'Paper Walls: America & the Refugee Crisis 1938 -1941' by David Wyman: A Book Look
August 15th 2005
It has become almost customary for a variety of institutions in the United States, including the federal government, to commemorate the Holocaust. It makes sense insofar as it was the most evil crime in human history - lessons can be learned. But there is a whiff of evasion about it. Not only is it a piece of cake to commemorate the crimes of other people, the implicit comparison variously elicits a sense of non-comprehension - how could they do that? - or further reinforces a sort of moral smugness. Why this happens is somewhat difficult to discern.
What the Nazis did to the Jews of Europe and others does not differ much in terms of intent from genocidal human tendencies that are as antique as the Old Testament. Several factors do distinguish the Holocaust from the kinds of massacres carried out by Tamerlane or the Turkish generals against the Armenians. They would include: the scale of the killing, the gruesomely efficient techniques, the systematized logistical approach, the deception and secrecy involved in it and the eventual unearthing of explicit visual evidence. Now, if we accept the premise that the Holocaust was a singularly evil event in history, might it not be instructive to examine just how our own country's people and government responded to the escalating persecution of Europe's Jews?
It may be human nature to avoid looking in the mirror, to attempt to wriggle out of responsibility, to try and save face. It saves time to apply some introspection, which tends to yield a little more humility - a sometimes useful trait for individuals and states. But ignoring or dismissing uncomfortable historical events of one's country - they amount non-threateningly enough to aggregated, basic human flaws - does violence not only to the memory of those who suffered as a consequence, but also to the present and the future. What one won't find in the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles or the Holocaust Museum on the Mall will be a searching look at the findings of David S. Wyman's precise and shocking 1968 book Paper Walls: America & the Refugee Crisis 1938 - 1941.
In the four year period that Professor Wyman examined, he found that overwhelming majorities of the American public never favored expanding paltry quotas for immigrants in the wake of Kristallnacht - the night of broken glass. This reign of Nazi terror saw the burning of synagogues all across Germany, as well as the internment of tens of thousands in concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald - built just above a small city called Weimar.
Even before WW II catapulted the United States into the unassailable position it still inhabits, our land was already by 1938 the greatest, wealthiest and largest democratic country on the face of the earth. As such, one might have expected a little more generosity from its people. And while no one could have contemplated gas chambers and ovens, there was sufficient evidence of malevolent intent, as reflected in Hitler's January 30, 1939 statement before the Reichstag.
"Today I want to be a prophet again. If international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe." [applause]
What follows will be rather more a transcription than much of any analysis. Dr. Wyman's book is widely regarded as the central, founding text in the study of the American response to the German-Jewish refugee crisis of the critical period between Kristallnacht and the deployment of the Einsatzgruppen in the ghettos of Vilna and Kaunas at the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.
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"On a sunny Monday morning in early June 1939, a front-page headline in the New York Times announced: 'Roosevelt Appeals to World to Join in Moral Rearming.' Quite by coincidence, a story in the adjoining column was headlined: 'Refugee Ship Idles off Florida Coast.' The refugee ship was the St. Louis, a German liner carrying 900 fleeing Jews who had been refused entry by the Cuban government. Before turning back to Europe, the ship sailed for a week through Caribbean waters and along the Florida coast. The lights of American cities were visible from on board...
"Even though 700 of the refugees held numbers on the waiting lists for U.S. visas, Washington refused all pleas to take them in, even temporarily. Regulations were regulations: these people were not eligible to enter. [The Times reported] The Coast Guard patrol boat CG244, out of Fort Lauderdale, stood by the ship as she moved down the coast, barely making way, to prevent possible attempts by refugees to jump off and swim ashore...
"Although systematic extermination was not foreseen, the world was aware that life for the Jews under German control had become impossible. And, until it slammed the exits shut in October 1941, Germany was pressing the Jews to get out. From 1938 until well into 1941, all that was needed for rescue to occur was for the doors to open in the outside world. Few did. And the opportunity was lost."
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Wyman starts off by examining the American socio-political context in 1938; it wasn't a pretty picture when it came to the public. FDR's interest in the matter was keen enough initially, but faded as the Nazi military menace became more obvious. He did convene a conference at Evian within eleven days of the Anschluss of Austria in March of 1938, fully eight months before Kristallnacht. It didn't accomplish much, but then neither did his early immigrant friendly overtures with the vast majority of "isolationist" Republicans in Congress, working hand in glove with the vast majority of Dixiecrats.
