yet no germans or italians were mass interred.
the US ended up paying reparations for what FDR did.
The action of FDR justifies the recent action of President Trump. Just as FDR, President Trump is doing this for the cause of National Security.
And there is a big difference between preventing people trying to get Visas to the United States who might be terrorists versus just BLINDLY IMPRISIONING people based on race as FDR did.
Any you're saying that was a good thing?
OTOH, then California Attorney General Earl Warren pushed hard for it. He was the left's favorite appointment of Ike Eisenhower.
They also had a common religion from their origin, Shinto
I think the point here is that FDR is one of the gods of American Leftists and we should shame the Left at least as often as they shame us.
The Japanese were interned based on the ability to speak a language that the government didn't have enough monitors to police for espionage agents.
If we hadn't had enough German speakers, we would have interned the Germans too. Rightly so.
Right now we have all these idiots on the left asserting Islam is a race or Syrian is a race. Same nonsense.
And when a nation is struggling for survival, it should not be surprising that it does what has to be done. It is wholly inappropriate to look through 2017 lenses and wag a finger at the leadership at that time.
This is not helpful.
Bottom line, FDR got burned by the Japanese in Pearl.
Nobody on this board can say that the Japanese were a bigger spy risk than Germans. I used to play behind my home in STL in the woods in guard shacks for a Japanese internment camp. Yes they had them in other places in STL. Like Wildwood.
Ever pick apples in Eckerts Orchards here on a hayride? So did the Japanese in the 40s. But it was no hayride.
A Japanese spy was no risk of infiltrating McDonnell Douglas nearby making airplanes. They look different.
German people? Nearly everyone in St Louis has a little German blood, some a lot. The Japanese weren’t building airplanes for the Navy in st Louis. German descendants were.
My point: FR posters don’t need to stick up for FDR.
And where was the ACLU? Also remember the steamship St. Louis with Jewish refugees that was turned back; all perished in concentration camps.
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
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.
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 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