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GILA NEWS-COURIER SUPPLEMENT
ISSEI, NISEI, KIBEI THE U.S. HAS PUT 110,000 PEOPLE OF JAPANESE BLOOD IN "PROTECTIVE CUSTODY"
FORTUNE MAGAZINE, APRIL 1944
"MILITARY NECESSITY," "PROTECTIVE CUSTODY"
Meanwhile in the coming months, and perhaps years, a series of cases testing the constitutionality of evacuation and detention, even suits for recovery of property will come before the higher courts. Verdicts of "unconstitutional," or even eventual settlement of property claims cannot undo the record. It is written not only in military orders, in American Legion resolutions, Hearst headlines, and Supreme Court archives. It is written in the lives of thousands of human beings, most of them citizens of U. S.
When future historians review the record, they may have difficulty reconciling the Army's policy in California with that pursued in Hawaii. People of Japanese blood make up more than one-third of the Hawaiian Islands' population, yet no large-scale evacuation was ordered after Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field became a shambles. Martial laws was declared; certain important constitutional rights of everyone was suspended. The Department of Justice and the military authorities went about their business, rounded up a few thousand suspects. In Hawaii, unlike California, there was no strong political or economic pressure demanding evacuation of the Japanese Americans. Indeed, had they been removed, the very foundation of peacetime Hawaiian life, sugar and pineapple growing, would have been wrecked. General DeLos C. Emmons, who commanded the Hawaiian district in 1942, has said of the Japanese Americans there: "They added materially to the strength of the area. "
For two full years the West Coast "military necessity" order of March, 1942 has remained in force--an unprecedented quasi-martial law, suspending a small minority's constitutional rights of personal liberty and freedom of action. Those loyal evacuees who can take jobs in war plants in the East have reason to ask why they are forbidden to return to California to plant cabbages. Mr. Stimson and Mr. Knox have assured the nation that the Japanese enemy is not coming to our shores. The Pacific Coast is now a "defense command," no longer "a theatre of operations," in the Army's terminology. Each month the March, 1942, order seems or unreasonable.
Perhaps the Army forbids the evacuees to return home less for military reasons than because of strong California pressures and threats. The Hears papers on the Pacific Coast promise progroms of any Japanese citizens or alien in[sic] permitted to come home. New groups like the Home Front Commandos of Sacramento have risen to cry: "They must stay out--or else. " The Associated Farmers and the California Grange, the American Legion and the Sons and Daughters of the Golden West reiterate the theme of or else. Politicians listen and publicity urge that the despised minority be kept out of California for the duration.
There are Californians who care about civil liberties and human justice and see the grave danger of continued quasi-martial law, but they have difficulty getting their side heard. The California C. I. O. , the Leauge of Women Voters, and segments of the church are all putting up a fight against continued "protective security. " They work side by side with the Committee on American Principles and Fair Play, a group that includes such distinguished Californians as President Robert G. Sproul of the University of California, Ray Lyman Wilbur, and Maurice E. Harrison.
Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, who ordered the evacuation in 1942, encouraged California's racist pressure groups when he said, "I don't care what they do with the Japs as long as they don't send them back here. A Jap is a Jap. " General DeLos C. Emmons, who succeeded DeWitt on the West Coast last September, says very little. He is the same General Emmons who decided not to order wholesale evacuation of the Japanese from Hawaii.
The longer the Army permits California and the rest of Pacific Coast to be closed to everyone of Japanese descent the more time is given the Hearst papers and their allies to convince Californians that they will indeed yield to lawlessness if the unwanted minority is permitted to return. By continuing to keep American citizens in "protective custody," the U.S. is holding to a policy as ominous as it is new. The American custom in the past has been to lock up the citizens who commits violence, not the victim of his threats and blows. The doctrine of "protective custody" could prove altogether too convenient a weapon in many other situations. In California, a state with a long history of race hatred and vigilantism, antagonism is already building against the Negroes, who have come in for war jobs. What is to prevent their removal to jails, to "protect them" from riots? Or Negroes in Detroit, Jews in Boston, Mexicans in Texas? The possibilities of "protective custody" are endless, as the Nazis have amply proved.
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