Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,828

This is the grave of Ralph Carr.

Born in 1887 in Rosita, Colorado, Carr grew up in the mining town of Cripple Creek during its heyday as a gold rush town. He graduated from high school there in 1905 and then went to the University of Colorado, where in 1912, he got a law degree. He went into private practice and became a prominent attorney in Colorado. In 1929, Herbert Hoover named this good Republican as U.S. Attorney for Colorado.

In 1938, Carr, though he lacked electoral experience, was the Republican nominee for governor of Colorado. This was the year where in states such as Colorado, the backlash to the New Deal was setting in. Carr had terrible economic policies and ran on fighting the New Deal. In 1940, Colorado was one of the states on the Plains that abandoned the Democrats and at that time, there were enough people on the Great Plains, where the opposition was extra strong, that the state was pulled in that direction. So Carr defeated the incumbent New Dealer Teller Ammons in that governor race.

Carr was terrible on every economic issue. He wanted to bust strikes and he did, sending in the National Guard to stop a strike at the Green Mountain Dam construction site in 1939. He wanted government to spend nothing at all. All of this got him some attention and there was even talk about him being the VP for the 1940 Republican ticket, though he squashed that right away. But he did have a big role at the Republican National Convention and seconded Wendell Willkie’s nomination.

Colorado governor terms were two years at this time and he won reelection in 1940. He became the nominee for the Senate in 1942 against the largely odious Ed Johnson, who was a Democrat more or less but who was a really awful figure. But by this time, we were in World War II and Johnson pledged total fealty to FDR and that worked in that year. Johnson won and Carr’s political career was over.

So who cares, right? The guy is a right-wing anti-New Deal toad.

Except there’s this one thing.

More than perhaps any other politician in the entire United States of America and almost certainly than any politician in the American West, Ralph Carr rejected the idea of locking Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II based on their race. And let’s be clear–these were absolutely concentration camps. The use of “internment camp” is a complete linguistic stunt to get Americans past the fact that we fought the Nazis putting minority peoples in concentration camps based on race by putting our own minority peoples in concentration camps based on race. No, the camps between the two nations weren’t the same thing, but the principle wasn’t much different. It’s a disgusting part of our history, one of the many great shames in this nation’s horrible racist, genocidal past.

But supporting such things was not inevitable. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, rounding up the Japanese and throwing them in camps, they had to go somewhere. The answer was to be east of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada, mostly in the most isolated parts of the West possible. Most dry state western governors were outraged. They claimed they didn’t want these horrible people who probably wanted to bomb their cities and states because they were yellow. That was totally playing up to the racism in the those state’s populations.

But Carr? He approached it entirely differently. He simply said that the Japanese-Americans were as loyal as citizens as you or me. And he took it to the people of Colorado too. He started traveling the state, saying Colorado should welcome the Japanese. In one speech, he stated:

They are as loyal to American institutions as you and I. Many of them have been born here–are American citizens, with no connection or feeling of loyalty toward the customs and philosophies of Italy, Germany and Japan. … I am not talking on behalf of Japanese, of Italians, or of Germans as such when I say this. I am talking to … all American people whether their status be white, brown or black and regardless of the birthplaces of their grandfathers when I say that if a majority may deprive a minority of its freedom, contrary to the terms of the Constitution today, then you as a minority may be subjected to the same ill-will of the majority tomorrow.

When it looked like a camp would go into the Arkansas Valley, which became the Amache camp, the farmers of the Valley were horrified. One reason people on the west coast hated the Japanese was that they made farms that seemed failures work and become productive economic enterprises. So the farmers in the Arkansas Valley, in addition to their racism, feared for their economic livelihoods if the Japanese were to stick around. So Carr simply went to them and told them what was up. He stated:

They are not going to take over the vegetable business of this state, and they are not going to take over the Arkansas Valley. But the Japanese are protected by the same Constitution that protects us. An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen. … If you harm them, you must first harm me. I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred. I grew to despise it because it threatened [pointing to various audience members] the happiness of you and you and you.

So the truth of the matter is, it wasn’t just Carr’s bad economics that cost him in 1942. It was that whites abandoned him because he didn’t hate the Japanese enough. Big Ed Johnson beat him in that senate race in part by saying that if he was in charge, he’d use the National Guard to keep out the Japs unlike that traitor Ralph Carr.

Carr really wasn’t super healthy anyway. He had diabetes and that’s what killed him in 1950. He was 62 years old.

After World War II, thanks to Carr and his supporters (who did exist of course), many imprisoned Japanese stayed in Colorado instead of returning to the hothouses of hate in Oregon and California. Denver developed a quite significant Japanese-American community and in 1976, they raised money to put up a bust of Carr in Sakura Square. In 1994, Emperor Akihito visited the statue on his trip to the United States. In 1998, the Denver Post named Carr Colorado’s “Person of the Century.”

Ralph Carr is buried in Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, Colorado.

If you would like this series to visit other Americans who stood up against the evils of Japanese concentration camps, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Fred Korematsu is in Oakland and Minoru Yasui is in Hood River, Oregon. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.