Letters to the Editor

Stem Cell Prospects

The article regarding stem cell research at Stanford (“Finding the Cures Within Us,” March/April) should also give credit to the Stanford in Government internship program. As an alum of SIG (1965 and 1967 internships on Capitol Hill), I led the effort to kill the legislation of the Republicans in the House and Senate in 1998 that would have sent Stanford and other researchers to jail for 10 years for working with embryonic stem cells. I was able to kill the bill because SIG had launched my 40-plus years in public service and public policy. In that fight I was the principal lobbyist for the world’s biotechnology industry (1,000 companies in 40 countries). 

The case study of how I won that fight—one of 30 in the oral history of my career given to the Senate historian—is one I am now teaching at Stanford and other schools to encourage students to become public policy advocates. Without favorable public policies regarding science, science will not go forward or become beneficial to patients at the bedside. This is why Stanford’s Haas Public Service Center and the Stanford in Washington campus, both of which I helped to found, are so vital and why the recent Cardinal Service and Knight-Hennessy Scholars initiatives are so impressive and timely. 

When President Marc Tessier-Lavigne fashions the next mega-fundraising campaign for Stanford, a billion dollars of the campaign should be devoted to public policy education, showing that Stanford is concerned about the world, not just feathering its academic nest. We need more SIG alums—and alums of the Haas Center, SIW, Cardinal Service and Knight-Hennessy—as essential members of the team.
Chuck Ludlam, ’67
Washington, D.C.

Good Works

I admire the long-view mission of President Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Drell as stated in the March-April issue (“What's Next for Stanford,” President’s Column). I am one of the 200,000 living alumni who, I hope, were busy “uplifting humanity . . . throughout the world.”

 I read a number of interesting articles, but the one I read and reread is the one dealing with stem cell research, more specifically the stem cell treatment for pathologies of the eye, including macular degeneration. I look forward to being updated periodically on the progress made in this area of research. Now that Dr. Roncarolo is on board, I hope that her efforts toward clinical treatment will be realized, so that some of us with macular degeneration can take advantage of these treatments. Keep up the good work.
Laurice Kafrouni Durrant, MA ’65, EdD ’71
Keene, Texas

Jane’s Aversion

As apocryphal as it may be, I still prefer the other explanation for why Stanford was built on the flats rather than in the Foothills (“A Gentleman’s Quarrel,” March/April). The story goes that Leland and Jane Stanford, on a fact-finding mission to determine how they would honor their son, visited the campus of senatorial colleague Ezra Cornell (which was also built on its founder’s farm). As the song goes, Cornell University stood “far above Cayuga’s waters.” When Olmsted suggested building in the Foothills, Jane Stanford, remembering clambering around Ithaca’s hills, reportedly replied with words to the effect of “Over my dead body.” Kudos to Daniel Arnold for contributing to the magazine’s collection of wonderful historical perspectives.
Howard Baldwin, ’77
Sunnyvale, California

Active Learning

At last, an intelligent discussion of the value of the lecture versus active learning (“Should We Lose the Lecture?” March/April). I’ve always felt that I can read faster than listening to a lecturer droning on from notes prepared in the distant past. After all, the word lecture is derived from reading. Thank you, Sam Scott, for challenging this ancient practice. Unfortunately, change will only come one funeral at a time. 
Ed Morsman, ’60
Plymouth, Minnesota

A Nuclear Solution

The fact that three articles in the March/April issue discussed nuclear weapons indicates that people are worried (“Beating the Doomsday Clock,” First Impressions; “Let’s ReconsiderRussia”; “The Friendships of Sid Drell”). Unlike those who thought we should try to abolish them, President Trump wants to “greatly strengthen and expand our nuclear capacity,” gleefully saying “let it be an arms race” and boasting that we would “outmatch . . . and outlast them all.” To fulfill that promise, he has given the military a huge budget that eviscerates numerous social programs. What is he thinking? We are a planetary tinder box waiting to happen.

According to estimates from the Hubble space telescope, we are one tiny planet in a universe of 2 trillion galaxies, with more than a billion-trillion stars around which millions of planets orbit. There may be life on another planet, but we may never find out if there is a nuclear war. The stockpiles of nuclear weapons could blow our little planet to smithereens and it would be as if we never existed.

