Transcripts For CSPAN2 Bradford Pearson The Eagles Of Heart Mountain - A True Story Of... 20220810

Health and philadelphia magazines among many other publications. G he as a recipient of the German Marshall Fund of the United States marshall memorial fellowship whichdy took him to europe to studydy media on the continent. He grew up in hyde park, new york, and now lives in philadelphia with his wife and two children. The eagles of heart mountain is his first book. Please give a g warm savannah welcome to bradford pearson. [applause] thank you so much fore intro and and thank you all for for coming today. It really means a lot to me. This book originally came out in january of 2021. So this is actually the first inperson book event that ive been able to do in the year and 13 months. Excuse me, the 13 months that this book has been out this this is my debut book and it means a lot to me to actually be able to sit in front of people as opposed to just a very tiny camera on my laptop in my kitchen or in my basement or in a small corner of my living room wherever my two children arent are the five year old and a two year old so finding space to do book events where i had one at the japaneseam National Museum in la where our four year old at the time actually ran in and sat on my lap and said, who are you talking to and then said is this another one of your boring book events . So thats her favorite term as dad doing another boring book event. So i want to thank you for making sure that this is not one of my boring book events and actually being in person. So i really appreciate that. Yesterday i had the opportunity speaking of being in person. I had the wonderful opportunity to be able to speak with some sixth graders at one of the local Charter Schools here. And i i originally i was going to talk start this talk in a different way, but i wanted to share one small thing that these very precocious savannah sixth graders that you should all be very proud of told me about first of all, the first question they asked me was does a writer make a lot of money . And i said not a writer like me but there are lots of writers that do make a lot of money. So maybe you should become kent krueger or someone else david. About you who stands on the big stage and then the very last question that i got from one of the kids was. If someone else wrote this book and you read it, would you still think it was good . And i i, you know, i guess that ive been doing these presentations and book events for about 13 months now and it was one of the very few times where i had no answer and i had to sit there and sort of think about it for a second and i had to reflect and be like, thats the best question. Ive gotten over the past year and maybe id change a couple things, but i still think its pretty good. So anyway, so im actually gonna start by just reading a very very short section and then maybe you can answer that young girls question and still let me know if its good. This this very small scene takes place in the second game that the heart mountain eagles ever played in in 1944. The teams lined up under 78 degrees sky and the Carbon County kicker sent the ball deep khichi took the ball the 10 yard line and ran diagonally across the field heading to the left side line babe faked as a blocker then sprinted toward keychee. The pitch was flawless babe cradled the ball looked down field and saw nothing, but open dirt. Arms pumping as the dust kicked up beneath him. He was gone gone from that field gone from that camp gone from wyoming removed the barracks in the barbed wire in the military police add some bleachers and sketch in the Roosevelt Hotel looming over the field replaced the stones with grass color in the green of the palm trees and the white of the wobbly Hollywood Sign watching from mount lee the place all the bad with all the good and for those seconds. He can be just a boy doing what he loves most babe strodened into the end zone untouched. The eagles of heart mountain is the true story of the Best High School Football Team in the history of the state of wyoming which is a group of incarcerated japaneseamerican teenagers during World War Two. These kids have been pulled from their homes in los angeles and seattle and San Francisco have been sent these kids were sent to this corner of northwest wyoming brother kids have been sent to dry adviva beds and idaho swamps in arkansas 110 degree deserts in arizona. The book itself is about 90,000 words and every single. Of them grew out of my own personal embarrassment about how little i knew about this subject. In june 2013. I visited Yellowstone National park for another store that i was working on and one of those days i was able to visit the heart mountain interpretive center, which is a small museum that sits for the former heart Mountain Camp was i walked in the museum thinking that i had a pretty good handle on the subject. I grew up in hyde park new york, which is Franklin Delano roosevelts hometown. I studied history in college and i really thought oh, this is a subject and this is a history these camps that i understand really well and as i walked through the museum i realized that i knew about maybe 1 of the amount of information that i should know about these i knew nothing about the camp conditions the racism behind the governments decision to form these camps or the brave men and women who resisted these camps both before the camps opened and within the camps. Well, i was walking through and thinking about you know, how inept my education and history was on this subject. I saw one very a display in the museum and i still think to this day. Is probably the only time or the first time that ive read all the way to the very end of the Museum Display and thats something that ive changed since then because i got a whole book out of it. So so heres the three sentences that were on this display. Football and basketball were Popular High School sports at heart mountain while the Boys Basketball team traveled the state the girls Basketball Team played all but one game at home and the Football Team