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Norman Thomas and the Struggle Against Internment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Greg Robinson
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Extract

Historians of the wartime removal and mass incarceration of West Coast Americans of Japanese ancestry, commonly called the Japanese American internment, have examined with care and thoroughness the actions of the government and of the anti-Japanese-American forces that instigated the signing of Executive Order 9066. Most scholars, with the exception of Robert Shaffer, have paid comparatively little attention to the writings and activities of those non-Japanese Americans who opposed the internment policy. This is no doubt a result of the fact that the number of people who publicly challenged or opposed the government was small, especially at the outset, and that they were unable to mobilize public opinion in favor of Japanese Americans. However, the study of these dissenters is vital to understanding the internment, not as an exercise in political courage or feel-good humanitarianism, but because it points up the level of general awareness of the injustice done to Japanese Americans. By revealing the existence and contours of public debate over the treatment of Japanese Americans, it both suggests, at least heuristically, the availability of possible alternatives to internment and at the same time demonstrates the limits of most people's willingness to follow such alternatives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 29 , October 2005 , pp. 419 - 434
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2005

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References

Notes

1. For the government's decision to intern and the wartime Japanese-American experience, see, for example, Bosworth, Allen R., America's Concentration Camps (New York: Norton, 1967)Google Scholar; Daniels, Roger, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993)Google Scholar; Girdner, Audrie and Loftis, Anne, The Great Betrayal (New York: Macmillan, 1969)Google Scholar; Irons, Peter, Justice at War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (1982; rept. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Robinson, Greg, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Weglyn, Michi Nishiura, Years of Infamy (1976; rept. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

2. Shaffer, Robert, “Cracks in the Consensus: Defending the Rights of Japanese Americans During World War II,” Radical History Review 72 (1998): 84–120CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A few studies have been made of individual dissenters. A notable early example is “A Friend of the American Way: An Interview with Herbert V. Nicholson,” in Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese-American Evacuation, ed. Hansen, Arthur A. and Mitson, Betty E. (Fullerton: Japanese American Oral History Project, California State University Fullerton, 1974), 118–45Google Scholar. There also is a small but growing literature on African American opposition to the government's policy. See, for example, Kearney, Reginald, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 109–16Google Scholar; Doreski, C. K., “‘Kin in Some Way’: The Chicago Defender Reads the Japanese Internment, 1942–1945,” in The Black Press, ed. Vogel, Todd (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001), 161–85Google Scholar.

3. For Thomas's general career, see Seidler, Murray, Norman Thomas; Respectable Rebel (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Johnpoll, Bernard K., Pacifist's Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970)Google Scholar; Fleischmann, Harry, Norman Thomas: A Biography, 1884–1964 (New York Norton, 1969)Google Scholar; Durham, James C., Norman Thomas (New York: Twayne, 1974)Google Scholar; and Swanberg, W. A., Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist (New York: Scribner's, 1979)Google Scholar.

4. Gens, Stephen Mark, “Paranoia Bordering on Resignation: Norman Thomas and the American Socialist Party, 1935–1948” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1982), 106–10Google Scholar.

5. Ibid.

6. Fleischmann, , Norman Thomas, 213Google Scholar.

7. Norman Thomas article, January 1942, cited in Walker, Samuel, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (New York, Oxford University Press, 1990), 159Google Scholar.

8. The Socialist Party was not strong in California, especially after it was split in 1934 by the gubernatorial candidacy of onetime Socialist writer Upton Sinclair, who organized the End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement, which Thomas bitterly opposed. Sinclair's advisors made no special efforts to recruit support from racial minorities (Me Williams, Carey, The Education of Carey McWilliams [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979], 73)Google Scholar.

9. See letters, Sam Hohri to Norman Thomas, December 6, 1941; May 20, 1942; October 20, 1942; and January 25, 1943, in microfilm correspondence file, reels 12 and 13, Norman Thomas Papers, New York Public Library (henceforth cited as NT).

10. Letter, Ann Ray to Norman Thomas, January 14, 23, 1942 in NT.

11. Harry [Paxton] Howard To Norman Thomas, January 25, 1942, in NT. Howard would later publish an emotional piece in the Crisis, journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in which he underlined the centrality of racial bias in inspiring the government's internment policy and reminded African Americans that, if the government could arbitrarily confine American citizens of Japanese ancestry and violate their civil rights on a racial basis, it could do the same to them (Howard, Harry Paxton, “Americans in Concentration Camps,” Crisis 49 [09 1942]: 281–84, 301–2)Google Scholar.

12. Letter, Norman Thomas to Harry Fleischman [sic], February 5, 1942, in NT.

13. Letter, Norman Thomas to Francis Biddle, February 13, 1942, in NT.

14. Norman Thomas, letter to Hugh E. MacBeth, February 28, 1942, in NT.

15. Thomas, Norman, editorial in the Call, 03 7, 1942Google Scholar, cited in Seidler, , Norman Thomas, 214Google Scholar.

