Eleanor Read online

  Some of the things he says remind me of what you once said to me about being “with your own people” & the main theme that people who are prejudiced racially & religiously are just manufacturing a whipping boy for their own feelings is doubtless true. I’m just no good at judging a book like this, it is distasteful & I don’t feel any of the things as he describes them. I don’t lump people together. I don’t think of them except as individuals whom I like or dislike. I love you & I don’t feel strange ever with you & I’ve never had to argue about it in my own mind.6

  To Zionists—especially European Zionists—who argued that there was no “home” for Jews except Palestine, she replied, “The Jewish people can live in other places and the future will be open to them as to all others, I am sure.”7 But as it became evident that other lands, including her own, were not ready to receive the refugee and that the Jewish refugee did want to go to Palestine, she began to examine more closely the case for a Jewish homeland in Palestine as well as the chief argument of the opponents of Zionism, that Palestine’s deserts could not support a larger population.

  Mrs. Felix Frankfurter brought Dr. Chaim Weizmann to lunch with her. He told her the story of Palestine, beginning with the Balfour pledge of a Jewish homeland there. He had negotiated the original agreements with the Arabs, Dr. Weizmann went on, and they had understood clearly what the Jews envisaged by a homeland. On the basis of the British pledge, endorsed by Woodrow Wilson, and their agreements with the Arabs, the Jews had brought hundreds of thousands of settlers to Palestine and transformed the arid deserts into garden spots. “He was very convincing,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote afterward, “but I’ve heard many arguments on the other side.”8

  One of the chief arguments on the other side was being advanced by Dr. Isaiah Bowman, the president of Johns Hopkins University and a world famous geographer who headed the State Department’s advisory group on Palestine and the Middle East. “Incidentally I understand that Isaiah Bowman has said that Palestine cannot support even its present people satisfactorily,” Mrs. Roosevelt informed Louis Weiss at the time that she was trying to help him get more visas for children. “It has imported far more than it has exported in the past and they have the figures on this.” This argument was to be heard everywhere, she went on, and was “one of the things that the Jewish organizations should undertake to face.” Mrs. Rose Halprin, a Zionist leader, sent her a statement on “The Absorptive Capacity of Palestine.” It reflected the conclusions of Dr. Walter C. Lowdermilk, an expert on agronomy and soil development, who, on the basis of an exhaustive survey of Palestine, had come to a conclusion quite different from Bowman’s. Palestine could be transformed into another California, he maintained, and the full utilization of the Jordan River would make possible the absorption of four million Jewish refugees.9

  “A very convincing statement,” Mrs. Roosevelt acknowledged to Mrs. Halprin. “I will turn it over to the President and his advisers.” A skeptical President Roosevelt asked her to talk to Dr. Bowman about the Lowdermilk survey. Bowman unsettled her again. He dwelt on the security rather than the economic problem. A Jewish state in Palestine could not be set up and protected from regional hostility without a U.S.-British guarantee. Would the country back up the guarantee of a state 6,000 miles away? “The Jewish problem is one of the many problems that lie upon the conscience of the world,” Bowman wrote her subsequently.

  Only a heart of stone would deny the Jews full and sympathetic consideration. . . .Is it in their long-term interest to create a growing problem of security in the Near East that may require for its solution the more or less immediate use of American bayonets? The answer may prove to be yes, if there is no other way. But in all this wide world must there be a solution by force in just this particular area of 10,000 square miles?10

  As she indicated in a letter she wrote in January, 1944, she accepted Bowman’s reasoning:

  I have talked to the State Department people and I have talked to a great many British people. It would be foolish to think that Palestine by itself could stand up against the Arab world, and neither Great Britain nor the United States can be expected to constantly be prepared to fight the Arab world. So a compromise which looks both to the possibility in the future of the self-support of whatever population is in Palestine and to cooperation of the Arab world must be envisioned, and at the same time the Jewish people must find homes in many places.11

  Felix S. Cohen, the brilliantly creative son of the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen and assistant solicitor in the Department of Interior, sent her a “very wonderful old gentleman,” Dr. Milton Steinberg, who was described to her as neither Zionist nor anti-Zionist and who brought her a plan for Jewish resettlement in Australia, which needed people and had an overabundance of land that could easily be developed. She thought enough of his plan to forward it immediately to her husband at Warm Springs. It was among the items she sent down on April 12, 1945.12

  She knew that FDR had favored a homeland for Jews in Palestine, but she also knew that he felt it could only be established with the consent of the Arabs and that he had failed to win this consent in his meeting with Ibn Saud. When Rabbi Stephen Wise saw Roosevelt on March 16, 1945, after his return from Yalta and congratulated him on a successful mission, Roosevelt’s mournful response, as Dr. Wise informed Chaim Weizmann, was:

  I have had a failure. The one failure of my mission was with Ibn Saud. Everything went well, but not that, and I arranged the whole meeting with him for the sake of your cause. . . .I tried to approach the Jewish question a number of times. Every time I mentioned the Jews he would shrink and give me some such answer as this—“I am too old to understand new ideas!”

