Breckinridge Long
Between 1940 and 1944, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long supervised the US State Department’s Visa Division, which regulated the issuance of visas to people who applied to immigrate to the United States—including Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Long and his staff implemented new immigration rules and restrictions in response to national security threats, and often showed little sympathy for humanitarian concerns. Long fought any attempt to make immigration easier, and resented any criticism of the State Department, particularly by Jewish organizations.
Future Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, ca. 1934. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
Samuel Breckinridge Long was born in 1881 in St. Louis, Missouri, to a wealthy family. He practiced law, planning for a career in politics. He served as a third assistant secretary of State during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and, while in Washington, befriended future president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Long’s own political campaigns failed: he ran for the US Senate in Missouri twice and lost both times. When Roosevelt announced his presidential candidacy in 1932, Long enthusiastically raised money for the campaign. After Roosevelt’s landslide victory, Long became Roosevelt’s ambassador to Italy, serving from 1933 to 1936. When World War II began in September 1939, Roosevelt asked Long to work in the State Department and appointed him an assistant secretary of state several months later.
Refugee Crisis
As part of his duties at the State Department, Long supervised the Visa Division, which regulated the issuing of American immigration visas at American consulates all over the world. The US consulates in Europe, particularly in Nazi Germany and the territories it had annexed or invaded, were overwhelmed with people, many of them Jewish, requesting help with immigration.
By the time Long rejoined the State Department, more than 300,000 people born in Germany—mostly Jews—had joined a waiting list for an American immigration visa. At the time, immigration was limited by the applicant’s country of birth. A maximum of only 27,370 people born in Germany or Austria were legally allowed to immigrate to the United States each year. The US immigration quota for Germany was filled for the first time in 1939 and almost filled in 1940. During all other years of Nazi rule (1933–1945) the German quota was not filled, and the laws governing the visa process were never adjusted to meet the enormous demand.
Refugees crowd outside the US consulate in Marseilles, France, ca. 1940. US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
National Security Fears
Like most Americans, Long worried that Nazi Germany had planted spies and saboteurs in the United States. This fear of a “Fifth Column”—the term used for these individuals and groups— increased after the May 1940 German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. The four countries collapsed so quickly that many Americans believed that German spies played a role in bringing them down. In a speech, Roosevelt warned that new immigrants—even Jewish refugees—might be forced to secretly work for the Nazis.
On June 26, 1940, ten days after France surrendered to Nazi Germany, Long wrote a memo to other State Department officials laying out the options for stopping all immigration into the United States in the event of a national emergency. Consular officers, he wrote, could “put every obstacle in the way and require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas.”
Long’s proposal that the State Department could end immigration entirely in case of a national emergency never went into effect. Still, the State Department implemented new regulations that made immigration even more difficult for European refugees. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
Long’s memo was never put into effect, but a few days later Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed all State Department officials abroad to take additional caution when screening refugees. If the officials had any doubt about the identity or intentions of a refugee, they were to deny the visa application. After Hull’s order, it became much harder to immigrate from German-occupied areas.
In June 1941, the State Department issued a “relatives rule” that denied visas to anyone with close relatives still living in Nazi-occupied territory. They argued that Germany could pressure immigrants to become spies by threatening relatives still held by the Nazis.
The State Department also announced that all visa applications needed to be reviewed by an interdepartmental committee in Washington, made up of staff from the State and Justice Departments, the FBI, and military intelligence. This new committee, which, Long wrote, “will consider the cases of visa applicants from the viewpoint of national defense,” lengthened an already long and difficult immigration process.
Rescue Resolution
In November 1942, American newspapers and magazines printed reports of the Nazi regime’s plan to murder European Jews. Some Americans wrote passionate letters and telegrams to the State Department expressing their concern and pleading for rescue action. Others held public rallies calling on the US government to rescue or provide relief for the Nazis’ victims.
Long contended that rescue was impossible without harming the Allied war effort, and he tried to calm criticism by making it look like the government was doing more than it really was. In April 1943, delegates from the United States and Great Britain met for a conference in Bermuda. Long gave the American negotiators strict instructions ensuring that the conference would not lead to any significant new steps on behalf of Europe’s Jews. Long also briefly attempted to stop reports of mass murder from reaching the United States because he feared that releasing the news might lead to additional pressure on the State Department.
The young students of a Jewish yeshiva [religious school] in New York wrote letters pleading with President Roosevelt to take action to save European Jews. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
Treasury Department staff drafted this memo informing Roosevelt that Long and the State Department had been obstructing efforts to aid Jews. US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In November 1943, the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs held hearings on a bipartisan resolution calling on President Roosevelt to appoint a commission to rescue European Jews. Long testified in a closed session, claiming the State Department had undertaken extensive work to assist refugees and provide humanitarian relief. The congressmen were impressed, and Long, hoping to lessen public pressure and defeat the resolution, decided to release his testimony to the public. Almost immediately, Jewish organizations proved one of Long’s claims—that the United States had accepted 580,000 refugees since 1933—to be patently false. (The actual number, which varies depending on the definition of “refugee”--which was not a legally protected category at the time–was much lower.)
In December 1943, US Treasury Department officials discovered Long’s efforts to suppress information about the Holocaust. These officials successfully petitioned Roosevelt to create the War Refugee Board in January 1944 and to announce a new US policy of relief and rescue for Jews and other victims of Nazism. Approximately 5 million Jewish victims of the Nazi regime had already been murdered at this point. As part of a larger State Department reorganization, Long was reassigned from supervision of the Visa Division, and eleven months later, he left government service. He died in 1958.
Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. Myron Davis/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.