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December 31, 2006

The Disgraces of Privatized Memory

he growing privatization of historical sites, described in this NYTimes article, is a troublesome trend.

History in private hands can be a perilous thing. Consider Historic Poplar Grove Plantation just north of Wilmington, North Carolina, which, its website tells us, "preserves the homestead of a successful farming family," the Foys.

Visit the website a bit. You'll learn that "plantations were self-contained and self-sustaining. If you didn't make it or grow it or raise it, you probably did without it."

(Who did the growing and the raising?)

You'll learn that "Joseph Mumford Foy personally selected the trees from which the lumber was cut to build the present manor house."

(Who cut the lumber and built the house once Joseph Mumford Foy did his personal selecting?)

You'll learn that "the farmer worked hard all spring to get the ground prepared and get the crop in the ground," and that "when a successful crop did come in there was joy all around, and lots of work because food storage was a real concern. Corn could be dried, peas and beans hung in their shells for later, root crops put into the cool root cellar, apples and pears carefully dried in the sun."

(Who prepared the ground and got the crop in? Who did the harvesting, and was there really joy "all around?" Who dried the food?)

You'll learn quite a bit about the Foy family.

(That is, the white people in the Foy family.)

Oh, and you'll learn about the animals that lived on the plantation.

What you won't learn much about are the slaves that the Foy family owned -- the human beings who did the work.

My wife and I visited Poplar Grove a few years back. We were given a tour by a white woman dressed in period costume. We heard a great deal about the Foy family. At the end of the tour, I asked the guide to tell us a bit about the lives of the slaves at Poplar Grove. She said, "well, what we know is that the Foy family treated their slaves very well. In fact, they were so happy here that when the war ended and they were freed, 63 out of 64 of them chose to remain right here on the plantation as tenant farmers."

This is privatized history. It's incomplete, deceptive, and accountable to nobody. It disgraces the fullness of the memory of a place like Poplar Grove Plantation.

Posted by Eric at 8:59 AM | Comments (5)

December 30, 2006

Fundraising Through Falsehood at VDare.com

PDATE: 1/1/06. Brad Krantz of WZTK-FM confirms that Peter Brimelow's assertions about his radio are false.

FURTHER UPDATE, 1/2/06: Brimelow digs in his heels, citing a communication that WZTK told him he'd be on from 8:10 to 8:30 a.m., which (at least as I recall from 6 months ago) he was. I emailed Brad Krantz at 9:27:40 a.m. Here's the time stamp from my email (the text of which is below in the original post):

Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 09:27:40 -0400
From: Eric Muller
Reply-To: Eric Muller
Subject: V-Dare
To: brad@curtismedia.com

Brimelow alleges that I am "a regular self-appointed gatekeeper at WZTK-FM and probably for all the Establishment Media of [my] unfortunate adopted state." Obviously, I'm a pretty tardy one. Next time, Brad and Britt (and the rest of the state's media), I'll try to be timelier, and by God, when I give you your marching orders from my Liberal Media Command Bunker here in Chapel Hill, you'd better follow them, or there will be hell to pay! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to be going; I have the rest of Al Franken's monthly guest schedule awaiting my review and approval, and then I've got a conference call with Spielberg so that we can decide which Jewish actors and directors will be winning which Oscars this year.

**********************************
Peter Brimelow, creator of the website VDare.com, is raising funds.

VDare is a site devoted to a particular approach to immigration reform -- an approach that would disfavor immigration from certain nations (where skins are brown) and favor it from others (where skins are white). If this sounds familiar to you, it should: it's just another tired recycling of the nativism that has dogged American history nearly from the start.

American nativism sounds like, well, rather a load of codswallop in the Lancashire-inflected English that flows from Peter Brimelow's mouth. Perhaps it was his seven years as a resident of Canada that gave him such keen insight into the proper ancestry of good residents of the United States. Anyway, at least he's white.

I mention all of this not because I want you to go and give your appreciated stock to Peter Brimelow, but because it has come to my attention that he is saying things about me that are untrue in order to make a buck.

