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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.
The idea of a German-Jewish settler colony in Alaska found new relevance in 2007 when novelist Michael Chabon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2001) published The Yiddish Policemen’s Union about an Alaska burdened by conflict between Jewish and Indigenous groups. In this counterfactual timeline, Israel never became a country because Jewish refugees relocated in the colonized territory of Alaska. Further, Alaska never became a US state because American lawmakers promised “no Jewlaska.”2
In real life, however, the first woman Cabinet Secretary, progressive humanitarian Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (1933-1945), was an early supporter of this refugee relocation plan. She corresponded with a bishop on the ground in Alaska about it as early as 1935.3
Three years later, in 1938, Perkins expressed support for the Alaska resettlement plan in a note to her fellow member of President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes.4 The impetus then was Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass), during which Nazis burned synagogues, looted possessions, and deported Jewish men, killing many.
The following year, pro-immigration lawmakers were spinning their wheels on a different piece of refugee legislation, the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which would have welcomed twenty thousand child refugees into the United States. The bill never made it to the floor in either chamber of Congress. No amount of emotional appeal, even sympathy for children, could convince Congress to expand immigration quotas.
At sunset, in the woods of Tok, Alaska. Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In response, lawmakers turned to the idea of creating a separate quota to settle refugees in Alaska. Their stated objectives included military defense and economic development.5 The idea of developing the wilderness has long roots in many white colonial histories. Some writers of history claim that viewing the Alaska plan through an imperial lens imposes contemporary frameworks onto the past. But without the context of imperialism in the time that Alaska was a colonized US territory, anyone studying history misses a crucial and compelling piece of the puzzle. The Alaska resettlement plan stemmed from not only humanitarianism, but also US imperial interests.
In a story that few people already know, Perkins’s role is even less discussed. Why does that matter? The fact that a radically pro-immigrant purveyor of progressive New Deal policies wanted to move a white-passing refugee people into colonized territory to settle it is emblematic of most white Americans’ uncritical acceptance of imperialism. Most white Americans were uncritical of US imperialism, and usually their imperialist plans materialized. But in this case, the xenophobic and antisemitic backlash was so extreme regarding who would immigrate that even imperialism could not prevail.
By the time the Alaska plan was in motion, now as a bill referred to as King-Havenner, Perkins was no longer an active participant in the effort.6 Members of the US House of Representatives had tried to impeach her in 1939, for erroneous reasons relating to her failure to deport labor leader Harry Bridges. He was suspected of being a Communist labor organizer but a hearing determined that he did not qualify for deportation.7 But that’s a separate story, and by 1940, key proponents of the Alaska plan worked in the Department of the Interior. Secretary Ickes and his trusted legal advisor Felix Cohen collaborated with a few members of Congress – Representative Havenner, Senator King, and Senator Robert Wagner – Jewish activist groups, and still a representative or two from Perkins’s Department of Labor.8
Opponents of the bill, however, were plentiful and included xenophobic lobbying groups (sometimes called “patriotic societies”), much of Congress, and swaths of the American public who had voted for them.9 The politically calculating FDR was not going to swing his support for this plan during the 1940 presidential election year.10 Notably, Indigenous Alaskan voices are absent from the known history of King-Havenner, reflecting a lack of the incorporation of Indigenous voices into US institutions at the time.11
At the same time, antisemitism was as integral to this story as imperialism. The xenophobic lobbyists, the white Alaskans who wanted to keep their colonized territory Christian and as white as possible, and even miscellaneous correspondents of Perkins all speculated whether Alaska was “too cold for the Jews,” tying into antisemitic tropes of weakness.12 At the same time, Jewish refugees were so desperate that some vocalized support for resettlement in Alaska.13
The minds behind King-Havenner hammered out a plan. The quota would be separate from the National Origins Act quotas that determined how many people from each country could enter the United States per year. The Department of the Interior would oversee the resettlement program. The refugees would not be allowed to enter the mainland US, a concession to antisemitism that speaks volumes.
But like the Wagner-Rogers bill before it, the King-Havenner bill did not make it out of committee, in this case the Senate Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs. It remains a relatively unknown story, except for in Alaska.
The rise and fall of the King-Havenner Bill signifies a rare instance in US history when American imperialism lost. Yet it is another instance where the victors were American xenophobia and bigotry.
Denali, the highest peak in North America, at 20,310 feet above sea level. NPS Photo / Tim Rains, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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- David Wyman, Paper Walls; America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (The University of Massachusetts Press, 1968) 99-115.
- Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Harper Perennial, 2007) 28-29; See also: Tom Kizzia, “Novel involving an Alaska Jewish colony is rooted in history… Pulitzer winner writes from failed plan to move European Jews here prior to World War II,” Anchorage Daily News (26 April 2007).
- Rev. Rt. Antonin, Letter to Frances Perkins (25 January 1935), U.S. Office of Territories Records Re; Settlement of European Refugees in Alaska (1907-1951) RG 126, Archives, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK.
- Letter from Frances Perkins to Harold Ickes (3 December 1938) RG 174, Boxes 66-73, U.S. National Archives, College Park, MD.
- Confidential Memorandum of Meeting in the Office of Dr. Isador Lubin (14 January 1939) Joseph Chamberlain Papers, RG 278, Folder 80, Reel 4, YIVO Archives & Library Collections, New York, NY.
- Senator William Henry King (D-UT) and Representative Frank Roberts Havenner (R-CA)’s names were on the bipartisan joint bill.
- Harry Bridges was deposed but not convicted or deported.
- Confidential Memorandum of Meeting in the Office of Dr. Isador Lubin (14 January 1939) Joseph Chamberlain Papers, RG 278, Folder 80, Reel 4, YIVO Archives & Library Collections, New York, NY.
- Wyman, Paper Walls, 107.
- Wyman, Paper Walls, 99.
- In my new book, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany, I mistakenly place the Indigenous groups on the side of the xenophobic lobbying groups. I misinterpreted a secondary source from the 1960s that described “Alaskans” speaking out against the resettlement plan. The secondary source did not specify which Alaskans. Here is one of many places where an imperial framework would be useful for clarity. My mistake will be corrected for the second printing.
- For example, Alaska Weekly, Quoted in Wyman, Paper Walls, 106.
- Bruno Rosenthal, quoted in Gerald S. Berman, “From Neustadt to Alaska, 1939: A Failed Attempt at Community Resettlement,” Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration, and Diaspora Vol. 6 (1987) 75; See also: Tom Kizzia, “Sanctuary: Alaska and the Holocaust,” Anchorage Daily News (1999); Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, “First Americans, Misfits, and Refugees,” Architect of Justice: Felix S. Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism (Cornell University Press, 2007) 148.
