Cordell Hull Oversees State Department with Profoundly Anti-Semitic Colleagues

Appointed Secretary of State by FDR, Hull remains in the post until December 1944. From this position he has unique capacity to keep the immigration doors to the US closed. With the head of the Western European Division at State, Jay Pierrepont Moffat and other officials, Wilbur Carr and William Phillips, attitudes toward Jews are more than advocacy of immigration restrictions, they range from polite to racial anti-Semitism. Well into the 1940s, refusal to admit European Jewish refugees is systematically ingrained and personally reinforced by state department inaction.