Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

Government official

• Born: May 11, 1891
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: February 6, 1967
• Place of death: Poughkeepsie, New York

Morgenthau helped shape the fiscal policies of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and played a significant role in promoting the U.S. rescue of Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

Early Life

Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (MOR-gehn-thow) was raised in the elite world of German-born Jewish immigrants who achieved remarkable financial and professional success in late nineteenth century America. Rather than follow his father, the diplomat Henry Morgenthau, Sr., into public service, the younger Morgenthau chose to study agriculture at Cornell University and then operated a dairy farm and apple orchards in Dutchess County, New York. It was there, in 1913, that he became friendly with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, a friendship that would ultimately shape Morgenthau’s life. He strongly supported Roosevelt’s political aspirations, and when Roosevelt was elected governor of New York, he named Morgenthau chair of the state’s Agricultural Advisory Committee and appointed him to the Conservation Commission.

Life’s Work

Morgenthau followed Roosevelt to Washington, D.C., after his victory in the 1932 presidential election. Roosevelt chose him to head the Federal Farm Board, and when Treasury Secretary William Woodin resigned the following year, Roosevelt named Morgenthau his successor.

Morgenthau criticized deficit spending, but acceded to Roosevelt’s insistence that it was necessary to combat the economic woes of the Great Depression. A strong advocate of balanced budgets, Morgenthau nevertheless endorsed Roosevelt’s use of “emergency” supplementary budgets to finance government works agencies. As a result of Morgenthau’s opposition, Roosevelt dropped plans to fund Social Security from general government revenue and instead paid for it by taxing employees. It was Morgenthau who conceived the aggressive promotion of war bonds to help pay for the U.S. war effort in World War II (1939-1945).

Morgenthau had only a minimal contact with the organized Jewish community and did not consider himself a Zionist, although he was sympathetic to the development of Palestine as a haven for Jewish refugees. He was deeply loyal, both personally and politically, to Roosevelt and considered it inappropriate to seek the president’s intervention on Jewish matters. When the German Jewish refugee ship St. Louis unsuccessfully sought admission to the United States in 1939, Morgenthau spoke with Secretary of State Cordell Hull about it, but neither pressed for their entry nor raised the matter with Roosevelt.

In 1943, Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. and other senior aides to Morgenthau, most of them not Jewish, discovered that the State Department was suppressing news of the Holocaust and sabotaging rescue opportunities so the United States would not be shouldered with what one official called “the burden and the curse” of dealing with Jewish refugees. DuBois and his colleagues urged Morgenthau to bring the scandal to the attention of the president, but Morgenthau, still reluctant to bother Roosevelt, preferred to focus on trying to persuade the secretary of state to change the department’s policies. Only in the face of overwhelming evidence of the State Department’s malfeasance, and with congressional pressure on the refugee issue mounting, did Morgenthau finally agree, in January, 1944, to go to the president. To preempt Congress and avoid an election-year controversy, Roosevelt agreed to Morgenthau’s recommendation to establish a government agency to rescue Jews, known as the War Refugee Board. Operating from the Treasury Department’s offices and staffed by the same Morgenthau aides who had pressed for rescue action, the War Refugee Board played a key role in saving an estimated 200,000 Jews from the Nazis during the final fifteen months of the war. Morgenthau’s behind-the-scenes lobbying also helped thwart the State Department’s 1943 plan, approved by Roosevelt, for a joint Anglo-American declaration banning public discussion of the Palestine issue until after the war.

In 1944, Morgenthau and his aides prepared a blueprint for governing postwar Germany that came to be known as the Morgenthau Plan. It proposed demilitarization, partition of the country into separate states, and dismantling most major industries so Germany would revert to a primarily agricultural country incapable of provoking future wars. Morgenthau’s plan also recommended the execution, without trial, of senior Nazi war criminals. The War Department and the State Department opposed the plan because they hoped to have a militarily capable Germany on America’s side against the Soviet Union. Secretary of War Henry Stimson claimed Morgenthau was motivated by a desire for “Jewish vengeance” against the Nazis.

Roosevelt initially supported the Morgenthau Plan, as did the Soviets. Roosevelt persuaded British Prime MinisterWinston Churchill to go along with the plan, but after details leaked to the press and provoked some public criticism, Roosevelt backed off.

With Roosevelt’s death in April, 1945, Morgenthau’s days as Treasury secretary were numbered. He did play a prominent role in the 1945 Bretton Woods conference, which created such important international financial instruments as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Because Morgenthau did not have a close relationship with President Harry S. Truman, he resigned that summer. He then sought to rally public opinion in favor of his plan for postwar Germany, using a series of radio broadcasts, articles, and a book, Germany Is Our Problem (1945). His campaign failed; the Truman administration soon scrapped the Morgenthau Plan entirely and proceeded with the rebuilding of industrial Germany.

After leaving the Treasury Department, Morgenthau assumed an active role in Jewish organizational life. He chaired the United Jewish Appeal and served as an unofficial economic adviser to the government of Israel. An Israeli moshav, a village, Tal Shachar (Hebrew for “morning dew,” which is the translation from German of “Morgenthau”), is named in his honor.

Significance

Morgenthau helped steer the U.S. economy through the turbulent years of the Depression. As Roosevelt led the United States into World War II, Morgenthau advocated that the costs of war not be borne in debt but through fund-raising. Even before the end of the war, he was instrumental in making a plan to get the world’s war-torn economies back on a stable footing. His efforts at the Bretton Woods conference laid the groundwork for this. Some of the important results of the conference were the founding of the World Bank and the creation of an adjustable foreign exchange market rate system and of convertible currencies. Morgenthau also played a central role in promoting the rescue of Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

Bibliography

Beschloss, Michael. The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002. Focuses on the evolution and fate of Morgenthau’s plan for remaking post-World War II Germany.

Medoff, Rafael. Blowing the Whistle on Genocide: Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. and the Struggle for a U.S. Response to the Holocaust. A chronicle of the efforts by Morgenthau, his aide DuBois, and other Treasury Department officials to promote the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust.

Morgenthau, Henry, III. Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1991. This insider’s account of Morgenthau history brings to life the human side of a fascinating and influential family.