Here's the story he uses for his fundraising pitch:

If Brimelow is curious to know why so few of his writers were tapped for public commentary during the immigration debate, he might consider reading his own writers, who have a penchant for saying these sorts of things:

"Mexicans have a reputation for unashamedly cruising children," and "scandinavian women are apparently seen as part of the ongoing plunder by Muslims as they invade Europe for Allah." (Brenda Walker)

What you won’t hear, except from me, is that "Let the good times roll" is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.... Poor black people seldom cooperate well with each other because they don't trust other blacks much, for the perfectly rational reason that they commit large numbers of crimes against each other. Indeed, as Francis Fukuyama's best book, Trust, makes clear, in most of the world—outside Japan and the more British-Germanic-Nordic parts of Europe and their overseas offspring like America—people seldom trust fellow citizens beyond their extended families enough to voluntarily come together to solve community problems." (Steve Sailer)

[Fred] Korematsu was just a fugitive, but is it any wonder that when he was arrested across the bay, the headline read “Jap Spy Arrested in San Leandro”? (James Fulford)

[One of the two objectives of the Emancipation Proclamation] was to incite slaves to murder defenseless white women and children on the farms and in the cities of the Confederacy.... The Emancipation Proclamation was a call not for liberty, but for a race war and genocide. (Joseph E. Fallon)

Now to the matter at hand: One morning back in June, I was listening to the Brad and Britt show on WZTK-FM out of Greensboro, NC, when they had Brimelow as a guest. They did not cut him off, or end the interview abruptly. He was on for what I remember as a long segment, during which he spoke without interruption (and without significant challenge) for much of the time.

After hearing the interview, I contacted Brad Krantz, one of the show's hosts, to ask whether he knew much about Brimelow's VDare site and some of its writers. Here's the text of the email that I sent him:

Brad,

Read this stuff, and check out some of the linked material.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Brimelow: "Brimelow is a paleoconservative and maintains that America's culture and way of life is threatened by unrestricted immigration from Latin America and the Third World . "

It's all about maintaining white culture.

There's *lots* more if you dig.

--Eric

Nothing about VDare.com being a "hate site." No coded or conspiratorial transmissions from my supposed controllers at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Just links to Wikipedia entries, with an encouragement to Brad that he click through to VDare.com -- whose FAQ, incidentally, boasts that the site publishes the work of "white nationalists."

Brimelow tries to stoke his readers' outrage (and open their wallets) by claiming that I "have several times attacked [VDare] in my blog." This is false. In fact, I've mentioned VDare exactly once, in this blog entry of September 19, 2005, and it wasn't really an attack. Writing about Michelle Malkin's book "In Defense of Internment," I wrote the following:

So her claim is really this: Out of many thousands of decoded Japanese diplomatic cables, there were several that mentioned the idea of Japanese American espionage. We have no idea whether they were true, or whether anyone actually saw them, or what meaning anyone ascribed to them at the time, or what action anyone thought they required. We can't have any idea about those things, because the cables were too top-secret for anyone to mention in any document or conversation that appears in the historical record. But surely those messages, and not the hysteria, racism, and economic opportunism that scholars have documented, just must have been the justification for the evacuation and internment!

Maybe this sort of reasoning suffices for an appearance on Hannity & Colmes or a column at VDare. But for a work of history, which "In Defense of Internment" purports to be, it doesn't even pass the giggle test.

So I haven't "several times attacked" VDare.com on this blog. In fact, I mentioned it but once, and that was in passing.

Peter Brimelow: Please. If you want to raise money to publish "white nationalist" tracts and arguments for racially discriminatory immigration policies, that's your right. But do not try to get people to open their wallets by saying things about me that are untrue. Correct your falsehoods.

UPDATE, 12/31/06, 4:45 p.m.: Peter Brimelow has thus far ignored my request that he correct the falsehoods that he published about me. However, one Patrick Cleburne has posted a lengthy screed on the VDare.com blog in which he characterizes my blog as "highly judeo-centric" and claims that I have admitted that it was my "intervention ... that caused Brad Krantz of Burlington N.C’s WZTK-FM to cut short a planned interview and call-in session [with Peter Brimelow] last June."

