Part One: The Problem

Why is it that in the third week of every February, we remember and regret the actions of one of the most powerful and dilatory racists in our history, and then bestow our highest national honors on his memory? Stop the insanity!

The most bizarre of our traditions works this way. On February 19, we recall the executive order, EO 9066^[1], authorizing the internment of the Japanese immigrants and citizens during World War II. It is not a happy day. After we entered World War II, we forced some of our law-abiding citizens to abandon their homes and go to internment camps, where they were locked up. Their freedom was denied because of their ancestry, not by their actions. This wasn’t in some banana republic. Some of this happened on the very hill where my butt is sitting as I write this, and the bulk of it happened within just a few miles of that.

So we mark this anniversary with some measure of regret and shame. Then about the same time, we celebrate President’s Day. This year, it comes one day before EO 9066 day - February 18th. Our commemoration of President’s Day, aside from cashing in on some really neat mattress sales, is essentially to get a better-than-usual look at how our local newspaper editors look at U.S. history. To those of us with some knowledge of the events they purport to describe, this tends to be a cause for great disappointment, which is a subject for another article.

Anyway, most people don’t consciously realize something terribly important about all this. The central figure in both commemorative events is the same man. The guy who signed EO 9066 constantly makes it into the top five slots on the "Best Presidents" lists.

Do we really have, as a nation, a healthy and passionate regret for EO 9066? If so, then why does Franklin D. Roosevelt continue to fare so well when we rank our past presidents?

What EO 9066 Day Means

"You may think that the Constitution is your security - it is nothing but a piece of paper. You may think that the statutes are your security - they are nothing but words in a book. You may think that elaborate mechanism of government is your security - it is nothing at all, unless you have sound and uncorrupted public opinion to give life to your Constitution, to give vitality to your statutes, to make efficient your government machinery."
- Charles Evans Hughes

If we are to learn anything from EO 9066 Day, it has to be what a terribly narrow tightrope we walk when we consider issues of national security against the integrity of our constitutional process. As Ben Franklin insinuated with his famous "safety vs. freedom" dictum, safety is often at odds with freedom. The complete quote that he wrote in 1759, is "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither safety nor liberty"^[2] There is a temporary aspect to the safety payoff, and Franklin implies that honorable people will not go for it, opting instead to keep the freedom.

That’s essentially true, but the observer is engaging in a process of self-delusion if it’s inferred that Franklin is providing simple counsel, easily followed. He is not. The word "safety" is chosen, deliberately, to diminish the prize sought when people exchange their freedoms, something Franklin obviously didn’t want them to do. Thus it is in times of peace, but what about war? Is it not fair to substitute a more valiant intangible noun, i.e., "security" in place of "safety"? We lost thousands of innocent fellow citizens on September 11. They weren’t fighting anyone; they deserved to live out their days, at least as much as you or I. If we could sacrifice some freedom to keep that from happening again, protecting perhaps an additional 5,000 innocents, couldn’t such an exchange have some merits that Franklin didn’t appreciate? After all, there must be a certain nobility involved in securing the safety of others you have been elected to govern, that is not present in the situation where you look out for your own hide.

And therefore, couldn’t FDR have been somewhat justified in protecting our coastal areas by his action?

That’s the direction of some of the defense offered by Roosevelt apologists, but the evidence doesn’t seem to hold a bright future for this line of thinking. First off, the Constitutional protections were effectively suspended^[3] for thousands of United States citizens without due process. To my knowledge, nobody has reconciled this with the Constitution at all; which is to say, nobody has offered a reason why Japanese Internment did not interfere with the protections of the fourth and fifth amendments. The defense has always been, going back to the day the executive order itself was signed, basic necessity. "Necessary for the prosecution of the war"; a "military necessity." We were at war.

The inevitable question must be - given that you want to violate the Ben Franklin dictum and exchange your freedoms for someone else’s security, couldn’t you find a way to do that without violating the Constitution? At least 40% of the Japanese internees were born in this country and fully entitled to the rights and privileges of citizens. The federal government demanded that they leave their homes, so they were forced to liquidate whatever property they could and dispose of the rest.^[4] The financial losses involved in this were devastating. No restitution in any form was forthcoming, at least not until the 1988 Civil Rights Act signed by Ronald Reagan.

