Eleanor (16 page)

[I do] not see beyond the statement which the President has made, what more emphatically could be said. I will be glad to say anything or help in any way but I do not think it wise for me to formally go on any committee.
¹

Behind the scenes she did what she could to squeeze visas out of the balky State Department for the refugees who managed to get to Spain and Portugal. She worked with the U.S. Committee
for the Care of European Children to get the State Department to stretch its interpretation of the laws in the issuance of visas to children. Louis Weiss, a distinguished and selfless attorney who was working with the committee, inquired of Tommy as to whether Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to go back to the State Department—“. . .the matter may have been pushed as far as she wishes to push it at this time.”
²

In January, 1944, a group of Treasury Department officials headed by the secretary, outraged over State Department apathy and stalling in regard to helping Jews to escape extermination, confronted President Roosevelt with a carefully documented “Report on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” Roosevelt heard the group sympathetically, accepted its suggestion that he establish a war refugee board to direct rescue operations, and placed at its head a young Treasury Department official, John W. Pehle, who had helped draft the report and whose energy and clarity had impressed him. Pehle soon was soliciting Mrs. Roosevelt’s help.

He’s worried over the war closing the Balkan & Turkey routes through which they’ve been getting out some people & then there will only be Spain left & our Ambassador [Carlton] Hayes is not cooperative. I spoke to Franklin & asked if perhaps a change might be advisable & Franklin said wearily “well the complaints are mounting.”
³

She was not successful. Hayes remained at his post.

She did what she could to open America’s doors to the survivors of the holocaust, having little sympathy with the extreme Zionist position that Palestine was the only place where Jews might live in safety and without apology. “I fear Palestine could never support all the Jews, and the Arabs would start a constant war if all of them came,” she replied to a physician who protested what he called her “assimilationist” approach. “Why can’t Jews be members of a religious body but natives of the land in which they live?” she asked.
⁴

But she was not assimilationist in the sense of believing that Jews
should deny their identity as Jews. She once asked Judge Justine Polier, daughter of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, why, when she sought help for people—whether unemployed miners in West Virginia, sharecroppers, or Negroes in the South—Jews were always among the first to come forward to offer aid. Yet when Jews were mistreated, she found they were most hesitant to ask her help, and when they did, seemed embarrassed in doing so. Judge Polier tried to explain to her the background of oppression and exclusion that led some Jews to believe that safety and acceptance lay in escaping their Jewishness.
⁵

Having conquered the conventional attitude toward Jews instilled by the world in which she had grown up, Mrs. Roosevelt rejected the Zionist view that the Jew must always feel himself an outsider in a gentile culture because gentiles would always regard him as an alien. Author Ben Hecht sent her his
Guide for the Bedevilled
, in which he flailed away at anti-Semites and anti-Semitism with wisecrack and vitriol. “I read it half through today & find his style trying,” she wrote to a young Jewish friend:

Some of the things he says remind me of what you once said to me about being “with your own people” & the main theme that people who are prejudiced racially & religiously are just manufacturing a whipping boy for their own feelings is doubtless true. I’m just no good at judging a book like this, it is distasteful & I don’t feel any of the things as he describes them. I don’t lump people together. I don’t think of them except as individuals whom I like or dislike. I love you & I don’t feel strange
ever
with you & I’ve never had to argue about it in my own mind.
⁶

To Zionists—especially European Zionists—who argued that there was no “home” for Jews except Palestine, she replied, “The Jewish people can live in other places and the future will be open to them as to all others, I am sure.”
⁷
But as it became evident that other lands, including her own, were not ready to receive the refugee and that the Jewish refugee did want to go to Palestine, she
began to examine more closely the case for a Jewish homeland in Palestine as well as the chief argument of the opponents of Zionism, that Palestine’s deserts could not support a larger population.

