Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  Does this prove that American involvement in World War II was based on a lie and thereby illegitimate through and through? Some conservative critics, such as Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, suggest military action should have been taken sooner. They maintain that with the sinking of the Reuben James on October 31, 1941, “the United States would have been fully justified by international law in declaring war on Germany and her allies.” In their judgment, the neutrality acts harmed such states as Ethiopia and China, which were “attempt[ing] to resist the Italian and Japanese aggressors,” and Roosevelt’s advisors fell short in advising him of the threats: “Had the United States deliberately and forcefully entered the war in Europe earlier, on its own timetable, perhaps some of Hitler’s strategic victories (and, possibly, much of the Holocaust) might have been avoided.” Schweikart and Allen speculate that if America had entered World War II earlier, the Battle of Britain “would not have been close” and that Hitler might have “scrapp[ed] the German invasion of Russia.”23 They fault Roosevelt for following public opinion and failing to lead.

  President Roosevelt, like all American presidents, has his fans and his critics. But Zinn’s purpose is not to offer a critique of one specific U.S. president or one particular set of policies, but to indict all American presidents—Polk, Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson—and pretend they’re all the same because all of them, regardless of party or individual character, are irredeemable, greedy, capitalist war-mongers. Zinn’s project is to destroy the credibility of the American presidency—and of America, itself.

  Thus, Zinn refers to “one of the judges in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial . . . Radhabinod Pal,” who “dissented from the general verdicts against Japanese officials and argued that the United States had clearly provoked the war with Japan.”24 According to Wikipedia, Pal was the only one to maintain that all the defendants were “not guilty.”25 Zinn quotes from Richard H. Minear’s Victors’ Justice, which, he says, “sums up Pal’s view” that American “embargoes on scrap iron and oil” were to blame for “provok[ing] the war with Japan.” According to the Indian judge, “these measures were a clear and potent threat to Japan’s very existence.”26 But Victor Davis Hanson, drawing on numerous sources, points out that Japan could have obtained oil “in the Dutch East Indies without attacking Pearl Harbor and Singapore.”27 As Harvard professor Fredrik Logevall has written, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor to “destroy the American fleet” and buy “time to complete its southward expansion.”28 Schweikart and Allen, citing the fact that “Japan was already on a timetable for war,” judge the claims that “Roosevelt provoked Japan” as “absurd.” Japan’s policies were taking it toward bankruptcy, which would make war necessary. Intercepts beginning in December 1940 revealed that Japan was planning to “expand” to the southwest, the south, or the east—or in more than one of those directions.29

  Immediately after quoting Pal, Zinn asserts, “The records show that a White House conference two weeks before Pearl Harbor anticipated a war and discussed how it should be justified.”30 No further details about the mysterious “conference” are given. Zinn simply juxtaposes the fact of this murky meeting with Pal’s claim that the U.S. provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and allows the power of suggestion to implant the idea of a conspiracy. It would take a bit more work to describe the events actually taking place with names and dates. But no one should be surprised that the White House was anticipating possible entry into World War II in November 1941. So, of course the Roosevelt administration had to prepare for that contingency. Tensions were rising steadily. As Bailey points out, “Congress, responding to public pressures and confronted with a shooting war, voted in mid-November, 1941, to pull the teeth from the now-useless Neutrality Act of 1939.”31 None of that was a secret.

  Thus during “negotiations with Japan” in Washington in “November and early December of 1941,” the State Department “insisted that the Japanese clear out of China but, to sweeten the pill, offered to renew trade relations on a limited basis.” But the Japanese were “unwilling to lose face by withdrawing at the behest of the United States.”32 New York Times readers could have read about a November 25, 1941, “parley” at the White House involving discussions between representatives of the United States, Britain, China, and the Netherlands about “the Far Eastern situation.”33 On December 4, the giant, front-page headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune announced, “FDR’s War Plans!” The president was dismayed at the leak. But as Secretary of War Henry Stimson asked reporters a couple of days later, “What would you think of an American general staff which in the present condition of the world did not investigate and study every conceivable type of emergency which may confront this country and every possible method of meeting that emergency?”34

  The next stick Zinn uses to beat Roosevelt—and the United States—with is the truly tragic “plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe.” Zinn cites “Henry Feingold’s research” showing “that, while the Jews were being put in camps and the process of annihilation was beginning that would end in the horrifying extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, Roosevelt failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives. He did not see it as a high priority; he left it to the State Department, and in the State Department anti-Semitism and a cold bureaucracy became obstacles to action.”35

  FDR’s inaction has rightfully come under criticism by historians and commentators. But most of them, including Feingold himself, make some kind of bow toward the challenges of the situation Roosevelt was in. Feingold admits “the great difficulty of assigning to a modern nation-state a humanitarian mission to rescue a foreign minority for which it had no legal responsibility.” And while Roosevelt can be blamed for his decision, he can’t be faulted with anti-Semitism, which is simply not among the character flaws assigned to him by historians—even his critics. Feingold, for example, acknowledges that Roosevelt had, in fact, “appointed more Jews to high places than any prior chief executive.”36 And Robert Dallek, who believes that Roosevelt’s inaction in this tragedy mars an otherwise laudatory legacy, attributes it to lack of “political courage,” not anti-Semitism.37

  But such distinctions are not for Zinn. His point is that the American president was no better than Hitler—and America no better than Nazi Germany. Not only was the Roosevelt administration responsible for the deaths of Jews who were not allowed to emigrate to the United States, but the U.S. was enforcing “Nordic supremacy” just like the Third Reich—as evidenced in the treatment of black troops. Naturally, this suggestion is presented in the form of a question: “Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over ‘inferior’ races? The United States’ armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early l945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old.”38

  Zinn knows that black soldiers in World War II suffered nothing remotely like the conditions he himself had described in an earlier chapter of slaves “chained together . . . in different stages of suffocation,”39 but he elides the differences to make America seem no better than Nazi Germany.

  And Zinn has another victim class whose sufferings advance his America the Fascist thesis: women were oppressed, too! “The Fascist nations were notorious in their insistence that the woman’s place was in the home. Yet, the war against Fascism, although it utilized women in defense industries where they were desperately needed, took no special steps to change the subordinate role of women.” The evidence? “The War Manpower Commission, despite the large numbers of women in war work, kept women off its policymaking bodies.”

  And it only gets worse. While the treatment of blacks and women was bad, the U.S. came “close to direct duplication of Fascism,” according to Zinn, “in its treatment of the Japanese-Americans living on the West Coa
st.” FDR “calmly signed Executive Order 9066, in February 1942, giving the army the power, without warrants or indictments or hearings, to arrest every Japanese-American on the West Coast—110,000 men, women, and children—to take them from their homes, transport them to camps far into the interior, and keep them there under prison conditions.”40

  Not all Americans were in favor of the internment of the Japanese. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Republican congressman Robert Taft, and the prominent black journalist George S. Schuyler all opposed it. But it would probably be safe to say that most Americans were angered and frightened by the Pearl Harbor attack. One can get a sense of just how much the nation was on edge by perusing the newspapers from the time or by reading Schweikart and Allen’s description of the mood in 1942, when “a Japanese sub surfacing off the coast of Oregon” was taken as a sign of “an imminent invasion of San Francisco, San Diego, or the Los Angeles area.” “Bunkers were thrown up at Santa Barbara; skyscrapers in Los Angeles sported antiaircraft guns on their roofs; and lights on all high-rise buildings were extinguished or covered at night to make it more difficult for imperial bombers to hit their targets. Local rodeo associations and the Shrine Mounted Patrol conducted routine reconnaissance of mountains, foothills, and deserts, checking for infiltrators.” German Americans and Italian Americans also came under “the close scrutiny” of the FBI. But by 1942, threats to American soil on the East coast were not very serious.41 Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government interned twenty-two thousand people of Japanese origin, as well.42

  One now oft-forgotten part of this history is related by political science professor Ken Masugi, whose parents were interned first at Tule Lake (until it became “a segregation center to house ethnic Japanese who proved troublemakers in other camps”) and then at the Minidoka Center in Idaho. According to Masugi, “Any honest study of the relocation or WWII will discuss the Niihau episode.” This event occurred on the afternoon of December 7, 1941, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when a Japanese fighter-bomber landed on the remote Hawaiian island of Niihau. A native Hawaiian, Hawila Kaleohano, approached the pilot and grabbed his gun and papers. He then brought back two American-born inhabitants of Japanese heritage to act as interpreters. These two, a farmer and his wife—after they learned about the earlier attack on Pearl Harbor—decided to help the pilot and claim “the island for the Emperor.” Once the Hawaiians learned about their plot, a battle ensued, ending with the deaths of both the Japanese farmer and the pilot at the hands of the Hawaiians. The incident was included in the Roberts Commission Report released on January 24, 1942; understandably, it inspired alarm. Masugi comments, “Here was a simple farmer, neither agent nor nationalist, joining the cause of Japan in its moment of glory. . . .”43

  “The war posed loyalty tests,” Masugi explains, describing the divided loyalties of his own family, with his Japanese-born father favoring Japan and his American-born mother favoring the U.S. One of Masugi’s uncles “joined the army and was decorated; another, obeying his immigrant mother’s demand, went to prison rather than be drafted.”44 Masugi believes that the “initial phase of relocation could be justified without reducing it to racism or war hysteria.”45

  But Zinn obscenely compares internment camps for the Japanese to Nazi concentration camps, claiming that the “prison conditions” represented an almost “direct duplication of Fascism.” Consider what American soldiers saw when they came upon Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald, which Charles Sasser describes in his book about the 761st Black Panthers: “ ‘No more war, no more war!’ one bony creature chanted with hysterical glee, staggering and clapping her hands. All her teeth were gone. It was hard to tell if she were young or old.” Seared into the memory of Johnnie Stevens was “the stench of discarded, decaying flesh, burning bodies, piles of human excrement, sewer pits buzzing with flies.” Captain Johnny Long watched inmates “totter” over to the “bloating carcass” of a horse and throw themselves “upon it like starving jackals, ripping and tearing at the bloody thing with their bare hands as they ate the flesh raw.” Not knowing any better, the soldiers left food for the prisoners, which killed some of them, so far gone were their starved bodies.46 Zinn somehow never brings up such details. While arguably a violation of civil rights, the American relocation bears absolutely no resemblance to the Holocaust. At their camps, Japanese Americans “published their own newspapers,” tended gardens, and established schools, glee clubs, and “baseball teams for their children.” Eventually, internees were paid reparations.47

