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FDR on American Anti-Semitism
“If there was a demagogue around here of the type of Huey Long to take up anti-Semitism, there could be more blood running in the streets of New York than in Berlin.”
-- President Franklin D. Roosevelt
This statement comes up in the discussion of Roosevelt’s determined silence in the face of Hitler’s ongoing genocide of the Jews. The quote refers to the fact that there was a lot of anti-Semitism in America, and it may have been felt that it was best to be assertive about that which united everybody against the Nazis and Germany, including our allies the Russians, who have their own mass murders behind their borders (and we won’t even talk about the American Indians, since that may be counted as ancient history, though it was a point that Hitler did not fail to harp on). Roosevelt obviously felt that the best answer for everybody was to defeat the Nazis, and one would think that nothing very meaningful could be done in any case until that happened.
As for the date of this quote, Beschloss does not get more specific than to say it was pre-WWII. I would guess late thirties, but you shouldn’t bet on that.
(Source: “The Conquerors” by Michael Beschloss)
-- President Franklin D. Roosevelt
This statement comes up in the discussion of Roosevelt’s determined silence in the face of Hitler’s ongoing genocide of the Jews. The quote refers to the fact that there was a lot of anti-Semitism in America, and it may have been felt that it was best to be assertive about that which united everybody against the Nazis and Germany, including our allies the Russians, who have their own mass murders behind their borders (and we won’t even talk about the American Indians, since that may be counted as ancient history, though it was a point that Hitler did not fail to harp on). Roosevelt obviously felt that the best answer for everybody was to defeat the Nazis, and one would think that nothing very meaningful could be done in any case until that happened.
As for the date of this quote, Beschloss does not get more specific than to say it was pre-WWII. I would guess late thirties, but you shouldn’t bet on that.
(Source: “The Conquerors” by Michael Beschloss)