Earl Warren: A Nation's Helper


I am reading a biography of former Chief Justice Earl Warren.  Many circumstances from his life move me.  He lived through and shaped both dark times in our nations history as well as created a framework for civil rights and social progress.

World War II marks one of the worst time in world history.  While not alive during the war, I know of tremendous atrocities that occurred during the war.  I have met those who survived or escaped the Nazi holocaust.  I have also witnessed heroes who have been honored for their actions in campaigns like Normandy.

But we caused horrors here on the soil of mainland America.  The Warren biography has reminded me of the Japanese internment camps.  There are a few facts about these interments about which I am still trying to stretch my brain.
  • Internment orders applied to Japanese Americans regardless of immigration or citizenship status.
  • Possessions and property were lost and usurped as a result of the internment.
  • According to this biography there was never even one act of treason or anti-American war-related arrest against any Japanese American during World War II.


How those things could occur while we were fighting tyranny abroad still lies beyond me.  But I didn't live in those times.

The biography details the role that Mr. Warren played in the internment, its initiation, breadth and scope.  My state served as home to one of those interment camps, Topaz.
A former professor shared his mixed emotions regarding the interment camps.  He married a woman who he met because her parents were sent to Topaz.  But as a Constitutional scholar the concept of internment is anathema and almost too horrible to discuss.

The holocaust and internment camps remind us of the evil that humans are capable of perpetrating one on another. I for one am so uncomfortable with these topics that I cannot even watch Schindler's List all the way through in one sitting.  It is just more than I can bear.

But like Mr. Rogers says whenever there is a disaster or an awful event we should look for the helpers. While war provides the most brutal and costly of all ways to solve conflict there are a multitude of stories and examples of those who helped others even in the face of evil.  Many, too many, died that we can live and that we can live free.

We can all learn from Mr. Warren how to find peace even when we have been part of the group that brought about the wrong.  It may be true that he never formally apologized for his role in the process of internment.  But his life and dealings after the war showed a constant commitment to civil rights and freedom and made, I hope, impossible the very acts he ensured in earlier years.

Because of his life after the war and his commitment to civil rights Warren is now seen as a guiding star in civil rights and fairness.  He became a helper.


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