Through Millard Lampell, Helen Rogers Reid, and other liberal contacts, Ben became one of the leaders in an effort to enlist returning veterans in a campaign to advance a progressive agenda. At the forefront of the movement was the upstart American Veterans Committee (AVC), which presented itself as a progressive alternative to the conservative American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. AVC had adopted the motto of “Citizens First, Veterans Second,” and it made opposition to racial discrimination a core issue. The AVC’s organizing campaign was aided by some marquee political names, including Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., and Philip Willkie, son of the late Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie.
Ben was involved in the formation of yet another veterans’ group, this one calling itself the National Veterans Organization. This group was founded by minority veterans with the specific goal of addressing issues experienced by minority veterans. As accounts from around the country made clear, these problems were systemic: Local Veterans Administration officials had provided little or no assistance to minority veterans in some parts of the country. While a white veteran could enlist his local American Legion or VFW chapter to help him with the VA, the American Legion and VFW had effectively turned their backs on minority veterans by allowing local chapters to bar non-whites from membership.9
The National Veterans Organization leadership committee that included Ben lobbied the Veterans Administration and its national head, General Omar Bradley, to aid minority veterans. They specifically asked Bradley to press regional VA administrators to hire minority staff at local facilities. But the Truman administration was treading carefully on civil rights matters because of a backlash from Southern Democrats, and Bradley took his cue from the White House. Although discrimination and segregation were rife in the country’s VA facilities, Bradley would only encourage—not command—regional administrators to make more minority hires.
As Bradley and his chief medical director rationalized, they couldn’t force local VA facilities to “depart from community patterns too rapidly,” as one newspaper put it.10 It was clear to Ben and other minority veterans involved in these groundbreaking efforts that the problems they had exposed weren’t going to be fixed overnight. Still, they had succeeded in turning a national spotlight on the racist and discriminatory practices faced by minority veterans.
BEN HAD AMPLIFIED THE VOICE OF minority veterans, but many Americans in early 1946 didn’t believe that bigotry was the country’s most pressing issue. At every turn there was talk of Communist subversion aimed at conquering America. The January 25, 1946, issue of the Nashville Banner, one of the newspapers in Tennessee’s state capital, offered a snapshot of these fears. Among the stories was one about the War Department stepping up its drive “to purge subversive civilian employees from Army posts.” Another warned of “communistic activities” in the Tennessee Valley Authority, the New Deal–era electrification program. Still another story reported that the Grand Exalted Ruler of the national Elks social fraternity had vowed before a gathering of seven hundred Nashville Elks that the organization “will fight communism and all other un-American blocs until hell freezes over.”
Some prominent East Coast elites were soon running scared. Agnes Meyer, a liberal journalist married to the publisher of the Washington Post, wrote a five-part series for the paper in the summer of 1946, praising the work of a leftist Chicago community organizer named Saul Alinsky. By the following January, Meyer was warning a gathering of “women’s patriotic groups” in Washington, DC, that “communism and socialism are on the march throughout the world” and “their fanaticism must be met with a positive and realistic program if we are to win the battle.”11
Ben and others publicly challenging America’s status quo on racial, social, and economic matters found themselves in the line of fire by early 1946. There were suggestions from some quarters that those publicly highlighting America’s shortcomings were “pinks” or “reds” who were softening the country up for a Soviet-directed Communist revolution. Smears were hurled at some of Ben’s new friends and associates. A prominent conservative columnist and writer, Westbrook Pegler, accused the American Veterans Committee of being leftist or even Communist.12 Although Ben was a homespun conservative at heart, he was sailing into a gathering storm.
For now, Ben earnestly threw himself into his activism. Named to the planning board of the American Veterans Committee, Ben began speaking at organizing rallies around New York City. Addressing several hundred veterans and their supporters at a March 20 rally at a Brooklyn high school, Ben declared that “an attack against any minority is an attack on the United States of America.”13 He would repeat variations of that line in speeches over the next year. He also addressed the International Convention of the YMCA in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and shared an Upper West Side stage with Mike Masaoka at a Manhattan event where he was introduced as a JACL “special representative and national speaker of minority problems.”14
At some point early in 1946, Ben was introduced to the novelist Pearl S. Buck, the daughter of American Christian missionaries to China who had already been honored with a Pulitzer Prize for her 1931 novel about China, The Good Earth, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. During the war, Buck had created the East and West Association to assist the Allies by promoting a better understanding of the people and cultures of China and India. In the war’s aftermath, Buck and her foundation had taken a strong stand against continued European colonial rule in Asia while supporting the fight against bigotry and racism at home.15
Ben’s Fifty-Ninth Mission Tour was exactly the sort of thing that Buck and her association sought to support, and so an arrangement was reached: Ben would continue his speaking tour with the association’s endorsement and some financial support.
