“ ‘Well, I’ve been working with two governments there.’ The President threw back his head decisively. ‘I intend to go on doing so until I can get them together.’ ”
This is a puzzle. It seems irreconcilable with the decision to uphold Hurley, unless Roosevelt was so convinced that Hurley would indeed achieve coalition “by the end of April” that what he had in mind was sending the Communists arms and aid after they had become part of the national Government.
Of the major quirk in the case one has to ask whether there might have been a different result if the ambassador had been a different man. A different man could still not have achieved coalition because no one on earth could have arranged terms that both parties could accept. A different man might have facilitated rather than blocked the visit of Mao and Chou to Washington, but if he had been a different man in whom they had confidence, they would not have asked to go. There remains only the remote chance that an ambassador who both listened to his staff and had the ear of the President might have turned the President toward a wider option than the blank check to the Generalissimo.
Otherwise it would seem from the record that our course was destined not by our stars but by ourselves and our inclinations; that the President, the public, and the conduct of foreign policy combined to work toward an inescapable and, from our point of view, a negative end.
Is any principle contained in this dusty answer? Perhaps only that every revolutionary change exacts a price in loss as well as gain, and that history will continue to present us with problems for which there is no good and achievable solution. To insist that there is one and commit ourselves to it invites the fate set apart for hubris. We reached in China exactly the opposite of what had been our object. Civil war, the one absolute we tried to prevent, duly came about. Though we defeated Japan, the goal that would have made sense of the victory, a strong united China on our side after the war, escaped us. The entire effort predicated on the validity of the Nationalist government was wasted.
What should have been our aim in China was not to mediate or settle China’s internal problem, which was utterly beyond our scope, but to preserve viable and as far as possible amicable relations with the government of China, whatever it turned out to be. We were not compelled to make an either/or decision; we could have adopted the British attitude, described by Sir John Keswick as one of “slightly perplexed resignation.” Or, as a Brookings Institution study concluded in 1956, the United States “could have considered its China policy at a dead stop and ended all further effort to direct the outcome of events.”
Yet we repeat the pattern. An architect of our involvement in Vietnam, Mr. Walt Rostow, insists that a fundamental premise of American policy is the establishment of a stable balance of power in Asia. This is not a condition the West can establish. Stability in Asia is no more achievable by us than was unity in China in 1945.
Basic to the conduct of foreign policy is the problem basic to all policy: how to apply wisdom to government. If wisdom in government eludes us, perhaps courage could substitute—the moral courage to terminate mistakes.
The author wishes to acknowledge with thanks the assistance of Mr. Ray Cromley and Mr. John S. Service, and of Mr. William Cunliffe of the Military Records Division, National Archives, who found and secured declassification of the relevant documents.
* * *
Foreign Affairs, October 1972.
*1 Hurley’s accusations, passed on by the White House to General Marshall and by him in a peremptory query to Wedemeyer, caused a furious quarrel between Wedemeyer and Hurley, followed by an enforced agreement between them on an explanation for Marshall that would leave Wedemeyer’s command blameless while not disputing Hurley. This was accomplished in a convoluted masterpiece covering everybody except Colonel Barrett, who had neglected the soldier’s elementary precaution of obtaining his orders in writing. At Hurley’s insistence, unopposed by Wedemeyer, Barrett’s nomination for promotion to brigadier general, which had already gone forward, was withdrawn. His was the first in a line of honorable careers damaged to fill the need for scapegoats in China.
*2 Morale at the Embassy having sunk low under the effect of Hurley’s rages and vendettas, the officers on duty in Chungking, whose careers were vulnerable to unfavorable action by the chief of mission, were anxious to be transferred or, in the case of two who were on leave in the United States, not to return. Atcheson, as Hurley’s ranking subordinate, though too senior to be adversely affected, could not remain under the Ambassador’s violent objection, and was transferred to General MacArthur’s command as political adviser. Hurley personally obtained the removal of Service, whom he correctly guessed to be the principal drafter of the telegram, by direct request to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson (Service being attached to the Military Command). In the case of Raymond Ludden, a political officer who had also served with the Dixie Mission and after a four-month tour of Communist territory had reported the likelihood of their coming to power, Hurley obtained a statement from Wedemeyer that he “no longer required Ludden’s services.” Fulton Freeman, third secretary of the Embassy, Japan Language Officer Yuni, and Arthur Ringwalt, former consul in Kweilin recently transferred to Chungking, who suffered the longest under Hurley’s vindictiveness, were all variously reassigned. With the exception of Atcheson, who died shortly thereafter, the careers of all these men were slowed or otherwise damaged to greater or less degree by this episode. (Information supplied to the author by John S. Service.)
The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story
THE INCIDENT THAT SUGGESTED Henry Morgenthau, Sr., as a focus of the modern Jewish dilemma is one of history’s classic ironies: that by his alert dispatch of assistance to the Jewish colony of Palestine in August 1914—when serving as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey—he saved it from starvation and probable extinction, thus preserving it for the ultimate statehood which he came to believe was a “stupendous fallacy” and “blackest error.” Measured in material terms, the aid was minuscule, and the incident remains virtually unknown except to a few investigators; but it was of decisive and immense historical importance.
