Some of the American attitudes and perceptions of the thirties and forties I find truly extraordinary, almost inexplicable. It really was a different country a half century ago, and to understand it I think we have to put ourselves in the mindset and circumstances of that time. My research associate and I have sifted through a mass of available public opinion survey data of that time, and it provides sound documentation for three conclusions: the first is that during the period of the thirties, before World War II, Americans were well aware of the territorial expansion of the Nazis and there is a clear-cut pattern of disapproval. It is sharp. It is of majority status. It's clear-cut. It's unambiguous. Second, is that the plight of the Jews in Europe was very much a secondary phenomenon for Americans. It had -- in the technical jargon of polling -- very low saliency. People were aware of it if you probed, but it was not in the forefront of people's minds, and it will be demonstrated just how far back it was. And the third conclusion, which is what I find personally hardest to believe until I project myself back to those times, is that despite their disapproval of the Nazis and what they did, the American people were very reluctant to give a practical helping hand to the victims of Nazism -- the Jews, or any other victims for that matter. For those who are critical of American life right now, I think it's useful to be reminded that, compared to the America of the late 1930s, Americans today are generous and helpful and international-minded. In the 1930s, there was a parochialism and a xenophobia that, in retrospect, seems almost mean-spirited. I will provide ample documentation of these three conclusions with some very compelling statistics.

First, I'd also like to say a word about the sources of data I will be drawing upon. Much of the statistical data that I'll be using comes from the Roper Center in Storrs, Connecticut. This center has become, I think, the premier archive for survey data, a central clearing house for survey findings in the United States. The Roper Center has some ten to fifteen thousand studies in its libraries, and one hundred thousand or more questions on-line for the more recent types of surveys. The findings I'm presenting here are not online. We dug back, and they dug back in their library to find them. And using their data base, we systematically searched for a number of subjects: everything on Jews, anti-Semitism, Germany, Nazis and Nazi persecution, public attitudes toward World War II and the like. That was our approach. The survey data that we have available doesn't begin until 193.  That is when George Gallup established his firm.  Elmer Roper established his organization a few years later.  Franklin Roosevelt was an avid believer in opinion polls, and set up at Princeton a survey organization called the Office of Public Opinion Research.  And some of the data is from that office, particularly Roosevelt's interest in how Americans felt about the Jews he had added to his administration.  And the other major source is NORC (National Opinion Research Center) based at that time at the University of Chicago.  So this is the beginning, in fact, of public opinion polling in the United States with the commercial polling organization of Roper and Gallup on one side, and then the academic ones on the other.

It is useful to take a minute to recall that the 1930s was the period of the Great Depression, and that the mood of Americans was shaped by the enormous struggle with really serious poverty. In 1937, halfway between the start of the New Deal and Pearl Harbor, 98 percent of American families were living on less than five thousand dollars per year. The average family income was under thirty dollars per week, and practically no Americans owned their own home. In January of 1936, Franklin Roosevelt said in a famous speech, "A third of the nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished," but from today's middle class perspective, those numbers are more accurately two-thirds or more.

In the 1930s the United States was a country in which the cleavages and divisions between the social classes were very deep and bitter. The average steel worker earned three hundred and sixty-nine dollars per year and had to support six people on that. General Motors paid its top 20 executives two hundred thousand dollars per year, and its workmen under one thousand. And during this period of sit-down strikes and unionism, there were class divisions that seem unusual from today's perspective.

The first poll data we have comes from Gallup in 1935, and I want to give a flavor of what Gallup was reporting in those early years. He asked people what their most important problems were at the end of 1935 and the top items were: unemployment, the economy and government, neutrality, and reduction of taxes. The public was split as to whether the use of alcohol was worse than in the last years of Prohibition. Seventy-one percent of the public said the United States should not join efforts to mediate between warring countries; neutrality and the lack of desire to be involved in foreign affairs begins to emerge as a constant theme throughout this period.

In the 1936 Presidential election, the top issues for the public were: government extravagance, the regulation of business, disregard of the Constitution, and the dictatorial government that Franklin Roosevelt was alleged to be establishing.

There is, in 1936, throughout all the polls, very, very strong support for direct government action for peoples' social welfare. Eighty-nine percent favored government old-age pensions for needy people. More than 60 percent favored an amendment to limit, regulate and prohibit child labor, 72 percent favored a federally-regulated minimum wage, 76 percent favored labor unions. But at the same time, a 70 percent majority felt it necessary to balance the budget and start reducing the national debt. There was a lot of gloom in the air. Two thirds of the public thought that there would be another serious recession.  And there s some diversion: 61 percent favored the marriage of King Edward to Mrs. Simpson, two-thirds opposed making the country dry again, and 62 percent felt that the schools should teach the facts about communism, fascism, and socialism.

