In the Garden of Beasts

“and few presented a good appearance. Only two others beside myself in dinner jacket.Very careless atmosphere in dining room.” The next night the Carrs went to dinner at a different hotel, the Marlborough-Blenheim, and found it far more refined. “I like it,” Carr wrote. “How different from the Jewish atmosphere of the Claridge.”
    An official of the American Jewish Committee described Carr as “an anti-Semite and a trickster, who talks beautifully and contrives to do nothing for us.”
    Both Carr and Phillips favored strict adherence to a provision in the nation’s immigration laws that barred entry to all would-be immigrants considered “likely to become a public charge,” the notorious “LPC clause.” A component of the Immigration Act of 1917, it had been reinstated by the Hoover administration in 1930 to discourage immigration at a time when unemployment was soaring. Consular officials possessed great power over who got to come to America because they were the ones who decided which visa applicants could be excluded under the LPC clause. Immigration law also required that applicants provide a police affidavit attesting to their good character, along with duplicate copies of birth certificates and other government records. “It seems quite preposterous,” one Jewish memoirist wrote, “to have to go to your enemy and ask for a character reference.”
    Jewish activists charged that America’s consulates abroad had been instructed quietly to grant only a fraction of the visas allowed for each country, a charge that proved to have merit. The Labor Department’s own solicitor, Charles E. Wyzanski, discovered in 1933 that consuls had been given informal oral instructions to limit the number of immigration visas they approved to 10 percent of the total allowed by each nation’s quota. Jewish leaders contended, further, that the act of acquiring police records had become not merely difficult, but dangerous—“an almost insuperable obstacle,” as Judge Proskauer stated in a letter to Undersecretary Phillips.
    Phillips took offense at Proskauer’s depiction of consuls as obstacles. “The consul,” Phillips replied, gently chiding, “is only concerned with determining in a helpful and considerate manner whether applicants for visas have met the requirements of law.”
    One result, according to Proskauer and other Jewish leaders, wasthat Jews simply did not apply for immigration to the United States. Indeed, the number of Germans who applied for visas was a tiny fraction of the twenty-six thousand allowed under the annual quota set for the country. This disparity gave officials within the State Department a powerful statistical argument for opposing reform: how could there be a problem if so few Jews applied in the first place?It was an argument that Roosevelt, as early as April 1933, appeared to accept. He also knew that any effort to liberalize immigration rules might well prompt Congress to respond with drastic reductions of existing quotas.
    By the time of his lunch with Dodd, Roosevelt was acutely aware of the sensitivities at play.
    “The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited,” Roosevelt told him. “But this is also not a governmental affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims. We must protect them, and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.”
    THE CONVERSATION TURNED to practicalities.Dodd insisted he would live within his designated salary of $17,500, a lot of money during the Depression but a skimpy sum for an ambassador who would have to entertain European diplomats and Nazi officials. It was a point of principle for Dodd: he did not think an ambassador should live extravagantly while the rest of the nation suffered. For him, however, it also happened to be a moot point, since he lacked the independent wealth that so many other ambassadors possessed and thus could not have lived extravagantly even if he had wanted to.
    “You are quite right,” Roosevelt told him. “Aside from two or three general dinners and entertainments, you need not indulge in any expensive social affairs. Try to give fair attention to Americans in Berlin and occasional dinners to Germans who are interested in American relations. I think you can manage to live within your income and not sacrifice any essential parts of the