Henry Morgenthau, Jr.: The Remarkable Life of FDR's Secretary of the Treasury

By Herbert Levy

A fascinating exploration of early to mid-twentieth-century politics as seen through the eyes of a Roosevelt technocrat.

History seems to repeat itself. With ongoing wars abroad and the collapse of financial institutions at home, Americans rely on President Barack Obama and Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew to bring about positive change. When the US stock market collapsed in 1928 and World War II broke out, the nation turned to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., for leadership.

Henry Morgenthau, Jr. explores the life of this native New Yorker. Born into a prominent Jewish family, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., became a controversial figure in politics. Yet, his contributions were integral to social, political, and economic milestones in American history, all while he grappled with his identity as an American Jew during the atrocities of WWII in Europe. This new biography offers a glimpse of yesterday and lessons for today.

Author Herbert Levy offers an extensively researched life of this important American leader. From thorough research in the archives of Hyde Park to careful study of Morgenthau’s letters, Levy delivers an in-depth account of the fascinating life of this remarkable man. This book explores the complex and oftentimes frustrating world in which Morgenthau was forced to live and illuminates his odyssey as a Roosevelt technocrat.

Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Jun 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781632209443

Book preview

Introduction

Henry Morgenthau, Jr., lived a life of quiet heroism. Mocked in his Washington years as a fuddy-duddy for his unyielding rectitude, in fact, he experienced youthful and unfulfilled passion. Put to the test on a moral issue—the creation by presidential executive order of the War Refugee Board—he risked losing his most important friendship, that with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his position as secretary of the Treasury. He is responsible for the huge success of Roosevelt’s New York State gubernatorial administrations, which led to Roosevelt’s national prominence and the presidency of the United States. Aside from his contributions to Roosevelt’s New Deal fiscal programs and the financing of the United States’ war effort during World War II, neither the International Monetary Fund nor the World Bank would have come into existence except for his interest and encouragement. He also played a crucial role in the survival of the country of Israel and its escape from national bankruptcy in its infant years.

Today, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., is seen as the advocate of an approach to the reconstitution of Germany after World War II that is presently damned and dismissed variously as callous, vengeful, and vindictive, altogether inappropriate, and, luckily, never seriously considered. As will be seen in the last chapter of this book, elements of Morgenthau’s plan were put into effect through the efforts of Josef Stalin in ways more savage than Morgenthau ever envisioned, and were acquiesced to by Roosevelt and Churchill at Tehran and Yalta, and Truman, the latter in the Potsdam Agreement of July 1945 governing military government of a conquered Nazi Germany.¹ Morgenthau’s plan to contain anticipated, recurrent military aggression and genocide by his generation of Germans was atypical and a measure of the vast, traumatic shock engendered by a realization of the dimensions of the Holocaust wrought by Hitler and the Nazis in Europe. That was almost the only time Morgenthau was seriously engaged—with a personal sense of commitment—in a policy issue.

Well aware of the limitations of his personality, the way of life Morgenthau had consciously chosen for himself was the role of a nonparticipant in the clash of events. He was an onlooker to his father’s participation in Democratic Party politics through the latter’s connection with Woodrow Wilson—first, with Wilson’s efforts to secure the nomination, and then, Wilson’s election in 1912 as president of the United States. Morgenthau’s father acquired farmland at his son’s request in the lower Hudson River Valley. He found great joy in being a farmer.

This work focuses on Morgenthau’s response to the social and political myths of the period in which he lived. In some respects, Morgenthau was insulated, by his connection with Roosevelt, from some of the most egregious forms discrimination took in his lifetime. Certainly, as Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury, he had a very special position in the social hierarchy in the nation’s capital. That said, there can be no question but that Morgenthau was acquainted with the social and political anti-Semitism of the first half of the twentieth century. If nothing else, as the result of an agreement between Paderewski—the internationally acclaimed pianist who was then co-heading the Polish delegation to the Paris Peace Conference after World War I—and a group of American diplomats under President Wilson, had not his father been appointed in an official position to lead an American delegation authorized to investigate pogroms against Jews in the reemergent Polish Republic?

The recognition in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of the right of Poles and other ethnic groups in Central and Eastern Europe to form their own independent nations led to the concomitant minority rights treaties, to which each of the newly emergent states was a signatory. The purpose of these minority rights treaties ostensibly was to safeguard and guarantee the rights of other ethnic minorities (or nationalities) found in those newly emergent countries—among which were included Jews in Eastern Europe. Still, the only practical result of the treaties was that work was provided to the staff of a section of the respective foreign ministries required annually to submit reports to the League of Nations at Geneva. The procedure lasted for perhaps fifteen years. In the late 1930s, with the rise of government-sanctioned anti-Semitism in Germany and Hitler’s removal of Germany from continuing membership in the League of Nations, the uselessness and absurdity of the process led to its abandonment.²

Edna Lonigan had a PhD degree in economics and worked in the United States Department of the Treasury. I met her in Washington, D.C., in October 1951. Notwithstanding her far right-wing political allegiance, Ms. Lonigan told me with quiet pride that she understood Mr. Morgenthau had mentioned her in his diary. Her voice expressed at once respect for a competent administrator and the pleasure a government employee takes in the recognition by one’s supervisor of work well done. Four separate drawers of memoranda in the documents that Morgenthau deposited in the Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park, New York, are labeled Edna Lonigan. This suggests that Morgenthau regarded her as a valued member of the department staff and that his respect for her abilities was reciprocated. What is interesting in Ms. Lonigan’s regard for Morgenthau is that more times than not, government employees’ opinion of prior supervisors is more negative than otherwise.

