Tag: franklin roosevelt
In Face Of Refugee Crisis, Will We Repeat The Injustice Of 1942?

In Face Of Refugee Crisis, Will We Repeat The Injustice Of 1942?

This is how fear mongering works. The year could be 1942 … or 2015.

“I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

Those are the words of David Bowers, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia. The “sequester” he alludes to was the unjust and inhumane internment by the U.S. government of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. It wasn’t just “foreign nationals” who suffered this treatment but citizens as well, including those born in our country.

Bowers’ historically vacuous statement was apparently his contribution to the current debate over whether the U.S. should follow through on its promise to accept refugees from the Syrian civil war. What he implies is that Syrian refugees are just as likely to do the bidding of the Islamic State as Japanese-Americans were to serve the war aims of Imperial Japan.

That drew shudders from the descendants and colleagues of a distinguished American by the name of Minoru Yasui. Yasui spent virtually all of his 70 years trying to get the U.S. government not only to apologize for but also to understand the injustice of having interned him and nearly 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry during the war.

Yasui was born in Oregon. He had a law degree and had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army’s Infantry Reserve. Nevertheless, he was kept in prison and internment for three years. The reason? His ancestry.

The Yasui family has worked for years to gain their patriarch justice. He was announced as a posthumous recipient the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this month. A few days later, the hysteria over the Syrian refugees reached a fevered pitch, inspiring Bower’s remarks.

“If Yasui was here, he would condemn what is happening,” said Peggy Nagae, a Portland attorney who served as the lead attorney in reopening the case of his conviction for breaking laws restricting Japanese-Americans.

She notes that a 1981 governmental report, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, determined that the internment was not justified by military necessity but a “grave injustice,” the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”

No acts of espionage or sabotage were ever found among those interned. Yet the Japanese-Americans were thought to be waiting, plotting something really big against their own country.

Yasui purposefully broke a curfew, trying to mount a legal test. He spent nine months in solitary confinement while awaiting an appeal for disobeying an order for enemy aliens. The fight went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found the curfew constitutional as a wartime necessity.

Yasui was assigned to the Minidoka Relocation Camp in Idaho and later was sent to work in an ice plant.

After the war, he ended up in Denver, where he helped establish civil rights organizations and worked closely with African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. Yasui died in 1986.

And it wasn’t until nearly 50 years after the internment, in 1990, that the first checks of compensation for that act were issued by President George H.W. Bush. About $20,000 went to each internee.

For Nagae the parallels between Yasui’s era and the fears driving the politics today, especially after the Paris terrorist attacks, are stark. Her own father had also been interned and was befriended by Yasui.

“Fear is used to justify actions on the basis of military security and national security,” she said. “It’s an issue and conflict that doesn’t go away.”

Chani Hawkins, Yasui’s granddaughter, is working on a documentary film and other memorials to her grandfather’s life.

“We feel it is an important lesson that we must learn from as a country so similar mistakes are not repeated,” Hawkins said.

Apparently, many of us haven’t learned. More than half the nation’s governors have asserted that no Syrian refugee will be resettled in their state.

It’s a posture that won’t pass constitutional scrutiny — but also that makes little sense. The system of security checks for refugees is already rigorous, including vetting by counter-terrorism agencies. Yet a bipartisan House bill hurriedly passed last week would upend the complex security process already in place for judging refugee applications.

“Race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” Let’s remember those words — and make sure they play no part in how we respond to the Syrian refugee crisis.

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.)

(c) 2015, THE KANSAS CITY STAR. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC

Photo: Dust storm at Manzanar War Relocation Center. (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikicommons)

Film Review: When There Was No Vaccine

Film Review: When There Was No Vaccine

Within the living memory of the oldest Baby Boomers is a terrifying specter that haunted childhood in America. It was a disease, a disease that could have no symptoms, or could begin with a chill and then cripple or kill the victim. It could spring up at school, at a birthday party, at a summertime swimming pool. It mostly affected children, but it also paralyzed a future president, Franklin Roosevelt, who surmounted it but never recovered from it. It infected tens of thousands of new victims a year in the decade after World War II. There was no cure and there was no vaccine. The disease is polio.

