Franklin D. Roosevelt and civil rights
Franklin D. Roosevelt's relationship with Civil Rights was a complicated one. While he was popular among African Americans, Catholics and Jews, he has in retrospect received heavy criticism for the ethnic cleansing of Mexican Americans in the 1930s known as the Mexican Repatriation and his internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. From its creation under the National Housing Act of 1934 signed into law by Roosevelt, official Federal Housing Administration (FHA) property appraisal underwriting standards to qualify for mortgage insurance had a whites-only requirement excluding all racially mixed neighborhoods or white neighborhoods in proximity to black neighborhoods, and the FHA used its official mortgage insurance underwriting policy explicitly to prevent school desegregation.[1][2]
Mexican Repatriation
From his first term until 1939, the Mexican Repatriation started by President Herbert Hoover continued under Roosevelt, which some scholars today contend was a form of ethnic cleansing towards Mexican Americans. Roosevelt ended federal involvement in the deportations. After 1934, the number of deportations fell by approximately 50 percent.[3] However, Roosevelt did not attempt to suppress the deportations on a local or state level. Mexican Americans were the only group within the United States explicitly excluded from New Deal benefits.[4][5][6]
Executive Order 8802
In June 1941, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which created the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). It was the most important federal move in support of the rights of African-Americans between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The President's order stated that the federal government would not hire any person based on their race, color, creed, or national origin in the federal government or defense-related administration. The FEPC enforced the order to ban discriminatory hiring within the federal government and in corporations that received federal contracts.
Millions of black men and women achieved better jobs and better pay as a result. The war brought the race issue to the forefront. The Army had been segregated since the
In June 1941, at the urging of A. Philip Randolph, the leading African-American trade unionist, Roosevelt signed an executive order establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee and prohibiting discrimination by any government agency, including the armed forces. In practice, the services, particularly the Navy and the Marines, found ways to evade this order, and the Marine Corps remained all-white until 1942.[7]
In September 1942, at Eleanor's instigation, Roosevelt met with a delegation of African-American leaders, who demanded full integration into the forces, including the right to serve in combat roles and in the Navy, the Marine Corps and the United States Army Air Forces. Roosevelt agreed, but did nothing to implement his promise; it was left to his successor, Harry S. Truman, to fully desegregate the armed forces.
Executive Order 9066
Following the outbreak of the
Interior Secretary Ickes lobbied Roosevelt through 1944 to release the Japanese American internees, but Roosevelt did not act until after the November presidential election. A fight for Japanese American civil rights meant a fight with influential Democrats, the Army, and the Hearst press and would have endangered Roosevelt's chances of winning California in 1944. Critics of Roosevelt's actions believe they were motivated in part by racism.[9] In 1925 Roosevelt had written about Japanese immigration: "Californians have properly objected on the sound basic grounds that Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population... Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European and American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results".[10] In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of the executive order in the Korematsu v. United States case. The executive order remained in force until December of that year.
The Holocaust and attitudes toward Jews
Persecuted Jews outside the US
During his first term, Roosevelt condemned
Even in 1944, when US public opinion was strongly in favor of admitting an unlimited number of Jewish refugees, Roosevelt prevented even the existing immigration quotas from being filled by Jews.[12] Roosevelt also undermined plans to resettle Jewish refugees in the Dominican Republic and U.S. Virgin Islands, viewing these countries as too close to the US.[12]
In practice very few Jewish refugees came to the U.S.—only 22,000 German refugees were admitted in 1940, not all of them Jewish. The State Department official in charge of refugee issues, Breckinridge Long, insisted on following the highly restrictive immigration laws to the letter. As one example, in 1939, the State Department under Roosevelt did not allow a boat of Jews fleeing from the Nazis into the United States. When the passenger ship St. Louis approached the coast of Florida with nearly a thousand German Jews fleeing persecution by Hitler, Roosevelt did not respond to telegrams from passengers requesting asylum, and the State Department refused entry to the ship. Forced to return to Antwerp, many of the passengers eventually died in concentration camps.[13]
After the Allied conquest of North Africa in 1942, Roosevelt chose to retain the antisemitic Vichy leadership in power there, with some Jews remaining held in concentration camps, and discriminatory laws against Jews remaining in effect. In private Roosevelt argued that Jews did not need the right to vote since no elections were expected to be held soon, and that Jewish participation in the professions should be limited via a quota system. Only after an outcry from Jewish organizations in the US did Roosevelt change its policy regarding North African Jews, with anti-Jewish laws remaining in effect for 10 months after the US conquest.[14]
Attitudes to Jews in the US
Some of his closest political associates, such as
At the same time, Roosevelt expressed racist attitudes towards Jews, both in public and private.
References
- ISBN 978-0029138656.
- ISBN 978-1631494536.
- ISBN 9780826339737.
- ^ Johnson, Kevin (Fall 2005). "The Forgotten Repatriation of Persons of Mexican Ancestry and Lessons for the War on Terror". Vol. 26, no. 1. Davis, California: Pace Law Review.
- ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2023-08-12.
- ^ McGreevy, Patrick (2015-10-02). "California law seeks history of Mexican deportations in textbooks". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2023-08-12.
- ^ "National Montford Point Marine Association, Inc. - Home". montfordpointmarines.org. Retrieved 2019-12-26.
- ^ Keith Robar, Intelligence, Internment & Relocation: Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066: How Top Secret "MAGIC" Intelligence Led to Evacuation (2000)
- ^ Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)
- ^ "History - James Edward Oglethorpe - GeorgiaInfo". georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu. Retrieved 2019-12-26.
- ^ Stern, Sol (January 30, 2020). "Franklin Roosevelt Betrayed Europe's Jews". Tablet. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
- ^ a b c Lebovic, Matt (November 4, 2019). "Historian: New evidence shows FDR's bigotry derailed many Holocaust rescue plans". The Times of Israel. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
- ^ See the on-line exhibit on the Voyage of the St. Louis at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.[1]
- ^ Medoff, Rafael (December 21, 2020). "FDR, the Nazis, and the Jews of Morocco: A troubling episode". Jewish News Syndicate. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
- ^ Gellman, Irwin F. (1995). Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordel Hull, and Sumner Welles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 150.
- ^ a b Medoff, Rafael (April 7, 2013). "What FDR said about Jews in private". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved July 8, 2022.
- ^ A grandson who exposed the president's antisemitism; Rafael Medoff, Jewish Ledger, October 13, 2016