Reviews of New Books
By Karina Rollins, S.T. Karnick, Scott Walter
Absolute Threat
By Karina Rollins
In Defense of Internment: The Case for
“Racial Profiling” in World War II and
the War on Terror
By Michelle Malkin
Regnery, 376 pages, $27.95
No, despite what the title of her new book might lead you to believe, Michelle Malkin does not want to round up Muslims and ship them off to fenced-in camps in the desert. She does want to infuse the debate over national security and civil rights with a much-needed dose of reality—always guaranteed to offend members of the Left. When it comes to World War II, In Defense of Internment means exactly what you think: Malkin defends the evacuation from the West Coast, and the relocation or internment, of tens of thousands of ethnic Japanese.
How could she possibly do so? By digging through mountains of primary documents at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and research facilities in Seattle and Berkeley, and unearthing what few children are taught in school and what few adults know: complete history.
Much of In Defense is a straight- forward narration of historical events. For many readers, including this reviewer, the book provides first-time insight into the towering scale and immediacy of the threat posed by the Japanese.
Meticulously, she presents the contents of intercepted top-secret Japanese diplomatic “MAGIC” cables, Japanese-language newspapers in the U.S., transcripts of interviews with Japanese spies, and U.S. government memos to reveal the success of the Japanese in building a spy network in the United States, and of their extensive monitoring of American ships, planes, soldiers, and facilities.
The evidence not only of widespread Issei (native Japanese living in the U.S.) but also Nisei (American-born ethnic Japanese) collaboration with the enemy is shocking, and the number of Japanese military successes based on such collusion, staggering. The Pearl Harbor bombing itself was facilitated by a Honolulu spy cell that “monitored ship movements, water currents, and available support systems.... [The cell] also provided Japan with detailed maps, copies of which were found in the cockpits of downed Japanese fighter planes following the attack.”
The evidence is there for the viewing: Nearly half the book is a collection of appendices and notes containing copies of deciphered Japanese code messages, internal U.S. government correspondence, tables, and photos of key war figures and life in the camps (“neither luxury resorts nor barbaric prisons”). Part of a MAGIC cable from Los Angeles to Tokyo, dated May 9, 1941, reads: “We shall...maintain close connections with the Japanese Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the newspapers.... We have already established contacts with the absolutely reliable Japanese in the San Pedro and San Diego area...” (There were 117,000 ethnic Japanese living on the West Coast, within close reach of 88 vital U.S. military installations.)
Not only is such information virtually unknown, it has become taboo to even have a debate on potential legitimate reasons for the internment. Schools, universities, Asian-American organizations, the media, even the U.S. Congress, which granted $1.65 billion in reparations to 82,000 of Japanese ancestry in 1988, promote today’s popularly accepted—and only acceptable—version of WWII in-ternment as unfounded American hysteria and sheer racism. (No mention that almost 11,000 Germans were interned in the same camps as the Japanese; that Nisei who lived outside the West Coast were not required to move; or that other countries, including Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia, and Mexico, also interned enemy suspects in wartime.)
While it remains arguable that uprooting droves of American citizens from their homes was wrong, Malkin has convincingly documented that “FDR’s in-ternment measures were based not on anti- Japanese racism…but on common-sense nationality distinctions in time of war.”
Kudos to her, but why this book now? Because “civil liberties absolutists have invoked the World War II evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese to attack virtually every homeland security initiative aimed at protecting Americans from murderous Islamic extremists.” Because Malkin sees the need to point out to her fellow citizens what should be an obvious and ideology-free recognition: “In a time of war, the survival of the nation comes first. Civil liberties are not sacrosanct…. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness cannot be secured and protected without securing and protecting life first.” Because “the politically correct myth of American ‘concentration camps’…is endangering us today.”
Malkin points to some of the dangerous civil-liberties ideology in George W. Bush’s own administration—most notably in Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who likens any attempt at extra scrutiny for Arab-looking men to the internment camps of his childhood—but pulls her punches when it comes to taking to task the President himself, who could fire Mineta, and chooses to praise him.
