Standing outside the entrance to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s exhibition “Americans and the Holocaust,” which opens Monday, co-curators Rebecca Erbelding and Daniel Greene disagreed on how to grade Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts to save Jewish refugees during World War II. Erbelding, an archivist at the museum, gave FDR a B-minus, while Greene, who teaches at Northwestern University, was stingier with a C-plus. Both agreed that visitors to the museum in the past would have marked the former president considerably lower.
“We are not trying to apologize for FDR in any way or to put a finger on the scale,” Greene said on a walk-through of the exhibition, which contains artifacts, documents, video footage and a deluge of digital documents and facsimiles.
Erbelding, author of the new book Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe, allows that her scholarship on the War Refugee Board, which FDR created to circumvent State Department logjams, might predispose her to look more favorably upon Roosevelt than her colleague. But both agree that it is time for an exhibition that puts the Holocaust in the context of the war and of U.S. public opinion at the time.
“Here FDR is a main character,” Greene said.
The former president, who served from 1933 until his death on April 12, 1945, has long had a checkered legacy when it came to helping Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. Many know of the German ocean liner St. Louis, whose approximately 900 Jewish refugees the United States refused to admit in 1939. The following year, Roosevelt suggested in a news conference that Jewish refugees could be Nazi spies, and when the United States entered the war, FDR’s government prioritized military victory over saving Jewish lives.
Exhibit labels and posted poll questions, which viewers can flip to reveal results, center on what Americans knew about the Holocaust then, and the degree to which the public welcomed refugees. In November 1936, for example, 67 percent of respondents to one poll thought there would be another serious Depression. Three years later, 66 percent of the public said they wouldn’t support the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which proposed allowing 10,000 refugee children from Germany to come live that year with U.S. families.
Greene hopes visitors will emerge with an understanding that even the U.S. president faces constraints, and weighing public opinion, FDR decided not to expend political capital to rescue Jews.