The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  They did not understand Japanese-Americans, though, and their treatment of California’s Issei and Nisei constituted what can only be set down as a national disgrace. Those who like to stamp labels on public figures should find it instructive, for the racist repression did not come from the right, where according to liberal dogma it always lurks; it was advocated and administered by men celebrated for their freedom from bigotry—Earl Warren, Walter Lippmann, Henry L. Stimson, Abe Fortas, Milton Eisenhower, Hugo Black, and John J. McCloy. One man in the cabinet pleaded for compassion: Attorney General Francis Biddle—and he was supported by J. Edgar Hoover. One senator took the floor to protest—and he was Republican Robert A. Taft. The persecution of 125,000 immigrants, the majority of them naturalized citizens (all would have been except for discriminatory immigration laws), and many with sons in the Army, was a violation of their rights, a shirking of the government’s responsibilities, and an abrogation of the very principles for which—if the Roosevelt-Churchill Atlantic Charter meant anything—the country was fighting.

  The air strike at Pearl Harbor started the harassment, and the long string of Japanese victories in 1942 stirred a blind yearning for vengeance among American Caucasians—so runs the justification. It might be more persuasive had the judges at Nuremberg not ruled that the fever of war is not an extenuating circumstance. If Germans punished civilians on a racial pretext, so did Americans. To be sure, Japanese-Americans were not tortured, gassed, cremated, or used in sadistic medical experiments. Nevertheless, American authorities took steps down the dark road toward atrocities. Their contemporaries did not judge them; history must.

  Why intolerance should have been particularly intense on the West Coast is something of a mystery. In Hawaii, which had a much higher proportion of Oriental aliens, the Army moved quickly and sensibly; leaders of the Japanese cooperated closely with G2 and the FBI, and a few suspects were questioned. There were no charges, or even rumors, of discrimination. But in California, where only 1 percent of the population were Issei (first-generation Japanese-Americans) or Nisei (children of Issei), the trouble began the morning after Pearl Harbor. Governor Culbert L. Olson and Attorney General Earl Warren, working with sheriffs and district attorneys, set a ghastly example. Issei-Nisei were dismissed from civil service jobs; their licenses to practice law and medicine were revoked; in some communities they were forbidden to do business of any sort, and those who made their living as commercial fishermen were barred from their boats. Attorney General Warren, using the same sort of convoluted reasoning which would later be turned against him when he became Chief Justice, said that the absence of any domestic sabotage by Japanese showed just how devious their plotting was. “Opinion among law enforcement officers in this state,” he further informed Washington, “is that there is more potential danger among the group of Japanese who were born in this country than from the alien Japanese.”

  Launched thus by men in public office, and whipped up by the press, the hate campaign against the Yellow Peril became progressively more ugly. On January 29, 1942, a syndicated West Coast columnist wrote, “Why treat the Japs well here? They take the parking positions. They get ahead of you in the stamp line at the post office. They have their share of seats on bus and streetcar lines. Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it. Personally I hate the Japanese, and that goes for all of them.” He advocated expulsion to the interior of Americans with Japanese ancestry—all of them, including infants and the infirm—and added: “I don’t mean a nice part of the interior, either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off, and give ’em the inside room in the badlands.” Westbrook Pegler declared that every Japanese in California should be under guard “and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over,” and columnists Damon Runyon and Henry McLemore concurred.

  The sheep followed the shepherds. Insurance companies canceled Issei-Nisei policies. Milkmen refused to deliver their milk. Grocers wouldn’t sell them food. Warren had frozen their funds, and banks declined to honor their checks. Throughout early 1942 white Californians became increasingly fearful and suspicious. The state suggested to the Japanese-Americans that they might prefer to move inland, and it is a sign of their plight that eight thousand took the hint during the next three weeks.

  That didn’t solve the problem; it merely moved part of it. The germ of racism was spreading. The Nevada Bar Association resolved, “We feel that if Japs are dangerous in Berkeley, California, they are likewise dangerous in the State of Nevada,” and Governor Chase Clark of Idaho told the press that “Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats.” Governor Homer M. Adkins of Arkansas followed by announcing, “Our people are not familiar with the customs or peculiarities of the Japanese, and I doubt the wisdom of placing any in Arkansas.” Governor Payne Ratner ordered his state police to forbid their cars on state highways, explaining, “Japs are not wanted and not welcome in Kansas.”