Nor was any indication given at all, at the time the internees were installed in their "relocation centers," as to when they might be able to leave again. Overcrowding was a common problem.^[5] The buildings constructed for housing the internees were extremely cheap and flimsy; the terrain in which these camps were placed imposed harsh conditions on anyone staying there. When the internment was ended in late 1944, 5,918 children had been born in such camps. More offensive and problematic is the report that some 1,862 people died during their internment.^[6]

The poignancy of the occasion, this particular year, is not to be understated. Special recognition always goes to anniversaries that end in a zero, of course, and this is the sixtieth one. But the parallels are interesting. Our grandparents were shell-shocked by a surprise attack that took thousands of lives just two months prior; we are shocked by a similar event that took place just five months ago. Our situations are nearly identical; it’s like a piece of bad science fiction. We are, as they were, walking Ben Franklin’s tightrope between freedom and security. Those among us who aren’t completely insensitive or stupid, are reaching out to grasp at all the wisdom and good judgement we can possibly get.

We know we can’t get good judgement by learning from 1942, but sometimes the observation of very poor judgement can be just as valuable.

***

"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any public official, save exactly to the degree he himself stands by the country."
- Theodore Roosevelt

There’s no shortage of information about these events; a great deal has been written about them. However, a lot of what has been written is insincere. Research papers, class syllabuses, agendas for Days of Remembrance, are available at your local library or on the Internet. They wax lyrically about what "America" did; what "Americans" did; what "we" did. That’s technically true, but Executive Order 9066 was debated and approved by a small, elite band of dirty old white guys, while the rest of the country appears to have had only a passing knowledge of the decisions being made - and no power whatsoever to change them. So were these actions at least representative of a united nation, every man equally racist as the next one, owing to the Neanderthal sensibilities of an era long gone? Not at all. Loyal dissent back then was not what it is today; as you’ll see in this article, the concept of dissent had been relegated to insignificance. Where such disagreement existed, it was indeed given a voice. As an example, Attorney General Francis Biddle, was emphatically against it, as was the American Civil Liberties Union.^[7] The Munson report,^[8] commissioned by the President, indicated little to no need to pursue such an action.

It’s a curious thing about human nature: Once you appreciate what a Day Of Remembrance is all about, if you have any decency in you, you’ll feel at least an initial inclination to have some measure of shame and guilt. That’s true even if you’re like me, and weren’t born until twenty years after the events took place. We all tend to forget what useless emotion guilt is. For the most part, it does not function as a device to keep human behavior in check, as we imagine it does. It usually provides material benefit to the party working to perpetuate the guilt. It’s useful, mostly, to carnival hucksters and door-to-door charlatans selling vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias.

That’s not to say guilt can’t function in the way we intend, to provide us with the discipline to become better people. But if you have guilt over something you did, it won’t be useful until you define a prospective change in behavior. What did you not do? What did you do that you shouldn’t have?

If America as a whole does indeed have culpability for the atrocities that occurred under 9066, and I believe that it does, it’s pretty clear the mistake was in the voting. FDR had been elected President no less than three times before he signed the order. That’s very serious; he had broken some promises from his campaigns, and under better circumstances this could have been used to exonerate the electorate somewhat. But by the time you vote for someone three times, you ought to know who he is and what he’s all about.

Outside of that, guilt really doesn’t have much function in the equation. Once elected, FDR and his racist minions^[9,10,11,12] got this dirty ball rolling. Once that was done, it was too late for guilt. Perhaps "Shame" would be the more appropriate reaction.

Are We Honoring Presidents The Way We Should?

"Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."
- Victor Hugo

Just as you have to have an appreciation for the history behind EO 9066 Day in order to mark it properly, the same can be said of President’s Day.

In its former incarnation as "Washington’s Birthday," President’s Day could be fairly portrayed as America’s oldest holiday. It was proposed and ratified in 1796, during Washington’s administration.

