Infamy

by Richard Reeves

  * * *

  In California, the bigger city papers, following or leading their readers, were soon hardening their positions on the American Japanese. Both the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Examiner published a column by a Hearst writer, Henry McLemore, that began:

  Speaking strictly as an American, I think Americans are nuts.… The only Japanese apprehended have been the ones the FBI actually had something on. The rest of them, so help me, are free as birds.… I know this is the melting pot of the world and all men are created equal and there must be no such thing as race or creed hatred, but do these things go when a country is fighting for its life?… I am for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either.… Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.… Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it.

  The Examiner’s rival the San Francisco Chronicle went the other way for three days, editorializing: “It is not necessary to imitate Hitler by herding whole populations, the guilty and the innocent together into even humane concentration camps.” But on its front page, the paper printed these headlines beginning on December 10, 1941, and continuing through January: “Crime and Poverty Go Hand in Hand with Asiatic Labor,” “Brown Men Are Made Citizens Illegally,” and “Japanese a Menace to American Women.”

  Stories like that were standard newspaper fare going back to the turn of the century. The Chronicle had focused on the Japanese, editorializing: “The Chinese are faithful laborers and do not buy land. The Japanese are unfaithful laborers and do buy land.” The Los Angeles Times added: “Japanese males are taught by their elders to look upon American girls with a view to sex relations. The proposed assimilation of the two races is unthinkable. It is morally indefensible and biologically impossible.” The paper went on to defend “American womanhood,” which it considered “far too sacred to be subjected to such degeneracy. An American who would not die fighting rather than yield to this infamy does not deserve the name.”

  The Times mirrored the San Francisco papers with front-page headlines for the same period reading: “Jap Boat Flashes Message Ashore,” “Enemy Planes Sighted over California Coast,” “Caps on Japanese Tomato Plants Point to Airfields.”

  California’s capital newspaper, the Sacramento Bee, had focused hatred on a small Japanese settlement called Florin, nine miles south of the capital city. The paper’s publisher, V. S. McClatchy, founder of the Japanese Exclusion League of California, who died in 1938, had as a boy delivered papers by bicycle to that little enclave, and written: “As soon as a Jap can produce a lease, he is entitled to a wife. He sends a copy of the lease back home, gets a picture bride and they increase like rats. Florin is producing 85 American-born Japs a year.”

  And as early as February of 1940, William Randolph Hearst, the owner of the Los Angeles Examiner and its sister paper the Examiner in San Francisco, wrote a page one editorial in both papers inviting cabinet members and military men to travel west: “Come see the myriads of little Japs peacefully raising fruits and flowers and vegetables on California sunshine and saying hopefully and wistfully, ‘Someday I come with Japanese Army and take all this. Yes, sir, thank you.’” He continued, “Then see the fleets of peaceful little Japanese fishing boats, plying up and down the California coast, catching fish and taking photographs.”

  Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the fear and the exaggeration ran up and down the coast into the new year. On February 21, 1942, the Chronicle went so far as to claim that the Japanese in Hawaii were at the ready before the attacks, accusing them of deliberately blocking traffic with their cars and trucks to trap navy and army officers and men from reaching their ships and stations during the bombings. The piece went on to say that “among all the Japanese who knew the plot there was not one, no matter where born, who came forward to warn the United States.” That was not true, but the editorial ended by saying, “This is a fight for survival.… We have to be tough, even if civil rights do take a beating for a time.”

  Two days after that, the Bee editorialized: “The necessity for action has been growing for the past ten weeks as the possibility of a Japanese attack on the coast has loomed ever larger.… Californians never can feel secure until all enemy aliens and Fifth Column citizens, too—are put in place and surrounded with conditions which will make it utterly impossible for them to serve superiors in any totalitarian capital whose deadly purpose is to destroy the United States of America.”

  The papers were joined by hundreds of California organizations, among them Lions and Elks clubs, the Supreme Pyramid of the Sciots, the California Townsend Clubs, and the Magnolia Study Club of Anaheim. Radio also joined in. A prominent Mutual Broadcasting Company commentator, John B. Hughes—“News and Views from John B. Hughes”—was telling the nation, west and east, day after day, that 99 percent of Japanese, alien and citizen, were “primarily loyal to Japan.… The Japanese are a far greater menace in our midst than any other axis patriots. They will die joyously for the honor of Japan.” One of the most famous of graduates of Washington State University, Edward R. Murrow of CBS News, said in a January 1942 speech in Pullman, Washington, “I think it’s probable that, if Seattle ever does get bombed, you will be able to look up and see some University of Washington sweaters on the boys doing the bombing.” To the south, in Hollywood, the fear was pervasive enough that film studios joined together to ship reels of their negatives to underground vaults in the Midwest.

