Richard Reeves - Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese-American Internment in World War II

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This book is for Lavinia Josephine Catherine ONeill

People who live in Southern California sometimes head north from Los Angeles on U.S. Route 395, usually on the way to skiing on Mammoth Mountain on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Its a long, boring six-hour drive through mostly uninhabited territory. About halfway there, in the desolate high desert framed by distant mountains, they would see a sign: MANZANAR WAR RELOCATION CENTER .

Few people stop there. Driving past, someone in a car might ask, Isnt that where they put the Japanese?

Yes it is. More than 120,000 American Japanese were forced from their homes and incarcerated in ten relocation centers and several prisons during World War II. Within months of the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent them to these concentration camps by executive order. Most of the evacuees and prisoners, more than 70 percent of them, were American citizens, born in the United States. Their first-generation immigrant parents, however, were forever aliens, prevented from gaining naturalized citizenship by the Immigration Act of 1924. Most of them, citizens and aliens alike, were fiercely patriotic. Guarded by soldiers in machine-gun towers, none of them were charged with any crime against the United States. In fact, there was not a single American of Japanese descent, alien or citizen, charged with espionage or sabotage during the war. These men, women, and children were locked up for the duration of the war because they looked like the enemy, the troops of Imperial Japan, a place most of them had never seen.

Living in California on and off for years, Ive passed Manzanar many times, each time thinking I should stop, each time thinking I should write about what happened there and in the other camps in Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Arkansas. I am from a part of the country, New York, where most of the people I know had only the vaguest notion that these events happened. I finally decided to write this book when I saw that my country, not for the first time, began turning on immigrants, blaming them for the American troubles of the day. Seventy years ago, it was American Japanese, most of them loyal to their new country; now it is Muslims and Hispanics. This story is not about Japanese Americans, it is about Americans, on both sides of the barbed wire surrounding the relocation centers, the Americans crammed into tar-paper barracks and the Americans with machine guns and searchlights in watchtowers.

The sweeping story of what happened to the American Japanese and the Caucasians who imprisoned them is not a series of isolated events, but a look into a dark side of the American way. The story goes back at least to the treatment of Native Americans, to the persecution of British loyalists after the American Revolution, to the enslavement of Africans in the New World, to the treatment of American Germans during World War I, to Jewish quotas and Irish Need Not Apply, to the excesses of official bodies such as the House Un-American Activities Committee. And, at least to me, it seems there is always the possibility of similar persecutions happening again if fear and hysteria overwhelm what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

The dangers of history repeating itself seem greater given that this story is often forgotten, or treated as a footnote in the larger, mostly heroic description of World War II found in American history textbooks. Even at the time, the American Japanese concentration camps were underreported or misrepresented. Although there were periodic national stories about the roundup and incarceration of the American Japanese, much of that coverage treated the evacuation as something like a vacation trip to the country. The camps were generally portrayed as resorts; pioneer communities was the euphemism of the day. Americans, their sons shipping off to Europe and the Pacific, had a lot on their minds in those daysand California was still far away from most of America.

The United States government and military had no reason to publicize the evacuation and incarceration. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who within ten weeks of the Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the detention of the American Japanese, did not want the incarceration debated as a political issue. The evacuees themselves were, for decades, reluctant to tell their stories even to, especially to, their own families. The truth was simply too painful.

Then, partly because of the black civil rights and antiVietnam War protest movements in the 1960s and 1970s, young Japanese Americans began questioning their parents and grandparents about what happened to them in the 1940s. Soon enough, books and memoirs by American Japanese held in camps began to appear; many of them were striking works of literature, many privately published, many never published, and, significantly, a large number of them were books for children and young adults. Japanese American organizations were energized by the questions asked by the new generations; oral history projects were created, letters became public, small museums were opened, and activists lobbied for official apologies, financial redress, and the designation of some of the camp sites, like Manzanar, as national historical monuments. Government records of the evacuation began to be discovered or declassified. Soon academic tracts and legal texts were written focusing on the constitutionality (or unconstitutionality) of what happened during the war.

The men of history who had demanded and overseen the relocation camps tried in later years to explain themselves in books and hearings. They had striking injustices to explain. The Supreme Court had delayed or ignored challenges to the mass incarceration, deciding instead to protect President Roosevelt by waiting to hear all related cases until after the 1944 presidential election, and in the end the justices approved the concentration camps. Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy said in a memo, We can cover the legal situation in spite of the Constitution. Why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me. The governor of Wyoming, Nels Smith, shouted at Milton Eisenhower, then director of the War Relocation Authority, If you bring Japanese into my state, I promise you they will be hanging from every tree. The governor of Idaho, Chase Clark, added, The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats.

Two army officers of the Western Defense Command, Lieutenant General John DeWitt and Colonel Karl Bendetsen, both bigots, the former a fool, the latter a brilliant pathological liar, drove the process, grossly exaggerating the dangers posed by West Coast Japanese. The theory advocated before the House Committee on Naval Affairs by General DeWitt (and many others) was simply, A Jap is a Jap! There is no way to determine their loyalty.

While DeWitt was recognized by peers as weak and ignorant, Bendetsen could have been a calculating character in a bad spy novel. He stated in his 1944 entry in Whos Who in America that he had conceived the method, formulated the details, and directed the evacuation of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from military areas. When the Japanese evacuation was being investigated by congressional committees in the 1970s, he was asked about his involvement, and he replied, Of course, I wasnt in high-level meetings. I was just a Major.