![]() First, he was connected to Fortas by significant bonds of background and experience. On a deeper level, however, Rostow had clearly come to the right man for help. Rostow did not even bother to hide his own position-while he insisted that he did not consider official treatment of Japanese Americans to be “persecution,” he clearly regarded it as discriminatory. Since the Department of the Interior oversaw the War Relocation Authority, Rostow was in effect requesting that the administrator responsible for administering the camps act as a “mole” and feed him some private material to attack the government’s policy. On one level, it was an audacious request. “I just don’t like these Japanese cases, which lead to the conception of second-class citizenship, and strengthen the hand of our worst kind of reaction.” 1 “It is not persecution that leads me to write articles against the positions in which you officially find yourself!” He assured Fortas. ![]() Rostow asked Fortas whether he could do him the favor of having a member of his staff provide information that might “safely be made available” in four areas: restrictions on activities of Japanese Americans in Hawaii any actual incidents of sabotage among those in Hawaii or the mainland general information on the operation of the camps and the official justification for legal restrictions. United States, which was about to be argued before the Supreme Court). On September 23, 1944, he wrote Undersecretary of the Interior Abe Fortas that he had decided to “celebrate” his return to academia by studying the “Japanese exclusion cases” (by which he meant primarily the case of Korematsu v. In mid-1944, following an outbreak of back pain, Rostow left Washington and resumed teaching at Yale, where he was appointed full professor of law. In the wake of US entry into World War II, Rostow, who was then still in his late twenties, obtained a leave of absence from Yale and moved to Washington, where he served in the Lend-Lease administration and later the State Department. So impressive were his studies that he was asked to return after graduation and teach law. After studying at Yale University and Cambridge University, Rostow graduated from Yale Law School in 1937. His parents, Russian-Jewish immigrants, named him in honor of Socialist Party leader Eugene Victor Debs. Anefo ( Wikipedia)Įugene Victor Rostow was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1913. While Carey McWilliams and a small number of other writers had denounced West Coast racism, Rostow’s articles were among the first to directly challenge the legitimacy of Executive Order 9066 and the Supreme Court decisions upholding the government’s actions under it.Įugene Rostow in 1981. In addition to denouncing mass confinement in his twin articles, Rostow endorsed the concept of reparations for the victims of the policy. Designed for a larger public, it repeated the same critiques in more summary form. He followed this with an article in the popular magazine Harper’s in September 1945. In his first article, “The Japanese-American Cases - A Disaster,” published in the Yale Law Journal in mid-1945, Rostow presented a powerfully-reasoned critique of removal and incarceration as America’s “worst wartime mistake,” and refuted the official justifications offered. In 1945, even as Japanese Americans remained confined in camps by official order, Rostow, then a young law professor at Yale University, published a pair of articles that criticized their wartime treatment. In the annals of civil rights, a special place should be reserved for Eugene Rostow.
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