A Lapse of Democracy

AMERICA'S CONCENTRATION CAMPS by Allan R. Bosworth. 283 pages. Norton. $5.95.

In February 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor, U.S. troops began herding 110,000 West Coast Japanese Americans out of their homes and into internment camps scattered throughout the Western states. The wholesale roundup, ordered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, made a kind of simplistic military sense. After all, the Pacific Coast had been formally--if somewhat hysterically--declared a combat zone. The presence of aliens, all of whom were at least potentially sympathetic to the enemy, seemed to constitute a visible threat to the U.S.

The danger, it turned out, was nonexistent. In this strident attack on the wartime sequestration, Allan R. Bosworth, 65, a retired U.S. Navy captain, points out that no Japanese American was ever accused of sabotage or treason in the continental U.S. Indeed, a large number of the internees volunteered for duty with a regiment composed solely of Nisei, and they set an enviable combat record in Italy. The regiment became the most decorated fighting unit in U.S. history.

There are even more embarrassing footnotes. After Pfc. Sadao Munemori was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the citation of her son's heroism reached Mrs. Munemori behind the barbed wire of a relocation center at Manzanar, Calif. The American Legion canceled the charters of all Japanese American posts. In California in 1942, State Attorney General Earl Warren, campaigning for Governor, urged voters to keep Japanese out of California "so long as the flag of Nippon is flying over the Philippines."

By 1944, when it became clear that the U.S. was about to win the war, the detention of the Japanese finally proved too embarrassing for everyone. Although the Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of the presidential evacuation order, the relocation centers began emptying as suddenly as they had filled. The loss to the internees, who had been allowed to take with them only what they could carry, was estimated at $400 million, a figure that includes the farms, businesses and personal possessions they were forced to leave behind. After the war, this loss was settled at approximately 10-c- on the dollar. In retrospect, the story of the relocation camps adds up to one of the sorriest chapters in U.S. history, one that is only somewhat ameliorated by the fact that the internees were treated decently in the centers. It is a story that bears retelling, but Bosworth is the wrong man to do it. His angry account lacks not only literary grace but balance. As he fulminates against this lapse of democracy, the author descends to the irrationality that caused it.

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