War and Propaganda
Secret History: Japanese Americans in Concentration Camps
Abstract
Can we Trust Our Leaders? Shameful History
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.George Santayana
Original articles lightly edited. Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 26 September 2006, Friday, 2 October 2009
Locking Up US Japs
They weren’t called concentration camps, but War Relocation Centers—two in California, eight spread across the desert areas of the south-west. Their neat rows of long wooden huts were surrounded with barbed wire, and guarded by floodlights and watchtowers with machine-guns. Their 110,000 occupants—men, women and children—were chosen only by their race, rounded up by the army and packed into trains with no more possessions than they could carry. These were the Japanese Americans, some 79,000 of them, the second generation—as their parents called them, the Nisei.
The Japanese-Americans were one of the United States’ smaller minorities but, unlike the Germans and Italians, they were visible. More dangerously, they were also financially successful. They had started to come to California at the end of the nineteenth century, many of them hired as indentured laborers. By 1920, they had taken plots of barren land and built a multi-million-dollar farming industry, growing fruit and vegetables for California’s urban sprawls. Californians ate better, but it didn’t make them like the Japanese who, when they arrived in California, found laws that made them ineligible to own land or become citizens. So they rented land for their farms, and waited for the Nisei to grow up. They, at least, would be real Americans. Then, in 1941, came Pearl Harbor.
A certain amount of popular hysteria against the Japanese was understandable, but never happened. Nor did the security forces panic. The FBI smoothly detained some 2000 whose loyalty was suspect. The rest, it concluded, were overwhelmingly loyal.
But, when California’s business community speaks, it expects newspapers and politicians to listen. Led by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, it demanded internment. Austin Anson, secretary of a farmers’ organization said:
We are charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do!
California’s Attorney-General was Earl Warren, later to become America’s most controversially liberal Chief Justice. There were, he said, ways of testing the loyalty of Caucasians, but the Japanese were another matter. Law enforcement officers, he added, believed the Nisei were more dangerous than their Japanese-born parents.
Newspapers suddenly bristled with reports of lurid plots—the Japanese had planted tomato fields to point like arrows at military targets. The syndicated columnists moved in:
- Damon Runyon talked of “enemy agents among the large alien Japanese population”, and revealed the FBI had found a radio transmitter. They hadn’t.
- Drew Pearson unearthed a ring of 50 saboteurs in the Los Angeles Bureau of Water and Power.
- “To hell with habeas corpus”, urged Westbrook Pegler.
- Even Walter Lippman argued that the fact there had been no sabotage was “a sign that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect”.
Milton Eisenhower, the General’s brother, was put in charge of “resettlement”. Everywhere signs read:
New Management White Americans
Most of the Nisei lost everything. A post war government estimate was that internment cost them $400 million. They later received $38 million in compensation. Within a year, Roosevelt was trying to undo the damage proclaiming in February 1943:
Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race or ancestry.
Japanese-Americans who signed loyalty oaths were allowed out of the camps to help the war effort. Some 6000 served as interpreters and intelligence agents in the Pacific, thousands more in North America and Italy. A minority of the Nisei became embittered and violently pro-Japanese, renouncing their US citizenship. Most later asked for it back. There were hunger strikes and riots in several camps, Tule Lake, California, was sealed by tanks and put under martial law for three months.
After the war the Nisei scattered, many to jobs in the cities of the north, some to the lost or ruined orchards, market-gardens and oyster beds of California, to build again. In December 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that internment had not been unconstitutional, but Mr Justice Jackson and others dissented:
The Court for all time, has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon…
In 1968, a US government spokesman confirmed that America’s concentration camps had not been destroyed or allowed to decay. They were still there!
in The Observer supplement, May 1972.