  There were few men in press or politics willing to stand up for the rights of the Japanese living on the West Coast. The Santa Ana Register in Orange County, with a daily circulation of about fifteen thousand, was probably the most conservative daily in the state. The paper was owned by R. C. Hoiles, an early libertarian whose columns and editorials argued for limited government, free markets, property rights, and individual liberty—and against public schools, collective bargaining, social-welfare laws, and taxes. As early as February 5, 1942, Hoiles wrote: “The recommendation of the grand jury to have all alien enemies removed from Orange County calls for a difficult undertaking. Every bit of wealth that these workers are prevented from creating, which we so badly need during the war, will have to be created by the labor of some other worker.” He went on to urge restraint: “It would seem that we should not become too skeptical of the loyalty of those people who were born in a foreign country and have lived in the country as good citizens for many years. It is very hard to believe that they are dangerous.”

  A small number of national columnists and commentators in other cities also resisted the California hysteria, among them Ernie Pyle of Scripps Howard and Chester Rowell, whose columns appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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  In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, the struggle for the mind of President Roosevelt continued. But he was a man with a lot on his mind. It was possible that he had already decided in favor of the idea of evacuation of the West Coast Japanese and intended to leave the details to others. He was absorbed with the logistics and politics of a two-front war—against the Nazis and Fascists across the Atlantic and Imperial Japan across the Pacific. The great oceans that had protected and isolated America for centuries had become the paths to World War II.

  Attorney General Francis Biddle was against mass evacuation, in private, as were most of his young assistants at the Justice Department. Biddle was a Philadelphia lawyer of distinguished American lineage—his family traced its American heritage to 1671 and his great-great-grandfather Edmund Jennings Randolph was attorney general under President George Washington. And Biddle believed that the evacuation was unconstitutional if it included American citizens. The attorney general thought the real domestic danger was German and Italian aliens on the East Coast, where German submarines were in action torpedoing dozens of American supply ships headed for Europe. He was against evacuating the Japanese and Japanese Americans in the West, but he had been in office only five months and, as a
man of the establishment, he deferred not only to the president but to most senior officials, particularly Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

  Although Biddle did not make his own opposition public at first, the principal official dissent in the capital was coming from his department. Assistant Attorneys General Edward Ennis and James Rowe, and J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, were against talk of evacuation. “I must say,” said Ennis, director of the Justice Department’s Enemy Alien Control Unit, “it looked to me as if the army was itching to do something. They couldn’t fight the Japanese in California, so they found someone else to fight, and that was the Americans of Japanese ancestry.” Rowe sent a memo to the president’s secretary, Grace Tully, asking her to tell the boss that California politicians were likely to call for “one of the great mass exoduses of history.” Hoover, whose agents were doing double duty, was rounding up aliens on their “danger lists” and insisting that they could handle any disloyalty cases on the West Coast or Hawaii without military help.

  In memos to Biddle dated February 2 and February 3, Hoover wrote, “The necessity for mass evacuation is based primarily upon public and political pressure rather than on factual data. Public hysteria and in some instances, the comments of the press and radio announcers, have resulted in a tremendous amount of pressure being brought to bear on Governor Olson and Earl Warren, Attorney General of the State, and on the military authorities.” The army’s deputy chief of staff General Mark Clark, who had served in Hawaii, was one of the few military men willing to say that he thought evacuation of the 160,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans on the islands was not necessary. He also said the chances of a Japanese attack on the West Coast was “nil.”

  The FBI director and General Clark were backed up the next day, February 4, by cablegrams from Honolulu’s police chief William Gabrielson and Lieutenant General Delos Emmons, the army commander in Hawaii, stating that there were no acts of sabotage preceding or during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  * * *

  General DeWitt, however, more often than not pressed the idea that mass evacuation was necessary and critical. He phoned Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy on February 3 and insisted that a way be found to get around constitutional guarantees of liberties for American citizens. “Out here,” said DeWitt, “a Jap is a Jap to these people now.… You can’t tell one Jap from another. They all look the same.”

  McCloy, a New York lawyer before entering the administration, was well known for having proved that German agents were responsible for the “Black Tom” munitions depot explosion, which killed seven people during World War I. He replied to DeWitt that something could be worked out, adding, “You are putting a Wall Street lawyer in a helluva box, but if it is a question of the safety of the country and the Constitution … why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

  On February 14, DeWitt followed up his conversations with McCloy in a long memo to Secretary of War Stimson, writing:

  In the war in which we are now engaged, racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of American citizenship, have become “Americanized,” the racial strains are undiluted. To conclude otherwise is to expect that children born of white parents on Japanese soil sever all racial affinity and become loyal Japanese and, if necessary, die for Japan against the nation of their parents. That Japan is allied with Germany and Italy in this struggle is no ground for assuming that any Japanese, barred from assimilation by convention as he is, though born and raised in the United States will not turn against this nation when the final test of loyalty comes.

  DeWitt told Stimson that he believed that every one of the more than 112,000 American Japanese living along the Pacific Coast were “potential enemies of Japanese extraction” and that “there are indications that they were organized and ready for concerted operation at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.” He then laid out what he thought was likely to happen: sabotage, naval attacks, and air raids “assisted by enemy agents signaling from the coastline.”