With the anti-vaxxers holding sway among today’s stupid set, Nina Gilden Seavey’s 1998 documentary A Paralyzing Fear: The Story of Polio In America, now streaming on Amazon and Snag Films, is a timely and urgent reminder of the heartbreaking effects of an unchecked, brutal virus.

For most of those infected, polio was no problem: they might never feel it, or it could seem like a cold or a bum knee, and they would get over it. But for 5 percent of victims (and that meant thousands in the worst years) it brought paralysis — slight, moderate, or complete — or even death. As A Paralyzing Fear shows in detail, from America’s first large outbreak in 1916 through the early 1950’s, crutches, leg braces, and even constant confinement in full-body iron-lung breathing machines (think of an MRI scanner you cannot leave) were a part of childhood in this country as people struggled to deal with shriveled muscles and failing, withered limbs. There were treatments, like painful exercises and barely tolerable heat packs, but none were very good. The victims in hospitals were often isolated from their parents for fear of infection, and even medical staff avoided them. Afflicted children longed for human contact. Relatives avoided the funerals of the dead.

Polio’s most famous victim was of course Franklin D. Roosevelt, who fell ill in 1921 at the age of 39. He was paralyzed from the waist down but overcame his handicap while minimizing it to the public. He founded a rehabilitation spa in Warm Springs, Georgia for himself and other “polios.” (The spa was segregated; black polios in the south went to the Tuskegee Institute.) The documentary has rare and surprising footage of FDR frolicking in the pool at Warm Springs with his withered legs, utterly at home alongside the children and adults.

A Paralyzing Fear does a splendid job of telling the story of the survivors in their own moving words: you can’t shake the image of a middle-aged woman who at the time of the filming has been in an iron-lung, confined from the neck down, for over 40 years, or the adult man recalling the mockery and rejection he suffered in high school because of his disability. The film also palpably conveys our parents’ and grandparents’ justified fear of polio, and the excitement and urgency of the national effort — all privately funded via The March of Dimes charity — to find therapies and, ultimately, a vaccine. In that era, Jonas Salk — whose vaccine was created in 1951 and widely dispensed four years later — was considered Superman, Babe Ruth, and Christ rolled into one bespectacled man. Salk never patented his vaccine, and because of the jealousy of his peers, he never won the Nobel Prize or admission into the National Academy of Sciences. But he achieved something greater: Thanks to Salk and Alfred Sabin, the developer of an improved vaccine, polio has been eradicated from the U.S. and much of the world.

But the threat is growing again. Pockets of polio exist in impoverished parts of the world, places that are accessible by airplane. And thanks to superstitious, ill-informed, selfish anti-vaxxers and the craven U.S. state governments that permit them to opt out of mandatory vaccinations, a traveler could, within half a day, bring that scourge back to America. The terrifying potential consequences  are on view in the history captured in A Paralyzing Fear. That history must be seen, and its repetition must be prevented. As one of the interviewed victims says of the vaccine, “For me, it was too little, too late. But I was glad that nobody else would have to go through this.”

See the film, and vaccinate your kids.

Photo: Amber Case via Flickr

White House News Group Honors Black Reporter It Once Barred

White House News Group Honors Black Reporter It Once Barred

By Lesley Clark, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Harry S. McAlpin made history in February 1944 when he became the first black reporter to cover a presidential news conference at the White House.

Time magazine and The New York Times noted the milestone. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who’d opened the White House doors after entreaties from African-American publishers, greeted the reporter as he made his way over to the president’s desk, telling him, “Glad to see you, McAlpin.”

It was not a sentiment shared by McAlpin’s fellow scribes, members of the White House Correspondents’ Association who for a decade had denied black reporters the opportunity to attend the twice-weekly news conferences in the Oval Office.

Roosevelt’s invite did nothing to deter them. A member of the association told McAlpin he’d share notes from the news conference with him if he didn’t attend, suggesting that in the crush of reporters moving into the room someone could get hurt.

McAlpin “ever so politely declined the offer,” and stepping into the White House broke the color barrier, said George Condon, a White House correspondent for the National Journal and a former White House Correspondents’ Association president who’s researching the group’s sometimes-checkered history in celebration of its centennial this year.

Now, some 70 years after doing all it could to block black reporters, the White House Correspondents’ Association is looking to make amends, dedicating a scholarship for journalism students in McAlpin’s name.

