The Soul of America

by Jon Meacham

  Lindbergh had taken it upon himself to speak, as he put it elsewhere, for “that silent majority of Americans who have no newspaper, or newsreel, or radio station at their command.” Now it was time, he had decided, to make himself very clear on what he saw as a critical issue facing the nation as it debated whether to go to war against Hitler: the role of American Jews.

  “It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany,” Lindbergh said in Des Moines. “The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But”—and the but here is epochal—“no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them….Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.” The British and the Jews, Lindbergh continued, “for reasons which are not American…wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours.”

  Roosevelt had turned on Lindbergh long before. The previous year, after another isolationist plea to the country from the aviator, the president had told Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr.: “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.”

  The Lindbergh remarks in Des Moines on the role of Jewish opinion worried more than a few of his fellow isolationists. “Lindbergh’s anti-Jewish speech is, of course, all wrong,” Herbert Hoover wrote. “And I fear it will hurt all of us who are opposed to war.” Norman Thomas, the Socialist leader, declined to speak further on behalf of America First. “Not all Jews are for war,” Thomas said, “and Jews have a right to agitate for war if we have a right to agitate against it.” John T. Flynn, a journalist and America Firster, sent a plaintive message to the committee’s leaders after Des Moines. “It seems incredible to me that Col. Lindbergh without consulting anyone literally committed the America First movement to an open attack upon the Jews.”

  Anti-Semitism was a fact of life in America. In the Red Scare years, Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, a Michigan newspaper, chronicled the alleged Jewish influence in American life and published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated anti-Semitic text that provided haters a false narrative of Jewish conspiracy.

  “When we get through with the Jews in America,” Father Coughlin told an audience, “they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” The German-American Bund, led by Fritz Kuhn, had held a twenty-thousand-strong gathering at Madison Square Garden in February 1939 that featured cries of “Heil Hitler.” “The principles of the Bund and the principles of the Klan are the same,” a Bund leader said while appearing with Arthur Bell, the grand dragon of the New Jersey Klan. In 1940, fearing a third Roosevelt term, the Third Reich had sought to influence the presidential election by placing newspaper ads and paying for isolationist congressmen to attend the Republican National Convention.

  Even after Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States in December 1941, there were those who peddled a toxic blend of anti-Semitism (which came to include Holocaust denial), virulent anti-Communism, and Nazi ideology. Gerald L. K. Smith, a former ally of the late Huey Long, was a leading Hitlerite who ran for president in 1944 and published an alt-right forerunner, The Cross and the Flag. In later years, Smith advocated a form of Christian nationalism. “The Christian Nationalist Crusade,” he wrote, “is a nationwide political movement dedicated to the mobilization of citizens who respect American tradition and whose idealism is founded on Christian principle….We believe that the destiny of America in relationship to its governing authority must be in the hands of our own people. We must never be governed by aliens. We must keep control of our own money and our own blood.”

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  Americans, FDR noted in 1941, would “rather die on our feet than live on our knees,” and the passion for freedom, for justice, and for the rule of law was not limited to the world beyond the seas. After news of the June 1940 lynching of Elbert Williams, the secretary of his local NAACP branch in western Tennessee, The Pittsburgh Courier wrote: “There is something definitely wrong about a so-called democratic government that froths at the mouth about…terrorism abroad, yet has not a mumble of condemnation for the same sort of thing at home.”

  Eleanor Roosevelt was in many ways the conscience of the White House. “My impression of both him and Mrs. Roosevelt,” H. G. Wells wrote of the president and the First Lady, “is that they are unlimited people, entirely modern in the openness of their minds and the logic of their actions.” As a younger woman she had shared the anti-Semitism of the age, once describing Felix Frankfurter as “an interesting little man but very Jew.” As she grew older, her perspective widened. When The New York Times published a dispatch from Warm Springs on the twenty-fifth anniversary of FDR’s death, it quoted a white Southerner: “Mrs. Roosevelt? Well, she was what you’d call a Negro lover, wasn’t she?” Roy Wilkins, of the NAACP, said: “The personal touch and the personal fight against discrimination were Mrs. Roosevelt’s. That attached to Roosevelt also—he couldn’t hardly get away from it—and he reaped the political benefit from it.”

  The tireless Eleanor Roosevelt pressed FDR on anti-lynching legislation and resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when the group refused to allow Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall.

