Laura Delano Houghteling, first cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and wife of the United States Commissioner of Immigration, strongly opposed the immigration of Jewish refugees to the United States.
Houghteling’s sentiments were immortalized by State Department official Pierrepont Moffat. She happened to sit next to Moffat at a Washington dinner party in the spring of 1939, and he later jotted in his diary her explanation as to why she opposed the Wagner-Rogers bill, which sought to admit 20,000 German Jewish children outside the quota system. Mrs. Houghteling’s “principal reserve,” Moffat wrote, “is that “20,000 charming children would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.”
Sources: Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, p.150;
Medoff, FDR and the Holocaust, p.12.