NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Roosevelt explained his view of Asians in series of articles in the 1920s, shortly before he was elected governor of New York. Writing in Asia magazine in 1923, he sympathized with what he said was the widespread view "that the mingling of white with oriental blood on an extensive scale is harmful to our future citizenship."

Two years later, in an article for the Macon Daily Telegraph (for which he was a regular columnist), FDR asserted:  "Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results." The future president warned that "Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population."

Following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, some of President Roosevelt's military advisers began pushing for mass detention of Japanese Americans on the grounds that, as Secretary of War Stimson put it, "their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust [them]." FDR's belief that "Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation" contributed to his willingness to take such a radical step.

Roosevelt's perspective also helps explain why he authorized the roundup of Japanese Americans, yet never contemplated similar action against German Americans or Italian Americans, although they, too, had family ties to countries which America was fighting in the war.

"Orientals" were not the only ethnic group whom FDR viewed with automatic suspicion. He harbored similar sentiments concerning Jews. There are more than a dozen documented instances in which Roosevelt made unflattering statements about Jews in private conversations with friends or political allies in the 1930s and 1940s.

His remarks about Jews focused on several specific themes: that Jews possessed certain innate and distasteful characteristics; that it was undesirable to have too many Jews in any single profession, institution, or geographic locale; and that America should be an overwhelmingly white and Protestant country.

Thus President Roosevelt accused the publishers of the New York Times of using "a dirty Jewish trick" to resolve a tax problem. He told Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, America's foremost Jewish leader, that Jews in Poland were to blame for provoking antisemitism because they dominated the Polish economy. In a conversation with Sen. Burton Wheeler (D-MT), Roosevelt expressed pride that "there is no Jewish blood in our veins."

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