Lincoln inspired courage in wartime Colorado governor

A review by ISBA Bar News editor Stephen Anderson of “The Principled Politician: The Ralph Carr Story,” by Denver television journalist Adam Schrager (Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colo., 2008).

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A fervent admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Carr would turn for inspiration in tough times to his treasured collection of books and articles about the 16th president.

As governor of Colorado at the onset of World War II, Carr wasn’t afraid to say what he meant, to mean what he said, and to list his telephone number in the city directory.

The crisis that sent him often to the solitude of his Lincoln memorabilia, and eventually precipitated the end of his career in politics, was the government’s decision to intern Japanese residents of the West Coast.

As fears grew in Americans and threats increased against fellow citizens who happened to be of Japanese heritage, Carr worked on his 1942 Lincoln Day speech in the context of what the Great Emancipator might have done in a similar situation.

“We know Lincoln today as a man of strength as well as of tenderness,” he wrote, “and we know that in his efforts to be sympathetic, to be fair and to be just with his fellow men, he often violated the human rules set up by those who called themselves strong.”

Executive Order 9066, which unleashed the governor’s intemperate outrage, arrived on Feb. 19, 1942, by telegram from the White House. It gave the military virtually unlimited authority to remove anybody from a designated security area.

Carr inferred that the targets were anybody of Japanese descent. Subsequent rumors said 3,500 of the evacuees might be sent from California to Colorado.

His response was a speech that author Adam Schrager says would define Carr’s career. In it, he asked for justice and fairness to German, Italian and Japanese citizens who “are as loyal to American institutions as you or I” and have no connection to enemies of the U.S.

“The world’s great melting pot is peopled by the descendants of every nation in the globe,” he continued. “It is not fair for the rest of us to segregate the people from one or two or three nations and to brand them as unpatriotic or disloyal.”

Carr urged Coloradoans to accept evacuees, if so ordered, and resolve ensuing problems intelligently. “We are at war. We must realize that… Let us all be good soldiers.”

But the governor was adamant in his belief that the U.S. Constitution did not allow American citizens to be incarcerated only because they had been born to Japanese parents.

“The suggestion that an American citizen should be placed under restraint without charge of misconduct and a hearing is unthinkable,” he wrote to the U.S. attorney.

In a letter to Christian Century magazine, Carr warned that “If these people are not to be accorded all the rights and privileges the Constitution gives them, then those same rights and privileges may be denied to you and me six months from now for another just as poor reason.”

Frustrated, and at times disillusioned, Carr opted to run for the U.S. Senate in November 1942. He was the only Republican defeated in that election, although by a mere half of one percent.

Schrager writes that Carr’s “stand on ‘the Japanese question’ had kept him from Congress. It was his forcefulness and principle that had even kept it close.”

He believed in what Lincoln said about justice. “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”

By 1950, however, the negative issue from 1942 had become positive for Carr. Although hampered by diabetes and a foot infection, he won the Republican gubernatorial primary overwhelmingly on Sept. 12.

Within a month, he had died at age 62 from a combination of afflictions.

In December 1999, Ralph Carr was chosen Colorado’s “Person of the Century” by the Denver Post. The vindicating editorial summary concluded:

“What he did was take a stand. In one of America’s darkest hours, he defended humanity and decency, a move that cost him a career and sent ripples of goodwill rolling through Colorado for years.”

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Adam Schrager, formerly of Evanston, has a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Northwestern University. He covers politics for KUSA-TV, an NBC affiliate. He is the son of John Marshall Law School Prof. Leonard Jay Schrager, a past president of the Chicago Bar Association.