The U.S. and the Holocaust, part 1: "The Golden Door" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 8 p.m. I watched the first of three episodes of Ken Burns’ latest PBS documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust. The titles of the individual episodes – “The Golden Door,” “Yearning to Breathe Free,” and “The Homeless, the Tempest-Tossed” – were taken from Emma Lazarus’s poem on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, which as you may recall was the subject of a previous Ken Burns documentary back when his projects were still one-offs rather than mega-series. The three episodes ae 2 hours 9 minutes, 2 hours 18 minutes, and 2 hours 11 minutes, respectively: not easy to schedule in a TV marketplace that is used to programs ending in time for half-hour, hour or 90-minute segments. “The Golden Door” is actually a portrayal of America’s and Americans’ harder-edged views on immigration, which began in the late 1870’s (though he wasn’t mentioned on this show, one of the most fascinating political figures in U.S. history is San Francisco labor leader Daniel Kearney, who in the 1870’s founded the Workingmen’s Party and whose speeches have an oddly schizoid air in the current political context: when he denounced the growing power of corporations he sounded like Bernie Sanders, and when he denounced the alleged tides of immigrants – particularly Chinese – he sounded like Pat Buchanan or Donald Trump).

In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which as its name suggests banned all immigration from China for 10 years. It was regularly renewed and made permanent as part of the loathsome 1924 Johnson-Reed immigration bill, which overwhelmingly passed Congress, was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. The Johnson-Reed Act, which remained law for 41 years and was cited as a model by Donald Trump and some of the most notorious anti-immigration hard-liners in his circle, like Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, not only made the anti-Chinese exclusion permanent, it applied it to all other Asians as well. What’s more, it set up “quotas” for immigration and specified how many people would be let into the U.S. from each country – and, not surprisingly given the openly racist motivations of the law’s authors and speakers, the highest quotas were set for “white” Northern European countries: Britain, Germany, France and the Scandinavian nations. (One thing that’s long amused me is the number of modern-day white supremacists in the U.S. with Italian or Slavic names. The original white supremacists of the early 19th century considered only British, German and Scandinavian people “white.”) This was echoed in the White House meeting in which then-President Trump asked why we got so many immigrants from “shithole countries” like Nigeria and Haiti and so few from Norway. (My husband Charles’s response to that was, “I’ve been to Norway, and they have free education, free health care and their streets aren’t full of potholes. Why would a Norwegian want to come here?”)

Most of “the Golden Door” consists of parallel histories of the U.S. and Germany during the aftermath of World War I, with particular emphasis on their racial attitudes and the ways they handled the legacy of the “Great War.” Much of this is familiar to regular readers of history, including the humiliating peace imposed on Germany at Versailles in 1919 that forced Germany to give up 10 percent of its territory as well as all its overseas colonies, forbade them from rebuilding their military and, worst of all, imposed crushing reparations payments on them, mostly at the behest of France, where most of the damage from the war on the Western Front had occurred. Meanwhile, in the U.S. there had been a major revival of racist ideology – though Burns and his collaborators, Lynn Novick and Saran Botstein, don’t make this point, the 1920’s revival of the Ku Klux Klan and its transformation from a Southern vigilante group aimed mainly at terrorizing Black people to a nationwise organization targeting Jews and Catholics as well as Blacks came about through the inspiration of D. W. Griffith’s racist cinematic masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The combination of an increasingly isolationist citizenry, including many people who had determined that the “dirty Hun” atrocity stories with which we had been led into World War I had been lies invented by British propagandists, a rising tide of racism and the increasing power and influence of groups like the Klan encouraged U.S. authorities, especially in the State Department (which remained dominated by racist white elitists throughout this period), to make immigration into the U.S., especially from southern and eastern European countries whose citizens were considered “racially inferior” like Italians, Slavs and Jews, as difficult as possible.

