ABSTRACT
Spain presents a particularly complex set of problems for the historian who would understand America’s role in the refugee crisis of World War II. That America — and Great Britain — played a part in the destruction of Europe’s Jews can no longer be disputed; the question now is of degree. 1 But the Holocaust raised such fundamental issues that even a generation later it is difficult to move beyond the moralism that characterized the arguments of many liberal journalists during the war. They blamed myopic, even profascist State Department officials and public apathy for putting the Final Solution within the Nazis’ reach. 2 Refugee policy in Spain was especially vulnerable to moralists because of the position of the Spanish Civil War in the ideological battles of the thirties, and because the State Department’s courting of Francisco Franco often seemed to run counter to the fight against fascism. Franco’s victory remained a thorn in liberal sides well past the war years, and affected American diplomacy in that beleaguered nation until at least 1953. 3 The State Department, which had drawn general liberal wrath for its lack of apparent interventionism in the crises of the thirties, also was the zealous administrator of the restrictive American immigration laws. 4 So the Spanish refugee question combined for liberals the most emotionally explosive issues of the war years: the Final Solution, appeasement, and the future of democracy. One result was to cloud the refugee issue; another was to open all American diplomatic officials associated with the Franco regime to moralistic attacks, particularly the Ambassador, Carlton J. H. Hayes.