It is imperative that we start to think globally instead of nationally. We are all one human race; we are all migrants; we all came out of Africa. There were no borders; borders are arbitrary, usually the result of war. Instead we need to become better neighbors and negotiate with them to rid the planet of these “ticking time bombs.”

Before the turn of the millennium I had a letter published in the New York Times where I wrote, “let us . . . send all nuclear weapons to the sun, itself a nuclear entity.” Scientists got in touch with me to explain how that was indeed a possibility. I also suggested that we enlist the indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest to organize a “potlatch”—a ritual whereby each tribe (now read nation) competes to see who can give away the most of their prized possessions. Then, instead of a worldwide conflagration, we could have a worldwide celebration of our human intelligence and compassion and be a beacon to the universe. 
Carol Delaney 
Emerita, Anthropology
Providence, Rhode Island

‘Incomplete Narrative’

I was impressed and gratified by the article “Let’s Reconsider Russia.” It is a voice of reason that unfortunately rarely gets an airing in the major mass media. The voices of the Hellmans, along with the voices of such individuals as Professor Emeritus Stephen Cohen of Princeton University, former assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy and onetime senior research fellow of the Hoover Institution Paul Craig Roberts, former ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack F. Matlock, Pat Buchanan, and a number of other individuals who advocate engagement with Russia rather than the ever-increasing buildup of tensions that seems to be the contending current policy, should get a wider hearing in the media and in academia. None of them advocate full acceptance of current Russian policies, but urge understanding of Russian positions and finding common grounds for cooperation and de-escalation of conflict flash points on mutually agreeable and beneficial conditions.
Constantin Galskoy, MA ’71, PhD ’77
New Fairfield, Connecticut 

It is one thing to like and respect Russians as individuals and another to buy in to an incomplete narrative that appears to justify their actions from World War II forward. For example, by the authors “jumping forward four decades” after WWII in their piece, the enslavement of Eastern Europe neatly disappears, along with the proven danger of having Russians next door. Directly thereafter, the authors suggest that Ronald Reagan “didn’t help matters” by being unfriendly and starting a “war scare” within the Soviet Union—although it incidentally caused the demise of the Soviet empire and the fall of walls all over Europe.

No, the authors fast-forward again to 2013 and somehow it is the West that is responsible for the Ukrainian distrust of Russia. Our boycott of the Russian celebration of the end of WWII, in protest of the Russian invasion of Crimea, is somehow “painful” to somebody in Russia—particularly Putin—perhaps because it would remind them that the Soviets were not “Allies” at the beginning of the war.

One should recall that just before the beginning of WWII, the Soviet Union signed a secret nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, and in 1939 the Soviets invaded Poland just 16 days after the Germans. At the same time, the Soviet Union also annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Romania. The fact that they then killed some 20,000 captive Polish soldiers, policemen and intelligentsia (plus others) after the partition of Poland with Germany may have been overlooked in the Stanford article, but it and other depredations are still there in the minds and future concerns of all those who have experienced their Russian neighbors since that war. 

Not all of them can be expected to have much sympathy for the Russians and their subsequent troubles with the Nazis, but they all suffered, regardless.
John D. Rummel, PhD ’85
Montreal, Quebec

Are Wearables Bearable?

As a physician, I hold grave concerns about the potential adverse impact of a ”wearable device” that continually monitors one’s health status (“Wearable Devices That Tell You When You're Getting Sick,” Farm Report, March/April). The consequences of real-time collection and review of personal, emotional and physiological data remain uncertain. If it approaches the intensity of the monitors used in the intensive care unit to detect early deterioration of severely injured or unwell patients, the wearer will suffer the constant auditory startles of bell and whistle warnings that militate against tranquility and calm. Numerous false alarms raise blood pressure and anxiety that will contribute to heart attacks, strokes, depression and depreciation of quality of life. Vigilant surveillance risks aggravating chronic stresses or hypochondria. Philosophically, it could also be argued that obsessive measurement distracts from living a mysteriously rich unquantified or unquantifiable life.
Joseph Ting
Brisbane, Australia

Going in Circles

Having lived in England for two years and visited there regularly ever since, I read your article “Campus Traffic Goes in Circles, In a Good Way” (Farm Report, March/April) with interest, and shared it with many of my U.K. friends and colleagues.
Victor Schwartz, MS ’68
Austin, Texas

Cold War Redux

Rarely have I read such tosh as contained in the letter from Myron Gananian (“Einstein Reconsidered,” March/April). To blame “Churchill’s blind, near-mindless hatred of communism” for “the virtually immediate consolidation of the West into the bellicose and belligerent Cold War posture” is, frankly, rubbish.

