by Jim Newton
Through those weeks, Warren’s views on California’s Japanese had marched steadily ahead. Never had he uttered a public word of restraint. Not once had he expressed regret about the ramifications that his course of action would have on a substantial bloc of California’s population. Warren’s abiding sense of duty—his preoccupation with the need to defend California from its enemies—pressed him grimly forward, over hurdles and past restraints. He first stood in defense of Japanese state workers, only to then support their removal altogether. As that idea attracted support, Warren did not lift a hand to help nearly 100,000 California residents whose safety it was his job to protect under constitutional amendments he helped write and under the oath he took as attorney general. His actions against the Japanese bore his trademark effectiveness. His silence in their defense spoke for itself.
Canada began forcibly moving its Japanese population in January. FDR, who six weeks earlier had criticized private employers for firing immigrant workers, on February 19 authorized the military to do whatever it saw fit to safeguard the Pacific Coast. Executive Order 9066 did not mention the Japanese by name, but Roosevelt knew it would be applied only to them. Similar measures were undertaken throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Earl Warren’s most comprehensive comments on the removal came two days after FDR’s order, when he appeared at the first session of the Tolan Committee, a congressional panel on migration that came to California to discuss the possible movement of its Japanese residents. Because Warren’s testimony came after the issuance of FDR’s order, some of Warren’s defenders have downplayed the significance of his remarks. And it is true that his testimony did not, by itself, shape the order. Still, that ignores Warren’s actions leading up to his appearance. For weeks, he had been consulting with the principals—especially DeWitt and Clark. He lobbied them personally and asked others to do so as well. Thus, while the testimony did not influence FDR’s decision, the thoughts contained within it did, and the significance of the testimony is that it helps reveal the substance of Warren’s communications in the days preceding it.
Warren appeared shortly after nine A.M., hustling into the witness room armed with his maps, as well as testimonials he had solicited from sheriffs, prosecutors, and agricultural representatives. Greeted warmly by the chairman, Warren’s Oakland neighbor John Tolan—“I found out 25 years ago that in the trial of a lawsuit you take very good care of yourself,” Tolan said as Warren took the stand—Warren settled in quickly to the business of his presentation. He opened with the ominous observation that “there are some things transpiring in our State at the present moment that are rather dangerous, and we believe that there is only one way that they can be prevented, and that is by a speedy solution of the alien problem.”65
Remarking on the curious absence of sabotage since the outbreak of war with Japan, Warren expressed the tortured logic that he and DeWitt shared: “I believe that we are just being lulled into a false sense of security and that the only reason we haven’t had a disaster in California is because it has been timed for a different date. . . . Our day of reckoning is bound to come in that regard. When, nobody knows, of course, but we are approaching an invisible deadline.”66
In one revealing passage, Warren told the committee that his suspicion was based in part on the lack of cooperation that he and other law-enforcement officers were receiving from Japanese residents. Not one Japanese person, he said, had come forward to help any police agency anywhere in California.67 That was false. Warren himself had repeated during the February 2 conference what police had reported to him: that “five or six” individuals had come forward offering help. What’s more, Warren’s own staff had been approached by at least one young man pledging his allegiance to the United States and offering to take on jobs for investigators in order to prove it. Sherrill Halbert, a deputy attorney general working for Warren, wrote to Warren Olney about that contact, saying the young man was “willing to do undercover work or anything else that we might ask him.” “Personally,” Halbert concluded, “I suspect all Japanese, but as they go this man, who is twenty-five years of age, impressed me as being frank and sincere.”68
There is no evidence that Warren or his staff followed up on that contact, made less than a week before Warren testified to the Tolan Committee. It offered evidence that should have leavened Warren’s assertion that no Japanese were willing to provide information. But Warren was in no mood for equivocation. He pressed on.
In another section of his testimony, Warren revealed the blandly shared racism of the period. “We believe that when we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them, and we believe that we can, in dealing with the Germans and the Italians, arrive at some fairly sound conclusions because of our knowledge of the way they live in the community and have lived for many years,” Warren said. “But when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field and we cannot form any opinion that we believe to be sound.”69 Warren saw the Japanese as “different” and was utterly undisturbed by that belief.
Demonstrating how his views had hardened in the short time since he had endorsed the removal of alien Japanese but not American citizens, Warren noted, “While I do not cast a reflection on every Japanese who is born in this country—of course we will have loyal ones—I do say that the consensus of opinion is that taking the groups by and large there is more potential danger to this State from the group that is born here than from the group that is born in Japan.”70 Warren valued “consensus of opinion.” Discerning it was his great strength as a politician devoted to centrism. Here, however, the notion failed him. A majority committed to a wrong is still wrong. That idea eventually would become clear to Warren, whose Supreme Court service was distinguished by respect for minority rights against majority interests. But not in 1942.
