The Internment of Japanese Americans in United States History (3 page)

One person who read Munson’s report was John L. DeWitt, an army officer who was nearing the end of an undistinguished career. DeWitt was said to be “a cautious, bigoted, indecisive, sixty-one year old army bureaucrat.”
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Staff members described him after Pearl Harbor as “gone crazy.”
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DeWitt’s statements indicated an irrational fear and hatred of all Japanese. He claimed “The Japanese are an enemy race.”
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“We must worry about the Japanese all the time until [they are] wiped off the map,” he commented.
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“A Jap’s a Jap. They’re a dangerous element, whether loyal or not.”
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DeWitt admitted that there were no known cases of sabotage by Nisei. He claimed that the fact that no sabotage had taken place was proof that such treachery would occur soon. FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) director J. Edgar Hoover attacked DeWitt’s “hysteria and lack of judgment.”
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DeWitt certainly was not the only American with rabid anti-Japanese views. But as head of the newly created Western Defense Command, he was in a position to implement them.

The Fight Over Evacuation

Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy recommended establishing restricted areas. Remove everyone suspicious, he suggested, then return those who were not deemed dangerous. McCloy wanted to let the military act “in spite of the constitution.”
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DeWitt liked McCloy’s suggestion. He urged the War Department to round up all suspects fourteen years old and up from enemy nations and to deposit them at inland locations. He urged Roosevelt to give the secretary of war the right to detain aliens when the secretary deemed it necessary.

DeWitt and McCloy found an adversary in the Justice Department. Attorney General Francis Biddle saw no reason to remove people who were not proven to be disloyal residents. Biddle reported, “We have not uncovered . . . any dangerous persons that we could not otherwise know about.”
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Biddle’s findings brought about a power struggle between the Justice Department, which opposed moving innocent civilians, and the War Department, which wanted to detain Japanese Americans.

Top War Department officials met with Biddle on February 1, 1942. Biddle then drafted a press release that read, “The Department of War and the Department of Justice are in agreement that the present military situation does not . . . require the removal of American citizens of the Japanese race.”
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The War Department, in truth, was in no such agreement. Biddle said he would have nothing to do with mass evacuations. McCloy retorted that if it came to a choice between the safety of the country and the Constitution, “Why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”
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Three days later, DeWitt created twelve restricted zones that covered the Pacific Coast. Enemy aliens in these zones had nighttime curfews. During the daytime, they could leave home only to go to work. If the Japanese Americans disobeyed the regulations, they could be arrested immediately.

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had been wavering on the evacuation issue. By February 11, he decided to go along with the evacuations. Stimson made his recommendation to Roosevelt, who was not wholly enthusiastic about the idea. The president told Stimson, “go ahead and do anything you think necessary. But, be as reasonable as you can.”
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The pressure from Roosevelt and Stimson was too much for Biddle. The Justice Department gave up opposition to evacuations.

Executive Order 9066

On February 19, 1942, a Nisei speaker proclaimed, “our greatest friend is a man who is the greatest living man today—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
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That evening, the Nisei’s “greatest living friend” was about to betray them.

Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19. It was one of the greatest violations of civil rights in American history. The order gave the military the authority to exclude “any or all persons from designated areas, including the California coast.” Secretary of War Stimson immediately gave DeWitt authority “to carry out the duties and responsibilities imposed by said Executive Order.” DeWitt had free rein to do whatever he wanted.

The word “Japanese” never appeared in Roosevelt’s executive order, yet from the beginning, Japanese were the order’s only intended targets. Noncitizen Germans and Italians were “enemy aliens,” too, but nobody seriously considered locking them up.

Many people escaped the order because of an Italian-American fisherman in San Francisco named Giuseppe DiMaggio. Nobody outside San Francisco knew Giuseppe DiMaggio, but everyone knew his son. Joe DiMaggio was Most Valuable Player with the world champion New York Yankees. In 1941, he hit in a record fifty-six consecutive games. Force Joe DiMaggio’s father from his home? Why, that would be . . . un-American!

The Japanese in America had no national hero like Joe DiMaggio. More important, they lacked experienced national leadership. Most of the leaders among German Americans and Italian Americans were United States citizens. The Japanese leaders were noncitizen Issei, and those most influential Issei were already detained by authorities. Few of their Nisei children were over thirty years old. They lacked the experience needed to deal with governments and politicians. The most influential Nisei organization, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was less than five years old.

Less than a week after the evacuation order, a Japanese submarine fired shells at some storage tanks off the Santa Barbara coast. The next night, the army detected what appeared to be an enemy aircraft flying over Los Angeles. Within a couple of hours, more than fourteen hundred shells were fired, raining down fragments that damaged dozens of cars. The “enemy aircraft” turned out to be a wayward weather balloon.

DeWitt nonetheless used the hysteria to take further action. He issued his first proclamation on March 2, 1942. It called for two military zones: Zone 1 covered the western third of California, Oregon, and Washington, and the southern quarter of Arizona; Zone 2 covered the remainder of the four states.

Authorities urged those of Japanese ancestry to leave Zone 1. There were few voluntary evacuees. They had neither the time nor the desire to sell their properties, and nowhere to go if they did. Inland, Americans seemed no more hospitable to them than were their Pacific Coast neighbors. Some were turned back by armed mobs; others were thrown in jail. Many encountered
No Japs Wanted
signs.

