City of Nets (24 page)

The pressure for a mass evacuation kept building. There were sporadic incidents of Japanese being beaten or stoned. A nisei was stabbed to death on a Los Angeles street. The Dies Committee on Un-American Activities issued a report citing various (false) reports of Japanese wrongdoing. The
Los Angeles Times
abandoned its appeals to reason and declared that “the rigors of war demand proper detention of Japanese and their immediate removal from the most acute danger spots.” Both Governor Culbert Olson and Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron called for the evacuation of the Japanese. Perhaps the most influential Californian to press for a mass evacuation, though, was the state's ambitious Republican attorney general, Earl Warren, who was already making plans to challenge the Democratic governor in that year's election (he did and won). Allowing Japanese to remain in California “may well be the Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort,” Warren declared in late January. “Unless something is done it may bring about a repetition of Pearl Harbor.” Less than a week later, Warren called a meeting of California law enforcement officials, and they passed a resolution demanding that “all alien Japanese be forthwith evacuated from all areas in the state of California.” Like Walter Lippmann, Warren managed to convince himself that the complete lack of any Japanese sabotage was no reason to trust Japanese protestations of loyalty. On the contrary, he called the tranquillity “ominous.” Of this lack of criminal behavior, the future chief justice of the Supreme Court declared: “It looks very much to me as though it is a studied effort not to have any until the zero hour arrives.”

California's other chief source of anti-Japanese pressure was General DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, who had declared after Pearl Harbor that “Death and destruction are likely to come at any moment.” It is easy to deride DeWitt's apocalyptic view of California's future, but he must have felt keenly both his responsibility for defending the vulnerable California coast and the gross inadequacy of the forces with which he was supposed to carry out that responsibility. DeWitt was then sixty-two, slender, bespectacled, a professional, son of a general, a commissioned officer since the age of eighteen, and he knew the whole coast was wide open.

In late December, a Japanese submarine sank the tanker
Emidio
off Eureka, killing five of its crewmen. The freighters
Larry Doheny, Agiworld,
and
H. M. Storey
were fired upon almost within sight of shore. One Japanese submarine, the I-17, even surfaced just north of Santa Barbara and fired more than a dozen six-inch shells at a cluster of oil tanks. (The salvo did very little damage, except to the social life of William Randolph Hearst, who nervously shut down his nearby castle in San Simeon and fled with Marion Davies and assorted retainers to a more secluded chateau at Wyntoon, 250 miles north of San Francisco.) DeWitt was deeply alarmed by these assaults. He reported, with considerable exaggeration, that “substantially every ship leaving a West Coast port was attacked by an enemy submarine.”

DeWitt was no Caesar, just a professional army officer confronted by dangers larger and more mysterious than anything in his experience. And to such officers, the news from the Philippines was in some ways worse than the shock of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack on the Philippines was not a hit-and-run raid but a well-planned invasion, and General Douglas MacArthur had been forced to flee, humiliated. And the triumphant Japanese proved ruthless. Corregidor. Bataan. These were names that had a powerful effect on army officers assigned to decide the fate of Japanese fishermen in Los Angeles. “The Japanese race is an enemy race,” DeWitt declared, “and while many second- and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil . . . have become ‘Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted.” German and Italian immigrants had been largely assimilated, and any individual suspects could be investigated, DeWitt argued, but the Japanese could be neither differentiated nor trusted. Even a year later, in testifying before a House committee in San Francisco, DeWitt summed up his judgment when he said, “A Jap is a Jap.”

DeWitt's views were fully endorsed—indeed, encouraged—by his superiors in Washington, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and his deputy, John McCloy. Attorney General Francis Biddle raised a few legal objections to imprisoning U.S. citizens without trial, but he did not object very forcefully. And so, when President Roosevelt decided to take action on February 19, his Executive Order 9066 gave General DeWitt the authority to expel as many Japanese as he chose from the entire area under his command. DeWitt promptly ordered all of them, aliens and citizens alike, to move themselves eastward from the coast. Since many of the victims had no idea where to go or how to get there, however, he suspended his order until some emergency camps could be built. Finally, in April of 1942, he decreed the compulsory evacuation of more than 100,000 Japanese who lived within two hundred miles of the coast to sixteen “assembly centers”—sports stadiums, fairgrounds, tent cities. They were ordered to bring only what they could carry aboard their buses: bedding, extra clothes, the children's toys.

