'Exclusion,' 'Evacuation,' and Incarceration: When official bigotry targeted Japanese Americans
Eliminationism in America, Part 10: The long-building conspiratorial animus toward Asian immigrants became an easy springboard for roundups and concentration camps after Pearl Harbor.
Part 10 of 14. [Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.]
There was a great deal of hysteria along the Pacific Coast in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor, including sightings of phantom warplanes over Los Angeles and reports of "arrows of fire" near Seattle pointing the way to defense installations. Soon, the need to "lock up" the "dirty Japs" in their midst was a popular topic and was on the tongues of most of the coast's politicians and on the pages of its newspapers.
Such a removal would not be without problems, warned some. "Approximately 95 percent of the vegetables grown here are raised by the Japanese," noted J.R. Davidson, market master for the Pike Place Public Market in Seattle. "About 35 percent of the sellers in the market are Japanese. Many white persons are leaving the produce business to take defense jobs, which are not open to the Japanese." Letter writers to the local newspapers raised the same concern.
Their fears were quickly derided. Wrote Charlotte Drysdale of Seattle in a letter to the Post-Intelligencer:
It has been interesting to note how many contributors have been afraid we would have no garden truck if the Japs are sent to concentration areas. We had gardens long before the Japs were imported about the turn of the century, to work for a very low wage (a move for which we are still paying dearly) and we can still have them after we have no Japs.
Isn't that discounting American ability just a little too low?
And by Americans I mean not the children of the races ineligible to naturalization. The mere fact that a child is born in this country should not give him the rights and privileges of citizenship.
The fourteenth amendment, granting automatic citizenship to American born, was placed there for the protection of the Negro and at that time the great infiltration of Japs was not even thought of. In recent years there has been so much fear of hurting the feelings of these people that no one has had the courage to try to rectify the situation. Now it would seem that the time is ripe to put things right, for once and for all time.
She was not alone in this sentiment. Senator Tom Stewart of Tennessee proposed stripping citizenship from anyone of Japanese descent. The Japanese, charged Stewart on the Senate floor, "are among our worst enemies. They are cowardly and immoral. They are different from Americans in every conceivable way, and no Japanese who ever lived anywhere should have a right to claim American citizenship. A Jap is a Jap anywhere you find him, and his taking an oath of allegiance to this country would not help, even if he should be permitted to do so. They do not believe in God and have no respect for an oath. They have been plotting for years against the Americas and their democracies."
The press became the chief cheerleaders for removing the Japanese. The Seattle Times ran a news story alerting its readers: "Hundreds of alien and American-born Japanese are living near strategic defense units, a police survey showed today. ... There are Japanese in the neighborhood of every reservoir, bridge and defense project."
The Times also ran columns by noted conservative Henry McLemore, who frequently attacked the presence of Japanese descendants on the West Coast. In one column, headlined, "This Is War! Stop Worrying About Hurting Jap Feelings," McLemore fulminated:
I am for 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 of 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.
His sentiments were shared by many of the locals. Wrote W.M. Mason of Seattle, in a letter to the editor of the Post-Intelligencer:
If there be those who would say we can't do this to citizens, let them remember that we took this country from the Indians, killed thousands of them, arbitrarily moved other thousands from their homes to far distant lands, and to this day have denied them the rights, duties and privileges of citizenship.
If we could do that to the Indians, we can do something about the Japs.
Let's do it now!
With Pearl Harbor as a pretext, the national voices of white supremacism rose to assert themselves in the fore. "This is a race war," proclaimed Mississippi Congressman John Rankin on the House floor. "The white man's civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism. ... Once a Jap always a Jap. You cannot change him. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. ... I say it is of vital importance that we get rid of every Japanese, whether in Hawaii or on the mainland. ... I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps... Damn them! Let's get rid of them now!"
Moreover, as Testsuden Kashima details in his Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II, government bureaucrats had been preparing for some years for the possible roundup and incarceration of Japanese Americans, largely because "Yellow Peril" beliefs about the threat posed by "disloyal" Japanese were pervasive at the highest levels of government, including the president. The bureaucratic machinery, particularly among military planners at the West Coast Command in San Francisco, began grinding into action -- and by early April, they had declared it a "military necessity" to evacuate every Japanese person, citizen or not, from the Pacific coast.