Franklin Roosevelt was primarily concerned in filling cabinet posts to put into place first-rate administrators to run the federal departments in the most effective manner possible. In modern jargon, Roosevelt was seeking technocrats—capable, competent, nonpolitical administrators without political agendas—who were there to implement policies as Roosevelt might choose to set them. Although Roosevelt held regular cabinet sessions at which political and governmental issues were discussed, basically Roosevelt was his own man. Harold Ickes, his longtime secretary of the interior, observed in his Secret Diary, The President is all too prone to decide important questions either alone or with the particular Cabinet officer who is interested. In connection with Roosevelt’s commenting at a cabinet session on the question of the international embargo on the sale of munitions to either side during the contemporaneous Spanish Civil War, Ickes wrote, What I cannot understand is why such an important policy should not have been decided upon without a full and frank discussion in the Cabinet.³

If one considers the political milieu from which Roosevelt had to choose cabinet members—except for Frances Perkins and Henry Woodin, a Republican then-president of the American Car and Foundry Company—he was remarkably lucky in the quality of his appointees. By contrast, his successor Harry Truman saw his military aide Harry Vaughan indicted and a congressional investigation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (now, the Internal Revenue Service) by the King Subcommittee of the House of Representatives. And only Secretary of the Treasury Woodin and his deputy, Dean Acheson, had the temerity to oppose Roosevelt’s determination to go off the gold standard as the basis for issuing paper money. (No matter that today, in a manner of speaking, American currency is based on nothing so much as the votes of its members at the periodic meetings of the Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee. James Grant is somewhat more expansive in his view of the matter. He writes, [T]he post-1971 dollar is purely faith-based.⁴ In the year 1971 President Nixon gave legal recognition to the ban on the interchangeability of American currency for gold for any purpose, and abrogated the limits within which international currencies could trade against one another, instituted as a result of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944—perhaps Morgenthau’s finest hour as secretary of the treasury.)

Roosevelt had decided on a policy, and, like the fabled Hollywood movie producers of the era, after he decided on a policy, he preferred yes-men around him. He did not brook opposition once he had made up his mind on a course of action.

Acheson—brought up as a Connecticut gentleman, and finding himself out of sympathy with the monetary policies of the president—ended up resigning. Treasury Secretary Woodin was ill—indeed, slowly dying of cancer—separating Woodin from any day-to-day supervision of the operation of the Treasury Department he nominally headed.⁵ Roosevelt had the opportunity to appoint a successor to Acheson. Roosevelt was determined to appoint someone he could trust to loyally implement his ideas without the potential of coming up with any passionately held ideas of his own. And so, Roosevelt came to focus his attention on his Dutchess County neighbor, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., whose qualifications for the job of Treasury secretary were more apparent than real.

Politically, Morgenthau had inherited a connection with the Democratic Party. His father had been a generous-enough contributor of both his time and money to the campaign of presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson that Henry Morgenthau, Sr., had become the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, where he was one of two persons to publicize the Armenian massacres in 1915, a most undiplomatic, if morally admirable, posture. Morgenthau, Jr., was extremely helpful to Roosevelt by securing information about farm problems in the Midwest during the 1932 presidential campaign. Morgenthau’s inherited wealth allowed him to have a certain social independence, appropriate for a leading government figure in Washington. Most important was Morgenthau’s total lack of political ambition, and his utter and complete loyalty to the president.

On the debit side was Morgenthau’s lack of experience academically and professionally in the world of finance. That lack strengthened the probability that he would have no ideas of his own in the area of Treasury Department policy. The one other disqualification that Morgenthau exhibited was his Jewish background. It is apparent that this factor meant little to Roosevelt, so Morgenthau was nominated by Roosevelt to be undersecretary of the Treasury. Having finally decided on his successor, Roosevelt accepted Woodin’s resignation in November of 1933. Roosevelt then sent Morgenthau’s nomination to succeed Woodin to the Senate. After confirmation, Morgenthau was sworn in as the new secretary of the treasury on January 1, 1934.⁶

Morgenthau’s life cannot be understood except in terms of the ideas that permeated the period in which he lived.⁷

In this respect, consider a news article in the New York Times describing a newsperson’s visit to the factory site (turned rocket museum) on Usedom Island in Germany. This is where the Nazi government during World War II developed and constructed the V1 and V2 rockets which were sent nightly to devastate London during the last year of the war. The last paragraph in the article reads: Near the museum’s exit, a plaque is inscribed with a celebrated passage from the philosopher Immanuel Kant. It is his sublime crystallization of the two aspects of his experience that fill him with awe and admiration: ‘The starry skies above me and the moral law within me.’ Most visitors, it can be hoped at any rate, get the museum’s intended message: if the quest to reach the stars takes place in the absence of moral law, it will lead to atrocity.⁸

Rationalist philosophy that had triumphantly animated nineteenth-century European and American society—the belief that human reason is capable of causing the perfectibility of human society—led to an explosion of technological achievements that separates our world from the world of the eighteenth century—the world that had given birth to that philosophy. But other ideas were taking hold in the years after 1875, derived from Charles Darwin’s evolutionary postulates relative to biological development. Darwin chose to denominate the biological evolutionary development he formulated as natural selection. Herbert Spencer was to restate the concept as survival of the fittest. (Spencer was less interested in biology than sociology.) Both terms may be said to be in many ways interchangeable⁹—two facets of the same coin—leading to a sense of an inexorable and inescapable process, although that may not be precisely what Darwin intended.¹⁰

