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From The Controversy of Zion, Chapter 37. Text as it appears here has been reformatted. The entire book is available in .pdf format here.
“The prospect of an accommodation between Hitler and the Jews of Germany, indeed, appalled them and Rabbi Wise informed his associates of his ‘two fears’ in this respect: ‘. . . that our Jewish brothers in Germany might feel moved or compelled to accept a peace agreement or pact that might mean some slight amelioration or mitigation of their wrongs. . . that the Nazi regime might decide to prevent some of the evil consequences of its regime by such palliative treatment of the Jews as would disarm worldwide Jewish protest.’ (He describes the second possibility as the “graver” danger). Thus they feared that “the persecution” would collapse; the words are specific. Rabbi Wise, in New York, preferred that Jews in Germany should suffer rather than this should happen: ‘To die at the hands of Nazism is cruel; to survive by its grace were ten thousand times worse.’”—Douglas Reed
The Managers, the Messiahs, and the Masses
Douglas Reed
Amid jubilant scenes in Washington and Berlin on two successive days (March 4 and 5, 1933) the two twelve-year reigns began which were to end at almost the same instant in 1945. Today an impartial historian could hardly compute which reign produced the greater sum of human suffering. At the start the two men who appeared on the central scene were both hailed as Messiahs. In America a Rabbi Rosenblum described President Roosevelt as “a Godlike messenger, the darling of destiny, the Messiah of America’s tomorrow”; there spoke a political flatterer in words intended to “persuade the multitude.” In 1937, in Prague menaced by Hitler, a Jewish acquaintance told me his rabbi was preaching in the synagogue that Hitler was “the Jewish Messiah” (a pious elder who sought to interpret events in terms of Levitical prophecy). All through these years the masses in both countries (and for that matter in Russia too) had their particular “premier-dictator” depicted to them in such terms, or in those of “Big Brother,” “Papa,” “Uncle,” “Beloved Leader” or the fireside-loving “Friend.” The apparent antagonists, Mr. Roosevelt and Herr Hitler, both in different ways promoted “the destructive principle” in its three recognizable forms: revolutionary-Communism, revolutionary-Zionism and the ensuing “world government to enforce peace.”
Mr. Roosevelt’s reign began with a significant deception. He used a wheeled chair but the public masses were never allowed to see him, in flesh or picture, until he had been helped to an upright position. His infirmity was known; nevertheless, some directing intelligence decreed that the false picture of a robust man must to his last day be presented to the multitude (and even afterwards, for the sculptor who later made his London monument had to depict him in this sturdy pose).
Mr. Roosevelt created precedent by having his cabinet sworn in the hand of a distinguished Jew, Mr. Justice Cardozo, who was a committed Zionist, having yielded in 1918 to Mr. Brandeis and Rabbi Stephen Wise, with the despondent-sounding words, “Do what you please with my name”; he then received his Supreme Court judgeships, Rabbi Wise requesting them for him, first from Governor Al Smith of New York State and then from President Herbert Hoover. Thus the shadow of “dual allegiance” fell on Mr. Roosevelt’s administration at its start (as on Mr. Wilson’s, from the figure of Mr. Brandeis).
Mr. Roosevelt, after the Republican interregnum of 1921-1933, resumed the Wilson policies and in that spirit approached the major problem of America’s future at that moment: namely, whether the forces represented by the great Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, which had occurred in the six decades following the Civil War, should or should not govern America. All competent authorities had observed, usually with foreboding, the rapid rise of this new problem in American life, and had depicted the effects of the transplantation to American soil of a large population-mass which, under its religious directors, rejected the concept of “the melting-pot” and of “assimilation.” Mr. James Truslow Adams referred to it in his Epic of America, and Rudyard Kipling, who lived in New England in the 1890’s, wrote:
“The land was denuding itself of its accustomed inhabitants and their places had not yet been taken by the wreckage of Eastern Europe. . . Immigrants were coming into the States at about a million head a year . . . Somewhere in the background, though he did not know it, was the ‘representative’ American, who traced his blood through three or four generations and who, controlling nothing and affecting less, protested that . . . all foreign elements could and would soon be assimilated into ‘good Americans.’ And not a soul cared what he said . . . What struck me. . . was the apparent waste and ineffectiveness, in the face of the foreign inrush, of all the indigenous effort of the past generation. It was then that I first began to wonder whether Abraham Lincoln had not killed too many autochthonous ‘Americans’ in the Civil War, for the benefit of their hastily imported Continental supporters. This is black heresy, but I have since met men and women who have breathed it. The weakest of the old-type immigrants had been sifted and salted by the long sailing-voyage of those days. But steam began in the later sixties and early seventies, when human cargoes could be delivered with all their imperfections in a fortnight or so. And one million more-or-less acclimatized Americans had been killed.”
