Wartime Removal Hits All Coast Aliens, Good or Bad

By John O'Donnell
Seattle Times - Chicago Tribune - N.Y.
Times Special Service

SAN FRANCISCO, Tuesday, Feb. 3.--War, grim and harsh, came home to the enemy aliens of the nation's Western Front today, as they presented themselves for registration as nationals of Japan and Italy and Germany.

The cold fact is taking shape in the minds of these people that here on the West Coast the enemy alien's identity card will become a one-way ticket eastward beyond the mountains, hundreds of miles from the Pacific.

The temper of the states of the Pacific Coast and the judgment of those who are directing its defense already have brushed aside Washington's distinction of the "loyal enemy alien" and the potential saboteur.

They're insisting here that the luxury of these nice distinctions of peace-time security costs too much in the terms of war time and so the "good" enemy alien and the "bad" are classed as one in the orders that will bar them from thousands of square miles of vital territory along the coast from Mexico to Canada.

Biggest Move Since Dust-Bowl

Not since the days of the migration from the Dust Bowl will there have been such a movement of workers as is foreseen in the predicted evacuation of the nationals of the Axis and California's 60,000 native-born Japanese from the Pacific Coast line.

If the same policy were applied on the Atlantic Seaboard, every enemy alien would be removed from the New England states. The Italians and German nationals of New York City, of New Jersey and Philadelphia -- even including the refugees from Hitler's regime in Central Europe -- would be ordered westward and held behind a line running roughly from Watertown, N.Y., through Syracuse, from Elmira to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River.

Only by these drastic measures are the natives of the Pacific Coast certain that they can combat the danger of an industrial Pearl Harbor -- a sudden, skillfully organized attack by saboteurs on the great Pacific Coast defense plants.

Already Gov. Cuthbert Olson and Attorney-General Earl Warren have moved against the enemy alien here and are exerting economic pressure to drive him back from the Pacific Coast.

Drastic Measures Indorsed

The governor, still awaiting an announcement of federal policy from Washington, has indorsed this state policy:

Revoke the state licenses of enemy alien physicians, dentists, teachers, druggists, architects and optometrists.

Remove enemy aliens from all state jobs.

Strike the names of enemy aliens from state Civil Service lists.

Suspend the charters of Japanese societies and ban foreign-language schools.

Californians are critical of Washington -- insist that neither the White House or the Department of Justice appreciates in full the danger of the enemy alien here. They hailed the banning of aliens from the critical areas as a step in the right direction, but feel it was only a step and one taken too tardily.

Three weeks will pass before the drastic order goes into effect and the Italians must quit their vineyards and fishing fleet and the Japanese their acres of truck gardens.

"They've been given three weeks' warning -- plenty of time to move in a secret conspiracy we haven't yet discovered," they complain.

The background of Japanese ownership of California land is coming in for intensive study and this is turning up interesting facts. Under the California Alien Land Act, no person ineligible for citizenship can own land. According to investigators, Japanese money has financed the purchase of strategic land by American-born Japs. Some 5,000 California farms are operated by Japanese.

State Attorney-General Warren is charging that it has been common practice for an alien Japanese to record title to California land in the name of his children or in that of some other American-born relative. And, in one case, an alien Japanese prospective father recorded title in the name of his unborn child.