As it turned out, Spencer’s choice of phrase proved to be unfortunate. Natural selection was intended by Darwin to be understood in an intransitive sense to mean nothing more than that a species whose attributes best fitted the environment in which it found itself, would tend to survive and prosper. In this regard, Hofstadter¹¹ cites George Nasmyth for the proposition that the fittest . . . to Darwin . . . meant merely the best adapted to existing conditions.¹²

European civilization had come to exercise dominion over the rest of the globe. Theorists had an itch to explain the phenomenon, and they had a ready explanation at hand. All that was needed was Spencer’s change of Darwin’s intransitive phrase into a transitive idea—namely, that the fittest were fated to survive in the sense of prospering to the point of world dominance.

With respect to the prevalence of the sense of an inexorable and inescapable process, Hofstadter quotes,¹³ for example, the language used by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan in his book, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future:¹⁴ All around us now is strife; ‘the struggle of life,’ ‘the race of life,’ are phrases so familiar that we do not feel their significance till we stop to think about them. Everywhere nation is arrayed against nation; our own no less than others. And Hofstadter¹⁵ cites German general Friedrich von Bernhardi’s paean to the virtues of warfare,¹⁶ War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race and therefore all real civilization . . . The natural law, to which all the laws of Nature can be reduced, is the law of struggle . . . War will furnish such a nation with favorable vital conditions, enlarge possibilities of expansion and widened influence and thus promote the progress of mankind; for it is clear that those intellectual and moral factors which insure superiority in war are also those which render possible a general progressive development. Hofstadter continues, quoting Bernhardi: War gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things.¹⁷ And: . . . it is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and as such, an indispensable factor in civilization.¹⁸

The ambassador to the United States of the Polish government-in-exile during World War II, could write in Social Darwinist terms in his Memoirs, ". . . since the fateful mission of Lord Haldane, then British Secretary of War, to Berlin in 1909 to ascertain whether Kaiser Wilhelm II was actually contemplating a war of conquest, the world has not enjoyed one moment of real security.

This meant that more than thirty years of insecurity had been affecting human psychology and international relations, hampering economic development and cooperation. Mutual suspicion ruled international relations.¹⁹

William Faulkner, in his celebrated acceptance speech on receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, used Social Darwinist language in his memorable peroration, I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.²⁰ To be sure, the context in which the words were uttered and understood was no longer Social Darwinist.

There were the splendid examples of the Risorgimento in Italy and the seemingly unstoppable military triumphs of Prussia that led to the unification of Germany in a militarist mode. Social Darwinists denominated these as young countries with seemingly unlimited futures, not to be compared, say, with the Ottoman Empire that spent the nineteenth century being dismembered, besides being—dread word—Oriental; or Spain—humiliated by the United States in 1898 with a concomitant loss of almost all of what remained of its overseas empire—an exhausted remnant of a world power that under Philip the Second had dominated Western Europe in the sixteenth century; or that most wonderful example of a lack of political virility, the island of Sicily, victim of unnumbered invasions over the millennia, never an independent country with an indigenous government, leading to a population (postulated Social Darwinists) of indefinable mixed breeds clearly inferior to the homogeneous pure races of northern Europe, like those of Germany and the Nordic lands that had spread terror in the Middle Ages.

Odd Nansen, son of Norwegian arctic explorer and statesman Fridtjof Nansen, whose name was given to the League of Nations identification documents—the so-called Nansen passports—had been arrested during the German occupation of Norway in World War II and ended up in the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, outside of Berlin. In Odd Nansen’s secret diary of that time under detention, he recorded ironically—considering the plight in which he found himself—that Norwegians were not only Aryans, but moreover belong to the group of Aryans that is purest and that Germans therefore envy and admire most.²¹ (A striking confirmation of Nansen’s comment is found in an article that appeared in the New York Times some sixty years later, entitled Results of Secret Nazi Breeding Program: Ordinary Folks,²² describing a conference of persons whom the reporter describes as the children of the Lebensborn, an SS program devised to propagate Aryan traits. The article goes on to observe that Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS and a close associate of Hitler, valued the appearance of Scandinavians.) The Norwegian concentration camp inmates, although they were subject to their share of the barbarism, sadism, and cruelty that was the lot of all concentration camp inmates, nevertheless alone among the prisoners were able to receive letters and food and clothing packages from home, privileges unimaginable for the other inmates.

Social Darwinism inaugurated a species of latter-day provincialism. (Milan Kudera defines the term provincialism "as the inability (or the refusal) to see one’s own culture in the large context" [italics in original].²³) The prevalence of words like pure and purity, and the popularity of derogatory terms like half-breed and mongrel races attested to ever-narrowing circles of exclusion. (So Hitler, coming to Vienna earlier from Upper Austria, described in Mein Kampf [his political testament written in 1923 in prison for the attempted putsch in Munich with the nationalist would-be political adventurer General Ludendorf] how he first started reading the liberal, more-cosmopolitan Viennese newspapers and then changed to reading the nationalist press.)

