Posted on 01/31/2017 5:11:01 AM PST by topher
On a Side Note:
This happened with mainly Jews from ‘44 to ‘45 also due to WWII. Some ended up in Oswego, NY, located on Lake Ontario north of Syracuse.
If I remember they would bring them in by boat, up the St. Lawrence River.
The video below mentioned how boatloads of Jews would go from state to state, country to country looking for a place of refuge.
One part of the video describes how one woman started to cry when she saw the bed she was supposed to sleep in. She was crying because she hadn’t seen bed sheets in 5 years.
Oswego was safe haven for nearly 1,000 refugees — mostly Jews.
(4 Min Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1eptVZhoCk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Ontario_Emergency_Refugee_Shelter
I don’t think FDR thought infants were a threat either. But I don’t attribute the internment of women and children to compassion. Just like his other programs were not really compassionate.
To me, the program reflected poorly on FDR.
I do know a considerable amount about both WWII and the Amerian Civil War. Have never read anything close to what you are claiming. Where in Ms. Wests book document claim 20,000 Americans rotted in the Soviet Union after WWII. Is she claiming that Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan were all part the Communist lead conspiracy to hide that act. It is also strange, American Southern authors, such as Douglas S. Freeman, Jubal Early, John B. Gordon, Alexander Stephens and even Jefferson Davis are silent to the claim that 10s of thousands of Southerners were killed during the Reconstruction era by Federal soldiers. Can you name a credible source?
Just as we did not learn until the Holomodor (10 million Ukranians killed by Stalin in 15 months) until 1989 —— still not in our common core kid’s text books by the way....
I’m not sure, but did FDR successfully hide the Holocaust through 1941 / 1942... or was it public knowledge in USA by then?
The Germans were clearly capable of crimes against humanity, but FDR did not treat them the same. Full disclaimer... my last name also has an eisen in it.
“Is she claiming that Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan were all part the Communist lead conspiracy to hide that act.”
Not a communist led conspiracy to hide the act.
I have read that the United States government concluded that the American people would not support a war with Russia that would claim many more than the 20,000 lives. Succeeding presidents were of course locked in and couldn’t do anything about it if they had known. Eisenhower may have been misled.
What sources does Ms. West cite to substantiate her claim that 20,000 Americans soldiers died in the Soviet Gulag after the end of WWII. I prefer to read my history from multiple sources. So far you cite only an English major, who is a columnist by trade,as the sole source of that claim. I find it odd that a man like Ronald Reagan, that despised the Soviet system and the Communist party, would sit in the White House for 8 years, listing everything he could think of as bad about the Soviet Union and not once mention the deaths of 20,000 American soldiers at the hands of the Reds.
Again cite a source for 10,000 Southerners killed during Reconstruction by Federal troops. And why has virtually every Southern Historian been silent for the last 150 years on a crime of that magnitude.
“What sources does Ms. West cite to substantiate her claim that 20,000 Americans soldiers died in the Soviet Gulag after the end of WWII. I prefer to read my history from multiple sources.”
Well, consider her one of your sources. There are others.
“So far you cite only an English major”
You or someone ask for a source. I gave one.
“I find it odd that a man like Ronald Reagan... not once mention the deaths of 20,000 American soldiers at the hands of the Reds.”
Reagan called them the evil empire. What more can words do?
“Again cite a source for 10,000 Southerners killed during Reconstruction by Federal troops.”
Do your own research.
“And why has virtually every Southern Historian been silent for the last 150 years on a crime of that magnitude.”
They haven’t been silent. Read more. You want find it in school textbooks, certainly. Nor anything about Lincoln that is not heroic, and he certainly was not heroic.
I agree with you on that. But my point is he rounded up US citizens and interned them with no due process. And he is still a hero for liberals.
The Japanese as a group had no interest in assimilating but in colonization.
Their children were sent back to Japan to be indoctrinated and they kept their loyalty to Japan and the Emperor.
We did the same to German and Italian citizens.
What Reagan did talk about - Freedom. Reagan called them the EVIL EMPIRE. But he didn’t dedicate his speeches to detailed Soviet historical crimes against humanity.
You are talking about Stalin, who lived through the early 1950’s.
Stalin did not close his concentration camps after WW2.
Now, I wasn’t in the Gulag to verify, so who knows. But I think historical evidence of Stalin’s wretched, murderous behavior causes me to believe the reports.
As recently as Bengazi, we didn’t rescue our own. It happens.
Stalin was a dirtbag, nothing would surprise me with him.
concur with you 100%
he is obviously a huge hero
Ms. West would have cited sources for her claims. Look in her book and write down the source, I will be glad to look it up. Give me the name of one book dealing with the American Civil War that states 10,000 Southern were killed during Reconstruction. one books title is all I ask, and so far you have refused. The number of books I have read about the American Civil War is in the hundreds, not a single one of them substantiates your claim. Just give me a title, I will find the book and read it.
