and the ability of the united states to say patience, relax, trending in the right direction. this is as it was in northern iraq and better than it was then things are going in the right direction. the what we need to regains is the intermediate tools. . . gives me great pleasure to

introduce to you, greg robinson. [applause] >> thanks for coming eye. very grateful to the roosevelt library for having invited me and for all of you listening today. i want to tell you about my book and then explain more about how i came to write it and why i think it's important. a tragedy of democracy is about executive order 9066 and the removal and confinement of 120,000 west coast japanese americans into government camps in world war ii. a sent of events imprecisely

called the japanese american internment. it may be a surprise that there's anything new to say about this after all the legions of memoirs, plays, document riz, and so forth that have appeared on the subject. although i learned a great deal from all of those works, after studying the question for a long time, i have come to the conclusion there was something missing from what had already been written. i don't mean there was -- really that it wag wrong. the conventional narrative is accurate best it was hopelessly inadequate in time and space, so i set out to extend it. what do i mean? in terms of time, books of japanese americans in world war ii ten to focus exclusively on the war years. i go beyond that to discuss the prewar and post war period and not just as a back story but as the main part of the narrative, "a tragedy of democracy" talks

about the massive government spying on japanese americans that took place during the 1930s and the efforts of the federal government to build, in collaboration with the army, a set of camps, chit called concentration camps, before pearl harbor in order to hold enemy aliens. the constant spreading of scare stories and false rumors by west coast whites created a climate of fear where action against japanese americans, after world war ii broke out, seemed not just plausible but necessary. and it created a climate of mass suspicion and arbitrary treatment on a racial basis even before the war started in the same way it's im'ocan to understand the war time treatment of japanese americans without looking at the post war years, the time in which japan

americans left camps camps campd resettled and began organizing for protection of their civil rights. in many cases in coalition with black americans and other minorities to protest racial discrimination. i it was also a time when, right after the war, government officials started publicly expressing regret for their policies and treatment of japanese americans and started trying to make restitution, and that affect the evidence -- efforts towards all importantly. "a tragedy of democracy" is the first north american confinement. the book breaks new ground by looking at the history of camps in the united states and other areas in north america. it looks at the canadian government's wartime removal of 22,000 citizens and residents of japanese ancestry in british columbia. i also compare official policy toward japanese americans with that in wartime hawaii, where army commanders used fears of

local japanese to overthrow the civilian government after pearl harbor and to maintain military rule of the island for three years, during which time civilian courts were abolished and military tribunals judged cases. not just in guantanamo. i also shed new light on the histories of the 2200 japanese latin americans who were kidnapped from their home countries and brought to internment in the united states. plus the 5,000 japanese mexicans who were expelled from their homes and forced to move from the west coast of mexico into the center of mexico. by studying japanese american confinement, thus, within a continental, indeed international pattern, we can learn more about the causes of such actions as well that's results for these victims. "a tragedy of democracy" is the

final product of a long train of circumstances and development. it's a particular treat to be talking here at hyde park about my journey to this book because my journey started here 15 years ago. i was a graduate student living in new york city, and thanks to a grant from the franklin and eleanor roosevelt institution, i was up here to the roosevelt library to find material for my dissertation topic. as any researcher knows, what you do a lot of when you're at an archive is sit around waiting for boxes to be brought to you. it's true that the folks at the roosevelt libraries quite speedy in this. still you spend a lot of time ordering boxes and waiting for them to be brought. i was waiting for my boxes to come, and i started puttering around the research room to distract myself, and i came across a set of finding aids for writing by franklin roosevelt.

i never thought of fdr as much of writer, not compared to the doctor roosevelt or woodrow wilson or various world leaders, such as winston churchill or lenin. before i could think more about the question, there came my boxes, and so i put away the thought in the back of my health but fast forward several months. in the meantime, i dropped my dissertation, taken a leave of absence from school and started work at the legal assistance as a law firm. at one point the editor0s a journal, invited know write an article about franklin roosevelt for the journal. i didn't want to use my abandoned disdissertation and had little time for research. so i thought i would take up franklin roosevelt's write to see what he had written before he was president.

