Is That Legal?

I'm eager to hear Malkin's response.

Wow.

The underlying messages aren't surprising in the least but it is useful seeing it in black and white.

Have you written to Jesse yet asking for comment?

Eric,

Could the reference to "control[ling] our own white citizens in California" have anything to do with protecting Japanese-Americans from lynching? I'm not too familiar with instances of white on Japanese violence during that period.

I should know better than to skim. My question is fully answered not only in your post, Eric, but for anyone who isn't at all familiar with the events (as I am/was), read the second link of the update.

Malkin won't need to respond. A phalanx of wingnuts will dispute the authenticity of the document.

You know the drill: "They didn't have that kind of typewriter with those fonts in 1942..."

I know this isn't the most intellectual comment I've ever added, but...

"Col. Scobey"? Might there be an extra O MIA somewhere? Do you think of him as possibly a kind of laid back, pothead colonel, possibly jonesing for some snacks?

Few remember that "Fury", Fritz Lang's movie about a lynch mob, was based upon a case in California in the 30's and not the deep south. See also the "special deputies" raised to police the farm workers until well into the 60's--there was a thug underculture in the southwest quite capable of the violence Robinson describes--no one disputed "Bad Day at Black Rock" as being improbable.

The only reason I'm not impressed by this is that I expect this quality find from Prof. Robinson.

The document is from July, which is after the security issue could be safely put to bed; it's also getting close to November, with Big Labour Internment Groupie Culbert Olson starting to sense Earl Warren about to knock him senseless in the Gubenatorial election.

I bet patriotism in California reached levels seldom found outside Alabama .

Its too simple to think of decisions like internment in terms of polar extremes. It may be what is easiest for us to get "fired up" about, or what makes it easier to distinguish one point of view from another, but hardly is it ever accurate. Isn't it possible, indeed likely, that there were legitimate concerns about spy activity given the culture of the time? Given this memo, it seems similarly probable that there were concnerns about public, or cultural, reaction and backlash. Why are these two things treated as mutually exclusive? If its merely the case that we demand of our government complete disclosure of all rationale behind any momentus decision, then we simply trade one set of positives and negatives for another set. A government that discloses it doesn't trust its own citizenry to control their own racial prejudices in a time of war may not be the safest course of action for the government or the citizenry. I'm not going to attempt to decide which system (be it full disclosure, or disclosure by decision) is more or less beneficial in the end. But I do think its important to remember that many reasons likely go into any large decision, and just because we now find out one of those reasons wasn't disclosed doesn't preclude the probability that other reasons, indeed those that already were disclosed, were also important factors. Just because we now find out more information doesn't mean the information that was disclosed was a lie. To quote: They were under no suspicion "for the most part." It seems a fairly simple argument to make that any suspected class of people for spying will, for the most part, be wholly innocent of such suspicions. By extention, I have little trouble believing that those in the government, in that time and in that culture, certainly suspected spying by their enemies. Many reasons, one decision, little disclosure. This memo doesn't change my mind that many reasons, including the ones originally disclosed, informed the decision makers about that ill-fated choice to inter.

Multiple reasson, maybe. But the note on the memo makes it clear that the main reason was racism. It wasn't just that "for the most part" they were innocent (which can easily be read as a concession to bureaucratic atmospherices more than an allusion to fact). What clinches it is that they "were moved largely because we felt we could not control our own white citizens."

Whatever multiple reasons there might have been, the significant one was race. Period.

Very interesting. This provides an additional (albeit rather pathetic) defense of internment as a policy of protection, and an indictment of it as a policy of racism.

The very fact that an African-American activist (see second link above), however "ill-conceived" in motive was able to perceive this as being for the protection of Japanese-Americans speaks volumes about how people interpret what they hear from the media, even long ago.

It's also indicative of an interesting view that whites (in terms of violence) would be uncontrollable. A racist view in and of itself that we've seen repeated against other non-white targets.

Unlike most here, I like Michelle Malkin and most of what she writes. I think she's wrong on a number of areas on internment, but I applaud her and people like Eric for stimulating an interesting and necessary debate.

Holmwood

Actual....California was even worse than the deep south for many years....It even had state laws making it illegal for anyone Chinese to be marry....They also had state laws banning many other things if you were Japanese...Chinese, Hispanic, Black and others.......(especially Native American).

I did a quick read through a large portion of Malkin's book......If I were to give it a grade, it would have been an F minus to and Incomplete.

She left much out that didn't support her premise....and then even took small instances (pilot crashing on Niihau) and came up with ludicrous conclusions.

When were the German Americans rounded up and placed in the internment camps for fear of their allegiance to Germany? I must have missed that in the college history texts? HHMMMMMM!

Or the Italians, or the Vichy French, or the Austrians, or Algerians.....

Does Milkin have Stockholm Syndrome or something? Does she think she is in the club because she gets to hang out with White Supremecists or something? Does she not see they just use her as fake legitimicy so they can say "see we are not racist, look an almost brown person! And we like her! (as long as she keeps saying what we want her to)"

Insanity.