A Critique of Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment," Part One

With the publication this week of Michelle Malkin's book "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror," it looks as though I'll have plenty to write about. About which to write, I mean. (How many times did my father drill into my head the rule that prepositions are incorrect words to end sentences with?-- I know, I know. "With" is a preposition. This was a joke.)

The last couple of days have been a bit of a whirlwind. It isn't every day--or every decade, frankly--that a high-profile person like Michelle (syndicated columnist, frequent FOX News contributor) elaborately defends the eviction and incarceration of some 70,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry from 1942 to 1945 as a military necessity. I got my blog started some 16 months ago when Rep. Howard Coble blunderingly offered his view on a radio program that Japanese Americans were justifiably rounded up because "it wasn't safe for them to be on the streets"--a long-discarded justification for the government's program that Michelle does not see fit to defend in terms (although she generally sticks up for Coble anyway--see page xvii of her book).

I would have loved to get a review copy of the book from the publisher, as some bloggers on the right and some warbloggers did, but I didn't. And it's strange that I didn't, given that (a) I'm the only person in the blogosphere who regularly blogs about the government's wartime treatment of Japanese Americans, (b) Michelle wrote that it was my lengthy exchanges with Sparky at Sgt. Stryker 16 months ago that inspired her to do much of the research for her book, and (c) Michelle cites my work, both approvingly (where, on page 352, she speaks of my "thoughtful" analysis in this article on racial profiling) and disapprovingly (where, on pages 110 and 334, she faults my book "Free to Die for their Country" for "exalting ... belligerent draft resisters" in the camps). Fortunately, my local Barnes & Noble here in Chapel Hill had a copy on Monday, and I was able to read it yesterday, so I'm in a position to say something about it now while the blogosphere is abuzz about it.

In her prefatory note to readers of her new book "In Defense of Internment," Michelle Malkin says the following about the book's goal:

"This book defends both the evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast (the so-called "Japanese American internment"), as well as the internment of enemy aliens, Japanese and non-Japanese alike, during World War II. My work is by no means all-encompassing; my aim is to provoke a debate on a sacrosanct subject that has remained undebatable for far too long."

Read just a bit further, though, and you'll see that the book is not just about "provoking debate." It's about "correcting the record" (page xv). By the time she finishes her retelling of the story of how the U.S. government decided to force 112,000 Japanese aliens and U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry from their homes and into camps in the interior, she maintains that "it should be obvious to any fair-minded person that the decisions made were not based primarily on racism and wartime hysteria" (page 80), but were based instead on information in top-secret decrypted cables from Japan to its embassies around the world (the so-called "MAGIC" decrypts) suggesting that certain people in the Americas (both ethnically Japanese people, including primarily Japanese aliens but also a handful of American citizens of Japanese ancestry, as well as people of other races and ethnicities) were secretly working as spies for the Japanese government.

In other words, the government did what it did to people of Japanese ancestry in the United States from 1941 to 1945 because a select few officials at the very top of certain branches of the government (really a very few--the President, the Secretary of State, and a few War Department officials, but not the Attorney General or J. Edgar Hoover) knew that the Japanese government had sought to develop relationships with ethnically Japanese (as well as ethnically non-Japanese) people in the United States, and had apparently had some success in developing such relationships. It was cool and calibrated military necessity, not racism and not war hysteria.

I'll have more to say about her substantive claims about MAGIC and racism and hysteria later. (Dave Neiwert has already said plenty about it, by the way.) First, though, people ought to ask Michelle some very serious questions about the book's goal and the research methods that support it.

I was, frankly, amazed at the speed with which Michelle researched and wrote the book, and then brought it to publication. She mentioned yesterday that she had been led to do much of the research for the book by a weblog dialogue (a "diablogue?") between me and Sparky at Sgt. Styker that took place 16 months ago. I know that when I undertook to tell the story of a single government decision from this era - the decision to draft American citizens of Japanese ancestry out of the camps and into the military (which is the subject of my book) - I had to spend hours and hours first finding all of the relevant files from all the relevant agencies in archives all over the country, then sifting through those files to find all documents from all agencies and people relevant to the decisionmaking process, and then poring over the documents themselves, in order to link together disparate positions of many different people in many different agencies into a coherent narrative.

