At one point, Jewish leaders warned Bergson that a particular newspaper ad he was planning was so strongly worded that it might cause pogroms. Well, the ad was published in The New York Times and it didn’t cause any pogroms. So, at that point, Wise and other Jewish leaders should have acknowledged that their fears had been unwarranted.
You also write that Rabbi Wise believed that, as Americans, it might not be right to ask a government at war to take a special interest in the Jews of Europe. Isn’t there some validity to this argument as well?
Sure – except that during the Holocaust there were many things President Roosevelt could have done to help the Jews that wouldn’t have involved taking special action or detracting from the war effort. For example, the immigration quotas were largely unfilled; he could have simply let them be filled. Or troop-supply ships that were returning empty from Europe could have carried Jewish refugees.
Likewise, on the question of bombing Auschwitz, American planes were already flying within a few miles of the gas chambers in 1944 when they were bombing German oil factories nearby. It would have required a very minimal effort to drop a few bombs on the gas chambers or at least on the railway tracks leading to them.
At the end of The Anguish of a Jewish Leader, you quote several of Wise’s colleagues who said he was essentially a good man taken in by FDR’s enormous charm. Can you elaborate?
It’s true that President Roosevelt was remarkably skilled at gland-handing – telling people what they wanted to hear and making them feel as if he agreed with them even if he had no intention of doing what they wanted. There is an anecdote about FDR calling Wise “Stevie,” which may or may not be true, but there is no doubt Roosevelt understood how to disarm Wise by stroking his ego.
It’s also true that Wise’s admiration of Roosevelt was extreme. I found correspondence in which Wise referred to the president as “the All Highest” and similar expressions. The combination of FDR’s smooth talking and Wise’s weakness for flattery definitely made it harder for Wise to muster the courage to criticize the president’s policies.
But that’s exactly why he should have recused himself – if he didn’t have the political or personal courage to challenge Roosevelt’s abandonment of the Jews, he should have resigned.
What will your next book be about?
It’s called Cartoonists Against the Holocaust and it brings together political cartoons about the plight of the Jews in Europe which appeared in American newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s. The reader follows the history of the Holocaust through the eyes of political cartoonists, including Dr. Seuss and the famous “Herblock” (Herbert Block) of the Washington Post.