The advent of the Great Depression, which began in 1929 and didn’t really end until World War II-related war production stimulated the economy, slammed the golden door even more tightly shut as there were so few jobs and so many unemployed workers that among the demands of the American people were severe bans on immigration so U.S.-born workers didn’t have to worry about foreign competition for the few jobs that were still available. President Herbert Hoover encouraged the formation of private militias in California and other states on the southwest border to drive Mexican farmworkers back across the border into Mexico – even though estimates are that up to 65 percent of those deported in this fashion had actually been born on this side of la linea and were therefore U.S. citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Meanwhile, the Great Depression devastated the European economies, especially Germany’s. In the 1928 German elections tne Nazis garnered about three percent of the vote nationwide; by 1930 they were the largest single party in the Reichstag, the German legislature. Adolf Hitler’s talking points were that all the economic misfortunes visited on Germany were the fault of something called “international Jewry,” which translated into calls to ban Jews from various professions and slowly take away their civil and human rights. The Nazis essentially pulled the boiled-frog experiment on the Jews of Germany (and, once they started World War II and ended up ruling many of the countries German Jews had fled to, including Austria and The Netherlands, Jews elsewhere in Europe as well), slowly ratcheting up the heat pf persecution.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. Franklin Roosevelt had been elected President and took office on March 4, 1933 (the last President to have to wait that long; afterwards a constitutional amendment moving up the date to January 20 took effect). His mandate was to do something, anything to end the Depression and its toll on the American people, and he was at first relatively uninterested in foreign affairs. Word about what the new Nazi government iin Germany was doing to its Jewish people started trickling in to the U.S., mostly due to courageous reporters like Dorothy Thompson (who was thrown out of Germany in 1934 under Hitler’s personal orders, but continued to write and speak out against Nazism from elsewhere). But there were still lingering suspicions that the tales of Nazi atrocities against the Jews were being made up by British propagandists like the tales of “dirty Huns” which had been largely instrumental in getting the U.S. involved in World War I. One of the points Burns, Novick and Botstein make in their film is the widespread difference of opinion among American Jews as to how aggressive they should be against the Nazis and how they should respond. The most famous rabbi in the U.S., Stephen Wise, urged large public demonstrations against Nazi Germany and helped organize the 1933 rally at Madison Square Garden, where he was the closing speaker. But other Jewish leaders feared that speaking out too forcefully against the Nazis would not only antagonise them and lead them to retaliate with even harsher measures against German Jews, but would jeopardize the decades of hard work American Jews had done to build acceptance in this country.

Many of the stories in the film were told by people whose parents managed to navigate the abysmal U.S. immigration non-system and get them to relative safety in the U.S., including one young man (obviously quite old now; he said he was born in 1922, which would make him 100 years old if he’s still alive) named Günther Stern,whose parents sent him to the U.S. at age 15. The missioni they sent him with was to live with his aunt and uncle in St. Louis, where he was supposed to look for other people who could sponsor the rest of the family to emigrate since his aunt and uncle could afford to sponsor only him. “The Golden Door” ends in 1938, with Hitler’s annexation of his native Austria into the Greater German Reich, his swallowing up of neighboring Czechoslovakia and the peace conference at Munich in which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French president Édouard Daladier basically gaveHither everything he wanted. One of the most important points made by this movie is how much Hitler was influenced by American racism; not only did Hitler regard the U.S. as a model for how nations with supposedly “racially superior” populations should treat “inferior” tribes – in 1940 he famously told Edward R. Murrow, “I’m just doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians” – he had read the books of American “scientific” racist author Madison Grant in German translation and been inspired by them. He also studied the American Jim Crow laws that had relegated Blacks to a second-class existence and used them as a model for drafting the 1935 Nuremberg laws that turned Jews from “citizens” to “subjects” of the German Reich and severely limited their opportunities, including making marriage or any sexual relatioins between Jews and so-called “Aryans” illegal.

Hitler had bought into the racist theories of Madison Grant and others that the superior “Nordic” race had fallen from its rightful place on top of the world through interbreeding with “inferior” races, and he wanted to make sure that didn’t happen not only by obliterating the Jewish people from the earth but preventing the production of so-called “mongrelized” children. What’s most frightening about “The Golden Door” is how little the manifestations of this sort of hatred have changed over the years; in the 1930’s President Roosevelt’s political enemies claimed he was a Jew named “Rosenfeld” (compare to the most recent attacks on Obama for allegedly being a Muslim; in both cases the message is “he’s not one of us” and therefore unworthy to lead this country). A century ago one staple of racist propaganda in the U.S. and Europe was that Jews would reproduce so rapidly they would “replace” white Gentiles – a cry we hear all too often today as well. The film even mentions the ridiculous pseudo-science of eugenics, which sought to “improve” the human race by barring allegedly “inferior” people, including ones with physical disabilities or mental illnesses, from having children, while encouraging the so-called “superior” people to reproduce as much as possible. Eugenics had a lot of prestigious supporters, including Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (who wrote an official opinion upholding the forced sterilization of a so-called “feeble-minded” woman by writing, “Three generations of idiots is enough”), Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (an uncomfortable fact opponents of abortion, including Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in his opinion overruling Roe v. Wade, love to bring up), and Helen Keller. Only the horrors of Nazism brought an end to eugenics’ reputation as a legitimate “science.”