Roosevelt (39 page)

The Bill of Rights seemed in little jeopardy at the time. Americans were treating German, Italian, and Japanese aliens in their midst with admirable restraint. There were only a few incidents, such as the sawing down by some fool or fanatic of four Japanese cherry trees in Washington’s Tidal Basin. Oddly, one of the most tolerant areas with a large “foreign” population seemed to be California. The press there was restrained, even generous, as were letters to the editor. “The roundup of Japanese citizens in various parts of the country,” declared the San Francisco
Chronicle,
“…is not a call for volunteer spy hunters to go into action.” Other papers called for fairness toward Japanese aliens as well as toward Nisei—American-born citizens of Japanese parentage. “Let’s not repeat our mistakes of the last war” was a refrain.

The new Attorney General, Francis Biddle, wished to avoid mass internment and any repetition of the persecution of aliens that occurred during World War I. Roosevelt’s attitude was less clear. When Biddle brought him the proclamation to intern German aliens, Roosevelt asked him how many Germans there were in the country. Biddle thought about 600,000. “And you’re going to intern all of them?” Roosevelt asked, as Biddle remembered later. Not quite all, Biddle said. “I don’t care so much about the Italians,” Roosevelt went on. “They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are different, they may be dangerous.” Admiral McIntire was swabbing the President’s nose during this colloquium, and Biddle hastily withdrew, with the impression that his chief was reacting more to his sinuses than to subversives.

During January the climate of opinion in California turned harshly toward fear, suspicion, intolerance. Clamor arose for mass evacuation and other drastic action. The causes of the change have long been studied and defy easy explanation. Partly it was the endless Japanese advance in the Pacific, combined with a spate of false alarms—aside from the Santa Barbara episode—of attacks on the coast, stories of secret broadcasting equipment, flashing signals, strange lights, and the like. In part it was a growing feeling
that the Justice Department was pursuing half-measures; paradoxically, as the federal authorities became more energetic in sealing off sensitive zones and taking other precautions, the popular demand for drastic measures seemed to grow. But the main ingredient that fired and fueled the demand for “cleaning out the Japs” was starkly obvious. The old racism—economic, social, and pathological—toward Japanese on the West Coast simmered for a few weeks after Pearl Harbor and then burst into flames.

“Personally, I hate the Japanese,” declared a prominent West Coast columnist on January 29, “and that goes for all of them.” He called for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to the interior. “I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands….”

More and more, Washington felt the heat. California officials—notably Governor Culbert L. Olson and Attorney General Earl Warren, working in close touch with sheriffs and district attorneys-threw their weight behind the campaign for evacuation. In Washington the West Coast congressional delegations put unrelenting pressure on the Justice and War Departments and on their regional officials. Congressmen denounced as “jackasses” those who had failed to deal with sabotage and espionage at Pearl Harbor and would fail again.

It was the old story of a determined and vocal minority group of regional politicians and spokesmen with a definite plan united against an array of federal officials who were divided, irresolute, and not committed against racism. General John De Witt, the Army’s West Coast commander, after much vacillation finally gave his support to a general evacuation. For a while Stimson demurred on constitutional grounds. But during the first weeks of February—a time of frightful news from the war fronts—he gave way, partly because he had concluded that “their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese.”

Biddle held out longer. An aristocratic Philadelphian and Grotonian, proudly conscious of his inheritance from the Randolphs of Virginia and full of a fastidious
noblesse oblige,
he was not one to be swept off his feet by generals and regional politicians. But his political resources were small. He was a new member of the Cabinet, highly impressed by Stimson and somewhat mystified by Roosevelt. He did not enlist his potential Cabinet allies, Ickes and Morgenthau; indeed, there was no Cabinet discussion. Finding himself almost alone, he resorted to expedients and technicalities and was lost. Only a great outcry of protest on the highest moral grounds could have stopped the drift toward evacuation, and Biddle was neither temperamentally nor politically capable of it.

