Breckinridge Long

Breckinridge Long was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1881.  He graduated from Princeton University in 1904 and then studied at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.  Long practiced law from 1906 until 1917.  Shortly after President Woodrow Wilson, whom Long supported, won re-election in 1916, he joined the State Department as the Third Assistant Secretary of State.  In both 1920 and 1922, Long lost bids to become a US Senator from his home state.

While working in the State Department under Wilson, Long befriended Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), then the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.  He contributed to FDR’s successful presidential election campaign in 1932.  As a result, FDR appointed Long to be the US Ambassador to Italy from 1933 to 1936.  In 1940, FDR appointed him to be an Assistant Secretary of State.

According to Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt, The Home Front in World War II, “A deliberate policy of obstruction was under way, directed from the top of the State Department, from the man in charge of refugee matters, Breckinridge Long.”  The obstruction she was referring to related to the hope of Eleanor Roosevelt that more and more Jewish refugees from war-torn Europe could be brought to the USA.  “Long had successfully devised a series of tactics that walled out any applicant the State Department wished to exclude.  Long spelled out his plans:  We can delay and effectively stop ... the number of immigrants into the United States.  We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative advices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.” 

Eleanor Roosevelt believed that Jewish refugees were particularly obstructed because of Long’s anti-Semitism.  When Long met with FDR, he carried with him “fearsome stories purporting to prove that many of the (Jewish) refugees Eleanor wanted to bring into the country were not refugees at all, but German agents trying to use America’s hospitality for their own dark purposes.  By playing on the president’s fears that spies had infiltrated the refugee stream, Long managed to persuade (FDR) that the State Department’s cautious policy was the only way to go.”  Many of the Jewish refugees prevented from entering the United States because of Beckinridge Long died needlessly in Nazi concentration camps.

Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.  Just change the words Jewish and spies for Muslim and terrorists and you quickly move from cerca 1940 to 2016.  Perhaps terrorists could infiltrate the USA masquerading as refugees.  As a result of this fear, more than two dozen US governors decided to bar federally approved Syrian refugees from settling in their states.  However, recently federal Judge Tanya Walton Pratt blocked Indiana Governor Mike Pence’s attempt to cut off federal resettlement funds in his state for Syrian refugees who had passed a two-year federal vetting process.  Too bad there wasn’t a Judge Pratt to help Jewish refugees long ago.