“Dick Rowland Image”
”Shoots (News, Views and Quotes)”
– Off Welfare, Better Off
Welfare rolls nationwide have fallen by more than 50 percent since
welfare reform was enacted in 1996. The goal of reform was to move
families on welfare — the vast majority of which are headed by single women — from dependency to independence through work. How successful has reform been?
*1. Both national surveys and state data show that the women most at risk for long-term welfare receipt have left the welfare rolls at rates as fast as or faster than women who are much less at risk.
*2. In the states studied in depth, most of those leaving the welfare rolls have found employment, increased their incomes relative to welfare recipients and are gradually moving up the income; majority of those who have left say they feel they are better off.
During the booming economy of the late 1990s, welfare reform critics claimed that the good economy was primarily responsible for the fall in welfare rolls. They predicted that if the good times ended, welfare rolls would rise. Yet despite the increase in unemployment following the 2001 recession, many states continued to reduce their welfare rolls.
That is because most significant factor in caseload reduction is state policies. The states that have been less successful have had ineffective sanctions, high benefit levels and other counterproductive policies. Without any changes in federal law, the states that have failed to reduce their welfare rolls by as much as the average could adopt more effective policies. The impact would be significant:
*1. If the 23 less-than-average states had done as well as the average state, more than 800,000 additional people would have left welfare.
*2. Instead of a 59 percent reduction in welfare rolls since 1993, the United States would have 66 percent fewer welfare recipients.
Source: www.ncpa.org 10/1/02 Daily Digest, Joe Barnett, “Better Off Welfare,” NCPA Policy Report No. 255, October 2002
– Build It and They Will Come
Both Hawaii and Washington state tap public coffers to build high speed Net systems in hopes that someone will someday need them. Around $400 million will be spent in Hawaii. Small utilities in Washington are looking at piecemeal projects of $5 million each.
Source: Reason magazine 10/02
– The National Research Council addresses the shortage of science
and math teachers in the U.S. with a make-work plan for educrats. Even full Ph.D.s in the field should get two more years of training on how to teach, a report recommends.
Source: Reason magazine 10/02
”Roots (Food for Thought)”
Book Review
By George C. Leef, August, 2002
By Order of the President by Greg Robinson (Harvard University Press, 2001); 322 pages; $27.95.
If you go to the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C., you will see numerous statues, including one depicting men standing in a bread line. But you won’t see any statue showing Americans of Japanese ancestry staring out from behind barbed wire in one of the “internment camps” where they were imprisoned during World War II under Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.
The memorial gives us a sanitized version of FDR: no cigarettes, and no mention of one of the most egregious violations of the rights of
American citizens in our history. The fact that the rights of so many
Americans could be destroyed with a presidential signature is
inconvenient history for the idolators of Roosevelt and the imperial
executive that he left us. It might just remind people that Jefferson
was right in saying, “A government big enough to give us everything we want is big enough to take away everything we’ve got.” Better to just sweep it under the rug.
History professor Greg Robinson of the University of Quebec is
determined to bring the Japanese internment case back into the open. His By Order of the President is a brilliant reexamination of the
circumstances surrounding Roosevelt’s infamous order of Feb. 19, 1942. Where his book particularly shines is its probing of Roosevelt’s
mind. What did the president think about the Japanese and
Japanese-Americans? What information did he have about the alleged disloyalty of the latter? What political influences entered into his calculations? The book that emerges from his careful research is one that shows FDR to be anything but a paragon of virtue and sharply underscores the fragility of our rights.
Robinson writes that Roosevelt “deplored open prejudice” but, above all, he was a practical politician who needed to play to public opinion.
Defeated as the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1920, he kept himself in the public eye, and his pronouncements on the wave of nativist jingoism that swept the country were crafted with a view toward appealing to those sentiments while offending as few voters as possible.
While Roosevelt did not support an end to immigration, for instance,
Robinson writes that he hailed the addition of new European “blood of the right sort.” Furthermore, Roosevelt favored a policy of dispersing immigrants rather than allowing them to settle together in cities, which would supposedly “eliminate racial prejudice by eradicating the immigrants’ cultural difference and enabling them to adopt American manners and customs,” the author writes.
With regard to immigrants from the Orient, Roosevelt held to a view
that, to use an overworked word accurately, was racist. According to
Robinson, “FDR’s underlying assumption was that intermarriage was
dangerous because it would break down the unified racial character on which social cohesion and culture of a nation depended.” He favored banning land purchases by Japanese immigrants on the ground that doing so would help to safeguard against a “mingling of the blood.” Moreover, and crucial to his later actions, Roosevelt thought that people of Japanese ancestry were “innately Japanese” and would remain loyal to their ancestral land no matter where they were born and raised, and no matter how “Americanized” they might seem.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the pressure on Roosevelt to do
something about the suspicious-looking “foreigners” rapidly increased in its intensity. The military feared sabotage and fifth-column activities and put out inflammatory reports that were based on conjecture and even fabricated stories of clandestine cooperation between Japanese-Americans and ships of the Japanese Navy. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and others in the cabinet agitated for a policy of removal of all Japanese from locations near military installations. Soon that demand escalated to removal from the West Coast entirely.
