Sept/Oct 2026 (Volume 18, Issue 5)

 

By Jerry Harrington

In August 1938, a group of young, idealistic Iowa Quakers meeting outside Clear Lake, sent a letter to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Philadelphia. This letter proposed that the international Quaker organization support a summer training camp in Iowa for European refugees fleeing Adolf Hitler’s horrors. The goal, the group urged, was to help these migrants assimilate into American society. 

 

For many in Europe, the situation was dire. Since the Nazis rose to power in 1933, the movement transformed the German state into one hostile to minorities, especially Jews, but also political democrats, socialists and other “non-Aryans” who all feared for their lives. As Nazi control expanded beyond German borders into Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938, these groups within both nations faced the same fate. The result was that thousands of suffering people looked to leave Europe for freedom in the United States.

 

The AFSC responded positively. Groups of American Quakers—also known as the Religious Society of Friends—had visited Nazi Germany with the goal of providing financial and material aid to victims of oppression and were looking to set up workable programs to bring those in need to the U.S.

 

The Iowa Quakers’ letter offered a solution. In rural West Branch a Quaker boarding school called Scattergood—founded in 1890—had been closed since 1931, suffering from the fallout of the Great Depression, and had been only occasionally used for Quaker social and religious meetings. The Iowans proposed to fix up the current buildings and offered these facilities for the refugees, estimating that it could house 40 to 50 people in a quiet rural setting planners believed those escaping from Europe needed.

 

 

All this led to a meeting in West Branch in January 1939, with more than 60 representatives from both wings of the American Quaker movement—“Conservative” and “Progressive”—to put aside five decades of theological differences and help the refugees. They were joined by AFSC representatives. By now, the plan had expanded from a summer camp into an ongoing program at the school—renamed the Scattergood Hostel—to educate and integrate those fleeing Europe into the American mainstream. The facility was leased to the AFSC by Iowa Quakers for one dollar a year, while local and national efforts raised money to fix and clean the school buildings and make way for the refugees.

 

The result was a program based in rural West Branch that helped 186 refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Russia, Luxembourg and France become U.S. citizens. Lasting from 1938 to 1943, the effort accepted Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution, as well as political opponents of Hitler’s regime—artists, judges, journalists, academics and others who sought haven in the U.S. 

 

“The Quakers’ over-riding goal of Americanizing their guests guided almost every aspect of Scattergood Hotel’s program,” wrote Michael Luick-Thrams, author of “Out of Hitler’s Reach: The Scattergood Hostel for European Refugees, 1939-1943.” “The refugees, meanwhile, largely sought to adapt to the new environs as a means of basic survival and struggled to juggle who they had been with their new biographies they were building.” 

 

This action blossomed from the basic tenet of Quaker theology dedicated to social justice, a core element of the movement that began in England by George Fox in the mid-1600s. Quakers continued this practice when members migrated to North America and became one of the first groups to oppose American slavery. This commitment to social action was one reason that Philadelphia chemist John Scattergood gave funds to the Quaker community in West Branch that started the school under his name in 1890.

 

TO READ THE ENTIRE STORY AND OTHER FASCINATING STORIES ABOUT IOWA HISTORY, subscribe to Iowa History Journal.