This problem was only new to America; it was the oldest problem in recorded history and, as this narrative has shown, had recurred in country after country, down the ages, whenever Jewish immigration reached flood levels. Dr. Weizmann is a witness to it, for he discusses it in relating his beleaguerment of a British official, Sir William Evans Gordon, who grappled with it in England twenty years before it excited the alarm of United States Congresses. In 1906 Sir William sought to solve it through an Aliens Bill (as the 67th and 68th United States Congresses by quota laws). Dr. Weizmann says that in performing his duty Sir William (like Senator Pat McCarran and Representative Francis E. Walter in America in the 1950’s) came to be “generally regarded as responsible for all the difficulties placed in the way of Jewish immigrants into England.” Dr. Weizmann then continues:
“Whenever the quantity of Jews in any country reaches the saturation point, that country reacts against them. . . England had reached the point where she could or would absorb so many Jews and no more. . . The reaction against this cannot be looked upon as anti-semitism in the ordinary or vulgar sense of that word; it is a universal social and economic concomitant of Jewish immigration and we cannot shake it off. Sir William had no particular anti-Jewish prejudice. He acted . . . in the most kindly way, in the interests of his country. . . In his opinion it was physically impossible for England to make good the wrongs which Russia had inflicted on its Jewish population . . . .I am fairly sure he would equally have opposed mass influx of any foreign element; but, as it happened, no other foreign element pressed for admission in such numbers.” (Forty years later Dr. Weizmann spoke similarly to Jews in America: “Certain countries can digest a certain number of Jews; once that number has been passed, something drastic must happen; the Jews must go”).
Dr. Weizmann thus soberly presented the valid argument against unrestricted Jewish immigration only because he was speaking chiefly to Jews and was drumming into them the Talmudic argument that Jews cannot be assimilated; this argument is essential to Zionism, but is not inherently true. The quoted passages show that in 1906 a man in authority was still able to state that his country could not make good “wrongs” supposed to have been inflicted on Jews in another country, and to let “the interests of his country” govern his duty. In the ensuing decades all the premier-dictators of the West made it State policy to remedy alleged wrongs, done by a third party, at the expense of an innocent fourth party. The absurdity is shown by Dr. Weizmann’s own last-quoted remark, that when the number of digestible Jews is exceeded in any country “something drastic must happen; the Jews must go.” He and his associates for half a century had been using all their power in America to gain unrestricted access for Jews, so that, according to his own words, they were deliberately leading the Jews there to disaster; the time must come, if what he said was true, when governments elsewhere in the world will be under pressure to admit large numbers of Jews from America because of “the wrongs” done them there.
Such was the background of the dominant issue in American life when Mr. Roosevelt became president. Between 1881 and 1920 over three million legally-recorded immigrants entered the United States from Russia, most of them Jews. According to the United States Census Bureau the country contained 230,000 Jews in 1877 and about 4,500,000 in 1926. Only “estimates” are at any time obtainable in matters of Jewish population, as the “elders” oppose head-counting by others, and these figures are generally held to have been largely under-estimated. In the ensuing decade the figures eluded all verification, chiefly owing to changes in immigrant-classification ordered by President Roosevelt, and even the competent authorities will not attempt to estimate the extent of unrecorded and illegal immigration (competent observers judge that the total number of Jews in the United States now may be around ten million). In any case, the greatest single community of Jews in the world today is in the American Republic, having been transplanted thither during the last two generations.
In proportion to the total American population even the highest estimate would not reach one-tenth. In itself this is a relatively small group; politically organized to tip the balance of power it is of decisive importance. This problem was recognized and the Congressional Committee on Immigration in 1921 declared:
“The processes of assimilation and amalgamation are slow and difficult. With the population of the broken parts of Europe headed this way in ever-increasing numbers, why not peremptorily check the stream with this temporary measure, and in the meantime try the unique and novel experiment of enforcing all the immigration laws on our statutes?”
A quota law then passed limited the number of any nationality entering the United States to three percent of the foreign-born of that nationality resident in the United States in 1910. The next Congress went much further than the general statement above quoted; it was specific about the danger, the same Committee reporting:
“If the principle of individual liberty, guarded by a constitutional government, created on this continent nearly a century and half ago is to endure, the basic strain of our population must be maintained and our economic standards preserved. . . The American people do not concede the right of any foreign group . . . to dictate the character of our legislation.”
The years which then followed showed that the effect of Mr. Roosevelt’s presidency would be further to break down the principle stated, to alter “the basic strain,” and to enable “a foreign group” to dictate State policy.
