Misplaced loyalty?

Despite long-held stereotypes, Herbert Hoover did more for the Jews than FDR, argues Rafael Medoff.

By ATARA BECK
US president Herbert Hoover 370 (photo credit: REUTERS)
US president Herbert Hoover 370
(photo credit: REUTERS)
‘The Republican Party has been stereotyped as antiimmigration, isolationist and cold-hearted. But in fact, during the Holocaust, the Jews found many unlikely allies there,’ according to historian Dr. Rafael Medoff, author of 15 books about Jewish history, Zionism and the Holocaust. His latest is Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel, co-authored with Dr. Sonja Schoepf Wentling. Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which teaches the history of America’s response to the Holocaust, focusing on the abandonment of Europe’s Jews as well as efforts outside the American Jewish establishment to promote rescue.
Herbert Hoover and the Jews is a fascinating, well-researched book that uncovers an important, yet little-known, chapter in American Jewish history. Its lessons are extremely relevant today to both Jews and non-Jews.
“The Republican Party’s embrace of Israel and Zionism in recent years has deep roots,” Medoff said during a recent visit to Israel. “It did not start with the rise of the Evangelists but goes back to Herbert Hoover,” who was president of the US in the decade preceding the Holocaust.
The book discusses internal bickering within the American Jewish leadership during World War II, despite the urgency of the situation, which resulted in failure to act in the best interests of their brethren in Nazi Europe. The community, for the most part, glorified Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who served as US president throughout World War II, despite indications that he was absolutely indifferent to the plight of the Jews.
FDR “was widely perceived as someone who cared about the little guy,” Medoff says. His predecessor, Hoover, “was seen by many as coldhearted, mainly because of his cautious response to the Great Depression. But those stereotypes certainly did not hold true with regard to their responses to the Holocaust. FDR shut America’s doors to Jewish refugees; Hoover urged that more refugees be allowed to come in. Roosevelt said it was impossible to rescue Jews from Hitler; Hoover insisted that rescue was possible and that the US should act. When it came to the question of creating a Jewish state, FDR was non-committal, while Hoover strongly supported Jewish statehood.”
Herbert Hoover and the Jews includes several examples of this stark contrast. For instance, during the years of the Holocaust, Hoover endorsed the Wagner-Rogers Bill – Roosevelt did not – which, if passed, would have admitted 20,000 German Jewish children to America outside the quota system.
Hoover’s outcry against the Nazi slaughter was motivated by his humanitarianism, Medoff opines, pointing to the food-relief missions he led in Europe during WWI, which saved millions of lives.
“And part of it was what we today call Christian Zionism. He was a Bible-believing Quaker who believed that the Jewish people had the right to return to their ancient homeland.”
Yet it was Roosevelt, not Hoover, who enjoyed the support of the Jewish majority.
“The most prominent and influential Jewish officials, such as Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of the American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress, were fervent supporters of President Roosevelt, the New Deal [economic response to the Great Depression] and the Democratic Party,” Medoff explains. “They disagreed with the Republicans on most issues, and they feared [that] FDR would be offended if they built ties to the Republicans.”
According to Medoff, Wise’s hope was that support for FDR would encourage access to the White House.
“But this access, as it turned out, was very limited, infrequent and superficial.”
A large majority of Jews have voted Democrat in almost every election, with two notable exceptions: In 1948, Harry Truman lost substantial Jewish support because of his arms embargo against Israel, and in 1980, Jimmy Carter got only 40 percent of the Jewish vote because of his anti- Israel stance.
“These two elections indicate that when Israel is an issue in a presidential election, many Jewish voters might switch sides, and that could be the case this year, depending on how this race unfolds,” Medoff says. “Both candidates promise to be strong friends of Israel. Jewish voters will have to evaluate President Obama’s record and decide accordingly.”
DURING World War II, a small group of militant Zionist activists from Europe and Palestine went to the US to seek support for the rescue of Jews from the Nazis and the establishment of a Jewish state.
Hillel Kook and Benzion Netanyahu, recently deceased father of the current prime minister, were followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, father of Revisionist Zionism, the precursor to the Likud Party. After Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, Netanyahu became executive director of the New Zionist Organization of America in New York, the political rival of the mainstream Zionist Organization of America, and he found allies among Republicans and Democrats. Kook, under the alias Peter Bergson, simultaneously formed an independent coalition with people from across the political spectrum in order to focus on rescue, which became known as the Bergson Group.
“In American politics, you have to build relationships with both parties, so that if one side doesn’t give you what you want, you can go to the other,” Medoff affirms.
“This is Political Strategy 101. It creates political pressure and leverage. That’s what Hillel Kook and Benzion Netanyahu understood. But many Jewish leaders did not yet grasp that basic fact of political life.”
Therefore, Hoover’s Jewish connections included mostly dissidents and activists.
“Wise knew of Hoover’s sympathy yet still refrained from having any meaningful contact with Hoover or any other prominent Republicans,” Medoff maintains. “He thought that supporting the Democrats and the New Deal was good for the Jews and that if Roosevelt said rescue was impossible, then that must be the case. Eventually, Wise realized that rescue was in fact possible, but he could not bring himself to publicly challenge the president or to put public pressure on him.”
“It’s probably no coincidence that Prime Minister [Binyamin] Netanyahu, in his first term and again now, has made a strong effort to maintain a good relationship with both [major US] parties,” he suggests. “Building ties in Washington with the administration and the opposition are reminiscent of what his father was doing 60 years earlier and seems to stem from the same principle.”
Support for the Bergson Group came not only not only from politicians, but also from individuals as diverse as famed actor Marlon Brando and baseball superstar Babe Ruth.
Brilliant in PR, one of the projects organized by the Bergsonites in the midst of the Holocaust was a theatrical production about the situation in Europe, titled We Will Never Die. It was written by famous screenwriter Ben Hecht, who recruited stage and screen legends to star in the pageant.
Volunteers included world-renowned composer Kurt Weill, who created an original score, and the list of sponsors featured Hoover as well as other prominent politicians from both parties.
As Medoff writes, “the White House declined [producer] Billy Rose’s request that it send a message to be read aloud at the premiere. The administration feared the publicity surrounding the show would increase pressure to admit Jewish refugees....
“Most mainstream Jewish leaders were unhappy about the Bergsonites. Some feared the Bergson group’s vocal activism would usurp their own role in the Jewish community. Others worried that dramatic public activities... might provoke anti- Semitism. Some would not work with Bergson because their particular factions in the Zionist movement regarded him as their political rival since he had been associated with Jabotinsky.”
Nevertheless, We Will Never Die was a resounding success, having been viewed in March 1943 by more than 100,000 people.
For millions of Americans, reading about We Will Never Die in the newspapers was the first time they learned about the Nazi mass murders.
Yet the story of the Bergson Group is still largely unknown, a fact that Medoff attributes to “a variety of reasons.”
“Some historians skipped over the Bergson Group out of ignorance, while others were still stuck in the old Labor-versus-Revisionist quarrels of the 1940s,” he asserts. “Today, a new generation of scholars is bringing out the information, and in the end, museums and universities will have to decide according to scholarship rather than other considerations. The Holocaust museum in Washington recently added an exhibit, and someday Yad Vashem probably will, too.”