Justice for All

by Jim Newton

  The attack on Pearl Harbor propelled Warren to quick action. He put aside his disagreements with Olson long enough to join the governor in urging calm. Olson decried “the sudden and almost unbelievable attack on Hawaii,” and the following day suggested that German, Italian, and Japanese residents stay inside their homes to avoid retribution. Warren asked residents and law enforcement to be on the alert for sabotage. Anyone spying suspicious activity, he said, should call his office.5 Warren then summoned his staff for a rare Sunday meeting. His top aides convened at two P.M. to consider their response to the war. The attack, they realized, placed the attorney general’s office at the center of California’s protection; Warren asked that civil defense experts be collected for a meeting the following morning. Aides scrambled to round them up.

  Home late that night, Warren unwound with a long walk. The night was particularly dark, as he, a colleague, and his son Earl wandered through the Oakland neighborhood, the two men talking in low, pained voices while the boy tagged along, silently keeping pace. As they rounded a corner and headed home, the attorney general was struck hard from behind. He staggered forward, as his son and companion froze momentarily, an anxious day cresting in this darkened attack. Then up bounded Eric, a dim-witted neighborhood boxer dog, tail wagging. Earl Warren burst into laughter, gave the dog a shake, and sent him home.6

  Over the next few days, California went from jumpy to near-panic, as the state braced for what many believed was an imminent strike or even invasion on the West Coast. The FBI rounded up suspicious aliens—German, Italian, and Japanese. More than a thousand were arrested on December 7 and 8. Newspaper reports detailed seizures of weapons, signaling devices, and radios, all believed to have been planted and readied for just this moment. Japanese fishing boats along the West Coast were beached, and the Treasury Department froze all assets belonging to Japanese.7 On December 8, the civil defense experts brought together by Warren gathered for an emergency conference in San Francisco. Emerging from the five-hour meeting, Warren warned police chiefs and sheriffs to move quickly to secure their areas, and his comments signaled his early preoccupation with the notion that California’s enemies were in its midst, not merely abroad. “We are at war,” Warren said, “and are immediately confronted with the most serious law enforcement problem of all time. Sabotage is just as much a part of Axis warfare as are military and naval operations.”8

  Tips poured in to Warren’s office. There were reports of weapons caches in the Sacramento Valley, of sabotage attempted or suspected. Sheriffs called, pleading for direction.9 Planes overhead were mistaken for the enemy, and blackouts suddenly became a regular part of nightly life. Members of Warren’s staff struggled along with the rest of the state beneath the new exigencies of conflict. One night soon after Pearl Harbor, Helen MacGregor tried to make her way home with the help of Bill Sweigert. They were trapped by the blackout rules, but managed to make it to his house, where she then had to bunk down for the night. 10 At the Warren house, life was similarly disrupted. One air-raid warning in early 1942 forced the family into the basement shelter; for two days, Nina and Earl Warren and their children slept in sleeping bags and ate sandwiches for dinner, straining for sounds of an attack.11

  California’s fears only deepened as the Japanese Navy enveloped the Pacific Rim with a lightning series of strikes. In the hours and days following the destruction of much of the American Pacific fleet, Japan invaded Malaysia, Burma, Midway, Wake Island, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Guam. By Christmas, Guam, Wake Island, and Hong Kong were under Japanese control. On January 2, Manila fell as well. Singapore braced for its fate. Off the coast of California, Japanese submarines prowled and occasionally struck. Although the damage of those attacks would be tragically exaggerated by Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt in justifying the actions he was about to recommend, military records do reflect the sinking of at least three vessels—the tanker Monte Bello and two other ships—during the week leading up to Christmas.12 The war had been thrust upon America, and in those weeks it appeared quite possible that America would lose.

  But what was most curious in California about the six weeks immediately following Pearl Harbor was what, despite the revisionist recollections of many historians, did not happen: Californians, so long steeped in racism toward their Japanese neighbors, did not rise up against them, even as fury over Pearl Harbor spread. In those early weeks, acts of violence against California’s Japanese were few, the vitriol surprisingly contained.13 California politicians, including Warren, later blamed the public for what happened next, but that was false. It was not the public that led this descent. It was the work of leaders.

  In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the state’s newspapers were quiet, even respectful toward California’s 93,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Through early January, the Santa Barbara News-Press carried regular stories about the arrests of Japanese suspected of spying, but it also featured the story of a group of local Japanese who had banded together to contribute $3,000 a month in savings bonds and stamps to help the war effort: “100% of Japanese families in and about Santa Barbara have agreed to buy at least one $25 savings bond a month,” the group’s leader stated and the paper reported.14 Readers had questions about how to treat Japanese businesses and employees, and the newspaper delivered civil, careful responses. On January 3, the Los Angeles Times quoted FDR at length as the president expressed his concern over reports that employers across the country were dismissing workers of German, Italian, or Japanese descent. FDR called that “as stupid as it is unjust” and reminded the nation that its fight was against nations convinced of their racial superiority. “We must not forget what we are defending: liberty, decency, justice,” the president said. “I urge all private employers to adopt a sane policy regarding aliens and foreign-born citizens.”15 Two days later, with Pacific Asia reeling under the might of the Japanese Navy, the Sacramento Bee echoed FDR and editorialized in defense of California’s Japanese: “Race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice—that is the Nazi gospel. The wise and sensible American will avoid any of them as he would a deadly poison or a fatal pestilence.”16

