We know the story. Part of it, anyways.

It was 1957, three years after the United States Supreme Court ruled that ‘separate but equal’ public schools were inherently unequal. The court’s Brown versus Board of Education decision meant that America’s public-school systems had to stop segregating schools by race.

Racially segregated schools were a cornerstone of the brutal Jim Crow system of government-sanctioned discrimination and segregation that was disfiguring America’s southern states. Racial discrimination was rife in the rest of the country, too, but outside the south it lacked the full-throated support of state and local government.

Opposition to school desegregation was widespread throughout the south. Segregationists – a euphemistic term for virulent racists – bitterly opposed any attempts to put black and white children in the same classroom. But the law was the law, and many school districts were making at least token efforts to comply.

The Little Rock, Arkansas school district was one such district. Though their half-hearted desegregation plan was designed to delay the process as long as possible and to severely limit the number of black children who would actually sit in class with white children, it did allow for a handful of black students to attend Little Rock’s Central High School in the fall of 1957.

So, on the evening of September 3, 1957, after three years of resistance and delay, nine black teenagers, handpicked by the Board of Education, freshly scrubbed and almost comically naive about the reception that awaited them, readied themselves to enter Little Rock’s Central High School for their first day of classes. Later, they would become known as the Little Rock Nine, but as they waited anxiously that night, they were simply nine nervous students. They were Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Melba Patillo, Minniejean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, Gloria Ray, Carlotta Walls, Terrence Roberts, and Jefferson Thomas.

Minniejean Brown, then sixteen, recalled their anticipation during an interview years later. “The nine of us were not especially political,” said Brown. “We thought, we can walk to Central, it’s a huge, beautiful school, this is gonna be great.”

It wasn’t great.

The black students’ first attempt at entering the school was turned back by a jeering mob of hundreds of white supremacists and nearly 300 hostile Arkansas National Guardsmen. The Guardsmen had been posted to the school by Arkansas governor Orval Faubus not to protect the black students from the mob, although opposition to desegregation of the high school had been building for weeks, but to physically prevent the students from entering the building. A week later, with the Guardsmen replaced by city and state police, a second attempt was thwarted when a larger mob of more than 1,000 howling racists, many armed, broke through police lines and threatened to drag the students out of the building, after the nine students had been spirited in through a side door.

That fiasco prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send 1,000 highly-disciplined paratroopers of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to enforce the federal court order that Little Rock’s schools must be desegregated.

Thus, as history records, on September 25, 1957, escorted by U.S. Army soldiers, the nine black students attended classes at Central High School for the first time.  In many accounts, that’s the end of the story. A federal court ordered desegregation. Segregationists defied the court’s orders. Eisenhower sent federal troops. Black students went to school. Crisis averted. High-fives all around.

Except that wasn’t the end of the story. For the nine black students, it was just the beginning. What followed was eight months of unceasing harassment, threats, verbal abuse and physical attacks by white students in a vicious campaign that was coordinated by their parents and other adults and was tolerated – and in some cases encouraged – by school officials.

Despite soldiers stationed inside the school – 101^st Airborne paratroopers for two months, then federalized National Guardsmen for the remainder of the school year – the black students faced daily assaults and harassment.  They were continually tripped, kicked, slapped, shoved, insulted, and threatened by white students. Flaming wads of paper were tossed on the black girls. Melba Patillo had acid thrown in her face and only quick action by her soldier escort saved her eyesight. Elizabeth Eckford was stabbed by sharpened pencils. Minniejean Brown had food dumped on her in the cafeteria at least three times.

Soldier escorts were forbidden to touch harassing students and school officials refused to take action unless an assault occurred within their immediate view. The most aggressive students quickly realized that they could terrorize the black students with impunity. While some teachers stopped verbal and physical assaults in class, others did not.

It was a terrifying experience that shocked the nine students, even though they had been warned that there would be opposition. “I figured, I’m a nice person. Once they get to know me, they’ll see I’m okay. We’ll be friends,” said Brown.