The Tolan Committee heard from a long list of witnesses, almost all in support of the removal. But Warren’s testimony was singular—argued well, delivered by a smart and respected politician. Warren, McWilliams remarked later, “was, perhaps, the most forceful advocate of mass evacuation.”71
In his defense, Warren never urged that the Japanese, citizens or noncitizens, be interned. He merely proposed, as Lippmann had, their removal from the coastal zone, where attack and sabotage were most threatening. That testifies to his motives—Warren did not approach the alien problem with venom or greed; it was security that concerned him, not vengeance. But it also reveals his overriding commitment to security and his lapsed judgment in the face of danger and political pressure: Where, he might have asked himself, were these 100,000 people to go once forced from their homes, farms, and businesses? Removal placed people adrift. When the initial order for removal came, many confused Japanese evacuated their home communities and moved just over the line of the coastal restricted zone into California’s Central Valley. There they were met with suspicion and alarm. If they were too dangerous to live on the coast, could they really be trusted inland?
Faced with the social turmoil caused by evacuation, DeWitt soon turned to internment. By the end of March, California’s Japanese were being removed from their homes and taken first to assembly centers and later to detention areas—in effect, prisons. In all, 110,000 Japanese were transported to desert and mountain camps that were hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles from their homes. Detainees included men, women, and children. Most were incarcerated behind barbed wire for the balance of the war. Many lost homes, cars, furniture, a lifetime of savings and possessions. Even pets were prohibited from the camps.
The cost was enormous, personal, and capricious. As the orders solidified, family after family, all up and down the West Coast of America, sold what they could in the week to ten days that they were given to report. One young woman, her story preserved by a student project decades later, was married on April 5, 1942, and the following day left for the first stop in what would be a three-and-a-half-year journey of imprisonment:
Honeymoon in h
orse stables. Sand. Dust
Odors of hay. Like animals herded. Here.
We were Americans, most of us,
But our skin was yellow, we were quiet.
We turned ourselves outside in. We showed
No one ourselves, especially not ourselves.
I drank imaginary champagne, shook imaginary rice
From my hair.
No one sent congratulatory telegrams.72
Some puzzled over whether the orders applied to them and desperately attempted to comply without destroying families and children. Elaine Black Yoneda was a white woman, a native of Connecticut. Her husband, Karl, was a Japanese-American, born in the United States and educated in Japan. They had a three-year-old son, Tommy. Karl volunteered to help construct Manzanar when that facility was first commissioned, hoping to build habitable spaces for those destined to go there. Karl was at Manzanar in March when Japanese along the coast were ordered to report for processing. Alone and frantic, Elaine Yoneda desperately sought to learn whether Tommy, who was half-white, would be interned. The answer: Tommy was ordered to camp, and Elaine, his mother, was told she could not accompany the three-year-old boy there because she was white. “You needn’t, nor will you be allowed to go,” an Army captain told her.73 Refusing to be separated from her son, Elaine Yoneda forced her way onto the train. After months, she and her son were released, but only after she agreed to submit monthly affidavits to General DeWitt attesting, among other things, that Tommy had not been in fights because of ancestry and had not endangered national security. Once free, Tommy was required to be in the custody only of a Caucasian.
Others tried to soften the impact of the evacuation orders, but to little avail. In Los Angeles, Father Hugh T. Lawery at the Catholic Maryknoll Center questioned whether the order should apply to the center’s orphanage, where a number of infants, some of mixed race, were being raised. Colonel Karl Robin Bendesten, a Stanford-educated lawyer serving on the General Staff, responded, “I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.”74
For Hideo Murata of Pismo Beach, a small town on California’s central coast, the order to report was too much to bear. Murata was the proud recipient of an Honorary Citizenship Certificate, in which Monterey County formally thanked him for his service to his country in World War I—“Our flag was assaulted, and you gallantly took up its defense,” the proclamation read. When the order to evacuate came, Murata presented the certificate to the county sheriff, hoping his military service and honorary citizenship would protect him, wondering if, indeed, this was some sort of joke. He was informed that it was serious and applied to him. So Murata paid for a hotel room and checked in. In his room, alone, he held his certificate in one hand. And then he killed himself.75
Not one act of sabotage was ever attributed to a Japanese or Japanese-American resident of the United States.
Warren’s support for this mass denial of civil liberties was far from a lonely one. It was ordered by FDR himself and supported by many of America’s leading liberals. Culbert Olson tried to soften the removal in some respects, but endorsed it along with the great mass of Californians, liberal and conservative. When Kiyoshi Hirabayashi challenged his arrest for violating a curfew order and failing to turn himself over for removal from his hometown of Seattle, the United States Supreme Court upheld DeWitt’s authority to impose restrictions on the West Coast Japanese.76
As he did after defeating the nomination of Max Radin to the California Supreme Court, Warren after the internment retreated into churlishness. For decades, he refused to discuss the matter publicly, and though later in life he would sometimes reflect on it with his Supreme Court clerks, he maintained a stubborn public silence. To his friend Drew Pearson, Warren confessed pain at the decision. Typically, it hurt him most as it struck most closely to his own experience. “One man, Tasheto Ogawa, had served with me in World War I and was wounded,” Warren told Pearson in 1967. “You can imagine how I felt sending him away.”77 Still, Warren did send him away, without apologies.
