The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  When Executive Order 9066 was signed, McCloy hoped that a well-organized evacuation could be accomplished slowly, quietly, and without noticeable hardship. On February 20, he sent DeWitt a detailed list of instructions: the elderly should not be disturbed, the evacuation should be accomplished in gradual stages, and all private property had to be protected.51 He made it clear that he expected DeWitt to report by phone and in writing to him on an almost daily basis.

  Several thousand Japanese—Nisei and Issei—had already voluntarily removed themselves from the immediate coastline, and it was still McCloy’s intention that the great bulk of these people gradually and voluntarily resettle outside the military zones designated along the coast. Soon, however, it would become clear that voluntary exclusion would not work, for the simple reason that Americans in areas to the east were unwilling to receive the Japanese into their communities.52

  By the first week of March, McCloy decided the situation required a personal visit to the West Coast. Before leaving on March 7, he gave Stimson a memo outlining the War Department’s plans. He informed him that a number of temporary relocation camps had been selected where the evacuees would initially be housed in tents. And, on the recommendation of General Eisenhower, he had selected Milton Eisenhower, the general’s younger brother, to serve as the head of a War Relocation Authority. Milton, he said, had made a “most favorable impression,” and he intended to take him along on an inspection tour of the West Coast and Hawaii.53

  The next day, at 6:00 A.M., McCloy flew to San Francisco, where he and Eisenhower met with DeWitt, Bendetsen, and other military officers involved in the evacuation. He also talked at length with Lieutenant Commander Ringle, who “greatly impressed” him with his “knowledge of the Japanese problem along the Coast.”54 Ringle still believed that a mass evacuation was unnecessary. Though this assessment must have given McCloy pause for thought, he never seriously considered trying to undo what had already been decided. But in the weeks ahead, he sometimes seemed to act as if Ringle’s views had registered.

  His trip to the West Coast was educational in other ways. The morning after he arrived in San Francisco, some two hundred members of the Japanese American Citizens League convened a three-day emergency conference to discuss the impending evacuation. McCloy was introduced to its leaders and heard that the organization had already voted to assist the authorities in whatever evacuation plan was effected. A JACL official, Saburo Kido, declared, “We are gladly cooperating because this is one way of showing that our protestations of loyalty are sincere.”55

  On the final day of the conference, McCloy demonstrated that he had not failed to listen. As the featured speaker that day, he said, “We know that the great majority of citizens and aliens are loyal,” he said, “and being appreciative of that, we are most anxious to see that you don’t suffer any more than necessary the loss of property values. . . . We want to have conditions [in the camps] just as humane and comfortable as is possible to have them. Above all, we want to give you protection.”56

  At a time when most government officials were demanding an evacuation on grounds of “military necessity” or outright racism, this speech presaged many of the themes used during the war, and later, to justify what was generally seen as a regrettable but necessary policy. Already, in McCloy’s mind, the evacuation decision had become somewhat benign. Collectively, Japanese Americans were a potential security threat, but as individuals they were victims of war’s circumstances. Implied was the idea that, if racism was involved, it was not the government’s racism, but the government’s desire to protect the Japanese Americans from the racism of other citizens, that required an evacuation. In return, these Oriental citizens had to understand that their war duty was to cooperate.

  This was a message that this particular group of Japanese Americans was prepared to accept in a mood of subdued resignation. After the speech, one of the JACL’s leaders, Masao Satow, walked up to McCloy and invited him to join a group of delegates who intended to have dinner in Chinatown.

  A surprised McCloy said, “Did you say Chinatown? Aren’t the Chinese hostile toward you fellows? Aren’t you afraid to go down there?”