Just as Hollywood had been mildly surprised at the disappearance of its gardeners, it now looked the other way as still more of its inhabitants vanished. “One day the Japanese were there, and the next day they'd simply disappeared,” according to one witness, Anne Relph, who was an elementary school pupil in North Hollywood at the time of Pearl Harbor. “I can remember going to a friend's home and seeing that suddenly her bedroom was just filled with beautiful toys, and I said, ‘Where did you get those?' She said, ‘Macimo (or whatever her name was) gave them to me last night before she went to the internment camp.' A lot of the Japanese children had done this, given their toys away to friends rather than have them confiscated.” Children could give away toys, but their parents had a more difficult time dealing with the people who began eyeing their possessions. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston watched a dealer offer her mother fifteen dollars for a twelve-place dinner set of blue and white porcelain that had been brought from Japan. The mother told the dealer that it was worth at least two hundred dollars. The man thought for a moment and then said he might be able to pay $17.50. “She reached into the red velvet case, took out a dinner plate and hurled it at the floor right in front of his feet,” Mrs. Houston wrote.

“The man leaped back shouting, ‘Hey! Hey, don't do that! Those are valuable dishes!'

“Mama took out another dinner plate and hurled it at the floor, then another and another, never moving, never opening her mouth, just quivering and glaring at the retreating dealer, with tears streaming down her cheeks. He finally turned and scuttled out the door. . . . She stood there smashing cups and bowls and platters until the whole set lay in scattered blue and white fragments across the wooden floor.”

“My dad had just purchased a 1941 Packard—he had probably bought it for fourteen hundred dollars, and he had to sell it for seven hundred dollars,” said Norman Mineta, a Democratic congressman who was ten at the time of Pearl Harbor. “There were other people who had businesses and grocery stores. What do you do with a grocery store? In thirty days? A lot of them just padlocked their businesses and had to walk away from them. They lost thousands and millions of dollars totally.”

Mineta and the rest of his family were assigned to a hastily built barracks in the Santa Anita Racetrack, which ultimately held a total of nearly nineteen thousand bewildered Japanese refugees. “In a room about the size of this [his congressional office] there were six of us . . . from May until October of 1942. From Santa Anita we went to a camp at Hart Mountain, Wyoming. These camps were all barbed wire, guard towers, searchlights. . . . In the summer these places were extremely hot and in the winter extremely cold. They put them in isolated spots so that even if you jumped the fence and got away, you'd still be twenty miles from any community. . . . They were concentration camps. There's no question about it.”

“Concentration camp” is a term that arouses emotional reactions, and the barbed wire and the searchlights and the crying children all sound distant echoes of the Nazi Holocaust, but this was not the Holocaust, just the army carrying out orders with the standard proportion of army inefficiency and incompetence. It was all very unpleasant. Nobody tried to beat or starve the prisoners—on the contrary, the army mess hall slopped out rations with a prodigality that shocked the frugal Japanese—but life in a row of tar-paper barracks was undeniably harsh. Mrs. Houston's mother, who had smashed all her cherished dinner plates, was appalled to find herself standing in line for a chance to use one of twelve unseparated toilets in a communal latrine. Another aging lady of similar sensibilities had brought with her a large carton originally designed to hold boxes of Oxydol soap. By sliding this over her head, she could retain an absurd modicum of privacy. The old lady graciously offered to loan her Oxydol carton to Mrs. Houston's mother, and Mrs. Houston's mother gratefully accepted.

The scene of this exchange was a remote and windswept place called Manzanar, the first of the Japanese relocation camps. When Mrs. Houston arrived in late afternoon after a day-long bus trip from Los Angeles, the first thing that impressed her was “a yellow swirl across a blurred, reddish setting sun. The bus was being pelted by what sounded like splattering rain. It wasn't rain. This was my first look at something I would soon know very well, a billowing flurry of dust and sand churned up by the wind through Owens Valley.” Owens Valley, that garden spot of the past, that fertile ranchland from which the authorities of Los Angeles had siphoned off all the water, until it turned into a parched wasteland, a wilderness, a place fit only for the Japanese.

