Just
as each generation has its holocaust deniers, apparently every
generation must spawn a defender of the Japanese internment. In the
1970s and 1980s that defender was Lillian Baker, a Gardena, California
woman whose earlier interests had run to hatpins and collectible
jewelry, and who by opposing the Japanese American campaign for
redress for the wartime injustice, may have thought
she was avenging
the death of her first husband at the hands of the Japanese forces in
the Philippines during World War II.
What the Americans of Japanese
ancestry, long term U.S. residents and their American-born children,
had to do with atrocities in the Far East she never tried to explain –
but like Karl Bendetsen and John J. McCloy, two prime players in the
events of 1942 that led to the forced removal of 110,000 members of
one entire racial group from the West Coast, she felt compelled to
make the connection.
Lillian
Baker could be dismissed as an eccentric. Her books were largely
self-published, her touted organization, Americans for Historical
Accuracy, lacked much of a following. But Michelle Malkin, whose book
In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World
War II and the War on Terror (Regnery, 2004) came out in
August, can cause much more damage. She has a well-known and
conservative publisher. She is a syndicated columnist with access to
the Fox network and the national media. Malkin claims her book will
“debunk the myths” about the decision to exclude Americans of Japanese
ancestry from the West Coast in 1942 – what she terms the internment
(incarceration is the accurate term).
Malkin’s
first goal is to discredit every comment made after 9/11 that any
racial profiling of Arab or Muslim Americans equates to the injustice
forced upon America’s ethnic Japanese during World War II. Her second goal
is ideological – to support racial profiling as a tool in the
"War on Terror." She writes, “the ethnic grievance industry and the
civil liberties Chicken Littles . . . wield reparations law like a
bludgeon over the War on Terror debate.” Some commentators may have
overstated the comparison between what is happening in the U.S. in
recent times under the Patriot Act with what happened to Japanese
Americans who were deprived of their freedom in 1942, but if any of
these dare criticize Malkin’s book they will be lumped into this
“grievance industry.”
Malkin’s
main thesis is that the decision to exclude was based not on racism or
wartime hysteria, as a government commission found in 1983, but on
information obtained in translated cables of Japanese diplomatic
traffic prior to December 7, 1941. She asserts with boring repetition
and no convincing evidence, that the MAGIC translations were the real
basis for the military necessity of the evacuation and internment of
the ethnic Japanese (which they were not). She asserts that
information in the cables PROVES that there were “espionage networks”
among the Japanese communities and that this was sufficient reason for
the mass incarceration. In order to argue that such a network could be
dangerous she fills several chapters with accounts of the perfidious
behavior of Japanese agents in numerous countries in South East Asia
prior to Pearl Harbor. To support her contention that Japan was the
“only Axis country with a proven capability of launching a major
attack on the United States” (a claim she has had to withdraw) she
mentions actions by Japanese submarines in the first weeks of the war
and the shelling of Goleta, which occurred after the decision to
exclude was made. She writes, “little-known Japanese submarine attacks
are disregarded, downplayed, or denied altogether in the
oversimplified, comic-book version of history plied by critics of the
West Coast evacuation.”
Malkin
herself totally disregards the climate of race-baiting, economic
jealousies and vigilante attacks on members of the Japanese
communities that by early February 1942 combined with war hysteria to
cause many politicians and the press to demand that the government do
something about the “Japanese problem.” The bulk of her book is
devoted to rewriting the history of the internment decision and its
impact on the evacuees so that she can wield that “internment” as a
defense of racial profiling.
The facts:
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed
Executive Order 9066, which permitted a designated military
commander to exclude “any and all persons” from “certain military
areas.” The order was almost exclusively applied on the West Coast
to Japanese aliens, who by law were ineligible for citizenship, and
to their American-born children, leading to the removal of more than
110,000 persons. Evacuees were not given hearings, as were enemy
aliens interned by the Justice Department and there were no
documented cases of espionage or sabotage. By June 1942, this entire
population was incarcerated in temporary camps near their homes, and
then transferred to one of ten permanent “relocation centers” in
desolate locations in the interior of the West (except for two camps
in Arkansas) where more than half of the original population still
remained at the end of the war.