In fact, the campaign of intimidation had begun months before the school year started.  In 1956, aware that the school board was creating a plan for integration, Little Rock residents formed the Capital Citizens Council (CCC), a local offshoot of the White Citizens Council that was resisting desegregation in Mississippi. The CCC launched an anti-integration media campaign, organized rallies, and tried to pressure the school board to drop the desegregation plan. CCC statements charged that the NAACP, which supported integration, was an agent of international communism, as if only communists might want their children to receive a decent education. In August, 1957, less than a month before school was to begin, Little Rock segregationists formed the Central High Mother’s League in an attempt to present a less-threatening image than the CCC and its White Citizen’s Council model. In truth, fewer than 25 percent of Women’s League members were actually the mothers of Central High students, but all of the group’s members were adamantly opposed to desegregation of the public schools. The Mother’s League filed anti-integration lawsuits, pressured pubic officials, held public rallies, and organized a school walkout.

As the reality of court-ordered desegregation grew nearer and as public opposition increased, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus saw an opportunity to resurrect his fading political career. Until then considered a moderate Southern politician on race – though moderate is a relative term, as he was in no way an advocate of anything remotely resembling social, political, or economic equality for blacks – Faubus quickly assumed a leading role in opposition to school desegregation. His actions would prompt federal intervention and would prolong the crisis for many months, damaging the city’s reputation and leading to the closure of all Little Rock high schools for a year, but in the end, it would also result in his re-election to a record six terms as Arkansas governor.

In the weeks before the new school year was to start, segregationists targeted the families of the black students who were planning to attend Central High School. Families received threatening phone calls and visits at their homes from members of the Capital Citizen’s Council hinting darkly of trouble if their children attempted to enter Central.  Other calls were made to black community leaders, to encourage them to dissuade any black children from attending Central, warning of dire consequences for the entire black community if desegregation succeeded. While more than 500 black students lived in Central High’s attendance area, just eighty expressed a desire to attend the school. After interviewing all of the volunteers, the school board selected 17 to be the first group to integrate the school. But when they were told that they would not be able to participate in any extracurricular activities, and their parents were threatened with loss of their jobs, eight of the 17 elected to remain at the local black high school, leaving nine to be the first blacks in a school with nearly 2,000 white students.

None of the nine black students saw themselves as pioneers at the start of their ordeal. They had volunteered to go to Central for the same reasons white students might have volunteered: it was close to home, it was well-equipped, it had a sterling reputation. They only wanted a chance for a better education. None of the nine had any special desire to attend school with white students. Having lived all their lives in the oppressive atmosphere of the segregated south, they knew virtually nothing about white people.  “I really thought that if we went to school together, the white kids are going to be like me, curious and thoughtful, and we can just cut all this segregation stuff out,” Brown recalled.

At the time, Central High School was the most prestigious high school in Arkansas. In addition to local funding, the school received $1.5 million each year from the state to maintain programs. Meanwhile, Horace Mann – the nearby high school that had been built for black students – received no state funding. Its programs were paid for by donations. Horace Mann was actually a good school, with an outstanding faculty and a fine reputation. The school was a source of pride in Little Rock’s black community. But the black high school offered fewer classes than Central, had fewer activities, had less laboratory equipment, and relied on the white school’s hand-me-downs for textbooks, equipment, and athletic uniforms. Of course, this was the pattern throughout the south, and in much of the north as well, and it was one of the reasons that the Supreme Court had ruled that separate was not equal.

Each of the nine black students had been selected based on a careful review of their academic record, their temperament, and an interview with the school superintendent. They all came from stable, middle class families. Their parents were professionals – teachers, preachers, nurses, business owners. The students themselves were studious and well-mannered, regular churchgoers who planned to go to college. Most of all, they were unlikely to lash out violently at harassment or abuse.

