In a recent CNN interview with Kaitlan Collins, Hillary Clinton had this to say: “Trump is reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939. I write about this in my book. President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing Germany.” To suggest Clinton’s history is way off the mark gives new meaning to understatement. Roosevelt’s vicious anti-Semitism, racism and courting of bigots is no secret, as all the official, published government documents, as well as public records attest.
In a 1925 column for the Macon Daily Telegraph, FDR wrote, “Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.” He warned, “Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population,” and favored the admission of some Europeans, so long as they had what he called “blood of the right sort.”
Frank Freidel’s biography, which is overall favorable to FDR, writes that in 1927, after first deciding against quotas and in favor of accepting the brightest applicants, Harvard’s Board of Overseers (of which FDR was a member) realized that 42 percent of those accepted were Jews. With Roosevelt’s approval, they decided on a 15 percent quota for Jews which, although more generous than other Ivy League schools, was a racial quota nonetheless.
In 1938, FDR privately suggested to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the era’s most prominent American Jewish leader, that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were to blame for provoking antisemitism there. In 1939, Roosevelt expressed (to a U.S. senator) his pride that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins.”
The St. Louis ship episode is much better known, but here is a brief reminder. In May 1939, the German liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, to Havana, Cuba. The 937 passengers were almost all Jewish refugees. Cuba's government refused to allow the ship to land. The United States and Canada were unwilling to admit the passengers (though most Americans sympathized with the passengers). Roosevelt refused them entry; this, in spite of the fact the U.S. did not use more than 190,000 quota places from Germany and German-occupied countries from 1933 to 1945. The St. Louis sailed back to Europe, where 254 of its passengers were killed in the Holocaust.
In 1940, Roosevelt still dismissed pleas for Jewish refugees as “Jewish wailing” and “sob stuff.” In 1941, President Roosevelt remarked at a cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon.
During his meeting on January 17, 1943, in Casablanca with leaders of the new local regime in Allied-liberated North Africa. U.S. ambassador Robert Murphy remarked that the 330,000 Jews in North Africa were “very much disappointed that ‘the war for liberation’ had not immediately resulted in their being given their complete freedom.” According to the official record of the conversation (published by the U.S. government in its ‘Foreign Relations of the United States’ series), this was the president’s reply. “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,” which “would not permit them to overcrowd the professions.”
During negotiations with the Vichy governor of Morocco, Auguste Nogues, and then with General Giraud, Roosevelt mentioned explicitly that his take on quotas for Jews “Would eliminate the understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews, namely that while they represented a small part of the population, over 50% of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc. in Germany were Jews.”
Roosevelt had no problems courting votes of bigots. He denied that he invited African-Americans to a 1929 luncheon, refused to support anti-lynching legislation in the 1930s, and sought the white racist’s votes.
In a confidential memo of an August 4, 1939 meeting with Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana, one of FDR’s close political allies, the two discussed possible presidential candidates in the event that FDR decided not to run for re-election the following year. Among the names that came up were Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Democratic Party chairman James Farley. A Hull-Farley ticket “could not get elected,” the two agreed because “the Jewish-Catholic issue would be raised.” Farley was Catholic and, as Wheeler put it, “Mrs. Hull is a Jewess” (not by Jewish tradition, since only her Father was – but such details did not bother Hitler either). Roosevelt then said, “You and I, Burt, are old English and Dutch stock. We know who our ancestors are. We know there is no Jewish blood in our veins, but a lot of these people do not know whether there is Jewish blood in their veins or not.”
How did FDR become a Democratic semi-deity? The answer appears to be that the Ivies have long been teaching very selective history, not just in the 21st century. This allows us to at least give Yale law school graduate Clinton the benefit of doubt as being simply ignorant rather than a skilled liar.
