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BT: I wonder if we could go back a little bit. When you were looking for an attorney that would take the, and represent the renunciants, and you went to the JACL and then they referred you to the ACLU and you talked to Besig, why was it that Besig didn't take the case?

TN: Well, Mr. Besig was the director of the ACLU. He said, "The ACLU in northern California will support you, but we're financially strapped and we can't finance it, the cases like this. So you'll have to finance it yourself." But, you know, we couldn't get any support, so we come back to camp, and I told all the people that the main thing is money, so raise a fund, a trust fund. So we raised a trust fund. And Mr. Collins said, "Gee, I would have used all that money for publicity," he says. Buy, get a good time in... well, the San Francisco newspaper were very liberal at that time, especially the Chronicle. And the Hearst papers were very bad, but they were turning around. So he was going to use all that money for publicity more than anything else.

BT: So why do you think that Besig didn't... and he was the head of the northern California ACLU?

TN: Well, he had supported us, all right.

BT: Right, but why do you think that he didn't go to Roger Baldwin with the national ACLU?

TN: Well, they had a conflict already.

BT: Could you talk about that?

TN: Well, you know, I never talked about it, but Mr. Collins told me that Roger Baldwin supported the government more than... he was a conscientious objector during the First World War. Now he turned around, he wanted to be a pro-American more than anything else.

BT: And so there was no support from Roger Baldwin.

TN: No, no. Then, once we started this case, the ACLU in New York figured they missed out on the evacuation issue, the biggest civil liberties case of all. So they wanted to get in one way or another, by hook or crook, they wanted to get in. So they got in. [Laughs]

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.