The emerging debate over which Californian should replace the now-disdained Father Junipero Serra as one of the only two representatives of the state enshrined in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall has thrown up some intriguing names: Jackie Robinson, Cesar Chavez, Sally Ride and John Steinbeck among them.
Also Earl Warren, a former governor of California who is regarded as a liberal icon for his record as chief justice of the U.S., especially for writing the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court opinion in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a cornerstone of the civil rights movement.
Warren’s legion of admirers might be well advised to hope the discussion doesn’t go any further.
That’s because it’s sure to force a public reckoning with Warren’s role in one of the darkest episodes in American history: the dehumanizing relocation and incarceration of more than 110,000 residents of Japanese extraction in California and other Western states during World War II. In any event, the reckoning is overdue.
Warren’s support of the dehumanizing treatment of Japanese residents came in 1942, while he was California attorney general. He would notch the first of his three gubernatorial election victories later that year and was elevated to the high court by President Eisenhower in 1953.
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As attorney general, however, Warren produced what must stand as one of the most irremediably racist presentations by a public official in 20th century American history. This is his Feb. 21, 1942, testimony before a congressional committee in San Francisco chaired by U.S. Rep. John H. Tolan, D-Oakland.
Reading Warren’s testimony today, as I did while researching my forthcoming book, a history of California, will be a shattering experience for anyone accustomed to thinking of him as a hero of the campaign for equal protection under the law.
Before delving into the details, some background about the Statuary Hall issue. Serra’s reputation has plummeted since his statue was installed at the Capitol in 1931.
A Franciscan missionary from Spain, Serra was long lionized as a pioneering missionary spreading the Catholic faith during the Spanish colonization of the West Coast in the 18th century. In recent years, scholars have pointed to the abuse and effective enslavement of Native Americans at the missions he founded.
Pope Francis canonized Serra in 2015 as “evangelizer of the West,” even though reconsideration of the Serra legend had already become part of America’s confrontation with its historical racism.
Warren’s support for the Japanese incarceration isn’t a secret. But such mentions fail to communicate the flavor of Warren’s testimony or the importance of his role.
Indeed, it’s conceivable that without his support, the incarceration might never have taken place.
His testimony to the Tolan committee is an extended accusation that Japanese residents, including American citizens, were effectively guilty of betraying and deceiving America. His remarks landed on fertile ground for paranoia, as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had occurred a little less than three months earlier.
In his presentation, Warren placed the most sinister possible interpretation on every nugget of information he presented. Referring to the maps of Japanese landholdings throughout the state, he said that they showed “a disturbing situation… [A]long the coast from Marin County to the Mexican border virtually every important strategic location and installation has one or more Japanese in its immediate vicinity.”
Warren suggested that this couldn’t be coincidental — the Japanese were in these locations to conduct surveillance and sabotage.
The truth was that the existence of many of these landholdings was the product of a historical injustice: Forbidden by California law to own land or to lease it for more than three years at a time, immigrant Japanese — the Issei generation — gravitated toward parcels disdained by those burdened by no such restrictions. Those were, in the later words of agricultural historian Masakazu Iwata, “thousands of acres of worthless lands … which the white man abhorred.”
Warren dismissed as immaterial the fact that no evidence had been found by the FBI or military authorities that any such surveillance, much less sabotage, had occurred.
Asked by a committee member whether it was possible to distinguish which of the U.S-born Japanese residents were loyal to the U.S. rather than to Japan, Warren opined that “there is no way. … We believe that when we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them and we believe that we can, in dealing with the Germans and the Italians, arrive at some fairly sound conclusions because of our knowledge of the way they have in the community and have lived for many years. … But when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field.”
Warren’s assertions about the faithlessness of Japanese residents drew upon a strain of anti-Japanese sentiment in California that dated back to the turn of the century.
Since Warren’s testimony came two days after President Franklin Roosevelt had issued his infamous Executive Order 9066 allowing Secretary of War Henry Stimson to designate any portions of the Western United States as “military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded,” his defenders sometimes try to minimize his responsibility for the policy.
Yet Roosevelt’s order, as indefensible as it might be, was a generalized grant of authority; nowhere in its five terse paragraphs do the words “Japanese” or “Japanese Americans” appear. At the time of Warren’s appearance, the scope and nature of the policy was just beginning to be hashed out.
Michael Hiltzik writes for the Los Angeles Times.