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

were limited to “handsome speeches” but unable to devise any “constructive measures”
providing the Nazis and their Fascist counterparts the opportunity to “gloat…over their
fecklessness.” 8
Hannah Arendt concluded that it was “obvious” to the delegates at Evian
that the entirety of German and Austrian Jewry were “potentially stateless”; a conclusion
that would be shared and acted upon by other nations seeking to “rid” themselves of
unwanted minorities. 9
James MacGregor Burns perceived Roosevelt as a flawed
individual afflicted by a “derangement of ends and means,” struggling to follow the
proper moral course while seeking to retain and acquire pure political power. 10
Arthur
Morse, David Wyman, Henry Feingold and Saul Friedman have argued that America,
influenced by anti-Semitism, economic and social nativism, anti-alien and anti-immigrant
prejudices, fear of the introduction of dangerous foreign ideologies, isolationism resulting
from the Great War and the effects of the Depression, had offered little more than public
expressions of sympathy to the victims of Nazi persecution while maintaining barriers to
immigration. The downward spiral of these persecuted minorities’ existence could
potentially have been altered, they claimed, if the democratic nations of the world had
reacted in a more positive, forceful and charitable manner. Instead the response was
muted, generally ineffectual and often contradictory. 11
8 Ismar Elbogen and Moses Hadas, A Century of Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1946), 662.
9 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, seventh edition (NY: Meridian Books, 1962), 282.
609.
10 James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970),
11 Arthur D. Morse. While Six Million Died A Chronicle of American Apathy (NY: The Overlook Press,
1967); David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press); Saul Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy
Towards Jewish Refugees, 1938-1945 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1973).
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