was never allowed to play in a way game. The Football Team won all of its games in two years, but one a close 19 to 13 loss to casper in november 1944. I reread this display a couple times to sort of make sure i understood what this thing was actually saying the sport this location the success and i went home to texas where i lived at the time and i wrote the story about yellowstone and and went on to work on lots of other stories for magazines and newspapers, but i really couldnt stop thinking about those three sentences that that team and and the conditions that they must have faced and months would pass and then a year would pass and i really couldnt get that out of my head. Who were these young men . Why were they so good and and what led to incarceration to begin with . And every journalist knows that if youre working on a story, but you cant stop thinking about another story that thats probably the story. You should actually be spending your time on as opposed to whatever youre doing with your day to day so i got to work. I reached out to the people at the Heart Mountain Foundation who sent me a physical cd with every copy of the heart mountain sentinel newspaper on it when they open the heart Mountain Camp, there were 13,000 people had been sent there from mostly from los angeles and some other communities up and down the west coast. So if you had a community i was 13,000 people in the 40s it basically operated as a small city. So that means that they had a from my perspective a pretty fantastic weekly newspaper, and i was really lucky in that this weekly newspaper was staffed with real journalists and was led by an editor from seattle who was was really an incredible editor and went on to work at the denver post and the Des Moines Register and really instilled this sense of at this paper. And because of that this newspaper also had a sports section and id stay up every night reading these these these newspapers on this disc and you know, i had a day job and i would come home and this was right after my wife and i had had our first daughter and she was six months old and my wife would be up feeding her and then i would stay up and and read through these papers and eventually i tried to read every single page and every story of all these papers that have been sent to me to sort of really understand the full scope and the full picture of what was going on at this camp. Lucky for me this camp the newspaper had a fantastic sports section and every week that the team played a game. Theyd run four separate stories on the team. They would run a preview of the upcoming week review of the last weeks game a column and then a huge fat box score and when youre a journalist and youre looking for information, especially about something that happened, you know, 75 years ago Something Like this is just a real treasure trove and it helped me not only to be able to deter who these people were but to determine the arc of the season determine who the best players were but more importantly it showed me the impact that this team had on the camp. So there were 13,000 people at a peak in the camp and four or five thousand people would come out to every single one of the games that these guys played there were no bleachers. They would stand vined six eight ten people deep they would back up farming trucks to the field. So people could stand in the tailgate and on top of the cab to really get a sense and get a scene of what these players were doing. Where the heart Mountain Camp was built it was the first time that theyd ever been a permanent settlement in Human History on that piece of land in wyoming. So thinking about four or 5,000 people watching this Football Team play meant that that was the first time in Human History that that many people had been on that piece of land doing something together and sort of thinking about that on the scale of who we are and who we are as a people. It really meant a lot to me and it showed sort of the emotional resonance of this team. As i read the stories that were in the paper, i started building out a hierarchy of who i thought were the best players on this team when youre writing a book or when youre writing a magazine story or a newspaper story. You dont only want facts and figures but you want characters and you want important and you want impactful characters and from the very first game. I knew that the main character this book was going to be a young man named babe namora. Before he was taken from his home and sent to camp babe was a starting running back for a Hollywood High School in los angeles. He was a multisport star. He started second base. He was a shortstop. He played point guard. He was a triathlete. Excuse me a decathlete at the time japaneseamericans, especially in los angeles werent allowed to play in white leagues. So japanese americans out there had to form their own leagues, which they formed as the nissan Athletic Union and these teams operated in seattle and San Francisco and san diego la sacramento and every community that had japanese americans in it and even as a young boy by the time he was 14 or 15 babe was really dominating these leagues. He was dominating in baseball softball track any sport that they threw at him babe was really fantastic. He had great hands incredible instincts and he ended up competing against men that were in their 20s and 30s and all these sports and being handily in retrospect and i think people at the time thought and defend this belief as well. That babe was the best japaneseamerican athlete of his generation in the United States, and it just so happened that his family got sent to a camp in northwest wyoming that i visited on a whim and you know, unfortunately babe died in 2011 and when youre writing a story about people who are mostly dead you run into a lot of obituaries. And sometimes those can be dead ends, but from reporting standpoint, they can also be really enlightening and theyre usually written by family members, but she means that you dont necessarily get you get some the nuts and bullets you get their jobs and you get their family