The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America by Bradford Pearson

Episode Date: November 16, 2021

The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America by Bradford Pearson In the spring of 1942, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. Nearly 14,000 of them landed on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain. Behind barbed wire fences, they faced racism, cruelty, and frozen winters. Trying to recreate comforts from home, they established Buddhist temples and sumo wrestling pits. Kabuki performances drew hundreds of spectators—yet there was little hope. That is, until the fall of 1943, when the camp’s high school football team, the Eagles, started its first season and finished it undefeated, crushing the competition from nearby, predominantly white high schools. Amid all this excitement, American politics continued to disrupt their lives as the federal government drafted men from the camps for the front lines—including some of the Eagles. As the team’s second season kicked off, the young men faced a choice to either join the Army or resist the draft. Teammates were divided, and some were jailed for their decisions.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with an airgate podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in have i ever told you how much we appreciate you guys tuning in like from the bottom depths of my heart like not the not like the lower part the bottom where the v is when you see the heart thing it goes like more of this and then it meets

the bottom like right there at that v bottom that's how much i appreciate you guys the podcast uh stuff i improv i did i just never get it anyway guys that's where my heart is for you right at the bottom you're at the bottom of my heart wait shouldn't you be the top I don't know this sounds like some whole other thing too anyway guys top or bottom we love you being a part of this thanks for tuning in go to see all of the video on youtube.com or says Christmas hit the bell notification button go to Goodreads oh gosh, Goodreads over there. You can see all the wonderful books we're reading and reviewing, including the author we have on today. And I think two of my giveaways are running. There'll be a second one on the 15th for two of my

books. You can go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those cool places the kids are playing at. We don't have a Snapchat, probably for the most obvious of reasons, but maybe we should get on there as well. Let me know if you want one, email me and we'll look into it. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO

for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me.

There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show. His book came out earlier this year, The Eagles of Heart Mountain, A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America by Bradford Pearson. He's going to be on the show telling us about his amazing work here and this amazing story that a lot of coverage hasn't gone on about this experience of us putting these poor people in internment camps during World War II. He is an award-winning journalist whose work examines everything from magicians to Japanese-American incarceration

to his own kidnapping. We'll get to that later. He's written for the New York Times and Esquire, Time, Men's Health, and Philadelphia Magazines, among many other publications, and is the former features editor for Southwest, the magazine. He is a recipient of the German Marshall Fund of the United States Marshall Memorial Fellowship, which took him to Europe to study media on the continent. He grew up in Hyde Park, New York, and now is in Philadelphia with his wife and two children. The Eagles of Heart Mountain is his first book. Welcome to the show, Bradford. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me today, Chris. I really appreciate it. Awesome. It's wonderful to have you on. I love your collection of books there in the background. Yeah, it makes me seem more scholarly than I really am. Awesome. It's wonderful to have you on. I love your collection of books there in the background.

Yeah, it makes me seem more scholarly than I really am. I need to have a green screen of books in the background. You can take this one if you want. Oh, can I steal it? As long as I show the corner one where your book is featured there, I can see what you're up to. All right, there you go. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your plug so people can find you on those interwebs.

Sure. So you can find me. I'm active on book. Give us your plug so people can find you on those interwebs. Sure. So you can find me. I'm active on Twitter. My handle is Bradford Pearson, my first name and last name. Same on Instagram. My website is bradfordpearson.com. I update events there and different reviews, things like that. So this is a pretty interesting book. What motivated you to want to write this book or what brought you to the story?

