Washington Lobbying

St. John’s 1949 journey from the Tubabao camp to the United States to win his stranded flock a home: his arrival in New York in early September 1949, his personal lobbying of Congress for the amendment of the American displaced-persons law so that the stateless Far Eastern Russians might enter, the 1950 amendment of the Displaced Persons Act that Truman signed on June 16, 1950, the founding of the Washington parish of St. John the Baptist during the trip, and the resettlement that emptied Tubabao into the United States and Australia by 1951.

Tradition: ROCOR (glorified 1994; Moscow Patriarchate veneration affirmed 2008)

The Problem the Camp Could Not Solve

The Tubabao refugees were admitted to the Philippines for four months only (see Tubabao Refugee Camp). When that welcome was extended and re-extended, it bought time but solved nothing: the camp was a holding place, not a home, and the International Refugee Organization’s mandate was to resettle, not to maintain. The obstacle was legal. The principal American instrument for admitting the postwar stateless, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948, had been written for the displaced of Europe. Its eligibility cut-offs and quota mechanics effectively excluded the Russians of the Far East, who had been displaced not by the Second World War in Europe but by the Russian Civil War decades earlier and the Chinese Civil War now. Without a change in the law, the great majority of the Tubabao Russians had no legal route into the United States at all.

St. John resolved to seek that change in person. The lives state the decision plainly: he “travelled personally to Washington, D.C. in order to ensure that his people would be allowed to enter the USA, and to become permanent residents there. He successfully lobbied the Members of Congress for the amending of the law so that it would allow these refugees to enter the USA” (orthodoxcanada.ca, “Saint John (Maximovitch)”). The Orthodox Church in America’s life gives the same: he “travelled to Washington, D.C., in order to ensure that his followers would be allowed to enter the US under refugee status” (oca.org; corroborated at en.wikipedia.org, “John of Shanghai and San Francisco”).

The Journey and the Lobbying (1949)

St. John left Tubabao on July 8, 1949 (rocorstudies.org; the lives variously note his departure from the camp in early-to-mid July). He reached New York on September 5, 1949 (rocorstudies.org, “From Shanghai to Tubabao”). From there he went to Washington and to the work of advocacy — meeting members of Congress and pressing the case of the Far Eastern refugees who fell outside the existing statute.

The specific mechanics of his lobbying are thinly documented in the surviving sources, and the lives describe the activity rather than minute it: there is no published transcript of his Congressional meetings, and the named legislators he saw are not preserved in the standard accounts. What the sources uniformly attest is the fact and the result — that an Orthodox bishop, himself stateless and speaking through interpreters, personally carried the petition of a refugee camp on a Philippine island into the corridors of the United States Capitol, and that the law was subsequently changed in a way that opened the door to his people. The sources present this as cause and effect; the documentary chain between his particular meetings and particular clauses of the amended act is not something the hagiographic record establishes, and is not asserted here as proven legislative causation.

It is worth weighing what the act of lobbying meant for such a man. St. John was an ascetic of legendary unworldliness — a bishop who ate once a day, slept sitting up, and gave his shoes to beggars (see Bishop of Shanghai). The corridors of the United States Congress were as foreign to his temperament as could be imagined. That he undertook the journey at all, and pressed it through a foreign capital in a foreign tongue, is itself the testimony the lives draw out: the same shepherd who would not abandon his flock under the Japanese occupation would not abandon them on a tropical sandbar, and was willing to be, for their sake, a petitioner in the marble halls of a government not his own. The Russian Church Abroad’s own accounts, and Perekrestov’s Man of God, treat the Washington advocacy as one of the clearest demonstrations of his pastoral self-forgetfulness: he spent himself on behalf of his people in whatever arena their need required.

The Legislative Vehicle

The change came through the amendment of the Displaced Persons Act. On June 16, 1950, President Harry S. Truman signed the 1950 amendment to the Displaced Persons Act into law (Public Law 81-555; 64 Stat. 219), substantially enlarging and liberalizing the 1948 statute — extending its admissions deadline to mid-1952 and removing several of the restrictions Truman himself had denounced in the original act (en.wikipedia.org, “Displaced Persons Act,” citing P.L. 81-555, signed June 16, 1950). Within this broadened framework, a provision was made for refugees in the Far East: the Orthodox accounts report that the amended law admitted a quota of European refugees stranded in the Far East, under which the Tubabao Russians at last became eligible, and that a United States selection mission reached the camp to process them in 1950 (rocorstudies.org; orthochristian.com/80526.html). The precise statutory clause governing the Far Eastern caseload is named inconsistently across the secondary literature, and the figure of “4,000” Far Eastern refugees that circulates in some retellings is reported in the refugee histories rather than verified here against the act’s text [Disputed: the camp histories and Orthodox accounts attribute the Tubabao resettlement to a Far East provision of the 1950 Displaced Persons Act amendment admitting roughly 4,000 refugees (rocorstudies.org; orthochristian.com/80526.html); the statutory citation generally given for the 1950 amending act is Public Law 81-555, signed June 16, 1950 (en.wikipedia.org), but the consulted sources do not pin the Far Eastern quota to a specific section number]. What is firmly established is the outcome: the law that had excluded them was changed, and the change made their American resettlement possible.