members names if you get a real sense of who they were as a person you get a sense of, you know, beyond the nuts and bolts of their life you get a sense of what their family members thought about them and what they cared enough to remember them for but it also lists survivors and for me that gave me the first person who became the linchpin of this book, which is the woman named jan morey who was babe named moores daughter after some frantic and a bit. Haphazard of googling. I found jans email address on a dead Linkedin Profile page and center an email that just sort of said hey, you know you have no idea who i am, but ive been sort of surreptitiously at night researching your fathers life, and id really love to talk to you a little bit about it. I dont know what this project is. I dont know if this project is ever going to be anything, but id really like to talk to you a little bit about about your dad and your dads life and his time at the at the heart Mountain Camp that was in may of 2017 and and my book came out in uhuary of 2021. And the reason i bring up is that i think a lot of times. In this profession and then in all of our professions and in our personal lives, sometimes we procrastinate on things that are very easy things to do and there are things that we want to do and there are things that sometimes we dont know if we can do but for me writing this book was a sign that anyone anyone in this room can do what i did today as maybe its not necessarily writing a book, but its finding stories and you know talking to people and remembering, you know on a grand scale. Maybe its just capturing your familys story and maybe its capturing your neighborhood or a churchs story, but everybody here has the tools to do that. Ill get off my tiny little soapbox there. But so i talked to jan one day on the phone and probably rambled on for too long about my thoughts and for the team and you know for whatever reason she agreed and said sure you can you can come out to my house in anaheim, and we could talk about my dad we could talk about his life years later. I found out that she had reached out at time. I was the the editor of southwest infight magazine and i didnt know this but she had reached out to them to make sure that i was legit and i wasnt making up who i was so as i was checking in on her family. She was apparently doing a full background check on me before before she let me into her home which i appreciate and so im in our house in anaheim and when babe died jan did this this great thing for for the family and you know for for her family and for the folks who came to babes funeral and that she created these binders of babes whole life. To create a binder that was his early years his High School Years his time in. And and his time afterwards and you know for me it was it was amazing to sort of watch. This mans life unfold personally and then as a reporter, i was like, oh my gosh, theres all this great stuff that shes collated and put in binders for me to sort of go through and ill never forget the the most affecting thing for me that day and i was you know, flipping through pictures some of the photos appear in the book from one babe was a little boy and but the most affecting thing for me was flipping through a binder. I came across this sort of maybe eight by eight size felt letter and it was an h and m in bright blue and white and it looked brand new and i realized that it was babes varsity letter from the heart mountain eagles Football Team. And you know for anyone whos played High School Sports you remember getting a varsity letter you remember what that meant whether it was, you know, soccer or baseball basketball field hockey, whatever that may have been i dont know where mine are right now, but im sure theyre in one of the any boxes my parents keep asking me to remove from their attic and move to my own home, but seeing that there was this varsity lighter from this american concentration camp just meant so much more to me than any other writer than i could have received. You see the Camp Administration gave this team very little money. They gave everybody in the camp very little opportunity to thrive. So that meant that the people in the camp had to do what they could to make life better for themselves and especially for their kids and for the younger generations there. Um the money for this team was raised by other african, excuse me other japanese americans in the camp the uniforms were pennies that had so little money that they couldnt afford thigh pads. So instead they would shove cardboard into their pants and tape it up with athletic tape. So to see this varsity letter meant to me that this community cared enough about these kids to pool their own money to pull money that very few of them had you know, they had to sell their house. Chinese on the dollar when the federal government had sent them to these camps any savings that they had was was dwindling while theyre in the camps. But to me these people wanted to give these kids some semblance of their old life and in that small instance that meant just making these little varsity letters to give to these kids who played on a Football Team who brought a lot of joy to people where there was very little joy jan was helpful in a lot of ways in terms of helping me learn more about her fathers life, but she also opened up completely the world of japanese American Life in los angeles to me. I left messages from lots of other families when i was first started reporting this book and i got very few calls back and then as soon as jan would call one of the families they would call me the next day. I reached out to kichi. Akeda, who was one of the last living eagles players and before i knew it. I was interviewing khichi at the Japanese American Museum in little tokyo in la and that was because jan vouched for me. When i say this book would have been possible without one person. That one person is is jan morey and i bring her up in every talk that i do because i know that i would not have been able to do this book without her support and her guidance. I mean she would i