The Tydings Resolution

The halls of the United States Senate rang again with denunciation of the German persecution of the Jews when Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland arose and submitted a resolution urging President Roosevelt to convey to the Hitler government “an unequivocal statement of the profound feelings of surprise and pain experienced by the American people” at the oppression of the Jews of Germany.

Several months ago Senator Joseph Robinson, majority leader in the Upper House, spoke in a vein very much like this. His expression of indignation had no effect beyond goading the barbed Nazis to outbursts of anger, very much like that a bull emits when the banderillas strike its hide. Senator Tydings’s resolution is not only commendable in itself but commendable in that it is only the initial step in a series of steps, the final one of which willbe, we trust, the presentation of a memorandum by President Roosevelt to the German government along the lines indicated by the Senator from Maryland. According to Senatorial procedure, the Tydings’s resolution is now in the hands of the Foreign Relations Committee. It devolves upon the members of this committee to report out this resolution, or else, kill it in committee. When and if this resolution is voted out, the United States Senate will debate and vote.

The burden laid upon the President of the United States by the terms of the resolution are not, we believe, too heavy for him to bear, for it is entirely within the democratic traditions of President Roosevelt to require him to express to Berlin “the earnest hope of the people of the United States that the German nation will speedily alter its policy” toward the Jews and will restore their civil and political rights.

In the preamble to his resolution, Senator Tydings quiets that fear always evident in legislative chambers that an old precedent is being violated or a new one created by pointing out that on nine separate occasions the United States has raised an official voice against the persecution of Jews in other countries, as far back as 1840 and as recently as 1919. No one dare say that President Roosevelt is not a friend of Jewry, but he has, for reasons which apparently satisfy him, not dared to speak against the persecution of Jews in Germany on his own initiative. A resolution passed by the Senate, and, it is to be hoped, in the lower House as well, would provide him with the impulse and the justification to put the United States on record as an outspoken friend for justice to the oppressed.

In commending Senator Tydings for raising his voice for justice to the Jews of Germany, one shold not forget to give praise also to Max J. Kohler, for whom the Senator derived the basic information for his resolution.