What did Churchill actually say in his famous speech in Fulton, Mo., on March 5, 1947? “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of ancient states of central and eastern Europe. . . . All these famous cities and populations around them . . . are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high level and increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

In the follow-on words of John Lewis Gaddis, the preeminent historian of the Cold War, “The Russians did not want war, Churchill acknowledged, but they did want ‘the fruits of war and indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.’ Only strength could deter them: ‘If the Western Democracies stand together . . .  no one is likely to molest them. If however they become divided or falter in their duty and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away, then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.’”

A year later, after further Soviet/communist power-grabs in Eastern Europe, President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine with its implied American commitment to assist victims of aggression and intimidation throughout the world. 

There are many other flaws to Gananian’s revisionist view of history. Stalin had already concluded early in 1946 that a lasting peace was only possible when communism triumphed throughout the world. Soviet puppets were in power in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary by 1945. In Poland, Stalin’s decisions during the war (including seizing a third of Poland’s territory) ensured that he had to impose a pro-Soviet regime. As for Churchill, he was out of power from 1945 to 1951 and had nothing, for instance, to do with the formation of NATO in 1949.

Winston Churchill had many flaws, contradicted himself throughout his political career and was often wrong. But on the subject of communism’s world strategy, Stalin personally and the fate of Eastern Europe after World War II, history has entirely vindicated him.

As for Gananian’s claim that no Russian specialist in the U.S. government spoke out about “the hollow, rotting Soviet Union,” that too is nonsense. I attended scores of off-the-record briefings of U.S. correspondents based in Moscow from 1976 to 1979 given weekly by U.S. Ambassador Mac Toon. He never pulled his punches about Soviet deficiencies, and his cables to the State Department and advice to President Carter in person were equally robust.
Robin Knight, MA ’68 
Former Moscow bureau chief for U.S. News & World Report
London, England

The Big Picture

As a Stanford Business School graduate who worked as an international development professional for 30 years, I read your article “The Elevator Pitch” (January/February) with considerable interest. And I honor Bob and Dottie King in their extraordinarily generous gift to the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed). Many of our generation shared the goal of ending the global disparity between haves and have-nots.

In that quest, I resided for 21 years in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. And like Seed, I initially focused on advancing management education.

Over the decades, I gradually came to the same conclusion as that of the article: namely, that foreign aid dollars have had little effect on poverty. To this day, behind deceptive façades of affluence, the larger reality is one of extreme inequality, soul-shattering deprivation, debilitating corruption, environmental devastation, and a breakdown of family and community relationships.

As I became aware of this systemic failure, I went back to a lesson my GSB professors drummed into my head in my student days. 

“When you identify a problem, don’t just look at what is right before your eyes. Look upstream and take in the Big Picture—look at the system failure responsible for the problem you seek to address.”

I realized that the Big Picture problem was a system of policies and institutions—many advanced by the United States, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. That system transferred control of national economies and resources from people seeking to create their living to transnational corporations and other non-national economic interests seeking to suck the wealth out of national economies and poor communities to grow the fortunes of the few. 

Eventually, I realized that the claims of development success advanced by institutions like the World Bank and IMF are based on measures of monetary income that create an illusion of progress while obscuring a deeper truth.

Except for lack of access to immunizations and other basic modern health care measures, most people in low income countries had a reasonable quality of life in their pre-development days when they created their own livelihoods directly from the land. Displaced by development from their traditional livelihoods, they became landless laborers and sweatshop workers separated from family and community living in fetid barracks and slums and working under slavelike conditions for less than subsistence wages.

It would make me proud to see my alma mater become “the leading research university for thinking about the challenges of poverty in the developing world.” It will require stepping back to look upstream at the Big Picture and asking some difficult questions—starting with the stories “The Elevator Pitch” article cites as examples of success. 

