WHY I WENT ALONG

A recent editorial here in Iowa commented on the "worst mistake of World War II." The reference was to the evacuation and relocation of 120,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast, beginning in the spring and summer of 1942. At the time I was twenty-two years old, living in Nebraska, working for the Soil Conservation Service. I read a daily newspaper, listened to news on the radio, checked books out of the library, and regularly browsed through magazines at the local barbershop. Yet as I think back on it now, I do not remember being aware of the evacuation, and I certainly was not disturbed by it. I have talked to several friends from that same small town, and they recall a similar unawareness. Why?

If physically we are what we eat, at least in part, then our mental state must result in part from what we consume from the media. I decided to find out what I was being fed by the media in 1942. I had someone check the newspaper I was reading then -- the Hastings, Nebraska, Tribune. In the six months following the evacuation order, dated February 19, 1942, the daily made no mention of this subject on the front page. It was mentioned half a dozen times in short articles on the inside pages, and a couple of these noted that most of the evacuees were American citizens. But this was not presented as anything alarming and there was no editorial comment to suggest that outrage was in order.

Since I now live near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I checked the front page of every issue of the Cedar Rapids Gazette for seventy days following Executive Order 9066. There was no mention of the evacuation. There was plenty of war news, most of it bad, and much of it describing Japanese atrocities against civilians in the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia. Nor did the Gazette run editorials about the evacuation. A guest column by Carl Sandburg about the government's special war powers pointed out that Lincoln had often used unauthorized power during the Civil War, suggesting, it seems to me, that we might expect this kind of thing in any war.

I think the only magazines we subscribed to back then were a church periodical and the Ladies' Home Journal. From the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature I find no evidence that the Journal carried any items on the evacuation. If I browsed through Life at the barbershop, which is possible, I might have come across a four-page article in April 1942. It described the Japanese-Americans at the camp at Manzanar, California, as generally happy, adapting quickly to their new situation, planting flowers in window boxes and enjoying the "scenic loneliness" of their surroundings.

In June 1942, The New Republic carried a letter from an internee at the assembly center at Puyallup, Washington. He was very critical of conditions in the camp. The Army protested the report. The New Republic sent out its own investigator and in January 1943 reported that, in general, the relocation was being conducted in a decent, humane way.

A year after the evacuation began, The Atlantic ran an article by a university professor from the state of Washington. He also concluded that the evacuation and relocation were being carried out in a way to do credit to the American people. He quoted a Japanese-American colleague who said that the relocation was a good example of democracy in action. Other magazines, such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post, agreed that the evacuation was a military necessity and that it was being well handled. Some articles told poignant stories of what happened to specific people, but this did not change the general conclusion of the articles.

It is hard to reconstruct what I got from radio news in 1942, but, then as now, radio depended heavily on wire services and newspapers. It is possible that some broadcast might have mentioned Walter Lippmann's column just one week before Roosevelt signed the evacuation order. In it Lippmann warned that we were in great danger from without and from within and that drastic action was justified. He may have believed the report that the Japanese navy had been sighted 150 miles off our West Coast. Three days later, Westbrook Pegler echoed the same threat, and it seems likely that other radio commentators would have repeated that message.

I think I understand now why the evacuation of Japanese-Americans made so little impression on me. If in the spring and summer of 1942 I had read all the articles I have read in these past few months, I think I would have still arrived at the same conclusion -- not to worry. If that could happen to me in a country with a free press, I think that gives me a little different perspective on what happened in Nazi Germany, where the press was not free.

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