Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (131 page)

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N THE SAME
evening that Roosevelt was conducting his lesson in global strategy, a Japanese submarine surfaced off California near Santa Barbara and lobbed a few shells landward. Quite clearly the purpose was psychological: to steal the president’s thunder. The mission succeeded. The same papers that carried Roosevelt’s speech included articles about this first attack on the American mainland.

Roosevelt learned a lesson: not to announce major speeches so far in advance. He also detected an opportunity: to impress on Americans the differences between wartime and peacetime. Roosevelt worried from the start about the dissemination of war news. Congress had no sooner declared war on Japan than the president urged caution in repeating reports about the fighting. The initial news from Hawaii had been followed by wild speculation on what the Japanese were up to and where they might strike next. Roosevelt tamped down the rumors by refusing to comment on most of them, but his silence prompted suspicions that the White House knew more than it was saying. A journalist raised the issue at Roosevelt’s first wartime news conference. “This is not an impudent question, sir, but it might clear up things,” he said. “Do you intend to give the public the benefit of all of the reports you get?”

“I am going to give—all of us are going to give—everything to the public, on two conditions,” Roosevelt replied. “The first is that it is accurate. Well, I should think that would seem fairly obvious. And the second is that in giving it out it does not give aid and comfort to the enemy…. I should think that those two conditions ought to be put up in every office in Washington.”

A reporter remarked sardonically that there was no need to post the rules in government offices. “It is impossible to get any information from any department now,” he complained. “They give you the run-around.”

“Well, then, you can’t assume that the information has conformed to the two conditions.”

“You ought to have someone there who can say whether it does conform.”

“That has got to be determined by the higher officers—the army and navy.”

“But we have been told that these officers have no information—have instructions not to talk on any subject.”

“I think that is probably correct.”

“Where does that put us?”

“It means that you have got to wait—sit and wait on this information, because you can’t determine whether certain information conforms to those two principles. We can’t leave that determination in the hands of a third assistant…. It has got to come from the top.”

A reporter asked Roosevelt to clarify what he meant by a news report giving aid and comfort to the enemy. “Does that mean that no bad news is going to be given out?”

“No, no,” the president replied. “It depends on whether the giving out is of aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Roosevelt’s rules weren’t particularly helpful to reporters, as this exchange suggested. Reporters and editors often had to guess as to what would help the enemy and what wouldn’t. Yet to a remarkable degree they accorded the president and the administration the benefit of the doubt. Their trust reflected, in varying combinations, their patriotism, their worries about alienating readers, and the respect they had developed for Roosevelt during the previous nine years. Roosevelt’s cultivation of the press through hundreds of press conferences had amassed for him a store of goodwill against which he was able to draw during the war. For nearly a decade he had given them story after story, besides providing the best show in Washington. His audience valued his performance.

He continued to cultivate the press after the war began. He restricted information regarding his own movements and whereabouts, to the annoyance of some members of the press corps. And he resolutely enforced, to the extent he could, his two rules of wartime media, especially the one about information that might aid the enemy. But the censoring and repressive hand of government was light compared with its weight in the past. Roosevelt was no First Amendment purist; as on many other subjects, his concerns regarding civil liberties were pragmatic and political rather than ethical. He remembered the Espionage and Sedition Acts of the First World War. He recalled in particular how they had alienated large parts of Wilson’s liberal base and contributed to the buildup of pressures that exploded poisonously after the war, dooming Wilson’s peace plan and polarizing the country for a decade. Roosevelt was playing a long game, already reckoning how the war should end. He needed the press on his side, and he did what he could to keep it there.

I
N CERTAIN OTHER
respects, the Roosevelt touch was far from light. Since the mid-1930s the president had feared the emergence of a fifth column in the United States (at the time, in fact, when this term for domestic disloyalty was being popularized in the Spanish civil war). In August 1936 Roosevelt met with J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to discuss “subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism,” according to Hoover’s memorandum of the meeting. Hoover, again according to his own account, initially demurred, explaining that the FBI’s charter confined its investigations to violations of the law. Political activities were off limits. Yet Hoover mentioned a possible way around the stricture. A law left over from the First World War allowed the bureau to respond to requests from the State Department for information. Roosevelt took the suggestion and the next day brought Hoover back to the White House. This time Cordell Hull was present. The secretary of state had even less use for subversives than Roosevelt did, and a saltier vocabulary. “Go ahead and investigate the hell out of those cocksuckers,” Hull told Hoover.

The bureau stepped up its surveillance upon the outbreak of the war in Europe, and did so openly. “The Attorney General has been requested by me to instruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice to take charge of investigative work in matters relating to espionage, sabotage, and violations of the neutrality regulations,” Roosevelt announced on September 6, 1939. The needs of efficiency motivated the president’s decision. “This task must be conducted in a comprehensive and effective manner on a national basis, and all information must be carefully sifted out and correlated in order to avoid confusion and irresponsibility.” But the centralization of counterespionage also reflected Roosevelt’s desire to have direct access to the information the investigators unearthed.

