Scare on the Coast

At dawn one morning FBI men raided Terminal Island, a disordered conglomeration of tiny wooden houses, fish nets, rabbit warrens, where 2,000 Japanese lived right in the middle of Los Angeles Harbor, a stone's throw from the Navy's Reeves Field. Agents blocked the bridge, rooted through the narrow lanes of fishermen's huts, tions." carted off 383 men for "investigations." All along the West Coast the presence of enemy aliens became a suddenly, sinisterly glaring fact: Japanese and Italian fishermen along the water front, Japanese who worked all day on hands & knees in geometrically perfect truck gardens which sometimes overlay oil pipelines, Japanese settlements near big airplane plants and military posts.

Attorney General Francis Biddle marked off 135 restricted zones from which all enemy aliens must move by Feb. 24. No one could say how many thousands would have to pack up and go. Nor did anyone know where they would go to. (The Government considered the idea of setting up big farm camps in the interior.) Francis Biddle also set up a curfew zone, covering a fourth of California, where all remaining aliens must be in their houses from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., must never travel more than five miles from home.

No citizen of a democracy could be happy about some of the pathetic situations which these orders created. For every potential fifth columnist, hundreds of innocent aliens would suffer. In industrial Pittsburg, near San Francisco, old Italian women who had lived in the same houses for 30 years, who had sons & daughters working in Pittsburgh factories, prayed at Mass that they would not have to leave home.

Luciano Maniscalco, a San Francisco fisherman for 40 years, sat glumly in his bunting-draped home, surrounded by snapshots of his twelve children: one in the Navy, one in the Army, one in the Merchant Marine, one a Red Cross ambulance driver. Complained old Maniscalco, "I wanta be citizen, wanta fish. What I do now? Can't get job. Not a citizen. Can't get papers, can't write. My head she too damn hard."

The orders would also play hob with West Coast agriculture. In the Los Angeles area, Japanese produce more than half the truck crops--especially celery, spinach, beets, string beans--vegetables which take infinite work and patience. In Santa Cruz County, a $500,000 crop of sprouts and artichokes awaited harvesting by Italians. Most of California's tomato crop, which accounts for a fourth of U.S. canned tomatoes, has been grown by Japanese farmers.

But the West Coast valued safety more than vegetables, more than the comfort or livelihood of foreigners who might be innocent but were still foreigners. Francis Biddle's measures struck most West Coast citizens, indeed, as wishy-washy, especially in giving aliens one to three weeks of grace to move from restricted zones. From California's Attorney General Earl Warren, from 100 sheriffs and district attorneys and from Los Angeles' Mayor Fletcher Bowron came a demand that all enemy aliens be removed at least 200 miles inland. The Los Angeles County Defense Council wanted them all interned.

By week's end the coast was sure that its fears were not hysterical. FBI agents continued their raids. In one of them, made on "very definite suspicions of espionage," at Vallejo, Calif, near the Navy's big Mare Island yard, they seized Navy signal flags and flares, arrested nine Japs.

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