Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

by Lynne Olson

  Most major U.S. colleges and universities, including virtually all the Ivy League schools, had strict quota systems for the acceptance of Jews. The relatively few Jews who were admitted often found what Kingman Brewster called a climate of “subliminal anti-Semitism.” As Yale students, Brewster, McGeorge Bundy, and a few others sponsored a campaign in 1938 to help German Jews immigrate to the United States. The response from fellow Yalies was disheartening. As Bundy wrote in the Yale Daily News, “An all-too-large group has said: ‘We don’t like Jews. There are too many at Yale already. Why bring more over?’ This is not an argument. It is an expression of intolerance and prejudice.”

  The American Jews who did attend college found still more doors closed to them after graduation. Most were barred from attending prestigious graduate schools, including those in medicine and law. Many if not most major companies and law firms refused to hire them. They were not permitted to live in certain residential areas; were prevented from joining private clubs, including country clubs; and could not stay at many hotels and resorts.

  A number of federal government agencies, particularly the State and War Departments, were rife with anti-Semitism. The upper echelons of the State Department were dominated by wealthy Ivy League Brahmins who resisted the hiring of Jews and made life difficult for the few who slipped through the net. They also consistently denigrated Jews in their daily conversations, as the diary of former undersecretary of state William Castle makes clear.

  Anti-Semitic himself, Castle wrote about frequent gatherings of senior State Department officials in which the maligning of Jews made up a large part of the talk. Describing one dinner party in early 1940, Castle observed: “I am afraid that many unpleasant things were said about the Jews, so it was as well that the company was small.” Among the guests that night was Hugh Wilson, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, whose own prejudice against Jews was well known.

  Although not a career diplomat, Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle was also noted for his antipathy toward Jews. After the fall of France, Berle inveighed in his diary against the attempts by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was Jewish, to persuade Roosevelt to provide more aid for the British. “The Jewish group, wherever you find it,” Berle wrote, “is not only pro-English, but will sacrifice American interests to English interests—often without knowing it.”

  Many high-level U.S. military officers exhibited a similar prejudice. In 1938, General George van Horn Moseley, a former Army deputy chief of staff and one of the country’s most decorated soldiers, advocated mandatory sterilization of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany before they could be admitted to the United States. “Only in that way can we properly protect our future,” Moseley declared.

  Also espousing anti-Semitic views were the two Army officers considered the War Department’s foremost experts on Germany—Colonel Truman Smith and his friend Major Albert Wedemeyer, who had been assigned to the Army War Plans Division shortly after spending two years at the German war college in Berlin. As Wedemeyer saw it, Jews were inherently abrasive, scheming, and selfish, which made them “suspect or distasteful and incompatible” with other groups. Wedemeyer developed his dislike for Jews during his stay in Berlin, where he first realized, he wrote, how strongly Roosevelt was influenced by Jewish interests. After World War II, Wedemeyer, who was by then the deputy Army chief of staff, asserted that the president’s Jewish advisers—among them Samuel Rosenman, Felix Frankfurter, and Henry Morgenthau—“did everything possible to spread venom and hatred against the Nazis and to arouse Roosevelt against the Germans.” Motivated by selfish interests, those Jews and others, he said, helped make America’s entry into the war inevitable.

  Wedemeyer was reiterating a common charge of the prewar years—that FDR had brought to Washington a swarm of radical Jews to run the government. Some opponents of FDR even contended that the president himself was a Jew. Both contentions were false. Although Jewish lawyers, economists, and other professionals certainly were an important source of talent and expertise for the administration, Jews made up less than 15 percent of Roosevelt’s top-level appointees.

  Yet that number, small as it was, was considerably larger than the number of Jews hired in high-level positions in private business and industry. In the 1930s, the federal government—particularly agencies dealing with economic and social reform—provided one of the few employment bright spots for college-educated Jews, who tended to be strong New Deal supporters.