Yeah. So the Eagles of Heart Mountain is a story about the greatest high school football team in the history of the state of Wyoming, who just happened to be a group of incarcerated Japanese American teenagers during World War II. So what I try to do with the book is I try to take the story of this football team and use it as a way to tell the whole story of Japanese American incarceration and a little bit of the history of Japanese American life and everything that led up to the incarceration following Pearl Harbor. What initially got me interested in this story was I was actually in Wyoming on a completely different assignment. I was working on a story about Yellowstone back in 2014. And while I was

up there, I was able to stop into, there's a small museum in this corner of Wyoming where the Heart Mountain Camp used to be. And I walked in pretty cocky thinking that I had a decent handle on the I was able to stop into, there's a small museum in this corner of Wyoming where the Heart Mountain Camp used to be. And I walked in pretty cocky thinking that I had a decent handle on the history of what had happened in this time in America. And I walked out pretty flat embarrassed by how little I really knew about this history. And while I was in the museum, there was a small, there's about two sentences on one of the displays that talked about the high school football team at the camp. And I won't go into too much detail because it gives away the end of the book. But those two sentences piqued my interest and made me think that I was like Japanese Americans, football, there's this camp. I was like, how does all this come together? And I bet you

there's an interesting story there. So I started digging into it, researching it a little bit more. And I found some of the families of the players who were on the team, some players who were still living and some families, widows, children, spouses, all kinds of stuff, and really just got cranking on all the research that went into it. Definitely. This is one of those dark times in our history. And unfortunately, it doesn't get taught much in history books and everything else. I've heard more about it from George Takei and some other people that talked about it that were in the internment camps. And it's just, it was a horrible thing that we did. We destroyed people's lives.

We destroyed their businesses, those who were running businesses, San Francisco, et cetera, et cetera. And I'll give you a foundation here. In the spring of 1942, we forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. That's just crazy. 14,000 of them landed in this Cody, Wyoming camp. Yeah. Over the course of the war, about 14,000 passed through this camp. It ended up, as soon as the camp opened, it became the third largest city in the state of Wyoming. Yeah. And these were Americans living behind barbed wire fences, facing racism, cruelty, and frozen winters. Life's been destroyed, had nothing except what they had in their hands. And I guess, what is it? What's the old saying? Hope springs eternal. So these guys found hope in their camp. Yeah. So basically when they opened the camp,

when the federal government forced all these Japanese Americans off the West coast and into camps across the West, the people who were in the camps, so these Japanese Americans, took it upon themselves to find ways to give themselves some sort of life back, to give themselves some sort of sense of normalcy. And a lot of times that meant doing things that helped the kids and teenagers in the camp. Because you're an adult, you're trying to take care of your family. But from a broader standpoint, they realized that there were these kids, there were tens of thousands of kids that got incarcerated too, including, unfortunately, there were some

kids who were actually taken from orphanages if they were even partially Japanese American in camps. Yeah. I imagine considering one of those kids being a threat to the security of the United States, it still boggles my mind. But then basically, one of the first things that they did when they opened, especially at the Hart Mountain Camp in Wyoming, was they built a baseball field and they built a football field. And those sort of served as this jumping off point for a lot of the other activities that gave some of the folks even a little bit of joy in those years of the camp. And it was baseball, football. Eventually they had a basketball team, softball leagues, sumo wrestling, kendo, judo. They had all these things. And at a lot of the camps, everyone really rallied around sports and athletics as a way, again, to have some sort of sense of normalcy, despite the fact that they were in these tar paper barrack shacks that

had been built in an hour. Snow and dust came through in the winter. In this part of Wyoming, you're thinking about the fact that in the summer, it gets to 110. In the winter, it gets to negative 30 with the wind chill. So you have these just terrible conditions. So they were really looking for any little bit of hope that they could. And this football team really gave the Heart Mountain camp. That's heartbreaking. And it's buried, of course.