One major loophole kept the government from moving the Issei and Nisei. They were civilians, and the military had no control over them. Stimson went to Congress to solve this problem. He requested a law ordering any civilian who disobeyed a military order in a military zone to serve a year in jail. The bill passed unanimously.

War Relocation Authority

Most Japanese Americans were not going to leave the Pacific Coast of their own free will; that appeared obvious. But where were they going to be moved had not been determined.

Inland, governors let it be known that the exiles would not be welcome in their states. Wyoming’s governor said, “If you bring Japanese into my state, I promise you they will be hanging from every tree.”
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Japanese Americans would be welcome in Idaho, that state’s governor said, only if they were in “concentration camps under military guard.”
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The Idaho governor’s idea prevailed. The Issei and Nisei would be moved to inland camps. They would be kept there for an indefinite period of time, perhaps for the duration of the war.

Only the army had the force to move more than a hundred thousand civilians, but Secretary of War Stimson balked at removing thirty-five thousand troops from combat to guard generally peaceful civilians. On March 18, Executive Order 9012 established the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Army troops would transport the evacuees to their relocation camps. From there, the civilian WRA would take over. Milton Eisenhower, an Agriculture Department official and older brother of General Dwight Eisenhower, was chosen as the first WRA director. He concluded that he had no alternative but to build evacuation camps where the residents could send their children to schools, perform useful work, and maintain as much self-respect as possible. When the war is over, Eisenhower wrote, “we as Americans are going to regret the unavoidable injustices that may have been done.”
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Eisenhower soon resigned the thankless job, and his assistant, Dillon Myer, replaced him.

The War Relocation Authority had a notable ally. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) was working to have Nisei exempted from the evacuation, so ultimately, the JACL voted to cooperate with the WRA. Many Japanese Americans despised the decision.

Mike Masaoka of the JACL defended the decision. “If in the judgment of military and federal authorities evacuation of Japanese residents from the West Coast is a primary step toward assuring the safety of this nation, we will have no hesitation in complying,” he claimed. “But if, on the other hand, such evacuation . . . cloaks the desires of political or other pressure groups who want us to leave merely for motives of self-interest, we feel that we have every right to protest.”
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Masaoka gave several reasons for his group’s cooperation with evacuation orders. Cooperation could be seen as the Japanese Americans’ contribution to the war effort. It would show Japanese-American patriotism and thus help non-Japanese work on their behalf. Japanese Americans had the duty to follow their alien Japanese family members if they were forced into camps.

The JACL felt they had no real alternative. The money of most Japanese Americans had been confiscated by the government. Since most Issei and Nisei were not voting-age citizens, they had no political power. The leaders they had trusted for decades were sitting in prison camps. Public opinion was against people from the nation that bombed Pearl Harbor and appeared to be winning the Pacific war. Cooperation with the government, even in an unjust removal, was a better alternative than violence and pointless bloodshed. Historian Roger Daniels commented, “Active resistance was really out of the question. It would have been absolute community suicide.”
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On March 27, DeWitt issued Public Proclamation Number 4. This order forced persons of Japanese ancestry to stay in Military Zone 1 after the end of the month. A few days earlier, the government had encouraged these civilians to leave the military zone. Now, the same government was ordering them to stay.

A few days earlier, DeWitt had issued Exclusion Order Number 1. Persons of Japanese ancestry were moved from Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, Washington, to a camp in Manzanar, California. Fifty-four families, including 276 people, most of them United States citizens, were evicted from their homes. There would be more than a hundred such evacuation orders before the end of the war.

On June 2, 1942, DeWitt declared the entire West Coast an exclusion area. Half-a-world away, another significant event was taking place. It was June 3 in the western Pacific Ocean. The Battle of Midway, the bloodiest sea battle in the history of warfare, had begun. By the end of the battle, the Japanese fleet would be crippled. United States Naval Intelligence told Roosevelt that the Midway defeat ended any chance of a Japanese invasion of America.

If military necessity was the only reason for evacuation, it could have stopped right there. But sometimes people and governments continue mistakes rather than admit them. Plans for the mass evacuation continued as scheduled.

Many people hoped that an evacuation would not take place. “At first we did not believe the reports of a possible evacuation,” recalled Shig Wakamatsu. “Then we thought, ‘Maybe they will take our parents, but not us.’”
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Chapter 4

WHY DID THE GUNS POINT INWARD?

Without warning, the signs popped up throughout Japanese- American communities on the West Coast. The worst nightmare of a peaceful, innocent people was coming to pass.

The signs ordered all persons of Japanese ancestry, “aliens and non-aliens” alike, to report to assembly points on specific days. Those signs themselves were an insult. The term non-alien might have been used because the government was ashamed to admit that it was rounding up and detaining United States citizens. “During the war years I was never referred to as a citizen. I was always considered a non-alien,” penned Seattle, Washington-born Gordon Hirabayashi.
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Newspaper headlines blared “Japs Given Evacuation Orders Here.” Actually, they were given little instruction. They had to meet at a central point, such as a bus station, within ten days. They were told only to bring bedding and linens, extra clothes, toilet articles, tableware, and “essential personal effects.”

Hideo Murata, a World War I veteran, could not believe the notice. He called his friend the sheriff, who assured him it was real. Murata checked into a local hotel, paid for his room in advance, and committed suicide. Authorities saw, clutched in his hand, a Certificate of Honorary Citizenship presented the previous Fourth of July. The certificate was a “testimony of heartfelt gratitude, of honor and respect for your loyal and splendid service to the country.”
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