Reply #66: my aunt had an interesting experience -- when she was my age ... [View All]

[Lisa]

... she had a chance to meet with a famous Canadian progressive (J.S. Woodworth). She told me that she greatly feared being disappointed ... she had admired him for many years, and was worried that he might brush her off or say something about the internment that would show he was like so many other political leaders at the time ("a sad necessity, had to be done", etc.). As it turned out, it wasn't like that at all -- even though she was so much younger, he was very approachable, sympathetic, and not a bit condescending.

Reading documents from the time, I now realize that she wasn't just experiencing jitters -- Woodworth and his colleagues were really torn about the internment issue. Even some Canadian leftists were deeply suspicious of "ethnic communities", and those who weren't afraid or bigoted, were concerned that appearing to be "Jap-lovers" (as the mainstream Vancouver newspapers put it) would sink any chance of the CCF gaining political power in BC. The CCF really had nothing to gain, and everything to lose (at least in the short term) by opposing the internment, because Japanese-Canadians didn't get the vote until after the war.

I try to remind myself that it's not the only time that people were let down by politicians they'd supported ... Jewish Americans and Canadians tended to vote for the Democrats/Liberals, and ironically this might have led the politicians to believe that since they already had a lock on that particular constituency, therefore there was no need to make an effort to appeal to them if it would cost support from other groups (e.g. by lifting immigration restrictions in the 1930s). And a lot of Muslim Americans voted for Bush in 2000 ... apart from a few photo-ops and halfhearted platitudes, he didn't exactly throw himself into defending their civil liberties and protecting them from his riled-up "base".