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December 2004
Indefensible Internment
There was no good reason for the mass internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
 In
Defense of Internment: The Case for �Racial Profiling� in World War II and the
War on Terror, by Michelle Malkin, Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 416 pages, $27.95 Since
9/11,
some civil libertarians have denounced every antiterrorism policy that singles
out Arab men as a repetition of the terrible mistake the government made after
Pearl Harbor, when it evicted tens of thousands of American citizens of
Japanese ancestry from their West Coast homes and banished them to barren camps
in the interior. Supporters of profiling have a reasonable response to this
comparison with what we�ve come to call the Japanese-American internment: There
is a big difference between asking Arab male airline passengers some extra security
questions and forcing American citizens behind barbed wire in the high desert
for three years. As obvious as that answer might seem, it is not the
answer that conservative columnist Michelle Malkin gives in her book In
Defense of Internment: The Case for �Racial Profiling� in World War II and the
War on Terror. She argues instead that the desert imprisonment of virtually
all of the West Coast�s Japanese-American men, women, and children for three
years was the right thing to do: It was a sound military judgment that Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and his top war advisers made on the basis of solid
intelligence that Japan had organized untold numbers of Japanese resident
aliens (the �Issei�) and their American-citizen children (the �Nisei�) into a
vast network of spies and subversives. Over
the last several decades, historians have shown that the chief causes of the
Japanese American internment were ingrained anti-Asian racism, nativist and
economic pressures from groups in California that had long wanted the Japanese
gone, and the panic of wartime hysteria. As the Presidential Commission on the
Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians said in its 1981 report to
Congress, �The broad historical causes which shaped [the decisions to relocate
and detain Japanese Americans] were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure
of political leadership.� Malkin contends that this history is a big lie�a
�politically correct myth� that �has become enshrined as incontrovertible
wisdom in the gullible press, postmodern academia, the cash-hungry grievance
industry, and liberal Hollywood.� That passage alone should tell
the reader this book is not a trustworthy work of history but a polemic�The
O�Reilly Factor masquerading as the History Channel. At the heart of
Malkin�s account are breathless allegations of widespread Japanese-American
treason grounded primarily in the �MAGIC
decrypts��Japanese diplomatic cables that American military intelligence
intercepted and decoded. These cables�to which President Roosevelt, Secretary
of War Henry Stimson, and his assistant John J. McCloy had access�revealed what
Malkin describes as a �meticulously orchestrated espionage effort to undermine
our national security [that] utilized both Issei and Nisei, in Hawaii and on
the West Coast, before and after the Pearl Harbor attack.� It was primarily
this intelligence, says Malkin, rather than racism or wartime hysteria, that
led this trio of men to approve and implement the eviction, exclusion, and
detention of all people of Japanese ancestry along the West Coast. Malkin�s
evidence simply does not support the enormous weight of the argument that she
builds on it. First, many of the men who proposed and implemented the
internment did not have access to the ultra-secret MAGIC
cables. Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, the chief architect of the eviction of Japanese
Americans, did not see them. Neither did the governors of the Mountain West
states, who in April 1942 rejected the federal government�s request to allow
Japanese Americans freedom of movement and instead insisted that any Japanese
Americans in their states be kept behind barbed wire and under military guard.
Plainly, the MAGIC
intelligence could not have influenced them. More
important, we know nothing at all about how the few men who did have access to the tens of
thousands of decrypted cables actually used them or understood them. Nothing
in the historical record shows that Roosevelt, Stimson, or McCloy attached any
particular significance to any specific MAGIC
decrypt, let alone to the vanishingly tiny fraction that mentioned a desire to
enlist Nisei spies. What
this means is that the evidence Malkin deploys to �debunk the great myth of the
�Japanese American internment� as �racist� and �unjustified�� is�at best�mere
speculation. This speculation might be worth a moment�s reflection if Malkin
also addressed the voluminous historical research that has shown the impact of
racism, nativism, political pressure, economic jealousies, and war panic on the
government�s policies toward Japanese Americans. Greg
Robinson, for example, a historian at the University of Quebec at Montreal,
carefully traces the development of Roosevelt�s view of Japanese Americans as
immutably foreign and dangerous in his 2001 book By Order of the President:
FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans. And at least half a dozen
works by Roger Daniels, a historian at the University of Cincinnati, document
the intense lobbying for evacuation by California nativist groups and white
agricultural interests as well as the extraordinary viciousness of America�s
leading newspaper columnists in demanding that Japanese Americans (in the words
of one of them) be �herded up, packed off, and given the inside room in the
Badlands.� But Malkin does not so much as
mention any of that evidence, except to say that a reader can find it elsewhere
in �pedantic tomes� and �educational propaganda.� She dismisses what she cannot
rebut. These
objections to Malkin�s handling of the evidence are the concerns of scholars
