Infamy by Richard Reeves Read Free Book Online Page B

OF THE PRESIDENT
    SIGNING OF EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066 : FEBRUARY 19, 1942
    On the next to last day of 1941, December 30, Saburo Kido, the San Francisco attorney who was the president of the Japanese American Citizens League, had a visitor, his friend Fred Nomura, an insurance agent. “Sab,” Nomura said, “I hear they’re going to put all the Japanese in concentration camps. Do you know anything about that?”
    “Who says so?” asked Kido.
    “The chief of police in Oakland told me. He told me everybody—Issei, Nisei, even the little kids are going to be interned.”
    “He’s crazy. They can’t do that to us. We’re American citizens.”
    The first public call for all American Japanese, aliens and citizens, men, women, and children, to be moved into “concentration camps” was on January 14, 1942, in the Placerville Times , the newspaper in a small town forty miles east of Sacramento. Two weeks later, on January 29, California’s attorney general, Warren, who had been an important voice for moderation, essentially switched sides, issuing a press release that read, “I have come to the conclusion that the Japanese situation as it exists in this state today, may well be the Achilles Heel of the entire civil defense effort. Unless something is done it may bring about a repetition of Pearl Harbor.”
    Governor Olson, a Democrat who expected that Warren, a Republican and a member of the whites-only Native Sons of the Golden West, would be his opponent in the election in November of 1942, did the same thing, testifying before a congressional hearing a week later, saying: “Because of the extreme difficulty in distinguishing between loyal Japanese-Americans, and there are many who are loyal to this country, and those other Japanese whose loyalty is to the Mikado, I believe in the wholesale evacuation of the Japanese people from coastal California.” Then the governor gave a statewide radio address, saying, “ It is known that there are Japanese residents of California who have sought to aid the Japanese enemy by way of communicating information or have shown indications of preparation for Fifth Column activities.”
    In Los Angeles, Mayor Fletcher Bowron, after dismissing all city employees of Japanese lineage, declared, “Right here in our own city are those who may spring to action at an appointed time in accordance with a prearranged plan wherein each of our little Japanese friends will know his part in the event of any possible attempted invasion or air raid.… We cannot run the risk of another Pearl Harbor episode in Southern California.” He later added, “There isn’t a shadow of a doubt but that Lincoln, the mild-mannered man whose memory we regard with almost saint-like reverence, would make short work of rounding up the Japanese and putting them where they could do no harm.” He continued by calling the Japanese Americans “the people born on American soil who have secret loyalty to the Japanese Emperor.”
    California’s officeholders were soon joined by politicians from all over the country, particularly southerners in Congress. “This is a race war,” said Representative John Rankin of Mississippi. “I say it is of vital importance that we get rid of every Japanese, whether in Hawaii or the mainland.… Damn them! Let’s get rid of them now.”
    One congressman, Jed Johnson of Oklahoma, was demanding the sterilization of all American Japanese. Talk like that, and some secret experiments as well, were part of American life then. Even the president, Franklin Roosevelt, was comfortable with the casual racial myths and theories, including eugenics, that had emerged in the United States in the 1920s—and were cited by Hitler when he came to power. By any modern standards, Roosevelt and millions of people who voted for him were racists and, often, anti-Semites. The president, in conversations with friends, speculated that the reason Japanese were “devious and treacherous” was the shape of their