Another source of pressure on FDR came from California politicians whose constituents had just discovered a perfect way of eliminating
competitors. Robinson writes,
“Greed and economic rivalry played a significant part in the
anti-Japanese movement. To white farmers in California, organized into groups such as the Western Growers Protective Association, the Grower Shipper Vegetable Association, and the White American Nurserymen of Los Angeles, the war emergency offered an opportunity to ‘kick the Japs out,’ rid the area of their hardworking competitors, and take over the fertile Japanese-operated lands.”
Radio broadcasters did their part by proclaiming that there was a
Japanese plot to poison the produce they sent to market. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” Roosevelt declared, but he never did anything to allay the panic that those interest groups and their
political allies were spreading.
FDR did receive information and counsel going in the opposite direction. The FBI had done a careful study on actions of the Japanese in Hawaii and concluded that there was no evidence of disloyalty or plots to aid the Japanese forces. Attorney General Francis Biddle argued against internment on moral and constitutional grounds.
But the groundswell of anti-Japanese feeling was too much to ignore, let alone fight against. Roosevelt decided in favor of ordering the
internment of Japanese-Americans in areas far removed from the Pacific. (Robinson notes that the order, strangely, did not pertain to Hawaii, where one would have thought the likelihood of collaboration with the Japanese military would have been greatest.)
Executive Order 9066 authorized the secretary of war and military
commanders he designated to prescribe military areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions” they might decide were warranted. The text did not specifically mention Japanese-Americans or the West Coast, but everyone knew that the order was designed to allow the military to round up Japanese-Americans and imprison them somewhere inland. Robinson comments scathingly,
“The order’s bland language concealed an unprecedented assertion of
executive power. Under its provisions, the President imposed military rule on civilians without a declaration of martial law, and he sentenced a segment of the population to internal exile (and ultimately forced incarceration) under armed guard, notwithstanding that the writ of habeas corpus had not been suspended by Congress (to whom such power was reserved by the Constitution). More importantly, Executive Order 9066 was unprecedented in the extent of its racially defined infringement of the basic rights of American citizens.”
As the war against Japan turned in favor of the United States in 1944, the military declared that the West Coast was no longer “endangered” by the presence of Japanese-Americans and several of Roosevelt’s advisors pressed him to end the internment. Significantly, Secretary of War Stimson had become convinced that his earlier support for the policy was based on false information and hysteria. He argued that the internment should be terminated. Nevertheless, FDR remained unmoved. Ending the internment with the war still raging would have been politically troublesome for the president and his party. “Concerned with election-year politics,” Robinson writes, “FDR eventually ordered all action on ending exclusion from the West Coast halted until after the November election. Meanwhile, as the internees remained confined, Roosevelt explored various politically palatable alternatives to opening the West Coast” (emphasis added).
The administration even went so far as to perpetrate a fraud upon the U.S. Supreme Court. A young man, Fred Korematsu, had been arrested and convicted for disobeying the order for all Japanese-Americans to report for deportation in 1942. In 1944 his case would be heard by the Supreme Court. Lawyers in the Justice Department received a report stating that there had in fact been no evidence of communications between Japanese-Americans and ships of the Japanese navy, contrary to assertions in the army’s report which was being cited as the justification for the government’s action. The lawyers were told by Solicitor General Charles Fahy to present “the best possible case,” and the damning information was buried in a footnote. The Court subsequently ruled that the internment was legal.
By Order of the President deals a devastating blow to the myth of FDR as the great humanitarian. Robinson makes it clear that the internment order and the handling of the Japanese-Americans and their property was a part of the great political game at which Roosevelt excelled. The tragic consequences for 110,000 people didn’t matter.
More important, the book should compel Americans to think about the ease with which our rights can be extinguished. Clinton advisor Paul Begala once remarked, apropos of one of Clinton’s many executive orders, “Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool.” But those strokes of the pen often bring about the loss of life, liberty, or property for citizens. Robinson’s excellent book deals with an egregious example of a president willing to exert unrestrained power over innocent people just because it was “good politics” to do so. That power, we should be mindful, still exists.
George C. Leef is the book review editor of
Ideas on Liberty magazine.
”Evergreen (Today’s Quote)”
Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rules prescribes not, and not to be subject to the innocent, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man. – John Locke, Freedom Daily, September 2002
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