  When President Roosevelt began to tell Ibn Saud of what the Jewish settlers had done for Palestine through irrigation and the planting of trees, Ibn Saud’s answer was, “My people don’t like trees; they are desert dwellers. And we have water enough without irrigation!” Roosevelt added, “I have never so completely failed to make an impact upon a man’s mind as in this case.”13

  The immediate issue was what to do with the homeless and destitute Jews coming out of the extermination camps. When Dr. Wise stressed the horror of sending 1,200 Jewish refugees released from Bergen-Belsen to Algiers instead of to Palestine, Roosevelt said, “I have discussed that matter with Winston Churchill and he says ‘don’t talk about the White Paper or regulations, but we will let the Jews come in.’”14

  Within two months, however, Roosevelt was dead, and although Truman vigorously supported the request of the Jewish Agency, spokesman for the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, for the admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine, Clement Attlee, who succeeded Churchill during the Potsdam Conference, was not ready to discuss the issue. As an alternative Truman dispatched Earl G. Harrison, former U.S. commissioner of immigration, to Europe to investigate the situation in the camps. Harrison’s report, which Truman released, said it was “nothing short of calamitous to contemplate that the gates of Palestine should be soon closed,” and urged the issuance of the 100,000 additional immigration certificates. Truman asked Attlee to go along with this recommendation, but the British leader turned him down and proposed instead a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry which would associate the United States with responsibility for carrying out whatever the committee recommended.

  To reassure the Arabs, the State Department obtained Truman’s consent to release a letter Roosevelt had written to Ibn Saud in which he promised that no decision would be made about Palestine without full consultation with both Arabs and Jews. Rabbi Wise had known nothing about this letter, and there was a general feeling of depression and letdown in the Jewish community. “My husband meant the Jewish people no harm,” Mrs. Roosevelt wrote the director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Jewish Memorial Book Committee. “He dreaded war between them and the more numerous Arabs and felt that a more amicable agreement could be reached. He felt that he had not succeeded with Ibn Saud.”15

  She herself was a passiona
te advocate of immediate issuance of the 100,000 admission certificates. In August, 1945, May Craig, after five months in the European theater, had come to her Washington Square apartment. May, a flinty New England journalist, had spent three days at Dachau and her reports were more terrible than any Mrs. Roosevelt had read in the press. She was deeply upset. If the Germans, a civilized people, can sink so low, she remarked to May, so might the Americans. The Bilbos and the Rankins, she said, referring to two southern demagogues then riding high, would probably behave the same way if they had the power.16

  Mrs. Craig was followed by Helen Waren, an actress who, in 1944, had left the Broadway hit The Searching Wind to go overseas for the USO in Ten Little Indians. She came to tell Mrs. Roosevelt of her “grimmest journey” through the Third Army Sector in Germany after V-E Day, where she had found the most appalling and deplorable conditions among the displaced Jews, who were, she said, being forced to live in camps together with their former persecutors—SS men, Gestapo, Nazis, Polish and Ukrainian collaborationists. “All over Europe I found the same heartrending plea: ‘We want to go to Palestine—we want to be among Jews.’” She should write her observations out in the form of a report, Mrs. Roosevelt said. “I shall see that it gets into the proper hands.” She sent copies to the president, General Marshall, Henry Morgenthau, and Adele (Mrs. David M.) Levy, the daughter of Lessing J. Rosenwald, who was then heading the women’s division of the United Jewish Appeal.17

  When Truman and Attlee on November 13, 1945, announced the establishment of an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Mrs. Roosevelt, in a letter to Truman, voiced her unhappiness over the delay it represented:

  I am very much distressed that Great Britain has made us take a share in another investigation of the few Jews remaining in Europe. If they are not to be allowed to enter Palestine, then certainly they could have been apportioned among the different United Nations and we would not have to continue to have on our consciences the death of at least fifty of these poor creatures daily.

  The question between Palestine and the Arabs, of course, has always been complicated by the oil deposits, and I suppose it always will. I do not happen to be a Zionist and I know what a difference there is among such Jews as consider themselves nationals of other countries and not a separate nationality.

  Great Britain is always anxious to have some one pull her chestnuts out of the fire, and though I am very fond of the British individually and like a great many of them, I object very much to being used by them.

  Truman assured her that he would do what he could to get as many Jews into Palestine as possible without waiting upon the report of the joint committee. The latter, however, might produce a report leading to a lasting settlement.18

  In spite of her opposition to the appointment of yet another committee and her support of 100,000 visas, she still believed that a large influx of Jewish settlers would trigger an Arab uprising and that the Jewish community was not capable of defending itself. “Unless the British and the Americans are ready to protect the Jews by force from the Arabs it would seem like suicide to allow them to go back,” she wrote at the beginning of 1946.19

  Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit to Germany after the London session of the United Nations confirmed for her the passionate longing of the Jews for Palestine, the despairing sorrow in the displaced persons camps, that Miss Waren had reported. She was invited by the Army, “at my own suggestion, be it said, but tactfully put so they wouldn’t have me if they didn’t want me, to visit our men before I go home. . . .” She wanted to take a look at the refugee camps and to see for herself how much truth there was in reports of GI “fraternization” with German Fräulein. Those camps were the “saddest places. . .the Jewish camps particularly are things I will never forget.” In the mud of the Zilsheim camp an old Jewish woman knelt and, throwing her arms around her knees, murmured over and over, “Israel, Israel,” and Mrs. Roosevelt knew “for the first time what that small land meant to so many, many people.”20

