BURGER ON INTERNMENT?
Eric Muller reminds his readers that 65 years ago yesterday, President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, the legal foundation for the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
If you click on the image below, you can see a margin note that Warren Burger wrote on page 64 in his copy if R.L. Bruckberger's Image of America (1959). It's a little cryptic - the note reads, simply:
E W
Jap-Am
1941
and the passage next to it is marked with a margin line. But the text and the note together operate as a critique of Internment, I think. The context for Bruckberger's argument on this page is a lengthy comparison between the alleged pragmatism and caution of Jefferson compared with the intemperate, impatient utopianism of Saint-Just. The passage reads:
"Saint-Just thought he loved mankind, yet on a mission to Stasbourg he ordered the mass arrest of all suspects and when it was brought to his attention that he had undoubtedly imprisoned many innocent people among the guilty, he replied, 'You may be right about a few of them, but there is grave danger and we do not know where to strike. Now, when a blind man is looking for a pin in a heap of dust, he gathers up the whole heap.' But that 'dust' was men and women, French, like Saint-Just himself."Perhaps Burger's note intends to reference the critique of Saint-Just in this passage: that his treatment of individual human beings belied his profession of love for human kind. The 'dust' in the case of the internees was also men and women, many of them American, like FDR himself.
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2-21: In comments, Prof. Muller reads the margin note as a criticism of Earl Warren rather than of Internment itself, which makes a lot of sense.
Labels: Burger, marginalia
2 Comments:
I read the margin note more directly as a criticism of Earl Warren than of internment. Surely the "E W" with which Burger begins his margin note is Earl Warren. And the year Burger notes is 1941 -- the year of the Pearl Harbor attack and its immediate reaction -- rather than 1942 -- the year in which the internment decision was implemented.
Warren, as Attorney General of California in 1941-1942, was one of the most vocal preachers of mass suspicion of Japanese Americans.
So I see this more as a shot by Burger at Warren than as a comment on internment itself.
That makes much more sense than my interpretation. Thanks!
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