The Holocaust, Winston Churchill observed, was “the most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.” America’s failure to do more to save European Jewry was the product of both cold indifference and antisemitism. It was also the failure of the most powerful man in the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt — a fact that is largely overlooked in a recent PBS documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns.
The U.S. and the Holocaust aired in late September. Encompassing three installments and nearly seven hours, Burns and longtime co-producers Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein examine America’s failures in gritty and exhausting detail.
As one might expect, the docuseries is replete with emotionally searing moments. Holocaust survivors share their gripping stories of survival and unimaginable loss. Burns and his team make masterly use of pictures, old footage, and archival documents to paint a picture of an entire world that was forever lost. It is, appropriately, haunting. It deserves to be watched.
However, The U.S. and the Holocaust is also, to some extent, a missed opportunity, weakened both by presentism and partisanship. The film focuses on the role immigration and rising antisemitism played in denying refuge to those seeking shelter from Nazi Germany. There is considerable truth to this: The U.S. did revamp its immigration laws and quotas in the decades prior to the Holocaust. It did seek to limit immigration, particularly from Eastern European nations. The 1921 Emergency Quota Act and 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which severely curtailed immigration to the U.S., were seminal moments in sealing the fates of untold numbers of Jews. Similarly, fears that many immigrants would be spies for foreign powers were key to American reluctance to welcome fleeing refugees. The economic devastation wrought by the Great Depression played a role as well in discouraging Americans from accepting increased immigration.
The docuseries wants you to know that these were collective failures, steeped in American bigotry. The “exclusion of people and shutting them out is as American as apple pie,” historian Peter Hayes claims. Perhaps. But one man could have made a difference. And he failed to do so.
Burns and his partners, including writer Geoffrey Ward, are unabashed admirers of Franklin D. Roosevelt. This is clear from their 2014 docuseries The Roosevelts, a 14-hour, largely glowing look at the political dynasty.
FDR was, and is, a monumental figure in American politics. The only president to be elected to four terms, he held power for 12 years, from 1933 to his death at the beginning of his fourth term in April 1945. He ushered in a political realignment, transforming not only Democratic Party politics but the U.S. itself. His time in power spanned almost the entirety of Hitler’s reign. Yet the documentary curiously absolves him of wrongdoing.
“Could FDR have exerted more influence?” asks noted Holocaust historian and U.S. envoy for antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt. “Certainly … but it’s forgetting that public opinion was opposed.” Roosevelt, we are told, was not unsympathetic to the Jews’ plight. He “knew a lot of Jews” but “wants to be careful.”
Leaders in a democracy do, indeed, have to weigh public opinion. But the film fails to ruminate on how much of a priority Roosevelt made saving European Jewry. The facts, long established and borne out by the work of scholars such as Rafael Medoff and the late David Wyman, tell us that it wasn’t much of a priority at all.
Indeed, FDR made numerous antisemitic statements and quips — none of which were featured in the documentary. In 1923, while he was sitting on Harvard’s Board of Directors, “Roosevelt decided that there were too many Jewish students at the college and helped institute a quota to limit the number admitted,” Medoff noted in 2013.
In 1938, while he was president and Jews were fleeing Germany in increasingly large numbers, Roosevelt privately suggested that, by dominating the economy in Poland, Jews were bringing hate upon themselves. During a 1941 Cabinet meeting, FDR remarked that there were too many Jewish federal employees in Oregon. One wonders what he privately thought when he was governor of New York.
In another infamous example, in 1943, Roosevelt told U.S. officials in Allied-liberated North Africa to continue some of the discriminatory practices of the pro-Nazi Vichy France regime. The number of local Jews in certain professions “should be definitely limited” in order to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.” As Roosevelt called Nazi “complaints” toward Jews “understandable,” the Holocaust was well underway.
In fact, Roosevelt also made a number of bigoted remarks about immigrants, including those from East Asia. He warned, for example, of the “mingling of white with Oriental blood.” Yet, in a documentary that seeks to equate hatred of immigrants with antisemitism, these comments are all omitted. Indeed, the documentary even briefly, and appropriately, focuses on how American universities installed quotas to limit the number of Jews. That Roosevelt supported such policies seems like it should have been relevant. Excluding this key information, long available in the public sphere, is both damning and discrediting. It suggests that ideology and hagiography supplanted the need to tell the full story, warts and all.
Roosevelt’s biases were not unusual for his time, nor, for that matter, for his class. The documentary even highlights the many prejudices of his contemporaries, including several senators and congressmen. But FDR was president. His powers were vast, and he was — on a number of other occasions, such as his infamous plan to pack the Supreme Court — unafraid to use them.
While the documentary understandably blames America writ large, the leader of the free world, arguably the most individually powerful and influential American in modern history, largely gets a pass.
The film’s focus on the constraining effects of popular opinion is also misleading. Roosevelt was a tremendously powerful president who, for most of his presidency, had crushing majorities in the House and Senate. Nor was he confined by legalities and niceties. As the historian Paul Johnson, among others, has pointed out, FDR’s Justice Department wiretapped his own wife.
FDR could have, it seems, done more. He didn’t.
Roosevelt’s appointments and policies would prove crucial. Upon appointing William Dodd to be envoy to Germany, FDR told the former history professor that persecution of German Jewry was “not a [U.S.] governmental affair” and that influence should only be used to protect U.S. citizens residing in the country. Roosevelt, Medoff has observed, effectively “reversed outgoing president Herbert Hoover’s directive to the then-U.S. ambassador in Germany, Frederic Sackett, ‘to exert every influence of our government’ on the Hitler regime to halt the persecution of German Jews, not just American residents of Germany.”
In the prewar years, FDR helped Nazis avoid boycotts by permitting German goods to enter the American market with misleading labels disguising their origin. Under his watch, U.S. deterrence in both East Asia and Europe eroded while our future opponents gained strength.
Yet the docuseries omits these troubling details about Roosevelt’s attitudes and influence, preferring to cast blame on the American collective — or, when necessary, on the U.S. State Department. But individual agency matters. Men and women can and do shape history in profound ways. Roosevelt undeniably did just that on other fronts. But on this front, he not only failed — he declined. In sharp contrast, his successor, Harry Truman, would, against the advice of many of his advisers, recognize Israel and have a sign on his desk emblazoned with “The Buck Stops Here.” An honest and full examination of the U.S. and the Holocaust is needed. As one Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, once wrote: “For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.”
Sean Durns is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst.