These fears were justified. Over a seven day period in late December 1941, nine Japanese submarines operated along the U.S. west coast, attacking eight American merchant ships, sinking two and damaging two more, killing six US seamen.
Moreover, contrary to inherently implausible claims that Japanese Americans were uniformly loyal or that all the disloyal ones had been rounded up, highly secret US intelligence decrypts showed that numerous Japanese spy and sabotage rings were active after Pearl Harbor. All of them went out of business though due to the internment.
Thus the depiction of the Japanese internment as motivated by racism and excessive wartime fear is simply false. Many Germans and Italians were also interned, and the indisputable evidence from intelligence files of Japanese subversion has been publicly known for some time, with several books and monographs discussing it in detail. The preferred narrative of the Left persists though, being a slander against America that is too useful to let go of.
Inevitably, wartime emergency policies dictated by military necessity often have harsh and unfair consequences. For the great majority of loyal Japanese Americans, internment was cruel and virtually inexplicable in that there was no individualized determination and no opportunity to prove their loyalty and good citizenship. For the small number of the actively disloyal, internment was too kind. Unfortunately, neither then nor today is there a satisfactory way in an emergency to provide due process and make determinations of loyalty on a mass basis over a few weeks time.
As it happens, faced with a similar menace of jihadist violence rooted in our now large numbers of Muslims, we have found an enlightened alternative to their internment: a massive internal security state that has not just Muslims but all of us under near comprehensive electronic and computerized surveillance. I hope that we will not one day rue that we chose that route instead of interning Muslims of questionable loyalty.
I agree with most of what you said.
However,
FDR was left (more government).
I am on the right (less government).
What FDR did was a more government thing (left). I don’t think that being critical of him is “left”.
And I still don’t see how Japanese women and children need to be locked up, while 1000’s of German heritage airplane builders in MCD, Grumman, etc were free under FDR.
Japanese people just look so different.
I still think -— FDR got burned. FDR took it out on a race of people. Democrats are traditionally far more racist than Freepers. Don’t underestimate the ability of a democrat to be racist.
I never want to be considered an apologist for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but I ran across some interesting correlations in the histories I have read. Historians tell us FDR liked mystery, subterfuge, and indirect tactics for their own sake. His natural temperament embraced secret intelligence, and not even his closest associates penetrated his core being. FDR compartmentalized chief advisors such as Harry Hopkins, Henry Stimson, Henry Morgenthau, and their subordinates. They often operated without knowledge of each other’s actions, and often on the same assignment.
One great frustration for scholars is that FDR preferred talking and seldom committed anything to paper. Roosevelt forbade note taking in his presence and rarely recorded his discussions regardless of how significant the issue or important the participants. As the prospects for peace became ever more remote, the supreme secret of WW II resided within his heavily camouflaged interior; the atomic bomb.
The attack on Pearl Harbor and the grievous events following hard upon meant for FDR that the most devastating attack on United States territory during WW II now confronted the most vital secret of WW II. Against these unforeseen occurrences, Roosevelt had to weigh the agreement he had made with Churchill in August 1941 that the allies would stay on the defensive in the Pacific and defeat Germany first. Overall Germany was viewed as a much more formidable industrial and military power than Japan, but the agreement also took into account that an unimaginable catastrophe loomed in this war.
I maintain Roosevelt was consistently deliberate and pragmatic in his decisions, so his silence as defined by the absence of political actions contrary to internment had to align with an issue he considered more important. The one critical issue for him to consider in early 1942 in light of internment was the German atomic bomb program.
In the 1930’s as the dictatorships and democracies became more belligerent towards each other, there was still a significant exchange of commercial, industrial and scientific information. That exchange had promptly ended on September 1, 1939.
In its place, frightening evidence emerged concerning atomic research, which demanded evaluation. Germany had acquired Europe’s only uranium mine when subjecting Czechoslovakia. The Nazi’s had conquered Norway and placed the heavy-water plant at Rjukan under I.G. Farben’s control with the directive to vastly increase its output, which the cartel did by increasing its budget 1000%. Defeating France in June 1940 meant the Germans obtained control of Europe’s only cyclotron.
As Europe fell under Nazi and Fascist sway between 1933 through 1941 many members of the small fraternity concerned with atomic physics fled for the United States. These included Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segre, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Hans Bethe. Of those who stayed, the staunch German patriot and brilliant theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg was the most troubling. His brilliance was certified by award of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics. All these refugees believed that under pressure by government, Heisenberg could quickly discover the remaining insights needed to lead experimental physicists and engineers in directions enabling production of a bomb. By decree the German economy and those of occupied countries could then provide an elite team of technicians with any human and material resources they wished.
