Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Resilience: The Forced Removal of 120 Thousand Japanese Americans

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

After President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, General John DeWitt issued over a hundred exclusion orders in quick succession, and demanded that all Japanese Americans–even those with as little as one-sixteenth ancestry–prepare themselves to be sent to incarceration camps. They had under two weeks to pack up–to give up everything they owned, everything they treasured–and prepare for the unknown. Joining us today is Professor Lorraine Bannai. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome. I'm so glad to have you back with us as we continue our series, Resilience, the Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans. After President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which was very broad in its language, the military began the process of interpreting it and enacting it. the military began the process of interpreting it and enacting it. Military leader who oversaw the task, General John DeWitt, issued over a hundred exclusion orders in quick succession and demanded that Japanese Americans, even those with as little as one sixteenth ancestry, prepare themselves for being sent to incarceration camps. They had under two weeks to pack up,

to give up everything they owned, everything they treasured, and prepare for the unknown. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. where it gets interesting. On March 2nd, 1942, Lieutenant General John DeWitt, who had been given the task of heading up the military's Western Defense Command, issued a proclamation that established two military areas in the United States. Military Area 1 consisted of the westernmost half of Washington, Oregon, and California, as well as the southern half of Arizona. The remainder of the states in the U.S. made up Military Area 2. Later that month, the military announced their intentions to remove all people of Japanese descent from Military Area 1. The removal, which the government called an evacuation, began almost immediately. Let's hear from Professor Lorraine Benai to explain some of

the details. There was this law, and pursuant to Executive Order 9066, military commander on the West Coast, General John L. DeWitt, began to issue a series of orders. He first issued a curfew order that applied to persons of Japanese ancestry, whether citizen or immigrant, and to immigrants of Italian and German ancestry, not to citizens of Italian and German ancestry. ancestry, not to citizens of Italian and German ancestry. So the curfew was imposed, and that was followed by a freeze order issued only against Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans saying that they could not leave the West Coast except pursuant to future military order, and then an order that they be removed from the West Coast. And up and down the West Coast, there were, quote, civilian exclusion orders that ordered Japanese Americans in one area after another, giving them 10 days notice to pack up and report to the Army for removal to temporary restraint areas called

assembly centers, and then to 10 more permanent camps within the interior of the United States. One thing I want to note is that the last order issued, the removal order, was really that Japanese Americans report for removal. When they reported for removal, they were moved by the army into these camps. There was no separate order that ordered them into the internment camps. The order, basically the army moved them into these temporary horse stalls you've heard about, the fairgrounds, and then they were moved to 10 more permanent camps in the interior. Many, of course, stayed for up to about three years or so. You have to keep in mind that two-thirds of those who were removed were American citizens, right? And so it defies any reason

that citizens who are entitled to due process, entitled to notice and hearing, and all of that could be subject to this mass removal without hearings, notice, and screening. President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102 on March 18, 1942, which created the War Relocation Authority, a government agency that was tasked with organizing and speeding along the process of incarceration. From the end of March to August, approximately 112,000 Japanese Americans were sent to what the military called assembly centers. But like Professor Benaiz said, these were often nothing more than racetracks or fairgrounds. They were a stopgap area where the military could process individuals and families

and organize them into groups that would head to larger and longer-term incarceration centers built by the military that would be their home for the duration of the war. The U.S. was also not the only country to consider its citizens of Japanese descent a threat to national security. Canada forcibly relocated and incarcerated over 22,000 Japanese Canadians from British Columbia on the country's west coast, a number that represented over 90% of the total Japanese Canadian population at the time. And in Mexico and South America, more than 2,200 people of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from places like Peru, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and many of them were sent to U.S. incarceration camps. Well, the U.S. government publicly called them relocation centers. Incarceration camps were situated many miles inland, often in remote

locations, areas of the country that were largely tribal and had been taken from Native populations. Noteworthy is that the incarceration rates were significantly lower in the then U.S. territory of Hawaii, where the bombing had taken place. Japanese Americans made up over one-third of the population on the island chain, and their labor was needed to sustain the economy. The military did declare martial law following the Pearl Harbor attack, however, and the army stationed there restricted and kept tabs on the Japanese Americans through hundreds of military orders. And what about other populations of

immigrants? Did the U.S. place restrictions or incarcerate Italian Americans or German Americans? Here's Professor Benai again. Certainly in the research, in what I've looked at, there wasn't that hostility against Italian Americans and German Americans. So as you know, Japanese Americans were incarcerated in mass with no hearings or anything. German and Italian immigrants were given individual hearings if they were under suspicion, but there was no mass incarceration of them. You could see in some of the hearings that were conducted around the time, the feeling that Japanese Americans were the ones to be suspicious of, and there was nothing to fear

