Representative King's Investigation and the Ghost of Hearings Past

In honor of Thursday's congressional hearing on "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response," I thought I'd invite a Ghost of Hearings Past for a brief visit to the Faculty Lounge.

The year was 1941.  The committee was the House Committee on Un-American Activities, headed by Texas Representative Martin Dies, Jr.  The subject was the spread of Fifth Column tendencies in the Japanese American community.

(Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1941)

The situation was dire:

(Washington Post, April 10, 1941)

Scary stuff indeed.  (Except it turned out that all of the information in this secret Japanese manual was available, in English, in American bookstores across the country, for a dollar.)

But there was more!

(Washington Post, August 1, 1941.)

The confidential report by the Dies Committee investigator continued:

(Washington Post, August 1, 1941.)

All of this was false.  The investigation, designed to ferret out the subversive tendencies of Japanese Americans and Japanese resident aliens, revealed a great deal more about the anxieties and prejudices of the investigators.  

But here's the important thing:  the Dies Committee's 1941 investigations weren't just historical psychodrama.  They contributed to the atmosphere of hysteria that swept the West Coast after the Pearl Harbor attack.  Politicians and journalists urging the mass removal of Japanese Americans from the coast in early 1942 pointed to the Dies Committee's "findings" for support.  Military officials used the findings to justify their decision to give the politicians what they were clamoring for.

We will surely hear defenses of this Thursday's hearing along the lines that it's an innocent inquiry into a vital national security matter.  I don't dispute that we should protect ourselves from domestic terrorists, whatever their faith or ancestry, though I suspect that the FBI is a bit better at this than Representative King's committee.  (J. Edgar Hoover's FBI didn't buy any of the Dies Committee's findings, and the FBI was right.)

But these sorts of inquiries have a history of getting things horribly wrong.  Their errors don't tend to become visible until long after lots of innocent people have suffered for them.

I can only hope that Congressman King's sleep will be disturbed by the Ghost of Hearings Past.  There's still time for a change of heart.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

See too this post at Jadaliyya: http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/822/the-peter-king-radicalization-of-muslims-hearing-and-american-democracy-

[Don Matsuda]

Dies was a viscious racist politician from Texas. I was a disabled survivor of the 100th/442nd Regiment that rescued a lost battalion from Texas. I was kicked out of California during WWII, yet I joined the US Army. The most decorated soldiers in the US were Mexican and Japanese Americans. We fought and continue to fight against the rabid racism of politicians like Peter King. I now fight the persecution of Muslim Americans.

[Earnest Masumoto]

I concur with your piece that those clippings contributed to the hysteria that led up to the imprisonment of the Issei and JAs during the War, but the comparison is pale if one considers that there were no proven acts of violence against the USA then by them.

There have been many proven acts of violence by Muslim extremists against the USA and more in the courts.

We know that radical Islam proselytizes violence against Israel and the West in some mosques and on the internet, whereas I know of no such preaching in the Japanese temples and churches in the USA before, during or after the War.

E. M.
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"To ignore the religious nature of the terrorist threat is to succumb to politically correct delusion. To ignore the homegrown religious nature of the terrorist threat is to succumb even further. […]To listen to King's critics, you would think he was urging modern-day internment camps for Muslim Americans. […]Yes, there are other sources of terrorism. Radical Islam is the biggest and most dangerous. And, yes, King is a flawed questioner. But the question he poses is an appropriate -- and important -- one."
-- Ruth Marcus, the Washington Post

[Earnest Masumoto]

Tom Ikeda's link is not visible - so may I add:

The public is not informed by the press that the Muslim community is outing the radical Muslims - if they are? This is not like how the JACL outed the Issei and the JA community leaders before the WW2 broke out. This showed that they (JACL) were proactive - which in retrospect turned out to be a farce. The Muslim community, like CAIR, has not demonstrably been effective in preventing the confirmed acts of violence - if any.
E.M.