This Day in History: FDR orders Japanese Americans into internment camps
history.com
history.com
The narrative I’ve heard is that the Japanese internment was done solely due to racism. Yet, in the first incident where Japanese American citizens are confronted with the option of helping Japan or helping America, both Japanese Americans side with Japan.
This incident is suppressed as it doesn’t fit with the narrative that the internment was done solely due to racism. The Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles has a fantastic display on the internment camps, and yet doesn’t once mention the Nihau incident. However the museum spends many sections explaining how the internment was driven due to racist farmers wanting Japanese American farm land.
The plane from the incident was donated to a museum, and it appears that the late Senator Inouye prevented it from being displayed.
Yes the internment was a horrible event in American history, and we should all try to keep it from happening again. But I’m disappointed when I repeatedly see evidence of the Niihau incident attempting to be erased from history because it doesn’t fit a narrative.
This is factually incorrect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_America...
So millions with German ancestry, detained some who were German nationals and only a few in internment camps.
>detained some who were German nationals and only a few in internment camps.
Not just detained some, Germans accounted for "36.1% of the total internments under the US Justice Department's Enemy Alien Control Program."
Nonetheless, you specifically stated: "the government didn't put German-Americans in concentration camps" which is absolutely, 100% a factually incorrect statement.
Take the L with grace after being proven wrong.
No it doesn't. Your point is ahistorical and factually incorrect.
>you are mentioning _German_ nationals detained
No I'm not. The first fucking sentence of the Wikipedia article reads "Internment of German resident aliens and German-American citizens"...
German-American CITIZENS.
Again, take the L and stop replyguying. You moved the goal posts and are hilariously still wrong. You're fractally wrong. Stop it.
If one takes a Japanese American citizen, who has committed no crime, and imprisons them based on their ethnicity, then their imprisonment is indeed "solely due to racism". You're presenting a false dichotomy and validating the justification for their imprisonment, for what?
Can you imagine if the story read, "Three Puerto Rican residents of German descent — two of which immigrated to Puerto Rico from Germany — helped a Nazi pilot after crash landing his plane. Therefore the US Government has decided to send all German Americans across the continental US to internment camps."?
This is just a bad take.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_America...
Historian Gordon Prange notes that "the rapidity with which the three resident Japanese went over to the pilot's cause" troubled the Hawaiians and added: "The more pessimistic among them cited the Niʻihau incident as proof that no one could trust any Japanese, even if an American citizen, not to go over to Japan if it appeared expedient."[16] Novelist William Hallstead argues that the Niʻihau incident influenced decisions leading to the Japanese American internment on the continental United States. According to Hallstead, the behavior of Shintani and the Haradas was included in an official Navy report dated January 26, 1942. The report's author Navy Lieutenant C. B. Baldwin wrote: "The fact that the two Niʻihau Japanese who had previously shown no anti-American tendencies went to the aid of the pilot when Japanese domination of the island seemed possible, indicate[s] [the] likelihood that Japanese residents previously believed loyal to the United States may aid Japan if further Japanese attacks appear successful."
So, this incident, according to historians, is cited as the reason for the internment. Yet, in museums dedicated to the Japanese American experience, this isn’t mentioned anywhere.
So, I’m not saying it justifies sending almost the entirety of the Japanese American to internment camps. Im saying that it was a major justification on sending almost the entirety of Japanese Americans to internment camps, and that information is being repressed in favor of a narrative that the internment was entirely due to racism.
[1] "The American public overwhelmingly approved of the Japanese-American internment measures and as a result, they were seldom opposed" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
While literally every other nations in the world had many years ago started to grow again.
FDR policy like the NRA were some of the most horrible and nonsensical invasion of the US economy ever attempted and were overwhelmingly counter productive.
What saved him early on was to get of the gold standard and that policy was already in planning from Hoover. After the US went of the gold standard the fast 3 month recovery in the history of the US happened (faster then even the 1921 recovery) but the from the moment the NRA was established growth was essentially halted.
He then made a massive about turn before WW2. He kicked most the idiot communist and fascist sympathizers from his service and hired people who actually knew what they were talking about economically speaking. He embraced business where before he was hostile.
And thankfully he did before he could return back to his pre-war policies leading to the economic miracles in the 50/60s.
