I have twice started a point-by-point response to Michelle Malkin's latest comments, and twice stopped. Malkin has elided or failed to respond to the basic critiques Eric Muller and I have made, and I fear that the only result of my responding will just be to prolong a debate in which everything has been said.
Malkin's whole operation, and the logical gymnastics involved, reminds me of nothing so much as the attempts of scientists in past ages to defend the Aristotelian thesis that the Earth was at the center of the solar system and that planets moved in perfect circles. Scientists such as Ptolemy devised extremely complicated and ingenious sets of formulas to describe aberrations in planetary orbits such as retrograde motion (apparently backwards motion) among the outer planets, including describing orbital paths made up of circles within circles. When Kepler and his successors substituted the heliocentric model, in which the Earth and other planets orbited the Sun, and abandoned the search for perfect circles, they discovered that each planet's orbit could be described by a simple ellipse pattern. However, the geocentrists refused to accept this accurate and clear model, since it violated their religious faith, and they continued to devise overly complicated explanations for observable phenomena.
In the same way, Malkin and her defenders, to serve their tendentious
political argument, are forced to jump through logical hoops and exclude from consideration actual evidence that would, to the average observer (as well as to generations of researchers) most easily account for events.
Most notably, Malkin disregards the primary role in events of West Coast military figures, political leaders, commercial groups and opinion makers, since the evidence of anti-Japanese racism and hysteria in their actions and motivations is so overwhelming as to be irrefutable. As a result, they are forced to invent a vast conspiracy in order to explain events--the prewar MAGIC cables (which offer no direct evidence of espionage by Japanese American agents). They must then assert that these prewar cables--and not the views of those actually on the West Coast--were fundamental to the ultimate decision.
Without the MAGIC cables as ultimate motor, Malkin's entire thesis tumbles. Yet, the conspiracy she outlines does not fit the observable evidence--there is not a single mention of MAGIC among the various Top Secret papers discussing the case for mass removal of Japanese Americans, and no positive evidence from the period that they played any role whatever in the government's views of Japanese Americans. If it had, those who had access to the MAGIC cables--President Roosevelt, Secretary of War Stimson and Assistant Secretary McCloy--would have supported mass removal of all West Coast Japanese Americans immediately after Pearl Harbor. With such certain knowledge, they would not have needed to wait for two months, for most of which these they openly opposed mass removal (or, in the case of FDR, authorized efforts to defend loyal Japanese Americans).
I am unable to discern how Malkin's charges about MAGIC, and the evidence she adduces to support them, differ in substance from those formerly made by David Lowman, and I defy her to prove otherwise, as I defy her to show concrete evidence within the MAGIC intercepts that the "vast" network she claims of Japanese American agents ever existed. Where are the names, or at least descriptions, of the informants?
I have very little to add to Eric's comments on Michelle Malkin's "final rebuttal." He hits the nail on the head. Malkin sums up her whole presentation on the reasons for the wartime removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans by asking how it was, if these events were prompted primarily by racism and hysteria, that military authorities and intelligence sources were so worried about security.
Of course, American authorities were concerned by the threat from Japan, and rightly so. However, the primary concern of the knowledgeable authorities was sabotage by Japanese agents who were Caucasians, or Japanese infiltrated into the United States, NOT Japanese Americans. Rightly so, once again. Of the 19 people ultimately convicted of being Japanese agents, 18 were Caucasian. None was Japanese American .
Those who opposed mass evacuation of Japanese Americans were not uninformed about the situation on the West Coast or sentimental about Japan. On the contrary, it was precisely their profound understanding of the nature of the threat that enabled them to say with confidence that Japanese Americans were loyal, and that any necessary action could be handled by the relevant authorities, so mass military removal was NOT warranted. J. Edgar Hoover, in a report to the President in November 1941, warned of the espionage activities on the West Coast of Japanese agents disguised as "language officers." However, Hoover also reported that the Japanese were so suspicious of the Nisei that they would not only not use them, but ordered those who booked passage to Japan followed on the suspicion that they were American agents. It was Kenneth Ringle of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the outstanding defender of Japanese Americans, who led the raid on the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles in March 1941 that enabled American authorities to learn of Japanese intelligence operations, presumably including the Tachibana ring.
Malkin asks, if the Japanese American were not a threat, how it was that two defense zones, Terminal Island and Bainbridge Island, were created on the West Coast. As I explain in BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT, it was Curtis B. Munson, Franklin Roosevelt's special agent--the same Curtis Munson who claimed that Japanese Americans were overwhelmingly loyal--who was indispensable in recommending that San Pedro be turned into a defense area to guard against potential sabotage. As a result, on November 27, 1941, ten days before the Pearl Harbor attack, the Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor Naval Defense Sea Area was created.
[A] commenter [to an earlier post] takes issues with a statement that I once made to the effect that I thought the Supreme Court had made the correct decision in the Korematsu case, when it refused to invalidate an army order, approved by President Roosevelt (and by Earl Warren, who at the time was the governor of California), removing persons of Japanese extraction from the west coast in 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor. In hindsight, it is apparent that the order was erroneous--that the Japanese-Americans did not pose a threat to the nation and that the order was influenced by racism. But the wisdom of hindsight is treacherous. In March of 1942 when the order was issued, just three months after Pearl Harbor, there was not only fear that Japan would attack the continental United States, but also a need to demonstrate resoluteness in a war for which the nation was not prepared.
