Today -100: April 20, 1921: These people

Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes asks Congress to severely restrict immigration to make it “impossible for most of these people” – undesirables from the Balkans, Armenia, Russia, Georgia – “to enter the United States.”  Many of “these people” are of course Jews. The State Dept report says Romania is allowing any Jew in the army to be discharged if they go America (which certainly sounds like something Romania would do). And Latvian and Lithuanian immigrants, it says, are mostly “Jews of an undesirable type.” And “Armenians, Jews, Persians and Russians, all of which have been so driven hither and thither since 1914 that they cannot be regarded as desirable populations for any country.” (Update: the State Dept will sort of deny that these are Hughes’s personal views, but rather reports from officials abroad which Hughes passed on to Sen. Fall.)

The Allies’ Commission on Reparations demands that Germany move the entire gold reserve of the Reichsbank to its Cologne or Coblenz branches (Cologne is currently occupied by Britain, Coblenz by the US), where the gold will be under Allied control.

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