July 25, 1943—With Adolf Hitler’s master plan for mass murder moving ahead virtually unimpeded, approximately 1,500 people trade ideas on how to halt the killings by attending the Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe in New York City’s Commodore Hotel. The event was part of a campaign employing tactics to influence public opinion that are taken for granted today but that at the time caused no end of controversy, including full-page newspaper ads, public rallies, and lobbying of the President and Congress.
Though intended to raise alarms about the massive human-rights abuses occurring in Europe, the conference was highly risky for its organizers because it held the potential to embarrass and annoy President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had included American Jews as a key component of his New Deal coalition.
Yet the principal force behind the protest, a Zionist emissary from Palestine known as Peter Bergson, had grown desperate in the face of an administration that not only refused to take military action to halt the death camps, but that softpedaled the fact that Jews formed a disproportionately large number of Hitler’s victims.
Though the FDR administration’s inactivity flummoxed such prominent Jewish Democrats as Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and the Rabbi Steven Wise, a co-founder of the NAACP, ACLU, and the American Jewish Congress, they refused to break with him.
And really, when you think of it, how much maneuvering room did they have? Would they back the Republican Party? Not very likely—the GOP had made few if any attempts to woo them. The attitude of the American people did little to move them in this direction. “Americans don't like Jews much better than do Nazis," observed Fortune in 1939. The sad thing is not that this statement could be made, but that more than half of all American surveyed agreed with this statement at the time.
Bergson, however, made few concessions to good opinion. The last time he had done so was when he changed his name (born Hillel Kook, he changed it to Bergson to avoid embarrassing the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Abraham Isaac Hacochen Kook). His response to Wise ought to stand as a standard reply by any ethnic or religious leader when faced with the charge of being a “self-appointed” leader:
"Who empowered you? We represent the conscience of the Hebrew nation. We represent ourselves. You are an American clergyman and a member of the Democratic Party.... On the day on which one square yard of Palestine will be free, I shall be there as a citizen, and abide by the decision of whoever will be the government of the Hebrew people.... Whereas you will then continue to be an American clergyman, member of the Democratic Party."
A play by Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, We Will Never Die, was a sellout in half a dozen cities, giving Bergson enough revenues to organize the Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe. Two million European Jews had already died. The meeting, which began on July 20, included a host of panelists who laid out, in deep detail, how the Allies could go about saving the rest before it was too late, including on such topics as transportation, relief, international relations, military action, religious appeals, and public opinion.
Most important of all, Bergson assembled a coalition that stretched across the ideological spectrum. He had already demonstrated an impressive ability to enlist unexpected people in his cause—notably the Irish-American Congressman Andrew Somers, whose antipathy toward British imperialism was one that Bergson shared. Somers ended up sponsoring a bill in favor of the Committee for a Jewish Army. As former New York Mayor Ed Koch has noted, Somers spoke out repeatedly in favor of Bergson’s group and castigated Britain for keeping Jews out of Palestine, thereby putting himself in serious jeopardy with FDR.
The Emergency Conference featured 19 co-chairs ranging from the conservative (Herbert Hoover) to the liberal (Democratic Senator Edwin Johnson). It was hard for FDR to dismiss such a broad, blue-ribbon group of speakers. Later that year, Bergson’s efforts led to a Congressional resolution urging the creation of a U.S. government agency to rescue Jewish refugees.
The War Refugee Board that FDR finally created in January 1944 had a small budget, but it has been credited with saving the lives of 200,000 people in the last year and a half of the war.
To me, it’s virtually inconceivable to think of modern political advertising, pressure-group advocacy, or humanitarian intervention efforts without the contribution of Bergson. At the same time, his clash with Rabbi Wise over the proper approach to gaining FDR’s aid might be thought of as a forerunner of the more recent split in their religious community that Samuel Freedman chronicled in Jew Vs. Jew. This early struggle, fought on somewhat different grounds than the one Freedman depicted, featured an American assimilationist (Wise) against an Israeli who believed power—whether through military force or aggressive concerted action—was the best means of ensuring the survival of their people.
For the most part, FDR’s actions regarding the Holocaust have not excited as much controversy as those of Pope Pius XII. But, while it is true that he saw the threat posed by Hitler far earlier than the great majority of his countrymen, it is also true that political considerations, as well as his own background, prevented him from taking the kind of preventive action that Bergson wanted.
It is true that exaggerated atrocity stories in WWI had led Americans to be suspicious of similar claims in WWII, so the President had to tread carefully in breaking isolationist sentiment. Nevertheless, there might have been a bit more to it.
In 1942, the President shocked his Irish-American economist, Leo Crowley, by saying, “You know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.” That lord-of-the-manor spirit—that sense of “How can you possibly doubt someone like me who has done so much for your people?”—forms an element of his relationships with the out-groups who formed such a key part of his political base. That characteristic has to be weighted—not just purely military considerations—when one evaluates the validity of his inaction regarding the Holocaust.
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