Days of Infamy Quotes

“Banning visitors on the basis of religion is not the only parallel with the imprisonment of Japanese Americans. The Trump administration also launched what can only be called a war against immigrants and asylum seekers from parts of the world that are home to nonwhites. “The country is full,” he declared in April 2019 on Fox News. Those who do make it across the border are often shoved into camps built on the same principles as those that housed the Japanese. And, of course, Donald Trump made building a wall to separate the United States and Latin America one of the cornerstones of his presidency. Here again, the same five justices who allowed for the restriction of Muslims into the United States chose to ignore racist intent and allowed the Trump administration to divert funds allocated for military projects, including improved housing for soldiers in uniform, to be used to build the barrier.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“And so, it would be sad enough if Japanese internment could be dismissed as an aberration of the American past, but the feelings and reasonings that resulted in that injustice are all too present in the nation today. On December 7, 2015, the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Washington Post reported, “Donald Trump called Monday for a ‘total and complete shutdown’ of the entry of Muslims to the United States ‘until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.’” After his election, President Trump attempted to institute just such a ban. For a time, district and circuit courts, the lower two rungs on the federal judiciary ladder, ruled against the Trump administration, calling the proposal racially motivated, but eventually, after transparently sanitizing the initiative by restricting the order to citizens of specific countries that Trump claimed, without evidence, were hotbeds of terrorism, the Supreme Court in Hawaii v. Trump upheld the ban, as in Korematsu, on the grounds of national security.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“What is vital to appreciate is that neither the Korematsu decision nor the appalling violations of basic rights wrought by internment were created in a vacuum. Both were inevitable byproducts of a nation that had spent a century either perpetuating or acquiescing to slander and bigotry. Harlan Fiske Stone, Hugo Black, Earl Warren, and John DeWitt were no more responsible for the injustices perpetrated in the 1940s than were Horace Page, Ulysses Webb, James Phelan, Samuel Gompers, V. S. McClatchy, and William Randolph Hearst.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“In 1999, Korematsu was the only resister to be awarded the Medal of Freedom while still alive. He died six years later, at age eighty-six.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“In 1987, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals set aside his conviction. There is a kiosk named for him in the Coronado National Forest, near the site of the prison in which he was held. Gordon Hirabayashi died on January 2, 2012, at age ninety-three, and that May, President Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Yasui’s conviction was not set aside in his lifetime. His appeal was pending when he died in 1986, and only afterward was his record cleared. He, too, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously by President Obama.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Unlike in the cases of the three other resisters, Endo had not violated any of the rules set up by General DeWitt to enforce Executive Order 9066. As the war went on, with Japanese American soldiers amassing an extraordinary record in Italy, justice department lawyers began to become anxious about Endo’s case. Government officials offered to release her from confinement as a way to end her lawsuit. But Endo refused and remained in the camp. Her case, Ex parte Endo, was decided by the Supreme Court on December 18, 1944,”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“The majority opinion, by Justice Hugo Black, a Ku Klux Klan member as a young man who became one of the nation’s leading civil libertarians, began with a lofty statement of principles. “All legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can.” From there, he proceeded to postulate pressing public necessity where none existed and deny the racial antagonism that was there for all to see.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“And so, he concluded, because Japanese Americans had been largely shunned by whites, which “tended to increase their isolation, and in many instances their attachments to Japan and its institutions,” the government was within its rights to deem them a threat, even those who were American citizens. In other words, Japanese Americans were allowed to be discriminated against because they had previously been discriminated against.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Gordon Hirabayashi was held without bail for five months, until, at his trial, a jury found him guilty after deliberating for all of ten minutes. Min Yasui was convicted by a federal judge and sentenced to a year in prison and a $ 5,000 fine, the maximum under the law. Yasui was then held in solitary confinement in the county jail for nine months, denied exercise periods, showers, and a haircut. Fred Korematsu was also quickly found guilty and sent to the concentration camp in Topaz, Utah. Later, he would say, “I didn’t feel guilty because I didn’t do anything wrong … Every day in school, we said the pledge to the flag, ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ and I believed all that. I was an American citizen, and I had as many rights as anyone else.