Remember Pearl Harbor, and the camps that followed

Although the Greatest Generation mostly is no longer with us, Americans always will remember the sacrifice that began Dec. 7, 1941. That’s when Imperial Japan attacked the U.S. bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, without warning. Of eight American battleships moored in the harbor, four were sunk and three damaged; 2,402 U.S. service members were killed, along with 57 civilians.

A day after the attack, which President Roosevelt called “a date that will live in infamy,” Congress declared war on Japan, bringing the United States into World War II. Almost four hard-fought years later, 416,000 Americans lay dead from the fighting, an immense cost. An estimated 60 million people died worldwide. Victory meant the defeat of both Imperial Japan, which had committed such atrocities as the “Rape of Nanking” in 1937 and the Bataan Death March of 1942; and of Nazi Germany, which exterminated 6 million European Jews and millions of others, including Romani people, political dissidents and people with disabilities.

While America played a crucial role in defeating these tyrannies, after the war Americans were honest enough to admit that they had made mistakes of their own. In particular, about 110,000 Japanese Americans, most Nisei — second-generation Americans born here — were forced into internment camps for the duration of the war.

The internment was pushed by Roosevelt and Earl Warren, first as California’s attorney general, then its governor. The Nisei supposedly were security risks and an “enemy race,” even though FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said they were loyal.

This point is quite important, as many apologists for the camps wrongly assume there were good and justified reasons for assuming the worst.

“The entire ‘Japanese Problem’ has been magnified out of its true proportion,” wrote Naval intelligence officer Kenneth Ringle at the time, and “should be handled on the basis of the individual, regardless of citizenship, and not on a racial basis.”

Tragically, these warnings were not heeded.

Whole families were moved from the West Coast to such camps as the Manzanar War Relocation Center, in the Owens Valley, now a National Historical Site. It’s worth pointing out that these were not death camps like the Nazis ran. Still, they constituted an unjustified deprivation of liberty for people who did nothing wrong.

As columnist Steven Greenhut wrote in the Register in 2007, “I’ve talked to camp internees and am astounded by their enduring patriotism and lack of bitterness.” The sons of the Nisei proved their patriotism in such decorated units as the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which fought in Europe.

We’re proud to note that the Santa Ana Register, then the name of the Orange County Register, was one of two newspapers in America that we know of that opposed the internment, and the only one on the West Coast. After the war, then-Publisher R.C. Hoiles worked to help Japanese Americans regain some of their confiscated property.

As Hoiles wrote in 1942, “few, if any, people ever believed that evacuation of the Japanese was constitutional. It was a result of emotion and fright rather than being in harmony with the Constitution and the inherent rights that belong to all citizens…. We must realize, as Harry Emerson Fosdick so wisely said, ‘Liberty is always dangerous but it is the safest thing we have.’”

Even though America remains a beacon of liberty, we always must remember that it’s during the darkest hours when our commitment to human rights will be most-severely tested.

A version of this editorial was originally published on Dec. 7, 2012 in the Orange County Register.