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FC: Was the Los Angeles office chapter of the ACLU, were they the only office looking for a plaintiff?
FO: Oh, no. No, no. San Francisco did, too. They were looking for, and as you may know, Wayne Collins -- who was, got this sort of a Al Wirin kind of a person up there -- sought to do it. And I can't remember whether Wayne represented Hirabayashi and/or Korematsu, I can't remember that. Be in the books, of course, but certainly he was involved, absolutely. And I guess, well, let's see. Hirabayashi was a Seattle person, so that was the curfew, so he probably wasn't involved in that directly. Probably was involved in the Korematsu case. Oh, yeah, but the San Francisco and the Los Angeles office was very definitely involved in getting it tried.
There's, the national office, there was a philosophical debate that went on again as there had been, as to whether the order itself should be challenged as distinguished from the evacuation. I don't know if I made that clear. As I say, many people thought that the ACLU should have challenged the order, Executive Order 9066 and Public Law 503, I think, was the number. I wasn't here during that debate 'cause I was away, but I don't find much, much in that debate at all. As I look back, the order itself, the order itself, which, of course, everybody knows about, 9066, didn't offend me because, again, it was military decision. Whether it was right or wrong, that's another question, but it was a military decision that says that the president said the military commanders can kick anybody out if they, he or she -- he at that time -- felt it was necessary for the national defense. Well, that's, kick anybody out, I mean, all right. It's like, like, I try to analogize, say there's a fire and the fire department makes lines around it and says, "Nobody can come in. They just can't come in." Well, who can really holler about that? But if they say, "Everybody can come in but the Japanese," now you got, now you got something that you can holler about. So I, as I say, I don't find much truck in the argument as to whether the order was bad. What was bad was the evacuation. That was what was bad. But here, here in Los Angeles and San Francisco, we felt both were bad.
<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1995, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.