Investigative Classics is a weekly feature on noteworthy past examples of the reporting craft.
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policies regarding illegal immigration have led many journalists to invoke the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
That infamous policy was decreed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt through an executive order issued after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Eventually, about 117,000 people of Japanese descent were forced to leave their businesses and homes and relocate to sparse camps set up in remote areas of Washington state, Oregon and California (above, Manzanar War Relocation Camp in California).
An archive of stories in the San Francisco News, published as the policy was implemented in the spring of 1942, reveals how imprecise the analogies are to the current situation on the border, though both cases have instances of intolerance.
The first difference, of course, is that Trump’s policies are aimed at people who are in the country illegally. FDR’s policy was issued at a time when Japanese immigrants were allowed to live in America but were denied the opportunity to become naturalized citizens. Their children who were born here were American citizens, and they comprised more than 60 percent of the people sent to the camps.
One of the first stories in the archive, a March 2 column by Arthur Caylor, invokes the racial fear at play:
The Japanese colony and the Negro colony in San Francisco are close enough neighbors to provide many contacts. They share some things in common. The color-line is not so noticeable as it is elsewhere. This had made it possible, my agents learn from loyal Negro sources, for Japanese to spread racial propaganda. …
It’s not nice to think that Japanese agents should be trying to stir up strife right in our own town—and at a time when the Japanese problem may mean such tragedy for loyal Japanese-Americans. But if you don’t think such things can go on, who do you suppose is tearing down air-raid shelter signs and defacing other notices designed to prevent confusion and save lives? Now is the time for Jap spies to do their stuff.
A March 3 news article reports that the Japanese were only the first targets of a wider effort:
After the military areas are cleared of Japanese, the general [John L. DeWitt] indicated, German and Italian aliens would be next in line for evacuation. However, German and Italian aliens 70 years of age or over will not be required to move “except when individually suspected.” Also exempted will be “the families, including parents, wives, children, sisters and brothers of Germans and Italians in the armed forces,” unless such removal is required for specific reason.
One of the most striking aspects of the coverage, from a contemporary perspective, is the lack of pushback as suggested by this March 4 article:
Sixty-five chapters of the Japanese-American Citizens League, which claims a membership of 20,000 American-born Japanese, will hold meetings soon in 300 communities “to discuss methods by which they can correlate their energies and co-operate extensively in the evacuation process.” Mike Masaoka, national field secretary of the league, said its members “realize that it was the necessity of military expediency which forced the Army to order the eventual evacuation of all Japanese,” and that he “assumed” the classification of Americans of Japanese lineage “in the same category as enemy aliens was impelled by the motives of military necessity and that no racial discrimination was implied.”
In an echo of today’s concerns regarding illegal immigrants, a March 5 story wondered who would replace the Japanese who performed work other Americans did not want to.
The work [picking strawberries, celery, tomatoes and cucumbers] requires the most arduous form of ‘stoop labor’…
The Japanese exodus also will hit the lawns and gardens of thousands of Bay Area residents, particularly those on the Peninsula, for there seems no substitute labor supply to replace the hundreds of Japanese gardeners.
Fast and efficient workers, some of the Japanese have been caring for from 40 to 50 gardens each.
A March 6 editorial presumably captured the view of the Bay Area’s more enlightened citizenry when it argued:
Japanese leaders in California who are counseling their people, both aliens and native-born, to co-operate with the Army in carrying out the evacuation plans are, in effect, offering the best possible way for all Japanese to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States. … Inasmuch as the presence of enemy agents cannot be detected readily when these areas are thronged by Japanese the only course left is to remove all persons of that race for the duration of the war.
That is a clear-cut policy easily understood. Its execution should be supported by all citizens of whatever racial background, but especially it presents an opportunity to the people of an enemy race to prove their spirit of co-operation and keep their relations with the rest of the population of this country on the firm ground of friendship.
The coverage includes many inflammatory stories about alleged Japanese spy rings and other disloyal acts, proposals in the U.S. Senate to strip all Japanese-Americans of their citizenship, and the imposition of “drastic new curfews” in late March aimed at reminding people it was time “to wind up their affairs before evacuating the area.”
An April 3 article was one of several that discussed the disposition of property once owned by Japanese-Americans:
Nearly one-third of the Japanese farm lands on the Pacific Coast have been transferred to new operators under the supervision of the Farm Security Administration, L.I. Hewes, regional director, announced today.
On April 29, columnist Caylor warned that Japanese-American suffering would not end with peace.
When the war is over and the Japanese come back to Japtown—the date to be announced later—they’re likely to discover that Japtown doesn’t live here anymore. Indeed, the Japanese—aliens and citizens alike—may find that San Francisco has grown cold-shoulderish to their return at all.
