Episode 6: Lower than Animals

Mark Oppenheimer 

Support for Antisemitism, U.S.A. comes from the Henry Luce Foundation and the David Bruce Smith Foundation.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made history with the first transatlantic solo flight. He piloted his plane the Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris, and he returned home to a hero's welcome. 4 million people, or pretty much everyone in New York City, lined the streets for a ticker tape parade in his honor. Five years later, Lindbergh dominated the news headlines again. But this time for tragic reasons. His infant son had been kidnapped. And two months and many ransom notes later, the baby's remains were found. To escape the press, Lindbergh took refuge in Europe. He made several trips to Germany, assessing and admiring the Nazi buildup of the German air force. In 1938, German Air Force Commander Herman Goering presented Lindbergh with a metal on behalf of the Fuhrer. This was just a few weeks before Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass, when Nazi thugs ransacked Jewish stores and synagogues, and carried off tens of thousands of Jews to concentration camps. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt saw fit to speak out criticizing Lindbergh publicly for his cozy relationship with the Nazis. Lindbergh dedicated himself to making sure that the United States did not get involved in a European war. Lindbergh did not want us to fight the Nazis. In September 1941, he gave a speech on behalf of the America First Committee, which opposed entry into the war.

Charles Lindbergh 

In selecting the three groups as the major agitators for war, I have included only those whose support is essential to the war party. If any of these groups, the British, the Jewish or the administration, stop agitating for war, I believe there will be little danger of our involvement.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Lindbergh blamed American Jews for this drift toward war. He said that he admired the, quote, "Jewish race," and he understood why Jews would want to overthrow Nazi Germany. But Lindbergh objected to the fact that American Jews were urging their government to help European Jews. In that speech, Lindbergh went on to say, quote, "their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." And Lindbergh warned, quote, "instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every way possible, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences." "Tolerance," Lindbergh cautioned, quote, "cannot survive war and devastations." In his diary, he complained about the number of Jews coming into the country as refugees. He wrote, "it is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country, adding to rather than detracting from its strength. If an antisemitic movement starts in the United States, it may go far, it will certainly affect the good Jews along with the others. When such a movement starts, moderation ends, and we are not a moderate people once we get started, and an anti Jewish movement might be considerably worse here than in Germany." Not surprisingly, even before his 1941 speech, Lindbergh was accused of both Nazi sympathies and antisemitism.

Charles Lindbergh 

A smear campaign was instituted against individuals who opposed intervention. The terms of fifth columnist, traitor, Nazi, antisemitic, were thrown ceaselessly at anyone who dared to suggest that it was not to the best interests of the United States to enter war. Men lost their jobs if they were, frankly, anti war. Many others dared no longer speak.

Mark Oppenheimer 

After Pearl Harbor, Americans overwhelmingly supported the war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But until Pearl Harbor, many Americans were sympathetic to the Nazis and not so sympathetic to the Jews. And it wasn't just a matter of a few bad apples. Antisemitism in the 1930s was very public and very widespread. You found it among politicians, among clergy. It was in the US government and in the US Army. And when troops went around the world to fight fascism, they took those antisemitic views with them.

Mark Oppenheimer 

I'm Mark Oppenheimer, and this is Antisemitism, U.S.A., a podcast about the history of antisemitism in the United States. Episode Six, Lower than Animals. William Dudley Pelley was the leader of the Silver Legion, also known as the silver shirts. The silver shirts were somewhere between a strange far right social club and a private militia. According to them, they were preparing to defend the country from Jews and other threats. At their peak, they had around 15,000 members with tens of thousands of other hangers on.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Pelley's story could be the basis of a great novel. He began his career as an author and journalist. In 1918, he worked for the YMCA and the Associated Press, and ended up in Siberia alongside an American Expeditionary Force to oppose the region's Bolshevik takeover. Pelley later said that it was in Russia that he discovered how dangerous Jews were because of their role in the Russian Revolution. Pelley's next stop was Hollywood, where he divorced his wife made a small fortune as a screenwriter and enjoyed the sins of the flesh. But then his Hollywood career fell apart. And he blamed Jewish Hollywood moguls for his problems. So then Pelley went in a totally different direction. In 1928, he had a vision through a quote, "blueish mist." In his vision, he found himself on a slab of marble, next to two men who told him the secrets of the universe. Pelley moved to New York and wrote about his experiences. He became a spiritualist guru, and thousands of people subscribed to his newsletter. Some gave him a lot of money. Then Pelley's life took another crazy turn. Here's historian Bradley Hart, author of Hitler's American Friends.

