On December 8, 1941, the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Los Angeles Times announced that California was “a zone of danger” and called for
alert, keen-eyed civilians [who could be] of yeoman service in cooperating with the military authorities against spies, saboteurs and fifth columnists. We have thousands of Japanese here. . . . Some, perhaps many, are . . . good Americans. What the rest may be we do not know, nor can we take a chance in the light of yesterday’s demonstration that treachery and double-dealing are major Japanese weapons.[1]
As far as America was concerned, all persons of Japanese descent were considered the enemy. As California Governor Culbert Olsen disingenuously claimed, “When I look out at a group of Americans of German or Italian descent, I can tell whether they are loyal or not. I can tell how they think . . . but it is impossible for me to do this with the inscrutable Orientals, and particularly the Japanese.”[2] California representatives John Costello and Harry Sheppard warned that American Japanese were a “fifth column threat” and a “national hazard.”[3] “Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron accused “all Japs”—including those born in America—as being capable of fifth-column activity and summarily dismissed city employees of Japanese descent.”[4] He claimed, without a single shred of evidence, “Right here in our own city are those who may spring to action at an appointed time in accordance with a prearranged plan wherein each of our little Japanese friends will know his part in the event of any possible attempted invasion or air raid. . . . We cannot run the risk of another Pearl Harbor episode in Southern California.”[5]
On December 22, 1941, . . . the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce petitioned General DeWitt for the “evacuation” of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the city. Soon after, the California American Legion called for the imprisonment of all Japanese “dual citizens” in concentration camps, and the California Joint Immigration Committee and Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West passed resolutions favoring removal of all Japanese Americans from the state. . . . Groups such as the Western Growers Protective Association, the California Farm Bureau, and the White American Nurserymen of Los Angeles lobbied for expulsion of Japanese farmers and promised that there would be no loss to farm production if the Japanese Americans were expelled.[6]
Congressman John Rankin (D – Mississippi), a notorious bigot, spouted his personal opinion from afar:
So far as I am concerned, I am in favor of deporting every Jap who claims, or has claimed, Japanese citizenship, or sympathizes with Japan in this war. . . . Once a Jap always a Jap. You cannot change him. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. . . . [I am] for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps and shipping them back to Asia as soon as possible. . . . This is a race war, as far as the Pacific side of the conflict is concerned. . . . The white man’s civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism. . . . One of them must be destroyed. . . . Damn them! Let’s get rid of them now![7]
Rankin claimed that the Japanese were “pagan in their philosophy, atheistic in their beliefs, alien in their allegiance, and antagonistic to everything for which they stand.”[8] Fellow Congressman, John Dingel (D – Michigan), was even more extreme, proposing that the government hold ten thousand Japanese Americans in Hawaii as hostages to keep Tokyo honest.[9]
Among the press, radio broadcaster, John B. Hughes, slandered the Nikkei on a near-daily basis, claiming that ninety percent of U.S.-born Nisei were “primarily loyal to Japan.”[10] Newspapers also stirred up animosity against the Nikkei. Walter Lippmann, the nation’s most esteemed newspaperman, influenced Americans from Oval Office to the common man for the incarceration of the Nikkei:
The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and without. . . . I am sure I appreciate fully and understand thoroughly the unwillingness of Washington to adopt a policy of mass evacuation and mass internment of all those who are technically enemy aliens. . . . [but] the Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone . . . and nobody ought to be on a battlefield who has no good reason for being there. There is plenty of room elsewhere for him to exercise his rights.[11]
According to Henry McLemore, a columnist for William Randolph Hearst,
I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. 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. . . . Let us have no patience with the enemy or with anyone whose veins carry his blood. . . . Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them. Let’s quit worrying about hurting the enemy’s feelings and start doing it.[12]
Nationally syndicated columnist, Westbrook Pegler, also trumpeted, “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with Habeus Corpus until the danger is over.”[13] Another popular journalist, W. H. Anderson, wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times, labeling the Nisei as
