Racial Injustice
Irons, Peter
Racial Injustice JUSTICE AT WAR by Peter Irons Oxford University Press. 407 pp. $18.95. In 1942, more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent, 70,000 of whom were American citizens, were...
...Even the Japanese-American Citizens League initially supported the evacuation, in a futile attempt to demonstrate Japanese-American patriotism: JACL President Saburo Kido declared: "We are glad to become the wards of our Government for the duration of the war...
...Robert Justin Goldstein (Robert Justin Goldstein, a political scientist at Oakland University in Michigan, wrote "Political Repression in Modern America" and "Political Repression in Nineteenth Century Europe...
...President Roosevelt himself comes off as poorly as anyone...
...The official reason put forth by Government officials for this action was that in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, West Coast Japanese-Americans were believed to pose a serious espionage and sabotage threat in light of the high concentration of military installations in that region...
...In 1942, more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent, 70,000 of whom were American citizens, were forced by the U.S...
...Government officials withheld from the Supreme Court the fact that the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission had found no evidence to support War Department claims of widespread Japanese-American espionage and sabotage...
...Once the evacuation had begun, opposition disappeared in a political climate shaped by continuing Japanese military advances in Asia and the Pacific...
...They were given a week's notice and allowed to bring with them only what they could carry by hand...
...One scholar has labeled the episode the "most widespread disregard of personal rights in the nation's history since the abolition of slavery...
...There is, however, a major news item in Justice at War...
...Unfortunately, the general reader is likely to be swamped or stupefied by the copious narratives covering three years of detailed legal maneuvering that comprise most of the book...
...After his 1944 conviction was reversed, he was asked why he had not sought a pardon from the President to overturn his criminal record...
...The Court's decisions in Korematsu and other Japanese-American cases essentially indicated it would not seek to second-guess, during time of war, governmental decisions that were based on a claim of military necessity...
...In the Hirabayashi case, for example, the Court reviewed the "choice of means" by which the legislative and executive branches of the Government exercise their power "to wage war successfully," and found that "it is not for any court to sit in review of the wisdom of their action or substitute its judgment for theirs...
...The evacuation originated in anger and racism against Japan after Pearl Harbor...
...Irons suggests that had the Court known the truth, it might not have upheld the constitutionality of the evacuation, as it did in Korematsu v. U.S...
...Fred Korematsu, for whom the most important of the Supreme Court cases is named, is now in his sixties and works as a draftsman in Oakland, California...
...He responded, "If anyone should do any pardoning, I should be the one pardoning the Government for what they did to the Japanese-American people...
...They were subsequently incarcerated for one to four years in detention camps surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by military police...
...Sentiment for evacuation was whipped up by West Coast politicians and newspapers and by such commentators as Walter Lippmann, who declared on February 12, 1942, a week before President Roosevelt authorized the evacuation, that the lack of any sabotage by Japanese-Americans since Pearl Harbor merely proved that "the blow is well-organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect...
...The case that Irons makes quite effectively is that political, not legal, considerations controlled the Japanese-American affair from start to finish...
...Irons's account is a gold mine of information, both old and new, and for this reason alone it is welcome...
...Irons's position on this point is not strong...
...His only interest in the Japanese-American cases seems to have been political...
...Much later, at an investigation in 1981, John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War in 1942 and one of the major villains of the affair, blurted out that the internment amounted to a "retribution for the attack that was made on Pearl Harbor...
...Government to leave their homes on the West Coast...
...They were forced to live in bleak barracks with each family allotted one small room...
...Many Government bureaucrats swallowed their severe doubts over the constitutionality of the internment...
...Most published accounts of this chapter in our history have concentrated on the hardships endured by the Japanese-Americans, who suffered an estimated $400 million in property losses and untold personal tribulations...
...In contrast, Peter Irons in Justice at War focuses on the Government's decision-making process and especially on the actions and decisions in the cases brought by a handful of Japanese-Americans who sought to assert their constitutional rights...
...The normally civil-liberties-conscious National Lawyers Guild supported the internment, while the American Civil Liberties Union played a highly equivocal role, apparently for fear of alienating the Roosevelt Administration...
...Congress passed legislation backing up Roosevelt's original executive order after hearings in both houses which lasted less than two hours and after similarly truncated floor debate which ended in approval by voice vote...
...During their entire ordeal, the Japanese-Americans were never charged with committing any crime, presented with any evidence against them, or given the benefit of a trial...
Vol. 49 • February 1985 • No. 2