Bradley Hart 

In 1933, when Hitler takes power, Pelley again transitions his career to become a fascist leader, bizarrely enough. So he claims that in 1932, before Hitler takes power, he has received a revelation from Jesus Himself, telling him that when a house painter in Germany creates a new political movement, he should do something similar in the US. Now, of course, Pelley only reveals this supposed prophecy after Hitler has taken power in 1933. But he claims that this is the inspiration for the foundation of Silver Legion or sometimes called the Silver Shirt Legion.

Mark Oppenheimer 

And you might have guessed what he and his followers wore: silver shirts with a large red L above the heart. They stood out. Pelley wanted to establish a "Christian Commonwealth." This Commonwealth wasn't meant for everyone. Pelley wanted to enslave black people again. And of course, there would be no place for Jews in this commonwealth.

Bradley Hart 

If you look at his plans, supposedly for what he wants to do, to or with America's Jewish population. A lot of it is about segregating them from wider society. And so he proposes actually confining Jews to a number of American cities and confining them to essentially ghettos and having an entire division of the government essentially watch over Jewish affairs effectively. I mean, not dissimilar really to what Hitler was doing in Germany. But actually in some ways, more overt.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Pelley promised he would establish a "secretary of Jewry." Pelley believed in a very creative version of the Jewish communist conspiracy.

Bradley Hart 

But the other interesting and telling thing about Pelley is that his view of who Jews are and who qualifies as a Jew is really unusual. So Pelley adopts this view that anyone who is supposedly under the control of a rabbi, this is the term he actually uses is to be classed as a Jew. And he estimated this number is in the tens of millions. There's tens of millions of Americans, he says, are under the control of a rabbi in some way. Now, this is a an estimate of Jewish Americans that far exceeds what we know the Jewish population has ever been of the United States.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Pelley had other solutions for what he called the Jewish problem. Along with the confinement of Jews to one place in each state, he would deny Jews the vote. And that wasn't Pelley's most drastic idea. He proposed sterilizing Jewish men. In Pelley's words, quote, "present Jewish families need not be disrupted. Present young Jews and young Jewesses says need not be kept from marrying. But no more Jewish babies will come from such unions. Jewish families will be childless." In 1936, Pelley ran for president. He proclaimed that "the time has come for an American Hitler and a pogrom." He promised to turn the silver shirts into an American Gestapo. Fortunately, Pelley was far less successful with American voters than Hitler was in Germany. Pelley formed what he called the Christian Party, but only got on the ballot in Washington state where he got about 1500 votes. Pelle became the focus of both Congressional investigations and prosecutions. The latter because he had funneled donations meant for his spiritualist journals into silver shirt activities. He went on the lam but he was caught. And in 1942, he was convicted. He spent eight years in jail. When he got out he reinvented himself yet again. As a UFO enthusiast who talked in seances with figures such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. You might be thinking that William Dudley Pelley was a totally fringe figure. And that's mostly true. There was no chance he was going to become an American Hitler. But look, there's another way of seeing things. While there were not a lot of self described Nazis in the United States in the 1930s, there were a lot of Nazi sympathizers. And there were famous Nazi sympathizers like Henry Ford, and Charles Lindbergh. As Bradley Hart explains, the one thing that held these movements and figures together was a shared hatred of Jews.

