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                    I X--FDR AND THE MYTHS OF SUBVERSION

 
On a warm Saturday night in July 1916, when the European war was already two years old but the United States was still at peace, two men rowing  a skiff approached the Lehigh Valley Railroad's marine terminal in New York harbor, a narrow peninsula known as Black Tom. There, a collection of barges, railroad cars and warehouses held munitions awaiting shipment to the Allies.The men were agents of the Imperial German government. They succeeded in setting off  a series of mammoth explosions that blew windows out from Wall Street to Times Square, sent shells whizzing around the harbor, pockmarked the Statue of Liberty, and forced the evacuation of  immigrants from Ellis Island. Investigators eventually tracked down the Kaiser's agents, but more than twenty years were to pass before the case was proved against the German government. John McCloy represented the claimants and Owen Roberts sat on the international mixed commission that decided the case.

Black Tom made the headlines across the United States and defined the ideas of American officials about the prospect of sabotage in World War II. The belief was that since the Germans had scored so heavily with sabotage in World War I, they would no doubt try again. Since they had used immigrants from Germany and Austria-Hungary, immigrants would be dangerous again. FDR was assistant secretary of the navy when the blast went off and he was supposed to have explained his decision a generaztion later to intern the Japanese Americans with the remark that he didn't want "any more Black Toms." The worried American authorities had no way of knowing that Adolf Hitler had no use for peacetime spies and saboteurs. He thought their blundering  might endanger his political aims toward England and might bring the United States into war against him.(1)

In 1940, the British, having seen their munitions go up in smoke on Black Tom, established with FDR's acquiescence an intelligence outfit which operated in the States, called British Security Coordination, partly to safeguard their purchases. The collapse of the Anglo-French front in 1940 inspired extravagant Fifth Column rumors, such as the myth that a Norwegian fifth column had been the decisive factor in turning the country over to the Germans.Churchill had originated the British controls on aliens while home secretary in 1910 and 1911, and was easily persuaded to move against refugees in 1940. He even harked back to a riot involving Japanese immigrants in Vancouver in 1907, and wondered whether the Canadians could cope in case of war with Japan. As for FDR, he swallowed some of the wilder tales that the British were circulating and exaggerated  the dangers America faced. After reading the returns on election night in 1940, he was to comment that the nation had escaped a Putsch. Churchill, of course, had every reason to emphasize with Roosevelt the dangers of the situation.(2)

The reality was that the Germans hadn't prepared themselves beforehand for an invasion of England and so forfeited any chance they had in 1940. Thereafter, there was never any real danger of an invasion, although the possibility existed that Britain might be starved into submission by the U-boats, or humbled by the loss of her empire. So long as Britain held out, the Germans couldn't move across the Atlantic. Despite the wartime propaganda, Hitler had no plans for world domination, although his mastery of Europe was threatening enough for most Americans. Neither was there much evidence for the solidarity of the Axis.(3)

Some of the more egregious reports reaching the White House came from Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., a much-married scion of the famous family. Vanderbilt traveled extensively for FDR. He reported at one point in the summer of 1940 that the Germans were already in Dakar and that they could seize the Hump of Brazil and be bombing the Panama Canal by Christmas. He made much of the fact that there were German and Austrian ski instructors in the western resorts and that the railroad bridges to the Coast were unguarded, causing the Army to turn out troops in the bitter winter of 1941. He predicted a crisis in Mexico at the time of the 1940 presidential elections and appears to have been approached by adherents of the opposition party. Despite the advice of Josephus Daniels, and official Mexican cooperation, rumors of Mexican unfriendliness persisted. Stimson was still listening to them almost to the day Mexico declared war on Germany.(4)

Much of the Californians' distrust of their Japanese minority reflected a fear that defense industries might be relocated inland because of the danger of sabotage. They also worried that the overseas Japanese might use Mexican territory to organize an attack on vital targets. The president shared these ideas, which he may have picked up during his stay in California in 1916. At a Cabinet meeting in March 1942 he spoke of "some friends of his"-- a favorite ploy-- who had located a number of secret airfields the Japanese had prepared in Baja California. He explained that these fields were so secret that they were unknown even to the local population. FDR was easily taken in by a document forged by British Security Coordination which purported to reveal a Nazi plot to establish satellite regimes in South America. He used the bogus material in a radio address, was caught out, and the result was a minor Anglo-American row.(5)