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born in Oakland, California, on January 30, 1919, to parents who ran a flower nursery. After graduating from high school, he worked as a shipyard welder until, like Mitsuye Endo, he lost his job after Pearl Harbor. When the order for relocation came, Korematsu ignored it, unwilling to leave his Italian American girlfriend. He was arrested in May 1942. While awaiting trial, he was visited in jail by an attorney with the California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The California ACLU was looking for someone for whom it could file suit to test the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Mitsuye Endo was the only woman among the four resisters. She went to secretarial school after high school in Sacramento and was then hired for a clerical job by the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Her employment included a background check, which revealed she was Methodist, had a brother in the army, had never been to Japan, and was totally loyal to the United States. In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, however, she was fired from her job.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Minoru “Min” Yasui, the son of two fruit pickers, was born in Oregon in 1916, and at the age of twenty-three had graduated from law school. At the time of Pearl Harbor, Yasui, who had been in ROTC, was a lieutenant in the army reserves. He tried to enlist in the regular army nine times, but his application was rejected. Yasui, the only attorney of Japanese heritage in Oregon, then opened a law practice to help with the Japanese community’s legal needs.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Gordon Hirabayashi was born in Washington State to Christian Issei parents whose flower farm had been seized under restrictive land laws. After high school, he enrolled at the University of Washington, and in the summer of 1940, he attended a YMCA leadership conference at Columbia University in New York, during which he became a pacifist. When he returned home, Hirabayashi joined the Quakers and registered as a conscientious objector. After a curfew was declared for anyone of Japanese ancestry, Hirabayashi decided to resist, continuing to move about freely as a law-abiding citizen. Instead of registering for relocation, Hirabayashi turned himself in to the FBI with the intention of creating a test case of the government’s right to incarcerate Japanese Americans without due process of law.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“The 442nd also became the most decorated unit for its size in the entire United States Army. “They won seven Distinguished Unit Citations, including one awarded personally by President Harry Truman who said, on July 15, 1946, ‘You fought the enemy abroad and prejudice at home and you won.’ In addition, after an exhaustive survey of individual actions from WWII, twenty more Medals of Honor were awarded, bringing the total to twenty-one. Over 4,000 Purple Hearts, 29 Distinguished Service Crosses, 588 Silver Stars, and more than 4,000 Bronze Stars were awarded to the men of the 442nd RCT for action during WWII.” One of those Medal of Honor winners was a twenty-year-old from Hawaii, Daniel Inouye, who lost an arm fighting in Italy and so had to give up his dream of becoming a surgeon. Instead, he went on to be elected to the United States Senate, where he served for almost fifty years.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“What was remarkable was that unspeakable treatment did not cause the internees to turn against the country that had treated them so shabbily. Instead, many Japanese internees shamed the nation with their patriotism. In 1943, the War Department finally decided that native-born Americans of Japanese descent were perhaps not “enemy aliens” and were eligible to participate in the war effort. Not in the Pacific, of course—Japanese Americans could not be trusted that much. But the army asked for volunteers for a unit to be assigned to Europe. Almost immediately thousands of young men from both Hawaii and the mainland volunteered. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of these volunteers, was sent to Italy and fought with astonishing bravery, with more than eight hundred dying for their country and hundreds more wounded.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Military authorities encouraged these “Americanization programs,” and “Japanese Americans who cooperated with the programs were rewarded while those who resisted were isolated and labeled as ‘troublemakers.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“During that time, these “concentration camps,” as they were called by the authorities that managed them,”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“With these marriages came children. Many children. “At the turn of the century, there were only 269 children; by 1910 the number had grown to 4,502; and by 1920 it had multiplied more than sixfold to 29,672.” And so, a measure to limit the Japanese population on the West Coast vastly increased it. Moreover, to the nativists’ chagrin, since those children were birthright citizens, they would have the very rights that the anti-Japan faction was attempting to deny to their parents. Thus most families became a mix of the native born, or second generation—called “Nisei”—and immigrants, or, literally, first generation—“ Issei.