The Unacknowledged Lesson: Earl Warren and the Japanese Relocation Controversy By G. Edward White
Y'all remember Earl Warren, no relation to Elizabeth but a champion of civil rights and the Chief Justice who gave us Roe v Wade, He supported internment 100%.
Between February and August 1942, about 112,000 Japanese-Americans were transported from their homes along the Pacific Coast in California, Oregon, and Washington to “relocation centers” in California, Idaho, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. The Japanese, about two-thirds of whom had been born in America, were housed in these centers until January 1945, when they were officially released. The relocation centers resembled concentration camps: they were enclosed with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards, privacy and independent family life for the incarcerated Japanese were almost nonexistent, and the daily lives of the Japanese were controlled by their supervisors. The relocation centers were not, however, instruments of genocide or barbarism or even brutality; in this sense the term “concentration camp” incorrectly describes them. The centers did represent, though, the first and only episode in American history in which the United States government forcibly interned American citizens on the basis of their racial and ethnic affiliation.
President Franklin Roosevelt signed the executive order creating the relocation centers, but the principal architects of the relocation program were John J. McCloy, assistant secretary of war, and three U. S. Army officers, Major General Alien W. Gullion, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, and Colonel Karl R. Bendesten. In developing the relocation policy these men had the full cooperation and support of Earl Warren, who held the positions of attorney general and governor of California during the Second World War.
In 1971 Earl Warren, having retired as chief justice of the Supreme Court two years earlier, began writing his memoirs. I was a law clerk to Warren at the time, and he asked for my reactions to drafts of the memoirs as they were prepared. Warren’s memoirs, anonymously edited, eventually were published in 1977, three years after his death. For the most part, they were the conventional reminiscences of a public figure. Warren revealed almost no information that was not already available, and in some instances, such as his account of the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the famous 1954 case invalidating racial segregation in the public schools, he gave a less than full description of events.
The memoirs also painted less than flattering portraits of some of Warren’s political acquaintances, including Dwight Eisenhower, who, while president, was quoted as saying to Warren that he would solve the Communist problem by “kill[ing] the S. O. B.’s.” They ignored some controversial moments in Warren’s career, such as his opposition during the height of the Cold War to the nomination of Berkeley law professor Max Radin, a distinguished scholar but a supposed “leftist,” to the California Supreme Court. On the whole, the memoirs were a bland, unrevealing, and selective account of Warren’s life. Warren’s pet burro, his “friend and constant companion” during Warren’s youth in Bakersfield, California, received more attention than any single justice of the Supreme Court.
One episode of Warren’s career, however, received significant, although sparse, attention in his memoirs—the Japanese relocation decision. Warren said that he had “since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens.” He then articulated his guilt feelings in terms that, for a father of six and a devoted family man, were vividly personal: “Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was consciencestricken.” On reflection, Warren believed that “t was wrong to react so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty. .?.?.”
Warren’s confession of error in the Japanese relocation controversy raises several questions. How did Earl Warren, one of the most vigorous advocates of civil liberties in the history of the Supreme Court, come to advocate and defend a policy that constituted a wholesale deprivation of the civil rights of Japanese-Americans? How could Warren, a principal force behind the Court’s unanimous attack on racism in Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny, have ignored the racist character of the relocation, which was imposed only against Japanese nationals and aliens, leaving unaffected people of Italian or German origin? How did Warren, a champion of equality and fairness under the law as chief justice, justify the patently inequitable nature of a relocation process reserved only for Japanese? And why did Warren, whose strength of convictions was well-known to his acquaintances, who almost never admitted that he had been wrong on an issue, and who rarely changed his mind once he had formed an opinion, decide to recant on the Japanese relocation issue? An examination of these questions takes one inside the mind of one of America’s least penetrable public figures...
