Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California, G.P. Putnam's Sons: NY, 1977. 603 pp., 1942
Chapter 18 Cold War Journalism
1. Relocation Camp
"The Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, which opened the door for Los Angeles's massive industrial expansion and urbanization, also brought out a renewed racial hostility from the white Southern California population. Anti-foreign /nativist movements had deep roots in the area. Since the 1860s the state's labor movement and small farmers, threatened by massive immigrations of cheap Asian and Mexican labor, had reacted with prejudice and attempts at exclusion . . .
". . . Chandler had attacked various racist-inspired moves to limit land ownership-the 1913 Alien Land Law, for instance-or to restrict immigration . . . " p. 296
"By the late 1930s, as first- and second-generation Japanese and Mexican-Americans entered the job market, questions concerning immigration were replaced by the urban-based social and economic problems of acculturation and discrimination. With the outbreak of the war, some of the old tensions found new expression, and the Los Angeles press, led by the Hearst papers and the Times, contributed to one of the region's most shameful periods.
"Within a month after the Pearl Harbor attack, California's press began a systematic campaign to evacuate all Japanese-Americans in California and the rest of the country into "relocation" camps for the duration of the war . . .
" . . .
" . . . Ninety thousand Japanese-Americans in California were uprooted from their homes and farms to live for more than three years in concentration camps . . ." p. 297
" . . . more than $5 million in Japanese property was auctioned off in the city [Los Angeles]."
" . . . Earl Warren [called] Democratic Governor Culbert Olson soft on Japanese-Americans and "identified the absence of any sabotage up to then as an attempt to create "a false sense of security." p. 298