Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

  Also on the twenty-ninth, Bendetsen met with the California congressional delegation, which unanimously approved a plan of action that called for the evacuation of enemy aliens and “dual” citizens but made no mention of any specific ethnic group. When Bendetsen briefed Gullion on his meeting with the legislators, however, he represented their proposal as “calling for the immediate evacuation of all Japanese from the Pacific coastal strip including Japanese 21 years of age and under.”33

  On February 4, Biddle met with Bendetsen, Gullion, and McCloy. The attorney general’s refusal to consider evacuating American citizens without a suspension of habeas corpus angered the War Department group. McCloy, a lawyer and banker, had the aplomb and temerity to tell the attorney general, “If it is a question of the safety of the country [and] the constitution … why the constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”34 Biddle insisted that the Justice Department would have nothing to do with violating the rights of U.S. citizens—if that was to happen, it would have to be the War Department that carried it out.

  This was the opening the military men were waiting for. That very day, Bendetsen submitted a memo to Gullion recommending that the president issue an executive order giving the secretary of war control of alien enemies and the power to “requisition the services of any and all other Federal agencies,” that is, the Justice Department, in carrying out whatever measures he deemed necessary. Bendetsen recommended the removal of “both Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese extraction or parentage” from the West Coast and their relocation to “the Zone of Interior in uninhabited areas where they can do no harm under guard … [M]ass evacuation is a course which, if followed, will largely relieve the necessity for eternal vigilance.” As Bendetsen saw it, the only problem—aside from the daunting mechanics of such a huge undertaking—was that “no one has justified fully the sheer military necessity for such action.”35

  Bendetsen was arguably the most fanatical and racist of the War Department group. Because it was DeWitt who submitted the February 14 “Final Recommendation” memo suggesting mass evacuation, then signed the order for it and oversaw its execution on the ground, he is often regarded as having been responsible for its conception. On the contrary, it was Bendetsen, following Gullion’s general orders, who bears the responsibility both for writing the “Final Recommendation” memo signed by DeWitt and for devising and administering the specifics of the evacuation. After the war, Bendetsen would boast that he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for being the one who “conceived method, formulated details, and directed evacuation of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from military areas.”36 In 1949, Father Hugh T. Lavery of the Catholic Maryknoll Center in Los Angeles would write of him, “Colonel Bendetsen showed himself to be a little Hitler. I mentioned that we had an orphanage with children of Japanese ancestry, and that some of these children were half Japanese, others one-fourth or less. I asked which children should we send to the relocation center … Bendetsen said: ‘I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.’ ”37 For his work, Bendetsen was promoted twice in a ten-day period—to lieutenant colonel on February 4 and to full colonel on February 14. Coincidentally or not, these were the respective dates of Bendetsen’s memo to Gullion recommending mass evacuation and of DeWitt’s “Final Recommendation” memo—which was also, as noted, written by Bendetsen—to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, urging the same.

  • • •

  As the situation on the West Coast grew more tense, anger at Japan was increasingly directed at the ethnic Japanese. By the middle of February, there were at least five murders and twenty-five other serious crimes committed against Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans in the Pacific states.38

  The national cry for evacuation and incarceration of the West Coast ethnic Japanese was reaching a crescendo. Such disparate and influential syndicated newspaper pundits as the measured liberal Walter Lippmann and the acerbic conservative Westbrook Pegler both came out in favor of removal. In a piece called “The Fifth Column on the Coast,” Lippmann argued for “a policy of mass evacuation and mass internment,” and three days later Pegler fulminated, “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now—and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”39

  Three days after his meeting with the War Department group, Biddle had lunch with Roosevelt and expressed his opinion that mass evacuation was ill-advised, that the Justice Department was not equipped to carry it out, and that the Army had made no convincing argument for it as a military necessity. Biddle further “emphasized the danger of the hysteria … moving east and affecting the Italian and German population in Boston and New York.” Roosevelt’s response, that he was “fully aware of the dreadful risk of Fifth Column retaliation in case of a raid,” indicated either that he had swallowed as true the bogus accusations of sabotage and espionage made by Navy Secretary Knox, the Roberts Commission report, and countless others or that he simply found it politically expedient to go along with them.40

  Without Roosevelt’s support, Biddle began to cave in. In a February 9 letter to Secretary of War Stimson, he again expressed the same desire to wash his hands of the entire matter that he had voiced to McCloy, Gullion, and Bendetsen five days earlier. “The proclamations directing the Department of Justice to apprehend and, where necessary, evacuate alien enemies do not, of course, include American citizens of Japanese race,” wrote Biddle. “Should they have to be evacuated, I believe that this would have to be done on the military necessity in the particular area. Such action, therefore, should in my opinion be taken by the War Department and not by the Department of Justice.”41

  Stimson, however, had his own doubts about the legality of such a drastic measure. “I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system,” he wrote in his diary.42

  On February 11, Stimson and McCloy asked Roosevelt for a decision on the evacuation question.43 “Is the President willing to authorize us to move Japanese citizens as well as aliens from restricted areas?” Stimson wanted to know.44 FDR avoided answering the question directly, instead putting the onus of the decision back on Stimson. In his diary account of their conversation, Stimson wrote that Roosevelt “told me to go ahead on the line that I had myself thought the best.”45

  McCloy immediately called Bendetsen to tell him they had “carte blanche” as far as Roosevelt was concerned.46 Overstating FDR’s order, McCloy said that Roosevelt had specifically authorized the evacuation of citizens and had acknowledged that while such action was likely to have some repercussions, the situation had to be dictated by military necessity.