Hawkins writes: Darwin and his supporters were engaged in the attempt to redefine nature and stress the importance of struggle, death and extinction.²⁴ By identifying human beings in a Darwinist sense as one more biological species comparable to the biblical beasts of the field and extrapolating from animal behavior the laws of life to which human beings were inextricably bound, Social Darwinists effectively destroyed any valid basis for moral principles to govern human conduct—to which principles the eighteenth-century rationalists had given their allegiance. Human beings were regarded by Social Darwinists as akin to animals in the jungle. Hofstadter²⁵ quotes Brooks Adams: Human societies are forms of animal life . . .²⁶ (Sigmund Freud accepted the Social Darwinist concept that human beings were one more animal species and attempted to use the idea that sexual activity, being a natural element in animal behavior, should be considered in a similar fashion by the human species, and it needed to be liberated from Victorian strictures on the subject.)

George Santayana, an American philosopher active in the first half of the twentieth century, could write an essay entitled, Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923) in which, speaking of human faculties, he wrote—tongue in cheek but with dead seriousness—"The animal [italics added to the word animal throughout this paragraph] mind treats its data as facts . . . but the animal mind is full of the rashest presumptions. . . ."²⁷ "Assurance of existence expresses animal watchfulness . . .²⁸ Animals, being by nature hounded and hungry creatures, spy out and take alarm at any datum of sense or fancy . . .²⁹ Professor Edman in his introductory essay speaks of the human animal and explains pedagogically, Essences serve as signs, portents for the precarious animal life . . . He goes on to quote Santayana, There is . . . a circle of material events called nature, to which all minds belonging to the same society are responsive in common. Also, quoting Santayana: Assuming such a common world, it is easy to see how animals may acquire knowledge of it and may communicate it.³⁰ Professor Edman then explains somberly and without any sense of Santayana’s irony, Material events arouse intuitions, and the interests and necessities of animal psyches will compel them to regard those of the essences given to them as intuitions, as signs for the environment in which they act and undergo, do and suffer."³¹

The laws of life derived from an examination of jungle observation were thereby not merely the most atavistic, but also the most biologically true, human instincts. Indeed, Freud came to write a whole book on a theory of the interconnection between animal instincts and human behavior titled Totem and Taboo. Animal instinct is, by definition, separate and apart from moral precepts of good and evil. Implicit in those animal instincts was the need to protect one’s own flock, pride, troop, or ethnic group against the predatory instincts of others. Eric Hoffer puts the matter in this fashion:³² The puzzling thing is that when our hatred does not spring from a visible grievance and does not seem justified, the desire for allies becomes more pressing . . . Whence comes these unreasonable hatreds, and why their unifying effect? They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt and shortcomings of the self. The awareness of inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt and shortcomings of the self during this period included a dimension of sexual inadequacy. John Dollard³³ alludes en passant to a sense of physically inadequate sexual dimension in Caucasian male responses to African American male sex organs, usually expressed as the reason why Caucasian women would be attracted to African American men. Some element of this colored Nazi diatribes against Jews.

By the nature of Social Darwinist dogma, there must always be others whom one must fear will seek by innate instinct to take from you what is yours. Hawkins writes:³⁴ Human brains are programmed to divide people into friends and aliens . . . Hence [quoting Edward O. Wilson³⁵], ‘We tend to fear deeply the actions of strangers and to solve conflict by aggression.’ Social Darwinism, as noted, was ultimately validated in the minds of its adherents by reference to the scientific investigations of Darwin so as to suggest the scientific inevitability of the message Social Darwinists advocated (just as the phrase scientific socialism buttressed the economic determinism that Karl Marx proclaimed with the certainty of a latter-day prophet). Written from the point of view of the others, does not the sense of an inescapable doom sheathed in a civilized velvet glove permeate the stories of Franz Kafka, the author who gave the world the adjective Kafkaesque?³⁶

The basic amorality of the ideas of the Social Darwinist period is illustrated by such fin de siècle literary works as Guy de Maupassant’s forgotten novel Bel Ami and Arthur Schnitzler’s play Das weite Land. More important, the tone of each work suggests an ambiguous respect for the accomplishments described. The former delineates a young man on the make, who lies, cheats, and betrays to achieve success, covering his tracks all the while. The book ends as he is about to marry the daughter of a prominent publisher. The latter portrays an outwardly charming Viennese manufacturer who betrays his wife constantly, and also his best friend, an utterly decent doctor, by seducing the young woman with whom the doctor is in love, hoping to persuade her to marry him. At the play’s end, the protagonist pushes a young soldier into a fatal duel that leads to the young man’s death, just as he was about to leave for several years on a scientific expedition—and all because the protagonist’s wife had taken the young man to bed one night.

The timbre of such works is a world removed from, say, Donizetti’s comic opera L’Elisir d’Amore, or Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair. The character Becky Sharp in the latter work is a young person equally on the make, except that her adventures are viewed with indulgent amusement as simple human foibles. Thackeray’s prose does not convey those dreary overtones of a dreaded causality resting on the scientific inevitability of evolutionary biology which colors Bel Ami and Das weite Land. It is the difference in tone between L’Elisir d’Amore and Tristan. In theory, both describe young love—although one does not think of the music of the Liebeslied and the "Liebestodt" in Tristan as the expression of young love. Rather, it is the irresistible, evolutionary instinct of the mature Life Force (to use George Bernard Shaw’s phrase in Man and Superman). While Donizetti’s music is all gaiety and fun, Wagner—however resplendent the sound—conveys the cataclysmic portentousness and doom implicit in the ideas symbolized by the words the laws of life.³⁷ It is a message of Social Darwinism expressed in music composed by someone who understood he was one of the Social Darwinist elect.³⁸