In 1937 the most vital public issues are: unemployment, neutrality (again), social security. Eight-six percent thought that the cost of living was higher than a year earlier. Two-thirds of the public noticed a decline in business in their communities but equal numbers opposed government spending to help businesses out of the slump. And 60 percent approved a government reduction in relief expenditures. There was -- I was surprised to find -- a very striking concern with law and order. Clearly there was a sense of disorder and chaos that was responded to in a rather severe fashion by the public. Sixty-one percent favored the death penalty for murder, 84 percent favored sterilization of habitual criminals and the hopelessly insane, 67 percent felt that the labor unions should be regulated by the government, and so forth. Most people, three-quarters of the public, felt that there would be another world war, and yet only 16 percent felt that it would come within the next year or two. And Germany was seen as the country that would most likely start it. And in the polls of 1937 there is really no reference at all to the situation in Germany, the persecution of people there.

In 1938 you first see the growing concern about the possibility of war. Seventy-three percent felt that Roosevelt's proposal for a larger navy would help to keep the United States out of war. A majority still believed that the United States would not have to fight Germany again in their lifetime. Only a third felt that they were better off than the year before.

I think it's important to stress -- in studying the context for public attitudes toward the Holocaust -- how much the country has changed during the past half century.

In terms of values and attitudes, I want to single out some immense differences between today's America and the America of the 1930s. One of these differences has to do with anti-Semitism in this country. It was widespread throughout the country in the thirties, and it really was an expression of general xenophobia, a dislike, a mistrust of the stranger, the foreigner, the person who is different. In one of the Roper studies of 1938, Roper asked the question, "What kinds of people do you object to?" Jews are mentioned by 35 percent of the respondents, and the next highest number are noisy, cheap, boisterous and loud people at 27 percent, uncultured, unrefined, dumb people at 14 percent, and then all the other types.

The following year, in 1939, Roper did a very large-scale study for Fortune with a sample of 5,236 people, and he asked them which of four statements came closest to reflecting their own attitudes toward Jews. I think it is worth my quoting the statements exactly because they're so different from the kinds of questions that we might ask today and they're very striking. And the four statements were:

They are an interesting set of questions. Here's how the respondents answered. Thirty-nine percent feel that Jews are like everybody else and should be treated like everybody else. And fifty-three percent hold that Jews are different and should be respected. Eleven percent would restrict them socially. Thirty-two percent would restrict them in business. Ten percent wanted Jews deported. And eight percent said they didn't know. But really that is extraordinary -- to have a majority who wanted some form of restriction against Jews.

There's fascinating and important trend data that's available from the 1930s and 1940s. Let me just offer a few numbers and then I'll discuss the trends. For a number of years the question has been asked in various polls about whether the Jews have too much power and influence in the business world. In the early 1940s a 57 percent majority believes that the Jews have too much power and influence. In the forties, 60 percent believe that Jews have too much power and influence in the United States in general. There was a very good series of questions about whether voters would vote for a Jew as President. And in 1937, the first time that question is asked, 47 percent said that they would vote for a Jew as President -- not a majority. And a question that's always very revealing, although it's a little difficult to interpret, the perception of people as to whether anti-Jewish feeling is increasing or decreasing: in 1939, by a ratio of 45 percent to 17 percent -- almost three-to-one -- there is a knowledge, an awareness that anti-Semitism is increasing.

In the 1930s American perceptions, polls reveal, are powerfully influenced by the feeling that it was a mistake for the United States to have entered World War I. However, these attitudes changed considerably as war approached. So you see isolationism peaking in 1937 at 70 percent and by 1941, right before America entered the war, it had been reduced to 30 percent. Large majorities of Americans desperately wanted to stay uninvolved in a European war in the 1930s. So year after year the polls show vast majorities saying, "If there's another war in Europe we should stay out, we should stay out, we should stay out. . ." In fact, even though the Munich accords were disapproved of, nonetheless 59 percent felt that England and France acted correctly in giving in to Germany rather than going to war.

A question asked toward the end of the prewar period, in 1939, was, What should we do if war breaks out in Europe? And the answers are very clear-cut: Ninety-five percent reject the idea that the United States should declare war. Everybody. Eighty-five percent reject the idea that we should send troops (a little softer statement of the same notion). To the statement which puts the question directly to people, If Germany is defeating England and France, should we enter the conflict, 71 percent answered no, a consensus of the American people. On the other hand, there is widespread support for doing something to help, as long as it doesn't entail the risk of our getting into the war. Eighty-two percent said to send food supplies. Sixty percent support changing the neutrality law, so that England and France can buy supplies, including planes and the like. And it is very interesting that it is not a partisan issue: Republicans and Democrats support or don't support these matters to the same extent. So you're talking about a point of view that cuts across the political ideology of that time.

