Tag Archives: American History

Executive Order 9066

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In the aftermath of Imperial Japan’s surprise attack upon the U.S. Military at Pearl harbor, fear and uncertainty gripped the United States. Americans of Japanese heritage were suspected of divided loyalties or worse. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 enabling the Secretary of War to declare “Military Zones” and ultimately authorizing the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans in “War Relocation Centers.”

The internment of Japanese Americans potentially applied to anyone who had a Japanese great grandparent or closer heritage, so that citizens of Chinese-Japanese heritage were affected; Koreans were affected as well, since Japan had governed Korea for almost 40 years by the time of Pearl harbor. (It is notable that almost none of the more than half-million Chinese-Americans in the US during the war years were affected by this “relocation” effort. China was a U.S. ally in the war with Japan.) Was this internment order inspired by racism and bigotry? In large part, no doubt. Simple greed was a major factor as well, profiteering knowing no limits of race. Many of the Japanese-Americans who were subject to internment had to sell their homes and possession on very short notice and at greatly undervalued prices. As noted, the action was not applied to people simply because they were from East Asia. The Japanese were specifically targeted.

Of the ten internment camps that were established in 1942 and 1943 in support of the relocation effort, Manzanar in California’s Owens Valley is the most well-known. This is due to three factors: it was the first of the “War Relocation Centers” (WRCs) to be opened, in March of 1942; it was the largest, and it has been preserved as a National Historic Park.

One of the aspects of these camps that is worth calling to mind is that while they were truly “Concentration Camps” in the original sense of the word, they were not in the same category as the concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe which gave that term such an especially evil and murderous reputation. In fact, the American Jewish Committee at one time strenuously objected to the use of the term “Concentration Camp” to refer to the WRCs, as the WRCs were demonstrably far different from Nazi camps. The WRCs featured stores, schools, hospitals, recreation facilities of sorts, and libraries. These were not comfortable facilities, and no one would wish to be imprisoned even in a palace, but they were not intentionally physically brutalizing.

These camps were Spartan, to say the least. The accommodations were meager and only just barely adequate, being built of boards and tarpaper, and having minimal heating, no cooling. At a place such as Manzanar, in the high desert, the cold could be fierce and the heat intense. The facilities, though, were basically the same as the barracks used by members of the armed forced at the time, and so were not intentionally harsh. There were no “permanent” buildings at these camps. Some structures were placed upon concrete slabs, and a few had masonry foundations, but none were of brick. The guard towers were wood-frame construction in all the camps. Costs were kept low.

I had the moving experience of meeting a former inmate of Manzanar a few years ago in California when I attended a memorial service for Ruth Colburn, the mother of a College classmate. She had served as head librarian at Manzanar from 1942 through 1945. In that capacity, she made many deep and lasting friendships, and she earned the respect and affection of many of the camp’s inmates, as reflected in the fact that one of the “alumni” of Manzanar, a gentleman in his early 80s, remembered that she had been a gracious and kind presence in a difficult and stressful circumstance. He had been a teenager at Manzanar, and had evidently taken full advantage of the library that was provided.

Growing up in California, I had the chance to know a few people of Japanese heritage who had been sent to these “War Relocation Centers.” Frank Kamada, a nurseryman, had been interned at Camp Jerome in Arkansas. Frank recalled such things as being “deloused” by being showered in Malathion insecticide, and having to play baseball with ball of string wrapped in medical adhesive tape copped from first aid kits. Frank also remembered being allowed outside the camp to work for and with local farmers, and teaching the Arkansan farmers techniques of soil conservation and improvement which originated in Japan. Frank spoke of this time without apparent bitterness or regret. “We were at war,” he once observed. Note that use of “we.” Frank was Nisei, a 2nd generation Japanese descendant. He identified as American, as did his parents. But they were all interned.

