by Jim Newton
In turn, Olson informed DeWitt that leading Californians were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the Japanese in their midst. Summing up their meeting, DeWitt told Defense officials in Washington, “There’s a tremendous volume of public opinion now developing against the Japanese of all classes, that is aliens and non-aliens, to get them off the land. . . . As a matter of fact, it’s not being instigated or developed by people who are not thinking but by the best people of California. Since the publication of the Roberts Report they feel that they are living in the midst of a lot of enemies. They don’t trust the Japanese, none of them.”38
Having reached accommodation with Olson, DeWitt then confronted Warren. As an avowed foe of the governor, Warren was in a position to obstruct the growing sentiment against California’s Japanese. Had he announced opposition to removal, the issue might well have become a partisan one, debated in the coming election. That would have taken courage, but it was not out of the question. Ever since his statement to Robert Kenny in the 1938 attorney general’s race, Warren was on the record in defense of civil liberties—though his definition of civil liberties in that case turned on rights of protest and organization, not defense of racial minorities. He had shown none of the overt racism that some other Progressive politicians had succumbed to, and though Warren was a member of the American Legion and the Native Sons, he had never been enthusiastic about their anti-Orientalism. All that gave hope. Warren, however, tacked in another direction.
No record exists of his January 29 conversation with DeWitt, but the substance of it can be inferred from what each did next. The same day that he spoke with Warren, DeWitt—the same man who, Biddle archly observed, tended to reflect the last good argument he’d heard—told his superiors in Washington that he now favored evacuation of the West Coast. DeWitt specified that evacuation should include not only Japanese immigrants but also Japanese-American citizens.39 On the following day, Warren told the Associated Press, “I have come to the conclusion that the Japanese situation as it exists today in this state may well be the Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort. Unless something is done it may bring about a repetition of Pearl Harbor.”40
Warren was not alone in expressing such fear of infiltration and subversion, which stretched from Pearl Harbor to Washington. In January 1942, security was the nation’s abiding concern; beneath it, cherished values gave way. And one of those values was the idea of America as a home of immigrants, where race and heritage were characteristics of its citizens but not limiting or defining ones. Instead, race and heritage became barometers of trustworthiness, even in men such as FDR and Warren. “It is difficult,” Warren told the Associated Press, “to distinguish between a dangerous enemy alien, of which we are certain there are many here, and citizens who may be relied on to loyally support the United States war effort.”41 Unsaid but implied in the context of that debate was the clear message that it was difficult to make that distinction when it came to Japanese aliens, but not Germans or Italians.
When he convened law-enforcement officials the following week to assess the security situation in the state, Warren urged passage of a resolution asking the federal government to remove at once all alien Japanese “from all territories in the State of California within 200 miles of the Pacific Coast for the duration of the war.”42 The motion passed. With that, Warren had joined the cause for removal, but he clung to one shred of moderation. As of the first week of February 1942, Warren still proposed only to remove immigrant Japanese, those who lived in the United States but still held Japanese citizenship and who were prevented by law from becoming American citizens. He separated those Japanese-Americans who were born in the United States of Japanese parents and who were, after all, American citizens. That may have seemed like a small distinction to families threatened by removal, but it passed for a moderate position in those weeks. Indeed, that grasp for a center did not hold. The following day, the board of supervisors in Ventura County, a rural coastal area north of Los Angeles, unanimously voted to demand that the government remove not just immigrants but “all persons of the Japanese race.”43 Explaining why they deliberately went beyond what Warren and his colleagues had requested, the supervisors blandly replied that “it is impossible to know those Japanese who are loyal to the United States.”44
The resolution requesting federal intervention attracted news coverage at the law-enforcement conference, but its real business was the commissioning of a set of maps. At Warren’s charge, prosecutors and sheriffs from across the state agreed to conduct an extensive survey of Japanese landholdings in their counties. In each instance, they were to assemble lists of every rural parcel where a Japanese resident lived, worked, or owned land. The results were to be conveyed as quickly as possible back to Warren’s office. Among those close to Warren, there was no doubting his enthusiasm for the project. Warren, Tom Clark told the FBI confidentially, “was making quite a drive on alien Japanese through potential violations of the alien land laws of the State of California.”45 So important did Warren believe the undertaking that he placed his most trusted deputy in charge of it. The conference adjourned on February 3, and Warren Olney went to work.
