Immigration, the Red Scare, and Japanese American Internment
We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions—bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
AMERICA HAS BEEN A COUNTRY OF IMMIGRANTS SINCE the Pilgrims established the first successful European settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. (An earlier attempt at Jamestown, Virginia, was an abysmal failure, in part because of hostile relations between English settlers and Native Americans.) Conflict between immigrants and Americans who were already here has also been a part of our history. The first conflict was with the Native American tribes, many of whom were decimated by the late nineteenth century.
Then, as the United States filled with wave after wave of immigrants from Europe and from other parts of the world, conflict intensified between immigrant groups that had arrived earlier (from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany) and had consolidated political power, and those that came later (Italians, Eastern Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, and others).
This conflict was often political and cultural, and it sometimes had religious overtones (particularly if immigrants were Jewish, Catholic, or from predominantly Buddhist or Hindu countries in Asia). Many immigrants faced prejudice, including the family of Donald Trump, whose grandfather Friedrich Trump emigrated from Germany in 1885. After two world wars, his son Fred Trump hid that heritage from other New Yorkers. (The Trumps pretended they were of Swedish origin.)
The United States is unique among powerful nations because the vast majority of its citizens (excluding Native Americans) have family roots elsewhere. Such is not true of Russia, China, Japan, or the powers of Europe. We are alone among superpowers in having a predominant language—English—that was not spoken here four hundred years ago. In the twenty-first century, we will need to combine representative democracy with a society in which no single ethnic group is the majority.
In this chapter we pick up America’s immigration story and its impact on the rule of law midstream—in the early twentieth century. Many European immigrants and descendants of African slaves, and a relatively small number of other immigrants, had arrived much earlier, but many other immigrants were just arriving.
These later waves of immigrants became a source of fear, rooted in ethnic prejudice, religious prejudice, and the concern that tumultuous political and social upheavals in Europe would spread to the United States.
In the early twentieth century, US government officials feared that many immigrants were loyal to their countries of origin or to political movements therein. This fear intensified with the massive immigration between 1880 and the 1920s, as well as the growth of anarchism and Marxism in Europe. During the First World War, Americans of recent European origin were suspected of being loyal to different sides. Then, with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its violent aftermath came a renewed fear of communism.
There was also a cultural component of the fear of immigrants. Status quo–loving Americans feared the change the newcomers were bringing. On top of all of this, there were economic concerns—many immigrants were poor, and their arrival coincided with the growth of union-organizing movements in the United States. Employers feared unions (union-organizing and union-busting tactics were sometimes violent) and feared the immigrants who sometimes joined and occasionally organized unions.
In 1915, before the United States entered World War I, President Woodrow Wilson warned against “hyphenated Americans”—specifically German-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, and Russian émigrés, saying that they “poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” He called them “creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy,” and declared that they “must be crushed out.” Wilson was not an aberration. He was elected twice, and many Americans shared his views.
Right after World War I, German, Russian, Italian, and Jewish immigrants were singled out for investigation, arrest, and contempt. Fear of Bolshevism was often the excuse.
When the Bolshevik Revolution began in Russia in 1917, it took everyone by surprise. When the Bolsheviks took control of Russia two years later, it became apparent that the agenda of the new country—the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—was the Marxist ideology of global communism. The Bolsheviks seized power violently, and the violence would only get worse in coming decades.
It became evident that the Soviet Union would do all it could to undermine capitalist countries, including democracies. This meant destabilizing the new representative democracies set up in Europe after World War I, including Czechoslovakia and Hungary, formed out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These countries had communist parties that ran candidates in elections, but many communists didn’t want to play by democratic rules. Undermining other countries’ governments through fomenting armed revolution was central to communist ideology.
Since the days of Czarist Russia, but especially after the Russian Revolution, the Russians have been interfering with and undermining liberal democracy. After World War I the Russians sowed mistrust in representative democracies throughout Europe through both covert and violent means as well as assisting, and sometimes controlling, foreign communist parties during elections. We address Russian and Soviet subversion of Western democracies in chapters 5 and 20 and note that, even if the communist mantra is gone, foreign interference in elections remains a serious, very real threat to our democracy.
After World War I the Soviets attempted to undermine the rule of law in the United States by sending its spies into our country and encouraging Americans to sign up for cells of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), some of which were colluding with the Soviets. The United States also had a Socialist Party—a labor union movement—which the Russians unsuccessfully tried to turn into a communist movement. Communists fought to take over labor unions, claiming that their primary goal was to improve workers’ pay and living conditions. Most American labor unions reacted by embracing a staunchly anti-communist philosophy—making it clear that Soviet intervention in American politics was most unwelcome.
These Soviet-inspired communist activities brought fear to the United States in the decade after World War I and beyond.