They had their nativist slogans. "America First" and "America for the Americans" - tautologies will always sound convincing to some. The latter slogan still holds some sway in Germany today with the addendum: Ausländer raus!
Among the politicians, as one might imagine, the most obnoxious were the Dixiecrats, even as isolationist Republicans provided most of the votes by party. There was that famous bigot-red baiter Martin Dees of Texas, along with Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina. The latter inserted into the Congressional record the words of the reactionary Catholic radio personality Charles E. Coughlin, who railed on about "the New York barges that slide out to clandestine meetings with ships anchored off the 12-mile limit to bringin overall-clad refugees with 'W.P.A. shovels' in hand." This last reference disparaged FDR's Works Progress Administration, which sought to employ desperate Americans in building infrastructure across the land.
Coughlin, a Canadian-born priest cum wolverine in Royal Oak, Michigan, was the most influential anti-Jewish agitator. His publication, Social Justice got around to reprinting the Czarist secret police forgeries known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this sort of business, he enjoyed the support of another Michigan notable by the name of Henry Ford, who penned a ghastly tome entitled The International Jew.
Just to be fair, to keep it non-denominational, the fundamentalist Protestants got their licks in as well. Prominent among them were slapdash theologians such as Gerald B. Winrod of Kansas. He headed up an anti-Jewish outfit called the Defenders of the Christian Faith. Wyman related his warnings to the flock:
"...the names appearing on the places of business, the condition of shop windows, the babble of foreign tongues, the language used on the signs in public places, the filth in the streets, the greasy lives of the people, the utter disregard for American standards of morality, the flagrant violation of the Christian Sabbath, the whole atmosphere of these great unassimilated sections of foreign population is such as to cause serious concern."
It wasn't just self-described "Heartland" racists who contributed to the climate of fear and hatred, "scholars" published by the New York Chamber of Commerce threw in their two cents. "Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office of the Carnegie Institution of Washington D.C., offered his 267-page Conquest by Immigration as "a research on the essential long-time parallel between conquest following successful military invasion and enforced settlement on the one hand and legalized, peaceful immigration on the other." Dr. Laughlin made the usual jingoist arguments about the "high incidence among aliens of mental
disease, criminality, and appearance on relief rolls."
As tends to be the case, rude people with rude opinions will gain attention. This would have been the case with such characters as William Dudley Pelley and his "Silver Shirts," to say nothing of the German-American Bund - fascist sympathizers of the first order. Their numbers were small nationally, but in New York and other cities on the eastern seaboard, their blathering would be translated into action not infrequently - the oft-lubed foot soldiers would beat up Jews given half a chance. Pelley's outfit published pamphlets depicting the Capitol adorned with a Star of David - Jews running the New Deal and so on. For its part, the Bund would amass 20,000 frenzied supporters on the curious occasion of Washington's birthday - curious in that they passed the eve doing the sieg heil, booing Roosevelt, and otherwise making oblivious with respect to the Bill of Rights.
The Road to Hell is, on occasion, Paved with Bad Intentions
In the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht, American public opinion turned more sharply against the Nazis. This sentiment would dissipate quickly when the rubber hit the road - formulating an immigration policy that might have saved desperate innocents. In February of 1939, Republican Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts and the great Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York submitted "identical bills to permit, over a single two-year period, entrance outside the quotas of a total of 20,000 German refugee children aged 14 or younger." It would be the first sustained effort to liberalize the Immigration Act of 1924. The attempt to bring such a modest number of children into the United States was a reflection of Depression-era hostility toward immigration of adults above and beyond the trickle allowed by law at the time.
In spite of favorable editorial reaction across the country, the support of the big unions and a bipartisan gaggle of notables, opposition in Congress quickly coalesced. Self-professed patriotic organizations, among them the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, inundated representatives with appeals to "protect the youth of America from this foreign invasion." The first argument can be summed up by the slogan "charity begins at home." Hereby, the opinions of those tens of millions still suffering from the ravages of the Depression were most effectively swung. A supplementary argument concerned the "slippery slope" scenario - let in the kids and all sorts of shifty continentals won't be far behind. In breaking down party support, Wyman noted that "one fourth of the Democrats were behind the bill in contrast to less than one tenth of Republicans."
