WASHINGTON, D.C. — In HBO’s recent adaptation of the Philip Roth novel The Plot Against America, American Jews are coerced by President Charles Lindbergh to move to rural parts of the country so they will become “Americanized” and shed their Jewish ways. In real life, however, it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who wanted to do just that.
In the novel and television series, Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 on a platform of keeping America out of Europe’s war. But his agenda soon expands beyond isolationism.
The fictional Lindbergh administration regards cultural and religious differences —especially Jewish ones— as undesirable, even dangerous. Jewish teenagers are enticed by the “Office of American Absorption” to spend their summers on farms in the midwest. Sandy, the elder brother of the narrator, 9 year-old Philip Roth, returns from his months in Kentucky shorn of his Newark (read: Jewish) mannerisms and attitudes.
Then the “Absorption” office comes up with another scheme: large East coast companies are compelled to transfer their Jewish employees to cities in the south and west that have few Jewish residents. Phillip’s father quits his job in order to keep their family from being relocated.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was, in real life, a vocal advocate of similar social engineering. During his campaign as the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate in 1920, FDR told an interviewer from The Brooklyn Eagle that “the foreign elements” had “crowded into one district and they have brought congestion and racial prejudices to our large cities.” The result, Roosevelt asserted, “is that they do not easily conform to the manners and the customs and the requirements of their new home.”
Population resettlement was the answer, according to FDR. “If we had the greater part of the foreign population of the City of New York distributed to different localities upstate we should have a far better condition,” he told the interviewer.
Roosevelt returned to the problem of immigrant assimilation in a column he wrote for a Georgia newspaper, the Macon Daily Telegraph, on April 21, 1925. “[F]or a good many years to come European immigration should remain greatly restricted,” the future president wrote. “We have, unfortunately, a great many thousand foreigners who got in here and who must be digested. For fifty years the United States ate a meal altogether too large—much of the food was digestible, but some of it was almost poisonous.” He added: “The United States must, for a short time at least, stop eating, and when it resumes should confine itself to the most readily assimilable foodstuffs.”
Long after becoming president, FDR continued to view immigrants, and especially Jewish immigrants, as problematic and in need of dispersal.
At a private White House luncheon on May 22, 1943, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill discussed their plans for the postwar world. The status of the Jews came up in the conversation. FDR sympathetically cited a plan that his senior adviser on population issues, Isaiah Bowman, had concocted for dealing with the Jews.
Vice President Henry Wallace, who was present, wrote in his diary that Roosevelt told Churchill “the best way to settle the Jewish question” was “to spread the Jews thin all over the world.” Wallace continued: “The president said he had tried this out in [Meriwether] County, Georgia and at Hyde Park on the basis of adding four or five Jewish families at each place. He claimed that the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.”
The Jews were not the only immigrants whom President Roosevelt thought should be “spread thin.” He was also deeply concerned about what he saw as the inability of Asians to become fully American. “Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population,” he wrote in that Georgia newspaper in 1925.” 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.”
At a press conference on November 21, 1944, FDR was asked by a reporter whether the 130,000 Japanese-Americans whom he had put in detention camps would be permitted to return their homes when the war ended.
“A good deal of progress has been made in scattering [Japanese-origin citizens] through the country, and that is going on almost every day,” Roosevelt replied. In language almost identical to that which he used when discussing the Jews, he said: “[I]n the Hudson River Valley or in western Georgia which we all know, in one of those countries, probably half a dozen or a dozen families could be scattered around on the farms and worked into the community. . . . And they wouldn’t—what’s my favorite word?—discombobulate the existing population of those particular countries very much.”
In The Plot Against America, it is Franklin Roosevelt, as leader of the opposition, who eventually saves America from Lindbergh’s creeping fascism. It makes for entertaining television, but it’s fiction.
Mark Twain famously remarked that “truth is stranger than fiction.” In this case, the truth of what the liberal FDR had in mind for Jews as strange, if not stranger, than what the reactionary Lindbergh carried out in Phillip Roth’s fiction.
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Rafael Medoff, Ph.D, is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust.
Mr. Medoff is paid to spread nonsense and cherry picked comments from FDR. FDR hired more Jews in his administration than all previous administrations combined. FDR was called by right wing and even not so right wing elements pro-Jewish and a secret Jew. FDR could have easily sided with the business class and wealthy interests to support Hitler and oppose Stalin, as people forget (Medoff wants people to not remember, too) the majority of the business class was more in favor of Hitler and Mussolini than siding with the Communists anywhere. In the 1930s, FDR maneuvered around the immigration quotas and an anti-foreigner Congress, with whom the State Department had direct ties beyond FDR, to ensure Jewish European immigration throughout most of the 1930s. Nearly 70% of German Jews were able to get out of Germany before war began in August 1939. FDR openly supported the creation of the war crimes tribunal during the war, and rightfully worried about turning WWII into a save Jews crusade, in order to ensure he could finish off Hitler and Mussolini. If people read Robert Rosen’s book which I link to here, one would have a far more balanced view because, while Mr. Rosen has a point of view, we are so often hearing from the likes of Mr. Medoff, who analyze FDR from a presentist perspective, and therefore is ahistorical. Mr. Medoff is the type of historian who would call Lincoln a racist who didn’t care about stopping slavery because Lincoln told anti-black jokes and made comments we would be shocked at learning about today. Yes, one can make such an argument, but it is again ahistorical in thinking the world would accept abolitionist thinking in 1860 or even thereafter during and after the Civil War. The anti-Semitism was significant inside the US in the FDR years, and the fact we were able to fight against Hitler at all is a miracle. https://www.amazon.com/Saving-Jews-Franklin-Roosevelt-Holocaust/dp/1560257784/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=robert+rosen+for+and+the+jews&qid=1589644274&sr=8-3
Mitchell Freedman: Can you say by whom Mr. Medoff is paid? He is a recognized scholar who will be a featured speaker at upcoming American Jewish History online conferences. – Don Harrison, editor, San Diego Jewish World.
He gained his notoriety and money from the Wyman Institute. Every time he gets paid to speak at a synagogue, he cashes in. He gained his ability to publish books from being director at that institute. It is of course well funded. But really, the funny thing about the Wyman Institute is it started out as a more left oriented place in terms of who was there, and then drifted rightward. The one thing that never really changed, and only got worse, is their FDR-hatred.
Funny how FDR “maneuvered around” immigration quotas when in fact the quotas were not even filled, because the State Department, with FDR’s knowing connivance, put illegal barriers in the way of Jewish immigrants.
Start here, with this article from Time magazine. This was a continuing battle, and the State Department had many supporters in the US Congress, and in the press throughout the nation. https://time.com/5712367/wwii-german-immigration-public-charge/. Also, then go to the Rosen book. To think Medoff’s view is the be-all or the most-all is to look at this way too narrowly, and with present tense perspective, instead of what the article in Time also shows, which is a high degree of hostility in the US public against Jewish immigration from Germany and elsewhere. FDR was maneuvering us to fight Hitler, something a lot of business leaders and lots political figures in the media and in Congress did not want. They wanted to support Hitler against International Communism, and if it took out Jews, so what, they said.
The Myth of Roosevelt & the Jews????? I remember growing up with my family all claiming FDR saved the Jews and was such a wonderful person. It appears it ain’t true! Also they hated Harry S. as if he had something to do with FDR’s death. On the other hand Eleanor was a great liberal influence on FDR.