As I noted yesterday, in her new book “In Defense of Internment,” Michelle Malkin undertakes to “defend … the evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast (the so-called “Japanese American internment”).” (p.xii) (“Ethnic Japanese” here means the Nisei–American citizens born in this country to Japanese immigrant parents who had been forbidden by U.S. law from naturalizing as U.S. citizens because they were Asian.)
Michelle is undoubtedly aware that the two most prominently voiced criticisms of the government’s program are these:
1. The government evicted all American citizens of Japanese ancestry from their West Coast homes and placed them into camps, but took no action affecting American citizens of German or Italian ancestry. (In other words, if your name was, say Joe Kaminaka or Lou Matsumoto, you were evicted and confined; if your name was, say, Joe DiMaggio or Lou Gehrig, well, uh, you know.)
2. The actions taken against Japanese Americans were absurdly disproportionate to the scope of any security risks of which the government was even arguably aware.
If you’re going to defend the program, this is what you’ve really got to defend, because this is what scholars most commonly and cogently criticize.
How does Michelle’s book handle these two tasks?
The quick answer (a longer answer follows): As to (1), the 165-page text includes a single paragraph (on page 64). As to (2), the book says nothing at all.
Here’s the longer answer.
1. Why no similar treatment of similarly situated Americans of German and Italian ancestry? (Why, that is, did Joe Kaminika end up in Manzanar in 1942 while Joe DiMaggio ended up batting .305?) Here’s the lone paragraph on the point from “In Defense of Internment”:
The disparate treatment of ethnic Japanese versus ethnic Germans and ethnic Italians is often assumed to be based on anti-Japanese racism rather than military necessity. Japan, however, was the only Axis country with a proven capability of launching a major attack on the United States. Some ethnic Germans and ethnic Italians had divided loyalties, but there was no evidence that Germany or Italy had organized a large-scale espionage network akin to the one described by Japan’s diplomats in the MAGIC messages.
Moreover, any attempt to evacuate all ethnic Germans or ethnic Italians from coastal areas would have done more harm than good to the war effort because so many Americans had German or Italian ancestry. An East Coast evacuation of ethnic Germans and Italians, as envisioned by General Drum, would have resulted in the relocation of some 52 million people. By comparison, the total U.S. population at the time was 135 million people.
I’m afraid we’re into eye-rolling, head-shaking territory here. Nevermind that Michelle tells her reader nothing about the racial backdrop for the government’s distinction between citizens of Asian ancestry and citizens of European ancestry–decades of depictions of Asians as a fearsome, robotic, animalistic Yellow Peril.
Item: “Japan was the only Axis country with the capability of launching a major attack on the United States?” Here Michelle contradicts herself, because the book emphasizes repeatedly that Roosevelt, Stimson, and McCloy had good reason (from MAGIC) to worry about potential Nisei involvement not just in a full-blown Japanese attack on the West Coast, but in more ordinary kinds of domestic spying, disruptions of war production, and the like. So why would it appropriately have mattered (if it were true) to the MAGIC-reading trio of Roosevelt, McCloy, and Stimson that Japan could mount a full-blown assault on the West Coast but Germany could not mount a full-blown assault on the East Coast? What’s more, it was not true after early June of 1942–before a single Japanese American was transferred for indefinite detention in a “relocation center”–that Japan had the capability of launching a major attack on the United States. The decisive American victory at Midway ensured that. And folks, notwithstanding Michelle’s assertion (page xxxiii) that this view of Midway’s impact is hindsight, that’s just wrong: Newsweek (June 22, 1942), The New Republic (June 15, 1942), The Nation (June 27, 1942), Time (June 22, 1942), and the Los Angeles Times (June 8, 1942) all opined that the Midway victory essentially foreclosed any large-scale sea-based attack on the continental United States.
Item: “There was no evidence that Germany or Italy had organized a large-scale espionage network akin to the one described by Japan’s diplomats in the MAGIC messages,” says Michelle. Huh? This claim is so easily refuted that it’s not worth the effort to spell it out. The only difference between the Japanese espionage operations and the Nazi ones was that we didn’t have to decypher intercerpted cables to get a hint of the Nazi ones.
Item: “Any attempt to evacuate all ethnic Germans or ethnic Italians from coastal areas would have done more harm than good to the war effort because so many Americans had German or Italian ancestry.” Oh, I see. Because there were so many potential spies and saboteurs along the East Coast, it didn’t make military sense to do anything to them. (Remember: it’s not just that the government didn’t evict and detain Americans of German and Italian ancestry: it’s that the government did absolutely nothing to them!)
2. How, from the alleged MAGIC evidence that Japan had successfully recruited certain Kibei (that is, American-born citizens who had resided and been educated in Japan) into spying, did the government (and does Michelle’s book) justify uprooting tens of thousands of Nisei (American-born citizens who’d never been to Japan) from their homes and forcing them into indefinite detention in barren camps?
Here’s how General John DeWitt justified suspicion of all Nisei in February of 1942: “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.”
Michelle doesn’t say that, though. She just doesn’t say anything.
Update: Allow me, before people jump all over me, to correct one thing I asserted (namely, that the government did nothing to American citizens of German ancestry). The government did act against a number of German aliens–a far smaller number than Japanese aliens–and those actions sometimes entailed the internment of American citizen children of those aliens. What I meant is that the government took no sizeable or programmatic action against American citizens of German ancestry as such.
Comments are closed.