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FA: The ACLU, Kiyoshi Okamoto wrote to the ACLU and asked for their support.

RD: He wrote to Roger Baldwin.

FA: What do you make of the ACLU, Roger Baldwin's response?

RD: Well, this was... the role of the ACLU in the early days of the relocation, incarceration, was really despicable, and now I'm talking about the national ACLU. The northern and the southern California branches did some very, very good work, but the national was opposed to what they did. Initially, the American Civil Liberties Union had agreed to defend Gordon Hirabayashi and Seattle members of the ACLU supported this, but they reneged very early on, before, after Executive Order 9066 but before people went to camp, they simply withdrew their support so that Gordon had to be defended by a good Quaker lawyer who had never hired an, had an appellate case in his life.

Later, when one of the leaders of the resistance in Heart Mountain, Kiyoshi Okamoto, wrote a private letter to Roger Baldwin, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, asking him whether he would help them, Baldwin apparently consulted with leaders of the Japanese American Citizens League in Salt Lake City and answered Okamoto in a public letter, which was made public before Okamoto received it, denouncing what he was doing, saying that they had no right to do this, etcetera, something the American Civil Liberties Union today would absolutely deny. Then later in the war, later in the war, the ACLU joined in amicus curiae briefs and in its postwar propaganda talked of itself as the defenders of the Japanese American people. And then -- and this was the thing that really turned my stomach at the time -- then eventually it made Edward Ennis, the Department of Justice man who was responsible for the execution of the renunciation act and who was responsible for what courts ruled later was the illegal -- you can't say deportation -- exiling of Americans to Japan, some of whom had never been there before, made him one of the postwar heads of the American Civil Liberties Union. I think that that was an utterly despicable action, and one which the official historians of the American Civil Liberties Union have never properly discussed.

FA: The ACLU told Okamoto that he had no legal case -- no, he had a good moral case, but no legal case at all.

RD: Yeah, well, that's...

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1998, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.