newswire article commentary portland metro human & civil rights | media criticism The Oregonian whitewashes role in WWII internments as state honors Minoru Yasui e-mail: author: Lawrence J. Mausharde-mail: maushard@gmail.com The Oregonian not only abdicated its responsibility to report objectively on the internment issue, it absolutely led the charge that every man, woman, and child with Japanese ancestry -- US citizens and aliens alike -- had to go. The Oregonian wasn't the watchdog questioning or not questioning authorities; it was a co-conspirator completely in bed with the powers that be. Oregonian forgets crucial editorial & Congressional hearings Oregonian's Palmer Hoyt became head of US domestic propaganda office in '43 Oregonian's 2/26/42 editorial supporting removal of Japanese Americans Minoru Yasui finally gets his Day in Oregon The Oregonian has once again failed the surviving internees, the Japanese-American community, the city and beyond with its whitewashed coverage of the paper's role in Portland's nightmare episode of ethnic cleansing and its WWII internment concentration camp.



And it comes just in time as the Beaver State officially recognizes the late Japanese-American rights champion Minoru Yasui today, March 28, 2016, with the first Minoru Yasui Day in Oregon. Special events begin at 4:30pm in Portland at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, 121 NW 2nd Avenue, in the heart of the former Japantown district.



Writer Joseph Rose ("Japanese-American internment in Oregon: Never forget February 1942," 02/19/16, link to www.oregonlive.com) claims the paper's coverage at the time was "appalling," due to its inability to ask "no hard questions. The newspaper failed to perform its basic function of fostering debate, seeking the truth and questioning authority when human lives hang in the balance."



But Rose's take doesn't come close to the awful truth of the paper's actions in this case. He describes the paper as one that basically either ignored or buried or downplayed the harrowing internments. This is false. As a result, his piece represents a continuing whitewash by this city's paper of record that did so much more than supposedly ask no hard questions.



What's really appalling is either Rose knows the truth, or he's failed to make the necessary efforts at learning the role taken by his employer in this cruel human rights chapter. Either way, his Feb. 19 article fails to recall that The Oregonian not only did ask and answer some important internment-related questions of the day, it took a leading role early on in the roundup of the Japanese-American community both via its editorial pages and in person during Congressional hearings on the internments held in Portland.



The Oregonian not only abdicated its responsibility to report objectively on the internment issue, it absolutely led the charge that every man, woman, and child with Japanese ancestry, US citizens and aliens alike, had to go. The Oregonian wasn't the watchdog questioning or not questioning authorities; it was a co-conspirator completely in bed with the powers that be.



Executive Order 9066 issued on February 19, 1942, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt set off a series of actions ultimately forcing more than 110,000 Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent into isolated military-style camps in Western desert areas for the duration of the war. Prior to their final destinations, the internees from California, Oregon and Washington State were first ordered to report to temporary Assembly Centers, a total of 16 locations up and down the West Coast, while the larger desert facilities were constructed. The Rose City ended up with the Portland Assembly Center, its very own feeder concentration camp.



"The support for removal expressed at the Portland hearings was not atypical, but the Portland hearings (of the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration - better known as the Tolan Committee) did differ from those held in San Francisco and Seattle in one important way - the absence of organized opposition," wrote historian Dr. Ellen Eisenberg in "As Truly American as Your Son": Voicing Opposition to Internment in Three West Coast Cities; Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 104, No. 4, Winter 2003. "Small but organized groups opposing the removal participated actively in the San Francisco and Seattle hearings, but in Portland no organized group defended Japanese Americans or questioned the need for mass internment."



No organized group, not one, spoke out for the Japanese Americans in Portland, according to Eisenberg.





OREGONIAN PUBLISHER GIVES TESTIMONY



However, those speaking in favor of removal at the Tolan Committee hearings in Portland included Edwin Palmer Hoyt, editor and publisher of The Oregonian, who provided testimony on February 26, 1942 focused mainly on the potential for sabotage by the resident Japanese Americans in regards to widespread forest fire arson. Hoyt somewhat bizarrely explained, "I want to give you a viewpoint . . . which was expressed to me . . . that 10 or 12 individuals, in the western part of Oregon when the weather is at the right point and the humidity low, and with an east wind blowing, could set a fire that would virtually destroy our entire forest area, at least the commercial aspects of it" as a threat to the nation's military need for lumber. Hoyt then submitted his paper's pro-"evacuation" editorial from that day's publication titled "For the Tolan Committee" directly into the committee's official record.