This Soviet interference into our democratic process was a real threat to the rule of law. But how we respond to a threat can also subvert the rule of law. As in the other instances of external or internal threat, including the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War and our reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Soviet threat generated a resurgence of the problems that have always stood between our society and a genuine rule of law. Whenever such threats arise, the problem of due process immediately comes into play, often reinforced by the problems of alternative facts as well as ethnic and religious bigotry.
The rule of law again and again comes under threat not only from external sources (such as Soviets or Russians fomenting violence or interfering in elections) but from our poor reactions to that external threat. We had two periods in our history when we overreacted to the Russian threat. The first was the Red Scare after World War I. The second was McCarthyism after World War II, which we will discuss in Chapter 7.
Although this fear of violent communism could have been directed toward Americans of any ethnic group, the groups most often attacked for actual or perceived “communist” connections were from countries most closely associated with the threat—Jews of Russian or Eastern European background and, because of the enormous political upheaval and active anarchist movement in Italy, Italians.
In June 1919, a series of bombings by Italian anarchists set our country on edge. Letter bombs were mailed to government officials, businessmen, and law enforcement officials. Most never reached their target, but a few people were injured, including a US senator’s housekeeper whose hands were blown off. Another bomb damaged the homes of New York judge Charles C. Nott and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Three radicals were arrested.
In those days, immigration policy was run by the Labor Department (immigration policy is in large part an issue of labor economics, although from time to time real or perceived national security issues come into play as well). Only the secretary of labor could issue arrest warrants and deportation orders for foreign violators of the immigration acts.
Palmer, the attorney general, decided he needed more power to intervene in the immigration issue, and in August 1919 he named J. Edgar Hoover, who was only twenty-four years old, to head a new division of the Justice Department: the General Intelligence Division (GID). Hoover’s job was to identify and investigate members of radical groups.
On November 7, 1919, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, federal agents and local Boston police made a series of violent raids against the Union of Russian Workers in a dozen American cities and beat some workers badly. Some who were arrested were American citizens and not members of the targeted group. Some were teachers conducting night classes in a shared space. There were more arrests than warrants. In New York City alone, 650 people were swept up and arrested.
When Congress questioned Palmer, he said his task force had amassed more than sixty thousand names of suspected anarchists, socialists, and communists. Forty-three were deported.
Palmer, wanting more power, pushed for a new sedition act that gave him authority to raid on a broader scale.
The Justice Department conducted raids in thirty cities in twenty-three states on January 2, 1920, and continued for the next six weeks. More than three thousand were arrested, and many others were jailed for long periods before being released. There were searches without warrants, and miserable conditions in jail, as some of those arrested were beaten. Raids were often conducted in meeting halls. Sometimes every person there was arrested, whether they belonged to the group or not. Some were American citizens.
Wrote Francis Kane, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, “People not really guilty are likely to be arrested and railroaded through their hearings. We appear to be attempting to repress a political party. By such methods we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.”
Kane resigned in protest.
Palmer replied by saying such raids protected America and were urgently needed.
“There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties,” he said.
A few weeks later, Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post canceled more than 2,000 of Palmer’s warrants, saying they were illegal. Of the 10,000 arrested, 3,500 were imprisoned and 556 resident aliens were deported.
Palmer wanted Post fired. President Wilson defended Post but urged Palmer to “not let the country see red.”
In May 1920, the newly formed American Civil Liberties Union reported on Palmer’s unlawful activities. They cited illegal entrapment by agent provocateurs and unlawful incommunicado detention. Noted legal scholars including the future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter denounced the Palmer raids and deportations and the lack of due process.
In June 1920, Massachusetts federal judge George Weston Anderson effectively ended the raids when he ordered seventeen of those arrested discharged and wrote, “A mob is a mob, whether made up of Government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals and loafers and the vicious classes.”
Yet fear of immigrants—especially Jews and Italians—continued. On September 16, 1920, a terrorist attack on Wall Street, blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks eighty-one years later, provided yet another excuse to associate immigrants with terrorism. A bomb exploded outside the JP Morgan and Company headquarters, killing thirty-eight people. The attackers were never found, but widespread public opinion was that they were anarchists, and likely immigrants. Xenophobia reached new heights. (In 1944 the FBI reopened the investigation and concluded, without any specific evidence, that the attackers were probably Italian anarchists.)
Meanwhile, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were accused of shooting two men in an armed robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920. The trial was rife with prejudice toward Italians. Even though there was testimony that they were innocent, the jury found them guilty on July 14, 1920, and sentenced them to death, partly because they were anarchists. The judge expressed his antipathy toward the defendants and later boasted about his role in the case to prominent members of the Boston bar. For the next seven years there were protests against their execution. Still, a three-man commission upheld the verdict, and they were executed at midnight on August 23, 1927. There were protests in every major city in the United States and around the world. There was rioting in Paris, London, and other European cities.
On the fiftieth anniversary of their execution, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in 1977 declared a Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day, saying they were unfairly convicted and that “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.”