Mr. Roosevelt (like Mr. Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George and General Smuts) evidently was selected before he was elected. Mr. Howden says that Mr. House “picked Roosevelt as a natural candidate for the presidency long before any other responsible politician,” chose him as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1913, and then through the years groomed him for the presidency, expecting to govern through him, as through President Wilson. Then something went wrong. Mr. House was confident that President Roosevelt would call on him but then realized that “certain people don’t want the president to listen to me.” These people were evidently too strong, for Mr. House was dropped without any courtesy and at this point (1933) disappears from the story.
One can only offer a reasonable surmise about the reasons. Mr. House, at seventy-five, regretted young Philip Dru of 1912, who had thought the American Constitution “outmoded and grotesque,” had seized power by force and then governed by emergency decree. He had a new set of more sober and responsible ideas ready for Mr. Roosevelt and, from relegation, then “watched with forbidding” the concentration of irresponsible power in Mr. Roosevelt’s hands. Mr. House had caused President Wilson, as his first major act, to write into the American Constitution (as the Sixteenth Amendment) the chief destructive measure proposed in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, the “progressive income tax,” but in the 1930’s Mr. House was alarmed by the completely untrammelled control of the public purse which his second “Rockland” obtained.
Presumably, then, Mr. House was discarded because he had retreated from his earlier ideas, for those original ideas governed Mr. Roosevelt’s policy throughout his twelve years. He supported the world-revolution; his first major act of State policy was to recognize the Communist Government and in the ensuing war he resumed the House-Wilson policy of “all support.” He supported revolutionary-Zionism. Finally, he took up the old “league to enforce peace” idea and re-foisted it on the West under a new name, that of the “United Nations.”
Thus Mr. Roosevelt put “Philip Dru’s” ideas into further practice. Of Mr. Wilson in the earlier generation his Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Franklin K. Lane, had said, “All Philip Dru had said should be comes about; the President comes to Philip Dru in the end.” As to Mr. Roosevelt, twenty years later, Mr. House’s biographer (Mr. Howden) says, “It is impossible to compare Dru’s suggested legislation with Mr. Roosevelt’s and not be impressed by their similarity.”
This is an illustrative example of the transmission of ideas from generation to generation, among a governing group. Mr. House’s ideas were those of “the revolutionaries of 1848,” which in turn derived from Weishaupt and the revolutionaries of 1789, who had them from some earlier source. When Mr. House abandoned them they were transmitted without a hitch to the ruling group around another president, and the one man who had modified these ideas was left behind.
Mr. House was the only casualty in the inner circle. Mr. Bernard Baruch was adviser to Mr. Roosevelt even before he became president. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt records that “Mr. Baruch was a trusted adviser to my husband both in Albany and in Washington,” that is, during Mr. Roosevelt’s four-year term as Governor of New York State, before his presidential nomination. During this pre-presidential period Mr. Roosevelt (according to one of Mr. Baruch’s biographers, Mr. Morris V. Rosenbloom), although America had repudiated the League of Nations, drafted the plan for a new body to be called the United Nations. Rabbi Stephen Wise and Mr. Brandeis, of the earlier group around President Wilson, regrouped themselves around President Roosevelt (Hitler’s anti-Jewish measures in Germany at this time revived Mr. Brandeis’s desire to drive Arabs out of Palestine).
Right at the start of Mr. Roosevelt’s twelve years some doubt may have arisen about his docility, and means have been found to ensure it (the reader will recall “Rockland’s” attempt to assert independence in 1912 and the “exultant conspirators” mirth about his capitulation). That would explain the curious fact that Rabbi Stephen Wise, who had campaigned for Mr. Roosevelt as senator in 1914 and as governor of New York State in 1928, did not support him for the presidency in 1932. Then something happened to reassure the rabbi, for immediately after Mr. Roosevelt’s election he proclaimed that the new president had “rewon my unstinted admiration,” and by 1935 was again an intimate of the White House.
In the light of earlier experience, the identity of the men surrounding President Roosevelt plainly pointed to the policies he would pursue. He made this clearer by widening the circle of his Jewish advisers. In 1933 this had a new significance. In 1913 President Wilson’s Jewish advisers were publicly accepted as Americans like any other Americans, and simply of the Jewish faith. In 1933 the question of their allegiance had been raised by the Zionist adventure in Palestine. In addition, the issues of the world-revolution and of world-government had arisen since 1913, and both of these also threw up the question of American national interest, so that the feelings entertained about them in the president’s immediate circle became a matter of first importance.
