Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

  In May of that year, a Joint Planning Committee report noted that the crews of Japanese commercial ships docking in Oahu made regular contact with local Japanese-Hawaiians, in order to “advance Japanese nationalism and to cement bonds of loyalty.”6 FDR’s response, on learning of this, was that any Japanese or Japanese-Hawaiian who had any contact with these ships “should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble.”7

  By this time, the Japanese were being blamed for sowing the very same seeds of discontent that left-wing agitators had been accused of planting in the 1920s. Intelligence reports claimed that Japanese agitators were inciting minorities—particularly African-Americans—and radicals to labor unrest, racial strife, and other nefarious unpatriotic activities and attitudes. The FBI and MID undertook a fruitless investigation of relations between Japanese and African-Americans, conducting covert surveillance of associations like the Washington, D.C.–based New Negro Alliance, a direct-action civil rights group, and the National Negro Congress, a broad-based lobbying coalition of African-American organizations, for indications of Japanese influence. With no evidence, the bureau also blamed Japanese agitators for a rash of strikes that were triggered by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, a piece of New Deal legislation that guaranteed the rights of workers to form labor unions, conduct collective bargaining, and participate in strikes.8

  After the Japanese invasion of northern China in mid-1937 and the conquest in December of Nanking, which resulted in widespread atrocities by the Japanese army, U.S. relations with Japan seriously deteriorated. By October 1940, with war appearing a certainty, Navy Secretary Frank Knox sent FDR a list of fifteen actions that should be undertaken “to impress the Japanese with the seriousness of our preparations” for armed conflict.9 The twelfth item was “Prepare plans for concentration camps.”

  With anti-Japanese feelings on the rise throughout the country, the sentiment for internment was gaining in currency. In August 1941, the president received a letter from John D. Dingell, a New Deal congressman from Michigan, who proposed that if the Japanese took any action against American citizens in Japan, the United States should retaliate by placing ten thousand Japanese-Hawaiians in concentration camps, and be prepared to do the same to the entire U.S. ethnic Japanese population.

  In October, Attorney General Biddle, concerned by increasing anti-Japanese attitudes and recalling the excesses of World War I, condemned the “type of hysteria” that arises during national emergencies and often leads to the persecution of “innocent people.”10 Less than a month later, he reassured a group of West Coast Japanese who had traveled to Washington to register their “concern about the strained relations between the United States and Japan” and to profess their loyalty to the United States.11 “I promised them they would receive fair treatment,” said Biddle, “if they do not violate any laws.” At the same time, however, he also revealed plans for the control of alien enemies that ranged from supervised parole to detention.

  In November 1940, the FBI’s Honolulu office, which had recently reopened after having been closed for six years, furnished a report refuting the Joint Planning Committee’s conclusion that Japanese-Hawaiians were disloyal and should be considered a security risk.12 The bureau report contended that only a small group of about a thousand teachers, Buddhist and Shinto priests, and consular agents warranted surveillance, while the vast majority of Japanese-Hawaiians were steadfastly loyal to the United States.

  Faced with conflicting intelligence reports from the military and the FBI, Roosevelt secretly assigned his adviser John Franklin Carter, a journalist who wrote under the pen name Jay Franklin and had been a speechwriter for FDR’s 1940 reelection campaign, to establish an independent intelligence network that would investigate the fifth-column threat in Hawaii, as well as on the West Coast, where more than 95 percent of the Japanese and Japanese-American population of the United States lived.‡

  The two areas appeared vulnerable to a Japanese attack that—so the thinking went—would be aided by a fifth-column movement of alien, immigrant-generation issei and their children, the American-born nisei, who were U.S. citizens. Carter asked Curtis Munson, a Chicago businessman and special representative of the State Department, to assess and report on the West Coast and Hawaiian situations.

  Munson submitted his report a month before Pearl Harbor. While acknowledging that there would likely be some sabotage by paid Japanese agents, he found overwhelming evidence that “there is no Japanese ‘problem’ on the West Coast. There will be no armed uprising of Japanese … There will be no wholehearted response from Japanese in the United States … We do not believe that they would be at the least any more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with whom we went to war.”13 In Hawaii, Munson found, the Japanese were overwhelmingly faithful to the United States, and the FBI and Navy intelligence had the potentially disloyal individuals under surveillance. On the contrary, Munson’s main concern was not the disloyalty of the ethnic Japanese but the very real possibility of violence directed against them after war broke out.

