Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we’re going to talk about a topic that came to mind because of something that happened recently. And that is on December 16th, after 10 months of negotiations, the Department of Justice walked away from talks to pay monetary damages to families who were forcibly separated at the border during the Trump administration. What happened at the border was that people who came across illegally were separated. Families were separated, and adults were imprisoned in one place. Their children were taken away, and imprisoned in another place. In some cases, it has been difficult to reunite parents and children.

So when President Biden was running for office, he said to the parents of these children, “You deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what.” So because of that sense of the government owing something to these people, apparently there was then an attempt at negotiating some kind of settlement. And on December 16th, the Department of Justice walked away, because by some accounts, the amount of money involved in that kind of compensation would be hundreds of thousands of dollars per individual. So today, what we want to talk about is that kind of restitution, that kind of idea of what happens when the government does something wrong, morally wrong, unacceptable, just out of bounds. What is the government’s responsibility for that? And how has that been playing out over time?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Many people think the reason that the Biden administration has backed off on the idea of recompense for the families who were separated at the border was because of the outcry from right-wing media, and from lawmakers as well. So for example, Chuck Grassley said that, and this is a quote, “Many Americans think it’s a pretty outrageous idea to offer massive taxpayer-funded payments to illegal immigrants who broke our laws. Under what circumstances, if any, do you think it’s appropriate for an illegal immigrant who broke our laws,” catch that repetition there, “to receive more money from the government than the family of a fallen service member?”

The reason it’s important to talk about the idea of the government providing recompense when it has done something to cause grievous harm is because at the end of the day, we are talking about what the government should do or should not do in a democracy. What are the boundaries around that? How do you put a price on separating a child from its parents? It is an act of extraordinary cruelty that doesn’t have a monetary value. So what, in a system like ours, can you do to address that horrific pain?

Joanne Freeman:

We talked a lot in trying to decide how to discuss this episode, because it’s a complicated topic. It’s a tangled topic. There are all kinds of peoples that are involved in it in one way or another, which is why we want to focus on one strand of this very complicated conversation, and that is the federal government doing things that are unacceptable to individuals, to groups, and what happens. What is the proper response?

Heather Cox Richardson:

So we’ll be looking today at a number of times when the federal government was a party to some form of an atrocity. And it’s important to remember that we’re not trying to compare these, or to say one was worse than another, or one was not as bad as another, but rather to put a whole bunch of different things that the federal government did or didn’t do, that caused immeasurable pain to people that cannot be made whole solely by the payment of cash. So one of the ways to get into this is the obvious way, which is to look at human enslavement and how that was such a deep part of American history from its very inception. And it’s interesting to start, I think, with a case that did not involve the federal government, but involved Massachusetts. And that was a story that I’m going to pull out here, because it’s a history of enslavement, but it’s not a generational history of enslavement, and it is a history in which an enslaved woman gained reparations for the fact she was enslaved, a distinct case where her complaint was that of enslavement.

Joanne Freeman:

In 1783, an elderly formerly enslaved woman from Massachusetts named Belinda Royall, also known as Belinda Sutton, became the first American to win reparations for bondage. Now, she was enslaved for more than 50 years, and she petitioned the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, requesting an income from the estate of her former owner, Isaac Royall, basically saying she had been enslaved and she deserved to be compensated in some way because of her enslavement. And Royall had been a loyalist during the Revolutionary War, and ultimately he fled to Nova Scotia. So she petitioned the government, and apparently she couldn’t either read nor write, so she had help in writing this petition, probably by Prince Hall, who was a leader of Massachusetts’ Black community.

But I’m just going to give you a sentence or two of what her petition said. “50 years, her faithful hands have been compelled to ignoble servitude for the benefit of an Isaac Royall, until, as if nations must be agitated and the world convulsed for the preservation of the freedom which the almighty father intended for all the human race, the present war was commenced.” So she’s placing herself in time, talking about her enslavement, and stepping forward in making a request of the Massachusetts government.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What I love about this petition is she is not demanding financial restitution based on the fact that the nation or Isaac Royall owe her back wages. She is making a claim to being owed reparations because of the fact that she had been held for 50 years in bondage, and now there was this new country that had, as she says, immense wealth. She has been denied a piece of that because of the institution under which she had been kept. And I know it’s sort of a splitting-hairs distinction, but it strikes me as being an important distinction, because the monetary value here is not on her back wages, which she needs as well in order to survive. The monetary value is in freedom, which is not something on which you can put a price. And that node really interests me in terms of the other kinds of reparations we’re talking about, like, what is it worth to a parent to be able to be with their child?

Joanne Freeman:

So we’ve just looked at a very early point in which a formerly enslaved person stepped forward and made a claim. The fact of the matter is that in the early 19th century, there were iconic abolitionists who also discussed, in one way or another, the idea of reparations. So for example, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison argued for reparations at the National Anti-Slavery Convention in Philadelphia in 1833, and here’s how he phrased it. He said, “We maintain that no compensation should be given to the planters emancipating their slaves, because it would be a surrender of the great fundamental principle that man cannot hold property in man, because slavery is a crime.” And he then goes on later to say, “If compensation is to be given at all, it should be given to the outraged and guiltless slaves, and not to those who have plundered and abused them.” So he’s talking about the crime of slavery, and compensation being given because of the commission of that crime.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He’s also talking about the great fundamental principle that man cannot hold property in man. We are all created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights. Including those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I mean, it’s an interesting reference back to the concept of a government that promotes a certain principle of democracy. But then again, that comes up against the reality that large enslavers especially had invested heavily in human bodies, in human beings. And the idea of simply taking that property away is something that people are not willing to entertain in the mid-19th century. So when England, for example, abolished slavery in the Caribbean in 1834, it did in fact compensate the slave owners, not the enslaved people, about $26.2 million it paid to about 46,000 enslavers. And that inspired American abolitionists to start to talk about compensating enslavers, simply to make the institution go away, rather than get people to undermine their economic system based solely on principle.

Joanne Freeman:

So basically, abandoning the whole question of the morality of what happened.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And so lawmakers do turn to the idea of compensated emancipation as a way to make the problem of human enslavement go away, even if the money seems to be going to the wrong people. And that becomes a really dramatic feature of the country in 1862, after the Republicans get shellacked in the November elections of that year. The Democrats, who really do very well in that election, insist that they have gotten the gains they have, especially in Congress and in the state houses around the country, because Lincoln had just presented the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that September. And they say, “Look, nobody really wants emancipation.” And so Lincoln very deliberately gives a message to Congress that has a very detailed outline of how he would propose long-term compensation for enslavers and the prolonging of human enslavement in the United States until 1900.

And there’s a big fight about whether he did this deliberately, of making the northerners, who had voted against him in the ’62 election, say, “Wait a minute. We don’t feel like paying,” I think the number was ultimately $1.6 billion, “to the Confederates who are trying to kill us.” So he managed to kill off the idea of compensated emancipation in the American South by this message to Congress in 1862. But he actually did present a 13th Amendment to the Constitution that would’ve extended the institution of slavery until 1900, and compensated White enslaves for having owned their Black neighbors. The United States government did in fact provide compensation for enslavers in the District of Columbia. Thanks to the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of April 16th, 1862, the United States government compensated former enslaves who were loyal to the union, and they could have up to $300 for each of the enslaved people in their households.

It also offered $100 to any freed people who decided to leave the United States. The board in charge of providing that compensation reviewed more than 1,000 petitions from enslavers, and most of the people who asked for it received the full amount that they were allowed. The largest individual payout was a person who received $18,000 for 69 enslaved people. There is a wonderful letter talking about reparations from 1865 that, to me, has always summed up the questions that we have here, and this is a letter that probably most people know about. It was written by a man named Jordan Anderson, who was enslaved in Tennessee, and apparently got a request from his former enslaver to come back to Tennessee and to work for him. And Anderson explains exactly what it will take to get him to come back. The letter itself is an absolute classic, but apparently his enslaver had said, “If you come back, you’ll have a good chance with me.”

And Jordan Anderson writes back, “Well, you know, I want to know particularly what the good chance is that you propose to give me.” And he goes on to say the life that he’s living is good. He’s got a decent salary. His kids are going to school. He goes to church. People refer to him and his wife by honorifics, not by their first name. And he says, “You know what? If you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.” And then he goes on and says, “Here’s some of the things that I would like. And in order to test your sincerity,” as he says, “I’m going to ask you to send us our wages for the time that we served you. I served you faithfully for 32 years,” and Mandy, his wife, 20 years. “At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy…” Which by the way are not high prices for those days. That’s not a high wage.