"After some two dozen posts and nearly 18,000 words [Muller and Robinson] still have not explained why, if internment, evacuation, and relocation were driven primarily by racism and wartime hysteria, our intelligence agencies were so concerned about Japanese espionage on the West Coast."
Lowman fervently believes that the raw [MAGIC] intercepts speak for themselves and trump other sources of intelligence on the Japanese American community. However, the messages speak more of intentions than results.
. . .
The hints contained in MAGIC, if decisionmakers paid them any heed at all, were not by themselves sufficient to justify the mass evacuation and incarceration of over 100,000 civilians.
. . .
Lowman's book rehashes old arguments and gives a tortured reading of the available intelligence sources. He errs in giving absolute primacy to communications intelligence, no matter how ambiguous. His polemics should be viewed as symptomatic of the lingering bitterness stemming from Pearl Harbor and the emotions raised by apologies and compensation.
The book . . . did not persuade me that the "internment" was justified based on the information available to the government at the time. From what I can tell, the government did not have evidence that disloyalty on the part of ethnic Japanese was widespread. Rather, the best information it had (which admittedly may have consisted of little more than educated guesses) was that such disloyalty was not widespread at all. Under these circumstances, it was improper in my view for the government to evacuate and relocate all ethnic Japanese living on the West Coast. Instead, the correct approach would have been some combination of the measures urged by high government officials who did not support internment -- such as excluding ethnic Japanese from sensitive jobs, evacuating them from highly sensitive areas, and/or interning those among them as to whom there was some reasonable suspicion of disloyalty, including perhaps those active in certain organizations where disloyalty was widespread.
I strongly recommend this book. Among other things, Michelle demonstrates that, contrary to what millions of schoolchildren have been taught, (1) there was substantial evidence of ethnic Japanese disloyalty and espionage before, during, and after Pearl Harbor, (2) President Roosevelt was not hoodwinked by bigoted military leaders, and (3) there is no reason to conclude that the decision to evacuate and relocate ethnic Japanese living on the West Coast was motivated by racism or hysteria.
**By the way, if Miregnoff was persuaded that "there is no reason to conclude" that the program was motivated by racism or hysteria, yet he also believes that internment was not "justified based on the information available to the government at the time," then I wonder just what Mirengoff thinks did produce the government's program. Sunspots?
RUSH: Give us some of the evidence.
MALKIN: Well, there was a lot of evidence from MAGIC messages, and these were cables that were high-level Top Secret diplomatic traffic from Tokyo to its consular offices in the west coast and it shows that there was this vast espionage network being organized using first generation and second generation ethnic Japanese.
Michelle Malkin’s book bases its entire argument in favor of racial profiling on the premise that it was justified in the case of the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. Having done my part as a historian to show the illogical and factually unsupported nature of the arguments Malkin deploys to support this position, I had intended to avoid further comment, not least to avoid giving free publicity to such a book. However, Malkin’s book has encouraged a group of insistent bloggers and blog commentators, particularly a man who calls himself “Bob”, to pepper all the sites that feature a discussion of Malkin’s work with a common set of arguments (often identically worded) in defense of her position.
To be sure, Malkin’s defenders do not all attempt, as she does, to justify the ultimate policy of removal and indefinite incarceration. Rather, the crux of their position is that Executive Order 9066 itself was based not on hysteria or racism but on the actual situation at the time, and that we cannot say now that the government leaders were wrong to react to the information they had. I do not feel it necessary to restate my objections to Malkin’s individual arguments. However, this new position needs to be carefully addressed, since it can otherwise muddy a great many waters and spread confusion.
Before addressing the specific factual basis of this argument, the first thing to say about it is that it seems curious, and rather suspicious, that those who use it support Malkin’s larger thesis about the wisdom of ethnic profiling, instead of citing it to refute her. Why? Because even if we accept for the sake of argument that it was taken in response to a plausible threat, the government’s action only proves the unreliability of race-based selection and the danger of relying solely on ethnic or racial factors in assessing risk. Mass removal was subsequently shown to be unnecessary—-Japanese Americans contributed widely to the war effort, the FCC discredited General DeWitt’s claims of shoreline signalling of Japanese ships, and American occupation authorities in Japan after the war studying Japanese documents found no evidence of giant spy rings. Moreover, the vast majority of those involved—-from Assistant Attorney General Tom Clark to Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron to California Attorney General Earl Warren—-subsequently declared the policy to have been a mistake. As early as the Eisenhower Administration, long before there was an active redress movement, Attorney General William Rogers issued an official statement apologizing for the government’s error. Even Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy supported legislation during the postwar years granting reimbursement to Japanese Americans, aliens or citizens, for their property losses during evacuation. McCloy told Congress that such a law “is only an appropriate form of recognition for the loyalty which Japanese Americans as a whole evidenced to the country during the war.”
The second thing to say about arguments of those who defend Executive Order 9066 is that they have the burden of proof not only that evidence of an actual threat existed (as they claim the MAGIC cables do—-a claim I have previously called into serious question) but that it guided the conduct of those in government. This must be shown by direct evidence. It cannot simply be assumed, with the burden of proof on the other side. The 9/11 commission’s work demonstrates the fallacy of saying that since documentary evidence existed, and that government officials had access to it, they must have seen it and reacted accordingly—-the President and his advisors had access to evidence that Al-Qaida planned to attack but did not act on it.
