 We are going to have a lively discussion this evening around the title-trained Crystal City by James Jarba Russell. So thank you all for being here. It has been my pleasure to work with Dr. Dupuis and Paula Owen from the Southwest School of Art. Thank you both so much for the partnership that we have between the library and the Southwest School. I think it has enriched the library immeasurably. If you guys have not visited the Marie Swartz Art Resource Center on the second floor of the library, please do. This is one result of the partnership between the Southwest School of Art and the library. The Marie Swartz Art Resource Center serves as the library for the Southwest School of Art, but it's also just an incredibly beautiful space and an incredibly amazing collection that is also open to the public. So I want to thank the library foundation especially for funding this program and for enriching partnership through these opportunities that we have for discussion together. I want to thank the Southwest School for organizing the program, and before we get started I want to welcome Dr. Eddie Dupuis, the Dean of the Southwest School. Thanks very much, D.D. It's a real pleasure to see everybody here and to welcome you to this first panel discussion. On otherness, as D.D. said, I'm Dr. Eddie Dupuis. I'm the Dean of the Southwest School of Art. You may know that after 50 years of offering programming for youth teams and adults, the Southwest School of Art began a college program last fall. It was a natural next step in our development and teaching and advancing the liberal arts, the visual arts, I should say. And we're in our second year of the program. We have some of our students here. Most of them in the second year, and we have 36 students. And many of our faculty are here tonight as well, so I'm delighted to see them. I think we have some training students for this as well. So the panel discussion tonight is part of our one book program at the school. We selected Jan Jarvis Russell's book because of its timeliness and timelessness. The issue of how we acknowledge and treat the other is as old as the biblical story of the exile of the Israelites in the battle on and as fresh as the border of immigration issues in our own text in the backyard. Jan Jarvis Russell is a train to Crystal City, bringing to life the dark and very complex history of World War II in tournament camps in Crystal City, Texas, a mere few hours drive from where we are right now. We're fortunate they have a distinguished group of panelists tonight, and I'm delighted to be able to introduce them all to you. First, of course, is Jan herself. Jan Jarvis Russell is the former columnist of the San Antonio Express News and currently contributing editor of Texas Monthly. In her long career in journalism, she's covered Texas politics and culture with an emphasis on San Antonio. She's the author of Lady Bird, a biography of Mrs. Johnson, published by Scriveners in 1999, and of course, the critically acclaimed The Train to Crystal City, published by Scriveners in 2015. She lives with her husband here in San Antonio. Lauren Turrick is assistant professor of history at Trinity University, where she teaches classes on modern American history and the history of U.S. foreign relations. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Virginia and is currently working on a book about religion and U.S. foreign policy. Jason Johnson is assistant professor of modern European history at Trinity University. He received a PhD in modern European history with a specialization in German history from Northwestern University. Dr. Johnson has held a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany and the Northwestern History Department award at his dissertation, the annual Harold Perkin Award for best dissertation in history. At Trinity, he teaches a variety of courses on modern European history, including the history of World War II and the history of the Holocaust. David Martin Davies is a familiar voice, if not a familiar face. He's a veteran journalist with over 25 years experience covering Texas, the border, and Mexico. Davies is the host of The Source, a live call-in news program that airs on KSTX at 3 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Since 1999, he has been the host and producer of Texas Matters, a weekly radio news magazine that looks at the issues, events, and people in the Lone Star State. Davies' reporting has been featured on National Public Radio, American Public Media's Marketplace, and BBC. He has written for San Antonio Light, the San Antonio Express News, the Texas Observer, and many others. And he's also honored several awards for his journalistic activity. He'll be our moderator this evening. So, Jan John Russell will start stuff with a short reading from her book, and then the discussion will begin. Thank you all for coming very much. So many thank yous that I'm not going to drag it out, but I know I wanted to thank the library and, of course, the Southwest School. I've been so enjoying my interaction with some of the students in the school around my book. I do believe in two things, words and image, and I always love to be around artists because they constantly remind me about the image. And I really appreciate this opportunity. I will make a short reading, but before I wanted to kind of square out how my book of the train to Crystal City fits into our panel's discussion of otherness, we're really honored to have this discussion and with these group of people. And what happens in the war, especially great wars such as World War I and World War II, is that it's sort of a natural instinct for patriotism that can in fact result in scapegoating of people who are immigrants, even legal immigrants. And that's what happened to my character in the train to Crystal City. I just want to give you a little brief context for the book. Franklin Roosevelt has a reputation as a kind of congenial president, always doing good things. But when he came to the internment of Japanese, Japanese Americans, Germans, German Americans, Italians and Italian Americans, it could be argued that Roosevelt was congenially ruthless. In the run-up to World War II, FDR spoke the shifted dramatically from conditions at home, the Much Love New Deal, to the events abroad. He realized that America would eventually have to get into the war. But in the 1930s, isolationism gripped the nation. Even after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Paul showed that 90% of Americans favored neutrality. The country was not yet ready for war. In response to that event, the invasion of Poland, Roosevelt created a secret division within the Department of State called the Special War Problems Division. And the job of the Special War Problems Division was to identify American civilians who were living in Europe and the Far East would be in danger in the event of war. These civilians were diplomats, businessmen, missionaries, journalists, and these were the people that Roosevelt knew to be in his way the moment that we got into the war. In addition, in 1939, he asked the State Department to prepare a plan to put into internment camps civilians of foreign descent, particularly German and Japanese, who were living legally in the United States. So these were not illegal immigrants. They were legal immigrants from Japan and Japanese. Even before this, three years before this, on October 24, 1936, Roosevelt had given J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, broad powers to investigate Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants who either because of their occupations or their activities were suspected or could be disloyalty to the United States. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the entire political and military establishment applied pressure on Roosevelt to act immediately against Japanese immigrants. They immediately became the other, even if they had nothing to do with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But also German and Italians who were immigrants from Axis countries. Most of us know about Executive Order 9066, which forced the removal of 120,000 Japanese, two-thirds of them American-born from the West Coast. So just because these people were Japanese in their blood, they were taken to these war relocation centers and held there. But under the terms of the same order, 9066, Germans and Italians were also subject to internment as well. Meanwhile, Hoover had, since 1936, been compiling these lists of suspect enemy aliens. And those were the most other of the others. And within 48 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, 1,200 Japanese leaders, merchants, farmers, priests, newspaper men were arrested without charges. 602 Germans and 90 Italian were also arrested. The term enemy alien meant that the people that were enemy aliens were indefinitely held in internment. They had no access to lawyers, no legal way to petition the government. As you know, my book focuses on this largely unknown camp, the Crystal City internment camp. Which became the center of Roosevelt's enemy alien program. So people that Hoover had been investigating since 1936, that the camp existed for two purposes. One was to reunite enemy alien fathers with their holy innocent wives and to a great extent American-born children in Crystal City. The other was the fact that Crystal City became the center of Roosevelt's prisoner exchange program. We don't realize it, but because of the enemy alien act of 1798, somebody will correct me. Because of that act, you could be arrested if you were a citizen of a country we were at war with. So it wasn't personal to the government, even though it was very personal to the people who were arrested. The people in the Crystal City internment camp was the only camp that had multiple nationalities, German, Italian, and Japanese. As well as the fact that Hoover had also orchestrated the kidnapping of about 4,000 people from 13 different countries in Latin America for the purpose of exchange. Those two were there too. So over the course of the war, the camp in Crystal City, as Eddie said, 120 miles from where we sit tonight, was commonly known as the kidnap camp. We were kidnapping people and bringing them to Crystal City and then sending many of them out in six different prisoner exchanges. As a journalist, to find this kind of an activity going on in your own backyard that is, for the most part, incredibly secret, is a rare and compelling situation. So over the course of five years, I worked to get the records of the camp declassified, the FBI files of the bothers declassified, and interviewing children that were in the camp. We're going to talk about that. But the great tragedy of the Crystal City camp, no matter what you think about what FDR did, is that so many American-born children, Japanese and German, were traded into war in these exchanges for people that were ostensibly more important Americans. And it was quite shocking for the children to learn that themselves because they did not know of their role in the war. And it was quite shocking to me. I'm going to read from one, as in war, things go awry in the fog of war and things are supposed to behave go one way and they often go the wrong way. Since we're talking about otherness tonight, I wanted to describe the last one scene from the last prisoner exchange in 1945, in January of 1945, when one of my main characters, Ingrid Eiserl, a German-American from Cleveland, her family were traded. And the surprise of the thing was since this was the last trade of the war, we had so very few Americans left in Germany, almost all of them had come back. There were in that trade a few American POWs who did get out in the 45th trade. But because there weren't many Americans, we ended up trying to save 350 Jews who were at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. So in a trade that was supposed to be American for Germans, Ingrid Eiserl was traded for a German too in Bergen-Belsen, which just tells you that things don't always work out as you expect them. And I'd like to read from a passage that I've never read publicly before because it's very emotional for me. Irina Hassenberg's father, which she was born in Germany, but her father was a banker in Amsterdam. She was a close friend of Anne Frank's. In fact, right before this passage begins, one of her last acts in Bergen-Belsen was to give Anne Frank, who was still alive at that time. Irina took her last piece of bread to Anne Frank before she got on the train out. So that was pretty astonishing. The conditions, we had about 5,000 people at the time in Crystal City at the time of this exchange. There were 15,000 Jews still alive in Bergen-Belsen. So of course the conditions of the camp couldn't be compared because our camp was a humanitarian run camp. Their camp was run by Joseph Craigward, who was known as the butcher of Bergen-Belsen. So let me read from this. And this is the kind of thing, there's no black and white answers in my book. When you hear that this, that Ingrid was traded for Irene, you have to ask, well, was it worth it for us to do all of this? And I think that's the thing I like about the book the most is that there's no easy answers to this. This is, she describes, at night, this is Irene describing at night in the barracks the women reply in the dark and describe recipes for their favorite food. That's because they were all starving. Stuffed beasts, breast of veal, goulash, vegetables of all kind, cakes and cookies. Each woman would try to outdo the others in these night times, sentencing feasts. During these nights Irene thought to herself that there was no word to describe the physical pain of hunger. Quote, true hunger is a painful, ever-present feeling that is impossible to comprehend, Irene said. It's gnawing, it's hollow. During the day Irene cleaned the barracks and did the laundry. There was no soap, only cold water. When mothers left the barracks to go to work, Irene and the other young teenagers cared for the smaller children. Her brother, Werner, did hard labor alongside his father. Under conditions that were barely survivable, Irene and her family spent 11 months in Bergen-Belsen. Every night I went to sleep hoping that I would wake up in the morning, Irene called. Finally, on January 21, 1945, after the Hassanburg families had passed some examinations from by the Nazis, they assembled at the center of the camp with a group of about 300 other Jews in Bergen-Belsen who were on the list for exchange. Near evening, a train flying a Red Cross flag rolled into the camp. Irene and Werner studied their mother Gertrude as they walked up the steps into the heated train. Her father, John, following behind. Both parents were in the works, were under work or suffering from starvation. As the train moved slowly out of Bergen-Belsen's, the Hassanburgs were silent. The train headed for Switzerland was forced to make numerous stops. Allied pilots had bombed many of the tracks and they had to be cleared. At times the train sat on the tracks for hours, unable to move. In the compartment, both Gertrude and John were in great physical pain. They struggled to stay upright in their seats. Werner and Irene, both also suffering from malnutrition, did their best to take care of their parents. On the second night of the four-day journey, John got up to go to the bathroom. He was too weak to walk by himself, so Irene took his hand and walked and led him. We're almost free now, she witnessed. I'm not going to make it, he replied. That night, John fell asleep on Irene's shoulder, and during the night, he died. Irene shook him, but there was no response. For several hours, she and Werner held him in their arms and wept. Gertrude seemed confused, unable to comprehend what had happened. John was the first person to die on the train. 150 more died before they got to the exchange. Over the next few days, then over the next few days. In the morning, a nurse came by and declared John dead. His body was wrapped in a blanket and thrown off the train at the next town on a bench near the train station. The indignity of it, their father left in a strange town with no funeral rights, did not yet penetrate Irene or Werner. After all they had entered, they were too numb, they were in shock. So we know about the Jews representing the other, which is what our discussion is. But as difficult as it is to say, the kids in Crystal City, who were Japanese American and Italian American and German American, were also the other. So shall we talk about that? I just really can't say enough about what an achievement this book is. A journalistic achievement, investigative reporting achievement. Janet was able to go where a lot of reporters, where other reporters have not been able to go for doggedness and ingenuity and also her humane approach to this incredible story. And she answered a very important question that I mean, I've found in Crystal City and I've interviewed people who were in Crystal City before and told that story. But to go and tell the deeper story about why this happened, you know, and so she tells the story that this was a political decision. We've all heard the story about, you know, the United States was in hysteria and people were worried about the Japanese and we made a mistake. We opened these camps and we did this and we apologized for it and we learned a lesson. But she tells the story that this is a political decision done for specific reasons and part of the strategy and makes you really believe that this was not an isolated incident and things like this will happen. It's not a one-off in American history, things like this will happen. And so, you know, the full title of the event tonight is Otherness, a panel discussion on immigration, internment, detainment and the plight of others in America. So who are others? Who are the others in America? And I believe that others is, who is the other is a fluid condition. Who's of other today or not another today could be one or not tomorrow. It all depends upon a political expediency. We experience that now, today, as we're going through a very coarse political process with these primaries and we're hearing people calling for mass deportations. Also, we have that going on today, not far from us in Dilley and Carn City, where we have detainment centers for people who are fleeing basically failed governments in Central America and they have already come through horrible conditions and they find conditions that are pretty terrible here in the United States. You look back in our own history in Texas, you don't have to go back very far. I've been reading a lot about women's suffrage here in Texas and, you know, women didn't have to vote in Texas until 1918. That was just for primaries. That was a year earlier than the United States as a whole, but still it was, you know, astonishing. Women could not serve on juries in Texas until 1954. Why is that? And so what is the otherness? So otherness could be a gender, could be a gender, could be a gender identity. We see that already. Conditional whiteness, what does that mean? Well, whiteness that is given can be taken away if you don't have the right attitudes, if you don't have the right thought process because otherness can be an affiliation. The Red Scare, communism here, the San Antonio Public Library where we are today during the Red Scare was rated by the Bear County Sheriff's Department as they seized the library records trying to see who checked out what books could that happen today. Well, just last week we saw Planned Parenthood rated and seizing of records. Records that are supposed to be confidential between women and their doctors. Women who sought treatment at these places who were guaranteed that their identities would be protected have now been seized. What will happen with that information? We don't know. What is otherness? Who are the others? So we're going to be talking about that. So, you know, and aside, I mean, just this weekend I was here in the library on the sixth floor in the Tech Santa Department going through old newspapers, 1968 newspapers, looking at doing some research. And I came across, here's a story about 1968, January, they had a seminar for the 70s. Mayor McAllister and other great establishment individuals in San Antonio held a conference for the weekend where they were going to figure out what San Antonio was going to do in the 1970s. And their big issues, their big ideas were, well, let's figure out a way to honor the heroes of the Alamo Plaza. Let's get rid of all those businesses out there in front of Alamo Plaza. Let's find another water resource for San Antonio. We need more water here. Let's build a river walk all the way to Bracken Ridge Park, you know. And I was astonished about all of the things that they were talking about in the 68. We're still talking about it today. And so there is this concept of contemporariness. We are locked into the day that we live, and it's hard for us to gain perspective about what does it mean to live in this age. And looking back, you can see that history does repeat itself. Hopefully we will learn the lessons of the train to Crystal City and some of these other, but I don't know. Well, let's get going here. Well, we've got more scholars to hear from, people who know what they're talking about. So not me because I don't. Jason Johnson, you know, let's talk about European history. Sure. Well, thank you for organizing this panel. TBR, Southwest School of Art, Jamf, it's a fabulous book. It's a beautiful space to this people library. I'm going to begin on the other side of the planet, as it were, to talk a little bit briefly just about how Crystal City even came about. That is, where did this war come from? That is, how did Adolf Hitler come to power and where does otherness play in there? Adolf Hitler, as you might know, was appointed Chancellor of Germany, January 30th of 1933. He did not seize power. There was no Nazi seizure of power. That's a myth they made up. He was handed power. The majority of Germans never voted for the Nazis. He knew he had a lot of work ahead of him. It turned out, about a month after his appointment, at the end of February 1933, a really cold Berlin night, the Reichstag, the parliament building caught on fire. We don't know for sure what happened, but the building was gutted. And Hitler saw this, of course. And he penned it on a young Dutch conist. The Nazis have been talking all along about the dangers of communism and how Jews control communism. And these two movements, in particular, are out to destroy Germany. And Hitler started saying, after this Reichstag fire, look at this other out there trying to destroy us all. Germany is under attack. It's us versus them. He used fear of this other to get total control of German society. About a month later, March, he goes back to this parliament. And he says, will you, German parliament, give me unlimited dictatorial power for four years? Our nation is under attack. There's this other out to get us. They've burnt down our capital building walls. And 83% of the German parliament says, absolutely. And that's it. He has total unlimited power. Shortly thereafter, he sets up a concentration camp in a beautiful little town, it's a suburb of Munich called Dachau. He starts putting his enemies, the communists, especially first. Then by 1935, he's able to pass because this power given to him out of this fear-mongering of the other that the Nazis have created and the ruin of this fire. In 1935, there's a narrower of those that make it, make being a German citizen and a Jew impossible. Jews become subject of the German Reich. But this all goes back to this fire and this fear-mongering and saying, our nation is under attack. We have these enemies inside the country. We have to do something. It's this fear, the power of this fear, I think, that is present often in this story and all around us. Wow. And you think perhaps it can't happen in the United States where we don't have a dictator in power. And yet, what we end up seeing after the attack on Pearl Harbor, again, an attack on the American nation, there are people out there out to get us. What we see is a tremendous amount of fear-mongering and scapegoating occurring in the United States. So one of the most incredible parts of this incredible book that Jan has written is the section where she describes Sue Me and Ingrid, two American-born, American citizens, teenagers who are repatriated to Germany and to Japan, countries that they were not born in, these are the countries of their parents' origin, places that they perhaps never set foot in. And so this repatriation process raises some real questions about American constitutional rights and civil liberties in wartime. How could this repatriation of American citizens to another country have possibly be considered legal or acceptable? And this, for me, is where this question of otherness really comes into play. During World War II, Japanese-Americans and German-Americans were singled out for official persecution because American leaders and the public viewed them as others by virtue of their identification with America's enemies in war, Japan and Germany. After Pearl Harbor, decades of anti-Asian sentiments in the U.S., especially in the West erupted. These are sentiments that were long-standing and it's evidenced by the fact that back in 1924 the U.S. passed immigration restrictions that prevented Japanese immigrants from coming to the U.S. Now, by the time of Pearl Harbor, many of FDR's advisors and FDR himself see Japanese-Americans as fundamentally different from other Americans, no matter how long they've lived here. One of his generals, Lieutenant General John DeWitt, called for the Japanese evacuation from the West and he actually said, and I quote, the Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizen, have become Americanized, the racial strains are undiluted. So after Pearl Harbor, FDR issues several presidential proclamations which authorized the United States to detain any allegedly dangerous alien enemies and most of his advisors supported this. The FBI began rounding up and arresting thousands of people of German, Italian and Japanese origin on the suspicion that they might be enemy aliens who posed a threat to American security during wartime simply because of their ethnic origins, their otherness. Now, a minority of those people may have held pro-access views, but the vast majority of those who were arrested posed no threat at all. They were offered no chance to defend themselves against accusations that they were committing espionage or anything else, which is something that Jan shows very clearly in the book. Now, we all know about the Executive Order 9066 that actually starts off the process of these internment camps, the forced incarceration of Japanese and German citizens. The question then is how does this, how is this justified legally? One of the Japanese citizens, or Japanese-Americans who is incarcerated is Fred Korematsu, a resident of California, and he challenged the internment all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court ruled six to three that FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans was completely legal. He was completely constitutional. How can this be? It's because the threat of potential espionage during wartime outweighed the individual rights of Korematsu and others of Japanese ancestry. And laws such as the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 and the Sedition Act, acts which remain in effect today, allow the government to detain enemy aliens upon declaration of war. So national security concerns in the U.S. intersect in really important ways with otherness and lead to the denial of what we would consider to be very basic civil and constitutional rights owed to all Americans. So it can happen here. So, Jan, you know, you chronicle this event in post-World War II, as the war breaks out in the United States. I mean, was that the attitude of the common person? Did they know what was happening into this regard across the United States? And did they figure that this was just the way to do things? Well, I can speak from Santa, from the Texas point of view. You know, everyone was behind Roosevelt in the war, the vast majority of them. And so newspapers, including the San Antonio newspapers, published things. If you see anything suspicious, turn these people in, which is the kind of thing we hear today, right? If somebody picks up your bag at the airport, you call the police, right? And so there was this attitude that the country had to win the war, and that Roosevelt said, I'm going to prosecute the war at all costs, and everybody got a lock gate. The vast majority of Americans went along with that. And even Eleanor Roosevelt, who had definitely worked hard to not let this happen in the internment, ultimately she too went along with it. So I think that's the case. If I could just comment a little bit on these two incredibly important points that they have made, you know, one of the things that I learned in talking to the children of the camp, both German-Americans and Japanese-Americans, the issue of loyalty became hugely important to them in their family barracks in the camp because the American-born children, perhaps as a response to the fact that they didn't see themselves as other before the war broke out because in Los Angeles, there were a lot of Japanese-Americans in schools and there was a multicultural... Sumi went to school with people from the Philippines, from black people, green people, every kind of person was in her high school. By the same token, Ingrid had grown up in a German-American community where Beethoven was played and songs were done and the moment the war started, all of that stopped, you know, it became... hamburgers became Salisbury steak and stuff like that on even the level of life. So there was this overreaction on the part of the children of the camp to be uber-American, uber to be, you know, to keep trying to prove their patriotism, which is one reason they went back to the countries of their parents to prove to people that, you know, they all joined the American military when we had an occupying force. So I now see that too as David was talking about. We all see Latino kids who are uber-American, you know, we've got the dreamers and we've got the people joining the military and that it's a reaction of thinking you can arm yourself into... you can get your citizenship back if you're just American enough. I think that's one thing. And as he was saying about what was happening in Germany, it's interesting to me that Biddle, who was our attorney general and who was against this too, he became, in the Nuremberg trial, he was the head, he was one of the people in the trial and he who had signed all these certificates for all these kids in Crystal City, American as well as not, he gets confronted when the German lawyers say but you too had, you too had concentration camps and so the idea that we're so different, I mean, we were different in levels of extremes our internment, but at least in Germany at the time, they got blowback and Biddle had to say to express his regret for this very thing. And so I think one of the things is one of the reasons you have scapegoats is to build up your position, right? If you're the president and you can scape some goat somebody, you're building up your position, we're pure, you're not pure. And so I just think it's very, very tricky how we treat people in times of war and now we're seeing this in San Antonio as well with all these immigration issues and with the Muslims, you know, of being scapegoated. And I think a lot of the problem is exactly what she said is that we have these old rules of especially the enemy alien act of 1798, I knew she'd get it right, I didn't know if it was 88 or 98. Anyway, until we get rid of that we're not going to make much progress, you see? And there's no political power for it because it's so much easier for a politician to demonize another than to take responsibility for their own job. Just to add on a little bit there bringing the German perspective as you were mentioning, after the war, American journalists, American soldiers would ask average Germans how could this have happened, to speaking the Holocaust, of course. And they almost always said two things. One, they said, nishkegegem tamak there's nothing that I could have done about it and then they pointed to this. They said, you had concentration camps in your country too and the good people of San Antonio or Charlotte or wherever were now marching in the streets against that. So how could you do this? That's what they said. Jason, let me ask you about Hitler's rise when he was chancellor and he was building up Germany, it's my understanding that he was speaking about peace. He was a peace candidate. Can you talk about that? There's a promise of stability that Hitler offers. The aftermath, as you probably know, World War I is so intense in Germany. The country is largely destroyed and it's claimed for the war. It gets a bill in today's dollars that's about 800 billion dollars that has to be paid. And this is a country that has no functioning economy. There's this incredible hyperinflation that happens in 1923. Money becomes worthless. Literally, you get a paycheck by the time you get to the bank to cash it, it is worthless. Hitler starts saying, I promise stability, I promise German glory. I promise there will be no Bolshevik style revolution. And he says this insane stuff about Jews as well as creating this other. But it's these promises of stability that get him far for a while. By the end of the 1920s, though, he's not getting the kind of votes he wants. He starts back peddling this anti-Semitic stuff. And he starts really focusing on promises of stability. And he gets 38, 39% of the votes. But that's still on enough. The old power structure of Germany is a complicated system. Decides the best way to neutralize him is a threat is to appoint a chancellor. Leader of the government, and they will make him go away. A very famous quote by one of these men who appointed him chancellor in 1933 was, we'll appoint him a chancellor. Within a few months, he'll be back so far in the corner, he'll squeak like a mouse. And that was the plan. People unified and promises of stability. But this fire happened, right? And he has a vision of Germany that he starts implementing. That is a racially pure Germany, pure of others, especially Jews, of course, because they are the arch enemy in this world. But it's the promise of stability that really matters here. And by 1936, he can say that unemployment in Germany is null. Zero, jobs created for everyone through new deal kind of programs. And that's what makes him, right? Stability, then, jobs. By the middle of the 1930s, he starts taking, people start disappearing, but Jews are a small minority. They're a small other. And you have a job. Lauren, you look at public policy, like American foreign policy. And how does that come into play in defining the other? So in situations like what we're talking about here with World War II, if you think about the countries that the U.S. sees as the enemy, because part of this panel is talking about immigration, too. So thinking about the United States as a country that has a large number of immigrants coming in, despite some of the immigration restrictions that I talked about, a country that during wartime, there is the threat that immigrant populations are going to feel more loyal to the country of their birth. And this was a concern in World War I, and it was a concern again in World War II. And so when conflict breaks out, the fear is that you are not going to be as loyal to your own country, the United States, where you've come to immigrate to, but you'll remain very embroiled to the country of your birth. And so then it leads to questions about how do we rally the citizenry behind the war effort? Is there a threat that people are going to spy for their former country? Is there a threat that they may potentially engage in acts that will threaten U.S. national security? And so that's where this really comes into play. That's the fear, the threat that undergirds some of these decisions that FDR makes about interning enemy aliens and their families. But you also understand from your bio that you look at Christian foreign policy lobbying on the United States, looking at different regimes and how they treat Christians. And so in other parts of the world, the Christians are the others. Yes, absolutely. And so that is a fine example. So one of the issues in World War II and what we're talking about is, you know, is a Jewish lobby effective at getting FDR to engage in efforts to save the Jews in Germany? And the answer is no, he's not. But some of the groups that I look at are very effective later on in the 20th century in actually lobbying to protect the religious rights of themselves abroad, their ability to function as missionaries, but also to protect people who convert to Christianity in countries in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, so that they, you know, they are protected. And that shapes American foreign relations in significant ways if your government is focused on protecting another in another country. Did you want to add to that, Jason? It looked like you did. Okay, there we go. All right, it looks like you wanted to jump in. But, you know, we're almost out of time, but if there's anyone who's got a burning question, you know, I mean, we're just an intimate group and ask it. I'll rephrase it so we capture it. But this is a quick question. Yes. Sure, like in the Depression era, there was a lot of deportation of Mexican labor, and it didn't matter if you were native born or if you were not. There was expulsions. The question is actually for Mr. Jordan. Mm-hmm, sure. Yes, it's a really, you know, difficult time in fact, and the exchange program that they established during this period. Then they could arrest a born national who were Japanese and other German and Italian, but especially the Japanese in South America and even camps here in Christmas City. I don't understand that. How could their native country, like Ecuador or Venezuela, how could these nations give up these people so easily? I don't understand that part of the... You can take it out. I don't understand. Is it like the embargoes where we're not going to buy things from you? So the question is, how do these countries in Central and South America give up their people? I'm going to tell you how it worked in Crystal City. I don't know how it worked in other camps, but Roosevelt had a, quote, good neighbor policy going on in Latin America, and he was trying to establish some military installations in Latin America that would help protect the United States in the eventuality of the war. So he was dealing with 13 different countries said yes to him. Mexico said no and had its own internment camps inside Mexico. But the deal was that what the government got out of that is that in return for arresting these people and the government seized their properties. So if you had a big sake factory in Peru and you were the Donald Trump of sake at that time, then suddenly the... And this happened to Alice Nishimoto in Crystal City, then what happened is that the FBI working through the local police rounded these people up, put them on a but, an army boat in Peru and then they took them to the port of New Bromphil... I mean of New Orleans, not New Bromphil. And the moment they stepped out on the American soil, they were arrested as illegal aliens. They were taken and doused. The kids talk about this and put on the train to Crystal City. So they were stateless. They were stateless. Some of these people who spoke only Spanish were taken into Japan, into Germany, speaking Spanish. And so it was a crazy thing. Amazingly, 81 Jews who had fled the run-up to Hitler were in this group. 81 Jews from South America. One family, the Jacobi family from Columbia was in Crystal City. So the story is that, you know, you can have a law or then you can just kidnap people. But the legal basis for that is that they were in the United States illegally having been kidnapped by the United States. Yes, ma'am. I guess I'll address it to you. It's about... Okay, it's about Netanyahu had a speech recently about how he equated what's going on with the Palestinians with how you had to get rid of... I mean, the Nazis and the Jews. You had no choice but to go to war and that was the end of that. And now he's equating that to what's going on with Palestine and saying, basically, we just have to get rid of them because there's no change. And so I feel like Netanyahu is really taking on this otherness and applying it in, you know, political ways. And I just wanted to... Right, and what about Netanyahu's claim that it was the Palestinians' idea to do the Holocaust? And so this is why this has been in the news, right? Netanyahu has this claim that Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust, right, from that part of the world and that is just factually not true. And so there is that problem that he's just staying information that is not accurate. Yeah, but given his status, him just saying that there are people that are willing to believe it. Truth is malleable in these circumstances. And so we see it all the time. You know, it becomes a mnemonic infection and it gets into people's brains the next thing you know and how it's a fact. Absolutely. It's this ability to use categories of otherness for political ends, right? And this is where the real danger comes in and I think European history and American history, right? It's creating these categories in which people, certain people have more rights than others. That's what Hitler's doing across the 30s. That's what these neuroverbals are about, right? When rights are removed, when there's an imbalance in rights, that can be the first step. Degeneracy, right? And that, for me, is where the danger really comes in, where there's inequality in rights that can be terribly nasty, dot, dot, dot. Right, but it seems like people are like, how do we keep this from happening again? I mean, it seems like in the past we've had individuals who can stand up, Albert Schweitzer or Albert Einstein or Nelson Mandela, people of great stature who can shout down these manipulators and demagogues and try and establish a moral compass again. I don't know if we have that anymore. Right. This is something I struggle with. In my, I teach, World War II, I teach this through the Holocaust, right, at Trinity. And at the end of these courses, the students are saying, you know, what's the takeaway here, right? And there's this never again rhetoric, right? There have been, it's hard to define what a genocide is, but there have been probably at least 30s, and people started saying, the moral compass stuff, right? I think it gets to what we're all talking about. It's this fear of the other. I tell my students, don't be afraid, right, of people who are different from you because it's that kind of thinking, right, that leads to Crystal City, leads to all the things that we're talking about here. And there's no silver lining something like the Holocaust. Irene, who was the Holocaust survivor here, you know, I start my book with her quote and she says this at every speech because she's doing peace talks with Palestinian women in her town, which is what we should be doing, Jews and Palestinians speaking, and she believes it's the stories that do the healing. She says enemies are people whose faces you've never seen and whose stories you've never heard. So some of the work of this is for other people to tell the stories now. It took 72 years for Ingrid to ever open her mouth about what happened to her. And it took Irene a long, long time to talk about what happened to her in Bergen-Belsen. I mean, I say, tell your stories, but that's an act of courage. It's not exactly, we can't all just hope that the politicians like some fairy godmothers are going to take care of us because that's not true. I think we have to tell these stories again and again. I'm very proud of the fact that there are journalists losing their lives right now trying to tell the story and not just journalists. And so, not all politicians. Yes, ma'am, I know you wanted to talk. Two quick questions. In the 50s, when I was a child, every right-thinking, wealthy person had a Japanese gardener. They felt obligated to make some room for them back in society. And so, I remember, 10 years before that, there were nobody in the elites of the country who were raising questions about what was done to the Japanese. Secondly, there was a far greater number of Japanese both from absolute numbers and percentage-wise in Hawaii. And while there were some spies rounded up, clearly the local population was not touched. Was the hysteria limited to the mainland? This is a matter of numbers. The same reason that, you know, that Roosevelt wanted to take every person with one-sixteenth blood of Japanese, he wanted every one of them taken. But in Hawaii, there were so many Japanese that the whole island would have collapsed in terms of work. And so, they took the leaders. There were 250 Buddhist priests from Hawaii in Crystal City. That