President Donald Trump’s social media post comparing Barack and Michelle Obama to apes has been widely criticized, and rightly so. The overwhelming majority of Americans reject such racist stereotypes, and we expect our political leaders to adhere to a higher standard.
Unfortunately, racist humor among presidents is not a new phenomenon; it dates back to at least a century ago. The difference between then and now is that such remarks used to be made only in private, not in public.
According to Curtis Roosevelt, a grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, FDR would “tell mildly anti-Semitic stories in the White House," in which "the protagonists were always Lower East Side Jews with heavy accents…"
The 2016 book His Final Battle, by former New York Times editor Joseph Lelyveld, mentioned that at the Yalta Conference in 1945, Roosevelt “laughed" at an adviser’s remark about “putting kikes in Palestine."
The transcript of FDR’s conversations with Josef Stalin at Yalta mentions a joke that Roosevelt made about “giving the six million Jews in the United States" to Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia. (For decades afterwards, the State Department circulated only a censored version of the transcript, in which that remark by the president was omitted.)
Roosevelt’s private correspondence also reveals that he once joked about relatives suspecting his fifth child was Jewish, because of the baby's "slightly Hebraic nose."
Not that Roosevelt was the first or only president to have told bigoted jokes in private. Woodrow Wilson joked about "darkeys" and "coons," sometimes with a faux accent. Lyndon Johnson indulged in harsh ethnic jokes. So did Richard Nixon.
But the public didn’t know about those jokes at the time they were made. Government officials whose racist jokes became publicly known at the time usually suffered significant consequences.
Recall that Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz was forced to resign in 1976 after it became known that he told a crude joke about African-Americans. In 1983, Interior Secretary James Watt was forced out of office after telling a harsh ethnic joke (about "a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple").
What presidents say matters. They set the tone for public discourse. So it’s good that the White House last week deleted the “apes" video and attempted to distance President Trump from the staff member who posted it; those steps in effect acknowledge that such racism is unacceptable. But what’s really needed is an explicit apology from the president. To say “just kidding" is not enough.and in doing so symbolically preside over the funeral of their own handiwork.
Dr. Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and the author of more than 20 books about Jewish history, Zionism, and the Holocaust. Follow him on Facebook to read his daily commentaries on the news.