How Al Smith handles 1930s antisemitism and Germany

FDR did not like Jews. He thought that when you had too many Jews in one place, they inevitably tended to dominate things and thus it was completely fair that other groups disliked Jews for this. See here. His views on Jews (among other things) were pretty horrifying.

In 1923, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at the college and helped institute a quota to limit the number admitted. In 1938, he privately suggested that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were therefore to blame for provoking anti-Semitism there. In 1941, he remarked at a Cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon. In 1943, he told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions “should be definitely limited” so as to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.”

Al Smith's top aide for almost 20 years was Belle Moskowitz. She was his 1928 Campaign Manager and press agent for nomination in 1932. Joseph Proskauer, another top adviser of his, would later be president of the American Jewish Committee. Smith certainly was no antisemite.

Smith was an early opponent of German antisemitism, supported the 1933 anti-Nazi Boycott, spoke at anti-Nazi rallies, denounced Nazi brutality, and supported joining the war in Europe.


What sort of specific actions might him being President instead of FDR have resulted in? I'm going to assume his VP is John Nance Garner, as that'd still make for a very balanced ticket.
 
See https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/...by-richard-breitman-and-allan-j-lichtman.html for a review of Breitman and Lichtman's FDR and the Jews, the most balanced work on this subject. What a great many critics seem to miss is not only popular anti-Semitism but strong popular opposition to allowing any more immigration into the US during the Great Depression. ("We don't have enough jobs for our own people," etc.) FDR should have lobbied Congress to loosen immigration quotas but there is no likelihood that he--or Smith had the latter been president--would have succeeded.

Also, I'll recycle an old post of mine:

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I know that W. D. Rubinstein's The Myth of Rescue is a controversial book, but Rubinstein may have a point in arguing that until the last moment many German Jews were just not that anxious to come to the US--which if true suggests that adjustment in quotas might have had less of an effect than is widely assumed:

"Critics of America's immigration policies during this period have often focused upon the fact that Germany's quota was underfilled until 1939. In 1937, for instance, only 11,520 persons migrated to the United States from Germany, only 42 per cent of the possible total of 25,957 set by the 1924 quota. Critics of American policy have often attributed this to the 'paper walls' erected by America's consular bureaucracy in Germany, walls which were removed only at the last possible moment, when a vast tide of desperate refugees resulted, at last, in some humanitarianism being introduced into America's harsh immigration administration. There is, of course, an element of truth in this, and many individual cases of bureaucratic pettifoggery and narrow-mindedness, strongly suggestive of anti-semitism, can doubtless be found. Yet this begs perhaps the central question, a question which all critics of the refugee policies of the democracies during these years should certainly address and answer: how many German Jews had actually applied, at any particular point during the years of Nazi rule, to enter the United States (or any other country), but were denied entry through bureaucratic harshness or anti-semitism? No definitive data is available to answer this question, but such information as does exist strongly suggests that the answer is that, until Kristallnacht, many fewer German Jews actually wished to enter the United States than one would assume.

"On 17 November 1938 — that is, just after Kristallnacht — Frances Perkins, the American Secretary of Labor, stated that the German—Austrian immigrant quota was then filled 'for at least fourteen months'. In other words, at this time perhaps only 32,000 Germans and Austrians (Jews and non-Jews) had actually applied to migrate to the United States. At the time perhaps 250,000 Jews remained in Germany and 125,000 in Austria. During the early period of Nazi rule, the number of German Jews who applied to migrate was, almost certainly, much smaller still, and the fact that the quota figure was not met until amazingly late must be attributed in large part to the unwillingness of Germany's Jews to apply to migrate to the United States until the very last moment...' https://books.google.com/books?id=6IaEAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA225
 
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