This is probably part of the critical race theory stuff that people need to study. Because as we've had a lot of authors on the shows over the years, it's amazing to me, like I learned a lot of stuff and authors have learned a lot of stuff because they've done the research. So many stories of what white people have done across the history of this country for 450 years or something. What's special about this team, this Eagles team that you profile in the book? Yeah. So basically when they show up, there's the very first day that they decide to have tryouts. So there's this coach there who was a coach out in Los Angeles, and he decides that we've had a baseball team in this camp. The kids are playing sports. But one thing that would be great if we could have a football team. If they had the football team, they'd be able to play other high schools from around Wyoming and Montana and really be able to prove themselves and who they are. So he puts out a call and says, hey, we're going to have tryouts. 40 kids show up. Only three of them have ever

played high school football. Wow. So yeah. So he goes, all right, how are we going to get this team? How are we going to use the skills that we have? So they basically started recruiting kids from all different sports. Start recruiting shortstops, decathletes, point guards, all these different guys who are quick, and they could figure out how to use them in a football scheme. And then they created a scheme that sort of exploited the fact that they were smaller than their opponents, but also meant that they were faster. They didn't tire as easily. So they could run, they ended up basically running prototype early version of a spread offense and that they moved the backs out of the field,

lined them up on the line of scrimmage and threw the ball a lot more. Remember this is 1944, 1945 timeframe. Most of it is most football games at that point, youmage and threw the ball a lot more. Remember, this is 1944, 1945 timeframe. Most of it is, most football games at that point, you're trying to jam the ball through. Scores are 10 to 6, 7 to 6, 6 to 3, like very low scoring games. And some of the games that the Eagles put up, 56 to nothing, 21 to nothing.

They didn't get scored upon until the last game they ever played. Holy crap. In the two seasons that the camp was open. So basically, so you had all these players who were trying to figure out how to play football, but then you also had the three players who had played football before. You had one kid who was a really incredible athlete, and his name is Babe Nomura, widely considered one of the greatest Japanese athletes of his generation.

After the camp closed, he played juco ball and then went on to play at San Jose State and was an All-Associated Press, All-West Coast pick. Just an incredible athlete. During college, he got tryout offers from the NFL and Major League Baseball. He was great. So basically, the team leaned on him to say, hey, you've got to be the driving force here, especially this first season. And so we can all sort of get our legs under us and figure out how to play football. And all these teams in Wyoming and Montana really just had no idea how to handle him. And then also how to handle this offensive scheme that they had never seen before. Cause they're all these, these country boys from the farm out in Wyoming, and the Eagles were outweighed by 50 or 60 pounds in each game, average per player.

Wow. But imagine if you're thin and fast, you can quickly get up through there. When they hike the ball, you can get up sack. Yeah, and that was the thing. Yeah, the center, the starting center for the Eagles weighed 119 pounds. But if that meant that he was able to jump the line, get through, or at least do something kind of wily, it threw everybody else off in this way

that they really weren't prepared for. And also at this point, everyone's playing both sides of the ball. They're playing offense and defense. So if you're in good shape and you're fast, that means that once you get back on defense, you're not tired. Once you get back on offense, you still... So they basically tried to take all the disadvantages that you would normally think that that size body or that style of play would give them as a disadvantage, and they tried to flip it and turn it into an advantage for them. Wow.

Maybe someone needs to start an NFL team of all Japanese players. That might be cool. Yeah. They basically just get a ton of slot receivers, get everybody up, get everybody fast, cross and that's that they're doing that a lot of sort of trick plays they would switch in and out their quarterbacks a lot and switch them out and run them out to the line they just did a lot of things that kind of kept their opponents on their heels somebody should have given this coach like an nfl thing he ended up just going. He didn't even coach the second season. He ended up going and

just working for the mail service at camp. Wow. How many seasons did they play for? So they played for, so the camp was open for three falls. The first fall they played an intramural within the camp and then the next two years that the camp was open, they played teams

from across Wyoming and southern Montana. Wow. And they just pe the pants off them. I don't know. Was some of it the swagger of these backcountry boys who were just like, yeah, we can beat these guys, a little bit of racism. And then they're just surprised by their speed and agility. Yeah. So the first year, the camp had a hard time scheduling games because none of the team's families or their towns wanted them to come play because all the games had to be played in the camp. So they would take kids from across the state and send those teams,