  Bendetsen was in San Francisco, having been sent there to assist DeWitt in the writing of the “Final Recommendation” regarding “evacuation of Japanese and other subversive persons from the Pacific Coast,” which was due on the thirteenth. In justifying the military necessity for mass evacuation, Bendetsen employed the same logic that the BI chief William Burns had used when he told a House subcommittee in 1922 that the absence of any radical action was proof of clandestine plotting.47 The Bendetsen/DeWitt “Final Recommendation,” dated February 14, insisted, “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”48

  Perverse as it may have been, this was enough to set the machinery for mass evacuation in motion, and on February 17, Roosevelt gave approval to the War Department’s plan. Stimson and McCloy avoided notifying Biddle, who, that same day, sent FDR a memo providing him with information on the subject of a possible West Coast evacuation for his upcoming press conference.49 Biddle’s memo informed the president that while arguments in favor of evacuation were based on a supposedly imminent Japanese attack on the West Coast and sabotage on the part of the region’s ethnic Japanese, intelligence reports from the FBI and the War Department indicated that neither supposition was true. Evacuation was, therefore, not only unnecessary
but also certain to hurt agricultural production. When Roosevelt then advised Biddle that he had already approved the mass evacuation of Japanese aliens and Japanese-American citizens, the attorney general’s resistance ended.

  That evening, in his living room, Biddle met with Gullion; McCloy; Bendetsen; Rowe; the head of the Alien Enemy Control Program, Edward Ennis; and Assistant Attorney General Tom C. Clark. Unaware that Biddle had already capitulated, Rowe and Ennis engaged the War Department group in debating the issues and presenting the constitutional case against evacuation of citizens, while the attorney general simply looked on and said little. After a time, Gullion impatiently reached into his pocket and extracted a piece of paper on which was written an order giving the War Department the authority to evacuate aliens and citizens alike.

  “I laughed at him,” said Rowe eight months later. “The old buzzard got mad. I told him he was crazy … But in another minute I thought that I was crazy. Because the Attorney General immediately wanted to get to work polishing up the order.” Rowe and Ennis were devastated. “[Biddle’s] attitude amazed me,” Rowe said. “Ennis almost wept. I was so mad that I could not speak at all myself and the meeting soon broke up.”50

  On February 19, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the secretary of war and his designated military commanders to prescribe areas from which, at their discretion, “any or all persons may be excluded.”51 The order was specifically worded to avoid any mention of the ethnic Japanese, but there was no doubt at whom it was directed. Italians, whom Roosevelt referred to after Pearl Harbor as “a lot of opera singers,”52 and hence not treacherous, were not to be evacuated except by Stimson’s order, and then only on an individual basis.53 Germans, who Roosevelt thought were “different, they may be dangerous,” were theoretically in the same category as Japanese, but the War Department made an exception for “bona fide” German refugees, which postponed the evacuation of German aliens until DeWitt could determine who the true German refugees were.54

  The evacuation of all ethnic Japanese on the West Coast began on March 31, 1942, conducted by DeWitt and the newly created War Relocation Authority, an agency of the Department of the Interior. Despite his acquiescence, Biddle was appalled: “I thought at the time that the program was ill-advised, unnecessary, and unnecessarily cruel … [T]he Nisei, American citizens from the day they were born in this country like any other Americans, were … treated like aliens … Their constitutional rights were the same as those of the men who were responsible for the program.”55 The bitter irony, of course, was the incongruity of fighting Fascism and racism abroad while incarcerating tens of thousands of American citizens at home for no other reason than their ethnic identity.

  In its 1982 report, Personal Justice Denied, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians stated, “The promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it—detention, ending detention and ending exclusion—were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”56 These conclusions are true as far as they go, but there were other factors operating as well.

  Morton Grodzins, whose groundbreaking 1949 study of the relocation and internment laid down the foundation for all subsequent investigations, points out, “Virtually every statement made concerning the special danger of the Japanese minority could also have been made against Germans and Italians.” As Grodzins notes, there were over eighteen thousand more Italian than Japanese aliens in California, and over seven thousand more foreign-born Italians than the entire ethnic Japanese population of the state.57 DeWitt and others, in fact, pushed hard for the removal of all West Coast alien enemies. Why, then, aside from the obvious motive of racism, were only the ethnic Japanese as a whole removed and incarcerated, and not the Germans and Italians as well? Again, the state of New York was home to more German aliens than the total number of ethnic Japanese on the West Coast, yet no outcry was made for the removal of German aliens from the East Coast.