Malkin has come to terms with the cruel reality, as far too few people have, that “We are at war with stateless enemies abroad and Islamist infiltrators at home who will not stop plotting to kill us unless we kill them first overseas and nab them pre-emptively on our own soil.” Her book is “a defense of racial, ethnic, religious, and nationality profiling”—what she terms “threat profiling”—since “providing for the common defense is the government’s paramount function—not guaranteeing the right of Muslims to board planes without hassles.”
In his fireside chat of February 23, 1942, FDR told his fellow Americans: “We know now that if we lose this war it will be generations or even centuries before our conception of democracy can live again.” Three years after the monstro- sities of 9/11, it takes a young woman born to immigrant parents from the Philippines to remind her fellow Americans that: “As commander in chief, Roose- velt resolutely understood [that a] nation can’t stand for anything unless it is still standing. For defending this unalterable truth, America need never apologize.”
Karina Rollins is a TAE senior editor.
Catholic America
By Scott Walter
The American Catholic Voter: 200 Years
of Political Impact
By George Marlin
St. Augustine’s Press, 420 pages, $30
Catholics remain a swing group no politician can afford to ignore, which is why both Presidential candidates should study The American Catholic Voter, a rollicking ride through the history of Catholics in America by Brooklyn-born, Irish-bred banker and sometime-pol George Marlin.
The book begins with Protestant-Catholic conflict in seventeenth-century Britain, sketched in Michael Barone’s meaty introduction, and ends with 2004 headlines depicting Washington’s Cardinal McCarrick hemming and hawing over whether to deny Holy Communion to the first Catholic Presidential candidate in 44 years.
Chronicling the shifting allegiances of his co-religionists, Marlin skillfully balances the larger issues affecting elections with the backroom maneuvering in which the Emerald Isle’s sons have long excelled. While never dry, Marlin’s text is sturdily supported with statistics and citations from a broad bibliography. His heroes are the poor, hard-working Irish, German, Italian, and Slavic immigrants who climbed their way up the American ladder with help from local parishes and political machines.
As the American Revolution began, Catholics were less than 1 percent of the population. By 1800, Catholic voters (aka “wild Irishmen”) were both attacked and wooed by office-seekers. The Federalists warned against allowing this rabble to vote, while the rabble’s votes were eagerly sought by the Democratic-Republicans (as the Democratic Party was first known) led by Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson. Burr was a masterful pol and made good use of New York City’s Tammany Society, established in 1787.
In the years leading to the Civil War, heavy immigration boosted Catholics to 12 percent of the nation’s population, and their concentration in big cities increased their political heft. As early as 1838, a New York governor courted Catholics with talk of state support for parochial schools. But such talk inflamed nativists, and they and their Catholic foes were juggled by the various political parties from mid-century onward.
The new Republican Party bobbed and weaved with Catholics and nativists, but chose Abraham Lincoln as its 1860 standard-bearer in part because he had not been anti-immigrant; in return, German Catho lic immigrants may well “have provided his margin of victory,” Barone observes.
Still, for most of the nineteenth century, Catholics leaned strongly toward the Democratic Party, then quite different from its current incarnation. It had, with Jefferson, championed limited, “frugal,” and decentralist government. From the end of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, the Party was captured by evangelical Protestants and rural populists under such champions as William Jennings Bryan, causing Catholic voters to desert their national leaders at the polls (even as they kept their local Democratic machines humming).
In 1928 another shift in forces put the first Catholic, Al Smith, at the top of the Democratic ticket. He was defeated amidst much anti-Catholic bigotry, but by bringing urban Catholics back to the fold he planted the seeds of a new governing majority that his successor FDR would harvest in the next four contests.
