Contentious legacy

Sir, – With regard to “Historians grapple over FDR’s legacy, with the future of Israel at stake” (March 11), the trouble with reporter Maya Shwayder’s survey of the ongoing debate on whether US president Franklin D. Roosevelt can be branded anti-Semitic is that the centerpiece to the whole argument is missing. I refer to Eleanor Roosevelt, his wife. Whenever prominent Jews asked for the president’s help concerning the plight of European Jewry, he told them to refer to his wife. He encouraged her to help, knowing that if he himself came out openly in favor of Jewish rescue he would have to face the animosity of at least part of his electorate. Eleanor Roosevelt, at her husband’s behest, did not fail the Jewish people. She was particularly instrumental in implementing the youth aliya program together with Henrietta Szold and Recha Freier, saving the lives of thousands of young Jews by bringing them to the Jewish Agency’s youth villages. Indeed, Israel has a special stamp to commemorate her efforts. Moreover, I cannot fathom where the idea of “FDR’s notably anti-Semitic mother Sara” comes from. After two years of study at the Roosevelt library in Hyde Park, New York, where the president’s mother also stayed, the only comment I came across by her was that she could not tolerate her neighbors, the Vanderbilts, because of their ostentation. I don’t think they were Jewish. LILY POLLIACK Jerusalem The writer is a retired professor of history Sir, – Your article quotes University of Toronto Prof. Michael Marrus as saying that nobody should judge President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his silence during the Holocaust because it was “another world” in those days. American society was rife with anti-Semitism, and FDR’s records, Marrus said, should be evaluated “according to the standards of his day – his culture and his society and his context.” But that’s not what Prof. Marrus wrote in his 1987 book The Holocaust in History. There he told us that by the time of the American-British conference on refugees in Bermuda in April 1943, “[public] opinion was mobilized on behalf of several schemes for rescue and refuge” (p.167). So I guess the entire public wasn’t anti-Semitic after all. He goes on to report that “in early 1944, Roosevelt finally bowed to public pressure and established the War Refugee Board” (p.168). So once again, the public supported rescue, and there was even enough “public pressure” on FDR to force him to establish a new government agency for this. It was not “another world.” There was anti-Semitism in America, but there were also many good people. There were opponents of rescue, but there were many supporters. Roosevelt could have gone either way; he chose to side with the rejectionists. Nobody forced him to abandon the Jews, and no historian should be trying to rationalize that abandonment. Marrus had it right back in 1987, and his new attempts to excuse FDR are baseless. NATHAN MOSKOWITZ Rockville, Maryland Sir, – You say that Prof. Allan Lichtman, coauthor of FDR and the Jews, claims that criticism of the Roosevelt administration’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz was “manufactured” by “right-wing, pro-Israel factions.” In 2004 I traveled to South Dakota to interview former US senator and presidential candidate George McGovern. McGovern, of course, was no “right-winger,” nor was he particularly pro-Israel, but as a bomber pilot during World War II he flew over Auschwitz while carrying out bombing raids on oil factories just a few miles away. Here is part of what he said on camera: “There is no question we should have attempted... to go after Auschwitz. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth... and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.” McGovern called Roosevelt “a great man” and his “political hero,” but felt the president made two major errors. One was the internment of Japanese-Americans, the other the decision not to “go after Auschwitz.... God forgive us for that tragic miscalculation.” STUART ERDHEIM Long Beach, New York The writer was producer of They Looked Away, a documentary film based on research he did for the article ‘Could the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz?’