  The historian Stephen Fox argues that the evacuation of the West Coast ethnic Japanese but not the German or Italian alien population of either coast was based on pragmatic concerns, that is, sheer numbers. Practically speaking, not only were there too many Italian and German aliens, but interning them, says Fox, would have angered hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Italian- and German-Americans, which might well have provoked a serious domestic crisis.58 Indeed, Biddle alerted Roosevelt that the hysteria on the West Coast was having an effect on the morale of East Coast ethnic Germans and Italians, and he also cautioned Stimson that “the evacuation of all enemy aliens would … present a problem of very great magnitude.”59 A group of lawyers whom the attorney general engaged to study the legality of evacuating Japanese-American citizens advised that “persons of Japanese descent constitute the smallest definable class” and were therefore the easiest group to evacuate.60 As Fox concludes, “Who should or should not be removed came down to a question of the number of people involved.”61

  Moreover, there was no economic motivation to intern the West Coast German and Italian aliens. Unlike the ethnic Japanese, neither of these groups were large-scale landowners. As Grodzins writes, “For three decades previous to the war, farm organizations had expressed regret at the penchant of Japanese to shift from a laboring to an entrepreneur status.”62 The outbreak of war finally provided these powerful agricultural interests with the opportunity to eliminate their competitors and seize their land.

  Finally, there was the attitude of President Roosevelt toward the ethnic Japanese, an attitude in line with the prevailing belief that racial characteristics were innate and that being born in the United States, speaking English as a native language, and growing up surrounded by American culture did not mitigate the fact of having Japanese ancestry. It was essentially the same as Bendetsen’s opinion that “while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”63 Or DeWitt’s blunter assessment, “A Jap’s a Jap.” In Roosevelt’s writings from the 1920s, he referred to the ethnic Japanese as people of “oriental blood” and therefore “unassimilable,” a mind-set that he carried forward through the next decades, and that predisposed him to believe Navy Secretary Knox’s fabricated statement and the insinuations of the Roberts Commission report about Japanese-Hawaiian complicity in Pearl Harbor, as well as the rash of other unsubstantiated rumors concerning subversive activities by West Coast ethnic Japanese.64

  Roosevelt also believed that immigrant groups in general should not be permitted to cluster together. As the 1920 Democratic vice presidential candidate, he had declared, “Our main trouble in the past has been that we have permitted the foreign elements to segregate in colonies. They have crowded into one district and they have brought congestion and racial prejudices to our large cities. The result is that they do not easily conform to the manners and the customs and the requirements of their new home. Now, the remedy for this should be the distribution of aliens in various parts of the country.”65

  So, by removing the ethnic Japanese from the West Coast, Roosevelt successfully broke up the Little Tokyos that existed in every major city in California, Oregon, and Washington. The historian John Howard also plausibly argues that the postwar resettlement of Japanese-Americans constituted a deliberate attempt on the part of the government to disperse the Nikkei community, to “Americanize” its members, and to decrease their geographical proximity to Japan.66

  There is no evidence that Roosevelt agonized greatly, if at all, over the decision to forcibly uproot the lives of 112,000 people. “I do not think he was very much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step,” said Biddle in his 1962 memoir. “He was never theoretical about things.” According to Biddle, the fact that 70 percent of these people were American ci
tizens also did not cause the president to lose sleep. “Nor do I think that the constitutional difficulty plagued him,” wrote the former attorney general.67

  The evacuation and internment of the West Coast ethnic Japanese is a serious blot on Roosevelt’s legacy, but it is in keeping with his often cavalier disregard for civil liberties. As Frank Donner points out in The Age of Surveillance, “The President’s record as a social reformer has obscured his anti-libertarian tendencies, reflected not only in his policies on such issues as wiretapping and Japanese relocation but in his prior career in public life. One need only recall his praise, in his 1920 campaign for the vice-presidency, of the raid the previous year by American Legionnaires on the Centralia, Washington, headquarters of the IWW as a ‘high form of red-blooded patriotism.’ ”68

  • • •

  Meanwhile, the arrests and detentions of domestic alien enemies continued. In all, 8,004 Japanese-Americans, 6,847 German-Americans, and 2,991 Italian-Americans were taken into “custodial detention,” and in some cases held up to three years after the end of the war. Hundreds of others were “repatriated” to Germany and Japan in prisoner-of-war exchanges, among them many U.S.-born children—American citizens—who were sent “home” with their immigrant parents. In the end, not a single person arrested and interned under the Alien Enemy Control Program was convicted of committing a war-associated crime against this country.

  German, Italian, and Japanese aliens and West Coast Japanese-Americans bore the main brunt of government scapegoating during World War II, but they were not the only ones to be persecuted. Conscientious objectors whose opposition to the war was based on religious conviction were assigned either noncombatant status in the armed forces or, in the case of those unwilling to wear the uniform, a form of alternative service, but draft resisters, political dissenters, and those whose religious beliefs did not qualify for CO status went to jail. Approximately fifty-five hundred men, more than three-quarters of them Jehovah’s Witnesses, were thus imprisoned.