“Everybody Did It” Is A Poor Excuse For FDR’S Response To The Holocaust

There are two significant problems with the “everybody was doing it” line. The first is that it’s immoral.

Right and wrong should never be determined according to what other people are doing. You would think that would be obvious to the leaders of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Harvard University, and Columbia University. 

The second problem is that it’s historically indefensible. 

“Congress, the State Department, the media, and the public” —the villains cited by the Holocaust Museum spokesman—were not equal actors alongside President Roosevelt in their knowledge of, or ability to respond to, news of the Holocaust.

–Congress did not stop FDR from helping the Jews. Although most of Congress was anti-immigration in the 1930s and early 1940s, Roosevelt still could have admitted nearly 200,000 more Jewish refugees from 1933 to 1945 through unused quota places, without congressional approval or action. Moreover, when members of Congress, in late 1943, introduced a resolution to create a refugee rescue agency, the Roosevelt administration strongly opposed it.

–The State Department did not stop FDR from helping the Jews. On the contrary, it was the State Department that enthusiastically implemented Roosevelt’s policy of downplaying news of the Holocaust, suppressing refugee immigration, and ignoring or obstructing opportunities for rescue.

–The media did not stop FDR from helping the Jews. Roosevelt’s refugee policy was not based on media coverage. In fact, the administration was partly to blame for the media’s inadequate coverage of the mass murder of the Jews, because the president and his spokesmen, who set the tone that much of the news media followed, downplayed that news.

—Nor was the American public to blame for FDR’s abandonment of the Jews. The public didn’t have the power to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, did have that power.

As president, he had the ability to help Jewish refugees without undermining the war effort, and he had the moral responsibility to act against the murder of millions of innocent people, by taking steps that would not have affected the war effort, such as opening America’s doors to refugees or bombing the railways and bridges leading to Auschwitz (by U.S. planes that were already bombing adjacent targets).

The taxpayer-funded U.S. Holocaust Museum should be telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, concerning Roosevelt’s abandonment of the Jews—not minimizing FDR’s responsibility by resorting to childish excuses about how everybody else was abandoning them, too.