Citizens by accident of birth, but who were Japanese nevertheless. . . . A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched . . . so a Japanese American, born of Japanese parents, nurtured upon Japanese traditions, living in a transplanted Japanese atmosphere and thoroughly inoculated with Japanese thoughts, Japanese ideas, not withstanding his nominal brand of accidental citizenship, almost inevitably and in the rarest exceptions grow up to be Japanese, not an American.[14]
The majority of public opinion was slanted against the Nikkei. Even Theodor Geisel (known to most as Dr. Seuss) produced racially-biased political cartoons of the Japanese[15] and screen actor Leo Carillo published an open letter, referring to West Coast Japanese Americans as a menace and called for their mass removal inland to preserve “the safety of the people.”[16] The popular photo magazine Life ran a stereotyped article entitled, “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese”[17] and the novelist H. G. Wells portrayed the Japanese as villains in his novel, “War of the Worlds.” Many Christians even expressed their racism openly like the Episcopal minister who protested sending missionaries to Japan: “Can you Christianize a Jap? Indeed, can you make an Occidental out of an Oriental? Nay, any more than you can change a leopard’s spots [Jeremiah 13:23].”[18] Some, such as Austin E. Anson, the managing secretary of the Salinas Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association, at least admitted to being motivated by economic greed:
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 or the brown man. . . . If all 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.[19]
The Japanese American internment was not the U.S. government’s initial plan of action. West Coast Nikkei were originally given permission to relocate voluntarily if they had a place to go in the interior states. Several thousand attempted to leave, yet this option quickly closed as many encountered hostile resistance along the way. A few hardy families in the community liquidated their property, tied suitcases all around their cars, and sallied eastward. They were greeted by signs in front of store windows, “Open season for Japs!” and “We kill rats and Japs here!”[20] Gas station owners refused to sell gas to Nikkei travelers and the governor of Kansas, Payne Ratner, even placed state highway patrolmen on the western edge of the state and directed them to turn back any prospective newcomers.[21] One later report stated that Japanese Americans
who tried to cross into the interior states ran into all kinds of trouble. Some were turned back by armed posses at the border of Nevada; others were clapped into jail and held overnight by panicky local peace officers; nearly all had difficulty in buying gasoline; many were greeted by “No Japs Wanted” signs on the main streets of interior communities; and a few were threatened, or felt that they were threatened, with possibilities of mob violence.[22]
Once voluntary relocation did not prove viable, Milton Eisenhower, the first director of the WRA, was given the unenviable task of overseeing a government-organized evacuation. He did not voice his concerns publicly, but instead wrote to his former boss, Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard, “I feel most deeply that when the war is over and we consider calmly this unprecedented migration of 120,000 people, we as Americans are going to regret the avoidable injustices that may have been done.”[23] Eisenhower originally intended the “sand and cactus” relocation camps to “serve as staging areas” for the evacuees, most of whom “would be moved into private jobs as soon as possible,” but received strong opposition from many of the Western states being considered as relocation sites. For example, in Wyoming, the so-called “Equality State,”
A leading Republican spokesman expressed fear “that if the government sends these Japs to Wyoming now, we will have them on our hands after the war is over, and Wyoming instead of California will have a Jap problem.” When one lone editor, L. L. Newton of Lander, suggested that “Christian principles” be the basis of treatment of any incoming Japanese, a Cheyenne paper asked, apparently for the rest of the state’s press, “Has Mr. Newton Gone Berserk?”[24]
Eisenhower tried to calm their fears at an April 7, 1942 meeting with Western governors in Salt Lake City. His hope was to establish a plan based on the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) which would relocate the Nikkei to inland areas where they could aid the war effort through agricultural or manufacturing work. Instead, his efforts were undermined:
Colonel Karl R. Bendetson, the architect of the Japanese internment, started by claiming that the evacuation was dictated by “military necessity” and that while most Japanese might be loyal under most conditions, they “must be regarded as potential enemies, if put to the test of being present during an invasion by an army of their own race.”[25]