Similarly, arguments claiming to be based solely on evidence available at the time must not beg the question of intent. To put it simply, people have a tendency to find what they look for--if Japan appeared to Americans to be a bigger threat than Germany, it was a natural result of the fact that government leaders had concentrated their prewar efforts on investigating Japan. One is reminded of the military chiefs at Pearl Harbor who were so fixed on combating the imagined threat of sabotage by local Japanese Americans that they clustered American aircraft on the ground, with the result that American aviation was wiped out by Japanese bombers in the first stages of the attack.
Finally, the existence of a plausible threat does not foreclose judgment of the government’s response based on the nature of the actions. That is, even assuming for the sake of argument that the Army acted in response to a genuine concern about disloyalty by Japanese Americans, we can say that racism or hysteria informed its response if its actions were disproportionate or arbitrary--for the historian, all is NOT fair in love and war. The Army chiefs assumed that people of Japanese ancestry posed an undifferentiated threat and made no serious effort to devise a more limited policy or to balance evacuation against other defense needs (such as farm produce). Indeed, since the West Coast military summarily moved out all people of Japanese ancestry, including babies and orphans who could not conceivably have been connected to Japan, the claims for military necessity must be questioned.
Furthermore, the government’s decision to remove the West Coast Japanese cannot be isolated simply to the time it was decreed, with no attempt to factor in either later information or later events. (Malkin herself accepted this, at least initially, and thus attempted to justify the indeterminate incarceration that followed, but she has since shifted her position at various times towards the fallback argument of stopping with Executive Order 9066.) If excluding Japanese Americans from the West Coast in Spring 1942, was simply a military decision, it would follow that it was a military necessity to keep them excluded in 1943 and 1944, even after the Army had established hearings to determine the loyalty of the Japanese Americans, and the threat of Japanese invasion was sufficiently distant that the West Coast ceased to be a defense area. I have grave doubts that Malkin’s defenders can explain away all the evidence of racial bias by the military.
(This said, we must be careful not to read backwards in our judgments. For example, the fact that some 15 percent of those in the camps, after being summarily confined for a year, refused for various reasons to swear unqualified loyalty to the government that confined them does not mean that 15 percent of Japanese Americans in the prewar era were actively, or even passively, disloyal. The importance of the inmates’ immediate circumstances in shaping their responses is starkly indicated by the enormous fluctuation in the percentages of people who refused to affirm their loyalty in the different camps.)
Even without these other considerations, the arguments that form the basis of the claim that Executive order was a rational response to a military threat do not withstand scrutiny. As the great journalist and critic H.L. Mencken famously said, there is a simple solution for every problem, neat, plausible, and wrong. This is such a case, as a serious examination of the Malkinites’ fallback position shows. This position, such as I understand it, can be fairly summarized briefly thus:
Premise A.
The government acted reasonably in its “ethnic profiling” and removal of Japanese Americans, irrespective of citizenship, because:
1. The United States had reason to fear Japan in early 1942, as Japan had control of the Pacific Ocean, and was sinking U.S. ships. Unlike Germany and Italy, it had the capacity to invade the United States.
2. There was evidence that Japan had created a spy network.
3. Since ethnic Japanese in the Philippines had supported the Japanese invader, it could be assumed that Japanese in the United States would do so too. American citizens of Japanese ancestry in Japan supported the Japanese cause, while Japanese aliens in the United States expressed support for Japan.
Premise B. The removal policy was not racist, because.
4. Japanese Americans were removed only from the West Coast, the sole zone which was threatened, and not from other areas of the country, and since other Asians were not removed.
5. There was no mass ethnic-based removal in Hawaii because martial law had been declared.
6. There was no mass ethnic-based removal of German or Italian aliens or because it was unfeasible.
7. The Supreme Court upheld mass removal in the Korematsu case, which means that the Justices accepted the government’s characterization of its reasons, and Korematsu remains good law.
Premise A relies on exaggeration and a failure to contextualize. The United States was indeed at war with Japan, and the Japanese had taken over the Western Pacific, but (as David Niewert points out) it is hardly accurate to say that Japan controlled the Pacific. In any case, by this logic Japan was a threat from the time of Pearl Harbor, so if the loyalties of Japanese Americans were suspect based on their prewar conduct, why did the Army wait two months to advocate their removal-—two months during which time, military officials conceded, there were NO reports of sabotage or espionage.
Most importantly, Japan did not pose a greater threat than Germany, whose subjects (let alone U.S.-born descendants) were not likewise targeted for wholesale removal. In fact, Japan was considered a lesser threat than Germany (hence the Allies’ Germany-first strategy). German U-Boats sank hundreds of allied ships, and the threat of air raids by German planes was taken seriously. Germany, too, had a spy network, and unlike Japan it could rely on its own subjects and their descendants.
I have not made a study of the conduct of ethnic Japanese in the Philippines, but I do know that their case was little discussed, if at all, in the debates leading up to Executive Order 9066. After all, these were people who were not United States citizens or people who had spent their entire lives in the United States, as the Nisei were. The actions of American-born Japanese who lived for many years in Japan and were subjected to various pressures from the Japanese government is likewise scarcely relevant to the ideals and loyalties, let alone actions, of those who chose America. Even if there were many Issei and some Nisei who favored Japan in the prewar years, the two countries were not then at war. The potential danger they posed was magnified because of their racial difference. To take an obvious contrary case, although Charles Lindbergh was widely perceived as pro-German because of his prewar isolationism, and FDR himself privately stated his certainty that Lindbergh was a Nazi, he was not interned once war was declared, and indeed he volunteered in support of the American war effort.
