Justice for All (26 page)

 

Those sentiments rumbled through the public, and exposed old wounds. Calls for evacuation or incarceration of Japanese immigrants multiplied. And as the momentum in favor of removal gathered force, the scope of the debate expanded as well: No longer were merely Japanese immigrants, the so-called Isei, under consideration; now, backers of removal also began to clamor for the exclusion of Nisei, people born in the United States and thus citizens, distinguished from other Americans only by their race and heritage. In Los Angeles, all city and county employees who were of “Japanese parentage” were fired, “as public officials expressed alarm at what they said was a potential fifth column danger,” the Associated Press reported on January 28.
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Warren's actions in the days after the Roberts report was released were curious, in some respects even contradictory. When California's State Personnel Board moved to prevent Japanese-Americans from taking civil service exams, Warren objected. Such a bar, Warren concluded, would be unconstitutional and would deny Japanese-Americans—Americans, after all, born in this country—rights solely on the basis of their race. Warren's opinion annoyed members of the panel, whose spokesman told reporters that Warren was “totally misinformed” about what the board was attempting to accomplish.
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The board then disregarded Warren's legal advice and proceeded to investigate state workers. By the end of February, the board's true motives had become apparent, and they were just as Warren suspected. On April 2, the board voted to suspend “all state civil service employees of Japanese ancestry.”
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Warren fought the board on those moves, and though he lost, he won the admiration of some of those who waged the principled effort to defend California's Japanese immigrants and American-born citizens of Japanese descent.

“This,” said Dillon Myer, who was to become the chief of the War Relocation Authority, was “Earl Warren at his best.”
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But even as Warren moved to protect some rights, he swung into action to abrogate other, far more important ones. In those pivotal days after the Roberts report was released, Earl Warren and his staff gathered intelligence on Japanese organizations and land holdings, investigated the state's ability to confiscate property belonging to Japanese, and researched the government's right to remove or detain people based solely on their ethnic and national heritage.
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Once gathered, that information was shared with military authorities, specifically the commanding officer at the Presidio in San Francisco, General DeWitt. In personal meetings and conferences with subordinates and others, Warren and DeWitt fueled each other's suspicions, each pushing the other to see threats of attack, sabotage, and even invasion. “I was,” Warren wrote later, “in constant touch with him.”
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That was Warren's bad luck and poor judgment, as DeWitt proved incapable of the command to which he was entrusted.

Born on a Nebraska army base in 1880, DeWitt was a second-generation general, his father having served in the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War and in various Army posts after that. Two brothers also followed their father into the Army, rising to the rank of brigadier general (all four DeWitts are buried at Arlington National Cemetery).
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But while John DeWitt was long on military experience, he was short on the skills being asked of him in early 1942. A dropout from Princeton who had never spent an adult day as a civilian, DeWitt was an aging man with little experience in the subtleties of political leadership. He was untested by significant military command, and his upbringing—he had been raised in the Indian Wars and served in the brutal American campaign in the Philippines—led some to conclude that he was indifferent to the suffering of minorities.
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When DeWitt was told that some of his desperately needed reinforcements after Pearl Harbor were black, he complained. “You're filling too many colored groups up on the West Coast,” he told his superiors. “I'd rather have a white regiment.”
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He was at once insecure and arrogant, panicky, prone to outburst and susceptible to paranoia. It was not a healthy mix.

DeWitt did not at first embrace the idea of taking responsibility for the coast's Axis aliens. In Washington, the early weeks after Pearl Harbor had been marked by an intense debate between Attorney General Francis Biddle and Secretary of War Henry Stimson over the fate of the West Coast Japanese. Stimson argued for removal of some or all of the Japanese population. Biddle counseled against any such measure, and was supported by some of his own lawyers, as well as, ironically, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who preferred to handle the threat as a law-enforcement matter. In San Francisco, DeWitt in those weeks struggled to articulate a firm position with respect to the Japanese, but at some points seemed inclined to oppose it on practical and constitutional grounds. “I'd rather go along the way we are now . . . rather than attempt any such wholesale internment,” he said in a December 26 phone conversation. “An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen.”
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Among DeWitt's many character flaws, however, was his tendency to vacillate. As Attorney General Biddle later put it, the general was “apt to waver under popular pressure, a characteristic arising from his tendency to reflect the views of the last man to whom he talked.”
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Now, with public anxiety rising over the Roberts Report, DeWitt came under pressure from leading Californians to act.

On January 27, DeWitt conferred with Governor Olson. Olson already had demonstrated his hair-trigger nerves on the day after Pearl Harbor when he proposed keeping enemy aliens indoors. In the weeks since the attack, he had careened from statements urging restraint toward the Japanese to others suggesting that he was fearful of what they might do. DeWitt was similarly alarmed. He was receiving reports of attacks on American shipping by Japanese submarines and of signaling by onshore spies to Japanese vessels off the coast. “Time,” DeWitt wrote later, “was of the essence.”
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While the attacks on shipping were real, the grounds for suspicion of involvement by California's Japanese were far flimsier. One particular area of anxiety was the allegation that Japanese residents of the West Coast were signaling to enemy ships and submarines. Once checked, those tips invariably proved to be false—one neighbor reported on a signaling case in Santa Monica, for instance, but the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI concluded that it was merely someone adjusting a stuck window shade.
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Still, the volume of such reports convinced DeWitt that some were real, and he almost certainly shared his growing anxiety with Olson. Soon after his meeting with DeWitt, Olson announced in a radio speech to the state, “It is known that there are Japanese residents of California who have sought to aid the Japanese enemy by way of communicating information, or have shown indications of preparation for fifth-column activities.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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