so i ordered copies of the article from the fining aids of fdr's writings, especially from the 1920s when he was in private life and trying to recover and had used writing as a kind of therapy for himself. when i read the airlines discovered to my great surprise that fdr hat written several pieces on diplomatic relations between the united states and japan which he wanted to improve. but he declared that the largest sticking point in relations between japan and the united states was the question of japanese immigration, and fdr in the 1920s, added that the exclusion of japanese immigrants from the united states and the discriminatory laws that kept them from owning property and becoming citizens were justified because they kept racial impurity against enter marriage. i thought, if that's what the thought in the 1920s, what did

he think in the 1940s? what was the relationship between fdr and the japanese internment. i thought it was a question i could easily answer by looking into the books but i discovered there was a hole in the research, that people who wrote about japanese americans hadn't written been franklin roosevelt, and people who wrote about franklin roosevelt hadn't written about japanese americans. so i started reading up more, and as i asked the questions, others came along, and to figure out the answers i came more and more to hyde park in search of answers. i would get up early in the morning from brooklyn, take the subway to manhattan take a trap to -- take a cab to the museum, and then come back. an finishing work at the law firm, i went back to school, and in the process i was so

fascinated by my little article turned into a dissertation, and which turned into a book, and which is not for sale at hyde park. the book came out a few weeks after september 11th. although i had written the book long before the attacks took place, my messan been the perils of overreacting gamed a special timeliness from them. the book was reviewed and featured in places where normally such a work wouldn't be and it has remained ever since the work i'm best known for. still, i didn't want to stop there, and in the process of putting together, "by order of the president --" i found more information than could fit in a volume. but i realize how much the wartime removal of japanese americans has influenced american society and literature

law, but most ordinary people did not know a great deal about what happened. once i finished the roosevelt book i decided to write a short study of the consensus in regard to confinement. the need seemed even more pressing after the patriot exact the u.s. invasion of iraq which re-opened the old debates about race and patriotism. i realized just how vital the issue of japanese confinement and its proper understanding was when the conserve columnist published a popular work purporting to defend the government's wartime removal policy as a successful incident of racial profiling. but my new interest in writing and re-telling the japanese wartime experience was matched and overshadowed by the uneasy sense that the accepted version was inadequate and more needed

to be flesh it out. my inspiration also came in part from my own experience of immigranting to montreal and teaching in canada, which led know study american history from a north american point of view, and as i learned canada's history and started teaching at the university of quebec, i saw parallels and differences in the development of united states. both of these were useful to stud about yaws they tested widespread assumption about paper exclusiveness, american national identity. in the same way as i read up further on the wartime treatment ofment japanese canadians and discovered how deeply they had been victimized by canada's removal policy and i was surprised to fine that no book examined the similarity and differences across the border, and it dawned on me my book would have to look at eventson the mainland united states. i was further inspired by my

first trip to hawaii in 2006 -- it was very embarrassing to be a specialist on japanese americans and then discover this entirely different community of japanese americans. about which i knew relatively little. i also heard that hawaii was a place of overracial harmony and good real estates and japanese americans had been spared mass removal during world world war i inly, something i has written about in my book on franklin roosevelt. but an pearl harbor, the u.s. army commander pushed through a declaration of martial law, suspended the u.s. constitution, dismissed the elected government and declared himself military governor. during my trip i heard some of the stories of martial law and of the military tribunals that densed military just. they had thrown military military -- thrown judges out of

the court. defendants had no due process or legal protection, virtually all those accused were found guilty and often given harsh or arbitrary sentences which they could then purge or reduce by giving blood or other legal actions. i soley -- slowly realized the difference between militarism and toll toll tall tearan system, there was a connection between invasion of constitutional rights of japanese in american and on the mainland. the fact that they army proclaimed the presence of so many japanese americans, it felt a danger, and as the threat of invasion from tokyo had grown more distant, they had increasingly fixated on the presence of japanese meshes as an excuse to hold on to martial

law by playing the race card. eventually i discovered that the military tribunals were challenged in court. the army and the justice department in 1944, knowing they had little chance of proving there was any real military emergency to make martial law necessary, were threat of an imminent invasion from tokyo, instead based their case on continuing martial law on the threat of japanese americans. the case went to the supreme court after the war as the case of duncan versus konomuku in a leanmark ruling the supreme court clearly said that military tribunals that judge civilians are unconstitutional, and the opinion of the court and the conquering opinion by frank murphy contained strang language denouncing the armies actions as attempts to justify is by references to japanese americans as racist in sum, the events in hawaii, i learned, not only