All this lent a specific significance to the earlier Congressional pronouncement (1924), denying the right of “any foreign group” to “dictate the character of our legislation.” Among the president’s “advisers” many were of foreign birth or in effect became “foreign” by their devotion to Zionism or their attitude towards the world-revolution and world-government. In this sense a “foreign group,” embodying the mass-immigration of the preceding hundred years, formed itself around the American president and “steered” the course of events. The twelve years which followed showed that any “advice” acted on by the president must have been to the benefit of the destructive principle in its three interrelated forms: Communism, Zionism, world-government.
Prominent among his advisers (in addition to the three powerful men above named) was the Viennese-born Professor Felix Frankfurter. Mr. House’s biographer Mr. Howden, who expresses Mr. House’s opinion, thinks he was the most powerful of all: “Professor Frankfurter duplicated with Mr. Roosevelt, more than anyone else. . . the part played by Mr. House with President Wilson.” The part played by unofficial advisers is always difficult to determine and this opinion may place Professor Frankfurter too high in the hierarchy. However, he was undoubtedly important (he, too, first came into the advisory circle under Mr. Wilson).
Like Mr. Brandeis and Mr. Cardozo, he became a Supreme Court Justice and never openly appeared in American politics; yet the effects of his influence are plainer to trace than those of other men, which have to be deeply delved for. He was head of the Harvard Law School during the 1930’s and in that capacity trained an entire generation of young men who were to give a definite shape to the events of the 1940’s and 1950’s. They received marked preference for high employment in their later careers.
They include in particular Mr. Alger Hiss, who by trial and conviction was revealed as a Communist agent, though he was a high “adviser” of President Roosevelt (Mr. Justice Frankfurter voluntarily appeared at the trial to testify to Mr. Hiss’s character), and Mr. Dean Acheson, who as American Secretary of State at that time declared he would not “turn his back” on Mr. Hiss, and others. Mr. Hiss played an important part at the Yalta Conference, where the abandonment of half Europe to the revolution was agreed; Mr. Acheson’s period of office coincided with the abandonment of China to the revolution.
Apart from this distinct group of young men apparently trained during President Roosevelt’s early years in office to take over the State Department, the president was accompanied by a group of Jewish advisers at the highest level. Mr. Henry Morgenthau junior (a leading Zionist, whose “Morgenthau Plan” of 1944 was the original basis for the bisection of Europe in 1945) was his Secretary of the Treasury for eleven of the twelve years. Other intimate associates were Senator Herbert Lehman (another leading Zionist who took great part in promoting the “second exodus” from Europe in 1945-1946, which led to the war in Palestine), Judge Samuel Rosenmann (a resident inmate of the White House, who helped write Mr. Roosevelt’s speeches), Mr. David Niles (of Russian-born parentage, and for many years “adviser on Jewish affairs” to Mr. Roosevelt and his successor), Mr. Benjamin Cohen (a drafter of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and another important Zionist), and three Jews from Russia, Messrs. Sidney Hillman, Isador Lubin and Leo Pasvolsky.
These leading names, from the personal entourage of the president, represent only the pinnacle of an edifice that was set around all American political life. This sudden growth of Jewish influence, behind the scenes of power, obviously was not a spontaneous natural phenomenon. The selection was discriminatory; anti-Zionist, anti-revolutionary and anti-world-government Jews were excluded from it. The formation of this “palace guard” was unpopular, but unofficial advisers are difficult to attack on specific grounds and Mr. Roosevelt ignored all protests, and so escorted began his thrice-renewed presidency. Hitler simultaneously appeared as the symbol, at that moment, of the mathematically-recurrent Jewish persecution, and in the calculations of President Roosevelt’s advisers took the place occupied by “the Czar” twenty years before in those of Mr. Wilson’s.
Mr. Roosevelt’s long continuance in office was chiefly due to Mr. House’s master-plan for winning elections. Under this strategy of the intensive appeal to the “fluctuating” vote “discrimination” became the chief slogan. It was raised on behalf of the Negroes, who were used as a stalking-horse*; and in fact was used to crush objection to the excessive influence of the “foreign group” represented by “the palace guard.” Coupled with it was the appeal to the poor in the form of promises to soak the rich. This strategy proved so effective that the Republicans beat a retreat and began to compete with the Democrats for the favour of “the foreign group,” who were held to be the arbiters of elections. In this way the secret grip on power was made secure, and the American elector was in fact deprived of true choice between parties. Mr. Roosevelt fortified himself by his policy of “deficit-spending,” the basic theory of which was that the amount of public debt was unimportant, as the State only owed it to itself. At that point the American people lost and have never since regained control of the public purse, and the occupant of the White House became able by a stroke of the pen to command expenditures which in earlier times would have covered the annual budgets of half-a-dozen thrifty States. Mr. Roosevelt gained these powers by invoking the need to beat “The Crisis,” and he produced The Permanent Emergency in which his country still lives.