and they show up, have to go through barbed wire and pass guns to play these football games. But then the second, nobody wanted to play them because they were afraid of losing to the Eagles. So you had teams that were pulling their games off the schedule. The nearby high school, which is called Cody High School, which is a fairly sizable town in Northwest Wyoming, they scrimmaged the Eagles at the beginning of the second season and had plans to play them that year. But then they lost the scrimmage 45 to nothing and then pulled the game off the schedule. And this was the closest high school to the camp, about 10 miles down the road. So you basically had, it was this combination of racism and just people coming in thinking they'd be able to beat this team and then just

being thoroughly demolished in every game. And then getting to the point where they were embarrassed to even try to think about playing them the next season too. Wow. What are some other stories you want to tease out about, about your adventures in the story in the book? Yeah. So the thing about this book that I found interesting is that what I tried to do was I tried to give the reader, use this football team as a way to teach sort of a broader audience about Japanese American history and how we got to this point. Cause I think a lot of us, like you said at the top, like we don't learn much about this in high school. I grew up in New York, so I grew up on the East Coast. And there aren't that many Japanese Americans on the East Coast. There's still a majority of them are still on the West Coast, where I think this history is taught

a lot more than other parts of the country. So I wanted to use this book as a sort of a way to get a new audience to this subject. Because I wanted to use this book as a sort of a way to get a new audience to this subject. Because when I started researching this book, I came at it from the football angle, and then I realized just how little I knew about all of this. So I sort of thought this as an opportunity to say, hey, if I can catch people's eye with this book about football and World War II, I could talk about all the, like you said, the racism and the xenophobia that led to this moment. So that was one hook in. And then while I was writing the book, I realized that there's this whole other separate thing that's happening while the camps are open. And that's that the federal government is trying to draft Japanese Americans out of the camps and

send them to the front lines in Italy and France. Yeah, so the federal government pretty quickly, once the camps opened, realized that they need more young men. So they say, oh, we have tens of thousands of draft eligible men in these camps. Why don't we just try to get volunteers? That, for obvious reasons, failed because the federal government didn't adequately say,

oh, here's what's going to happen. People are like, wait, so what happens if I go home on leave? Do I go back to a camp? And they're like, yeah, you do. So no one volunteered. Then they reinstate the draft in 1944. And then while this is all happening at Heart Mountain with the football team, as the football team is getting better and getting more and more people at their games. Sometimes there are 5,000 people that will come out to these games.

At the same time, there begins the largest draft resistance movement in World War II happening in these camps. So you have dozens of guys that are resisting their draft cards and saying, look, we're Americans, we're Japanese Americans, we're citizens. You force us into these camps. If you close the camps or you clarify our citizenship status, we're citizens. You force us into these camps. If you close the camps or you clarify our citizenship status, we will gladly fight. We support this war. We're Americans. We'll gladly fight. And the federal government didn't back down. So these 63 men in Heart

Mountain, and then it spreads to all the other camps too, these 63 men end up getting charged and sent to federal penitentiary for resisting the draft. So that's all happening. The same kids who are on this high school football team are also having to make the decision for themselves, for their families, for their country, and for their whole community, really, what they're going to do. Some of the kids are going right from practice to their draft physicals. Some of them are going from there to meetings about resisting the draft. So you have all these decisions that these teenagers are having to go through. And that was one of the things that really drew me to this story was the sort of universality of,

we've all been teenagers. We all understand what that's, but I can't imagine what it must have been like to be 15 years old, have your dad or mom tell you that you're going to be sent to a camp and have to stand there and say goodbye to all of your friends that just don't happen to be japanese american and they're getting to this camp and then your government telling you oh yeah some of you are also uh going to have to go fight the war that we don't think you're american enough to stay in your homes yeah but you can go dive for us you know for freedom and stuff and a lot of and a lot and stuff. And a lot of young men did. A lot of young men volunteered or were drafted and fought in the 442nd Regiment, which is an all-Japanese American regiment who freed a lot of American prisoners and pinned down troops in northern Italy and France.

