A protest against Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welle address admonishing Americans to cease their condemnation of internal policies of other nations has been issued by a group of Chicago educators, international law experts and others, who asserted it was a confusion in terms to call “the torture of religion and racial persecution as practiced by Nazi Germany a domestic policy.”
In a telegram to Mr. Welles, made public by Salmon O. Levinson, lawyer who is known as the originator of the Kellogg-Briand treaty to outlaw war, the group cited statements by Secretary of State James G. Blaine and President Benjamin Harrison in 1891 and by Secretaries of State William M. Evarts and John Hay to show that persecution and exile were not a domestic question.
“Is murder a domestic policy?” the telegram asked. “Are concentration camps, is confiscation of property, is creating and foisting upon other countries exiles and refugees by the hundreds of thousands, are all these domestic policies?” The telegram concluded: “We have searched American history in vain to find a precedent for the week and dangerous policy you announced at Baltimore.”
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