and historians, and some may think them unfair measures for the work of a
political columnist. �I am neither a historian nor a lawyer,� Malkin reminds
her reader in the book�s prefatory note. But even political columnists are
bound by ordinary rules of inference and logic, and it is on this score that
her book fails even more spectacularly. Let
us posit, for the sake of argument, that FDR
relied on concrete evidence of Japanese-American spying when, in mid-February
of 1942, he signed the executive order that authorized the military to exclude
people from sensitive military areas. At most, that would mean that the
government had a basis for doing something to detect and prevent
Japanese-American spying. It would not mean that the government had a basis for
doing what it actually did, which was to evict more than 110,000 people
of Japanese ancestry (including tens of thousands of U.S. citizens) from their
homes without charges or hearings, exclude them from the entire coastal region,
and detain them in desolate camps for years after any threat of a Japanese
assault on the U.S. mainland had evaporated. The
financial costs to Japanese Americans were enormous; estimates run well above
$150 million (in 1940s dollars) for property loss alone, and that figure does
not include loss of income or opportunity. Neither, of course, does it reflect
the incalculable emotional losses Japanese Americans suffered through
stigmatization and incarceration. Almost all of the financial losses went
uncompensated; a government program for paying claims for documented property
loss ultimately paid out an average of 25 cents on every claimed dollar. Token
redress payments of $20,000 to surviving internees in the late 1980s were a
pittance given the actual losses. Surely a handful of ambiguous diplomatic
messages cannot support the infliction of this amount of suffering. Malkin
might have written a book called In Defense of Limited Measures
to Protect against Japanese-American Subversion. But she instead wrote In
Defense of Internment. This is not a technical distinction. What supported
the confinement of Japanese Americans through 1942, 1943, 1944, and a
good part of 1945? It was certainly not the MAGIC
cables, or any other intelligence source. What supported it was instead the sort of view that Gen.
DeWitt expressed in 1942, when he said that �the Japanese race is an enemy
race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States
soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become �Americanized,� the
racial strains are undiluted.� What supported it was the sort of opinion voiced
by California Attorney General (later U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice) Earl
Warren when he argued that the absence of subversive activity by
Japanese Americans proved that such activity was just around the corner. What
supported it, in other words, was racism and wartime hysteria. And what supported the government�s decision to force all
American citizens of Japanese ancestry into camps for years while taking no
programmatic action of any sort against American citizens of German or Italian
ancestry? It is important to remember that while Lou Shimizu and Joe Takahashi
sat in desert camps, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio played baseball. This was a
breathtaking discrimination among U.S. citizens who shared every cause for
suspicion except for their race. Malkin justifies this
discrimination as a military measure in a single paragraph, contending that our
European enemies posed a lesser threat to the U.S. mainland than the Japanese
and had fewer spies, and that American citizens of German and Italian parentage
would have been too logistically difficult to exclude because of their large
numbers. These justifications defy reason. Germany was a more dangerous presence along the East
Coast of the U.S. mainland for a far longer time than was Japan along the West
Coast, and it twice landed saboteurs on Eastern shores. Germany had a network
of spies whose existence did not need to be pieced together from vague
references in decrypted diplomatic messages. And as for Malkin�s point that
there were so many potential German-American and Italian-American saboteurs on
the East Coast that it made sense to do nothing to them�well, that argument
refutes itself. Lurking behind Malkin�s book is a more basic error about
the way human beings make decisions. Malkin writes about a world in which the
president and his military advisers acted primarily because of either
clear military threats or racism and hysteria. But of course that is not
how racism and hysteria work. Racism and hysteria are irrational lenses through
which people see their world, including its military threats. Malkin writes as
though it were possible to wring prejudice and panic from the minds of the
military men who planned and executed the Japanese-American internment. To say
that racist and hysterical planners may have believed it was necessary to evict
and detain tens of thousands of innocent Americans is one thing. To say, as
Malkin does, that these planners truly were motivated by cool assessment of
solid intelligence is quite another. In
the final analysis, In Defense of Internment is a
book that did not need writing. When she finally gets around to proposing
antiterrorism policy in the last chapter of her book, Malkin advocates such
measures as allowing law enforcement and airport security to take account of
ethnicity, and barring Muslims from serving in combat roles in the Middle East.
To support these measures, she had no need to take up the cause of defending
the lengthy and miserable detention of tens of thousands of innocent American
citizens of Japanese ancestry. Why,
then, did she choose to take up that cause, and why now? Could it be that she
actually supports the idea of detaining American Arabs and Muslims? �Make no
mistake,� she says in her book, �I am not advocating rounding up all Arabs or
Muslims and tossing them into camps.� Forgive
me the mistake.� Eric
L. Muller is George R. Ward Professor at the
University of North Carolina School of Law. He blogs at isthatlegal.org. |