  Lynchings of blacks by whites had still occurred with depressing regularity into the thirties. According to contemporary reports, there had been 3,500 such attacks since 1900 but only 67 indictments and 12 convictions. In December 1933, in a speech to the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, FDR spoke out against such racially motivated violence. “We know that it is murder, and a deliberate and definite disobedience of the Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ ” the president said. “We do not excuse those in high places or in low who condone lynch law.”

  Fine words, but the president felt constrained by the abiding problem of the Democratic Party: the appeasement of its segregationist Southern wing. Mrs. Roosevelt and the NAACP pressed the president to take a firm stand on federal anti-lynching measures only to find him consumed with other matters. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing,” Roosevelt told NAACP leader Walter White. “I just can’t take the risk.” He would not spend political capital on civil rights, but when Mrs. Roosevelt asked if she might speak her mind on the lynching question, the president said, “You can say anything you want. I can always say, ‘Well, that is my wife; I can’t do anything about her.”

  In the end, FDR supported such a measure, though it failed in Congress: The president sacrificed the legislation to ensure support for other New Deal programs. “I am so sorry about the bill,” Eleanor wrote White. “Of course, all of us are going on fighting, and the only thing we can do is hope we will have better luck next time.” A small sign of the structural nature of racist sentiment came when a young aide, Will Alexander, was leaving the administration in June 1940. “Will, don’t you think the New Deal is undertaking to do too much for the Negro?” asked Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture who joined FDR’s ticket as vice president later that summer.

  On the symbolic front, Mrs. Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 when the group refused to allow Marian Anderson, the African American singer, to perform at the DAR’s Constitution Hall near the White House. From Groton, Endicott Peabody wrote approvingly, telling Eleanor that the DAR’s discrimination was “in line with the prejudice, I might say cruelty, with which we have dealt with the negro people. Your courage in taki
ng this definite stand called for my admiration.”

  Anderson was instead invited to sing at the Lincoln Memorial to a vast Easter Sunday afternoon audience on the Mall. She opened with “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and closed with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, wrote that he had “never heard such a voice” and that “the whole setting was unique, majestic, and impressive.” Walter White called the concert “one of the most thrilling experiences of our time.”

  The NAACP, among others, had been long at work battling discrimination in employment, education, housing, voting, and public accommodations. It was the slowest of goings, but the warriors for equality fought on, year in and year out, court case after court case, flashpoint after flashpoint. In early 1941, A. Philip Randolph, the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, decided that a mass march on Washington would be the best way to draw attention to segregation in the nation’s burgeoning defense industries. Writing the NAACP’s Walter White, Randolph argued that “something dramatic has got to be done to shake official Washington and the white industrialists and labor forces of America to the realization of the fact that the Negroes mean business about getting their rights as American citizens under national defense.” The First Lady was also urging integration within the armed forces themselves and the promotion of blacks within the military. In his diary, Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, lamented “Mrs. Roosevelt’s intrusive and impulsive folly.”

  When he heard about Randolph’s proposed July 1941 march, Roosevelt dispatched his wife to New York to try to talk the African American leadership out of it. “You know where I stand,” Mrs. Roosevelt told Randolph and White. “But the attitude of the Washington police, most of them Southerners, and the general feeling of Washington itself are such that I fear that there may be trouble if the march occurs.” The reward for calling off the demonstration was Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in military industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce the new directive. “I hope from this first step,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Randolph, “we may go on to others.”

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  Roosevelt’s greatest concession to fear, the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, was also arguably his greatest failure as president. Beginning in 1942, about 117,000 Americans of Japanese descent were rounded up and consigned to concentration camps for the duration of the war. The shameful episode had all the hallmarks of a fevered era of fear run amok. There was racial prejudice, anxiety about espionage, and a lost sense of justice. “Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats,” said the governor of Idaho, Chase Clark. The attorney general of California, Earl Warren, argued in favor of internment.

  Japanese American children wave from a train window in Seattle en route to an internment camp in March 1942—the result of FDR’s Executive Order 9066.

  On Thursday, February 12, 1942, Walter Lippmann wrote that while he understood “the unwillingness of Washington to adopt a policy of mass evacuation and mass internment,” there was no real choice in the matter. “The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone: some part of it may at any moment be a battlefield,” Lippmann wrote. “Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.”