No influential segment of California political life was sympathetic to the Japanese. The Oriental Exclusion League, formed in 1919, included among its members representatives of the California Federation of Labor, the State Grange, and the American Legion. Hiram Johnson, California’s Progressive governor and senator, whom Warren greatly admired, was openly antagonistic to the Japanese; so were author Jack London, a Socialist, and conservative newspaperman William Randolph Hearst. The Los Angeles Times, in 1920, stated that “assimilation of the two races is unthinkable. It is morally indefensible and biologically impossible. An American who would not die fighting rather than yield to this infamy does not deserve the name.” Warren had not had extensive contact with Japanese, although he had been a devotee of authors, such as London, Rudyard Kipling, and Frank Norris, who perpetuated racial stereotypes...
By 1938, when he ran for Attorney General, Warren was an accomplished politician, with a relatively wide base of support and a consistently good record of performance as district attorney. On the stump he continued to stress the virtues of “common honesty” and efficient government, and he also indulged in some standard anti-New Deal rhetoric, calling Roosevelt’s “Hundred Days” legislation “the first major effort to change by stealth .?.?.the greatest free government of all time into a totalitarian state.” Despite this partisanship, Warren had not failed to notice that California’s registered Democrats had grown to outnumber registered Republicans by 1934. He was also well aware of the distinctive “cross-filing” system of California primaries, instituted by Progressives in the early 20th century as a device to avoid special interest control over primary nominations. In the 1938 election for attorney general, Warren entered not only the Republican primary, but the Democratic and Progressive primaries as well. He won the nominations of all three parties...
...As the prospect of war in Europe increased, he organized law enforcement agencies in a program of civil defense. In this last effort he revealed himself as an advocate of preparedness who was extremely sensitive to the possibility of wartime sabotage.”Do not be deceived,” he said in the spring of 1941, “that [the totalitarian powers] are not attempting to exercise fifth column activities .?.?.in this country. They would like nothing better than to create the same situation here that they developed in France, Denmark and Holland.”
Added to Warren’s stereotyped views about Orientals, then, was his strong concern for civil defense, which he regarded as an integral function of the attorney general’s office. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec.7, 1941 only reinforced Warren’s suspicions about the Japanese in California. In 1942 he called the presence of the Japanese in California “the Achilles’ heel of the entire civilian defense effort.” He also argued that because no fifth-column activities and no sabotage had been reported a “studied effort” at sabotage was taking place. Warren felt that “when we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test [their] loyalty,” but “when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field” because of “their method of living.”
Warren was an initial proponent of the Japanese relocation policy and a defender of that policy once it had been implemented. In 1943, when the Allied forces had begun to neutralize Japanese supremacy in the Pacific, fears of an invasion of the West Coast subsided, and pressures to release interned Japanese began to surface. In a conference of state governors that June, Warren vigorously opposed releasing any Japanese. “If the Japs are released,” he said, “no one will be able to tell a saboteur from any other Jap. .?.?. We don’t want to have a second Pearl Harbor in California. We don’t propose to have the Japs back in California during this war if there is any lawful means of preventing it...”
...The detained Japanese were eventually released from the relocation centers in January 1945, despite considerable protest by various California newspapers and organizations. Warren, then beginning his second four-year term as governor, privately expressed concern for the action, but publicly asked Calif ornians to “join in protecting the constitutional rights of the individuals involved” and to “maintain an attitude that will discourage friction and prevent civil disorder.” In a conference with law enforcement officials at the time of the release of the Japanese, Warren refused to adopt a resolution condemning the incarceration policy.”[A]t the time of their exclusion,” he reportedly said, “not one of us raised a voice against it. We can’t condemn it now...”
...Warren was not alone in his reluctance to confess error for the Japanese internment policy. Of the prominent persons whose participation in the internment controversy might have been regarded as inconsistent with their subsequent reputation as civil libertarians, few had repudiated their earlier stance. Justice Hugo Black, for example, who had written one of the Supreme Court opinions in the 1940’s sustaining the constitutionality of the relocation policy, said in 1967 that “I would do precisely the same thing today.” Likewise Justice William Douglas, another civil libertarian who supported relocation, has never publicly changed his mind.
Me: I haven't read as good an essay on FDR. What I of know is Dan Inouye joined the 442nd and became a powerful Democrat.
https://www.vqronline.org/essay/unacknowledged-lesson-earl-warren-and-japanese-relocation-controversy
Congratulations to our presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden!
= new reply since forum marked as read
If I were to vote in a presidential