In addition to the media, prominent West Coast politicians soon lent their voices to the chorus of those calling for the evacuation of Japanese Americans. California governor Culbert Olson, Attorney General Earl Warren (later to become chief justice of the United States), Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron, and General John DeWitt, head of the army's Western Defense Command, agitated for the removal of Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast. Warren called the presence of Japanese Americans on the Pacific shore the "Achilles heel" of the civilian defense effort. Echoing Warren's sentiment in his testimony before the Tolan Committee (a committee created by Congress to investigate the threat of enemy alien activity on the West Coast) Earl Riley, mayor of Portland, Oregon, stated that the Nisei "are definitely a hazard, and that the longer they are permitted to have the freedom that they now have . . . the greater is the.....
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