The undercurrent of anti-Semitism wasn't difficult to detect, as reflected in the rhetoric of immigration restrictionists and the approach of the bill's supporters. The publication of yet another "patriotic" society, the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, mused that backers of the bill were undoubtedly "in the employ of large interests in this country." A Miss Margaret Hopkins Worell of the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, in House testimony, vigorously disputed the contention of a member that the refugees wouldn't "all be Jewish." Indeed, even supporters of the bill were put on the defensive, including Wagner, as they attempted to demonstrate that "selection of the boys and girls should be based on their need to emigrate and not on their 'race and religion.'"
When it came time to vote the bill out of the full Senate Immigration Committee, a variety of Senators who had traditionally sided with Wagner decided to duck the vote. "Poison pill" amendments put the bill on hold by the end of June. With the outbreak of war on September 1st, the bill was ultimately buried as even the chief lobbying group for the legislation, the Non-Sectarian Committee, decided that another push might just make matters worse. Newsweek correspondent Raymond Moley reflected the apprehension that "debate in the open will loose the tongues of certain members of Congress who are itching to burn verbal fiery crosses."
With the defeat of the Wagner-Rogers bill, another tack taken by those Americans attempting to get Jews out of Nazi Germany concerned the opening of Alaska to new immigration. The idea was that the new immigrants could help develop the icy northern expanse. Undersecretary of the Interior Harry Slattery put together a report which presented immigration as a win-win scenario for the American public. Legislation based on the findings of the Slattery Report was submitted by Senator William H. King (D-UT) and Rep. Franck Havenner (D-CA).
This initiative sought to mitigate the sort of objections that had greeted previous immigration legislation by presenting the bill as one that would benefit struggling Americans as well, through an Interior Department chartered "Alaska Development Corporation." Alaskans looked askance at the legislation, as much for the "big government" implications as for their mistrust of the composition of the immigrants. John B. Trevor of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies knew what buttons to push now that war was raging. Raising the possibility of a fifth column danger, he stated that "Nazi persecution of Jews had occurred 'in very man cases... because of their beliefs in the Marxian philosophy.'" Both the House and Senate Committees on Territories declined even to act on the measure.
Indicative of the surreal nature of the era's immigration policies, shortly after the aforementioned Evian conference, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, General Rafeael Trujillo, offered to take in tens of thousands of refugees. An American commission from the Department of Agriculture visited one of Trujillo's estates at Sousa and determined that 29,000 persons could be settled there. While it was imagined that this effort would serve as a trial run for additional colonies in the Western Hemisphere, by March of 1940 only 500 refugees had been settled there. It was ultimately concluded that the tract could only house approximately that many and so the numbers would not climb any higher.
Charity Extends to the Channel
In May of 1940 the Nazi blitzkrieg turned westward, defeating the French army in six weeks and forcing an emergency evacuation of British forces at Dunkirk. Before the guns fell briefly silent on the Continent, the German Luftwaffe was bombing London. By mid-June the British government was making arrangements to send thousands of children abroad to safety.
Within weeks a committee - Eleanor Roosevelt served as honorary president - had been formed to receive the British children. Meanwhile, 15,000 offers of homes had been extended by American families. In Congress the Mercy Ship Bill, dedicating non-combatant ships for the kids, sailed through Congress within six weeks. Thousands of British children reached Canada and the United States.
Wyman contrasted the treatment of German-Jewish refugee children with the British tykes this way. "A glimpse of the attractiveness of the Anglo-Saxon image appeared in a tabulation of letters offering homes for the young refugees. The type of child most often requested was "a blond English girl, 6 years old."
At the same time, American labor was attempting to help matters. "On July 2 a delegation led by AFL president William Green took the list to Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long who agreed to grant special emergency visitors' visas to the designated refugees and their families. These labor leaders and Jewish scholars included peole fleeing eastern Europe and the Soviet GPU as well as refugees escaping the Gestapo. Long also met with a group of Orthodox rabbis and accepted their lists totaling over 700 names of jewish theological students and rabbis in the Baltic area. Still another list, that of the American Jewish Congress, received favorable action by the State Department."
This optimism was short lived however as reflected in the diary the responsible State Department bureaucrat. "Remarks recorded by Breckinridge Long in his diary after a lengthy conversation with Laurence Steinhardt in late 1941 help explain the actions of both men in the refugee crisis of 1940. Long set down his approval of Steinhardt's clear-cut opposition to
'immigration in large numbers from Russia and Poland of the Eastern Europeans whom he characterizes as entirely unfit to become citizens of theis country. he says they are lawless, scheming, defiant - and in many ways unassimilable. He said the general type of intending immigrant was just the same as the criminal Jews who crowd our police court dockets in new York and with whom he is acquainted... I think he right - not as regards the Russian and Polish Jew alone but the lower level of all that Slav population of Eastern Europe and Western Europe.'"