  While Munson was conducting his study, Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Ringle, who spoke Japanese and was well known in the Los Angeles Japanese-American community, was carrying out a similar investigation for the ONI. Ringle’s break-in at the Japanese consulate the previous spring had yielded documents showing that Japan mistrusted the issei and nisei as being too Americanized to be of use as espionage agents. His report, submitted on January 26, 1942, more than six weeks after Pearl Harbor, concluded, “The entire ‘Japanese Problem’ has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because of the physical characteristics of the people. It should be handled on the basis of the individual, regardless of citizenship, and not on a racial basis.”14

  Cooler heads like Munson and Ringle were not destined to prevail. Immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Secretary of the Navy Knox went to Hawaii to consult with naval officers and inspect the devastation. When he returned to Washington on December 15, he met with Roosevelt to report his findings and then held a press conference, at which he declared, “I think the most effective fifth-column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii, with the possible exception of Norway.”15 Knox’s remark, which had no factual basis, appeared in newspapers across the country, effectively indicting the Japanese-Hawaiian community for complicity in the attack. Concerned that the misinformation could lead to reprisals against the ethnic Japanese, John Franklin Carter asked Roosevelt to issue a public statement refuting Knox’s claim, but FDR remained silent on the matter.

  As FBI agents went about the business of rounding up alien enemies around the country, attention also focused on the West Coast, which, along with Alaska, was officially designated a “theater of operations,” that is, a war zone. The Fourth Army there was commanded by Lieutenant General John DeWitt, who had been the author, in the 1920s, of the defense plan for Oahu that called for martial law, suspension of habeas corpus, and registration and internment of select alien Japanese.

  Biddle characterized DeWitt as “apt to waver under popular pressure, a characteristic arising from his tendency to reflect the views of the last man to whom he had talked.”16 On one matter, however, DeWitt was unwavering. In his attitude toward Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans, he was unabashedly racist. “A Jap’s a Jap,” he declared flatly on more than one occasion, adding, “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.”17

  In the wake of Pearl Harbor, DeWitt fully expected another Japanese attack, and he was determined not to be blindsided. On December 9, he hotly scolded San Franciscans for their casual attitude toward a blackout the previous night, after the supposed sighting—actually a false alarm—of a squadron of Japanese warplanes over the Bay Area.

  From his San Francisco headquarters, DeWitt passed along to the War Department unsubstantiated rumors of espionage an
d sabotage by Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, including an undocumented account of an impending revolt of twenty thousand Japanese-American San Franciscans and a report of regular communications between Japanese spies and submarines off the coast that had led to attacks on “practically every ship that has gone out.”18 These intelligence reports turned out to be either wildly exaggerated or simply false, leading one of DeWitt’s under-generals to refer to his commanding officer in a diary as a “jackass.”19

  Right after Pearl Harbor, DeWitt recommended the creation of a military zone, running a hundred miles inland from the coast, from which dangerous enemy aliens—German, Italian, and Japanese alike—would be barred. On December 19, he went a step further, proposing that all alien enemies over fourteen years old be moved away from the coast and relocated inland.

  At the beginning of January, Biddle sent Assistant Attorney General Rowe to San Francisco to meet with DeWitt. DeWitt pressed for the registration of all West Coast enemy aliens, for the designation of military exclusion zones that enemy aliens could enter only with a pass, and for the raiding of issei residences. In a January 4 meeting with DeWitt, Rowe and the chief West Coast FBI agent, Nat Pieper, agreed that the Justice Department would undertake these actions.

  Although DeWitt mistrusted Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans in equal measure—“I have no confidence in their loyalty whatsoever,” he told Rowe—he initially opposed any mass evacuation and incarceration of them.20 “I’d rather go along the way we are now … rather than attempt any such wholesale internment,” he informed the Army’s provost marshal general, Allen Gullion, adding, “An American citizen is, after all, an American citizen.”21

  Gullion was frustrated with Biddle’s temperate approach to the alien enemy question, which was based both on the attorney general’s constitutional concerns and on the various intelligence reports that affirmed that the West Coast issei and nisei were no threat. Impatient with what he regarded as Biddle’s foot-dragging, Gullion asked his aide, Major Karl R. Bendetsen, a thirty-five-year-old Stanford Law School graduate, to draft a memo to the president recommending that the Alien Enemy Control Program be transferred from the Justice Department to the War Department.

  The struggle for management of the Alien Enemy Control Program was the latest manifestation of the turf war that had been brewing since Roosevelt had directed the FBI, ONI, and MID to cooperate and coordinate intelligence gathering in 1936. In June 1940, the three agencies had agreed to a division of labor that gave the FBI responsibility for investigating cases of civilian espionage, counterespionage, and sabotage in the United States and American territories, while MID’s purview was military espionage and sabotage, including instances involving civilians employed by the Army, and ONI was to handle investigations of cases involving naval personnel, including the Navy’s civilian employees.

