Making Precedents Count

Go, California!

Last week the state passed AB 351, a challenge to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA 2012). The bill protects Californians from unconstitutional actions by the federal government, like the NDAA’s ability to suspend habeus corpus (yeah, I linked to Wikipedia. Don’t be shy about using it to double check your understanding of habeus corpus.) It’s not the first state to challenge the NDAA (Alaska and Virginia), but what’s nice about the bill is:

1. It was introduced by a Republican (good for you, Tim Donnelly!) and sponsored by a Democrat (and to you, Mark Leno!). Even in these dark times of partisan struggle, it is possible to come together around the things that matter, like making sure that American residents and citizens cannot be held indefinitely without charges just because they are suspected of being enemy combatants.

2. It proves that we’ve learned at least a little bit from our past. Remember WWII when the government detained thousands of Japanese Americans without trial under suspicion of being “the enemy”? Remember all the mistakes we made after 9/11? This is a step away from all those mistakes. Towards something more just and constitutional. Ahilan Arulanantham has a nice piece connecting the JA incarceration and the passage of AB 351here. Short, too.

You can read about the bill’s passage or read the bill itself. Or, if you’re really excited about constitutional rights read both. While drinking a your required pumpkin spice latte (Seriously. Everywhere has a version now…) and thinking how nice it is that we’re trying to not repeat our shameful history.

Righteous

I’ve been interning with Densho the Japanese American Heritage Project (digitizing Japanese American history and making it available in various ways) this summer. Amidst creating finding aids and QA testing some digital repository software, I’ve been transcribing some handwritten letters because handwriting and OCR are not friends. Not even frenemies.

The letters are from Helen Amerman Manning, who taught high school at Minidoka as a young woman. She writes a lot about how nice everyone (staff and internees) are, how dusty it is, and whenever she washes her hair. She goes to choir a lot, too. So much of the letters are daily observations that it’s easy to miss the incredibly historical parts (she meets Min Yasui almost as soon as she gets there. Like almost everyone else she meets, she thinks he’s wonderful and bright.). Then I came across this excerpt today:

I had a nice card from Ren today and a letter from Aunty Hope. Confidentially she burns me up with her failure to realize that the evacuees are not war prisoners but over 50% are American citizens! And a lot more than that proportion are people who came here for a new start in life (just as her ancestors did) or else were born here (just as she was) and are completely in sympathy with the American ideals. Again I would remind her that no Japanese in America has been convicted of sabotage but many American citizens (many native-born!) of German ancestry have!

I’d just like to see how the DAR’s would behave under the same circumstances! Ask her if she wants her American friends with German names put in concentration camps in this country! Ask her how she likes the idea of fellow citizens living behind barbed wire with MP’s on duty, and no charges against them! If Tom and Ten are fighting so that we can send the “Japs” back to Japan and put the Jew and negro “in their places” she’d better look out for fear they start sending everyone but the American Indians back where they came from! How do you suppose the 5000 or more Japanese Americans in the army feel about fighting for the preservation of race prejudice? Would Tom and Ren have any misgivings about loyalty to a country that wasn’t sure it would have room for them if they lived “to come back”? Would they fear to go out to die for America and leave their aged parents (most volunteers’ parents are over 60) uprooted in a potentially hostile country?

I love the bit about sending everyone but the American Indians back to where they came from, because who gets counted as an “America” remains such a modern argument.

To find the letter, go to:

http://www.densho.org > Archive > Photo and Document Collections > Private Collections > Helen Amerman Manning Collection > page 2 > denshopd-p171-00040

Out of the Archives: Basketball in the Camps

Looking at archival material from the Japanese Internment Camps, or the Japanese Concentration Camps, if you prefer that terminology, I often find myself wondering how closely life on the inside approximated life on the outside. Certainly the American government had a stake in making the inmates look happy and healthy– more like an extended vacation than a forced imprisonment. Even with beauty pageants and basketball courts, how can life ever feel normal when your life is so heavily regulated by the government and your “town” is enclosed by barbed wire fencing?

Today’s edition of Out of the Archives comes from Calisphere and the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA):

Title:

Scattered throughout the school grounds and near recreation halls throughout the center, these single standard baskets get a great deal of use from both boys and girls. — Photographer: Parker, Tom — Amache, Colorado. 12/11/42

Identifier:

Volume 8

Identifier:

Section A

Identifier:

WRA no. E-508

Collection:

War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement Series 3: Granada Relocation Center (Amache, CO)

Contributing Institution:

UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library

Reference URL: http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4k4004qt/?order=1

More on Calisphere and JARDA, from their website:

Calisphere is the University of California’s free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 200,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts — reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history. Calisphere’s content has been selected from the libraries and museums of the UC campuses, and from a variety of cultural heritage organizations across California. See the list of contributing institutions.

Calisphere is a public service project of the California Digital Library (CDL). Through the use of technology and innovation, the CDL supports the assembly and creative use of scholarship for the UC libraries and the communities they serve. Learn more about the CDL.

JARDA contains thousands of Japanese American internment primary source materials:

• Personal diaries, letters, photographs, and drawings
• US War Relocation Authority materials, including camp newsletters, final reports, photographs, and other documents relating to the day-to-day administration of the camps
• Personal histories documenting the lives of the people who lived in the camps as well as the administrators who created and worked in the camps

Historically, these heavily requested materials for research, classroom study, and other uses have been difficult to access physically because they are widely scattered in a number of different collections. The JARDA project was created to remedy this problem. This single point of entry provides access to the rich resources of many diverse California archives, libraries, oral history programs, and museums.