by Jay Winik
In most cases visas were not granted, but the department seldom refused applications outright—that would only have produced noisy protests. Rather, it set up a line of obstacles that stretched from Washington to Lisbon to Shanghai and that simply wore out the persistence of the fleeing refugees. One outraged American publication wrote, “Owing to the department’s inertia and its obstructionist tactics only a handful [of refugees] have been saved. The record of delays, misleading reports, promises, more delays, refusals of consuls to act on instructions presumably sent from Washington—all this is bitter knowledge among persons engaged in the business of trying to salvage political émigrés.”
Soon, the flow of refugees was reduced to a mere trickle—this at a time when Jews were being murdered first in the hundreds, then in the thousands, then in the hundreds of thousands, and then in the millions.
Applicants from Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Italian territories—those who most needed to find a safe haven—were required to surmount impossibly complex regulations. Most never did, no matter how needy or desperate they were. As time went on, Long’s campaign was increasingly relentless—and devious, too, as when he testified to the House, “The historic attitude of the United States as a haven for the oppressed has not changed. The Department of State has kept the door open.” Then came his most influential and notorious policy, in the form of a secret intradepartmental memo, which he circulated in June 1940, first addressed to James Dunn and Adolf Berle Jr. “We can,” Long brazenly wrote, “delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.” The refugees despaired, and for good reason. Only 10 percent of the quota for immigrants from Germany and Italy was filled, and 200,000 people were shut out. Critics pointed out that by his actions, Long was indirectly assisting the Nazis, but faced with these barbs Long simply shrugged his shoulders and pressed forward.
How wide was the support for Long’s policies in the government itself? True, Long was thin-skinned, humorless, and narrow-minded, but he was never personally interested in encomiums. As it happened, his stridency won him some supporters, but it alienated others. One Treasury Department official, Randolph Paul, would later describe Long and his colleagues as an American “underground movement . . . to let the Jews be killed,” while Josiah DuBois Jr. would bristle at the mere mention of Long, outright calling him anti-Semitic. The president’s own Advisory Committee on refugees was so “wrought up about” Long that its chairman insisted on meeting with Roosevelt to vent his grievances. And Eleanor herself sent a heated memo to the president, saying, “I am thinking about these poor people who may die at any time and who are asking only to come here on transit visas and I do hope you can get this cleared up quickly.” A rattled Roosevelt sent a note to his undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles: “Please tell me about this,” he inquired. “There does seem to be a mixup.”
There wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. It might seem that Long’s actions would threaten to swamp the State Department in a tide of indignation, but Long enjoyed the support of the most important constituency of all: Roosevelt himself. To mollify the critics, and on Welles’s recommendation, the president met with Long on October 3, 1940, at noontime; it was a lengthy meeting for the president, a half hour. Long, never a man of great patience, seemingly lost what little he had. He was unrepentant. But he was suave enough not to appear deaf to the cries of victims in Europe. He smoothly shifted the focus of the discussion and persuaded the president that countless refugees were in fact nefarious German agents seeking to infiltrate the shores of America. In any case, he also painted a fanciful picture of a sympathetic, yet careful procedure in the State Department, one that operated efficiently to rescue the deserving while weeding out the dangerous. However unimaginative Long was, his gift for manipulating the political process can hardly be exaggerated. By the end of his presentation, he had received the president’s unqualified approval. Perhaps at this stage the president believed the refugee issue was manageable. It wasn’t, because Hitler wasn’t. But with his fears stoked, the president was unwilling to compromise the war effort.
That day Long proudly noted in his diary—his bureaucratic syntax notwithstanding—that Roosevelt was “wholeheartedly in support of the policy which would resolve in favor of the United States any doubts about admissibility of any individual.”
A WEEK LATER ROOSEVELT MET with James G. McDonald, the chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. If Long was no pushover, neither was McDonald. A man of great principle, he had been the high commissioner for refugees for the League of Nations in the 1930s, and he had no great love for double-talking bureaucrats or foot-dragging heads of state. In 1935 he had resigned his post in the League because of the organization’s reluctance to help Jews in Nazi Germany. He was equally impatient with Long, whom he regarded as an anti-Semite. Yet McDonald had great admiration for Roosevelt and saw the president as an untiring advocate for refugees. Roosevelt had no illusions about what McDonald wanted. He knew that McDonald’s committee, though it lacked political clout in the government, had painstakingly sifted through lists of endangered refugees, examined affidavits and records submitted by friends of endangered antifascists, and submitted selected names to the State Department for action.
But on this day, McDonald got nowhere. He thought he would have the president’s undivided attention. He didn’t. Instead, Roosevelt sought to defuse the situation by playing the role of an amiable raconteur. He simply recounted one story after another, each having nothing to do with why he and McDonald were meeting. Unable to get a word in, McDonald finally dispensed with tact and started to openly criticize Long, only to have the president frostily snap at him. Don’t, Roosevelt bristled, “pull any sob stuff.”
