When he was police commissioner of New York in 1895 and 1896, Theodore Roosevelt expressed pride in the substantial number of Jews on the force. Although many recent immigrants from Russia and Poland remained physically weak, he declared, a sizable number of the city’s patrolmen and officers displayed “the Maccabee type” of courage, “nerve and hardihood,” and would help “put a stop to the unreasoning prejudice” against their race.
Roosevelt also maintained that promotions were granted strictly on the basis of merit: “I should positively refuse to recognize any creed or any nationality or anything else, except fitness. If there were ten promotions and the best ten candidates were Jews, they would secure all the prizes; but if they were not the best, then none of them would be promoted.”
These values shaped Roosevelt’s subsequent policies as governor of New York and president of the United States.
But, as author Andrew Porwancher points out, Roosevelt’s rhetoric and behavior also reflected “the countervailing forces” acting on him at the turn of the 20th century: partisan political calculations; growing opposition to immigration; humanitarian impulses toward antisemitic violence abroad constrained by diplomatic protocols; and his own contradictory views about the virtues of ethnic identity, cultural pluralism, and “melting pot” assimilation.
A look at Theodore Roosevelt's relationship with the Jews
In American Maccabee, Porwancher (a professor of history at Arizona State University and author of The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton) provides an informative and nuanced analysis of Roosevelt’s respect for Jews and his handling of a series of challenges that affected them.
THROUGHOUT HIS career, Roosevelt made a conscious effort to appoint Jews to positions at every level of government, from Etta Falk as a board manager of a prison, the first Jewish woman appointed by a governor of New York State, to Oscar Straus as secretary of commerce, the first Jewish Cabinet member in American history.
Roosevelt wanted the appointments to serve as a rebuttal to antisemitic stereotypes, and to demonstrate to Jews that they had the same rights and opportunities as other American citizens.
He also oscillated between acknowledging that his choices were a deliberate attempt to ensure religious diversity and denying that religious identity influenced them. Roosevelt expressed his ambivalence in a remark to Straus, whose nomination, not coincidentally, was announced on the eve of an election: “I don’t appoint you because you are a Jew, but I am mighty glad you are one.”
American Maccabee features a detailed analysis of the responses of the Roosevelt administration to antisemitism in Romania and Russia.
To avoid accusations that the United States was interfering in the internal affairs of another country, secretary of state John Hay argued that Romania’s antisemitic policies spurred a massive emigration of destitute Jews, even though fewer than 7,000 had landed on America’s shores in the previous year. While Hay’s remonstrance had virtually no impact on Romanian authorities, Porwancher notes, it evoked an enthusiastic response from Jews in the United States.
Roosevelt was even more reluctant to make forceful protests to the Kishinev pogroms. They would accomplish nothing, he claimed, alienate Russia, and disrupt trade. Speaking out, he feared, might also prompt the czar to express “horror at the lynching of negroes.”
Nonetheless, Roosevelt decided to forward a B’nai B’rith petition decrying the pogroms, “couched in respectful language” to the Russian government, which promptly announced it would not receive it.
Kishinev, Porwancher emphasizes, “marked only the beginning of a new phase of Jewish bloodletting.” And in addition to pressing the president to address the scourge of pogroms, Jewish Americans pleaded with him to do something about the refusal of Russian authorities to issue passports to citizens of the Jewish faith who wanted to re-enter the old country to visit relatives or conduct business; and to rewrite an extradition treaty the Russian authorities were using to justify the return of political refugees.
DIFFICULT IN their own right, these issues arose while Roosevelt was trying to broker an end to the Russo-Japanese War and amid claims that Jewish bankers were refusing to provide loans to Russia unless the czar ended the persecution of Russian Jews.
In his 1904 Annual Message, president Roosevelt denounced Russia’s passport policy as “unjust.” Setting aside diplomatic norms, he deemed “the massacre of Jews in Kishinev” a crime “so vast in scale and of such peculiar horror” that the United States had a “manifest duty... to show our disapproval.” But as chaotic conditions spread in Russia, the White House released a statement asserting that no action taken by the United States “will be of any benefit to the unfortunate sufferers for whom we feel such keen sympathy.”
Roosevelt, Porwancher suggests, “wasn’t coldly seizing” on upheaval “as a convenient pretext to do nothing.” Since the United States was not prepared to invade Russia because of pogroms, he believed protests would be “futile, undignified and mischievous” and might even make the plight of Russian Jews worse.
Meanwhile, Porwancher indicates, Roosevelt’s policy preferences on immigration to the United States remained inconsistent. Torn between support of restrictions to enable people who were already in the US to have better housing and receive higher wages and a desire to make America a refuge for oppressed people, the president endorsed turning away individuals who “are ignorant, vicious and with low standards of life, just as we have shut out the Chinese.”
Although he didn’t know that the illiteracy rate among recent Jewish arrivals was 26%, Roosevelt supported making literacy in any language a prerequisite for entering the United States. In a few months, however, he did an about-face, insisting that “All we have a right to question is a man’s conduct.”
Listening again to his better angels, Roosevelt issued a bold prediction: “I believe this Republic will endure for many centuries. If so, there will doubtless be among its presidents, Protestants and Catholics, and very probably, at some time, Jews.”
The reviewer is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
- AMERICAN MACCABEE: THEODORE ROOSEVELT & THE JEWS
- By Andrew Porwancher
- Princeton University Press.
- 349 pages; $35