And for the most part, they didn’t.

For the first two months of the school year, the 101^st Airborne remained in Little Rock. Soldiers were stationed in the school and each black student was assigned an escort. While the presence of troops deterred some violence against the blacks, bolder, more committed segregationists soon recognized that troops would not protect the black students from verbal and physical harassment.

As a result, threats, assaults and harassment against the nine started immediately and slowly increased as community anger at the dispatch of federal troops rose. Eisenhower himself wanted the paratroopers withdrawn as soon as possible, and school and military officials quickly began reducing the visibility and numbers of soldiers in the building.

For the beleaguered nine, each reduction in troops meant an increase in harassment and attacks.  At Thanksgiving, the 101^st was withdrawn completely, and the disciplined paratroopers were replaced with barely trained and mostly indifferent Arkansas National Guardsmen. Attacks against the nine quickly spiked.

Not all of the white students participated in the campaign of harassment and assaults. It is likely that no more than 200 white students actually carried out attacks. A few white students made friendly gestures, but most had been intimidated by hardcore segregationist warnings not to show any kindness to the nine black students.

Week after week, the nine black students faced the abuse and hostility of hundreds of openly racist students and the cold indifference of many hundreds more. Teachers and administrators who could have controlled the offenders looked the other way. Segregationists interpreted each reduction in security as a victory, and a dizzying pattern emerged: as security measures were slowly reduced, attacks against the nine correspondingly rose. In February, Minniejean Brown was expelled after several confrontations with white students, all of which were started by whites. This “victory” further incited the segregationist fringe, as they taunted the others with the chant, “One down, eight to go.”

Yet the remaining eight soldiered on. Whatever hopes or dreams they had once entertained about being accepted had been long forgotten. Now, they were warriors. They fought back – not with kicks or pushes or hate-filled rants – but with courage and a steely determination to prevail. They drew strength from their families and their community as they now fully recognized the importance of what they were doing.

But the price they paid was harrowing. Their families were constantly harassed. Each night, their phones rang with threatening calls and all-too-often rocks were thrown through their windows. The police were no help. After decades of brutality at the hands of law enforcement, southern blacks knew never to call on police for assistance. At least two of the parents were fired from their jobs because of their children’s involvement in desegregation and at least one parent had to leave town to find work as a brick mason. As desegregation continued, some whites took out their frustrations on other blacks, and some in the black community blamed the nine and their families for the loss of their jobs and the loss of social services that they had relied on.

Eventually, the year came to an end. Though many traditional senior activities were cancelled because of the continued threat of violence, a graduation ceremony was held, and Ernest Green, one of the nine, became the first black graduate of Central High School.

But even the end of the school year wasn’t the end of the story.  Lawsuits hoping to halt the desegregation effort continued through the summer and into the next year. When the courts refused to halt desegregation, Governor Faubus closed all three public high schools in the city. The schools remained closed for the entire 1958-1959 academic year. In September 1958, a special election was held in Little Rock asking voters if integration should continue. Voters overwhelmingly opposed integration, 129,470 against, 7,561 for.

With all public high schools closed, more than 3,600 students were left to find their own education. More than 750 white students enrolled at a newly established private school. Many other students left town to live with relatives or friends to continue their eduction. Because of the unrelenting stream of death threats against the Nine, the NAACP arranged for several of the students to find temporary homes in other cities.

When public schools reopened for the 1959-1960 school year, only two of the Little Rock Nine returned to Central High School. The rest had graduated from other schools or had moved away. In the end, all of the Nine left the south, and though all were scarred by their experiences, all went on to successful careers.

Little Rock’s public schools were not fully integrated until 1972.

Today, the results of the Brown decision are mixed. The outrageous resource disparity between black and white schools has been largely eliminated and black academic performance has greatly improved. But white performance has also improved, so a large racial achievement gap remains. Meanwhile, white flight and segregationist housing policies have reversed early gains in school integration.

