|
This is in some ways an apples and oranges comparison. All of the 82,000 people paid reparations in 1988 had been affected directly by heavy-handed government actions. Not a penny in reparations, however, has been paid to their children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren born after World War II. Most Americans probably would agree to pay reparations to anyone who actually was a slave prior to Emancipation during the 1860s - but no former American slaves are today alive.
But look deeper and you will discover a Politically Incorrect alternative history of World War II that argues it was a mistake to pay reparations to Japanese-Americans. If you have the courage to reconsider everything the schools and media taught you to believe about the so-called "American concentration camps" like Manzanar and the WWII "Japanese-American Internment," then read on for a MAGIC carpet ride.
December 7, 1941. The nation of Japan, in the midst of seemingly honorable negotiations with the United States, launches a sneak attack against Pearl Harbor, killing thousands of Americans. Japanese-Americans in the Little Tokyos along the West Coast, largely culturally insular from the communities around them, are instantly viewed with suspicion and mistrust by their neighbors.
If a mysterious enemy can attack Hawaii, is the then-sparsely-populated West Coast also vulnerable? Military planners knew that in 1912 the chief military adviser to Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen, Homer Lea, had predicted that the century would bring a war that would begin with a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor followed by successful Japanese occupation of parts of America?s West Coast.
About one percent of West Coast residents were of Japanese descent. Were they loyal to the U.S. - or to the nation that attacked us, Japan? And, if in doubt, should this potential Fifth Column be removed from the coast and its military facilities?
Political pressure for such relocation grew quickly. As the very liberal Walter Lippmann wrote in his national newspaper column on February 12, 1942: "It is a fact that the Japanese navy has been reconnoitering the Pacific Coast more or less continually and for a considerable period of time, testing and feeling out the American defenses. It is the fact that communication takes place between the enemy at sea and enemy agents on land. These are facts which we shall ignore or minimize at our peril?. The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone: some part of it may at any moment be a battlefield. Nobody?s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield."
These, mind you, were the words not of a jingo racist but of the preeminent Left-liberal American journalist-intellectual of the time, Walter Lippmann, writing coolly amid the fevers of a just-declared war. You can imagine the fears and feelings of other Americans in the heat of that moment. (And, during the war, a Japanese submarine surfaced one night and shelled a small oil facility in Oxnard, California, just north of Los Angeles.)
In the Oval Office, President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew far more than did Lippmann.
In late 1940, cryptographers of the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service had cracked "Purple," Japan?s highest level diplomatic code. The intelligence information gained from intercepted Japanese messages was cover-named MAGIC, a name later subsumed under the British intelligence name ULTRA. (Whether this means FDR knew in advance of the attack on Pearl Harbor is grist for another mill.)
MAGIC messages revealed that Japanese espionage networks were spread along the West Coast. You can read many of these decoded messages in the new book MAGIC: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast During World War II (Athena Press, Inc., 2001) by the late David D. Lowman, former Special Assistant to the Director of the National Security Agency (popularly known as "the Puzzle Palace"). Lowman oversaw the declassification of the MAGIC Messages for this highest U.S. Government cryptographic intelligence agency.
He noted that not a single official familiar with these Top Secret MAGIC messages disagreed with the course of action FDR took towards Japanese-Americans.
The Japanese Government planned for, "Utilization of our ?Second Generations? and our resident nationals. (In view of the fact that if there is any slip in this phase, our people in the U.S. will be subjected to considerable persecution, and the utmost caution must be exercised," read MAGIC Message #044, which also discussed cooperation "with the German and Italian intelligence organs in the U.S.," as already agreed among these three powers with which the U.S. was formally at war.
The Japanese term for this ?Second Generation? born in the U.S. is Nisei. The "First Generation" is called Isei.
President Roosevelt had to deal with a dilemma similar to one faced by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. British intelligence had cracked the German code and warned Churchill that Coventry was about to be a bombing target. He could have evacuated the city, but German spies would see this and signal that the British had broken Hitler?s secret code. Churchill kept the secret and left thousands at the mercy of Nazi bombs.
MAGIC intercepts gave FDR the knowledge to target specific potential West Coast spying and espionage for Japan. Such pinpoint action, however, could reveal to Japan that we were reading its secret messages. If its cryptographers switched to a new code, we might be unable to decipher it.