Meanwhile, in "In Defense of Internement," Michelle "corrects the record" by telling a much broader story about a whole long set of government policies and decisions. She cites to original documents from a staggering number of agencies and offices within agencies--the FBI, the Justice Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, various branches of the War Department (including G1, G2, and the Provost Marshall General's Office), the State Department, the Military Intelligence Division, FDR's communications, and, of course, the voluminous MAGIC cables. I haven't checked, but I assume that lots of relevant materials for the story Michelle tells would be all over the country--in both DC-area branches of the National Archives as well as many of its regional offices, in presidential libraries, in the private papers of people like John McCloy and Milton Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall and many others who played a role in this long and complex story, and in lots of other places.

I can't imagine how Michelle--or, indeed, anyone--could have done the primary research necessary to understand the record, let alone "correct" it in the manner the book attempts to do, in five or six years, let alone in one. Especially while doing anything at all in addition to researching the book (such as writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column). To tell the story correctly, a person would need to sift through thousands and thousands of pages of archival material from all over the country and then piece bits together into a coherent story.

I have a hard time believing that Michelle did anything of the sort. I suspect that she derived much of the information that supports her account from secondary sources, and relies primarily on primary research done (or perhaps not done) by others. (I do not doubt, by the way, that the documents to which Michelle cites actually exist; I'm not suggesting she's making them up. What I suspect--indeed, what I know from my own experience--is that there must be thousands of additional documents in the archives that are relevant to a full understanding of the government's wartime decisions, and that massively complicate the simple story she narrates.

A person certainly can "provoke debate" (uninformed debate, at least) by going about things in this way. But a person can't "correct the record" in this way, or report history in a way that anyone ought to believe. It's just not possible, and it's not credible.

Now, if you were of a mind to unsettle the settled understanding of what led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans between 1942 and 1945, and restore some credibility to the now-discredited claim of military necessity, you'd need to do two things.

First, you'd need to make at least a prima facie case of causation--that is, you'd need to persuade people that the various government actors whose actions produced the decision had well-grounded suspicions of subversion by American citizens of Japanese ancestry, and that those well-grounded suspicions of subversion were what led them to take the actions they took.

Second, you'd have to undermine the settled understanding, supported by several decades of comprehensive research by numerous scholars, that racism, economic jealousy, and war hysteria led these actors to take the actions they took.

How does Michelle's book try to accomplish these two things?

As to the first, the book quotes extensively from a handful of deciphered messages (the "MAGIC" cables) about Japanese efforts to develop some Issei and Nisei as spies for Japan. It really all turns on those MAGIC cables. The trouble is that the historical record tells us absolutely nothing more than that Roosevelt, the Secretary of War (Stimson), and his top assistant (McCloy) generally had access to the thousands of messages of which these concerning potential Issei and Nisei spies were a tiny few. The record tells us nothing about who actually reviewed which of the intercepts, or when, or what any reader understood them to mean. The record is just silent on these issues--reflecting, in a way, the silence of the actors themselves on MAGIC at the time. One might well say (and Michelle does), "but they couldn't talk or write about the MAGIC decrypts; they were ultra-secret and everybody was keen to keep them that way." That may well be so. But that doesn't mean we can fill in the silence in the record with our own suppositions about what they must have read and what they must have thought about what they read. In short, Michelle's book presents no evidence--because, apparently, there is none--to show that MAGIC actually led anybody to think or do anything.

And then, of course, there's the much larger problem (suggested by Greg Robinson below) that the program we know as the Japanese American internment was not a single decision but rather a long series of decisions taken over a period of months (or, if you count some of the pre-war preparation for action against the ethnically Japanese in the USA, a period of years). And we know--for totally certain--that many of those decisions could not conceivably have been influenced by concerns for military necessity supported by MAGIC.

Let's take one example. When you think of the Japanese American internment, what do you picture? People living in the desolate high desert, in tarpaper barracks, under military guard, right?

Do you know how that happened? Do you know how it happened that Japanese Americans ended up spending years in desert camps under military guard, unable to leave without clearance? If you think that any federal government actors (let alone Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, or John McCloy) made that decision, you're wrong. The federal government, having evicted Japanese Americans from their homes and confined them in the late spring of '42 in racetrack and fairground "assembly centers," wanted to move Japanese Americans to wide-open, unguarded agricultural communities in the interior, modeled after Civilian Conservation Corps camps. But in early April of 1942, the governors of the Mountain States unequivocally rejected that idea, saying (I quote here the words of Governor Chase Clark of Idaho) that "any Japanese who might be sent into [the state] be placed under guard and confined in concentration camps for the safety of our people, our State, and the Japanese themselves." The federal government, needing the cooperation of the states, had no choice but to accede to the governors' demands.

