Roosevelt signing the Selective Service Act, September 1940
I had believed for years that the liberals let Roosevelt off easy for the Japanese internment. In 2001 came a fair-minded and well-researched book that told the story. I reviewed it in Liberty, August 2003.
Review of Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans,Harvard University Press, 2001.
In the eyes of most historians, Franklin Roosevelt bore little responsibility for the wartime internment of the Japanese Americans. Greg Robinson, assistant professor of history at the University of Quebec, argues in this book that most historians are wrong.
Roosevelt wasn’t much interested in the Japanese Americans, Robinson writes. But that does not absolve him of responsibility. He signed the detention order. He knew what the policy was. And, writes Robinson, Roosevelt showed “an astounding casualness about the policy and an indifference to its effect.”
The federal government was of two minds about citizens of Japanese descent. In 1940 the FBI had reported that the Hawaiian Japanese, citizens and noncitizens, were overwhelmingly loyal. So had a White House intelligence unit. On the other side, Frank Knox, the War Republican FDR chose as Secretary of the Navy, argued that the Japanese in Hawaii could not be trusted and should be put in camps. Henry Stimson, the former Taft and Hoover official FDR appointed as Secretary of War, wanted all Japanese, in Hawaii and on the Pacific Coast, put in camps —- a step Attorney General Francis Biddle said was illegal.
On Feb. 19, 1942, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, ordering the removal of the West Coast Japanese. The Democratic-controlled Congress quickly backed up the order with legislation. Ethnic Japanese were ordered removed from Washington, Oregon and California. Of the 112,000 people taken away, 70 percent were citizens.
In his review of documents, Robinson finds that this order was “not based strictly on military considerations.” The military was also of two minds. Gen. Mark Clark and Adm. Harold Stark, speaking for the top brass, reported that internment was not necessary. The military commander of the West Coast, Gen. John DeWitt, thought it was. Roosevelt took the latter view, agreeing with Stimson.
More than 100,000 ethnic Japanese lived in Hawaii. The Japanese there were about 35 percent of the population. It was a much higher proportion than on the West Coast, and it meant that a far higher proportion of whites in Hawaii knew Japanese and trusted them.
Robinson says that while Roosevelt “had played a largely passive role in the decision to evacuate the West Coast Japanese,” he “actively campaigned for mass removal in Hawaii.” FDR argued in a memo to Knox, “I do not worry about the constitutional question — first, because of my recent order, and second, because Hawaii is under martial law.” But the military commander of Hawaii, Delos Emmons, opposed internment. He didn’t think it was necessary. There were logistical problems of moving 100,000 Hawaiian Japanese to places like Idaho and Nevada, and political problems on the U.S. mainland, too. Eventually, Roosevelt gave it up.
Back on the mainland, the camps were made of wooden barracks surrounded by fences and guards, and placed in the desert. Roosevelt’s first administrator was Dwight Eisenhower’s brother Milton, who took the job with the idea that the Japanese would be resettled. When he discovered that the intention was to keep them confined, he resigned, writing that most of them were loyal.
The camps were run by civilians. The agency in charge, the War Relocation Authority, was patterned after a New Deal agency, the Resettlement Administration. Roosevelt’s left-wing vice president, Henry Wallace, who had been Secretary of Agriculture during the 1930s, asked to use Japanese-American labor to reclaim the desert and create “model agricultural communities,” and nominated a Wallace deputy to have the job. That was one farm program that never materialized.
Internment reflected the fears of most Americans, and amplified them. The fact of internment seemed to confirm that Japanese were not to be trusted. If they were so innocent, why had they been locked up? Pressure arose from several quarters, including the War Relocation Authority itself, for Roosevelt to say publicly that most Japanese were loyal. John McCloy, assistant secretary of war and an “architect of the internment,” Robinson says, strongly supported such a statement. Roosevelt ignored these appeals for months. Finally, on Feb. 1, 1943, he issued such a statement.
This statement, Robinson says, is held up by
IRoosevelt’s supporters as proof that the president’s thoughts were good and pure. “In fact,” writes Robinson, “Roosevelt approved verbatim a text written by others and had little to do with it.”
As the tide of war turned, so did the thinking of some who had championed internment. McCloy was an early supporter of an army regiment of Japanese Americans, which became the 442nd Combat Team. Stimson agreed; he argued that “the Japanese problem in this country after the war would admit of a far easier solution if voluntary enlistment were permitted.” Roosevelt agreed to the unit, but for a different reason: He thought it would be good propaganda.The extraordinary bravery of the 442nd, which fought in Italy, undermined the rationale for the internment. So did the rollback of Japan’s forces in the Pacific. In 1944, several of the New Deal liberals, including Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and Undersecretary Abe Fortas, began pushing for the end of internment. Knox died, and Stimson, also a Republican, called for an end to the policy. Later that year, the Supreme Court was to rule on the internment in the case ofKorematsu v. United States,and Attorney General Biddle believed the government would lose.
“Once the consensus on ending exclusion was cemented,” Robinson writes, “the chief problem was stage-managing the request to win Roosevelt’s approval.”
Stimson went to Roosevelt. His response was to suggest that Stimson call the governor of California, Earl Warren, and get Warren’s approval. Warren would later become Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and be known as a liberal, but in 1942 he had been elected in California largely on his enthusiasm for interning the Japanese. Why would Warren offer to let them out? Besides, he was a candidate that year for the Republican nomination for president — that is, to run against FDR — so it was not likely that he would accept responsibility for bringing back the “Japs.”
Nor would Roosevelt. He put off the matter until after the 1944 election. It was in December 1944, on the eve of the Korematsudecision (which the government, ironically, won) that the decision was taken to end the internment. Even then, the decision was ascribed not to Roosevelt but to Stimson.
Having read Stimson’s diary, Robinson concludes that the Secretary of War did, in fact, have “a racist streak” about the Japanese. But he cared about the Constitution, and was worried, in his words, about “blowing a tremendous hole” in it. Roosevelt didn’t. “The internment,” Robinson concludes, “was not fundamentally inconsistent” with Roosevelt’s “overall political philosophy and world view.”
Robinson has written a concise, focused and well-researched volume. Those who celebrate the demolition of the FDR myth will have wished for more vitriol, and perhaps a few fireworks. But the facts are here, and even Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., admits in the cover blurb that “it was not FDR’s finest hour.”
A few years later, former Seattle Times columnist Michelle Malkin wrote a book defending the Japanese internment, and I reviewed her book unfavorably. There came the predictable controversy, and Robinson emailed me with a piece of evidence.
It was a letter written by John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war. Robinson had found the letter while researching the book reviewed here, but he hadn’t made much of it. Reading the letter again, he wrote, “It hit me.”
The letter, dated July 23, 1942, is to Robert Patterson, undersecretary of war, and is found in Patterson’s papers. At the bottom of a memo about food supplies is a handwritten note:
“These people are not ‘internees’ — they are under no suspicion for the most part and were moved largely because we felt we could not control our own white citizens in California.”
In the first part of that statement, Robinson wrote, McCloy is admitting ‘that military necessity was not the primary reason for mass evacuation of the Japanese Americans.” Robinson discounted the second part because there was little evidence that Japanese Americans needed to be put in camps in order to be physically protected from whites.
I saw another meaning to the words, “we could not control our own white citizens.” To me it meant that the white citizens could not be politically controlled if the Japanese Americans remained free.
The government did have a reason to intern the Japanese Americans. It just wasn’t a respectable one.