Never mind that Brad Krantz did not cut Brimelow's interview short.

Never mind that I lack the ability to "cause" Brad Krantz to do anything on his radio show.

Never mind that my supposed act of "repression" was nothing more than an email to the show's hosts with links to wikipedia entries about Brimelow and another VDare.com author, along with encouragement to read VDare.com.

The most obvious thing is instead this: I contacted the hosts at WZTK after Peter Brimelow's segment was over. I said this explicitly in the very post that Cleburne relies on and quotes.

Cleburne's statement that an "intervention" by me "caused" Brad Krantz to "cut short" Brimelow's interview is therefore knowingly and willfully false. I have written to him demanding a retraction.

Posted by Eric at 4:00 PM | Comments (55)

December 27, 2006

Gerald Ford: "31 Days"

f you're interested in learning a bit more about the late Gerald Ford, I'd suggest the book 31 Days by Barry Werth. It's a more-or-less day-by-day account of Ford's first month in office after Nixon's resignation.

Posted by Eric at 7:42 AM

December 26, 2006

A Trial Is Just A Defendant's Appeal From The Prosecutor's Press Release.

ack in my days at the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey, I used to hear a smug saying from a few of my "tougher" prosecutorial colleagues: "A trial is just a defendant's appeal from our press release."

What they meant was that for some defendants, the public announcement of criminal charges did the big and lasting damage. Even an eventual acquittal couldn't undo the effect of the accusation.

Judge Sarokin sees this philosophy afoot in the Duke lacrosse case, and doesn't like what he sees.

Posted by Eric at 9:16 AM

December 23, 2006

Densho.

ere's an article about Tom Ikeda's remarkable Densho Project, an online, digital museum of the Japanese American experience.

Densho deserves our support. You can show yours here.

Posted by Eric at 8:44 AM

December 21, 2006

Nifong Out?

y colleague Joe Kennedy argues that Mike Nifong should remove himself -- or be removed -- from the Duke Lacrosse case.

Posted by Eric at 4:23 PM | Comments (4)

December 20, 2006

Virgil Goode: Keep Out Religious Minorities To Preserve American Values

ep. Virgil Goode (R-VA): "I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America."

I am relieved that when I typed out this statement, its internal tensions did not cause my laptop to burst into flames. I make no guarantees for your monitor, however.

Note that Representative Goode represents Charlottesville, Virginia.

What would Mr. Jefferson say?

Posted by Eric at 10:15 PM | Comments (11)

Simon Wiesenthal Still A Gentile.

he late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal remains Jewish ... for now.

Posted by Eric at 10:10 PM

Sarokin Roars Back

umors of Judge Sarokin's departure from the blogosphere were apparently greatly exaggerated. Today he comes roaring back, advising folks not to attend Mary Cheney's baby shower if they harbor hopes of becoming a federal judge.

Posted by Eric at 9:51 PM | Comments (4)

UNC Law Students: Blogging Pro Bono in New Orleans

NC law students are again doing pro bono work in New Orleans over the Christmas break. You can follow their adventures at their blog.

Nobody's making them spend their break this way. They're doing it out of their strong commitment to public service, a commitment that pervades the atmosphere here at UNC Law School.

So check them out ... and give them your support.

Posted by Eric at 11:09 AM | Comments (2)

December 19, 2006

Reflections on a High School Reunion

atching up on some blogs I occasionally read, I happened across this lovely post about attending a high school reunion.

I think he has really captured something here. Check it out.

Posted by Eric at 5:53 PM | Comments (1)

Right Then, Roll to Me

nyone's list of perfectly crafted pop songs surely has to include Del Amitri's "Roll to Me." Weird video concept notwithstanding.

This Wikipedia chart showing the turnover in the personnel of Del Amitri makes me laugh mostly because it reminds me of those charts of the tenure of Supreme Court justices that are in the front or back of every Constitutional Law casebook.

Justin Currie is the John Paul Stevens of Del Amitri! Or, seen the other way around, John Paul Stevens is the Justin Currie of the U.S. Supreme Court!