When my folks owned a flower shop in the early 1970s, we did a great deal of business with vendors in the “Japanese Market.” Los Angeles’ wholesale flower market – in those days second only to Amsterdam’s – occupied two city blocks on either side of Wall Street in downtown LA. On the south side was the American Exchange, on the north was the Japanese Market. Many of the folks who owned concessions or worked in the market were Nisei or Sansei (3rd generation) who had been in the camps or had family who had been interned. Sada Miyahara (who anually on 17 March donned vibrant green and wore a green plaid tam on his head, would proclaim, “I’m Irish: Me O’Hara!”) had been at Tule Lake WRC. He recalled his time there frankly, but, again, without any grudge.

I was then and remain to this day struck by how little resentment or bitterness was expressed by these people to whom so great an injustice had been done. No doubt some small number of those imprisoned were loyal to the Emperor, but even these could hardly have constituted a meaningful threat to the U.S. But one must bear in mind that the shock of war was profound and dramatic, and that the suddenness of the surprise attack that brought us into it alarmed people in a way that even the 9/11 terrorist attacks did not. This does not excuse the internments, but it does help to explain them.

I would not aim to lessen the grim and oppressive aspect of these camps. Their very existence is a proof enough of oppression and discrimination. But as my brother observed, “I was appalled then (and am now) to think that US citizens could be treated that way but I was also struck by the complete lack of rancor evident when these folks told about their wartime experiences. I doubt I would be as calm in retelling such a tale. All the same, it seems, in a small way, more humane and civilized to know that those camps were provided with libraries and trained librarians. Somebody was thinking. How nice to know that Ruth Colburn was one of the people who made our internment camps something far less odious than what the Germans and Japanese had to offer the world at the time.”

Executive Order 9066 was officially rescinded by President Gerald Ford on 19 February 1976. Under President Jimmy Carter, a commission was established to fully investigate and evaluate the motive and the impact of Executive Order 9066. Eventually, reparation payments were made to living internees and the Federal Government formally apologized for the internment. While money and conciliatory words cannot truly redress an old wrong, remembering and reflecting may help us to avoid repeating the episode in some future time of fright and trepidation. Executive Order 9066 remains a part of our American past that must not be forgotten.

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Jamie Rawson
Flower Mound, Texas

To do injustice is more disgraceful than to suffer it. — Plato

Wilkes And Liberty!

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On this day in 1764, the notoriously ugly and immensely fascinating British politician and journalist John Wilkes was expelled from the House of Commons of the British Parliament for seditious libel and obscenity. The previous year, Wilkes had published a vitriolic criticism of George Grenville, King George III’s Prime Minister and later promoter of the Stamp Act for the colonies. In response, The Crown issued a vague and broadly applicable “general warrant” against Wilkes and his publication, The North Briton. More than forty people were arrested under this open warrant; papers and effects were seized, including personal, private papers from Wilkes’ home.

At first, The Crown attempted to prosecute Wilkes for seditious libel, but a court ruled that his position as a Member of Parliament protected him from prosecution. Not to be thwarted, The Crown dug deeper into the papers and effects seized under the general warrant. Unfortunately for Wilkes, among these private papers was a diary in which he recorded his various amorous encounters. This diary may have been intended for private circulation among Wilkes’ circle, but was not published in any sense of the word. On the basis of this manuscript, Wilkes was charged with obscenity and pornography, although it was simply his private journal and had not been intended for publication. Though a court would later overturn this charge as being completely unfounded even under the broad powers of a general warrant, Wilkes was expelled from Parliament and forced to flee to France for almost four years.

We Americans should be familiar with the history of the 1760s and 1770s in the colonies: Parliamentary overreach led to widespread discontent and unrest, ultimately fomenting the American Revolution and Independence. Less well-known is that there was great unrest in Britain itself during this period, and there was much chafing at Parliament’s dismissal of England’s traditional civil rights. Britons prided themselves on being the freest subjects in Europe, yet Parliament was ignoring their traditional liberties.

