Professor Greg Robinson, author of “By Order of the President,” has more to say about Michelle Malkin’s book “In Defense of Internment”:
Michelle Malkin engages in overkill. Her stated purpose is to prove that the removal and confinement of Japanese American aliens, and particularly of citizens, was based on justifiable fears of espionage and sabotage, rather than racism (and thus to make the case for racial profiling by the Bush Administration). If this were all she wished to argue, she could have stopped with the signing of Executive Order 9066 itself. She could then more easily have made the case that the Army and the Executive felt obliged to act as they did considering the circumstances, though it was a terrible injustice to loyal citizens. After all, how the government’s policy played itself out afterwards is logically irrelevant to the initial cause. She would still have been mistaken, in my opinion, about the threat from the Nisei (more on the distinction between the confinement of Issei and Nisei later on) . However, she would have been able to summon up some reputable authority. This was, after all, the retrospective commentary of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the most influential advocate of evacuation, in the memoir he wrote with McGeorge Bundy, ON ACTIVE SERVICE IN PEACE AND WAR. (P. 406). Because of this, Stimson supported compensation for losses suffered by Japanese American aliens and citizens in the evacuation. (On the other hand, Stimson went on to say that, more than the danger of disloyal activity, the anti-Japanese hysteria on the West Coast was so strong that Japanese Americans needed to be moved to protect them from illegal violence, a statement which throws into doubt Ms. Malkin’s insistence that racial bigotry played no factor in the evacuation).
In contrast, Malkin’s objective is to defend the government’s actions throughout, which means that she goes beyond that those involved believed, all in order to denounce a nonexistent conspiracy among her opponents to create “the myth of the concentration camp.” (Like Eric Muller, I am dubious about any campaign among scholars to equate the camps with concentration camps of Nazi Germany. As one who had relatives disappear during the Holocaust, I myself would be unlikely to do so).
Malkin thus follows in the paranoid style of Lillian Baker, the most important internment denier, whose gift to posterity, “The Concentration Camp Conspiracy,” likewise charges an immense conspiracy on the part of Japanese Americans to defraud the government and distort history. To be fair, Malkin does not go as far as Baker in claiming that the camps were pleasant places or that the guard towers were for the inmates’ protection. Still, her central premise is that the government acted justly in establishing camps to which Japanese Americans were “free to move elsewhere (initially)” “free to leave” and ” free to enter”. This is a serious distortion. Let us break down her comments.
First, Japanese Americans were, for a few weeks in March 1942, permitted to relocate “voluntarily.” However, they were required—in practice, and possibly officially—to have an outside sponsor, and they were given no aid or financing for such a move. Such relocation would have meant families had to sell everything they owned or relying on what they had on hand–the bank accounts of enemy aliens were frozen–and move to an unknown location. Despite this, thousands of Japanese Americans did indeed move East. The vast majority of them, relying on the assurances of the West Coast Defense Command, moved inland to eastern California, only to be caught in the cruel net of involuntary confinement when that area was declared restricted. The author correctly notes that the threat of violence from inland communities made further “voluntary” relocation possible.
She might have gone further, in order to defend the government, to point out that the War Relocation Authority did initially intend to place Japanese Americans in communities outside the West Coast, but that when WRA Director Milton Eisenhower visited a Western Governor’s conference, the rabid anti-Japanese sentiment he experienced forced him to shelve his plans and prepare for confinement for the duration. Rather, Ms. Malkin’s talent for overkill shows itself in her insistence that hostility from inland Japanese-Americans was a significant factor in striking fear in the hearts of the West Coasters.
To say that people were free to enter the camps is true but irrelevant. In many case non-Japanese spouses of confined Japanese Americans, such as Elaine Black Yoneda, “volunteered” to go to camp to be with their families. As with people who volunteer to be jailed for their beliefs, such actions are a result of (or protest against) injustice and not a denial of it.
Finally, the assertion that Japanese Americans were “free to leave” the camps must be placed in context. The author correctly notes that those with permits who were adjudged loyal by the governments were able to leave. Again, she might have gone on to mention that as time went on the camp inmates were able in many cases to get day passes to go into town for supplies or on hikes. However, the Japanese Americans were held for months without individual trials, hearings, or charges. Until individuals were able to arrange to get paroled through the long, cumbersome and inevitably arbitrary loyalty and sponsorship procedure, they had no way to escape being confined against their will. The WRA, for a number of reasons, was unable to accommodate all those who sought resettlement, and some three quarters of Japanese Americans remained in the camps throughout the war.
So much for Michelle’s claim that people were free to relocate out of the zone of forced eviction, free to enter the camps, and free to leave them.
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