A broadcast speech by Gen. Hugh S. Johnson in which he resorted to Jewish dialect to bring home a point and charged that virtually all American Jews favored a Roosevelt reelection in the hope it would bring about a war against Hitler brought a flood of protests to radio station WOR last night. The World-Telegram, on its front page, today dissociated itself from Johnson’s speech.
Quoting a speech in the Congressional Record by Senator Rush Holt, Gen. Johnson said Holt “also revealed that the Army is surveying the whole American markets for coffins for your dead. When he queried, the military acknowledged it, but a Major Ginsberg answered him in effect: ‘Why not? In an Army of a million men, they might fall off trucks.'”
Taking up Roosevelt’s charge that anti-American and anti-Christian forces were at work in the Republican campaign, Gen. Johnson said “of our non-Christian group, 95 per cent are for Roosevelt because, in righteous indignation for Hitler’s terrible persecution of their kinsmen, they think he will lead us into war against the anti-Jew and anti-Christ Hitler.”
He had made a similar statement recently in his syndicated column, resulting in a large number of letters of protest.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
