Ringle first served on the West Coast for a year in 1936 and 1937—in that year a magazine published by the University of California speculated that American Japanese might be “slaughtered on the spot” if war came. Ringle was then sent back to Japan. He was brought back to California in July of 1940. He felt he understood the American Japanese, and he liked them, but he was hardly sentimental about Japan or about the Japanese in America, including his friends and informants—most of whom saw themselves as patriotic Americans and willingly reported to him about the “disloyal” minority in their community. As the roundups began after Pearl Harbor, Ringle wrote to his superiors in Washington.
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.… It is submitted that the Nisei could be accorded a place in the national war effort without risk or danger, that such a step would go farther than anything else towards cementing their loyalty to the United States.… The opinion outlined in this paragraph is considered most urgent.
There were obvious danger points, Ringle said, but he estimated that at least three-quarters of the Nisei were actively loyal and the great majority of Issei were very old, very tired, and tended to be passively loyal. He also pointed out that one group, the Kibei, whose Issei parents sent them back to Japan for education, had to be interned and their loyalties questioned and tested. “These people, the Kibei, are essentially and inherently Japanese and may have been deliberately sent to the United States as agents. In spite of their legal [American] citizenship, they should be looked at as enemy aliens and many of them placed in custodial detention.”
Ringle was, however, appalled at the idea of mass evacuation and incarceration; he later noted with some grim satisfaction that, after “careful investigations on both the West Coast and Hawaii, there was never a shred of evidence found of sabotage, subversive acts, spying, or Fifth Column activity on the part of the Nisei or long-time local residents.” The phrase “Fifth Column” was first used in the Spanish Civil War by a Nationalist general, Emilio Mola Vidal, as four columns of troops were fighting their way to Madrid to overthrow the elected Republican government. Mola Vidal stated he expected support from secret Nationalists in the Spanish military and government offices—a secret “Fifth Column” that would provide information to the Nationalist forces and rise up as combatants if needed.
In the end, Ringle concluded that perhaps thirty-five hundred Japanese or Japanese Americans in the United States posed potential security risks.
That information was pretty much ignored by the navy, because naval authorities considered homeland intelligence an army matter, and so it never got to army intelligence. It did, however, get to President Roosevelt, who had a personal spy service—financed by a secret White House fund managed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson—which included some government officials, businessmen, and journalists who reported to him and to him only. One of FDR’s private spies was a Chicago businessman named Curtis B. Munson, who was dispatched to the West Coast by John Franklin Carter, a secret FDR spy who was a syndicated newspaper columnist under the name “Jay Franklin.”
Munson, who conferred with Ringle and with the FBI, wrote to Carter and the president as early as November 7, 1941, saying “99 percent of the most intelligent views on the Japanese were crystallized by Lt. Commander K.D. Ringle.” Summarizing all of the reports, Carter wrote to FDR:
There will be no armed uprising of Japanese.… The essence of what Munson has to report is that, to date, he has found no evidence which would indicate that there is a danger of widespread anti-American activities among this population group. He feels that the Japanese are in more danger from the whites than the other way around.… There will undoubtedly be some sabotage financed by Japan and executed largely by imported agents or agents already imported. There will be the odd case of fanatical sabotage by some Japanese “crackpot.” … The Japanese are hampered as saboteurs because of their easily recognized physical appearance. It will be hard for them to get near anything to blow up if it is guarded.… The dangerous part of their espionage is that they would be very effective as far as movement of supplies, movement of troops, and movement of ships out of harbor mouths and over railroads is concerned.… Japan will commit some sabotage largely depending on imported Japanese as they are afraid of and do not trust the Nisei.
A week later Munson added in his report to the president: “The Nisei are universally estimated from 90 to 98 percent loyal to the United States if the Japanese-educated Kibei are excluded. The Nisei are pathetically eager to show this loyalty. They are not Japanese in culture. They are foreigners to Japan.”
Added Carter in a cover note: “For the most part the local Japanese are loyal to the United States or, at worst, hope that by remaining quiet they can avoid concentration camps or irresponsible mobs. We do not believe that they would be at least any more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with whom we went to war.”
Carter, who worked in the National Press Building, near the White House, passed more Munson and Ringle opinions to Roosevelt on December 16. The president responded to only one point, that unguarded bridges and other infrastructure might be vulnerable to sabotage. The president asked for more information on that problem.
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For about two weeks after Pearl Harbor, newspapers and public officials in California called for calm and tolerance. West Coast newspapers were printing stories about Japanese Americans and their alien parents pledging loyalty to the United States. Editorials and radio broadcasts often mirrored this one in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 9: “The roundup of Japanese citizens in various parts of the country … is not a call for volunteer spy hunters to go into action.… Neither is it a reason to lift an eyebrow at a Japanese whether American-born or not.… There is no excuse to wound the sensibilities of any persons in America by showing suspicion or prejudice.”
Southeast of Los Angeles, the Brawley News editorialized: “Americans should remain calm and considerate. In this community we have many Japanese neighbors and citizens whose loyalty to their adopted country remains steadfast during the time of crisis.”