Premise B, despite its surface plausibility, relies too much on ignoring conflicting evidence to be sustainable. Mass evacuation was indeed limited to the West Coast. That is, however, where 90 percent of mainland Japanese Americans lived, where the historic prejudice against them was strongest, and where the mass campaign for their removal was centered. It is also where General DeWitt, with his racial bias, was in command. In any case, it is just as plausible to say that the evacuation’s being limited to the West Coast proves that hysteria and racism underlay it than the contrary position, for if Japanese Americans were potentially disloyal, why were those outside the West Coast not equally dangerous? It is likewise no argument to say that because other Asian groups were not subjected to arbitrary action, the government’s policy was not racially based. American mass media and military propaganda made a distinction along national lines between “good Asians” (like the Chinese) and “bad Asians” (like the Japanese).
I have already discussed the fact that martial law was declared in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, while President Roosevelt and Navy Secretary Knox pushed (unsuccessfully) for mass removal and/or incarceration in Hawaii at least through early 1943. Whatever the basis of their campaign, it at least proves that the existence of martial law did not persuade these leaders that mass removal was unnecessary, so it could not have been in itself the reason that no such removal occurred.
The question of why Japanese Americans and not German and Italian aliens (let alone Americans of German or Italian ancestry) were interned is too complex to be reduced to a question of feasibility, or simple numbers. While there were clearly too many German aliens nationwide to be easily rounded up, those on the West Coast could have been, and indeed General DeWitt was prepared to do so once the removal of Japanese Americans was completed, and was forbidden to do by the White House. In any case, the concept of “feasibility” is itself inextricably tied up with racism. That is, if the Japanese Americans, unlike Germans and Italians, could be moved without stirring up opposition and affecting morale, it was because popular prejudice against them was strong enough to make possible arbitrary action.
Finally, the nicest thing that can be said about the Korematsu decision is that it reflects the Court’s historic deference to the Army and Executive in times of war, and not a reasoned agreement with the government’s evidence. Indeed, during the 1980s federal judges overturned the convictions of Korematsu and the other Japanese American defendants because of a pattern of government misconduct and tampering with evidence during the trials. As was discovered in the early 1980s, when West Coast Defense Commander General DeWitt drafted his Final Report, he explained that his reasons for instituting mass removal was the alleged impossibility of telling a loyal Japanese American from a disloyal one. This draft, which set forth DeWitt’s authentic recital of the reasoning underlying his policy of mass removal, was suppressed by Assistant Secretary of War McCloy. McCloy ordered DeWitt to destroy all copies of his draft and to prepare a new one which would present the claim that evacuation was necessary only because there was otherwise insufficient time to determine the loyalty of individuals. Similarly, the FCC and other government bodies had informed the Justice Department that General DeWitt’s claims that Japanese Americans had engaged in shore-to-ship signalling, which lay at the center of his case for evacuation, were unfounded. Rather than report this to the Court, the Justice Department concealed this evidence from the Justices.
Historically, the evidence is there: Imperial Japan weaponized its expatriate populations, and when the opportunity presented itself, large segments (i.e. the majority) of those populations assisted the Empire.
Here's the souvenir I brought back from my trip to Vienna this summer. My wife saw it tucked away on the wall of a little antique shop specializing in military antiques and thought I might want to have it. It's a very thin cloth, with fibers coming off the sides where it was cut. It never had occurred to me that these things probably came in sheets, and that people had to cut out individual stars (along the dotted lines) from the larger sheets before affixing them to their clothing.Absolutists who oppose national-security profiling often invoke the World War II experience of Japanese-Americans. When asked whether the 12 Muslim chaplains serving in the armed forces should be vetted more carefully than military rabbis or priests, Sarah Eltantawi of the Muslim Public Affairs Council raised the specter of Japanese internment.
The analogy is ridiculous.
O'REILLY: You didn't answer my question. Isn't it fair to vet the Muslim chaplains harder than the rabbis, being the climate that we're in. It's not fair?
ELTANTAWI: You need to think harder about that question. Daniel Pipes, what did he suggest? He suggests that all American Muslims be suspended from their positions until they can, quote, prove their loyalty. How is that going to happen?
O'REILLY: I don't know if that's what he suggests.
ELTANTAWI: It's a quote from his article, Bill. It is a quote from the article. This is the same person who won't condemn Japanese internment. So we need to look and see what are the agendas of the people who are calling for this extra vetting? Is it really national security?
Fortunately, the Japanese were spared the full wrath of which America was capable by the U.S. Navy's extraordinary victory at Midway on June 4th, 1942. After that, the threat of raids on the mainland diminished sharply.
But by then, the evacuation from the West Coast of about 112,000 ethnic Japanese, about one-third of the adults being citizens, had been underway for months.
It should also be noted that the 1924 shutdown of immigration did much to cut down on the threat of disloyalty. All the Japanese-born noncitizens had been in the U.S. for at least 18 years. Even if they hadn't grown fond of America, they had at least gotten old enough that militancy wouldn't be as fun-sounding as it once might have seemed.
Japanese internment is not something one would necessarily assume liberals would fret over; after all, it was FDR, the super Democrat, who ordered it. But textbooks and museum exhibits describe the internment centers as American "concentration camps." To what extent is this "liberal guilt" and to what extent is it just plain anti-Americanism?
Aigner: Most Japanese were not active traitors, of course, and most Muslims here in the United States are not active agents of Osama bin Laden. But race, nationality and religion do seem to have binding powers, which can be dangerous in times of war. Is this the lesson of Japanese internment?
Malkin: Yes, this is one lesson.
"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."
"The truth is, the interment camps were essential to bringing the war with Japan to a decisive finish - perhaps more so than bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
It is amazing what a little sleep (though only a little) can do. I am flabbergasted by the number of blogs that have already picked up on Eric Muller’s and my critique of Michelle Malkin’s work “In Defense of Internment.” I am likewise impressed by the professional attitude the author took in the response she made on her website, and by her courtesy in stating that she encouraged her listeners to read Eric’s and my criticisms. I believe that Malkin’s conclusions are mistaken and even dangerous, but I respect the interest she has demonstrated in a fair historical debate, and it is in this spirit that I wish to make a few further rebuttals to her response. (In answer to the Malkin admirer who accuses us historians of refighting past battles while Malkin moves forward—it is my role and my responsibility to address Malkin’s ideas about the events of World War II, where I can claim expertise. I do not address the conclusions she draws from them about current events, except to say that improper historical interpretation will not aid the formulating of wise current policy).
1. My main point against Malkin’s contentions is that the MAGIC intercepts do not show any evidence that Japanese Americans were ever employed as agents by the Japanese government’s intelligence network, and that even if the cables has shown credible evidence of Japanese American spying it did not factor into the decision. I came to this conclusion after a thorough review of the evidence. To save the readers of my book BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT from what I considered a non-issue, I simply cited to the debate. Malkin’s attempts to challenge me on this point are unavailing. (I stated that Malkin lifts her case for MAGIC from the work of David Lowman. She says that she discussed cables that Lowman did not address; if this is so, I apologize for my misstatement; but at the same time Malkin freely admits my larger point, that her argument and her evidence are taken wholesale from Lowman, and indeed it is obvious that I could not have responded to her evidence so rapidly had the cables and the unfounded charges based thereupon, not already been specifically presented and refuted.)
The evidence Malkin cites from MAGIC in her response simply confirms that Japan created a spy network during 1941, which fact is not in doubt. Indeed, the raid that the ONI, let by Lt. Comm. Kenneth Ringle, made on the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles early in 1941 provided extensive evidence about Japanese spying. Ringle was thus in an especially informed position to say that Japanese Americans did not pose a threat of disloyalty after Pearl Harbor. I do not have any reason to doubt that the information from the MAGIC cables as a whole was very influential on policy, and that it made people wary of Japan. However, I find considerable evidence that both before and after Pearl Harbor, Army and government officials unthinkingly and prejudicially equated Japanese Americans with Japan. McCloy himself suggested during his redress testimony that the confinement of Japanese Americans was revenge for Pearl Harbor.
2. In regard to who made the decision to evacuate, Malkin claims:
"Greg ignores my discussion of this issue (see pages 76-77), where I cite Army documents demonstrating that DeWitt was following the lead of McCloy, not vice versa. As for DeWitt, I point out that the use of the term "Jap" was common at the time, even among those who opposed the evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese (see page 337). Too much has been made of DeWitt's Final Report, which is basically a cover story. The most important reason for the evacuation—MAGIC—was classified at the time and so could not be disclosed until after the war ended."
I am unimpressed by Malkin’s claims that Assistant Secretary McCloy was the leading figure in evacuation, and DeWitt (whose racial bias is well established) merely took orders from him. Even before examining her evidence, it defies credulity in any military system not to rely on the commander on the spot. Indeed, a large part of the reason that mass removal did not take place in Hawaii, where the President and the Secretary of War actively favored it, is that, unlike DeWitt, Hawaiian Commanding General Delos Emmons opposed mass evacuation. (More on that below).
Similarly, if DeWitt had merely been McCloy’s creature, he would not have dared oppose (as he did) McCloy’s effort to back creation of a Japanese American combat unit and McCloy's insistence that Nisei soldiers be allowed in the excluded West Coast zone.
In any case, the evidence she points to is dated February 8 and 11, 1942, comes several days after January 29, 1942 when, as is well established, DeWitt made his demand to the War Department for “evacuation” of both Issei and Nisei. The documents the author cites seem to refer to McCloy’s request that DeWitt provide a specific claim of military necessity for mass evacuation and a plan for effecting it. McCloy remained uneasy about the constitutionality of removing Nisei as well as Issei, and he thus asked DeWitt to come up with something concrete. DeWitt responded on February 14, with his Final Recommendation. The fact that McCloy and Stimson (and Roosevelt, who the author claims directed the case for evacuation) even asked DeWitt for such a showing of necessity effectively rebuts the author’s entire case that removal was based upon the MAGIC cables, since if they were already in possession of the all-important information that DeWitt was not, they would not have needed such a top secret internal justification.