That said, I think he made a number of very bad mistakes during the war. The internment of Japanese Americans being one of them.
The other being the unconditional totally over the top support for the Soviet Union. While help for to prevent Soviet collapse specially in 1941 maybe 1943 was warranted, the amount of power Soviet agents had in the US to command the US economy was frankly insane. And for that gigantic amount of effort almost no political concessions were asked for.
During the whole war in fact, did the Soviets hold captive Americans. Like literally in prison camps where many of them died. Not even did the US asked them to be freed.
Almost every possible military and industrial secret was opened up to the Soviets. The Soviets were not only able to order the most advanced chemicals like lubricants, explosives, but also whole production facilities and the tools to set them up.
The dominate position of the Soviets Post-WW2 is in not insignificant parts because of FDR unconditional support for them.
Even Churchill who had turned incredibly pro Soviet at times thought FDR was going to far to please Stalin. And Stalin didn't appreciate it at all and responded to every sign of good will with even more absurd demands. Its fair to say that Stalin played FDR like fiddle.
As a Caucasian American I’m ashamed of this, if it’s any consolation to Japanese Americans reading this.
And Allan Turing was incarcerated for being a homosexual.
The West was really at a low point in those times despite having won the war.
Yes, Americans were the "good guys" - but we weren't perfect.
We don't seem so far from them, conceptually or temporally.
There is a need for a serious sit-and-think about whether we are slouching our way toward Big Brother.
Would that the answer were a solid: "No, we are NOT creating Big Brother inadvertently."
So did the US. Not to try to excuse the German internment since it had its own problems, but it's really telling to compare what the British, Canadians and Americans did with ethnic Germans and Italians, compared to ethnic Japanese. Basically, it was mostly restricted to Germans and Italians with much closer actual ties; first generation immigrants, people with business connections, recent travel.
If the Americans, in particular, had taken the same approach to ethnic Germans and Italians that they did to ethnic Japanese - even one great-grandparent being proof of probable complicity with the enemy -- they would have had to detain roughly a quarter of all white Americans.
"German-language newspapers thrived as Germans became Indiana’s largest immigrant population by 1850. The Täglicher Telegraph und Tribüne, located near here, was among over 175 German-language newspapers published in Indiana, 1843-1920. These newspapers were important vehicles for readers in integrating and maintaining their cultural identities with American values. U.S. entry into WWI in 1917 created suspicion and antipathy toward German-American schools, churches, clubs and newspapers. Several of these Indiana newspapers, which had tried to present balanced war coverage, closed by 1918. This included the Täglicher Telegraph und Tribüne and papers in Berne, South Bend, Logansport, Evansville, and Terre Haute." https://events.in.gov/event/ihb-german-newspapers-demise
Before World War I, many German-Americans sent their children to schools that taught classes in German. In 1919, Indiana banned the teaching of German in schools: https://blog.history.in.gov/when-indiana-banned-the-german-l....
Before World War I, many streets and cities had German names. They were renamed during the war: "City and street names were changed from German-sounding designations to more Americanized ones. For example, East Germantown, Indiana, was renamed Pershing, Indiana. Ironically, Gen. John J. Pershing, supreme commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in France, came from a family that had changed its name from the German Pfoerschin." https://www.archives.gov/files/publications/prologue/2014/su...
Before World War I, you could drink beer in an beer garden in Indiana. The Indiana legislature ratified Prohibition in 1919 and two days later Nebraska did also which gave the amendment a three-fourths majority. Beer was outlawed.
So in 1917, a German-American could live in Indiana on a German named street in a German named city, get their news from a German language newspaper, send their child to a German language public school and drink beer in a beer garden on a Saturday afternoon, and by 1920, that was all over.
So yeah, I guess your great grandfather wasn't harassed any, but all of that was erased.
I mean to leading fascist in Italy was literally kicked out of the Socialist party. And not because his theory on Marxist exploitation was different.
It can certainty be argued that Hitler took the original NSDAP into a different direction then it would have gone otherwise. And Hitler himself certainty wasn't much thinker in terms of that history. He was much more a pure German nationalist and a race theorist.
But Hitler did deliberately build on that intellectual tradition.