By identifying with the ferae naturae as an explanation for the structure of society and postulating an amoral world in which concepts of good and evil are irrelevant—and not merely observed in the breach—Social Darwinists created a psychological frame of reference in which one could identify and trust only one’s own ethnic kin. Other persons were, per force, the enemy. The corollary to such a concept is that one must come to dislike, fear, and, finally, hate others because of their postulated undesirable, amoral, acquisitive instincts. Eric Hoffer, observing the events of the first half of the twentieth century, commented, Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking . . . Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.³⁹

The sense of an implacable inexorability, exuded by the scientism that enveloped the playing out of the concept of Social Darwinism, is reflected by the curious instance of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s reaction to the outbreak of World War II. After it began on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, her husband Charles A. Lindbergh, the celebrated aviator who flew the first solo transatlantic flight to Paris in 1927, became an active participant in the activities of the America First Committee, whose members were bitterly opposed to President Roosevelt’s sympathies for Great Britain.

Mrs. Lindbergh felt compelled as a loyal wife—a popular ideal in the 1930s—to produce a book reflecting her husband’s isolationist America First views. The result was a volume to which—with what must appear to us as unintentional irony—she gave the title The Wave of the Future—A Confession of Faith.⁴⁰ The title reflects nothing so much as the sense of an overwhelming fate implicit in the concept of Social Darwinism. Curiously, she opened her discussion with the figure of Boethius, a fifth-century Roman scholar who was also a servitor to an Ostrogoth king. Amid the societal anarchy and political upheaval following the barbarian conquest of the city of Rome in 451, Boethius wrote that it was the duty of those who could to salvage and preserve what was best of the fallen Roman civilization in the face of the barbarian onslaught. Mrs. Lindbergh’s choice of analogy is telling. It reflected contemporaneous events in Europe. The victorious barbarian conquerors of Rome were obviously of Germanic origin and represented a Social Darwinist inevitability. Britain in this view was analogous to a vanquished Rome.

So she wrote: "In the Greek tragedies the gods never forgave the sin of pride (italics in original). And there is no sin punished more implacably than the sin of resistance to change. For change [Mrs. Lindbergh’s genteel euphemism for the Social Darwinists’ struggle] is the very essence of living matter. To resist change is to sin against life itself."⁴¹ She continued: The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it.⁴² In the best Social Darwinist fashion, she concludes, Man has never conquered the underlying forces of nature.⁴³

Mrs. Lindbergh accepts the unspoken premise that reality is a Social Darwinist world. It followed that the contemporaneous, political systems of Germany and Italy were more in keeping with the fundamental and true animalistic nature of the human species. A democratic way of life was hopelessly inefficient and old-fashioned. (There was Winston Churchill’s sardonic comment that democracy was the worst of all political systems, except for all the others.)

And yet, Mrs. Lindbergh was identifying with Boethius, seeking to save what was possible of decency and culture. She described him as living in a time during which . . . a dream of civilized order and unity was dying, noting that [he] sat at his desk and contemplated his changing world with a troubled and uneasy mind.⁴⁴ And so—even though it violated every value with which she had grown up and to which she had given allegiance—as a writer, she sought to justify her husband’s goal of a Fortress America awaiting the onslaught of the contemporaneous Social Darwinist barbarians. Uneasily she wrote, France, England and America were not perfect, perhaps, but they made possible a mode of life I shall look back to the rest of my days with nostalgia.⁴⁵ She must regret [t]he tragedy is, to the honest spectator, that there is so much that is good in the ‘Forces of the Past,’ and so much that is evil in the ‘Forces of the Future.’ Faithful to her purpose of justifying her husband’s political goals, she concludes, in a Social Darwinist world, . . . I do feel that it is futile to get into a hopeless ‘crusade’ to ‘save civilization.’⁴⁶

In retrospect, the book The Wave of the Future is an astonishing defense of a political cause, albeit the only possible escape hatch for Social Darwinists to employ in order to avoid—to mix one’s pickles—Marx’s dustbin of history.

Note may be taken of a certain irony in Western attitudes of condescension during that period toward what was regarded as the fatalism inherent in the philosophies and religions of Asia and what were referred to as primitive peoples—a fatalism so very akin to the European peasant idea of Malocchio, or the evil eye. This condescension went along with the unthinking European acceptance of the inexorability implicit in those Social Darwinian laws of life based on the concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest. If anyone in those years was to be so bold as to remark on the essentially similar fatalism of all, such comment would have been met with indignant protest that there was no similarity at all. One was mere superstition, while the other was based on the indisputable science inherent in evolutionary biology. Besides, the Social Darwinist laws of life allowed for, involved, and most definitely encouraged individual initiatives to survive and prevail.

