At my grandson’s suggestion, I’m reading Daniel James Brown’s “Facing the Mountain,” a vivid and unflinching account of the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans. Cale loved listening to the audio version of Brown’s bestseller “The Boys in the Boat” years ago when we drove to Utah for a rafting trip, so it was no surprise that he would find Brown’s new book so compelling.
“Facing the Mountain” recounts events from the 1940s and yet it feels utterly of the moment. Neighbors, business owners, farm workers, World War I veterans, teachers, ROTC soldiers, students, children in foster homes, people in hospital beds, newborn babies, the elderly and disabled in nursing facilities were taken at gunpoint and forced to live in horse stables and windswept concentration camps with squalid toilets, no privacy and food budgets of 33 cents per person per day.
Anyone with even 1/16th Japanese ancestry was deemed an enemy. Roughly 120,000 Americans, many citizens by birth, others who were not allowed to become citizens by virtue of their Asian ancestry, were denied due process and treated like animals.
It was government-sponsored cruelty under the convenient and all-too-familiar guise of national security.
In 1976, President Gerald Ford revoked FDR’s Executive Order 9066 to incarcerate Japanese Americans saying, “In this Bicentennial Year, we are commemorating the anniversary dates of many great events in American history. An honest reckoning, however, must include a recognition of our national mistakes as well as our national achievements.”
Then 12 years later, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill apologizing to Japanese Americans and providing some modest restitution to the 60,000 survivors of the incarceration who lost everything except their self-respect. He called Executive Order 9066 “a mistake.”
They are just the kind of principled actions that make Donald Trump, the poster child for white fragility, outraged.
Trump is asking visitors to the Camp Amache and Sand Creek Massacre historic sites to report any posted information that they consider “negative” about our history so it can be removed. No honest reckonings allowed.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed through, ordering officials at national parks and historic sites across the country to replace anything that might be upsetting to visitors with “content that focuses on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
But apparently only the white ones.
Because one of the most inspiring features of our past is the power of oppressed people to overcome hatred and achieve greatness.
The late Hikaru “Carl” Iwasaki, a renowned photographer for the Denver Post, was held with his family in a concentration camp at Heart Mountain, Wyo. He photographed scenes inside the camp and in the post-war years, documented the lives of those who had been imprisoned there after their release.
He took me through an exhibit of photos from the camps years ago, describing the conditions and, more touchingly, the feelings those photos so powerfully evoked decades later.
He remembered the humiliations his parents and everyone in the camps endured and the brutal hardships. He spoke of their resilience, their determination to recover from the experience and their enduring love for the country that abused them so grievously.
He wanted me to understand. He wanted all Americans to know what happened.
There is something beautiful about the naked truth, and such ugliness in the effort to deny it.
In “Burn Order,” Rachel Maddow’s stunning podcast series about the lies and the racism involved in the campaign to persuade FDR to sign Executive Order 9066 (over strenuous objections from Eleanor), the story of the late Norm Mineta illustrates how strength of character can overcome hatred and oppression.
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Mineta was incarcerated with his family at Heart Mountain as a 10-year-old boy. He later served in the U.S. Army; was elected mayor of San Jose, Calif.; and served in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the cabinets of Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.
When Bush was under pressure to retaliate against Muslim Americans after 9/11, he told a cabinet meeting that he would not allow what happened to Mineta to happen again, not under his watch.
It’s proof that the truth matters.
Whether it is the slaughter at Sand Creek, the horrors of slavery, the incarceration of Americans of Japanese ancestry or the ICE killings on the streets of Minneapolis, a blizzard of lies can’t make it go away. And the response of ordinary Americans to protect one another and bravely seek justice in the face of institutional violence, lies and intimidation is simply too powerful to ignore.
Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.
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