Over the next two weeks, pressure on the federal government to act mounted almost daily in California. And while well-meaning state leaders weighed constitutional protections against the perceived security threat, more venal interests also saw an opportunity to settle old antagonisms. By 1942, California’s Japanese had become a significant part of the state’s farm economy, specializing in low-yield, high-profit vegetables, as well as flowers, and managing many of the state’s nurseries. Japanese farms were estimated in the early 1940s to be responsible for $35 million a year in agricultural output—roughly 40 percent of California’s commercial truck crops—and they dominated certain crops, such as strawberries, spinach, and tomatoes. Japanese cultivated roughly 90 percent of all California strawberry acreage.46 Their farms served California’s large urban areas, and thus tended to be located on the outskirts of its large cities. And inside Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and elsewhere, they sold much of their produce and flowers through Japanese-owned stores. Carey McWilliams estimated that approximately 1,000 Japanese-operated fruit and vegetable stores existed in Los Angeles before the war, employing about five thousand people, most of them Japanese.47
The significant place of the Japanese in California agriculture made them natural adversaries of the state’s large farming interests. Even before the release of the Roberts Report, those interests leaned on state officials to push the Japanese out and rid white farmers of their competition. On January 3, F. W. McNabb, an official of the Western Growers Protective Association, wrote to Warren to urge removal of the Japanese—as he put it, to ask that Warren “make a sincere effort to eliminate as many of these undesirable aliens from the land of California as is possible at this time.”48 Two days before the release of the Roberts Report, Western growers and shippers meeting in Florida passed a resolution urging immediate internment—not just removal—of Japanese aliens in California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona. The resolution also called for impounding all money and property. Farms were the clear targets of that measure. Norman Evans, a Los Angeles man elected to head the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, said internment would prevent violence from breaking out between Filipino and Japanese workers. The Japanese, he said, were “a menace in this country.”49 Austin E. Anson, a Washington lobbyist employed by the Shipper-Grower Association of Salinas, was even more blunt:
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 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.50
The shippers and growe
rs, along with the Associated Farmers, had long hitched their fortunes to those of California’s Republican Party. The effort to defeat Upton Sinclair in 1934 had cemented that alliance, and Olson’s election in 1938 had given the farmers new need to seek out friends in Sacramento. As the leading statewide Republican and California’s top law-enforcement official, Warren was a natural ally who welcomed his backing by farmers.51
Until Pearl Harbor, Warren handled the Associated Farmers as he did his other troublesome supporters—by welcoming their friendship and broad goals at the same time that he abjured their more extreme ideas. In 1940, for instance, he spoke to the association but pointedly withheld his support for the organization’s growing prejudice toward Japanese farmers. “Should we be in trouble with the Axis Powers, there will be more than three million of their nationals in this country,” Warren said, “but I have enough confidence in human nature to believe that the great majority of them will be loyal to the land of their choice. We must promote this loyalty. We must see to it that no race prejudices develop and that there are no petty persecutions of law-abiding people.”52
That was 1940, when war was Europe’s problem. By 1942, when America was at war, Warren was prepared to join the farmers, if not in their bigotry, at least in its effect. By mid-February, law-enforcement officials and farm representatives had responded to Warren’s call for their assessments of the situation in each of their areas, and Warren’s staff produced an extraordinarily damaging dossier on the threat of the Japanese to California’s security. Thirty-five of California’s fifty-eight counties responded to Warren’s request for information about Japanese leases and land ownership. Their reports were assimilated by Warren Olney in San Francisco. The result, Warren concluded, “shows a disturbing situation.”53
Olney and Warren found concentrations of Japanese land along electrical lines, railroads, military bases, oil fields, and coastal areas that could be used for invasion. In the fog of conflict, the colored pins on the maps that Warren hung on the wall of his office seemed to present a pattern: To Warren, at least, it appeared that California’s Japanese had acquired land in order to hold it until it was needed to wage sabotage or invasion of the United States. “Such a distribution of the Japanese population appears to manifest something more than coincidence,” he declared. And even if it did not, he added, “the Japanese population of California is, as a whole, ideally situated . . . to carry into execution a tremendous program of sabotage on a mass scale should any considerable number of them be inclined to do so.”54
There was another explanation, however. Japanese farmers had purchased coastal land because it offered the right climate for the table vegetables they specialized in growing. Others had picked up scraps of property along railroads and electrical lines because it was cheap and available. Indeed, in some cases they picked up those parcels because they were the victims of racist practices that kept better property out of their hands. In effect, then, the Japanese of 1942 were being accused of conspiracy because the Japanese in the years leading up to that point had been the victims of prejudice.