Once this was established, it was combined with Lincoln’s birthday because of a lingering confusion surrounding Washington’s birthday. Reputable sources at the time pinned Washington’s birth date as both February 11th and 22nd. This is fairly interesting and involved, and it’s beyond the scope of this article to document what was happening here. But in a nutshell, when world changed from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar, Great Britain took some 170 years to get with it. By this time, Washington had been born but the American colonies had not yet declared their independence, so America went on the Gregorian Calendar when Britain did. This was 1752, when Washington was 20.^[13]

There is a discrepancy of years as well as days, that affects Washington’s birth year as well. I’ll just let that one go - what matters to our discussion here, is that the new calendar contained an eleven-day correction as it was adopted.^[14] One of the reasons the old calendar had to be trashed was that it had a synchronization issue with the astronomical events it was supposed to track. By the time we changed the calendar, there was an eleven-day discrepancy that had to be fixed. So overnight, September 2 turned into September 14 in 1752.^[15]

This ambiguity concerning our earlier President effectively fused his birthday together with Lincoln’s, and this is the way it remained until modern times. Many folks about my age can remember in their childhood, we were still marking this holiday as "Washington and Lincoln’s birthday." In 1971, Nixon changed it to "President’s Day." One of the interesting side effects to this, is what has become a tradition to rank former presidents. Who was best, who was worst? It could be best described as a way to sell newspapers when there’s not that much going on in the world. This particular winter, of course, there’s a great deal going on - but I expect to see a lot of "Ranking the Presidents" lists, and of course that’s the point of the article you’re reading now.

In the November 1, 1948 issue of Life Magazine, Arthur M. Schlesinger provided the earliest known - to me, anyway - list of presidents sequenced by some criteria that defined a "good" president. Bear in mind, this is Arthur Sr. (1888-1965), not his son, the Kennedy Administration member who is alive today (b. 1917). Arthur the elder, who was for the most part as strongly and famously inclined politically as Arthur Jr. is today, injected his own personal prejudices into the process. That first list begins Washington, Lincoln, FDR.^[16] That’s Schlesinger’s ranking; it isn’t mine.

The Truman/Dewey election took place that week. It was - literally - a photo finish. We’ve all seen that famous "Dewey Defeats Truman!" picture. Knowing what we know about the younger Schlesinger’s activism, it seems comical to suppose his father would sit on the sidelines while such a drama unfolded. If he was trying to throw a last-minute monkey wrench into the Dewey machine, I guess it worked.

Schlesinger the younger has continued the institution his father seems to have started. He printed his own version listing the ex-presidents, by this time nine names longer, in a 1996 issue of New York Magazine.^[17] Before that and since then, we’ve had more lists by other people. So now we have this new slice of Americana; we owe the Schlesingers some measure of thanks for it, because it’s educational and it’s fun. But there’s a serious side to this.

As we should be reminded every February 19 - which comes so close to President’s day, soundly depriving us of any excuse to be ignorant - voting is a grave responsibility. There’s no use making a list of your favorite presidents if someone doesn’t read it; once you read it, it can influence how you vote; and if we all vote unwisely, some terrible things can happen. That’s the whole point of February 19. The bad news is, we have been trapped into the mindset that the list is a tradition. That leads some people to populate the list in traditional ways.

This works out well for FDR. His image is on the dime, and coinage seems to put a heavy influence on the lists. As you populate this list, if you’re not there to answer questions about FDR, you better put him in the top five somewhere. It’s tradition. The guy on the quarter and the guy on the penny go in the first two slots; maybe you toss in the other two Mount Rushmore guys; and somewhere you have to have FDR.

Not a lot of thought goes into that, which is odd because for a president’s name to be in the top five slots so consistently across several years, would be considered by most people a very high honor.

Morgan K. Freeberg

You can e-mail Morgan at mkfreeberg@hotmail.com.

About Morgan K. Freeberg

Copyright © 2002 by Morgan K. Freeberg
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-Published with permission