Dem
47
GOP
53
Today, we hear from J.E. in Manhattan, NY:
My grandfather, Jack J. Fox, served in a bomber wing during World War II. He flew missions over Europe, stationed in England. I am unsure what rank he started with, but he was evidently promoted to navigator during his tenure. Prior to the war, he studied biochemistry, graduating in 1938, and he returned to that afterwards, becoming co-chairman of the developmental therapy and clinical investigation program at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, where he invented a cancer drug still in use today.
Jack was born in Brooklyn, and raised in a strict orthodox Jewish family, but he broke away from that when he entered left-wing politics and became an organizer for the United Cannery, Agricultural and Packing House Workers of America while at the University of Colorado. It was not uncommon in those days for people like him, who did not come from money, to work while in school.
In 1939 he married a Japanese-American woman, Ruth Inabu (born in Utah, I might add). His family's reaction was to sit shiva for him, and I only met his sister at my grandmother's funeral in 1998. I might well have any number of cousins scattered around the tri-state area; I haven't looked. His wife was also a fierce believer in social justice, and she was a leader in the efforts to desegregate local businesses as a member of the Ethical Culture Society.
(Their marriage, by the way, was illegal in several states, Utah among them. Colorado was rather more lenient, but only in certain regions of the state).
Both grandparents were very involved in raising money and later volunteered to fight the fascists in Spain. (I submit that if the French and U.S. governments had not stopped what supplies the USSR was sending to them at the Pyrenees, the outcome of the Spanish Civil War might have been different, and there would have been one less, possibly two less, fascist governments to disfigure the face of Europe after the war).
I bring up this background because during my grandfather's service he was brought up before one of his superior officers. As related to me, the conversation was:Officer: I understand, Fox, that your wife is Japanese.My grandfather was very much angered by this, as it was calling into question his loyalty to the United States based on his wife's ethnicity. Rightly, he felt it uncalled for. As I understood it, he came as close as a junior officer could to telling off his superior given the dangerous nature of the missions he had been flying and what would happen to him as a Jewish serviceman were he shot down and captured.
Jack: No sir, my wife is an American citizen of Japanese extraction. Why is this relevant, sir?
Officer: We are investigating the depth of loyalty of our crews.
He was disallowed from flying later sorties in the Pacific, though by the time the matter would have became urgent the war ended. But this incident marked him, and my grandmother. The only reason she wasn't thrown into a prison camp was because of her marriage to Jack. Both continued to be active in movements for civil rights up until their old age.
We can get very smug in the United States about the strength and longevity of our democratic institutions, but our status as a democracy for all our citizens is only about as old as many former British and French colonies.
My grandfather was proud of his service. But he never forgot—and always impressed on us—that one should never have to prove one's loyalty based on one's parentage.
Thanks, J.E. (Z)