Friday, December 16, 2005

FDR a religious extremist?

Can someone get me a footnote on this thing?

Roosevelt's complex attitudes to American Jews were even more well-chronicled. Franklin's mother Sara was well known for being an anti-Semite, an attitude common among Eastern Americans at a time when Jewish immigrants were flooding into the U.S. and their children were advancing rapidly into the business and professional classes, alarming those already there. Roosevelt apparently inherited some of his mother's attitudes, and at times expressed them in private. Paradoxically some of his closest political associates, such as Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Baruch and Samuel I. Rosenman, were Jewish, and he happily cultivated the important Jewish vote in New York City (much as TR had done). He appointed Henry Morgenthau, Jr. as the first Jewish Secretary of the Treasury and appointed Frankfurter to the Supreme Court. But he once told Morgenthau and a Catholic economist, Leo T. Crowley: "This is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and the Jews are here on sufferance."

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