Italians. For this is what they say:
“1. ‘We,’ that is the democracies, ‘are not in a position to take in the Jews.’ Yet in these empires there are not even ten people to the square kilometer. While Germany, with her 135 inhabitants to the square kilometer, is supposed to have room for them!
“2. They assure us: We cannot take them unless Germany is prepared to allow them a certain amount of capital to bring with them as immigrants."31
The problem at Évian was, sadly, not ignorance of the Nazi agenda, but failure to prioritize preventing it. This remained a problem through the course of the war. It was a problem found in both politicians and in the public at large. In 2018, the Gallup polling company looked back at and tried to explain its own polling:
“[E]ven though nearly all Americans condemned the Nazi regime's terror against Jews in November 1938, that very same week, 72% of Americans said ‘No’ when Gallup asked: ‘Should we allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live?’ Just 21% said ‘Yes.’ . . . Prejudice against Jews in the U.S. was evident in a number of ways in the 1930s. According to historian Leonard Dinnerstein, more than 100 new anti-Semitic organizations were founded in the U.S. between 1933 and 1941. One of the most influential, Father Charles Coughlin's National Union for Social Justice, spread Nazi propaganda and accused all Jews of being communists. Coughlin broadcast anti-Jewish ideas to millions of radio listeners, asking them to ‘pledge’ with him to ‘restore America to the Americans.’ Further to the fringes, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Legion of America (‘Silver Shirts’) fashioned themselves after Nazi Stormtroopers (‘brownshirts’). The German American Bund celebrated Nazism openly, established Hitler Youth-style summer camps in communities across the United States, and hoped to see the dawn of fascism in America. Even if the Silver Shirts and the Bund did not represent the mainstream, Gallup polls showed that many Americans held seemingly prejudicial ideas about Jews. A remarkable survey conducted in April 1938 found that more than half of Americans blamed Europe's Jews for their own treatment at the hands of the Nazis. This poll showed that 54% of Americans agreed that ‘the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault,’ with 11% believing it was ‘entirely’ their own fault. Hostility to refugees was so ingrained that just two months after Kristallnacht, 67% of Americans opposed a bill in the U.S. Congress intended to admit child refugees from Germany. The bill never made it to the floor of Congress for a vote.”32
Gallup might well have noted the international appeal of fascism, which achieved political success in Spain, Italy, and Germany, but which had prominent proponents in other countries, including France, where the fascist movement was of particular inspiration to a group of Wall Street plotters who in 1934 sought unsuccessfully to organize a fascist coup against Roosevelt.33 In 1940, Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. alerted Eleanor Roosevelt to another such plot from New York tycoons and army officers.34 In 1927, Winston Churchill had commented on his visit to Rome: “I could not help being charmed by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing, and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers.” Churchill found in fascism the “necessary antidote to the Russian virus.”35
Five days after Crystal Night, President Franklin Roosevelt said he was recalling the ambassador to Germany and that public opinion had been “deeply shocked.” He did not use the word “Jews.” A reporter asked if anywhere on earth might accept many Jews from Germany. “No,” said Roosevelt. “The time is not ripe for that.” Another reporter asked if Roosevelt would relax immigration restrictions for Jewish refugees. “That is not in contemplation,” the president responded.36 Roosevelt refused to support the child refugee bill in 1939, which would have allowed 20,000 Jews under the age of 14 to enter the United States, and it never came out of committee.37 Senator Robert Wagner (D., N.Y.) said, “Thousands of American families have already expressed their willingness to take refugee children into their homes.” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt set aside her antisemitism to support the legislation, but her husband successfully blocked it for years. America rejected the 1939 Wagner-Rogers bill to admit more Jewish and non-Aryan refugees, but passed the 1940 Hennings Bill to allow unlimited numbers of British Christian children into the United States.38
While many in the United States, as elsewhere, tried heroically to rescue Jews from the Nazis, including by volunteering to take them in, majority opinion was never with them. In 2015, Gallup polling looked back at a January 1939 U.S. poll:
“The basic question Gallup asked related specifically to refugee children: ‘It has been proposed that the government permit 10,000 refugee children from Germany to be brought into this country and taken care of in American homes. Do you favor this plan?’ A second question asked of a different sample was basically the same as above, but included the phrase ‘most of them Jewish’ and ended with, ‘should the government permit these children to come in?’ It didn't matter much whether or not the refugee children were identified as Jewish. A clear majority, 67% of Americans, opposed the basic idea, and a lower 61% were opposed in response to the question that included the phrase ‘most of them Jewish.’ . . . A separate Gallup question in June 1940 . . . asked if Americans would be willing to take care of one or more refugee children from England and France in their home until the war was over. Attitudes in response to this question were more mixed, but still with a slight plurality saying they opposed -- 46% against, 41% in favor.”39 Of course 46% declining to themselves host a child from England or France is a different thing from 67% or 61% opposing anybody hosting children from Germany.
In June 1939, the St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying over 900 Jewish refugees from Germany was turned away by Cuba. The ship sailed up the Florida coast, followed by the U.S. Coast Guard, which had been dispatched by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. to keep track of the ship in case the U.S. government could be persuaded to allow it to dock. The government was not persuaded, the ship returned to Europe, and over 250 of its passengers perished in the Holocaust.40
As the fate of the Jews worsened in Europe, openness to accepting them into the United States did not significantly increase. One reason was fear of enemy spies. According to Time Magazine, looking back from 2019, “After the rapid German conquest of France, pervasive concerns about American security fostered a fearful and resentful climate of opinion; Roper Poll in June 1940 found that only 2.7% of Americans thought the government was doing enough to counteract a Nazi ‘Fifth Column’ operating in the U.S. German Jews were not immune from these suspicions. Some Americans thought Jews could be coerced into spying for Germany based on threats to their relatives in Germany; others, including a former undersecretary of state, thought that inherent ‘Jewish greed’ might lead refugees and immigrants to work for the Nazi cause. By mid-1941 the State Department instructed consuls to deny visas to applicants who had relatives living in the totalitarian countries of Germany, the Soviet Union, and Italy—and then Congress passed a bill directing consuls abroad to refuse a visa to any alien who might endanger public safety.”41
In fact, in June 1940, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for Immigration Breckenridge Long circulated a memo proposing that the United States indefinitely delay the admission of immigrants: “We can do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas.” The restrictive U.S. quotas, with millions of lives in the balance, were one thing, but 90% of the allowed places were not filled, condemning 190,000 people to their fate.42 There were over 300,000 people on the waiting list in early 1939.43
Dick Cheney's and Liz Cheney's 2015 book, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America, is one of countless accounts of U.S. superiority that finds the historical and moral greatness of the United States in WWII and in contrast to the Nazis.44 Featured, as is often the case, is the death of Anne Frank. There is no mention of the fact that Anne Frank’s family applied for visas to the United States, jumped through numerous hoops, found people to vouch for them, pulled strings with well-connected U.S. big-shots, produced funds, forms, affidavits, and letters of recommendation -- and it wasn’t enough. Their visa applications were denied.45
In