At first the plan was to make this a "voluntary evacuation", mostly to the states of the interior West. But shortly after the government announced this, the governors of those Western states held a meeting with War Relocation Authority officials in Salt Lake City at which they declared, adamantly, that the only terms under which they could accept such evacuees was under armed guard and behind barbed wire. Within a week, the WRA shut down its "voluntary" program and proceeded to make plans for incarcerating the entire population of Japanese Americans on the coast -- some 110,000 of them -- in concentration camps in the interior.
Evacuation notices started appearing in May in communities throughout the coast, and by the end of June, nearly the entire population of evacuees had been herded into temporary "assembly centers" while the camps in the interior were built. By summer's end, the 10 camps, located largely in hostile desert environments, were largely complete and began to be filled. By the war's end, some 120,000 people occupied them.
The entire episode was predicated on the failure to distinguish between Japanese nationals and Japanese American citizens, not to mention the even finer distinction involving the Issei immigrants, the vast majority of whom had been in the United States for over 20 years and who would likely otherwise have naturalized by then but for being legally forbidden to do so. Throughout the war, headlines regularly referred to the enemy "Japs"—as did headlines regarding the evacuation and subsequent events in the WRA's relocation centers. Consistent with popular sentiments prior to the war and during the evacuation debate, letters to the editor as well as political pronouncements made no differentiation between the citizens who once had been their neighbors and the foreign enemies their sons were fighting.
As I observe in Strawberry Days:
Washington's congressional delegation had a particular propensity in this regard. In addition to the damage already wrought by Democratic Senator Mon Wallgren, who had chaired one of the early congressional committees recommending evacuation in 1942, Congressman Henry Jackson, a respected Everett Democrat, took up the anti-Japanese cause with particular relish for the war's duration. Not only was he an enthusiast of the evacuation, he was a stern advocate of the campaign to keep the Japanese from returning to the Pacific Coast—both during and after the war. He was often seconded in this regard by his Seattle colleague, Democratic Congressman Warren Magnuson, who had a habit of raising groundless alarms about an imminent invasion of the Pacific Coast by the Japanese.
... In May 1943, Jackson began protesting in Congress against the army's policy of allowing Japanese American soldiers to visit the Pacific Coast on furlough; apparently, wearing an American uniform wasn't assurance enough of Nisei loyalty. Jackson sponsored a resolution calling for a complete investigation of "the Japanese situation," and his congressional colleagues were critical of the use of any Japanese Americans in combat. Rep. John Costello of California sounded the familiar refrain that "you can’t tell a good Jap from a bad Jap."
Jackson penned a speech that he never delivered on the subject, but it was clear he was opposed to Japanese Americans ever returning to his home district:
What is to be the eventual disposition of the Japanese alien and native ... is the second aspect of this problem of the Pacific. Are we to return them to their former homes and businesses on the Pacific Coast to face the active antagonism of their neighbors? Shall they again, as happened in World War I, compete economically for jobs and businesses with returning war veterans?
The House Committee On Un-American Activities chaired by Texas Democrat Martin Dies (known as the Dies Committee) also joined in on the action, partly at the urging of Jackson and others. A New Jersey Republican named J. Parnell Thomas flew out to Los Angeles and, without visiting a camp, declared that the WRA was pampering the internees. Thomas also demanded the agency halt its policy of "releasing disloyal Japs" -- that is, end its policy of relocating evacuees in jobs outside the camps.
The Dies Committee hearings provided a steady stream of scandalous headlines for a few months, bolstered by the reports of the unrest at Manzanar and Tule Lake. ... Dies himself held press conferences demanding that the WRA bring back all the Japanese it had relocated out of the camps and keep them interned for the duration of the war, claiming he had evidence that race riots in Detroit the week before had been the secret handiwork of an officer in the Japanese Army. Subsequent headlines detailed more wild allegations, including tales of elderly Issei secretly plotting a kamikaze attack on local forests, setting the West ablaze; caches of food being buried in the desert in a plot to aid the invading Japanese; and claims that the Japanese internees were being fed better in the camps than were American G.I.s (which may have been true, since much of the evacuees' food source was the camp farms they operated). Dies wrapped up his exploration of the "Japanese question" later that summer by reiterating demands that the WRA alter its policies -- but besides making headlines in the press, these pronouncements had little apparent effect on the changes that were already in motion at the WRA. And the Dies Committee would soon be more stridently focused on the looming "Red Menace."
