as Alger Hiss, of good family and reputation, were involved in it.

Their lack of honesty on this issue made liberals politically vulnerable. If the Korean War had not broken out, the resulting attacks, by McCarthy and others, probably would have remained on the fringe. But American soldiers dying in a country supposedly already secure made it an irresistible issue.