  Nonetheless, as unflinching and steady as the president was in providing vital job and other opportunities for Jews, he, along with his family and gentile advisers, were not free themselves from what FDR biographer Geoffrey Ward called the “open and almost universal” anti-Semitism of the Eastern establishment. T. H. Watkins, Harold Ickes’s biographer, wrote that the president “had a way of using the word ‘Hebrew’ with such a tone of arch superiority that across all the decades it still has the effect of fingernails on a blackboard.”

  On at least one occasion, FDR voiced the same sentiment expressed by Lindbergh—that Jews were outsiders in American society and needed to watch their behavior. At a lunch with Leo Crowley, a Catholic economist who had just been given an important job in the administration, FDR remarked: “Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance. It is up to you to go along with anything that I want.” The president may well have meant his comment as a joke, but the underlying point was clear.

  Even Harold Ickes, known as the administration’s most forceful critic of anti-Semitism, warned American Jews to watch their step. In the November 1938 speech in which he made his first attack on Lindbergh, Ickes admonished affluent Jews “to exercise extreme caution in the acquisition of their wealth and great scrupulousness in their social behavior. A mistake made by a non-Jewish millionaire reflects upon him alone, but a false step made by a Jewish man of wealth reflects upon his whole race. This is harsh and unjust but it is a fact that must be faced.”

  Many if not most American Jews were inclined to go along with the idea of keeping a low profile, especially with regard to the war. “Jews in the U.S. remain quiescent and hope for the best,” Isaiah Berlin, an Oxford don working for the British government in New York, wrote to his Russian Jewish parents in July 1941. “They are, above all things, terrified of being thought warmongers and to be acting in their own, rather than general, American interests.”

  For the most part, American Jews kept quiet when confronted with one of the most agonizing issues facing the Jewish community during that period: the controversy over whether to allow more European Jews to immigrate to the United States. According to Arnold Forster, “even leading Jewish organizations in New York, fearful of the outbreak of anti-Semitism, were largely silent on the refugee crisis.”

  In the late 1930s and early 1940s, thousands of desperate Jews lined up each day in front of U.S. consulates in Germany, Austria, and other Nazi-controlled countries to apply for visas. However, with little sentiment in America for providing them with a means of escape, almost all were turned away.

  Most Americans, including a majority in Congress and the State Department, were adamantly opposed to admitting more refugees. More than two-thirds of those surveyed in a Fortune poll agreed with the statement that “with conditions as they are, we should try to keep [immigrants] out.” As Time put it in March 1940, “The American people have so far shown no inclination to do anything for the world’s refugees except read about them.”

  The U.S. public feared that a new influx of refugees would mean fewer jobs for native-born Americans. Americans also worried that Nazi agents might be planted among the immigrants—an idea emphasized by Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover in their warnings about fifth columnists. Unquestionably, anti-Semitism was also an important factor in fostering the anti-immigrant mood. When a proposal was floated after the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom to take in ten thousand Jewish children from Germany, more than two out of three Americans were against the
idea. Britain eventually accepted nine thousand, while the United States took only 240. That meager response stood in stark contrast to Americans’ reaction in 1940 to the idea of providing a haven for British children escaping the dangers of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. A Gallup poll estimated that five to seven million U.S. families were willing to house young British evacuees for the duration of the war.

  Although Roosevelt was sympathetic to the plight of Jewish refugees, he did little of a concrete nature to help them before and during the war. As Arnold Forster saw it, “FDR failed Jews in their darkest hour.… The sorry truth [was] that throughout the Holocaust, Roosevelt kept the Jewish catastrophe low on his roster of priorities.” In his inertia, however, he was no different from a majority of Americans.

  As it happened, Lindbergh was undoubtedly correct in believing that most American Jews championed Britain’s cause and that many wanted the United States to get into the war. But he was woefully mistaken in alleging that Jewish organizations and individuals were key “war agitators” among the American people. While prominent Jews did indeed belong to such interventionist organizations as the Century Group and Fight for Freedom, they comprised only a small minority of those groups’ members, most of whom were upper-class East Coast Protestants. In July 1941, the German chargé d’affaires, Hans Thomsen, noted to his country’s foreign ministry that because of fears of scapegoating, “far-sighted Jewish circles are avoiding taking an active part in warmongering and leave this to radical warmongers in the Roosevelt cabinet and to English propaganda.”