McAlpin, who died in 1985, will be honored at the association’s annual scholarship dinner on May 3.

“Harry McAlpin was a remarkable man. We honor his role as the first black reporter to cover a presidential press conference. And we acknowledge that he did that in spite of opposition from the White House Correspondents’ Association of the time,” said Steven Thomma, the current association president and McClatchy’s government and politics editor. “Thanks to the work of Harry McAlpin, and men and women in the decades that followed, the White House press corps and the White House Correspondents’ Association is a diverse chorus of faces and voices. The country is better for it.”

McAlpin’s son, Sherman, calls his father’s history-making stint at the White House just one facet of a life well-lived, including serving as the president of the NAACP chapter in Louisville, Ky.

“He has been and continues to be my hero,” Sherman McAlpin, who works for the Department of the Navy, said of his father. “If I accomplished one-tenth of what he accomplished in his life, I would be a total success.”

Discrimination was a persistent factor for McAlpin, his son said. The elder McAlpin wanted to be a journalist and study at the University of Missouri, but he was barred because of his race. He ended up at the University of Wisconsin.

Similarly, it was a “hard road to try to get a black person into the White House correspondents’ circle,” Sherman McAlpin said. His father told him he was warned that at the White House news conference “someone might step on your foot” and a row would ensue.

Not missing a beat, McAlpin said, his father had replied: “I always thought the White House press would be the cream of the crop. I can’t imagine that would happen. But if it did, it would be the story of the year and I wouldn’t want to miss it.’ ”

Admittance to the White House came only after a decade of pressure from black newspaper publishers and editors, who began making a case for attendance in 1933, Condon said.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, which served as the gatekeeper to the events, denied entreaties from black publications, often responding with nothing but silence.

There was some justification for restricting access. More than 200 reporters jostled to attend and the room could get crowded, Condon said. Admission was restricted to reporters for daily newspapers, and most of the black publications, including McAlpin’s Chicago Defender, were weeklies.

Infighting among the editors and publishers of the black-owned newspapers had made it difficult for McAlpin to report — as he eventually did — for a coalition of newspapers, including the Atlanta Daily World, the only black daily.

Exceptions to the daily-only rule had been made, but not for black reporters, Condon said.

Once over the threshold, McAlpin attended the briefings, asking Roosevelt about an issue close to black readers: the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which Roosevelt had established to ban racial discrimination in defense contractors receiving federal contracts.

He lodged another first when he was part of the press train traveling to the 1944 Democratic National Convention and was one of the few reporters allowed to cover White House funeral services for Roosevelt.

And he made his mark with President Harry S. Truman, asking the new president at his first news conference whether he could assure African-Americans that he’d consider their views as Roosevelt had.

“He was a good writer, a good reporter who paid attention to what his community cared about,” Condon said.

But he was never a member of the WHCA.

“They blackballed him from ever joining the correspondents’ association or attending the group’s annual dinner,” said Condon, who recommended creating the scholarship. “The president could break the color line for his press conferences, but he could not rewrite the WHCA’s membership policies.”

McAlpin left the White House beat in 1945 and would later serve as a Navy war correspondent before moving to Louisville, where he practiced law and was NAACP president.

He broke another color barrier in 1971, when he was named the first black hearing examiner for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In an essay that aired sometime in the 1950s on Edward R. Murrow’s “This I Believe” radio series, McAlpin spoke movingly of the struggles he faced as he confronted racism.

He said that his father, who’d died when he was 15, had instilled a belief in him that all men were created equal, but that he was often tested.

“To live by these beliefs, I have found it necessary to develop patience, to build courage, to pray for wisdom,” McAlpin said. “But despite my fervent prayers, I find it is not always easy to live up to my creed.”

He said the “complexities of modern-day living — particularly as I must face them day to day as a Negro in America — often put my creed to test.

“It takes a great deal of patience to accept the customs of some sections and communities, to try to fit into the crossword puzzle of living the illogic of a practice that will permit me to ride on the public buses without segregation and seating, but deny me the right to rent a private room to myself in a hotel.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association accepted its first black member, Louis Lautier, in 1951. He attended the dinner in 1953 with the editor of the Baltimore Afro American. They were the only two black faces out of 800 at the dinner.

