Little Refugees

> A resolution sponsored by New York's Senator Wagner and Massachusetts' Representative Rogers would lift U. S. immigration quotas to let 20,000 child refugees from Germany (one-sixth of the estimated number who are in "desperate straits") enter the U. S. this year and next. At hearings on the bill last week, Clarence E. Pickett of the American Friends Service Committee (Mrs. Roosevelt's favorite charity) drew the pitiable picture of Jewish children in Germany barred from schools and from playing in parks, spat upon in the streets, seldom able to see their hunted fathers.

> Theatre was injected into the hearings by Actress Helen Hayes. Divesting herself of the majesty which for three years she has worn in Victoria Regina, she threw herself into the role of plain "Mrs. Charles MacArthur," mother of two."* She recalled her grandmother's stories about eight brothers & sisters around the family dinner table. "I remember that there was always room for one more. There is always room for one more/-ones who have no room elsewhere." Mother MacArthur clinched her argument by saying she would gladly adopt a child sight unseen,/- if assured it was not mentally defective. Said she poignantly: "I never saw my own child until he was placed in my arms after he was delivered."

> Newbold Morris of Manhattan (president of the New York City Council) reported that a committee of which he is treasurer had $250,000 to pay for transporting the 20,000 children if admitted, and 1,400 unsolicited offers of adoption. Herbert Hoover chimed in. Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago sent word: "These children have done no wrong."

* One (a boy) adopted, the other, Mary, whose birth in 1950 cost Producer Jed Harris two weeks' pay for the rest of the cast of Coquette when Mother MacArthur's confinement closed the show. Unsuccessful defense by Mr. Harris: that Mary's birth was "an act of God." /- Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt last fortnight "adopted" a Spanish Civil War orphan, Lorenzo Murias, 12, through an organization called the Foster Parents Plan for Children in Spain, by which refugee children are kept in France at a cost to U. S. foster parents of $9 per month.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.