Accidental Blogger

Yesterday marked the official Day of Remembrance for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to force Americans of Japanese origin from their homes, and to segregate them in detention centers (literally, concentration camps), for "the successful prosecution of the war" and "protection against espionage and against sabotage." Ultimately, more than 100,000 people were interned in ten camps spread across the Western desert.

The continuing relevance of this formative low point in the history of American civil liberties during wartime hardly needs elaboration. Yet I was struck by how little attention the event’s passing received in yesterday’s press. In Los Angeles, my home, and the home of a substantial Japanese American population both at the time of internment and today, the LA Times ran only a brief blurb (requires free subscription) in its "rearview mirror" section. The blurb focuses on a moving passage from Ansel Adam’s book of photographs of Manzanar detainees entitled, "Born Free and Equal." In a letter to his editor, Adams stated his purpose that "through the pictures the reader will be introduced to perhaps twenty individuals . . . loyal American citizens who are anxious to get back into the stream of life and contribute to our victory." In the passage included in the LA Times, Adams worried, more broadly, about the affect of wartime incursions on civil liberties after "peace is established and the crisis of feeling is reduced":

We have the chance now—and never has a better chance been offered us—to establish the true American structure of life. The treatment of Japanese-Americans will be a symbol of our treatment of all minorities. . . . It is our task to retain the individual as the foundation of society, irrespective of his race, color, or religion. It is a problem we must face and solve. . . .

What is the true enemy the democratic peoples are fighting? Collectively, the enemy is every nation and every individual of predatory instincts and actions. We fight to assure a cooperative civilization in opposition to the predatory Nazi-Fascist-Militarist methods and ideologies of government. We must prosecute this war with all the ruthless efficiency, stern realism, and clarity of purpose that is at our command. We must not compromise or appease. We must assure our people that there will be no further human catastrophes such as the destruction of Rotterdam, the annihilation of Lidice, the rape of Nanking, or the decimation of the Jews.

We must be certain that, as the rights of the individual are the most sacred elements of our society, we will not allow passion, vengeance, hatred, and racial antagonism to cloud the principles of universal justice and mercy.

These ideals merit emphasis. I’m troubled, though, that such an important event is approached without context, as if it were an historical aberration (in the "rearview mirror") remediable by recourse to abstract values we effortlessly recognize. Granted, as our ongoing activities in Guantanamo Bay make clear, we seem to have a hard enough time with the basic message, historical context aside, that detaining people without trial vitiates our ideals of universal justice and mercy. But, as the Bush Administration has amply shown, terms like "freedom," "democracy," and "individual rights" are easy to bandy around. It’s the hard cases, revealed by factual details, which give these terms meaning.  History offers little but hard cases, and few real aberrations.

I’m not going to attempt a comprehensive overview of the long and ugly history of the politics of Asian exclusion leading up to Japanese American interment. A few things, though, strike me as worth pointing out, because of their continued relevance and too frequent absence from general public discourse.

1. The background of working class hostility toward economic competition from Asian immigrants, which gained synergistic force from the racist perception of Asians as perennially foreign. California labor organizers and politicians were seminal in pressing for the restrictions on Asian civil liberties leading up to the Internment. One origin of the "union label" was the practice of the Cigar Makers’ Association of the Pacific Coast, which in 1874 placed a white label on cigar boxes to inform consumers they were patronizing white, rather than Chinese, labor. Pressing the case for struggling white workers in 1905, AFL-CIO president Samuel Gompers asserted that ""the Caucasians … are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by Negroes, Chinamen, Japs, or any others."

In California, at the time of Internment, Japanese American truck farmers were responsible for 40 percent of all vegetables grown in the state, including nearly 100 percent of all tomatoes, celery, strawberries and peppers. During the same period, economic refugees from the Dustbowl were flooding into California in search of agricultural work, a chapter of history memorably captured in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother series (1936), as well as Ansel Adams’s haunting "Trailer Camp Children, Richmond, CA" (1944). One rather untowardly cheerful take on this history is that Dustbowl labor became indispensable to fill the "labor shortage created by the US government" through "evacuation of Japanese farmers from the Pacific Coast." A longer view of the political forces that pitted poor native born white laborers against poor immigrant laborers and poor Asian laborers (immigrant as well as native born), reveals the dark underbelly of this means for relieving the pressure imposed by the mass migration of landless farmers to California during the Depression, and helps explain support for the Internment.