In 1980, the United
States Congress created the Commission on Wartime Relocation and
Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to find out why this executive order
had been promulgated, and to determine whether amends should be made
to the affected Japanese Americans. After a year of hearings and
extensive research, the Commission published its report, Personal
Justice Denied, in 1983. Their conclusion was that
“promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military
necessity, or driven by military conditions, but rather was based on
“racial prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political
leadership.” The U.S. Congress implemented the Commission’s
recommendations in the Civil Rights Act of 1988 which called for a
presidential apology and a redress payment of $20,000 to each
qualified survivor of the incarceration.
Several
scholarly works have been published recently evaluating reasons for
the decision to exclude Americans of Japanese ancestry from the West
Coast in 1942: Greg Robinson ( By Order of the President: FDR and
the
Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press,
2001) puts Roosevelt's approval of the internment into the context of
the racism of the time and in Roosevelt’s background. Tetsuden Kashima
(Judgement Without Trial: Japanese American imprisonment
during World War II (Seattle, University of Washington Press,
2003) argues that
there was a bureaucratic inevitability to the
incarceration based on his analysis of policies toward aliens in the
twenty years prior to Pearl Harbor. Earlier Kai Bird (The Chairman:
John J. McCloy & the Making of the American Establishment, Simon
and Schuster, 1992) gave much responsibility for the decision to then
assistant secretary of war John J. McCloy. In The Colonel and the
Pacifist, I argue, based on telling evidence from Bendetsen's
archive, that Karl Bendetsen considered himself the architect of the
“military necessity”on which the evacuation and incarceration were
based, that he was the man who made the difference in the handling of
the “Japanese problem” on the West Coast. And I show, further, as do
other scholars, that the necessity and the decision rested on a racist
view of Americans of Japanese ancestry.
Malkin
uses a broad brush to criticize the motives of those of us who have
written about the exclusion decision and the incarceration. She
claims she has no vested interest in “this subject,” and lists persons
who do and therefore are not qualified to discuss it, such as
evacuees, internees, or their families, attorneys representing any of
the above, or professors “whose tenure relies on regurgitating
academic orthodoxy about this episode in American history.” Such a
mean-spirited attitude toward those who may or may not disagree with
her shows a lack of respect for the work of others. Karl Rove would be proud of her.
![[jacket image]](images/cover/0226548236.jpeg)
Greg
Robinson and Eric Muller (Free to die for their country : the story
of the Japanese American draft resisters in World War II ,
University of Chicago Press, 2001) have written detailed critiques of
Makin’s book in weblogs (summarized on Isthatlegal.com). They
have pointed out numerous weaknesses and errors in Malkin’s arguments,
many of which she has admitted. I concur with their analysis, but
would like to extend the discussion.
Malkin
persistently conflates the MAGIC translation of diplomatic cables up
to and including December 7, 1941 with the wartime translation of
Japanese naval radio messages, also termed MAGIC. David Kahn, author of
Codebreakers (Macmillan, 1967), whom she misquotes, is more
careful to refer to the latter when making his claims that the use of
MAGIC translations shortened the war by at least one year.
In
appendices, she includes thirty pages of cable translations and fifty
pages of intelligence memos she claims demonstrate that they were
based on knowledge of the cables. No one disputes the fact of the
cables, or that intelligence officials saw them. The cables are a
matter of public record. Knowledge of their existence and many actual
cables were declassified during multiple hearings on the causes of
Pearl Harbor in1946. The full set of prewar diplomatic cables was
published in 1978 and is available in most libraries. Many historians
have evaluated them. What analysts such as the Army’s official
historian of the internment, Stetson Conn, do not agree with the
assertion that the cables were the basis, the causal factor, the
inspiration for the decision to forcibly remove Americans of Japanese
ancestry from their homes in 1942.
