Justice for All (27 page)

The significant place of the Japanese in California agriculture made them natural adversaries of the state's large farming interests. Even before the release of the Roberts Report, those interests leaned on state officials to push the Japanese out and rid white farmers of their competition. On January 3, F. W. McNabb, an official of the Western Growers Protective Association, wrote to Warren to urge removal of the Japanese—as he put it, to ask that Warren “make a sincere effort to eliminate as many of these undesirable aliens from the land of California as is possible at this time.”
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Two days before the release of the Roberts Report, Western growers and shippers meeting in Florida passed a resolution urging immediate internment—not just removal—of Japanese aliens in California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona. The resolution also called for impounding all money and property. Farms were the clear targets of that measure. Norman Evans, a Los Angeles man elected to head the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, said internment would prevent violence from breaking out between Filipino and Japanese workers. The Japanese, he said, were “a menace in this country.”
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Austin E. Anson, a Washington lobbyist employed by the Shipper-Grower Association of Salinas, was even more blunt:

The shippers and growers, along with the Associated Farmers, had long hitched their fortunes to those of California's Republican Party. The effort to defeat Upton Sinclair in 1934 had cemented that alliance, and Olson's election in 1938 had given the farmers new need to seek out friends in Sacramento. As the leading statewide Republican and California's top law-enforcement official, Warren was a natural ally who welcomed his backing by farmers.
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Until Pearl Harbor, Warren handled the Associated Farmers as he did his other troublesome supporters—by welcoming their friendship and broad goals at the same time that he abjured their more extreme ideas. In 1940, for instance, he spoke to the association but pointedly withheld his support for the organization's growing prejudice toward Japanese farmers. “Should we be in trouble with the Axis Powers, there will be more than three million of their nationals in this country,” Warren said, “but I have enough confidence in human nature to believe that the great majority of them will be loyal to the land of their choice. We must promote this loyalty. We must see to it that no race prejudices develop and that there are no petty persecutions of law-abiding people.”
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That was 1940, when war was Europe's problem. By 1942, when America was at war, Warren was prepared to join the farmers, if not in their bigotry, at least in its effect. By mid-February, law-enforcement officials and farm representatives had responded to Warren's call for their assessments of the situation in each of their areas, and Warren's staff produced an extraordinarily damaging dossier on the threat of the Japanese to California's security. Thirty-five of California's fifty-eight counties responded to Warren's request for information about Japanese leases and land ownership. Their reports were assimilated by Warren Olney in San Francisco. The result, Warren concluded, “shows a disturbing situation.”
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Olney and Warren found concentrations of Japanese land along electrical lines, railroads, military bases, oil fields, and coastal areas that could be used for invasion. In the fog of conflict, the colored pins on the maps that Warren hung on the wall of his office seemed to present a pattern: To Warren, at least, it appeared that California's Japanese had acquired land in order to hold it until it was needed to wage sabotage or invasion of the United States. “Such a distribution of the Japanese population appears to manifest something more than coincidence,” he declared. And even if it did not, he added, “the Japanese population of California is, as a whole, ideally situated . . . to carry into execution a tremendous program of sabotage on a mass scale should any considerable number of them be inclined to do so.”
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There was another explanation, however. Japanese farmers had purchased coastal land because it offered the right climate for the table vegetables they specialized in growing. Others had picked up scraps of property along railroads and electrical lines because it was cheap and available. Indeed, in some cases they picked up those parcels because they were the victims of racist practices that kept better property out of their hands. In effect, then, the Japanese of 1942 were being accused of conspiracy because the Japanese in the years leading up to that point had been the victims of prejudice.