The truth was that  FDR loved intrigue and was highly susceptible to tales of spying and subversion. By February 1942, however, his advisers felt that the post-Pearl Harbor scare over domestic sabotage was counterproductive. Thet knew that the war  must be taken to enemy territory and too many troops were being wasted on guard duty, particularly on the West Coast. Marshall even turned down a presidential offer to stress sabotage in a forthcoming radio address. Nevertheless, FDR continued to fret. On February 17th, the Army advised its commands: "The President had become concerned over persistent reports that there is to be a concerted sabotage effort between February 15 and March 15." He had already rejected Attorney General Biddle's plea to block the removal of the Japanese from the Coast. Biddle had planned to take J. Edgar Hoover with him to help persuade FDR, but in the end went alone on Saturday, February 7th, when he failed to budge the president over lunch. He considered resigning.(6)

For a while, the relocation of the Japanese was stalled because none of the federal agencies wanted the job. But then Milton Eisenhower, brother of the general, was summoned to the White House. A grim president told him that his particular contribution to the war effort was to head up a civilian agency to get the Japanese off  the Coast and that speed was essential. The original hope for a voluntary evacuation went down in flames when the governors and people of the western states refused to have the Japanese in their backyards, except under guard. Although Stimson referred to it as a "great national movement," Milton Eisenhower always felt that the program was unjust. He left after a few months, explaining that he couldn't sleep at night.(7)

Comparatively few of the Japanese had been moved when the carrier Hornet with Doolittle's planes aboard moved into the north Pacific to launch the bombing attack against Japan. At this point Roosevelt sent Marshall out to the Coast to beef up defenses against possible Japanese retaliation. The Army planners, always nervous about the aircraft factories on the Coast, worried that Yamamoto's carriers, which had been savaging the British in the Indian Ocean, might be used for a raid. Once again, Mexico came under scrutiny and another reconnaissance was made down both sides of the Gulf of California. Actually, retaliation for the Doolittle raid came in the form of thousands of balloons carrying bombs which the Japanese began launching into the jet stream late in 1944. A few hundred reached the States. They did little damage, but killed the wife and daughters of a clergyman who had taken the family for a fishing trip in southern Oregon.(8)

After operating off the Coast for a week in December, a few Japanese submarines returned late in February.  On the 23rd when, as it happened, the president was delivering one of his Fireside Chats, a sub surfaced and fired some rounds at an oil tank farm near Santa Barbara. There were no defenses at this point and DeWitt's headquarters assumed that the submarine's skipper had been informed of this by a Fifth Columnist. Next night a weather balloon touched off the noisy battle of Los Angeles when all the antiaircraft batteries cut loose. True to form, DeWitt claimed that enemy aircraft had been present, either launched from a submarine or flown from a secret base in Mexico.The Japanese actually built one class of long-range submarines which could carry a small plane which could be used to bomb the Panama Canal, but apparently no missions were ever flown.

By early 1943, Stimson and McCloy and other War Department officials who had been involved in the relocation of the West Coast Japanese felt that their continued incarceration was unnecessary, at least for most, and that they might be permitted to return to the Coast.  DeWitt was opposed. But DeWitt was relieved in the fall of 1943 by Delos Emmons, fresh from Hawaii, who believed that the improved military situation made the camps unnecessary. The West Coast was taken out of the category of a theater of operation in November and a volunteer regiment of Nisei, Japanese immigrants' sons, was performing with distinction in Italy.

he issue came up at Cabinet in May 1944.  On this occasion FDR wrote a memo summarizing his instructions:
" As I said at Cabinet, I think the whole problem, for the sake of internally quiet, should be  handled gradually. I am thinking of two methods: [1] Seeing with great discretion, how many Japanese families would be acceptable to  the public in definite localities on the West Coast.[2]. Seeking to extend greatly the distribution of other families in many parts of the  United States. I have been talking to a number of people from the Coast and they are all  in agreement that the Coast would be willing to receive back a portion of the Japanese  who were formerly there--nothing sudden and not in too great quantities at any one time."(9)

General Charles Bonesteel, who succeeded Emmons at the Western Defense Command, discussed the subject with the president when FDR visited the Coast in July. Bonesteel felt that the president's ideas were impractical. A good many Japanese could be expected to reestablish themselves in their familiar surroundings and, in any case, in the general's opinion, the Supreme Court would soon strike down the legality of confinement and exclusion. The word around Washington, however, was that FDR had his eye on California's votes in the upcoming election In fact, his trip to the Coast was the opener in his reelection campaign. He would go on to Hawaii and be photographed with MacArthur. Even visit Alaska.(10)

In the event, the government didn't announce the freeing of most of those under detention until December 14th, after the election. The move barely anticipated the Supreme Court's decision in Ex parte Endo that a loyal citizen couldn't be held in camp against his will. There had never been any explicit authority, either in a statute or in any executive order, for the confinement of the citizens among the Japanese.