  “No, sir,” replied Satow. “They’re Chinese and we’re Japanese, but we’re all Americans. Come on, join us.”57

  McCloy accepted the invitation and joined Satow and his friends in what became for the JACL officials a memorable dinner with the assistant secretary of war, a man whom many of them now began to regard as a friend of sorts. Among others, McCloy got to know for the first time JACL’s Washington representative, Mike Masaoka. He took an instant liking to this bright, gregarious, and articulate twenty-six-year-old; it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Masaoka impressed upon McCloy the idea that he and other Americans of Japanese ancestry were as loyal as any other citizens. “We think, feel, act like Americans,” Masaoka had said to a congressional committee in San Francisco only a few days before meeting McCloy. “We, too, remember Pearl Harbor. . . .”58 Though Masaoka endorsed an orderly but compulsory evacuation plan, he clearly did not envisage that his people would be interned behind barbed wire.59 Nevertheless, his compliant attitude made it that much easier for a resettlement program to evolve into a policy of indefinite internment.

  Two days after his dinner in Chinatown, McCloy and DeWitt agreed to put Colonel Bendetsen in charge of the evacuation program. Though the army was still ostensibly talking of a “voluntary migration,” Bendetsen quickly began building two large “reception centers” to “provide temporary housing for those who were unable to undertake their own evacuation, or who declined to leave until forced to.” By March 20, he had selected the sites for fifteen “assembly centers” and given the Army Corps of Engineers until April 21 to complete construction of the camps. A week later, DeWitt issued an order prohibiting any further “voluntary” evacuation of Japanese Americans inland. Henceforth, both Nisei and Issei were in effect prisoners of the army. Only about nine thousand Japanese Americans had taken the opportunity to migrate inland before the freeze order. (Japanese Americans already living in the East, well out of the exclusion areas, were never interned.) That left more than a hundred thousand for Bendetsen’s assembly camps.60

  McCloy, meanwhile, had left San Francisco on a plane bound for Hawaii. The trip gave him something of the sensation of being on the front line: “It was a grim place. At night there was a blackout so deep and so complete that it was eerie.”61 Upon his return, he told a packed news conference that a mass evacuation of the Japanese Americans from Hawaii was “impossible.” Too many of them, he explained, were providing essential labor for “defense projects” such as fortifications and new roads. He even attested to the loyalty of these Japanese workers by describing some of them as “keen and enthusiastic.”62 None of the reporters present questioned why an evacuation on the West Coast was deemed a military necessity when a much larger and more concentrated population of Japanese Americans, living in the midst of the Pacific battlefield, was thought essential to the national defense.

  The first phase of the mandatory evacuation did not begin until a few days later, on March 31. There were inevitable logistical problems, delays, and reports of inadequate facilities. The less attention accorded the whole affair, McCloy thought, the better. He went so far as to issue instructions throughout the government that every effort should be made to limit any publicity surrounding the evacuations. Even so, complications arose that constantly threatened to bring unwanted publicity.

  For one thing, the army had to define who was of Japanese ancestry. In the first week, dozens of Nisei married to Caucasian Americans requested individual exemptions from the evacuation orders. So as not to tear families apart, McCloy encouraged his army colleagues to issue a few such individual exemptions, but DeWitt and Bendetsen had simply denied all such requests. Although initially McCloy had instructed that persons over the age of seventy should not be disturbed, in practice everyone was evacuated. Soldiers even went into at least one orphanage
run by Caucasian priests and took into custody infants of partial Japanese extraction.63

  On April 6,1942, McCloy tried to bend this policy by writing Bendetsen a note about the case of one Keizo Tsuji, an associate pastor in a “100 percent white U.S. citizen” Phoenix, Arizona, church. The pastor of the church was protesting Tsuji’s forced evacuation on the grounds that it “violates the rights guaranteed us in the Constitution . . . since it restricts persons of one extraction while it permits persons of another extraction to be exempted.” McCloy recognized that this was undeniable and told Bendetsen, “I wonder whether as a matter of law and as a matter of policy it might not be well to include some exemptions of Japanese as well as Germans and Italians.”64