  Seven days later Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, giving legal sanction to the internment, in typically desperate conditions, of American citizens. It was a decision of a nation in panic, of a government that had lost its bearings, of a president who had chosen to forsake his duty to the spirit and to the letter of the Constitution. The ACLU challenged the program in court, writing Roosevelt: “Enforcing this on the Japanese alone approximates the totalitarian theory of justice practiced by the Nazis in their treatment of the Jews.”

  A majority of the Supreme Court upheld the essence of Roosevelt’s order in several cases, deciding, coldly, that “Hardships are part of war, and war is an aggregation of hardships.” The author of the opinion: Hugo Black.

  The military did allow the creation of an all–Japanese American unit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which fought bravely and well. In December 1945, General Joseph W. Stilwell, the American commander in the Far East known as “Vinegar Joe,” flew to the farmlands of Orange County, California. On the porch of a frame shack, Stilwell presented Mary Masuda with the Distinguished Service Cross. Masuda and her parents had been detained under Executive Order 9066; her brother Kazuo had served in the 442nd, performing nobly under fire in Europe, including a twelve-hour lone mortar barrage on German positions. He was killed in action.

  There were some show business figures in Stilwell’s entourage on his trip to the Masuda homestead. One of the party had this to say: “Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.”

  Eloquent words, and Ronald Reagan, then a thirty-four-year-old movie star and liberal activist, spoke them well. More than four decades later, Reagan, in his final year as president of the United States, quoted a newspaper clipping about the presentation at the Masudas’ as he prepared to sign the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. The bill—numbered 442 in honor of the 442nd—authorized compensation for the detained families and, perhaps more important, apologized to the victims of Roosevelt’s internment policy. “For here,” Reagan said, “we admit a wrong; here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”

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  As President Reagan’s apology suggests, there was no real debate about the moral content of internment. The same cannot be said, however, of Roosevelt’s response to the tragedy of the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews and others the Third Reich deemed less than human. Scholars continue to argue over the president and the Final Solution: Did Roosevelt do enough to save Jewish lives from being lost in the Shoah?

  On Thursday, April 12, 1945, Edward R. Murrow of CBS—perhaps the most famous man in broadcast journalism—visited Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp where nearly sixty thousand people had died. The prisoners Murrow saw were too weak to rise from their cots; he told listeners that he watched a man fall over dead. Inmates showed Murrow the numbers tattooed on their arms. “There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood,” Murrow said, describing a room with a concrete floor. “They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little.”

  Three days later, Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied commander, wrote of his own tour of a death camp. “The things I saw beggar description,” he said. “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick….I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’ ”

  Hitler had come to power in Germany on Monday, January 30, 1933. “For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated,” Hitler said as early as 1920. “Don’t be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus. Don’t think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst.” The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and Kristallnacht in November 1938 should have left no doubts about the evils of Nazi ideology even before World War II.

  President Roosevelt respond
ed, in a fashion, to the crisis even before Kristallnacht. As the scholars Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman wrote, the president had two ideas, both politically risky—and he was not a man who undertook political risks lightly. First, after Hitler took over Austria, Roosevelt combined the Austrian and Germany immigration quotas to increase the number of refugees who could be accepted into the United States. His second idea, one that led to a not entirely successful international conference in Évian, France, was that the nations of the world would accept a certain number of refugees, thus—Roosevelt hoped—moving them out of harm’s way.

  After a time, however, Roosevelt slowed his efforts to increase the flow of refugees out of the Nazi sphere. Why? Because the 1940 election was approaching. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the secretary of the treasury and a Hudson Valley neighbor of Roosevelt’s, believed that Roosevelt began thinking of a third term as 1938 wore on—which led the president to return to safer political form. As Breitman and Lichtman wrote: “The more Roosevelt risked on initiatives for Jews, the less he thought he could carry Congress and the public with him on broad issues of foreign policy.” And so ended the prewar Roosevelt story on Jewish questions.

  As the global conflict grew, Roosevelt believed, strongly, that the best course was to focus on first preparing for total war and second on waging it. The fastest way to save the Jews, the president argued (and Churchill agreed) was to defeat Germany. That was the core conviction. On Thursday, December 17, 1942, the United States, Great Britain, and other Allied governments issued a declaration: