The Principled Politician: The Ralph Carr Story

The phone was ringing. The phone was always ringing at the home of Colorado’s governor and it had little to do with the fact that teenagers had recently lived in the house. The incessant jangling was a constant during the three-plus years Ralph Carr served as the state’s chief executive.

From the wood-floored living room to the brick fireplace in the den to the upstairs bedrooms, one could hear its shrill sound throughout the early-twentieth-century home. The leaded glass on the windows, designed to keep out the noise of car horns, held in that godforsaken noise. This was no palatial governor’s mansion, but a simple two-story brick structure Governor Carr had purchased years earlier with his small-town lawyer’s salary.

Having his home address and number listed in bold type in Denver’s city directory invited the attention. It showed the person living at 747 Downing Street was “Carr, Ralph L., Governor, State of Colorado.” Phone operators connected Coloradans at all hours of the day.

His teenagers, Robert (Bob) and Cynthia, had begged him to follow the policy of Colorado’s previous governors and remove his name from the phone book, but Carr refused. “The rich, the powerful, the people with status,” he told them, “they all have ways of getting their message, their point of view, to you, but the poor man has no way to do this unless he can call you up at home.”

Now that they were at college, there was no one else to answer the phone. Carr sat back in his upper-floor study, letting it ring. The antelope, buffalo, elk, and moose heads on the wall, gifts from Teddy Roosevelt Jr.’s most recent Colorado hunt, stared at him. Everyone was looking at him these days, most with disdainful glares. Whispers of his impeachment were growing louder.

It was exactly four months after Japanese forces had attacked Pearl Harbor. Four months since war in the Pacific had led to the deaths of thousands of Americans, including numerous Coloradans. War had been officially declared against Japan, then quickly against Germany and Italy. The draft summoned all able bodied men to fight. Personal rations of gas, rubber, sugar, and coffee were in effect or imminent. A generation after World War I, the so-called Great War, an even greater conflict was underway. Emotions were raw, specifically toward the “Japs.” Because the West Coast was considered vulnerable to attack, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had signed Executive Order no. 9066 in February, establishing military zones along the coast and calling for the removal of its 120,000 residents of Japanese descent. Two-thirds of them were American citizens. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Carr had been asked by the Pacific Citizen, the official newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League, for his thoughts on how to treat the Japanese living in the United States. Although other political leaders refused the request, Carr did not.

“To the American-born citizen of Japanese parentage we look for example and guidance,” he wrote. “To those who have not been so fortunate as to have been born in this country, we offer the hand of friendship, secure in the knowledge that they will be as truly American as the rest of us.” Coming from a governor, the “hand of friendship” became national news.

His black phone jingled again. The hateful tone of the caller was similar to that of recent letters. Inches-thick stacks piled up every day at his office, from all over the state, all with unfamiliar names, but with a common theme. “This is war,” a Mr. Smith scribbled in a postcard, “and I am in favor of getting all Japs out—even if we kill every one of them.” A Mr. Varnum, an attorney in Denver, insisted, “Japs and Whites cannot live side by side in peace and security … Colorado must be kept a white man’s country.” Mr. Bradley, a farmer, wrote that he had “heard farmers say they would not tolerate any Japs. … Someone will have to dig a lot of graves for Japs should they be brought to Colorado.”

Carr sunk his five-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch frame into an overstuffed chair; the remnants of stale cigar smoke hung in the air from political gatherings of nights past. In his usual blue shirt, the 185-pounder looked seven months pregnant, an ample belly barely covered by the deep red tie. His normally dancing brown eyes were glazed over. The color of his constantly curly hair would soon match the white ten-gallon hat he wore on the campaign trail. Although the eighteen- to twenty-hour days were taking a physical toll, the Japanese “issue” was taking a mental toll.

What Carr lacked in height, he compensated for with a big personality, dominating any room he entered. He loved talking— sometimes in self-taught Spanish — and rarely lacked people willing to listen. There was always another person to meet, another story to share, another problem to solve. Put simply, he “loved people.”

“I sense their feelings when I’m around them,” he said. “And I sympathize particularly with the poor devil, who, because of circumstances, including often his own misconduct and blindness, gets himself into a place where he needs a pat on the back.” Four months after the Pearl Harbor attack, it was Ralph Carr himself who needed that pat on the back. He needed a night with his books, turning to his personal Abraham Lincoln collection for inspiration.

While some of his generation collected stamps, coins, or maladies, the fifty-four-year-old Carr collected everything Lincoln. Friends would send him newspaper articles published on the former president from all over the country. He kept them bundled in an oversized leather scrapbook, pasted along with clippings about his own career.

Carr agreed with what Lincoln said some sixty years before: “I desire to so conduct the affairs of this administration that if, at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left and that friend shall be deep down inside me.”

His phone rang again, and it wasn’t a friend.

The governor had recently sped across the plains and mountains, from the small towns to the big cities of Colorado, listening to his constituents’ concerns. From Grand Junction in the west to Sterling in the east, from Pueblo in the south to Fort Collins in the north, Coloradans were worried about the prospects of even more “yellow devils” coming to the state. That’s what the state’s largest paper, the Denver Post, called them.

Pearl Harbor had brought a fear so palpable to the Rocky Mountains and the country that the parents of Japanese American kids would place sandwich boards around their children’s necks, reading “I’m Chinese, not Japanese” just to make sure they wouldn’t become targets of racial slurs or worse, victims of violence.

