This article originally appeared in the Vineyard Gazette on April 20, 2012.

The Obama campaign’s recently released online documentary, The Road We’ve Traveled, opens by evoking the plight of the economy when Obama took office: “This will be as deep as anything we’ve experienced since the Great Depression,” and “not since the days of Franklin Roosevelt had so much fallen on the shoulders of one president.” It mixes a photograph of the Depression — “Unemployed — will take any job” reads one placard carried by a man — with a shot of suited office workers on the streets, presumably out of work, or about to be, because of the Lehman bankruptcy.

How historically accurate is the Great Depression comparison? The dizzying collapse of the housing and stock markets, followed by a deep and painful economic downturn, indeed was scary. It’s easy to forget the days when panicked investors were pulling their savings out of presumptively safe money market funds; the mega-layoffs that rocketed the unemployment rate to more than 10 per cent; the automobile industry going into intensive care; and the huge swathes of abandoned and foreclosed homes (“if you build it they will buy it” turned out to be a cruel mockery of the American fields of homeowners’ dreams). All that granted, the Great Depression comparison doesn’t work.

Don’t get me wrong. I am an admirer of both FDR and Obama but I don’t think the Great Depression and our current economic problems are in the same ballpark, or even the same league. On the day that FDR took office, March 4, 1933, the United States of America was plunging into an abyss. Every state had shut its banks or restricted their operation; there was not enough money in the Treasury to meet the federal payroll, and the New York Stock Exchange had shut down with no date set to reopen. Since the 1929 stock market crash, stock prices had plummeted 85 percent, and manufacturing in the United States had all but ceased: The automobile industry was operating at 20 per cent of normal capacity and the steel industry at only 12 per cent. The year before, 273,000 families had been evicted from their homes.

“Millions stayed alive,” wrote historian William Manchester in his extraordinary account, The Glory and the Dream, “by living like animals.” Two million homeless Americans were wandering the nation’s roads or riding the freight cars, one quarter of them between the ages of 16 and 21. The writer Edmund Wilson, while visiting Chicago, witnessed 100 starving people clambering through a garbage dump, “falling on the heap of refuse as soon as the [garbage] truck had pulled out and digging into it with sticks and hands.” Each night 200 Chicago women slept on the ground without shelter in Grant and Lincoln Parks. (On the Vineyard, up-Islanders, in particular, actually fended better for themselves because, according to one oral history, they could hunt, fish and farm).

One-fifth of the students in the New York city school system suffered from malnutrition. Nationally, a third of a million children were no longer being educated because their schools had closed for lack of funds. Before the 1929 crash, there were almost no shoeshine boys in New York City; now there were thousands (19 on one block alone). And among the more than 15 million persons looking for jobs that were nowhere to be found, were nearly 22,000 graduates of Ivy League universities.

The Great Depression didn’t just destroy jobs and savings (to the point that an estimated 28 per cent of the population had no income), it damaged people’s souls. “I haven’t had a steady job in more than two years,” a man told a New York Daily News reporter in 1932. “Sometimes I feel like a murderer. What’s wrong with me, that I can’t protect my children?” A special suicide category, “altruistic suicides,” according to Mr. Manchester, was created for “men who killed themselves rather than become a burden to the community.” After looking into the faces of thousands of Americans on a campaign swing, FDR told a friend that “They have the frightened look of lost children.”

And shortly after noon on March 4, it all changed. The “only thing we have to fear is fear itself” speech was a transformative historical event, like the Gettysburg Address. Roosevelt’s speech was the best thing his countrymen had heard in a long, long time — and that week, 450,000 wrote Roosevelt to tell him just that. Even Ronald Reagan, in the midst of a Presidency largely devoted to dismantling the New Deal, recalled how Roosevelt’s leadership revived American spirits: “It was that engrained American optimism, that sense of hope Franklin Roosevelt so brilliantly summoned and mobilized.”

President Obama deserves, in my view, great credit for intelligently and skillfully managing the country’s recent economic travails. But he did not face anything like the economic devastation of the Great Depression; nor did he create a magical, game-changing moment in the midst of an existential American crisis the way FDR did. He would do better, and The Road We’ve Traveled, would be more compelling, if he touted his achievements on their own merits and not on the basis of a mistaken analogy to the Great Depression.

This interview originally appeared in The Jewish Press on May 31st 2012.

The Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust, but the indifference of onlookers facilitated it. One of the guiltiest parties in this regard, according to a new book by former federal prosecutor Gregory Wallance, is the U.S. State Department. In the book, America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace Of An American Aristocracy, Wallance quotes Treasury Department lawyers who accused State Department officials of being “accomplices of Hitler” and “war criminals in every sense of the term.”