“In California we have many citizens of Japanese parentage,” wrote the San Francisco News. “A large proportion of them are native-born Americans. They must not be made to suffer for the sins of a government for whom they have no sympathy or allegiance.” Three days later, the News went further, saying, “To subject these people to illegal search and seizure, then arrest them without warrant to confinement without trial, is to violate the principles of Democracy as set forth in our Constitution.”
Politicians, most notably Governor Culbert Olson and State Attorney General Earl Warren, also called for calm and restraint—at first. Governor Olson, a self-professed pacifist who was chairman of a high-minded group, the Northern California Committee for Fair Play for Citizens and Aliens of Japanese Ancestry, said: “Californians have kept their heads.… The American tradition of fair play has been observed. All the organs of public influence and information—press, pulpit, school welfare agencies, radio, and cinema—have discouraged mob violence and have pleaded for tolerance and justice for all law-abiding residents of whatever race.”
There were some early signs of hope for peace and tolerance among West Coast schools, as well. In some schools, white students hugged their Japanese friends as they arrived on that charged Monday after the attacks. In Seattle, the principal of Washington Middle School, Arthur Sears, called all the students together for a morning assembly on December 8. “We are all Americans and we here at Washington want no part of race hatred,” he said. “We are all under the same roof.” After he spoke, students were assigned to write to their teachers about what he had said. A sixth grader named Betty wrote to Ellen Evanson, her teacher, “Mr. Sears told us that even if we have a different color face, it
’s alright because we’re American Citizens.… When we were saluting the flag I was proud to salute the flag. Some people were crying because they were proud of their country.” Another sixth grader named Emiko wrote to Miss Evanson: “Because of this situation, we [may be] asked to leave this dear city of Seattle and its surroundings … if the school I will attend next would have a teacher like you I will be only too glad. When I am on my way my memories will flow back to the time I was attending this school and the assemblies that were held in the hall. Wherever I go I will be a loyal American.”
Soon enough, however, fear and prejudice, politics and greed, began to spread quickly among white Californians. Politicians, military commanders, and the press began responding to or whipping up hysteria, passing on and publishing rumors of imminent Japanese bombing and invasion of California. The Los Angeles Police Department closed down the stores and shops on East First Street, the main thoroughfare of Little Tokyo, a community of more than thirty thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans, part of a colony that operated one thousand fruit and vegetable stands in the city, doing business of $25 million a year. Japanese florists had annual revenues of more than $4 million. Suddenly, carloads of people from other areas of the city descended on the streets of Little Tokyo and attacked the Japanese stores and stands. The vigilante “patriots” overturned carts and tables and threw tomatoes and potatoes at anyone with an Asian face.
Nisei schoolchildren were sometimes mocked. Some teachers refused to allow Japanese Americans to participate in each morning’s Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. Kay Uno of Los Angeles, a third grader, was walking to school the morning of December 8 when she heard someone call, “There goes that little Jap!”
“I’m looking around,” she said later. “Who’s a Jap? Who’s a Jap? Then it dawned on me, I’m the Jap.”
In Seattle that same Monday morning, Sumie Barta, a secretarial student, told this story:
I was at the bus stop going for a brush-up course at Knapp’s Business College. The driver did not greet me with the usual, “Hi, Sumi! How’s tricks!” I heard someone from the back of the bus yell, “Get that damn Jap girl off the bus, Curly.” He said, “Are you Japanese,” and I said I am an American Japanese. “You got any proof of that?” he sneers.… “I was born in King County.” Then Curly ordered me off the bus, saying, “You are still a damn Jap.” I could not continue my classes. I was suddenly afraid to be alone on the highway.
The hatred continued to spread. The president of the University of Arizona, Alfred Atkinson, prevented the school’s libraries from lending books to students with Japanese names, saying, “We are at war and these people are our enemies.”
Forcing Barta off the bus and blocking American Japanese at libraries were harbingers of what was to come. Within days, there was a brisk business in buttons sold to American Japanese and other Asians saying: “I am an American!” and “I am Chinese!” Most Americans, even on the West Coast, could not tell the difference. Life magazine, one of the country’s most influential journals, ran a section on how to identify the difference between a “Jap” and a “Chinese.” A popular cartoonist, Milton Caniff, creator of the comic strip Terry and the Pirates, published around the country a six-panel strip called “How to Spot a Jap.” The copy included:
A Chinese man or woman “C” is about the size of the average American. The Jap is shorter and looks as if his legs are joined directly to his chest.… “C” usually has evenly set chompers—Jap has buck teeth.… The Chinese strides. The Jap shuffles.… The Chinese and other Asiatics have fairly normal feet.… The Japs will usually have a fairly wide space between the first and second toes. Jap can’t pronounce our liquid “L” … hisses on any “S” sound.