would stay at her house in la while i was doing reporting and she would make me a little snack bags when i would go out and report i would go and i have my own little room there and she would turn it down wed have breakfast in the morning and then i would get my rental car and go to santa anita race track and report or the american National Museum, i would go to babes childhood home, which was a boarding house in hollywood, and i would sort of sneak in and i would tell jan later. Shes like, oh, hows the boarding house doing . So i love talking about jan as you could probably see because i just spent the last five minutes doing it, but its because she really did make this book possible what i was working on the book though. I knew that no matter how much time i spent in la learning about these kids lives before they went to camp. I needed to spend a lot of time in wyoming which is where this camp was every year. Theres a pilgrimage over the summer for camp survivors their families and other japanese americans to go back to this place in northwest, wyoming where so many families had you know, the worst years of their lives and its a very emotional week. Its very emotional even as an outsider. Its its emotional and for the families and the survivors of the camp. Its sort of serves as this opportunity to reflect on their lives to reflect back on those 75 80 years ago about what their lives were like the first public image i went to was in 2017, and then i went in 2018 and 2019 as well as you can see. Im not japaneseamerican youd be hardpressed to find less japanese name than Bradford Thomas pearson. So when i first got to the pilgrimage the very first time i i stuck out a little bit and i think in some situations some reporting situations that can be a real disadvantage and i expect it to be such when i when i got to the campsite, but for me somehow it actually turned into a really big advantage because every time i would sit down somebody would sort of look at me and say so, who are you and why are you here which gave me an opportunity to say hi. Pearson im working on this project and so one day im sitting there at the pilgrimage in one of the sessions and im flipping through an Old High School yearbook from heart mountain that babe or excuse me, jan or one of the other sources was donating to the museum and the archives there and im sitting there and a guy i could sense is kind of looking over my shoulder looking down. Hes looking hes like, what do you what do you what are you looking at . And i was looking at the Football Team. And next thing i know he says wait a second didnt uncle stan didnt uncle stan play on the Football Team. Hes like those are stands kids three rows up and you know sort of the serendipity of reporting sometimes i think so much of reporting comes down to luck and theres so much work that you can put into things but a lot of it really just comes down to to sitting down next to someone whos uncle ends up being one of the most dynamic characters in your book and and that was that was standing gawa and from a sourcing standpoint this sort of an interesting way to talk about some of the sourcing where theres when i wrote the book a lot of it was based on newspaper accounts interviews oral histories. So i was an archives in wyoming and Los Angeles Berkeley the national archives, but some of it comes from really unexpected places like stanagawa at that first pilgrimage after i had introduced myself to his kids. A couple days later. They come out to me and they said, you know before our dad died. He wrote a short memoir that like its really short a couple of us have copies of it. Was that be something that youre interested in taking a look at and i said somebody wrote an unpublished memoir full of details that no one else has ever seen before. Yeah, please, you know forward that along to me so i dont think i cursed an excitement when they told me that but i think that i would have been i probably would have been warranted. So they sent me this memoir and its you know, its short. Its maybe its maybe 30 pages in total, but its this mans reflection on his life and its reflection of his childhood in hawaiian. Its reflection of his time in los angeles, and and it talks about his life in camp and living in this chicken shack in the middle of montana during the winter while he was pulling sugar beets and you know when you start a project like this you kind of expect your research to go in certain ways. Being handed a full memoir chock full of details is not one of those ways. And neither is some of the other place that i got sources from which is, you know heart Mountain High school. Like i said, they tried to do as much as they could for these kids to make their lives normal and that included yearbooks and when youre looking through yearbooks, you know, weve all had yours when i was at the sixth grade class yesterday had to stop myself and ask but wait, do you guys still have your books like i didnt know when the generational divide ended on yearbooks. They informed me that they that they still do which was actually kind of gratifying for me as someone who still considers myself young but realized that i am not very young anymore in front of sixth graders. So when i was looking through all these different yearbooks that the different families had the different football families had it was really helpful in terms of not only seeing how their classmates put them on the page put this Football Team on the page in the yearbooks, but then also looking through and seeing what people had written in their friends your books seeing what the nicknames they give them seeing their inside jokes, you know when youre writing about stuff thats 75 or 80 years. Old and most your sources are dead. You kind of have to find lots of ways to fill out their characters. You can only do it so much through interviews with, you know, remaining family members. So for me finding these Little Things like the way that friends would talk to each other in their notes in your books was really helpful in building out those characters also really helpful