  The gentle, protective tone continued through much of January. The Sacramento Union on January 18 editorialized against a proposal to investigate the backgrounds of Americans born in the United States of Japanese descent. After acknowledging the rising panic over the war, the Union cautioned, “It is utterly deplorable, however, that this hysteria should be reflected in demands on the part of our elected representatives for legislative investigations of the racial backgrounds of American citizens.”17 Even the Los Angeles Times, rarely at the vanguard of civil liberties, continued through late January guardedly to urge readers to consider Americans of Japanese descent with equanimity, if not necessarily benevolence. “Many of our Japanese, whether born here or not,” the paper offered cautiously, “are fully loyal and deserve sympathy rather than suspicion.” Although the paper added a note of caution—“To be sure it would sometimes stump an expert to tell which is which and mistakes, if made, should be on the side of caution”—its larger point was of restraint.18

  Not all was calm in those weeks. Indeed, an undercurrent of concern about the presence of so many Italians, Germans, and Japanese in the United States was beginning to gather. Officials in Washington were perplexed by the question of how threatening to view the presence of more than a million immigrants from those nations with which the United States now was at war. Officials contemplated new supervisorial authority over Japanese farmers to ensure that crops were delivered as needed for the war effort. A defense plant in Los Angeles burned, and suspicion quickly focused on sabotage.19 And a few groups, including two that Warren was a member of, the American Legion and the Native Sons of the Golden West, were all too happy to turn on the state’s Japanese population. The Legion approved a resolution calling for internment on January 19, 1942, and that action was followed by strenuous local advocacy; among California Legionnaires, there w
ere early mutterings of “concentration camps.”20 But the dominant mood of those weeks, as captured by the coverage in California’s newspapers and the comments of its leading politicians, was of American solidarity—a solidarity that included Japanese-Americans—in defiance of a common enemy.

  The last week of January brought a marked change. On January 24, United States Supreme Court justice Owen Roberts issued a much-anticipated analysis of the causes of the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor. Roberts’s report made scant reference to the islands’ Japanese population, but one short passage from the document received much attention in the days that followed. In it, the commission remarked that spies had helped the Japanese military prepare for the attack. Of those spies, the report noted, “some were Japanese consular agents and others were persons having no open relations with the Japanese foreign service. These spies collected and through various channels transmitted information to the Japanese Empire respecting the military and naval establishments and dispositions on the island.”21

  Though the attack on Pearl Harbor had not unleashed California’s racism, the report on the attack did. Although the unnamed “persons having no open relations with the Japanese foreign service” were not identified in any way, much less by their race, those few words stoked the anxieties of well-meaning leaders and opened a line of attack for those long interested in pursuing their campaign against Japanese-Americans. On January 27, Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron convened harbor officials and Navy officers to discuss the city’s strategic defenses, and the county Board of Supervisors requested the immediate removal of “enemy aliens” from strategically significant areas. The following day, less than a week after urging sympathy for Japanese-Americans, the Los Angeles Times called for their removal. “The time has come,” the paper intoned, “to realize that the rigors of war demand proper detention of Japanese and their immediate removal from the most acute danger spots.” The Times showed no particular relish in that position, admitting it was “not a pleasant task,” but endorsed it nonetheless.22 Henry McLemore, a popular East Coast columnist visiting California, on January 29 called for evacuation in the harshest terms, and the Times published an only barely cleaned-up version:

  I am for 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.]

  Sure, this would work an unjustified hardship on 80 percent or 90 percent of the California Japanese. But, the remaining 10 or 20 percent have it in their power to do damage—great damage to the American people. They are a serious menace and you can’t tell me that an individual’s rights have any business being placed above a nation’s safety.

  If making 1,000,000 innocent Japanese uncomfortable would prevent one scheming Japanese from costing the life of one American boy, then let 1,000,000 innocents suffer . . .

  Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.23

  Those sentiments rumbled through the public, and exposed old wounds. Calls for evacuation or incarceration of Japanese immigrants multiplied. And as the momentum in favor of removal gathered force, the scope of the debate expanded as well: No longer were merely Japanese immigrants, the so-called Isei, under consideration; now, backers of removal also began to clamor for the exclusion of Nisei, people born in the United States and thus citizens, distinguished from other Americans only by their race and heritage. In Los Angeles, all city and county employees who were of “Japanese parentage” were fired, “as public officials expressed alarm at what they said was a potential fifth column danger,” the Associated Press reported on January 28.24

  Warren’s actions in the days after the Roberts report was released were curious, in some respects even contradictory. When California’s State Personnel Board moved to prevent Japanese-Americans from taking civil service exams, Warren objected. Such a bar, Warren concluded, would be unconstitutional and would deny Japanese-Americans—Americans, after all, born in this country—rights solely on the basis of their race. Warren’s opinion annoyed members of the panel, whose spokesman told reporters that Warren was “totally misinformed” about what the board was attempting to accomplish.25 The board then disregarded Warren’s legal advice and proceeded to investigate state workers. By the end of February, the board’s true motives had become apparent, and they were just as Warren suspected. On April 2, the board voted to suspend “all state civil service employees of Japanese ancestry.”26 Warren fought the board on those moves, and though he lost, he won the admiration of some of those who waged the principled effort to defend California’s Japanese immigrants and American-born citizens of Japanese descent.

  “This,” said Dillon Myer, who was to become the chief of the War Relocation Authority, was “Earl Warren at his best.”27

  But even as Warren moved to protect some rights, he swung into action to abrogate other, far more important ones. In those pivotal days after the Roberts report was released, Earl Warren and his staff gathered intelligence on Japanese organizations and land holdings, investigated the state’s ability to confiscate property belonging to Japanese, and researched the government’s right to remove or detain people based solely on their ethnic and national heritage.28 Once gathered, that information was shared with military authorities, specifically the commanding officer at the Presidio in San Francisco, General DeWitt. In personal meetings and conferences with subordinates and others, Warren and DeWitt fueled each other’s suspicions, each pushing the other to see threats of attack, sabotage, and even invasion. “I was,” Warren wrote later, “in constant touch with him.”29 That was Warren’s bad luck and poor judgment, as DeWitt proved incapable of the command to which he was entrusted.

  Born on a Nebraska army base in 1880, DeWitt was a second-generation general, his father having served in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War and in various Army posts after that. Two brothers also followed their father into the Army, rising to the rank of brigadier general (all four DeWitts are buried at Arlington National Cemetery).30 But while John DeWitt was long on military experience, he was short on the skills being asked of him in early 1942. A dropout from Princeton who had never spent an adult day as a civilian, DeWitt was an aging man with little experience in the subtleties of political leadership. He was untested by significant military command, and his upbringing—he had been raised in the Indian Wars and served in the brutal American campaign in the Philippines—led some to conclude that he was indifferent to the suffering of minorities.31 When DeWitt was told that some of his desperately needed reinforcements after Pearl Harbor were black, he complained. “You’re filling too many colored groups up on the West Coast,” he told his superiors. “I’d rather have a white regiment.”32 He was at once insecure and arrogant, panicky, prone to outburst and susceptible to paranoia. It was not a healthy mix.

  DeWitt did not at first embrace the idea of taking responsibility for the coast’s Axis aliens. In Washington, the early weeks after Pearl Harbor had been marked by an intense debate between Attorney General Francis Biddle and Secretary of War Henry Stimson over the fate of the West Coast Japanese. Stimson argued for removal of some or all of the Japanese population. Biddle counseled against any such measure, and was supported by some of his own lawyers, as well as, ironically, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who preferred to handle the threat as a law-enforcement matter. In San Francisco, DeWitt in those weeks struggled to articulate a firm position with respect to the Japanese, but at some points seemed inclined to oppose it on practical and constitutional grounds. “I’d rather go along the way we are now . . . rather than attempt any such wholesale internment,” he said in a December 26 phone conversation. “An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen.”33

  Among DeWitt’s many character flaws, however, was his tendency to vacillate. As Attorney General Biddle later put it, the general was “apt to waver under popular pressure, a ch
aracteristic arising from his tendency to reflect the views of the last man to whom he talked.”34 Now, with public anxiety rising over the Roberts Report, DeWitt came under pressure from leading Californians to act.

  On January 27, DeWitt conferred with Governor Olson. Olson already had demonstrated his hair-trigger nerves on the day after Pearl Harbor when he proposed keeping enemy aliens indoors. In the weeks since the attack, he had careened from statements urging restraint toward the Japanese to others suggesting that he was fearful of what they might do. DeWitt was similarly alarmed. He was receiving reports of attacks on American shipping by Japanese submarines and of signaling by onshore spies to Japanese vessels off the coast. “Time,” DeWitt wrote later, “was of the essence.”35 While the attacks on shipping were real, the grounds for suspicion of involvement by California’s Japanese were far flimsier. One particular area of anxiety was the allegation that Japanese residents of the West Coast were signaling to enemy ships and submarines. Once checked, those tips invariably proved to be false—one neighbor reported on a signaling case in Santa Monica, for instance, but the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI concluded that it was merely someone adjusting a stuck window shade.36 Still, the volume of such reports convinced DeWitt that some were real, and he almost certainly shared his growing anxiety with Olson. Soon after his meeting with DeWitt, Olson announced in a radio speech to the state, “It is known that there are Japanese residents of California who have sought to aid the Japanese enemy by way of communicating information, or have shown indications of preparation for fifth-column activities.”37