The Washington Parish

St. John’s Washington trip bore a second, lasting fruit. While in the capital pressing the refugees’ cause, he founded an Orthodox parish: “It was during this trip to Washington in 1949, that on September 11th, the Feast of the Beheading of St. John the Forerunner, Vladyka founded our parish” — today the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Washington, D.C. (stjohndc.org, “Life of St. John Maximovich, founder of our parish”). The young congregation met for its first nine years in the Resurrection Chapel of the Washington National Cathedral, securing its own ground near Meridian Hill in 1956 and completing the first phase of its church by 1958 (stjohndc.org). The parish’s own history ties its origin directly to the lobbying: “By the lobbying efforts of Vladyka in Washington, a law regarding Russian refugees was amended, with the result that many Russians were permitted to enter the United States” (stjohndc.org). The cathedral marked its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2024, a living institutional witness to the 1949 journey (orthochristian.com/163656.html).

The Resettlement Outcome

The change in the law opened the way out of Tubabao. Over the following years the camp’s population was resettled across the world. A United States selection mission processed refugees at Tubabao from 1950, and under the amended Displaced Persons Act a large share — the lives say roughly half — went to the United States (orthochristian.com/80526.html; rocorstudies.org). Others were taken by Australia, which received a substantial number of the Tubabao Russians, and by South American countries (orthodoxcanada.ca; the academic study by Kevin Carrico and others, “Russians in the Jungle: Tubabao as a Way Station for Refugees from China to Australia, 1949,” History Australia 16, no. 4 (2019), treats the Australian stream specifically). By 1951 the great resettlement was substantially accomplished, and the camp wound down toward its closure in 1953, with only a remnant — chiefly the sick — still awaiting placement (rbth.com; orthochristian.com/80526.html).

The numbers the sources give for the American share vary with the count used: the lives speak of roughly half the camp going to the United States, while the camp histories and the rocorstudies account put the figure resettled to the US at around three thousand, with the remainder divided chiefly between Australia and South America (orthochristian.com/80526.html; rocorstudies.org; orthodoxcanada.ca). The difference is one of bookkeeping rather than substance — successive ships, successive selection missions, and a population that did not all move at once — and all the sources agree on the shape of the outcome: the law was changed, the camp was emptied, and the Tubabao Russians found homes across the New World and the Antipodes rather than being returned to Soviet hands.

The episode is of a piece with the whole shape of St. John’s pastorate. In Shanghai under the Japanese he had stood bodily at the head of his colony when its leaders were being killed (see Bishop of Shanghai); at Tubabao he was the last shepherd across and the camp’s protector by night; and in Washington he became the petitioner who would not let the matter rest until the door was opened. The lives present these not as three separate feats but as one continuous refusal to leave his people — the Gospel of the good shepherd worked out across a refugee century. When he was reassigned to Western Europe in 1951, the Tubabao chapter was closing and his flock was finding homes; the next labor, treated in Section 04, awaited him in Paris.

See Also

References

  • Canadian Orthodox History Project. “Saint John (Maximovitch).” orthodoxcanada.ca. (His personal travel to Washington and successful lobbying of Congress for the amendment of the law; resettlement to the US and Australia.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint John (Maximovitch), Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco.” oca.org. (His travel to Washington to secure refugee status for his followers.)
  • “From Shanghai to Tubabao.” rocorstudies.org, June 28, 2025. (Departure from the camp July 8, 1949; arrival in New York September 5, 1949; the US selection mission and the amended Displaced Persons Act enabling resettlement; roughly 3,000 Tubabao residents to the USA.)
  • “When the Philippines Welcomed Russian Refugees.” orthochristian.com/80526.html. (Resettlement under the amended law; roughly half to the US, large numbers to Australia, others to South America.)
  • “Displaced Persons Act.” en.wikipedia.org. (The 1950 amending act, Public Law 81-555 / 64 Stat. 219, signed by Truman June 16, 1950; the liberalization of the 1948 statute and extension of admissions to 1952.)
  • Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Washington, D.C. “Life of St. John Maximovich, founder of our parish” and “Our History.” stjohndc.org. (Founding of the parish September 11, 1949, during the lobbying trip; the law amended by his efforts; the parish’s early years in the National Cathedral.)
  • “DC Cathedral Founded by St. John of San Francisco Celebrates 75th Anniversary.” orthochristian.com/163656.html. (The cathedral’s 2024 anniversary tracing to 1949.)
  • Perekrestov, Archpriest Peter (ed.). Man of God: Saint John of Shanghai & San Francisco. San Francisco: Holy Virgin Cathedral, 1994/2015. (The Washington advocacy as the major collected English account presents it.)