Democracy on Trial: The Japanese-American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II. - book reviews

National Review, August 14, 1995 by Ken Masugi

Democracy on Trial: The Japanese-American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II, by Page Smith (Simon & Schuster, 496 pp., $27.50)

AMONG all the subjects of American controversies involving race or ethnicity, perhaps only slavery and segregation have received more widespread condemnation than the World War II relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast. In 1988 President Reagan signed legislation apologizing for "wartime hysteria" and approving payments of $20,000 to relocated Japanese Americans. The bill he signed, passed by almost 2-to-1 bipartisan margins in both houses of Congress, was inspired by a Carter-era congressional commission, packed with liberals (such as former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg and former Congressman Father Robert Drinan) and heavily staffed by Japanese Americans.

The commission's report sought to establish an official history of the incarceration of 120,000 ethnic Japanese, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. According to the report, these men, women, and children were needlessly deprived of their rights and dignity; the Roosevelt Administration's national-security argument for sending American citizens packing into the desert was an utter sham. To deepen Americans' sense of guilt, the American History Museum of the Smithsonian Institution has mounted a permanent display on the episode, with a video of John Chancellor at his sanctimonious best condemning it. On a more scholarly level, Peter Irons's book Justice at War (1983) purported to uncover a conspiracy of Watergate proportions, a suppression of evidence that plainly would have vindicated the hapless Japanese of charges of disloyalty. Both Left and Right have political motives for attacking the relocation.

In Democracy on Trial historian Page Smith demolishes whatever preconceptions most readers may have held about the relocation -- especially the version given above. Taking seriously his own claim that "no event in history has been so thoroughly recorded," Smith, who has written numerous works on American history (including the eight-volume A People's History of the United States), has produced a singularly balanced account by simply reporting and summarizing the previously recorded words of the evacuees themselves. Ever sympathetic to those whose lives were uprooted, he concludes that the relocation was "wrong and indefensible but 'understandable."' "Military, not racial, considerations" led to the decision to relocate. Moreover, "those who condemn the relocation as a 'racist decision' have to climb over a mountain of evidence that many Japanese living in California were ardent Japanese nationalists. They might argue that this fact had no military significance . . . but they cannot well maintain that such groups did not exist." Smith notes that Japan's failure to invade the West Coast did not make the decision to relocate unreasonable. He presents the ethnic Japanese in America as extensions of Japanese culture and political influence. On this point, Smith might have noted that Asians in America had appealed to constitutional rights guaranteed to all persons (regardless of citizenship) plus the rights granted them by treaties with China and Japan. (Treaties often voided discriminatory state legislation.) Much of this argument has been presented before, in the works of historians Roger Daniels and John Stephan and in my own writing, and Smith could have considered still other facts, such as the Nihau episode, in which a Japanese American aided a downed Japanese flier after the Pearl Harbor attack.

In Smith's nuanced view, the Roosevelt Administration blundered into the relocation policy. When Attorney General Francis Biddle opposed raids on alien communities as an infringement of civil liberties, General John DeWitt, commander of the Western military sector, felt that security required the mass evacuation of all aliens, a move he had previously opposed. From such a sweeping effort, public sentiment would exempt Joe DiMaggio's immigrant father along with other Italians, but the Japanese had fewer defenders. Smith speculates that Biddle's East Coast "pride and arrogance and a touch of self-righteousness mixed in with a splendid solicitude for constitutional rights" led to a focus on the unfortunate Japanese.

While giving heed to opponents of relocation, Smith presents rarely voiced arguments. "Voluntary" relocation having failed, the leadership of the Japanese American Citizens League actually endorsed the forced resettlement policy. These younger Japanese Americans urged enthusiastic cooperation as a mark of their patriotism. Ranging from Northern California to Arkansas, the relocation centers themselves were "schools of democracy," Smith contends. "At most of the centers, hundreds and sometimes thousands of evacuees came and went freely, along with visitors, purveyors of food, evacuees without outside jobs, teenagers on shopping expeditions, . . . athletic teams going to play Caucasian teams 'outside,' . . . and so on." (My parents, for example, would take agricultural jobs during the growing season outside "camp" and then move back for the winter.) Evacuees could draw unemployment compensation. Guards, "like the barbed wire," were "more symbolic than practical." Students could attend college, and the University of California library offered interlibrary loan service in one camp. Those who found jobs could leave the centers, and thousands of government-sponsored job offers went begging; the evacuees chose familiar barracks over a free but strange world. Ominously, pro- Japan gangs terrorized the pro-Americans, resulting in the segregation of the Emperor's enthusiasts and their ceremonies to the Tule Lake center in northern California. If the camps yielded patriots who fought in highly decorated units in Europe, they had strong pro-Japan factions as well.