Rebel Lawyer: Wayne Collins and the Defense of Japanese American Rights by Charles Wollenberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Rebel Lawyer: Wayne Collins and the Defense of Japanese-American Rights, Charles Wollenberg, former Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of History at Berkeley City College, sounds unnerving alarms recurring in the present as well. Wollenberg states that his “argument is that the United States Constitution is not self-starting; it needs human intervention to transform its noble words and principles into concrete reality.”

A researcher and writer of Berkeley: A City in History in 2008, Wollenberg scrupulously followed attorney Wayne Collins’ defenses of “the rights and liberties of the West Coast’s Japanese and Japanese American population,” and drew a good-sized crowd to the eclectic and elegant temple of creativity that is the ACCI Gallery (Arts & Crafts Cooperative Inc.), 1652 Shattuck Ave. Our curiosity was not disappointed.

Mr. Wollenberg explained that Fred Korematsu was one of the irascible but deeply persistent and committed Collins’ defendants, as was Iva Toguri D’Aquino, a U.S. citizen unwillingly captured in Japan and forced to read radio scripts as one of several “Tokyo Rose” voices, with whom he pursued citizenship reinstatement and pardon for over 20 years. Collins was connected to the defense, release and eventual recompense for thousands of detainees at Tule Lake detention camp and elsewhere on the West Coast.

They survived years of discrimination encumbered, interned, threatened with deportation and/or disenfranchised by public fear and Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, echoing racialized past U.S. domestic legal wrongs through post- 9/11 anti-Muslim attacks and our present Southern border panic and inhumanity.
Irish-American Wayne Mortimer Collins mobilized not only his defendants, but whole communities of volunteers to work for their rights and personal dignity, inspiring civil rights lawyers and social justice advocates well into the 21st Century.

Waiting for Registration 1942

Collins died in 1974, but by that time Dorothea Lange’s exhibit of photos of the 1942 initial removal and incarceration had been presented by the California Historical Society and toured the country, significantly moving public and government opinion.
In 1983 a U.S. Commission “unanimously concluded that the policy of removal and incarceration was unnecessary, unconstitutional, and motivated by racism and political expediency.”
Same world, different challenges – or is it? Are they? Hear, hear!


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The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin America During World War II

by Mary Jo McConahay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In The Tango War, Mary Jo McConahay uncovers this neglected, generally unknown history of “the competition between the Allies and the Axis” for land, resources and political dominance in captivating detail. As a veteran journalist traveling worldwide and posted to cover wars in Central America and the Middle East for 30 years, this graduate of Cal Berkeley gives us a "masterful" and compelling rendering by not only describing key events, but by following political and individual persons involved in governing, map-making, aeronautics, rail and road-building, resource-hunting, diplomacy, propagandizing, spying and fighting battles.

McConahay and Maya Sapper

They were escaping, filming and doing things as unheard of as rounding up Japanese Peruvians to deliver to FDRs detention camp in Texas, turning away ocean liners of European Jewish emigrants in Havana or sinking U-boats and Italian submarines in the Caribbean. Over a vast territory in our own hemisphere, “a distance of 6,640 miles from the Rio Grande…to the Argentine Antarctic,” action and human drama roils in the background of her history as smoothly as a Bogart and Bacall script.
This is the book to read if you never did figure out which side of the continent Chile and Argentina are on, where the rubber, oil and Panama Canal are exactly; colonial and imperialist heartlands, heroes and landscapes; what the U.S.A. really did and did not do.

McConahay describes curving Amazons of intrigues, alliances, courageous acts and vile betrayals. In some of the most shocking cases, mass murderers brought along the “Fourth Reich” and its hatred of communists, resolving to settle quietly working for Bayer, Krupp or Volkswagen in Central and South America or backing fascist dictators.

Hollywood film crews and Disney animators explored and exploited the favelas and carnivals of Rio for U.S. PR, whole neighborhoods of urban European Jews bought up and settled in the pampas to raise alfalfa and cattle, celebrating the remainder of their holy days in peace. Who knew?
Same world, different challenges – or is it? Are they? Hear, hear!

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