Thursday, February 06, 2003

No partisan glory here

Andrew at Pathetic Earthlings offers this thought on Rep. Coble's remarks:
The Republicans need to start playing offense when it comes to their record on civil rights, and they've got some good folks in their history, and I don't just mean Lincoln. Ralph Carr was a lion. And I hope Colorado Governor Bill Owens, my horse for President in 2008, will invoke this fellow early and often.

Glenn Reynolds chimes in similarly, suggesting "that Coble doesn't even know the history of his own party on the subject."

Actually, it's quite clear that neither does Reynolds, nor for that matter Andrew. Not that it has any actual relevance when talking about the post-Nixon GOP anyway. [More on that later.]

Whenever the subject of the Japanese-American internment is brought up with Republican ideologues (say, Ann Coulter), they are quick to point out that it occurred under FDR. And this is unquestionably true. Moreover, any honest assessment of FDR's presidency has to acknowledge that this decision was a permanent blot, however mitigated it might be by his greatness in other arenas. But Roosevelt was not exactly alone in the blame.

FDR was responding to very broad and bipartisan public and political demands when he ordered the internment, via Executive Order 9066, which he signed Feb. 19, 1942. These included demands from a large number of governors and congressmen of both parties, as well as newspaper columnists from both sides of the political aisle.

But most of all he was responding to demands within his own administration, particularly from War Secretary Henry Stimson and his Assistant Secretary, John McCloy. These two were the main promulgators of the internment within the bureaucratic machinery -- and as it happened, they were both high-ranking Republicans. Indeed, Stimson was probably the most powerful Republican in FDR's administration (which was a truly bipartisan affair, in contrast to the current administration's MO).

In contrast, probably the most strenuous protests against the internment within the administration were made by Attorney General Francis Biddle, who threw up numerous roadblocks to the War Department's plans. Biddle was a classic New Deal liberal, and from the outset, he “was determined to avoid mass internment, and the persecution of aliens that had characterized World War I.” He was skeptical that Nisei citizens posed a threat to either general security or the military, and believed that the “military necessity” that Lt. Gen John L. DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense, ardently claimed was actually a figment of his imagination. Further, he had grave reservations about the constitutionality of evacuation. All of his objections later proved to be wholly accurate.

Moreover, the main players in the internment drama -- Lt. Gen. DeWitt, the aging Western Defense commander who succumbed to anti-Japanese hysteria within days of Pearl Harbor; Provost General Allen Gullion, who was primarily interested in establishing a precedent that would give the military the power to control civilian populations during wartime; and his lieutenant, Col. Karl Bendetsen, the Stanford-educated logician who masterminded both the legal details as well as the architecture of the evacuation and internment -- were all Republicans.

In the press, by far the loudest and most vicious voices clamoring for the internment were conservative Republicans -- notably Westbrook Pegler and Henry McLemore. And then there were Republicans in Congress. Probably the worst of the lot was Rep. Leland Ford of Los Angeles, who demanded on the House floor in January that all Japanese, citizen and alien alike, be evacuated. Growing impatient, he reported that he called Biddle’s office in mid-February “and told them to stop fucking around. I gave them twenty-four hours’ notice that unless they would issue a mass evacuation notice I would drag the whole matter out on the floor of the House and of the Senate and give the bastards everything we could with both barrels. I told them they had given us the runaround long enough ... and that if they would not take immediate action, we would clean the goddamned office in one sweep. I cussed the Attorney General himself and his staff just like I’m cussing you now and he knew damn well I meant business.”

Indeed, the internment in many ways could be said to be driven not by liberals but by conservatives. Among the loudest voices demanding such action were white-supremacist Southern Democrats (who in today's context would have migrated to the Republican side of the aisle). These agitators saw the war as a race war, primarily against the Japanese. For instance, there was this speech by Rep. John Rankin of Mississippi, whose own protege, James Eastland, later mentored Trent Lott:
“This is a race war! The white man’s civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism. ... Once a Jap always a Jap. You cannot change him. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. ... I say it is of vital importance that we get rid of every Japanese, whether in Hawaii or on the mainland ... I’m for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii, now and putting them in concentration camps... Damn them! Let’s get rid of them now!”

And finally, there were the moneyed Republicans. These were primarily West Coast businessmen who for the preceding 40 years had agitated against the presence of Japanese immigrants on our shores, concocting "Yellow Peril" conspiracy theories which claimed that those immigrants were actually secret "shock troops" sent by the Emperor to await secret commands for the invasion of the Pacific Coast. (These theories later played a significant role in persuading the public of the threat posed by the Japanese.) Of course, their real motivations in waving the banner of racial hatred were often openly economic.

Likewise, these civic leaders were at the forefront of the public push for internment. And as it happened, they often represented significant development interests -- people who hoped to acquire Japanese land holdings (particularly farmlands) cheaply, often to end their agricultural use. Indeed, the bulk of Japanese farmlands held before the war became suburban residential development properties in the years following the war.

Now, that said: There was no shortage of liberal New Deal Democrats who not only agitated for the internment, but also played significant roles in making it happen, and whose collective record in the matter is abysmal. Nearly the entirety of these were from Pacific Coast states, though not all: Earl Warren, then the Attorney General of California, who worked closely with DeWitt in effecting the evacuation. Washington Sen. Mon Wallgren, who chaired Senate hearings calling for the internment. Then-Rep. Warren Magnuson, who colluded with Republican committeeman Miller Freeman in advocating the internment. Then-Rep. Henry Jackson, who later also advocated harsher conditions for the internees. Even liberal lion William O. Douglas, who joined his colleagues on the Supreme Court in upholding the internment in three separate cases.

Then there was Idaho Gov. Chase Clark, who helped spark the decision to intern the Japanese by decrying the early efforts to voluntarily relocate Japanese immigrants in the inland states. Clark protested loudly in the press, saying: "Japs live like rats, breed like rats, and act like rats." Clark was a Democrat, and in fact was the father-in-law of one of my youthful heroes, Sen. Frank Church.

The reality is that neither side, Republican or Democrat, covered themselves in anything but abject shame during the entire internment episode. For one side to claim now that because some of its members spoke up, that this somehow vindicated the larger party's behavior in the matter, is abjectly untrue. Indeed, such claims could and should be called what they are: revisionism, or the falsification of history.

There were indeed heroes in the whole internment affair. Ralph Carr unquestionably was one of them. So was Francis Biddle. And so, for that matter, was Justice Robert Jackson, who later gained renown as the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremburg; his stinging dissent in Korematsu is still a legal landmark.

And on the ground, there were other heroes as well -- the few, muted, shouted-down voices of a handful of citizens and activists who opposed the internment at the time and dared to speak out against it. They were summarily attacked as "Jap lovers" and often subjected to threats and intimidation, if not outright violence.

These people, uniformly, were liberals -- often Christian church activists who later performed outreach work assisting the internees during the camp years. They were students and pacificsts who organized little-publicized protests against the internment. They were legal activists from the ACLU. They were a few small-town newspaper editorialists who knew all too well the land-grabbing motives behind much of the internment agitation.

They were the conscience of the nation then. And fortunately, it is many of those same factions who are performing the same function now. For their efforts, of course, they're being denounced as "anti-American" -- which, when you think about it, is just the post-9/11 update to "Jap lover."

It's nice that Reynolds is expressing some skepticism at least about Coble's remarks (which I analyzed earlier). But coming on the heels of his own previous justifications for internment, as well as his vicious attacks on the motives of antiwar protesters, it rings a bit hollow.

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