was that in the 1980s and 90s a group of california state students sort of set out to capture the true voices of as many people as they could that were in the camps, so they created this really beautiful database full of oral histories of people that were in the camp. So some people that they interviewed in the 80s were 100 years old and some people were 50 years old and were young kids in the camps, and those are really helpful for me. I found four different ones from different players and you can really see their personalities pop. You can tell if people were shy or gregarious and you know trying to build out a character within a historic book, you know when im writing a feature story i could sit with someone and writing a feature story about their time in 2021 or 2022 and you get a sense of what their personality is like by sitting with them in that moment, but trying to find ways to do that, you know this videos these oral videos. Excuse me, this oral history is that were on video where were really helpful to me. And also another thing was that i spent hours and hours flipping through thousands of photos in the basements of archives and photos from camp photos from before camp and finding looking at every single photo and having a notebook next to me writing down the photo number and saying what are the details in here that i could really use to try to make this book come to life this book that i feel like i have a duty these people have given me, you know, sort of the honor of telling their family stories as someone from outside the Japanese American Community. So what can i do to make sure that i really honor that trust and for me that was really finding as many details as i could so been through photos after photos after photos and looking for weather looking for what the mountains world like in wyoming looking for what the barracks were how decrepit conditions were but then also seeing the joy that certain events brought to people whether it was a High School Dance or pounding mochi on new years eve on the Lunar New Year to sort of celebrate their japaneseness despite the fact that the federal government had ripped so much of it away from them. Um the camp itself and and how he got there it in part is what i attempted to do with this book when i got the book deal. I realized that i had a much bigger opportunity here than to just write a book about a really kick Football Team and for me, i knew that if i can make this a book where you know, the cover has Football Players and talks about World War Two and if i could convince people to pick up this book that ostensibly on its literal cover is about football that meant that i had an opportunity really to talk a lot about the history of these camps how these camps came to be what the conditions were like there what the conditions were in the United States on, you know, december 6th, 1941. Theres lots of memoirs and academic texts that are written about this subject and those are really helpful in terms of building out the book, but theyre very few narratives about the subject of japanese american incarceration that traced characters lives through the years and for me, i know that in order to really tell story of what they were doing and what their lives were like in the camp i had to go back and tell the stories of their families when they came to the United States. I had to say what the stakes were and the reasons for them coming to the United States and the reason that this federal government thought so little of other americans that they put them in this camp and i really thought of as this trojan horse that i can convince people to pick up this book about football i can make this book about this much bigger topic which is who we are as americans and how treat each other. And i also thought of as an opportunity to sort of. Correct the record on some of the sort of the broad understanding of what we think of as the reason that the camps existed and thats for the one event right of pearl harbor if anyone had to say, you know, if i pulled all of us i pulled myself before i start working on this book. You would say pearl harbor. Japanese bombed pearl harbor and then we open the camps. In reality it was the camso opening was this decade the ending the culmination of this decades von campaign by groups up and down the west coast to try to remove asians and Asian Americans from the United States groups, like the native sons the golden west and even groups that we think of now as sort of upstanding citizens like the American Legion were staunchly antiimmigration and teamed up with politicians farmers and ranchers to pass racist antiland laws immigration quotas and housing discrimination. And this is sort of my little thing that i always talk about. Its like my one little knit that i find very interesting that most people do not so im warning you now that the main reason for all this happened was farming and japanese and japanese American Families have begun to really dominate farming up and down the west coast even by night as early as 1910 japanese farmers produced 70 of california strawberries and on the eve of pearl harbor in 1941 japaneseamerican farmers controlled every planted acre of peas beets broccoli celery and cauliflower in Los Angeles County and two out of every three acres of all vegetable farms in Los Angeles County. So on pearl harbor happens white farmers saw this as this opportunity to pounce and see an opportunity to sort of regain their place on top of the agricultural world on the west coast and they begin prodding their local politicians to do something and essentially what leads to japanese american incarceration. The event is just its a land grab. Its a land grab by farmers and ranchers and people who had sort of seen their place on the west coast be replaced by these farmers who are frankly just much better at their job than these other folks were and these ideas trickled their way up from local politicians to state politicians like earl, warren and california and eventually to the military and dc power brokers. The us and government had been spying on