The Jewish Press recently spoke to Wallance about the State Department’s sins of commission and omission; the extent of Roosevelt’s culpability in them; and the Treasury Department officials who lobbied to save Jews.

The Jewish Press: Why would Treasury Department officials charge their colleagues in the State Department as being accomplices of Hitler?

Wallance: Because Jewish groups in Switzerland provided information to the U.S. legation in Switzerland that 6,000 Jews were being killed daily in a single location in Poland. The legation then sent that information to the State Department, which, in turn, gave it to Jewish groups. The very next day, however, the State Department sent a cable back to the Swiss legation that said, in effect, “Don’t send any more cables like that.”

In addition, the department later blocked, if not sabotaged, a plan to rescue 70,000 Romanian Jews, as I recount in the book.

Why would it do that?

Anti-Semitism was part of it. But it was more than that. It was a heartlessness, an inability to empathize, to see this terrible crime that was being committed, and to say, “We’ve got to do something about it.” Some of them even opposed a plan to rescue Romanian Jews because “if it succeeds we’ve got no place to put them.”

Contrast that with the reaction of these Treasury Department lawyers – men like John Pehle and Josiah Du Bois – who, in my mind, are heroes. These lawyers found out about [the State Department’s cable to the Swiss legation], and that’s what made it possible for them to persuade their boss, [Treasury Secretary] Henry Morgenthau, to go to Roosevelt and persuade him to take Jewish rescue affairs away from the State Department and invest it in a War Refugee Board.

That board is credited with directly or indirectly saving 200,000 Jewish lives. But by the time it was created in January 1944, a year and a half had gone by since the first reports [of genocide had reached the U.S. government]. The War Refugee Board did a fair amount, but it was too little and too late.

How do you account for the State Department trying to derail rescue efforts and the Treasury Department trying to advance them? Weren’t they both departments of the same government?

Many members in the State Department were sealed off from the rest of America. They were educated in a bubble of privilege and wealth and told they were the chosen, the elite, imbued with Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism. They also received a healthy dose of conformity. The lawyers in the Treasury Department didn’t grow up in this aristocratic cloister.

Second, the Treasury Department was involved in almost all the New Deal programs. People were drawn to the New Deal because they wanted to change the world. They were idealists. The State Department was more like one of those old-line clubs like The Knickerbocker and attracted people, in large part, from this aristocratic bubble that I described. They had a completely different mindset about the world, and it was more of a “don’t rock the boat” attitude.

Finally, as I said, there was a significant degree of anti-Semitism in the State Department. I don’t think anti-Semites would’ve gone to work for Morgenthau, who was Jewish. Morgenthau’s hiring policy by the time war loomed actually was: “Does [the prospective employee] hate Hitler and does he want to lick Hitler’s guts?” So people in the Treasury Department naturally had a much different mindset.

Why assign so much blame to the State Department? Doesn’t the buck stop at the president’s desk? If Roosevelt wanted to do more to save Europe’s Jews, he could have, regardless of the State Department’s opinion on the matter.

Roosevelt certainly neglected the issue, so in that sense he’s responsible. But he wasn’t anti-Semitic. He appointed many Jews to high posts in his administration, for which he was attacked by both American anti-Semites and the Nazis. Furthermore, when he was presented with a rescue plan to save [tens of thousands of] Romanian Jews, he approved it on the spot.

His record is mixed. I don’t think it can be said that he set out in a deliberate and methodical way to block reports from Europe of massacres or to sabotage a rescue plan [as the State Department did].

Some people say Roosevelt abandoned the Jews, others say he saved the Jews. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.

In a recent letter to the editor to The Jewish Press, Wyman Institute director Rafael Medoff disputed your claim that your book is the first to properly examine the State Department’s role in the Holocaust. He argued that books like The Abandonment Of The Jews by David Wyman already covered the topic in depth.

In these books, the State Department’s role tends to get submerged in what I call the “collective guilt approach” to the American response to the Holocaust, which is that everybody was guilty: the press, Roosevelt, Congress, the churches, Jewish American groups, etc.

I came away from my research with the sense that, while very few of these actors are really free from responsibility, the State Department didn’t simply neglect the issue, which you could accuse Roosevelt of doing for example. It actually used its authority and power to block reports of the [Holocaust] and then obstructed efforts to save 70,000 Romanian Jews. These actions struck me as a different order of misconduct that needed to be examined on its own.