Malkin’s
discussion of the MAGIC cables borrows heavily from the arguments and
the pages of David D. Lowman’s posthumous and poorly researched book,
MAGIC: The untold story of the U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation
of Japanese residents from the West Coast During WWII (Athena
Press, 2000). In 1983 Lowman, a former official of the
National Security Agency, challenged the validity of the CWRIC report,
on the grounds that the Commission had overlooked the Japanese
diplomatic cables. He put forward for the first time the claim that
the cables proved that there had been extensive espionage networks
among the Japanese population in the United States in 1941. Lowman,
who lived in Hawaii in the 80s, did not bring this information to the
attention of the commission (which was in fact aware of the cable
translations), but went to the press with his assertions. Lowman’s
arguments were fully discredited by scholars and retired intelligence
officers during the investigations by the Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Citizens (CWRIC) and in Congressional
Hearings in 1983-1984.
To
support her argument that MAGIC provided the basis for the military
necessity of Executive Order 9066, Malkin asserts several times,
without citation or with an incorrect citation, that both Karl
Bendetsen and John J. McCloy said that MAGIC was an factor in the
development of the evacuation policy. Malkin bases her claim on
statements made by the two men for the first time in1984 testimony
before a Congressional committee. In this Malkin has made a huge
mistake. If she had, as she claimed, truly done the research to
establish causality for the exclusion decision, she would have applied
some skepticism to any statements made in the 1980s by McCloy, and
particularly by Bendetsen.
As
demonstrated in The Colonel and the Pacifist, Bendetsen was not
in full command of his faculties by 1984, and should not have been
allowed to appear in 1986. Furthermore Malkin took out of context his
statement that MAGIC had been a factor, perhaps because she accepted
Lowman’s attributions without reading the full text of Bendetsen’s
statement in the transcript of the hearing. Lowman had also accepted
uncritically Bendetsen’s story-telling in his fallacious 1972 Oral
History Interview with Jerry Hess of the Truman Library. It is well
known that oral historians do no fact checking on the content of the
statements they gather. Bendetsen was a supporter of Lillian Baker’s
organization and got news of the hearings of the CWRIC in letters from
her. (One can measure Bendetsen’s descent into Alzheimer’s in the
1980s by looking at the corruption of his signature on letters to
Baker preserved in her archive at Stanford’s Hoover Institution).
1981 appearances
before CWRIC
The
Commission heard testimony from hundreds of persons who had been
incarcerated during World War II. Bendetsen and McCloy appeared at the
Commission’s last session in Washington, D. C. in 1981. Both were
explicitly asked whether there was intelligence indicating that
Japanese Americans had engaged in espionage or sabotage. Neither
mentioned the MAGIC cables. Lowman credited the hostile audience with
causing Bendetsen and McCloy to fail to mention MAGIC. Malkin argues
old age to excuse McCloy for this so-called lapse. In fact, former
Supreme Court Justice Arthur A. Goldberg spoke directly about
intercepted messages, and McCloy said nothing about them. Senator
Edward W. Brooke asked him if he had any knowledge of sabotage or
espionage on the part of any Japanese American in the period under
discussion (prior to February 19, 1942). McCloy’s answer was ‘no’ to
sabotage, and the espionage he talked of was based on talk and rumor.
He agreed that the decision was made primarily upon the potential
threat the American Japanese might pose. McCloy revealed confusion
over dates and facts in his testimony indicating that he thought that
the Battle of Midway occurred in 1943 rather than in June of 1942.
The bulk
of McCloy’s 1981 testimony was fixated on Pearl Harbor. He stated to
the Commission that the Japanese Americans were removed and imprisoned
as “retribution for the attack that was made on Pearl Harbor.” He,
like Bendetsen, never seemed able to distinguish or separate the
American Japanese population from the enemy forces of Imperial Japan.
Bendetsen’s testimony showed he focused on the climate of hatred of
all Japanese because of “the brutal treatment of U.S. citizens and
U.S. troops by Japanese forces in the Pacific” but claimed that racial
enmity was not a factor in the decision to exclude.