Mrs. Felix Frankfurter brought Dr. Chaim Weizmann to lunch with her. He told her the story of Palestine, beginning with the Balfour pledge of a Jewish homeland there. He had negotiated the original agreements with the Arabs, Dr. Weizmann went on, and they had understood clearly what the Jews envisaged by a homeland. On the basis of the British pledge, endorsed by Woodrow Wilson, and their agreements with the Arabs, the Jews had brought hundreds of thousands of settlers to Palestine and transformed the arid deserts into garden spots. “He was very convincing,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote afterward, “but I’ve heard many arguments on the other side.”
⁸

One of the chief arguments on the other side was being advanced by Dr. Isaiah Bowman, the president of Johns Hopkins University and a world famous geographer who headed the State Department’s advisory group on Palestine and the Middle East. “Incidentally I understand that Isaiah Bowman has said that Palestine cannot support even its present people satisfactorily,” Mrs. Roosevelt informed Louis Weiss at the time that she was trying to help him get more visas for children. “It has imported far more than it has exported in the past and they have the figures on this.” This argument was to be heard everywhere, she went on, and was “one of the things that the Jewish organizations should undertake to face.” Mrs. Rose Halprin, a Zionist leader, sent her a statement on “The Absorptive Capacity of Palestine.” It reflected the conclusions of Dr. Walter C. Lowdermilk, an expert on agronomy and soil development, who, on the basis of an exhaustive survey of Palestine, had come to a conclusion quite different from Bowman’s. Palestine could be transformed into another California, he maintained, and the full utilization of the Jordan River would make possible the absorption of four million Jewish refugees.
⁹

“A very convincing statement,” Mrs. Roosevelt acknowledged to Mrs. Halprin. “I will turn it over to the President and his advisers.” A skeptical President Roosevelt asked her to talk to Dr. Bowman
about the Lowdermilk survey. Bowman unsettled her again. He dwelt on the security rather than the economic problem. A Jewish state in Palestine could not be set up and protected from regional hostility without a U.S.-British guarantee. Would the country back up the guarantee of a state 6,000 miles away? “The Jewish problem is one of the many problems that lie upon the conscience of the world,” Bowman wrote her subsequently.

Only a heart of stone would deny the Jews full and sympathetic consideration. . . .Is it in their long-term interest to create a growing problem of security in the Near East that may require for its solution the more or less immediate use of American bayonets? The answer may prove to be
yes
, if there is no other way. But in all this wide world must there be a solution by force in just this particular area of 10,000 square miles?
¹⁰

As she indicated in a letter she wrote in January, 1944, she accepted Bowman’s reasoning:

I have talked to the State Department people and I have talked to a great many British people. It would be foolish to think that Palestine by itself could stand up against the Arab world, and neither Great Britain nor the United States can be expected to constantly be prepared to fight the Arab world. So a compromise which looks both to the possibility in the future of the self-support of whatever population is in Palestine and to cooperation of the Arab world must be envisioned, and at the same time the Jewish people must find homes in many places.
¹¹

Felix S. Cohen, the brilliantly creative son of the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen and assistant solicitor in the Department of Interior, sent her a “very wonderful old gentleman,” Dr. Milton Steinberg, who was described to her as neither Zionist nor anti-Zionist and who brought her a plan for Jewish resettlement in Australia, which needed people and had an overabundance of land that could easily be developed. She thought enough of his plan to
forward it immediately to her husband at Warm Springs. It was among the items she sent down on April 12, 1945.
¹²

She knew that FDR had favored a homeland for Jews in Palestine, but she also knew that he felt it could only be established with the consent of the Arabs and that he had failed to win this consent in his meeting with Ibn Saud. When Rabbi Stephen Wise saw Roosevelt on March 16, 1945, after his return from Yalta and congratulated him on a successful mission, Roosevelt’s mournful response, as Dr. Wise informed Chaim Weizmann, was:

I have had a failure. The one failure of my mission was with Ibn Saud. Everything went well, but not that, and I arranged the whole meeting with him for the sake of your cause. . . .I tried to approach the Jewish question a number of times. Every time I mentioned the Jews he would shrink and give me some such answer as this—“I am too old to understand new ideas!”

