Not White Enough: The Long, Shameful Road to Japanese American Internment

In recent years, historians have approached the forced removal and subsequent detention of Japanese Americans from the West Coast from new and interesting angles, and Lawrence Goldstone sets out to do the same in his most recent book, Not White Enough. This is a legal history of this moment; as the book's jacket copy states, it's “the first [book] to trace the full arc of prejudice against Asian Americans that made internment inevitable and serves as a legal and political history of anti-Asian racism beginning with the California gold rush and ending with Korematsu.” Goldstone's assertion that incarceration was “inevitable” is an interesting but ultimately limiting aspect of his book that otherwise offers a broad and chronological history of Japanese American incarceration.Goldstone is a legal expert, and the book's expansive coverage reflects his immense knowledge in this area. Consisting of twenty-five concise and engaging chapters, Goldstone nests the wartime decision of the Army and United States federal government to remove and detain 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent within legal precedents. He reaches back to the 1790 Naturalization Act that ensured only white immigrants could naturalize, as well as Supreme Court cases from the nineteenth century, including the Dred Scott decision that denied Black Americans citizenship rights, to support his argument. These earlier cases, as well as rising anti-Chinese sentiment after the Civil War and later restrictions that targeted Asian migrants, are well-trod territory in existing scholarship; Goldstone is not the first to make the connections between these instances and Japanese American incarceration, nor does he offer ground-breaking insights in these areas. But his writing style offers an easily digested overview of the topic that is an ideal introduction for the general and interested reader.The unfortunate aspect of this overview is that it detracts from the understudied components of the legal history of incarceration that are in the middle chapters of the book and sandwiched between more well-known components of Executive Order 9066. Goldstone is strongest when delving into the overlooked legal restrictions on Japanese Americans along the West Coast during the early twentieth century. Take, for example, his discussion of Frank and Elizabeth Terrace. They were Washington state residents who brought a suit against the state's attorney general in 1923 to prevent him from enforcing an anti-alien land law so that they could lease land to a Japanese individual, N. Nakatsuta. The Terraces and Nakatsuta used as precedent a 1917 case involving a white homeowner from Kentucky who successfully challenged a state law that prohibited him from selling property to a Black family. Although the plaintiffs failed to prove that the anti-alien land law of Washington violated due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, this fascinating case adds to a longer history of discrimination against Japanese Americans on the West Coast. With examples like this, Goldstone does not necessarily need to reach back to the nineteenth century; his argument is well supported with cases that used precedents rooted in more immediate anti-Black and anti-Asian legal actions.Perhaps more supportive of his argument, however, is the in-depth analysis of California Attorney General Earl Warren's involvement in legal justifications for removal of Nikkei. Goldstone carefully details Warren's use of wartime hysteria and California's pre-existing, anti-alien land laws to argue for exclusion of Japanese Americans. Unfortunately, insights like these are largely lost within an extensive rehashing of existing scholarship on the racial and legal history behind incarceration.Goldstone's argument—that legal history made incarceration inevitable—also detracts from some opportunities to explore unique, wartime factors. For instance, I would have appreciated a legal expert's more nuanced examination of the legal debates on the proper role of military authority over civilians during war. Goldstone alludes to this point but does not fully engage with it, focusing instead on the racial roots of previous court decisions. Goldstone is not wrong in doing so; race was certainly an aspect that made the decision possible. What is lost, however, is an opportunity to look at the intersection of race, the law, and military authority at this moment. Goldstone's description of Western Defense Commander Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt as a “talentless bureaucrat” and “ignorant, narrow-minded bigot” (p. 173), while in hindsight is apt, leaves little room for a more complex discussion of how the Army's policies in response to war and pre-existing assumptions of Japanese Americans contributed to legal arguments for removal and incarceration.Goldstone's book is a useful and well-written introduction to the topic of Japanese American incarceration. It is best suited for the general reader and advanced undergraduate students interested in this tragic moment in America's past.