And there's actually still a mural at the Pentagon honoring their bravery. And they just put out a U.S. stamp honoring that regiment too. Good. I think they ended up paying a lot of these people a repayment plan, didn't they? But probably not until like decades later or something. Yeah. It was in the 80s. There was a reparations movement and every living person, every living Japanese American who was incarcerated during World War II was given $20,000. $20,000. So it was $20,000. And then you think about, so one of the things that I get into a little bit

in the book is that when the federal government said, okay, we're opening up these camps, most people had three days to a week to sell all their belongings or to find someone, a neighbor who, a white neighbor, or even technically even a Chinese neighbor or a Korean American neighbor to say, Hey, can you please watch over my stuff? I don't know how long we're going to be gone. But most people didn't have that luxury. Most people had to sell their houses or their businesses. People were selling cars for a dime on the dollar, brand new stuff. There are a lot of people, a lot of sort of white men would run through the Japanese American neighborhoods with a truck and say, I'll give you 50 bucks for your new car. And they had no choice. They had no choice.

So then after the war, even after the camps close, what are you coming back to? You're not coming back to your house. You're not coming back to your business. You're not coming back to your business. You're not coming back to your farm. So it took decades for the Japanese-American community to catch up financially for the three or four years that the camps were open. Yeah, you lose your business that maybe you spent years or decades maybe establishing. Incredible tragedy what happened. Let's talk about this because this was in your bio and we talked about it in the pre-show. Did your experience as a child, you were kidnapped as a child, if you want to expand on that, but did that experience made you want to embrace this story? Did you see a similar experience being taken against your will to this story?

Yeah, I don't know if I ever thought about it that way, but I do think, so the story that Chris is alluding to is that when I was in college, I got abducted here in city Philadelphia and I was kidnapped and held at gunpoint and robbed and lots of stuff. I think with that story and what that event in my life did was made me think and maybe be more empathetic person, which seems a little bit backwards as to what you would think if you got kidnapped. But it opened my eyes a lot to how other Americans live and how our federal government has failed a lot of people in this country. So whether it was the young men who kidnapped me because they had no money and no real recourse in their life at that point. I get into it a little bit in the story, Chris, and

that's later on after the men who kidnapped me were eventually convicted, I went and met with these men in prison and talked through what their lives were like beforehand. And I also think that looking at just how you tell a story and the interesting and different ways you could tell a story and what makes a story important to an audience outside of you. Like I thought this football team, their story was interesting, but how do I make that story interesting for a reader beyond me thinking, oh, I think this is really neat. And being able to tell the story in five minutes to your friends at the bar

is a lot different than sitting down and writing 90,000 words about it. And that was the same thing with my kidnapping, where I had this story about this terrible event that happened in my life, but I thought to go beyond that, Same thing with my kidnapping, where I had this story about this terrible event that happened in my life. But I thought, to go beyond that, how do I make the story interesting to an audience? And that meant that I was going to go find the men who kidnapped me and talk to them about their lives and what their lives have been like since that night that we crossed paths back in 2006. And it's an extraordinary story, if you guys get a chance to Google it,

is this Philly mag? Is this the best place to find a copy of the story? It's a brand in Philadelphia magazine. So if you just search my name or Philadelphia magazine, Bradford Pearson kidnapping, it'll be the first thing that pop up. There's not too many stories that are like that, that probably would throw you. So I was bullied as a kid and it made me a bully of bullies. So I definitely call out when people are abused or when people are victims or i see people that are being that that are being jerks and so it has uh endeared me to the underdog or to people that are they're not taken care of you go through experience the story where you believe it's life and death it's it sounds like they talked the third one out of possibly killing you,

and they had a gun, and so you're in that situation. But you have a little bit of experience what it's like to be taken against your will like these people were and put into this camp. It's true, yeah. And I think that everyone has the right to react to those sort of situations that when they happen to them, however they feel that they should act. And eventually, I get into a little bit in the story. And when you come out of a kidnapping like that and you're alive and you're back home,

