The question of whether it was within the power of the US to prevent the Holocaust—or at least to reduce the number of its victims—is usually posed as a military one: Should the Allies have directed some of the war effort toward disrupting the operation of concentration camps, for example by bombing the railroad lines to Auschwitz? This searching, compulsively watchable documentary, which juxtaposes archival photographs and news footage with interviews with Holocaust refugees, survivors, and historians, puts the question differently: Why did the US turn away the flood of Jewish refugees who sought to escape Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s? As the historian Rebecca Erbelding comments on camera, “Even though the Holocaust physically took place in Europe, it is a story that Americans have to reckon with too.”
“As a young country, America could not afford to turn people away; there was simply too much land to fill, too much work to be done,” Jia Lynn Yang writes in One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924–1965 (2020). Between 1870 and 1914 nearly 25 million people, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, made their way to the US. The Statue of Liberty, installed in New York Harbor in 1886, became an embodiment of the country’s openness to newcomers. In her poem “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus addresses the statue as “Mother of Exiles,” channeling its spirit in the well-known lines “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Lazarus’s vision, according to The US and the Holocaust, was more dream than reality. As the historian Peter Hayes comments, “Exclusion of people and shutting them out has been as American as apple pie.” While Burns has sometimes been accused of nostalgia in his approach to the American past—particularly in his documentary series about the Civil War—the new series is a scathing, even bombastic indictment of US immigration policy over the past 160 years.
In the 1860s Chinese laborers were employed to extend the transcontinental railroad into the American West—dangerous, exhausting work for which they were paid low wages. After the railroad was complete, they spread across the country, sparking protests from white workers who found themselves displaced.1 These protests helped inflame anti-Chinese sentiment and led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first US immigration law to discriminate on the basis of race or class, which blocked Chinese laborers from entering the country (although it allowed Chinese students, teachers, and other white-collar workers). Another immigration act the same year created other categories of inadmissible people, such as convicts, prostitutes, the indigent, and the insane; epileptics and anarchists were later added to the list. In 1917 a new law barred immigrants from virtually all of Asia and imposed a literacy requirement on others.