16. Letter, Norman Thomas to Travers Clement, March 11, 1942, in NT.

17. Thomas, editorial in the Call.

18. Ibid.

19. For the ACLU and Executive Order 9066, see Irons, , Justice at War, ch. 5Google Scholar.

20. Letter, Norman Thomas to John Haynes Holmes, March 9, 1942, in NT.

21. Irons, , Justice at War, 127–28Google Scholar.

22. Letter, Norman Thomas to Ann Ray, April 17, 1942, in NT.

23. Letter, Post War World Council to Franklin Roosevelt, April 23, 1942. Post War World Council papers, reel 25, in NT.

24. Ibid.

25. Letter, Henry Stimson to Mary Hillyer, May 25, 1942, cited in the circular letter “Post War World Council,” June 12, 1942, in Japanese Americans file, microfilm papers of the American Civil Liberties Union, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

26. Letter, Norman Thomas to Robert Taft, September 16, 1942, in NT.

27. New York Times, 06 19, 1942, p. 13, col. 5Google Scholar.

28. Ibid. See also “Minutes of the conference called by Post War World Council on the Japanese situation, held at the Russell Sage Foundation, on Thursday, June 18, 1942,” in Japanese American file, microfilm papers of the American Civil Liberties Union, Series II, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

29. Thomas, Norman, “The Thirties as a Socialist Recalls Them,” in As We Saw the Thirties, ed. Simon, Rita James (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 117Google Scholar.

30. Laidler, Harry W., ed., The Role of Races in Our Future Civilization, pamphlet (New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1942), 58–60Google Scholar.

31. Thomas, Norman, Democracy and Japanese Americans (New York: Post War World Council, 1942), 19Google Scholar.

32. Ibid., 34.

33. Yoneda, Karl, letter, San Francisco Chronicle, 09 11, 1942Google Scholar. Although Yoneda, like other Japanese American Communists, had been expelled from the Party following the attack at Pearl Harbor, he remained loyal to the Party and while at Manzanar circulated petitions to the U.S. government calling for a Second Front. Even though his letter attracted considerable attention, Yoneda did not choose to discuss the incident in his memoirs (Yoneda, Karl, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker [Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California-Los Angeles, 1964])Google Scholar.

34. Thomas, Norman, “A Dark Day for Liberty.” Christian Century 59 (07 29, 1942): 929–31Google Scholar.

35. Ibid.

36. Letter, Norman Thomas to St. Clair Bourne, June 26, 1942, in NT.

37. The journal of the Jewish labor group Workman's Circle, not the Socialist Party newspaper.

38. Letter, Norman Thomas to Israel Knox, November 21, 1942, in NT.

39. Letter, Israel Knox to Norman Thomas, November 25, 1942, in NT. It is interesting to speculate whether Thomas would have expressed his position differently had he known the reality of the Nazi death camps.

40. Letter, Norman Thomas to Hugh MacBeth, July 17, 1942, in NT.

41. Thomas, , Democracy and Japanese Americans, 19–20Google Scholar.

42. Letter, A. L. Wirin to Norman Thomas, June 27, 1942, in NT.

43. Letter, Norman Thomas to Ernest Besig, July 8, 1942, in NT.

44. Norman Thomas, draft statement, October 10, 1942[?], in American Civil Liberties Union file, Organizations Section, in NT.

45. Letter, Norman Thomas to Roger Baldwin, September 1, 1942, cited in Johnpoll, , Pacifist's Progress, 239Google Scholar.

46. Letter, Norman Thomas to Roger Baldwin, November 7, 1942, in NT. Thomas's reference was to John Steinbeck's popular anti-Nazi novel, The Moon Is Down.

47. Letters, Norman Thomas to Roger Baldwin, November 10, 1942; and John Haynes Homes to Norman Thomas, November 13, 1942, in NT.

48. Letter, Norman Thomas to Justice Frank Murphy, January 6, 1945, cited in JrHoward, J. Woodford, Mr. Justice Murphy: A Political Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 337Google Scholar.

49. Norman Thomas, “Totalitarian Justice in America,” speech, WMAL Radio, July 23, 1943, in War Relocation Authority numbered correspondence file 611.20, WRA Papers, RG 210, National Archives, Washington D.C.

50. Letters, Norman Thomas to Sam Hohri, January 8, 1943; and Norman Thomas to Dillon Myer, January 8, 1943, in NT.

51. Letter, Conrad Hamanaka to Norman Thomas, October 3, 1942, in NT. For government control of the press in the assembly centers, see Mizuno, Takeya, “Journalism Under Military Guards and Searchlights: Newspaper Censorship at Japanese American Assembly Camps During World War II,” Journalism History 29, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 98–106Google Scholar.

52. Letter, Norman Thomas to John McCloy, October 9, 1942, in NT. Thomas regarded the unequal pay scales and the exploitation of internees one of the most serious injustices in the camps (Thomas, Norman, “The Fate of the Japanese in North America and Hawaii,” Pacific Affairs 16, no. 1 (03 1943): 92–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Letter, Kiyoshi Okamoto to Norman Thomas, February 10, 1943, et seq., in NT. For Okamoto and the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, see Muller, Eric, Free to Die for Their Country (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

54. Letter, Margaret Anderson to Norman Thomas, December 27, 1943, in NT. Thomas, unlike many supporters of Japanese Americans, did not confine his concern and support to the “loyal Japanese.” After Common Ground rejected Hamanaka's article on segregation, Thomas suggested to Hamanaka that he write a piece on the unjust treatment of the “disloyal” inmates at Tule Lake and “take note of the attempts to deport people back to Japan after the war” (letters, Norman Thomas to Conrad Hamanaka, January 3, 1944, and February 15, 1944, in NT). In January 1945, following the lifting of exclusion of “loyal” internees, Thomas wrote Assistant Secretary of War McCloy to complain about the refusal to allow Japanese Americans classified as “disloyal” to return: “The tests by which these people were counted disloyal were, I always thought, rather unfair. Certainly, they were far more stringent than the tests required of enemy aliens, Italian and German” (letter, Norman Thomas to John McCloy, January 8, 1945, in NT).

55. “Thomas Hits West Coast Racism Against Nisei,” Pacific Citizen, 09 30, 1944, p. 2, col. 4Google Scholar.