The circumstances were these: The Jewish settlement in Palestine, numbering about 100,000, consisted, on the one hand, of pious and impoverished believers who had trickled in over the centuries to die in Jerusalem, together with some families who had never left the homeland, and, on the other hand, of the later wave of conscious Zionists who had immigrated since the 1880s and were endeavoring to establish themselves on land sold to them as worthless by Turkish and Arab landlords. Almost all were dependent either on remittances from abroad or, in the case of the new colonists, on the export of agricultural products to the West and some subsidy from the Diaspora. They would be cut off from these contacts if Turkey joined the Central Powers—which, Morgenthau foresaw, contrary to Allied expectations, was bound to occur. From his close, and at that time friendly, relations with the Turkish leaders—who were so taken with this unorthodox Ambassador that they offered him a Turkish cabinet post—he knew the hope of Turkish neutrality was a delusion.
On August 27 he cabled to the American Jewish Committee in New York, the earliest group of its kind organized in this country for the defense of Jewish interests and of “Jewish civil and religious rights, in any part of the world.” The AJC was the organ of what has been called the Jewish “establishment” of those days—that is to say, mainly the German Jews. Dedicated to assimilation in their country of residence, they were ipso facto opponents of the Zionist movement for a Jewish state, though not of Palestine as a center of settlement for the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe.
Morgenthau’s cable stated that “immediate assistance” to Palestine Jewry was required and suggested the sum of $50,000. Jacob Schiff of the AJC and Louis Marshall, its president, convened a meeting and raised the suggested sum within two days. Half was contributed by the AJC, $12,500 by Schiff personally, and $12,500 by the American Federation of Zionists. The funds were wired to Const
antinople, converted to gold, and carried in a suitcase to Jerusalem by Morgenthau’s son-in-law, Maurice Wertheim, my father, who was then visiting him.
When it came to distribution, the gold precipitated an attack of internecine quarreling among the various local organizations, until my father, who was then twenty-eight, picked up the suitcase, locked himself in an adjoining room, and told his clients he would not come out until they had reached an agreement. Under that ultimatum, they did.
The significance of the aid was perceived at the time by a man dedicated to the homeland in Palestine, Judah Magnes, first chancellor and first president of the Hebrew University, the only important American Zionist leader to transfer his home to the land of his beliefs. Speaking at a meeting of the Joint Distribution Committee at the home of Felix Warburg in March 1916, he said of Morgenthau’s crucial intervention that “no word can be too strong, no expression too exaggerated” to describe the historical task thus performed.
The initial relief, of course, far from solved the problem, which, as soon as the Turks entered the war in November 1914, became grave. About half the Jewish population in Palestine, including many of the older group and most of the new colonists, were Russian by nationality and had preferred to remain stateless rather than become Ottoman subjects. They were now subject to treatment by the Turks as enemy aliens, with no recourse to protection by Russia, whose pogroms they had fled. Expulsion and even massacre became imminent threats, involving the American Ambassador in unceasing efforts to mitigate the harsh and capricious measures of the Turks while activating, with the help of many others, the aid of his own and the Allied governments.
Six thousand Jews expelled from Jaffa were carried by the U.S.S. Tennessee, a warship in the area, to Egypt, where the British permitted their entry. Later the U.S.S. Vulcan carried food supplied by Jewish relief organizations to the near-starving community of Palestine. A steady flow of funds collected by Jews in the U.S.—sufficient to give monthly allotments of a few francs each to fifty thousand Jews cut off from former sources—had to be delivered by one means or another, past erratic Turkish opposition on the one hand and Allied blockade of Syria and Palestine on the other. At first gold bullion was shipped directly from Egypt on U.S. warships, but when the Allies closed down this entry, Morgenthau resorted to sending the funds by mail from Constantinople to the American Consul in Jerusalem, who distributed it to the needy. By these measures the nucleus of the future state of Israel survived.
Another contribution to the future of Israel, as important in a different way, was the support that made possible the revival of Hebrew as a living language. Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the compiler—one might say, the creator—of the modern Hebrew dictionary, was brought to this country in 1914 under Zionist auspices to continue his work in safety during the war years. But the funds to support him and his family while he worked, as well as a house to live in and schooling for his daughters, were arranged for by my father (who had visited Ben Yehuda in Jerusalem) and were supplied largely by his father, Jacob Wertheim, and a committee consisting of Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Julius Rosenwald, and Herbert Lehman, the magnates of the so-called gilded ghetto.
Why did they care about the revival of Hebrew? Or, in the earlier case, about the survival of the colony in Palestine? The answer to that—the unbreakable tie to the group—is the answer as well to the unique survival of the Jews for over nineteen hundred years without statehood or territory. It is also part of the assimilationist’s dilemma.
