Bainbridge Island Japanese American Monument Act Of 2007

Floor Speech

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND JAPANESE AMERICAN MONUMENT ACT OF 2007 -- (House of Representatives - February 06, 2007)

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Mr. WU. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to support H.R. 161, to expand the Minidoka Internment National Monument to include the Nidoto Nai Yoni Memorial, which commemorates the Japanese Americans of Bainbridge Island, the Japanese Americans of Bainbridge Island, Washington, who were interned during World War II.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order which forcibly removed approximately 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry from their homes, their friends, and their communities. They were incarcerated by this government for their ancestry. Just over 1 month after the executive order was signed, 227 Bainbridge island men, women, and children were sent to internment camps. They were the very first Japanese American families in the United States to be incarcerated.

We in the Pacific Northwest would like to think that we live in a better part of the country, in a part of the country where things are the way they ought to be. But sometimes the way we want things to be is not the way things happen or reality. Because these Japanese Americans were taken from their homes in the heart of the Puget Sound. They were sailed to Seattle. They were loaded onto trains for a 3-day journey to Manzanar, a concentration camp in California's Mojave Desert. These Americans were the very first Americans to be so detained, and the last of the detainees were not released until October of 1946, 4 1/2 years after the signing of the executive order and over a year after the end of World War II.

But this chapter of our history did not end there. Upon release from the internment camps, Japanese Americans could not return to the lives that they had led before the tragic and misled executive order. I would like to submit further information about General DeWitt's decisions and recommendations, and I will do that at a different time, but during the period of internment, they had lost their homes, their businesses, and their livelihoods.

By commemorating Japanese Americans who were so detained, we ensure that this sad episode in our history will never be forgotten and hopefully not repeated, because we need to learn from the mistakes of the past.

Thirty years passed before the executive order was formally rescinded in 1976. In 1988, a Presidential apology was issued internees.

This is not an abstraction. This is not a theoretical debate. The Military Commissions Act passed by this Congress on September 30, 2006, potentially puts American citizens at risk of military detention. That is a plain reading of the Military Commissions Act. It was hotly debated between the then chairmen of two committees and this Member. It has been commented upon to a limited extent in the national press.

But I think that a fair reading of the Military Commissions Act would show you that if a person is just walking down the street and is detained by military authority for whatever reason, and we are not talking about aliens in Afghanistan, we are talking about someone walking down the streets of Portland, Oregon, or in Bainbridge Island. What could potentially happen to that person?

The better course under the Military Commissions Act is that they are subject to military justice, a very limited review by a military tribunal, and the end of that appeal road is the Secretary of Defense. That is actually the better course.

Now, I have to point out that there are 25 detainees in Guantanamo who, after 5 years of detention, have not had their first review yet; and I say that is the better course because the course that is actually more troubling under the Military Commissions Act is that if there is not a review, there is no appeal. There is no appeal to a civilian court. There is no habeas corpus, a doctrine which has served Anglo American societies well for almost a thousand years.

This memorial, which H.R. 161 helps us remember, is not an abstraction. It was real suffering for the Japanese Americans, for the Americans who were incarcerated. But it is also a reminder that, as was said of the executive order much later, when actions are taken by this government in an atmosphere of hysteria, great injustices can be perpetrated; and we need to be careful in our era lest we be put in a position to issue an apology decades from now.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii passed under martial law, the writ of habeas corpus was suspended, and the military police took several hundred suspected spies and saboteurs of Japanese extraction into custody. But the very size of the Japanese community in Hawaii (nearly half the territory's population), and its vital importance to the islands' economy, foreclosed any thought of wholesale evacuation. The mainland community, however, was proportionately much smaller (in California, barely 1 percent of the population), more economically marginal and socially isolated, and long buffeted by racist pressures. The mainland Japanese for the most part kept warily to themselves, many of them toiling with exemplary efficiency on their family fruit and vegetable farms. Insular and quiescent, they were also internally riven by age and legal status. Their elders, the forty thousand first-generation immigrant Japanese, or Issei, were generally over the age of fifty and debarred from citizenship by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, a statutory impediment that perversely exposed them to the accusation that as non-citizens they were poorly assimilated into American society. A majority of their children, the eighty thousand second-generation Nisei, were under the age of eighteen. Born in the United States, they were also citizens. Alien and citizen alike, the peculiarly vulnerable Pacific Coast Japanese community was about to feel the full wrath of war-fueled hysteria.

Curiously, no clamor for wholesale reprisals against the mainland Japanese arose in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack. The Los Angeles Times soberly editorialized on December 8 that most of the Japanese on the Coast were ``good Americans, born and educated as such,'' and serenely foresaw that there would be ``no riots, no mob law.'' General John L. DeWitt, chief of the army's Western Defense Command, at first dismissed loose talk of mass evacuations as ``damned nonsense.'' He condemned any broadside assaults on the rights of the American-born Nisei. ``An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen,'' he declared. Individual arrests were another matter. Government surveillance, ongoing since 1935, had identified some two thousand potentially subversive persons in the Japanese community. Along with fourteen thousand German and Italian security risks nationwide, they were quietly rounded up in the last days of 1941. But those individual detentions stopped well short of wholesale incarcerations. ``I was determined,'' Attorney General Francis Biddle wrote, ``to avoid mass internment, and the persecution of aliens that had characterized the First World War.''

In fact, the immigrants whose loyalty had been questioned during World War I had then been freshly arrived and seemed to many observers unarguably alien. But by 1941 those older European groups were settled communities, well assimilated, their patriotism as well as their political loyalty actively cultivated by Roosevelt's New Deal. Though a surprising six hundred thousand Italians--more than 10 percent of the entire Italian-American community--remained Italian citizens and were automatically labeled ``enemy aliens'' after Mussolini's declaration of war, Roosevelt instructed Biddle to cancel that designation in a joyfully received announcement at Carnegie Hall, shrewdly delivered on Columbus Day 1942, just weeks before the congressional elections.

The Japanese were not so fortunate. As war rumors took wing in the weeks following Pearl Harbor, sobriety gave way to anxiety, then to a rising cry for draconian action against the Japanese on the West Coast. Inflammatory and invariably false reports of Japanese attacks on the American mainland flashed through coastal communities. Eleanor Roosevelt's airplane, en route to Los Angeles on the evening of the Pearl Harbor attack, was grounded in the Midwest while the first lady telephoned Washington to check a radio message that San Francisco was under bombardment. Painters at Stanford University blacked out the skylight of the library's main reading room so that it could not serve as a beacon to enemy pilots. Carpenters hammered up dummy aircraft plants in Los Angeles to decoy Japanese bombers away from the real factories. Athletic officials moved the traditional New Year's Day football classic from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California; the game was played instead in North Carolina, presumably safe from Japanese attack. Japan's astonishing string of victories in the Pacific further unsettled American public opinion. Hong Kong fell on December 2, Manila on January 2, Singapore on January 25.

The release at the end of January of a government investigation of the Pearl Harbor attack proved the decisive blow. The report, prepared by Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts, alleged without documentation that Hawaii-based espionage agents, including Japanese-American citizens, had abetted Nagumo's strike force. Two days later, DeWitt reported ``a tremendous volume of public opinion now developing against the Japanese of all classes, that is aliens and non-aliens.'' DeWitt himself, described by Biddle as having a ``tendency to reflect the views of the last man to whom he talked,'' soon succumbed to Rumor's siren. He wildly declared to an incredulous Justice Department official that every ship sailing out of the Columbia had been attacked by submarines guided by clandestine radio operators near the river's mouth. When evidence of actual attacks failed to materialize, DeWitt invoked the tortured logic that the very absence of any sabotage activity on the West Coast proved the existence of an organized, disciplined conspiracy in the Japanese community, cunningly withholding its blow until it could be struck with lethal effect. In February the respected columnist Walter Lippmann alleged that military authorities had evidence of radio communications between ``the enemy at sea and enemy agents on land''--a charge that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had already advised Biddle was utterly without foundation. A radio technician from the Federal Communications Commission reviewed DeWitt's ``evidence'' of electronic signals and declared it hogwash. All 760 of DeWitt's suspicious radio transmissions could be accounted for, and not one involved espionage. ``Frankly,'' the technician concluded, ``I have never seen an organization [the U.S. Army's Western Defense Command] that was so hopeless to cope with radio intelligence requirements. The personnel is unskilled and untrained. Most are privates who can read only ten words a minute. ..... It's pathetic to say the least.''

But by this time facts were no protection against the building gale of fear and prejudice. ``Nobody's constitutional rights,'' Lippmann magisterially intoned, ``include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.'' Lippmann's colleague Westbrook Pegler echoed him less elegantly a few days later: ``The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now,'' Pegler wrote in his widely read column, ``and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.'' Unapologetically racist voices also joined the chorus. ``We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons,'' a leader of California's Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association declared. ``We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man.'' Prodded by such sentiments, in early February 1942 DeWitt officially requested authority to remove all Japanese from the West Coast. It was impossible he claimed, to distinguish the loyal from the disloyal in the peculiarly alien and inscrutable Japanese community. The only remedy was wholesale evacuation. The same man who had said a month earlier, ``An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen,'' now announced, ``A Jap's a Jap. ..... It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not. ..... I don't want any of them.''

At the Justice Department several officials, including conspicuously Edward J. Ennis, director of the Alien Enemy Control Unit, as well as Biddle's assistant James H. Rowe, struggled to quell this irrationally mounting fury. Rowe denounced Lippmann and Pegler as ``Armchair Strategists and Junior G-Men'' whose reckless charges came ``close to shouting FIRE! in the theater; and if race riots occur, these writers will bear a heavy responsibility.'' Attorney General Biddle informed Secretary of War Stimson ``that the Department of Justice would not under any circumstances evacuate American citizens.'' But at a fateful meeting in the living room of the attorney general's Washington home on the evening of February 17, the gentle and scholarly Biddle buckled. Facing off against Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy and two army officers, Ennis and Rowe argued heatedly that DeWitt's request for evacuation orders should be denied. Unknown to his two subordinates, however, Biddle, new to the cabinet, unsure of his standing with Roosevelt, and overawed by the Olympian figure of Stimson, had told the secretary of war by telephone earlier in the day that he would not oppose DeWitt's recommendation. When this became clear, Rowe remembered, ``I was so mad that I could not speak. ..... Ennis almost wept.'' Even Stimson had grave misgivings. ``The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated,'' he wrote in his diary, ``either as part of a total evacuation, giving access to the areas only by permits, or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or even trust the citizen Japanese. This latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system to apply it.'' Despite his own reservations and the sputtering opposition of the Justice Department officials, Stimson advised the president that DeWitt should be authorized to proceed. The cabinet devoted only a desultory discussion to the matter. On February 19 Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. It directed the War Department to ``prescribe military areas ..... from which any and all persons may be excluded.'' No explicit reference to the Japanese was necessary. When Biddle feebly objected that the order was ``ill-advised, unnecessary, and unnecessarily cruel,'' Roosevelt silenced him with the rejoinder: ``[T]his must be a military decision.''

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