Andrew Lawrence Somers (March 21, 1895 – April 6, 1949) was an American businessman, World War I veteran, and Democratic politician who served 13 terms as a U.S. Representative from New York from 1925 until his death in 1949.
Biography
He attended St. Teresa's Academy in Brooklyn, Brooklyn College Preparatory School, Manhattan College, and the Pratt Institute. Subsequently, he was an entrepreneur in the dry color and chemical fields.
Military service
Somers enlisted in the United States military on July 18, 1917, and served in World War I. Initially, he was a naval aviator in the United States Naval Flying Corps, but later was transferred to the Marine Corps and was a captain in the Marines' reserve. He was honorably discharged on March 4, 1919.[1]
Congressional career
Somers became active in Democratic Party politics under the tutelage of the Brooklyn Democrat leader John H. McCooey. Somers defeated his Republican challenger, Warren I. Lee. He was just 29 at the time he took office, earning him the nickname "the boy Congressman.[2]
During his years in Congress, Somers chaired the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures. A strong supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies, Somers successfully guided FDR's gold devaluation bills through the House of Representatives.[2]
Somers also chaired the Committee on Mines and Mining (Seventy-ninth Congress), and the Committee on Public Lands (Eighty-first Congress). He also was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1928.[1]
Somers was actively involved in efforts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust, advocated for a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, and helped lead the campaign to create a Jewish army to fight alongside the Allies in World War II.
The Jewish Army Campaign
Somers was one of the earliest supporters of the Jewish political action committees collectively known as the Bergson Group. The congressman was approached in 1941 by the Bergson Group's new Washington lobbyist, Rabbi Baruch Rabinowitz. In his unpublished autobiography, Rabinowitz wrote that Somers's sympathy for the plight of the Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe was anchored in family lore. According to Rabinowitz, Somers's grandmother and her infant son (his father), found themselves in dire straits upon arriving in the United States from Ireland and were befriended by a Jewish family.[3][4]
During the Bergson Group's first months lobbying in Washington, when it did not yet have its own office, Congressman Somers permitted Rabinowitz to work out of his Capitol Hill office.[3]
Initially known as the Committee for Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, the Bergson Group in 1941–1942 focused on seeking U.S. support for the creation of an armed Jewish force that would fight alongside the Allies against the Nazis. Somers introduced a "sense of Congress" resolution to that effect in February 1942, sparking the first serious public discussions concerning the Jewish army proposal.[5]
The Roosevelt and Churchill administrations opposed the proposal, on the grounds that it might provoke a backlash in the Arab world, where the idea of a Jewish army was seen as a precursor to the creation of a Jewish state in British Mandatory Palestine. Rattled by Somers's outspoken support for the Jewish army idea, one British Embassy official in Washington privately denied the congressman as "the less happy type of Irish American Catholic demagogue." The British government rejected a request by Rep. Somers and three other Jewish army advocates to visit London in 1942 to promote the proposal.[6]
In late 1944, the British government decided that establishing a Jewish fighting force, which it called the Jewish Brigade, was necessary to impress American public opinion and avoid strains in the U.S.-British relationship. Prime Minister Winston Churchill explained the establishment of the Jewish Brigade in these terms: "I like the idea of the Jews trying to get at the murderers of their fellow-countrymen in Europe, and I think it would give a great deal of satisfaction in the United States." The Bergson Group celebrated the creation of the Jewish Brigade by holding a dinner in Washington to honor Rep. Somers as the leader of the congressional effort.[7]
Rescue from the Holocaust
In December 1942, the Allies publicly confirmed that the Germans were carrying out the systematic slaughter of millions of Jews. The Bergson Group responded by launching a campaign for U.S. action to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Somers played a leading role in that effort.[8]
Somers's name appeared on dozens of full-page advertisements advocating rescue, which the Bergson Group placed in newspapers around the country. The public endorsement by a prominent member of Congress added luster to the Bergson efforts. Somers gave numerous speeches in Congress supporting Bergson's rescue demands and addressed the group's conferences.[9]
It was politically risky for Somers to play such a high-profile role in the Bergson Group. was a loyal Democrat and Roosevelt supporter. He also needed the backing of the party and the White House in his re-election bids. Nonetheless, Somers opted to publicly identify with a campaign that directly challenged FDR on the Jewish refugee crisis.[9]
Former New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch referred to Somers's political circumstances in a 2007 address to the national conference of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies: "Somers was a Democrat. A liberal Democrat from New York, who was openly challenging the policies of a liberal and very popular Democratic president, in the middle of a world war. It is not a simple thing to oppose a president from your own party. I remember that more than a few of my fellow Democrats were angry at me for challenging President Jimmy Carter's policies toward Israel in 1980. I am not comparing myself to Andy Somers, and I am certainly not comparing Carter to Roosevelt. I am merely pointing out that Somers was risking his political life by going out on a limb with the Bergson Group against the Roosevelt administration."[10]
