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Nothing changes... Truman on Jews
« on: 2003-09-17 22:40:57 » |
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Truman rant on Jews surprises scholars
Diary found at his library
Source: Washington Post
Authors: Rebecca Dana
Dated: 2003-07-11
"The Jews, I find are very, very selfish," President Harry S. Truman wrote in a 1947 diary that was recently discovered on the shelves of the Truman Library in Independence, Mo., and released by the National Archives on Thursday.
Written sporadically during a turbulent year of Truman's presidency, the diary contains about 5,500 words on topics ranging from the death of his mother to comic banter with a British aristocrat.
But the most surprising comments were Truman's remarks on Jews, written on July 21, 1947, after the president had a conversation with Henry Morganthau, his Jewish Treasury secretary, who called to talk about a Jewish ship in Palestine -- possibly the Exodus, the legendary ship carrying 4,500 Jewish refugees who were refused entry into Palestine by the British, who then ruled the region.
"He'd no business, whatever to call me," Truman wrote. "The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed."
Truman then went into a rant about Jews: "The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political, neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist, he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."
Thursday, those comments startled scholars, because Truman is known as a president who acted to help Jews in postwar Europe and who supported recognition of Israel in 1948, even though his State Department opposed it.
"My reaction is: Wow! It did surprise me because of what I know about Truman's record," said Sara Bloomfield, director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Truman's sympathy for the plight of Jews was very apparent."
But Truman's comments were, Bloomfield said, "typical of a sort of cultural anti-Semitism that was common at that time in all parts of American society. This was an acceptable way to talk."
"Truman was often critical, sometimes hypercritical, of Jews in his diary entries and in his correspondences, but this doesn't make him an anti-Semite," said John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of history at Yale University. "Anyone who played the role he did in creating the state of Israel can hardly be regarded in that way."
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