you have this sense of euphoria and you have this sense that I've survived something. And those first weeks after the kidnapping, I felt like I literally figuratively dodged a bullet. So you think about how you feel free. you're going about saying you're invincible. And then those first couple of weeks, that shine wears off and then you start having nightmares and you start feeling nervous and start being anxious about things. And once that happened, it took me a while to get back on my feet, but then think, okay, what do I do now with this life that I've been granted? Do I sit around and feel sorry for myself or do I try to work hard and tell stories that matter and stories that mean a lot to me and stories that

have this broader, broader appeal and a broader, deeper understanding of what it's like to live in this country, whether it's today or in the 1940s. And what I tried to do with the book, though not explicitly, like the book never comes out of the latest the book goes is as follows some of the players later into their lives. But it's never comes into the present. It never mentions expressly the United States in 2020 or in 2021. And I did that on purpose because what I wanted to try to do was show as many lessons throughout the book that could still be applied to today. There's so many people that come up to me after reading the book and say, there's so many times when I was reading this that I thought

so little has changed in this country. And I always think, I always say, yeah, you're right. What part of the book made you think that? And their answers are always all over the board. There's always five or six different things that connects people to this moment. And when I think about that, I think, man, it's 80 years later and we haven't really changed that much as a country. If people can look at this book that's written about the 1940s and still see the connections to today. So that's what I try to do with a lot of my work is try to give people a lot of different entries to think about whether it's the past or present and how it applies to today. That's remarkable and commendable. Yeah, kids in cages, what we do to immigration people

when they come to this country. Yeah. So I started working on this book in roughly in about 2016. And when I started telling people about the book that I was working on, people would always say, oh, that's so relevant today. But what they said would always change, like you said, like whether at first it was the ban, immigration ban on folks from Muslim majority countries. Then it was kids in cages. Then it was family separation. Then it was anti-Asian violence when COVID first hit. And then my book came out the day before the insurrection on the Capitol. And I think that the insurrection on the Capitol, so much of that was based on misinformation and disinformation that those people had gotten from whatever source of media they, however they get their media, whether it was from the politicians who were telling them that or whatever news source they're getting, that's what led them there. And that's the same thing that led politicians to eventually vote and okay, the removal of 120,000 Japanese Americans was the

same sort of disinformation. So the fact that my book came out the day before my very first book event for the Eagles of Heart Mountain last January, there were still instructionists in the Capitol as the book event was going on. I had to say, oh, thanks everyone for coming, for taking your eyes off this terrible event that's happening. Let's talk about another terrible event. You're probably better off for it because I was going through heart palpitations, basically. I had to go lay down. I was going to have a heart attack with the anxiety and the anger. I was feeling watching it play out on TV.

But racism is also what brought that January 6th moment to the thing. Seeing the Confederate flag that had never gotten to the Capitol and during the Civil War being in the interior was just... And welcomed. Yeah, just made me so angry. And realizing how much of it came from the racial stokes of Donald Trump and his cronies and what they wrote in this and seeing that that's still exposed 200 years later by a

loser traitorist army to this nation and somehow it's seen as our country and i'm like that's not my country point of point of pride yeah it's and that's, that's, that bring up the racism. Like, that's really what I tried to impart in this book, too, is that I think a lot of folks have a misunderstanding. And again, this comes back to the fact that we don't learn this much in school, this misunderstanding about the military necessity, quote, unquote, for removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast. And the fact is that the U.S. government actually ignored all of their intelligence reports, which said that there would be no wide-scale sabotage or espionage by Japanese Americans and were instead just influenced by the racism of farmers and ranchers and politicians on the West Coast who had been trying for decades leading up to Pearl Harbor to remove Japanese Americans via alien land laws and immigration quotas and all sorts of things that they'd been trying to do for years to eliminate Japanese American influence on the West Coast and Chinese American influence and Korean Americans, Filipino Americans.