When Wilkes returned to England in 1768, he was again overwhelmingly elected to Parliament. He was also arrested almost immediately thereafter. The crowds which gathered outside the prison where Wilkes was being held grew so large that The Crown feared rebellion, and troops opened fire on the Londoners, killing several. Widespread rioting followed. An American who was in London at this time was greatly disturbed at the unrest and the mob violence, and comforted himself with the thought that America would never fall into riot and rebellion. Ironically, this American was in London to argue in support of American complaints against Parliament: Benjamin Franklin!

Wilkes remained in prison until 1770; upon his release he again strained the limits of Parliament’s patience by publishing accounts of Parliamentary debates in his newspaper. His printing staff was arrested in early 1771. Later that same day, an immense and angry crowd surrounded Commons, chanting “Wilkes and Liberty!” “No Liberty, No King!!!” and similar slogans. The government released the prisoners to avoid riot and rebellion. No further attempts to prevent the publication of Parliamentary debates were made.

Wilkes was elected Lord Mayor of London in 1774, and he was an outspoken critic of The Crown’s handling of the colonies and the American Revolution. Wilkes was in regular correspondence with Boston’s Sons of Liberty, and with key figures of the American Revolution such as John Adams and John Hancock. Wilkes advocated fair and rational responses to the legitimate grievances of the colonists, and he predicted that Britain would lose the colonies if matters were not addressed sensibly. But his words fell on deaf ears in Parliament.

Wilkes was truly a radical reformer in his day. He championed and pioneered Freedom of the Press. He also advocated broad electoral reform and campaigned against “rotten boroughs,” Parliamentary seats held by men who had never even visited the district they were to represent. Unusually for his time, Wilkes also advocated religious tolerance and the removal of legal debilities on minority religions. Later in his career he moderated his “radical” politics and fell from favor with the electorate.

Wilkes’ legacy was partly legal: The courts ruled that The Crown could not use general warrants as unlimited power to find any possible misbehavior. For example, in seeking evidence of Wilkes’ sedition, his personal journal of romantic adventures was irrelevant, despite it having been seized under the warrant. British Courts circumscribed the power of The Crown and defined a standard of personal expectation of privacy which even the government must not impinge upon. Additionally, precedents set in various cases concerning Wilkes have been repeatedly cited in decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, including the famous 1969 decision which prevented Congress from barring Adam Clayton Powell.

Wilkes’ legacy was partly pragmatic: Though Parliament did not soon repeal its prohibition against publishing its debates, in practice it yielded the matter so that by late 1771, the publication of Parlimentary debates was an assumed right of the press. It is no accident that the major British newspapers were founded in the years following (eg: The Times, 1785.)

And Wilkes’ legacy was partly architectural: When the Houses of Parliament had to be rebuilt in the late 1830s after a fire, the new structure was abutted right onto the bank of the River Thames. This was done, as the Duke of Wellington insisted, to prevent “the people” from exacting their demands by simply surrounding Parliament!

Wilkes’ stand on civil liberty struck a particularly resonant chord among the discontent colonists of British North America. But on both sides of the Atlantic Wilkes was seen as a champion of civil liberties. In Pennsylvania, the townsfolk of a new settlement in the Wyoming Valley named their town Wilkes-Barre, in honor of John Wilkes and Isaac Barre who supported the American colonists in Parliament. The name John Wilkes became synonymous with Liberty. In the colonies, many children were christened “John Wilkes Smith” or the like. Sadly, John Wilkes’ most famous namesake did much to halt the advance of civil liberty in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Sadder still, too few Americans know of John Wilkes and his legacy of influence on the liberties of an independent United States.

Jamie Rawson
Flower mound, Texas

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man
is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break,
servitude is at once the consequence of his crime,
and the punishment of his guilt.

— John Philpot Curran, 1790

FURTHER READING:

John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty, Arthur H. Cash; Yale University Press, 2006; ISBN: 030010870

This wonderful book was the first full biography of Wilkes to appear in more than a generation, and it was long over due. Cash treats Wilkes “warts and all,” never hesitating to make note of Wilkes’ less admirable character traits. Cash places Wilkes in the larger historical context of mid-18th Century Britain, a time of social turmoil, economic upheaval, and political unrest. Wilkes’ story is told in a consistently engaging manner which makes for a highly informative work that is also extremely entertaining. Cash captures the reader from the very first sentence of the book’s prologue: “This book is about an audacious journalist and politician who was born in the City of London in 1726 and died in the City of Westminster in 1797, his life spanning a time that included the American Revolution, which he admired, the French Revolution, which he hated, and the industrial revolution, which he did not know was happening.” A must-read!

