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Defending the Indefensible
There are lessons that can be learned from history, and sometimes those lessons can be painful. The ideals of liberty, and all men are created equal are worthy ideas and should be practiced, but they are dependent upon good men and women. Human beings are flawed, so at times liberty and equality is for us and not for them.
During WWII it was not just the Germans, and the Russians that instituted concentration camps. The United States and Canada did as well. There are some interesting parallels between the criteria of the German and the American criteria on who should be interned, and relocated to the camps. There is an important distinction between the fate of those that were interned in Germany, and America. There is however no escaping the fact that the internment, and relocation into the camps of American citizens of Japanese descent was due to racial animus. Sixty percent of the Japanese interned were American citizens.
Major Karl Bendetsen and Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Command, each questioned Japanese American loyalty. DeWitt, who administered the internment program, repeatedly told newspapers that “A Jap’s a Jap” and testified to Congress,
I don’t want any of them [persons of Japanese ancestry] here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty… It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese. American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty… But we must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map.
On January 2, the Joint Immigration Committee of the California Legislature sent a manifesto to California newspapers which attacked “the ethnic Japanese,” who it alleged were “totally unassimilable. This manifesto further argued that all people of Japanese heritage were loyal subjects of the Emperor of Japan; Japanese language schools, furthermore, according to the manifesto, were bastions of racism which advanced doctrines of Japanese racial superiority.
The manifesto was backed by the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West and the California Department of the American Legion, which in January demanded that all Japanese with dual citizenship be placed in concentration camps. Internment was not limited to those who had been to Japan, but included a small number of German and Italian enemy aliens. By February, Earl Warren, the Attorney General of California, had begun his efforts to persuade the federal government to remove all people of Japanese heritage from the West Coast.
March 27, 1942: General DeWitt’s Proclamation No. 4 prohibited all those of Japanese ancestry from leaving “Military Area No. 1” for “any purpose until and to the extent that a future proclamation or order of this headquarters shall so permit or direct.”
May 3, 1942: General DeWitt issued Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34, ordering all people of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or non-citizens, who were still living in “Military Area No. 1” to report to assembly centers, where they would live until being moved to permanent “Relocation Centers.”
These edicts included persons of part-Japanese ancestry as well. Anyone with at least one-sixteenth (equivalent to having one great-great grandparent).
Internment was popular among many white farmers who resented the Japanese American farmers. “White American farmers admitted that their self-interest required removal of the Japanese.”These individuals saw internment as a convenient means of uprooting their Japanese American competitors. Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, told the Saturday Evening Post in 1942:
“We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over… If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we do not want them back when the war ends, either.”
The Roberts Commission Report, prepared at President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s request, has been cited as an example of the fear and prejudice informing the thinking behind the internment program. The Report sought to link Japanese Americans with espionage activity, and to associate them with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Columnist Henry McLemore reflected growing public sentiment fueled by this report:
“I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands… Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”
The lesson to be learned is racial prejudice, and racial purity determinations were used to confiscate property, and to intern American citizens, and the US government went further by reaching out to South American countries to deport their Japanese, German, and Italian citizens to the United States so they could be placed in the camps, and some did.
It can happen here, and it did happen here.
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You focus on citizenship. Do you therefore concede that internment of the roughly 40% who were Japanese citizens — enemy aliens in wartime — was legitimate?
To the extent that you’ve addressed this question indirectly (in #22, in which you said: “the law did not allow Japanese immigrants to apply for citizenship, beginning around 1924 or so”), you seem to blame the US for not granting citizenship to these enemy aliens. This does not actually answer the question.
If the internment of the non-citizen Japanese was legitimate, then it seems to me that the internment of their US citizen minor children was also legitimate, if unfortunate. What else do you do with these children? You have again failed to answer this question, except to say that it is “indefensible.”
Well, I say that you’re wrong, and I think that you haven’t really thought it through. What do you do with the minor children of incarcerated prisoners, or properly detained illegal aliens? You need to put those kids somewhere.
What exactly do you propose as an alternative? Foster care? That would mean separating the families, and probably placing the kids with mostly white foster parents (which would probably be condemned today as even worse than internment).
Here’s another question that I didn’t ask, and I genuinely don’t know the answer. Did the US-born children of Japanese nationals have Japanese citizenship as well as US citizenship? Dual citizenship would also present quite a problem, as it makes allegiance unclear.
Finally, as to citizens who lost their “homes, businesses, and farms” — I’ll concede the freedom — I pointed out that almost half were minor children, who were unlikely to have a home, business, or farm. Perhaps their enemy alien parent(s) lost these things, but not the children.
