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BY ORDER OF
THE PRESIDENT
FDR and the Internment
of Japanese
Americans.
By Greg Robinson.
322 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard
University Press. $27.95.
The standard narrative in a large scholarly literature on the subject
stresses longstanding prejudice on the West Coast, war-induced fear of a
Japanese invasion and the incompetence of on-the-spot military officials, who
were afraid of a Japanese-American fifth column. As a result, it is said,
President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the Army to remove designated civilians
from Western military command areas. Greg Robinson, an assistant professor of
history at the University of Quebec in Montreal, does not directly challenge
this story. But the practical effect of his investigation is to stand the
received narrative on its head, transferring prime responsibility from
grass-roots bigots, local politicians and erratic Army brass to the president
and a small group in Washington.
A historical monograph, ''By Order of the President'' displays both the
strengths and weaknesses of a genre meant to contribute to knowledge through the
intensive investigation of a tightly limited topic. Robinson has probably
dredged up every comment Roosevelt ever uttered about Japanese-Americans over a
30-year period -- and has very likely made his thinking more systematic than it
actually was. Roosevelt (like most Americans) saw little distinction between
Japanese-Americans and Japan; thus hostility toward Japan led easily to
suspicion of Japanese-Americans. The decision to evacuate Japanese-Americans
from the West Coast was made carelessly, Robinson says, without a conscious
understanding that it would lead to internment camps. Once implemented,
internment was prolonged by the need to justify it against legal challenges and
by political pressures that kept most internees in the camps through the 1944
election. Roosevelt emerges from this inquiry with a coat of tarnish. So do
icons like Secretary of War Henry Stimson, his deputy, John J. McCloy, and
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. But there is a problem of context.
As the author notes, Canada removed its Japanese population from British
Columbia. He might also have mentioned that Peru deported virtually every
inhabitant of Japanese descent to the United States for wartime internment. The
suspicion of ethnic Japanese was multinational, nonpartisan and nonideological.
A long list of liberal politicians supported the policy, including Earl Warren
and Fiorello La Guardia. The few principled heroes in this book include Eleanor
Roosevelt, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and the two civilian heads of
the War Relocation Authority, Milton Eisenhower and Dillon Myer. They struggled
futilely for an early end to the program against a flood tide of hysteria and
expediency.
Robinson dutifully reports the larger context that brought the issue to
Washington and to the president in early 1942. But the momentum of his narrative
overrides this context, always taking him back to Roosevelt. He concludes that
while the president ''should not be saddled with the entire burden of guilt''
for the internment, there was more than enough burden for him to bear. More
generous observers, with a wider perspective, might see Roosevelt as a man at
the end of a process that was all but unavoidable. A diligent work of
scholarship, this book nonetheless takes too narrow a view of the responsibility
for an episode of which we all must be ashamed.
THE forced relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans during World
War II is little more than a footnote in most general histories of the war.
Compared with the Holocaust, the rape of Nanking, the siege of Leningrad or the
indiscriminate bombings of large cities by both sides, it can seem merely a
misguided security measure. But it was also a mass violation of civil liberties,
rivaled in 20th-century America only by the systematic segregation of
African-Americans.
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