the japaneseamerican community on the west coast for decades and years leading up to pearl harbor and every Intelligence Report that comes out says one thing and thats a japaneseamericans were no threat to the safety of the United States Naval Intelligence the fbi and the War Department all had spies and informants in the Japanese American Community for years up and down from seattle all the way down into baja, california and mexico in the verdict. Was that should japan and the United States go to war is that japanese americans would be loyal to the United States all these informants and all of these spies all said the same thing as this was proven later on. In that no japaneseamerican was ever convicted of sabotage or espionage during World War Two the same cannot be said for german americans or italian americans who actually there was one set of germanamericans who decided to take it upon themselves to release a whole batch of german pows from a camp in new mexico and you know, despite all this the racism of the times. I i think were still allowed to say that racism is bad in this country, you know led to the creation of this camps and there was no military necessity for that. It was basically just a racist frenzy that led to this land grab. And you know sort of in closing one of the things that people would always say to me in the years that i was working on. This book was that oh this topic is this topic is so relevant. Now this topic is so relevant. I started working on this book in 2016, and id agree and i would say yes, i do think its unfortunately timeless. Unfortunately relevant and the most interesting thing that i noticed happening. Over the years that people would say this to me was that what they would compare it to what they would say. It was relevant to in compared to today would change every couple months. And at first it was it was the trump administrations immigration ban on migrants from muslimmajority countries, and then they would say its relevant when it talks to with relation to the family separation policy at the us border and then it was when the images of kids and cages would come up theyd say, oh this is so relevant and then as the pandemic group, it was antiasian violence against against asianamericans across the country. And which is also something that happened right after a pearl harbor and you know over those years the comparison would change every few months and you know, like i said, my book came out in january 5th 2021 and the next day on january 6th 2021 as i was having my very first book event with my friend jason gay from the wall street journal the us capitol was overrun in full of who are taking over the us capitol as i sat there trying to do my first book event . And i couldnt help but make that you know that one final comparison that people had been making these other comparisons in terms of the relevancy of this for the past four years that ive been working on it and you know much of them antijapanese american fervor that happened after pearl harbor. It didnt happen immediately right after pearl harbor other americans white americans black americans sort of stood with their japanese american neighbors and said no, were going to defend our japanese american brothers and our neighbors here in our communities in our towns, but then a few weeks later as radio hosts and newspaper columnist and politicians repeatedly lied to their readers and their constituents about the threat of japanese americans the front page. They were front page stories in the Los Angeles Times that were completely fabricated about the threat of not only japan, but japanese americans on the west coast. Thats when people started turning on their neighbors. Thats when people started turning on their japaneseamerican neighbors, which is you know, the same thing that happened on january 6th. Is that so much of the news and information at that time whether it was on newsmax or fox news or oan social media threats politicians sort of stoking these differences and stoking this misinformation and disinformation. That led to the attack on the capitol in the same way that that misinformation led to the incarceration of 120,000 japanese americans. And because of events like what happened in 1942 people always ask me, you know, do you think that this could happen again . Could the United States so callously do this again to its own citizens and when i first started working on this book, i would say no, of course, of course not but unfortunately a lot has changed over the last six years and ive thought about this a lot in talks like this and then just sort of by myself at night or just sort of Walking Around and you know, we have voting we have governments who are stripping Voting Rights from american citizens hate crimes against Asian Americans have climbed by 73 percent books are being banned in libraries across the country and are being replaced with facebook threads and memes. And i think you know people asked could this happen again . I hope not. I really do. I hope this never happened again, but its all up to its up to all of us to ensure this doesnt happen again. We need to learn these tough histories. We need to learn about things that make us uncomfortable in our lives history needs to be uncomfortable learning about history learning about American History World History needs to be uncomfortable for some of us. We need to push back against unjust laws and most importantly we need to stand up for our neighbors, especially when they need it most. So thank you very much. If anybody has any questions i can also sing if yeah. No, i wanted to i wondered if you would elaborate a bit. One of the things that shocked me in reading your book was the fact if i remember correctly. It was quite a while ago that it was nearly a year after the camps should have been closed before they actually were closed. Largely for political purposes particularly the federal government and i remember roosevelt was running for a third or fourth term. I dont know which and he among others was largely responsible for not letting the japaneseamericans