October 24, 2020

“Somewhere along the line, [staying at Central High] became an obligation. I realized that what we were doing was not for ourselves”

–Elizabeth Eckford, one of the “Little Rock Nine”

“Black folks aren’t born expecting segregation, prepared from day one to follow its confining rules. Nobody presents you with a handbook when you’re teething and says, ‘Here’s how you must behave as a second-class citizen.’ Instead, the humiliating expectations and traditions of segregation creep over you, slowly stealing a teaspoonful of your self-esteem each day.”

 – Melba Patillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry, Simon Pulse, New York, 1995.

Sources:

Beals, Melba Patillo; Warriors Don’t Cry, Washington Square Press; New York, 1994.

Beals, Melba Patillo; I Will Not Fear; Revell; Grand Rapids, MI; 2018.

Breen, Daniel; Elizabeth Eckford Recounts “Hell” of Little Rock Central High School Desegregation; UALPublicRadio.org; January 30, 2020; https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/post/elizabeth-eckford-recounts-hell-little-rock-central-high-school-desegregation  Retrieved 5.27.2020.

Chafe, William H.; Gavins, Raymond; Korstad, Robert, editors; Remembering Jim Crow; The New Press; New Yprk; 2001.

Harvey, Lucy; A Member of the Little Rock Nine Discusses Her Struggle to Attend Central High; Smithsonianmag.com; April 22, 2016; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/member-little-rock-nine-discusses-her-struggle-attend-central-high-180958870/  Retrieved 5.27.2020

Honey, Michael K.; Little Rock at Fifty; HistoryNet.com; originally published in the October 2007 issue of American History; https://www.historynet.com/little-rock-50.htm Retrieved 5.27.2020.

Margolick, David; Through a Lens Darkly; VanityFair.com; https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/09/littlerock200709 Retrieved 5.27.2020.

Williams, Juan; Eyes on the Prize; Penguin Books; New York; 1987.

Choices People Made: The Little Rock Nine and Their Parents; Facing History website; https://www.facinghistory.org/for-educators/educator-resources/resource-collections/choosing-to-participate/choices-people-made-little-rock-nine-and-their-parents  Retrieved 5.27.2020.

History of Little Rock Public Schools Desegregation: Internet Archive;  https://web.archive.org/web/20061217140900/http://www.centralhigh57.org/1957-58.htm Retrieved 5.27.2020.

‘They Were Hanging Effigies,’ Little Rock Nine Activist Recalls Hate Campaign to Block Desegregation; RT.com; https://www.rt.com/usa/404300-little-rock-nine-anniversary/ Retrieved 5.27.2020.

It was a New Deal program that promoted old-fashioned housing discrimination and caused lasting damage to individuals and urban neighborhoods.

The 1934 National Housing Act revived the nation’s struggling construction industry and provided improved housing for tens of millions of Americans. Later, the Act – and the thirty-year mortgages it spawned – set the stage for America’s post-war housing boom. But the Act also encouraged redlining, a then-legal yet highly-discriminatory practice that denied mortgages to residents of thousands of urban neighborhoods. The results were predictably catastrophic. Today, fifty years after redlining was made illegal, its victims, their descendants, and the communities where they lived still suffer from its effects.

Redlining was the denial of financial services – including mortgages and insurance policies – to residents of targeted districts. Without access to federally guaranteed loans, residents of redlined neighborhoods were trapped in declining areas where jobs were scarce and industrial pollution was rampant. The practice denied them the opportunity to build equity and wealth, a generational penalty that is still being paid.

Redlining wasn’t specifically intended to destroy neighborhoods, though it was instrumental in the destruction of many. Its purpose was to protect mortgage issuers and the federal government from the risk of non-repayment.  But rather than require lenders to carefully assess the financial status of each loan applicant, the government allowed financial institutions to deny loans collectively to all residents of designated districts. Worse, the federal government actually laid the groundwork for redlining by developing the maps that labeled some neighborhoods as safe for loans, and others as highly risky.