Despite the flaws of his argument, Warren was persuasive, in part because he enjoyed a reputation for fairness and in part because he was diligent in advancing his argument. In early February, Warren began collecting the maps and sharing them with selective, influential audiences. In one crucial gathering, Warren brought together defense experts and Tom Clark, then the Justice Department’s representative in California in charge of evaluating the Japanese situation (and later to be Warren’s colleague on the Supreme Court). With them, too, was Walter Lippmann, the premier newspaper columnist in America. Lippmann was beating a particular drum during those weeks. In columns and speeches, he berated leaders for failing to bring America quickly to wartime footing, and he chastised citizens who wanted to protect themselves rather than pursue the enemy abroad. “Pearl Harbor,” Lippmann argued, “really was the reflection of America’s 20 years of self-indulgent refusal to believe the facts of life.” America was faced, Lippmann said, with a long war, one that could be won only if it dedicated its strength to attacking its enemies, not to pulling back in self-defense.55
With that in mind, Lippmann came to California to study the civil defense situation, and soon encountered Warren. At a meeting in Montecito, an elegant little community on California’s coast, Santa Barbara district attorney Percy Heckendorf presented the map of his area to Warren, Clark, and Lippmann. “Mr. Lippmann,” Heckendorf recalled, “showed great interest in the map and the significant things that were shown on it.”56 Having reviewed the map and interviewed Warren about its significance, Lippmann set to work writing his column. Headlined “The Fifth Column on the Coast,” Lippmann’s piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other papers on February 13, and it adopted Warren’s fear of sabotage and invasion: “Nobody’s Constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield,” he wrote. “And nobody ought to be on a battlefield who has no good reason for being there.”57
Attorney General Biddle, then still attempting to head off the internment and the military’s support for it, bitterly denounced Lippmann and other advocates as “Armchair Strategists and Junior G-Men.”58 Biddle had no way of knowing it, but one of Lippmann’s “armchair strategists” was Earl Warren. For while Lippmann did not directly attribute any argument to Warren, Heckendorf wired Warren to congratulate him for his role in shaping Lippmann’s views on the subject and on the column’s subsequent influence on the debate.59
As Lippmann was writing, Warren stepped up his other efforts to build support for the forced removal of the Japanese. At a meeting with the state’s leading anti-Japanese organization on February 7, Warren suggested that its members pressure federal authorities to act against local Japanese residents. Undoubtedly referring to the malleable DeWitt, Warren advised that authorities seemed to him responsive to lobbying: “[I]t is my opinion,” he told the members of the California Joint Immigration Committee, “without reference to any individual, that, generally speaking, the military and national authorities here would not be averse to having pressure applied in order to show the rest of the country just what their danger is here.”60
By February 11, Warren had crossed the final Rubicon in his view of what was needed. That day, he was accompanied by Clark and Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron, as the three met with DeWitt. Before the meeting, Warren, Clark, and Bowron agreed that Bowron would take the lead in presenting their position, which all three shared. And it now had become their view—and thus Warren’s view—that removal of all Japanese and Japanese-Americans was justified, regardless of citizenship, immigration status, or evidence of wrongdoing. Mere ethnicity, to them, warranted removal. Describing that meeting, Bowron said he and his colleagues advocated removal even though they realized “that many of the Japanese were citizens.”61 Since immigrant Japanese were not citizens, Bowron could only have been referring to the Nisei, those people born in the United States of Japanese parentage. Additionally, Warren’s maps were now nearly complete, and they identified all land within their counties “owned, occupied or controlled by persons of the Japanese race.”62 No distinction was made between Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese descent. The maps blended those distinctions, showing in red not only those rural properties occupied by immigrants but also the holdings of Nisei. (Indeed, much of the land owned by Japanese in California was actually owned by Nisei, since California’s Alien Land Act, then decades old, prohibited Japanese immigrants from purchasing or owning real estate; the law was widely evaded by the Japanese parents, who later turned over title to their native-born children.)
The logic of Warren’s maps, like the rest of his presentation, was difficult to resist by desperate, blindered leaders. In his final report on the internment, DeWitt adopted Warren’s research at great length and used it to justify the removal. In fact, large sections of Warren’s report were simply lifted verbatim by DeWitt—the description of Japanese land ownership in
the Santa Maria Valley, for instance, and Heckendorf’s analysis of the land situation in Santa Barbara County. “Whether by design or accident, virtually always their communities were adjacent to very vital shore installations, war plants, etc.,” DeWitt wrote later. “While it was believed that some were loyal, it was known that many were not.”63 DeWitt’s choice of words illuminated his state of mind. To him, “some” Japanese were “believed” to be loyal, “many” were “known” to be not.
On February 14, after speaking with Clark, Bowron, and Warren, DeWitt made his final recommendation to the secretary of war. He asked that the secretary exclude all Japanese aliens and Japanese-American citizens from the West Coast. Other aliens—Germans and Italians—were only to be removed if found to be enemies. In recommending that course, DeWitt also adopted the looking-glass logic that corrupted clear thinking in those vital weeks. Addressing the question of how to justify a mass deprivation of rights in order to prevent sabotage when no acts of sabotage had been committed, DeWitt wrote, “Along the Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today. There are indications that these are organized and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”64 In short, the absence of sabotage became the basis for believing that serious sabotage was being planned. Law-abiding behavior was evidence of insurrection in the works. Warren subscribed to that view as well. What, he and DeWitt might have asked themselves, would a loyal Japanese-American do under those circumstances to convince authorities of his loyalty, if even doing as they asked would be cited as evidence of subersive intent? Once passions had receded, the absurdity of that argument was plain. By then, it could be viewed only with heartache.