With the aid of famed writer Ben Hecht, Bergson made just the sort of noise that Wise feared. His Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe won many friends (mostly non-Jewish) in Congress.
Bergson’s push to create a War Refugee Board to aid rescue made progress in Congress despite the administration’s opposition. At the same time, officials of the Treasury Department uncovered evidence of the perfidy of State Department policy. This moved the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, another Jewish insider like Rosenman who has nothing in common with Bergson, to act.
Morgenthau presented this evidence to Roosevelt in a memo titled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews.” Backing down quickly in the face of Morgenthau’s threat to make the memo public, FDR created the rescue agency. The War Refugee Board saved at least 200,000 Jews who might have otherwise been added to the toll of 6 million. But even this points out how much more could have been done had this poorly funded and heavily obstructed agency been created sooner or been given more support.
The playwright’s decision to place Bergson in the room when Morganthau confronted FDR is, of course, an absurd historic misnomer. Bergson never got anywhere near the president, and the connection between Treasury’s actions and his activity was tenuous. But Weinraub is right in the sense that the two were ultimately part of the same campaign.
“The Accomplices” manages to make for good theater almost in spite of Weinraub’s determination to tell a rather complicated chapter of history. The rapidly paced dialogue and scenes sprinkled liberally with humor as well as irony move the action along relentlessly.
In posing the question of whether Roosevelt and Long were literally accomplices to the Holocaust, Weinraub is bound to stir up anger from those who are defenders of these men. The ever-dwindling group of kibbitzers willing to defend Roosevelt’s appalling record on the Holocaust still persist in their willingness to ignore history like some modern-day, flat-earth society.
But more fair-minded observers are bound to ask whether the author has taken Wise’s timorousness out of context. Can we really judge Wise’s angst about anti-Semitism or that of other Jews of his time, such as the owners of The New York Times, which buried the news of the Holocaust in their pages?
To that, the answer must be yes. As much as we may sympathize with the dilemma of World War II-era American Jewry, history’s verdict on their failure is not in question. Just as the memory of that failure helped inspire a generation of Soviet Jewry activists, it needs to inform us today, as we regard issues like genocide in Darfur.
In the end, Weinraub and his audience have no choice but to “judge” Stephen Wise even as we identify with his fear of being singled out. As we approach another day of remembrance for the Holocaust this week, the obligation to remember the “accomplices,” as well as those who had the courage to cry out against murder, like Peter Bergson, must not be obscured by time or political fashion.