Chapter 52
A PATH IN PEACE
During a swing through the West in early 1946, Ben was invited to a dinner at Mike Masaoka’s house in Salt Lake City. Although Ben had a date, one of the other guests caught his eye. She was a beautiful University of Utah student whose brother-in-law had roomed with Masaoka at the university several years earlier.
After dinner that night, Masaoka took the group to a local dance hall. Ben and the student were both awkward dancers, so they paired off and spent much of the evening together. Ben learned the short version of her life story. She was about to turn twenty-two. She was born and raised around Pocatello, Idaho, about fifty miles from Minidoka, one of the camps he had visited in 1944. And, like Ben, her father had been a farm boy who had immigrated from Japan in 1904.
Her name was Shige Tanabe, and Ben was smitten.
On his first visit to meet Shige’s parents in Idaho, Ben made a memorable impression. Euphoric at regaining the liberties of his pre-army life, Ben had taken to smoking cigars and drinking beer. He arrived at Shige’s house with a six-pack and stashed it in the refrigerator—not realizing that Shige and her family were devout Mormons who didn’t drink and didn’t smoke. “I think the family was always in a state of shock,” Shige later recalled of her dating life with Ben. “He wasn’t the normal boyfriend.”1
In a matter of weeks, the cigar-smoking, beer-drinking, non-Mormon boyfriend proposed to Shige. She accepted, and on August 9, 1946, they married in the town of Tyhee, Idaho.
After a brief honeymoon, Ben returned to the East Coast with Shige to continue his speaking tour. The East and West Association had given him the title of executive secretary of the Washington Council, but it sounded more impressive than it was. While the association helped arrange events, Ben paid most of his own expenses. He was burning through his savings.
In October, two months into their marriage, Ben and Shige celebrated the release of Ralph G. Martin’s book, Boy from Nebraska: The Story of Ben Kuroki. It was an exhilarating time, and the book received favorable reviews in major publications.
“Ben Kuroki is now on what he calls his fifty-ninth mission—the fight against prejudice here at home,” wrote the New York Times reviewer. “All who believe democracy has a future must wish him well. Ralph Martin has told his story simply and clearly. It is a good book. It should be widely read.”2
Throughout the fall of 1946, Ben traveled the middle Atlantic states, speaking to high school students and civic clubs about the importance of racial tolerance in a healthy democracy and promoting his book in radio interviews and bookstore signings. At a series of appearances in Binghamton, New York, in November, Ben and a popular Greek actress shared speaking honors as part of World Friendship Day, an event sponsored by the East and West Association to promote “international understanding and goodwill.”3
After Thanksgiving, Ben and Shige headed west for the holidays. They spent several days in Nebraska, where Ben delivered more speeches, including one at the University of Nebraska’s main campus in Lincoln. He detoured to the northern Nebraska town of O’Neill to introduce Shige to his friend Cal Stewart, now publishing a local weekly newspaper. The couple spent time with Ben’s family in Hershey, then continued on to Idaho.4
After ringing in the New Year with Shige’s family, Ben prepared to return to the East Coast. His savings were nearly depleted and speaking invitations were drying up. His Fifty-Ninth Mission Tour had been an extraordinary capstone to his combat exploits, but Ben was looking ahead to his next challenge.
THE FINAL ACT OF BEN’S CRUSADE unfolded over twenty-nine days in early 1947. Traveling to five states and the District of Columbia, Ben delivered his well-honed speech—“The Unfinished Fight for Democracy”—and gave interviews. On some days, he spoke to four different groups, with audiences ranging in size from the dozens to the hundreds.