“At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctors visits to me and pulling a tooth for Mandy, the balance will show what injustice we are entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future.” So if those are cases of places where the federal government did things to take away people’s inherent rights, there’s also these great late 19th century cases where the government gets in real trouble for not doing things.

Joanne Freeman:

And one of those cases takes place in 1890, where New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy ends up getting killed in New Orleans in the midst of rising violence between two Sicilian American families. And the New Orleans police rounded up 250 Sicilians, and then held 19 of them for Hennessy’s killing. On March 10th, 1891, six of the defendants were acquitted, but rumors began to spread that jurors had been bribed by powerful Italian families, potentially coming to be known as the mafia. On the following day, a mob of 20,000 New Orleans residents, led by a smaller group of influential politicians calling themselves one of these wonderful names, the Committee on Safety broke into the parish prison and lynched 11 of the Italian Americans who were still incarcerated, shooting nine, and hanging two others on a lamppost and a tree.

Now, the Italian minister to the United States, Baron Fava, not surprisingly rushed to the State Department when he heard of the killings. And he protested to Secretary of State James Blaine, “Why didn’t the government do something? Why wasn’t the government acting?” He didn’t like the inaction of the government, and this was a serious problem. Foreign nationals had been lynched in the United States, and he wanted what he called “energetic precautions” to protect the Italian colony in New Orleans. What’s interesting is Taft’s response, William Howard Taft, who was serving as the solicitor general, in a way is… I don’t want to say very honest, but it’s strikingly plain in laying out the problem.

He says, “The recent outbreak in New Orleans against the Italians has raised some rather embarrassing international questions,” that’s putting it lightly, “and emphasizes the somewhat anomalous character of our government, which makes the national government responsible for the action of the state authorities without giving it any power to control that action.” And ultimately, Minister Fava withdraws from the United States. Harrison responds by removing the entire American delegation in Rome. There’s an attempt at negotiating. President Harrison, in 1891, acknowledges that it was a quote “most deplorable and discreditable incident.” And finally, in 1892, Blaine tries to move the stand-off in negotiations by offering $2,500 to each of the Italian families of the victims, and sends that along, along with a telegram sent to Italian officials about the quote “lamentable massacre at New Orleans.” So the total that ends up being paid out is $25,000, equal to about $760,000 today.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I find this issue of the covering of the national government for state governments and local governments at this turn of the century period of lynching to be an absolutely fascinating moment in our history, because what the federal government is paying for is its lack of stopping a crime. And that becomes an issue in this period with a lot of countries, because a lot of foreign nationals are being lynched in America in this period. You just took a look at the Italians in New Orleans, but the same is absolutely true of the lynching of Mexicans in the American West.

So two historians, William Carrigan and Clive Webb, have looked into the lynching of persons of Mexican origin or Mexican descent in the United States from 1848 to 1928, and what they discovered was that in that period, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans. And the lynchings of occurred in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, and far away from the border as Nebraska and Wyoming. And by the mid-1890s, the administrations of Presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley had to start taking formal action in paying indemnities to Mexico in restitution for not stopping those lynchings. And there was one in particular that spurred that change in policy, and that was the story of Luis Moreno. Moreno was a man who was alleged in 1895 in Northern California to be involved in a robbery with three White men, in which a store owner, a guy named George Sears, was killed.

And shortly after midnight on August 26th, 1895, a mob of more than 200 men stormed the jailhouse where Moreno was being held, and Moreno gets killed. The Mexican minister to the United States took an active interest in the case, because Moreno was a Mexican national. The Mexican minister insisted that California authorities and politicians should get involved in ascertaining whether Moreno actually had had anything to do with the killing of George Sears in the first place. And investigation turned up the fact that they could not tell what the role of Moreno had been in the killing and who had been behind the lynching. And finally, in 1898, President William McKinley recommended that Congress authorize a payment to Moreno’s heirs of $2,000.

