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

of classical Western prudence” artfully co-mingled with “idealism and pragmatism.” 89
Jack Fischel claimed that Roosevelt did not identify the refugees as Jews due to domestic
concerns of stimulating domestic anti-Semitism as heralded by Father Coughlin, Gerald
L.K. Smith, Gerald Winrod and the German-American Bund. Any open display of
sympathy or support for Jews would open the President to such diatribes as being the
father of the “Jew Deal.” 90 Saul Friedman argued that any support for pro-Jewish
immigration measures would have caused FDR to suffer “politically” due to his
increasing unpopularity in opinion polls. 91
George L. Warren, former Director of the International Migration Service,
member of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees and later advisor to
Myron Taylor at the Evian Conference, believed FDR called for the July 1938 meeting as
a means of responding to the Anschluss because “he didn’t know what else to do.” Faced
with a potentially hostile Congress and restrictive immigration laws Roosevelt was
“terribly embarrassed” for having convened the conference. Short of maximizing the
existing German and Austrian quota there was little he could do to increase immigration
into the country. The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, established at Evian to
negotiate financial arrangements with Germany that would facilitate emigration and
resettlement, was a “futile effort by George Rublee… [t]hat failed completely.” He
offered a number of reasons for the Conference’s failure: the Depression with its
attendant unemployment; migrations from the countryside into the cities was occurring
89 Mark J. Rozell and William D. Pederson, FDR and the Modern Presidency: Leadership and Legacy
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 159-160.
90 Jack R. Fischel, The Holocaust (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 28.
91 Friedman, No Haven, 90.
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