It must be noted that Hofstadter, writing after 1945, concludes:⁴⁷ Spencer’s impersonal view of history is a brand of oriental fatalism(!), ‘a metaphysical creed and nothing else . . . ,’ quoting William James, The Will to Believe.⁴⁸ Hofstadter⁴⁹ had already quoted Spencer: ‘Not simply do we see that in the competition among individuals of the same kind, survival of the fittest has from the beginning furthered production of a higher type; but we see that to the unceasing warfare between species is mainly due both growth and organization. Without universal conflict there would have been no development of the active powers.’⁵⁰

Without question, the nadir of the Social Darwinist belief in the need to survive and prevail was reached in Nazi concentration and death camps. The Norwegian Odd Nansen in his surreptitious diary tells the story of how a nineteen-year-old Ukrainian was apprehended in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp stealing a leather bag from which he planned to make himself a pair of shoes. The punishment was death by hanging. Nansen writes, When the Ukrainian boy and the hangman appeared under the gallows there was a noise and hubbub somewhere on the square. It was a Dutchman, one of the Bible-searchers, screaming a protest against this infamy. One man—of 17,000—dared to react normally! ‘It’s shameful! It’s vile!’ he screamed. He was seized and led away.⁵¹

Nansen had earlier explained in his diary how the prisoners were divided into various groups or categories, each with its own identifying colored triangle. He had written, . . . there are the Bible-searchers, a strange little flock [who would appear to be similar to American evangelical Christians] who might be released if only they would abjure their ‘Bible–searching,’ one of whose tenets is that Hitler is a false prophet, a danger and disaster to Germany. But none of them will give up this odd conviction.⁵²

Later, Nansen made inquiries through a Norwegian friend who worked in the camp’s secretariat as to the fate of that one man who had dared to speak up. The friend looked up the Dutchman’s card. It said, ‘Subjected to mental examination.’ Nansen then wrote ironically, The only man in camp who reacted normally must be out of his mind.⁵³

Perhaps Hofstadter’s final value judgment on the concept of Social Darwinism⁵⁴ is the quotation he takes from George Nasmyth: Instead of subjecting it to the searching analysis demanded by its practical social importance . . . the intellectual world and public opinion has accepted ‘Social Darwinism’ uncritically and by almost unanimous consent as an integral part of the theory of evolution.

Concomitant with the development of Social Darwinian ideas was the changeover in the course of the nineteenth century of the societal image in Europe of those who till the soil. Historically, such folk were dismissed as peasants—uncouth, coarse, brutal, and violent. Whether because of Rousseau’s idea of natural innocence, or because of a concept of animal territoriality implicit in the Social Darwinist laws of life—and thereby applied by extension to the human species—a connection with the soil acquired the aura of authenticity with biological roots in the animal world, to which the human species was linked. Tillers of the soil were no longer considered uncouth peasants; they had become farmers. Contact with the soil lent a natural nobility and a societal superiority as compared with the moral and physical decadence that was associated with urban life.

The late-nineteenth-century Viennese composer Gustav Mahler, considering a title for the symphonic song cycle he had composed based on German translations of Chinese poems, could think of no more profound an image than the concept of animal territoriality so central to the contemporaneous, Social Darwinist image of an animalistically oriented human society, and so named the symphonic work Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth).

The idea that tillers of the soil are superior members of the body politic and that connection with the soil must be encouraged (that is, the political concept of family farms) continues to this day, as evidenced by the large sums of money allocated annually to farm subsidies by the European Union and the Congress of the United States.

Once, so sophisticated an observer as Freud expressed astonishment that such morally objectionable (and criminal) conduct as incest was found as well among rural folk. In one of his early works he introduces a case study by reporting that he went on vacation to get away from medicine, and, more particularly, neuroses. Climbing a mountain known for the views afforded from its summit, he was approached by a young woman, possibly eighteen years old, whose face Freud describes as sullen. Recognizing him as a physician, she complained that her nerves were bad. Freud comments, So there I was with the neuroses once again . . . I was interested to find that neuroses could flourish in this way at a height of over 6,000 feet . . .⁵⁵

Perhaps the apotheosis of the supposed greater moral worth of people living on the land as contrasted with city decadence is found in Knut Hamsun’s novel, The Growth of the Soil (1917). The work so impressed his contemporaries that it won a Nobel Prize in Literature! One may take note that first, the protagonist in the novel is a social isolate and a misogamist; and second, that the author, a Norwegian living in Norway, ended his life as a Nazi sympathizer during the German occupation of his country in World War II. So, too, at the end of Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), Thomas Mann’s allegory illustrating Europe’s descent into World War I, Settembrini (in the novel, the apostle of European rationalism), when bidding farewell to Hans Castorp (who was on his way back to his German homeland to volunteer as a soldier), tells Castorp: You go to fight among your kindred . . . it is your blood that calls . . .⁵⁶

What may be the last literary expression given to the postulates that underlie the amorality of Social Darwinist laws of life occurs in the climactic scene of the pseudonymous Pauline Réage pornographic novel, Story of O.⁵⁷ The scene is a vast demimonde party at which O (who at the opening of the story was portrayed as an independent, professional photographer) is reduced to the dimensions of a naked sex slave led by a young girl holding a leash attached to O’s genital flesh. Using a cliché popular in the middle third of the twentieth century: The naive American juxtaposed against a knowing and experienced Europe—the anonymous, drunken American male is described as instantly sobered by the spectacle of tethered, naked flesh.⁵⁸ The symbolism of the drunken American represents the naiveté of a Wilsonian rationalist belief in the perfectibility of the human species reflected against a sophisticated and disillusioned Europe steeped in the miasma of Social Darwinism—with the whole incongruously transposed to a sexual context. It is that substratum of ideas, one suspects, that proved so disturbing to readers, ultimately lifting the work from the realm of mere pornography to eventually be reviewed in that bastion of respectability, the New York Times Book Review.

Perhaps the last evidences in the real world of Social Darwinism in Europe were the public statements that heralded the dawn of Stalin’s last, aborted purge, the so-called Doctors’ Plot. Most of those arrested were Jews. In Eastern Europe, Jewish ethnicity had been regarded as a nationality, and in the Soviet Union, their internal passports were so marked.⁵⁹

Now, suddenly, as a prelude to the initial revelations of the Doctors’ Plot, Moscow newspapers began to print articles declaring—as proof of their nature as outsiders, inherently incapable of loyalty to the motherland—that Jews were rootless cosmopolitans, not people rooted to the soil.