The Sacco and Vanzetti case undermined the rule of law, because it was not a fair trial. Sacco and Vanzetti were presumed to be terrorists simply because they were socialists and were Italian. Other than that, the state did not have much of a case.
Congress also responded to this “threat” by passing the Immigration Act of 1924, which greatly restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, especially by Italians, Slavs, and Jews. The act also set quotas on immigrants from other countries, preventing immigration by many Arabs, Asians, and others.
This act was passed at a time of relative economic prosperity, but by late 1929, Wall Street had collapsed. The country was soon in the midst of the Great Depression and massive unemployment. This brought about a new threat from immigration—a very real threat to the jobs and public assistance for Americans who were already here. The Franklin Roosevelt administration thus had little choice but to continue harsh immigration restrictions throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. The political fear of immigrants of the 1920s was now compounded by economic fear and, later, by fear of renewed turmoil and war in Europe. Many Americans wanted nothing to do with foreigners, even if this meant turning away immigrants who, when they returned home, would very likely become victims of Nazi genocide.
JAPANESE INTERNMENT
Ethnic profiling took another tragic turn after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Hours after the destructive air strike, the FBI rounded up more than 1,200 Japanese community and religious leaders in Hawaii. They were detained solely for their ethnicity. Their assets were frozen. More than 1,500 Japanese Americans were sent to camps on the mainland.
On the West Coast, the FBI searched thousands of Japanese American homes for weapons and other contraband such as shortwave radios, cameras, and flashlights. In Hawaii, fishing boats belonging to Japanese Americans were seized.
Three men—Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Attorney General Francis Biddle—planned to round up Japanese, Italian, and German Americans. During hearings, Culbert Olson, the governor of California, and Earl Warren, the state attorney general, called for all Japanese to be removed from the state.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which created military zones in California, Washington, and Oregon that were to be cleared of Japanese Americans. About 127,000 people, mostly US citizens who had never been to Japan, were relocated to ten internment camps in Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, Arkansas, Idaho, California, and Utah. Given six days to dispose of their belongings, many, not knowing if they would ever return, sold their homes for a fraction of the value. Some were taken to relocation centers, where they lived for months before being sent to permanent camps. In Portland, Oregon, 3,000 Japanese Americans lived in a livestock pavilion. Another de facto camp was the Santa Anita Assembly Center, where 18,000 people were kept. About 8,500 people lived in the stables.
Each camp held around 10,000 imprisoned Japanese Americans.
In defiance of the order, Fred Korematsu, an American-born citizen, refused to leave his home and was arrested. After his conviction, he appealed, and the case went to the US Supreme Court in 1944. His conviction was upheld by a 6–3 vote.
“Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions,” wrote Justice Hugo Black. “Racial antagonisms never can.”
The court, however, held that because it was impossible to “separate the disloyal from the loyal,” the order applied to all Japanese Americans.
In 1944, Mitsuye Endo, the daughter of Japanese immigrants living in Sacramento, California, brought a case before the Supreme Court from an internment camp. She filed a habeas corpus petition. When the government offered to free her, she refused. She wanted to free all those in the camps.
The US Supreme Court held there was no legitimate, legally sanctioned reason for holding loyal, law-abiding Japanese American citizens once the government determined they weren’t threats to the nation’s security.
The last internment camp closed in March 1946.
More than forty years later, the US government gave reparations to those who lost property during imprisonment. In 1988, surviving prisoners were awarded $20,000 each.
President Bill Clinton awarded Fred Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The Korematsu decision has never been overturned although the Supreme Court in 2018, in a 5–4 decision upholding President Trump’s travel ban from Muslim countries (which the court distinguished from the Japanese internment), noted that the Korematsu decision was no longer considered good case law.
During the Second World War, Japanese Americans weren’t the only ethnicity discriminated against. The US government also restricted freedoms for 600,000 Italian Americans. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, the FBI arrested hundreds of Italian Americans.
General DeWitt, who had recommended rounding up Japanese Americans, called for all “enemy aliens” over the age of fourteen to be removed from the coasts to the interior. J. Edgar Hoover supported him.
Many Italian Americans, though not imprisoned, were forced to register and carry photo IDs at all times. They were subject to travel restrictions, and required to hand over all cameras, weapons, flashlights, and shortwave radios.
Italian-language schools were closed, and Italian American organizations were monitored by the FBI.
Several thousand Italians were forced to move from San Francisco Bay. According to New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio, Italians were not allowed within a mile of the harbor. His father, DiMaggio said, was forbidden to run his restaurant on the pier because he was a “foreign national.”
“He was not even allowed to stop by his restaurant for a glass of wine and a few pieces of bread,” said DiMaggio, who served in the military during the war. “I had nothing to say in the matter. I just shut up and did my tour.
“A million Italian-Americans served in the war, and more than half that number had to worry about owning a flashlight and carrying an Enemy Alien card. It makes me angry to this day.”