presented an interesting counterpoint to what happened to japanese americans on the mainland, but the tell a kind of prehistory we should all be thinking about when we look today at guantanamo and the military tribunals there. yet the story of martial law and duncan verse konomuku, the supreme court decision and japanese americans has remained absent, not from popular discussion but from constitutional law classes, from government discourse. it deserves to be lookedded at much more closely in connection with japanese americans. so i think that may be my book's contribution, it tells a story that many americans are not aware of, at least at the present. so, most probably "the tragedy of democracy" well be looked at in comparison so -- to "by order

of the opresident." by order the the president was an executive history,, and had little to say about japanese americans themselves. while i did a good deal of research at hyde park and made good use of what i found, i also made heavy use of existing literature and available public documents, and in fact i was mortified when both praise and criticism of "by order of the president" focused on my discussion of the larger history of the camps, which is something i hand -- hadn't done. "a tragedy of democracy" attempts to synthesize a great deal of new information on the experience on japanese americans and canadians and mexicans and latin americans, all filtered through different countries and in different languages. at the same time that it brings together history of the confine

independent different countries, histories that have been studied only in isolation. there's more orange research in "tragedy of democracy" than there was in boy by order of the president." part of that is because i had the good fortunate to be around for the explosion of digital documents. i found a great number of sources in the franklin library, whether newspaper walls, legal briefs, census records, finding aides and such. and it's also the result of devoting considerable time to pouring over sources from the period in different libraries and i archives. art of it also is that my book takes account of newly available

sources. what i hope people take away from both books is a sense of how fragile our liberties are, not just those or americans and people in the united states, but people in democratic societies throughout the continent, and just how easy it is in a time of emergency to suspend judgment and give excess power to military authorities or government officials with a plausible claim of national security. studying the wartime treatment of japanese americans in a new way may also help us to understand our current situation a little bit better. the case of the japanese americans in fact underlines most strongly those wise wards attributed to benjamin franklin who said those who give up sensual liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. thanks for listening.

let's have a little discussion. [applause] >> yes. [inaudible question] >> the question is, was there any actual evidence that led to the confinement? this is a key question, very intelligent question and key question, because michelle milkan and those who falled her have claimed the u.s. intercepts of the japanese diplomatic code displayed mass espionage by japanese americans. my contention is they don't show any such thing. they show pious hopes by japanese authorities who are recruiting spies, that they could get to recruit japanese americans, and even if there had been evidence of that, it was not shown to the people who made the actual decisions on the ground. the best answer i can come up with is, no. the best evidence is that there

was no actual evidence of any sabotage by any japanese american on the west coast, and this is one area where the comparative history helps us. the fact is that in canada, the military authorities opposed mass confinement. the chief of staff of the canadian army said there was no threat from japanese-canadians, that a small number of unarmed people are not going to be able to bring about any great rising against canadian troops and the greatest danger in fact was to them from rioting rather than from them. nevertheless, such was the influence of west-coast whites in canada, that the government yielded to the fears and the hysteria going on, and agreed to remove all people of japanese ancestry from the west coast of canada.

yes. [inaudible question] >> the question is whether the japanese mexicans were deported to the united states -- whether they had their own camps. the answer in a sense is no to both. mexico, unlike the other latin american countries a that collaborated we the u.s. state department, refused to give the united states any of its nationals for confinement. for intern. mexico had the same fears of ethnic japanese, and so even before mexico declared war on japanese, they declared a ford -- forbidden zone, 200 miles away away from the american border and 100 miles inland so all result office japanese ancestry were forced to move themselves. mexico did not set up for camps,

except for one type of internment camp that it arrested some people that it suspected of criminal activity. by and large, japanese mexicans were forced to move themselves. they went largely to guadalajara or to mexico city, where there was already a japanese community. in fact quite a notable one. and the -- so they escaped mass confinement. on the other hand, they were impoverished and their belongings were taken from them exempt for those who has mexican wifes to take care of their property and were forced to rely on the good will of the japanese community in mexico city. >> i'd like folks to come to the microphone and ask the question. >> go ahead, sir. i'll answer your question to you. [inaudible question]