According to Eisenberg, only one person outside the Japanese-American community, Azalia Emma Peet of neighboring Gresham, a Methodist missionary who had lived in Japan, had the courage to publicly question the internments at the Tolan hearings.



The paper's February 1942 pro-removal editorial, the Tolan Committee Congressional hearings, and editor and publisher Palmer Hoyt's testimony supporting forced removal are never mentioned in Rose's article last month on the local internments and The Oregonian's related coverage. Talk about appalling.



Local government also got heavily involved in the worst possible way.



According to the Eisenberg piece, Portland Mayor Earl Riley presented a statement to the Tolan Committee hearings in Portland urging quick evacuation of both Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens.



At its February 1942 meeting, the Portland City Council completed the revocation of business licenses (to Japanese nationals) and then passed a resolution urging the federal government to proceed with mass internment, and urged the immediate internment "Japanese nationals and persons Japanese descent irrespective American citizenship" for the duration the war.



As early as December 19, 1941, Multnomah County Sheriff Martin Pratt instructed Japanese American citizens and Japanese immigrants to pay their personal property taxes for 1942 in advance.



This wasn't a city reluctantly following orders from Washington to carry out a noxious war-time directive. No, it was more like a town hell-bent on proving its patriotic bona fides by unleashing its worst racist elements in a manner not far short of direct physical assault.





"FOR THE TOLAN COMMITTEE" EDITORIAL



Regarding the majority of Oregon's Japanese-American residents in 1942 who happened to be American citizens, the "Tolan" editorial states:



"In the matter of the Japanese who are American citizens, the problem is far more difficult. It is a hard decision, in view of our traditions, to take action against men and women upon whom citizenship has been conferred. But we cannot overlook the fact that dual citizenship has been discovered in a number of instances - and America is fighting for its life. The Army will have to decide in this particular. All we can say is that the Army must not be wrong."



There is no mention of right or wrong, of guilt or innocence here - just that "citizenship" normally offers at least some type of defense according to our "traditions" (with no mention of law or legal standing) against the coming unnamed evacuation and internment "action." These natural-born American citizens (Nisei) obviously were the children of immigrant Japanese (Issei) parents, immigrants who could never obtain citizenship due to racist exclusionary laws. The word choice of "conferred" is an interesting one, the editorial writer taking on a paternalistic attitude toward people who received their citizenship in exactly the same way as those for whom he speaks.



The editorial leaves no doubt that it supports the "hard decision" to remove (and thereafter intern) all Japanese Americans, citizens or not. But the paper, in the end, not so shockingly abdicates its editorial responsibility by stating the military "will have to decide in this particular." The piece concludes that "the Army must not be wrong." In other words, it has to get this right. With everything just noted, even though it won't spell out the words, there is no doubt what The Oregonian has decided is the right decision.



During the first days of the Portland Assembly Center internment, The Oregonian went so far as to print a propaganda feature photo page of smiling young internees effortlessly going about their daily lives: hanging laundry, playing ball games, etc.



The online version of Rose's Feb. 19, 2016 article includes this very photo feature among dozens of other related images. However, incredibly, the caption reads: "May 10, 1942, Oregon's Japanese Americans smiled for the cameras, even as they were forcefully removed from their homes and businesses."



Does Rose and/or the caption writer(s) actually believe these internees were all smiling of their own free will? Really? All these photos were spontaneous shots that captured naturally smiling, happy people tucked contentedly behind barbed wire and armed soldiers?



In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Palmer Hoyt as director of the Domestic Branch of the US Office of War Information (OWI), a position for which he took a six-month leave of absence from The Oregonian, according to the Palmer Hoyt Papers at the Denver Public Library. The United States OWI was the government propaganda agency created during WWII.



On November 24, 2015, Barack Obama presented to the family of the late lawyer and civil rights leader Minoru Yasui the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. A native of Hood River, Yasui is the only Oregonian to have received the award. He began his lifelong pursuit of human rights by challenging the wartime ethnic curfew in Portland, was jailed for months in solitary confinement in Portland's Multnomah County Jail, interned at the city's Assembly Center, and even falsely stripped of his citizenship for a time. Yasui challenged the legality of the ethnic curfews all the way to the Supreme Court, and helped direct the decades long campaign which resulted in a US government apology for the internments and reparations of $20,000 to each internee.