Bradley Hart 

And when I say that antisemitism was the glue that held these people together, I say that because when you look at what these groups have in common, in some senses, they have almost nothing in common except antisemitism. So to give you one example, we have Father Charles Coughlin, perhaps the most important and influential media personality in this period. Father Charles Coughlin is a Catholic. The Catholics themselves face a great deal of prejudice from groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Ku Klux Klan is also antisemitic. When you look at groups like William Dudley Pelley's Silver Legion, the Silver Legion is a Christian extremist movement that is also anti semitic. And so when Father Coughlin, the German American Bund, Silver Legion, even groups like the Klan are uniting in alliances of convenience in this period, it really is antisemitism is bringing them together. And these are groups again that don't like each other even or have very different antisemitic traditions motivating them, but anti semitism is the banner under which they can unite.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In the mid 1930s. Father Charles Coughlin was a Detroit priest and one of the leading radio personalities in the country. About a quarter of Americans listened to him at least once a month. In the wake of a night of antisemitic violence, known as Kristallnacht in November 1938. Coughlin decided to give his radio audience a history lesson. According to Coughlin, where did Nazism come from?

Father Charles Coughlin 

Nazism was conceived as a political defense mechanism against communism, and was ushered into existence as a result of communism. And communism itself was regarded by the rising generation of Germans as a product not of Russia, but of a group of Jews who dominated the destinies of Russia. But be it emphasized, that these Jews were not religious Jews, they were the haters of God, the haters of religions. Thus throughout Germany antipathy towards all Jews grew rapidly. It is my opinion that Nazism, the effect of communism, cannot be liquidated in its persecution complex until the religious Jews in high place in synagogue and finance or radio and press attack the cause. Attack it forthright and the errors then the spread of communism together with all our co-nationals who support

Mark Oppenheimer 

In Coughlin's logic, communism was the world's number one problem. And Jews were responsible for it in two ways. Number one, the usurious behavior of Jewish bankers had created fertile soil for communism to take root. And Jewish communists themselves had brought about the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and were busy exporting that evil to other countries. In Coughlin's mind, Nazism wasn't good, but it was understandable as a reaction to the problem of communism. So Jews had brought persecution upon themselves. They were the root cause of communism, and by extension, Nazism. For all of Coughlin's popularity, Nazism was never very popular in the United States. When the German American Bund held a packed house rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939, far more New Yorkers protested outside than were at the rally inside. And Coughlin did lose some of his radio outlets and some of his audience after his defense of Kristallnacht. At the same time, many Americans who hated Nazis nevertheless bought into Coughlin's logic. Communism was the biggest threat to democracy and Christianity and Jews were responsible for communism. Many conservative critics of President Roosevelt's New Deal, which they sometimes called the Jew deal, added one more argument: that Jews had a stranglehold not just on media, and entertainment, and banking, but also on President Franklin Roosevelt administrations. They had lots of secretive influence. Just to be clear, there were anti communists and anti New Dealers who are not antisemites, or, at the very least, would go nowhere near the Jew hatred of Pelley or Coughlin. At the same time in the 1930s antisemitism was pervasive on the American right.

Bradley Hart 

What's important to remember about this period is that antisemitism was much more widespread than we perceive it as being in the United States today. This was a period in which there were literally millions of Americans who not only harbored casually antisemitic views, but deeply anti semitic views that we would see as almost exterminationist today. Public opinion data indicated as many as a third of Americans at various points think that Jews should be encouraged or in some way forced to leave the United States.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Large percentages of Americans bought into conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers, Jewish entertainment executives, Jewish politicians. Plus, a lot of Christians saw Jews as a religious threat. And still other Americans understood the threat in racial terms. Put it all together, and at a minimum, about a third of Americans harbored deep suspicions of Jewish power. The culture of antisemitism led to countless instances of exclusion and discrimination, from universities, to offices, to hotels. Even though William Dudley Pelley's predicted race war never materialized, American antisemitism was dangerous. Members of the Christian front, a mostly Catholic group, inspired by Father Coughlin, smashed synagogue windows and assaulted Jews. In Baltimore, a gang of high school students who wanted to rid their school of Jews branded one of their classmates. Historian Rebecca Erbelding is the author of Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe. And she notes that when Americans first got wind of Nazi oppression in Europe, they came out in droves to protest.

