Samuel Miller Breckinridge Long was born in St. Louis, Missouri on May 16, 1881, a member of the storied Breckinridge family (who earlier spelled it "Breckenridge," but that's neither here nor there). Notable Breckinridges include:
-Robert Breckinridge: Virginia militia captain during the French & Indian War.
-Alexander Breckinridge: Son (John Floyd) was the 25th governor of Virginia.
-Robert Breckinridge, Jr.: Ratifier of the Constitution and later Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives.
-John Breckinridge: Senator from Kentucky and later Thomas Jefferson's Attorney General (1805-1806).
-James Breckinridge: Virginia House delegate (1789-1802, 1806-1808), member of the House of Representatives (1809-1817), Virginia House delegate (1819-1821, 1823-1824).
-Letitia Breckinridge: Second husband was Peter B. Porter, twice New York representative to the House and U.S. Secretary of War (1828-1829).
-John Cabell Breckinridge: U.S. Army Major, U.S. Representative from Kentucky (1851-1855), Vice-President under James Buchanan (the youngest ever VP), Candidate for President in the 1860 Election.*
*Breckinridge, a native Kentuckian, had the support of the Southern Democrats thanks to his stance on preserving slavery. He split the Democratic vote with Stephen Douglas (see previous "When did Republicans/Democrats switch platforms?" post), who favored Popular Sovereignty, or letting each state make their own decision on slavery. This split paved the way for Lincoln to take 180 electoral votes and the presidency, and for the South to secede from the Union.
-William Campbell Preston Breckinridge: U.S. Representative from Kentucky (1885-1895). Married Lucretia Hart Clay, granddaughter of Henry Clay.
-Ethelbert Dudley Warfield: President of Miami University, Lafayette College, and the director of Princeton Theological Seminary.
-John Cabell Breckinridge II: New York attorney, married Isabella Goodrich, daughter of B.F. Goodrich, founder of the B.F. Goodrich Company.
-Henry Skillman Breckinridge: One of Charles Lindbergh's lawyers during the Lindbergh kidnapping trial. Henry S. Breckinridge was the only serious (though not, like serious serious) challenger to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 Republican primaries, running against the New Deal.
That's a lot of family history, but the Breckinridges are a storied family in American political history.
Charles Lindbergh's involvement with the family is somewhat notable, as Lindbergh would go on to be the face of the America First movement, advocating for the U.S. foreign policy of "leave Nazi Germany alone." Henry Breckinridge, a longtime friend of Lindbergh and his personal attorney, was the first person Lindbergh called when he discovered that his son had been kidnapped. Lindbergh would later write Breckinridge after touring Germany, in regards to Nazi Germany:
(There is) a spirit in Germany which I have not seen in any other country. There is certainly great ability, and I am inclined to think more intelligent leadership than is generally recognized. A person would have to be blind not to realize that they have already built up tremendous strength.
It's hard to determine how close Henry Breckinridge was with Breckinridge Long, but they were only five years apart in age, and both involved in government affairs.
Anyhow, to Breckinridge Long. Long graduated from Princeton in 1904, Washington University School of Law, and got a Master's from Princeton in 1909. Long was admitted to the Missouri bar and opened a law office in St. Louis. Long supported Woodrow Wilson (and is credited with coining Wilson's successful 1916 re-election campaign slogan, "He kept us out of war," which Wilson did...for about another year). Shortly after Wilson won re-election, Long joined the State Department as Third Assistant Secretary of State but left in 1920 to unsuccessfully run for Senate (and took another L in 1922). While working for Wilson, Long became familiar with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Wilson's Assistant Secretary of the Navy (it was not lost on FDR that his 5th cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was also Assistant Secretary of the Navy in McKinley's administration.).
Long supported FDR's candidacy for president in 1932 and was rewarded with an ambassadorship to Italy in 1933. While in Rome, Long wrote back to Washington praising Mussolini and his regime for their "well-paved streets," the "dapper" black-shirted stormtroopers, and their seemingly always on-time trains.
He returned to private life in 1936, but still had some Opinions. Long said of the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria in 1938), that it was cool because "the Germans were the only people with the intelligence and courage to bring peace between the Rhine and Black Sea."
Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book "No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II" that Long kept a diary "filled with invectives against Jews, Catholics, New Yorkers, liberals, and, in fact, anyone who was not of his own particular background."
In 1939 FDR asked Long to return to the State Department. Long oversaw the Immigrant Visa Division, essentially formulating the policy of allowing immigrants into the United States as well as transfer visas in foreign consulates. This is where Long's history becomes problematic.
Long basically promoted U.S. National Security over humanitarian concerns. After the Anschluss, and then Kristallnacht in 1939, over 300,000 Germans (mostly Jews) applied for an immigration visa to the United States. Even as Hitler ramped up his efforts to dominate Europe throughout the 1930s, the United States - still reeling from the Great Depression - maintained the immigration quotas established by the Johnson-Reed Act.
The Johnson-Reed Act (passed in 1924) was an extremely restrictive immigration policy that targeted immigrants of specific "undesirable" countries or origins. Visas were limited to 2% of the total population of a given country according to their population in the United States as of the 1890 census.