This urgency prompted Leo Szilard in 1939 to convince Albert Einstein to join him in sending a confidential letter to FDR warning that the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics had been taken over by the military, and that a nuclear chain reaction in uranium could lead to construction of a bomb of enormous power. Several sources emphasized that Germany at their departure was well on the way to developing the atomic bomb, and well ahead of the British and Americans. Fritz Reiche, who left Germany in March 1941 for a job at the New York New School for Social Research, carried a message from Fritz Houtermans that even a morally perplexed Heisenberg would be forced into a relentless commitment to build the bomb. The day before Pearl Harbor, Dr. Vannevar Bush, Dr. Lyman J. Briggs, Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, Dr. James B. Conant, and Dr. Arthur Compton met secretly with FDR to convince him of the possibility of an atomic bomb, and of the imperative that the United States must get there first.
However, this most secret information had to withstand the universal public astonishment and horror emerging from the Pearl Harbor attack. Never before had even two carriers for any country planned and/or coordinated an attack on a naval or land target. No inkling existed in any allied Naval operational and intelligence community of a capability beyond the 21 Fairey Swordfish bi-plane torpedo bombers from a single carrier that had attacked at night the Italian Navy at Taranto. American traffic analysis intelligence reasoned that the absence of communication both to and from meant the carriers were staying in home waters to initiate counter attacks. Such a blank condition occurred for tactical operations in February and July and the conclusion had proven correct.
Yet, for Pearl Harbor the Japanese had forged a strategic weapon of six carriers, escorts and auxiliaries for a coordinated attack by 360 planes in two waves on a Sunday morning. The attack was not only unprecedented, but unexpected because all preparations were conducted without recourse to the diplomatic Purple Code that U.S. codebreakers were often reading in substantial portions. The U.S. had no agents in Japan and the Imperial Japanese Navy excluded their own population from observing training for this rapidly developing and essentially oral doctrine.
The American public could not have been more bewildered and incensed by the attack. They then became panic stricken as early 1942 saw an unbroken string of defeats in the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The early determination disappeared not to repeat against the Japanese the unbridled prejudice against Americans of German origin in WW I. The climate began changing in January in California until the events noted above allowed the intensification of lingering social and economic prejudices. The Nisei and their parents were loudly stigmatized to the point that notable state elected officials including Governor Culbert L. Olson and Attorney General Earl Warren demanded their evacuation. Only Roosevelt’s new Attorney General Francis Biddle remained adamant against the internment authorized in February.
Did Roosevelt really allow himself to be overcome by events and to acquiesce casually to what was arguably the worst violation of civil liberties in this country’s history? When proclaiming Bill of Rights Day, the week after Pearl Harbor he said, “We Americans know that the determination of this generation of our people to preserve liberty is fixed and certain as the determination of those early generations of Americans to win it”. Notwithstanding the proclamation some historians say his silence demonstrates a lukewarm and/or disinterest in civil rights.
Shortly after the Bill of Rights proclamation he passed to cabinet members and regional politicians the decision for internment without any of the political maneuvers for which he was noted. However, FDR had convincing military and civilian intelligence that citizens of Japanese ancestry and Japanese aliens posed no wholesale threat inside this country. On the East Coast there was a different approach to civil liberties, as Americans of German extraction did not face blanket internment, but were managed by F.B.I. investigations and at least tenuous legal reasoning. The more probable and reasonable explanation for his silence instead becomes a hidden anxiety behind a purposeful, utilitarian, brutal calculus to ignore civil rights. The status of atomic research intelligence would have excited his penchant for secret information leading to a secret agenda.
The hysterical public alarm of early 1942 did subside, popular attitudes refocused on defeating all Axis enemies, and Roosevelt’s Germany first promise remained intact. Roosevelt and Churchill concentrated on first defeating the enemy, which threatened development of the atomic bomb.
Partial Bibliography:
Naval History: Pearl Harbor’s Overlooked Answer
http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2011-12/pearl-harbors-overlooked-answer
“And I Was There” by Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton
At Dawn We Slept by Gordon W. Prange
The Catcher was a Spy: Nicholas Dawidoff
Heisenberg’s War: Thomas Powers
Don’t You Know There’s a War On: Richard R. Lingeman
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom 1940-1945: James MacGregor Burns
Roosevelt’s Secret War: Joseph E. Persico
War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, by Walter Brian Cisco. Collected and written from old newspaper accounts. Difficult to read because of the way it is written and subject matter.
Also, Lincoln The Man, by Edgar Lee Masters. Masters certainly did not like Lincoln, but the collateral history is fascinating. And we think things are corrupt now. The book rocked too many boats to get wide circulation.
Thanks, I will dig these out and study them.
I analyze actions like that by asking myself if, with all the available information at the time, would I have done the same thing? I probably would have.
Lot of left-wing librarians.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.