When I look at the foundations of federal immigration law, I’ve always wondered why. Not just the political why – what crisis caused who to introduce what bill, what strategy motivated whom to vote for it – but the personal why. Why do people vote the way they do? If they hold prejudices, why? What forces and influences in their lives led them to decide that restrictions on entry were necessary and desirable?
Assistant Secretary of State Wilbur J. Carr embodies this question for me. Why would a southern Ohio farm boy, who had probably known few Jews in his youth help implement immigration policies to exclude Jews seeking asylum in the 1930s? Why would he support senators pushing for general immigration restrictions a decade earlier? What other influences did he reject?
I couldn’t resist going to the Library of Congress and taking a look at Carr’s journals. I wasn’t looking for a riveting account of State Department policymaking. I knew from the reports of historians that his journals were much more mundane – meetings, dinner guests, the price of train tickets, that sort of thing. Instead, I was looking for a glimpse into the mind of one American – an American with no extraordinary privilege or talents except a gift for keeping the trains running on time, and who ended up surrounded by the politics of exclusion.
The Journal
The historians were right; Carr’s journals were mundane. Yet I found myself sitting there for days, poring over volume after volume, mesmerized. What fascinated me was the very act of recording those details, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. Their author clearly did not intend them as a political document for future historians. What prompts a person, I wondered, to record the minutiae of their daily life, for no other apparent purpose but their own need to recount them?
Here’s a typical passage, selected at random:
Friday, May 1, 1936
Busy morning. Lunched at [unintelligible]. Then to [unint.] where I heard the [unint.] violin played and found that the fault I found with A. string is due to my playing. Then I heard a D. Nicholas violin played and played on it myself and found it most responsive with a big but sympathetic tone. Brought it home for trial. [shorthand]
Long conference with Jack [unint.] and discussed a better plan for recruiting personnel for department.
Saturday, May 2, 1936
Interview with Mrs. Keblinger over her marital affairs. Then finished up my work. Club for lunch and had talk with Breck Long. Has come home to stay. Says President sent for him. Doesn’t know what President wants but probably campaign work. Back to Dept. where I worked until 4 when came home. We went to Justice Stones for dinner. The Adolph Millers, Edward Burlings, Mrs. Vernon Kellogg, Edward Lowry, the Charles Roads. Mrs. Burling had just returned from the [unint.] Gardens, and has found them interesting. …
Bombardment of Addis Ababa began to-day and by eleven p.m. the Emperor and his family had fled and the city was in flames.
All of Carr’s journals and letters have the same tone. No reflection, little opinion, just a detailed recording of events. He recorded Mussolini’s siege of Ethiopia and the exile of Emperor Haile Selassie – events Carr would have to respond to the following week – with the same dispassion with which he recalled small talk over dinner.
With this degree of equanimity, it’s easy to imagine why an office colleague chose to confide in him about her marital problems. Even events that would impact Carr profoundly, like the death of his first wife or his forced evacuation from Czechoslovakia after the Nazi invasion, generate little more internal reflection than these quotidian turns.
The Stoic
This week, I’ve been reading Helmut Walser Smith’s ambitious book, Germany: A Nation in its Time: Before, During and After Nationalism, 1500-2000. To fully empathize with Carr, I needed to understand the southern Ohio farm community that raised him in the decades after the Civil War. That community had been settled by German-American pioneers beginning in 1801. A couple of generations removed from the Rhineland, they moved and intermarried mostly among themselves. They still spoke German. I wondered what kind of conditions they had left behind when they braved the hazardous passage that Hans Georg Gerster described in his letters home.
Smith described a region in the early 1700s still decimated by the Thirty Years War of 1609-1648 – a war often compared to World War I and World War II combined in terms of devastation, but with a century-long aftermath. Some villages, like the one Carr’s third great-grandfather left in 1737, had lost more than half their population.
One particular passage in Smith’s study arrested my attention. He talked about the profound effect that the Stoicism of Justus Lipsius, a Flemish Catholic philosopher, had on German character and thought in the early modern era. Smith noted that eyewitness accounts of the Thirty Years War recorded horrific events, but rarely how the writer felt in experiencing them. “As these are stoic documents,” Smith writes, “they mark the events that impinge upon life with exactitude, and sometimes note the gap between what words can and cannot describe. We feel the quiver and hesitation of their authors’ quills, but the writers leave their inner states unaddressed.”
The Individual in the Modern World
We live in a very different era today – an era in which the dominant public issue might be described as whether inner experience matters less or more than the material world. That question remains so hotly contested that many fear dissolution into warfare (and others write blogs seeking to historically contextualize the crisis).
Carr, who was born in 1870, came to adulthood in a period bracketed by horrific conflicts. His father, a Civil War veteran, lived until the end of World War I. Carr himself would live to see the country enter a second world war. If Carr internalized a (perhaps simplistic) version of Stoicism practiced by a people who survived the destruction of early modern Europe, it’s easy to perceive that philosophy’s potential value to the individual. It’s also easy to imagine a simplistic version of that philosophy cutting the individual off from his and other’s inner experiences to the point that costs to the inner life become impossible to calculate.