Exactly how does supporting the creation of a Nigerian chain of big-box discount stores help to alleviate African poverty? Has Walmart alleviated poverty in the United States? Or contributed to it? 

Does helping a factory egg farm increase its production alleviate poverty? Or does it make one person rich while putting small backyard egg producers out of business? 

How does a TV show focused on the fashionable affluent lives of Africa’s wealthy elite class encourage a country to address the plight of its poor? And what end does a suburban housing project serve that turns scarce farmland into auto-dependent urban sprawl—even if profitable? 

Growing the ranks of multimillionaires and billionaires is not going to eliminate poverty. 

There is no solution to the challenge of poverty in the developing world short of addressing the whole range of social, environmental, economic and governance failures that currently threaten the future of the whole of humanity.

Most business schools have bought into the development models responsible for the system failure and thereby share responsibility for increasingly devastating consequences of a badly misguided development model. Business schools, however, also have the expertise in organizational system analysis and the public credibility to play a leading role in raising public consciousness of the systemic cause of the failure we must now as a global society confront. I sense from the article there may be growing recognition of this need within the Seed community.
David Korten, ’59, MBA ’61, PhD ’68
Bainbridge Island, Washington

In proposing to lift people out of poverty, the Stanford Business School Seed program states a worthy goal. However, as described in Stanford,its implementation appears focused on making entrepreneurs successful. This may “trickle down” to improving the lot of employees, but it will also export the economic inequality that poisons American society.

A better model would have been aimed at establishing successful cooperatives. If, for example, the Nigerian cassava farmers mentioned in the article were enabled to form a cooperative which owned its food starch factory and paid management to operate it, they could share the earnings instead of simply making the owner prosperous.
James R. Madison, ’53, LLB ’59 
Menlo Park, California

Medium and Message

I thoroughly enjoyed the piece by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, ’05, “Attitudes vs. Actions” (January/February). The subject matter was captivating because of its human-centered topic but also for its renewed relevance, given the current anti-immigration posture from the White House.

I also want to specifically congratulate Fetter-Vorm and the magazine for the choice of medium through which the article was presented: I feel comics (or graphic narration) is an underappreciated medium, and I was very impressed at how effectively it was used to deliver Fetter-Vorm’s message combining text and visual elements.

Thank you for making this choice!
Jaime Batiz, MS ’98, Engr. ’99
 Campbell, California

Another Memorable Evening

Reading “My Evening with Einstein” (January/February) reminded me of an experience I had nearly 20 years ago. I had recently joined a European biotech firm and was asked to dine with a distinguished member of its scientific advisory board, Professor Gustav Born, to get his views on the company’s lead drug candidate.

Dr. Born was well into his 70s and spoke with a slight German accent. One comment led to another, when he disclosed that he was the son of Max Born, the Nobel laureate, physicist and close friend of Albert Einstein. Well, as you can imagine, that was the end of the discussion on the drug lead and we spent the evening discussing his past.

Dr. Born entertained and mesmerized my wife and me with stories of his very early childhood in Berlin, surrounded on a daily basis by Albert Einstein and a never-ending procession of the leading scientific brains of the era. For a physics major like myself, the list of names that Gustav reeled off was particularly awesome—Heisenberg, Pauli, Fermi, Teller, Wigner, Planck et al. He mentioned a photograph that was taken with more than 20 eventual Nobel Prize winners at his Berlin home, which apparently was the meeting place of the scientific brains of Germany. Gustav also described his early recollection of Einstein playing with him and his electric train.

Unfortunately, all this came to an end in the early ’30s, as scientists fled Germany amid increasing persecution of Jews. Born, with his family, eventually ended up in the U.K. Although they never met again, Born and Einstein continued to correspond with each other till Einstein’s death. This correspondence has been published.

Gustav dwelt on his father’s pacifist views and the strain created on his relationship with Einstein over the letter to FDR that Einstein signed to support the development of the atom bomb. Max Born apparently never accepted Einstein’s rationale for this action.