I don’t mean to dismiss the moral and legal difficulties of the situation. Rather, it seems to me that the anti-internment side is dismissive of the genuine difficulties due to naive assumptions and a failure to grapple with the difficulty of the situation.
As to why those of German and Italian ancestry or origin were treated less harshly, racism isn’t the only possible explanation. These groups had generally arrived earlier than the Japanese and were more fully assimilated. Also, of course, Germany and Italy hadn’t launched the war against the US, and had no prospect of reaching the US mainland at the time of the internment.
Japan had launched the war, treacherously, and had serious naval superiority in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. I think that the invasion scare was vastly overstated, but there was no such scare on the East Coast at all, as the Royal Navy had the vastly inferior German and Italian navies securely bottled up.
Justice Frankfurter’s concurring opinion in Korematsu is interesting:
And how much just a continuance of bad politics exploiting bad economic beliefs? Certainly keeping the Chinese and Japanese out because of some unfair competitive advantage deriving from their race or culture was a major feature of post-Civil War politics in West Coast politics. The “those subhumans have superhuman abilities” argument. I’ve always assumed the politics carried on into the 20th century, explaining Earl Warren’s role in the whole sorry mess. But I don’t have any evidence for that–and have to note both that exclusion acts were repealed pre-War and everything seems to have cleared up politically awfully fast post-War . I do suspect it was like the situation in the South in the same period: complicated.
By the way, I don’t want to come across as some big fan of the Japanese internment. It was quite dreadful in many respects. I just don’t find it to be a very easy question, any more than I find the question of the bombing campaigns against German and Japanese cities to be an easy question. Or, for that matter, the use of blockade as a weapon of war, which generally makes itself felt through the starvation of civilian populations.
I also find the “racism” explanation to be inaccurate and unfair. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive because of the overuse of “racist” as slander by the far Left for the past 30-40 years. But I don’t find the internment to be significantly racist. It’s not as if we were interning Japanese and Japanese-Americans before the war, and it’s not as if we interned Chinese or Vietnamese. It was a war measure caused by the fact that we were at war with Japan.
While there was not an invasion scare on the East Coast, there was before the war a very open Nazi funded German American Bund with tens of thousands of members. And immediately after German’s declaration of war on the U.S., Nazi submarines were off the East and Gulf Coasts sinking a lot of shipping, and there was suspicion at the time that they were being helped by sympathizers onshore -all at the same time as the decisions were made on internment of Japanese Americans.
That’s an interesting comment. I certainly didn’t put words in the mouths of those individuals that were quoted.
Germany was the prime American focus in the war, not Japan. Prior to the war both the US military and FDR agreed it was likely we would be at war with either Germany or Japan or a combination of both. They viewed Germany as the greater threat and decided that in the event of a two-front war, 85% of our resources would be devoted to defeating Germany. It was recognized from the start that the war with Japan would only end after the war with Germany.
Germany’s declaration of war on America on December 11, 1941 released FDR and the military from a dilemma since they believed a war against Japan only to which America was devoting all its resources would be a strategic mistake.
What do American citizens of Japanese ancestry have to do with the rape of Nanking?
How so?
I hadn’t realized that the Japanese-American citizens that were interred, or even those that weren’t citizens that were interred took part in the Rape of Nanking.
Or in the mouths of those individuals that weren’t quoted.
Under normal circumstances they may be justified, however the laws at the time prevented the Japanese from becoming citizens. How many of those enemy aliens were ready to pledge their loyalty to the United States we will never know.
It is curious the disparate treatment German and Italian nationals received during the same period, German enemy aliens and German US citizens carried out operations on US soil, uboats were off our coast and yet we didn’t inter German enemy aliens in the same way.
Hi!
And I never said that was the case. Stop being silly.
The German and Italian immigrants in the US were recognized as being different because there were lots of Germans and Italian immigrants who were opposed to their home country’s governments and actively so. There were German Jews. There were German actors in Hollywood making anti-Nazi movies. The Manhattan Project would never have worked without German and Hungarian (also a belligerent) immigrants.
The Japanese at the time were seen as homogenous. Unfortunate, but true. If there was wide understanding of why the bulk of Japanese were here – the Meiji restoration and the losing side of the civil war fleeing to Hawaii – then there need not have been so much worry. There was every reason to worry about Japanese from Peru and Brazil – they were and remained loyal for the most part. But that was not an understanding of the time. And I find the presentism of this entire argument illogical.