Posted by Eric at 7:53 AM

December 18, 2006

The Jews of the Tennessee, Abe Lincoln, and the Development of Equal Protection

d Cone yesterday noted the 144th anniversary of General Ulysses S. Grant's notoriously anti-semitic General Order Number 11. Inexplicably, Ed took some heat over his post in his comments.

The little-known episode from the Civil War is really quite fascinating: General Grant, at least ostensibly frustrated by some gray-market selling that merchants were engaging in with vanquished Southerners as the army swept down the Mississippi Valley, ordered all Jews out of his military department. The order stood for a couple of weeks until Abraham Lincoln overruled it.

I wrote about this episode a few years ago in an article that appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review, and I'll reproduce what I wrote below the fold for anyone interested.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw a remarkable wave of German immigration into the United States. Fleeing economic chaos in Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, German immigrants fanned out across the American landscape, settling not just in the major east coast cities but also in inland trade centers. Among these German immigrants were Jews, primarily (although not exclusively) merchants. By 1860, about sixteen thousand Jewish country peddlers were at work in the United States, supported by a network of primarily Jewish retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers that stretched all the way back to the east coast. Many of these Jews settled along the major inland trade routes of the time--the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers. Some struggled, many (like the Brandeis family of Louisville, Kentucky) moderately prospered, and a few became business and civic leaders. Some quickly assimilated; others did not.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, the western trade routes, especially the Mississippi, became crucial to both North and South. At first, both North and South left the Mississippi open to trade. For the South, the river brought much needed coin and supplies southward to support the war effort. The North, for its part, needed southern cotton and was reluctant to wreak havoc on the economies of the western border states by shutting down trade with the South. By the summer of 1861, however, both South and North took steps to stem trade along the Mississippi. President Lincoln took the bolder step, announcing in August that all trade with the Confederacy was prohibited. Individuals wishing to trade could do so only by applying for a permit from the Department of the Treasury.

Memphis, Tennessee, was probably the greatest southern commerce center along the Mississippi north of New Orleans. It remained in rebel hands until the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 forced the Confederacy to abandon western Tennessee to General Ulysses S. Grant's advancing Union forces. Two months later, Memphis was under federal occupation.

Under Lincoln's order of August 1861, Union traders (and those who would take a loyalty oath to the Union) were free to operate in any federally occupied locale. With the occupation of Memphis, this southern trade center saw a wave of northern merchants, including but not limited to Jews, sweep into town. The situation in Memphis immediately became quite complex. On the one hand, the Lincoln administration wished to entice the local population back into the Union fold by ending their deprivation and allowing them to regain at least a fraction of their lost prosperity. The Union also desperately needed cotton for its own military and economic uses. On the other hand, the markets of Memphis were close to enemy lines; goods bartered for cotton quickly made their way to the Confederate army to support soldiers in the field. Because of these conflicting demands and incentives, the trade policies of the occupying Union forces shifted frequently from prohibition to encouragement and everything in between. In such a confused setting, bribery and corruption--even in the ranks of the Union army--soon became rampant.

Union military leaders, charged with the responsibility for administering the military Department of the Tennessee (which included that state and parts of Mississippi and Kentucky), quickly began expressing their frustration with the trade, licit and illicit, that they felt undermined the Union war effort. Grant complained in a letter to his sister that "(w)ith all my other trials I have to condend (sic) against is added that of speculators whos (sic) patriotism is measured by dollars & cents. Country has no value with them compared with money." Most of the ire, however, focused on the Jews, even though they represented only a fraction of the offending traders. Grant wrote to the Assistant Secretary of War that "in spite of all the vigilance that can be infused into Post Commanders(,) . . . the Specie regulations of the Treasury Dept. have been violated, and that mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders. . . . (The Jews) come in with their Carpet sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it. The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere."

When Grant decided to take action, he set aside his concerns with the "other unprincipled traders" and took aim solely at the Jews. On December 17, 1862, he issued his General Order Number 11:

I. The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.
II. Within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order by Post Commanders, they will see that all of this class of people are furnished with passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification, will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners unless furnished with permits from these Head Quarters.
III. No permits will be given these people to visit Head Quarters for the purpose of making personal application for trade permits.