  Lindbergh’s claim that Jews dominated the media also turned out to be erroneous. Fewer than 3 percent of U.S. newspaper publishers were Jewish, and those who were tended to be extremely cautious in their handling of the question of U.S. involvement in the war. A case in point was Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, who, while inclined toward interventionism, was far less outspoken than the publishers of the Herald Tribune, PM, the Post, and other New York newspapers. In September 1941, Sulzberger told Valentine Williams, a British propaganda official working for William Stephenson, that “for the first time in his life he regretted being a Jew because, with the tide of anti-Semitism rising, he was unable to champion the anti-Hitler policy of the administration as vigorously and as universally as he would like.” The Times publisher added that “his sponsorship would be attributed to Jewish influence by isolationists and thus lose something of its force.”

  ANNE LINDBERGH OFTEN ACCOMPANIED her husband on his travels for America First, but she did not go with him to Des Moines, which was shaping up to be one of the most unfriendly places in which he had spoken. An anomaly in the largely isolationist Midwest, Iowa—the home state of Vice President Henry Wallace—had large pockets of interventionist sentiment, fostered by the Cowles brothers’ Des Moines Register, the state’s leading newspaper. Shortly before Lindbergh’s speech, the editor of the Register, who was also chairman of the Des Moines chapter of Fight for Freedom, called Lindbergh “public enemy No. 1 in the United States,” adding that if he “were a paid agent of the German government he could not serve the cause of Hitler so well.” On the day of the speech, the Register ran an editorial cartoon on its front page showing Lindbergh speaking in front of several microphones, while Hitler and Mussolini sat before him, applauding enthusiastically. The caption over the cartoon read: HIS MOST APPRECIATIVE AUDIENCE.

  Unsmiling and visibly tense when he stepped onto the stage of the Des Moines Coliseum, Lindbergh was greeted by a mixture of cheers, applause, and boos, along with scattered heckling, from the crowd of more than eight thousand. In his speech, which was broadcast nationwide, he preceded his attacks on the “war agitators” with a denunciation of the way he and other isolationists, along with their cause, had been treated in the media. “Newsreels,” he said, had “lost all semblance of objectivity.… A smear campaign was instituted against individuals who opposed intervention. The terms fifth columnist, traitor, Nazi, anti-Semitic were thrown ceaselessly at anyone who dared to suggest that it was not in the best interests of the United States to enter the war.”

  When Lindbergh reached the heart of his address, the applause clearly outweighed the jeering. His mention of the British, the Roosevelt administration, and Jews as the main instigators of war fever brought most of the crowd to its feet, and, as he later wrote in his journal, “whatever opposition existed was completely drowned out by our support.”

  He told his audience that all three groups had been working for months to involve the country in the war “without our realization” and now were trying to create “a series of incidents which would force us into the actual conflict.” Still, though America stood on the brink of war, it was “not yet too late to stay out.” Lindbergh urged those listening, in the auditorium and on the radio, to contact members of Congress, “the last stronghold of democracy and representative government in this country.”

  He reserved his most scathing attacks for Roosevelt and his advisers, whom he charged with “using war to justify restriction of congressional power and assumption of dictatorial procedures.” But as Anne feared, his comments about Jews were the only part of the speech that received any attention. A few days after the address, she wrote in her diary that “the storm is beginning to blow up hard,” which was, by any measure, a massive understatement. Lindbergh’s remarks had spawned a hurricane of fury that swept the country and dealt the isolationist movement a near-lethal blow. “Rarely has any public address in American history caused more of an uproar or brought more criticism on any speaker, than did Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech,” wrote the historian Wayne Cole.