3. Malkin is similarly unable to touch my point that her case for military necessity for Executive Order 9066 is built on a rather minor event that occurred four days after the order was signed, and that she provides no other evidence of incidents or threats to the West Coast. Upon my calling her on this, she provides an impressive citation:
"Milton Eisenhower wrote in his autobiography that the historian Stetson Conn 'reports that there had been no Japanese submarine attacks or surface vessels anywhere near the West Coast during the preceding months'(p. 103), referring to the time period prior to January 1941. In fact, Conn said there had been no Japanese submarine attacks during the preceding month, meaning the month between late December and late January. See Milton Eisenhower, The President Is Calling (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1974) and Stetson Conn, 'The Decision to Evacuate the Japanese from the Pacific Coast' in Guarding the United States and Its Outposts (Washington DC: U.S. Army Center of History). The Conn report is available online at http://www.army.mil/cmh/books/wwii/guard-us/ch5.htm"
This is perfectly true: Conn, a leading critic of the Army’s decision to intern, says that there had been no submarine attacks during the month between late December and late January 1942, when the Army’s decision for mass removal was made. He says nothing else one way or the other. There is still no evidence that there were any incidents or attacks in the time that followed, still less that they influenced the Army’s decision.
I might note that one of the sentences of my critique was garbled in transmission. I meant to say that, based on the fact that Malkin shows no evidence of any sinkings near the West Coast, we are to assume that no such sinkings took place. One of Malkin’s defenders jumped on this point and lectured me that 12 ships were sunk off the West Coast. I know that there were sinkings in the Pacific, but I do not know where—I cited Attorney General Francis Biddle, after all, to the effect that there were sporadic sinkings of ships in the Pacific. In any case, as Biddle notes, it was hardly a threat compared to the horrendous loss of shipping in the Atlantic (at one point in 1942 the Germans were sinking Allied shipping faster than it could be built). This nonetheless did not force the Administration to take ANY arbitrary action against all German aliens, still less US citizens of German extraction. Malkin’s attempt to divert attention from this fact by the assertion that Germany was no threat because it had no aircraft carriers is self-evidently absurd.
4. Malkin is unprepared to face directly the paradox of there being a race-based mass removal on the West Coast but not in Hawaii, where the military situation was immediately grave. So grave, in fact, that, as I mentioned above, President Roosevelt and Navy Secretary Knox (and to a lesser extent Secretary of War Stimson) began to press for mass evacuation long after Hawaii was already under martial law. Thus, martial law (which, the author correctly notes, conferred shockingly broad and arbitrary power on the military) was not in the minds of these men an adequate substitute for arbitrary action against the local Japanese. Military considerations were not paramount in the Hawaiian case, since otherwise pressure for mass evacuation in Hawaii would have reached their height immediately after Pearl Harbor—particularly in view of the Niihau incident she cites (though without noting the presence of Japanese Americans among the troops that apprehended the malefactors). It would have logically subsided after Midway as well.
5. Nor is Malkin’s boast about her unrefuted testimony helpful for understanding:
". . . the intelligence memos of late 1941 and early 1942 from the FBI, ONI, and MID, which stated repeatedly and unequivocally that ethnic Japanese posed a bona fide national security threat. Maybe my critics think the results were 'cooked' by FDR, just as some critics of George W. Bush allege about the current CIA's pre-war intelligence. I don't know because Eric and Greg didn't say one word about the intelligence memos, which have been reprinted in my book for every lay person to read for himself/herself. Taken in totality, rather than in selective slivers, my defense of Roosevelt’s homeland security measures remains unrefuted.”"
One might agree about “cooked intelligence” and selective consultation of sources, especially in view of the ONI’s and FBI’s opposition to Executive Order 9066. In any case, the information she cites about the Tachibana and Hawaii spy rings is largely beside the point, since those were shut down many months before Pearl Harbor. Indeed, it was precisely the success of American intelligence to defuse the threat that gave the FBI such confidence that any danger could be dealt with. The fact that Hoover received summaries of the MAGIC data, irrespective of his knowledge of its source, proves that he was well-qualified to judge the threat posed by the Japanese Americans.
6. This point brings up particular danger in the author’s work. She speaks several times of “ethnic Japanese” as if unable to distinguish between the long-established resident Japanese American communities and the temporary Japanese visitors such as Japanese consular officials and other spies. U.S. government officials certainly made the same confusion at the time, showing particular disregard for the very real differences between them (a disregard which in their case I would consider as informed by racism). Worse, Malkin slips easily back into the targeting of the Nisei as “dual citizens,” and thus innately Japanese. This was a canard of nativists in California and Hawaii, designed to justify stripping them of their American citizenship. The citizenship conferred on the Nisei by their ancestral country, like that of children of many other immigrant groups, was nominal. Even then, ethnic Japanese communities united in campaigns for denaturalization of these children. This as well as other attempts by the Nisei to prove their "Americanness" during the prewar period, including through military service, belied any sense that the Nisei were essentially Japanese.
The author points out correctly that a significant fraction of the Nisei, the so-called "Kibei," received their education in Japan. Some elected to remain, and one individual even became a spy for Japan. At most this suggests, as Lt. Commander Ringle advocated, that the Kibei be specifically watched. (Of course, hindsight tells us that even that might well have been overdoing things in view of the fact that many Kibei, whose knowledge of Japanese made them superb military translators, proved to be outstanding patriots once given the chance to prove their loyalty).
