The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (4 page)

Four weeks after his arrest, Sumi learned her father was in a detention station in Tujunga, a thirty-mile drive north from Little Tokyo. Though they still had the Hupmobile, neither Sumi nor her mother knew how to drive; Tom had done all the driving in the family. A friend volunteered to take them to Tujunga. When they arrived at the detention center, operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Sumi saw a prison surrounded by barbed wire. Outside the center was a long line of women and children waiting to visit their incarcerated husbands and fathers. Sumi and Nobu took their place in line and waited.

Finally, after more than an hour, it was their turn. A guard with a gun on his hip and a rifle with a bayonet explained to Sumi that her parents would have to stand on opposite sides of the fence—five feet apart—and that they could speak only English to each other. Though Nobu knew a few words in English and Tom knew a few more, they spoke to each other only in Japanese. The rule would be a problem.

“But they speak Japanese,” Sumi said.

“English only!” replied the guard.

Her mother and father faced each other, one on one side of the fence and one on the other. At first, they stared into each other’s eyes, both of them afraid of making further trouble for themselves.

Finally Tom said, “Mama okay?”

Her mother nodded. “Papa okay?” she asked weakly.

That was the only English they could manage. For ten minutes they faced each other in silence. In desperation, Nobu asked Tom a question in Japanese about where he might be sent next.

The guard quickly stepped between them. “English only!” He pointed the bayonet at Nobu’s throat.

“Take that gun away from my mother’s face,” Sumi said. The sight of the guard with his fixed bayonet and the look of helplessness
and humiliation on the faces of her parents filled her with rage. Her favorite class in junior high school had been civics. She’d been taught that every American had a right to freedom and justice, and whatever happened, Sumi vowed to claim hers.

“I told them they could only speak English,” replied the guard, but he looked away from the fierce gaze of a young teenager and slowly lowered his weapon to the ground. In that moment, Sumi became not only the interpreter for her parents but their protector.

“Let’s go back home, Mama,” said Sumi. “Leave everything to me.”

That was the last day Sumi’s father was referred to as Tom. In government files he was listed as Tokiji, and from then on he answered only to his Japanese name.

Neither Ingrid nor Sumi realized it, but they had an ally in Eleanor Roosevelt. On Monday, December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Eleanor left the White House for an overnight trip to Los Angeles and San Francisco. She took New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, with her. As part of his declaration of a national emergency, FDR named La Guardia director of the Office of Civilian Defense. The goal of Eleanor and La Guardia that day was to encourage the Army, the Navy, and civilians on the West Coast. This mission, while similar to her past travels across the United States, signaled a shift in Eleanor’s role as first lady.

The country had 950,000 people enrolled as air-raid wardens, fire fighters, and medical technicians. Now that America was involved in history’s greatest armed conflict, the powerful first lady’s job was to support her husband in readying for war. However, she also wanted to protect the rights of immigrants. La Guardia, a charismatic Italian American, was an important ally. As La Guardia snarled to Eleanor before the trip began, “Hell, this isn’t a pinochle party we’re having. It’s
war
.”

Once they were airborne, the pilot sent word back to Eleanor that thirty Japanese airplanes were bombing San Francisco. La Guardia was in the rear of the airplane, taking a nap. When Eleanor woke him with the news, the response of the feisty mayor was immediate: “If the report is true, we will go directly to San Francisco.” It lifted her spirits that La Guardia gave no thought to retreating to Washington.
The rumors, however, were false, an indication of the country’s sudden jitteriness. Eleanor and La Guardia went as planned directly to Los Angeles.

On the ground, they met with a group of press and public officials in downtown Los Angeles, not far from Sumi’s apartment in Little Tokyo. Standing six feet tall, with grayish-brown hair and cobalt-blue eyes, Eleanor spoke to the work at hand, her imposing appearance lending weight to her words: “I am not here to give you any message. I am here to get down to work. I came here to find out from you what are the most helpful things we in Washington can do to help you. Tell me what you found lacking and what you want.” The statement summed up her approach to her job as first lady: duty first.

After Los Angeles, Eleanor traveled up the West Coast to Tacoma, Washington, where she had photographs taken with a group of American-born Japanese students—teenagers with foreign-born parents like Sumi and Ingrid. The students in Tacoma told the first lady about the FBI’s arrest of key Japanese leaders hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. They described the government confiscation of cameras and radios, the establishment of 9:00 p.m. curfews for anyone of Japanese ancestry, and the closing of Japanese-owned businesses. The students were bewildered and frightened. In a statement given after the photograph was taken, Eleanor issued a warning that reflected her deeply held commitment to civil rights:
“Let’s be honest. There is a chance now for great hysteria against minority groups—loyal American-born Japanese and Germans. If we treat them unfairly and make them unhappy, we may shake their loyalty, which should be built up. If you see something suspicious, report it to the right authorities, but don’t try to be the FBI yourself.”

Despite mob attacks on Japanese businesses in California and on German and Italian businesses on the East Coast, and the growing fear of immigrants, Eleanor continued to call for patience and tolerance. In her weekly newspaper column, “My Day,” she wrote, “We know there are German and Italian agents, Japanese as well, who are
here to be helpful to their own nations. But the great mass of people stemming from these various national ties must not feel they have suddenly ceased to be Americans.”

These were not popular arguments, but unlike her predecessors as first lady, Eleanor did not worry if she was popular. She was forty-eight when she became first lady and spoke her mind, even when her opinion differed from her husband’s. For instance, in February 1933, one month before Franklin Roosevelt’s inauguration as president, Eleanor ghostwrote a column arguing that taxes should be lowered and that Franklin should insist on more public spending from Congress. In private, she regularly disagreed with Roosevelt, who was not threatened by opinionated women. His mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, was demanding and outspoken as well.