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“In short, the entry of women into immigrant society was integral to the process by which Japanese immigrants sank roots in American soil.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Roosevelt thought such statements were nonsense and made certain his feelings were known in an address to Congress. “The overwhelming mass of our people cherish a lively regard and respect for the people of Japan … To shut them out from the public schools is a wicked absurdity, when there are no first-class colleges in the land, including the universities and colleges of California, which do not gladly welcome Japanese students and on which Japanese students do not reflect credit … Throughout Japan Americans are well treated, and any failure on the part of Americans at home to treat the Japanese with a like courtesy and consideration is by just so much a confession of inferiority in our civilization.” He even suggested at one point that Japanese immigrants should be allowed to become naturalized citizens.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Californians played up the threat that Japanese people in the United States were an advance guard. In early December 1906, California congressman Everis Hayes told a reporter, “The Japanese immigrant is not an immigrant in the ordinary sense of the word … They came to learn our weaknesses and defects so as to turn that knowledge to their own advantage. Before Japan went to war with China, she had an army of spies and observers in Manchuria. The Japanese knew more about the Russian army than the Russians themselves. They are doing the same thing now in the United States.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“ALTHOUGH THE DECISION IN Wong Kim Ark protected a tiny minority of Chinese people in America, it also inflamed anti-Asian sentiment, especially in the West. Politicians of both parties seized on race hatred as a reliable campaign issue and competed with each other in bigotry.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“In 1931, to gain access to the iron and coal it lacked at home, Japan overran the Chinese province of Manchuria and installed a puppet government. In July 1937, Japanese forces succeeded in occupying almost the entire east coast of China, during which they committed severe and widely publicized atrocities against the Chinese population, especially during the fall of Nanking. The barbarism of the Japanese military received wide coverage in the American press and reinforced racial stereotypes in the United States all the more. American military and political officials became alarmed that Japanese ambitions might threaten Hawaii and even the American West Coast.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“At the heart of the question was still how to define “white.” If it were appearance, then Ozawa’s argument of having paler skin than many of those qualified for naturalization would have merit. If it were scientific classification, Sutherland would need to choose from a number of theories, because few serious studies used broad and general terms such as “white,” “black,” or “yellow” as defining traits.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“While it is certainly possible that if Congress and President Washington had considered the Japanese, they would have been specifically excluded, that was not what the law said. Sutherland, who generally went strictly according to language—what is now called “textualism”—in this opinion claimed to be aware of the Framers’ intent, although there was no way to confirm his conclusion. None of the men who wrote the law were still around to be questioned about hypotheticals.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Justice George Sutherland wrote the opinion. He had joined the court just weeks before. Sutherland, born in Great Britain, was an immigrant, albeit from one of the “desirable countries in northern Europe.” That Sutherland did not identify with his fellow immigrant, Takeo Ozawa, became apparent when he took up the question as to whether the term “white” in the 1790 law was used only to differentiate it from “black.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Ozawa, Sutherland concluded, “is clearly of a race which is not Caucasian, and therefore belongs entirely outside the zone on the negative side.” Ozawa would not be allowed citizenship. Sutherland did feel the need to add a final bit of hypocrisy. “Of course, there is not implied—either in the legislation or in our interpretation of it—any suggestion of individual unworthiness or racial inferiority.” Of course not.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“the United States joined Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as nations who forcibly deported citizens without trial simply because of the circumstances of their birth. The case in which the Supreme Court upheld the same practice that America had condemned its enemies for, Korematsu v. United States, is now one of the few decisions in Supreme Court history that both liberals and conservatives list among the worst ever.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment