Lawrence Goldstone > Quotes

“You can demand courtesy but you have to earn respect.”
― Lawrence Goldstone

“Never confuse good luck with good planning”
― Lawrence Goldstone

“Arius's works were then burned, and he was exiled to Illyria, site of present-day Albania, as lacking in charm then as it is now.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World

“Two days after the president spoke, the Senate majority leader, Democrat Mike Mansfield, and the minority leader, Republican Everett Dirksen, together introduced a bill to guarantee voting rights to African Americans. A similar bill was soon introduced in the House of Representatives. Over ferocious opposition by Southern congressmen, the bill passed in both houses. On August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights

“James Madison, for example, at one point observed that he "always conceived that the difference of interest in the U. States lay not between the large & small, but the N. & Southn States," and added that "it was pretty well understood that the institution of slavery & its consequences formed the line of discrimination.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution

“The 442nd also became the most decorated unit for its size in the entire United States Army. “They won seven Distinguished Unit Citations, including one awarded personally by President Harry Truman who said, on July 15, 1946, ‘You fought the enemy abroad and prejudice at home and you won.’ In addition, after an exhaustive survey of individual actions from WWII, twenty more Medals of Honor were awarded, bringing the total to twenty-one. Over 4,000 Purple Hearts, 29 Distinguished Service Crosses, 588 Silver Stars, and more than 4,000 Bronze Stars were awarded to the men of the 442nd RCT for action during WWII.” One of those Medal of Honor winners was a twenty-year-old from Hawaii, Daniel Inouye, who lost an arm fighting in Italy and so had to give up his dream of becoming a surgeon. Instead, he went on to be elected to the United States Senate, where he served for almost fifty years.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu was born in Oakland, California, on January 30, 1919, to parents who ran a flower nursery. After graduating from high school, he worked as a shipyard welder until, like Mitsuye Endo, he lost his job after Pearl Harbor. When the order for relocation came, Korematsu ignored it, unwilling to leave his Italian American girlfriend. He was arrested in May 1942. While awaiting trial, he was visited in jail by an attorney with the California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. The California ACLU was looking for someone for whom it could file suit to test the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“At the heart of the question was still how to define “white.” If it were appearance, then Ozawa’s argument of having paler skin than many of those qualified for naturalization would have merit. If it were scientific classification, Sutherland would need to choose from a number of theories, because few serious studies used broad and general terms such as “white,” “black,” or “yellow” as defining traits.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“In an unfortunate and unintended preview, newspapers reported that “Commander Saito was enthusiastic over his experience and expressed his faith in the aeroplane for naval purposes in time of war.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies

“Justice George Sutherland wrote the opinion. He had joined the court just weeks before. Sutherland, born in Great Britain, was an immigrant, albeit from one of the “desirable countries in northern Europe.” That Sutherland did not identify with his fellow immigrant, Takeo Ozawa, became apparent when he took up the question as to whether the term “white” in the 1790 law was used only to differentiate it from “black.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“The majority opinion, by Justice Hugo Black, a Ku Klux Klan member as a young man who became one of the nation’s leading civil libertarians, began with a lofty statement of principles. “All legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can.” From there, he proceeded to postulate pressing public necessity where none existed and deny the racial antagonism that was there for all to see.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“In 1931, to gain access to the iron and coal it lacked at home, Japan overran the Chinese province of Manchuria and installed a puppet government. In July 1937, Japanese forces succeeded in occupying almost the entire east coast of China, during which they committed severe and widely publicized atrocities against the Chinese population, especially during the fall of Nanking. The barbarism of the Japanese military received wide coverage in the American press and reinforced racial stereotypes in the United States all the more. American military and political officials became alarmed that Japanese ambitions might threaten Hawaii and even the American West Coast.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“With these marriages came children. Many children. “At the turn of the century, there were only 269 children; by 1910 the number had grown to 4,502; and by 1920 it had multiplied more than sixfold to 29,672.” And so, a measure to limit the Japanese population on the West Coast vastly increased it. Moreover, to the nativists’ chagrin, since those children were birthright citizens, they would have the very rights that the anti-Japan faction was attempting to deny to their parents. Thus most families became a mix of the native born, or second generation—called “Nisei”—and immigrants, or, literally, first generation—“ Issei.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“While it is certainly possible that if Congress and President Washington had considered the Japanese, they would have been specifically excluded, that was not what the law said. Sutherland, who generally went strictly according to language—what is now called “textualism”—in this opinion claimed to be aware of the Framers’ intent, although there was no way to confirm his conclusion. None of the men who wrote the law were still around to be questioned about hypotheticals.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Greatness lies in persuading others to work for good.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Deadly Cure

“WHAT SERVETUS HAD NOT taken into account was that it does not take very long for revolutions to turn reactionary.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World