2. The role of Asians as a pawn in the battles over the rights of African Americans. For those who read legal opinions, perhaps the most famous example of this role is in Harlan’s dissent to the case that established the separate-but-equal doctrine, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Plessy upheld a law enacted by the state of Louisiana that required separate railway cars for blacks and whites. In 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy (who was seven-eighths white) took a seat in a "whites only" car of a Louisiana train. He refused to move to the car reserved for blacks and was arrested.  The Supreme Court found that the Louisiana law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.  In his eloquent dissent, Harlan protested that "in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law." He made one exception, however, to this color blind scheme:

There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But, by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation, who are not excluded, by law or by reason of their race, from public stations of any kind, and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.

Inversely, due to ambiguity about the term, "white," through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, some Asians became naturalized under the 1790 criteria that "free white persons" were eligible for citizenship, notwithstanding an increasingly hostile climate in state and national legislatures (anti-Japanese bills, for example, were introduced in the California state legislature every year between 1909 through WWII). The Supreme Court clamped a lid on this ambiguity in Takao Ozawa v. US (1922) and U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923). In the autobiographical brief that Ozawa wrote to support his case, he both attested to his assimilation ("In name, General Benedict Arnold was an American, but at heart he was a traitor. In name, I am not all American, but at heart I am an American.") and argued he was literally white, even more so than "the average Italian, Spaniard or Portuguese." The Supreme Court rejected Ozawa’s argument, finding that "white" is a synonym for "Caucasian"; since Ozawa was neither Caucasian nor an African by birth or descent, he did not have the right of naturalization.

Rather ingeniously, Thind, a Punjabi by birth, argued that under Ozawa, he qualified for citizenship as white, since South Asian Indians are not only "Caucasian," but "Aryan." In response, the Supreme Court retreated to the following inpenetrable position:

"What we now hold is that the words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that  word is popularly understood. As so understood and used, whatever may be the speculations of the ethnologist, it does not include the body of people to whom the appellee belongs."

Like the role of Japanese Americans, and other Asians, in the economy, their role as competitors for rights in America’s entrenched racial battles helped lay the foundation for internment. With rising levels of economic and racial inequality, we have no reason to believe, complacently, that a scapegoating, violation of rights on this order is something we will find only in the "rearview mirror."

3. Internment of people of Japanese origin was not limited to America. In 1942 the Canadian government also interned its population of Japanese origin, roughly 22,000 people, most of whom lived in British Columbia. Joy Kogawa’s novel, Obasan, recounts the experiences of a young girl growing up during this period. The tendency, illustrated in the LA Times piece, to see the Internment as an isolated example of American exceptionalism in the problem of racism, robs the event of its connection to a range of international human rights violations (witness the contentious debate over use of the term "concentration camps" to describe the "detention facilities"). In turn, I believe this isolation deprives us of our ability to understand the nature of event, and how to stop "it," in the larger sense, from occurring again.

4. It Doesn’t Matter That Some Japanese Americans Were "Disloyal." No-No Boy (1957), John Okada’s brilliant book about a young Japanese American man’s struggle to reintegrate into post-war Seattle after his internment, captures the range of responses among Americans of Japanese origin to America and to World War II. Among these are the response of variations on the "loyal American citizens" highlighted by Adams and Ozawa; the understandable ambivalence of the narrator; and the rebellious, pro-Japanese fervor of the narrator’s isei mother. The failure to distinguish between 1) members of an ethnic group who support their country of origin’s political goals from those who do not; and 2) those who support an enemy’s goals but pose no threat from those who actually pose a threat to national security, strikes me as a major, unlearned lesson of the experience of Japanese American Internment.