by Douglas Reed
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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
Mr. Roosevelt created precedent by having his cabinet sworn in by 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
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
“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
“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
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
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
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
“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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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[19]; 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.
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
In 1935 Mr. Roosevelt's second election campaign loomed ahead. Suddenly his advisers became aware that Mr. Long was popular far beyond his native
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.[20]
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
Mr. Roosevelt was re-elected in 1936. His allotted task evidently was to re-involve 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
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
Starting with this imaginary pogrom in
shown.
Thus Rabbi Wise records that he and his fellow Zionists were not deterred by urgent protests and appeals from the Jews in
“… 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
For the Zionists in
Hitler and the Jews became most acute in 1938. General Smuts then sent his Defence Minister, Mr. Oswald Pirow, to Mr. Pirow then went to
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
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 Czechoslavakia 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
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
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
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
When I experienced Hitler's first two invasions, of
[19] 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. (return) [20] 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 [21] The Nazis always claimed that their one-day Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933 was in reply to this provocation from [22] 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 [23] 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 |