>> can you summarize very quickly the karamotsu case. >> you're speaking of the japanese american who challenged executive order 9066. this is as opposed to the duncan case in hawaii. the case of fred koromotsu was one of a small number of cases of americans of japanese ancestry who challenged executive order 9066 and mass removal, in the courts. this case he refused to leave the west coast, and he got caught. he had a nonjapanese girlfriend that he wanted to stay with. but once arrested, he decided that it was matter of principle and he was going to not give up otherwise citizenship rights. so with the help of one of the branch office the american civil liberties union, he brought suit, challenging on the basis

of his constitutional rights, the government's policy of removing and confining him. in the lower courts, he was convicted of violating public law 502 and 503, congress' backing up of executive order 9066. the supreme court agreed to hear his appeal, and the federal government, which didn't want to lose the case because they were scared if any of the japanese americans succeeded in challenging thecourt -- challenging the army, the army would look back, and japanese americans would then -- once the camps were open, all run back to the west coast and there would be rioting and all sorts of problems. so, both to buttress the army's case and prevent problems, the army's leaders, most notably assistant secretary of war john mccloy, engaged in trickery. they withheld evidence. they rewrote other evidence to make the government's case

better. i don't have time to go into the details of this in the end, the supreme court decided 6-3, that the government's policy could be split up. that the actual removal of japanese americans from the coast could be split up from the confinement that followed, and so that the policy of removing people based on their japanese ethnicity was acceptable in the case of a wartime emergency. this was later challenged in the 1980s by researchers who found evidence that the government has engaged in trickery and manipulation and a federal court overturned the conviction of fred koromatsu who was later awarded the presidential medal of freedom. >> your fdr book from the' 20s is striking. i'm wondering, since the

interment is one of the black clouds over fdr's president circumstance if you -- presidency, how that type of attitude influenced his wartime decision. >> that's a whole book in itself. you could write a book about it. i did. very briefly, what i discovered is fdr had a long history of racial feeling about asians and japan americans in particular, beginning in the teens when he was assistant secretary of the navy and he feared an invasion from japan after california forbade japanese immigrants from buying land or owning property, and through the 1920s. and apparently through on into the '30s and '40s, he was making racial remarks about japanese. this doesn't mean that fdr hated japanese and and thus. in fact, he was rather a

liberal. he had japanese friends. heed a hired japanese culture. if you go into the big house, you see all sorts of japanese knicknacks his family brought back from japan. and so fdr did genuinely appreciate japanese but in some undefinable or less important way, they really couldn't come to america and be americans. they couldn't undo in one generation or two generations or three or four generations, their darwinian walsh -- racial programming. so, again, don't say this meant that fdr hated japanese americans. what it meant is that it informed his conduct that in an emergency situation was being called on to act against japanese americans. he really didn't consider very much the rights of 100,000 people he didn't think were really american anyhow, and it

inspired an indifference. he didn't really care enough to look into the case for widespread removal and to discover how fictitious it was. >> shout. [inaudible] question. >> what are my findings on mrs. roosevelt? excellent question. my next project is on eleanor roosevelt and world world war i. when i started writing on fdr i planned to have a chapter on eleanor to see how other people saw japanese americans. but she woulds so important and so interesting she was going to take over the entire book, and so i decided that i would -- had better let her go for the time being, and so in the meantime,

i've been assembling stuff. the story of eleanor roosevelt and japanese americans, very briefly, is a story of dissidence. it's a story of eleanor roosevelt trying to find ways to push her husband against -- to dissuade him from removing japanese americans, then to help japanese americans, she approved emergency funds from her account with the american friend service committee nor emergency programs for the japanese american evacuees. she asked to visit a camp, and in 1942 this was forbidden, but in 1943 she actually visited the gila river camp. i wrote to a number of japanese americans who had been to gila river to ask for their stories of mrs. roosevelt's visit. the first thing they all answered was, she was very tall. you figure the japanese americans who were not very

tall. one told me a store of her entering the mess hall where no whites were supposed to be and asking for a blast of butter milk, and all the japanese americans were staring out her, and she drinks the milk and says, this milk is sour, and they all looked at her and said, who is going to tell her it's always sour as soon as she got back from the camp, she went to los angeles, the pele -- belly of the beast as it were, and if we didn't get the japanese our -- out of the camps we will have another india on our hand, and she wrote a column on the japanese americans and on their contributions. so, her story is largely a positive one, although there was a limit to what she was able to achieve with president roosevelt. yes, sir?

