FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, EUGENICIST: New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II.
Settlement contingencies for a wide range of peoples were studied, but when Roosevelt described the M Project to Churchill during a lunch at the White House in May 1943, he focused on one particular group. FDR described it as a study about “the problem of working out the best way to settle the Jewish question,” Vice President Henry Wallace, who attended the meeting, recorded in his diary. The solution, which the President endorsed, “essentially is to spread the Jews thin all over the world,” rather than allow them to congregate anywhere in large numbers.
After Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Carter wrote to Truman explaining his work for FDR, offering to continue his unit’s covert activities and urging the new President to fund completion of the M Project.
Truman was deeply skeptical about the need for espionage or secret intelligence, and he had been informed by the State Department that the $10,000 per month that was being spent on the M Project was a waste of money. He terminated Carter’s operations and cut off funding for the migration studies.
Very few people outside the team that produced the reports were allowed to see them and they had no discernible impact on policy decisions. In retrospect, the M Project’s principal accomplishment was to shed light on how now-discredited eugenic theories influenced FDR’s thinking about race, immigration, and the Jews of Europe. As the M Project’s reports rolled into the White House, so did news about the methodical starvation, torture, and extermination of Europe’s Jews in the Nazi Holocaust.
Read the whole thing. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism:
In order to see how this conventional wisdom is built upon a series of useful liberal myths, and therefore understand the real lineage of American liberalism, we need to unlearn a lot of false history and categories we take on faith. In particular, we need to understand that American Progressivism shares important roots with European fascism. No clearer or more sinister proof of this exists than the passion with which American and European progressives greeted eugenics—widely seen as the answer to the “social question.”
Even knowing that his view of eugenics was infinitely more benign* than his opponents, it’s still more than a little troubling from the vantage point of the 21st century to see FDR use a phrase like “the best way to settle the Jewish question.” But it’s even more disquieting to know that modern-day Democrats are still uttering those words.
* Though far from perfect.