  Zinn not only ignores such facts; he also implies that the internments were kept secret from the public, claiming, “Not until after the war did the story of the Japanese-Americans begin to be known to the general public. The month the war ended in Asia, September 1945, an article appeared in Harper’s Magazine by Yale Law professor Eugene V. Rostow, calling the Japanese evacuation ‘our worst wartime mistake.’ ”48

  Was Japanese American internment, in fact, a secret from the “general public” until after the war ended in Asia? Absolutely not. One only needed to open a newspaper. Articles by Lawrence Davies in the New York Times, for example, described the developments in the internment of the Japanese blow by blow. Davies’s January 29, 1942, dispatch from San Francisco began, “An anti-fifth column campaign aimed at ridding State and city payrolls of all persons of Japanese ancestry, even though they themselves are American citizens, and moving all Japanese nationals to internment camps or at least out of the coastal war zone, made progress today.” The city of Los Angeles, like county and state governments, would dismiss public employees of Japanese ancestry.49 A few days later, on February 3, Davies reported that the state had “intensified its drive against potential fifth columnists” with “a surprise ‘raid’ by Federal agents against the big Japanese fishing colony on Terminal Island at Los Angeles, with more arrests at San Diego and San Francisco. . . .” The 255 “enemy aliens regarded as dangerous” in custody “so far” included Germans and Italians, along with the Japanese. Apparently internment camps were being discussed, as Davies reported that “demands still were heard in some quarters for wholesale removal of Japanese from the ‘combat zone’ to internment camps or inland places.”50 Subsequent dispatches reported on a “curfew zone” for enemy aliens, more raids on Japanese colonies (Puget Sound), discussions about internment camps—though they were said not to be “indicated” at “the present time”51—FBI raids uncovering stashes of ammunition, weapons, and contraband, and arrests and apprehensions, including those of German American Bund members, someone of Czech ancestry,52 a “so-called Buddhist priest,”53 former members of the Japanese military, and a number of Italians and Germans.54

  Executive Order 9066, which authorized military commanders to designate military exclusion zones, was signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. The February 24 New York Times reported that “almost 800 Japanese aliens who were seized in raids in California were started off for internment camps” and that the “residential fate of about 100,000 other enemy aliens on the West Coast was being marked out.”55 Detailed accounts about the process of relocation kept coming. A February 28 article reported that Japanese leaders were waiting “with an air of resignation” for the orders for between 75,000 and 125,000 to be interned.56

  Interestingly, “quite a few” Japanese Americans were waiting with anticipation for having a safe place, writes Brian Hayashi. For them, the camps might provide “refuge from the anti-Japanese violence they saw around them” like the “drive-by shootings, knife stabbings, and murder of a handful of California Japanese by Filipinos and others. . . .” And some others felt a “sense of honor” in being “ ‘prisoners of war’ ”—as a display of sacrifice for “the old country.”57

  And Harper’s, the very same magazine whose 1945 article Zinn cited, ran a ten-page article in its September 1942 issue about life in the internment camps. Carey McWilliams described his visit in June—a mere four months after the exe
cutive order—to the camp established at the Santa Ana race track. With a population 18,562, it had “almost everything that any California city of comparable size would have: newspaper, hospital, police and fire departments, recreational centers, stores, ball parks, workshops, and libraries.” There was a city council. After sampling some of the food, he wrote, “The food is good, there is enough of it, and the kitchens are clean.” Not quite Auschwitz. Inconveniences included waiting in line for meals and enduring two roll calls a day. Shelter was described as adequate. In stark contradiction of Zinn’s obscene suggestion, McWilliams reported, “It would certainly not be accurate to characterize Santa Anita as a ‘concentration camp.’ To be sure, the camp is surrounded by a small detail of soldiers; searchlights play around the camp and up and down the streets at night; and the residents cannot leave the grounds.” At the same time, though, it was “quite common to see American flags and service flags. . . . here are twenty-nine World War veterans . . . and a flourishing post of the American Legion.”58

  Masugi recalls learning from family members that camp conditions were “Spartan” but with amenities developing “over the years.” Residents were encouraged to leave the camps and go to work, in the fields and elsewhere. Three of Masugi’s mother’s siblings chose to move to Chicago, because “A job or place in college could get one out of the centers.”59

  In 1942, the Office of War Information released a ten-minute film distributed by the War Activities Committee of the Motion Picture Industry. Narrator Milton Eisenhower, director of the War Relocation Authority, reassured viewers that most Japanese were loyal and were being treated well and explained the reason for the internments: after Pearl Harbor, “the West Coast became a potential combat zone.” The footage in the film matches McWilliams’s description in Harper’s.60