Compounding this anti-Jewish sentiment was what the historian Robert Hofstadter would later call, in reference to the McCarthy period, the "paranoid style in American politics." Duly reflecting this enduring national trait was again Senator Reynolds of North Carolina who charged that "today our country is honeycombed with saboteurs and spies." Fortune magazine found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the Nazis had "already started to organize a 'Fifth Column' in this country." In the course of conducting the poll, Fortune found that "many people interviewed had volunteered that they were watching certain neighbors they suspected were fifth columnists." The best headline of the period came from the American Magazine: "Hitler's Slave Spies in America."
This retrospectively unwarranted fear grew to the point where in the fall of 1940 "the Department of State pressed the president of Haiti to cancel a plan for entry of 100 refugee families into his country. The State Department maintained that Haiti lacked effective means for controlling the subversive elements which would undoubtedly enter with the refugees. Among arguments that the American chargé marshalled to persuade the Haitian president were these:
'One, all refugees from Germany are at most only anti-Hitler; two, pressure can be exerted on those still having property in Germany to do the bidding of the German Government; three, further pressure can be brought to bear on them through acts or threats against their relatives still in Germany; four, German agents have been sent out in the guise of refugees.'"
By the end of 1940, the foot-dragging policies of the State Department was revealed by the liberal press. An emergency visa program was implemented in response, but it only granted a measly 1,236 slots. Up until July of 1941 an additional 800 refugees reached safety in the United States, many of them escaping from Lisbon - by then the last major departure point from Europe.
Wyman summed up the half year prior to the Wannsee Conference, where the final solution was formally adopted in early 1942, this way. "Events from late spring through the end of 1941 crushed the hopes of thousands who had looked to the United States for asylum. In June the State Department all but excluded refugees with close relatives in Nazi areas. The next month brought stringent visa screening in Washington and the forced closing of American consulates in German territory. In the fall legal flight from Nazi Europe came to a halt. And in December the United States entered the war. Bitter as these circumstances were for victims of Nazi persecution, the worst was yet to come for those who had not found a way out of German-controlled territory. American refugee agencies had discovered that the Nazis had sealed the walls. But they had no way of knowing the terrible implications of that step. Not successful in pushing the unwanted people onto an unwilling world, Hitler and his advisers had initiated plans for eradicating them completely."
Conclusion
"Estimates show that the American contribution, though limited, went beyond that of any other country, both for the Nazi period as a whole and for the crucial years from 1938 through 1941. From 1933 through 1945, something like 250,000 refugees from Nazism reached safety in the United States. Only Palestine, which received approximately 150,000, approached the American record. During the critical months from early 1938 through mid-1941, some 150,000 refugees entered the United States. About 55,000 found their way into Palestine in that period.
"Although the United States led the nations as a refugee haven, American ability to absorb immigration was vastly greater than that of the small European countries or the little-industrialized, though spacious and less populated, areas of Latin America and Africa. Viewed in relation to capacity, the English, Dutch, French, and others in Western Europe were far more generous than the United States.
"Why, then, were the quotas not widened? The chances for driving liberalized immigration legislation through Congress in the 1930's and early 1940's were virtually nonexistent. Groups which favored a liberal refugee policy believed such efforts would not only be fruitless, but actually might risk greater restriction by Congress. Nevertheless, they launched one major attempt, the Wagner-Rogers Children's Bill, which Congress strangled without allowing it to reach the floor of either house.
"Although responsibility for unwillingness to modify the quota system must lie in the first instance with Congress, one has to ask the more basic question of why Congress failed to act. A Gallup poll in early 1939 found only 26 percent approval for possible legislation for entry of 10,000 German refugee children (66 percent opposed; eight percent had no opinion). In December 1938, while the November pogroms [Kristallnacht] were still in the news, a Roper poll recorded an even more negative popular attitude. Only 8.7 percent favored entry of a larger number of European refugees than now admitted under our immigration quotas (83 percent opposed; 8.3 percent had no opinion).
One may level the finger of accusation at Franklin Roosevelt for having done so little and at Congress for having done nothing. But the accuser will find himself simultaneously pointing at the society which gave American refugee policy its fundamental shape. Like the President, the majority of Americans condemned Nazi persecution. But most opposed widening the gates for Europeans oppressed. Viewed within the context of its times, United States refugee policy from 1938 to the end of 1941 was essentially what the American people wanted."