Page 213 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

200 The American Diplomats

the streets”—a reference to public humiliations of Jews and Christians who
engaged in sexual relations with each other. 142 about three weeks after
streicher made these comments, Der Führer, the official organ of the state of
Baden and its leading newspaper, carried an article with the following title:
“race Hatred in the United states. torturing of Negroes and lynch Jus-
tice Which are Called Persecutions in Germany.” the article then dwelled
on one theme, that “race hatred in the United states is now an unwritten
law” everywhere. even in New York, the article stated, no Negro would
dare visit a “medium-class restaurant for fear of being beaten . . . a stranger
would be rebuked for exchanging friendly words with a Negro.” 143
Cordell Hull’s reluctance to issue a formal protest to Germany over the
Jewish question may also have been motivated by a very personal consider-
ation. He was certainly not known to be in any way hostile to Jews. in fact,
his wife was apparently of Jewish descent, which was not widely known
at the time. One historian has speculated that Hull “feared that the Jew-
ish connection made him vulnerable to attacks from anti-semites, who
would argue that his wife had forced him to support Jewish causes, and that
therefore he had succumbed to un-american influences.” Moreover, if he
was suspected of being a philo-semite, his chances of ever running for the
White House, apparently one of his ambitions, would have been slight. 144
america’s aloofness from european affairs cannot simply be dismissed
as irrational, and it can be argued that economic and political conditions
within the country would have made any other course by the administra-
tion politically unwise. But in the end the policy proved to be very costly.
Had the administration drawn the right conclusions from the dispatches
by american diplomats in Germany, it would have realized that it was in
the interest of the United states to take a firm stand against the Nazi dic-
tatorship, a stand that might have strengthened the hand of the european
statesmen who understood the nature of Nazism and favored a policy de-
signed to rein in Hitler’s Germany. america’s european policy in the 1930s
is yet another example of the costliness of the failure of statesmen not only
to gauge the intentions of foreign leaders accurately but also to implement
sound policies when those intentions pose a serious threat.