Inside the internment

[Photo courtesy Wing Luke Asian Museum]

A reader named Sara provides even deeper detail on the issue of the "protective custody" theory of the Japanese-American internment raised the other day by Howard Coble:

I wanted to call your attention to T.H. Watkins' biography, Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes: 1874-1952 (Henry Holt, 1990). Watkins had full access to the Ickes diaries housed at Hyde Park, with some materials still held by the Ickes family -- Clinton's aide [Harold] is the son of Roosevelt's Interior Secretary, and he is the Ickes family rep on all the materials.

Ickes has volumes to say about the internment. He opposed it strongly, but then in February 1942, FDR more or less handed off the policy to Ickes, at the recommendation of Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, as the camps were to be built on Interior Department land that Ickes managed. In effect, what his meant was that Ickes was the person with prime responsibility for the program throughout the war.

According to Watkins, the argument regarding the need to prevent civic disruption only came up once in the near Roosevelt circle as decisions were being made -- and that was in the cover letter Biddle wrote to FDR with the final 9066 internment orders. Biddle did not believe it, but apparently used the argument as it was what could survive legal challenge. Coble and others could probably cite that letter as evidence if he wanted to, but Watkins' exploration of the Ickes material clearly characterizes it as a legal cover argument (see pp. 791-92). I believe at a later date Biddle said precisely this.

One thing very interesting about the forces demanding internment that were ginned up on the West Coast in January-February 1942 is how closely they resemble the right-wing movement that was put together in 1934 to stop the campaign (E.P.I.C.) of Upton Sinclair for Governor. Aside from the national figures such as the Military Command, the heart of the demand for internment is the same set of institutions and personalities who put together the anti-EPIC effort. It is quite useful to understand this, because what in essence you have is a right-wing movement with roots way back in the '20s -- and that hangs nicely together into the Reagan years, that can be re-fitted as needed as the power-center for quite different movements. Its members are not particularly interested in recognition or personal power -- rather they elevate a figurehead as needed to serve their interests. In many respects it is a proto-model for the present Republican national organizational form.

At any rate -- Harold Ickes is an extremely important witness and diary writer on the Japanese internment issue, and managing the camps remained his responsiblity till the end of the War, even though he profoundly disagreed with the policy, and kept looking for ways to subvert it. And in his diary, Ickes was tough and candid about the motivations of those with whom he had to work, and about his enemies (yep folk like John Rankin) whom he roundly hated.

Sara, of course, is correct in every detail (and adds some I was unaware of). There is more on Ickes' role in Page Smith's Democracy on Trial: The Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II (which is actually a problematic work, but contains a great deal of useful information).