In the Garden of Beasts (6 page)

Roosevelt now brought the conversation around to what he expected of Dodd. First he raised the matter of Germany’s debt, and here he expressed ambivalence. He acknowledged that American bankers had made what he called “exorbitant profits” lending money to German businesses and cities and selling associated bonds to U.S.
citizens. “
But our people are entitled to repayment, and while it is altogether beyond governmental responsibility, I want you to do all you can to prevent a moratorium”—a German suspension of payment. “It would tend to retard recovery.”

The president turned next to what everyone seemed to be calling the Jewish “problem” or “question.”

FOR ROOSEVELT, THIS WAS
treacherous ground. Though appalled by Nazi treatment of Jews and aware of the violence that had convulsed Germany earlier in the year, he refrained from issuing any direct statement of condemnation. Some Jewish leaders, like Rabbi Wise, Judge Irving Lehman, and Lewis L. Strauss, a partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Company, wanted Roosevelt to speak out; others, like Felix Warburg and Judge Joseph Proskauer, favored the quieter approach of urging the president to ease the entry of Jews into America. Roosevelt’s reluctance on both fronts was maddening. By November 1933, Wise would describe Roosevelt as “immovable, incurable and even inaccessible excepting to those of his Jewish friends whom he can safely trust not to trouble him with any Jewish problems.” Wrote Felix Warburg, “So far all the vague promises have not materialized into any action.” Even Roosevelt’s good friend Felix Frankfurter, a Harvard law professor whom he later named to the Supreme Court, found himself unable to move the president to action, much to his frustration. But Roosevelt understood that the political costs of any public condemnation of Nazi persecution or any obvious effort to ease the entry of Jews into America were likely to be immense, because American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany’s persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression. The isolationists added another dimension to the debate by insisting, as did Hitler’s government, that Nazi oppression of Germany’s Jews was a domestic German affair and thus none of America’s business.

Even America’s Jews were deeply divided on how to approach the problem. On one side stood the American Jewish Congress, which
called for all manner of protest, including marches and a boycott of German goods. One of its most visible leaders was Rabbi Wise, its honorary president, who in 1933 was growing increasingly frustrated with Roosevelt’s failure to speak out. During a trip to Washington when he sought in vain to meet with the president, Rabbi Wise wrote to his wife, “
If he refuse [sic] to see me, I shall return and let loose an avalanche of demands for action by Jewry. I have other things up my sleeve. Perhaps it will be better, for I shall be free to speak as I have never spoken before. And, God helping me, I will fight.”

On the other side stood Jewish groups aligned with the American Jewish Committee, headed by Judge Proskauer, which counseled a quieter path, fearing that noisy protests and boycotts would only make things worse for Jews still in Germany. One who shared this point of view was Leo Wormser, a Jewish attorney in Chicago. In a letter to Dodd, Wormser wrote that “we in Chicago … have been steadfastly opposing the program of Mr. Samuel Untermeyer and Dr. Stephen Wise to further an organized Jewish boycott against German goods.” Such a boycott, he explained, could stimulate more intense persecution of Germany’s Jews, “and we know that, as to many of them, it could be still worse than it now is.” He stated also that a boycott would “hamper efforts of friends in Germany to bring about a more conciliatory attitude through an appeal to reason and to self interest,” and could impair Germany’s ability to pay its bond debt to American holders. He feared the repercussions of an act that would be identified solely with Jews. He told Dodd, “We feel that the boycott if directed and publicized by Jews, will befog the issue which should not be ‘will Jews endure,’ but ‘will liberty endure.’ ”
As Ron Chernow wrote in
The Warburgs
, “A fatal division sapped ‘international Jewry’ even as the Nazi press claimed that it operated with a single, implacable will.”

