Jay M. Brown
In 1848 with the agricultural industry of the West Coast and Hawaii facing a severe labor shortage the United States government pressured the government of Japan to relax their restrictions on Japanese laborers migrating to the United States. By 1900 approximately 85,000 Japanese laborers were working the fields in Hawaii and California.
Prior to the migration of the Japanese the largest non-white ethnic group in the West Coast and Hawaii had been the Chinese who during the 1849 Gold Rush came to California as miners. The reaction of English speaking Americans to the Chinese miners would set the pattern and attitude towards all Orientals for years to come.
The Chinese miners were forced out of the mine fields through acts of terror and arson committed by the “native” miners who resented the intrusion of non Americans. In 1850, with the achievement of statehood, California passed a number of laws officially discriminating against the Chinese population.
California cities were empowered to expel or restrict the Chinese to segregated areas. Public agencies as well as corporations were prohibited from employing Chinese. In addition other federal, state or local laws or court decisions at various times prohibited the Chinese from; becoming citizens or voting, testifying in court against a white person, engaging in licensed business and professions, attending school with whites, and marrying whites. Chinese persons alone were required to pay special taxes, and a major source of revenue for many cities, counties and the state of California came from these assessments against the Chinese.
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Although business recruited Chinese workers for menial tasks labor unions demonstrated and petitioned local elected officials to remove all individuals of Chinese heritage from California. Reacting to extreme pressure from various California lobby groups the United States Congress, beginning in 1882, enacted a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts and thus eliminated for a time, what West Coasters considered the “yellow peril”.
With severe labor shortage in the agricultural industry in 1884 and the arrival of Japanese workers the “yellow peril” stereotype was transferred to the Japanese workers. The transfer resulted at first from popular confusion of the two nationalities and was accelerated by the increasing Japanese immigration which revived fears of Oriental inundation.
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Although their skills and hard labor in the agricultural fields were welcomed the Japanese, as soon as they showed any signs of initiative or a desire to better their economic conditions, were seen as a threat to the white population. Led by the Hearts newspaper chain, after the Russo-Japanese War, other publications including the
New York Times
saw the prosperity of California threatened and a conflict between the United States and Japan as inevitable.
By 1913 labor unions fearing that the Japanese workers would undermine union progress pressured California legislators and finally, in 1924, the Federal Government to pass various Anti-Japanese legislation.
At no time during this period did any of the media-radio, the press or motion pictures, remind the general public that many of those with Japanese ancestry were American citizens.
During the few years that followed the passage of exclusion legislation and land laws political agitation against the Japanese vanished. The outbreak of the depression, coupled with the aggression of the Japanese Government in China and Manchuria, led once again to resentment against Japanese living in America.
In 1935, 1937, and 1939, anti-Japanese measures once more appeared in California’s legislature, as public opinion generally began to turn against Japan and Japanese Americans. But the attention of the politicians, as of the public, focused primarily upon the domestic problems of the depression and beyond the revival of the familiar stereotypes, no large scale movement developed against the Japanese until the “Dastardly and unprovoked attack” by Japan at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941.
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Responding to pressure from West Coast political leaders and the media as well as the Western Defense Command to evacuate Japanese from coastal areas President Franklin Roosevelt, on February 19, 1942, issued Executive Order 9066. Roosevelt signed the order without asking for justification of the evacuation program and without discussing it with his cabinet.
“Why did Roosevelt do it? No historian can ever answer, definitively, this kind of question. Nothing anyone can say in explanation, however, can expiate it; no doctrine of historical relativism can absolve Franklin Roosevelt of the responsibility for giving the army the right to treat American citizens of Japanese ancestry as it wished.”
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Along with most Americans, as Daniels points out, Roosevelt harbored all thoughts of racist prejudice against Asians.
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The Executive Order was a sweeping and unprecedented, delegation of presidential power to an appointed subordinate. Although its authority was used only against Japanese Americans it was an instrument that could have affected any American. Executive Order 9066, designed by the army, could have been applied against any group anywhere in the country. No geographical areas were specified, no ethnic groups mentioned, and no distinction made between citizens and aliens.
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EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066
NOW, THEREFORE, by the virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commanders may impose in his discretion . . .
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
The White House
February 19, 1942
Prior to the issuing of Executive Order 9066 general restriction had limited enemy aliens travel to within five miles of homes and curfews had been established. The Executive Order gave the Secretary of War and Military Commanders authority to exclude any person from a designated area. At first Japanese Americans were asked to leave the West Coast voluntarily but when the inland states objected to receiving the refugees the voluntary evacuation was halted and compulsory evacuation was instituted.
With the establishment of compulsory evacuation all persons of Japanese descent, irregardless of their citizenship, were first taken to temporary assembly centers often established at fairgrounds or racetracks and then moved inland to ten isolated relocation centers.
The evacuees were limited to taking with them only items they could carry with no provisions made by the authorities for the shipping of household goods.
Merchants and business men were forced to sell their businesses with most suffering losses. Farm property, under Farms Security Administration was transferred to Caucasian tenants and Corporations.
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To arouse fear and suspicion, upon the Japanese Americans, the press and radio slanted the news with a Hearst columnist urging that “the Japanese Americans in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman . . . and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”
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Faced with a hostile press and the apparent hostility of the public many Japanese Americans were convinced that the evacuation was primarily motivated, not by military necessity, but by racial prejudice. General DeWitt of the Western Defense Command, reinforced this feeling by explaining, as quoted by the
Los Angeles Times
, on April 14, 1943, that “A Jap’s a Jap . . . It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not . . . I don’t want any of them . . . They are a dangerous element . . . There is no way to determine their loyalty.”