  She could not forgive the Germans for what they had done. “The weight of human misery here in Europe is something one can’t get out of one’s heart.” In Frankfurt, Army officers at her request located her old classmate Carola von Schaeffer-Bernstein. When Mrs. Roosevelt sadly remarked on Europe’s tragic situation, her friend quickly replied, “It was everybody’s fault. We are all to blame. None of us has lived up to the teachings of Christ.” Mrs. Roosevelt had no wish to hurt her friend but she felt duty-bound to ask how it was possible to be “so devoted to the principles of the church yet not protest the mistreatment of the Jews?”

  “Sometimes,” the reply came back, “it is wiser not to look over the hill.”

  “It was good to see you again,” she wrote Carola afterward, “but there is a sadness over the whole of Europe which, I am afraid, it is hard to get away from.”21

  Not long after her return from Germany, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry handed in its report. It was unanimous in its recommendation of the immediate issuance of 100,000 entry certificates. It also urged that Palestine become a binational state dominated by neither Arab nor Jew. And, in view of the hostility between Arab and Jew, it favored continuance of the British mandate. Truman promptly endorsed these recommendations. The British, however, backtracked, and Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, who earlier had promised to implement any recommendation that was unanimous, now told a British Labor party conference that the only reason Truman wanted Palestine to take Europe’s Jews was because Americans did not want any more Jews in New York City.

  Mrs. Roosevelt disregarded the slurring implications of Bevin’s remarks, because she felt he had a point:

  It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself. Mr. Bevin’s speech gave many of us pause. We should not so conduct ourselves that such things can be said about us by responsible statesmen.22

  She felt the United States should relax its immigration laws. “I think we have a duty to lead in taking our share.”

  But she was angry with the British response to the joint commission’s recommendations. “There was really no need for a commission of inquiry, but we went along with Great Britain. The obvious reason we went along was that we believed Great Britain would accept the report of such a group and try to implement it.” There was no escaping the immediate point at issue—the 100,000 Jews in Europe

  who must find homes immediately and they want to go to Palestine. The Arabs threaten dire things. The British talk about the impossibility of increasing the military force. But surely our allied Chiefs of Staff could work out some form of military defense for Palestine which would not mean an increase in manpower.23

  In Palestine, the British rejection of the joint commission’s recommendations turned the desperate Jewish settlers toward acts of terrorism against the British forces and illegal immigration organized by the Jewish defense force, the Haganah. Bridges were blown up and British officers kidnapped. There were pitched battles between British and Jewish troops. The British, with 50,000 troops in Palestine, decided on drastic action. The Zionist leaders were jailed. That strengthened the influences of the terrorists. The King David Hotel, headquarters of the mandatory and the British Army, was blown up with forty-three killed and forty-three injured. She was horrified:

  Violence of this kind kills innocent people, and enough innocent people have already died in the world. More innocent Jews have suffered than any other people. . . .Violence can only make a fair and reasonable solution in Palestine more difficult.24

  A few days later the British retaliated, which distressed her because she felt a great nation should have self-control and patience. She was even more revolted by the British decision to deport to Cyprus all captured “illegal” immigrants. “Dear Lady Reading,” she wrote her old friend and co-worker on August 23, 1946:

  I am writing you this letter which you can pass on if you think wise, to Mr. Attlee and Mr. Bevin. I do not feel I have any right to express my feelings to them officially and yet
as a human being, I can not help wanting to tell them how certain actions as regards the situation in Palestine have made me feel.

  In the first place, I hope and pray that they will not actually put to death the young terrorists. I do not approve of what any of these people have done in the way of violence. I understand perfectly, however, the fact that this feeling of despair on the part of the Jewish people [has] been growing for a long time and the show of force. . .Great Britain has made in Palestine has probably built up this resistance movement, since force always creates a similar attitude in the opposition.

  If these young people are killed there will without any question, be a sense of martyrdom and a desire for revenge which will bring more bloodshed. A generous gesture will, I think, change the atmosphere.

  In addition, I can not bear to think of the Jews of Europe who have spent so many years in concentration camps, behind wire again on Cyprus. Somehow it seems to me that the 100,000 Jews should be let into Palestine and that some real agreement should be reached with the Arabs. Willy-nilly, the feeling grows here that it is [not] just justice which Great Britain is looking for where the Arabs are concerned, but it is that she wishes the friendship in order to get more favorable consideration where oil concessions are concerned. I know this may not be true but no matter what the real reasons are, it is in such a mess that ultimately I feel it should be turned over to the United Nations. In the meantime the gestures should be on the generous side where Great Britain is concerned. . . .

  I shall be grateful for whatever you decide to do about this letter.

  With every good wish, I am,

  Affectionately,25

  Lady Reading passed the letter on, commenting ambiguously to Mrs. Roosevelt that there was more to the problem than appeared to the naked eye.