If Roosevelt was a cautious humanitarian, Long was a consummate realist, coldhearted where Roosevelt was warm-blooded, callous where Roosevelt was spirited. Yet theirs was a relationship every bit as significant as Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Marshall’s, Sumner Welles and Cordell Hull’s, or Harry Hopkins and Roosevelt’s. Buoyed by his support from the president, Long happily sparred with James McDonald; jousted with Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the treasury; and collided with Joseph Buttinger, the refugees’ advocate. Nor did he shrink from crossing words with Eleanor Roosevelt herself. His clash with Eleanor began on a warm August day in 1940 when a small Portuguese liner, the SS Quanza, pulled into New York harbor. It had 317 passengers, and it was far from its usual South African run. It was instead evacuating eighty-three war refugees from occupied France.
Here was the St. Louis redux, on a smaller scale—another opportunity for America to save lives. The passengers were a broad array, including “Negro seamen,” American ambulance drivers, members of the eminent Rothschild family, the editor of Paris Soir, a Japanese journalist, a seventeen-year-old Czech figure skater, a Parisian opera star, and a French movie star as well as the refugees.
Predictably, every passenger holding an American visa was allowed to disembark. As for the refugees? Grouped together and scared, they begged to be allowed in, but were flatly told by officials: “Impossible.” What was needed? All the proper papers, which, given the bureaucratic labyrinth that had been established by the State Department, were virtually impossible to obtain. Having little choice, the Quanza’s captain decided to sail on to Mexico rather than return to Europe, which was, as one refugee said, “a German concentration camp.” But when they arrived at Veracruz, the Mexican authorities were no more willing to accept the refugees than the Americans had been.
By now, the passengers were in “complete despair.” Shrewdly, the Quanza’s captain sailed back to the United States, docking at Norfolk, Virginia, where ostensibly the ship would be loaded with coal to pre
pare for the voyage home. This gave refugee organizations precious time to plead for help. They did, appealing directly to Eleanor Roosevelt. She in turn personally confronted the president, and asked him to do something. Something, but what? Roosevelt quickly dispatched an envoy, Patrick Malin, to assess the situation. Working in the name of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, Malin hurried to Norfolk. He collected the documents of everyone aboard, and in the end certified that anyone without documents was a political refugee, entitled to stay in America. The passengers were jubilant. “Mrs. Roosevelt saved my life,” one refugee proclaimed. Others nodded their heads in agreement.
This was a rare political victory over Breckinridge Long, but a short-lived one. “It was a violation of the Law,” he insisted in his diary. “I would not give my consent. . . . I would have no responsibility for it.” Afterward, Long redoubled his efforts, piling up one obstacle after another to keep refugees from getting visas. It was, Joseph Buttinger told Eleanor Roosevelt, a “ghastly situation.” Eleanor agreed, and once again sent a personal note to the president to do more. “FDR,” she scrawled, “can’t something be done?” This time Roosevelt ignored her. Yet as reports of Long’s obstructionism piled up, as lines of desperate Jews lengthened at consulates in western Europe, as the news reports of Nazi oppression mounted, Eleanor thought that surely the issue couldn’t have been simpler. She all but exploded, telling the president: “Franklin, you know he’s a fascist!”
The president was curt in responding. “I told you, Eleanor,” he said crossly, cutting her off. “You must not say that.”
“But he is!” she shot back.
How serious was the matter? Eleanor later told her son that her inability to admit more refugees was the “deepest regret” of her life.
THROUGHOUT THE STATE DEPARTMENT, at the highest levels, officials were either uninterested or uninformed or unconcerned. As a consequence, Long’s attitude affected far more than just visa policy: it helped define the government’s entire response to the European Jewish crisis. So long as he had his way, the United States would remain a timorous bystander.
For Roosevelt, the pressure from without—to do something, to help the Jews, to streamline procedures—was overpowered by the pressure from within: a government apparatus tugging at him to address national security first, and humanitarian matters only as a distant second. Baffled observers wondered why Roosevelt’s conscience, his very essence, did not compel him to shoulder his way into action. Where at least was the anger? Where was the Churchillian eloquence that, for example, railed against the “villainy of the Nazi outrage”? Publicly, the refugees’ advocates put on a brave face. But behind closed doors they were discouraged. There were a few notable public dissenters. The Nation editorialized, “The record is one which must sicken any person of ordinarily humane instincts.” It continued: “It is as if we were to examine laboriously the curricula vitae of flood victims clinging to a piece of floating wreckage and finally to decide that, no matter what their virtues, all but a few had better be allowed to drown.” But such voices were few and far between.
In the face of all this, it is little wonder that as late as January 1943, 78 percent of respondents in one poll thought it would be a “bad idea” to let in more immigrants after the war; or that in August 1940, 15 percent of respondents had considered Jews “a menace to America.” Increasingly desperate Jews, squeezed between the Nazis’ deceptiveness and the U.S. government’s apathy, had to find another route for help.