  The official story being spread on the West Coast by politicians and the press—and by California agricultural interests eager to take over Japanese fields and crops—was that the Japanese had deliberately moved onto farms close to military bases, airports, defense factories, power stations, and power lines. That fantasy was “verified” by California officials, particularly Attorney General Warren, who, with the help of the state’s county sheriffs, prepared maps of the distribution of California Japanese, including entries as vague as “Jap across the street from boat works [in Sausalito].” What the maps did not show was that Japanese farmers and workers had usually been there for decades, even generations, before the bases and other facilities were built.

  The press was also buying any story the military was selling. The New York Times reported on February 18 an example of “threats to national security” that was almost comical: “On the farm of Isaburo Saki, 48 years old, agents found binoculars, flashlights, a radio, and what appeared to be a home-made blackjack.”

  The official phrase “military necessity” was the argument being fueled in Washington by daily reports from DeWitt’s headquarters. The general was reporting on every wild rumor bouncing around the state. After the Montebello incident, he told Washington that substantially every ship leaving a West Coast port was attacked by enemy submarines. Part of his paper war was an effort to discredit naval and FBI intelligence, who were stating that the West Coast Japanese were not a real threat. One of DeWitt’s memos reported that Japanese submarines were being signaled to by “enemy agents on shore”—even as navy intelligence was reporting that the Japanese navy had only one submarine between Hawaii and California. DeWitt, who was sixty-two years old, was no different than many of the mediocre officers who managed to survive in a smaller army after World War I. General Gullion, sixty-one, also favored mass evacuation as soon as war was declared and had already suggested that camps be built to hold all Japanese, citizens and aliens, men, women, and children. Secretary of War Stimson immediately rejected the idea. After being blocked by Stimson and snubbed by Attorney General Biddle, Gullion called DeWitt as early as December 22, 1941, and urged him to do the job. He wanted DeWitt to recommend the evacuation and incarceration. But as memos and calls went back and forth between Washington and San Francisco, DeWitt sometimes seemed to be changing his mind, something he did regularly. Twice before December 26, DeWitt sent Gullion reports arguing against mass evacuation, saying, “If we go ahead and arrest the 93,000 Japanese, native born and foreign born, we are going to have an awful job on our hands and are very liable to alienate the loyal Japanese from disloyal.… I’m very doubtful that it would be common sense procedure to try and intern or to intern 117,000 Japanese in this theater.” He went on to say that the evacuation would not be sensible: “An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen. And while they all may not be loyal, I think we can weed the disloyal out of the loyal and lock them up if necessary.”

  Gullion, the army’s top legal officer, was learning what others already knew: men who worked with DeWitt saw him as indecisive, often influenced by the last person with whom he talked. One day he would tell California congressmen he favored evacuation of all Japanese, the next he would be arguing that mass evacuation would be a logistical nightmare. Those who knew the general, his chief deputy General Stilwell among them, thought his real concern was evading the fate of Pearl Harbor commanders Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, whose military careers were essentially ended because they were totally unprepared for the sneak attack.

  In fact, General DeWitt, the army’s man on the West Coast, tried to avoid confronting the politicians of California, Oregon, and Washington. Those politicians were giving in to public hysteria and to their states’ racists, including fa
rmers and fishermen determined to eliminate Japanese competition. Despite what he had been telling Gullion about logistics, DeWitt was still using his “A Jap’s a Jap” line, talking of segregation of all Japanese of “undiluted racial strain.” Then, day after day, he changed, twisting his arguments again and again—often depending on his audience of the moment. At times, he characterized evacuation warnings and preparations as “damned nonsense”—and then he suggested that the War Department issue a proclamation declaring the states of Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah as military zones. That grand plan was quickly killed in Washington and Provost General Gullion soon realized that DeWitt was too weak or ignorant to be trusted.

  The provost general’s next move was to send one of his young assistants, a thirty-three-year-old captain named Karl Bendetson, to San Francisco by plane to be an “adviser” to General DeWitt. Bendetson was a talented and ambitious Stanford Law School graduate from Aberdeen, Washington, a small town 110 miles southwest of Seattle, whose army reserve unit was called up early in 1941. He was then assigned to Gullion’s staff in Washington, D.C. The thinking of the young captain and General DeWitt was not dissimilar. In one phone call between them, DeWitt, speaking of the Japanese Americans offering to cooperate in the war effort, said, “Those are the fellows I suspect the most.” Bendetson agreed, saying, “Definitely. The ones who are giving you lip service are the ones always to suspect.”

  Bendetson quickly became DeWitt’s confidant and deputy chief of staff. He had also, on February 4, 1942, changed the spelling of his name from “Bendetson” to “Bendetsen” to make it seem less Jewish. “Bendetsen” was, in fact, a serial liar from a prominent Orthodox Jewish family that had emigrated from Lithuania in 1869, settling first in Elmira, New York, then moving west to the Seattle area. But in 1929 he denied all that, claiming to be a Christian to get into a Stanford fraternity, Theta Delta Chi, which barred Jews from membership. As the years went by, he created a new biography under the name Bendetsen, saying that he was from a Danish logging family and that a fictional great-grandfather had come from Denmark to America in 1670.