Trump should heed Earl Warren’s lesson
Politician used fear to win election.
Donald Trump’s call for a ban on all Muslims entering this country, and his invocation of President Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor, has been debated and scrutinized.
Many are shocked by his words, but I am not among them. Sadly, I have seen this before, when a rising political star traded heavily in the currency of fear to fuel his political machinery. Back then, that man was not a rightwing conservative like Trump; he was Earl Warren, who later became chief justice of the Supreme Court, where he was beloved by liberals as a progressive force for racial desegregation.
Warren was not always so enlightened. In 1941, as California’s attorney general, Warren had his sights on the governorship. AntiJapanese sentiment was high, and Warren encouraged the mob. He leveraged a widely held notion that all of us, even citizens born here, had a natural, racial predisposition toward Japan. Given the opportunity, he warned, we would do harm to America. He played upon ignorance of our culture and fear of our “otherness,” claiming it was our “method of living” that rendered any distinctions among us impossible. SOLDIERS ON OUR DRIVEWAY What followed was a nightmare, exceedingly so immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941. Overnight, my family and 120,000 others of Japanese descent became the enemy, simply because we looked like those who had attacked us.
The noose tightened when the government imposed curfews, restricted our travel, then froze our bank accounts. On Feb. 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued an order authorizing our “evacuation” from the West Coast.
Soldiers with bayonets marched up our driveway to order us out, my mother crying as she held my baby sister. We were permitted only what we could carry; our homes and businesses were abandoned or sold for pittances. They sent us first to a racetrack to live for weeks in a horse stable before being shipped away to an internment camp in the swamps of Arkansas. We spent four long years behind barbed wire fences, without charge or trial, all for the crime of being Japanese.
Trump called for entry bans and databases of Muslims, and he said he might even have supported the World War II internment.
Like him, Warren harnessed the power of fear. In a masterful stroke, Warren acknowledged that there were no reported acts of espionage or sabotage by our community, but he argued this was compelling evidence of some unknown, massive and coordinated activity yet to come.
Warren went on to become governor, buoyed in part by his anti-Japanese platform. HEED WARREN’S LESSON Trump’s arguments echo Warren’s election gambit in 1942. Citing dubious polls, Trump warns that there is “great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population.”
“Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses,” Trump argues, “our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad.”
Trump thus resurrects FDR’s wartime justification for internment: Because we cannot know whom to suspect, better that we suspect them all.
In his later years, Warren came deeply to regret his actions.
“It was wrong to react so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty, even though we felt we had a good motive in the security of our state,” he wrote in his memoirs.
Trump and his supporters would do well to heed Warren’s personal lesson and to study our history of not so long ago, when unspecified fears of a group, based solely on conjecture and appearance, led to the incarceration of tens of thousands of innocents. It was fear, prejudice and a failure of political leadership that left so dark a stain upon our nation’s honor. If, in the wake of terrorist attacks, there is indeed mounting public fear and prejudice, then our leaders must provide guidance and remind us of the values that define who we are.
As one who has ambitions to lead, Trump must disavow his plan and invest no further capital in the politics of fear.
Should he continue, we the people must refuse to grant him a platform or high office from which to unleash it.
History carries with it twin torches of wisdom and insight, so it might illuminate paths both behind and before us.
Let us hope they banish these dark shadows Trump has begun to cast.
George Takei is an actor and social activist currently starring on Broadway in the new musical
Allegiance.