Thread by @sewellchan

Watching #USandTheHolocaustPBS is doubly painful. It reminds us of the fragility of democracy, at home and abroad, and of the consequences of failing to live up to our humanitarian ideals.

https://twitter.com/kenburns/status/1571648889878450176

The film draws a powerful thread across slavery, Chinese exclusion, eugenics, antisemitism, immigration restrictions, Japanese incarceration.

Hitler saw parallels between US conquest of Native lands and herding of Indigenous people into reservations and his own conceptions of race war and lebensraum, as @TimothyDSnyder explains.

60% of those deported under Herbert Hoover’s “Mexican Repatriation Program” were US citizens. In 1932, for the first time, more people exited the US than entered. Depression intensified global search for scapegoats.

Conservative elites abetted Hitler’s rise, believing they could control him. They were willing to curb democracy, which they associated with socialism and labor unions.

This is all familiar history, but so important for Americans to understand. @KenBurns is a national treasure.

Also shrewd in noting that FDR took office vowing to use broad executive power to combat the Depression and that his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, was mainly interested in trade, not democracy.

1933: 1m Americans rallied against the Nazis. Among them was former Gov. Al Smith, first Catholic to be nominated by a major party for president. He compared Nazi brownshirts to KKK nightshirts.

@deborahlipstadt points out that FDR’s Jewish advisers pulled him back from forcefully denouncing Nazis, fearing it would only make things worse for German Jews.

Learning for first time about brave US journalists Edgar Ansel Mowrer (Chicago Daily News) and Dorothy Thompson (@Cosmopolitan, Jewish Daily Bulletin), forced to leave Germany after their unsparing reporting on Hitler’s rise and Nazis’ extremism. #USandTheHolocaustPBS

Nuremberg laws were based in part on Jim Crow laws. Asked about their persecution of Jews, they replied “Mississippi” and cited southern lynchings.

Nazi laws classifying Jews were actually less stern than US one-drop laws defining “persons of color.”

Painful, essential truths.

Almost 2/3 of Americans believed the Nazi persecution was mostly or partly Jews’ own fault. Film’s scholars say FDR lacked support of Congress and public opinion for lifting quotas and admitting refugees.