Gustav Born is 95 now, living in the London area. I doubt if we’ll meet again, but I shall certainly never forget my most memorable dinner with him. Not as good as meeting Einstein, but a very close second as far as I’m concerned.
Laszlo Eger, MBA ’73
Boston, Massachusetts

Thinking Small

I find myself bemused by the article (“Should We Lose the Lecture?” March/April). As a graduate student at the School of Education in the late 1960s, I had the good fortune to study with three faculty members who were all doing cutting-edge research on small group instruction. Elizabeth Cohen focused on how gender and ethnic diversity affected student learning, and Robert Koff and Frank Hawkinshire were deeply involved in training prospective high school teachers to use small groups as part of their pedagogy. In my own subsequent work as a teacher and school administrator, I have always found that small group instruction, whether with fifth graders, school principals or doctoral students, markedly improved both engagement and learning. So it’s good to know that 50 years later the sciences are catching up.
James H. Lytle, EdD ’70
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

About Russia

Dorothie and Martin Hellman’s argument that America needs to adopt a more understanding and compassionate approach to Russia is startlingly uninformed and idealistic (“Let’s Reconsider Russia,” March/April). Russia’s historical relations with the West, varied as they have been, by no means justify its current actions and policies. And far from making “provocative digs” at Russia, countries along its western borders, including neutral Finland and Lukashenko-ruled Belarus, are implementing defensive measures to ward off Russia’s physical and virtual aggressiveness. That they have good reason to is beyond doubt: Russia’s incursions on the sovereignty and integrity of other nations have been on display not only in Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and Georgia, but in Estonia and Moldova.

Moving “beyond fear, anger, and hate,” as the Hellmans urge, has to be based on a full picture of reality. Putin may not be the devil incarnate, as they say, but he is undoubtedly a shrewd and calculating leader determined to restore his post-Soviet country’s global eminence at any cost. His pursuit of that goal poses a direct and immediate threat to Western democracy. If that seems too strong a statement to make, let’s keep attuned to where the congressional and FBI investigations of Russian influence on the U.S. presidential election and its winner lead in the weeks and months ahead.
U. Pasicznyk, MA ’71
Toronto, Ontario

The article on Russia by the Hellmans relates interesting history, but it misdirects, as in: “I’m not saying Russia is never wrong. . . . we’re not always right and Putin is not the devil incarnate.”

Remarkably manipulative. Putin is a past KGB agent who’s taken over the reins of one of the world’s greatest countries, polluted it environmentally and politically, and converted its resources for international influence and to cash for himself and friends.

Putin is simply a murderous dictator who has added 17 years to the denial of the Russian people their human rights and representative government—a history extending back beyond the time of the tsars.

The mystery here is why this article was written, and more mysterious: why Stanford published it, when so much could be said in support of the Russian people and their seemingly eternal suffering under “bad dudes,” whether devils incarnate or not.
Alexander Cannara, Engr. ’66, MS ’74, PhD ’76
 Menlo Park, California 

I note two articles that address an issue that is central to the theme of several of my self-published “Bannana” books (available on Amazon and Kindle): the future relationship of America and Russia.

A classmate, Phil Taubman, ’70, writes about Sidney Drell (whom I was fortunate to meet at Grove House in 1968) and his friendship with Andrei Sakharov, the courageous physicist, whose home in the closed, secret city of Sarov I had the chance to visit when I was invited to speak at a conference there in the summer of 2002, as described in chapter 11 of Bannana in Russia. In Phil’s article (“The Friendships of Sid Drell,” March/April) I learned that it may well have been Drell who was the recipient of Sakharov’s “forbidden letter” warning of disaster for humanity unless there was some “convergence” between the Soviet system and that of the West. That letter, once published, inspired the nuclear test ban movement.

The article entitled “Let’s Reconsider Russia” (March/April) poses the existential question of how we move forward today, in an environment much different from the one in 2002, when we were (seemingly) headed for “convergence.” Nefarious Russian involvement is today suspected under every rock. How to move this dynamic in a constructive direction?

What if Russia were recognized as the source of the world’s first effective treatment for Alzheimer’s, an ailment that is threatening to bankrupt the West but has a limited market in Russia, where people die too young? There is increasing evidence that the above will be discovered to be true. What has been my reward for having explored these turbulent waters? I am a convicted “embezzler” in Finland, for the “crime” of having paid myself a salary as CEO of the company I founded in Finland (my father’s country) and ran for over three years before being removed in a tale that is stranger than fiction and told in Bannana’s Crime and Punishment: Justice in Finland.