So Japanese Americans ended up going into guarded camps (call them what you will) because Mountain State governors demanded it. Do you think that the governor of Idaho had access to the MAGIC decrypts, and that he formulated his demand for "concentration camps" on the basis of an evidence-based belief of military necessity? Or do you think maybe something else explained it? (Before you answer, consider also that Governor Clark liked to compare people of Japanese ancestry to "rats," proposed that all American Japanese be sent "back" to Japan (where most of them had never been) and that the Japanese islands then be "sunk," and admitted publicly that his views on the subject were "prejudiced" because he didn't know "which Japs he could trust" and therefore "didn't trust any of them." Or consider that the Governor of Wyoming announced that if the federal government went ahead with its CCC Corps Camp plan, there would be "Japs hanging from every pine tree.") Personally, I don't see how the MAGIC decrypts could have had anything to do with the decision to confine Japanese Americans under military guard in camps, which is probably the central feature of what we call the Japanese American internment.

OK, so there's really nothing in Michelle's book to accomplish the first of the things the book needed to accomplish--that is, to make out a prima facie case that MAGIC led to the series of decisions that constituted the program Michelle defends.

What about the second? What does Michelle offer to discredit the copiously documented influences of nativism, economic jealousy, racial stereotyping, rumor-mongering, and hysteria on the series of decisions that constituted the program Michelle defends?

Nothing. Literally not one single thing. Not a sentence.

If a book is going to try to "provoke a debate on a sacrosanct subject that has remained undebatable for far too long" (p. xii), and to "correct" the historical "record," I think the book needs to offer a reader more than this.

Michelle is undoubtedly aware that the two most prominently voiced criticisms of the government's program are these:

1. The government evicted all American citizens of Japanese ancestry from their West Coast homes and placed them into camps, but took no action affecting American citizens of German or Italian ancestry. (In other words, if your name was, say Joe Kaminaka or Lou Matsumoto, you were evicted and confined; if your name was, say, Joe DiMaggio or Lou Gehrig, well, uh, you know.)

2. The actions taken against Japanese Americans were absurdly disproportionate to the scope of any security risks of which the government was even arguably aware.

If you're going to defend the program, in addition to its provocation, this is what you've really got to defend, because this is what scholars most commonly and cogently criticize.

How does Michelle's book handle these two tasks?

The quick answer: As to (1), the 165-page text includes a single paragraph (on page 64). As to (2), the book says nothing at all.

Here's the longer answer.

1. Why no similar treatment of similarly situated Americans of German and Italian ancestry? (Why, that is, did Joe Kaminika end up in Manzanar in 1942 while Joe DiMaggio ended up batting .305?) Here's the lone paragraph on the point from "In Defense of Internment":

The disparate treatment of ethnic Japanese versus ethnic Germans and ethnic Italians is often assumed to be based on anti-Japanese racism rather than military necessity. Japan, however, was the only Axis country with a proven capability of launching a major attack on the United States. Some ethnic Germans and ethnic Italians had divided loyalties, but there was no evidence that Germany or Italy had organized a large-scale espionage network akin to the one described by Japan's diplomats in the MAGIC messages. Moreover, any attempt to evacuate all ethnic Germans or ethnic Italians from coastal areas would have done more harm than good to the war effort because so many Americans had German or Italian ancestry. An East Coast evacuation of ethnic Germans and Italians, as envisioned by General Drum, would have resulted in the relocation of some 52 million people. By comparison, the total U.S. population at the time was 135 million people.

I'm afraid we're into eye-rolling, head-shaking territory here. Never mind that Michelle tells her reader nothing about the racial backdrop for the government's distinction between citizens of Asian ancestry and citizens of European ancestry--decades of depictions of Asians as a fearsome, robotic, animalistic Yellow Peril.

Item: "Japan was the only Axis country with the capability of launching a major attack on the United States?" Here Michelle contradicts herself, because the book emphasizes repeatedly that Roosevelt, Stimson, and McCloy had good reason (from MAGIC) to worry about potential Nisei involvement not just in a full-blown Japanese attack on the West Coast, but in more ordinary kinds of domestic spying, disruptions of war production, and the like. So why would it appropriately have mattered (even if it were true) to the MAGIC-reading trio of Roosevelt, McCloy, and Stimson that Japan could mount a full-blown assault on the West Coast but Germany could not mount a full-blown assault on the East Coast? What's more, it was not true that after early June of 1942--before a single Japanese American was transferred for indefinite detention in a "relocation center"--Japan had the capability of launching a major attack on the United States. The decisive American victory at Midway ensured that. And folks, notwithstanding Michelle's assertion (page xxxiii) that this view of Midway's impact is hindsight, that's just wrong: Newsweek (June 22, 1942), The New Republic (June 15, 1942), The Nation (June 27, 1942), Time (June 22, 1942), and the Los Angeles Times (June 8, 1942) all opined that the Midway victory essentially foreclosed any large-scale sea-based attack on the continental United States.