The historians Carrigan and Webb have pointed out that by the late 19th century, the United States was being criticized by governments throughout the world, because it wasn’t protecting foreign nationals on its soil. They insisted, in fact, that it was time for the government to step in and stop doing nothing. The government continued to insist that it had no authority to intervene in the affairs of any individual states, but it did try to head off diplomatic crises by providing financial compensation to the families of anybody who was lynched in America.

Joanne Freeman:

Along similar lines of what you said a little while back, Heather, this really fascinates me, because you have local crimes that are committed. You have the national government, the federal government, in some cases being pushed into responding, though it doesn’t fully feel responsible, and not really admitting responsibility. There’s a kind of fuzzy middle ground there. It’s another also way in which federalism, the sort of fuzzy middle ground between the national government and state governments, which was so handy in getting the Constitution passed, sometimes leaves a haze of responsibility, which really comes up in these questions having to do with morality. I just want to offer a sentence or two from the message to Congress that McKinley included, just a sentence in it, because it has so much to do with what we’re talking about here today. He says, “I recommend the appropriation by Congress out of humane consideration, and without reference to the question of liability of the government of the United States.” Because we’re nice. Out of humane considerations we’re doing this, but we claim no responsibility.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And yet, one of the reasons that I wanted to include this particular episode in American history, the payment of indemnity for lynching of foreign nationals on American soil. Not for the lynching itself, but for the fact the government didn’t do anything to stop it, is that it worked. When Carrigan and Webb took a look at the years from 1848 to 1879, they saw that the lynching rate for Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the US was at a rate of 473 per 100,000 people. But by the turn of the 20th century, after the Mexican government starts to receive payments from the US government for not stopping lynchings, the rate of lynching had to 27.4 lynching victims per 100,000.

Joanne Freeman:

So you really do have action because of a foreign government pushing this government into actually doing something, when the default clearly is to not act, to not take responsibility.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it brings up the importance of reparations not solely as a means of addressing some wrong being done, but also of a means of stopping future wrongs from being done. Once somebody has to pony up something… And I’m not sure cash is the answer to everything, as we started out by saying. But once somebody has to say, “Yeah, I really screwed up, and I should have acted differently,” and they have to atone for that and make sure it doesn’t happen in the future, it appears, anyway, from what happened with Mexican lynchings in America, to work.

Joanne Freeman:

So you’re basically saying, Heather, that holding people accountable for what they do in some kind of a way can really matter. That sometimes, it will prevent people from doing the same thing again.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that’s part of, I think, the issue of reparations, that is partly making sure that people are recompensed in whatever way is possible. As I say, I think we’re talking about things that are not actually… They’re so priceless, there’s no way to fix it. But it partly helps the victims of that unjustness in the past, but with luck, it stops it from happening again in the future, which brings us to Japanese internment. So on February 19th, 1942, a little over two months after the bombing in Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order. It was executive order 9066, and that gave General John DeWitt, the man who was responsible for overseeing the defense of the West Coast, authority to order the mass evacuation of Japanese and Japanese Americans from the West Coast and from other military areas. So beginning in early March of 1942, approximately 120,000 people, including 70,000 of whom were American citizens, were deported to 10 relocation camps across the West.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, one of those 120,000 people who were deported, or were supposed to be deported to relocation camps, was a man named Fred Korematsu. He was a child of Japanese immigrants. He lived in Oakland, California. And at the time of executive order 9066, he was a 22-year-old welder. And he was in love with an Italian American woman, and unwilling to leave his home and follow the order. And he, for a while, evaded the FBI, and even got cosmetic surgery in an attempt to disguise his ancestry. But ultimately, he was apprehended by FBI agents, and sent to a relocation camp. In September of 1942, Korematsu stood trial in federal court in San Francisco, and he argued he was and willing to fight in the United States military, that he had even tried to join the Navy, and that he had never been to Japan.

Despite that, the judge found him guilty of violating the removal order, sentenced him to five years probation, and allowed a military policeman to take him back to the relocation camp. Korematsu and his lawyers challenged the case all the way up to the Supreme Court. And on December 18th, 1944, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld his conviction saying quote, “Korematsu was not excluded from the military area because of hostility to him or his race, but because of military dangers and military urgency.” But at the time Justice Robert Jackson wrote an impassioned dissent, arguing that internment set a very dangerous precedent. He said, “The court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” That’s really stating it nicely and bluntly.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That line, “The principle lies about like a loaded weapon.”

