When I was trying to assess President Teddy Roosevelt’s views of Jews for my new book, American Maccabee, I realized it would be easy to say that Roosevelt was “a man of his times” and indeed a Christian of his times. But that easy description is not, in fact, a simple one.
America is a nation of contradictions, and perhaps no one better inhabited the national tensions than our 26th president. He was both New York patrician and North Dakota cowboy, trigger-happy colonel and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, boxing-ring brawler and wordsmithing scholar. He felt a genuine affinity for the Jewish people, championed their causes, and earned their gratitude. But at the same time, he was not wholly immune from the antisemitic currents coursing through American history.
If we seek to distill coherence from the conflicted record, we risk ignoring too much historical evidence. We oversimplify. “TR,” as he is commonly known, was in truth a mix of impulses, instincts, and ideas, some of them admirable and others reprehensible. He was complicated—like us.
Roosevelt rose to power in an age when the question of Jewish belonging in America felt urgent. His social circles were dominated by a kind of genteel Judeophobia. It may not have been as crass as the antisemitism of heartland farmers or urban toughs, but it was antisemitic nonetheless.
Roosevelt fraternized with the likes of Henry Adams, descendant of two presidents and a notorious Jew hater. Adams was delusional about Jewish influence. One person who knew him joked that Adams was paranoid, suspecting that “the Jews are all the press, all the cabinets, all the gods and all weather.”
That friend wasn’t far off. “We are in the hands of the Jews,” Adams once lamented. “They can do what they please with our values.”
The esteemed Harvard professor may have been an extreme case in Roosevelt’s circles, but he wasn’t alone in his prejudices. Reactionaries of his ilk bristled at the specter of affluent Jews overtaking their universities, institutions, clubs, summer getaways, and the nation itself. They worried about poor Jews as well, feeling overwhelmed with fear when they witnessed indigent Jewish refugees fleeing Eastern Europe for the golden shores of America.
Moving in these circles, Roosevelt had opportunities to reject the bigotry of his friends. In his 20s, TR threatened to resign from a club because it sought to exclude a Jewish applicant on account of his faith. He also took a friend to task for arguing that Jews in the military were unfit to be officers. Likewise, Roosevelt complained to a literary companion that his latest story included strictly Gentile protagonists. “There ought also to be a Jew among them!” Roosevelt admonished the writer.
These moments of private candor are revealing. TR had nothing to gain but much to lose from chastising his friends over their bigoted attitudes.
Then, on the world stage, Roosevelt emerged as an outspoken critic of Jew hatred around the world. It earned him the affection of Jewish voters, who supported him in record numbers.
Yet even Roosevelt was sometimes guilty of assuming the worst about Jews. He occasionally peddled conspiracy theories that Jews were orchestrating global events. As Spain violently suppressed Cuban rebels, TR alleged—falsely and without evidence—that French Jews were enriching themselves off the conflict.
“The Jew moneylenders in Paris, plus one or two big commercial companies in Spain, are trying to keep up the war,” he told a naval captain. The Jew as war profiteer was an old libel repeated ad nauseam, and TR should have known better.
Similarly, during the First World War, he claimed there was a Jewish conspiracy influencing then-president Woodrow Wilson.
“All the Jews around him (and there are many of them) are pro-German and pacifist,” Roosevelt griped to a British member of Parliament. It wasn’t true. The old prejudice reared its head.
The full record includes some ugly personal prejudice as well. When a Jewish reporter conveyed doubts about the sincerity of TR’s intention to step down from the presidency, Roosevelt condemned the journalist as a “circumcised skunk.” Roosevelt also used an ethnic slur when he was mad at a Jew in his own party. The particular term is not only offensive in our day but also regarded as unpublishable in his day. When the bit of correspondence was published in an edited volume, the phrase was delicately changed to “graceless person.”
This mixed record—sometimes standing up to antisemitic prejudice but sometimes indulging in it himself—is even more complicated by the fact that Roosevelt’s opposition to prejudice and his prejudice against Jews could be fused together. In numerous episodes in his life, his philosemitic and antisemitic instincts appear simultaneously.
Consider one example: When Roosevelt served as New York City police commissioner, he came up with a clever plan to undermine the antisemitism of a hateful rabble-rouser who was planning, provocatively, to give a speech on the supposed evils of Jewry on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the heart of Jewish life in America at the time. TR mused that “the proper thing to do was to make him ridiculous.” He decided he would assign the bigot a police detail consisting exclusively of Jewish officers.
But then Roosevelt ordered a deputy to collect Jewish officers not by inquiring who was Jewish but by discerning who looked Jewish. In Roosevelt’s words, “Don’t bother yourself to hunt up their religious antecedents; take those who have the most pronounced Hebrew physiognomy—the stronger their ancestral marking, the better.” Here Roosevelt demonstrated that supporting Jews and stereotyping them could go hand in hand.
Roosevelt showed comparably paradoxical inclinations in his presidency. He made history in 1906 by naming the first Jew to sit in the cabinet, Oscar Straus.
Roosevelt had deep faith in Straus’ abilities but also thought of him as an ethnic exception. As the president told a Christian theologian, “I want the Jewish young man who is born in this country to feel that Straus stands for his ideal of the successful man rather some crooked Jew money-maker.” The irony is unavoidable. He broke down barriers for Jews in America, but partly because he was indulging ugly prejudices about conniving Jewish financiers.
This counterintuitive blend of benevolence and bias was strikingly commonplace in the Rooseveltian era. As the scholar John Higham has keenly noted, “A stereotype may express ambivalent emotions. It may blend affection and contempt. … Many Americans were both pro- and anti-Jewish at the same time.”
Roosevelt was, in fact, a man of his time. And a Christian. A survey of leading ministers in Roosevelt’s day finds some virulent antisemitism. A preacher in Baltimore said Jews were “merciless, tricky, vengeful,” their humanity lost in greed, and concluded that “of all the creatures who have befouled the earth, the Jew is the slimiest.” Another minister in Detroit thought bigotry itself was evidence of the awfulness of Jews. He alleged that “antisemitic feeling” was rooted in “the craftiness of the Jew.”
Yet the most fervent defense of Jews in Roosevelt’s era also came from Christian clerics. Roosevelt knew many of these ministers personally. Some of them spoke out against the waves of mob violence—pogroms—that were happening in Russia during TR’s presidency.
The American Baptist Missionary Union organized a meeting in Buffalo to support Jewish victims, identifying the plight of Jews as a Christian concern. The group said that Baptists in particular had a responsibility to fight for religious freedom since their own ancestors were persecuted for their faith. Around the same time, the famed Congregationalist theologian Lyman Abbott publicly pressured Roosevelt to intercede for Russian Jews, saying, “It is time for the United States government to interfere in the cause of humanity.”
TR did interfere, at times condemning the pogroms and resisting calls to stop Jewish refugees from coming to America. He later gave part of the money he had won with the Nobel Peace Prize to the National Jewish Welfare Board and supported the idea of a Jewish state “around Jerusalem.”
But the record is complicated. To see Roosevelt as a man of his times and a Christian of his times requires we acknowledge the full depth of the contradictions of his feelings toward Jews. The historic record demands we reckon with the paradoxes of the president, his faith, and the nation he led. It offers us, too, the opportunity to reckon with our own contradictions. In our moment—as the question of Jewish belonging reemerges with fresh urgency—we would be wise to remember that we are heirs to Theodore Roosevelt’s America and all its incongruities.
Andrew Porwancher is professor of history at Arizona State University. His latest book is American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews.
