Government documents hold a place of particular respect for their contemporary and historical audience. Though it may be argued that governmental publications are not really public rhetoric their influence on public imagining and memory is undeniable. More importantly, when analyzing events which involve strong elements of country-wide emotion it becomes abundantly clear that official publications are as much shaped by public rhetoric as they do shape it. To remove them from analysis would be to omit a significant part of the subject of study.
The first piece for analysis is 1942 “Executive Order Number 9066”. Signed by Roosevelt, this order authorized the internment of Japanese Nationals and Japanese Americans (Italians were more often interned under acts related to Espionage or stipulations of naval-law acts though this order did also apply).
The act begins with a justification for its necessity, stating that in times of war the country must take “every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities”. National-defense material, premises, and utilities, what the order calls for here is every possible protection of the premise of national defense. Unlike materials or utilities a premise is not tangible, it is a philosophical foundation for an argument or undertaking. Psychological studies show that for any list people are least likely to remember the middle element, did the writer of this order know that when they chose to put premise in between the other justifications? It could have been the unconscious choice of a well-practiced persuasive speaker. In either case, protection of a premise is a weak justification for the uprooting of thousands of people. The document emphasizes this by the placement of the phrase, as well as letting on, to the rhetorically inclined, how strong the anti-Japanese hysteria was for the government to order their internment to protect the very idea of national defense.
Perhaps most interesting about this order is that despite its notoriety for the interment of the Japanese population, they are not mentioned once in the act’s entirety. This is not a virtue of all government documents, the U.S. congress has previously passed bills such as the “Chinese Exclusion Act” which unabashedly target a particular demographic. Since the order was used to intern a few German and Italian nationals and Americans it would not be a huge stretch to say that specific mention of the Japanese was left out in order to give the document more broad jurisdiction should another group appear threatening.
“Conduct to be Observed by Alien Enemies” is simply a rules list for immigrants to keep away from anything which might be military, or might record military going-ons, or might have been invented by the military. These mandates are not out of the ordinary for the treatment of these nationals, nor is the rhetoric exceptional. It does serve as a good document from which to make a note on the use of the world “alien”. These documents refer to the interned Japanese and Italians exclusively as “alien” or “non-alien people of [descent]”, as they are further detained they become “alien enemies”. The rhetorical effects of labeling immigrants aliens is widely discussed by contemporary publics but the effect is even more noticeable, and potentially novel, in the primary documents. By choosing to refer even to American nationals as “non-aliens” the documents prime their audience to think of those populations not as fellow countrymen but as foreigners and intruders. This is further exacerbated with the addition of the word “enemy” which leaves little room for sympathetic interpretation. While these rhetorical choices may reflect cultural attitudes at the time, as official documentation they also create and validate those attitudes as the prevailing voice of the strong public.
Next is the “Warrant Hearing In This Case of Hidenori Arima”, a court secretary’s transcript of a deportation case. The most revealing pieces of this text can be found in the body of the third question. It asks the man in question if he understands that his case has been reopened “to present documentary evidence or oral evidence by competent witnesses to substantiate your claims, if possible, of your entry into, and continuous residence within, the United States during the time that you claim to have resided in this country”. Particularly notable here is the phrase “competent witnesses”, although it appears innocuous it brings to question what sort of people would be considered good witnesses by this court. The man in question appears to be trying to show that he entered the country legally and remained in it respectably. He requires an official translator to interact with his english-speaking inspector suggesting that he has not yet mastered the language. It would not be out of the question to assume that any witnesses of his legal and well-behaved U.S. residence would be another Japanese person. Would their “oral evidence” be competent to this court? Like others, the document refers to Mr. Hidenori as “alien”, suggesting that the court might be less than welcoming to taking another alien’s testimony to support Hidenori’s.
The “Department of Justice; Alien Enemy Hearing Board” document is served to a man of Japanese descent notifying him of a hearing he must attend to discuss his continued detention in Fort Missoula. Two pieces of phrasing jump out on this page. First, that the board’s title includes the word “enemy” is notable. The board deals with already-interned persons, so perhaps it feels correct in its classification of them as enemies, still the phrasing is exceptionally harsh and must have primed its members to view their detainees through a certain light. Second, is the note at the bottom of the document that reminds detainees that while they may “bring a friend” as it were, they are not permitted anyone to act as an attorney for them. Contrary to many of the phrases analyzed from these documents, this one appears almost friendly in nature. Detainees may or may not have relatives with them in-camp, and were unlikely to benefit from the advocations of an attorney, but one can picture their fellow detainees observing their hearings with them, rooting for their early release. Unlike the title speech, this note seems to lack the strong negative rhetoric (imagine; “you are permitted to bring other alien and non-alien persons with you”) about the immigrants, as though by addressing them personally it loses some of that cultural aggression.