Assimilation was a solution born of the Enlightenment—a dream of adaptation within a dominant Gentile society while supposedly maintaining something not quite definable called Judaism. Whether this was to be equivalent to or more than the Jewish religion depended on the individual interpreter, but in any case it tended to shrivel in partnership with assimilation. In degree and nature the whole concept of assimilation was a disturbing problem of belief tortured by doubt, and so troubling that it was not discussed in front of the children. It is likely, I suspect, to remain forever unsolved, never wholly achieved or wholly abandoned.
Meanwhile the record suffers from a certain distortion—in that the dominant voice, as in every historical record, belongs to the victors, who in this case are the Zionists. Events proved them right with regard to the revival of Israel, and the assimilationists wrong. Consequently the former appear in the record as the disciples of truth and the latter as obstructionists, blind and selfish bitter-enders, objects of scorn and sometimes of malice. The malice and falsity of Felix Frankfurter’s recollections of Morgenthau, published after the subject was safely dead, are a mean-spirited example.
Yet while the Zionists supplied the impulse, the ideal, and the driving force, not to mention the settlers, the fact remains that the German-Jewish leaders in America, whether from motives of guilt or reinsurance or a sense of responsibility, or a mixture of these, gave the support without which there would have been no living settlement to incorporate statehood. The work of Louis Marshall, for one, was essential. As chief spokesman of the “establishment,” he cooperated with Chaim Weizmann to create the Jewish Agency, through which non-Zionists could support the settlement in Palestine. Nathan Straus was another. His support of public-health and other projects in Palestine, estimated to have absorbed two-thirds of his fortune, is commemorated in the town named Netanya on Israel’s seacoast. Ultimately it was Morgenthau’s son, Henry Jr., who, on leaving Roosevelt’s Cabinet, assumed the chairmanship of the United Jewish Appeal in 1947–50 and raised the funds critical for the survival of Israel in the endangered first years of statehood. He was galvanized, I have no doubt, by the failure of his ceaseless effort, as Secretary of the Treasury under Roosevelt, to make the President take some effective action to save Jews from Hitler’s final solution.
Needless to say, the German program of annihilation was the experience that turned assimilationists into supporters of statehood, anti-Zionists into reluctant pro-Zionists. Nor was it Hitler alone who accomplished the change but the reaction of the Western democracies—the lack of protest, the elaborate do-nothing international conferences, the pious evasions, the passive connivance in which Hitler read his cue, the avoidance of rescue, the American refusal to loosen immigration quotas when death camps were the alternative, the refusal even of temporary shelter, the turning back of refugee ships filled with those rescued by Jewish efforts. More than nine hundred on board the St. Louis were turned back to Europe within sight of the lights of Miami, more than seven hundred on board the leaking Struma were turned back from Palestine to sink with all on board in the Black Sea. Was their fate so very different from that of Auschwitz?
The accumulation of these things slowly brought to light what had long lurked in the shadows of ancient memory: a bitter recognition that the Gentile world—with all due respect to notable and memorable exceptions—would fundamentally have felt relieved by the final solution. That the Jewish “establishment” came to believe this about the Gentiles cannot be documented because it was the great unmentionable, too painful to acknowledge, but basically this is what shattered the faith of assimilationists and brought out the funds for support of Israel.
To go back to the assimilationist’s dilemma: We must be careful, as always in the practice of history, not to ascribe meanings and motives as we see them through the lens of intervening events. To a person of my grandfather’s generation and background, the problem was not originally seen as a dilemma. During the first half of his life he was perfectly clear and absolutely convinced about what he wanted and what he believed he could achieve in America.
His Zion was here. What he wanted was what most immigrants wanted at a time when liberty glowed on the Western horizon: Americanization. This meant to him not the rubbing-off of identity, but Americanization as a Jew, with the same opportunity to prove himself, and the same treatment by society, as anyone else.
If he is to represent the problem, he must be fixed in terms of time, place, and circumstance. On an immigrant boy of the 186
0s, America’s open door to upward mobility and the nineteenth century’s belief in progress were formative influences equal to, if not greater than, his Jewish heritage. This is a point that non-Jews tend to overlook. They think of a Jew as some kind of immutable entity, instead of as a product of time and place like any other human being.
Morgenthau was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1856, the same year as Louis D. Brandeis and Woodrow Wilson, and twenty years after Andrew Carnegie, the immigrant boy’s greatest success story. Brought up in early childhood in comfortable circumstances, he came to the U.S. with his family in 1865 at the age of nine, as a result of business reverses suffered by his father, Lazarus Morgenthau, a prosperous cigar manufacturer. Lazarus had risen from the German-Jewish equivalent of the American log cabin. As the son of an underpaid cantor with too many children, he had started life as an itinerant tailor, peddling self-made cravats at fairs and gradually enlarging the enterprise to a business employing others. By the time Henry, his ninth child, was born he had achieved success in the cigar business, with three factories and a thousand employees. He could provide a household with servants and the first built-in bathroom in Mannheim, educate his children, indulge the family passion for theater, opera, and concerts, and carry out the traditional philanthropies.
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