Holly Yasui, daughter of Minoru Yasui, recently emailed the following:



"Though I do not hold the current City Hall or the editors of The Oregonian responsible for the actions of their predecessors, I agree that representatives of those institutions could certainly set the record straight by issuing apologies as the President and Congress did in 1988 on behalf of their predecessors."



On the first official Min Yasui Day in Oregon, a march will retrace his steps from Yasui's former law office to the old Portland police headquarters, now a law firm, which is hosting a reception after the march.



Oregon's honor for Yasui has come rather late in the process. Colorado and Denver first held a Minoru Yasui Day back in 1984, and the city of Denver did so again last year on September 10, just prior to the Presidential award in November. Yasui settled in Denver after WWII and lived the rest of his life there with his family, actively involved in civil rights issues. See a short 1983 news documentary that includes interviews with Yasui and visits to related Portland sites at https://vimeo.com/38271249



To ensure there was no misrepresentation on my part regarding the local history, I contacted Dr. Ellen Eisenberg, the Dwight & Margaret Lear Professor of American History at Willamette University in Salem. In addition to the previously cited piece in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, she is the author of many works including the book The First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII (2008, Lexington Books). Her research centers on the history of American immigrant and ethnic communities.



"I think you are right on the mark in your analysis," she wrote via email. "I had not seen the recent (Feb. 19) story in The Oregonian, so I thank you for bringing this to my attention. I think that it is very appropriate to call on them for a (very late) apology-- and on the city council too, if they have not already taken such a step."



Another local academic with strong interest in the topic is Ken Ruoff, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Japanese Studies at Portland State University. An acclaimed author on a variety of topics, Dr. Ruoff has taught courses on the local internments, and worked with the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center on public informational programs about the Japanese American internments.





"THE POWER OF THE MASS MEDIA CAN MATCH THAT OF GOVERNMENTS."



"Great article (on my earlier Feb. 4 piece at Truthout.org calling for local institutional atonement about the internments)," Dr. Ruoff wrote via email. "I happen to agree with you about apologies being necessary. But one of the things that I find curious about the mass media (this is just my impressionI have never done formal research on this nor have I checked into whether there is formal research) is an incredibly strong unwillingness to apologize. They are even worse than governments in this area, if you ask me. And that is pretty remarkable because at times the power of mass media can match that of governments, easily."



The Oregonian can still make real efforts to try and make things right by posting an editorial recognizing its full support of the unjustified internments, identify how it became a government propaganda tool, and formally and explicitly apologize to the entire city -- and especially the still-living residents who experienced this foul chapter of our collective American experience in Portland.



The City of Portland also needs to officially apologize for its role in leading the charge to expel and intern its Japanese American community, as well as finally rescind its internment-related resolutions from 1942.



A final note.



Much of the information contained here was published Feb. 4, 2016 in the Speakout section of Truthout.org ( link to www.truth-out.org). I had first submitted the piece for publication to Erik Lukens, editorial and commentary editor at The Oregonian. He replied on Feb. 1: "Lawrence: Your piece would supplant another guest opinion . . . with greater relevance and interest to our readers. Erik."



Once again, The Oregonian gets it completely wrong.



# # #





Nearly 4,000 innocent men, women, children and seniors from Portland and beyond were imprisoned behind the closed wire and the armed guards of the Portland Assembly Center (an Orwellian moniker if there ever was one) on the present-day site of the Portland Metropolitan Exposition Center. This took place from May through September in that first full year of US involvement in WWII.



Only there was no Expo Center back then. It was, in fact, the Pacific International Livestock Exposition. That's right, a cattle yard. The camp facilities were hurriedly constructed atop manure-laced soil that reeked throughout much of that long, hot summer of 1942. Minoru reportedly called the concentration camp, the "Portland Pigpen."



About half of the local deportees are said to have relocated elsewhere and never returned home.



One of those internees who returned to Portland was the late Harue "Mae" Ninomiya who passed away on October 23, 2015. My entire 2008 interview with Ninomiya about her experiences at the Portland concentration camp and more at http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/04/375164.shtml contribute to this article add comment to discussion view discussion from this article