Inquisition in Los Angeles

Recovering from malaria in a California Marine camp, 22-year-old Marine Pfc. Robert E. Borchers of Chicago one night wrote a letter to the American Legion:

"I am one of the fortunate Marines who have recently returned to this country after serving in the offensive against the Japanese on Guadalcanal. . . . We find . . . a condition behind our backs that stuns us. We find that our American citizens, those of Japanese ancestry, are being persecuted, yes, persecuted as though Adolf Hitler himself were in charge.

"We find that the California American Legion is promoting a racial purge. I'm putting it mildly when I say it makes our blood boil. . . . We shall fight this injustice, intolerance and un-Americanism at home! We will not break faith with those who died. . . . We have fought the Japanese and are recuperating to fight again. We can endure the hell of battle, but we are resolved not to be sold out at home."

Witches' Broth. Private Borchers' letter landed plop in the midst of the West's most violent racial hysteria since "Yellow Peril" pioneer days. The 112,000 U.S. Japanese evacuated from the West Coast had become the object of hatred more intense than the anti-German-American feeling of World War I. The U.S. mortally hates and fears the Jap; but the furiously boiling stew had many other ingredients. Professional patriots, demagogues and sensational newspapers, led by the Hearst press, were vigorously stirring the witches' broth.

The mayor of Kent, Wash., truck-gardening town near Seattle, which had some 1,600 Japs before the war, had signs printed up: "We Don't Want the Japs Back Here Ever." The mother lodge (15,000 members) of the Fraternal Order of Eagles voted unanimously in Seattle to deport all U.S. Japanese after the war. So did the Portland Progressive Business Men's Club, and the Oregon State Legion. Hardly anyone ever bothered to distinguish between the alien Japanese, who are deportable, and U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry. A battalion of U.S.-born Japs is fighting well in the front line in Italy; another 2,500 Japanese-Americans are elsewhere in the U.S. Army; hundreds serve in Military Intelligence in the South Pacific; 20,000, cleared by FBI, now live in the Midwest & East. But hate-mongers were not troubled by such facts.

Fair Play. The feeling is bitterest in California. A month ago 4,000 Japs, segregated at Tule Lake for disloyalty, rioted; the affair was clumsily handled by the fumbling War Relocation Authority. Pro-U.S. Japs suffered from the Tule trouble. Almost their only defender has been the Pacific Coast Committee on American Principles and Fair Play. Among its board members: the University of California's President Robert Gordon Sproul; Stanford's former President Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur; the University of Oregon's President Donald Erb; Nobel Prizewinner Dr. Robert A. Millikan. But when the Fair Play Committee's Pasadena chapter distributed Private Borchers' letter to the Legion, it promptly got itself "investigated" last week.

The "investigation" was California's fourth recent legislative romp into U.S.-Jap baiting. It was headed by a ruddy-faced Sacramento attorney, Chester F. Gannon, Legionnaire and key Republican member of the State Assembly. Although Marine Borchers' letter had started the fury, Gannon did not summon him as a witness. Gannon had his own views: "We have been told it would be unhealthy for Japanese--even American-born--to be seen on California streets, and that returning Marines and soldiers would slit their throats."

Trial by Fury. Before Gannon's committee in Los Angeles trooped a succession of witnesses, outdoing each other in wild charges. Hearst's Examiner one day ran 62 inches of testimony, blazoning it high above the progress of the war in Russia, Teheran and Italy. Typical "evidence":

>Stories of nude bathing parties in a river near Fresno, of Japanese men & women "bare naked" cavorting in an outdoor tub.

>A missionary who said he had seen "Japs take the body of a Chinese, cut out the heart and liver and eat it."

When Investigator Gannon had piled up sufficient horror tales, he summoned white-haired Mrs. Maynard Force Thayer, D.A.R. member and chairman of the offending Pasadena Fair Play Committee chapter. Sample testimony:

Gannon: "Do you want to champion the rights of a people where different sexes do nude bathing together? . . . Mrs. Thayer, have you ever smelled the odor of a Jap home? . . ."

Mrs. Thayer: "I have no interest in disloyal Japanese."

Gannon: ". . . The Bill of Rights is not such a sacred thing after all. Don't you know that at the time the Bill of Rights was written we had 150,000 slaves in the United States?"

Mrs. Thayer: "I think we've made some progress since then. ... It is of greatest importance that in time of war we do not go off into race hatred."

Gannon: "Are you a Communist? . . . This sounds like their doctrine."

Mrs. Thayer: "I am registered as a Republican."

At the end of the hearing, Nobel Scientist Millikan telephoned a protest statement to the committee attorney. When the attorney began to read it aloud, Gannon interrupted:

"Tell us who Dr. Millikan is," he demanded. "I don't know."

The Gannon investigation was too much even for the Los Angeles Times, which until then had been close behind the Examiner in retailing the committee's doings.

Under a heading LEGISLATIVE COMMITTEES SHOULD NOT BE BULLIES, the Times sternly editorialized: "It is no proper function of a legislative committee ... to turn itself into a prosecutor of what may currently be unpopular. . . . When they turn themselves into witch-burning agencies . . . they go far afield."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.