Free Infamy by Richard Reeves

under guard.”
    Deeming them all to be potential traitors, Bendetsen wanted all American Japanese removed from western states. Back in his family’s hometown in Aberdeen, Washington, there was only one Japanese American family, the Saitos. Natsu Saito, a forty-two-year-old widow and mother, owned the Oriental Art Store, a novelty shop down the street from Bendetsen’s law office. Fluent in both Japanese and English, Mrs. Saito had been arrested within forty-eight hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor. To the extent that there were any charges against her, it was that her shop catered to Japanese seamen in town who came by while their ships were loaded with timber, and that her oldest son, Lincoln, was a student at a Presbyterian seminary in Japan. That was more than enough for the FBI. Agents ransacked her store before she was taken away from her three younger children. They had no idea where she was for more than three weeks. Learning that their mother was being held in a detention center in Seattle, the teenage children, Morse, Perry, and Dahlia, drove the 112 miles to the big city on Christmas day. They were turned away, told there were no visiting hours on the holiday. They returned home and tried to run their mother’s shop, but many of the customers who came knocked goods off shelves and then spit in their faces. After several hearings, Mrs. Saito was released on probation, and she and the three children were ordered to take a bus to Olympia, Washington—paying their own way—to board a train to the Tule Lake camp on a barren lava field in northern California, five miles from the Oregon border.
    When Bendetsen said he wanted to remove “anyone” of Japanese ancestry, he meant what he said: old people in hospitals were scheduled for evacuation and were kept under military guard until they died or were able to travel. Grace Watanabe of Los Angeles, along with her mother, were loaded aboard a troop train to an unknown destination. She was forced to leave her father, a Methodist minister suffering from cancer, in a hospital. Two soldiers guarded the door of his hospital room. He was one of more than one thousand Japanese too sick to travel—each one guarded by soldiers, as if they could escape.
    Japanese infants were included in the evacuation and so were children adopted by Caucasian parents. And orphans, too. Federal agents visited West Coast orphanages looking for children with Japanese features. A Catholic priest in charge of an orphanage, Father Hugh Lavery of the Maryknoll Center in Los Angeles, said that Bendetsen “showed himself to be a little Hitler. I mentioned that we had an orphanage with children of Japanese ancestry, and that some of these children were half Japanese, others one-fourth or less. I asked which children we should send.… Bendetsen said, ‘I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.’”
    The new colonel did not make any distinction between the forces of Imperial Japan and American Japanese. He wrote: “The Army’s job is to kill Japanese not to save Japanese.… If the Army is to devote its facilities to resettlement and social welfare work among Japanese aliens, it will be that much more difficult for it to get on to its primary task, that of winning the war.”
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    As Attorney General Biddle’s opposition to mass evacuation became public, he became a principal target not only of the army but of the West Coast press. In the San Francisco Examiner and other newspapers around the country, the Hearst columnist Henry McLemore wrote on February 5: “Mr. Biddle could not even win the post of third assistant dog catcher in charge of liver-spotted Airedales. That’s the way they feel about Mr. ‘Blueblood’ Biddle out here.… It would be a shame wouldn’t it, and an affront to civil liberties, to move the Japanese from in and about defense centers without proper warning. It might even upset their plans of sabotage.”
    In