The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

Michigan Representative Clare E. Hoffman, addressing the fifth Annual National
Defense Meeting held in Philadelphia on March 29, attended by seventy-three patriotic
organizations, argued that America could no longer serve as the refuge of the
“downtrodden and oppressed.” Rather, the alien posed an internal threat by spreading
dissatisfaction, intolerance, Communism and calls for the “destruction of the only
existing land of refuge”; acts facilitated by a President who had ignored historical
lessons, abandoned campaign promises and who had “charted a course at the end of
which lay dictatorship.” 47
One writer to the editor of a leading national newspaper voiced the concerns of
many average Americans. The nation should provide assistance to citizens in need rather
than extending “an invitation to feed and care for the agitators of Russia and Germany
and Austria.” 48 The Nation believed that any loosening of current American immigration
laws would require an “unmistakable demonstration of [positive] public opinion” in order
to persuade Washington politicians to confront an issue that was deemed “too hot to
handle.” 49
Others continued the argument that FDR should aid America’s own
impoverished and unemployed and not allow entry of thousands of foreign “unwanted
citizens” in violation of immigration laws. 50 A writer to an African-American newspaper
described the “colored people of the United States [as] among the most persecuted in the
world.” He believed that American attention should be diverted away from the plight of
47 Rep. Clare E. Hoffman, “The Enemy within Our House,” Congressional Record Appendix, Seventy-
Fifth Congress, 3 rd sess., vol. 10, April 2, 1938 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1938), 1283-1285.
48 The United States News, April 4, 1938.
49 The Nation, December 10, 1938, 609-610.
50 Washington Post, March 30, 1938, 6.
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