Justice for All (25 page)

Chapter 8

“THE BEST PEOPLE OF CALIFORNIA”

JUSTICE WILLIAM DOUGLAS, FOR THE COURT, DECEMBER 18, 1944
¹

JUSTICE HUGO BLACK, FOR THE COURT, DECEMBER 18, 1944
²

 

 

 

 

 

 

AFTER THE DIFFICULT WEEKS of late 1941, Earl and Nina Warren looked forward to a languid Sunday on December 7. Earl was home for the weekend, and Oakland was stirring with Christmas. The papers carried news of war in Europe and preparations for war in the Pacific—as well as continued turmoil regarding the King, Ramsay, and Conner pardons, and updates on a municipal strike that loomed for Monday in Berkeley. But there was shopping to be done, trees to buy and decorate. At 88 Vernon, the basement was bare—but not for long. On Christmas Eve, after the children had gone to bed, Earl and Nina would set up a grove of little trees, each matching the height of a child. Beneath that child's tree would sit his or her pile of presents. The children would wake and run to their trees.

With the season came festivities. That night of the sixth, the Claremont Country Club, where the Warrens were members of long standing, was hosting a Christmas gala to benefit West Oakland children. The Warrens passed, preferring to spend the night at home with theirs. All were home that holiday—except for Jim, a student at Harvard Business School, where he was enduring but unhappy, pining for his girlfriend, Maggie, soon to be his wife.
³
The rest of the Warren youngsters, from thirteen-year-old Virginia to six-year-old Robert, were in the Warren nest on the morning of December 7. Earl Warren, Jr., always an early riser, puttered around the yard with the radio on. Bobby was in the kitchen with his mother, watching her cook and licking the spoon.
⁴
As they worked and chatted in the kitchen, the radio interrupted with the news from Hawaii. Within minutes, the phone began to ring.

The attack on Pearl Harbor propelled Warren to quick action. He put aside his disagreements with Olson long enough to join the governor in urging calm. Olson decried “the sudden and almost unbelievable attack on Hawaii,” and the following day suggested that German, Italian, and Japanese residents stay inside their homes to avoid retribution. Warren asked residents and law enforcement to be on the alert for sabotage. Anyone spying suspicious activity, he said, should call his office.
⁵
Warren then summoned his staff for a rare Sunday meeting. His top aides convened at two P.M. to consider their response to the war. The attack, they realized, placed the attorney general's office at the center of California's protection; Warren asked that civil defense experts be collected for a meeting the following morning. Aides scrambled to round them up.

Home late that night, Warren unwound with a long walk. The night was particularly dark, as he, a colleague, and his son Earl wandered through the Oakland neighborhood, the two men talking in low, pained voices while the boy tagged along, silently keeping pace. As they rounded a corner and headed home, the attorney general was struck hard from behind. He staggered forward, as his son and companion froze momentarily, an anxious day cresting in this darkened attack. Then up bounded Eric, a dim-witted neighborhood boxer dog, tail wagging. Earl Warren burst into laughter, gave the dog a shake, and sent him home.
⁶

Over the next few days, California went from jumpy to near-panic, as the state braced for what many believed was an imminent strike or even invasion on the West Coast. The FBI rounded up suspicious aliens—German, Italian, and Japanese. More than a thousand were arrested on December 7 and 8. Newspaper reports detailed seizures of weapons, signaling devices, and radios, all believed to have been planted and readied for just this moment. Japanese fishing boats along the West Coast were beached, and the Treasury Department froze all assets belonging to Japanese.
⁷
On December 8, the civil defense experts brought together by Warren gathered for an emergency conference in San Francisco. Emerging from the five-hour meeting, Warren warned police chiefs and sheriffs to move quickly to secure their areas, and his comments signaled his early preoccupation with the notion that California's enemies were in its midst, not merely abroad. “We are at war,” Warren said, “and are immediately confronted with the most serious law enforcement problem of all time. Sabotage is just as much a part of Axis warfare as are military and naval operations.”
⁸

Tips poured in to Warren's office. There were reports of weapons caches in the Sacramento Valley, of sabotage attempted or suspected. Sheriffs called, pleading for direction.
⁹
Planes overhead were mistaken for the enemy, and blackouts suddenly became a regular part of nightly life. Members of Warren's staff struggled along with the rest of the state beneath the new exigencies of conflict. One night soon after Pearl Harbor, Helen MacGregor tried to make her way home with the help of Bill Sweigert. They were trapped by the blackout rules, but managed to make it to his house, where she then had to bunk down for the night.
¹⁰
At the Warren house, life was similarly disrupted. One air-raid warning in early 1942 forced the family into the basement shelter; for two days, Nina and Earl Warren and their children slept in sleeping bags and ate sandwiches for dinner, straining for sounds of an attack.
¹¹

California's fears only deepened as the Japanese Navy enveloped the Pacific Rim with a lightning series of strikes. In the hours and days following the destruction of much of the American Pacific fleet, Japan invaded Malaysia, Burma, Midway, Wake Island, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Guam. By Christmas, Guam, Wake Island, and Hong Kong were under Japanese control. On January 2, Manila fell as well. Singapore braced for its fate. Off the coast of California, Japanese submarines prowled and occasionally struck. Although the damage of those attacks would be tragically exaggerated by Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt in justifying the actions he was about to recommend, military records do reflect the sinking of at least three vessels—the tanker
Monte Bello
and two other ships—during the week leading up to Christmas.
¹²
The war had been thrust upon America, and in those weeks it appeared quite possible that America would lose.

But what was most curious in California about the six weeks immediately following Pearl Harbor was what, despite the revisionist recollections of many historians, did not happen: Californians, so long steeped in racism toward their Japanese neighbors, did not rise up against them, even as fury over Pearl Harbor spread. In those early weeks, acts of violence against California's Japanese were few, the vitriol surprisingly contained.
¹³
California politicians, including Warren, later blamed the public for what happened next, but that was false. It was not the public that led this descent. It was the work of leaders.

In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the state's newspapers were quiet, even respectful toward California's 93,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Through early January, the
Santa Barbara News-Press
carried regular stories about the arrests of Japanese suspected of spying, but it also featured the story of a group of local Japanese who had banded together to contribute $3,000 a month in savings bonds and stamps to help the war effort: “100% of Japanese families in and about Santa Barbara have agreed to buy at least one $25 savings bond a month,” the group's leader stated and the paper reported.
¹⁴
Readers had questions about how to treat Japanese businesses and employees, and the newspaper delivered civil, careful responses. On January 3, the
Los Angeles Times
quoted FDR at length as the president expressed his concern over reports that employers across the country were dismissing workers of German, Italian, or Japanese descent. FDR called that “as stupid as it is unjust” and reminded the nation that its fight was against nations convinced of their racial superiority. “We must not forget what we are defending: liberty, decency, justice,” the president said. “I urge all private employers to adopt a sane policy regarding aliens and foreign-born citizens.”
¹⁵
Two days later, with Pacific Asia reeling under the might of the Japanese Navy, the
Sacramento Bee
echoed FDR and editorialized in defense of California's Japanese: “Race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice—that is the Nazi gospel. The wise and sensible American will avoid any of them as he would a deadly poison or a fatal pestilence.”
¹⁶

The gentle, protective tone continued through much of January. The
Sacramento Union
on January 18 editorialized against a proposal to investigate the backgrounds of Americans born in the United States of Japanese descent. After acknowledging the rising panic over the war, the
Union
cautioned, “It is utterly deplorable, however, that this hysteria should be reflected in demands on the part of our elected representatives for legislative investigations of the racial backgrounds of American citizens.”
¹⁷
Even the
Los Angeles Times
, rarely at the vanguard of civil liberties, continued through late January guardedly to urge readers to consider Americans of Japanese descent with equanimity, if not necessarily benevolence. “Many of our Japanese, whether born here or not,” the paper offered cautiously, “are fully loyal and deserve sympathy rather than suspicion.” Although the paper added a note of caution—“To be sure it would sometimes stump an expert to tell which is which and mistakes, if made, should be on the side of caution”—its larger point was of restraint.
¹⁸

Not all was calm in those weeks. Indeed, an undercurrent of concern about the presence of so many Italians, Germans, and Japanese in the United States was beginning to gather. Officials in Washington were perplexed by the question of how threatening to view the presence of more than a million immigrants from those nations with which the United States now was at war. Officials contemplated new supervisorial authority over Japanese farmers to ensure that crops were delivered as needed for the war effort. A defense plant in Los Angeles burned, and suspicion quickly focused on sabotage.
¹⁹
And a few groups, including two that Warren was a member of, the American Legion and the Native Sons of the Golden West, were all too happy to turn on the state's Japanese population. The Legion approved a resolution calling for internment on January 19, 1942, and that action was followed by strenuous local advocacy; among California Legionnaires, there were early mutterings of “concentration camps.”
²⁰
But the dominant mood of those weeks, as captured by the coverage in California's newspapers and the comments of its leading politicians, was of American solidarity—a solidarity that included Japanese-Americans—in defiance of a common enemy.

The last week of January brought a marked change. On January 24, United States Supreme Court justice Owen Roberts issued a much-anticipated analysis of the causes of the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor. Roberts's report made scant reference to the islands' Japanese population, but one short passage from the document received much attention in the days that followed. In it, the commission remarked that spies had helped the Japanese military prepare for the attack. Of those spies, the report noted, “some were Japanese consular agents and others were persons having no open relations with the Japanese foreign service. These spies collected and through various channels transmitted information to the Japanese Empire respecting the military and naval establishments and dispositions on the island.”
²¹

Though the attack on Pearl Harbor had not unleashed California's racism, the report on the attack did. Although the unnamed “persons having no open relations with the Japanese foreign service” were not identified in any way, much less by their race, those few words stoked the anxieties of well-meaning leaders and opened a line of attack for those long interested in pursuing their campaign against Japanese-Americans. On January 27, Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron convened harbor officials and Navy officers to discuss the city's strategic defenses, and the county Board of Supervisors requested the immediate removal of “enemy aliens” from strategically significant areas. The following day, less than a week after urging sympathy for Japanese-Americans, the
Los Angeles Times
called for their removal. “The time has come,” the paper intoned, “to realize that the rigors of war demand proper detention of Japanese and their immediate removal from the most acute danger spots.” The
Times
showed no particular relish in that position, admitting it was “not a pleasant task,” but endorsed it nonetheless.
²²
Henry McLemore, a popular East Coast columnist visiting California, on January 29 called for evacuation in the harshest terms, and the
Times
published an only barely cleaned-up version: