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Children welcoming US President Warren G. Harding to Metlakatla, Alaska, July 8, 1923. National Archives and Records Administration, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1940, the United States Congress and the Department of the Interior considered opening a separate immigration quota to enable German-Jewish refugees to settle in the American colonized territory of Alaska.1 The history of this proposal is relatively common knowledge in Alaska, yet mostly unknown elsewhere in the US.
- David Wyman, Paper Walls; America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (The University of Massachusetts Press, 1968) 99-115.
Rebecca Brenner Graham is author of Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Kensington, Jan. 2025) and a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University. Previously, she taught at the Madeira School and American University. She has a PhD in history and MA in public history from American University and a BA in history and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College. In 2023, she was awarded a Cokie Roberts Fellowship from the National Archives Foundation and a Rubenstein Center Research Fellowship from the White House Historical Association. In addition to Contingent, her writing has been published in Time, Slate, Ms., the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other places.