Robert Walker Kenny and Interned Japanese-Americans (June 1969 | Volume: 20, Issue: 4)

Robert Walker Kenny and Interned Japanese-Americans

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Authors: Janet Stevenson

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June 1969 | Volume 20, Issue 4

By nightfall of December 7, 1941—the day Pearl Harbor was attacked—F.B.I, agents on the Wast Coast had arrested 1,300 “potentially dangerous” enemy aliens. During the next few weeks the western edge of the country underwent a panic that is hard to understand even in retrospect. Sporadic acts of violence against Japanese, alien and native-born, began to occur. A California state legislator demanded the mass evacuation of “all persons of Japanese ancestry,” and the cry reverberated in the press. By mid-February of 1942 the California attorney general, Earl Warren, was calling for military action to “protect this state from the Japanese situation.” On February 19, President Roosevelt signed the executive order that made such action possible. Many Japanese-Americana who could afford the price of a ticket accepted “voluntary deportation” to other areas of the country. On April 30, the long-expected final order of exclusion came through.

All persons of Japanese descent in the three coastal states were required to report to so-called assembly centers; they were to bring bedding and linen, toilet articles and clothing, knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, and cups. Nothing else.

In the end, the evacuee figure came close to 110,000. There were old and young, sick and well, mothers, grandmothers, infants, aging veterans of other U.S. wars. Half of them were under twenty years old; many neither spoke nor read Japanese. All were forced to leave their homes, lands, and businesses. They were herded into hastily built barracks, surrounded by barbed wire, in remote, often isolated areas of California, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, and Arkansas.

In 1945, when the Japanese were permitted to return, Earl Warren was governor of California and Robert Walker Kenny was attorney general. Kenny and Warren were political rivals. Both were frequently mentioned as possible presidential nominees for, respectively, the Democratic and Republican parties. It was the attorney general, not the governor, who had to handle the politically sensitive task of the peaceful return of the Japanese to California. In a recent interview with his biographer, Janet Stevenson, Kenny recalled that process and the events leading up to it.

 

One of the strange things about the whole episode of the so-called relocation was that there really wasn’t much anti-Japanese sentiment in California at the time of Pearl Harbor. Nor even afterward. It had to he whipped up. It took a number of weeks to do it.

I was in the state senate in December, 1941, and I remember we had a resolution offered to the effect that all Japanese-Americans should be barred from civil service employment. Well, it just didn’t get any takers. The thing was referred to committee—which is to say, it got lost.

And Governor Culbert L. Olson (who changed his mind a few weeks later) was making statements about how we should not regard the Japanese in California as responsible for what had happened in Hawaii; they were just as much victims as we Caucasians. … I remember going up in an elevator in the State Building in Los