FDR - Jean Edward Smith [345]
For the military, Roosevelt’s figures proved a mixed blessing. “Everyone set out to build sixty thousand planes and forty-five thousand tanks,” said General Lucius D. Clay, who had been placed in charge of all military procurement. “But we needed balanced forces. We needed ammunition, we needed machine guns, field artillery, anti-tank weapons—the whole range of equipment to fit out the troop formations which were being raised. And we could not afford to expend all our resources meeting the president’s goals. It was a hell of a fight. Finally I prepared a chart showing what the Army would have if the President’s goals were achieved, and what it would lack, especially artillery and anti-tank guns. I gave it to Mr. Hopkins, who quickly saw the point we were making. Mr. Hopkins got the President’s personal O.K. (although he never gave it a public O.K.), and Mr. Roosevelt’s goals were quietly revised downward.”28
On February 19, 1942, in one of the shabbiest displays of presidential prerogative in American history, Roosevelt approved Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forcible evacuation of persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific coast. The order applied to forty thousand older, first-generation Japanese immigrants (Issei) who were debarred from citizenship by the Immigration Act of 1924, as well as to their children (Nisei), some eighty thousand persons born in the United States and therefore American citizens by birth.* There was no military necessity for the order. J. Edgar Hoover, then in his seventeenth year as director of the FBI, called the evacuation “utterly unwarranted”; Major General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, commanding the southern sector of the Western Defense Zone, labeled reports of Japanese sabotage “wild, farcical, and fantastic stuff”; the Los Angeles Times initially editorialized against removal; and Attorney General Francis Biddle thought the program “ill-advised, unnecessary, and unnecessarily cruel, taking Japanese who were not suspect, and Japanese-Americans whose rights were disregarded, from their homes and from their businesses to sit idly in the lonely misery of barracks while the war was being fought in the world beyond.”29
For the first month after Pearl Harbor, little concern was given to the Japanese on the West Coast. But as the magnitude of the Navy’s defeat became clear, and as Japan advanced unstopped across the South Pacific, public opinion turned sharply antagonistic. Many Americans could not comprehend or explain the humiliating defeats suffered by Allied forces unless they were betrayed by legions of saboteurs undermining resistance from within. Lieutenant General John De Witt, the overall Army commander on the West Coast (whom FDR had passed over when he named George Marshall chief of staff in 1939), argued in a tortured twist of logic that “the very fact that no sabotage has taken place [in California] is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”30
Racism fed fears of sabotage. For fifty years anti-Japanese sentiment had pervaded the social structure of the Pacific Coast. “California was given by God to a white people,” said the president of the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, “and with God’s strength we want to keep it as he gave it to us.”31 Greed and economic rivalry contributed. Though Japanese farms occupied only 1 percent of the cultivated land in California, they produced nearly 40 percent of the state’s crop.32 As the manager of the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association told The Saturday Evening Post: “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do.”33
The tipping point for public opinion came on January 24, 1942, when the Roberts Commission, which had been appointed by FDR to investigate the Pearl Harbor attack,* reported that Nagumo’s strike force had been aided by Hawaii-based espionage agents, including American citizens of Japanese ancestry.34 The commission