from the Italians and the German Americans. In fact, at one of the hearings, one of the people testifying said, you can't possibly have a situation where Joe DiMaggio's father will be stopped from fishing in San Francisco Bay. And so the whole idea that Joe DiMaggio's father will be stopped from fishing in San Francisco Bay. And so the whole idea that Joe DiMaggio's father might be taken away was outrageous to anyone. In fact, Giuseppe and Rosalia DiMaggio, baseball legend Joe DiMaggio's parents, who are both Italian immigrants, were among the thousands of German, Japanese, and Italian immigrants the government classified as enemy aliens. The DiMaggio's lived inside of Military Area 1, but instead of incarceration, the DiMaggio's were

required to carry photo ID booklets at all times and had to apply for a permit to travel outside of a five-mile radius of their home. Giuseppe was ultimately banned from being on the San Francisco Bay waters where he had fished for decades, and his boat was seized. Joe DiMaggio enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces and rose to the rank of sergeant. He spent the war on bases in the U.S., first in Santa Ana and then in New Jersey and Hawaii. And even though he asked for a combat assignment because he was embarrassed by his cushy military jobs, he was turned down. No one was going to put famous Joe DiMaggio in harm's way. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast

Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me?

Steve! It's my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship

with brand-new guests, and we'll be digging into our mail stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments so join us for brand new office ladies 6.0 episodes every wednesday plus on mondays we are taking a second drink you can revisit all the office ladies rewatch episodes every monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. The other thing, of course, is that Japanese Americans are much more readily identifiable, or at least the ideas that you can tell an Asian

American from someone who's not Asian American. And at the time, there were newspaper articles, magazine articles that had like two page spreads. And on one side, it's kind of like how to tell a Chinese American from a Japanese American. And they had on one side of Chinese and the other side of Japanese, and they had little lines to their eyes and talking about the difference between their eyes and nose and things like that. And then there were buttons that some Chinese Americans would wear that I'm not Japanese.

And so it was just a bizarre and frightening time. So I think certainly because of this history of animosity and because Japanese Americans look different, they would be treated differently from German and Italian immigrants. After the relocation of Japanese Americans had been completed, General DeWitt went so far as to lift some of the curfew restrictions that had been placed on Italian Americans and German Americans. None of these loosened restrictions applied to Japanese Americans. His final report laid out his position that their race and ancestry made it impossible to determine their loyalty and made incarceration a necessary action.

In fact, he made it clear that he wanted Japanese Americans to be incarcerated indefinitely. The original version of the report was so offensive and so misleading that DeWitt's co-writer on it, Colonel Carl Benditson, ended up ordering all of the copies of it destroyed. The contents of the original copy remained cloaked in mystery for nearly 40 years. Of course, even without particulars, it would have been pretty easy to conclude how racist and offensive the report was based on the onslaught of propaganda that began to circulate after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Because as Professor Benai mentioned, anti-Japanese propaganda was at an all-time high.

And it dealt in racism, not facts. These political cartoons that were in newspapers and propaganda posters that hung in populated places debased the Japanese race as subhuman. Depicting them as apes and gorillas, dishonest in nature, corrupt, and intellectually inferior to white Americans. Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, did not begin his career as a children's book author, and even though he had published a few titles in the late 1930s, from 1940 to 1948, he worked full-time as the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York-based newspaper PM. During the war, Seuss created nearly 400 cartoons that often supported America's war effort. He praised FDR's policies and even took some shots at isolationists, Charles Lindbergh in particular, for being opposed to the U.S. entry into the war.

And he also created anti-Japanese political cartoons. In one large black-and-white square in Seuss's signature rounded childlike sketching, a long line of Japanese Americans stretched through the West Coast, happily waiting to each take a brick of TNT. The cartoon's caption reads, waiting for the signal from home. A decade later, the author would travel to Japan to research an article for Life magazine. With the help of his Japanese liaison, Mitsugi Nakamura, Seuss went to schools all over Japan and asked kids to draw what they wanted to be when they grew up. He was deeply affected by the project, and when he returned to the U.S., he started work on his book,

Horton Hears a Who. He said in an interview, Japan was just emerging. The people were voting for the first time, running their own lives. And the theme was obvious. A person's a person, no matter how small. Though I don't know how I ended up using elephants. He dedicated the book to my great friend Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan. In a poster prepared by the Special Services Division of the U.S. Army in 1942, the large headline reads, How to Spot a Jap. And many similar articles ran in magazines, including Life magazine, which published How to Tell Japs from the Chinese, a spread that breaks down racist physical traits for readers.

