Manufacturing Hysteria by Jay Feldman

Author:Jay Feldman [Feldman, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-37986-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

Three days after his meeting with the War Department group, Biddle had lunch with Roosevelt and expressed his opinion that mass evacuation was ill-advised, that the Justice Department was not equipped to carry it out, and that the Army had made no convincing argument for it as a military necessity. Biddle further “emphasized the danger of the hysteria … moving east and affecting the Italian and German population in Boston and New York.” Roosevelt’s response, that he was “fully aware of the dreadful risk of Fifth Column retaliation in case of a raid,” indicated either that he had swallowed as true the bogus accusations of sabotage and espionage made by Navy Secretary Knox, the Roberts Commission report, and countless others or that he simply found it politically expedient to go along with them.40

Without Roosevelt’s support, Biddle began to cave in. In a February 9 letter to Secretary of War Stimson, he again expressed the same desire to wash his hands of the entire matter that he had voiced to McCloy, Gullion, and Bendetsen five days earlier. “The proclamations directing the Department of Justice to apprehend and, where necessary, evacuate alien enemies do not, of course, include American citizens of Japanese race,” wrote Biddle. “Should they have to be evacuated, I believe that this would have to be done on the military necessity in the particular area. Such action, therefore, should in my opinion be taken by the War Department and not by the Department of Justice.”41

Stimson, however, had his own doubts about the legality of such a drastic measure. “I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system,” he wrote in his diary.42

On February 11, Stimson and McCloy asked Roosevelt for a decision on the evacuation question.43 “Is the President willing to authorize us to move Japanese citizens as well as aliens from restricted areas?” Stimson wanted to know.44 FDR avoided answering the question directly, instead putting the onus of the decision back on Stimson. In his diary account of their conversation, Stimson wrote that Roosevelt “told me to go ahead on the line that I had myself thought the best.”45

McCloy immediately called Bendetsen to tell him they had “carte blanche” as far as Roosevelt was concerned.46 Overstating FDR’s order, McCloy said that Roosevelt had specifically authorized the evacuation of citizens and had acknowledged that while such action was likely to have some repercussions, the situation had to be dictated by military necessity.

Bendetsen was in San Francisco, having been sent there to assist DeWitt in the writing of the “Final Recommendation” regarding “evacuation of Japanese and other subversive persons from the Pacific Coast,” which was due on the thirteenth. In justifying the military necessity for mass evacuation, Bendetsen employed the same logic that the BI chief William Burns had used when he told a House subcommittee in 1922 that the absence of any radical action was proof of clandestine plotting.47 The Bendetsen/DeWitt “Final Recommendation,” dated February 14, insisted, “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.

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