A Challenge to American Sportsmanship
Eleanor Roosevelt
Originally published
in Collier's 112 (October 16, 1943): 21, 71.
I
can well understand the bitterness of people who have lost loved ones at the
hands of the Japanese military authorities, and we know that the totalitarian
philosophy, whether it is in Nazi Germany or in Japan, is one of cruelty and
brutality. It is not hard to understand why people living here in hourly anxiety
for those they love have difficulty in viewing our Japanese problem
objectively, but for the honor of our country, the rest of us must do so.
A
decision has been reached to divide the disloyal and disturbing Japanese from
the others in the War Relocation centers. One center will be established for
the disloyal and will be more heavily guarded and more restricted than those in
which these Japanese have been in the past. This separation is taking place
now.
All
the Japanese in the War Relocation centers have been carefully checked by the
personnel in charge of the camps, not only on the basis of their own
information but also on the basis of the information supplied by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, by G-2 for the Army, and by the Office of Naval Intelligence
for the Navy. We can be assured, therefore, that they are now moving into this
segregation center in northern California the people who are loyal to Japan.
Japanese-Americans
who are proved completely loyal to the United States will, of course, gradually
be absorbed. The others will be sent to Japan after the war.
At
present, things are very peaceful in most of the Japanese Relocation centers.
The strike that received so much attention in the newspapers last November in
Poston, Arizona, and the riot at Manzanar, California, in December were settled
effectively, and nothing resembling them has occurred since. It is not
difficult to understand that uprooting thousands of people brought on emotional
upsets that take time and adjustment to overcome.
Neither
all the government people, naturally, nor all of the Japanese were perfect, and
many changes in personnel had to be made. It was an entirely new undertaking
for us, it had to be done in a hurry, and, considering the number of people
involved, I think the whole job of handling our Japanese has, on the whole,
been done well ….
Problems in Relocation
At
first, the evacuation was placed on a voluntary basis; the people were free to
go wherever they liked in the interior of the country. But the evacuation on
this basis moved very slowly, and furthermore, those who did leave encountered
a great deal of difficulty in finding new places to settle. In order to avoid
serious incidents, on March 29, 1942, the evacuation was placed on an orderly
basis, and was carried out by the Army.
A
civilian agency, the War Relocation Authority, was set up to work with the
military in the relocation of the people. Because there was so much indication
of danger to the Japanese unless they were protected, relocation centers were
established where they might live until those whose loyalty could be
established could be gradually reabsorbed into the normal life of the nation.
To
many young people this must have seemed strange treatment of American citizens,
and one cannot be surprised at the reaction that manifested itself not only in
young Japanese-Americans, but in others who had known them well and had been
educated with them, and who asked bitterly, "What price American
citizenship?"
Nevertheless,
most of them realized that this was a safety measure. The Army carried out its
evacuation, on the whole, with remarkable skill and kindness. The early
situation in the centers was difficult. Many of them were not ready for
occupation. The setting up of large communities meant an amount of organization
which takes time, but the Japanese, for the most part, proved to be patient,
adaptable and courageous.
There
were unexpected problems and, one by one, these were discovered and an effort
was made to deal with them fairly. For instance, these people had property and
they had to dispose of it; often at a loss. Sometimes they could not dispose of
it, and it remained unprotected, deteriorating in value as the months went by.
Business had to be handled through agents, since the Japanese could not leave
the camps.
An Emotional Situation
Understandable
bitterness against the Japanese is aggravated by the old-time economic fear on
the West Coast and the unreasoning racial feeling which certain people, through
ignorance, have always had wherever they came in contact with people who were
different from themselves.
This
is one reason why many people believe that we should have directed our original
immigration more intelligently. We needed people to develop our country, but we
should never have allowed any groups to settle as groups where they created
little German or Japanese or Scandinavian "islands" and did not melt
into our general community pattern. Some of the South American countries have
learned from our mistakes and are now planning to scatter their needed
immigration.
Gradually,
as the opportunities for outside jobs are offered to them, loyal citizens and
law-abiding aliens are going out of the relocation centers to start independent
and productive lives again. Those not considered reliable, of course, are not
permitted to leave. As a taxpayer, regardless of where you live, it is to your
advantage, if you find one or two Japanese-American families settled in your
neighborhood, to try to regard them as individuals and not to condemn them
before they are given a fair chance to prove themselves in the community.
"A
Japanese is always a Japanese" is an easily accepted phrase and it has
taken hold quite naturally on the West Coast because of some reasonable or
unreasonable fear back of it, but it leads nowhere and solves nothing.
Japanese-Americans may be no more Japanese than a German-American is German, or
an Italian-American is Italian. All of these people, including the
Japanese-Americans, have men who are fighting today for the preservation of the
democratic way of life and the ideas around which our nation was built.
We
have no common race in this country, but we have an ideal to which all of us
are loyal. It is our ideal which we want to have live. It is an ideal which can
grow with our people, but we cannot progress if we look down upon any group of
people among us because of race or religion. Every citizen in this country has
a right to our basic freedoms, to justice and to equality of opportunity, and
we retain the right to lead our individual lives as we please, but we can only
do so if we grant to others the freedoms that we wish for ourselves.