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September 19, 2005
Michelle Malkin's Ever-Shrinking Defense of Racial Internment
This document (further) devastates the revisionist claims of Michelle Malkin in her book "In Defense of Internment." (You can read the rest of the devastation here.) Malkin argues that McCloy was the chief architect of the Japanese American internment, and that he settled on the policy of evacuation and internment because of top-secret decrypted evidence of Japanese American spying (the so-called "MAGIC" diplomatic cables) to which he, and a very few others, were privy.
That Robinson's document helps kill Malkin's thesis is obvious: Five months after the launch of the policy of evacuation and internment, McCloy tells a superior at the War Department that the main reason for the policy was an out-of-control white population in California.
Malkin has finally posted a response to Robinson's document and Ramsey's column. There are lots of words, but in the end she says two main things. First, she tries to create doubt about the authenticity of the handwritten note by emphasizing that the copy of the McCloy memo that Robinson found in the Patterson papers was an office copy in which the handwritten note had been typed in after the fact. Second, she diminishes the significance of McCloy's admission because it came as a postscript to a memo about whether the government was adequately feeding the internees rather than as the focus of a memo about security.
On the first point—the authenticity of the handwritten note—we expect a Dan-Ratheresque disquisition about kerning and typeface, but Malkin gives up the game before really even starting it. When all is said and done, she says this:
"I would venture a guess that McCloy probably wrote the note. But unless someone locates the original, we cannot be certain. In failing to acknowledge this uncertainty, Ramsey and Robinson are either being sloppy or dishonest."
Ramsey and Robinson are being sloppy or dishonest?
Let's do a reality check: Malkin builds her defense of the racial detention 110,000 people on three key propositions:
1. Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy actually saw and read perhaps half a dozen out of the thousands upon thousands of intercepted and decoded MAGIC messages.
2. McCloy understood them to indicate that American citizens of Japanese ancestry were participating in spy rings.
3. McCloy understood the mass removal and detention of 110,000 people as an appropriate and proportionate response to the threat stated or implied in the MAGIC decrypts.
What contemporaneous evidence does Malkin adduce for any of these essential propositions?
None.
Not a shred, on any of the three points. We do not know for sure that McCloy actually saw any of the specific MAGIC messages Malkin highlights. If he saw them, we have no evidence of what he understood them to mean. And if he understood them to mean that some American citizens of Japanese ancestry were spying for Japan, we have no evidence this led him to conclude that every man, woman, and child of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast—the elderly, the senile, the gravely ill, the orphans—needed to be forced from their homes and their hospital beds and their orphanages and shut behind barbed wire.
And yet according to Malkin, it is Ramsey and Robinson who are being "sloppy or dishonest."
On the second point—the significance of the admission—she says this:
"A handwritten note scrawled on the bottom of a memo about food is not the venue for discussing state secrets such as the MAGIC messages which revealed extensive Japanese espionage activity on the West Coast."
This is priceless, because the point Malkin makes in her book is that there was no venue at all, anywhere, ever, for discussing state secrets such as the MAGIC messages. They were too top-secret, she maintains, and thus nobody with access to them could write anything down about them or talk about them to anybody who did not have clearance.
So her claim is really this: Out of many thousands of decoded Japanese diplomatic cables, there were several that mentioned the idea of Japanese American espionage. We have no idea whether they were true, or whether anyone actually saw them, or what meaning anyone ascribed to them at the time, or what action anyone thought they required. We can't have any idea about those things, because the cables were too top-secret for anyone to mention in any document or conversation that appears in the historical record. But surely those messages, and not the hysteria, racism, and economic opportunism that scholars have documented, just must have been the justification for the evacuation and internment!
Maybe this sort of reasoning suffices for an appearance on Hannity & Colmes or a column at VDare. But for a work of history, which "In Defense of Internment" purports to be, it doesn't even pass the giggle test.
Malkin also says this on the subject of the significance of the memo:
"Ramsey and Robinson believe the note on the bottom of an obscure food memo by an unknown author trumps everything else that McCloy said or wrote during the 1940s and the 1980s."
No. Ramsey and Robinson believe that the note on the bottom of an obscure food memo by an author even Malkin concedes "probably" to be the Assistant Secretary of War further corroborates the already overwhelming case that the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans was not a decision grounded primarily in actual military necessity. Nobody needs to "trump" the vague and self-protective ramblings of an 87-year-old John McCloy. In the scholarly study of the Japanese American internment, McCloy's memories do not dictate a truth that scholars need to overturn. Quite the opposite is true. McCloy's memories are so out of step with the overwhelming body of evidence about the internment that it is McCloy's memories about the impact of MAGIC that need to be corroborated. Malkin has never even tried to do that.
Finally, it's interesting that Malkin nowhere even mentions the other direct evidence about what prompted the internment that Robinson cites—the February 1943 admission by McCloy's top assistant to an officer in the Provost Marshal General's Office that a key basis for the evacuation had been economic:
"That [sic] West Coast saw a way to get rid of the Japs, they got rid of them, now they don't want them out there, they want to take the property over."
We continue to wait for Malkin's explanation of that one.
Posted by Eric at September 19, 2005 8:57 AM
Comments
1. I am a historian dealing in early 19th century America. If the fact that a document, or note, was "handwritten" and then typed, or vice versa, cast doubt on the document's authenticity, there would be absolutely no history of government, law, politics, economics, social structures, or anything else.
2. "But unless someone locates the original, we cannot be certain." Why is that, exactly? To be a paranoid jingoist wingnut is one thing. But to inject such sentiment into the motives of historical actors (to imply, i.e., that somebody may have slipped the note in there somewhere along the line) or to contemporaries studying the same subject (I shudder to use the word, "colleagues") is an indication of Malkin's unprofessionalism. Not only unprofessional in the way she packages her 'idea' but her methods and, most important, the way that she deals with criticism. Criticism, after all, is the pulse that makes academia work.
Posted by: geist at September 19, 2005 10:24 AM
does being right ever get old?
just wanted to thank you for all your work on this project. while academia must never be reflexively defensive or hostile to the questions that come from without...
it must always remember that it does have an idenity, one built of certain assumptions of what scholarship means, and how it operates. innovation from these traditions is justified by deep discussion with those very ways.
it is not that Malkin does not have a right to do history, or that anyone is a priori to be excluded from academic discourse. but as scholars in our respective fields, it is important that we relate to the public how we operate, why we have the standards we do, and how they serve to keep our work both curious and humble.
Posted by: ben at September 19, 2005 11:19 AM
All these years I've been writing and publishing books always being careful to be as honest as I can possibly be, even when writing fiction..... And suddenly it dawns on me: All I need do to write a great selling title is rewrite history.
How's these for great ideas?
1. How The South Won The War
2. Lennon-- The Beatle Who Led The 1918 War For Russian Democracy
3. Mason And Dixon-- Journey To The Pacific
4. How Robert E. Lee Ended Slavery In America
5. Jimmy Carter Wins Second Term!
6. George Bush-- Hero Of The War Against Terror
7. The life And Times Of United States President, Osama bin Ladin
8. Chuck Berry-- The Grandfather Of Bluegrass Music
9. Elvis Lives Next Door
10. Billy The Blogging Poet-- Greatest Blogger In The World!
You reckon any of those would sell?
Posted by: Billy The Blogging Poet at September 19, 2005 10:17 PM
Earth to Michelle: You now are officially like the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," all extremities lopped off, writhing on the ground, spurting blood and shouting, "It's only a flesh wound."
To paraphrase a line from my kids' current favorite movie, it'd be nice if some asses just stayed kicked, y'know?
Posted by: Lex at September 19, 2005 10:27 PM
perhaps they could find a sample of McCloy's handwriting?
Posted by: Nic at September 20, 2005 11:09 AM
Why do we even bother with a Michelle Malkin?
Are we going to fight every single nasty and evil outbreak; futility and exhaustion come to mind.
As we do in class, teach what to do, not what not to do.
Posted by: RedWolf at September 20, 2005 12:24 PM
As I always disclaim when I make this point: I'm biased - but Michelle Malkin is the most-read blogger on the internet.
If we shouldn't bother with the most-read voice in our particular medium (and I'm counting Eric as a blogger here, not in any of his other hats) then have we already given up?
Posted by: Auguste at September 20, 2005 3:07 PM
Right on, Eric.
Posted by: Cathy Young at September 20, 2005 7:03 PM
Michelle Malkin is the most read blogger?
Really?
I did not know this.
But then I define a blogger as someone who is known for their blog, and only for that. In that category I would put Wonkette, Kos, Atrios, Juan Cole, etc, etc. I hesitate to even include Cole because he is a professor.
Malkin is a propagandist who became a "blogger" when it became obvious she could reach more of her freaks this way. The same way white house prostitute Jeff Gannon started a blog after his nude "8 inches, cut" pictures surfaced on the internet. Until that point she had a published column through townhall that was available on the internet, like a lot of other "journalists". (Most are legit, but she isn't, without Scaife and his like, and Regnery to prop her up, she'd just be another homeless,deranged street corner preacher).
Please don't insult the real, anonymous bloggers by putting her in that category. For one thing, most of these folks started in total anonymity doing what they do because they love it, and most make zero money. They do what they do as a labor of love, not because they are whoring themselves as the mouthpiece of ultra-libertarian right-wingers.
Posted by: Kerry at September 23, 2005 9:32 AM
"They do what they do as a labor of love, not because they are whoring themselves as the mouthpiece of ultra-libertarian right-wingers."
Well actually "ultra-libertarians" and people who currently pass themselves off today as "right-wingers" frequently disagree. Ron Paul is a Republican from Texas who is effectively Libertarian. He has written many articles critical of the Patriot Act:
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=5815
Modern day Libertarians have been highly critical of both the US actions in Iraq and the weakening of the 4th amendment via the Patriot acts I and II. As a Libertarian I feel the Japanese Interment during WWII was unlawful, immoral, and clearly racist (Since Americans of Italians and German were not also likewise placed in interment camps..)
Posted by: smokedham at September 24, 2005 12:05 AM
It is more than obvious that Michelle has very serious hostility issues. Where those come from is really anyones guess. I have a few ideas. I view her as a complete joke as a journalist. I only see an angry child attempting to get attention through conflict. If this is all based on "what Michelle says" or "what Michelle thinks" then I am not even sure why someone would spend time on it. As far as her Blog goes, I would really like to see some hard evidence that she is "one of the most popular or most read on the internet" If you ask me thats a load of crap. Her blog is just a conduit for her to spew her hate filled rants as is her stupid book. I could think of a lot of other productive things to do with my time than being worried about what Michelle Malkin things or says.
Posted by: Chris at May 11, 2006 9:55 AM
Don't you think it's just because she's soooooo good-lookin'?
Posted by: Irish at May 15, 2006 2:07 PM