'Refugees and Rescue' at the onset of World War II
Barbara McDonald Stewart remembered her father as someone who was always there during her childhood, an attentive and loving presence. Editing his diaries and papers forced her to revise her memories: James G. McDonald was attentive and loving, yes, but not always present.
"I was very close to my father," said Stewart, an historian who lives in northern Virginia and has taught at George Mason University. "He would walk me to school, read me stories at night. Now, I've read his diaries, and it seems that he was never home!"
Stewart's father was often not home because he spent much of the 1930s and early 1940s dashing across Europe and America, trying to enlist support for Jews and others trying to escape Nazi Germany.
Indiana University Press, in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, has published the second of three volumes on his work. Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945 tells the story of an IU alumnus who served as the League of Nations' top official for refugees and later an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"It is a compelling, mostly tragic story, centered around a Midwesterner who blended the qualities of political insider and outsider," write editors Stewart, Richard Breitman and Severin Hochberg.
The first volume, Advocate for the Doomed, covering McDonald's diaries from 1932 to 1935, was published by IU Press in 2007.
James G. McDonald was born in 1886. When he was a youth, his family moved to Bloomington from Albany, a small town near Muncie, Ind., so he and three of his brothers could attend Indiana University.
The brothers worked their way through college by waiting tables at a campus dining hall. After graduate school at Harvard, James McDonald returned to IU in 1914 to teach history. He married his childhood sweetheart, Ruth Stafford, the next year.
McDonald moved his family to New York in 1917. He led the Foreign Policy Association from 1919 until 1933, when he became High Commissioner for Refugees with the League of Nations. During that time, he got in the habit of recording his daily activities and observations, dictating them to a secretary.
Stewart and her sister, Janet McDonald Barrett, donated their father's diaries and papers to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2004. The diaries and papers, together with other primary-source writings about the events in which McDonald was involved, make up much of Refugees and Rescue.
McDonald worked tirelessly to persuade U.S. officials and their allies that a nightmare was coming in Germany. He had seen the future when he met with Adolf Hitler in 1933.
"He knew that Hitler was absolutely bound and determined to destroy the Jews," Stewart said. "It was really a question of, how many could you get out before he did that?"
McDonald resigned as High Commissioner at the end of 1935, in a dramatic gesture to call attention to the plight of refugees in Europe. (His diary records that he then traveled to Bloomington to visit his brother and former IU colleagues, where he was "much interested and disturbed by the stories they told me of increased anti-Semitism in the university because of the influx of Jewish boys from the east, where restrictions in professional schools had limited their admissions.")
He resumed his work on behalf of refugees in 1938, when he became chairman of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. His focus increasingly became America's response to Nazi persecution and mass murder.
Refugees and Rescue has received attention for its revelations about Roosevelt, with Patricia Cohen writing in the New York Times that the book "upends a widely held view that he (FDR) was indifferent to the fate of Europe's Jews."
In the late 1930s, Roosevelt supported behind-the-scenes proposals for resettling Jews in South America and Africa. He even took credit for some of the plans. But he moved away from the issue as the U.S. readied for war. And he was constrained by political realities: widespread anti-Semitism and, until 1941, a strong desire by many Americans to not get drawn into what they saw as Europe's war.
After the U.S. did enter World War II, national security concerns -- expressed strongly by State Department officials, especially Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long -- weighed against letting immigrants into the country, even those who were trying to escape Hitler.
Some of McDonald's efforts were successful. At least 20,000 European Jews were resettled in Bolivia, and others escaped to the United States and elsewhere. But there were many disappointments. In 1942, Roosevelt approved granting visas to 5,000 Jewish children in German-occupied France. But the move came too late. The war escalated and travel in and out of France was shut down.
"He thought what he was doing was worthwhile," Stewart said of her father. "On the other hand, there were more setbacks than there were pluses."
McDonald continued in public life after World War II and was the first U.S. ambassador to Israel from 1949-51. Indiana University awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 1951.
Barbara McDonald Stewart, who had just graduated from Northwestern University, accompanied her father to Israel in 1949 and helped run the new U.S. embassy. The story of those years will be told in the third volume of McDonald's diaries and papers, which also will be published by IU Press.