 

While Pearl Harbor was a disaster for some, it was a boon for Hollywood and a bonanza for the nearby aircraft plants. The two fledgling industries had grown up together in Los Angeles, but the aircraft builders had had a considerably harder time of it. At the end of the 1930's, when the movie business was the nation's fourteenth largest (and the largest of all in Los Angeles), aircraft manufacturing still ranked only forty-first.

Though Glenn Martin had started making planes in Los Angeles as early as 1916, the demand for aircraft in World War I prompted him to move east, where more skilled labor was available. Donald Douglas, who had worked for Martin, moved back to the non-union West in 1922 and made friends with Harry Chandler of the
Times,
who wrote him a check for fifteen hundred dollars and helped him open a small plant in Santa Monica. A. P. Giannini of the Bank of Italy (which changed its name to the Bank of America only after Mussolini attacked Abyssinia in 1936) was also willing to finance airplane builders, just as he enjoyed financing movie studios. But many of these operations were small and primitive (Howard Hughes began by leasing one corner of a Lockheed hangar). The manufacturers bought most of their engines and instruments in the East. “It was sheer tin-bending,” said one veteran who lived on into the huge growth of the city's aerospace industry.

Pearl Harbor naturally brought convulsive upheavals in all the industries that could provide weapons. Detroit's automobile assembly lines simply shut down and began converting to the manufacture of tanks and artillery. The highly individualistic airplane builders of Los Angeles, who ran their competing firms a bit like Hollywood studios, could hardly believe President Roosevelt's announcement that their industry would have to produce 50,000 warplanes in 1942, ten times the targets for 1939. But when they were threatened with the prospect of a “czar” imposed by Washington, they hastily organized an Aircraft War Production Council and began sharing their resources. In one week early in 1942, for example, Vultee solved a shortage of step nuts by getting 1,000 of them from Lockheed; Douglas, in turn, got 1,000 needed cotter pins from Vultee. When Northrup's hydro press broke down that same week, it borrowed the use of North American's press, while North American acquired sixteen engine mount forges from Consolidated. The industry produced a record 47,000 planes that year, 86,000 the year after, and more than 100,000 the year after that.

Through no foresight of the Los Angeles authorities, the manpower for this tremendous surge in production was providentially available: the despised Okies from the dust bowl, who had poured into California during the Depression despite all of California's stern efforts to keep them out. Even with the Okies finally at work, and with thousands of women emerging from kitchens to enter factories, still more help was needed, and the high pay in the Los Angeles area lured in swarms. All told, 780,000 new immigrants came to southern California from 1940 to 1944. And though the movies had long been Los Angeles' biggest industry, that ended in 1940, for government spending fed not only the aircraft plants but shipbuilding, rubber goods, chemicals, nonferrous metals. From being the nation's seventh-largest manufacturing center in 1939, Los Angeles during the war became second only to Detroit.

 

One of the few Americans who seemed to ignore the first news from Pearl Harbor was Howard Hughes. The tall, gaunt Texan had been working compulsively at his office all that Saturday night, heard the bulletins on the radio Sunday morning, and went right on working. He was working on a twin-engine plane known as the D-2, which he hoped to sell to Washington as a medium bomber; he was working on a pressurized airliner that would be able to fly in the stratosphere and was known only as “the Buck Rogers ship”; he was also trying to run an airline that he had acquired the year before, which was called Transcontinental and Western Air and would soon be renamed Trans World Airlines.

When Hughes first came to Hollywood in 1925 and rented a room at the Ambassador Hotel for himself and his new wife, Ella, he was twenty years old and vaguely on the lookout for movie projects to finance. He had abandoned his lackadaisical studies at Rice the year before, when his father had suddenly died and left him heir to the Hughes Tool Company and an estate conservatively estimated, for tax purposes, at $871,518. His first movie, entitled
Swell Hogan,
was so bad that it was never released.
Everybody's Acting
made him a small profit, and
Two Arabian Knights
did fairly well, and then Hughes embarked on the movie he really wanted to make, an epic of the fighter pilots of World War I. The director, Marshall Neilan, thought up a splendid title,
Hell's Angels,
but he and Hughes soon quarreled, so Hughes took over the direction himself.