  He reasoned that a few such exemptions could well give the government the evidence it might later need in the courts to prove that the evacuation was not administered strictly on the basis of race. In response to McCloy’s suggestion, the army’s Office of the Judge Advocate General drew up a number of exemptions, all of which dealt with mixed-blood and mixed-marriage cases. Initially, anyone with as little as one-sixteenth Japanese blood was considered subject to the evacuation orders. Under the new rules, those with less than one-half Japanese blood and “whose backgrounds have been Caucasian” were to be exempt. Families consisting of a Japanese wife, a non-Japanese husband, and their mixed-blood children were exempt. But a Caucasian woman married to a Japanese American citizen, if she wished to live with her husband, had to follow him into the camps.65

  None of these categories fit the case McCloy had initially raised, that of a Japanese male in whose behalf the Phoenix pastor had petitioned. The Office of the Judge Advocate General told DeWitt that in their opinion there were no grounds on which to free the individual mentioned by McCloy other than the “apparent harmlessness of the individual. It goes without saying that there may be many such individuals among the Japanese.” The army’s lawyers concluded that to make an exception in one case would open the floodgates to thousands of appeals.66

  McCloy made no effort to press the issue. In the meantime, Milton Eisenhower, confirmed in his job as head of the newly created War Relocation Authority, was having his own problems. On April 7, at a Salt Lake City meeting of Western governors, he presented a plan for the rapid resettlement of the evacuees from the “assembly centers” into rural communities across the West. His idea was to house the evacuees in fifty to seventy-five camps modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps. The residents would be allowed to come and go as they pleased and, if they could, obtain jobs at prevailing market rates in the surrounding agricultural communities.

  To Eisenhower’s surprise, his plan was met with nearly universal denunciations. Except for the governor of Colorado, all the governors said they would have no evacuees in their states unless they were kept under constant guard. The attorney general of Idaho, Bert Miller, voiced the most extreme opinion when he urged that “all Japanese be put in concentration camps, for the remainder of the war. . . . We want to keep this a white man’s country.” Such statements shocked and profoundly depressed Eisenhower. “That meeting,” he recalled later, “was probably the most frustrating experience I ever had.”67

  Eisenhower nevertheless caved in to the governors and agreed that the evacuees would remain under armed guard within what he was now calling the “reception centers.” On returning to Washington, he met with McCloy, who promised his assistance in finding suitable sites for the camps on isolated stretches of federally owned land.68 By this time, more than four months after Pearl Harbor, the first actual evacuations had begun from Japanese American communities up and down the West Coast into the “assembly centers” devised by Bendetsen. Most of these assembly centers were hastily converted racetracks, fairgrounds, and parking lots.

  The assembly centers were a far cry from what McCloy had promised would be “comfortable” camps, or what another official had described as “normal communities.” Years later, an evacuee described the conditions at one assembly center, the Santa Anita racetrack, in this fashion: “We were confined to horse stables. The horse stables were whitewashed. In the hot summers, the legs of the cots were sinking through the asphalt. We were given mattress covers and told to stuff straw in them. The toilet facilities were terrible. They were communal. There were no partitions. . . . It had extra guard towers with a searchlight panoraming the camp, and it was very difficult to sleep because the light kept coming into our window. . . .”69

  McCloy had left the West Coast before the mass evacuations began in the first week of April, so he had no firsthand exposure to the conditions inside the assembly centers. He was, however, aware that people were being put up in makeshift shelters on racetracks and fairgrounds. This was to be regretted, but it was also, in his view, a temporary inconvenience mandated by the circumstances of war.