So the fate of 110,000 aliens and citizens was bucked over to the
White House—and into a void. Because there had been no clarion call of protest the President was never faced with a compelling set of alternatives and arguments. He confronted on February 11 a War Department memo that tried simply to put the onus of decision on him. The President would not have it. This was the same day he was answering Quezon’s query about neutralization; Singapore was on the verge of surrendering. The evacuation may have seemed to him a tricky and second-level question. He told Stimson and McCloy to do whatever they thought necessary, and asked only that they be as reasonable as they could. Eight days later the President signed an order for evacuation prepared by Biddle and Stimson and their men. A month later Congress passed a bill supporting the President’s action. During the debate Representative John Rankin, of Mississippi, demanded that Japanese in concentration camps be segregated by sex so that they would not multiply twenty-five times in two generations.

Hindsight would prove that there was little military necessity for mass evacuation. The American Civil Liberties Union would call it “the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history.” Hindsight would also put responsibility not only on the obvious factors of racism and frustration, but also on a great negative factor—the opposition that never showed up. The liberal dailies and weeklies were largely silent. Walter Lippmann, so zealous of individual liberties back in New Deal days, urged strong measures because, he said, the Pacific Coast was officially a combat zone and no one had a constitutional right to “do business on a battlefield.” Westbrook Pegler, citing Lippmann’s argument, cried that every Japanese in California should be under guard, “and to hell with
habeas corpus
until the danger is over.” A few Congressmen protested—most notably Senator Taft, in querying the congressional validation—but they were ineffectual. Doubting administration officials did not carry their protests to the Chief Executive.

Only a strong civil-libertarian President could have faced down all these forces, and Roosevelt was not a strong civil libertarian. Like Jefferson in earlier days, he was all for civil liberties in general but easily found exceptions in particular. He related to friends that at a Cabinet meeting (in March 1942) he had told Biddle that civil liberties were okay for 99 per cent but he ought to bear down on the rest. When Biddle pleaded that it was hard to get convictions, Roosevelt answered that when Lincoln’s Attorney General would not proceed against Vallandigham, Lincoln declared martial law in that county and then had Vallandigham tried by a drumhead court-martial. Earlier he had treated Biddle’s earnest support of civil liberties as a joking matter—in fact, had solemnly told him
that he was planning to abrogate freedom of speech during the war and then he let Biddle declaim against the idea at length before telling him he was joking.

Indeed, Roosevelt seemed to enjoy shocking the shy Philadelphian. Once, when J. Edgar Hoover confessed to the President, in the Attorney General’s presence, that an FBI agent had tried to tap the telephone wire of left-wing union leader Harry Bridges, and had been caught in the act, Roosevelt roared with laughter, slapped Hoover on the back, and shouted gleefully, “By God, Edgar, that’s the first time you’ve been caught with your pants down!”

The President assumed that the German saboteurs who landed on the East Coast in June 1942 were guilty and should be executed. He liked the idea of quick drumhead courts in wartime. To be sure, Roosevelt’s civil-liberties derelictions were not numerous, but certainly the wartime White House was not dependably a source of strong and sustained support for civil liberties in specific situations.

This expedient departure from principle was nothing new in American history, but it had a dangerous edge in 1942. The supreme irony of the evacuation was that while Germans and Italians offered the same alleged threats to military security as the Nisei and Issei, their guilt was established on an individual basis, not a racial basis. Roosevelt was quite aware of the distinction and supported it. Nor did he seem concerned that his friends the Chinese were part of the same yellow race against which he was discriminating. He was following unconsciously a kind of Atlantic First policy in civil liberties as well as military strategy. By allowing his subordinates to treat aliens and citizens on a racial basis, he was unwittingly validating the political strategy that Tokyo was directing during the early months of 1942.

While Washington was interning over 100,000 American citizens and aliens mainly on racial grounds, Tokyo was conducting its main political offensive in Southeast Asia on largely the same basis.

