The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

Judge Irving Lehman (September 14, 1933), that he intended to address the general topic
of human rights violations within the Reich while excluding specific references to the
Jews. The U.S. Ambassador in Berlin, William E. Dodd, questioned the President about
official American policy regarding German anti-Semitism and was advised that the Nazi
treatment of Jews was an internal “affair” outside the purview of the United States
Government except when it impacted upon the Jewish-Americans “who happen to be
made victims.” 42
FDR utilized the media as a means of disseminating “stories, nearly always
favorable,” that were assured of nationwide front page coverage that would overpower
the “adverse editorials” in many newspapers and dominate the front pages to the
“exasperation of his many enemies.” 43 The President skillfully utilized the proverbial
bloody pulpit, provided by his Presidential News Conferences and his fire side chats, to
generate a “supply of news” that would overshadow other press stories. 44
He could also
utilize reporters’ questions as a means of promoting and framing the policies of the
42 Rafael Medoff, Blowing the Whistle on Genocide: Josiah E. Dubois, Jr., and the Struggle for a U.S.
Response to the Holocaust (W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2009), 5, 6. Roosevelt was
criticized, following the call for the Evian Conference, for his failure to openly chastise Hitler and his
policies. Oswald Garrison Villard, the treasurer of the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom,
praised the Administration for its “noble action” for leading the way to rescuing the refugees of Germany
and Austria. However, it has “not spoken out strongly enough.” While FDR discussed the quarantining of
those nations that threatened international peace and issued “other veiled references or generalizations in
regard to the dictators [still he] has not called the devil by his right name, as did John Hay when Secretary
of State and Theodore Roosevelt when President…in inviting a delegation of American Jews to the White
House at the time of the Russian pogroms at Kishinev and telling the world just what the two highest
officials in our Government felt about those horrors. Those pogroms were merciful compared to the
horribly slow, cruel tortures of the concentration camps of today and of the robbing, maltreating and
degrading of hundreds of thousands of people.” “Thomas Mann Advocates Reich Refugee Exhibit,” The
Sentinel, May 19, 1938, 34.
43 John Williams Tebell and Sarah Miles Watts, The Press and the Presidency: From George
Washington to Ronald Reagan (NY: Oxford University Press, 1995), 438, 444.
44 Graham White. FDR and the Press (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979), 23-24.
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