The effective commercialization of this technology in the West would be a high-profile example of a more generally applicable business model (described in Bannana in Russia) I believe can contribute to “convergence.”

In his president’s column (“Our Unlimited Potential,” March/April), Marc Tessier-Lavigne mentions the 200,000 living alumni ready to contribute to solving “still-untreatable illnesses.” I am doing my part. Can Stanford help? Specifically, I am seeking the help of alumni interested in supporting my efforts to raise the visibility of a very promising compound currently off the Western radar in secret clinical trials in Kazakhstan, to which I have legal claims.

Looking forward to hearing from interested parties.
Martti Vallila, ’71
Boston, Massachusetts

I suppose the authors believe that WWII could have been avoided had we shown more compassion for Germany’s travails under the Treaty of Versailles and Hitler’s concerns about Jewish preeminence in German arts and sciences. If a few foreign trips and patching up a failing marriage are sufficient to qualify the authors to publish an article on international affairs, then why not dump the Stanford political science department?
Anthonie Voogd, ’59
Ojai, California

Science, Religion and War

There were two letters in the March/April issue (“Einstein Reconsidered”) in response to the article “My Evening with Einstein” (January/February). Both dealt with the elements of war.

Something totally different stood out to me. When asked “if he thought the world would be a better or worse place without religion,” he replied (as a scientist) that “he saw no need for religion and science to be in conflict with each other.” His comment reminded me of something Mary Baker Eddy wrote in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: “It has been said, and truly, that Christianity must be Science, and Science must be Christianity, else one or the other is false and useless; but neither is unimportant or untrue, and they are alike in demonstration. This proves the one to be identical with the other.”

Einstein also “reiterated his belief that the elimination of national sovereignty (his advocacy of world government) was imperative if we were to avoid the catastrophe of mass destruction.” To me, this meant there has to be a power—life, truth, love principle, mind, etc.—that governs the whole universe, instead of human mortal beings.
Jackie Leonard-Dimmick
Atherton, California

‘Nuances of Belief’

I welcome William Pahland’s letter (“Story Suggestion,” March/April) suggesting that the magazine do an in-depth and unbiased article on religious Muslims’ attitudes toward non-Muslims. I suppose the question is, what kind of Muslim: Sunni? Shia? Sufi? Wahhabi? And Muslims from where? West Africa? Malaysia? Lebanon? And toward what kind of non-Muslims: Atheists? Catholics? Southern Baptists?

As a Quaker having lived in all the above Muslim regions, I’d like to see a little more appreciation of the nuances of belief, both Muslim and Christian. Just as China was humiliated by Europeans for a century, so Muslims have struggled to regain their independence and respect.
Linda Agerbak, ’58
Arlington, Massachusetts

Memorable

Though my awareness and response is tardy, it was with real sadness that I read of Bruce Cass's passing (Farewells, March/April). Though I knew him only briefly and casually through wine tasting, his engaging personality and tremendous enthusiasm were memorable. He was at once a terrific teacher, charming raconteur and genial host.

After I took his class, around 1976 or 1977, he appointed me “Vice President, Stanford Winetasting Club,” with free tastings for the term—not because of my wine knowledge but because I could manage a mailing list punch card deck and produce printed mailing labels. Not common then.
Bob Wieting, PhD ’79
Simi Valley, California

Prisoners

In your January/February History Corner (Farm Report), there was an item entitled “Japanese Professor Interned at Tule Lake.” The article stated that “After an initial stay at Santa Anita Racetrack in Southern California, Ichihashi and his wife were transferred to Tule Lake in Northern California.” The article makes it sound like Professor Ichihashi and his wife chose to stay in some hotel. They were put in horse stalls, prisoners under armed guard, and then were transferred to concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire fences, with watchtowers and armed guards who were ordered to shoot anyone who went outside the fences. As it was taught in schools, the incarceration of Japanese immigrants and their American-born children was due to wartime hysteria. It was not. Prejudice and discrimination against immigrants from Asia coming to the West Coast in the 1800s was rampant. Many laws were passed barring Asian immigrants from becoming citizens, from marrying whites and from owning land. White supremacist and agricultural organizations like Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West felt threatened by Japanese farmers, and Pearl Harbor was the perfect opportunity to get rid of them.
Maiko Emi Adachi, ’06
Chicago, Illinois