Women's rights activist Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) spoke out strongly for U.S. action to help Jews who were persecuted by the Nazis. As president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which led the World War One-era drive for women's right to vote, Mrs. Catt opposed European immigration,...
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U.S. Congressman Emanuel Celler (1888-1981) was one of the most outspoken voices on Capitol Hill for rescue of Jews from the Nazis. First elected to the House of Representatives from a heavily-Jewish district of Brooklyn in 1922, Celler served in Congress for the next fifty years. During the 1930s,...
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The response of America's churches and other Christian religious institutions to the persecution of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s was generally weak. Most American Christian leaders strongly condemned the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, but few advocated practical steps to help the Jews....
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Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States, on several occasions publicly referred to the failure of the United States to respond adequately to the plight of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust. At a reception honoring the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on April...
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Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionist Zionism, asked the British to create a Jewish armed force to take part in the war against Hitler. Twenty-five years earlier, Jabotinsky had successfully lobbied London to create the Jewish Legion,...
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Former First Lady Grace Coolidge (1879-1957) was a prominent supporter of the Wagner-Rogers legislation of 1939, which would have admitted 20,000 German refugee children to the United States outside the quota system. Mrs. Coolidge, who had served as First Lady from 1923 to 1929, announced that she and her neighbors...
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Oscar S. Cox (1905-1966), an official in the Roosevelt administration, helped Treasury Department staffers in their behind the scenes efforts to promote the rescue of Jewish refugees. From 1941 to 1943, Cox served as general counsel of the Lend-Lease Administration and the Foreign Economic Administration....
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While he was a student at Stanford University in 1934, future U.S. Senator Alan Cranston (1914-2000) visited Germany. He was appalled by German totalitarianism and antisemitism. After graduating from Stanford in 1936, Cranston returned to Europe and spent time in Germany, as well as fascist Italy, as a correspondent...
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