Such Splendid Prisons by Harvey Solomon

Author:Harvey Solomon [Solomon, Harvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS027100 History / Military / World War Ii, HIS036060 History / United States / 20th Century, POL011010 Political Science / International Relations / Diplomacy
Publisher: Potomac Books

Fig. 35. One of the cards from everyday Americans incensed by the attack on Pearl Harbor; many were intercepted by the FBI and never delivered. U.S. National Archives and Record Administration, Record Group 59.

Barely six weeks after Pearl Harbor, though, it’s hard to overstate the public’s animosity toward the Japanese. “More Monkeymen Caged” reads the title of a front-page story in the Bath County Enterprise that runs shortly after the Life piece. Since the Japanese were moved from their embassy, all incoming mail has been diverted to the FBI, which weeds out the insulting and obscene messages. “Liars—backstabers, to bad your innocent citizens—including women and children—must suffer. From all USA citizens,” reads one scrawled postcard. A letter addressed to “The Dishonorable Japanese Ambassador Nomura” reads, “You back-stabbing, underhanded, smiling assassins, when we get through with you and yours, you will wish you had never copied the Hitler gangster. . . . Remember this, you dirty, stinking, underhanded, double-crossing snake, and take this message back to your stupid emperor.”7

The FBI brings this mail to State, which sees no good reason to deliver it to the Japanese, so it doesn’t. While such vituperation never rises to this level in government memos, distrust of the Japanese clearly flows through certain quarters of the Roosevelt administration. Those thoughts never surface publicly, especially given the delicate ongoing negotiations to achieve the end game: the exchange of diplomats from both sides as soon as practicable. “The Japanese will be mean-spirited and dangerous when their military reverses begin,” opines William Langdon, a veteran in State’s Division of Far Eastern Affairs. “If we do not get our people out of their hands before this situation begins, it is quite conceivable that the Japanese may decide to hold our people as hostages.”8

Such disparaging sentiment isn’t unusual, nor is the occasional whiff of racism. The day the Germans arrived at the Greenbrier, Loren Johnston obliquely compared them to the Homestead’s Japanese. “Confidentially,” he wrote to a staff member, “I would say our class of patronage over the next few weeks may be a little better than our neighbors. What do you think?”9 Yet this kind of veiled comment pales before the blatant racism expressed by another State employee on the same day Langdon writes about the Japanese being “mean-spirited.” “The German and the Italian Governments can be expected to accord more civilized treatment to our personnel than the Japanese Government,” wrote Maxwell Hamilton in a memo marked Strictly Confidential. “I shudder to think of American officials and American nationals in the hands of Japanese once the veneer of civilized conduct disappears.”10 (Career foreign service officer Hamilton, who was fluent in Mandarin and had several postings in China, served as U.S. ambassador to Finland after the war.) As barbarous as Japanese treatment of American prisoners of war becomes, they never systematically murdered more than six million Jews and millions more Soviets, Poles, Serbs, Roma, gay people, and people with disabilities, as the Nazis did.

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