Prelude to Catastrophe by Shogan Robert;

Author:Shogan, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

VI

BUNDLES FOR BRITAIN

HAVING BEEN MENTORED by Felix Frankfurter and inspired by Justice Brandeis, Benjamin Cohen shared many of their convictions as well as their Harvard background. But for all his achievements in the early years of the New Deal, Cohen did not match the public stature of these two giants. In the end, though, what he achieved in the struggle against Nazism far overshadowed anything these two more prominent figures accomplished or even attempted.

One advantage of his relative lack of celebrity was that Cohen was not besieged, as Frankfurter and Brandeis were, by American Jews seeking FDR’s help for the Jewish targets of Hitler’s hatred. Not that he could escape entirely from such pleas. In the wake of Kristallnacht, as Sam Rosenman was advising FDR not to ease quota restrictions for European Jews, Stephen Wise, the most prominent Jewish American, asked Cohen’s advice on how to get Roosevelt more directly engaged in the battle for the victims of persecution.

Cohen had small comfort to offer. The Jews “cannot again rush to Washington to ask the Bishop of Washington who is a great friend to go to the Skipper,” he wrote Wise, an apparent reference to the Right Reverend James E. Freeman, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, who had conducted a national prayer service at Roosevelt’s first inaugural. Now, Cohen believed, that gambit had been overused.

Similarly in June 1940 when Wise asked Cohen to set up a meeting between the president and officials of the World Jewish Congress, created by Rabbi Wise to aid Jewish refugees, Cohen declined. “I don’t feel I should push myself into Jewish matters when the skipper does not ask my advice,” he explained. “Why don’t you speak to LDB [Brandeis] & FF [Frankfurter] about it? They are high moguls and I am only a nobody.”

But this response to Wise camouflaged the intensity of Cohen’s true feelings about the plight of the Jews. They had been revealed earlier, in the tragic year of 1938, when, following the Anschluss, FDR set in motion at Evian the international conference on the refugee crisis. Although Cohen was not a member of the U.S. delegation, he nevertheless went to the conference as a private citizen to observe the proceedings. Cohen was no naif. As a disciple of Brandeis and Frankfurter, a veteran of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, a Wall Street operator who had made a fortune in the market and escaped before the crash, and a designer of the New Deal’s most important reforms, it did not take him long to see that the much ballyhooed meeting would produce nothing of consequence. But he stayed in Evian and relayed information about the proceedings to his friends among the leaders of the American Jewish community. While in Europe, Cohen also met with David Ben-Gurion, the future first prime minister of the state of Israel, who was then chairman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, which sought to promote development in the incipient Jewish homeland. Fearing correctly that the British would restrict

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