Uprooted: Chapters 2–3

Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was a classic example of racism embodied in law.

Burnett had the state treasury pay generous bounties...

He expected to work hard, live frugally, save as much as possible, and return wealthy to his native village after a few years.

An estimated 10,000 Chinese were hired by the Central Pacific Railroad to build the western section of the first transcontinental rail line, which, when completed in 1869, linked California to the eastern United States.

Central Pacific president Leland Stanford, who later founded Stanford University, praised them for being “quiet, peaceable, industrious, economical—ready and apt to learn all the different kinds of work” needed in railroad building.

Originating in India, the raw opium was usually refined in the town of Victoria, on Vancouver Island, off Canada’s west coast, dubbed the “opium capital of the New World.”

No “decent” person could condone such an “unnatural act"...

A San Francisco native, William Randolph Hearst, presided over what one historian has called the “sewer system of American journalism.”

Of the 30,000 destitute San Franciscans who applied for public relief, not one was an Issei.

He loved to traipse around the White House in samurai armor and practice jujitsu, the Japanese art of fighting without weapons.

But now the “infernal fools in California,” TR complained, had created a crisis.

Farmers’ wives toiled especially hard in the fields, from daybreak to sundown.

Members of the second generation, however, were automatically citizens, because they were born in the States. Their arrival had a profound effect, convincing their Issei parents to stay in the new land.

For the Nisei, assimilation was never an issue.

“We are Americans, not by mere technicality of birth, but by all the other forces of sports, amusements, schools, churches, which...affect our lives directly. Some of us are Yankee fans; some of us are Dodger fans....We listen to Beethoven, and some of us even go through the Congressional Record.”

The Issei, on the other hand, scrimped and saved, even on necessities, for their children’s education.

Yet they found that good grades were not enough to break into the mainstream economy.

During the 1912 presidential election campaign, Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate and an ardent white supremacist (born in Virginia, he was a son of the South), appealed to California voters...

The American Legion and other patriotic organizations denounced Japanese “abuses.”

South Carolina senator Ellison DuRant Smith, a fiery speaker, set the tone: “We now have sufficient population in our country for us to shut the door and to breed up a pure, unadulterated American citizenship.”

Japanese newspapers branded the law “most humiliating to the Japanese race,” an “unfriendly act,” and “a wound that will hurt and rankle for generations and generations.”

“...Dirty children with sores on their heads. Working men scantily dressed and browned and weather-beaten. Country girls with straight hair in a short pigtail with fat legs and thick ankles.”

We do not hesitate to repudiate and condemn our ancestral country...Fellow Americans, give us a chance to do our share to make this world a better place to live in!

A reporter described an upstate New York facility: “The prison contains three rows of barbed wire that enclosed the barracks. Placed at intervals along the barbed wire are twelve elevated sentry boxes with each box armed with a repeating shot gun, a rifle, and a machine gun.”

On weekends, he hired private planes and flew over the base, snapping photos of its defenses and the location of each warship in its berth.

By mid-January 1942, a barrage of rumors was stoking invasion fears.

Since the 1890s, various groups had hyped Imperial Japan’s threat to the West Coast.

For sheer nastiness, however, few equaled Henry McLemore, a columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain.

A gifted lawyer, Warren was also a shrewd politician and California’s attorney general.

After Pearl Harbor, according to Warren, “an entire race of people, men, women, and children alike...[are] poised to take disloyal action against the United States at any moment.”

Though “horrified” by the lax state of civil defense, Munson had confidence in the Japanese community.

“A wayward daughter of an ancient Chinese emperor left her native land...”

The writ of habeas corpus, which safeguards people from being imprisoned unlawfully, was suspended.

The writ of habeas corpus, which safeguards people from being imprisoned unlawfully, was suspended.