The Dawn Of The Nuclear Age

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On this day in 1942, underneath the bleachers of the unused Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi produced the first man-made nuclear chain reaction. The crucial hurdle to making use of the potential of nuclear power had been leapt.

Fermi had received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1938. Though Mussolini’s fascist government had forbidden Fermi to leave the country, he was granted a special exit visa so that he could attend the prize ceremony in Stockholm for the glory of Italy.

Fermi took advantage of the trip to defect to the United States. He was not merely opposed to the fascist ideology, he had a more pressing, personal concern: his wife was Jewish, and Hitler’s Germany had been pressing Italy to address its “Jewish Problem.”

The institutionalized intolerance and oppressive actions of the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany cost both countries many of their best and brightest scientists. The flight of these scientists to the freedom of America permitted the United States to develop the first nuclear weapons. And though such awful weapons be loathesome, surely it would have been a ghastly world in which Hitler developed nuclear weapons first.

Dogmatic oppression weakens even powerful, militaristic regimes; Freedom truly is strength.

Jamie Rawson
Flower Mound, Texas

Taking A Stand

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Can one individual make a difference? In our vast and complicated world, can the actions of one person make any impact at all? Of course the answer is a resounding yes!

It was fifty-six years ago this very day, on 1 December 1955, that the late Rosa Parks took her stand by keeping her seat, and thereby changed America.

In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, city ordinance and state law required that black citizens must take seats at the back of public busses. Adding further insult to this burden, blacks were also required to yield their seats in the restricted section of the bus if a white person wished to sit down.

Coming home from work on the evening of 1 December 1955, 42 year old Rosa Parks was tired. She had taken a seat in the first row of the restricted section of a Montgomery city bus. When the front section filled up, a white man – no “Southern Gentleman,” he – demanded that Parks give up her seat.

Over the years, the precise reason for Rosa Parks refusal to do so has been told and retold in varying versions, but it seems certain that she was basically tired; she was tired from a long day at her job, and more: she was tired of the blatant injustice and unfairness of the Montgomery ordinances and Alabama laws.

Parks’ decision to keep her seat was made on the spur of the moment, it seems, but she had already become involved in the nascent Civil Rights movement and challenging the bus rules had been discussed at meetings which Parks attended. Nevertheless, she was completely alone that chilly December evening in 1955 when she defied the system. She was arrested and jailed.

Almost immediately leaders of the Civil Rights movement called for a boycott of Montgomery city busses. This boycott had a seriously negative impact on the city bus service, for black citizens had accounted for almost three-fourths of the ridership! The boycott lasted for more than a year, ending after a Supreme Court ruling in the wake of which Montgomery finally declared that city busses were no longer to be segregated. The boycott had another impact as well: in coordinating the boycott and rallying Alabama’s black citizens to the cause of Civil Rights, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rose to the forefront of the movement, and became a national and international leader and spokesman for Civil Rights.

Rosa Parks did not achieve her victory alone, of course. Millions of people were involved. But her act of defiance, her refusal to bend to an absurd, unfair, and hugely unjust law, and her personal courage did change the world. That change is still on-going, and Rosa Parks was not the only individual whose courage had an impact. But Rosa Parks, as one solitary individual, did make a difference.

Think of Rosa Parks today. She always said that she did not consider herself to be a titan, just a plain, ordinary person who simply took a stand; but what a profound chain of events was sparked by her spontaneous courage! Yes, others deserve our respect and honor as well, but Rosa Parks made a difference and in her own small way helped o make an immense change in the world ever after. Toast her courage and her achievements. And, perhaps, think of how you will change the world!

Jamie Rawson
Flower Mound, Texas