By the 1890s, the acceptance of the postulates underlying Social Darwinism had led to a most shocking and virulent species of racism in the United States, including the institutionalization of lynching as a form of extralegal societal control.⁶⁰ Words like pure and purity were popularly applied to everything from morals and religion to womanhood, race, and soap,⁶¹ while fears were voiced about the consequences of undesirable behavior by halfbreeds and mongrel races—the former a derogatory appellation applied to the children and grandchildren of American Indians and Caucasians, while the latter term was applied to groups as diverse as African Americans, Jews, and Sicilians. By the end of the nineteenth century, words like quadroon and octoroon fell into disuse—even as the effort was made in state constitutions and statutes in the American South to define the exact measure of ancestry necessary to determine racial classification.⁶²

The pervasiveness of Social Darwinist modes of thinking extended even into the precincts of the Supreme Court of the United States. So that Court could write, "Legislation [sic] is powerless to eradicate racial instincts . . ."⁶³ These words revealed a negation of the purpose in the late 1860s of congressman Thaddeus Stevens and the other Radical Republicans to secure the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution after the end of the American Civil War.

The majority members of the Court do not appear to have applied their own rule correctly—for example, the need for "separate but equal" accommodations to satisfy the constitutional provision. Plessy had purchased a first-class ticket for his railroad trip, and there were apparently no separate, first-class accommodations for African-American passengers.⁶⁴ The state law would have required the railroad company to have put up a partition in the first-class coach—something, it appears, the railroad company failed to do. The court’s failure to recognize Plessy’s first-class ticket encouraged the institution of a caste system. There was no longer legal recognition of African-American class rights in a Caucasian society. All African Americans were herded into a Jim Crow coach.

Indeed, it was no accident that in the opening years of the twentieth century, American sociologist William Graham Sumner coined a distinction between folkways and mores to underline the difference between those standards by which people professed to live, and those other standards in accordance with which people actually acted in the world in which they lived. Professor Sumner regarded the power of those unspoken societal customs or standards to be so fundamental as to negate and render useless any efforts at contemporaneous social reform.⁶⁵ In that respect, Hawkins finds: The foundation of his work, from his essays during the 1880s to the publication of his study of folkways in 1906, was the assumption that Darwinism was as relevant to an understanding of social life as it was to the organic world.⁶⁶

The effect of Social Darwinist thinking in the United States was so profound that a private college was not permitted by the United States Supreme Court to entertain a biracial student body, holding that the state of Kentucky did not violate the mandate of the Fourteenth Amendment that purported to limit state action by its—the state of Kentucky’s—adoption of legislation resulting in the prohibition of such enrollment, and did not thereby deny the equal protection of the laws—a result concurred with by the liberally-revered Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.⁶⁷ What is astonishing about the language of the Court’s opinion is that although the ostensible reason for the case being considered by the Supreme Court was whether there was a possible violation of the Constitution of the United States, the opinion of the Court did not see fit to explicitly state that it found no such violation—although that, in its narrowest sense, is what the court actually concluded! (It is perhaps almost superfluous to add that the court has since changed its mind.)

So all-encompassing were Social Darwinist habits of thought that even Franklin Roosevelt was capable on occasion of speaking as a Social Darwinist. Beschloss writes: Just after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt lunched with [Treasury Secretary] Morgenthau and Leo Crowley, a Catholic who was Custodian of Alien Property. As Morgenthau later recorded, the President told them, ‘You know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here on sufferance.’⁶⁸ The remark was not entirely isolated. In many ways Roosevelt—however empathetic, democratically oriented, and liberal-minded he was—thought in conventional Social Darwinist terms. One of Roosevelt’s biographers, Allan M. Winkler, writes, "He read Alfred Thayer Mahan’s important book The Influence of Sea Power on History and later corresponded with the admiral himself."⁶⁹ While the focus of Roosevelt’s interest was undoubtedly on the importance of sea power, the context, as the quotations from Mahan given earlier indicate, was a Social Darwinist understanding of human society.

Once a Social Darwinist configuration of narrowing social groupings was melded into a perception of reality, it was perhaps inevitable that social distinctions should develop in the last years of the nineteenth century in the United States that emphasized and enforced social differences between Gentiles and Jews. The latter were commonly regarded as loud, pushy, vulgar in their clothes and manners, questionable in their business dealings—and altogether foreign to what were deemed to be the cardinal virtues of discretion, consideration, and moderation. Also, for those of a religious bent who were concerned with such matters, there was the Jewish failure to acknowledge the last and truest religious revelation. This was expressed in the thought that the New Testament revealed a higher development of the concept of divine love and forgiveness than was to be found in the pages of the Hebrew Bible. The latter was held to exhibit a vindictive emphasis focused on a stern justice. Professor Vernon Louis Parrington, in his vastly popular survey, Main Currents in American Literature,⁷⁰ commented on Jonathan Odell, a Loyalist satirist during the American Revolution. Parrington wrote of Odell as "possessing a clear intellect and a heart little touched by Christian charity—a stern Hebraist [sic] who would sweep away with the besom of wrath all the enemies of his God and his King⁷¹ and also: No Christian charity spread its mantle over the shortcomings of his enemies, no Christian forgiveness found lodgment in his unforgiving heart. He was a son of the Old Testament and he girded his righteousness with prayer."⁷²