out. Just wonder we could hear a little bit more about sure. Yeah, and thats im glad you brought that up. Thank you, because its one of the things that always stuck with me too. And you know, i said at the top i grew up in hyde park new york, which is Franklin Delano roosevelts hometown. I went to Franklin Delano roosevelt high school. My mascot was the president s half. The town is basically roosevelt based and you know, so for me writing this book in a lot of ways was informative as to parts of fdrs character that you know as a normal person who understands history not historian. I had sort of had known about and and this thing that you talk about jack is that basically Franklin Delano roosevelt. Everyone said we need to close the camps federal government War Department said, theres no reason to keep the camps open and this was in early 1944 people been saying it for years almost as soon as the camps opened the there was absolutely whatever, you know, little trickle of military necessity people that originally thought was had completely vanished the japanese were not going to attack the west coast. But roosevelt says while im running for real action, and why dont we put off this decision until after the first week of november and well see if i win reelection because people are never going to let me win if i if i open up the camps and to me that was so to see it so boldly political and just say theres 120,000 people that youve taken from their homes and ruined their lives for no reason, theyve sold their homes. Theyve sold their cars people have died in these camps thousands of miles away from their homes. People have been killed in these camps and you decide because you dont think that you might not maybe you wont win real election if you open the camps to me was you know, i i theres a lot of sad and terrible things in this book, but to me that seemed one of the most despicable parts of all the history that i learned because it was just so openly political and you know fdr was this political beast but to see that and say no im going to continue the suffering of all of these people so that maybe i can you know, when an unprecedented fourth term was was really thats it was disgusting and it was such a hard thing to read and i feel like ive reread that section a few times because every time i wrote it it was just more more angry and i was like, i need to like rain this back so but yeah, thank you for for bringing that up. There may be some things you said upon which we might disagree. Sure. But there is one thing i think we would agree on. Words matter and as a child of the 50s. We were taught that it was an internment right . You used a word incarceration. Yes, would you explain the difference . Sure, and the very first words of my book are words matter so well, there you go. See maybe its not as original as i thought then so yeah, and thats its a great question. Its one that i get asked a lot in that basically the determine tournament is it has a very Legal Definition that talks about foreign nationals being held by a government. So there were internment camps during World War Two they were run by the department of justice and it was those were japanese nationals that the Us Government had considered some sort of threat to the United States and those men were rounded up on december 8th and how that totally separate camps and then even during the time roosevelt called what i wrote about in this books concentration camps, the term was concentration camp, but then obviously over the course of the war the term concentration camp became synonymous with extermination camps and then after the war in an effort to sort of soften and make a difference between the exterminate excuse me extermination camps in europe and the japaneseamerican camps in the United States the term internment camp kind of smushed all of these japanese and japanese american camps together into the idea of internment camps when even the expression at the time was a concentration camp, so i use concentration camps at the beginning of the book and that im mostly talk about the term of japanese american incarceration as to japanese internment and i basically deferred to scholars and japanese americans of my generation and said, what is the terminology that this community which im not a part of uses and that was really important to me as someone who is not part of this community to sort of go in and sort of not only honor the story but honor the terminology that they want to use and its really interesting you bring it up because when i speak and interview people who are in their 70s 80s and 90s for this book they all use the term internment camp because when they came out of the camps it became just the expression that everyone used for the intervening 30 or 40 years. Its younger generations people that are in there, you know 50s 60s and under who are starting to use the term concentration camp again, and and thats not in an effort to equate these camps with extermination camps and people in the japaneseamerican community be the first people to to say that there was an obvious difference between these kinds of camps, but they think you know figuring out the correct terminology is important for them. So was important for me. Youve clearly become passionate about what . Happened to the japaneseamerican citizens have you identified other stories you want to tell to continue to make this . Episode in history clear, so if somebody is an interested in football, they might not pick up this book. But im sure there are million stories. Did you identify some in your research that you want to pursue i did and i was actually lucky enough. I guess it was about two years ago. Now the New York Times ran a project about the end of World War Two and the home front in the United States and what the end of the war meant for people in the United States and people around the world and enter on the special projects team there reached out to me and said like hey brad, like are there other things that maybe didnt get into your book and this is before the book came out that youd like