Thus, all Jews in the Department of the Tennessee had twenty-four hours to clear out or be arrested. Grant's order applied indiscriminately to all Jews-- men, women, and children; traders and nontraders; recent arrivals and established members of the community. On its face, it applied even to Jewish soldiers in the Union army. Such a military order would not be seen again until General [John] DeWitt evicted [Japanese Americans] from the west coast eighty years later.

Like the west coast Japanese-Americans, the Jews of the Tennessee complied with the military order. Twenty-five hundred Jews desperately began looking for scarce transport up the Mississippi river and out of the reach of Grant's order. Their departure was rushed and traumatic. One surviving account tells of "a baby almost left behind in the haste and confusion and tossed bodily into the boat" and of "two dying women permitted to remain behind in neighbors' care." Another account tells of a group of four Jews in Oxford, Mississippi, whose horse, buggy, and luggage were confiscated shortly before they were sent away by train under guard. When one of them asked the reason for their detention, he was told, "Because you are Jews, and are neither a benefit to the Union or Confederacy."

Jewish community leaders complained about the order and sought to have it rescinded. A delegation of Jews from Paducah, Kentucky sent a telegram to President Lincoln protesting Grant's "inhuman order, the carrying out of which would be the grossest violation of the Constitution and our rights as citizens under it, (and) which will place us . . . as outlaws before the whole world." The leader of this delegation, Cesar J. Kaskel, also sent letters and telegrams to Jewish community leaders and newspapers around the country, urging them to speak out against Grant's order.

Kaskel then traveled to Washington, D.C., where he, an Ohio congressman, and the leader of a national Jewish organization were granted an appointment with President Lincoln. Kaskel showed the president Grant's order and explained its background and impact. Lincoln, shocked by the order, responded with a biblical metaphor:

Lincoln: And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?
Kaskel: Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham's bosom, asking protection.
Lincoln: And this protection they shall have at once.

At that, Lincoln drafted a note to his General-in-Chief of the Army, Henry W. Halleck, instructing him to rescind General Order Number 11.
Halleck later took the opportunity to explain to General Grant why President Lincoln had revoked the order:

It may be proper to give you some explanation of the revocation of your order expelling all Jews from your Dept. The President has no objection to your expelling traders & Jew pedlars (sic), which I suppose was the object of your order, but as it in terms prescribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.

Lincoln himself explained to a group of Jewish leaders that he "d(id) not like to hear a class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners."

This episode thus marks an early appearance on record of what now seems commonplace: heightened or "strict" scrutiny of a law that singles out a racial, ethnic, or religious group for a unique burden. The order was both underinclusive, in that it did not target non-Jewish traders, and overinclusive, in that it did target nontrading Jews. But heightened scrutiny was not part of legal or constitutional understanding in 1863. Indeed, many decades would pass before courts would develop the doctrine as they struggled to give meaning to the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

Posted by Eric at 2:13 PM | Comments (2)

Albion Tourgée and Samuel Field Phillips

ally Greene has a very interesting post up about Albion Tourgée, Samuel Field Phillips, and Plessy v. Ferguson.

It's hard to paint the past with a broad brush; the detail work just won't seem to permit it.

Posted by Eric at 7:48 AM

December 17, 2006

A Very, Very Good Beer

onight I tried a new beer: Mochshof Mönchshof Kellerbier.

This is the best beer I have had in a long time. Incredibly smooth, full, hoppy and fruity, with a faintly sweet aftertaste. It ain't cheap -- my one-pint bottle set me back $3.75 -- but it's worth the price.

If you're a beer drinker, and can find it, by all means give it a try.

Posted by Eric at 10:37 PM | Comments (4)

Do People Really Believe That Stuff?

uring the Cowboys-Falcons game last night, a commercial ran for "Lending Tree.Com." A woman, appropriately dressed for the holiday season, tells a friend why she decided to borrow money from Lending Tree. She says:

"I felt like they were looking out for me."

WOW!!! I've just never seen or heard of a any credit company in America looking out for anyone except their shareholder. Are American consumers so ridiculously stupid as to believe that these companies are looking out for them?