The interest groups chimed in as well. The American Legion joined in on the rising anti-Japanese sentiments with its denunciation of the WRA's policy of "coddling the Japs," and longtime anti-Asian groups like the Native Sons of the Golden West (whose demeanor and behavior historically included vigilantism) became active in agitating alongside newer groups like the Pearl Harbor League. Some of these groups distributed signs proclaiming: "We don't want any Japs back here -- EVER!" These signs gained prominence in places like Kent, in the heart of what had been a thriving Japanese community in the White River Valley; the town's mayor, a barber, displayed the warning prominently in his shop, and earned a Time magazine appearance for it, pointing at the sign.
As it became evident, in late 1944, that the camps were going to be closed (thanks largely to the Supreme Court ruling in Ex parte Endo), the agitation against allowing them to return became feverish. A Bainbridge Island man named Lambert Schuyler published independently a little pamphlet that had wide distribution titled: The Japs Must Not Come Back! Schuyler's core arguments were not very distinguishable from those offered twenty years before by the exclusionists:
As a nation we stand prejudiced against orientals. This is something which our bleeding-heart idealists have overlooked. They claim our basic laws, the principles upon which America rests, are unanimously in favor of regarding all men as equals. The fact remains, however, that according to our statute books all men are created equal except those with yellow skins. Any race, color or creed, say our laws, may become naturalized citizens of our country except the Japanese, Chinese and Hindu. These are judged unfit for assimilation in our society.
Mind you, we on the Pacific Coast are glad of it. What irks us is the loop-hole in our Constitution through which orientals may purchase the farm next door to us and defy us to kick them out. The loop-hole is this—all babies are created equal providing they are born in the United States. The Japs, Chinese and Hindus are no exception to this rule. Oriental babies born here are automatically American citizens. ... Obviously this is a contradiction of principle which cannot be justified within the bounds of either religious or political idealism.
For Schuyler, in keeping with the anti-Japanese tradition, the tenets of white supremacism and pseudoscientific racial eugenics were paramount:
The dividing lines between the races are necessary to prevent mixed breeding. The white race does want to survive!
There is no dodging it. This is a white man's country. The white man runs it. And he is not going to let his own rules of behavior drive him from his own soil. So, as long as we remain a people of spirit we will refuse to sanction the mixing of colored blood with ours. Japanese in America will never be the social equals of the whites for the simple reason that they are not assimilable. Germans? Italians? Jews? Yes. We can assimilate any of the whites. But the colored races are different. We reserve the right to reject from our midst those who are not patently assimilable.
His final solution: designate a passel of Pacific islands permanent territories of the United States, and then remove all persons of Japanese descent to this new permanent homeland. Of course, no one of Japanese blood would be permitted to become a permanent resident of the mainland afterward.
Schuyler was hardly alone. Up and down the coast, in a number of semi-rural communities that had formerly hosted Japanese families but mostly were in the process of becoming suburbs as part of the postwar boom, jingoes began organizing community meetings aimed at repelling their return. The one that circulated around Bellevue in April 1945 read:
DO YOU WANT JAPS FOR YOUR NEIGHBORS AGAIN?
Free MASS MEETING—Monday, April 2, 8 P.M., Bellevue
George H. Crandell, an attorney who lived on Hunts Point, headed up the Japanese Exclusion League. He claimed to the local paper, the Bellevue American, that a "Jap spy ring was operating on the West Coast" and that the return of the Japanese from the internment camps would pose a military threat until the war with Japan was over.
"Dozens of local organizations are springing up along the Coast in the so-called Japanese 'hot beds’ where they were thickly colonized before the war," Crandell told the American. "Each organization is trying to keep the Japs from trying to come back into that particular area ... Unless we do something about it, the Japs are going to move in with us. And surely none of us want that."
Crandell also had even grander motives. "We've got to do more than keep the Japs out of our own back yard. That won't solve anything. We've got to get them off the entire Pacific Coast, and we've got to do it legally and peaceably. But we've got to do it permanently, and it can be done if we're all willing to put a shoulder to the wheel."
The American also obliquely hinted at economic interests behind the gathering: the meeting, its story said, was sponsored by "a large committee of Eastside business men and women who oppose resettlement of the Japs in this area."