Despite the flaws of his argument, Warren was persuasive, in part because he enjoyed a reputation for fairness and in part because he was diligent in advancing his argument. In early February, Warren began collecting the maps and sharing them with selective, influential audiences. In one crucial gathering, Warren brought together defense experts and Tom Clark, then the Justice Department's representative in California in charge of evaluating the Japanese situation (and later to be Warren's colleague on the Supreme Court). With them, too, was Walter Lippmann, the premier newspaper columnist in America. Lippmann was beating a particular drum during those weeks. In columns and speeches, he berated leaders for failing to bring America quickly to wartime footing, and he chastised citizens who wanted to protect themselves rather than pursue the enemy abroad. “Pearl Harbor,” Lippmann argued, “really was the reflection of America's 20 years of self-indulgent refusal to believe the facts of life.” America was faced, Lippmann said, with a long war, one that could be won only if it dedicated its strength to attacking its enemies, not to pulling back in self-defense.
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With that in mind, Lippmann came to California to study the civil defense situation, and soon encountered Warren. At a meeting in Montecito, an elegant little community on California's coast, Santa Barbara district attorney Percy Heckendorf presented the map of his area to Warren, Clark, and Lippmann. “Mr. Lippmann,” Heckendorf recalled, “showed great interest in the map and the significant things that were shown on it.”
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Having reviewed the map and interviewed Warren about its significance, Lippmann set to work writing his column. Headlined “The Fifth Column on the Coast,” Lippmann's piece appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
and other papers on February 13, and it adopted Warren's fear of sabotage and invasion: “Nobody's Constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield,” he wrote. “And nobody ought to be on a battlefield who has no good reason for being there.”
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Attorney General Biddle, then still attempting to head off the internment and the military's support for it, bitterly denounced Lippmann and other advocates as “Armchair Strategists and Junior G-Men.”
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Biddle had no way of knowing it, but one of Lippmann's “armchair strategists” was Earl Warren. For while Lippmann did not directly attribute any argument to Warren, Heckendorf wired Warren to congratulate him for his role in shaping Lippmann's views on the subject and on the column's subsequent influence on the debate.
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As Lippmann was writing, Warren stepped up his other efforts to build support for the forced removal of the Japanese. At a meeting with the state's leading anti-Japanese organization on February 7, Warren suggested that its members pressure federal authorities to act against local Japanese residents. Undoubtedly referring to the malleable DeWitt, Warren advised that authorities seemed to him responsive to lobbying: “[I]t is my opinion,” he told the members of the California Joint Immigration Committee, “without reference to any individual, that, generally speaking, the military and national authorities here would not be averse to having pressure applied in order to show the rest of the country just what their danger is here.”
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By February 11, Warren had crossed the final Rubicon in his view of what was needed. That day, he was accompanied by Clark and Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron, as the three met with DeWitt. Before the meeting, Warren, Clark, and Bowron agreed that Bowron would take the lead in presenting their position, which all three shared. And it now had become their view—and thus Warren's view—that removal of
all
Japanese and Japanese-Americans was justified, regardless of citizenship, immigration status, or evidence of wrongdoing. Mere ethnicity, to them, warranted removal. Describing that meeting, Bowron said he and his colleagues advocated removal even though they realized “that many of the Japanese were citizens.”
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Since immigrant Japanese were not citizens, Bowron could only have been referring to the Nisei, those people born in the United States of Japanese parentage. Additionally, Warren's maps were now nearly complete, and they identified all land within their counties “owned, occupied or controlled by persons of the Japanese race.”
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No distinction was made between Japanese immigrants and American citizens of Japanese descent. The maps blended those distinctions, showing in red not only those rural properties occupied by immigrants but also the holdings of Nisei. (Indeed, much of the land owned by Japanese in California was actually owned by Nisei, since California's Alien Land Act, then decades old, prohibited Japanese immigrants from purchasing or owning real estate; the law was widely evaded by the Japanese parents, who later turned over title to their native-born children.)

The logic of Warren's maps, like the rest of his presentation, was difficult to resist by desperate, blindered leaders. In his final report on the internment, DeWitt adopted Warren's research at great length and used it to justify the removal. In fact, large sections of Warren's report were simply lifted verbatim by DeWitt—the description of Japanese land ownership in the Santa Maria Valley, for instance, and Heckendorf's analysis of the land situation in Santa Barbara County. “Whether by design or accident, virtually always their communities were adjacent to very vital shore installations, war plants, etc.,” DeWitt wrote later. “While it was believed that some were loyal, it was known that many were not.”
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DeWitt's choice of words illuminated his state of mind. To him, “some” Japanese were “believed” to be loyal, “many” were “known” to be not.

On February 14, after speaking with Clark, Bowron, and Warren, DeWitt made his final recommendation to the secretary of war. He asked that the secretary exclude all Japanese aliens and Japanese-American citizens from the West Coast. Other aliens—Germans and Italians—were only to be removed if found to be enemies. In recommending that course, DeWitt also adopted the looking-glass logic that corrupted clear thinking in those vital weeks. Addressing the question of how to justify a mass deprivation of rights in order to prevent sabotage when no acts of sabotage had been committed, DeWitt wrote, “Along the Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today. There are indications that these are organized and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”
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In short, the absence of sabotage became the basis for believing that serious sabotage was being planned. Law-abiding behavior was evidence of insurrection in the works. Warren subscribed to that view as well. What, he and DeWitt might have asked themselves, would a loyal Japanese-American do under those circumstances to convince authorities of his loyalty, if even doing as they asked would be cited as evidence of subersive intent? Once passions had receded, the absurdity of that argument was plain. By then, it could be viewed only with heartache.

Through those weeks, Warren's views on California's Japanese had marched steadily ahead. Never had he uttered a public word of restraint. Not once had he expressed regret about the ramifications that his course of action would have on a substantial bloc of California's population. Warren's abiding sense of duty—his preoccupation with the need to defend California from its enemies—pressed him grimly forward, over hurdles and past restraints. He first stood in defense of Japanese state workers, only to then support their removal altogether. As that idea attracted support, Warren did not lift a hand to help nearly 100,000 California residents whose safety it was his job to protect under constitutional amendments he helped write and under the oath he took as attorney general. His actions against the Japanese bore his trademark effectiveness. His silence in their defense spoke for itself.

Canada began forcibly moving its Japanese population in January. FDR, who six weeks earlier had criticized private employers for firing immigrant workers, on February 19 authorized the military to do whatever it saw fit to safeguard the Pacific Coast. Executive Order 9066 did not mention the Japanese by name, but Roosevelt knew it would be applied only to them. Similar measures were undertaken throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Earl Warren's most comprehensive comments on the removal came two days after FDR's order, when he appeared at the first session of the Tolan Committee, a congressional panel on migration that came to California to discuss the possible movement of its Japanese residents. Because Warren's testimony came after the issuance of FDR's order, some of Warren's defenders have downplayed the significance of his remarks. And it is true that his testimony did not, by itself, shape the order. Still, that ignores Warren's actions leading up to his appearance. For weeks, he had been consulting with the principals—especially DeWitt and Clark. He lobbied them personally and asked others to do so as well. Thus, while the testimony did not influence FDR's decision, the thoughts contained within it did, and the significance of the testimony is that it helps reveal the substance of Warren's communications in the days preceding it.