Franklin D. Roosevelt
Four-term US president: the New Deal and the war
He died on 12 April 1945, less than a month before victory in Europe. Here one must be exact, because assessments of his role diverge sharply. His administration neither abolished the immigration quotas of 1924 nor came near filling them: in the years of greatest need, entry from Germany remained below what the quota allowed. The Évian conference of 1938, which he himself convened, ended in nothing—of thirty-two countries only the Dominican Republic agreed to take refugees. The liner St. Louis, with nine hundred passengers, was not admitted to America in 1939.
And the same administration in January 1944 established the War Refugee Board, which is estimated to have saved some two hundred thousand people—above all in Hungary, through Raoul Wallenberg. It was established under direct pressure from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, and it was established late.
Sources
Documents of the period
- The Évian conference (1938); the St. Louis affair (1939); the establishment of the War Refugee Board (January 1944) — the quotas went unfilled; the board was created in 1944
Basis: documents and evidence.