To avoid tipping his hand to Japan, President Roosevelt had two choices. He could do little or nothing, thereby leaving potential spies and saboteurs in place. Or he could cover the removal of this risk with a sweeping action that deceptively appeared, as the 1988 reparations measure declared, to come from "racism, war hysteria and a lack of political will."
The 1988 congressional hearings that led to reparations for Japanese-Americans assiduously avoided any mention of then-declassified MAGIC Messages and the risk they revealed. It was by then Politically Incorrect to suggest that FDR might have had good, or at least plausible or prudent, reasons to move against any Japanese-American.
How big was that risk of spying or sabotage perceived to be during the war fever of early 1942? One U.S. intelligence officer sympathetic to Japanese residents, according to Lowman, estimated that "the loyalty to the United States of about a fifth of the Japanese population could not be trusted."
On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. Contrary to today?s widespread notions, it made no mention of those with Japanese ancestry. It merely created a zone "from which any or all persons may be excluded," at the discretion of the Secretary of War or appropriate Military Commander. In practice, this exclusion zone included the whole of California, the western halves of Washington State and Oregon, and the southern third of Arizona along the Mexican border.
(The U.S. Supreme Court later affirmed 6-3 that this Executive Order was constitutional because it was "nothing more than an exclusion order," not based on "racism," and because "there were disloyalties" during a time of war with the Empire of Japan.)
Under a nearly 200-year-old Federal Law, no U.S. citizen in America may be "interned," a term that applies only to detention of "enemy aliens." Thousands of Japanese citizens along the West Coast were moved into facilities such as the guarded camp at Tule, California, as were many Nisei who refused to take a loyalty oath to the United States. Many at Tule took part in marches and ceremonies honoring the Emperor of Japan. At war?s end, those at Tule were subject to deportation to Japan, although many asked to remain in the U.S.
More than 110,000 Japanese-American citizens were removed, often on short notice and with little opportunity to bring possessions or secure property, to "Relocation Centers" such as Manzanar near Inyo, California. These were barracks-like cities thrown together to house about 10,000 people.
Japanese-American citizens, at least initially, were free to move inland from these exclusion zones, according to controversial relocation historians such as Lillian Baker. But in wartime 1942 America, those who looked like the enemy usually found it safer to accept the free food, housing, and compatible community of the Relocation Centers than to seek scarce jobs and housing among suspicious and angry Caucasian strangers.
Japanese-American citizens who already lived outside the exclusion zone - e.g., east of Highway 97 in Oregon and Washington State - were not subjected to evacuation, nor of course were those who lived in the Midwest or along the East Coast. In Hawaii, where about 30 percent of the entire population was Japanese-American, there were no Relocation Camps such as Manzanar. (In British Columbia, the Canadian government imposed similar coastal evacuation and controls on Japanese-Canadians, but this reporter has found no evidence that Canada has paid them any reparations.)
Most Americans are surprised to learn that those of Japanese ancestry were not the only ones under suspicion. On February 24, 1942, about 10,000 Italian-American aliens living in California, many of them elderly and disabled, were ordered to evacuate coastal and military zones. Roughly 52,000 Italian-American aliens in California were subjected to an 8 P.M.-6 A.M. curfew and prohibited from traveling more than five miles from their homes. Hundreds of Italian-American citizen fishermen were prohibited from taking their boats to sea, and many of their boats were impounded.
In 1941, New York Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio had a 56-game hitting streak and was an American hero. The following year his father Giuseppe was among thousands of Italian-Americans told they could not fish in San Francisco Bay or visit the city where he had lived and raised his children.
As then-Congressman Rick Lazio (R.-N.Y.) told a 1999 House of Representatives Hearing on the Wartime Violation of Italian American Civil Liberties Act, "600,000 Italian nationals - most of whom had lived in the United States for decades - were deemed enemy aliens and subject to strict travel restrictions, curfews, and seizures of personal property for no other reason than their heritage." This happened to Italian-Americans on both the East and West Coasts. Even the immigrant gateway Ellis Island was used as an Internment Center for Italian and German nationals.
This, said Italian-American Lazio, is "what we call ?Una Storia Segreta,? which is our ?secret story,?" unknown today even to many Italian-Americans. And Congressman Lazio continued: "There were cases of German Americans who were involved in espionage and helping the Nazis. There were no instances of Italian Americans involved in espionage, who passed on information to any of America?s declared enemies." (Japanese-Americans argue that not one of them during WWII betrayed America. But broadcast propagandist "Tokyo Rose," convicted of treason, was a second-generation Japanese-American from Los Angeles who studied zoology at UCLA.)