Federal ‘residential security maps’ were created for more than 200 American cities by the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC). These maps assigned each of a city’s neighborhoods one of four ratings: Type A – typically affluent neighborhoods on the edges of the urban area; Type B – less affluent, but still desirable neighborhoods; Type C – declining neighborhoods; and Type D –  lower income neighborhoods, hazardous for lenders. On the maps prepared by HOLC, Type D areas were outlined in red – thus, redlining.

Ratings were assigned based on demographics and other characteristics. Banks were eager to make loans in Type A and B neighborhoods. Some loans were made in Type C neighborhoods, but the terms were harsher than loans in better neighborhoods. Virtually no loans were made in Type D areas.

Neighborhoods with measurable numbers of African-American, Jewish, Asian, and Hispanic residents were nearly always assigned Type D. Not only were residents of these areas denied loans, but the rating itself lowered neighborhood property values. The fact that African-American residents caused a neighborhood to be redlined gave whites yet another reason to keep African-Americans out of their communities through zoning regulations, restrictive housing covenants, and, at times, threats of violence.

Redlining didn’t create racially segregated cities. By the mid-1930’s, African-Americans were already confined to inner city ghettos by prejudice and fear. But redlining gave housing discrimination a veneer of legality, if not moral authority, and it provided banks with a justification for discriminatory practices that effectively trapped African-Americans in overcrowded, decaying slums where they were easily exploited by landlords who charged excessive rents and made few repairs.

Redlining also denied African-Americans the benefits of federal housing policy from the 1930’s to the 1970’s, a period when the nation’s rate of home ownership jumped from under 50 percent to almost 70 percent. By the late 1950’s, fewer than two percent of FHA-guaranteed loans had been issued to minorities.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 ended legal redlining. But the effects of the practice are still felt, said Devonta’ Dickey, Advocacy and Engagement Coordinator for Cleveland Neighborhood Progress. Redlining and other forms of housing discrimination are significant factors in the disparity in wealth between whites and the victims of redlining.

In Cleveland, areas redlined on the HOLC’s 1940 map correspond almost exactly with areas that today suffer the highest rates of poverty, poor health, disinvestment, foreclosures, and toxic releases, Dickey said.

Discriminatory practices in Cuyahoga County didn’t end when redlining was made illegal. Research conducted in 2019 by the Western Reserve Land Conservancy’s Thriving Communities Program found that African American borrowers seeking home purchase loans are denied more than twice as often as Caucasian borrowers. Further, high income blacks are denied loans more often than moderate- and middle-income Caucasians.

February 28, 2020

References:

https://livingnewdeal.org/glossary/national-housing-act-1934/

https://livingnewdeal.org/glossary/national-housing-act-1934/

https://www.wrlandconservancy.org/articles/2019/07/31/housingmarketstudy/

Images:

Top image: House from redlined neighborhood in Cleveland, 1962; Cleveland Public Library

HOLC map: https://ohiohome.org/news/blog/october-2018/predictingevictions.aspx

It could have been the greatest rescue in maritime history.

Immediately upon receiving the distress signal, Captain Arthur Rostron ordered his ship to race to the aid of the stricken vessel. His crew rushed to ready their ship to receive two thousand survivors of the sinking passenger liner. Lifeboats were swung out; huge urns of hot coffee and soup were prepared; medical instruments were readied; nets, ladders and lights were rigged along the sides of the ship; and thousands of blankets were pulled from storage and piled for quick distribution.

On the steamship’s bridge, Captain Rostron measured the distance to the sinking vessel. At best speed, they could be there in four hours.

But the passengers and crew of the RMS Titanic didn’t have four hours. And by the time Captain Rostron’s RMS Carpathia arrived on scene, Titanic was gone and 1,517 people were dead – drowned or frozen in the icy sea.

