Internment
During the internment, racism against the Nikkei was tempered since most Americans no longer needed to interact with the “enemy race.” Some still complained, however, that relocation centers were receiving special privileges.[1] For example, one senator from Wyoming, E. V. Robertson, accused the WRA of “petting and pampering” the internees, many of whom “profess loyalty to [Japanese Emperor] Hirohito and his war regime.”[2] He likely did so after receiving countless letters from angry Wyomians calling the Nikkei a “lazy and shiftless lot” who should “be segregated by sex because we don’t need more little Japs.”[3] It was not until the squalid conditions of the camps were publicized that such rumors were laid to rest.
Latent racism continued to smolder against the Nikkei as they waited behind barbed wire. Jitsuo Morikawa illustrated how quickly that problem could be fanned into flame on a special excursion outside of Poston:
When he (Dr. Mayberry) drove Paul Nagano, Reverend Yamamoto and me from Poston Relocation Center to Phoenix for Paul’s ordination, he stopped at one motel after another, but was refused each time to accommodate these Japanese Americans from Poston. We watched with pride and gratitude the courage and mounting anger of this white Caucasian who certainly didn’t have to fight for our rights. But he had an irrepressible distaste of justice and was capable of towering rage and anger against all wrong. He was a man of passion and feeling, and they came erupting like a volcano.[4]
General sentiment swung toward the internees as it soon became apparent that they were not a security threat. Yet some stubbornly insisted on sounding the alarm. For example, during a publicity visit to one relocation center in January 1943, Senator A. B. “Happy” Chandler (D – Kentucky), head of a special subcommittee on military affairs, told the press that untrustworthy evacuees were ready to commit “almost any act for their Emperor” and that, in some camps “as many as 60 per cent” were disloyal.[5] His wife, Mildred, also commented, “All Japanese . . . should be put on shipboard and dumped in the ocean when Tokyo was bombed.”[6] President Roosevelt prolonged the internment until he won his unprecedented fourth term.[7] Public opinion continued to berate the internees even during their incarceration:
America is being played for a sucker by the astute treacherous Japs who are being given their freedom to roam through war industry centers of the East and Mid-West by the War Relocation Authority. . . . Have these government officials the minds of children? Have they forgotten the principles of those Japanese leaders who planned and executed the raid on Pearl Harbor even when their nation was supposedly on friendly terms with the United States? Do they believe for a minute that these internees at Manzanar and other camps intend to keep their word—that their word is worth anything.[8]
Carey McWilliams, Commissioner of Immigration and Housing for the California State Government, recorded in detail the history of American prejudice against the Nikkei. Sadly, some even did so in the name of Christ. Charles M. Goethe, a Sacramento millionaire who served on the Northern California Council of Churches, financed pamphlets urging Californians to “Slap the Jap Rat” or to declare, “No Jap Is Fit to Associate with Human Beings.”[9] Dr. John Carruthers was both a Presbyterian minister and a racist as well: “It is our Christian duty to keep the Japanese out of this western world of Christian civilization.” Carruthers claimed that the Japanese Americans should not object, if they were Christians, since, as Christians “they ought to be glad to be shoved out anywhere that they can bear witness to the Kingdom of Christ.”[10] Although many non-Japanese Christians ministered to the Nikkei during the internment, they remained overwhelmingly silent from speaking out against injustices. Many churches and denominations would not publicly condemn the Japanese American internment until decades after the camps had closed.
[1] See Jack Carberry, “Hostile Group Is Pampered at Wyoming Camp,” Denver Post, 24 April 1943.
[2] “Says We ‘Pamper’ Internees in the West,” New York Times, 7 May 1943. Robertson was graciously invited to visit Heart Mountain, but he repeatedly refused claiming to be “too busy.”
[3] Mackey, Remembering Heart Mountain, 43-44.
[4] Jitsuo Morikawa, “Tribute to Dr. Ralph L. Mayberry,” Huntington Park Baptist Church, Los Angeles, CA (15 November 1980), cited in Paul M. Nagano, “American Baptists Combat ‘Serious Injustices,’” American Baptist Quarterly 17, no. 3 (September 1998), 215. Nagano’s ordination was held on February 23, 1943 at the Tempe First Baptist Church.
[5] Daniels, Concentration Camps, 112.
[6] Letter from Ralph R. Merritt to Dillon Myer (4 March 1943), Manzanar Records, 1942-1946, University Research Library, UCLA.
[7] Roosevelt withheld freedom from the Nikkei for his own political expediency despite strong urging from Secretary Stimson, Attorney General Biddle, and Interior Secretary Ickes that “there is no longer any military necessity for excluding these persons from the state of California and portions of the state of Washington, Oregon and Arizona. . . . The continued exclusion of American citizens of Japanese ancestry from the affected areas is clearly unconstitutional in the present circumstances. . . . The continued retention of these innocent people in the relocation centers would be a blot upon the history of this country” (“The West Coast Turns into a War Zone,” Washington Post, 8 December 1982). The War Department would conveniently issue a statement just one day before the Supreme Court ruled against the internment: “Continued mass exclusion from the West Coast of persons of Japanese ancestry is no longer a matter of military necessity. For this reason, mass exclusion orders under which persons of Japanese ancestry were evacuated from the Pacific Coast area in 1942 were revoked today” (Mackey, Remembering Heart Mountain, 147). Despite Roosevelt’s role in the internment, churches would honor him in special services and relocation centers would fly their flags at half-mast when the president died on April 12, 1945 (“Center Mourns Sudden Death of President,” Heart Mountain Sentinel, 14 April 1945).
[8] Editorial, Los Angeles Evening Herald Express (9 November 1943).
[9] Carey McWilliams, Prejudice: Japanese Americans: Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1944), 237-38.
[10] Ibid., 240.
