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Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Washington, D.C., United States, date uncertain. See more photographs |
HENRY MORGENTHAU |
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Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (1891-1967) served as United States Secretary of the Treasury in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations from January 1, 1934, until July 22, 1945. Morgenthau was born into a prominent Jewish family in New York City; his father, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was a prominent real estate investor and diplomat who served as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, Morgenthau worked under Herbert Hoover (who later became U.S. president) in the U.S. Farm Administration of the United States Department of Agriculture. From 1922 to 1933, he was the publisher of American Agriculturist, an independent journal. In 1929, his long-time friend and then governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed him State Commissioner of Conservation. Following Roosevelt's election to the presidency, Morgenthau was appointed Chairman of the Federal Farm Board (an independent and intergovernmental agency below Cabinet level) in 1933, and, in 1934, Secretary of the Treasury. |
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During his eleven years as Treasury Secretary, Morgenthau stabilized the U.S. dollar, helped finance the “New Deal,” prepared the U.S. economy for war, and financed the war effort through the sale of war bonds. Although he opposed Keynesian economics (a theory, associated with the British economist John Maynard Keynes, that government spending could end the depression) and disagreed with certain aspects of Roosevelt's “New Deal,” he was extremely loyal to Roosevelt. Morgenthau was the only Jew in Roosevelt's cabinet. While showing some concern for the plight of Germany's Jews, he did not become actively involved in the issue until the late 1930s. In 1938, aware that the U.S. immigration quota system was insufficient to accommodate the number of immigrants who wanted to come to the United States, he proposed to Roosevelt that the United States acquire British and French Guiana in order to use these territories as a place of refuge for immigrants from Nazi Germany. Roosevelt did not favor that particular proposal; but Morgenthau continued to bring various rescue plans to his attention. |
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In April 1943, after the Allied governments confirmed the mass murder of the European Jews, Morgenthau became deeply involved in the rescue issue. The U.S. State Department obstructed and delayed a licence to send supplies to Jewish children in Transnistria, as well as funds to support hidden Jewish children and escapees to Spain. On January 13, 1944, Morgenthau and his staffers at the Treasury Department presented Roosevelt an 18-page indictment of the Roosevelt Administration's failure to help the Jews of Europe. Entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of Jews,” the Treasury report was inspired by the failure of the Bermuda Conference of April 1943, protests from Jewish leaders at the administration's failure to act, and perhaps by Morgenthau's meetings with Revisionist Zionist Peter Bergson, who urged him to create an organization to rescue the Jews of Europe. Aware of growing political pressure for action on the refugee issue, Morgenthau urged Roosevelt to create a rescue agency. Roosevelt issued an executive order on January 22, 1944 that established the War Refugee Board (WRB). |
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During the same year, Morgenthau devised a plan for the occupation of Germany, known as the Morgenthau Plan. It advocated harsh measures to ensure Germany could not go to war again. According to the plan, Germany was to be partitioned into two states, its industry internationalized or annexed by neighboring countries, and its heavy industry dismantled. Although Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed a modified version of the plan in September 1944 at the Second Quebec Conference, the victorious Allies never fully implemented it. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson firmly opposed the policy as did British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Moreover, in the first postwar years, the Truman administration's concern about the developing “Cold War” and the need to strengthen the western zones of occupied Germany reinforced opposition to implementation of the Morgenthau Plan. Still, the western Allies implemented some of its suggestions. For instance, the Morgenthau Plan strongly influenced Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive (JCS 1067), issued on May 10, 1945. This Directive, which remained in force until July 1947, aimed at reducing overall German living standards in order to in order to prevent Germany's reemergence as an aggressive power. It prohibited assistance to the German agricultural sector, and banned the production of oil, rubber, merchant ships, and aircraft. Due to personal and policy differences with President Harry S. Truman, Morgenthau was forced to resign from the Treasury in July 1945. He spent much of the rest of his life working for Jewish philanthropies, including the United Jewish Appeal, and became a strong supporter of the state of Israel. |
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