America's Ambivalence and Apathy

Dimensions:
A Journal of Holocaust Studies

Volume 10, Number 1


Indifference to reported violence, to remote brutality, is surely not unique to the twentieth century, but it explains better than anything else our common silence in the face of outbreaks of evil today. As writers in the present issue suggest, it also helps to explain America’s failure to vigorously assist European Jewry during the Holocaust era. Our contributors, in fact, raise many questions about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s leadership, and about Americans in general, that challenge some distinguished thinkers (who have written in these pages and elsewhere) who insist that the United States was simply unable to rescue Europe’s Jews from the Nazis.

It is particularly noteworthy when historians acknowledge moral indifference as a factor to be considered when scrutinizing historical events, since their professional craft demands attention to context and available, realistic choices. Henry Feingold, writing in a recent Dimensions (Vol. 8, No. 2) on American inaction during the Holocaust, is very clear about the historian’s responsibility to be pragmatic about historical events. For example, he states, when examining the Roosevelt administration and America in the 1930s and 1940s, that it is fundamental to see Americans “as they were,” not “as they should have been.” According to this way of thinking, Roosevelt’s America was burdened with too many political, social, and military problems to allow the President to fully assist European Jewry in the '30s and '40s.

Problems there were, of course, and our contributors reconstruct them and give them due weight. Observes Leonard Dinnerstein, the award-winning author of Antisemitism in America: “FDR’s tenure in the White House coincided with the worst period of anti-Semitism in the history of this country.” Dinnerstein points out that because Roosevelt was always alert to the public mood, he rarely took steps to reform the nation’s highly restrictive — and strongly anti-Jewish — immigration policy. When he did make tentative attempts to do so, he was rebuffed by a staunchly conservative Congress.

William L. O'Neill and Robert E. Herzstein corroborate Dinnerstein’s conclusions about America’s fierce isolationism and anti-Semitism in the '30s and '40s. A historian at Rutgers University, O'Neill uses polls from the 1930s (when this instrument for measuring popular opinion first became a reliable tool) to show that well over half of all Americans “identified Jews with negative stereotypes.” Such sentiments, in turn, reinforced Congress’s reluctance to liberalize U.S. policies on refugees. Herzstein (Roosevelt & Hitler: Prelude to War) explores how Henry Luce’s powerful journalistic enterprise, Time Inc. (Time, Life and Fortune magazines, and the March of Time newsreels), covered Jewish subjects in the '30s and '40s. During World War II, Luce -- and his media properties -- remained aloof from the plight of Europe’s Jews. Herzstein discusses why this was so.

Indifference toward the Jewish victims of the Third Reich also manifested itself in the Roosevelt administration’s conception of the postwar investigation and punishment of war criminals. Michael R. Marrus (The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1945-46: A Short History with Documents [forthcoming]) writes that the U.S. government, favoring an international tribunal for war criminals rather than summary execution, sought above all to command maximum international respect for judicial procedure and fair play. When American officials debated what the nation’s war-crimes policy should be, crimes against Jews did not figure significantly in their discussions.

Religion scholar Michael N. Dobkowski states in his article that despite the formidable obstacles that the U.S. would have had to overcome to save great numbers of Europe’s Jews from the Nazis, these obstacles cannot, in the final analysis, either fully explain or justify America’s half-hearted, even callous, refugee and rescue policies. Dobkowski’s assertion is part of a strong plea urging that moral principles be taken into account when the past is studied.

The questions raised by these articles are extremely complex — and troubling. Why couldn’t Roosevelt choose humanitarianism over practical politics? Why did responsible Allied leaders prefer caution to moral resolve, especially when their enemies were ideologically driven killers? What does the United States’s inaction in regard to those victimized by Nazi Germany say about America as a nation, about America as a “haven for the oppressed”?

In the first of two book reviews, Nathan Glazer scrutinizes America’s various postwar attitudes toward the Holocaust in his discussion of Lawrence Graver’s An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary. In our second review, Susan Miron reviews John Garrard and Carol Garrard’s The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman, a biography of a distinguished Soviet author who wrote about the Holocaust in the U.S.S.R.