Carpathia rescued 710 survivors of the Titanic from the lifeboats that morning. But the rescue effort – conducted with exacting professionalism, compassion, and heroism – was overshadowed by the tragic deaths of so many others.

Like every disaster, the loss of Titanic and the deaths of more than 1500 persons were the result of a chain of circumstances, errors, misjudgments, and bad luck. Anywhere along the chain a different decision might have changed the outcome. Even after the ship had been built with watertight compartments that failed to reach the main deck; even after she was provided with a grossly insufficient number of lifeboats; even after she had rushed headlong into waters known to be harboring icebergs; even after the lookouts failed to spot the looming white mountain; even after the ship’s desperate last-second course change proved just enough to tear open multiple watertight compartments; and even after lifeboats were launched with empty seats; final catastrophe might have been averted.

If Carpathia had been twenty-five miles nearer, or if SS Californian, which was nearer, had received Titanic’s frantic distress calls, rescue ships might have arrived on scene before Titanic sank. Titanic would then be an ironic footnote – the unsinkable ship that sank – but she would not be remembered today as one of the greatest maritime disasters in history.

But the chain remained intact. Catastrophe wasn’t averted. No rescue ships arrived before fifteen hundred people were forced into the freezing water, where they paid the price for the errors of others: faulty design, overconfidence, inattention, and poor planning.

Captain Rostron, his crew, and the Carpathia’s passengers did everything in their power to save the passengers and crew of Titanic. They treated those that they could save with generosity and kindness during the four-day voyage to New York.

After her rescue mission, Carpathia resumed her passenger service on the Atlantic. Taken up for war service at the outbreak of World War I, she was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine in July 1918 with a loss of five crew members. 275 persons were rescued.

April 14, 2019

On President’s Day, let’s take a moment to remember the six American presidents who also served in the U. S. Navy.

Of the 45 men who have been president of the United States, six had previously served as officers in the Navy: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter. All served during World War II, although Carter did not graduate from the Naval Academy until June of 1946, ten months after the war ended.

As naval officers, they had a variety of experiences. All except Carter served in the Pacific theater during the war. Kennedy and Bush won medals for their actions in combat. Johnson did too, but he was recognized for his actions as an observer. Kennedy, Nixon and Ford all volunteered to leave stateside assignments where they could have remained. As a prospective pilot, Bush was headed for combat the day he enlisted. Johnson’s time overseas was brief, as he was a member of Congress before entering active duty in 1941 and in July 1942 President Roosevelt barred members of Congress from serving in the military. Carter entered the Naval Academy in 1943, when there was no reason to think that the fighting would end before he would graduate.

As presidents, they were something of a mixed bag.  Three were democrats, three were republicans. Although Kennedy generally gets good marks, none of the naval veterans are typically included in the top tier of U. S. presidents. Johnson and Nixon achieved significant successes, but those successes were overshadowed by catastrophic failures later on. All six left office prematurely. Kennedy, of course, was assassinated. Johnson declined to run for a second term. Nixon resigned, and Ford, Bush, and Carter all lost bids for re-election.

Though unable to win second terms, Ford, Bush, and Carter are generally remembered as dedicated and honorable public servants who damaged their own re-election chances by taking politically unpopular actions that they believed were in the best interests of the United States.

Gerald Ford was a well-respected and well-liked Congressman from Michigan when he became vice-president under Richard Nixon.  When Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment for obstructing justice, Ford became president. But Ford fatally damaged his re-election prospects when he pardoned Nixon.

Ford knew that the pardon would be unpopular, but he hoped to avoid a long, divisive trial that would compound the damage that the Watergate scandal had inflicted on the country.  But while Ford expected to be criticized for the pardon, even he must have been shocked when his approval rating dropped from 71 percent to 50 percent overnight.  While not the only reason for his defeat in 1976, Ford’s pardon of Nixon is always considered one of the key contributors.

