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Summary:
Henry Oinas-Kukkonen, Keep European Refugees Out – The Anti-Immigrant Leaders Against the Alaska Development Act of 1940
A three-day hearing concerning the future of the Arctic territory of
Alaska intertwined with a possible safe haven for European refugees was
arranged at the time, when World War II was escalating in Europe. The
US Senate subcommittee of the Committee on Territories and Insular
Affairs, including officials, politicians, opinion leaders,
representatives of NGO’s and citizens, gathered together in
Washington D.C. to determine the future of a proposed bill called the
Alaska Development Corporation Act of 1940.
The bill was proposed both in the Senate and the House of
Representatives in March 1940. It proposed the increasing of the
population of Alaska with European war refugees. In May 1940 two major
anti-immigrant leaders, John Thomas Taylor and John B. Trevor, were
invited to give their testimony to the hearings in the Capitol
concerning the development of the peripheral American northland. Taylor
was the Director of the National Legislation Committee of the American
Legion and Trevor was the President of the American Coalition of
Patriotic Societies.
Taylor and Trevor strongly opposed the bill that aimed develop Alaska
with the help of refugee resettlements. Their anti-immigrant claims and
allegations can be summed up Americans first, Alaska only for
Americans, and the US Border closed.
In the hearings there were 28 witnesses of whom only four were against
the bill, and two of them were Taylor and Trevor. The nativist
statements of these national level opinion leaders did not go unnoticed
by the Committee and they had an impact on three senators out of four
in the subcommittee: Homer Truett Bone (D), Robert Rice Reynolds (D)
and Gerald Prentice Nye (R) shared opposition to immigration. The bill
became stalled in the Congress.
Takaisin
Studia Historica Septentrionalia 80
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