The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When Washington hated its cherry trees
Citizens expressed rage after air attack on Pearl Harbor.
There are
WASHINGTON — few seasonal segues more welcome in Washington than the blooming of the cherry blossoms, marking the return of spring and reasserting the capital’s claim to be not just a powerful city but a beautiful one. Along the Tidal Basin
and countless streets, the cherry trees are beloved for shade and symbolism alike.
They weren’t always. In the panicked days after Japan’s devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, infuriated residents suddenly saw the ornamental forest as a ready target for
their rage. Three days after the Dec. 7, 1941, bombings in Hawaii, the saws came out.
Early in the morning of Dec. 10, after the lights near the Tidal Basin were switched off, someone crept onto the Mall and felled four of the Yoshino cherry trees, including two that had been part of the original group from Japan planted in 1912. The
cutters were quiet, apparently sawing by hand.
Lest there be any confusion, one of the stumps was inscribed: “TO HELL WITH THE JAPANESE.”
It was just one bit of lash
ing out at a country that had been seen as the capital city’s particular friend but was now a declared enemy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had declared war on Japan two days earlier.
At the Asian-focused Freer Gallery, curators quickly whisked their extensive collections of Japanese sculpture and painting out of pub
lic view, more for their protection than in protest. Dance bands at Glen Echo pointedly struck “Japanese Sandman” from their playlists.
“Japan’s Mark is Taboo,” read the headline of a story in The Washington Post from Dec. 10, likening the swift
blackballing of all things connected with the country to the anti-German sentiment that had swept the city at the start of World War I. From antiques galleries to five-and-10 stores, Japanese products were pulled from the shelves.
“Some merchants were rebuked by patrons for displaying ‘Japanese’ goods,” the story said, “which were, however, Chinese, as proved by the ‘Made in China’ label.”
But nothing was more Japanese in midcentury Wash
ington — or, in fact, today — than the acres of cherry trees that quickly came to define the District’s postcard portrait: white marble framed by delicate pink blossoms.
The trees had become so entrenched in the city’s psy
che by 1937 that residents erupted in a full-on “cherry tree rebellion” at news that many would be removed to make room for the planned Jefferson Memorial.
Women, many of them garden-club militants, grabbed tools from the construction workers and pitched dirt into the holes, backfilling and backtalking with fierce abandon, according to a National Park Service account. Some of them chained themselves to the trunks in defiance of the bulldozers.
The standoff ended after Roosevelt promised that the trees would be transplanted instead of destroyed, and the removals continued - at night.
Just four years later, Washingtonians were sneaking in to cut them down.
It was part of an early and building wave of anti-Japanese vandalism throughout
the country. In California and Oregon and other areas with large populations of Japanese Americans, Buddhist temples and grocery stores were attacked. In Washington, the trees stood in.
“If you don’t have a Japantown, you lash out at this symbol instead,” said Jason Petrulis, a historian at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona.
Officials decried the toppling of the trees. Irving Root, superintendent of the National Capital Park, blamed the timber terrorism on “misguided individuals, probably youths.”