Densho Digital Archive - Roger Daniels Interview (denshovh-droger-02-0005)

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Q: Could you describe for us what was some of the drastic action taken by the government against Japanese Americans with the home raids? What did the FBI do? Incidents.

RD: First of all, the FBI had lists of persons, what they called the ABC lists, of persons who were presumed to be dangerous. Now, very, very few people in the United States government knew anything about Japanese Americans or Japanese, for that matter, and so they operated as security agencies often operate: on the whole principle of guilt by association. If you were a member of a certain organization, you are on the list. If you were, had contributed, for instance, to relief funds for the Japanese during what Japan called the China Incident, what the Chinese called the War of Resistance, that was it. If you were a member of the Japanese Associations, an officer in the Japanese Association, which took money from the Japanese government, you were the agent of a foreign power. If you were prominent, a head of the Chamber of Commerce; you were on the list. The Japanese government paid a subvention, helped support the Buddhist churches in the United States, therefore Buddhist priests were technically agents of the Japanese government. The government came and picked up these people, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes very startlingly. Just took the father of the family and this was based on status. They were, of course, enemy aliens, but they were trying to pick those who they thought might be dangerous. In some cases, these were the Buddhist priests, these were very old and not at all dangerous men. It would be like if there'd been an American colony in Japan and they'd arrested all the, all the ministers. These ministers would not have been the people to organize resistance, but that was the way that worked. And it was demoralizing. People didn't know where the father was, and quite often in families, it was the husband -- and this is true in immigrant families generally -- it was the husband who dealt with the outside world. The wife often did not. Well, these families were suddenly decapitated. The, the head of the house was taken away. Quite often, especially if they were business men, their funds were frozen. And here was a wife with children and maybe adult, if the children were old enough, if there was somebody of adult age, that helped, but there were many families in which there were no adults who were citizens. These were terrified people. I think it was maybe worse for those Japanese Americans who didn't live in Nihonmachi, in Japanese communities, but maybe were isolated, and they were really alone. But the community, of course, sort of collapsed in on itself and there was a great deal of, of mutual aid, and organizations were set up to help.

Later, before the roundup, there were these spot checks for contraband, cameras, not fancy cameras, any kind of cameras; shortwave radios, not sending sets, receiving sets; any weapons; dynamite. That might sound sinister, but large numbers of, very large percentage of Japanese Americans were farmers and needed dynamite to blow up stumps. And the papers would print stories, and they printed a story about how many firearms had been seized from the Japanese American community and it sounded very impressive, but in fact, over 95% of the firearms came from two sporting goods stores that were run by Japanese Americans. So they ran, so obviously if you ran a sporting goods store, you did have a lot of arms and ammunition. But always, the papers put the worst face on this. And the fact that the FBI raided a house, well, if the FBI raided them, they must've done something wrong, so it was what we call a self-fulfilling prophecy. The government suspected them, the people suspected them, then some of them were actually arrested and I remember this terrible thing that happened at Pearl Harbor so obviously they must've done it.

So that by the time, starting in March, that people go off to camps, most of the population is not only -- non-Japanese American population -- is not only ready to support this, they're kind of relieved, well, these dangerous people are gone, we'll be safe, we can sleep, we won't be murdered in our beds, etcetera. Despite the fact, of course, that there was not one single solitary instance of espionage or sabotage by a Japanese American in the United States. Some, like General DeWitt and Earl Warren, used this very innocent fact as another argument against them. As Earl Warren said before the Tolan Committee, the fact that there has not been an act of espionage or sabotage proves that we've living under an invisible deadline; proves that they 're waiting for some signal and then we'll have a Pearl Harbor here in the United States. Joe Heller has taught us to call that Catch-22, and it's, because obviously if there had been any espionage and sabotage, that would be an excuse for putting them in concentration camps. But since there wasn't any espionage or sabotage, that was proof, too. There was no way you could win.

[Interruption]

Q: Tell us who you think was responsible for the evacuation.

RD: Well, it has to start, of course, all the way up at the top. Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. He must bear major portion of the responsibility. Below him, the political heads of the War Department, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and particularly his deputy, John J. McCloy. There were also the Provost Marshal General of the United States, Allen Gullion, and his assistant, Major Leader Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen. These were among the crucial shapers of American policy. But in addition, we must include the Congress, particularly the West Coast delegation. All the congressmen and senators from the three West Coast states sent a petition to Roosevelt to do so. Hundreds, literally hundreds of organizations of Caucasians in the western states petitioned for this, and of course, this was a popular act. The Hearst Press, the newspapers, not just people like Westbrook Pegler, but supposedly responsible writers like Walter Lippmann, called for all of this. So in the final analysis, this was a popular act, so that the entire American people, the whole tradition of anti-Asianism going back to the 1860s is in part responsible for the incarceration.