But specifically when they saw this opportunity after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they pounced on this. And the one thing when you think about when it comes to how unnecessary it was from a military standpoint is that you have to remember that Japanese Americans were removed from Washington or California and a little bit of Arizona, not Hawaii where Pearl Harbor happened and not the rest of the country. You can live right over the border from California into Nevada and be Japanese American and you didn't have to go into a camp. So that just shows how unnecessary the whole thing was. And these people didn't get any due process. They're American citizens and their due process was taken away from them. Do they have attorneys that tried to, like nowadays we have attorneys that run out and try and take care of this sort of stuff yeah eventually so the at first the aclu declined to take up the case yeah but then an aclu attorney

from southern california struck out and did it on his own and who tried to find a good test case for not necessarily to fight the initial removal but to fight the camps being through perpetuity. So they found a young woman who was a secretary, she was a Christian woman, secretary, Japanese American, and they said, we're going to base this whole case on her. And eventually it went to the Supreme Court. And right before the Supreme Court's decision was announced, Roosevelt announced that they were going to close the camps because they knew that they had no leg to stand on. They knew that keeping the camps open, even if there was some minor military justification for the original removal, which there really wasn't, they knew that legally they had some sort of ability to do that under

a time of war. But it was keeping the camps open and keeping them there. So there are a lot of brave men that, you know, that Minyasui and lots of other men like him, who initially resisted going into the camps and were convicted and tried and sent to prison and then sent to camp. So you had some men who were individually doing that on their own, not really on a wide scale, a wide scale level. Yeah. You can't put a monetary price on what's lost in things like this. I think Neil Peart of Rush wrote, this is shortly after the fall of the wall in 1989. He wrote, everyone's really happy that this wall fell, but who's going to pay back all the lives, all the people who died, all the struggle, all the heartbreak, all the bread lines, all the suffrage that took place, the human carnage.

Who's going to repay that? And who's held accountable? And that's one of the biggest problems with things like these that happen in the world, usually by the hands of oppressive governments, including ours. And they're incredible tragedies. Do you think we need to teach more of this in schools? Oh, yeah. I think that everything that's going on right now with the critical race theory issue that's bouncing around this country for no reason, basically just shows how much we need

to learn this history. If you have the situation where your government is trying to actively tell you, no, you don't want to learn that. You shouldn't learn that. Our children can't learn. That's the stuff that you need to be teaching kids. Those are the kinds of things that kids are smart. Whether a kid is five or a kid is 18 in a public school system, kids understand history and kids can understand and use their own life to learn history. And I think that we need to learn more about Japanese American history. We need to learn more about the civil rights movement. We need to learn more about Mexican American history. There's all these things that for years, you have these textbooks, especially high school history textbooks,

the content is driven and sometimes edited by state legislatures and by state boards of education who say, oh, we won't buy that high school history textbook, which is tens of thousands of copies for the state of Texas or the state of California, if you mentioned slavery in this way. So basically, every publisher is stuck in this situation where they can't even sell a book that gives a complete view of U.S. history because the state legislature in Texas or the state legislature in Florida, the Board of Education in this state won't allow that. Again, a textbook, it's not some radical text. They won't allow that to be taught and to be bought by their school districts. And I think that contributes to our

racism. It just occurred to me because we don't learn about each other. We don't learn about each other. And we, or we learn a very limited whitewashed, literally whitewashed view of what that history meant. So you have kids who are getting a bad set of facts and they're learning to debate this bad set of facts in the same way that Facebook has a bad set of facts or whatever it is. And that you have some sort of textbooks that tells you a lot of slave owners were actually very kind to their slaves. And then you have a generation of eighth graders in Texas or Oklahoma or wherever it may be say, oh, actually, a lot of slave owners are pretty good. What about those slave owners? Why don't we talk about how good they were?