Then-House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R.-Ill.) during these hearings observed: "All the Italian-American community wants is the truth to be told. It is not a question of reparations or looking for money or anything like that, but the truth has been obscured and it ought not to be obscured." [Emphasis mine] No reparations have been paid to those of German or Italian ancestry who suffered under U.S. control and relocation policies.
In World War II Internment Camps in Missoula, Montana, and Crystal City, Texas, nationals who were German, Italian, and Japanese lived in equality side by side. Unlike the Relocation Centers, such Internment Camps had barbed wire, lights, and guards to keep people in. More Germans, Italians, and other European "enemy aliens" would be Interned in such camps during the war than Japanese nationals, unless we add the 5,620 Nisei who renounced their U.S. citizenship. (By contrast, of about 19,000 military aged Japanese-American males in Relocation Centers, about 1,200 patriotically volunteered to fight for the U.S. in the war. Just over 20,000 other Japanese-Americans were inducted.)
Work in these Internment Camps, and in Relocation Centers, was reputedly voluntary - albeit rewarded with low $12-19 per month pay comparable to conscripted soldier pay. As the war proceeded, tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans in Relocation Centers were urged and helped to get jobs outside the Centers. Inside the Centers, as provocative revisionist historians such as Lillian Baker assert, were medical and dental facilities, recreational facilities, and schools where children learned and prepared for college. The birthrate in these Centers was higher than elsewhere in the nation, where husbands were away at war.
Was the evacuation of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast an unfair hardship imposed on tens of thousands of patriotic citizens? Yes. Despite government efforts to warehouse, protect, transport, and recompense Japanese-American property, billions of dollars worth of land, businesses, and possessions that these hard-working Americans had honestly earned were lost. An undeniable case can be made for recompensing specific families for property unjustly lost, and under the 1948 Evacuation Claims Act the Federal Government paid over 26,000 claims prior to 1988?s reparations.
But unfair individual losses did not justify $20,000 in reparations to every ethnic Japanese evacuee and internee, revisionist historians argue. Under the politically-convenient 1988 law, notes William Hopwood of the Center for Internee Rights , taxpayers paid reparations for "human suffering" and the United States formally apologized to former enemy aliens now living in Japan, Japanese-Americans who during the war renounced their citizenship, U.S.-born children of Japanese diplomats who went home to Japan during the war, and more than 6,000 babies born in the Relocation Centers during the war who left while still too young to remember the experience. No payments have been made to German or Italian individuals or their families - 14,183 in all -- interned in some cases in the same camps with Japanese who received reparations. And Japan has paid no reparations to Americans it imprisoned and used as slave labor during World War II.
When Japanese-American former U.S. Senator S.I. Hayakawa (R.-Calif.) called these reparations a "wolf-pack of dissident young Japanese-Americans" making an unconscionable raid on the U.S. Treasury, activists called him a "banana," yellow on the outside but white on the inside. And Japan?s government was cynically happy to give tacit support to Leftists demanding reparations from a United States they called racist.
Was the evacuation of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast exclusion zone illegal or unwarranted? The U.S. Supreme Court found it entirely legal and constitutional, and noted that Japanese-Americans in the Relocation Centers had the freedom to leave (but not to return to excluded areas). The MAGIC Message intercepts in 1942 persuaded President Roosevelt that the evacuation was warranted, or at least was prudent and reasonable.
Like today?s critics of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, we are all prone to the fallacy of "historicism," to judging people of a past time by our Monday-morning quarterback knowledge, values, and morals today. Today we know that virtually all Japanese-Americans were loyal and patriotic. But in 1942 with the U.S., Japan, and Nazi Germany all racing to build and use the first atom bomb - and without the comforting knowledge that the U.S. would win that race and the war - would you as President, looking at those MAGIC Messages, have issued Executive Order 9066 or not?
And if you conclude that President Roosevelt made the right decision under the circumstances in 1942, then why did Japanese-Americans deserve reparations? FDR, as a matter of national security, decided that millions of Americans would be conscripted to fight for years overseas (where more than 292,000 would die, and nearly 671,000 would be maimed or wounded for their country). FDR also decided as a precaution for national security that more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans living along the West Coast would in effect be "drafted" to sit out the war, housed and fed at taxpayer expense in homeside Relocation Camps that resembled army camps. Virtually all of them survived the war. As the poet John Milton wrote, "They also serve who only stand and wait." For this, say the revisionists, they got reparations?