Photo: J.M. Eddins Jr./MCT

Bogus Social Security History Lesson On The Internet

Like an irritating canker sore that just won’t go away, there is a plague of propaganda on the Internet that lingers and lingers — spreading half-truths and outright lies about Social Security to millions of Americans. At least once or twice a day, someone forwards me an Internet message that claims to be providing a bit of a history lesson about Social Security. But it’s really a lesson in how to take tiny kernels of truth and twist them into big fat whoppers of misinformation.

I’ve addressed this issue before in past columns. That’s because the messages it contains have been out there polluting people’s opinions about Social Security for years. I first saw it maybe 20 years ago, being passed around via fax and snail mail and other pre-Internet forms of communication. For the past 10 years, it’s been a staple of the conservative blogosphere. And like so much misinformation on the Internet, if the message is spread far and wide enough and repeated often enough, no matter how preposterous it is, it starts to take on an aura of authenticity. So it’s time once again to set the record straight.

Although this so-called Social Security history lesson states, “It doesn’t matter if you are a Democrat or Republican, facts are facts” — it quickly reveals itself to be an attempt to convince people that the Democrats have messed up the original Social Security program beyond all recognition. In today’s column, I’ll cover about half of the allegations in the email. I’ll save the rest for next week.

Allegation: “Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security program. He promised that it would be completely voluntary. It no longer is voluntary.”

Fact: Participation in the Social Security program never was voluntary. Although early Social Security planners, including Roosevelt, gave some thought to making the program a voluntary one, they quickly realized it could never work that way. They figured that if given the choice, the rich would opt out of system, and a large segment of the lower middle class and poor (the very people who would need Social Security the most in retirement) would choose not to participate. Social Security would never have been the success it is today — the best anti-poverty program for seniors the government has ever come up with, giving tens of millions of Americans a stable income in retirement — had it been a voluntary program.

Allegation: “FDR promised the participants would only have to pay 1 percent of the first $1,400 of their annual incomes into the program. Today, people pay 7.65 percent of the first $106,800.”

Fact: Social Security planners, including President Roosevelt, knew from day one that as the program grew, taxation and revenues would have to grow. This is just common sense. Show me one large-scale pension plan or government program anywhere in the world that has the same funding structure it did 75 years ago! And by the way, the Social Security tax rate is not 7.65 percent, as is often stated. The Social Security tax is 6.2 percent. The other 1.45 percent of the payroll tax is used to fund the completely separate Medicare program.

Allegation: “Social Security money would be put into an independent trust fund and therefore would be used to fund Social Security and no other government program. Under Johnson (a Democrat), the money was moved to the general fund and spent.”

Fact: All Social Security monies are still deposited into the Social Security trust funds. But every nickel of those trust funds is, and always has been, invested in U.S. treasury securities. In other words, as Social Security tax collections come into the Treasury Department (and that’s at a rate of about $2 billion per day), those revenues are instantly converted into treasury notes that are deposited into the trust funds. But the actual cash goes into the government coffers and is spent for whatever purposes the government spends money on. But the point is, the Social Security trust funds still hold the Treasury notes. And every month for the past 75 years, the government has made good on its obligations to Social Security by redeeming enough bonds to cover Social Security benefits due.

This is the way the program has always worked. I usually ask critics: If you were in charge of Social Security, what would you have done with all the money? Bought Enron stock? Buried it under a mattress? Putting the money in treasury securities has always been considered the safest way to invest Social Security’s holdings.

So President Lyndon Johnson didn’t “move the money to the general fund to spend it.” What LBJ did do was change an internal government bookkeeping practice. Social Security’s income and expenditures used to be kept on a completely separate set of books. He simply added Social Security’s accounts to the general government budget. But that did not change in any way the method used to invest and spend Social Security money (as explained above).

But let’s be honest. Johnson moved the balance sheets for Social Security money into the overall government budget for one sneaky reason: All the Social Security income made the actual government deficit, caused at the time by spending for the Vietnam War, appear smaller. But please note that no president since, Democratic or Republican, has changed that little accounting trick — for the very same reason: Adding Social Security’s surpluses to the overall government ledgers makes for a rosier (albeit duplicitous) budget scenario.

Next week: more allegations and more facts.

If you have a Social Security question, Tom Margenau has the answer. Contact him at thomas.margenau@comcast.net.

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