Every one of the governors, except Colorado’s Ralph L. Carr, opposed the relocation: “If Colorado’s part in the war is to take 100,000 of them, then Colorado will take care of them.”[26] Herbert B. Maw of Utah suggested that each state be given a quota of Japanese along with Federal funds to handle them. He criticized the army and the WRA for being “much too concerned about the constitutional rights of Japanese American citizens. . . . The constitution could be changed.”[27] Idaho Governor Chase A. Clark even ranted, “Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats. We don’t want them buying or leasing land and becoming permanently located in our state.”[28] Clark also testified before a congressional committee in Seattle that the Japanese would only be welcome in Idaho if they were in “concentration camps under military guard.”[29] Nels Smith of Wyoming openly declared his dislike for Orientals and simply would not, as he put it, “stand for being California’s dumping ground.”[30] Eisenhower reported their vehemence in his memoirs:
One governor shouted: “If these people are dangerous on the Pacific coast they will be dangerous here! We have important defense establishments, too, you know.” Another governor [Nels Smith of Wyoming] walked close to me, shook his fist in my face, and growled through clenched teeth: “If you bring Japanese into my state, I promise you they will be hanging from every tree.”[31]
As a result of such strong opposition, Eisenhower reluctantly agreed to open a series of guarded relocation centers for internment. He would last just ninety days on the job before recommending his friend and former colleague, Dillon Myer, to be his replacement. Myer also came to the conclusion that the environment in the camps was “not good from any standpoint” and “that something should be done about moving evacuees to locations outside of the centers as soon as possible.”[32] Nevertheless, in the spring of 1942, nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from the West Coast and placed in temporary assembly centers.[33] They resided in those centers for several months before being removed once again to ten permanent relocation centers scattered throughout the nation’s interior.
[1] Los Angeles Times (8 December 1941). They made a similar claim in an editorial a month later: “Many of our Japanese, whether born here or not, are fully loyal and deserve sympathy over suspicion. Others, in both categories, hold to a foreign allegiance and are dangerous, at least potentially. 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” (“Dies and the Japs,” Los Angeles Times, 23 January 1942). Another editorial five days later rescinded that call for caution: “The rigors of war demand proper detention of Japanese and their immediate removal from the most acute danger spots” (“Facing the Japanese Issue Here,” Los Angeles Times, 28 January 1942).
[2] Betty E. Mitson, “Looking Back in Anguish: Oral History and Japanese-American Evacuation,” The Oral History Review 2 (1974), 36, 40. Olsen also met with DeWitt privately to tell him that Californians “feel that they are living in the midst of enemies. They don’t trust the Japanese, none of them” (Robinson, By Order of the President, 96).
[3] Oppenheim, Dear Miss Breed, 38.
[4] Yoo, Nisei, 126.
[5] Fletcher Bowron, speech and statement in Congressional Record (9 February 1942), A547-48. Bowron would also admit, however, that “perhaps the Japanese could not be trusted in the present emergency precisely because of the discrimination Californians had visited upon them” (ibid.).
[6] Greg Robinson, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 72. See Frank J. Taylor, “The People Nobody Wants,” The Saturday Evening Post (9 May 1942), 66.
[7] Congressman John Rankin, Congressional Record (15 December 1941). The Seattle Post-Intelligencer also quoted him as saying, “Once a Jap, always a Jap. You can’t any more regenerate a Jap than you can reverse the laws of nature” (19 February 1942).
[8] Congressman John Rankin, Congressional Record 77, no. 2 (14 February 1942), A691-92.
[9] William Dudley, ed., Japanese American Internment Camps (San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 2002), 50.
[10] Hosokawa, Nisei, 264.
[11] Cited in Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 112.
[12] Henry McLemore, San Francisco Examiner (29 January 1942) cited in the United States War Relocation Authority, Wartime Exile (New York: AMS Press, 1975), 109-110. Hearst’s San Francisco Chronicle and his motion pictures were the foremost of anti-Japanese propaganda which popularized the epithet “yellow peril” (Daniels, Concentration Camps, 29, 31). Another Hearst columnist, Damon Runyon, levelled false accusations of a powerful transmitter located in a Japanese rooming house (Damon Runyon, “Coast ‘Little Tokyo’ Depleted by Raids,” [Rochester, NY] Democrat and Chronicle, 2 January 1942).
