Proving Coble's negative

Rep. Howard Coble wants proof that he was wrong:

"I certainly intended no harm or ill will toward anybody. I still stand by what I said ... that, in no small part, it (internment) was done to protect the Japanese-Americans themselves."

Coble said if it is proven to him that was not one of FDR's motivations, then he will apologize for that remark.

Of course, in this post, I've already provided substantial evidence here that Coble was wrong. (Not that I expect him to read this blog, but at least the information has been published.) Let's rewind the relevant portion of the tape, citing once again Personal Justice Denied: The Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians:

This explanation sounds lame indeed today. It was not publicly advanced at the time to justify the exclusion and, had protection been on official minds, a much different post-evacuation program would have been required. [Internment architect and Assistant War Secretary John] McCloy himself supplied the most telling rebuttal of the contention in a 1943 letter to DeWitt:

That there is serious animosity on the West Coast against all evacuated Japanese I do not doubt, but that does not necessarily mean that we should trim our sails accordingly ... The Army, as I see it, is not responsible for the general public peace of the Western Defense Command. That responsibility still rests with the civil authorities. There may, as you suggest, be incidents, but these can be effectively discouraged by prompt action by law enforcement agencies, with the cooperation of the military if they even assume really threatening proportions.

That is the simple, straightforward answer to the argument of protection against vigilantes -- keeping the peace is a civil matter that would involve the military only in extreme situations. Even then, public officials would be duty-bound to protect the innocent, not to order them from their homes for months or years under the rubric of a military measure designed to maintain public peace.

Further proof is in all the numerous documents that detail the reasoning for undergoing the internment, as well as the discussions that resulted in that outcome. A good summary of these can be found in Roger Daniels' The Decision to Relocate the Japanese-Americans.

Absent that, of course, Rep. Coble should at the very least avail himself of Executive Order 9066, Roosevelt's order for the evacuation. He will find that it is utterly absent of any mention of the need to safeguard Japanese-Americans.

Next on his reading list should be Lt. Gen. John DeWitt's Feb. 14, 1942 memorandum, "Evacuation of the Japanese and Other Subversive Persons from the Pacific Coast," which included the finding of "military necessity" for the internment. The heart of its rationale was positively Kafkaesque:

“The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become Americanized, the racial strains are undiluted. To conclude otherwise is to expect that children born of white parents on Japanese soil sever all racial affinity and become loyal Japanese subjects, ready to fight, and if necessary, to die for Japan in a war against the nation of their parents... It therefore follows that along the vital 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.

Nowhere, however, is there any mention of concerns for the safety or well-being of the Japanese community, much less the need to protect them from their violent neighbors.

The justification to which Rep. Coble refers did not arise until a year later, in Gen. DeWitt's Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942, which provided the War Department's official justifications for the internment. It is briefly mentioned:

Further, the situation was fraught with danger to the Japanese population itself. The combination of spot raids revealing hidden caches of contraband, the attacks on coastwise shipping, the interception of illicit radio transmissions, the nightly observation of visual signal lamps from constantly changing locations, and the success of the enemy offensive in the Pacific, had so aroused the public along the West Coast against the Japanese that it was ready to take matters into its own hands. Press and periodical reports of the public attitudes along the West Coast from December 7, 1941, to the initiation of controlled evacuation clearly reflected the intensity of feeling. Numerous incidents of violence involving Japanese and others occurred; many more were reported but were subsequently either unverified or were found to be cumulative.

The report, of course, neglects to mention the central role that DeWitt and his officers played in drumming up this hysteria. More to the point, the entirety of the rest of the document is devoted to detailing the supposed threat posed by the Japanese population to the rest, as Personal Justice Denied describes it: "signaling from shore to enemy submarines; arms and contraband found by the FBI during raids on Nikkei homes and businesses; ... concentration of the ethnic Japanese population around or near militarily sensitive areas; the number of Japanese ethnic organizations on the coast which might shelter pro-Japanese attitudes or activities such as Emperor-worshiping Shinto; the presence of the Kibei, who had recent ties to Japan."

There was only one problem with the Final Report: none of its information was true.

As Personal Justice Denied explains:

Two items stand out as demonstrable indications of military danger: shore-to-ship signaling and the discovery of arms and contraband. Reading the Final Report while preparing to defend the exclusion in the Supreme Court, Justice Department attorneys were drawn to the signaling contention. It was investigated by the FCC and found to be so utterly unsubstantiated that, in its brief to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department was careful not to rely on DeWitt's Final Report as a factual basis for the military decision it had to defend. There simply had not been any identifiable ship-to-shore signaling.

Indeed, most of this was purely hysteria. And the press played a significant role. For a war-happy press anxious for a local angle on the conflict, the prospect of a West Coast invasion made great-selling copy. The Los Angeles Times ran headlines like “Jap Boat Flashes Message Ashore” and “Caps on Japanese Tomato Plants Point to Air Base.” Pretty soon, everyone was getting into the act. Reports of “signals” being sent out from shore to unknown, mysterious Japanese boats offshore began flowing in. One report, widely believed at the time, came from someone who heard a dog barking somewhere along the shore of Oahu, and believed that it was barking in Morse code to an offshore spy ship.

In the Seattle area, the stories were almost as ridiculous. “Arrows of Fire Aim at Seattle” shouted the Seattle Times’ front-page headline of December 10. It told of fields in the Port Angeles area, between Seattle and the Pacific Ocean on the Olympic Peninsula, that had been set afire by Japanese farmers in a shape resembling an arrow, when viewed from the air; ostensibly, the arrow pointed to the Seattle shipyards and airplane-manufacturing plants, a likely target for incoming bombers. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer blared a similar front-page story the next morning. Neither paper carried any subsequent stories about the fires -- which investigators soon determined had been set by white men who were clearing land.

In any case, the Justice Department found the Final Report so factually barren that, in defending the evacuation, it wound up relying heavily on the "protective custody" theory before the court -- even though that claim was likewise empty, because there is no contemporary record of this concern playing any kind of role in the decision. It was not advanced in the press; it did not appear during the Tolan Committee hearings (which were Congress' rubber-stamp sessions on a decision that already had been made); nowhere in any records of FDR's conversations with other officials regarding the internment does it appear to have even been mentioned.

What Rep. Coble wants, of course, is for his critics to prove a negative, which in most cases is an unreasonable request. But the record in the internment has been voluminously examined and detailed, and the verdict has always been clear and overwhelming that protecting the Japanese population from vigilantism was, if considered at all, at best a negligible factor in the decision to intern them.

Perhaps, if he demands proof, he should simply be asked this: Why, if they were being interned for their protection, were the guns in the guard towers at the concentration camps pointed inward?