Item: "There was no evidence that Germany or Italy had organized a large-scale espionage network akin to the one described by Japan's diplomats in the MAGIC messages," says Michelle. Huh? This claim is so easily refuted that it,s not worth the effort to spell it out. The only difference between the Japanese espionage operations and the Nazi ones was that we didn't have to decipher intercerpted cables to get a hint of the Nazi ones.

Item: "Any attempt to evacuate all ethnic Germans or ethnic Italians from coastal areas would have done more harm than good to the war effort because so many Americans had German or Italian ancestry." Oh, I see. Because there were so many potential spies and saboteurs along the East Coast, it didn't make military sense to do anything to them. Remember: it's not just that the government didn't evict and detain Americans of German and Italian ancestry: it's that the government did absolutely nothing to them! (Before people jump all over me, the government did act against a number of German aliens--a far smaller number than Japanese aliens--and those actions sometimes entailed the internment of American citizen children of those aliens. What I meant is that the government took no sizeable or programmatic action against American citizens of German ancestry as such.)

2. How, from the alleged MAGIC evidence that Japan had successfully recruited certain Kibei (that is, American-born citizens who had resided and been educated in Japan) into spying, did the government (and does Michelle's book) justify uprooting tens of thousands of Nisei (American-born citizens who'd never been to Japan) from their homes and forcing them into indefinite detention in barren camps?

Here's how General John DeWitt justified suspicion of all Nisei in February of 1942: "The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted." Michelle doesn't say that, though. She just doesn't say anything. Let me note a part of the book where I think Michelle is quite right. In her introduction (pages xiii to xxxv), or at least in certain parts of it, she makes the case that the civil liberties Left and representatives of the Japanese American community have not helped anyone think clearly about the Roosevelt Administration's policies by attacking each step of the Bush Administration's domestic antiterrorism policy since 9/11 as a reprise of the worst mistakes of WWII. This was one of the two main points I made in my article "Inference or Impact? Racial Profiling and the Internment's True Legacy," which Michelle graciously cites in her book.

A big part of what drove Michelle to write this book was her disgust with people on the left who have never met an antiterrorism policy they like, and who have trotted out the scary specter of the incarceration of Japanese Americans at every opportunity. In "Inference or Impact," I worried about the Chicken Little effect of repeatedly claiming a replay of the WWII experience of Japanese Americans--that it might lead people to minimize the reality of that experience. Michelle is doing that in this book, and in at least a small way, I think the civil liberties left has some of its own rhetoric to blame. David Cole didn't force Michelle Malkin to write this book, mind you. But maybe some of David's rhetoric helped her build her head of steam.

However, I hasten to add that Michelle is also slaying dragons of her own creation. She's outraged, she says (see pages 95-99), at all of the people who liken the War Relocation Authority's "Relocation Centers" for Japanese Americans to Nazi death camps by naming them with the historically accurate term "concentration camps." (That's what FDR himself called them - see the quotation from FDR on page 21 of Michelle's book.)

I don't have the faintest idea who Michelle is talking about here. I know of no one who compares Manzanar to Auschwitz, and Michelle's book doesn't cite anyone who does so.

Michelle is certainly right that scholars of the Japanese American experience and the Japanese American community itself play games with terminology, sometimes using historically authentic terms such as "concentration camp" while rejecting other historically authentic terms (such as "internment") on the basis that they do not adequately reflect what really happened. (Most savvy people today speak of "incarceration" rather than "internment.")

But Michelle does exactly the same thing, rejecting the historically authentic term "concentration camp" while insisting on using the historically authentic but grossly misleading term "evacuation." (People are "evacuated" in order to protect them from a threat, such as a hurricane or a forest fire. Japanese Americans were evicted from their homes, not evacuated.)

If in fact there were people who compared this country's camps for Japanese Americans to Nazi Germany's death camps, I would certainly understand Michelle's angry desire to set the record straight. My grandfather was in Buchenwald,** and I'd be as outraged as anyone--probably more outraged than most--by the suggestion that this government ran places like that. But--to foreshadow my next post on this topic--the way to counter a comparison of Manzanar to Buchenwald is to describe Manzanar carefully. It is not to compare Manzanar to a Boy Scout Camp, which Michelle comes very close to doing.