A full
reading of his testimony gives a vivid picture of the unreliability of
Bendetsen as a witness in the 1980s. He was received rudely in1981 by
the audience of former ‘internees’ because his meandering statements
seemed to have no connection with the reality of the experience of
those former inmates in the incarceration camps he had organized. He
claimed he had nothing to do with the decision and implied that
perhaps he didn’t even agree with it, which surprised McCloy.
1984 testimony – A
red herring!
A
subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee conducted hearings
in1984 to evaluate several bills on the Japanese-American and Aleutian
Wartime Relocation. Lowman’s charges had just been publicized. Edward
Ennis, in 1942 an assistant attorney general who had opposed the
decision to exclude, testified that the MAGIC code argument “is a
complete red herring. It has been brought in 40 years after the event
as an additional justification for the evacuation.” Bendetsen
immediately disagreed with Ennis’s assertion that General DeWitt
didn’t have MAGIC. Every assertion Bendetsen made about MAGIC was
weakened by his subsequent answers to questions from Rep. Sam B. Hall,
Jr. and he finally admitted that he first became aware of the MAGIC
cables “after the Battle of Europe, which I went through.”
Malkin
excused McCloy’s testimony in 1981 because of his age. McCloy and
Bendetsen were even older when they scrambled to get on the MAGIC
bandwagon for the first time in 1984 – McCloy was 89, Bendetsen 75 and
slipping – after Lowman’s charges were supposed to have jogged their
memory. In his introductory remarks McCloy stated several times that
“the proximate cause of the President’s order was the Japanese attack
[at Pearl Harbor] and its terrifying consequences to the security of
the country when it occurred.” He did say that he was cleared to see
MAGIC, and that “President Roosevelt, in my mind, knew all about
MAGIC, the essence of MAGIC, and knew that we had this invaluable
asset to deal with in the course of the war,” a reference to the
wartime MAGIC translations. The summary of points in his prepared
material said only of MAGIC: “The fact that the relocation commission
never disclosed the existence of ‘MAGIC’ is the clear indication of
the unreliability of the commission’s so-called ‘investigation.’” In
written remarks given to the committee he parroted arguments made by
Lowman that the reading of MAGIC by a few officials gave a “clear
knowledge of the existence of subversive Japanese agencies.” In hours
of rambling testimony and exhaustive answers to the questions of the
Committee, McCloy only once mentioned MAGIC in relation to Japanese
Americans. Congressman Thomas Kindness of Ohio (a former business
associate of Karl Bendetsen) asked:
Mr. Kindness:
Do you recall any
information from MAGIC that had to do with the internal security
situation in the United States on the West Coast, that related to
Japanese-Americans around that time?
Mr. McCloy:
I think the only thing was that somewhere in MAGIC there was a
statement going out from Tokyo to the command posts and embassies that
the Japanese had entrained a subversive agency operating that would
frustrate or interfere with any attempt that we might make to obviate
the consequences of any other such attack. That’s all spelled out.
Maybe they were boasting, I don’t know.
One
should perhaps look at what motivated the late-in-the-day assertions
by Bendetsen and McCloy that the MAGIC cables were the basis for the
evacuation decision. Both men refused to say that the exclusion had
been a mistake. They were incensed by the charge that a policy they
had helped implement had been judged to be racist. Both opposed any
kind of apology or compensation to their former charges, always
minimizing the harshness of the camp experience and arguing that
perhaps the evacuees deserved what they got because of the attack on
Pearl Harbor. McCloy wrote, “The sacrifices of that segment of our
Japanese /American population which was affected by the President’s
order issued to counteract the consequences of the Pearl Harbor attack
were not as severe as those suffered by many others including citizens
of the U.S. due directly to the attack.” McCloy said he wanted “to
protect the reputation of the people who made the decision.”
McCloy
and Bendetsen each frequently equated persons of Japanese ancestry in
their care with American internees and prisoners of war held by the
Japanese military. Bendetsen many times argued, as did the State
Department, that they must provide at least minimal humane treatment
for the residents of the Relocation Camps in the hope that the
Japanese, who would learn of camp conditions from the Spanish
diplomats representing their interests, would do the same for their
American internees and prisoners of war. In a recent book historian
Brian Masaru Hayashi has argued that this was a reason that the
internees in “American concentration camps” were treated relatively
well, though their confinement “had many oppressive aspects to it.”
