It's a good thing I'm giving a midterm next week, because both of the issues that really annoyed me this week (and my students, if any of them are Kossacks, will tell you so) had to do with the Presidency and the Japanese. Today, we'll discuss Japanese internment at some length, because the rationales for that turned out to be just as slippery as the rationales used to defend the Iraq war, and because the National Archives have LOTS of images taken by such illustrious photographers as Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams which I use in my classroom presentation. Next week, the Bomb.
In 1940, there were 320,000 People of Japanese origin or descent in the United States and its territories: 200,000 in Hawaii, and 120,000 on American mainland, mostly in Pacific Coast states, mostly in California. Of the 120,000 in the United States, 40,000 were issei, first generation immigrants barred from citizenship by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, but their children and grandchildren, the 80,000 nisei and sansei, were under 18 and citizens, as the 14th Amendment dictates, because they had been born here.
After Pearl Harbor, Hawaii passed under martial law. Although the mass evacuation of the 200,000 Japanese from Hawaii was considered, the military government AND the business community contended such a program would seriously disrupt both the defense AND THE ECONOMY of Oahu. In Hawaii and in the Unites States east of the Rockies, government surveillance had identified some 2000 potentially subversive persons in the Japanese community, who, along with 14000 German and Italian security risks nationwide, were rounded up late in 1941.
California was different. Less than a month after Pearl Harbor, on January 5 1942, the Mutual Broadcasting Company charged Japanese engaged in espionage, and that Japanese domination of food production in California (the economic basis of the Japanese community was in agriculture) was part of Japan's master war plan. The Los Angeles Times questioned the loyalty of the nisei, the first generation American-born Japanese:
A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched – so a Japanese American born of Japanese parents – grows up to be a Japanese, not an American
These were joined by the American Legion and farming interests who explicitly stated question of whether the Pacific Coast was the territory of white men or brown men, and by politicians, including Attorney General Earl Warren, who pressed federal authorities for Japanese removal.
Lieutenant General John DeWitt, the commander of the Western Defense Command and the 4th Army, headquartered at the Presidio in San Francisco invoked the logic that the very absence of sabotage activity on the West Coast proved the existence of an organized, disciplined conspiracy to commit sabotage. I'm not sure how anyone comes to a conclusion like that, although it's probably connected to taking your shoes off at airports. In early February 1942, DeWitt sent Washington a written recommendation for the mass evacuation of the Japanese from the Pacific States on the grounds it was impossible to tell the loyal from the disloyal in the peculiarly alien and inscrutable Japanese community; Secretary of War Henry Stimson noted that doing this would make a tremendous hole in Constitution, but nobody listened to him. On February 13, the Pacific Coast Congressional delegation forwarded to the President a recommendation asking for the immediate evacuation of
all persons of Japanese lineage and all others whose presence should be deemed dangerous or inimical to the defense of the United States from all strategic areas
of California, Oregon, Washington, and the territory of Alaska.
Six days later, on February 19, FDR signed Executive Order #9066:
Executive Order
Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas
Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises . . . Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion. The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, in the judgment of the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to accomplish the purpose of this order.(snip)
I hereby further authorize and direct the Secretary of War and the said Military Commanders to take such other steps as he or the appropriate Military Commander may deem advisable to enforce compliance with the restrictions applicable to each Military area herein above authorized to be designated, including the use of Federal troops and other Federal Agencies, with authority to accept assistance of state and local agencies.(snip)
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The White House,
February 19, 1942.
Just like the Constitution, in which "all other persons" is understood to mean "slaves," the words "Japanese" and "Japanese Americans" never appear in the order. It's evident that the term “military necessity” covered a particular anti-Asian variant of American racism, and Army intelligence reported officially that it believed the mass evacuation of Japanese was unnecessary. Accordingly, all Japanese inhabitants of the designated area, including American citizens, including children, were evacuated by the end of 1942.
An estimated 15,000 Japanese left the prohibited Pacific coastal zone in February and early March to move in with relatives east of Rockies, since the Japanese residing outside the Western Defense Command were never subject to detention. The remainder were sent to one of ten relocation camps: two in Arkansas, the other eight scattered through the arid western interior. The camps imprisoned more than 110,000 people who were never charged with crimes nor given a hearing from March 1942 to December 1944. Here's a map:
The rationale? You saw it above. Some newspaper cartoonists decided it was really to protect the Japanese from white people. As you remember, this is one of the reasons Andrew Jackson gave as he explained that Indian Removal was a good thing in 1830.
And so they were rounded up. All of the subsequent images of the internment process will bear the captions they were given by the photographers:
(A young evacuee of Japanese ancestry waits with the family baggage before leaving by bus for an assembly center in the spring of 1942, Clem Albers, California, April 1942)
(Persons of Japanese ancestry arrive at the Santa Anita Assembly Center from San Pedro. Evacuees lived at this center at the former Santa Anita race track before being moved inland to relocation centers. Clem Albers, Arcadia, CA, April 5, 1942)
(The last family off the bus from San Francisco have just arrived at this assembly center (formerly a race track) which will be their home until relocation centers inland have been established and are ready for occupancy. Dorothea Lange, San Bruno, California. 4/29/42)
Race tracks. Santa Anita in Southern California, Tanforan on the Peninsula. Race tracks. Each of the internment camps soon became little cities with the tensions endemic to real cities. Farmers daily passed through gates in first fence and inmates willing to submit to a process of interrogation to establish their loyalty to the United States could be furloughed for work beyond the second fence. All the following pictures will be from Manzanar, in the Owens Valley in Yolo County near Mono Lake, where Los Angeles's water comes from.