These companies will take the shirt off your back in a hearbeat in the dead of winter.

But they make up for that by taking it from you in arbitration -- where the rules of evidence are only loosely applied, the proceedings are not public, and no class actions are allowed.

On an unrelatd note. Marion Barber III -- the Cowboys' undersized running back -- is just about the hardest runner I've seen since Walter Payton. He's not in Payton's class for ability. But Barber puts to bed the argument that you need a "big back" for the tough yards. What you need is a tough back for the big yards. And he's it.

Posted by shertaugh at 7:38 AM | Comments (1)

December 16, 2006

Judge Sarokin, Newly Arrived in the Blogosphere, Seems Poised to Leave It.

udge H. Lee Sarokin (retired) looks at the blogosphere a few days after joining it, and doesn't at all like what he sees:

"And what are the credentials of these people who spew such hatred? Have they served their country in any capacity? Do they contribute to society in any meaningful fashion? Do they have jobs? Do they have any experience or training that makes them experts? ... Even if you don't agree with me, I think I have earned the right to be treated with some respect, if not for my public service which apparently offends you, at least for my age."

Judge Sarokin does deserve respect -- and not just for his service, but also for his willingness to experiment in and with this medium. He has, sadly, caught the worst of the medium right from the start. It's not a good showing for the blogosphere, and it's depressing.

Posted by Eric at 9:29 PM | Comments (5)

December 15, 2006

Robert Jackson, the Holocaust, Nuremberg, and the first night of Chanukah

ead John Barrett's very moving words about Robert Jackson, the Holocaust, Nuremberg, and the first night of Chanukah.

Posted by Eric at 11:00 PM

Judge Sarokin on Maher Arar's Bivens Action Against U.S. Officials

etired federal judge H. Lee Sarokin has a new post up on his blog. This one's about the dismissal of Maher Arar's damages action against U.S. officials for his rendition to, and torture in, Syria.

Check it out.

Posted by Eric at 10:23 AM | Comments (1)

December 14, 2006

David Duke in "The Situation Room"

NN gives David Duke the microphone.

Wise or unwise?

Posted by Eric at 8:33 AM | Comments (1)

Today's Germans Ask: "Could It Happen Here?"

rom the "nothing new under the sun" department:

This week, in the town of Grimmen in West Pomerania, right-wing adolescents mobilized against an exhibition on Anne Frank, disparaging her diary as a forgery. In October, several adolescents in Parey, a town in Germany's Saxony-Anhalt region, forced their 16-year-old classmate to walk across the school yard wearing a large sign during lunch break. The sign read: "In this town I'm the biggest swine / Because of the Jewish friends of mine." It's a phrase from the Nazi era, used to humiliate people with Jewish friends.

Posted by Eric at 8:10 AM

Interned. Drafted. Prosecuted.

he current issue of Diverse Issues in Higher Education features an article about the several hundred Japanese American internees who resisted the draft in World War II.

Posted by Eric at 7:13 AM

December 12, 2006

An Open Letter to the Members of the Institute for Political and International Studies of the Foreign Ministry of Iran

ear Members of the Institute for Political and International Studies of the Foreign Ministry of Iran,

I understand you've just hosted an academic conference on whether the Holocaust happened.

I'd like you to meet my great-uncle Leopold. He was my grandfather's brother.

He was born in Wertheim am Main, Germany. He fought for Germany in World War I. He lost the use of his arm on a battlefield.

As an adult he moved to Bad Kissingen, in northern Bavaria. He had a clothing shop on this little square:

And he prayed at this beautiful domed synagogue:

In November of 1938, he was forced to sell his store to someone who wasn't Jewish, he was arrested and jailed for a few weeks, and his synagogue was burned down. It looked like this afterwards:

He was released from jail late in November of 1938.

In April of 1942, he and most of the rest of the region's Jews were marched through the streets of Wuerzburg, Germany, to waiting trains. Someone was good enough to document the march with a camera, so that it might be easier for you members of the Institute for Political and International Studies of the Foreign Ministry of Iran to believe.