Other images that were created as propaganda relied on scary illustrations to elicit fear out of Americans. A 1942 poster called This is the Enemy shows a menacing ape-like Japanese man looming over a fearful white woman. The man's teeth are bared, his hat is plastered with the Japanese flag, and as he reaches for the woman in his clawed hands, he holds a sharply pointed knife. Not all Americans were swayed by propaganda, and many expressed their disagreement with Executive Order 9066 and the incarceration of Japanese Americans. A small group of progressive church organizations that included the Quaker-led American Friends Service Committee hosted modestly attendant protests. Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas circulated a petition to void FDR's executive order. The petition was signed by nearly 200

notable thought leaders and progressives of the day, influencers like Pearl S. Buck and W.E.B. Du Bois. Unfortunately, it had no impact. There were military officers who expressed reservations too. Lieutenant Commander Katie Ringel, who worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence, never found any proof of sabotage or espionage by a Japanese American. He wrote a memo about it to several of his colleagues saying the entire Japanese problem has been magnified out of its true proportion largely due to the physical characteristics of the people. And if you listen to our previous series Momentum, it may come as a surprise to you to learn that even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover expressed doubts about incarceration,

he wrote a letter to the U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle that said the demand for removal was based primarily on public and political pressure rather than factual data. A.G. Biddle was all too aware. In a few meetings with military officials shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, Biddle spoke up against the idea of the forced removal of Japanese Americans, claiming it was ill-advised, unnecessary, and unnecessarily cruel. Even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt called for cooler heads to prevail. She traveled to California just a few days following the attack, and although it was met with much disapproval,

she insisted on being photographed with Japanese Americans, a practice she would continue throughout the war as she visited incarceration camps in the United States' interior. In her nationally syndicated newspaper called My Day, Eleanor wrote on December 16, 1941, we as citizens, if we hear anything suspicious, we'll report it to the proper authorities. But the great mass of our people stemming from these various national ties must not feel that they have suddenly ceased to be Americans. This is perhaps the greatest test this country has ever met, she said. If we cannot keep in check anti-Semitism, anti-racial feelings, as well as anti-religious feelings, then we shall have removed from the world the one real hope for the future on which all humanity must now rely.

In the end, these small resistances to the louder call for the forced removal of Japanese Americans were quickly drowned out. Dissenters like Attorney General Biddle took a step back from early opposition. When Biddle wrote in his 1962 autobiography, he said, the decision had been made by the president. It was, he said, a matter of military judgment. I did not think I should oppose it any further. But one public official persisted, and he persisted loudly. The Japanese are loyal Americans, Colorado Governor Ralph Carr wrote in an editorial. I am not in sympathy with those who demand that all evacuees be placed in concentration camps, regardless of their American citizenship or of the legality of their presence here. Our Constitution guarantees to

every man, before he is deprived of his freedom, that there be charges and proof of misconduct in a fair hearing. Ralph Carr was born in Colorado in 1887, the son of a miner. After earning his law degree at the University of Colorado, he moved to the southern portion of the state to practice law. There he shared friendships with many of the Japanese-American farming families who lived and worked in the region. A Republican, Carr was a fiscal conservative who championed many social issues. By 1938, he had chosen to run as governor on the Republican ticket and won his first two-year term. He was a popular public figure. He was easily re-elected in 1940. Jason Hansen, who is the Director of Interpretation and Research for History Colorado, says,

when the War Department asked Western governors about this plan to bring Japanese people to their states from the West Coast, Ralph Carr was the only one who said yes. There was already a Japanese population in Colorado, both in Denver and in the southern portion of the state. Carr didn't say yes because he was in favor of Japanese incarceration camps, but rather his stance was that if Japanese Americans were going to be incarcerated, then they should be treated fairly. And he hoped that the state of Colorado could provide that fairness. So in the end, he also didn't say no, right? He didn't take a moral stand to prohibit the incarceration from happening in his state.

Instead, he declared, as a good American, if this is what the war effort requires, Colorado will do its duty. Carr's acceptance of the Grenada War Relocation Center, which was known as Camp Amachi, brought with it an onslaught of hate mail and threats from angry citizens. They did not want Japanese Americans to be brought into their state, even to be incarcerated behind barbed wire fences lined with guards. When the first buses of Japanese Americans arrived at Camp Amachi, an angry crowd showed up to protest. Carr placed himself between his constituents and the Japanese

Americans who were being taken into the camp. He said, they're not going to take over the vegetable business of this state, and they're not going to take over the Arkansas Valley. But the Japanese are protected by the same constitution that protects us. An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen. If you harm them, he told the people, you must first harm me. I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred. I grew to despise it because it threatened the happiness of us all. Ultimately, his unpopular position cost Governor Carr his political ambitions. He lost a run for Senate in 1942 to his opponent, a Democrat who openly criticized Carr's welcoming of Japanese Americans in Colorado. And although Ralph Carr lost his political career,

it cannot compare to what Japanese Americans lost. In just days, the lives they'd been living had come to an end in so many ways we rarely consider. so many ways we rarely consider. Join me next time when we visit families on the West Coast as they comply with government orders to leave their homes behind. Thanks for being here today. I'll see you soon. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting, and I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review or sharing a link to it on your social media?

All of those things help podcasters out so much. Here's Where It Gets Interesting is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. See you again soon.