BUT BY THE END of 1940, in addition to the refugees’ plight there was desperation of another form. England, the only leading nation now at war with Hitler, was rapidly depleting its munitions and other matériel. Running out of options, Churchill pleaded for immediate help. But Roosevelt, as with the refugees, was inclined to caution. In May 1940, as Hitler’s forces marched westward across Europe, the president refused Churchill’s urgent request for destroyers. There was nothing America could give that would be of greater help to England. Roosevelt, however, was unwilling to take this step.
Nevertheless, the president did stand up to his own military chiefs so that America could supply England with airplanes; 22,000 thirty-caliber machine guns; 25,000 automatic rifles; nine hundred 75-millimeter howitzers; 58,000 antiaircraft weapons; 500,000 Enfield rifles (left over from World War I); and 130 million rounds of ammunition. But for the time being, that was as far as Roosevelt was willing to go. Thus, as German planes and troops beat France into submission, there were growing whispered questions about him. These questions went to the heart of his response to the Nazi threat. Why, interventionists wondered, was this eloquent liberal, this enemy of totalitarianism, standing passively by, first during the horror of the Munich agreement and now during the agonizing fall of France? Why was this graduate of Groton and son of Harvard, who fought relentlessly for the impoverished at home, now coldly ignoring the plight of Hitler’s victims cramming American consulates abroad? Why, it was asked in London, was there a hiatus in action at the White House—and where was the bold improvisation for which Roosevelt was so famous? Finally, why was America all but following a policy of “America first”?
Moreover, did Roosevelt not see that his pursuit of political popularity at home had exacted a heavy toll—that he was sending a signal to Hitler that America was sitting this one out?
In truth, Roosevelt’s was a double game. At the same time as he was trying to rearm England, he was continuing to insist to the American public that the United States would not fight. But in pandering to the Americans who wanted to stay out of the war, the president was unable to turn the country around on the question of involvement. That, however, was about to change.
Caught at a crossroads, with Paris about to fall, the French government fleeing, and Mussolini’s Italy declaring war and attacking at the Côte d’Azur, the president argued that, in effect, America would at least enter the war by proxy. Speaking at a commencement in Charlottesville, Virginia, he declared in stirring words that it was a “delusion” for the United States to contemplate existing as “a lone Island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force.” He repeatedly emphasized America’s responsibility to arm and supply those nations now firmly committed to standing against Germany, although he mentioned no names. “We will,” Roosevelt said, “extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation; and at the same time, we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves may have equipment and training equal to the task.” After pausing for emphasis, he concluded, “Full speed ahead!”
In Britain, a resolute Churchill huddled by the radio, taking in every one of the president’s words. On hearing “Full speed ahead!” the prime minister all but jumped for joy. If America wasn’t going to join the fight, then at least it would help Britain stay in the fight. “We all listened to you last night,” a grateful Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, “and were fortified by the grand scope of your declaration. Your statement that the material aid of the United States will be given to the allies in their struggle is a strong encouragement in a dark but not unhopeful hour.” Now, there was no turning back. America was headed toward a war footing, even if the president protested otherwise. The Roosevelt administration moved cautiously at first, then more decisively, calling for compulsory military training, the draft, the creation of a million-man army, and the use of the U.S. Navy to deliver supplies to Britain. To be sure, there were detractors. One isolationist, Senator Burton Wheeler, whose choice of words would later prove unfortunate, railed against America’s getting involved in the “Holocaust of Europe’s wars,” while William Borah, the Senate’s longest-serving member, delivered a scathing attack against Roosevelt, insisting that America would now be “taking sides,” and that this would be “the first step to active intervention.” And the aviator Charles Lindbergh, the nation’s most prominent isolationist, continued to be a spokesman for antiwar fervor.
Roosevelt sat back and waited, believing that the r
apidly changing international situation would eventually mute the isolationists. By now, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland had all but disappeared as states. France had fallen; the Low Countries were occupied. Norway, Denmark, and Finland lived under the swastika. And it was just a matter of time before Greece would be threatened and the Balkans overrun. Everywhere, it seemed, there were fields of danger. At home, public opinion still remained mixed, but antiwar sentiment was softening. In July 1940, a Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans felt the most important task was to stay out of the war, but 73 percent supported giving all possible assistance to England short of entering the conflict.
What would it take to get the nation into the war? Lacking Roosevelt’s firm voice to steer it, the country stayed divided, and a great debate raged. There were those who wanted no part of the war whatsoever. There were those who were haters—hating the Jews, despising the British, or sympathizing with the Fascists. There were left-wing isolationists, who saw war as an unmitigated evil; and right-wing isolationists, who saw this war as a plaything of the dictatorial Roosevelt. There were mothers who simply couldn’t bear the thought of their boys dying on far-off battlefields. And then there were those who wanted to fight the Nazis immediately.