Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians

8. Ending the Exclusion

8 Ending the Exclusion Historical writing about the exclusion, evacuation and detention ofthe ethnic Japanese has two great set pieces-analysis ofevents which led to Executive Order 9066, and life in the relocation camps. 1 In large measure, these events were accessible to historians from the moment they took place; equally important events have remained obscuremost significantly, the end of the exclusion from the West Coast. Examining how exclusion ended brings one full circle to a deeper understanding of the forces and ideas behind Executive Order 9066. The ending of the exclusion should logically depend on its beginning : when the circumstances that justified exclusion no longer exist, exclusion itself should cease. Three separate justifications for exclusion suggested two distinct sets of circumstances in which it would end. Through the first six months of 1943, a long struggle was waged in the War Department to determine which of these theories and programs would prevail. General DeWitt and the Western Defense Command embraced at one time or another two theories for exclusion. The first, which DeWitt relied on in his final recommendation to Stimson urging exclusion , was that loyalty was determined by ethnicity.2 For that reason the ethnic Japanese would ultimately be loyal to Japan. The second theory employed the stereotype of the "inscrutable Oriental;" it was adopted by the Western Defense Command in its supplement to the Final Report, the fully developed apologia for evacuation. The ethnic 213 214 PERSONAL JUSTICE DENIED Japanese were so alien to the patterns of American thought and behavior , this theory suggested, that it was impossible to distinguish the loyal from the disloyal.3 For the Western Defense Command, both theories justified the exclusion of Nisei and Issei from the West Coast for the duration of the war; in the first case, because they were presumptively dangerous and ultimately enemies and, in the second, because no one could distinguish enemy from friend. The third theory held that loyalty was a matter ofindividual choice and that the loyal could be distinguished from the disloyal, but urgency required exclusion because it was impossible to conduct individual loyalty reviews in early 1942, under imminent threat ofJapanese raids or sabotage. The War Department in Washington, particularly McCloy and Stimson, held this view.4 Its logical conclusion was that no good reason existed to exclude from the West Coast at least those Issei and Nisei who cleared a loyalty review. At root, this theory held that the ethnic Japanese were a greater threat to security than ethnic Germans and Italians, and it did not extend the presumption ofloyalty to American citizens of Japanese descent; but it also saw limits to the danger they were believed to present-and made government responsible for reviewing loyalty and reassessing the military position so as to return people to normal life as soon as possible. The intensity of the argument between the Western Defense Command and the War Department over how and when to end the exclusion demonstrated the truth of what the Tolan Committee suspected as early as March 1942: there had been no common understanding of the basis of the original decision to exclude nor of how to treat loyal ethnic Japanese after exclusion.5 As McCloy told Bendetsen in April 1943: "We never thought about it."B In early 1943, debate over ending exclusion ranged over a number ofissues: starting a loyalty review in connection with raising the volunteer combat unit (which the Western Defense Command recognized as logically leading to the end of exclusion for the loyal); the question of the conditions under which Nisei soldiers and other classes ofethnic Japanese who presented no obvious security risk could return to the West Coast; the language for General DeWitt's Final Report justifying the evacuation; and, finally , the conditions under which the War Department would revoke the exclusion orders. The War Department recognized by early 1943 that military necessity could not justify the exclusion from the West Coast of loyal American citizens or resident aliens of Japanese ancestry, but it was unwilling to force a revision of the exclusion orders or to make public ENDING THE EXCLUSION 215 the opinions which Stimson, Marshall and McCloy then held. Only in May 1944 did Stimson recommend to President Roosevelt and the Cabinet the ending of exclusion, and only after the 1944 election did the President act on the recommendation. Just as the exclusion was born of political pressure, it was continued...