That's not the point, guys. Yeah. And go read the book cast by Isabel Wilkerson. Wilkerson, yeah. Wilkerson. It's just an extraordinary read, really hard to read. I had to stop like every other page and almost sit and wait. It's a tough book to get through, like actually physically get through

because of how often you have to stop and put it down and be like, all right, I can't read that for another day. The atrocities. And you've got to be wary of this government too. You've got to hold the government accountable. Anytime a government is hiding something from you, it's usually up to no good and power corrupts. And that's why we're supposed to have this beautiful open government. Just recently, what was it? There was some bombing that we did in Iraq, I think, that killed a bunch of innocent people and they covered it up.

Now they finally admitted to it, I think, today. You're like, oh, what else is under the table over there? Just killing kids. What else is going on? What else are you hiding from us? It's good to be accountable. You made me realize that one of the biggest problems with the way our history has been whitewashed is we don't learn enough from each other and it actually engenders is that the right word racism because we i i didn't realize it until we had so many authors on the show and they would

tell us so many stories about stuff they discovered and i'd be like i didn't learn about that in school what and a lot of it's just hidden and buried on purpose and it was like when the statues came up for all the Robert E. Lee statues and all that sort of stuff. I didn't understand what went on. I just thought, I don't have to put up some, idiot, put up some statues. I didn't understand the whole evil sort of thing that they did behind it and why it was done and when it was done. I thought they were- Yeah, exactly. The one is like, that was the most interesting in that story. And like you said, I think that by removing some of the more

contentious parts of teaching U.S. history, we're not giving kids, A, a full set of facts, but we're also teaching kids to not recognize, understand, and respect the differences and differences in all of our lives and how my upbringing is different than your upbringing and where do we find that common ground, but also recognizing, again, that your experience is different than your upbringing and where do we find that common ground, but also recognizing again, that your experience is different than mine. Let's learn from each other as to what those experiences can do to make all of our lives a better and have a better understanding of each other. I always say the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history and thereby we're doomed to repeat it. Anything else you want to touch on in the book before we go out? No, I always appreciate the opportunity to talk about this. I will say the thing about

the Eagles of Heart Mountain in writing it is that when I started, I had an embarrassingly low level of education about this subject. So if you ever find yourself in a situation where you're saying, oh, I don't know about that. And you're embarrassed by how little you know about something, that's okay. That happens to people like me, professionals. So for anyone, it's never too late to pick up a book and learn about something or listen to a podcast or read a newspaper article about something and just get yourself a little bit more educated about a subject that you might not have learned about in school, but you still have time on this earth to learn even a handful of facts about something new. Yeah. And it really expands your mind, expands your life. And that's why I love this. I love

it because I get a front row seat to brilliant authors like yourself who spent 10, 20,000 hours, God knows how much, preparing this stuff. And then I get to ask all the questions and hopefully my audience, dammit audience, you better be listening. You guys learned something too. Were you better or else? Anyway, guys, give me your plugs, Bradford. Again, most of my handles are just Bradford Pearson. So first name, last name, bradfordpearson.com. And then also you can find some of my most recent work at Philadelphia Magazine and the New York Times. There you go. Check it out, guys. Thank you very much, Brad, for being on the show. We certainly appreciate it.

I thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, guys. Thank you very much, Brad, for being on the show. We certainly appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Chris. There you go. The Eagles of Heart Mountain, a true story of football incarceration and resistance in World War II in America, just came out on the paperback version. It was out in January this year. The paperback version just came out November 2, 2021. Pick that baby up.

Share with your friends and neighbors and learn about this stuff. And, of course, share the stories as well. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com to see all the different things we're doing over there. Go to Goodreads.com for just Chris Foss. Also go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all the groups that we have. There's so many. I can't even keep track of any more.

Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out it's called beacons of leadership inspiring lessons of success in business and innovation it's going to be coming on october 5th 2021 and i'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book it's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies.

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