The day after the Endo  ruling, Ickes explained to his relocation agency staff the president's desire to distribute the Japanese as much as possible away from the Coast. Such had been the agency's policy all along in releasing individuals. "Spreading them thin," as its publicity put it. This was motivated partly by a desire to get people out of the camps and into an environment where they wouldn't be subject to discrimination, and so dispose of a racial problem. From another point of view, it was itself discrimination. It accomplished in part the objectives of the anti-Japanese forces, for, by 1946, after the Japanese had been allowed to return, the Coast had less than sixty percent of its prewar population of Japanese.

FDR hadn't mellowed, When some of the inmates in the camps rebelled at their continued confinement, he instructed that firm measures be taken against them. When it was objected that this might affect the treatment of Americans held by the Japanese, he said in a Cabinet on December 17th "that it did not make any difference what the Japs in Japan thought about it."(11)

On a July day in 1944 the cruiser Baltimore, with the president aboard, cleared the minefields and entered the channel to Pearl Harbor. It was nearly ten years to the day the Houston had brought the chief executive in 1934. The Houston lay at the bottom of the Java Sea, and her distinguished passenger was a very sick man. It was hoped that the trip would afford him some rest away from Washington. His frailty was a closely-guarded secret, for he was being nominated for a fourth term by the Democrats. Greeting war workers, handshaking servicemen, and hobnobbing with Douglas MacArthur would help him against Tom Dewey, the racket-buster from New York whom the Republicans had chosen to challenge FDR's unprecedented tenure in the White House.

Some accounts have FDR weighing the competing strategies of Nimitz and MacArthur at a briefing session at a Waikiki mansion and coming down on MacArthur's side in favor of an early   liberation of the Philippines. But if something was actually  decided, nothing really changed in the calculations of the Joint Chiefs. FDR echoed MacArthur in  proclaiming that the Philippines must be liberated as a matter of national honor. MacArthur was livid at having to come all the way from Australia to afford his great rival favorable exposure before the voters. The general's disposition  wasn't helped by the fact that a MacArthur-for-president boomlet had fizzled at the Republican convention. MacArthur stayed with his friend, Robert Richardson, the same who had    despaired of defending the West Coast in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and was now commanding in Hawaii,  thoroughly subordinate to the admirals. Richardson may have helped find a huge open limousine for MacArthur to  make his own dramatic entry to the welcome ceremonies for FDR. MacArthur's injured feelings caused him to boast to his staff of how he had outdebated Nimitz.

But MacArthur realized he would outlive Roosevelt. On his return to his headquarters he predicted that the president would be reelected, but wouldn't serve out his term. "Doc," he told  his physician, "in six months he'll be in his grave."(12)

His strategical confab with MacArthur and Nimitz may have been more than a little showbiz, but FDR gave some no-nonsense directions when he met with the new Hawaii governor, Judge Ingram Stainback. Hawaii had been the scene of a battle between the military government and those who wished to restore civil power. Poindexter had turned over the governorship, lock, stock, and barrel to the Army, which administered the territory, spent its revenues and dealt out a rough and ready justice by means of provost courts and military commissions. When these organs began  handing down death sentences and punishments unknown to the legal system, Washington had mooted the death sentences and returned the more complicated matters to the territorial courts, which the Army had prorogued. Nevertheless, the government remained in the grasp of Colonel Thomas Green who occupied a suite in Iolani Palace, where, so his detractors had it, he spent his  time admiring an organization chart of his empire. Harold Ickes maneuvered Roosevelt into replacing the supine Poindexter in the summer of 1942, and Stainback promptly chased Green out of the Palace.(13)

FDR didn't give up gracefully on relocating Japanese from Hawaii. When Emmons pleaded a labor shortage, the president growled:  "I think that General Emmons should be told that the only consideration is that of  the safety of the Islands and that the labor situation is not only a secondary matter but should not be given any consideration whatsoever. The amount of sugar and pineapples grown or harvested has such a small ratio of  effect on our national economy that the United Nations can get along with a large  reduction in the Hawaiian  supply if necessary."(14)

Here, FDR was out of date and Ickes enjoyed telling him so. The president suspected the Big Five of hoarding Japanese labor on the plantations, but for some years the planters had been relying overwhelmingly on Filipinos, who posed no questions of loyalty. The president was in the company of those who frankly wished to lessen the Japanese presence in the Islands, such as  Angus Taylor, the U.S. Attorney; and Frank Knox and Admiral Bloch who steered relocation orders through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Early in 1942, Maxwell Hamilton of the State Department's Far Eastern Division wrote to Sumner Welles that something should be done about the "serious problem" of the large Japanese population in Hawaii He was also advocating  the removal of the West Coast Japanese, in which sentiment Stanley Hornbeck joined him. (15)

