DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL

Rating:
Summary: Extolling the virtues of "military necessity"
Review: Page Smith's view of Japanese-American evacuation and relocation runs counter to most current interpretations. Rather than trace the root cause to wartime hysteria and racism, Smith takes at face value the claim of "military necessity". Yet the evidence Smith does present does not support his final conclusions. However, Smith's work is popular amongst those who wish to defend relocation.

Unusually for a senior historian, Smith's work has a weakness unacceptable in a high school report: a lack of proper footnotes or endnotes. Instead Smith relies on spotty attribution and a limited "Note on Sources" at the end of the volume. What this conceals is a pattern of misquoting and misinterpretation. In particular, Smith selectively quotes from the report of Kenneth Ringle, an intelligence officer who broke into the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles and gathered material on plans for the use of Japanese-Americans as spies and saboteurs. Among the passages not quoted by Smith is a quote condeming Japanese-Americans as race-traitors for being more loyal to the United States than Japan.

Instead, Smith emphasized that evidence which, to him, shows that Japanese-Americans could not be trusted or assimilated into mainstream culture, a common calumny on Asian immigrants. He also dismisses the evidence given by the treatment of other enemy aliens, particularly those from Germany and Italy, the majority pf whom were left alone where they lived.

Smith's work was greeted by uniformly negative reviews in the professional journals and is now largely ignored by the historical profession. The danger is that Smith's prose, which is polished and appealing, will sway those who are not more familiar with the actual course of events.

Those interested in the subject should turn to the work of Roger Daniels and to the US Congressional Report "Personal Justice Denied."

Rating:
Summary: Poor history well-written
Review: This is a very annoying book. Page Smith was a professor of history at (if memory serves correctly) the University of California Santa Cruz. For those who aren't familiar, conservatives are an endangered species up there. That means Smith was a good old-fashioned New Deal Democrat, and of course his hero was FDR. Why he chose to write a book about FDR's darkest hour and the tragedy that stemmed from it I don't know, but he did.

Smith was (I understand he's since passed away) an oral historian, weaving accounts of common people into the narrative of whatever history he was retelling. He was a very good writer with a common touch, able to convey the emotions and motives of the various people in his narrative. On the other hand, he could be an only so-so historian, with the history itself, especially the causes and course of various events, getting buried in all the human interest detail.

Strangely, that didn't happen here, and this is a worse book for it. Smith has a decidedly skewed perspective on the evacuation of the Japanese-American population during World War II. He recounts that there were citizens descended from all three enemy nations living on the West Coast, tells you that only the Japanese were made to move and put in these relocation camps, and then concludes by insisting that this wasn't done out of racial discriminatory practices. The bald fact is that it couldn't have been anything else: non-citizens who were from enemy nations could have and probably should have been interned, but citizens have a separate set of rights, and no one ever talked of interning (as a for instance) Dwight Eisenhower or Chester Nimitz, let alone Albert Einstein. Fiorello LaGuardia and the Dimaggio brothers weren't relocated, either, and the Dimaggio's father (a resident of Oakland) was still an Italian citizen.

Still, the author does do some good, here and there. He makes clear that the story we were told in the '70s and '80s, that all Japanese-Americans were super-loyal to the US, was largely a fabrication (presumably to help with their case when they were trying to get compensation from the Federal government) and that the situation was a great deal more complex than that. There was considerable disloyalty, some of it cause by the relocation to the centers in the interior, some of it predating that and relating to the individual loyalty to the emporer and Japan. This part of the book is, to my mind, the most valuable.

Even so, Smith's book is really poorly done. While the writing is skilled and keeps things moving, he seems to feel he must recount every reorganization and personell move in the centers and in the government administration of them. There are also a lot of dry statistics (complete with bad math) and repetitive facts.

Lastly, some of the contextual history of the book (recounting the progress of the War itself, and of the political situation at home) is just flat wrong. Smith has Helen Gahagan Douglas fighting for her seat in the House of Representatives against Richard Nixon in 1944 (when Nixon was still in the Navy; their famous campaign against one another occurred in 1950, and was a Senate race), misdates the battle of Guadalcanal, and generally screws up the whole history of the war.

I was interested in the book because I knew Smith was going to defend Roosevelt, and in that I wasn't dissappointed. The defense, however, was so lame I didn't really even enjoy reading it. The chapter on the Executive Order enacting the Japanese-American evacuation is titled "The Decision Nobody Made" as if the order sprang out of the ground or something. He barely acknowledges Roosevelt had to sign it. The oral histories of the various people who were evacuated was interesting, but everything else in this book was poorly done, and frankly I would expect the oral history could be found elsewhere. I wouldn't recommend this book.