  Life became terrifying for the eight thousand on the run. They found signs in barbershop windows reading JAPS SHAVED, NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTS, or in restaurant windows, THIS MANAGEMENT POISONS BOTH RATS AND JAPS. Gas stations refused them gas. They couldn’t get water, or even the use of public toilets. Five Nisei reached New Jersey and were hired by a farmer; a vigilante committee put the farmer’s barn to the torch and threatened to kill his youngest child. In Denver, where a Nisei girl found a job, she tried to attend church. The minister himself blocked the way. He asked, “Wouldn’t you feel more at home in your own church?” Lieutenant General John L. De Witt, commanding general of the Western Defense Command and an old Philippine hand, thought that letting Japanese-Americans roam the countryside was folly anyhow. “A Jap’s a Jap!” he said. “It makes no difference whether he’s an American or not.”

  California was pressing for federal action. Roosevelt, weary of the issue and preoccupied with theaters of war, told Stimson and McCloy, then Assistant Secretary of War, to handle it; he asked only that they be as reasonable and humane as possible. Stimson was busy with his own maps and pins, so the initiative passed to McCloy, who became the administration’s prime mover for resettlement, con brio. On instructions from General De Witt, Major Karl R. Bendetsen, head of the War Department Aliens Division, had already drawn up an evacuation plan. He was in San Francisco putting the final touches on it when McCloy telephoned him on February 8 to say, “We have carte blanche to do what we want as far as the President is concerned.” De Witt, who had already endorsed the Bendetsen draft, promptly mailed it to Washington.

  Six days later Attorney General Biddle urged caution, advising FDR that “the Army has not yet advised me of its conclusions in the matter.” But at this point he was crossing foils with Stimson, the strong man of the cabinet, who felt that he must support McCloy and De Witt. As Biddle recalled twenty years later, “If Stimson had insisted, had stood firm, as he apparently suspected that this wholesale evacuation was needless, the President would have followed his advice. And if… I had urged the Secretary to resist the pressure of his subordinates, the result might have been different. But I was new to the Cabinet, and disinclined to insist on my view to an elder statesman.”

  Something else happened that Saturday; Walter Lippmann weighed in with what Biddle’s staff later called the decisive opinion. “It is a fact that the Japanese have been reconnoitering the Pacific Coast for a considerable period of time, testing and feeling out the American defenses,” Lippmann wrote in his column of February 14. He understood Washington’s reluctance to adopt “a policy of mass evacuation and mass internment,” but “The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone: some part of it may at any moment be a battlefield. Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.” General De Witt could hardly have put it more forcefully. The offices of Undersecretary of the Interior Fortas and Director Milton Eisenhower of the War Relocation Authority were alerted for supporting roles, and on February 19 the President signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the War Department to
establish “military areas” and to exclude from them “any or all persons.”

  It was not Roosevelt’s finest hour. With a stroke of his pen he had consigned to De Witt’s mercies an innocent and bewildered people who, like most first- and second-generation immigrants, were more loyal to their new country than old settlers. The middle-aged Issei had been producing more than half California’s fruits and vegetables before Pearl Harbor; by traditional American standards they had made good. The Nisei were in their teens or early twenties. Nativeborn, conditioned in California’s public schools, they talked, dressed, behaved, and danced like their Caucasian peers.

  Under Executive Order 9066, as interpreted by De Witt, voluntary migration ended on March 27. People of Japanese descent were given forty-eight hours to dispose of their homes, businesses, and furniture; during their period of resettlement they would be permitted to carry only personal belongings, in hand luggage. All razors and liquor would be confiscated. Investments and bank accounts were forfeited. Denied the right to appeal, or even protest, the Issei thus lost seventy million dollars in farm acreage and equipment, thirty-five million in fruits and vegetables, nearly a half-billion in annual income, and savings, stocks and bonds beyond reckoning.

  Beginning at dawn on Monday, March 30, copies of General De Witt’s Civilian Exclusion Order No. 20 affecting persons “of Japanese Ancestry” were nailed to doors, like quarantine notices. It was a brisk Army operation; toddlers too young to speak were issued tags, like luggage, and presently truck convoys drew up. From the sidewalks soldiers shouted, “Out, Japs!”—an order chillingly like the “’Raus, Juden, ’Raus!” which Anne Frank was hearing from German soldiers on Dutch pavements. The trucks took the internees to fifteen assembly areas, among them a Yakima, Washington, brewery, Pasadena’s Rose Bowl, and racetracks in Santa Anita and Tanforan. The tracks were the worst; there families were housed in horse stalls.

  These areas, as reports from Milton Eisenhower and Fortas make clear, were only temporary quarters. The prisoners (for that is what they now were) received identity cards and periodic inspections of their belongings and their persons. Although no one told them, they were awaiting the construction of eleven huge “relocation centers.” Because state governors felt as they did, all the centers were to be on federal land—the most desolate such land in the country.

  The President never visited these bleak garrisons, but he once referred to them as “concentration camps.” That is precisely what they were. The average family of six or seven members was allowed an “apartment” measuring twenty by twenty-five feet. None had a stove or running water. Each block of barracks shared a community laundry, mess hall, latrines, and open shower stalls, where women had to bathe in full view of the sentries. Modesty was one characteristic both Issei and Nisei women had in common with their ancestors, but when they raised the point, their guards told them to forget it; weren’t they Americans now?

  They were to spend three years on dreary tracts east of the Sierra Nevadas, in California’s desolate Owens Valley, and at Tule Lake, in northern California’s remote Siskiyou County. Surrounded by barbed wire, with powerful searchlights in watchtowers sweeping their windows each night, they struggled to recapture something of the life they had known before Pearl Harbor, teaching the children, holding church services, and attending what eventually turned out to be 2,120 marriages, 5,981 christenings, and 1,862 funerals.

  Their cause should have been the cause of everyone who believed in freedom; the American Civil Liberties Union would call it “the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history.” But that was not a popular view at the time. If the federal government intended to wait upon public opinion in California, the barracks might as well have been made permanent. Racists there had no intention of putting up with free Japs, despite what others said, and the Supreme Court could go hang.

  But even the Supreme Court was tepid in its support of liberty. On Monday, December 18, 1944, the Court handed down findings which would have been inconceivable in peacetime. Justice Douglas dodged the issue of constitutionality; Justice Black, in what is now remembered by students of the law as a bad decision, wrote that California had been threatened with invasion, the authority of the military was paramount, and the Japanese hadn’t been excluded because of racial prejudice anyhow. (Roberts, Murphy, and Jackson dissented.) In two cases the Court offered divided advice. It upheld the mass evacuation as a proper exercise of the power to wage war and ruled that there was no justification for continuing to detain American citizens whose loyalty was unquestioned. The Army began moving Japanese-Americans back to the coast on December 19—and was confronted by fifty-seven separate acts of violence by anti-Japanese vigilantes. To crown this tragicomedy, the Hearst press raged over reports of a prisoner riot at Camp Tule, citing it as evidence that the interned families were “disloyal.”

  There had been no riot at Tule. At no time during the detentions were there any disturbances in the camps. The staggering irony is that the patriotism of the Japanese-Americans had been almost wholly unaffected by their mistreatment. With incredible stoicism they had accepted a double standard under which—to cite one instance—a white intern was paid $500 for a schedule of examinations and minor operations while an experienced Issei physician beside him, completing identical tasks, received $19. Others had planted trees, carried out experiments in developing artificial rubber, and painted Army recruiting posters, knowing that they would be paid nothing. To the confusion of their guards, they assembled each morning to raise the Stars and Stripes and salute it while their Boy Scout drum and bugle corps (every camp had one) played the national anthem. At Camp Topaz 3,250 adults were enrolled in camp courses; the two most popular were the English language and American history. Saturday evenings they sang “America the Beautiful,” and after January 28, 1943, the men of military age did a lot more than sing.

  On that Thursday Stimson announced that the Army would accept Nisei volunteers. Immediately more than 1,200 signed up, and before the war’s end 17,600 Japanese had joined the Army, taking the recruit’s oath of allegiance while still behind barbed wire. In Italy they served with great distinction in the 100th Infantry and the 442nd Infantry. No Nisei ever deserted. During the Italian campaign the 442nd alone suffered the loss of three times its original strength while winning 3,000 Purple Hearts with 500 oak leaf clusters, 810 Bronze Stars, 342 Silver Stars, 47 Distinguished Service Crosses, and 17 Legion of Merit awards. In Europe these units were a legend. Bill Mauldin wrote that “to my knowledge and the knowledge of numerous others who had the opportunity of watching a lot of different outfits overseas, no combat unit in the Army could exceed them in loyalty, hard work, courage, and sacrifice. Hardly a man of them hadn’t been decorated at least twice, and their casualty rates were appalling.”

  Those who fought beside the Nisei knew what drove them. They were trusting that when word of their war records reached California, attitudes toward their families would improve, and that the Issei’s prewar possessions would be returned to them. It was a vain hope. Japanese-American homes, farms, and businesses had been taken over by white Californians, most of whom, with Hearst’s aggressive support, kept their loot. The Nisei themselves, returning in uniform, were rejected by barbershops and restaurants. After the San Francisco Examiner had run the headline SOLDIERS OF NIP ANCESTRY ALLOWED TO ROAM ON COAST, a Nisei who had lost a leg in the ETO was publicly beaten. That was too much even for bigots, and overt outrages subsided.

  To imply that everyone in the state was a xenophobe would be to compound injustice. But a great many people sat on their hands and looked the other way. The War Department became concerned about Nisei incidents; white officers who had served with them were sent on West Coast lecture tours to describe their gallantry to farmers and businessmen. One first lieutenant was asked by a lanky farmer, “How many of them Japs in your company got killed?” The lieutenant replied, “All but two of the men who started in my platoon were killed by t
he end of the war.” The farmer said, “Too goddam bad they didn’t get the last two.” People stared at the ceiling, at the floor, at their laps. No one said a word.

  Pressing demands of the Western Defense Command kept Lieutenant General John L. De Witt at his desk throughout the war, far from the excitement and challenge of combat. His fidelity did not go unnoticed, however. The Army awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal with two oak leaf clusters, the Navy honored him with its Distinguished Service Medal, France made him an officer in its Legion of Honor, and Mexico decorated him with its Order of the Aztec Eagle. In 1947 he retired with full honors, whereupon, in a remarkable display of Occidental inscrutability, he became an ardent member of the Japan-America Society.

  ***

  Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, Secretary of Agriculture Claude R. Wickard casually offered Americans a tip. Farmers were going to be busy feeding the Army, he said, so civilians who liked fresh vegetables might like to plant home gardens—he called them victory gardens. Millions of urbanites who didn’t know a harrow from a spade and thought a rake was what Errol Flynn was put down peas, carrots, spinach, tomatoes, radishes, beets, lettuce, and cabbages in every open place they could find—backyards, parking lots emptied by gas rationing, playgrounds, Chicago’s Arlington Racetrack, the Portland (Oregon) zoo, Ellis Island, and Alcatraz. Guided by advice from the Department of Agriculture and seed firms, victory garden farmers surprised and delighted the country. By 1943 a third of America’s fresh vegetables were coming from twenty million victory gardens.

  The U.S. wasn’t that fond of greens, but it was something to do. In wartime the nation had become one huge transient station inhabited by people saying goodbye, people on the move, or people just waiting, if only for an end to the Kleenex and hairpin shortages. Middle-aged men painted their World War I helmets white and joined Civil Defense, testing sirens, filling boxes with sand and pails with water, practicing first aid and standing watches night after night, scanning the skies for a glimpse of an Axis plane. In government drives women and small children collected scrap rubber, wastepaper, aluminum, tin cans, and toothpaste tubes. Housewives salvaged cooking grease and rolled Red Cross bandages—two and a half billion of them, from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day. A Seattle shoemaker gave six tons of rubber heels. “Cotton Ed” Smith contributed the rubber mat that supported his favorite spittoon. In Boston, Beacon Hill held a black-tie scrap rally, donations to which included an eighty-year-old Gatling gun, a buggy, and Governor Leverett Saltonstall’s rowing machine.