Rebecca Erbelding 

There's a wave of marches and rallies throughout the United States, including the largest protest march in New York City history to date, which is timed to book burning on May 10 1933, an event that Americans knew about in advance. There was so much newspaper reporting about this, and so many newspaper correspondents in Germany, who were really influential Americans reporting back what they were seeing on the streets. And so there is a lot of interest in the spring of 1933 in the United States about what's happening. This does not translate to a robust government response.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Why was there not a robust government response? Here's the most basic reason why: immigration laws. As of 1933, the United States had a cap on overall immigration of about 150,000. And quotas privileged immigrants from places like Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany. Congress hadn't passed those laws simply out of a desire to keep Jews out of the country. But that had been one motivation. And back then, the US didn't have any sort of legal process for admitting refugees. So as the crisis in Europe unfolded, there was a contradictory response. There was widespread sympathy for Jews. At the same time, there was opposition to letting in more immigrants.

Rebecca Erbelding 

So by the summer of 1939, over 300,000 people are on the waiting list under the German quota to immigrate to the United States. And Roosevelt after the annexation of Austria combined the German and the Austrian quota, which bumped that number up from 25,957 to 27,370. So it's a small bump, but it also opens up all of those slots to Austrian Jews. And you see photos of tens of thousands of people applying for immigration, applying to get on the waiting list at the consulate and reports that day after day, another thousand people are lined up, another thousand, another thousand.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Many German and Austrian Jews did manage to emigrate. But Jews in other parts of Europe could not even apply for visas.

Rebecca Erbelding 

When we talk about Jewish immigration, when we talk about Jewish refugees fleeing, we are talking about people who lived in Central and Western Europe. People who lived in Eastern Europe largely did not have the opportunity to leave. One because the quotas were so small. And two because by the time the Nazis threatened those areas, it was already too late. So when Germany invades Poland, which already had a very small quota, the US government in Poland flees alongside the Polish government in exile. They go into exile in London, US diplomats flee with them. And by March 1940, there are no US diplomats left in Poland. So no place for you to go to show your paperwork, no place for you to go for an interview. So the Polish Jews who do manage to escape are the ones who get to Moscow. And so it is incredibly difficult to leave from Southern and Eastern Europe.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Again, why doesn't the United States do more? Part of the answer is antisemitism on the part of State Department employees, some of whom were deliberately thwarting attempts to help Jews.

Rebecca Erbelding 

In mid December 1943, one Treasury Department employee breaks into the State Department file room on a Saturday morning, and discovers that not only have the delays been deliberate, the State Department is deliberately trying to stop this humanitarian aid. But that the Assistant Secretary of State, a man named Breckinridge Long, had personally instructed US diplomats in Switzerland to stop sending information about the Holocaust to the United States, that that information was trickling out to activists. Those activists were then putting pressure on the government to do something.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Individual antisemites like Breckinridge Long of the State Department created additional stumbling blocks. But the main reason that the US didn't do more to help Jewish victims of the Holocaust, is because most Americans didn't want more immigration in general. And they certainly didn't want more Jewish immigration in particular.

Mark Oppenheimer 

For example, in 1939, the St. Louis, a ship carrying nearly a thousand, mostly Jewish children, was turned away from the United States. Nearly all the passengers were also blocked from entering Cuba or Canada. After sailing back to Europe, some passengers were granted entry to Great Britain. The others ended up in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. 250 of the passengers died in the Holocaust. It was a tragedy created not simply by Jew hatred, but by an inflexible immigration system most Americans didn't want to change. There was a bill before Congress that year that would have admitted 10,000 or 20,000 children from Germany outside the quota system. But the bill never even came up for a vote. A public opinion poll revealed an overwhelming majority of Americans opposed the idea, and that was to help children. By the end of 1942, the US government knew about Germany's final solution. It was in American newspapers, President Roosevelt knew, American Jewish leaders knew. This didn't lead to a change in US immigration laws. But it did eventually prompt the creation of a War Refugee Board in the Treasury Department. In the last 16 months of the war, its staff members engaged in frantic and creative efforts to save Jews from extermination.