One may note the currency in the first half of the twentieth century of the theological idea that found a distinction between the higher and more-civilized ideal of Christian charity as contrasted with the unforgiving sternness that was popularly associated with Jews and the Old Testament. In this scheme of things, the expressions of forgiveness, humility, and mercy that are found in the words of the Hebrew Bible were considered merely as intimations of the truer and greater revelation related in the Gospels. The concept of Old Testament unforgiving sternness was closely merged with the idea of vengeance. (The popular image of Jewish vengefulness is iconized in the characters of Shylock and Barabas found in the Elizabethan plays by Shakespeare and Marlowe that we know as The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta.) So, Henry Stimson, then secretary of state in the cabinet of President Herbert Hoover, given the suggestion that mail to suspected spies ought to be opened, was reported to have responded with the comment that gentlemen do not open other people’s mail. He did not hesitate to dismiss Morgenthau’s plan for the reconstitution of Germany after World War II as a species of Jewish vengeance.⁷³

While the dimensions of this work do not permit any extensive comment on the development of the social prejudices against Jews that were rampant in the United States by the opening years of the twentieth century, one may take note that as late as the administration of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in the early 1960s, Arthur Krock, the Washington correspondent for the New York Times, allowed himself on one occasion to write, "[A]lthough the Attorney-General has, on his official stationery, remonstrated with a private Washington club to which he belongs for its tradition against Negro guests and members, he did not deny its legal right to make distinctions which, in some other Washington clubs as elsewhere, extend to persons calculated to have more than x per cent of ‘non-Aryan’ Caucasian ancestry. Recently, even by meeting the ‘x’ test, a prominent official of this and the previous Administration encountered some opposition to his admission to one of these."⁷⁴

Still, it is valid to say that the 1960s saw the beginnings of the dissolution of such social prejudices.

If one would seek to understand why such prejudices started to disappear in the 1960s, it is perhaps useful to start by noting that the generation coming of age in the years of that decade had no personal experience with the events and the attitudes contemporaneous with World War II and the decades preceding it. It was a generation that was acutely sensitive to the consequences of that war, both in terms of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi government of Germany and the vast international realignments resulting from that war. What had not been apparent at the end of World War I was very much apparent by 1960—namely, that Europe was no longer the kingpin of the globe. The young nations that Social Darwinists had earlier celebrated were by 1960 second-tier participants of a politically exhausted Western Europe that was slowly finding its way into an economic and political confederation in the face of a Cold War, on a continent divided by an Iron Curtain. The prior European generation had left to its children a legacy of moral and political failure that had led to death and destruction on an almost unimaginable scale—a source of deep shame.

Not that it mattered to Henry Morgenthau, Jr. By February 6, 1967, he was dead and no longer concerned.⁷⁵

CHAPTER 1

The Founding Father

Founders of American dynasties are more fun to read about than their progeny. Their children grow up with wealth and/or power and in the process learn discretion. They tend to take their worldly advantages for granted, and avoid calling attention to themselves. The maker of the family fortune, starting out with little or nothing, has an innate gift, or, at the school of hard knocks, learns to create assets by seizing whatever opportunities there be to get ahead. Unclouded by doubt, founding fathers tend to enjoy their accomplishments as these accumulate during their lifetime.

Before the age of periodic blood tests, pharmaceutical products, and diets to keep tabs on cholesterol and blood pressure and what-have-you, eating what he would, oblivious to the dietary consequences, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., lived for ninety years and enjoyed his life. He says as much to those who take the trouble to read his various stabs at autobiography. While these are written in the sober-sided style of the early twentieth century, they reveal a personality quietly satisfied with himself and not a little amused by his experiences.⁷⁶ His grandson Henry III’s own volume expresses regret that his grandfather’s sense of merriment—which he found so immediate in his grandfather’s ordinary interchange with people—is missing from his grandfather’s written pages. Henry III says, [I]n person my grandfather displayed a sense of humor and zest that got lost in his writing. As an older man, ‘he was fun to be with,’ recalled his granddaughter, [historian] Barbara Tuchman . . .⁷⁷

Freud says that a mother’s favorite child is destined for success. Henry III records how [a]t a very early age [his grandfather] gained his mother’s special attention, and how [f]rom the beginning he seemed to have an instinct for attracting people and making them smile.⁷⁸ Henry III attributes his grandfather’s happy disposition to his pleasant memories of his Mannheim childhood, [which] provided a sense of security that would stay with him all his life . . . the ebb of the family fortunes in the New World inspired his irrepressible ambitions . . .⁷⁹

In his autobiography All in a Lifetime,⁸⁰ Henry Sr. recounts how he was asked in 1919 to chair a three-person American commission to investigate atrocities against Jews within the geographical boundaries of the resurgent Polish Republic. Unsure that their dream of a restored Polish Republic would at long last be made a reality, the Polish Nationalists asked the eminent pianist Ignace Paderewski to co-lead their delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, hoping his worldwide prestige would secure them a felicitous hearing. Locally, in a Social Darwinist world, these idealistic dreamers embraced a virulent, self-identifying form of nationalism that excluded the one-third of the population identifiable as other, non-Polish ethnics. This led to local anti-Semitic excesses. American Jews, also at the Paris Peace Conference, protested the inconsistency between an insistence on justice for one’s own ethnic group and physical acts of