The aims of the war, proclaimed the Imperial Rescript in December, were to insure the peace and stability of East Asia and to defend that region against Anglo-American exploitation. The struggle was named the Greater East Asia War; its aim was to build the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Late in January 1942 Premier Tojo told the Diet that Japan would grant independence to South Pacific peoples who undertook to help build the new sphere. These plans were hoisted on a wave of popular exultation. Propagandists attacked white Western rule, its individualism, materialism, class and group strife. Soon newspapers were gleefully
picturing white Europeans, naked to the waist, forced to do the physical labor once reserved for Asiatics. “Remember December Eighth!” proclaimed a Japanese poet:

“This day world history has begun anew

This day Occidental domination is shattered All through Asia’s lands and seas.

Japan, with the help of the gods

Bravely faces white superiority.”

The Japanese were shrewd enough to adapt their anti-Western strategy to specific situations. Tokyo signed an alliance with Thailand granting it sovereignty, independence, extensive assistance, and the return of lost territories; and promised Burma independence within the year. The Japanese interned the Dutch officials of Java, dismantled the colonial administrative system, rewrote the textbooks to champion anti-Western and pan-Asiatic doctrines, freed nationalist leaders, including Achmed Sukarno, who had been imprisoned by the Dutch, and promised political concessions.

But it was in the Philippines that the invaders found their most auspicious state of affairs. Proclaiming that they had come to emancipate the Filipinos from America’s oppressive domination, they promised to set up the “Philippines for the Filipinos” as part of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Collaborators were quickly found to adorn the new Japanese-controlled regime. American influence was denounced as hedonistic, materialistic, corrupting of the family. The local Japanese Commander in Chief admonished the Filipinos: “As a leopard cannot change its spots you cannot alter the fact that you are Orientals.”

This imperious summons to an antiwhite, pan-Asiatic, nationalist crusade could not cloak potential weaknesses and divisions. Extremists in Tokyo made clear that while all the nations would be equal in the new Asia, Japan would be more so, as “center and leader.” Indiscriminate cruelty was inflicted on native populations. Japan’s long-term strategic stake in liberating colonial nations ran counter to the short-run needs of the Japanese military, which wanted to control and exploit local populations for immediate war needs. Still, the potential of an antiwhite, pan-Asiatic movement seemed almost limitless in the early months of 1942. Even more, the Japanese showed their skill in appealing to Moslem elements in Southeast Asia and thus raised the specter of an ultimate appeal to Islam and to antiwhite feeling in the Middle East.

Long critical of white colonial policies in Asia, Roosevelt did not underestimate the threat of Tokyo’s war against the whites. With the Philippines and the other countries clamped firmly in the Japanese vise, there was little that he could do. But there was
one potential battleground where he could try to wield influence—India. With the fall of Singapore in February and the impending overrunning of Rangoon, the subcontinent would soon lie almost naked before a Japanese advance.

Only a President with Rooseveltian self-confidence would have even dared touch the Indian cauldron in the early months of 1942. The looming threat from the east seemed to be sharpening all the old hopes, fears, and antagonisms in that steaming subcontinent. Indian nationalists saw their chance to win freedom from British rule, but they ranged from bitter pan-Asiatics willing to fight along with the Japanese against the whites to those who feared Japanese conquest even more than they hated British rule. Moslems dreaded a grant of independence that would inundate them in Hindu rule; a host of local princes depended on the British to help protect their accustomed prerogatives; separatist interests and sects throughout the country clamored for recognition; in the endless villages millions labored for their daily rice with only the haziest idea of the decisions of far-off London, Tokyo, or even Delhi.

Proud and powerful personalities stood amid the tumult: Jawaharlal Nehru, both a Western intellectual and an Indian patriot, anticolonial and antifascist, leader of Indian nationalists but also their agent; Mohammed Ali Jinnah, wary chief of the Moslem League; Subhas Chandra Bose, eager to form an Indian national army to help the Japanese throw the British out of India. And brooding over the scene was the gnarled, loinclothed figure of Mohandas Gandhi, leader of the Congress party, pacifist, vegetarian, the most powerful man in India, because of his ability to grip the attention of the masses.