  Some of his friends in the administration were shocked by what McCloy was willing to do in the name of national security. That summer, he got into an argument with Harold Ickes over the exercise of martial-law powers in Hawaii. The interior secretary blamed a “weak governor” for having surrendered virtually all civilian authority to the War Department. McCloy stubbornly refused to allow his generals to relinquish any of their powers despite Ickes’s appeals. After one angry confrontation over the issue, Ickes’s assistant secretary told him that McCloy had said “he did not care whether it was constitutional or not, that there were times when even the constitution could justifiably be disregarded.” Ickes commented in his diary, “This may be true, but whether or not it should be disregarded on the say of the Army alone is doubtful. . . . I like McCloy a lot and I have seen him more than any of the other men in the Army but I have been told that he is more or less inclined to be a Fascist and this would not surprise me. I know of my own knowledge that he is strong and able.”70

  This, of course, was not the first occasion on which McCloy’s seeming disregard for the Constitution had been so cavalierly expressed. He had privately conveyed similar sentiments to both Biddle and J. Edgar Hoover when it came to discussing the evacuation order or, in the case of Hoover, whether it was permissible to wiretap union leaders suspected of sabotage. In his view, military necessity justified any measure.

  Few individuals outside the War Department were in a position to dispute exactly what conditions constituted grounds for “military necessity.” Initially, no one denied the possibility of military raids on the West Coast. But then, in the first week of June 1942, the U.S. Navy achieved a decisive victory at the Battle of Midway, sinking four Japanese aircraft carriers and numerous other ships. The Pacific was no longer a Japanese lake. A few days later, McCloy boasted to Ickes over lunch, “We caught them before they were ready to be caught. . . .”71

  After Midway, McCloy knew that the threat of air raids, let alone a full-scale invasion of the West Coast, had practically vanished. But by that time, the evacuation of Japanese Americans into assembly camps was nearly complete. More than ninety thousand Nisei and Issei were now living in sixteen different assembly centers, and, despite the decisive naval victory at Midway, no one in the War Department considered rescinding the evacuation order. To the contrary, McCloy was disturbed that by the end of the month only three of the more permanent “relocation centers” would be open.

  A week later, The New Republic added to his worries by publishing a devastating critique of conditions inside the camps. In a story entitled “Concentration Camp: U.S. Style,” a Japanese American internee described in graphic detail the soldiers armed with machine guns in guard towers, the barbed wire surrounding the camps, the filthy condition of the converted horse stables, and the “stinking mud and slop everywhere.”

  Such public controversy only quickened McCloy’s desire to transfer responsibility for the internees from the army to the civilian War Relocation Authority. But after only two months on the job, the WRA’s Milton Eisenhower was severely depressed by what he had come to regard as an unconscionable task, a veritable “nightmare.”72 The onl
y Japanese Americans he had been able to “relocate” outside the camps were a small percentage of college-age Nisei. These had been reluctantly accepted as students by a few Eastern universities after intense lobbying by the American Friends Service Committee.73

  Eisenhower’s unhappiness was matched by McCloy’s dissatisfaction with his management of the problem, and by mid-June both men agreed that a new WRA director should be found. One evening soon afterward, Eisenhower attended a party at the home of one of his former Department of Agriculture colleagues, Dillon S. Myer. After playing Myer’s piano for a while, Eisenhower took his friend aside and urged him to accept the job. When Myer asked if Eisenhower really thought he should do it, Eisenhower said, “Yes, if you can do the job and sleep at night.” He confessed he hadn’t been able to do so himself.74

  Myer took the job anyway, and brought to it the zeal and efficiency that his predecessor had lacked; in the months ahead, he rapidly finished fifteen permanent “relocation centers” spread throughout California, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. By the end of the year, the camps housed 106,770 internees.75 Each camp was about one square mile and contained tar-papered barracks, schools, communal kitchens, churches, and recreation centers. Though they were not exactly normal communities, under Myer’s administration the camps gradually became more livable.

  For all the problems attending to the evacuation, McCloy nevertheless believed that things had been managed surprisingly well and humanely. That summer, he dictated a memo for his files praising the army’s conduct: “I wonder if anyone realizes the skill, speed and humanity with which the evacuation of the Japanese has been handled by the Army on the West Coast? I am struck with the extreme care that has been taken to protect the persons and goods and even the comforts of each individual. Certainly an organization that can do a humane job like this and still be a fine fighting organization is unique—and American.”76