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2. Spectacularizing Japanese American Suspects: The Genealogy of the FBI’s Post–Pearl Harbor Raids
- University of Hawai'i Press
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57 C H A P T E R 2 Spectacularizing Japanese American Suspects The Genealogy of the FBI’s Post–Pearl Harbor Raids The FBI is well-known today in spite of spectacular happenings, not because of them. —J. Edgar Hoover, Persons in Hiding1 It used to be everybody wanted to write a play. Suddenly [in the “riptide that followed Pearl Harbor”] everybody wanted to catch a spy. —Frederick Collins, The FBI in Peace and War2 Under the guise of an emergency and pretended threats to national security, the citizenry was denied the known facts, public opinion skillfully manipulated, and a cruel and massive government hoax enacted. —Michi Nishiura Weglyn, Years of Infamy3 Within hours of the 7 December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FBI agents had snapped into spectacular action that resulted in the arrests of 1,395 purportedly dangerous Japanese Americans, newly classified as “enemy aliens” and “non-aliens,” in New York, California, and around the country.4 Headed by infamous director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI raids on Japanese American communities in the wake of Pearl Harbor, and the subsequent detention of those of Japanese descent suspected of harboring intentions for sabotage or espionage, initiated a chain reaction that three months later led to the mass evacuation and internment of all West Coast Japanese Americans (120,000 citizens and aliens alike). The U.S. government and mass media would eventually 58 Chapter 2 cast these Japanese American evacuees, especially the roughly two-thirds of them who were American citizens, as willing players in a happy “lark” in order to frame the internment as a benign counter-spectacle to the Nazi persecution of Jews, for an international audience observing the U.S. treatment of its own minorities.5 But before that racial farce entered the wartime repertoire, Japanese Americans were compelled to make their debut on the national stage by Hoover’s calculated decision to spectacularize the post–Pearl Harbor raids for various historically and ideologically situated reasons. As the first non-white, transnational subjects of the FBI’s decade-long discourse indicting “actor-criminals” and their dangerously perverse use of theatrical disguise in real life, these Japanese suspects demanded spectacular containment —in Hoover’s logic—to quiet public anxiety. In the 1930s, when the FBI’s gallery of suspects contained only white Americans, Hoover instituted a public relations and surveillance strategy that encouraged vicarious participation on the part of the American audience. The FBI staged what Robert Gid Powers calls “crime pageants,” focusing the American people’s attention on the “Public Enemy Number One” of the moment so they could be co-participants in the Bureau’s crime fighting.6 G-men (which stands for “Government men,” a catchier word for FBI agents) fan clubs popped up among various groups around the nation; in these fan clubs ordinary Americans could learn the tricks of the FBI’s trade and envision themselves as amateur arms of the Bureau. As Powers points out, the FBI’s focus on participation through publicity echoed President Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal public mobilization. (The “fear itself” of Roosevelt’s famous 1933 inauguration speech cast public demoralization as more dangerous than the direct economic impact of the Depression.) The American public may have been cast as audience to much of this publicity, but this audience was not understood as passive. Instead, ordinary (innocent) Americans were co-participants along with suspect (criminal) Americans because FBI crime pageants were performed even for the benefit of criminals themselves. After all, Hoover believed “the theory that the best way to defeat crime is to impress upon criminals the surety of apprehension and punishment.”7 While the participatory crime pageants and other G-men pop culture rituals of the 1930s may have been the proper audience arrangement to win the peacetime public away from the seductiveness of gangster glamour, Hoover completely overhauled the FBI’s publicity program for the World War II context in order to finally realize the starkly modernist vision he had always had for his Bureau and to render the spectators to the Japanese counterespionage campaign as passive as possible. Much as Diana Taylor has argued about Argentine policing during the Dirty War, the FBI “needed disguises to infiltrate the other’s space, the space of the ‘weak’” but it emphasized the enemy’s theatrical [184.72.135.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:07 GMT) Spectacularizing Japanese American Suspects 59 tactics “while denying that the military used the same tactics.”8...