* See footnote on page 318
His presidency followed a design obviously predetermined and the course of events in the world might have been entirely different if it had been shorter. However, the hidden mechanism was so efficient, and the hold of his mentors on it so secure, that he was maintained in office through three re-elections. Only once was his tenure threatened with unexpected interruption, dangerous to these plans.
In a Southern State, Louisiana, arose a politico of Mr. Roosevelt’s type. Mr. Huey Long, a young demagogue with a fleshy face and curly hair from a poor hillbilly home, grew popular (like Mr. Wilson and Mr. Roosevelt) by attacking “the interests” (in his particular countryside, the oil interests in general and Standard Oil in particular). The idol of the poor whites, he was elected governor in 1928 and at once tried to raise money for building schoolhouses by putting a tax on oil, whereon at the opening of the Louisiana Legislature one Rabbi Walter Peiser refused to invoke a blessing, calling him “an unworthy governor.”
Mr. Long grew more popular and was elected to the United States Senate where (March 1935) he devoted “a large part” of a speech to “an attack on Mr. Bernard Baruch,” in whom he apparently saw the supreme representative of the “interests” (about the only charge never made against Mr. Long, who had many Jewish associates, was that he was “anti-semitic”). Mr. Long was becoming a force in the land and wrote a book called My First Week in the White House, containing illustrations which showed Mr. Roosevelt, looking much like the Roosevelt of Yalta, listening humbly to the wisdom of a hale and ebullient Huey Long.
He set out to undo Mr. Roosevelt by outdoing him in Mr. Roosevelt’s especial skill: lavish spending and lavish promises. He did this in an ingenious way (he was possibly trickier than even Mr. Roosevelt). Mr. Long, with his “Share the Wealth” and “Every Man a King” programme, controlled the political machine in Louisiana. When the Roosevelt money began to flow into the States (for expenditure on all manner of crisis “projects,” and incidentally on votes) Mr. Long calmly diverted it to his own similar ends. He forced through the Louisiana Legislature a law prohibiting local authorities from receiving any Washington money without the consent of a Louisiana State Board. As he controlled this board, he intercepted the cornucopian stream and the money was spent to enhance his, not Mr. Roosevelt’s voting strength. He did with public money what Mr. Roosevelt was doing, but for his own political account.
* The agitation about the lot of the American Negro, of which so much is heard in the outer world, is kept going, from New York, almost entirely by the two chief Jewish publicity organizations (the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, both of which dispose of large funds) and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, which from its inception has been largely Jewish-directed. The Negro himself plays a passive part in it. His wish is for better opportunities of advancement alongside the white population; he does not desire to interbreed. The energy of the Jewish organizations which claim to intercede in his cause is entirely directed towards a compulsory intermingling which neither race desires. Thus the influence of these non-Negro groups was the chief one behind the litigation leading to the Supreme Court ruling of 1955, which held the existing separate-school system to be illegal and ordered its abolition and compulsory mixed-schooling (this judgment can hardly be enforced in the South without civil war and it has been followed by various violent episodes, including the use of the National Guard and of tanks to enforce mixed-schooling). I was able to see the American Jewish Committee’s budget for 1953, the estimates for which were $1,753,000. This stated, in respect of the Negroes, “The status of Jews is more secure in most of the civil and political rights areas than that of some other groups, especially Negroes. But so long as a successful threat is made to the enjoyment of rights by Negroes, the rights of Jews are riskfully in balance. Accordingly, a large proportion of our work has been directed towards securing greater equalization of opportunities for such other groups, rather than for ourselves . . . An example of this is our relationship with the N.A.A.C.P., which comes to us for assistance in certain matters where we have a special competence. . . A fruitful weapon is court action. . . We participate directly in litigation . . . We have filed briefs attacking segregation. . . and have prepared briefs challenging discrimination against Negroes.” The Supreme Court is composed of political appointees, not of professional jurists; this is an important factor in what might develop into a grave situation.
In 1935 Mr. Roosevelt’s second election campaign loomed ahead. Suddenly his advisers became aware that Mr. Long was popular far beyond his native Louisiana; he was a national figure. The Democratic National Committee “was astonished when a secret poll revealed that Long on a third-party ticket could poll between three and four million votes and that his Share The Wealth plan had eaten deeply into the Democratic strength in the industrial and farm States” (Mr. John T. Flynn).