He kicked things off with an appearance on Americans All, a radio program hosted by Tomlinson D. Todd, a prominent Black civil rights activist in Washington, DC. Ben appeared on the show with US senator Glen H. Taylor, a progressive Democrat from Idaho. For his segment, Ben was interviewed by Grace Yaukey, sister of the novelist Pearl Buck. “It seems to me so terribly important that if America is to be the leader of world democracy we should set a true example at home,” Ben solemnly declared.5
After a stop in New York City, Ben proceeded to Wallingford, Connecticut, for events on February 9. A few days later, he traveled to the Berkshires of western Massachusetts for two events in Pittsfield. He spoke to congregants in the Sunday morning services at the First Methodist Church and then addressed an evening crowd at the First Congregational Church. Before an audience of five hundred that evening, Ben built to a soaring finish. “To make the United States the proving ground that people can all live together in peace and without prejudice is our great obligation,” he said. “To quote Franklin Roosevelt, Americanism is not and never has been a matter of race and religion. Americanism is a matter of the heart and mind.”6
The following day, February 17, Ben returned to Binghamton, New York, for the biggest event of his finale. Ben had made his public speaking debut almost exactly three years earlier at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, nervously taking the podium before a well-heeled audience of one thousand in San Francisco’s finest luxury hotel. His appearance at the Herald Tribune Forum had been before another high-powered crowd in New York City’s most elegant hotel. Now, although the crowd size in Binghamton equaled or exceeded those in San Francisco and New York City, Ben found himself living a classic Americana moment: a farm boy from Nebraska who had made something of himself, addressing a salt-of-the-earth audience in a high school gymnasium near the confluence of the Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers in Upstate New York.7
Ben rose to the occasion with another inspiring event. “Though many Fascists were killed during the war, we have not killed fascism nor the tenets of racial superiority,” he declared as he built to a climax. He called out organizations like the Ku Klux Klan as the obvious face of fascism in America, but warned that the American ideal was being undermined in more subtle ways, including by unjust laws.8
He called out the discriminatory immigration laws that barred his parents from American citizenship, “even though they have lived here forty-five years, raised ten children, and given two of those children to Army service.” He called out the lack of legal protections that allowed people of color to be barred from “certain New York City hotels” or restaurants or other public facilities. When he declared with rising vehemence that “an attack on one minority is an attack on all minorities,” the overwhelmingly white audience burst into applause. He concluded with a summons to those before him and the country at large: “I do not believe that war has brought peace, and I urge you to join the Fifty-Ninth Mission, the fight against intolerance here in America.”9
The pace of Ben’s appearances picked up for the remainder of the month. In Fredericksburg, Virginia, scene of a great Civil War battlefield that saw 1,300 Union soldiers killed and 9,600 wounded, Ben spoke four times during the course of a day.
He made his final stop on March 3 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, another town whose name would be forever linked to the four-year struggle to preserve the Union and extinguish slavery. Members of the International Club of Gettysburg College had invited Ben to their campus, and he met some of the students in a gathering at the home of the college president.
As a photographer snapped away, Ben sat on a couch beside the president of Gettysburg College, Dr. Henry Hanson. To Ben’s right was an Arab student from Palestine. Over his right shoulder stood a Pennsylvanian of German ancestry who had served with the navy in the Pacific during the war. Over Ben’s left shoulder, bending forward slightly to follow the conversations, was a dark-skinned student from the Philippines, which the US had finally granted independence the previous year after forty-six years of colonial rule. Next to the Filipino stood a young man from China, then a student from France and a student of Indian ancestry from British Guiana.10 It was an all-male group, but otherwise symbolic of the diverse America that Ben had sought to celebrate in his Fifty-Ninth Mission Tour.
Later, three hundred people crowded into the Brua Chapel on campus to hear Ben deliver the speech that was etched into his heart and mind. His story was the story of so many Americans, he explained. “I am fighting against discrimination not only against the Americans of Japanese descent, but also discrimination against any other minority. For an attack on one minority is an attack on all minorities. And an attack on minorities is an attack against all America.”11
The big idea that Ben had tried to convey to his audiences was that America’s success in the fight against fascism and other totalitarian ideologies hinged on the morality of its actions at home and abroad. As the weeks had passed, he had inserted into his speech examples of postwar injustices committed against returning veterans of color. These included the confiscation of land from Japanese American veterans in California, who had acted as legal proxies for parents targeted by alien land laws, and the beating and lynching of Black veterans in the South.
“The United States should be a leader of democracy—but stealing land from ex-GIs because their parents are Japanese, or killing Negroes, does not speak well for America to the world,” Ben said. “We can’t afford to lose our position morally as an exponent of democracy, for the news of our discrimination spreads everywhere in the world immediately. Those who continue race prejudices are few—but so were the groups that put Hitler and Tojo into power.”12
It had been another good day for Ben, but he was physically and emotionally spent. The country was hurtling toward a second Red Scare in the aftermath of President Harry Truman’s losses in the midterm elections four months earlier and the rapid deterioration of US-Soviet relations. Eighteen days ahead, in the most infamous act of his presidency, Truman would sign Executive Order 9835—the so-called Loyalty Order—setting in motion a witch hunt for Communists in the federal government. The Cold War abroad had unleashed icy winds at home, and progressive crusades like Ben’s Fifty-Ninth Mission Tour faced growing peril.
Tired, nearly broke, and discouraged that his tour hadn’t produced policy changes or other tangible results, Ben was ready to go home.