This is quite true. Half my family immigrated from Germany to the Midwest during the Depression, and we still have a few curios from that time (Nazi propaganda published as “philosophical pamphlets from the Homeland” which some people liked to share with their German-speaking friends). Heck, there were Nazi summer camps within driving distance of my grandparents’ home!
What ended up happening in the greater Chicago area, at least, is that German-immigrant societies split into two warring camps, the pro-Nazi camp, which tended to be favored by less-educated, lower-class (but not poorer — during the Depression everyone was poor) German immigrants, who found the populism attractive, and the hyper-patriotic camp, which distanced itself as much as possible from the pro-Nazi camp, heavily emphasizing American patriotism and idealism.
My family fell into the latter camp (this is how they ended up conservative and Republican, incidentally), and I know of two members who worked for the US military on classified projects during WWII, so I guess the patriotism was convincing. Every now and then, though, when I hear old family stories, I hear of an acquaintance or friend-of-a-friend who, from the sound of it, might have been an American Nazi. Oh, it would be rude to call ’em that, but it sure would explain some stuff.
“I hate Illinois Nazis.”
It might be indelicate to ask why it was easier to see the Japanese as more homogeneous. Now perhaps the answer is just that there wasn’t wider understanding of why the bulk of Japanese immigrants were here, or perhaps the answer is that Japanese immigrant societies didn’t publicize displays of American hyper-patriotism the way, say, the German-American societies my ancestors joined did. But it could also be because, well, they looked different, “more foreign” and “harder to tell apart”. Others have mentioned other, pre-existing prejudices, as well as naked conflicts of interest (for example, over farmland) which may have contributed, too.
I don’t think it’s unduly harsh to point out less-than-savory reasons for seeing Japanese immigrants as a homogeneous “foreign” element. Pointing out those reasons isn’t saying, oh, we moderns are so much better than they were, or saying we can’t understand why things happened the way they did. Empathizing with the mindset of an era is important for historical understanding, but it needn’t mean approving all of what happened. Not judging people too harshly after the fact isn’t inconsistent with also believing them to have been wrong.
We need to take down all the statues of Hugo Black. Assuming there are any statues of Hugo Black.
Copying my comment from (the other) thread because it’s equally relevant here:
I saw a bust of Hugo Black once. It may qualify as a “statue”. And the statues can stay exactly where they are.
Black, among other things, was an opponent of substantive due process. Since I believe in substantive due process, narrowly defined, I do rather hold that against Black, especially since he used his opposition to prop up elements of the New Deal which should have been ruled unconstitutional. If images of Black were removed, how could I scowl at him for that?
Wouldn’t sheer numbers factor in? As of the 2000 Census:
Even if the will to intern Germans prevailed, such a policy would not have been logistically feasible.
But I agree that there was ample reason to treat Germans similarly. The common sinking of American merchant vessels was undoubtedly angering and unsettling. Blackouts were mandatory along the coasts to hinder U-boat attacks, so they couldn’t be ignored by many civilians. And U-boats came darn close to landing a few times. Add Nazi sympathizers to the mix and there was good reason to worry about saboteurs.
Hugo, girl!
Abwehr trained saboteurs were landed on Long Island from a U Boat.
The Japanese were concentrated in a few areas. Can you say that of Italians and Germans? Non-Italians and non-Germans to a large degree knew someone who was German or Italian by ancestry. That just wasn’t true of Japanese. Plus the language barrier. How many non-Japanese spoke Japanese in American in 1941? There aren’t that many today. Japanese were seen as “other” because in 1941 America they were “other”. Race certainly was a part of it. But only a part.
The Japanese were isolated. By geography. By culture and language.
Why does that make it okay to throw American Citizens into gulags?
Gulags? You are clueless.
Do you have an argument or are you just going to make personal attacks?
Ok so Gulags might be somewhat of an exaggeration. However, these citizens were ripped from their homes and lives. They lost their jobs, their homes, their pets and most of their personal property. They were placed in a prison camp and often forced to work. Unlike a gulag they did get paid for the work but not much.
Let’s not pretend, just because it was not exactly a gulag, that this was some pleasant or relaxing day spa with all the amenities of home provided by the government. This was a prison camp with sub standard living conditions, poor medical treatments and bad food. These people committed no crime. Normally we would be horrified that a person who committed no crime could be imprisoned for years. A just Democracy does not arrest people (including children) for not committing a crime. Nor does it make simply existing legally in the country, while following all laws, an offense punishable by years in a prison camp.