The Train to Crystal City is both history and cautionary tale about xenophobia
While Franklin D. Roosevelt is regarded by the vast majority of presidential scholars to be among the three greatest American presidents (along with Washington and Lincoln), his administration bears the stain of a human rights violations that are still coming to light today. That violation is the internment of more than 100,000 Americans of foreign ancestry following the United States’ entry into World War II in 1941. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Government, under the now-infamous Executive Order 9066, rounded up citizens of Japanese, German and Italian descent and placed them in internment camps around the country. A recently released book sheds new light on a little-known aspect of the internment program. In The Train to Crystal…