The anger was unlike anything Carr had witnessed before. Even a clergyman wrote the governor, imploring him to “Clean up the Japagerms!” To Coloradans, the Nisei—second-generation Japanese Americans—were thought to be the same as the Issei, the first generation Japanese who had never been naturalized. Citizenship did not matter.

Carr made two strong points to anyone who would listen. First, if President Roosevelt felt that interning the Issei (the non-citizens) in Colorado would help the country’s security, Colorado would not object. Carr said Colorado had no greater priority than helping win the war. Those who mailed him letters or called him at home believed he was wrong.

Second, his position concerning the Nisei perplexed even his best friends and created a frenzy of antagonism statewide. The Nisei were American citizens, and Carr believed they must have all the rights afforded any American citizen despite wartime hysteria.

If they, or any other American citizen, wanted to come to Colorado, he could not and would not keep them out. He went so far as to tell Coloradans that those American citizens of Japanese descent even had the same right to run for governor as he did, assuming they met the age requirement, of course. Carr was a stickler for the rules.

However, the thousands who wrote and called the governor did not differentiate between citizen and noncitizen, between Nisei and Issei, between alien Japanese and American-born Japanese. They were seen as cut from the same “Japanese cloth” and to them, it was a dirty, venomous, savage, and despicable cloth. “We don’t want Denver overrun by the yellow race,” read one handwritten letter.

A Mrs. Cornell, a homemaker from Boulder, begged the governor, “May God of heaven speak to your soul … no one [wants Japanese here] to see our bodies ravished and raped by the very devil himself.” Mr. Hobbs from Colorado Springs echoed her sentiments. “Don’t think for a moment any of these [Japanese] would hesitate to do damage to Colorado … Colorado don’t want enemy aliens from anywhere. Let’s keep ’em out.”

Columnists, neighbors, politicians, and county gossips all wondered. Coloradans threatened open violence to keep them out. Colorado’s senior senator Edwin C. Johnson, a Democrat, suggested the National Guard be called to keep them out. Leaders in both the Democrat and Republican parties spoke out against housing any Japanese in Colorado. State legislators wanted Carr to call a special session to deal with this “menace.”

The state’s neighbors were equally venomous. Wyoming governor Nels Smith said that if anyone with Japanese ancestry were brought to his state, “There would be Japs hanging from every pine tree.”

Idaho attorney general Bart Miller said his state wanted to remain pure. “We want to keep this a white man’s country.” Carr looked out the window at the half-foot of new snow that had fallen in Denver that April day. A record snowfall that winter was sure to lead to record crops in the fall. He wondered if there would be farmers to harvest the corn and sugar beets since most able bodied men had volunteered for service or were drafted into it.

These were late-night thoughts and tangents in the broad debate, where Carr never wavered from his main focus. For the sake of those fighting abroad and those supporting them at home, he intended to preserve the Constitution. He joked he was being cussed in Colorado as often as he was being discussed. The people weren’t listening. They certainly weren’t understanding.

A Lieutenant Mann from Denver warned the governor about what might happen if the federal government actually sent people of Japanese ancestry to Colorado. “We are sitting upon a seething volcano, Governor,” he suggested.

Carr needed some sleep. He blew on his glasses to clean them and thought of what could have been. If he and a friend had struck gold back in 1934 with the five hundred dollars Carr had borrowed on a life insurance policy, he could have been rich. Instead, his partner ended up selling Fords in California.

Striking it rich had also been the goal of his father, Frank, whom he described fondly as a “miner and a tinhorn gambler,” never indicating which of the two he admired more. The governor always considered his father a dreamer and the most compassionate man he knew. He was also his son’s hero. Governor Carr enjoyed hearing the story of how his father, shortly before Ralph was born, in 1887, had stopped a mob from lynching an innocent man. That was courage.

Now Ralph Carr felt as if he were facing his own mob. Every time he spoke to a group about the “Japanese question,” he hoped they could see the logic, the reason behind his beliefs. Yet, the hate mail and vitriolic phone calls continued, angry letters to the editor filled the newspapers, and hideous threats against the Japanese living in Colorado continued.

Adam Schrager, author of "The Principled Politician: The Ralph Carr Story"
He would not back down.

The same reporters who described him as “jovial” and “engaging” and “dynamic” soon began to use adjectives like “stubborn,” “determined,” and “bull-headed.” He had developed a thicker hide as the state’s chief executive and compared the bumps of each year in office to “ten years of ordinary living.”

Carr liked to say that he “didn’t take this job to feel the public pulse or to follow the popular demand,” but that it was up to governors “to direct public opinion rather than to follow it.” Public opinion, without question, was against him.

Carr was Colorado’s first Republican governor since the mid-1920s when Clarence Morley rode the support of the Ku Klux Klan to the state’s top job. Morley lost his reelection bid in 1927 and the party had failed to find a leader until Ralph Carr. But now he was desperately tired from being continually attacked by both friend and foe.

As he tried to sleep that cold April night, he remembered the blaring page-one, above-the-fold headline that week in the Denver Post: “Gov . Carr stakes political future on his Jap Stand.” There was no respite from the clanging phone or assault by mail. He clung to the writings of Lincoln and to his belief in the U.S. Constitution. If he had to answer every explosive call and poisonous letter to combat this war on the home front by himself, then so be it. His principles were nonnegotiable.

The Denver Post, the state’s largest newspaper, took a keen interest in Governor Carr’s stand regarding anyone of Japanese descent. All the stories were splashed on the front page with significant detail.

Reprinted from "The Principled Politician: The Ralph Carr Story" by Adam Schrager. Copyright © 2008. Published by Fulcrum Publishing.

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