Since FDR’s election as president in 1932, Eleanor had relied on her own judgment and her convictions. Politics was the bond that defined the marriage. Eleanor served as his mobile surrogate, his chief champion for the New Deal’s relief and social policies, traveling more than 280,000 miles in his first two terms. Bound to a wheelchair because of his paralysis due to polio, Franklin used Eleanor as what he called “my eyes and ears,” to visit people and places he could not easily reach and gather the knowledge he needed to lift the country out of the Great Depression. During Eleanor’s first summer as first lady, Franklin asked her to go to Appalachia and report to him on the poverty there. “Watch the people’s faces,” he told her. “Look at the conditions of the clothes on the wash lines. You can tell a lot from that.”

Dressed in a miner’s clothes, Eleanor went down into the mines with workers to report on conditions. A celebrated 1933
New Yorker
cartoon by Robert Day captured the miners’ surprise. The cartoonist depicted two miners shoveling coal in a dark shaft, with their faces looking up to the light. The breathless caption read, “For gosh sakes, here comes Mrs. Roosevelt!” Wherever Eleanor went, she spoke her mind.

But that day on the West Coast, the character of this political
partnership changed. Eleanor was spitting into the winds of war. She and Franklin had two different visions of the way forward for the country, as well as two competing visions for their complicated life partnership. Eleanor was focused on conditions at home—the fight against poverty, the press for social reform, and the protection of the civil liberties of German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants. To her, the assurances of the First Amendment were nonnegotiable. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, as Roosevelt watched Hitler annex Austria, occupy Czechoslovakia, and march into Poland
on September 1, 1939, the president’s attention shifted away from the home front to the events in Europe, leaving Eleanor out of many decisions, especially the ones related to the fate of American immigrants from Germany, Japan, and Italy.

Even in the aftermath of a disaster as large as Pearl Harbor, Eleanor felt the guarantees of the Bill of Rights must be protected. Roosevelt did not agree. He believed the threat from saboteurs and spies was real and took aim against enemies at home, real and imagined. Again and again, Eleanor tried to make her case to him that the problem with immigrants was grossly exaggerated. “These people were not convicted of any crime,” Eleanor wrote in an unpublished magazine article for
Collier’s
, “but emotions ran too high, too many people wanted to wreak vengeance on Oriental looking people. There was no time to investigate families or to adhere to the American rule that a man is innocent until he is proven guilty.”

Although history would later prove her right, on the day after Pearl Harbor, Eleanor was in a distinct minority. Walter Lippmann, the most influential journalist in America, published a column in the
Washington Post
on February 12, 1942, titled “The Fifth Column on the Coast.” Lippmann insisted national security preempted civil rights. “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 a fact that communication takes place between the enemy at sea and enemy agents on land.” He argued that the arrest of Japanese
Americans would not violate their constitutional rights. “Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield. There is plenty of room elsewhere for him to exercise his rights.”

Three days later, Westbrook Pegler, a conservative columnist who did not usually agree with Lippmann, expressed similar views in his column in the
Washington Post
: “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”

The entire political establishment applied pressure on Roosevelt to act not only against Japanese immigrants but also against Germans and Italians. All the military figures—General John DeWitt, Provost Marshal General Allen Gullion, and Secretary of War Henry Stinson—supported the arrest and incarceration of anyone suspected of disloyalty to the United States and the total evacuation of the Japanese from the West Coast.
California’s attorney general, Earl Warren, later immortalized as a civil rights champion on the US Supreme Court, urged Roosevelt to intern all Japanese on the West Coast. Warren called the threat of Japanese subversives “the Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort” and warned, “Unless something is done, it may bring about a repetition of Pearl Harbor.”

No one was as influential in the decision to uproot thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans from their homes—as well as thousands of German and Italian immigrants on the East Coast—and incarcerate them without charges as DeWitt, the Army’s West Coast commander. In testimony to a subcommittee of the House Committee on Naval Affairs in April 1943, DeWitt said, “I don’t want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty. It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty. But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.”

Later, DeWitt made clear that he also wanted Germans and Italians removed as well. “I include all Germans, all Italians, who are
alien enemies,” he said to a fellow military officer. “Evacuate enemy aliens in large groups at the earliest possible date; sentiment is being given too much importance. Get them all out.”

Roosevelt’s decision to arrest and intern about 120,000 Japanese, two-thirds of them American citizens such as Sumi, and thousands of other immigrants, mainly Germans such as Ingrid’s father, had its roots in his experiences as an ambitious young man at the start of his political career. On March 17, 1913, at the age of thirty-one, Roosevelt was appointed assistant secretary of the Navy, a position he held for seven years. In his new post with the Navy, he had access to secret intelligence, and he approached it with bravado. “I get my fingers into everything,” he said, “and there’s no law against it.” He oversaw the Office of Naval Intelligence, which was in those days a small operation. Roosevelt threw out the sleepy bureaucrats and replaced them with several of his Ivy League friends who, like Roosevelt, believed that America was in danger from German assassins.

Their fears were confirmed by an act of sabotage in New York known as the Black Tom incident on July 30, 1916. Just after midnight, a small band of Germans set off a large explosion. The force of the blast turned the night sky over New York bright orange. Its epicenter was a small island called Black Tom. The bang jolted people from their beds. The Brooklyn Bridge shook, and the Statue of Liberty, less than a mile away, was damaged by shards of red-hot steel. The most important loading terminal in New York Harbor, then used to send munitions to Britain, was destroyed. The largest explosion ever in the United States, it convinced Roosevelt of two things: that America must enter the war, and the nation was at risk from a vast network of undercover German agents.