Joanne Freeman:

That captures a lot. Many newspapers ended up speaking against the court’s decision. The Washington Post, for example, had a headline that read Legalized Racism, but the American public at large supported the decision. A December 1942 Gallup poll found that 48% of Americans believed the detainees should not be allowed to return to the Pacific Coast after the war. Just 35% of Americans said they should be allowed to go back. Now, Korematsu married. He had kids. He moved back to California in 1949, and worked as a drafter, although obviously his job prospects were limited, because he had this criminal conviction. And apparently, he never or rarely spoke about this. His memories of this case, for obvious reasons, were painful. His children supposedly learned about it in high school history class.

In 1981, Peter Irons, a professor of political science at the University of California San Diego, discovered documents that indicated that when Korematsu’s case went to the Supreme court, the government had suppressed its own findings that Japanese Americans on the West Coast were not in fact security threats. So Korematsu returned to federal court, and in 1983, finally, a federal judge threw out his conviction.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that right there speaks again to what is really at stake with reparations, is the role of the government. In this case, it concealed its own findings that Japanese Americans were not security threats.

Joanne Freeman:

I will note, it’s a political science professor who found those documents. So I just want to offer a little salute towards academics who dig for documents, and in this case, really found something that had a dramatic impact, certainly on one person’s life, but even more broadly than that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And yet, one of my other favorite quotations from this period is President Truman. And Harry Truman mostly stayed silent about the issue of internment until December 1945, when Eleanor Roosevelt talked to him about some of the racism and violence that people who were returning to California were experiencing. And Truman reacted in a letter to Roosevelt of December 21st, 1945, in which he said, and I quote, “These disgraceful actions almost makes you believe that a lot of our Americans have a streak of Nazi in them.” So Truman began working with the Department of the Interior to develop a bill that would enable people to get compensation for property they had lost. It was quite a narrow bill, and that bill and others like it were defeated. Truman finally reached out to Mike Masaoka, a Japanese American lobbyist and activist who headed the Japanese American Citizens League, and he helped to rally congressional support behind a revised proposal.

Masaoka later recalled, “The compensation proposal was highly significant for two reasons. If approved, it would constitute an admission by the federal government that the evacuation was an injustice, and its victims were entitled to recompense. Second, it would inject funds, whatever the amount, into the economy of Japanese Americans at a time when they were struggling to overcome the effects of the evacuation.” And there it is in a nutshell, both the recognition that the government has committed a wrong and an attempt to make people whole again. That legislation gets held over until 1948. And as the Senate is holding hearings on it, Truman’s Civil Rights Commission released a report in October of 1947 called To Secure These Rights, which was a broad-based examination of civil rights policy and discrimination. It was mostly focused on Black Americans, but the report did contain strong language about Japanese internment.

It said, “The most striking mass interference since slavery with the right to physical freedom was the evacuation and exclusion of persons of Japanese descent from the West Coast during the past war. The evacuation of 110,000 men, women, and children, two-thirds of whom were United States citizens, was made without a trial or any sort of hearing, and at a time when courts were functioning.” On February 2nd, 1948, Truman delivered a special message to Congress on civil rights. He suggested establishing a commission on civil rights, passing anti-lynching legislation, and protecting the right to vote. His last bullet point focused on finally settling evacuation claims for formerly interned Japanese Americans.

He said, “During the last war, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were evacuated from their homes in the Pacific state, solely because of their racial origin. Many of these people suffered property and business losses as a result of this forced evacuation, and through no fault of their own. The Congress has before it legislation establishing a procedure by which claims based upon these losses can be promptly considered and settled. I trust that favorable action on this legislation will soon be taken.” And in fact, passed it, and in July of 1948, Truman signed the Japanese American Evacuation Claims bill into law.

Joanne Freeman:

So the bill was passed, but it was far from a runaway success. The Justice Department that had to evaluate claims struggled to process the 26,000 claims totaling $148 million. And in part, the problem was because documentary proof was hard to get. Many internees had lost documents during the period of internment. The whole process was difficult. In the end, the government awarded just $37 million, less than 10 cents per dollar, lost in homes, businesses, property, and savings. Now, during the 1950s, and again in the 1970s, there were renewed efforts to secure further restitution for internees. There were hearings, there was discussion. And then in 1987, the tide began to turn. Congressional Democrats introduced a Civil Liberties Act to provide a standardized indemnity to every internment victim. And the House passed the act on September 17th, 1987. And near the end of the floor debate, Ron Dellums, the Black California representative who later would end up serving as Oakland’s mayor, recalled his experience of losing his friend to internment while a child in West Oakland.

Ron Dellums (archival):

My home was in the middle of the block on Wood Street in West Oakland. On the corner was a small grocery store owned by Japanese people. My best friend was Roland, a young Japanese child, same age. I will never forget, Mr. Chairman and members of this body, never forget, because the moment is burned indelibly upon this child’s memory, six years of age, the day the six-by trucks came to pick up my friend. I would never forget the vision of fear in the eyes of Roland, my friend, and the pain of leaving home. My mother, as bright as she was, try as she may, could not explain to me why my friend was being taken away as he screamed not to go. And this six-year-old Black American child screamed back, “Don’t take my friend.” No one could help me understand that. No one, Mr. Chairman.

Joanne Freeman:

So on August 10th, 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, apologizing to internees and providing $20,000 in restitution for each of the 82,219 internment survivors. So in all, the government paid about $1.6 billion to internment camp survivors. At the signing ceremony, Reagan issued a kind of apology for the internment, despite his earlier reticence at the indemnities. He said-

Ronald Reagan (archival):

Yes, the nation was then at war, struggling for its survival, and it’s not for us today to pass judgment upon those who may have made mistakes while engaged in that great struggle. Yet, we must recognize that the internment of Japanese Americans was just that, a mistake. For throughout the war, Japanese Americans in the tens of thousands remained utterly loyal to the United States. Indeed, scores of Japanese Americans volunteered for our armed forces, many stepping forward in the intern camps themselves. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up entirely of Japanese Americans, served with immense distinction to defend this nation, their nation. Yet back at home, the soldiers’ families were being denied the very freedom for which so many of the soldiers themselves were laying down their lives.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which brings us back to where we started, with the separation of children from their parents at the Southern border of the United States. What you’re hearing now on right-wing media, that somehow the federal government, under Democratic President Joe Biden, is planning to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the people that at the speakers on those media stations are calling illegal immigrants. And yet the larger story is that in a democratic government like ours, we have expectations of the rights that people who are in this country will enjoy. And part of that contract involves the protection of things like a parent’s relationship to a children, a person’s right to live where they would like to live, the ability of the government to step in and stop lynchings.

Joanne Freeman:

All of these things are just what Heather and I said at the outset. They’re intangible things, they’re things that are hard to put a price on, but they’re things that are vitally important. There’s a component of morality mixed in here with questions about criminality and who takes responsibility and who doesn’t, and in dealing with these problems over and over again, the government is debating what it’s responsible for, and in doing so, making a pretty strong statement about what kind of nation it is and how its citizens should feel about it, and what they can expect of their government as American citizens in kind. So it’s tangled. You could hear in all of the stories we talked about today there’s so much mixed up in this, of right and wrong, and responsibility, and restitution, and repair. And assigning blame when it’s the national government is not an easy thing, but it’s a vitally important thing, because when push comes to shove, it informs us as to what kind of country we’re going to be.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And one of the pieces that really jumps out when you look at these cases is that the answer is not just money. The answer is an apology, for sure, but also a way to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Because in the cases that we have talked about, the things that people lost are priceless. It doesn’t matter how much money they hand you if they have taken away your child. Financial restitution is an important thing so that there is a recognition of that harm, but the harm doesn’t go away. And the question of how you address that harm, whether through the apologies that Reagan may or may not have made, or that Benjamin Harrison may or may not have made, or that Colonel Anderson never made to Jordan Anderson, whether the apology is certainly important, whether it’s enough, I think is still on the table.

And I would say it’s probably not, that there actually needs to be not only the financial restitution, not only the apology, but also some means of making sure that whatever pain was inflicted in the past through the federal government either not doing something or doing something can never happen again.