That is why the golden rule is the best rule to live by in my opinion.

Every day people seeking political asylum are evaluated. Some are let in, some aren’t.

Through post WWII eyes, we did the wrong thing. Before that…we probably still did the wrong thing but the reasons aren’t quite as dastardly.

They always feared invasion. Once I scoffed at that idea and the lady tore me up verbally. There are sunken U-boats in the Potomac, off the coast of New Jersey, and German frog men landed in New York.

I once had a female friend who was a non-Jewish Czechoslovak. When the Germans took over Prague, one of her uncles went over to the partisans. As she told it, that family and extended family lived in mortal fear every minute of every day. And then the Gestapo found them. First they took the uncle’s immediate family. The rest of the family fled their homes. My friend and her parents could find no shelter except among the tombstones inside a Catholic church— yep, just like in “The Sound of Music.” Only in this instance the Gestapo found them there too. My friend was one of the few in the family who escaped. She was later taken in by strangers and kept safe. The day she told me this story, she had no idea whatsoever of what had happened to the rest of her family. Every day that I remember her story, I look with greater fondness on that red, white, and blue banner flapping in the breeze at our local war memorial.

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/stlouis/

In 1939, the US was still in a perilous economic situation. With no knowledge of the Holocaust to come, it is unrealistic to expect any people to accept a large number of refugees who at the time were only fleeing discrimination and economic privation. Having national quotas for people ‘likely to become a public charge’ is not unreasonable during the Great Depression when you had millions of your own citizens needing food, shelter and jobs.

By 1943 when we did know that the Nazi’s were trying to exterminate the Jews, we were already up to our neck in World War II. The ’should we have bombed the railroads’ debate has been hashed over endlessly by people who know far more about the subject than you or I. You can argue the merits of which course of action would have saved more lives (prosecute the war to the fullest or divert resources to try to save the Jews) but a debate over the effectiveness of tactics is very different than ‘a stain on our history’ and can only be done with hindsight. (For the record, I would argue that slowing the Third Army’s advance into the Ruhr in the fall of 1944 cost the lives of more Jews by prolonging the war than the 900 people on board the St. Louis, 254 of whom would eventually die in the Holocaust.)

Yes, we did give visas for people of particular distinction to enter the US. That’s just common sense. If you have a world renown physicist or artist who wants to immigrate, any country would take them. But the St. Louis was not filled with physicists and artists. It was filled with ordinary people with little to no means, something there was no shortage of anywhere in the world in 1939.

With hindsight, it is unfortunate that the passengers of the St. Louis did not find refuge in the US or anywhere else, but that is because of actions of the Nazis in the 1940s, not because of any action of the US. To claim otherwise seems to me to be looking too hard to find a mote in the eye of the US while ignoring the planks strewn across Europe at the time. Read what we did do:

1. Telephone records show discussion of the situation by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, members of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cabinet, who tried to persuade Cuba to accept the refugees.

2. The Coast Guard was not ordered to turn away the refugees, but the US did not make provision for their entry. Efforts to persuade the Canadian government to accept the St. Louis also failed.

3. US officials worked with England and European nations to find refuge for the travelers in Europe. The ship returned to Europe docking at Antwerp, Belgium. The United Kingdom agreed to take 288 of the passengers who disembarked and traveled to the UK by other steamers. After much negotiation by Schröder, the remaining 619 passengers were allowed to disembark at Antwerp; 224 were accepted by France, 214 by Belgium, and 181 by the Netherlands. They appeared to be safe from Hitler’s persecution.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_St._Louis

And that is a ’stain on our history’?

As for knowledge of atrocities during the war, I don’t know what could have been done. Perhaps that is where this discussion should head. What could allied forces done differently during the war to help victims of the Holocaust?

Most Nations were fighting for their very existence.