Ickes felt that his turf in the Interior Department had been subject to sneak attacks, beginning with the appointment of MacArthur to the top Army post in the Far East, about which he wasn't consulted, and the displacement of Poindexter. There were also serious moves to set aside the civilian governors of Alaska and Puerto Rico, and Knox was frank about the Navy's desire to annex Hawaii. General Emmons was just as stubborn about retaining military rule, which was used to control labor, as he had been about refusing to relocate Japanese. But the tide ran against him. The danger to Hawaii receded after the battle of Midway in June 1942. If the Japanese had won  and had succeeded in destroying the Pacific Fleet, they might've tried for Hawaii afterwards. They had plans on the shelf to occupy Hawaii, which like all occupation plans looked to governing with participation by the natives. The plans gathered dust.(16)

The administration blundered when the Chicago Tribune published a story about the battle of Midway which stated that the Navy had known something about the Japanese plans. The Navy actually did know about the Japanese plans because it had been reading the Japanese naval code, and a sensitive document had been seen by a Tribube correspondent  who had been sailing with the fleet. Naturally the Navy was ambivalent about prosecuting , but FDR insisted. Biddle was forced to appoint a special prosecutor who empaneled a grand jury. The grand jury refused to indict because in the end the authorities shrank from presenting concrete evidence as to the potential harm in the Tribune's story. The Japanese meanwhile  introduced  new versions of their  code, as a matter of routine. It is unlikely that they were influenced by the argument that broke out  in the American press,  the charges and countercharges  between the administration and its political opponents. It was a messy and potentially disastrous episode.(17)

The president was equally inflexible in dealing with Charles Lindbergh.  Lindbergh had resigned his commission in the Air Corps in protest against FDR's policies, but after Pearl Harbor the hero wanted to get back into uniform. He arrived, hat in hand, in Washington, only to be turned down by Stimson and Knox, at the president's instructions. But Henry Ford took him on  as an expert in his aircraft engine plants and he went on to work with aircraft firms, and eventually reached the war in the South Pacific. For a time both MacArthur's people and the Navy closed their eyes to the fact that Lindbergh as a civilian had been flying combat for months, and shot down at least one Japanese plane. He was finally ordered out by General George Kenney,  MacArthur's air commander. Had he been shot down or captured, the repercussions would have been enormous.(18)

When. Robert Richardson succeeded Emmons in Hawaii, he got into trouble over restoring habeas corpus, and unwisely threatened to send a federal judge to the stockade. As a result he drew a contempt citation for which a presidential pardon had to be obtained. By this time FDR was getting a little tired of military governors. Provost Marshal General Allen Gullion had set up a school for military governors in Charlottesville at which all sorts of anti-New Deal incantations were reported. Richardson cleaned up his act before FDR arrived on the Baltimore, by relinquishing his military governor title. By then Army officers in Hawaii suspected that military government on American territory was a legal fiction. But when FDR conferred with Stainback,  he told him that if he didn't accede to the military's wishes, he, FDR, would reimpose martial law. Hawaii was finally put under the provisions of the law that permitted the exclusion of the West Coast Japanese.(19)

FDR then voyaged up to the Aleutians to show himself to the troops, visiting Adak, Dutch Harbor and Kodiak Island, within range of the Japanese Navy. While he was en route,  a seaplane flew out to his flotilla and dropped a mailbag with the news that Missy LeHand, FDR's favorite secretary and companion, had died; also, Manuel Quezon. The administration had accommodated Quezon by passing a law to  extend his term of office. But the decisive voice in Philippine affairs would be MacArthurs.

By the time the president made his visit, Alaska had become a backwater, But in September 1939, when the European war threatened, FDR had suggested sending a fleet detachment to cruise off the Aleutians and generate a lot of meaningless radio traffic to get the attention of the Japanese and get their minds off moving against the western colonies in the Pacific. In August 1944 the Americans in the Pacific were involved in a similar maneuver, simulating a force preparing to invade the Kurils. The president had milked wartime security for all it was worth during his press conferences in Hawaii.  "I have seen many things here. Where I am going, I cannot tell you. When I am to get back, I cannot tell you. And where I am going on my return, I don't know." He may not have been briefed on the radio deception scheme. He inspected Adak, the Army-Navy joint command post, and experienced the rotten Aleutian weather that spoiled his attempts at fishing. He was unrefreshed when he finally reached the States at Puget Sound, and showed his fatigue,  making a fumbling speech. But the Alaskan trip gave him ammunition for a gibe at the Republicans. They had circulated a rumor that he had left his dog Fala behind on Adak, and had sent one of the taxpayers destroyers back to pick him up. FDR raised gales of laughter when in a speech he claimed that Fala's Scotch soul had been deeply hurt by the false story.(20)