to explore and have a little bit more time with things that you know, maybe were set into a paragraph in your book that you really want to report out and i said, yeah how much time you got and so so that i got assigned two separate stories for that. I went out to los angeles reported them and one of the biggest things that i always think about in that project is that you know when the camps closed in late 44 and early 45 the racism that started the camps on the west coast didnt disappear in those four years, you know, just because the camps closed didnt mean that these peoples lives went back to what it was like before the war, you know, a lot of people had to find totally new houses. They had to find new jobs. They had to start from scratch kids, you know if you were a freshman in high school all of a sudden youre going to be a freshman in college and the last four years you had spent at a camp high school. That was a very bad teachers some teachers some people i interviewed for the books. So that their teachers were barely literate and you know, so i and the biggest thing for me in learning about these other histories was was housing and that like when they got back to the west coast, there was almost no place for anyone to live and a lot of these folks ended up in worse conditions than they were in camp because they lived in temporary trailers on air bases and air strips and on the worst sort of corners of Los Angeles County next to the dump next to smelting plants next to north grumman plants, and some folks had no money for years and never recovered and lived in these sort of temporary trailer camps for the rest of their lives even though you know before the war they had great jobs is as landscapers or teachers or running boarding houses or working at tofu factories, and then the war stripped all of their money, they lost their houses and when they came back, that up having to live in you know, worse barracks or trailers than then they and they had in the camps and im glad you said because i had become pretty passionate about this beyond. The book and i always say this to people where you know, i dont really care. You know, its nice that people buy my book, but i want people more just to understand this history. So if i give this talk or i give another talk or i give you know a presentation somewhere in the end. Personally, i i maybe my wife will disagree but i dont really care if i sell any more books, but as long as people learned this history and you know become more informed americans because of it, ill really feel like ive done my job so here you brad, you largely answered my first question in answering hers. But so my second really is in in readiness and listening to you today. I learned a lot about the under swell of angst it was going on up and down the west coast from an economic political and a an social how do you rate . The impact of the west coast with fdrs own almost neoracism in his own in his own way. Yeah, thats thats interesting because like so much of what fdr ended up doing here was basically just abdicating responsibility, right . He said okay these people on the west coast. Hes military commanders think that this is necessary. They wrote an executive order. That was just very vague which technically could have allowed for the incarceration of german or italian americans, even though nobody writing it knew or everybody writing it knew that that would never be used for that and i think that like you said sort of that angst on the west coast. Filtered its way up, but as we saw and i didnt mention this in the talk, and i probably should have is that you know only japaneseamericans in washington, oregon, california and a very small sliver of arizona had to go to the camps. So if you lived across the state line in nevada, you were fine if you lived in if youre a japaneseamerican lived in chicago or denver or salt lake city, you could or wyoming. Yes. Yeah exactly the and and theres a very small part in the book. Where a young man. Whos japaneseamerican who is on a Football Team at a Wyoming High School comes into the camp and then gets to go home to his family at night while the team he played against who are also japanese american teenagers have to go back to their barracks and sleep behind barbed wire and the most egregious example of that is that hawaiians japanese americans in hawaii for the most part werent sent to camps and that was if there was a military threat you would think that that would be the real place where you would put japanese americans in camps and it just sort of showed how unnecessary and capricious all of this was in that if you thought that there was a military necessity in california, you would certainly think that was one in in hawaii, but i think that again a lot of this just comes down to fdr sort of allowing focusing most of his energy on the european theater definitely not on the home front and saying okay if carl benditson and john dewitt think that this is important to do in, california. And they basically have beaten it through the War Department. Theyve basically taken it over the head of the attorney general. Im just going to sign it and he said make it its expedient as possible. That was how fdr said it so which is again another black mark on on roosevelts tenure in the white house. Especially towards the end some thanks. Thank you all so much. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Weekends on cspan2 are an intellectual feast. Every saturday American History tv documents americas , and on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding or cspan2 comes from these Television Companies and more including mediacom. The world of change in an instant but mediacom was ready. In the traffic soared and we nr slow down. Schools and businesses went virtual and with power a new reality is that mediacom we are built to keep you ahead. Mediacom along with these Television Companies supports cspan2 as a public service. Now got to tell you all a bit about michael. Hes got an interesting story. Michael ian black is an actor, comedian and a writer who started his