Therefore Mr. Long, although he could not have become president at that time, certainly could have prevented Mr. Roosevelt’s re-election, and the ruling few suddenly beheld a disturber of their regime. However, as Mr. Flynn says, “Fate had gone Democratic and remained so”; on September 8, 1935 Mr. Long was shot in the Louisiana State Capitol by a young Jew, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss. The motive will never be known because Dr. Weiss, who might have explained it, was shot by Mr. Long’s tardy bodyguard.*
* Mr. Long had foretold his assassination in July, saying in the Senate that enemies bad planned his death with “one man, one gun, and one bullet” as the medium. He said that a dictograph, concealed in a New Orleans hotel room where his “enemies” had met, recorded this conversation. A contemporary writer who claims to have been present at the meeting, Mr. Hodding Carter, says, “The ‘plotting’ was limited to such hopefully expressed comments as, ‘I wish somebody would kill the . . . .’ .”
The political effect was clear; Mr. Roosevelt’s re-election was ensured. The usual suggestion of “a madman” was conveyed to the public mind and various other motives, not entailing insanity, also were suggested. No public investigation was made, as in the cases of other political assassinations of the last hundred years, in respect of which investigation was denied or curtailed. Such investigations as have been made (for instance, in the cases of President Lincoln, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and King Alexander of Yugoslavia) have never supported the theory (always put forward) of the lonely “madman,” but have revealed thorough organization with powerful support. The removal of Mr. Long determined the pattern of events for a decade, so that it was as important in its effects as the murders of more highly-placed men.
Mr. Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936. His allotted task evidently was to reinvolve his country in the “foreign entanglements” of Mr. House and Mr. Wilson, and, like Mr. Wilson, he promised from election to election to keep it out of these. Meanwhile, the uproar about Hitler grew and, as I have shown, his persecution of men was subtly transformed into a “persecution of Jews.” Mr. Roosevelt, just two years before the Second War, made public, through cryptic statement which to the initiated was an undertaking to involve his country in war and to wage it primarily for the cause represented by his palace guard. Mr. Wilson made his public statement, with its menace to Russia, in December 1911, about three years before the First World War; Mr. Roosevelt made his, with its menace to Germany, in October 1937, about two years before the Second World War. The two statements are implicitly identical in identifying the American cause with the Jewish cause as mis-represented by the Zionists.
Mr. Roosevelt said (October 5, 1937), “Let no one imagine that America will escape. . . that this Western hemisphere will not be attacked . . . When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disaster.”
The president’s speech-writers on this occasion were not cryptic enough. The allusion to “joining in a quarantine” was instantly understood by the public masses also as a threat of war. This caused such consternation that Mr. Roosevelt was obliged up to the very moment, four years later, when America was actually involved in war to promise “again and again and again” that “your sons will not be sent into any foreign war.” (In October 1937 he certainly knew that war was coming in the autumn of 1939; at that very moment I had informed The Times from Vienna that Hitler and Goering had said so, and the American president would not have been less accurately informed).
By 1937 the falsification of the news-picture from Germany, which was described in the last chapter, had been going on for four years. I gave several instances, and here adduce another. Rabbi Stephen Wise relates that the American Jewish Congress immediately after Hitler’s advent to power started the boycott-Germany movements on the basis of “cable reports” from Germany that “a nationwide pogrom” of Jews was being “planned.”* He then mentions, casually, that the “reported” pogrom “did not come off,” but the boycott did. **
* The Nazis always claimed that their one-day Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933 was in reply to this provocation from New York, and Rabbi Wise’s book of 1949 thus bears out their statement.
** See footnote on page 321
Starting with this imaginary pogrom in Berlin, the propagandist campaign in America formed the basis on which Mr. Roosevelt rested his “quarantine” speech. The Zionists around the president were not truly concerned about the suffering of Jews at all; on the contrary, it was necessary to their politics in America and to the entire undertaking, and they feared its alleviation. In this they continued the policy of the Talmudic revolutionaries in Czarist Russia, who went to the length of assassination to prevent the emancipation of Jews, as has been shown.
Thus Rabbi Wise records that he and his fellow Zionists were not deterred by urgent protests and appeals from the Jews in Germany to stop the boycott. The prospect of an accommodation between Hitler and the Jews of Germany, indeed, appalled them and Rabbi Wise informed his associates of his “two fears” in this respect:
“. . . that our Jewish brothers in Germany might feel moved or compelled to accept a peace agreement or pact that might mean some slight amelioration or mitigation of their wrongs. . . that the Nazi regime might decide to prevent some of the evil consequences of its regime by such palliative treatment of the Jews as would disarm worldwide Jewish protest.” (He describes the second possibility as the “graver” danger).