When President Roosevelt began to tell Ibn Saud of what the Jewish settlers had done for Palestine through irrigation and the planting of trees, Ibn Saud’s answer was, “My people don’t like trees; they are desert dwellers. And we have water enough without irrigation!” Roosevelt added, “I have never so completely failed to make an impact upon a man’s mind as in this case.”
¹³

The immediate issue was what to do with the homeless and destitute Jews coming out of the extermination camps. When Dr. Wise stressed the horror of sending 1,200 Jewish refugees released from Bergen-Belsen to Algiers instead of to Palestine, Roosevelt said, “I have discussed that matter with Winston Churchill and he says ‘don’t talk about the White Paper or regulations, but we will let the Jews come in.’”
¹⁴

Within two months, however, Roosevelt was dead, and although Truman vigorously supported the request of the Jewish Agency, spokesman for the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, for the admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine, Clement Attlee, who succeeded Churchill during the Potsdam Conference, was not ready to discuss the issue. As an alternative Truman dispatched
Earl G. Harrison, former U.S. commissioner of immigration, to Europe to investigate the situation in the camps. Harrison’s report, which Truman released, said it was “nothing short of calamitous to contemplate that the gates of Palestine should be soon closed,” and urged the issuance of the 100,000 additional immigration certificates. Truman asked Attlee to go along with this recommendation, but the British leader turned him down and proposed instead a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry which would associate the United States with responsibility for carrying out whatever the committee recommended.

To reassure the Arabs, the State Department obtained Truman’s consent to release a letter Roosevelt had written to Ibn Saud in which he promised that no decision would be made about Palestine without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews. Rabbi Wise had known nothing about this letter, and there was a general feeling of depression and letdown in the Jewish community. “My husband meant the Jewish people no harm,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote the director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Jewish Memorial Book Committee. “He dreaded war between them and the more numerous Arabs and felt that a more amicable agreement could be reached. He felt that he had not succeeded with Ibn Saud.”
¹⁵

She herself was a passionate advocate of immediate issuance of the 100,000 admission certificates. In August, 1945, May Craig, after five months in the European theater, had come to her Washington Square apartment. May, a flinty New England journalist, had spent three days at Dachau and her reports were more terrible than any Mrs. Roosevelt had read in the press. She was deeply upset. If the Germans, a civilized people, can sink so low, she remarked to May, so might the Americans. The Bilbos and the Rankins, she said, referring to two southern demagogues then riding high, would probably behave the same way if they had the power.
¹⁶

Mrs. Craig was followed by Helen Waren, an actress who, in 1944, had left the Broadway hit
The Searching Wind
to go overseas for the USO in
Ten Little Indians
. She came to tell Mrs. Roosevelt of her “grimmest journey” through the Third Army Sector in
Germany after V-E Day, where she had found the most appalling and deplorable conditions among the displaced Jews, who were, she said, being forced to live in camps together with their former persecutors—SS men, Gestapo, Nazis, Polish and Ukrainian collaborationists. “All over Europe I found the same heartrending plea: ‘We want to go to Palestine—we want to be among Jews.’” She should write her observations out in the form of a report, Mrs. Roosevelt said. “I shall see that it gets into the proper hands.” She sent copies to the president, General Marshall, Henry Morgenthau, and Adele (Mrs. David M.) Levy, the daughter of Lessing J. Rosenwald, who was then heading the women’s division of the United Jewish Appeal.
¹⁷

When Truman and Attlee on November 13, 1945, announced the establishment of an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Mrs. Roosevelt, in a letter to Truman, voiced her unhappiness over the delay it represented:

I am very much distressed that Great Britain has made us take a share in another investigation of the few Jews remaining in Europe. If they are not to be allowed to enter Palestine, then certainly they could have been apportioned among the different United Nations and we would not have to continue to have on our consciences the death of at least fifty of these poor creatures daily.