When Franklin Delano Roosevelt requested Mussolini allow Jewish refugees to settle in Ethiopia so they would not come to the United States.

‘Roosevelt Condemns Jews to Be Permanent Pariahs’ by Felix Morrow from Socialist Appeal. Vol. 3 No. 2. January 14, 1939.

Asks Mussolini to Open Up Ethiopia but Clamps Down on Admitting Refugees to U.S.

Pious tears continue to flow here for the Jewish refugees, but there is not a sign that the Roosevelt administration intends to permit Congressional action enabling refugees to find a haven here. The extraordinary fact that not a single Congressman has issued a public statement declaring for relaxing immigration restrictions, not even Congressman Celler whose bill with that purpose died in the last session and has not been re-introduced, is to be explained by active administration discouragement of such measures.

Privately administration leaders are saying that Jews should go to “sparsely settled” lands – Africa, South America, Palestine, in fact anywhere except the United States. Roosevelt has now publicly enunciated this principle in his letter to Mussolini requesting that Jews be allowed to settle in Ethiopia.

A “Subtle” Move

Administration admirers think it was very clever and very noble of Roosevelt to send the letter. It not only served the purpose of “subtle” pressure upon Mussolini to break the axis with Hitler, they say, but served to focus public attention anew upon the plight of the refugees. Mussolini’s refusal to accede was to be expected, and the net result is that everybody is once more awakened to the need to find a haven for the refugees. So say Roosevelt men.

And of course it is true that the demoralized and cowardly respectables who lead the Jewish-American community are expressing gratitude for Roosevelt’s gesture and acceding to his request that the lid be kept down on all proposals to open the door to the refugees here.

What It Really Means

But Roosevelt’s proposal to Mussolini actually serves to publicly crystallize and drive home the doctrine that haven for refugees is to be sought primarily outside the civilized world. The Uganda, the Guianas, the African wilds, the Argentina pampas, the Brazilian back-country – these are to be deemed good enough for the Jews. Hundreds of thousands of cultured cosmopolitans, accustomed to the refinements of metropolitan existence, are to be saved, if at all, by being condemned to the bitter task of opening new areas to agriculture.

The ostensible pretext for this doctrine is that metropolitan areas of the world cannot today absorb the refugees. By this criterion, however, no haven at all could be found for the refugees, for the world is suffering today from agricultural overproduction as much as from overproduction of manufactured goods. If there is no room for more city workers, technicians and professionals, neither is there any room for more tillers of the soil.

Turning Back the Clock

If the principle underlying Roosevelt’s proposal to Mussolini were carried out on the basis that the refugees should not aggravate agricultural overproduction, they would then be condemned to mere subsistence farming – raising only what they could themselves consume and then, being without cash crops, depending for manufactured goods on the charity of more fortunate Jews or reduced to primitive handicraft manufacturing to supplement their produce-raising. A fantastic attempt to turn the clock back to the days before the market existed!

The whole doctrine implied by Roosevelt is a fraud. Overproduction exists everywhere. It affects the lonely gaucho riding cattle, the Australian sheep-herder, the black peasant in darkest Africa. It is, of course, not real overproduction at all, but capitalist-enforced abstention from the use of goods and services. Neither in the cities nor in the back-country do people actually have enough food or manufactured goods, nor enough medical and dental care, nor enough housing or schooling. In a sane world, every last Jewish or anti-Nazi worker, doctor, dentist, teacher, writer, technician, actor, artist, musician, scientist, could find his industry and talents utilized to the utmost and the product of his labor enriching the life of all with whom he comes in contact. But in the capitalist world we live in, he is condemned by the Roosevelts to a perspective of eating his heart out in Ethiopia.

Second-Class Citizens

Far from constituting a gesture of friendship to the Jewish refugees, Roosevelt’s proposal to Mussolini to settle them in Ethiopia is a pronouncement that the refugees are henceforth to be second-class citizens of the world. Not for them the life of civilization. Even twenty-five years ago this doctrine would have seemed incredible; but so rapid is the decay of capitalism that this arch-reactionary, in essence anti-Semitic doctrine is now enunciated by the foremost banner-bearer of the “great democracies.”

There have been a number of periodicals named Socialist Appeal in our history, this Socialist Appeal was edited in New York City by the “Left Wing Branches of the Socialist Party”. After the Workers Party (International Left Opposition) entered the Socialist Party in 1936, the Trotskyists did not have an independent publication. However, Albert Goldman began publishing a monthly Socialist Appeal in Chicago in February 1935 before the bulk of Trotskyist entered the SP. When there, they began publishing Socialist Appeal in August 1937 as the weekly paper of the “Left Wing Branches of the Socialist Party” but in reality edited by Cannon and other leaders. Goldman’s Chicago Socialist Appeal would fold into the New York paper and this Socialist Appeal would replace New Militant as the main voice of Fourth Internationalist in the US. After the expulsion of the Trotskyists from the the Socialist Party, Socialist Appeal became the weekly organ of the newly constituted Socialist Workers Party in early 1938. Edited by James Cannon and Max Shachtman, Felix Morrow, and Albert Goldman. In 1941 Socialist Appeal became The Militant again.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/v3n02-jan-14-1939.pdf