  Virtually every newspaper and magazine in the nation denounced him. The New York Herald Tribune called his speech an appeal to “the dark forces of prejudice and intolerance.” In a PM cartoon entitled “Spreading the Lovely Goebbels Stuff,” Theodor Geisel drew Lindbergh sitting atop “a Nazi Anti-Semite Stink Wagon.” Liberty magazine called him “the most dangerous man in America.” Before Lindbergh, the magazine wrote, “leaders of anti-Semitism were shoddy little crooks and fanatics sending scurrilous circulars through the mails.… But now all that is changed.… He, the famous one, has stood up in public and given brazen tongue to what obscure malcontents have only whispered.”

  Among Lindbergh’s critics were the country’s leading isolationist newspapers, which only days before had showered him with praise. The Hearst press assailed his “intemperate and intolerant address,” while the Chicago Tribune inveighed against the “impropriety” of his comments about the Jews.

  In New York, Wendell Willkie, who earlier had upheld Lindbergh’s right to speak out against the administration’s policies, called his speech “the most un-American talk made in my time by any person of national reputation.” Willkie added: “If the American people permit race prejudice to arise at this crucial moment, they little deserve to preserve democracy.”

  For interventionists, the Lindbergh speech was a godsend. Neither Roosevelt nor Harold Ickes made a public comment, but then they didn’t need to: the national reaction was already one of outrage. The only White House official to make note of the speech was Steve Early, who merely said he thought there was “a striking similarity” between Lindbergh’s remarks and the “outpourings of Berlin in the last few days.”

  Isolationists, for their part, were painfully aware of the enormous damage done to their cause. The executive director of the Keep America Out of War Congress, whose members were largely liberal pacifists, wrote that the Des Moines speech had “done more to fan the flames of Anti-Semitism and push ‘on-the-fence’ Jews into the war camp than Mr. Lindbergh can possibly imagine.” The congress’s governing board made clear its “deep disagreement” with Lindbergh’s “implication that American citizens of Jewish extraction or religion are a separate group, apart from the rest of the American people, or that they react as a separate group, or that they are unanimously for our entrance into the European war.”

  The Socialist leade
r Norman Thomas, one of the congress’s founders, was so infuriated by the speech that he severed all ties with America First and Lindbergh, to whom he once had been close. “Didn’t our friend Lindbergh do us a lot of harm?” Thomas wrote to a friend. “I honestly don’t think Lindbergh is an anti-Semite, but I think he is a great idiot.… Not all Jews are for war, and Jews have a right to agitate for war if we have a right to agitate against it.… It is an enormous pity that … the Colonel will not take the advice on public relations which he would expect an amateur in aviation to take from an expert.”

  Thrown into turmoil by the speech, America First was bitterly divided about how to respond. In a letter to Robert Wood, executive committee member Sterling Morton condemned Lindbergh’s inflammatory remarks, saying, “There are no people who have more right than the Jewish people to oppose Hitler and all he has done, and they have a perfect right to use their influence in favor of war if they so wish.”

  Robert Stuart and John T. Flynn, head of America First’s New York chapter, strongly urged the organization to issue a vehement denunciation of anti-Semitism. Flynn, who did not disagree with Lindbergh’s statements about Jews, nonetheless called the speech “stupid” and said it “has given us all a terrible kick in the pants. This just pins the anti-Semitic label on the whole isolationist fight [and] lays us wide open to this charge of racial persecution.”

  Other America First leaders, however, supported what Lindbergh had said, and Lindbergh himself refused to repudiate or modify any of his statements. Loath to excoriate the most popular isolationist in America—“the heart of our fight,” as one America First official described him—and faced with a lack of consensus on what to do, America First settled for a vague statement denying that either it or Lindbergh was guilty of anti-Semitism. The document satisfied no one and added fuel to interventionists’ charges against the group. Lessing Rosenwald, whose family owned Sears, Roebuck and who once had been a member of America First’s national committee, demanded that Robert Wood publicly disavow Lindbergh’s speech. When Wood failed to do so, Rosenwald ended his close friendship with the Sears chairman. The breach was never healed.