Rebecca Erbelding 

And they do a whole host of things. They make it easier for humanitarian aid organizations to send aid into Europe. They debate whether or not the United States should bomb Auschwitz. They opened a refugee camp in upstate New York, bringing the first group of refugees outside of the immigration system to the United States, almost all of them Jewish. They put pressure on neutral nations to do more to protest what the Nazis are doing and to share information about what their diplomats are seeing inside Nazi territory. Pretty much everything that the United States does in relation to the Holocaust in 1944 and 45, is filtered through this organization of 30 year old Treasury Department lawyers. And they are remarkably successful. They save tens of thosuands of lives and help hundreds of thousands of people in the final year of war

Mark Oppenheimer 

Despite high levels of antisemitism in the United States, and despite implacable opposition to immigration, American actions saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives. Could the United States have done more? Of course. In retrospect, anything short of everything wasn't enough. We'll have more after the break.

Mark Oppenheimer 

It took General George S. Patton, only a few months to go from being disgusted with Nazis to being disgusted with Jewish survivors. Patton was the commander of the 3rd United States Army on its push from Normandy into Germany. He was brash and brave. He pushed his men relentlessly, telling them that war is a bloody business, and that the best way to save their lives was to kill Nazis as efficiently as possible. A journalist gave Patton the apt nickname, "blood and guts." In 1945, Patton's troops entered the Ohrdorf concentration camp, the first camp liberated by Americans. A few days later, Patton accompanied Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower on an inspection of the camp. Eisenhower arranged for camera crews to accompany this and other camp inspections, which enabled millions of Americans to watch on newsreels.

Newsreel 

The murder mill at Ohrdorf brings out the full horror and bestiality of the Nazi scum and General Eisenhower, a man hardened by the blood and shock of war seems appalled at these unbelievable sites. Accompanied by General Bradley on his revolting mission, and also by General Patton, hardboiled, yet visibly moved, the Supreme Commander sees demonstrations of the torture racks. Most camp officers fled before the advancing Allies, but some fell into our hands and with townsfolk are forced to witness the devil's work of the men they should be ashamed to call countrymen.

Mark Oppenheimer 

It was too much even for Old Blood and Guts, Patton vomited during the camp tour. He could not steel himself to go into one shed that contains stacks of corpses. Eisenhower ordered American troops and German townspeople to tour a camp, and he commented that the American soldier now will know what he is fighting against. Patton gives similar orders to soldiers and civilians under his command. Fast forward a few months, Patton was now military governor of Bavaria, and many Holocaust survivors had remained in the concentration camps. In some cases, they were even prevented from leaving. Conditions in the camps were squalid, and displaced persons from other occupation zones were trickling into the region. President Harry Truman appointed a committee to investigate. The committee was led by Earl Harrison and his August 1945 report was shocking.

Earl Harrison 

Many Jewish displaced persons are living under guard behind barbed wire fence in camps built by the Germans for slave laborers and Jews, including some of the most notorious of the concentration camps amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary, and generally grim conditions in complete idleness. We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of SS troops.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Harrison also noted that the US Army preferred to employ Germans including in many cases former Nazis rather than displaced persons. The investigator put his finger on another issue. As the chief targets of Nazi persecution, Jewish survivors had particular needs. Harrison argued that the US Army should treat Jews as Jews and give them special consideration, including housing and help emigrating to Palestine or elsewhere. At first, Eisenhower bristled at the criticism. But then he complied with orders from the White House to more actively help displaced persons, especially Jews. Patton hated Harrison's report and disagreed with his new orders. But orders were orders and he obeyed them. In his private writings, however, Patton revealed his very negative opinions about Jews. Here's Joseph Bendersky, author of The Jewish Threat: Antisemitic Politics of the US Army.

Joseph Bendersky 

From his papers, we know that he was definitely a social Darwinist racial thinker who saw Jews as inherently inferior. In his mind, the Jewish survivors that he encountered at the DP camps and concentration camps after World War Two proved the point that they were inherently inferior. He went so far as to state that no people could drop to the level of this despicable condition in a mere four years. It had to be a reflection of their innate character. And he favored the Germans over the Jews

Mark Oppenheimer 

Patton wrote in his diary that quote, "Harrison and his ilk believed that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals." As the months passed, Patton thought less and less of the Jews who'd survived Nazi persecution. They were living in squalor, their hygiene was lacking. He heard that Jewish men and women sometimes used adjacent toilets or even just relieved themselves on the floor. When Eisenhower dragged Patton to a Yom Kippur service that fall, Patton complained about the stench. In his diary, Patton frequently recorded his complaints about Jews, quote, "either the displaced persons never had any sense of decency, or else they lost it all during their period of internment by the Germans. My personal opinion is that no people could have sunk to the level of degradation these have reached in the short space of four years." In other words, Patton believed that liberated Jews were wretched not because they'd been starved, or worked nearly to death, or because they'd witnessed unimaginable horrors, or because their families had been murdered, or because they'd been treated like animals. They were wretched because they were an inferior race. And Patton couldn't stomach displacing Germans from their homes in order to provide accommodations to Jews. After all, Germans were a superior race.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Patton had brought his conspiratorial ideas about Jews with him to Germany, and what he saw in the camps did not change his mind. Patton worried about Jewish power pushing American policy in dangerous directions. He complained about former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, whose advocacy had led to efforts to rescue Jews in the final years of the war. Patton suspected there were pro Jewish elements in the US military government of Germany. He accused a quote "Semitic influence in the press" of trying to "implement communism." Ultimately, Patton's opposition to the new policies cost him his job. He told the press that strict denazification was impossible, it would be like rooting out Democrats or Republicans in America. So Eisenhower removed Patton from his post. Patton was unusual in his outspokenness, but not unusual in his views. Given the pervasiveness of anti Jewish racism and conspiracy theories in the US population, it isn't surprising many army officers shared these views. And these views persisted both during and after the war.

Joseph Bendersky 

There was definitely this great condemnation of the persecution of Jews and what the Germans did to Jews in the concentration camps. But as soon as the military it only within a matter of months, this changes, this attitude changes. As soon as they are dealing with the actual Jewish refugees, the Jewish survivors who are traumatized, there is very little sympathy for them. Whereas the Germans appear to be cooperative, orderly, clean. And you can see this, there's immediate identification within a matter of months with the Germans. So a lot of suffering that went on there. At the same time, they didn't want them to come to United States, they do not want Jews to go into Palestine. And you have this displaced person problem and all these people suffering for years.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Exact numbers are impossible. But between 1933 and 1945, the US admitted between 200,000 and 250,000 Jews, the Nazis systematically murdered 6 million Jews and inflicted imprisonment, torture and other forms of persecution on many millions more. In the end, the US admitted more Jews fleeing Nazi persecution than any other country did. But many more were denied entry. After the war, debates about America's immigration quotas, and when we should make exceptions, resumed. It was clear many Jews had no homes to go back to. And it was also clear that Jews in parts of Europe that were coming under Soviet rule wanted to go elsewhere. They flooded into the Allied zones of occupation in Western Germany. Some wanted to go to Palestine, others hope to come to the US. But would the United States finally open its doors? The simple answer was no. Public opinion had not changed. Remarkably, a survey in late 1945 showed that only 5%, 5% of Americans wanted to increase rates of immigration. At the same time, President Truman wanted to find a way to help ease the crisis of displaced persons. Here again is Rebecca Erbelding.

Rebecca Erbelding 

Truman doesn't quite know what to do. And finally, with the absence of any sort of congressional action at the end of 1945, he announces that displaced persons will get preference under the quota. So the quota system remains and remains in place until 1965. But that people who are displaced can skip the line. Basically, this results in thosuands of people, but not a lot, coming to the United States who were displaced in 1945, 1946, and 1947. Now they still needed a financial sponsor, they still needed all of the paperwork. A lot of that was really tricky to get when you're in a displaced persons camp. But the people who made it tended to have family who had emigrated before the war, and so people who could sponsor them, who are now American citizens that they were joining,

Mark Oppenheimer 

Congress debated a Displaced Persons Act, proposing to admit refugees as immigrants outside the quota system. John Trevor, an architect of the old restrictive laws from the 1920s, testified in 1947, before a House committee, he was against the Displaced Persons Act of course. He complained that the United States had already taken in more than its fair share of refugees, and of Jewish refugees in particular. He said that Jewish displaced persons, this being a rather euphemistic phrase for Holocaust survivors could go to places like Canada, Australia, or South Africa, places with lots of land where they could become farmers. Trevor wanted to keep Jews out of American cities where he believed that slums would breed revolution.