7. Malkin does me the courtesy of restating in her response my comments about how excessive she is in her descriptions of the camps. Still, assuming that Malkin’s blanket statements about the nature of the camps are properly qualified by the points that I made, then it seems that she and I largely agree on the nature of the confinement of Japanese Americans. The WRA camps were not, in fact, comparable to the Nazi death camps (and to avoid any such confusion, I have tended to avoid whenever possible using the term “concentration camp” in my work to define them, despite its technical validity). What the Japanese American camps are, instead, comparable to is to various (true) concentration camps, such as those that were established for Boers in turn of the century South Africa, and those established for Gays and Lesbians in Castro’s Cuba. They provided for arbitrary and indeterminate confinement based not on individual guilt but group membership.
The United States certainly was much kinder to its confined Japanese than were the Canadians. The WRA did indeed provide schools, newspapers, and hospitals, and it tried, without much success, to preserve such property as people had not already lost or been robbed of. Most people joined in to try to make things as pleasant as possible under the circumstances. However, The camps were spartan and uncomfortable, and the inmates were forced to work at salaries that were fixed at a discriminatorily low rate of compensation ($19 month as the absolute maximum, compared to, say, $150 per month for Caucasian teachers providing the exact same work.) Dissent was limited, and arbitrary confinement produced internal tensions and family breakdown among the inmates.
In any case, the question of conditions in the camps is largely beside the point of why Executive Order 9066 and its aftermath was deplorable. As I said in BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT, “the internment was not simply an error of official overzealousness but a tragedy of democracy. Its human costs, in the blood and suffering of its victims, were insignificant compared with the military casualties of World War II or with the millions slaughtered on the Rape of Nanking and in the Nazi death camps. Even within the history of the United States, the treatment of the internees pales in comparison with the enslavement of African Americans or the destruction of Native American nations. The special stain of the internment is that an unpopular group of American citizens was singled out on a racial basis and summarily dispossessed and incarcerated." (pp.5-6).
8. Japanese Americans, even American citizens, were not granted the same privileges of hearings that German and Italian aliens were. Period. If the government had contented itself with mass removal of the Issei, it would still have been arbitrary (especially since the Issei, unlike other enemy aliens, were barred from naturalizing themselves and thereby both protecting their rights and proving their loyalty) but it would not have been so clearly based on racial factors as was a policy that assumed that American citizens were disloyal based on their ancestral heritage. Period.
I do not consider that Malkin has squarely met my arguments about her omissions in this regard. It would have been possible to hold such hearings while the Japanese Americans were in the Assembly Centers, and it would have been no more or less constitutional or useful than the hearings that actually took place during 1943 and thereafter. Moreover, General DeWitt, (in the draft of his Final Report that was censored by Assistant Secretary McCloy), made clear that lack of time was not a factor in the refusal to hold hearings, but rather the impossibility of telling a “loyal Japanese” from a disloyal one on racial grounds. (Even if we adopt for the sake of argument Malkin’s desperate and absurd attempt to call the Final Report a fiction designed to cover up the truth of MAGIC, any such need for concealment would not have touched that point).
There is no evidence (and this after the inquiry of many scholars) that MAGIC had any relation whatsoever to the Canadian internment, which was openly predicated on racist hostility to Japanese on the Canadian West Coast, and in the absence of such evidence the Canadian experience must be seen as a mirror of the racism and hysteria that fostered the similar developments south of the 49th parallel.
9. Finally, in response to my point that Malkin does not address the role of the long history of anti-Japanese American racism on the West Coast in events, she responds dismissively:
"As I explain above and in the book, there have been hundreds of books and dissertations on this topic. Why repeat what has already been said hundreds of times?"
It is ridiculous to say, as the author does, that because there is a preponderance of evidence of hysteria racial hostility towards Japanese Americans on the West Coast —and that the pressure from West Coast political figures and commercial groups in Washington pushed the Executive branch in important ways-- that this need not be factored into the decision. It is for this reason that I stated, and I repeat, that Malkin’s work is based in bad faith.
It has been a fascinating experience participating with Eric Muller in this blog critique of Michelle Malkin’s book. I am a bit dizzy from the effort of writing and distributing, and receiving the responses. I credit Eric and Michelle Malkin equally with impressive energy and rapidity of composition, neither of which I generally have. There is little that I need to say by way of rebuttal to the comments ion my critique posted by Malkin (although she refers to me as “Greg,” I do not feel I know her well enough to call her Michelle, never having met her). On most matters, either she tacitly agrees with what I wrote, restates her erroneous conclusions, or tries to elide my point. In regard to points that require further clearing up, I will make a brief rebuttal now and save more for Suanday.
Regarding Malkin’s defense of her use of MAGIC intercepts, the only thing that the few dozen intercepts prove, as I noted, is that Japan was anxious during 1941 to create a spy network , among Japanese Americans but principally among non-Japanese, and that agents of Japan furnished various data (in the few cases where the source of such data was identified, it was someone other than a Japanese American). The Redress Commission did consider the question of MAGIC, which it specifically found irrelevant to Japanese Americans. As an addendum to PERSONAL JUSTICE DENIED points out, the MAGIC cables instructed Japanese agents to emphasize recruitment of groups other than Issei and Nisei, particularly “Negro, labor union members, and anti-Semites”, since if there was any slip, the whole network might be exposed and Japanese Americans would be subjected to considerable persecution. (p.472).
