There have been numerous questions about why Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t do more to help the endangered Jews of Europe escape the inferno of the Nazi Holocaust and help them flee to the United States, but now evidence has arisen with one salient answer: Roosevelt wanted the Jews to go anywhere but the United States.
As Steve Usdin writes in Tablet Magazine, confidential files kept in Roosevelt’s personal safe in the White House, and correspondence in his personal files indicate that Roosevelt was hostile to Jews coming over from Europe.
The files reveal that with the “M Project,” a secret study Roosevelt commissioned of options for post-war migration of the millions of Europeans, especially Jews, displaced by the war, Roosevelt asked John Franklin Carter, a journalist and former diplomat, along with anthropologist Henry Field, to find a region that would suit the displaced foreigners. Roosevelt selected Aleš Hrdlička, curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, who believed the white race was superior, to head the project. Roosevelt liked Hrdlička’s ideas of human racial “stock,” and told Carter to tell Hrdlička to head up a secret international committee of anthropologists to study the “ethnological problems anticipated in post-war population movements.”
As Usdin notes, “Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack he’d written to Roosevelt expressing the view that the ‘less developed skulls’ of Japanese were proof that they were innately warlike and had a lower level of evolutionary development than other races. The president wrote back asking whether the ‘Japanese problem’ could be solved through mass interbreeding.”
Roosevelt had written in 1925, “No sensible American wants this country to be made a dumping ground for foreigners of any nation, but it is equally true that there are a great many foreigners who, if they came here, would make exceedingly desirable citizens. It becomes, therefore, in the first place, a question of selection … a little new European blood of the right sort does a lot of good in every community.”
Examples of “the right sort” included immigrants from Southern Germany and Northern Italy.
Roosevelt’s goals for the committee were to find “the vacant places of the earth suitable for post-war settlement” and the “type of people who could live in those places.” The first places to be examined were South America and Central Africa. FDR wrote, “Is the South Italian stock—say, Sicilian—as good as the North Italian stock—say, Milanese—if given equal economic and social opportunity? Thus, in a given case, where 10,000 Italians were to be offer[ed] settlement facilities, what proportion of the 10,000 should be Northern Italians and what Southern Italian?”
Carter told Hrdlička that Roosevelt “also pointed out that while most South American countries would be glad to admit Jewish immigration, it was on the condition that the Jewish group were not localized in the cities, they want no ‘Jewish colonies,’ ‘Italian colonies,’ etc.” Keeping with this theme, the president also tasked the committee with determining how to “resettle the Jews on the land and keep them there.”
Hrdlička couldn’t get Roosevelt to give him total control, so he left the project, leaving it to Isaiah Bowman, president of Johns Hopkins University and a geographer, who held anti-Semitic views. Roosevelt had written Bowman in 1938, “Frankly, what I am rather looking for is the possibility of uninhabited or sparsely inhabited good agricultural lands to which Jewish colonies might be sent … such colonies need not be large but, in all probability, should be large enough for mutual cooperation and assistance—say fifty to one hundred thousand people in a given area.”
In May 1943, Roosevelt told Winston Churchill that the M Project was about “the problem of working out the best way to settle the Jewish question,” Vice President Henry Wallace, who attended the meeting, recorded that Roosevelt endorsed that the idea “essentially is to spread the Jews thin all over the world.”