US Internment Camps

Of the approximately 110 or 112 thousand Japanese interned, about 62% were American citizens (Nisei) who, under the Constitution were entitled to due process. It should be kept in mind however that of that 62%, the bulk of them would have been under 21, and what would you do in this circumstance? Break up families and relocate the elders away from the coast, and leave the youth there? It has been reliably estimated that 90% of US citizens of Japanese descent (Nisei) were loyal Americans, and 75% of Japanese nationals (Issei) were also loyal to America. Mathematically still leaves something like 17,270 people of Japanese ancestry who were potential spies and espionage agents. Was this a group of sufficient size to cause problems on the West Coast? I would think so, especially if they were mixed in with the loyal Japanese population. Before Pearl Harbor was attacked, General DeWit attempted to get the Japanese-Americans to voluntarily move inland from the coast, and a few thousand actually did so, DeWit (pre Dec ’41) also believed that wholesale exclusion of the Issei and Nissei was un-necessary and could be resolved by individual interviews. Events caught up with his plans, and he then supervised the mass relocation of Japanese-Americans from both coast. The great bulk of course were in the west.

As to the personal property of the Japanese-Americans, in fact during the relocation/internment process a great number of precautions were taken to protect the property of those forced to move away from the coast. Especially in California where the Issei (born in Japan) generation was forbidden by law from owning real-estate or becoming American citizens. They could own property on the west coast in Oregon, Washington, and other states. They were also banned from citizenship all through America at the time.


Many in California were taken first to areas like Santa Anita Racetrack for the purpose of getting them all in one central spot, then returned to their homes with escorts in small groups so that the personal possessions of Japanese-Americans could be indexed and warehoused, and the owners issued receipts. Unfortunately for the Japanese-Americans, many of them misplaced or lost the receipts. Items requested would be shipped to the camps free of charge if they were allowed in the camps themselves, i.e. not "contraband".


In spite of these precautions, many families still suffered heavy losses as a result of the internment. A key contributor to their losses was California's own; "Alien Land Act", which prohibited non-citizens from owning property in that state. As a result, many of the Japanese American farmers were actually tenant farmers and lost their rights to those farm lands. Second generation Japanese-Americans or Nisei could own land/real estate even in California. That the process was ill-planned and executed cannot be denied, and it included many people who were victims of racial animosity and others who were denied their constitutional rights. The fact that it was thought necessary to complete the process rapidly probably accounts for many of the wrongs.

Of the 110-112,000 Japanese evacuees, 15,000 were immediately able to relocate elsewhere on their own. Another 35,000 who did enter the relocation centers eventually left and resettled in other parts of the country as employment or college opportunities arose during the war years. I believe that slightly over 6,000 young Nisei went to college in the mid-west universities at US government expense. In some instances, Japanese living outside the exclusionary zone sought and received admittance to these centers as they were excluded from rationing.


To compensate the property and other losses, the U.S. Congress on July 2, 1948 passed the "American Japanese Claims Act ", stated that all claims for war losses not presented within 18 months "shall be forever barred". Approximately $147 million in claims are submitted, 26,568 settlements to family groups totaling more than $38 million were disbursed in the end. The lost receipts surely came into play here as without a "proof" of loss or which items were lost, they wouldn’t be reimbursed/compensated.


Finally understanding that in some cases these laws and acts were rather "limited" in their fairness, Besides the 1948 act for claims, other laws were passed to reimburse the Japanese/Americans:


1951: PL 82-116
1952: PL 82-545
1956: PL 84-673
1960: PL 86-782


This settled the matter (for a while). However, a movement beginning in the mid-1960s, focused on condemning America as a racist society, pushed to reopen the issue and gain government apologies and further reparations. So in 1972:


PL 92-603 - Social Security adjustment was passed for Japanese/Americans.


The movement's first real publicity success was in 1976, when President Gerald Ford proclaimed that the evacuation was "wrong". And under President Carter, in 1978:


PL 95-382 - a second Social Security adjustment was passed.


Then in 1980, again under Carter, a commission was established by Congress to study their matter. The commission's refusal to address non-Japanese interment/relocation was questioned however (Italian or German-American). So it wasn't until February 24, 1983, that they issued a report entitled "Personal Justice Denied". And out of that came the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.