Malkin does not respond to my criticism of her case for the military necessity of mass evacuation, which relies on the shelling of Goleta by a Japanese submarine on February 23, 1942. Since this was 12 days after mass evacuation was approved by President Roosevelt and four days after Executive Order 9066, it cannot have impacted the decision. Instead, Malkin repeats her claims on pp. 90-92 of her book, namely that “the Goleta shelling and the famous “Battle of Los Angeles” air raid scare a few days later precipitated the forced evacuation of Terminal Island in Los Angeles harbor, which, by the way, had been singled out in MAGIC messages as a hotbed of Japanese espionage activity.”
This would be irrelevant even if it were true, since Terminal Island was taken over by the Navy, which did not support mass evacuation, and did not affect the larger decision, but it is not. In fact, Terminal Island was ordered cleared of its alien population on February10, and the Navy took it over on February 14, giving all the area’s residents a month to move. On February 25 (right after the shelling incident and before any air raid scare) the Navy changed its mind and ordered all the residents out on 48 hours notice. So the least that the shelling could have done in any case was to change the timetable for evacuation of Terminal Island, not inspire it. Even that much is doubtful, since those who were removed from Terminal Island were allowed to settle elsewhere in Los Angeles. If there had been spies and saboteurs who represented a threat, one would have assumed that they would have been removed wholesale from the region.
"The signing of Executive Order 9066 later came to be regarded as one of the most controversial decisions associated with McCloy's career. . . . More than any other individual, McCloy was responsible for the decision, since the president had delegated the matter to him through [Secretary of War Henry] Stimson. . . . Why ... did McCloy become an advocate of mass evacuation? One answer is simple racism, particularly evident in Stimson's attitudes. Another is that McCloy and Stimson were 'led by the nose by second-rate people like Colonel Bendetsen.' And it was true . . . that at the time, McCloy was 'distracted and distraught with a large number of problems.' But he also possessed a unique combination of predilections that made him particularly vulnerable to Bendetsen's and [Provost Marshall General] Gullion's arguments [for mass evacuation]. [Gullion] had convinced him that the enemy would inevitably engage in sabotage. Ever since Amherst and his enthrallment with the military-preparedness movement, he had been instinctively swayed by national-security arguments. Theoretical objections to strong action on civil-libertarian grounds were indications of soft thinking.
. . .
"Another major factor was McCloy's exposure to intelligence sources. Some observers in recent years have cited evidence of Japanese American disloyalty in such special intelligence resources as the Magic intercepts. There is no doubt that McCloy was reading Magic intercepts of Japanese diplomatic traffic at the time of the evacuation decision. But, as in the question of how much warning the Magic cables should have given him regarding the attack on Pearl Harbor, it is difficult to determine whether this intelligence information was a factor in his thinking. McCloy himself, in testimony before a congressional commission forty years later, did not mention the intercepts.
"Only a handful of Magic cables, out of thousands intercepted, might have conveyed the impression that Tokyo had recruited both alien Japanese and Japanese American citizens for espionage work. . . .
"Prior to Pearl Harbor, there had been no systematic analysis of Magic intercepts. So any references McCloy saw in the Magic intercepts to Japanese American espionage were fleeting and impressionistic. A meticulous analysis of the intercepts, in fact, would have shown that the intelligence information cabled back to Tokyo came almost exclusively from 'legal' espionage conducted by Japanese diplomats out of their embassy and consulates. Even the covert, 'illegal' espionage coordinated out of these Japanese consulates was not very sophisticated or extensive. One Magic intercept, for instance, reveals that, as late as May 1941, the Japanese Embassy was reporting that 'only about $3,900 a year is available for actual development of intelligence . . .' The few agents hired were invariably Caucasian Americans or German nationals.
"Whereas such Magic evidence was highly ambiguous, McCloy also had access to intelligence that firmly dismissed the potential for sabotage. . . .
"It is hard not to conclude that McCloy allowed his fears of sabotage and his penchant for decisive action to sweep aside any other considerations." (from pages 154-56)
As a matter of fact, I did in fact personally sift through thousands of pages of archival material—-from court documents obtained from NARA in Seattle, to War Relocation Authority records stored at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, to stacks of primary documents from the National Archives in College Park, Md. Other scholars and researchers such as Robert Stinnett, Burl Burlingame, Arthur Jacobs, and Col. Lee Allen, were generous enough to share their FOIA treasure troves and personal archival materials with me. I especially recommend Col. Allen's invaluable website here, which contains some 400 documents related to the evacuation/location. Most are primary documents.
Conventional wisdom concerning this controversial event in American history is that individuals of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and put into American concentration camps in violation of their constitutional rights because the country was overcome with "racism, hysteria and a lack of political will" after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The determined researcher will find that the truth is quite different. A careful review of the documentation in this archive reveals that many Japanese along the West Coast of the U.S. did, in fact, pose a grave security risk to the country.
A law professor's musings.
Eric Muller, UNC Law School
isthatlegal-at-bellsouth-dot-net
Click here to read Greg Robinson's and my compiled comments on Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment"
"Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II."
One of the Washington Post's Top Nonfiction Titles for 2001.
Now available in paperback!
Read the first chapter here.
Click on the book's cover to buy it.