George H. W. Bush served in Congress and was U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Director of the CIA before becoming vice-president during the Reagan administration. Upon his election as president in 1988, he quickly realized that the U.S. economy was slowing, causing the federal deficit to rise alarmingly. Although he had famously promised not to raise taxes, he believed a compromise on taxes was necessary to avert economic disaster. Although supported by many moderate republicans, Bush knew that conservative republicans would oppose any tax hikes and that he would pay a political price. But the pushback from conservatives was fiercer than Bush expected, and his popularity fell by more than 20 points. Most historians believe that the tax hike was a major reason that Bush was not re-elected.

Although Bush’s action crippled his later re-election campaign, his budget bill was instrumental in reducing federal deficits and making possible federal budget surpluses during the Clinton administration. 

Jimmy Carter is the only Naval Academy graduate to have served as president. After commissioning in 1946, he remained on active duty in the Navy until 1953, when he resigned to take over his family’s business following the death of his father.  At the time, Carter was slated to become the engineering officer for the nuclear power plant to be placed in USS Seawolf (SSN 575), the U.S. Navy’s second nuclear submarine.

Having served in the Georgia state legislature and as governor of Georgia before becoming president, Carter had no federal government experience beyond the Navy when he took office. His election campaign was built around his status as a political outsider, not beholden to Washington’s entrenched elite.

Many politicians have campaigned as political outsiders, but Carter wasn’t kidding. He detested the deal-making and horse-trading that modern politics seems to demand and for most of his term he refused to do it. Even when he tried, he was terrible at it. In Carter’s case, there was no single, defining incident where he placed the good of the nation above his own political fortunes. Instead, he made a conscious effort to ignore political considerations in virtually every action of his presidency.

Stuart Eizenstat, one of Carter’s key advisors, wrote, “… in Carter’s view of the presidency, what mattered was ‘doing the right thing,’ and believing in a just reward upon returning to face the electorate.”

Carter’s aides greatly respected his determination to ‘do the right thing,’ regardless of political consequences, but they also recognized how his reluctance to consider the politics of a policy crippled his presidency and obscured his very real accomplishments. For Carter, there was no ‘just reward.’

Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter have all seen their reputations rise in the years after they left office. Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, Bush’s commitment to reducing the federal deficit, and Carter’s steadfast refusal to participate in politics as usual demonstrated a commendable willingness to place the nation’s interests above their own.

Did service in the US Navy reinforce their sense of duty and their willingness to risk their political future for the sake of an unpopular action? Perhaps.  It is worth noting, though, that many presidents have taken politically unpopular positions for the greater good without having served in the military.

But each of these presidents considered their naval service to be a defining event in their lives, and it is not unreasonable to assume that their experiences in the Navy shaped the way they perceived their role as presidents. 

“I can imagine no more rewarding a career. And any man who may be asked in this century what he did to make his life worthwhile, I think can respond with a good deal of pride and satisfaction: ‘I served in the United States Navy.’

• President John F. Kennedy, 1 August 1963, in Bancroft Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy.
  [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, January 1 to November 22, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), 620]

February 18, 2019

See also:

http://navylive.dodlive.mil/2019/02/18/the-naval-careers-of-americas-six-sailor-presidents/?

Eizenstat quote from President Carter: The White House Years; Thomas Dunne Books,St. Martin’s Press, New York: 2018

photo: WhiteHouseMuseum.org

Beate Sirota was a 22-year-old language expert working for the Allied occupation authorities in Tokyo in 1946 when she wrote one of the most important paragraphs in Japanese history.

One of a handful of women on the staff of General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), Sirota was tasked with drafting a section of the proposed Japanese constitution that would establish civil rights for Japanese women involving marriage, money, and family.