Thus they feared that “the persecution” would collapse; the words are specific. Rabbi Wise, in New York, preferred that Jews in Germany should suffer rather than this should happen: “To die at the hands of Nazism is cruel; to survive by its grace were ten thousand times worse. We will survive Nazism unless we commit the inexpiable sin of bartering or trafficking with it in order to save some Jewish victims” (1934, to the world Jewish Conference). “We reject out of hand with scorn and contempt any and every proposal which would ensure the security of some Jews through the shame of all Jews” (1936). Mr. Brandeis, in Washington, was equally resolute for martyrdom in Germany: “Any arrangement which results in making a market abroad for German goods strengthens Hitler.... ...To thus relieve Hitler’s economic distress in order to save by emigration some of Germany’s Jews would be .... deplorable statesmanship.”*
* In fact, these Zionists were quite ready to “‘traffic with the Nazis” and make financial deals with them when it suited their purpose. Seven years later, when the Second War was at its climax, Rabbi Stephen Wise received an offer from “‘a group of Nazi functionaries” to allow Jews to go from Poland to Hungary, against payment. Both these countries were German-occupied, so that the advantage to the Jews involved is not apparent, and Mr. Wise must have had some ulterior reason (possibly connected with the later “‘exodus” to Palestine) for wishing to transfer Jews from occupied Poland to occupied Hungary in wartime when he had so fiercely opposed their liberation from Germany in peacetime.’ He requested President Roosevelt to release dollars for the bribe, to be deposited to these Nazis’ account in Switzerland, whereon the president “‘immediately” answered, “‘Why don’t you go ahead and do it, Stephen!” Instructions were then given to another prominent Zionist, Mr. Henry Morgenthau at the Treasury, and despite State Department and British Foreign Office protests the money was transferred to the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress for crediting to the Nazi leaders!
** The word “pogrom” (a Russian one meaning “‘massacre”) plays an especial part in this propaganda. It is applied to any kind of disturbance in which Jews are involved and has by suggestion been given this specific, though false significance, so that the casual reader might suspect a misprint if he were to read of “a pogrom of Russians” (or of Arabs). Dr. Weizmann says “‘there were never any pogroms” in his native Russian countryside but uses the word continually, explaining that “‘it is not necessary to live among pogroms to know that the Gentile world is poisoned.” In inciting a British military governor of Palestine to harsh measures against Arabs Dr. Weizmann said he “had had some experience with the atmosphere which precedes pogroms,” though by his own earlier statement he had none. He describes as a pogrom disorders in which five or six Jews were injured, and as “‘Arab terrorism” the events of 1938, in which 69 British, 92 Jews and 1500 Arabs were killed. A distinguished British officer, Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart V.C., who lived in Poland between the two wars, says ‘The Jewish question seemed unanswerable . . . Pogroms were rumoured to be taking place, but I considered the rumours to have been grossly exaggerated for there were no ocular proofs of the massacre of thousands of Jews.”
For the Zionists in America the spectral danger of a reconciliation between Hitler and the Jews became most acute in 1938. General Smuts then sent his Defence Minister, Mr. Oswald Pirow, to Germany to ease tension in the Jewish question, if he could. The British prime minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, welcomed the attempt; he told Mr. Pirow that the pressure of international Jewry was one of the principal obstacles to an Anglo-German understanding and said he would be helped in resisting this pressure (Leon Pinsker’s “irresistible pressure”) if Hitler could be induced to moderate his spleen.
Mr. Pirow then went to Germany. He says that he made a specific proposal, that Hitler responded favourably, and that agreement was in sight.
At that very instant fate again intervened, as in the case of Mr. Huey Long, Count Stolypin, Czar Alexander II and others; whenever a chance of pacification appeared fate intervened. A young Jew shot a German diplomat, Herr von Rath, in Paris. Riots followed in Germany, synagogues were burned, and Mr. Pirow’s mission abruptly ended. No investigation into the murder, or any organization that might have been behind it, was held, or if one was begun it never produced any informative result; Rabbi Wise presents the familiar picture (found also in Mr. House’s novel) of the “half-crazed youth,” maddened beyond endurance.
Mr. Roosevelt responded immediately: “The news of the past few days from Germany has deeply shocked public opinion in the United States. . . I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization . . . I asked our Ambassador in Berlin to return at once for report and consultation.”