Accepting Bendetsen’s
late-in-life assertions fatally damages Malkin’s arguments.
Bendetsen’s son said that Bendetsen was hit hard by Alzheimer’s in the
1980s. In 1988 his secretary admitted to Lillian Baker that Bendetsen
was afflicted with Alzheimer’s and unable to answer her letters, and
he died in 1989. In all of his testimony in the 1980s, Bendetsen’s
grasp of the basic facts of the incarceration was weak, and his desire
to discredit the report of the CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied,
was blatantly obvious. He was obsessed, as was Lillian Baker, with
the effort to show that redress was unnecessary and that any financial
payment was “an unwarranted raid on the U.S. treasury.”
Conditions inside the Camps
As did
Lillian Baker before her, Malkin argues that conditions in the
Relocation Centers were benign. She appears to have accepted
uncritically Bendetsen’s delusional assertions in 1986 testimony that
there was no internment, there were no guards, “they were free to go,”
that students were released to go to college “at government expense.”
The record in government archives and in Bendetsen’s own archive
and testimony by those forcibly detained demonstrate the falsity of
these claims. That Malkin would assert them so baldly suggests that
her claimed “extensive research” was cursory at best.
Lillian
Baker wrote a whole book to argue that the relocation camps should not
be called concentration camps, though that was the term used by many
including President Roosevelt. Malkin repeats Baker’s arguments. In
another of her books, Baker republished the entire 1943-1944 yearbook
of Manzanar High School to show, “what really happened at Manzanar
Relocation Center.” Its pages show the activities of
a group of very American teenagers, though every face is Japanese.
This is the yearbook of a school made as American as possible,
attended by students behaving as American as possible, and making the
best of a bad situation. One could wonder why they needed to be there,
what threat to American life they would have presented had they completed
high school with their neighbors on the West Coast.
Rather than showing what an easy life these students had, Baker made a
good case for considering that their incarceration was unjust and
racially motivated.
An
organization of scholars and professional researchers recently
declared in a letter to the press that Malkin's book represents "a
blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity and
fairness." They observed that Malkin’s work presents a version of
history that is "contradicted by several decades of scholarly
research, including works by the official historian of the United
States Army and an official U.S. government commission."
Malkin’s
In Defense of Internment has not made the case that the1942
exclusion of Americans of Japanese ancestry was based on the MAGIC
diplomatic intercepts and therefore justified. There is a threshold
of scholarship and analysis that an honest author must meet in denying
widely accepted history. Malkin has not met that test. Her renewal of
the 1942 attacks on Japanese Americans respects neither her country
nor history.
* * *
Notes
In one of Regnery’s web
pages the subtitle of Malkin’s book is: The World War II Round-Up
and What It Means For America's War on Terror. In December 1944,
85,000 evacuees remained in government custody in Relocation Centers
when the exclusion order was rescinded (a decision forced by the
Supreme Court’s decision in favor of Mitsui Endo in her habeas corpus
case). Translated intercepts of Japanese naval codes are credited with
enabling the U.S. victory at Midway in June 1942 and with finding and
shooting down Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s plane in April 1943, among
other benefits.
Sources
-- Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians CWRIC Testimony, Washington
D.C. hearing, November 1, 1981, National Archives.
-- Testimony,
Subcommittee on Administrative Law and Government Relations of the
Committee on the Judiciary, House of Relations, June 20, 21, 27 and
Sept. 12, 1984.
-- Letter signed by 39
scholars is available online on History News Network.
-- Brian Masaru Hayashi,
Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment.
(Princeton University Press, 2004).
-- Lillian Baker,
American and Japanese Relocation in World War II: Fact, Fiction&
Fallacy. Introductory Remarks by Karl R. Bendetsen. (Webb Research
Group, 1990).
