For the most part, Warren’s tenure as attorney general was predictable. He reorganized the internal workings of the office, paying particular attention to the court calendar and to the assignments of staff personnel. He moved to shut down dog tracks, which were illegal in California, began raids on gambling ships located off the coasts of Santa Monica and Long Beach, and fought the attempted intrusions of organized crime into California. As the prospect of war in Europe increased, he organized law enforcement agencies in a program of civil defense. In this last effort he revealed himself as an advocate of preparedness who was extremely sensitive to the possibility of wartime sabotage.” Do not be deceived,” he said in the spring of 1941, “that [the totalitarian powers] are not attempting to exercise fifth column activities . . .in this country. They would like nothing better than to create the same situation here that they developed in France, Denmark and Holland.”
Added to Warren’s stereotyped views about Orientals, then, was his strong concern for civil defense, which he regarded as an integral function of the attorney general’s office. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec.7, 1941 only reinforced Warren’s suspicions about the Japanese in California. In 1942 he called the presence of the Japanese in California “the Achilles’ heel of the entire civilian defense effort.” He also argued that because no fifth-column activities and no sabotage had been reported a “studied effort” at sabotage was taking place. Warren felt that “when we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test [their] loyalty,” but “when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field” because of “their method of living.”
Warren was an initial proponent of the Japanese relocation policy and a defender of that policy once it had been implemented. In 1943, when the Allied forces had begun to neutralize Japanese supremacy in the Pacific, fears of an invasion of the West Coast subsided, and pressures to release interned Japanese began to surface. In a conference of state governors that June, Warren vigorously opposed releasing any Japanese. “If the Japs are released,” he said, “no one will be able to tell a saboteur from any other Jap. . . . We don’t want to have a second Pearl Harbor in California. We don’t propose to have the Japs back in California during this war if there is any lawful means of preventing it.”