Let us look at the documentation for the three points I cited at the beginning of this talk. The first point is that in the late 1930s the American public knew about Nazi territorial expansionism in Europe and disapproved of it. So you have a pattern here: ninety-two percent disbelieve Hitler's claims that he had no more territorial ambitions. Eighty-six percent said that Hitler's desire to possess the Polish corridor was not justified. Seventy-seven percent said that Germany's demand for the annexation of the Sudetan-German areas of Czechoslovakia was unjustified. Sixty-one percent said that they would join a boycott of German goods.

Sixty percent said that the Munich agreement would likely result in war rather than peace, even though -- as I pointed out earlier -- there was support for it in order to keep America out of the war.

The second point is that the Nazi persecution of the Jews had very low saliency for Americans throughout World War II, as well as in the prewar period. Here is a question that was asked by George Gallup in 1937, 1938, and 1939. "Which news events interested you the most?" In terms of saliency, in 1937 the top items are the floods in Ohio, the Sino-Japanese War, the Windsor marriage, Amelia Earhart's disappearance, the business lunch, the Texas school explosion, the controversy about Justice Black and the Ku Klux Klan, the sit-down strike at General Motors, and the Supreme Court decisions on the New Deal. In 1938, the next year, you have the crisis in Czechoslovakia, and for the first time the various Nazi persecutions.

In 1939, Gallup changed his methodology. Instead of asking people open-ended questions about what was on their mind, he presented them with a list of items and asked them to choose the ones that were the news events that interested them the most in 1939. Here are the answers: England and France declare war on Germany, Congress lifts the arms embargo, the attempt on Hitler's life in Munich, the blitzkrieg in Poland, and the Russo-German treaty of friendship. A lot of war-related issues, but there is no public mention whatsoever of the plight of the Jews.

In 1943 a poll question was asked by Gallup: "It is said that two million Jews have been killed since the war began." A minority, forty-seven percent, agreed that the statement was true. A fifty-two percent majority either said they didn't know or that it was just a rumor. So people were unaware and didn't accept allegations.

There was also a very interesting poll that was done by the Office of Public Opinion Research in Princeton in 1942, the agency that Franklin Roosevelt established. The poll asked two questions. The first was whether people felt that the ideas that the Nazis were disseminating in Germany were good or bad. Eighty-two percent said that they thought that Hitler's ideas were bad for the German people. And then those 82 percent were asked "What is it that is bad about those ideas?" And here, in order, is what people disapproved of: militarism, anti-church attitudes, racial superiority, disrespect for women and elders and family, the ideology of Hitlerism, the devotion to the state, anti-democratic ideas, and hatred of the Jews. The latter came to about one percent -- practically non-existent. So this is, I think, a very compelling piece of evidence that of all the Nazi teachings, hatred of the Jews wasn't considered all that egregious. Why was this so? One reason is that Americans by and large didn't believe the Germans were evil, just Hitler. So whenever people were asked, "Are the German people to blame for the war, or was it only the government of Hitler?" it was Hitler who was blamed. And there was a real preoccupation with Japan. When people were asked, "Who are more cruel at heart?" 18 percent chose the Germans, and 82 percent said the Japanese. I think it's fascinating to speculate on whether, if the Nazi-style persecutions had taken place in Japan, Americans would have been more apt to believe in the veracity of reports describing atrocities.

Now I come to the point that is really the most difficult to understand and to accept. Although Americans ultimately disapproved of the Nazi treatment of the Jews (in 1938, 94 percent of those polled criticized the Nazis' treatment of the Jews) the majority of Americans were extremely reluctant to assist the Jews or other Nazi victims in practical ways. Only 57 percent favored even a mild official remonstrance over these matters, such as the temporary withdrawal of the U.S. ambassador to Germany. That's about as far as Americans would go. Now, what wouldn't they do? Here is, I think, very striking evidence of a reluctance to help. Remember, it's 1938. "We should not allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany into the United States" -- 72 percent. "Our government should not contribute money to help Jewish and Catholic exiles from Germany settle in other lands" a majority. In 1939 Gallup asked a split sample of people these questions: "Do you oppose or do you support admitting 10,000 refugee children from Germany into the United States?" (Nothing was specified about those children, except that they were refugee children.) Two-thirds of the American people opposed that. And then in the other half of the sample the question was asked, "Do you oppose or support admitting 10,000 refugee children from Germany who are mostly Jewish into the United States?" And the amount who were opposed was just a couple of percentage points lower than the number who were opposed in the previous question. There has been a lot of criticism of Franklin Roosevelt and his unwillingness to let more refugees into this country. But to the extent that his attitude was one of not wanting to know about the plight of the refugees, it was a pretty accurate reflection of the attitudes of Americans generally during that period.

I want to end here by making one observation. I doubt very much whether Americans would have been more willing to help European Jewry even if the press had devoted much more attention to them. If you think of the preoccupations of most Americans of that time -- the economy and the possibility of it deteriorating even further; a xenophobic attitude toward Jews; an isolationist outlook -- it may very well be that no matter what the press did to report on the Nazis' persecution of the Jews, most Americans would have been reluctant to see their country intervene.