[13] Westbrook Pegler, “Fair Enough,” Los Angeles Times (16 February 1942) and other papers. Pegler also exacerbated the rumors that the internees should be used as hostages to keep Imperial Japan from harming U.S. POWs and that for every hostage the Axis murdered, the U.S. should retaliate by killing “100 victims selected out of [American] concentration camps” (Nationally syndicated newspaper column [9 December 1941]).
[14] W. H. Anderson, “The Question of Japanese Americans,” Los Angeles Times (2 February 1942), A4.
[15] See The New York Daily PM, “Waiting for the Signal from Home” (13 February 1942), in Richard H. Minear, Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel (New York: The New York Press, 1999). Seuss would later atone for his wrong thinking by dedicating Horton Hears a Who! (1954) to “My Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan.” See https://www.openculture.com/2014/08/dr-seuss-draws-racist-anti-japanese-cartoons-during-ww-ii.html.
[16] Letter from Leo Carillo to Leland Ford (6 January 1942), cited in tenBroek, Barnhart, and Matson, Prejudice, War, and the Constitution, 77.
[17] “How to Tell Japs From the Chinese,” Life (22 December 1941), 81-82.
[18] “Rector Denounces All Missions to Japan,” Christian Century (21 January 1942), 93.
[19] Frank J. Taylor, “The People Nobody Wants: The Plight of Japanese-Americans in 1942,” Saturday Evening Post, 9 May 1942, accessed at https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/05/people-nobody-wants.
[20] Sone, Nisei Daughter, 160. Only 2,005 would voluntarily move away from the West Coast.
[21] “A ‘Keep Out’ to Japanese,” Iola Register, 1 April 1942.
[22] U.S. Department of the Interior, War Relocation Authority, WRA: A Story of Human Conservation (Washington, D.C., 1946), 26.
[23] Letter from Eisenhower to Wickard (1 April 1942), “Correspondence of the Secretary of Agriculture, Foreign Relations, 2-1, Aliens-Refugees,” RG 16, NA, cited in Stephen E. Ambrose and Richard H. Immerman, Milton S. Eisenhower: Educational Statesman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 61.
[24] Roger Daniels, “Western Reaction to the Relocated Japanese Americans: The Case of Wyoming,” in Relocation to Redress, 113, citing T. A. Larson, Wyoming’s War Years (Laramie, WY: University of Wyoming, 1954).
[25] “Report on Meeting, April 7, at Salt Lake City, with Governors, Attorneys General and other State and Federal Officials of 10 Western States,” enclosed in Eisenhower to Wickard, cited above.
[26] Daniels, Concentration Camps, 94. Carr, an outspoken advocate for Japanese Americans, stated in 1942, “If we do not extend humanity’s kindness and understanding to them, if we deny them the protection of the Bill of Rights, if we say that they must be denied the privilege of living in any of the 48 states without hearing or charge of misconduct, then we are tearing down the whole American system.” Carr sacrificed his political career in his fight for the Nikkei. For more on his life and legacy, see https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/ralph-carr, E. E. Duncan, Ralph Carr: Defender of Japanese Americans (Palmer Lake, CO: Filter Press, LLC, 2011), Adam Schrager, The Principled Politician: The Story of Ralph Carr (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008), and The Untold Story of Ralph Carr and the Japanese, accessed at https://vimeo.com/28381711.
[27] “Report on Meeting, April 7.”
[28] Chase A. Clark, speech in Grangeville, ID (May 1942).
[29] Robert C. Sims, “The Japanese American Experience in Idaho,” Idaho Yesterdays 22 (Spring 1978), 2-10. For more on Clark’s role in the relocation program, see Robert C. Sims, “‘A Fearless, Patriotic, Clean-Cut Stand’: Idaho’s Governor Clark and Japanese American Relocation in World War II,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly (April 1979), 75-81.
[30] “Report on Meeting, April 7.”
[31] Milton S. Eisenhower, The President Is Calling (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1974), 97, 114-119.
[32] Dillon S. Myer, Uprooted Americans: The Japanese Americans and the War Relocation Authority during World War II (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1971), 6.
[33] About 6,000 Nikkei children were born in the camps.
