February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
But it was the dissenting opinion of Justice Frank Murphy — one of the most famous in the history of the Supreme Court — that is remembered today as a superb defense of American civil liberties.
The second large Asian group to immigrate to the United States (the Chinese came first), the Japanese began arriving on the West Coast in large numbers in the 1890s. Long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they faced racism and exclusion. In 1913, for example, the California state legislature passed the Alien Land Law, which banned Japanese from purchasing land — a clear effort to stymie growing Japanese success in agriculture and to discourage Japanese immigration. In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that persons of Japanese ancestry were not eligible for U.S. citizenship. Anti-Japanese sentiment grew more intense in the late 1930s as Imperial Japan expanded its military power in the Pacific and once World War II commenced formed an alliance with Nazi Germany.
Thus the surprise Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 caused this pre-existing anti-Japanese sentiment to surge to unprecedented heights. Politicians, newspaper editors, and military officials openly declared the Japanese population in America a threat to national security. California’s attorney general and future Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Earl Warren, depicted Japanese Americans as subversive and dangerous — the “Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort.” General John L. DeWitt, the man in charge of the defense of the western United States argued, “A Jap is a Jap. It makes no difference whether the Jap is a citizen or not.” In mid-February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the government to remove over 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry to internment camps.
Internment dealt a devastating blow to Japanese Americans. First, there was the humiliation of being branded disloyal simply on the basis of their ethnicity. No comparable roundup of Italian or German Americans had been ordered. Second, internment cost Japanese Americans $400 million in lost businesses, property, and wages. Nonetheless, the great majority of Japanese Americans decided that the best way to prove their loyalty to America was to cooperate with internment. Incredibly, several thousand young men volunteered to serve in the Army’s all-Japanese segregated 442nd Combat Regiment — one of the most decorated units in the war.
A small group of younger Japanese Americans, however, viewed internment as a violation of their civil liberties and launched a campaign of resistance based on legal challenges. Ultimately, three cases made it to the Supreme Court. The most significant was that filed by Fred Korematsu because it directly challenged the constitutionality of a policy of internment based solely on race.
The decision handed down on Dec. 18, 1944 resulted in a 6-3 vote upholding the policy of internment as a reasonable action by the government during wartime. Not surprisingly, Justice Frank Murphy led the minority and wrote the dissenting opinion. Long before FDR named him to the court in 1940, Murphy had earned a national reputation in the 1930s (as mayor of Detroit and governor of Michigan) as a leading voice of liberalism and defender of civil liberties. On this day his dissent ended with both a stinging denunciation of internment and an uplifting appeal to the highest principles of American democracy:
“I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must accordingly be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.”
Fortunately for Japanese Americans, the war ended nine months later and they were soon released from the camps. Faced with the daunting task of rebuilding their lives and the lingering shame of internment, many opted to suppress the memories of the ordeal. The task of gaining an apology and financial redress from the U.S. government fell to a later generation of Japanese Americans in the 1980s. In 1983 Congress approved a symbolic reparation payment of $20,000 to each family affected. Around the same time, Fred Korematsu’s conviction (as well as those of two other resisters whose cases came before the Supreme Court) was overturned. The appellate court ruled that recently discovered evidence revealed the existence of a manifest injustice — crucial documents were withheld from the court by the government — which had it been known at the time may very well have changed the Supreme Court’s decision.
The Korematsu case and Justice Frank Murphy’s dissent have, in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 and the subsequent passage of the Patriot Act, received renewed interest from liberal legal scholars and civil libertarians. They see powerful parallels between the experience of Japanese Americans during World War II and that of Arab Americans during the ongoing War on Terror.
HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK
Dec. 18, 1980: The hunger strikes that claimed the lives of 10 IRA prisoners are called off after prisoners receive promises that they will be treated as political prisoners.
Dec. 20, 1954: Jackie Gleason signs one of the largest entertainment contracts ever, a $6.1 million deal with the Buick Motor Company to produce 78 30-minute shows in 1955 and ’56.
HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES
Dec. 20, 1820: playwright Dion Boucicault is born in Dublin.
Dec. 21, 1865: Revolutionary Maude Gonne is born in Hamshire, England.