The words referred to the synagogue-burning. (Mr. Roosevelt did not comment on the murder) and the central sentence is demonstrably untrue, because Mr. Roosevelt, and all his contemporaries, had earlier seen the wanton destruction of religious edifices. True, they had not been synagogues, but Mr. Roosevelt had “seen” the dynamiting of Christian churches and cathedrals in Communized Russia, and on becoming president had rushed to recognize the government that did it. Moreover, when he made this declaration he had just sent a telegram cordially approving the enforced capitulation of Czechoslovakia to Hitler and in that deed had found nothing incongruous with 20th Century civilization. This was the moment when I threw up my post, feeling unable to continue in journalism at a time when untruth was master of “the news.”
The United States in effect became involved in the Second War when President Roosevelt made these declarations in 1937 and 1938, not on the day of Pearl Harbour, and a straight line led from them to his later statement of July 17, 1942, when he implicitly promised vengeance on Germany solely on account of its treatment of Jews; the men who prompted him to that public threat had from the start vehemently opposed any mitigation of Jewish suffering in Germany.
The murder of von Rath in Paris was the shot of Sarajevo which in effect opened the second war, as the developing fluid, time, now reveals. Unlike Mr. Wilson, Mr. Roosevelt never privately believed that he would keep his country neutral; in 1938 his mentor, Mr. Bernard Baruch, declared “We are going to lick that fellow Hitler; he isn’t going to get away with it” (General George C. Marshall). Unless some change occurs, and none is foreseeable yet, the American president in any third war would find himself held in the same coils as his predecessors of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945.
During these six years when “the unnecessary war” was brewed I watched the turbulent, darkening scene from Berlin and Vienna and all the great cities on which the long night was soon to fall: Prague and Budapest, Belgrade and Bucharest, Sofia and Warsaw. I saw as much as any man, I suppose, of the stoking of the furnace from which the ingot, war, was produced; and more than most, because I was not confined to any one country or faction, but had the run of them all. I knew the noise of the bravoes in the Storm Troopers’ Stammkneipen, the furtive, bitter talk of their adversaries in private dwellings, and the nervous murmur of men on the run, who glanced ever over their shoulders. I saw the face of the mob, that dinosaur without a cerebral cavity, in both its moods: the inflamed one of illusory hope (in Berlin) and the hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed one of hopeless disillusionment (in Moscow). I met fear at every level, from the street-cleaner to the head of state or of government; I saw the terror in both its headquarter cities.
I knew or met many of the men who appeared to be powerful and to uphold opposing causes, and yet by their acts all brought “the unnecessary war” nearer and nearer. I talked with Hitler, Goering and Goebbels; I lunched quietly by the Geneva lakeside with chubby Maxim Litvinoff, a typical figure of the Café des Exiles, and wondered what he knew of Russia who so little Russia knew, though he was Foreign Minister of that communized land. I saw Mussolini, and Ramsay Macdonald, one of the British prime ministers who passed shadow-like across the blind during these years. I talked for long hours with Edouard Benesh in the old castle at Prague, with Austrian chancellors and Hungarian prime ministers, with Balkan kings and politicians. I went to watch the League of Nations, with high expectations then (for I was still callow) and was repelled by the manner of its proceedings, which was without dignity, by the lobbying and canvassing behind the scenes, and by the throng of hangers-on and intriguers which enfringed it; I think few enthusiasts for the “United Nations” would be found among those who knew the League of Nations. I went to Moscow, in the journalistic bodyguard of a rising young minister named Anthony Eden, and there saw a regime which was the facsimile of the National Socialist one in Germany in every major respect save the status of the Jews, who appeared to me to be predominant in the key-positions of the Soviet state.
It was all a whirling confusion, at the centre of which was one plain fact: that Hitler would make war unless he were prevented and that this war was coming, because he would not be prevented. There was another British prime minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin (a source of grief to the newspaper correspondents in Germany) who withheld the truth of Hitler’s warlike intentions from his countrymen because, as he later said, he would have “lost the election” if he had told it. If his successor, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, thought that by continuing the policy of encouragement to Hitler he could “steer” Hitler to direct his war against the Soviet (I have no proof of this, but it may have been Mr. Chamberlain’s calculation) that was at least a policy, where before was no policy at all. But it was a mistaken policy, for all qualified observers in Germany foresaw that when he struck Hitler would join hands with Stalin in waging war, not wage war against him (I wrote this in my pre-war books).
When I experienced Hitler’s first two invasions, of Austria and Czechoslovakia, I realized that the last hope of averting the unnecessary war was gone. I felt that I lived in a mad world and this explains the title, Insanity Fair, which I gave to the book I wrote at that time. I could see only a lunatic lack of policy then. Eighteen years later, in the light of all that has come about and been made known, the possibility that the unnecessary war was not in all quarters held to be unnecessary obviously cannot be written off.