In August 1943, Somers headed a delegation of rescue advocates that left for Canada, intending to confront President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, who were meeting in Quebec. En route, the congressman received a telegram from the White House offering a meeting with the president in Washington after the summit. Based on that offer, the delegation canceled its trip to Canada. But the promise of a meeting with the president was never fulfilled.[11]
Somers sparked significant controversy in the autumn of 1943 over the Roosevelt administration's abandonment of the Jews. This episode began when Bergson Group representatives met with Secretary of State Cordell Hull on August 12, 1943, and asked for permission to send delegations to Palestine, Spain, and Turkey, to press local government officials to remove hindrances to the arrival of refugees. Congressman Somers would head the group going to Turkey. Secretary Hull told the Bergson officials he was "sympathetic" to their request. But two months later, famed investigative journalist I.F. Stone, writing in the New York City daily newspaper PM, revealed that the State Department was still stalling on Bergson's requests.[12]
Stone quoted Somers extensively. "I think the run-around being given us by the State Department contrasts shamefully with the courage shown recently by the governments of Denmark and Sweden in facilitating the escape of 90 percent of the Danish Jews from Nazi round-up, " the congressman said. "If small countries, one of them under Nazi occupation, the other under the show of Nazi power, can do this much, surely we can do more than make sympathetic speeches about the problem. The frontiers of Europe today are as full of holes as a sieve, as shown by the Danish experience and as shown by the ease with which thousands have fled across the Swiss and Spanish borders. If we establish rescue camps in Turkey and other neutral countries, the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe will find a way to get to them." Somers vowed, "I'm going to force this to a showdown with the State Department. Who knows how many people we could have reduced by now if our delegation had been permitted to proceed as soon as Secretary Hull gave his approval."[12]
The State Department never did grant permission to Somers to travel to Turkey, but the publicity about the controversy helped increase pressure on the Roosevelt administration over the refugee issue. It erupted just as members of Congress, including Somers, were introducing a resolution urging the president to create a new government agency for the sole purpose of rescuing Jewish refugees. The hearings about the resolution played a major role in bringing about the creation of the U.S. government's War Refugee Board. The board helped rescue more than 200,000 Jews from the Nazis during the final months of the war.[13]
According to the historian Dr. Rafael Medoff, author of numerous books and articles about America's response to the Holocaust and the Bergson group, "Cynical British officials believed Congressman Somers found common cause with the Jewish people because, as an Irish-American, he sympathized with the Jewish fight to oust the British from Palestine. While Somers's concern about the British-Irish situation no doubt sensitized him to what the Jews faced in Palestine, his support for the rescue of European Jewry sprang from nothing more complicated than human decency and the natural desire for justice."[14]
Advocacy for Israeli Statehood
During the post World War II years, Somers actively supported the Bergson Group's efforts to mobilize American support for the creation of a Jewish state. Once again, he added his name to Bergson newspaper ads and spoke in Congress and in public addresses about the news for a Jewish homeland. He also served as co-chair of the Bergson Group's American League for a Free Palestine. Somers visited the new State of Israel for two weeks in the summer of 1948. He repeatedly pressed the Truman administration to loan the Jewish state funds to address urgent humanitarian needs, such as the absorption of hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors and Jews who were expelled en masse from Arab countries in the wake of the war. In February 1949, a $100-million loan was approved.[2]
Death
Somers was admitted to the U.S. Naval Hospital, in Queens, NY, on March 1, 1949, for an unspecified stomach ailment. He died there on April 6, 1949, and was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, Brooklyn. Nearly 1,000 family members, friends, and political associates attended the funeral.[15]
^ abRafael Medoff, Militant Zionism in America: The Rise and Impact of the Jabotinsky Movement in the United States, 1926–1948 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002), p.74
^Samuel Merlin, Millions of Jews to Rescue (Rafael Medoff, ed.) (Washington, DC: The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, 2011), pp.47–48
^David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff, A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust (New York: The New Press, 2002), pp.26–27
^Henderson (Foreign Office) to Baker (Colonial Office), November 28, 1945, CO733/461/75872/14C, PRO, cited in Medoff, Militant Zionism, p.26 Merlin, p.50.
^"A Dinner in Honor of A. L. Somers," The Answer, November 1943, p.26.
^ abRafael Medoff, Militant Zionism in America, pp.26
^Remarks by the Hon. Edward I. Koch, Fifth National Conference of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, June 17, 2007 – Fordham University School of Law, New York City, Files of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Washington, DC.
^Samuel Merlin, Millions of Jews to Rescue (Rafael Medoff, ed.) (Washington, DC: The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, 2011), pp.91
^ abI. F. Stone, "State Dept. Blocks Plan to Rescue European Jews," PM, October 17, 1943, p.6.
^David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp.201–204.
^Rafael Medoff, "Background Memo: Andrew L. Somers," Files of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Washington, DC.
^1,000 Pay Tribute to Andrew Somers," New York Times, April 10, 1949, p.76.