same thing happened to the Germans. Roosevelt went to see Roosevelt one day and he said, I want you to arrest every person of German background in this country, every single person of German background. The Italians, they're a bunch of opera singers, but these Germans, they're dangerous. That was the idea. The reason we didn't arrest every single German, I guess Texas would have gone to Louisiana by that point because we had a lot of them here. Anyway, if we had done that, all the factories would have shut down. There were so many Germans that we were depending upon. So it was a numerical question of what was Roosevelt's origin? Was he not a German Jew? No, apparently he had some sort of place in his lineage. Yes, it was some place in his lineage. He had an ancestor who was a Dutch Jew, but it wasn't directly him. I don't know, three generation. They're both from the same family. Same family. But one thing about San Antonio, the second gardens we had at Bracken Ridge Park, we had a family there. The jingle family. They were basically like a zoo display of Japanese people that we had in San Antonio. They would come out, their daughters would dress in the kimonos, and they would serve tea and do a tea ceremony for tourists and what have you. Then we had the war break out and the city basically had a huge outcry. I know where Japanese are there at the sunken gardens and they drove those people out of town. This family was very close to the Mavericks. They were not just like some incidental family. The Mavericks, they were the congressmen at the time, didn't matter. They were ran out of town. And they renamed the garden the Chinese garden, remember? Yeah, so that happened. I know ma'am, you had a question. I really want to get you in there. All the old persons would be very hard to achieve. I wondered what historians think about the protective power of economic strength. When there's lots of money and lots of jobs and lots of prosperity, do people not worry so much about those others? That's a great question. Well, I have enough, I'm not going to get any jobs for them too. So I wondered, well, I just think the myth of American exceptionalism is so strong people can tell their stories, but don't bother me with the facts. Let me tell you what American exceptionalism means. American exceptionalism, we talk about all the great things America has done except when we put people in camps and except when we do all sorts of other things. But Jason, that question about economic power in a class, that is a sweet, fat, slow one right down your strike zone. As I said, by 1936 on paper, there's zero unemployment in Germany, and that's what keeps the Nazis in power. The first thing that Hitler does in 1933, he passes something to cause an enabling act, he has all this power. He passes something called the law for the restoration of the German civil service, which seems harmless enough, right? The thing is though, the law called for Jews to be banned for all parts of the German government employment, right? So teachers, for example, university professors were banned, lawyers were banned, and you would hope that non-Jewish Germans would stand up against this. But let's say that someone wanted the corner office in the law firm, suddenly that's open, and that plays out at every level of German society from the very beginning. And so, jobs matter to economics to believe, at least from the 30s in Germany. It's willingness to not stand up against such actions when there is quite at its beginning job security and all that, and a little, only that is very little physically. I think that's a great question. I think it's true in the United States too. If you look at a turn of the century factory work, when we have low wages and a series of depressions in the United States, there is a lot of hostility that emerges to immigrant groups, even though they are often doing the sort of lowest paid work. And so what we see is in times of plenty, when there are plenty of jobs, there is a decrease, and I think it's very similar to the case in Germany. Can I get the last couple of questions? Yes, sir, right there. Can you stand up for us? A little bit louder? So the question basically is why is this not better well known? Why don't more people go out and buy copies of train to Crystal City? I don't know. If you want to, there's a table back there with a twig that has some. It was that it was chosen for its isolated location. In other words, it was far from the east and west coast. The Earl Harrison who was the immigration naturalization service, I got his diary and he wrote in there that Crystal City is as close to Siberia as we have in the United States. That's not true. And it was also close to the Latin American people that came that way so they didn't have to go so far. The other issue is that when you went into this camp when you left the camp, we didn't discuss kind of daily life in the camp, but daily life in the camp was highly regimented. There were sensors on what people could write and what they did. The penalty for trying to escape the camp was death. They had scarred towers around there, so it was a spooky place. But one of the reasons it didn't come out was because when you left the camp, even if you were a person who was old enough to write, you signed an oath saying you would never speak of your experiences in the camp. And most of these people grew up with, you know, World War II is the feel-good movie in America, you know, and so they weren't going to be walking around, especially the Germans saying, I was an internee at the Crystal City intern McCamp. They were ashamed of what had happened to them. And they had signed this oath of secrecy and they knew what the government could do. Ingrid was completely freaked out by the government. Whenever I went to interview her, I had to leave my cell phone in the car because she thought it was a personal tracking device. So, you know, she had a healthy respect for the government. So, I think that's part of it. And this is not the greatest, this is like Kafka, you know, you're reading in this stuff. It's not the most, it doesn't make you feel good. I'm very glad we won World War II. My father fought in World War II. His uncle was a POW in Germany. Perhaps he was part of the prisoner exchange. This is not easy. This is not an easy subject to discuss. And so, a lot of it was because of the shame that the people felt about being interned. I really are out of time. Thank you. Thank you.