The League a little while later published a newsletter filled with articles about the various kinds of threat the returning Japanese presented. It included an editorial titled "A Program That All Can Back!" which outlined the League's political agenda:
Almost daily letters come into the headquarters of the Japanese Exclusion League from persons who are anti-Jap but who confess their inability to go along with the League's program because "it sets a precedent that will undermine the fundamentals of the Constitution and imperil other minority programs."
Let's re-inspect the program and see:
Item 1. Induce the government to keep all Japs out of the Western Defense Command until the war is over. That's just good sense, with a war on. If only one among them was a saboteur, the exclusion of all, to prevent his dirty work, would be justified. And we heard a man, close to the military intelligence service, say in a public speech that six known Japanese spies were now operating in Seattle alone.
Item 2. Deport all alien Japs and all disloyal Japs. Who will argue that this is either un-American or unnecessary?
Item 3. Stimulate interest in a national post-war election (so the soldiers can participate) to amend the Federal Constitution and provide that, after a certain date, NO MORE descendants of persons not eligible for citizenship may automatically become citizens merely because their alien mothers were here when they were born.
Japanese now constitute only one-tenth of 1 per cent of our population. No great danger there. The peril lies in permitting fast-breeding races that are not assimilable to go unchecked, and to make American citizens of them as fast as they are spawned. Give them a few years and they will make good of their boast of dominating America. And they'll do it without firing a shot. They will VOTE OUR COUNTRY AWAY FROM US.
If that kind of law is un-American, we set a bad precedent many years ago. We had such a law once. And we kicked it out the window.
The April 2 meeting attracted about 500 people, and Crandell, as expected, launched into his diatribe against the evacuees, concluding that "the one and only way to solve the Japanese question is to exclude them forever from all American territory!" Another speaker asked for a show of hands from all "who favor exclusion of all American-born Japanese from this country," and about 400 hands went up. However, the meeting broke up after some in the audience began heckling the speakers. The same fate befell a similar meeting scheduled for the same evening in Seattle. And in Bellevue, a counter-meeting was held a couple of weeks later denouncing any attempt to keep Japanese farmers from returning to their homes.
In the end, the forces opposing the Japanese families' return to the newly developing suburbs won out, not so much by virtue of having scared them away or intimidated them, but largely because of economic forces interacting with the conditions created a generation earlier.
At the time of the evacuation, as a lingering effect of the Alien Land Laws, very few of the Japanese farming families owned their own farms; most still lived the itinerant tract-to-tract lifestyle of the truck farmers whose efforts had turned so many of these formerly marginal lands into valuable properties ripe for development. After the camps closed, many of the evacuees found that their former farms were in the process of being platted for suburban neighborhoods, or that in any event the white landowners were intent on doing the same.
The result was that after the war, the Japanese evacuees largely resettled in urban areas and took up occupations other than farming. Whereas at the time of the relocation, over 60 percent of the evacuees were employed in agriculture, after the war less than 20 percent were so engaged.
On the other hand, the blindly eliminationist bigotry that had erupted during wartime -- which had indeed characterized nearly the entire history of Asian American immigration -- had played its course. The exclusion of Chinese and Filipinos, both allies in the war, was dropped in 1944, as was the prohibition against their naturalization.
And the American public -- instructed, no doubt, by the remarkable example of the segregated all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team, whose blood sacrifice as the most decorated unit of World War II gained national attention -- gradually shifted its attitudes about the ability of Japanese immigrants to become fully American. With the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, even Japanese immigrants were finally permitted to become U.S. citizens.
More important, widespread attitudes about the inability of Asians to assimilate in American society were, over time, demolished utterly. Nowadays, hardly an eyebrow is even raised at the kind of interracial marriage between Asians and Caucasians that seemed such a horrific prospect in the 1920s.
However, influence of the eliminationist bigotry that had informed the transformation of American immigration law during these years was never fully erased. By early in the 21st century, it would come creeping back out of the woodwork.
Next: The Immigrant Other
This is really a great post. I teach an Intro to Lit and Film online for a small public college, and I have them read John Okada's "No No Boy". I provide a lot of context, but this substack might be a clearer way to do that. I've got a mix of Wikipedia sites that describe No No Boys and EO 9066, but the students rarely read through all of it. Generational trauma and Place and Setting are the themes for the two discussion forums, and I think this post really underscores both.
May I share this with my students at GW? I'm teaching the US and the World Wars and we just covered the camps and the 100th/442d. I would, of course, credit you in full.