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Whatever goodwill there had been toward Issei and Nisei after Pearl Harbor was soon gone as news arrived daily of seemingly invincible and brutal Japanese armies running wild though the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies. Tolerance of any kind was replaced by fear and by the greed of white merchants and farmers who wanted to eliminate competition from California’s six thousand Japanese-operated farms, which totaled at least 250,000 acres and were worth more than $75 million. More than 40 percent of California’s produce was from American Japanese farms that often stood on land white farmers ignored as too poor for cultivation.
In the cities, many white businessmen coveted the stores, businesses, and fishing boats of Japanese competitors. The leader of one agricultural organization, Austin Anson, managing secretary of the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association of the Salinas Valley, told the Saturday Evening Post:
We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japanese 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 man.… They undersell the white man in the markets. They can do this because they raise their own labor. They work their women and children while the white farmer has to pay wages for his help.
Soon after Pearl Harbor, Caucasian shopkeepers joined the farmers in outspoken hatred, with signs saying THIS RESTAURANT POISONS BOTH RATS AND JAPS and OPEN HUNTING SEASON FOR JAPS. A barbershop put up this one: JAPS SHAVED: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTS. Then there was Burma Shave, a shaving cream company that advertised with rhyming signs placed in sequence along highways. The company replaced the advertisement, “A shave / That’s real / No cuts to heal / A soothing / Velvet after-feel / Burma-Shave” with this new one, “Slap / The Jap / With / Iron / Scrap / Burma-Shave.”
The California hysteria was also beginning to reach across the country. The editorial cartoonist of PM, New York City’s most liberal newspaper, drew a cartoon showing multitudes of bucktoothed, squint-eyed Japanese lined up across the entire West Coast to be given packs of dynamite at a stand called “Honorable Fifth Column.” The caption was “Waiting for the Signal from Home.” The artist’s name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, later to become famous writing children’s books under the name Dr. Seuss.
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Assistant Attorney General Thomas C. Clark, who happened to be in California in December of 1941, working on a federal antitrust case, began collecting newspapers with headlines such as “Los Angeles Bombed” and “L.A. Raided,” and reports of mass suicides among the Japanese in California. Most of those rumors were not true, but there were a number of individual suicides up and down the state after Pearl Harbor. Dr. Honda Rikita, a physician in Gardena who had served as medical officer in the Japanese army as a young man, was picked up on December 7, one of the “dangerous” leaders. Imprisoned in solitary confinement, he was interrogated for a week by the FBI before he killed himself by slashing his wrists. Some Issei and Tokyo radio claimed he was beaten to death during questioning. He did leave a series of suicide notes, one reading: “A doctor’s vocation is to save lives. In order to save lives it is a doctor’s highest honor to sacrifice himself. I have dedicated myself to Japanese-American friendship.”
Bombing stories, many of them coming from U.S. Army bases in California, were never confirmed. The civilian reports that the Justice Department’s Clark saw were even more imaginative. One reported seeing Japanese admirals in northern California wearing flamboyant uniforms and cocked hats with feathers. That one turned out to be a meeting of a local Masonic lodge. Clark, whose knowledge of evacuation issues was negligible—he once asked an assistant what “Nisei” meant—was the first Justice Department official to publicly support military control of all coastal operations, military and civilian. He began traveling from city to city and town to town along the coast, making speeches on the way, saying: “When you hire a doctor, you usually do what he says, or you get another doctor. We have our Army people and they tell us to do this and we must try to do this with as little disruption as possible.”
The army source Clark trusted and talked to every day was Lieutenant General John DeWitt, the sixty-one-year-old commander of the Western Command and the Fourth Army, five divisions of soldiers and mar
ines, one hundred thousand half-trained and ill-equipped men scattered at bases from Puget Sound in Washington to San Diego, California. DeWitt, like many of the leaders of the peacetime military, was ill equipped himself, a military bureaucrat, an organizer of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression of the 1930s, whose career had been mainly in the Quartermaster Corps.
Now headquartered at the Presidio in San Francisco, DeWitt was an officer with a reputation for changing his mind, often echoing the last person he had talked to on the telephone. He was also noted for covering his career flanks. He had refused to talk to either Ringle or Munson, probably because he believed neither the navy nor political Washington had any business evaluating army performance. One point that stuck in DeWitt’s mind and often appeared in his conversations was that after Pearl Harbor both the army and navy commanders of Hawaii—General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel—were being charged with dereliction of duty for not having contingency plans in case of attack from Japan. Ironically, as part of his staff duties in the 1920s, DeWitt was responsible for a contingency plan for the aftermath of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The plan was forgotten or ignored, but its essential elements were total military control of the islands and internment of Japanese workers throughout Hawaii.
DeWitt’s headquarters was reporting enemy sightings day after day, stating that Japanese air force planes and submarines were engaged in constant reconnoitering all along the Pacific Coast—and wilder tales of bombardment from the sea, arson around Seattle, and illegal radio transmissions up and down the coastline. Almost all of that was untrue.
The second-ranked soldier in the West was Major General Joseph Stilwell, commander of Fort Ord in California, later to become famous as “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell in China and India. He kept a pocket diary during those early days. Some of his notations beginning on December 8 included:
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