NO JEWS-I MEAN JAPS-WANTED HERE
Mayer, Milton
No Jews—I Mean Japs—Wanted Here By MILTON MAYER Seattle, June 28 IT was 10 years ago, along about now, that I saw the signs on the walks and the fences. Not in Berlin or Munich or Hamburg; not...
...Those signs mean me...
...An outfit called The Remember Pearl Harbor League—remember Remember Pearl Harbor stamped on the restaurant butter-pats, folks?—is formally behind the campaign of hatred...
...Prof...
...Rainier, on whose summit the Indians thought God dwelt, and I'd say, "Look here, I am helping a friend...
...Last week, when I saw the signs on the walls and the fences of Auburn...
...I was, after all, an Amerikaner...
...The signs frighten me, and these wonderful people aren't touching the signs...
...Instead, whenever a Nisei family moves back, these people go out to the home and help fix it up...
...They reply that they know that the friend is a Japanese American, and, when the patriot starts arguing, they say that they did not come out there toiirgue, they came out there to help a friend...
...But I never saw it...
...They reply that they are helping a friend...
...not yet, in 1935...
...Wash., they read, Banish the Japs Forever and We Want No Japs Here...
...Tear them down?—But they're on private property...
...Some of the signs have come down, on account of publicity and, in a few cases, persuasion...
...Ten years agb, when I saw them in Germany, the signs read Juden nirht erwunsckt and Raus mit den Juden...
...Colored...
...I am sure that these wonderful people aren't much help to their friends, since they aren't house-painters or farmers by trade...
...I'M a terrified white man, my friends...
...In spite of W. R. Hearst's lewd campaign over the years against the Yellow Peril, the thing never really took hold out here...
...they read, simply White and...
...A couple of nights later, beer bottles were thrown through the windows while the family slept...
...Some of the clubwomen have been working on the problem, and one of the leading clubwomen of the state spent the night in the home of the first Nisei family to return to Auburn a couple of weeks ago...
...But I'm not nearly so terrified as the preacher who pretends they're not there...
...Rainier...
...It is a straight, unvarnished, un-rationalized campaign of race hatred...
...They were in the villages then, outside Hanover, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg...
...Ira Reid of Atlanta University says that, as far as he knows, these signs up and down the West Coast are the first such in modern American times...
...Occasionally, while these wonderful people are at work, one of the local patriots comes up to them and asks them what the hell they think they are doing...
...The standard segregation notices throughout the South are, of course, unemotional...
...The economic appeal went cold...
...These wonderful people—like the clubwoman, and the Quakers, and the members of Fred Snorter's People's Church in Seattle—have figured out what to do about these signs, and they're doing it...
...And yet, I was treated well, even handsomely, in the villages of Nazi Germany...
...And when I saw them, on my first and last visit to Nazi Germany, I was afraid, and I said to myself, "Mayer, this means you...
...and if no patriot accosted me and gave me a chance to make my speech I would make it to Mt...
...What terrifies me about the hatred of the Japanese Americans is its baselessness...
...And I was afraid again, and I said to myself again, "Mayer, this means you...
...This week, in a town outside Seattle, I saw the signs again...
...I'm afraid of those signs...
...help paint it and repair it and get the garden going...
...There are some wonderful people, in Seattle, and in Auburn, and everywhere...
...I once heard of a town in West Virginia by the name of Bell, where there is supposed to be a sign at either end of the main street reading, Nigger, Don't Let The Sim Set On You...
...I remember some wonderful people in Germany, who, though they didn't dare do anything when their kids threw stones at Jews on the street, whaled the kids when they got them indoors...
...Pass a law against them?—But I might want to put up a sign against some American Hitter myself some day...
...But the wonderful people mean me, too, just as they did in Germany, when, though they heiled Hitler by day, they smuggled food and cheer into the homes of the Jews at night...
...Intermarriage was not uncommon, and yellow and white children attended the same schools and lived as neighbors...
...What can I do about it so that I won't be afraid...
...WHAT makes me think these signs mean me...
...What is more, there appears to have been no feeling whatever against yellow skin like the feeling in the South (and North) against black...
...So the campaign to drive out the Japanese Americans—true, it meant profit for white men who bought out their farms at ridiculous prices—was a fake campaign, and the campaign to keep them from moving back is equally fake...
...What makes me afraid...
...for delicacy's sake...
...And yet, I was treated well in Auburn, Wash...
...They don't read Dirty Niggers Sit Here and Only White Southern Womanhood Allowed in This Toilet...
...And if I wanted to get rid of my terror entirely, I believe I'd go out to Auburn and hinder, with my helpfulness, a Japanese American who was coming back home...
...I would lift up my face to Mt...
...But I suspect they are helpful to the patriots, who, though they gain the whole world, will lose their souls if they don't get wise to themselves ; and I think the technique of the wonderful people is the way to wise up the patriots...
...the Japanese, nearly all truck farmers and house servants, could not be peddled as a threat to the American Worker...
...And I know that the wonderful people are helpful to me...
...AUBURN is just a random sample...
...and I'm afraid, as I was when I saw them in Germany...
...The preachers of Auburn, by the way, have been silent...
...one of them told the eminent clubwoman, "I'm a preacher, not a crusader, and I believe that the less said about these things, the better...
...I am, after all, a white man...
...By golly, I believe I'm not nearly so terrified as the people who put them up...
...The patriot asks them if they know that the friend is a Jap bastard...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 28