Mark Oppenheimer 

In episode four, we talked about Trevor's views on maintaining the country's racial stock. 25 years later, his views hadn't changed much. But the moment was different. This time around, Trevor generally avoided his old blatantly antisemitic rhetoric, and members of Congress pushed back vigorously against his talk about maintaining the country's racial balance. The next year 1948, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, which gave slots outside the quota system to displaced persons, but only certain displaced persons.

Rebecca Erbelding 

One of the restrictions that they put inside the Displaced Persons Act is that you had to be in the American Zone of Occupation, prior to December 1945, in order to qualify. For many Jewish survivors, who had recovered and then attempted to go home, they had not made it back to the American Zone of Occupation before that date. And so automatically, the law disqualified many Jewish Holocaust survivors, and prioritized people who never tried to go home, people who were from Eastern Europe, displaced as forced laborers or as other forms of displacement into Germany or into Central Europe during the war, and then decided that they were just going to stay and get to the United States. And so the majority of people who qualify who've come to the United States under the Displaced Persons Act, are not Jewish Holocaust survivors. Forced laborers who are not Jewish, also went through horrible things, but are often in better physical shape than many Jewish survivors. Jewish survivors, many of them had been in hiding or in camps for years. They are emaciated, they are sick, they need assistance after the war. And so when Americans are looking at photos, they are seeing healthier looking non Jewish Polish displaced persons and saying, Well, those people will be okay, if they're allowed to come. But Jewish immigrants, they look sick, they might be bringing disease, they're going to need economic support.

Mark Oppenheimer 

It's the same logic that led General Patton to regard Jewish refugees as animals. In 1950, Congress finally amended the Displaced Persons Act to remove the preferences.

Rebecca Erbelding 

And so it takes a really long time for the idea that those are the people we should really be helping to take hold, and it never really takes hold in time. And so while the United States does admit tens of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors, more end up in Palestine, which then becomes the State of Israel, because it's closer, that's where you should go, and that is where young people see a future for themselves.

Mark Oppenheimer 

American antisemitism did not vanish with the country's war against Nazism, or because of revelations about the Holocaust. Many Americans still associated Jews with foreign radicalism, they still bought into conspiracy theories about Jewish economic and political power. Some still saw Jews as a subhuman race that threatened the country's racial stock. Yet, even so, something was changing. Antisemitism gradually became less respectable. Immigration restrictionists didn't talk about Jews the way they had after World War One. George Patton insulted Jews privately, but not publicly. John Trevor felt compelled to tone down his rhetoric. Perhaps that's all pretty thin progress. But after decades of pervasive and often systemic antisemitism, the stage was set for Jews and their allies to demand that they be seen as full Americans.

Mark Oppenheimer 

Thank you for listening to Antisemitism, U.S.A. it's a production of R2 Studios, part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Visit R2studios.org for a complete transcript of today's episode and for suggestions for further reading. I'm your host Mark Oppenheimer. Antisemitism, U.S.A. is written by John Turner and Lincoln Mullen. Britt Tevis is our lead scholar Jim Ambuske, is our producer, Jeanette Patrick is our executive producer. We'd like to thank Zev Eleff for being our lead advisor and we'd like to thank our advisory board members, Laura Shaw Frank, Riv-Ellen Prell, and Jonathan Sarna. Our graduate assistants are Rachel Birch, Alexandra Miller, and Amber Pelham. Our thanks to Bradley Hart, Rebecca Erbelding, and Joseph Bendersky for sharing their expertise with us in this episode. We're able to bring you this show through the generosity of the Henry Luce Foundation, the David Bruce Smith Foundation, and many individual donors like you. Thank you for listening, and we hope you'll join us for the next episode.