Infamy : The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II (9780805099393) by Reeves Richard

Author:Reeves, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805099393
Publisher: Macmillan

7

“LOYALS” AND “DISLOYALS”

TULE LAKE: SEPTEMBER 1943

After his Easter conversion, Stanley Hayami returned to his diary, now worried by newly published stories of Japanese Imperial Army atrocities in the Pacific. Most of them had actually happened in 1942—the Bataan Death March and the execution of the airmen captured after Colonel James Doolittle led a dramatic bombing raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942—many of the stories had been censored for more than a year for fear of their effects on American morale at home.

“It seems that since the ‘murder’ of the Doolittle bombers who were captured by the Japanese, public feeling seems to be pretty strong against us,” wrote Hayami. “Every time the Japs over there do something bad, we over here (who have nothing to do with it—and who don’t like it any more than anyone else) get it in the neck. Phooey!”

That same day in a speech on the Senate floor, Senator Tom Stewart, a Democrat from Tennessee, demanded that the citizenship of Japanese immigrants be rescinded. “They cannot be assimilated,” he said. “There is not a single Japanese in this country who would not stab you in the back. Show me a Jap and I’ll show you a person who is inherently deceptive.” The national president of the American Legion’s Women’s Auxiliary said, “Let us long realize what the Japanese are. We have leaned over backward to care for the Japs who were sent to relocation camps. We might just as well realize now that they are not and never will be Americans.”

Senator Chandler, the Kentucky Democrat who was chairman of the Senate’s Military Affairs Committee, got some more publicity by holding hearings that concluded that as many as twenty thousand Japanese American young people were loyal to Emperor Hirohito. The senator was perceptive enough to understand that the camps were turning many evacuees against the government, and he considered the internment camps to be a failed experiment. The senator blamed Myer and his staff, stating: “I may say that generally, from the top, that is from Mr. Myer on down through each one of the officers, these people are sincere and God-fearing, honest, well-meaning American citizens, but they are theorists, they are professors, they are making a social experiment of this thing.”

Because of Chandler’s speeches on the Senate floor and interviews he gave to California newspapers basically saying the army should take over the camps, Myer asked Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he knew, if she could persuade her husband to see him. The WRA director was invited to lunch at the White House and told his story, saying Chandler was making a bad situation much worse, that if Chandler’s committee report repeated officially what the senator was telling reporters, there would be more trouble in the camps. The president replied that he could take care of that—and he did. Calling other senators, Roosevelt said he wanted the Chandler report toned down when it was made public. In the end, the Kentucky senator satisfied himself by recommending that “loyal”

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