Posthumous book is based on intercepted wartime communications with Japan.

Among the most heartbreaking moments in American history was the mass arrest and internment of more than 100,000 Japanese American men, women and children at the outbreak of World War II. Today, more than 50 years later, the rationale given by the U.S. government at the time--the threat of espionage and sabotage in support of the Japanese war effort--seems paranoid, if not plain phony. But David D. Lowman, author of “MAGIC: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents From the West Coast During WWII” (Athena Press, $29.95, 400 pages), is willing to argue that the government was right all along.

Lowman’s provocative study is based on a top-secret wartime intelligence project with the code name “MAGIC,” a remarkable code-breaking operation that allowed U.S. intelligence analysts to intercept and decipher messages that passed between Japan and its diplomatic outposts around the world in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and throughout the war. His review of the intercepted message traffic and other declassified intelligence documents, many of them reproduced in facsimile, prompts him to conclude that the internment order was justified by urgent security concerns.

“Recently declassified MAGIC intelligence . . . clearly supports President Roosevelt’s controversial wartime decision to issue Executive Order No. 9066, which served as the authority to evacuate more than 112,00 residents of Japanese descent from the West Coast of the United States at the beginning of World War II,” argues Lowman, a former official of the National Security Agency, in his posthumously published book. “In addition to MAGIC, the president had available to him alarming assessments from the U.S. intelligence community which reported large-scale disloyalty, espionage and potential sabotage by U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry.”

One especially inflammatory message, for example, was sent by a Japanese intelligence operative in Los Angeles to Tokyo on May 9, 1941. “We have already established contacts with absolutely reliable Japanese in the San Pedro and San Diego area, who will keep a close watch on all shipments of airplanes and other war materials, and report the amounts and destinations of such shipments,” reads the deciphered message. “We also have connections with our second generations working in airplane plants for intelligence purposes.”

But it is possible to read the MAGIC intercepts and come away with an entirely different impression of the evidence. All that Lowman is able to prove is that a few Japanese intelligence agents with high hopes and active imaginations proposed to enlist Japanese Americans in the imperial war effort, but there is nothing here that proves they actually succeeded in doing so.

Indeed, the same operative who sent the “smoking gun” message of May 9, 1941, concedes that there are other Japanese “whom we can’t trust completely” and proposes to “make use of white persons and Negroes.” Still other deciphered messages suggest the recruitment of “communists, Negroes, labor union members and anti-Semites.” And yet it was only the Japanese and Japanese Americans--and, significantly, virtually all of them on the West Coast--who were arrested and interned.

Lowman was a controversialist, and so is his publisher. Both of them are incensed by the fact that reparations are being paid to the victims of the internment order, and they denounce the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians that recommended the reparation program to Congress in 1983. “Since that time, in an effort to obtain money and rewrite history,” writes Lee Allen, publisher of “MAGIC,” in his preface to the book, “there has been an unrelenting effort to recast the reasons for the evacuation solely in terms of racism, war hysteria and lack of political will.”

“MAGIC” frequently strikes the same shrill and troubling note. Still, the author and publisher of “MAGIC” are intellectually honest enough to allow us to come to our own conclusions after reviewing the wholly fascinating collection of historical documents and photographs that are presented here. Indeed, they even permit their adversaries to speak for themselves. Thus, for example, the appendix includes a statement by Angus MacBeth, general counsel for the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment, in which Lowman’s argument is squarely and, I think, convincingly rebutted.

“It is very difficult to distinguish puffery from truth in the ‘MAGIC’ documents,” writes MacBeth. “There is no indication in the ‘MAGIC’ cables of a sabotage or fifth column organization.” And, after considering what is actually contained in the decrypted messages, MacBeth stands by the conclusion in the official report of the commission: “Not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast.”

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At the end of the Avenue 43 off-ramp of the Pasadena Freeway, on a quiet and otherwise unremarkable corner, sits a quaint old house that catches my eye every time I pass it. Once, out of sheer curiosity, I pulled over and ventured inside the shady courtyard, and that’s when I first discovered one of the forgotten relics of California history--the home of a man called Charles Fletcher Lummis.

Lummis is fully fleshed out in “American Character: The Curious Life of Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Rediscovery of the Southwest” by Mark Thompson (Arcade Publishing, $27.95, 400 pages), a colorful and compelling account of a man who was, at various times, an author, an archeologist, a newspaperman, a photographer, a poet and an early advocate for the rights of Indians, whom he insisted on calling “First Americans.”

Lummis literally walked into California history in 1885 when he traveled on foot all the way from Cincinnati to accept a job at the fledgling Los Angeles Times. Armed with a Harvard education, a sense of adventure and a capacity for hard work, he reinvented himself over and over again, enduring the hardships of the frontier and the fighting front, struggling with ill health and a troubled marriage, and even surviving an attempted murder. By the time he died in 1928, one obituary pronounced him the “Apostle of the Southwest.”

Thompson concedes that Lummis is not well-loved by historians, who have complained about his “self-glorifying purple prose,” faulted the accuracy of his writing and reporting, and declared him to have been “a poseur, a lecher and a drunkard.” But “American Character” is an earnest effort to rescue Lummis from such disrepute and to restore him to a respectable place in the history of California.

“His eccentric behavior and ostentatious outfits were partly the mark of a savvy salesman who depended on a precarious stream of revenue from books and freelance articles to make ends meet,” writes Thompson in his own verdict on Charles Fletcher Lummis. “But it was also a form of personal protest against silly prejudices toward people who are different, which was at the root of the racism and xenophobia that Lummis spent his life fighting.”

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West Words looks at books related to California and the West. Jonathan Kirsch can be reached at jkirsch@kirsch-mitchell.com.