(Row of Barracks , Manzanar, Dorothea Lange, June 9, 1942) Those are the Sierra Nevadas in the background. This is RURAL.
(Manzanar Relocation Center from Guard Tower, Ansel Adams, c 1943-1944)
(Military Police, Manzanar, Clem Albers, April 2, 1942)
(Inside a barrack, Manzanar, Dorothea Lange, June 30, 1942.)
(Third Grade Arithmetic, Manzanar, Dorothea Lange, July 1, 1942) and there's more from this photograph:
Third grade students working on their arithmetic lesson at this first volunteer elementary school. School equipment was not yet available at the time this photograph was taken.
Yes, they were in SUCH a hurry to get the Japanese out of the cities that their new communities weren't fully ready for them when they got there.
(Richard Kobayashi, Farmer with Cabbages, Ansel Adams, c 1943-1944)
(Roy Takeno reading paper in front of office, Ansel Adams, c 1943)
(Manzanar, California. A branch of the Los Angeles post office has been established at this War Relocation Authority center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry. Clem Albers, 1942)
When the director of the War Relocation Authority made the loyalty-interrogation process compulsory for all internees in early 1943, 8500 internees who refused to participate were labeled disloyal and sent to the camp at Tule Lake for discipline. Those whose loyalty was confirmed were recruited into the Army. Eventually there were 33,000 Japanese Americans in uniform, many as members of the Military Intelligence Service as interpreters and translators on the Pacific front. Remember this when we get to the court cases, because language was used by the government to justify internment. I suppose it would have taken too long to interrogate all of the Japanese before any of them were sent to internment camps.
While all this was going on, a group of social scientists at Berkeley began a scholarly study of all aspects of the relocation, and two theories came out of that: it was fueled by either (white) special interest groups on the Pacific Coast, or by General De Witt’s military estimate of the situation. Subsequent study of themotives behind relocation pin it firmly on FDR, who knew that cracking down on Japanese Americans would be popular both in Congress and among Americans generally; Roosevelt himself was convinced that the Japanese, both alien and citizen, were dangerous to military security long after the military rejected this policy.
There were also lawsuits, and four cases regarding the legality of internment made it to the Supreme Court. The Court heard the cases of Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui
(who, incidentally, had a law degree from the University of Oregon and was a practicing attorney when he was detained) in April 1943. In both cases, the government argued that the only certain way to isolate potentially disloyal Japanese from loyal Japanese was to isolate the whole group. The ruling on Hirabayashi, written by Harlan Stone, the Chief Justice, stated that the danger of espionage and sabotage by Japanese Americans overrode any Constitutional promise of equal protection; it was based partially on idea that the existence of Japanese language classes for Japanese American children provided evidence that Japanese Americans sought
relatively little social intercourse between them and the white population.
Yes, I'm sure that that's exactly why we were sent to Hebrew school or Greek school or Vietnamese school, to isolate ourselves from the larger population. Frank Murphy, in his
concurring opinion, had this to say about the government's policy:
[It bore] a melancholy resemblance to the treatment accorded to members of the Jewish race in Germany and in other parts of Europe.
Fred Korematsu's case was heard in October, 1944, at which time the Japanese Americans were
still in camps long after Japanese forces posed any thereat to the West Coast. This time, the government claimed that mass internment had been necessary to protect Japanese Americans against racial hostility (the "out-of-harm's-way" argument again), and that Korematsu had not met the burden of proving that whites were not not hostile to Japanese Americans. His case lost by a 6-3 vote. However, the Court simultaneously issued a unanimous ruling
on a case regarding Mitsuye Endo in which she claimed
habeas corpus. The ruling concluded that military officials had no authority to subject citizens who are "concededly loyal” to continued detention, and this is how Justice Robert Jackson concluded his concurring opinion:
I conclude, therefore, that the court is squarely faced with a serious constitutional question,-whether the relator's detention violated the guarantees of the Bill of Rights of the federal Constitution and especially the guarantee of due process of law. There can be but one answer to that question. An admittedly loyal citizen has been deprived of her liberty for a period of years. Under the Constitution she should be free to come and go as she pleases. Instead, her liberty of motion and other innocent activities have been prohibited and conditioned. She should be discharged.
The Endo decision was announced December 18, 1944. The day before, the War department had issued press release announcing the closing of the internment camps. Not surprisingly, given the hostility that Korematsu had not proved to the Court's satisfaction, instances of violence and harassment marred peaceful return of Japanese Americans to their homes, farms, and businesses. While the
Los Angeles Times expressed a wish that the Japanese would seek homes elsewhere on Pacific Coast, Governor Warren immediately urged the people of California to support Army decision to close camps, and the African-American, Filipino,and Korean communities pledged cooperation and assistance to the returning Japanese. It's estimated that around 4,000 of the "evacuees" left the country to settle in Japan.
Compensation? In July 1948, Harry Truman signed the Japanese American Claims Act, which appropriated $39 million to settle claims that amounted to $148 million.The final claim wasn't settled until 1965, and then, it was settled on the basis of 1942 prices without interest. On February 19, 1976, President Gerald Ford formally rescinded Executive Order 9066.
A couple of years ago, the AP U.S. history exam asked a question about the World War II experience of four American ethnic groups, one of which was Japanese Americans. They had to pick two. Of the 1100 or so that I graded, 90% discussed Japanese Americans. I had expected that based on the amount of material that has been written about Manzanar I'd see it most often, but the camp that had the most mentions in my exams was Topaz, the relocation camp in Utah. I'm guessing every school child in Utah is taken there on a field trip at least once.
I could go on, but I'll stop here. It's really difficult to teach this in a way that's "fair" to the people who wanted the Japanese interned, and I've given up making any effort to do so.