Americans had spent a century learning to hate and fear the Japanese, and after the catastrophe of Pearl Harbor they lashed out—half in habit and half in frustration at the only available enemy. John Hughes, a radio commentator, was the first to demand evacuation of the Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast early in January 1942. Spurred by the fear of imminent invasion, and convinced that Japanese Americans would assist as fifth columnists, the public clamored for action, just as quickly the government complied.
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Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox became the most vehement proponent of anti-Japanese American measures in Roosevelt’s cabinet,
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while Attorney General Francis Biddle as he states in his memoirs, “was determined to avoid mass internment, and the prosecution of aliens that had characterized the First World War.”
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The bank accounts of all enemy aliens were frozen by the Treasury Department thus denying most adult Japanese residents access to their own money. This was slightly modified to allow Japanese Americans to withdraw a maximum of $100 a month from their bank if they had no other source of income.
Less than seventy two hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor the military proposed a mass evacuation of all Japanese from the West Coast. This plan was aborted on the advise of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Nine days later General DeWitt officially recommended that “action be initiated at the earliest practicable date to collect all alien subject fourteen years of age or over, of enemy nations and remove them” to the interior of the United States and hold them “under restraint after removal.”
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Although the proposal was not, at the time, acted upon it exemplified the thinking and the direction the military desired to be taken. Supporting the DeWitt proposal was the Army’s chief law enforcement officer, Major General Allen W. Gullion, the army’s Provost Marshall General and Major Karl R. Bendetsen, a lawyer who directed the Aliens Division of the Provost Marshall Office. Bendetsen was to become, in matters pertaining to the Japanese, the army’s chief spokesman and planner.
Many politicians used the psychological fears of the West Coasters against the Japanese Americans to gain political stature among the voters. Among them was Earl Warren, who would eventually be elevated to the Supreme Court and become its Chief Justice, but in 1942 Warren was the Attorney General of California preparing to campaign, successfully, for the governor ship. In testimony before the Tolan Committee, a House Committee that was charged with examining the problems of evacuation, Warren said, in 1942, that “the consensus of opinion among the law-enforcement officers of this State is that there is more potential danger among the group of Japanese who are born in this country than from the alien Japanese who were born in Japan. 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 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. But when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field and we can not form any opinion that we believe to be sound.”
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When questioned about the civil rights of the Japanese Americans Warren stated that he believed that in time of war every citizen must give up some of his normal rights.
Two months before Pearl Harbor the United States State Department sent a special investigator, Curtis B. Munson, to report on the disposition of the Japanese American communities on the West Coast and Hawaii. Munson’s final confidential report to the President and the Secretary of State remained a secret until 1946. According to Munson Japanese Americans possessed an extraordinary degree of loyalty to the United States and immigrant Japanese were of no danger to our nation. Munson’s findings were corroborated by the FBI and Navy Intelligence who had kept the Japanese American population under secret surveillance for a number of years. These reports were all kept secret from the American public. The public had been psychologically conditioned to hate and mistrust, and we did.
Although racial prejudice played a major role in determining how we would treat the Japanese Americans other factors, primarily economic, helped foster the discriminatory action our nation would take against this group.
Despite the fact that the Japanese comprised only one percent of California’s population they controlled almost fifty percent of that state’s commercial truck crops. Their agricultural skills had enabled them to produce an improved farm product and to bring down the price of farm goods. Much of the fertile and rich growing farm acreage of California, although held in the names of citizen Nisei, belonged to the noncitizen Japanese immigrants. Denied the right to become American citizens and unable to purchase land in their own name the Japanese immigrants purchased the land in the names of their citizen offsprings. They were able to purchase, before Pearl Harbor, low priced land that the Caucasian population considered worthless—usually swampland and desert areas. Utilizing their agricultural skills the Japanese immigrants were able to turn this land, which in many cases bordered dams, railroad tracks and high-tension electric wire lines, into fertile high producing agricultural fields.
The success of the Japanese in turning barren land into productive fields was met by accusations by the population of “unfair competition” and that “the Japs had taken over the best land.” As general economic conditions on the West Coast declined, coupled with the prejudicial attitudes developed over the years and the attack on Pearl Harbor, West Coasters concluded that the Japanese were a threat to the security of the United States. It was also felt that they would become fifth columnists and spies for the Emperor of Japan. Thus the stage had been set for what would become a betrayal of the constitutional guarantees of not depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
From May 1942 to November 1942 the Japanese Americans were evacuated from the West Coast to relocation centers administered by a civilian agency—the War Relocation Authority. Most of the relocation centers were established in undeveloped and isolated areas. Varying in size from 6,000 acres to 72,000 and in capacity from 8,000 detainees to 16,000 the ten centers utilized were:
Manzanar and Tule Lake in California;
Poston and Gila River in Arizona;
Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas;
Minidoka in Arizona;
Heart Mountain in Wyoming;
Granada in Colorado; and
Topaz located in Utah.
Over one hundred thousand men, women and children were imprisoned in these relocation centers with approximately seventy thousand of them citizens of the United States. “They were imprisoned without indictment or the proffer of charges pending inquiry into their ‘loyalty.’ They were taken into custody as a military measure on the grounds that espionage and sabotage were especially to be feared from persons of Japanese blood. They were removed from the West Coast area because the military thought it would take too long to conduct individual loyalty investigations on the ground. They were arrested in an area where the courts were open, and freely functioning. They were held under prison conditions in uncomfortable camps, far from their homes, and for lengthy periods—several years in many cases. If found ‘disloyal’ in administrative proceedings they were confined indefinitely, although no statute makes ‘disloyal’ a crime.”
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