Analysis: Let Us Not Persecute These People

Date: February 1, 1942

Author: Francis Biddle

Genre: speech

Summary Overview

This radio address, delivered by United States Attorney General Francis Biddle, outlined the process to be followed to identify, register, and monitor citizens of nations that were then at war with the United States. The enemy alien registration of 1942 was the latest in a series of steps taken in an effort to contain perceived threats from within the country. Japanese, German, and Italian citizens living in the United States were forced to register and be fingerprinted at local post offices, and they were required to carry their enemy alien registration card with them at all times. Most Americans, influenced by prevailing ideas about race and ethnicity and frightened that there were enemy agents living among them, supported this registration and the subsequent internment of people of Japanese descent, including American citizens, on the Pacific coast. A far smaller number of Germans and Italians were also detained. Attorney General Biddle argued that the burden on the people identified as enemy aliens was light—just a simple registration form—and was a necessary step in wartime. He also emphasized that the vast majority of these people were peaceful and loyal, and that persecuting them would only make them more likely to be sympathetic to the enemy nation of their birth.

Defining Moment

The United States has a long tradition of suspending civil liberties during times of war. Following the country's entrance into World War I in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson issued regulations restricting the rights of enemy aliens. The restrictions were broad enough to allow for large numbers of aliens to be arrested and questioned and sometimes incarcerated. Regulation 12 stated that “an alien enemy whom there may be reasonable cause to believe (is) about to aid the enemy… or violates any regulation promulgated by the President… will be subject to summary arrest… and to confinement in such penitentiary, prison, jail, or military camp.” Over six thousand aliens were arrested during World War I, most on espionage charges stemming from alleged support of the German government.

In the heightened international tension of the 1930s, as Japanese and German (and after 1937, Italian) aggression pushed the world toward war, the United States again looked within its borders for subversive elements. The idea of the fifth column, a term coined during the Spanish Civil War, was that enemy agents working within a country could turn the tide of war and could spread misinformation and chaos by infiltrating the fabric of the nation they fought against. Fifth column elements were seen as being responsible for the rapid fall of France, and for Russia's early alliance with Hitler, among other things. In 1936, the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) was given broad authority to investigate suspected enemy organizations and operatives. In 1940, the Alien Registration Act, known as the Smith Act, outlawed subversive speech and forced all noncitizen residents of the United States to register with the government. Though the primary purpose of the Smith Act was to identify aliens living in the United States, it was also used to prosecute over two hundred perceived Communist and fascist sympathizers.

On December 7, 1941, the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was attacked by the Japanese. War with Japan was declared the following day in a joint session of Congress. On December 11, Germany declared war on the United States, and hours later the United States followed with a declaration of war on Germany. Immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Public Proclamation 2525, in accordance with the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which gave the government the authority to take property from and detain enemy aliens. This proclamation specifically targeted Japanese citizens. The following day, Public Proclamations 2526 and 2527 expanded the regulations to German and Italian aliens. Aliens who were considered potential threats were arrested by the FBI and turned over to military and immigration authorities. On February 2, the government required citizens of enemy nations (Germany, Japan, and Italy) over fourteen years of age to register and be fingerprinted. At the same time, the government began discussing the removal of both Japanese aliens and citizens from the Pacific coast to inland detention camps. On February 19, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the relocation and internment of over one hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry.

Author Biography

Francis Beverley Biddle was born in 1886 in Paris, France, and was the third son of American parents. After his law professor father died in 1892, the family lived in Switzerland for two years before returning to the United States. Biddle attended the prestigious Groton School in Massachusetts and then earned a law degree from Harvard in 1911. After graduating from law school, he became the private secretary to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes before joining a Philadelphia law firm where he worked in corporate law for twenty-three years. Though he was a longtime Republican, he was at odds with labor policies in his party, and President Roosevelt appointed him as chairman of the National Labor Relations Board in 1934. In 1941, Biddle was appointed attorney general. Biddle had been in this position for three months when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In February 1942, after initially opposing the measure, Biddle agreed to Executive Order 9066, which allowed for the mass removal of people of Japanese ancestry to internment camps. Biddle resigned as attorney general after Roosevelt's death in 1945, and Roosevelt's successor, Harry S. Truman, named him a judge in the postwar Nuremberg Trials, where twenty-one senior Nazi officials were tried for war crimes, twelve of them subsequently sentenced to death. After the war, Biddle served as chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Commission. He authored several books, including a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Biddle died in 1968 in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.

Document Analysis

This radio address was given on February 1, 1942, nearly two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fear of enemies residing within the country permeated the national consciousness, and the attorney general's address is intended to reassure the American people that their government is taking extensive measures to keep its citizens safe. The address is also meant to convince the public that the government knows who the dangerous elements in the population are and that there is no need to persecute enemy aliens who had not been thus identified.

Biddle begins by introducing the purpose of this identification, the “new and important part of the job of making America safe.” The alien registration a year prior to Biddle's speech identified all “non-citizens of enemy nationality,” but Biddle stresses that this is a matter of identification and not one of condemnation. Indeed, correct identification will ultimately help to protect innocent people from “injustice or persecution which might arise from mistaken identity.” The nation will be protected from aliens who mean them harm, and aliens who are loyal will be safe from suspicion.

Of the aliens identified in 1940, Biddle estimates that 1.1 million were Germans, Italians, and Japanese. They were not singled out then, but since the United States was now at war with those nations, it needed to take precautions, “thorough-going, wartime precautions.” Measures to control the “conduct of enemy aliens” were issued on December 7 and 8, 1941, and the identification of enemy aliens is one more step in that process. The burden of proof in cases where the allegiance of an enemy alien is questioned is on the accused. “A small proportion have records which suggest doubtful or divided loyalties… upon each one rests the burden of proof of his own harmlessness to our cause. Unless and until he is able to give that proof to our complete satisfaction, he must remain in custody.” Biddle explains that even enemy aliens beyond suspicion are restricted: They are unable to travel freely, unable to own cameras or radios, and will be forced out of areas considered too sensitive. Biddle defends these restrictions. “Such regulations are neither oppressive nor, by implication, hostile,” and he does admit that some individuals may be “inconvenienced.”

Biddle describes the registration process in detail. It will begin on the West Coast, as this is a “potentially critical area.” This special attention paid to the western states foreshadows the particular suspicion that fell on those of Japanese descent whose population was highest near the Pacific.

After describing the process of registration and warning enemy aliens that failure to register or follow the restrictions set for them would not be tolerated, Biddle turns his attention to “our citizen population.” The government was doing everything in its power to keep the nation safe, he explains, and therefore it would be counterproductive to retaliate in any way against those identified through this process. Aliens provide needed labor, and if they are deprived of jobs, they would become a burden on the state. Biddle reminds his listeners that most of them came to the United States as immigrants to “escape persecution; to enjoy the privileges and obligations of democracy; to raise their children in a free world,” and that immigrants and the children of immigrants were fighting for their country. Enemy aliens should not be unjustly held accountable for “the bandits who are at the moment in control of the nations where they were born.”

Glossary

fifth column: a group of people who act traitorously or subversively out of a secret sympathy for an enemy of their country; originally from a 1936 statement about Franco sympathizers in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War

incur: to come into or acquire some consequence, usually something undesirable; to become liable; to take upon oneself

racketeer: a person engaged in a racket, which is an organized illegal activity, such as bootlegging or extortion of money

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Beevor, Antony. The Second World War. New York: Back Bay, 2012. Print.

Daniels, Roger. Concentration Camps, USA: Japanese Americans and World War II. New York: Holt, 1971. Print.

Robinson, Greg. By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. Print.