When adopted as part of Japan’s postwar constitution, the sentences Sirota wrote redefined the role of women in Japanese life, upending a thousand years of cultural and social tradition, exactly the result that MacArthur was looking for.  Along with the renunciation of war and the strengthening of Japanese democracy, the equality of women was a key part of MacArthur’s plan to smash the power of the Japanese militarists who had disastrously led Japan into World War II.

Women had never enjoyed equal rights in Japan. Marriages were arranged and adultery was permitted for husbands, but not for wives. Women could not own property and had no legal, economic, or political rights. High schools were segregated by sex, and there were no colleges or universities for women at all. MacArthur was determined to halt Japan’s traditional gender discrimination, and Beate Sirota would play a key part.

Sirota was born in Austria, the daughter of a well-known concert pianist.  But the rise of Nazism terrified her parents, Russian Jews who had emigrated to Vienna. When Sirota’s father was invited to teach and perform in Japan, they grabbed the opportunity. From ages five to fifteen, Sirota lived in Japan, where she learned the intricacies of the Japanese language and of Japanese society, including the powerlessness of Japanese women.

In 1939, at age 15, having completed secondary school in Japan, Sirota enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, California.  She was there in December 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Unable to return to Japan, she completed her studies and obtained work as a translator. For nearly four years she had no direct contact with her parents.

As soon as the war ended, she looked for a job that could take her to Japan, so that she could search for he parents. Fluent in Japanese, she quickly found work as a language expert with the U.S. government’s Foreign Economic Administration supporting the Government Section of SCAP in Tokyo.   Upon arrival in Japan, she located her malnourished parents, who had survived the war despite constant government suspicion.

In February 1946, the Government Section was assigned to draft a new constitution for Japan. The document would need to be approved by General MacArthur before submission to the Japanese government, which would have final say.  MacArthur wanted to use the new constitution to make far-reaching social changes in Japan. Belying the importance of the task, the Government Section was given just eight days to prepare their initial draft.

As the lone woman in the unit, Sirota was assigned to write the section on women’s rights. It didn’t matter that she had virtually no government experience and had studied modern languages in college.  She was a woman – the only woman readily available – and that was qualification enough.

Undaunted – indeed, energized by the tasking – Sirota quickly toured all of the available libraries in Tokyo, gathering samples of constitutions that could guide the Section’s work. She found the German Weimar Constitution of 1919 to be especially helpful.  The Japanese Meiji Constitution of 1889 was useful mostly as a template for what not to include, she noted later.

On her own initiative, Sirota also drafted a section that would protect Japanese children from exploitation, ban full-time child labor, and ensure free medical and dental care for children.

“Believing this was a chance Japan would never have again,” she wrote, “I wanted to be sure not to omit a single thing that might benefit Japanese women in the future.”

While the section on children’s rights and many of the specific details of her section on women’s rights were dropped by U.S. officials, the document that was ultimately presented to the Japanese for review included her language guaranteeing equality for women. When Japanese officials saw the American draft, they were initially opposed to the section on women’s rights. But when an American officer pointed out that the section had been written by Sirota, who had lived in Japan for more than ten years, was fluent in the language, and understood the point of view and feelings of Japanese women, Japanese officials relented, and the article remained in place.

Later, many of the specific requirements Sirota had drafted that were dropped from the constitution were incorporated into legislation, and thus became law.

Sirota served in Japan until 1947. For the rest of her life she worked as a translator, primarily for the Asia Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving relations between Asian nations and the west. She died in New York City in 2012.

Article 24 of the Japanese Constitution, promulgated on November 3, 1946:

Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis.
With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes.

For further information on Beate Sirota Gordon’s experiences in Japan, see her memoir: The Only Woman in the Room, Kodansha International, Tokyo, 1997.

Photo: Occupation of Japan, 1945. Scene at Sasebo, Kyushu, Japan, shows mother working with sleeping child on her back. Photographed by crewmember of USS Chenango (CVE-28), released October 19, 1945. Official U.S. Navy photograph, now in the collection of the National Archives. (2015/12/01).

January 10, 2019