Where both factions did agree, however, was on the certainty that any campaign that explicitly and publicly sought to boost Jewish immigration to America could only lead to disaster.
In early June 1933 Rabbi Wise wrote to Felix Frankfurter, at this point a Harvard law professor, that if debate over immigration reached the floor of the House it could “lead to an explosion against us.” Indeed,
anti-immigration sentiment in America would remain strong into 1938, when
a
Fortune
poll reported that some two-thirds of those surveyed favored keeping refugees out of the country.

Within the Roosevelt administration itself there was deep division on the subject. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman in American history to hold a cabinet position, was energetic in trying to get the administration to do something to make it easier for Jews to gain entry to America. Her department oversaw immigration practices and policy but had no role in deciding who actually received or was denied a visa. That fell to the State Department and its foreign consuls, and they took a decidedly different view of things. Indeed, some of the department’s most senior officers harbored an outright dislike of Jews.

One of these was William Phillips, undersecretary of state, the second-highest-ranking man in the department after Secretary Hull. Phillips’s wife and Eleanor Roosevelt were childhood friends; it was FDR, not Hull, who had chosen Phillips to be undersecretary. In his diary Phillips described a business acquaintance as “
my little Jewish friend from Boston.” Phillips loved visiting Atlantic City, but in another diary entry he wrote, “
The place is infested with Jews. In fact, the whole beach scene on Saturday afternoon and Sunday was an extraordinary sight—very little sand to be seen, the whole beach covered by slightly clothed Jews and Jewesses.”

Another key official, Wilbur J. Carr, an assistant secretary of state who had overall charge of the consular service, called Jews “
kikes.” In a memorandum on Russian and Polish immigrants he wrote, “They are filthy, Un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” After a trip to Detroit, he described the city as being full of “
dust, smoke, dirt, Jews.” He too complained of the Jewish presence in Atlantic City. He and his wife spent three days there one February, and for each of the days he made an entry in his diary that disparaged Jews. “
In all our day’s journey along the Boardwalk we saw but few Gentiles,” he wrote on the first day. “Jews everywhere, and of the commonest kind.” He and his wife dined that night in the Claridge Hotel and found its dining room full of Jews, “and few presented a good appearance. Only two others beside myself in dinner jacket.
Very careless atmosphere in dining room.” The next night the Carrs went to dinner at a different hotel, the Marlborough-Blenheim, and found it far more refined. “I like it,” Carr wrote. “
How different from the Jewish atmosphere of the Claridge.”

An official of the American Jewish Committee described Carr as “
an anti-Semite and a trickster, who talks beautifully and contrives to do nothing for us.”

Both Carr and Phillips favored strict adherence to a provision in the nation’s immigration laws that barred entry to all would-be immigrants considered “
likely to become a public charge,” the notorious “LPC clause.” A component of the Immigration Act of 1917, it had been reinstated by the Hoover administration in 1930 to discourage immigration at a time when unemployment was soaring. Consular officials possessed great power over who got to come to America because they were the ones who decided which visa applicants could be excluded under the LPC clause. Immigration law also required that applicants provide a police affidavit attesting to their good character, along with duplicate copies of birth certificates and other government records. “
It seems quite preposterous,” one Jewish memoirist wrote, “to have to go to your enemy and ask for a character reference.”

Jewish activists charged that America’s consulates abroad had been instructed quietly to grant only a fraction of the visas allowed for each country, a charge that proved to have merit. The Labor Department’s own solicitor, Charles E. Wyzanski, discovered in 1933 that consuls had been given informal oral instructions to limit the number of immigration visas they approved to 10 percent of the total allowed by each nation’s quota. Jewish leaders contended, further, that the act of acquiring police records had become not merely difficult, but dangerous—“
an almost insuperable obstacle,” as Judge Proskauer stated in a letter to Undersecretary Phillips.

Phillips took offense at Proskauer’s depiction of consuls as obstacles. “
The consul,” Phillips replied, gently chiding, “is only concerned with determining in a helpful and considerate manner whether applicants for visas have met the requirements of law.”

