FDR New Deal Legacy Intact, but Internment of Japanese-Americans Lives in Infamy Too
Frank H. Wu, a visiting professor at George Washington University Law School, is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White and coauthor of Race, Rights & Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment.
Even the greatest leaders remain human beings. By most measures, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal created our modern society, ranks among the best politicians in our nation's history. Yet FDR was capable of misjudgments too, and it ultimately was his decision to authorize the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans. The mass imprisonment of approximately 125,000 individuals—a majority of them native-born in this country—was unjustified.
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese Imperial Navy launched a devastating attack on the United States at its Pearl Harbor installation in the Hawaiian islands. FDR declared it "a date which will live in infamy." Because the Japanese hostilities came without provocation, our declaration of war was justified.
Soon thereafter—67 years ago today, in fact—Roosevelt signed an executive order granting the military the authority to round up and intern Japanese-Americans. Virtually everyone of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast was sent to 10 internment camps. Given a few days' notice, they could take only what they could carry.
They lost their jobs, possessions, and freedom. In the shadow of watchtowers, behind barbed war, guarded by armed soldiers, they were held captive by their own government. There were never allegations of individual wrongdoing, much less any proven cases of treason.
The internment was supported by public figures of every background. Promoters of the program made a simple claim: Japan and the United States were at war, hence persons of Japanese descent should be regarded as enemies even if they were citizens. To extremists, the Pacific war was a racial war, and so it followed that the Japanese together were an enemy race.
Liberals were no different. Earl Warren, who would later serve as chief justice and bring an end to the official segregation, backed the policy. The American Civil Liberties Union national office was unwilling to challenge the plans, so its California chapters broke away in order to do so.
There were compelling reasons to be skeptical about the generalizations that Japanese-Americans as a group would be traitors. Long before any fight against the Axis powers, demagogues had been campaigning for the exclusion of Asian immigrants and the expulsion of Asian-Americans.
They had succeeded in many respects. Asians who wished to come to this country on a legal basis were limited to strict quotas, and those who had managed to come here could not naturalize as citizens because they were not "free white persons." In many states, as the only people who were "aliens ineligible to citizenship," they could not own real estate. To ensure their isolation, they could not intermarry with Caucasians. Asians born on American soil had to litigate all the way up to the Supreme Court to be deemed citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, and nonetheless nativists sought to strip them of the right to vote.
The internment applied to men, women, children, the elderly, and the disabled alike. It made no distinctions, other than along the lines of blood.
Its proponents dismissed due process because, they asserted, the Oriental mind was inscrutable, rendering it impossible to sort out the loyal from the disloyal. Ironically, they argued that the assimilation of Japanese-Americans was a disguise.
If the arguments for the internment were accepted at face value, it would have made sense to lock up Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, which was in the actual theater of conflict, or to do the same with German-Americans and Italian-Americans. Neither idea was attractive. Japanese-Americans made up much of the workforce on Hawaiian plantations. A relatively low number of German-Americans and Italian-Americans were incarcerated because they were considered suspicious as individuals, but it would have been ill-advised to try ethnic incarceration of such sizable populations.
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Reader Comments
Nuclear proliferation and Japanese American Interment
My sentiments:
1. Better America developed deliverable nukes before Soviets or NAZIs who no doubt would not have hesitated to use them in mass. That being said, both the Soviets and Germans have nukes, and so do Islamic states with potential to lose them to rouge terrorist (through poor controls, bribery or whatever)
2. The US feared Japanese invasion of the West Coast - in hind site, a misplaced fear. But it was a necessary precaution.
3. Americans of Japanese descent were interred under harsh conditions, but by no means horrific ones suffered by Jews, gypsies, Chinese, and captured Allied soldiers at the hands of the NAZIs or Japanese Imperial Army. That didn't make it right.
4. The Axis Powers were unusually cruel, inhumane and dispicable because they were brainwashed into believing they were superior and therefore correct in killing the inferior to allow them to be rulers.
5. Has the world learned any lessons from the Greatest of all wars? Genocide continues. Nuclear proliferation. Concentration camps for American citizens - but we call the 2 million behind bars as inmates (half of whom are non-violent offenders and the only crime was self-infliction of addiction/enjoyment to selves)
6. History is condemed to repeat itself in an ironic twist of fates as universal cycles of ebb and flow has seen civilizations rise to fall as similar patterns imerged to be repeated as deja vu from era to era of human history. WWIII can not be ruled out - an with the Clock of the Atomic Scientists set at 5 minutes to midnight - our global nightmare is much closer than we may think.
World War two and Fascist Japan
World war two was not a joke and the United States had to fight to protect the free world against the planetary evil of three fascist countries , The Empire of Japan,,Nzzi Germany, Mussolini's Italy....it is not exactly correct to assume that the american camps were the same as the german s or even of the russians for that matter only some protection against a possibility of espionage from this group.....the history of the brutality of the japanese against the chinese is too disgusting to talk about and will not easily be forgotten by our senior citizens.....what the americans did in california was in my view very appropriate for that period....Cordially....
Hoss - Counter Point....
You seem mystified that only West Coast Japanese were interned. Remember, at the time of the interment, the disaster at Pearl Harbor left the West Coast militarily naked. During that period there was near panic regarding the threat of invasion.
From December '41 through April of '42 America watched as; Wake Island, Guam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Corrigedore, Indo China and The Philippines fell to the Japanese onslaught. We knew that Japanese "5th columnists" were involved in all of these invasions. Many believed that the West Coast was next.
As a matter of fact, my father was stationed in Santa Monica Ca. at an Army anti-aircraft battery overlooking the beach. The military took the threat seriously.
It is also appropriate to note that approximately 42% of those interned were not American citizens, but Japanese.
There were virtually no Japanese citizens, in Japan, of American or European descent. Japanese immigration law prohibited most Europeans/Americans from becoming citizens. More than 25000 American and European civilians were interned by the Japanese during WWII.
The cruelty of the Japanese toward their POW and civilian captives is illustrated from these statistics;
American Military personnel captured by the Nazis - 1% died in captivity.
" " " " " Japanese - 42% died in captivity.
American Civilians Interned by the Nazis - 3% died in captivity.
" " " ' Japanese - 11% died in captivity.
In hindsight, the internment of Japanese Americans was wrong and unnecessary. However, "hindsight", removed from the time and context of history, usually results in a distorted vision of the past.
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