[inaudible question] >> the question is whether in hawaii other cultural groups, such as the chinese and koreans and filipinos -- did they speak out on behalf of the japan americans in hawaii. the answer is yes. part of my research on eleanor roosevelt is her exchanges at a chinese american ymca director by the name of ching. when mrs. root went to hawaii in 1943, she met with ching and was so impressed by him and how he helped the japanese americans to enlist in the army in the 442nd, she invited him to come to the white house to brief fdr on the problems of the japanese american soldiers. and there were also korean

americans from hawaii who served in the 442nd. a council -- colonel young kim. doesn't mean it was paradise of racial harmony, but certainly groups of people that worked together in civic unity groups. japanese americans were about 40% of the population. so, it was possible for all the other people on the islands to really know them to have experience with them to have lived with them, really. whereas the japanese americans on the west coast had the misfortune of not being widespread enough to make their internment impossible and to excite public opinion in their favor, but be enough people, unlike on the east coast, to inspire hostility, economic competition, and racism. >> have any of the japanese in

the post world war written articles of books talking about their confinement? >> yes. there's a whole literature of japanese americans in the postwar years. the book i edited, follow are her own road, deals in large measure with the first book written about the japanese american wartime experience, a memoir, an extraordinary work called "citizen 13660. " which was published number 1946 and which literally graphically details the stories of the camps, and there war few others in the first years after the war, after which a period of silencing and silence obtained. but in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, japanese americans started organizing a movement for repairations, what we call redress, for apologies and repayment for what they suffered, and part of that

experience was exactly precisely breaking the silence. people testifying about their experience. and eventually, with the help of japanese americans in congress, the united states created a wartime commission. a commission on wartime relocation and internment of civilians to investigate the wartime confinement of japanese americans, and again, there were many people who testified. many speaking for the first time about their experience publicly before the commission and this led eventually to the united states voting a redress act, the civil rights restoration act, by which congress voted an official apology and a $20,000 redress payment to each person who had been removed under executive order 9066. i should add that canada was also inspired by this same redress struggle, and there was a redress movement among japan canadaans, six weeks after the

united states voted a redress act, canada voted an official apology and $21,000 to each japanese canadian, a bit of canadian one-upsmanship. none of the latin american governments has yesterday offered repairations, although a few weeks ago outgoing president of peru formally apologizees to the per ruthans about the rights and wartime confinement. >> any comments about the american pressing their period? >> the question is about the american press. well, on the west coast, in the first weeks after pearl harbor, the press turned rather negative, and there were wild stories, particularly in the hearst press, wild stories about

japanese planting vegetables in the shape of arrows to indicate the way for bombers to bases or poisoning vegetables and all sorts of wild stories. it wasn't restricted to the united states. the same thing happened in british columbia, and the same thing happened in the west coast of mexico and elsewhere. there war very few newspapers that opposed mass confinement of japanese americans. among which were disproportionately black american newspapers, such as the los angeles tribune and the chicago defender. the san francisco chronicle also resisted executive order 9066. by and large the american press did not report a great deal about the japanese americans. people outside the west coast didn't know or care much about the japanese americans, until the government moved them, and then people figured, where there's smoke there must be fire. the government must know what at it doing.

and so for the balance of the war years, the press was fairly negative, until the exploits of the japanese american soldiers of the 442nd, in combination with the government efforts to present a positive public image to japanese americans to aid in resettlement of people getting out of camps, began to change the minds of newspapers. but there lots of important newspapers, like the denver post, which remained solidly antijapanese during the entire war period. >> so we had no courageous commentators who were standing up for them. >> not at the outset. the only national figures who really spoke out against executive order 9066 were the writer, pearl s. buck, and the socialist party leader, norman thomas. >> did earl warren, who was instrumental on the supreme court and giving so many rights,

ever comment upon his action during this period of time or people apologize for what he had done or was instrumental in doing? >> an excellent question. well, they're all excellent question. that's a particularly excellent question because it brings flow work i'm doing right now. earl warren not only was a major instigator of the mast removal of japanese americans, but he was somebody who also called for martial law in california and spoke in favor of a court suit to strip japanese americans of voting rights and citizenship rights during his gubernatorial campaign in 1942. that said, earl warren was also a gov, who when the army lifted restricts on japanese americans to return to the west coast, said their civil rights will be enforced, and so he made it possible for japanese americans

to come back to the coast before the end of the war without major bloodshed. he did not apologize during his lifetime. he made a private apology to japanese american activists named edison uno who pursued him for an apology and dogged his steps, and he finally made a private comment to edison uno, but only in his memoirs that he actually apologized. on the other hand -- again trying to give both sides -- earl warren was an important contributor to the an abolition of the act which japanese americans moved to have overturned and title 2, which aloud the government to intern anybody they fought what dangerous without a trial. which is something the japan

americans, based on their own experience, began to oppose and was eventually overturned in 1971, thanks in large part to the endorsement of the repeally earl warren.