The Jews Should Keep Quiet by Rafael Medoff

Author:Rafael Medoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Jewish Publication Society
Published: 2019-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Rescue Resolution

In the days preceding the march, Bergson Group supporter Fowler Harper, a law professor and solicitor general for the Interior Department, began drafting a congressional resolution calling for the creation of a U.S. government agency to rescue refugees. On October 1 Senator Elbert Thomas (D-UT), who intended to co-sponsor the resolution, sent an early draft of it to Assistant Secretary Long for his comment. It took Long four weeks to reply. On October 27 Long wrote back that the administration was already doing its best to help refugees, so the agency proposed in the resolution would be “unwarranted and liable to duplicate functions which are being carried out by the Department.”17

In the meantime, Bergson had brought his case directly to Long. Their meeting took place at the State Department on October 15. Bergson was accompanied by Henry Pringle, who until recently had been chief of the publications division of the Office of War Information. It was a measure of the growing public interest in the plight of the Jews, along with the Bergson Group’s diplomatic skills, that a handful of Roosevelt administration officials, such as Pringle and Harper, would join his cause. (Nor were they the only ones; later that autumn, Interior Secretary Ickes himself would become honorary co-chairman of the Washington DC chapter of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe.) Bergson explained to Long the need for “some organization of the Government to attend to the affairs of the Jews,” as Long put it in his memo of their talk. Long replied that such an organization already existed, in the Visa Division of the State Department, where there was “a section which devoted its entire attention to the refugee problem.” Long then pressed Bergson, without success, to stop publishing advertisements calling for Allied rescue action.18

In early November Harper presented his final draft of the resolution to the lead sponsor, Senator Guy Gillette (D-IA). It called for “the creation by the President of a commission of diplomatic, economic, and military experts to formulate and effectuate a plan of immediate action designed to save the surviving Jewish people of Europe from extinction at the hands of Nazi Germany.” At Bergson’s direction, Harper omitted any mention of Palestine as a destination for refugees, so as not to alienate those members of Congress who would be reluctant to challenge British policy in the middle of the war. On November 9 Gillette introduced it in the Senate, and Will Rogers Jr. (D-CA) and Joseph Baldwin (R-NY) presented it in the House of Representatives.19

Because it was merely a non-binding recommendation rather than legislation, such a resolution ordinarily would not have necessitated a hearing. But Rep. Sol Bloom, as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, insisted on the unusual step of holding full hearings. Whether Bloom was acting directly at the request of the administration or simply concurred with its stance against the resolution, the apparent goal was the same: to delay and undermine the resolution. At Bloom’s direction, hearings on what became known as the Gillette-Rogers resolution opened on November 19.

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