If you were of a mind to unsettle the settled understanding of what led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans between 1942 and 1945, and restore some credibility to the now-discredited claim of military necessity, you’d need to do two things.
First, you’d need to make at least a prima facie case of causation–that is, you’d need to persuade people that the various government actors whose actions produced the decision had well-grounded suspicions of subversion by American citizens of Japanese ancestry, and that those well-grounded suspicions of subversion were what led them to take the actions they took.
Second, you’d have to undermine the settled understanding, supported by several decades of comprehensive research by numerous scholars, that racism, economic jealousy, and war hysteria led these actors to took the actions they took.
How does Michelle’s book try to accomplish these two things?
As to the first, the book quotes extensively from a handful of decyphered messages (the “MAGIC” cables) about Japanese efforts to develop some Issei and Nisei as spies for Japan. It really all turns on those MAGIC cables. The trouble is that the historical record tells us absolutely nothing more than that Roosevelt, the Secretary of War (Stimson), and his top assistant (McCloy) generally had access to the thousands of messages of which these concerning potential Issei and Nisei spies were a tiny few. The record tells us nothing about who actually reviewed which of the intercepts, or when, or what any reader understood them to mean. The record is just silent on these issues–reflecting, in a way, the silence of the actors themselves on MAGIC at the time. One might well say (and Michelle does), “but they couldn’t talk or write about the MAGIC decrypts; they were ultra-secret and everybody was keen to keep them that way.” That may well be so. But that doesn’t mean we can fill in the silence in the record with our own suppositions about what they must have read and what they must have thought about what they read. In short, Michelle’s book presents no evidence–because, apparently, there is none–to show that MAGIC actually led anybody to think or do anything.
And then, of course, there’s the much larger problem (suggested by Greg Robinson below) that the program we know as the Japanese American internment was not a single decision but rather a long series of decisions taken over a period of months (or, if you count some of the pre-war prepartion for action against the ethnically Japanese in the USA, a period of years). And we know–for totally certain–that many of those decisions could not conceivably have been influenced by concerns for military necessity supported by MAGIC.
Let’s take one example. When you think of the Japanese American internment, what do you picture? People living in the desolate high desert, in tarpaper barracks, under military guard, right?
Do you know how that happened? Do you know how it happened that Japanese Americans ended up spending years in desert camps under military guard, unable to leave without clearance? If you think that any federal government actors (let alone Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, or John McCloy) made that decision, you’re wrong. The federal government, having evicted Japanese Americans from their homes and confined them in the late spring of ’42 in racetrack and fairground “assembly centers,” wanted to move Japanese Americans to wide-open, unguarded agricultural communities in the interior, modeled after Civilian Conservation Corps camps. But in early April of 1942, the governors of the Mountain States unequivocally rejected that idea, saying (I quote here the words of Governor Chase Clark of Idaho) that “any Japanese who might be sent into [the state] be placed under guard and confined in concentration camps for the safety of our people, our State, and the Japanese themselves.” The federal government, needing the cooperation of the states, had no choice but to accede to the governors’ demands.
So Japanese Americans ended up going into guarded camps (call them what you will) because Mountain State governors demanded it. Do you think that the governor of Idaho had access to the MAGIC decrypts, and that he formulated his demand for “concentration camps” on the basis of an evidence-based belief of military necessity? Or do you think maybe something else explained it? (Before you answer, consider also that Governor Clark liked to compare people of Japanese ancestry to “rats,” proposed that all American Japanese be sent “back” to Japan (where most of them had never been) and that the Japanese islands then be “sunk,” and admitted publicly that his views on the subject were “prejudiced” because he didn’t know “which Japs he could trust” and therefore “didn’t trust any of them.” Or consider that the Governor of Wyoming announced that if the federal government went ahead with its CCC Corps Camp plan, there would be “Japs hanging from every pine tree.”) Personally, I don’t see how the MAGIC decrypts could have had anything to do with the decision to confine Japanese Americans under military guard in camps, which is probably the central feature of what we call the Japanese American internment.
OK, so there’s really nothing in Michelle’s book to accomplish the first of the things the book needed to accomplish–that is, to make out a prima facie case that MAGIC led to the series of decisions that constituted the program Michelle defends.
What about the second? What does Michelle offer to discredit the copiously documented influences of nativism, economic jealousy, racial stereotyping, rumor-mongering, and hysteria on the series of decisions that constituted the program Michelle defends?
Nothing. Literally not one single thing. Not a sentence.
If a book is going to try to “provoke a debate on a sacrosanct subject that has remained undebatable for far too long” (p. xii), and to “correct” the historical “record,” I think the book needs to offer a reader more than this.
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