Tom Clark, Fletcher Bowron, and others who worked with Warren to support the internment made their amends after the war. Warren refused. Thirty years after the fact, Warren declined an invitation to deliver a commencement speech when protesters questioned his internment actions.
Beginning in 1967, Edison Uno, who spent four and a half years in the Crystal City Internment Camp, asked Earl Warren for the apology he felt was long overdue. Writing to Life magazine and to Warren directly, Uno urged the chief justice to “publicly settle any doubts about the loyalty of the Nisei for once and for all.”78 When Uno received a belated reply, it came from Warren’s secretary, who informed him that she had not had the chance to speak with Warren about his request but warned him that no response was likely to be forthcoming. “He has stated on many occasions that it is a historical fact of many years ago which under no circumstances could be undone, and that it would serve no good purpose to dredge it up at this time,” Margaret McHugh wrote. One can only assume that Warren, who was scrupulous with his mail, approved that unsatisfying language. Still, Uno persisted despite the warnings of others in the Japanese-American community that Warren would never be budged. He and other members of the Japanese American Citizens League continued a persistent campaign to convince Warren to reconsider. Reading those appeals decades later, one cannot help but be struck by their clarity and their immense sense of propriety. The men and women who wrote to Warren gave up some portion of their lives in part because of his mistake, and yet not once in their letters was there blame or anger. Instead, they appealed to his place in history and to his demonstrated belief in civil rights and racial equality. “We of the Japanese American Citizens League sincerely admire and respect your judicial leadership in the area of extending civil liberties to all Americans,” one letter read. “It is precisely because we feel this way that we ask your help in dispelling the cloud that still hangs over us.”79
In April 1969, in his final months as chief justice, Earl Warren returned to Boalt Hall, the law school at U.C. Berkeley, to deliver “Observations on Human Rights and Racial Discrimination.” It was a moment of great personal satisfaction for a law student of little note who had risen to the pinnacle of his profession and performed with historic significance. Warren was the toast of the university he cherished, and on that day he basked in its approval. But seated at the front of the auditorium were twenty-five determined Japanese-American students. They sat during the standing ovation. The organizer asked if Warren would take questions, but the chief justice, staring into that knot of unfriendly faces, declined.
Outside, on the patio of the Earl Warren Institute, well-wishers pressed forward, eager for a word with the nation’s leading justice and the university’s most distinguished graduate. When the Japanese-American students interrupted him, one demanded that he explain his role in the internment. “You will have to ask the federal government about that,” Warren said. Students quoted Warren’s own words from 1942 back to him, and he again replied, “It was done because of federal law.”80
Still, they pressed, challenging his view of the law—challenging him, the Chief Justice of the United States, these students forty years younger than he—demanding that he apologize, here, at his university, on his day. “Is it true,” one student called out, “that you, of all the principal figures involved, are the only one who has refused to admit error?”
“Yes,” Warren answered, “that is true. I never apologize for a past act. Besides, that is just a matter of history now.”81
And with that, Earl Warren tucked in his chin, set his jaw, and pressed forward through the line. He never looked up, never took the bait, never apologized to those who could not reconcile the great civil libertarian with the man who had interned their parents and grandparents, without a charge having ever been filed or a suspicion ever verified.82
The closest that Warren would come in his lifetime to saying he was sorry for his role in the internmen
t came in the form of a letter endorsing the Japanese American Citizens League’s long quest for repeal of Title II of 1950 Internal Security Act. That title gave the government authority to open detention camps during a national emergency, and the JACL had begged Warren, then retired, to join them in seeking its repeal. Receiving no reply from him directly, members of the organization lobbied through his son, Earl Jr., then serving on the bench in Sacramento. Warren’s response finally came, in the form of a letter written to Jerry Enomoto of the JACL. In it, Warren supported repeal of the law, which he described as “not in the American tradition.” And in a wistful allusion to his own role in just such a violation of the “American tradition,” Warren added, “I express these views as the experience of one who as a state officer became involved in the harsh removal of the Japanese from the Pacific Coast in World War II, almost 30 years ago.”83
With that, Uno and his colleagues accepted the closest thing to an apology they would ever receive from the chief justice during his life. Only in his memoirs, published after his death, did Warren finally and publicly acknowledge how wrong he had been, and even then he fought a rearguard action to circumscribe his responsibility for it. Warren noted the atmosphere in California and the strong support for removal, and emphasized that his position had been “not to intern in concentration camps all Japanese, but to require them to move from what was designated as the theater of operations, extending seven hundred and fifty miles inland from the Pacific Ocean [emphasis in original].”84 Warren must have recognized the limited usefulness of that hedge, for he hastened to add, “Of course, for most of them it was the same as directing their confinement.” Having lamely attempted to limit his responsibility to his testimony and to confine his testimony to removal, Warren then finally admitted error:
