AMITY SHLAES: Shaming Americans. Ken Burns’s The U.S. and the Holocaust distorts the historical record in service of a political message.
By 1925, a reality inconvenient to the narrative thrust of The U.S. and the Holocaust intruded. Americans of all backgrounds, including blacks, saw their lives improve, with electric appliances and automobiles changing even working-class life. The Harding-Coolidge wager that growth would reduce extremism was succeeding. Mid-decade, the Ku Klux Klan commenced a precipitous decline. Lynchings likewise dropped. Coolidge traveled to Omaha to challenge thousands of members of the mighty American Legion to reconsider any prejudices they might harbor: “We must all realize,” Coolidge told the crowd, “that there are true Americans who did not happen to be born in our section of the country, who do not attend our place of religious worship, who are not of our racial stock, or who are not proficient in our language.” In America, concluded Coolidge, “we are all now in the same boat.”
But it is Herbert Hoover whom the film wrongs most. Hoover had first won national popularity for the kind of grand humanitarian heroism that the filmmakers admire, getting past enemy lines in World War I to feed the starving citizens of German-occupied Belgium. Years later, Hoover had the bad luck to become president during the first year of the Great Depression. The scarcity of jobs—one in four Americans was unemployed by 1932—made many want to shut out foreign competitors. In the West, state and local governments began pressuring Mexicans, whether citizens or not, to return to Mexico. Many left voluntarily; others were forced out. At times, federal immigration officials were involved. In the Los Angeles raids, for example, federal authorities arrested 389 aliens, 269 of them Mexican. Other times, the drive to remove or send away legal immigrants was led by towns, counties, and states, and scant records of these events exist. Estimates of the number of Mexicans who left or were driven out range widely, from 200,000 to more than 1 million. Repatriation and deportation are not equivalent, as scholars Brian Gratton and Emily Merchant noted in 2013 in International Migration Review, and the evidence suggests that many Mexican-Americans left of their own accord. The departures went on for years, including at least some that occurred well into the mid- or later 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt, not Hoover, was in the Oval Office.
Rather than offer all this detail, the film weaponizes history to clobber Hoover: “Under the slogan ‘American jobs for real Americans,’ Hoover’s Labor Department approved raids by sheriffs, marshals, and vigilantes that rounded up some 1.8 million people of Mexican descent and deported them.” That “1.8 million,” outside the bounds of serious scholarship to date, is particularly ominous in a film about the 6 million—leaving an opening for authors of urban legend to present Hoover as operating in the big-number league of the Nazis. Adding insult to injury, the film chides Hoover for what it treats as an exceptional cruelty: enforcing a regulation already on the books requiring immigrants to demonstrate that they could care for themselves. Yet such measures were an American tradition dating back to a period that the documentary presents as Edenic: the 1882 Immigration Act empowered authorities to deny entry to “any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” This is not much different from what our own bureaucracies do when they check with employer sponsors in evaluating green-card applications.
It is in the second episode that the filmmakers turn to Franklin Roosevelt, the only president forced to contend with the Third Reich while in office. Roosevelt himself was capable of bigotry. During his first election campaign, Roosevelt allowed himself a kind of casual but nasty xenophobia, as in a San Francisco speech in which he assailed the Chicago electricity magnate Samuel Insull, who was taking his employees down with him as his firm failed. Roosevelt spoke against “the Ishmael or Insull, whose hand is against every man’s,” a line so creepy one can only ask, “What does that mean?” In his March 1933 inaugural address, just weeks before Hitler opened his first concentration camp, Roosevelt channeled Henry Ford on international capital, claiming that “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed” and that “practices of the unscrupulous money changers”—code for Jewish Wall Street—“stand indicted.” Burns covers none of this.
Earlier: New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II. As the Holocaust raged, the American president secretly asked his government to study the possible resettlement of remaining European refugees in Africa and South America. His goal: for Jews to be ‘spread thin all over the world.’