  When the FBI also assumed direction of the civilian organizations that would be used to combat any fifth-column activity, Hoover ran into a dispute with MID, which had defined a fifth column as a military entity, “essentially a part of military operations,” whose activities “are coordinated … with those of the uniformed forces of the enemy.”22 MID accordingly considered the supervision of anti-fifth-column groups to be within its domain, not the FBI’s. A month after the agreement that delineated each agency’s areas of responsibility, MID began planning its own operation to counter fifth-column activity. Hoover disdained the Army’s intelligence unit as being prone to “hysteria and lack of judgment” and protested to Roosevelt that MID was usurping the FBI’s authority.23 After six weeks of negotiations, Hoover finally prevailed, and the bureau hung on to its control of anti-fifth-column operations.

  Now the Justice and War departments again locked horns over the Alien Enemy Control Program. The War Department’s goal of gaining control of the program was pushed dramatically forward by the January 25 publication of the report of the Roberts Commission, which was issued as part of the joint congressional committee hearings investigating Pearl Harbor.24

  The report concluded—incorrectly, it would later be proved—that there had been espionage leading up to the attack, by both “Japanese consular agents and other … persons having no open relations with the Japanese foreign service,” a conclusion that was widely and mistakenly interpreted to be confirmation of Navy Secretary Knox’s claim of sabotage and fifth-column activities.25 Reaction to the Roberts Commission report was vehement, as anger toward the ethnic Japanese population, which on the West Coast was remarkably restrained in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor but had been gradually gaining momentum, now swung violently against everything Japanese.

  Even before the report was published, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce had called for the removal of all Japanese aliens and Japanese-American citizens. Congressman Leland M. Ford of California had also gone on record as being in favor of moving all Japanese, aliens and citizens alike, to concentration camps. In letters to Hoover and the secretaries of war and the Navy, as well as in a statement to the press, Ford argued that any loyal ethnic Japanese should be willing, even eager, to acquiesce, since “other loyal Americans are enlisting in the Army and Navy and Air Forces and are willing to give their lives for their country, and if these men are willing to make their contribution to the safety and welfare of the country … it is not asking too much of the Japanese to make theirs in the form of permitting themselves to be placed in concentration camps, although they may be loyal.”26

  After the publication of the Roberts Commission report, mass evacuation and internment became the rallying cry of the day. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ demand for the removal of aliens on January 27 was followed by similar resolutions in seventeen more counties around the state and from the statewide County Supervisors Association.

  The San Francisco Examiner columnist Henry McLemore advocated “the 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. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands. Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it … Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”27

  In the Los Angeles Times, W. H. Anderson argued, “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched … So a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents, nurtured upon Japanese traditions … almost inevitably and with the rarest of exceptions grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”28

  California’s governor, Culbert Olson, urged DeWitt that federal intervention was needed immediately, warning that the danger of vigilante action was imminent. California’s attorney general, Earl Warren—soon to be the state’s governor and later chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court—also publicly came out in favor of mass evacuation.

  Prominent among those calling for the removal of the ethnic Japanese were powerful agricultural interests, who saw the chance to put their competitors out of business and buy up their lands. Over the decades, Japanese immigrants had purchased millions of acres on the coast and in the inland valleys, becoming a considerable agricultural and economic presence. The Western Growers Protective Association, the Grower-Shipper Association of Central California, and the White American Nurserymen of Los Angeles were all vociferous in their advocacy of mass evacuation. “We trust that your office will make a sincere effort to eliminate as many of these undesirable aliens as possible at this time,” one official of the WGPA wrote to Warren.29 The managing secretary of the GSACC was even more blunt, saying, “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work and they stayed to take over … If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don’t want them back when the war ends, either.”30

  The public outcry aided B
endetsen and Gullion, who had been exerting heavy pressure on DeWitt to support the wholesale removal of the ethnic Japanese community. Now DeWitt started coming around. The day after talking to Governor Olson, he told Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy that the predominant sentiment on the West Coast boiled down to “a Jap is a Jap” and that “the question of the alien Japanese and all Japanese presents a problem in control, separate and distinct from that of the German or Italian.”31 The latter groups, said the general, “you don’t have to worry about … as a group. You have to worry about them purely as certain individuals.”

  On January 29, Biddle issued an order requiring all enemy aliens to leave the West Coast restricted zones by February 24, and the attorney general further designated dozens of additional zones of exclusion. Faced with immediate relocation, at least four Italian aliens in northern California, all over fifty-seven years of age, committed suicide rather than comply, the stigma of disloyalty being too much for them to bear.32