Mainstream Jewish leaders such as Rabbi Wise did not support the Alaska proposal.
“[J]ust because small numbers of Jews might settle there” was not sufficient reason to endorse the scheme, Wise wrote to a colleague. Talk of settling refugees in Alaska “makes a wrong and hurtful impression to have it appear that Jews are taking over some part of the country for settlement.”
The only Jewish organization to endorse the Alaska plan was the small Poalei Zion (Labor Zionists of America). Although as a matter of principle the Labor Zionists regarded Palestine as the appropriate destination for European Jewish refugees, they endorsed the Alaska scheme as a matter of life and death which superseded their ideological preferences.
Did FDR Try to Rescue the Jews?
Controversy over FDR and the 1930s rescue plans exploded in 2009 with the publication of the second volume of the diaries of refugee advocate James G. McDonald. Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald 1933-1945, published by the U.S. Holocaust Museum, was edited by Museum historians Richard Breitman and Severin Hochberg, along with McDonald’s daughter, Barbara McDonald Stewart.
The book claimed to reveal FDR’s deep interest in settling large numbers of Jewish refugees in Africa or Latin America in the 1930s. The editors highlighted a private statement by FDR that he might ask Congress for $150 million to help resettle Jewish refugees, which they said proved Roosevelt’s concern for the Jews. But as it turned out, FDR never asked Congress for the funds. (Ironically, in a 1993 lecture, Prof. Breitman himself had criticized Roosevelt for not requesting the funds.)
Prof. Henry Feingold strongly disputed the Breitman-Hochberg claim that Roosevelt tried to save the Jews:
President Roosevelt considered himself a nation-builder – even to the point of falsely taking credit for writing the constitution of Cuba, in order to show his impact on history. His own administration had an agency that resettled large numbers of farmers from the Dust Bowl to Alaska and other undeveloped regions.
There was no financial or political cost in having experts research all sorts of tropical regions and dozens of other remote locations where Jews might theoretically be settled. But when it came to projects that actually had some practical potential, such as Alaska, he was unwilling to cross swords with restrictionists who did not want refugees coming to American territory.
It was not expensive for Roosevelt to sit in his office and say “if you can get me a large scheme that can attract money, I could pursue it.” It cost him nothing to say he was interested. But ultimately he was just being his normal expansive self. The Jewish issue was peripheral to him. FDR was unwilling to confront powerful restrictionists and isolationists, and take the political risks involved.
What the New Research Reveals
Although the Breitman-Hochberg book did not live up to its claim of presenting new research on FDR and German Jewry, other new scholarship has done just that – and none of the findings flatter Roosevelt.
Two recent books about settling Jewish refugees in the Sosua region of the Dominican Republic reveal that “the State Department’s hostility and obstructionism” played a more significant role in undermining that project than previously known. The books are Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosua (Duke University Press, 2009), by Prof. Allen Wells, and Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua, 1940-1945 (Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2008), by Prof. Marion A. Kaplan.
Wells finds that the Roosevelt administration played a significant role in undermining Sosua. American officials initially applauded the project, expecting it to decrease pressure on the U.S. to take in immigrants. Yet the administration refused to loosen the arduous bureaucratic requirements for would-be settlers or ease the process of obtaining a U.S. transit visa, which an immigrant needed in order to pass through New York on the way to Sosua. The administration even added a new requirement – refugees traveling to Sosua were required to sign a pledge that they would stay there permanently.