During the next two years the FBI compiled lists of potentially worrisome foreign nationals. The Alien Registration Act of June 1940—often called the Smith Act, for its sponsor in the House of Representatives, Howard Smith of Virginia—loosened the legal reins on the bureau by making a federal crime of advocacy of the overthrow of the American government. Active Communists presumably fell within the scope of the law, as perhaps did closet Nazis and fellow travelers of both the extreme left and the far right. On signing the Smith Act, Roosevelt assured the American people that loyal aliens need have no fear of government. Others had better watch out. “With those aliens who are disloyal and are bent on harm to this country, the government, through its law enforcement agencies, can and will deal vigorously.”

The focus on aliens followed the historic practice of most countries during wartime. Governments typically detained enemy aliens on grounds that they posed a prima facie security threat. Normally the aliens were deported to their home countries, but when deportation was inconvenient or impossible, they were sometimes held for the duration of the conflict.

The American government adopted this practice immediately after Pearl Harbor. By December 1941 Hoover and the FBI had identified thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian aliens in the United States; Roosevelt gave the order to round them up. Several thousand were arrested within days—some of the Germans and Italians even before the declarations of war between their home countries and the United States.

The arrests largely quelled public concern about espionage and sabotage as they involved the Germans and Italians. Roosevelt deliberately downplayed the matter. The wartime policy of the FBI, adopted with the president’s approval, was to minimize news of the activities of Axis agents, lest the public become aroused. An internal FBI document explained: “There must not be permitted to develop any vigilante system of wartime law enforcement.”

Managing passions toward the Japanese, however, proved beyond the capacity of the bureau, and beyond the political will of the president. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor naturally provoked alarm at the possibility of additional attacks against Americans and American soil. This alarm, combined with the puzzlement that the United States had been caught so unprepared, primed Americans to imagine espionage or sabotage among Japanese nationals living in America. The hoary concept of the “yellow peril” reemerged, coloring attitudes toward anyone of Japanese ancestry. The American intelligence apparatus, having snoozed through Pearl Harbor, grew suddenly insomniac, and like other insomniacs it conjured nightmares from fragments of fact, worst-case scenarios, and whole cloth. Rumors were accepted as truth, or at least as working approximations of truth, by those charged with preventing another Pearl Harbor.

General John DeWitt headed the army’s Western Defense Command, with responsibility for the West Coast. Determined not to be California’s counterpart to Admiral Husband Kimmel or General Walter Short—two officers already under investigation for failing to defend Pearl Harbor—DeWitt took every report most seriously. Stray radio signals became secret transmissions from Japanese spies to ships offshore. When the signals fell silent, their very silence indicated the insidious guile of the enemy.

The material interests of others inflamed DeWitt’s suspicions. For decades the neighbors and economic competitors of the Chinese and Japanese in California and nearby states had resented the Asians’ willingness to work long and hard for low wages and modest profit margins; at every opportunity some of those competitors had tried to elbow them aside legally or physically. Pearl Harbor provided a new opportunity, and demands at once arose to drive the Japanese from their homes, their farms, and their businesses. The more forthright didn’t disguise their intentions. “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons,” a spokesman for the California Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association said. “We might as well be honest. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man.”

Elected officials followed the popular mood and sometimes led it. California’s attorney general, Earl Warren, called for the imposition of martial law. “In view of the circumstances, the problem becomes a military problem rather than one in civil government,” Warren said. The mayor of Los Angeles demanded the removal of Japanese from the “combat zone,” meaning most of the West Coast. Several members of the city council endorsed the mayor’s demand.

Pundits joined the calls for removal. Walter Lippmann insisted that security preempted civil liberties. In an essay written from San Francisco and titled “The Fifth Column on the Coast,” Lippmann asserted, “The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and from without…. It is a fact that the Japanese navy has been reconnoitering the Pacific Coast more or less continually and for a considerable period of time, testing and feeling out the American defenses. It is a fact that communication takes place between the enemy at sea and enemy agents on land.” Americans ignored these facts at their peril, Lippmann said. He denied that removal of Japanese Americans from the coastal zone would violate their constitutional rights. “Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield. 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.” Westbrook Pegler rarely agreed with Lippmann, but on this subject the outspokenly conservative columnist did. “We are so damned dumb and considerate of the minute Constitutional rights and even of the political feelings and influence of people whom we have every reason to anticipate with preventive action!” Pegler said. “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now, and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”

Confident of public support, DeWitt requested authority to remove the Japanese—including American citizens of Japanese descent—from the West Coast. His request at first divided the Roosevelt administration. Henry Morgenthau thought things were proceeding too fast. “When it comes to suddenly mopping up 150,000 Japanese and putting them behind barbed wire…,” the Treasury secretary said, “I want at some time to have caught my breath.” Attorney General Francis Biddle initially opposed removal, vowing that “the Department of Justice would not under any circumstances evacuate American citizens.”