President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which provided redress of $20,000 for each surviving detainee, totaling $1.2 billion dollars. Despite congressional cries to individually determine worth, this was a straight tax-free pay-out, and included about 3,500 Japanese who had renounced their citizenship during the war and asked to be returned to Japan. It also applied to hundreds of persons who live in Japan today and have virtually no connection to the United States.


Finally on September 27 1992: PL 102-371 (H.R. 4551) the Amendment of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was passed, and an additional $400 million in benefits was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, who also issued another formal apology from the U.S. government.


Don’t get me wrong here, the treatment of the Japanese-Americans was and is an embarrassing episode in our national memory. But it wasn’t as "heartless/thoughtless" as some would like to portray either.

 

The Wagner-Rogers Bill died in the Immigration and Naturalization Committee - it did not even have enough support in the congressional committee to be put up for a vote before the full House & Senate. So it is rather partisan to specifically point to FDR as "killing" the bill. Further, to placate charges of "favoritism" & in a vain effort to gather more support, it was to have been three Jewish German children for every two non-Jewish German children - so, it would not be 20,000 Jewish children, but 12,000 Jewish children & 8,000 non-Jewish children. Finally, what really "killed" this bill, was the amendment to the Bill that the 20,000 children were to be charged against the German immigration quota, rather than being kept separate from the German immigration quota. With the addition of this amendment, Senator Wagner & Representative Rogers no longer supported the bill, and then proceeded to withdraw it.

 

As to the Evian Conference. Madagascar had been proposed as a place for sending the Jews before the Conference even began. I believe that Poland was the first nation to consider sending their Jewish population there beginning around 1937, however negotiations with France never amounted to much, and quickly broke down.

Also, FDR proposed Ethiopia and Kenya - not Madagascar - to be the new Jewish "homeland." However, by mid-1939, Sylvia Pankhurst had convinced FDR that this plan woud be a failure because the Ethiopian resistance would massacre any refugees that set foot in that country.

 

Sorry, need to correct you there-

"The Polish historian Władysław Konopczyński has suggested the first concentration camps were created in Poland in the 18th century, during the Bar Confederation rebellion, when the Russian Empire established three concentration camps for Polish rebel captives awaiting deportation to Siberia.
The earliest of these camps may have been those set up in the United States for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s; however, the term originated in the reconcentrados (reconcentration camps) set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–1878) and by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902).
The English term "concentration camp" was used more widely during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), when the British operated such camps in South Africa for interning Boers. They built a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, the British sent 25,630 overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children.
The Germans used concentration camps in German South-West Africa during the Herero and Namaqua Genocide between 1904 and 1907. The Italians used concentration camps in Libya during the colonisation between 1929 and 1933."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment#Earliest_usage_and_origins_of_the_term

And also W. Everdell in The First Moderns; Profiles in the origins of twentieth Century Thought (Chicago. Chicago University Press. 1997) traced their origins to Spanish Cuba in 1869; they were used to separate civilians from rebels. Anyone not in a camp could be assumed to be a rebel. America copied these in the Philippines in the Philippine-American War. It's a common misconception that the British invented them.

 

Well done Gordon, excellent post.

 

History is full of myths...Some of us have argued the myth on Britain establishing the first camps for a long time. Unfortunately facts don't always overcome peoples wishes to demean. As with American...and British and Commonwealth camps..What would anyone have us do with perceived enemy aliens in war time? We all have skeletons, but turning them into a hammer to bash on other matters is not always a good thing to do. KB you did the same recently in a Jewish ship off Turkey that sank with horrendous loss of life. As I pointed out to you at the time, you missed out much of the associated facts of the matter and also the other incidences which you chose not to either research or post. You can not get away with this sort of stuff. Selected sources are not sources if you do not publish both sides of the story.

 

Oh, I'm sure concentration camps in one form or another have been around for a long, long time under many different names and in many places. Really, I'm speaking of the modern usage in the last 100 or so years. And I don't think the British use in the Boer war was quite the same thing because frankly, they were dealing with a foreign and disaffected population. The US policy is far more pernicious because we were locking up our own citizens.

I'm proud of my country, and particularly proud of its involvement in WWII. Yet, there are dark chapters which should not be ignored. Roosevelt was not a saint.

 

Sounds justs like Lincolm to me.