Yet FDR didn’t care much for Al Smith (and vice versa), preferring instead the supercilious tradition of Woodrow Wilson that later begot the self-satisfied loser Adlai Stevenson. The Democrats were trudging the road to big, centralized government based not on city machines like Tammany, which were relatively humane and moderate, but on “social science” and “progressive” ideology. While the machines employed a few wardheelers who knew every man, woman, and child in their precinct, government by social science spawned sprawling, inhuman bureaucracies that tended to wretched excess—out-of-control federal welfare programs, the devastation that “urban renewal” brought to old city neighborhoods. Eventually, this philosophic shift brought a backlash that allowed first Nixon and then Reagan to re-assemble FDR’s old coalition of Southern Protestants and Northern Catholics under Republican auspices.
Marlin’s beloved Catholic immigrants were conservative on social questions and moderately liberal on fiscal issues—call them anti-yuppies. (Today’s Hispanics look to continue the pattern.) But many of their descendants have recently softened in the faith, turning into suburbanites who are more blasé about abortion than, say, federal deficits. So Marlin now follows the wiser pollsters and restricts the term “Catholic voter” to those who practice their faith.
They now amount to only about 9 percent of the electorate, yet their propensity to swing between parties in battleground states explains Bush’s preaching “compassionate conserva-tism” at Notre Dame and Kerry’s recent claim that he thinks life begins at conception. Both campaigns keep seeing glimpses of the elections of Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan in their rear-view mirrors.
For the big picture, read this book.
TAE contributing writer Scott Walter is vice president of The Philanthropy Roundtable.
Maternal Misconceptions
By S. T. Karnick
7 Myths of Working Mothers: Why Children
and (Most) Careers Just Don’t Mix
By Suzanne Venker
Spence Publishing, 208 pages, $24.95
In 7 Myths of Working Mothers, Suzanne Venker documents the deterioration of American children’s well-being over the past three decades, and she convincingly traces the great ma-jority of it to the effects of mothers’ mass movement into the workplace. Most effec- tive is her attention to the causal relationships among the various factors. She notes how the hurried pace of modern family life prevents children from getting enough sleep, how parents’ lack of time to prepare healthy meals and monitor children’s play (which leads to excessive television watching) increases obesity among the young.
According to Venker, feminists, aided by mass media, the government, and business, have convinced the public that a normal woman cannot be happy without a career outside the home. Venker refutes this popular notion by demonstrating that most mothers working full-time outside the home are not happy. And it is natural for women to be concerned about their children in a way that fathers often cannot be. “The reason the women’s movement continues to hit a brick wall is because its platform demands that women put themselves first—and yet the overwhelming majority of women discover, once they become mothers, that they no longer want to,” Venker writes.
Fathers don’t “have it all” either. A parent working full-time outside the home (as most fathers do) cannot provide more than “peripheral parenting.” Women have been forced into “chasing a dream that none of us, male or female, has ever achieved—or ever will achieve.”
Venker also documents just how little a couple gains economically when a second parent enters the workforce. “The truth is,” she writes, “that middle class working mothers have made money the scapegoat.” Their real motive, claims Venker, is personal fulfillment. That may be an honorable goal, Venker concedes, but not when it comes at the expense of children whom one has chosen to bring into the world.
Her avoidance of traditionalist rhetoric and assumptions strengthens her persuasiveness, but there is room for ingenuity. Consideration of multiple-child dynamics would have made the book more useful. A greater number of children increases the total amount of work in a household, but older children can contribute greatly to that effort.
Researchers should also consider how the time crunch for working mothers harms their marriages. Venker briefly alludes to this problem—noting that she neglected her marriage while writing the book—but fails to follow up.
Finally, to know the full effects of the working-mothers illusion, it is important to compile some good statistics on how the two types of families live and feel. We should be able to compare divorce rates of couples in which both parents work to those in which one stays home, the achievements of children of both types of family, the levels of happiness and personal satisfaction reported, and so on. Venker did not do any original survey research for the book, a deficiency that she and other authors on both sides of the question should rush to rectify.
Nevertheless, this is a useful and in-teresting book that just might improve the lives of some parents and their children.
S. T. Karnick is senior editor at the Heartland Institute and a fellow at the Sagamore Institute.