Oh and wouldn't you know it, on January 10, 1921 a fire in the Commerce Building destroyed 25% of the 1890 census, with another 50% "destroyed by water, smoke, and fire." So...there wasn't exactly a back-up on a floppy disk. Census Bureau Clerk T.J. Fitzgerald:
(The records were) certain to be absolutely ruined. There is no method of restoring the legibility of a water-soaked volume.
What records did remain were destroyed in 1935.
The Johnson-Reed Act excluded all Asian countries as well as significantly limiting visas for prospective immigrants from Southern & Eastern European countries while increasing available visas for Northern & Western Europe. As a result, only 27,370 visas from Germany would be approved each year. There was about an 11-year waiting list to get into the United States in 1939 from Germany. A Hungarian applying for an immigrant visa faced a 40-year wait.
Eleanor Roosevelt once remarked of Long to FDR: "Franklin, you know he's a fascist." To which FDR responded, "I've told you, Eleanor, you must not say that."
Emanuel Celler, a Democratic representative from Brooklyn from 1923-1973, described Long as
Cold and austere, stiff as a poker, highly diplomatic in dress and in speech...and anti-Semitic.
Long reviewed Hitler's terrible book Mein Kampf as "eloquent in opposition to Jewry and Jews as exponents of Communism and chaos." In a 1940 diary entry, Long said that those sympathetic to the plight of those targeted by the Nazis were "largely concentrated along the Atlantic seaboard, and principally around New York" who had "joined up with the small element in this country which wants to push us into this war."
Long's views on Jews and basically all non-Americans reflected what was actually a popular opinion in the United States at the time. Two weeks after Kristallnacht, 72% of respondents to a Gallup Poll said the United States should not allow larger numbers of German Jews into the United States. 54% of respondents said the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis was their own fault. 67% of Americans opposed a bill proposed in Congress to admit child refugees from Germany, and the bill never made it to the floor for a vote. A lot of Americans thought Germany and the Soviet Union were using Jewish refugees as spies. Let's not forget that there was another recession in the Great Depression. Unemployment hit 20%. "Economic Anxiety" has been around for a while.
A June 26, 1940 memorandum from Breckinridge Long detailed the following regarding potential immigrants from the United States:
We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone the granting of the visas. However, this could only be temporary. In order to make it more definite, it would have to be done by suspension of the rules under the law by the issuance of a proclamation of emergency - which I take it we are not yet ready to proclaim.
The State Department - remember this is Long's doing - "cautioned consular officials to exercise particular care" in screening applicants for visas. In June 1941, the State Department issued a "relatives rule," which denied visas to immigrants with close family still in Nazi territory which, by June 1941, was pretty much all of Western Europe. And by that point, most American consulates in German-occupied territories were closed (under German orders, to which the United States complied). On June 22, 1941 the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa - the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
On July 1, 1941 the State Department centralized all alien visa control in Washington. All applicants needed to be approved by a review committee in Washington, and then were required to submit additional paperwork, including a second affidavit proving their finances were in order. Basically after July 1941 it was virtually impossible to leave Nazi-occupied Europe for the United States.
This was Long's goal, as he was terrified of "radicals" and "the Jewish press" for his efforts to prevent immigration to the United States. He saw himself besieged by "communists, extreme radicals, Jewish professional agitators, and refugee enthusiasts...all woven together in the barrage of opposition against the State Department which makes me the bull's eye."
Emanuel Celler, on Long:
Long said that he refused to grant visas for security reasons. Well, what is meant by security reasons - he felt that if he granted a visa to a refugee, the relative of the refugee might be held as a hostage in Germany and...they might force him to behave in a way that involved the security of the United States and therefore he would not grant him a visa. Which was a lot of hooey.
Eleanor Roosevelt found Long "not only unsympathetic but also opposed to the policies she supported and, as much as possible, she tried to work around Long."
For many applicants trying to escape the Nazis, many of the documents the State Department required were simply impossible to acquire. One of these applicants was Otto Frank, who wrote to his old college buddy Nathan Straus, Jr. asking him to put up $5,000 (just over $87,000 in today's dollars). It was a good ask: Straus was the son of a Macy's co-owner, head of the U.S. Housing Authority, and a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. Otto Frank and his family, including his daughter Anne, would never make it to the United States.
FDR could have removed Long. He didn't. Ultimately, only 10% of the immigration quota from Germany was filled under Long. Most of those who didn't receive visas died during World War II.
Emanuel Celler said of the State Department's division under Long:
There unquestionably were a number of anti-Semites in the State Department, and I know that personally...The normal attitude of the State Department in those days, and I suspect it still exists, that you don't do anything to rock the boat. You keep things calm. And the fact that the millions of Jews were being murdered while they were delaying, I don't think that troubled most of them, frankly.
Breckinridge Long came from a rich, political family with a history of turning its back on pretty much anyone who didn't look like them. In that way, they represented most of America. Breckinridge Long is a wide-angle view on how things don't change all that much.