I note that Michelle has set up an "errata" page for the book. Here's one. On page 99, she says that "[h]istorians who compare the American relocation camps to Dachau and Bergen-Belsen will be hard-pressed to find a single European Jew who ... was given permission to leave ... a Nazi death camp." Not so. Nearly all of the German and Austrian Jews (like my grandfather) who were seized at Kristallnacht and taken to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen in early November of 1938 were released over the following several months. Those who could not get visas out of Germany and Austria were later recaptured and killed (like my great uncle Leopold). But Nazi Germany's policy from the mid- to late 1930s was to "encourage" (by which I mean terrorize) Jews into leaving the country. In Michelle's final chapter (page 150), she details what she sees as the many important similarities between the activities of al Qaeda and its supporters today and the activities of Japanese Americans sixty years ago:

"There are parallels between World War II and the War on Terror, but the antiprofilers don't make the proper comparisons. The Japanese espionage network and the Islamic terrorist network exploited many of the same immigration loopholes and relied on many of the same institutions to enter the country and insinuate themselves into the American mainstream. Members of both networks arrived here on student visas and religious visas. Both used spiritual centers--Buddhist churches for the Japanese, mosques for the Islamists--as central organizing points. Both used native-language newspapers to foment subversive tendencies. Both leaned on extensive ethnic- or religious-based fundraising groups for support--kais for the Japanese, Islamic charities for Middle Eastern terrorists. Both had operatives in the U.S. military. Both aggressively recruited American citizens as spies or saboteurs, especially (but not exclusively) inside their ethnic communities. Both were spearheaded by fanatics with an intense interest in biological and chemical weapons."

(Michelle might also have noted in this passage that American citizens of Muslim faith and Arab ancestry have actually pled guilty to charges of attending al Qaeda training camps (the Lackawanna, NY cases) and seeking to levy war against the United States in Afghanistan (the Portland, OR cases). Those, it would seem, are even clearer instances of threat to the United States by American citizens than the handful of vague references about Kibei and/or Nisei in the MAGIC cables.) The cover of the book, makes this visceral connection, in a way that does not inspire much confidence that the book is Fair and Balanced. I thought the visual equation of a Japanese American man with Mohammad Atta was a bit, shall we say, scandalous. Michelle disagreed.

Now I know who the Japanese American man on the cover is (Richard Kotoshirodo), and I still say that the cover is scandalous. Kotoshirodo was an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, educated in Japan (making him a "Kibei"--that is, a person born in the US to Japanese alien parents (a "Nisei") and who was sent to Japan for his primary and/or secondary education) who, while employed by the Japanese consulate in Hawaii, was sent out by the consulate to observe various sites of interest to the Japanese consulate in the months before Pearl Harbor and told to report back on his observations. The book's cover compares this apparently disloyal American citizen of Japanese ancestry who did some surveillance for his employers at the Japanese consulate before Japan's surprise attack to Mohammad Atta, a Saudi citizen who piloted a plane into one of the World Trade towers, killing thousands of civilian innocents. A fair comparison? Not in my eyes. Maybe others see it differently.

One other thing: nobody who looks at this cover in a bookstore is going to have the faintest idea who the Japanese American face is; nearly everyone, it's safe to say, will recognize Mohammad Atta. Coupled with the book's title ("In Defense of Internment") and its subtitle ("The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror"), which sits directly between the two photographs, this cover will, I think, suggest to the ordinary person that American citizens of Japanese ancestry presented World War II America with the same sorts of risks as al Qaeda does today. If that's not a scandalous aspersion on the loyalty and character of Japanese Americans, I don't know what is.

Michelle's purpose in writing the book, you'll recall, was to "offer a defen[se] of the most reviled wartime policies in American history: the evacuation, relocation, and internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II." (p. xiii) "Even with the benefit of hindsight," she argues on page 80, "it is not at all clear that mass evacuation [of all people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S. citizens] was unwarranted." Why? Because information (especially from the MAGIC decrypts) about subversive activities by Japanese Americans (which, she notes, happen to be just like the sorts of subversive activities that Arabs and Muslims are engaging in) provided a "solid rationale for evacuation." (p. 141.)

So here's what I don't get.

On page xxx of the book's Introduction ("A Time To Discriminate"), Michelle tells us to "[m]ake no mistake": she is "not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps."

She's not?

Muller is the Ward Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law.  His discussion of Malkin's book continues at IsThatLegal.org.