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

cooperation in preventing the publication of all works “libeling the head of a State or the
sacred institutions of a State through misrepresentation of history.” Such a resolution
was declared unsupportable by the American publishers and represented a source of
“humiliation.” 99
American political and popular reaction to the Anschluss was mixed. President
Roosevelt ended the preferential tariff treatment of Austria and Secretary of State Cordell
Hull advised the German Government that the American Administration held the Reich
responsible for the payment of Austrian financial debts to the United States—both actions
signaling American acquiescence to the annexation of Austria. 100
Hull directed U.S.
Ambassador to Berlin Hugh Wilson to protest the persecution of Jewish American
citizens and the confiscation or the destruction of their property. The Reich Government
granted in return limited concessions: American Jews would not have to comply with the
mandatory registration of their property unless they were living within Germany or
Austria or had been German citizens who emigrated after 1933. 101
A survey of newspaper editorials on the Austrian situation noted that fifty three
percent favored isolationism while forty seven percent believed that a strong national
defense and a willingness to fight would ensure the peace. 102 Senator Elbert D. Thomas
99 Schneiderman, ed., American Jewish Year Book Review of the Year 569, 89-93. The American
publishers included John Day Co., E.P Dutton and Co., Farrar and Rinehart, Harcourt, Brace and Co.,
Harper and Bros., Macmillan Co., and the Harvard, Oxford and Yale University Presses.
100 “Austria Removed from Preferential U.S. Tariff List,” Tampa Tribune, April 8, 1938, 6.
101 Sheldon Spear, “The United States and the Persecution of the Jews in Germany, 1933-1939,” Jewish
Social Studies 30, no. 4 (October 1968): 221-222. Following Kristallnacht, however, these concessions
were ended as new anti-Semitic policies called for the total disenfranchisement of all Jews, foreign and
domestic, from the German economy.
102 US News, March 21, 1938; The Times, March 23, 1938, 15.
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