“Yasui’s conviction was not set aside in his lifetime. His appeal was pending when he died in 1986, and only afterward was his record cleared. He, too, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously by President Obama.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“And so, it would be sad enough if Japanese internment could be dismissed as an aberration of the American past, but the feelings and reasonings that resulted in that injustice are all too present in the nation today. On December 7, 2015, the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Washington Post reported, “Donald Trump called Monday for a ‘total and complete shutdown’ of the entry of Muslims to the United States ‘until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.’” After his election, President Trump attempted to institute just such a ban. For a time, district and circuit courts, the lower two rungs on the federal judiciary ladder, ruled against the Trump administration, calling the proposal racially motivated, but eventually, after transparently sanitizing the initiative by restricting the order to citizens of specific countries that Trump claimed, without evidence, were hotbeds of terrorism, the Supreme Court in Hawaii v. Trump upheld the ban, as in Korematsu, on the grounds of national security.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“It is not uncommon for the cyclist, in the first flush of enthusiasm which quickly follows the unpleasantness of taming the steel steed, to remark, ‘Wheeling is just like flying!’ This is true in more ways than one.… Both modes of travel are riding upon the air, though in one case a small quantity of air is carried in a bag and in the other the air is unbagged.… To learn to wheel one must learn to balance; to learn to fly one must learn to balance.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies

“ALTHOUGH THE DECISION IN Wong Kim Ark protected a tiny minority of Chinese people in America, it also inflamed anti-Asian sentiment, especially in the West. Politicians of both parties seized on race hatred as a reliable campaign issue and competed with each other in bigotry.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“What was remarkable was that unspeakable treatment did not cause the internees to turn against the country that had treated them so shabbily. Instead, many Japanese internees shamed the nation with their patriotism. In 1943, the War Department finally decided that native-born Americans of Japanese descent were perhaps not “enemy aliens” and were eligible to participate in the war effort. Not in the Pacific, of course—Japanese Americans could not be trusted that much. But the army asked for volunteers for a unit to be assigned to Europe. Almost immediately thousands of young men from both Hawaii and the mainland volunteered. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of these volunteers, was sent to Italy and fought with astonishing bravery, with more than eight hundred dying for their country and hundreds more wounded.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Unlike in the cases of the three other resisters, Endo had not violated any of the rules set up by General DeWitt to enforce Executive Order 9066. As the war went on, with Japanese American soldiers amassing an extraordinary record in Italy, justice department lawyers began to become anxious about Endo’s case. Government officials offered to release her from confinement as a way to end her lawsuit. But Endo refused and remained in the camp. Her case, Ex parte Endo, was decided by the Supreme Court on December 18, 1944,”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“What is vital to appreciate is that neither the Korematsu decision nor the appalling violations of basic rights wrought by internment were created in a vacuum. Both were inevitable byproducts of a nation that had spent a century either perpetuating or acquiescing to slander and bigotry. Harlan Fiske Stone, Hugo Black, Earl Warren, and John DeWitt were no more responsible for the injustices perpetrated in the 1940s than were Horace Page, Ulysses Webb, James Phelan, Samuel Gompers, V. S. McClatchy, and William Randolph Hearst.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“In short, the entry of women into immigrant society was integral to the process by which Japanese immigrants sank roots in American soil.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Ozawa, Sutherland concluded, “is clearly of a race which is not Caucasian, and therefore belongs entirely outside the zone on the negative side.” Ozawa would not be allowed citizenship. Sutherland did feel the need to add a final bit of hypocrisy. “Of course, there is not implied—either in the legislation or in our interpretation of it—any suggestion of individual unworthiness or racial inferiority.” Of course not.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“the United States joined Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as nations who forcibly deported citizens without trial simply because of the circumstances of their birth. The case in which the Supreme Court upheld the same practice that America had condemned its enemies for, Korematsu v. United States, is now one of the few decisions in Supreme Court history that both liberals and conservatives list among the worst ever.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Mitsuye Endo was the only woman among the four resisters. She went to secretarial school after high school in Sacramento and was then hired for a clerical job by the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Her employment included a background check, which revealed she was Methodist, had a brother in the army, had never been to Japan, and was totally loyal to the United States. In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, however, she was fired from her job.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Roosevelt thought such statements were nonsense and made certain his feelings were known in an address to Congress. “The overwhelming mass of our people cherish a lively regard and respect for the people of Japan … To shut them out from the public schools is a wicked absurdity, when there are no first-class colleges in the land, including the universities and colleges of California, which do not gladly welcome Japanese students and on which Japanese students do not reflect credit … Throughout Japan Americans are well treated, and any failure on the part of Americans at home to treat the Japanese with a like courtesy and consideration is by just so much a confession of inferiority in our civilization.” He even suggested at one point that Japanese immigrants should be allowed to become naturalized citizens.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“Californians played up the threat that Japanese people in the United States were an advance guard. In early December 1906, California congressman Everis Hayes told a reporter, “The Japanese immigrant is not an immigrant in the ordinary sense of the word … They came to learn our weaknesses and defects so as to turn that knowledge to their own advantage. Before Japan went to war with China, she had an army of spies and observers in Manchuria. The Japanese knew more about the Russian army than the Russians themselves. They are doing the same thing now in the United States.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment

“During that time, these “concentration camps,” as they were called by the authorities that managed them,”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Days of Infamy: How a Century of Bigotry Led to Japanese American Internment