Your first two books (published in 1981 and 2005, respectively) were about corruption in the NYPD and the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. How did you get from these topics to the State Department and the Holocaust?

A couple of years ago, I was reading newspaper accounts about the discovery of letters written by Otto Frank to friends in the U.S. seeking their assistance in getting visas for himself and his family. The visa obstacles proved too much, though, and he decided to take his family into hiding in Amsterdam. We all know the rest of the story. I just was struck by the notion that American visa regulations and policies might have doomed the Frank family. So I started reading up on the subject and felt that not enough attention had been paid to the State Department’s role.

The second reason I decided to write this book is these Treasury Department lawyers; I found their outrage at the State Department morally redeeming. In part, they morally redeemed the good name of the United States. I can’t say enough about them. I’d like to see their story and all that they did really widely known because it’s an inspiration.

By GREGORY J. WALLANCE

This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post on 03/20/2012.

Israeli prime minister’s reference to War Department’s handling of Auschwitz was unwarranted.

In his address last week to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu provoked a controversy by comparing the Iran nuclear threat to the Holocaust.  Yehuda Bauer, a scholar at Yad Vashem, dismissed Netanyahu’s analogy as “sheer nonsense.”

Overlooked in the din was Netanyahu’s other Holocaust parallel in his speech – his citation of the War Department’s refusal in 1944 to bomb the gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz.  The War Department, Netanyahu pointed out, rejected Jewish bombing requests, partly on the bizarre ground that bombing Auschwitz would drive Nazi Germany to even more “vindictive action.”

This parallelism should have generated its own controversy because it implies that the American conduct during World War II — what Holocaust historian David Wyman called the “abandonment of the Jews” — could be repeated.  In the speech, to be sure, Netanyahu acknowledged that the current American government is not the same as the 1944 one.  If so, why mention the War Department incident other than to question American resolve in the face of a second potentially existential threat to the Jewish people and perhaps stir up a guilty national conscience?

The American government’s response to the Nazi exterminations was indeed, as Harry White, a senior official in FDR’s treasury department (and later an architect of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreements that established the IMF and World Bank), put it at the time, “little short of sickening.”  Even before the War Department’s rejection of the Auschwitz bombing request, highly educated, patrician officials in the State Department had covered up reports of the extermination scheme and blocked the rescue of 70,000 Romanian Jews.

But these wartime diplomats were part of a now all-but-vanished American aristocracy that existed outside the experience or even awareness of most of their fellow Americans.   Sheltered in a hermetically sealed aristocratic archipelago, they went from elite northeast boarding schools to Ivy League educations to diplomatic postings.  Imbued with a sense of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, convinced that America needed them more than they needed America, and virulently anti-Semitic they developed a heartless indifference to the sufferings of human beings from different ancestries, religions or economic backgrounds (Breckinridge Long, a wartime assistant secretary of state once described Mein Kampf as “eloquent in opposition to Jewry and Jews as exponents of Communism and chaos”).

The head of the Division of European Affairs in 1940, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, as a young diplomat in Warsaw shortly after the end of World War I, had watched desperate refugees flee oncoming Soviet armies: “they sounded like so many cackling geese and generally behaved in a manner that made us pray like the pharisee, ‘Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other men’.”  It was as though whatever nerves transmitted human empathy and compassion had been amputated.

John J. McCloy, the War Department official who rejected the Auschwitz bombing request, hailed from this same eastern establishment tribe.   His father-in-law refused to do business with Jews, his own clubs barred Jews, and he demonstrated a similar lack of compassion.   After lawyers in the treasury department discovered the state department’s cover-up and obstruction — the lawyers called the diplomats “accomplices of Hitler” — FDR had no choice but to take refugee and rescue responsibilities away from the State Department and vest them in the newly-created War Refugee Board.   But McCloy withheld War Department assistance from the board’s rescue efforts and then rejected the Auschwitz bombing request.

But the point is, that apart from a few yacht clubs, class no longer wields power in America (just ask any Tea Party member).  It has been more than 15 years since the Secretary of State was a white man and the current president of the United States is not likely to utter the Pharisee’s prayer (except perhaps for the sake of private irony).

While there are important lessons to be drawn from the State and War Departments’ response to the Holocaust, especially the hazards posed by powerful elite groups cut off from society’s mainstream, how to formulate a policy toward Iran is not one of them.  The American response to the Holocaust is irrelevant to the Iran nuclear crisis.

The writer lives in New York City and has authored several books, including America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy, which will be released on April 19, Holocaust Remembrance Day.