One result, according to Proskauer and other Jewish leaders, was
that Jews simply did not apply for immigration to the United States. Indeed, the number of Germans who applied for visas was a tiny fraction of the twenty-six thousand allowed under the annual quota set for the country. This disparity gave officials within the State Department a powerful statistical argument for opposing reform: how could there be a problem if so few Jews applied in the first place?
It was an argument that Roosevelt, as early as April 1933, appeared to accept. He also knew that any effort to liberalize immigration rules might well prompt Congress to respond with drastic reductions of existing quotas.

By the time of his lunch with Dodd, Roosevelt was acutely aware of the sensitivities at play.

“
The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited,” Roosevelt told him. “But this is also not a governmental affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims. We must protect them, and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.”

THE CONVERSATION TURNED
to practicalities.
Dodd insisted he would live within his designated salary of $17,500, a lot of money during the Depression but a skimpy sum for an ambassador who would have to entertain European diplomats and Nazi officials. It was a point of principle for Dodd: he did not think an ambassador should live extravagantly while the rest of the nation suffered. For him, however, it also happened to be a moot point, since he lacked the independent wealth that so many other ambassadors possessed and thus could not have lived extravagantly even if he had wanted to.

“
You are quite right,” Roosevelt told him. “Aside from two or three general dinners and entertainments, you need not indulge in any expensive social affairs. Try to give fair attention to Americans in Berlin and occasional dinners to Germans who are interested in American relations. I think you can manage to live within your income and not sacrifice any essential parts of the service.”

After some additional conversation about trade tariffs and arms reductions, the lunch came to an end.

It was two o’clock. Dodd left the White House and walked to the State Department, where he planned to meet with various officials and to read dispatches filed from Berlin, namely the lengthy reports written by Consul General George S. Messersmith. The reports were disconcerting.

Hitler had been chancellor for six months, having received the appointment through a political deal, but he did not yet possess absolute power. Germany’s eighty-five-year-old president, Field Marshal Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, still held the constitutional authority to appoint and remove chancellors and their cabinets and, equally important, commanded the loyalty of the regular army, the Reichswehr. By contrast to Hindenburg, Hitler and his deputies were surprisingly young—Hitler only forty-four, Hermann Göring forty, and Joseph Goebbels thirty-six.

It was one thing to read newspaper stories about Hitler’s erratic behavior and his government’s brutality toward Jews, communists, and other opponents, for throughout America there was a widely held belief that such reports must be exaggerated, that surely no modern state could behave in such a manner.
Here at the State Department, however, Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in which Messersmith described Germany’s rapid descent from democratic republic to brutal dictatorship. Messersmith spared no detail—his tendency to write long had early on saddled him with the nickname “
Forty-Page George.” He wrote of the widespread violence that had occurred in the several months that immediately followed Hitler’s appointment and of the increasing control the government exerted over all aspects of German society. On March 31, three U.S. citizens had been kidnapped and dragged to one of the Storm Troopers’ beating stations, where they had been stripped of their clothing and left to spend the night in the cold. Come morning, they had been beaten until they lost consciousness, then discarded on the street. A correspondent for United Press International had disappeared but after inquiries by Messersmith had been released unharmed. Hitler’s government had declared a one-day boycott of all Jewish businesses
in Germany—stores, law firms, doctors’ offices. And there were the book burnings, the firings of Jews from businesses, the seemingly endless marches of Storm Troopers, and the suppression of Germany’s once-vibrant free press, which according to Messersmith had been placed under government control to a degree greater than “
has probably ever existed in any country. The press censorship may be considered an absolute.”

In one of his latest dispatches, however, Messersmith took a markedly more positive tone, which Dodd doubtless found heartening. With uncharacteristic optimism Messersmith now reported seeing signs that Germany was growing more stable and attributed this to the growing confidence of Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels. “
Responsibility has already changed the primary leaders of the Party very considerably,” he wrote. “There is every evidence that they are becoming constantly more moderate.”