Sometimes I like to think that's my great-uncle Leo in the front of the line, looking back over his shoulder at the camera. But that man seems to have two working arms, so I doubt it's him.

They had to leave their belongings behind at the train station.

I guess somebody told them their bags would come later.

Here's a Gestapo telegram that reflects the departure of my great-uncle Leo and the rest of the Jews for a transit ghetto near Lublin, Poland, called Izbica:

Izbica was a pretty lousy place:

That's the furthest I can trace my great-uncle Leo. I've read that many of the Jews who reached Izbica in April of 1942 were murdered at the death camp called Belzec, but I haven't been able to document that.

I do know, though, that my grandfather never heard from his brother again.

If we do hear from my great-uncle, I'll be sure to let you know.

Until then, though, I'll be working under the assumption that the Holocaust happened.

Posted by Eric at 4:17 PM | Comments (11)

December 11, 2006

Seeking Help With Firefox

he commenter to this post is right: Firefox doesn't seem to be able to reproduce the wingnut quotes.

Strange, that.

Posted by Eric at 6:12 PM | Comments (7)

December 10, 2006

H. Lee Sarokin, A Former Federal Judge, Is Blogging.

ow! H. Lee Sarokin, the federal judge for whom I clerked, has entered the blogosphere. He's calling his blog "X-Judge."

Sarokin sat as a federal district judge in New Jersey from 1979 to 1994 and as a federal circuit judge on the Third Circuit from 1994 to 1996. He retired from the federal bench in 1996.

Posted by Eric at 1:42 PM | Comments (2)

December 7, 2006

Pearl Harbor's Collateral Victims

n this 65th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, we should first and foremost remember the sacrifice of the American servicemen who (perhaps preventably) lost their lives.

But it's not inappropriate also to think a bit about some of the attack's collateral victims -- Japanese Americans who ended up the victims of hysterical overreaction and nativist opportunism on the West Coast.

This article in today's Oakland Tribune tells the story of one such family -- the Ochikubo family from Oakland, California. In some respects the family's story is quite typical: the dentist and his family were uprooted and sent to the Tanforan racetrack, where they lived in filthy horse stalls. They were then sent for indefinite detention behind barbed wire at the Topaz Relocation Center in the Utah desert.

In one respect, though, the Ochikubo story is different. George Ochikubo decided to fight his exclusion from the West Coast. He filed a lawsuit in the summer of 1944 seeking an injunction against his continued exclusion from the Coast. After the November 1944 election, when FDR rescinded the mass exclusion of all Japanese Americans, the military issued an individual exclusion order against the dentist (and around 10,000 others), and the lawsuit became a test of this individual (rather than mass) exclusion order. (The photo, from the Los Angeles Daily News collection at the UCLA Library, is of George Ochikubo (in the middle), with his attorney A.L. Wirin to one side and Saburo Kido, president of the Japanese American Citizens League, to the other.)

Ochikubo's lawsuit is one of the subjects of my forthcoming book from the University of North Carolina Press.

Posted by Eric at 10:27 AM

Pearl Harbor, 65 Years Later

he Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in which well more than two thousand Americans tragically lost their lives, took place sixty-five years ago today.

It is increasingly common, I find, for people to believe that Japanese military action -- the "sneak attack" -- caught the United States entirely unsuspecting and unprepared.

Consider this teletype that went out to all US military forces on November 27, 1941:

Unprepared? Yes. Unsuspecting? Certainly not.

UPDATE: See more here.

Posted by Eric at 9:47 AM | Comments (5)

December 6, 2006

Congress Acts To Preserve History

ongress yesterday voted to set aside funds for the preservation of the ten Japanese American "relocation centers" from World War II, along with a number of other wartime confinement sites.

This is a photo I took of one of the remaining structures on the site of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center outside Cody and Powell, Wyoming. The legislation will help organizations like the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation preserve the site and create an interpretive learning center.

President Bush still has to sign the bill, and Congress will have to appropriate money in future years to fund the program.

UPDATE: Mary Dudziak tracks this news, and writes about a visit to Manzanar, here.

