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escue effort; a project based not on “pity for the exiles” but as a symbolic “reaffirmation
of our own [core] beliefs.” 112
Thompson argued that any solution to the refugee crisis
would require multinational cooperation and the creation of an organization that would
have the proper amount of expertise, influence and finances. The European refugee
situation, however, created a potential “trap” for the United States and the Western
European nations. Any failure to act could “make them complicit” in Hitler’s anti-Jewish
policies and “discredit them before their own publics” or “force them into ineffectual
action divisive of their domestic public opinion.” 113
Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut have suggested that Feis and Thompson
were the sources of “four key proposals” adopted by the U.S. Government in its approach
to the refugee problem. Feis argued for the consolidation of the annual German and
Austrian immigration quotas; “streamlining” the mechanism of obtaining and providing
“affidavits of support” from American sponsors and the creation of the Presidential
Advisory Committee for Political Refugees. Thompson’s primary focus was on the
creation of an international refugee organization to deal with forced migration as a multinational
effort. 114
Some historians, as will be described, have asserted that it was
Thompson’s public criticism of the Administration for its official inaction that prompted
FDR to call for a refugee summit
112 Thompson, “Refugees,” 387.
113 Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Champion of Freedom Public (New York: Public Affairs,
2003), 487.
114 Herbert Feis to Felix Frankfurter, March 22, 1938; Feis to Cordell Hull, March 22, 1938, Feis Papers,
Box 33, Library of Congress; Moffat Diary, March 16, 1938, Moffat Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard
University cited in Breitman, American Refugee Policy, 57.
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