Posted by Eric at 7:16 PM | Comments (5)

December 5, 2006

A Brilliant But Bungled Radio Ploy

his could have been a truly brilliant bit of radio.

A DC-area talk radio host used his hour-long call-in program on the Sunday after Thanksgiving to argue that all Muslims in the United States should be forced to wear an identifying symbol -- a crescent -- so that we could more easily identify the enemy within.

It was really just a ploy; he was trying to see whether he'd draw support for such an outrageous and historically chilling idea. (Audio of the hour-long show is available here.)

Here's the thing, though. To make something like this really work, you've got to take a whole bunch of calls. You can find a crazy or two who'll call in to a radio program to support just about any damn thing. For a ploy like this to really work, you've got to line up quite a few callers who are willing to support the craziness you're spouting.

But the host took only four calls in the entire hour. And two of the callers excoriated him for making the suggestion in the first place. The other two supported the idea.

Don't get me wrong: it's certainly scary that even two people would voice support for making American Muslims wear a crescent. (Nowhere near as scary, though, as the recent Gallup poll of 1,007 adults that revealed that forty percent believe American Muslims support al Qaeda.) But two callers out of four were just not enough to create the effect that the radio host was shooting for. This is especially so because talk radio shows have call screeners, and I have to wonder whether the two callers out of four who made it through the screeners accurately represented the listening audience's reaction. The host kept saying that the phones were ringing off the walls, and that every line was full. Yet he took only four calls.

I'd love to see a radio host do this the right way: float the proposal for ten minutes or so, and then really open the phone lines to get a broad sampling of reaction. That would be much more revealing, and more useful, than what the DC host did.

Props to the DC guy for trying it out; it took guts. But unfortunately, I just don't think he taught us too much.

Posted by Eric at 8:42 AM | Comments (3)

Race In School Assignments.

he Supreme Court yesterday heard argument in two cases challenging race-based school assignments. Seattle's plan used race as a tiebreaker for assignment to oversubscribed high schools, in the name of keeping the racial makeup of Seattle's high schools within 15% of the district's overall white/non-white makeup. The Louisville (Ky.) plan applied to all schools, not just high schools, and used race to assign kids to schools in a way that would keep each school's black population at a required 15%. Given strong patterns of residential segregation across the country, these sorts of plans have been important to districts seeking to achieve and sustain a degree of racial integration in their schools.

If Justice Kennedy's questions at yesterday's arguments are the bellwether -- and in a case such as this, there's good reason to think they will be -- both of the challenged plans are doomed.

If this is the outcome, I'll be at least a bit surprised. Going into the argument, I expected that the Court would strike down the Seattle plan but uphold the Louisville one, at least in part because of Lousville's history of de jure race discrimination in school assignments. I anticipated a majority opinion that conceded a compelling interest in racially integrated public schools, but held that Seattle's plan was not drawn carefully and narrowly enough to accomplish that goal.

This was the 7-to-2 conclusion of my Constitutional Adjudication Seminar this semester, incidentally. It's a seminar in which students brief, argue, and then decide pending Supreme Court cases. A seven-student (well, actually six students, plus myself) voted to uphold the Louisville plan and strike down Seattle's. The two dissenting students would have struck down both plans.

It sounds as though five votes weren't in evidence yesterday for the proposition that these plans are serving a compelling state interest in racial integration. Rather, it sounds as though Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice Roberts can't get past the simple fact that school districts are using race as a basis for school assignment, period.

If that's so, we will have traveled a long, strange road from the decades between 1954 and around 1974, when racial integration in public schools certainly seemed to be a very important objective of the Equal Protection Clause.

Posted by Eric at 8:00 AM | Comments (1)

December 1, 2006

UNC Law: To Infinity And Beyond!

rin Kerr notes an announcement of changes in Stanford Law School's upper-level program.
According to Stanford's announcement, the school is "transforming the JD into a three-dimensional degree program."

Well, I am very pleased and excited to announce that the University of North Carolina School of Law will be partnering with the university's outstanding Physics Department to transform its JD into a four-dimensional degree program.

Posted by Eric at 10:24 AM | Comments (8)