Posted on 04/27/2014 5:19:36 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Not exactly. About 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced to leave the western states. Roughly 1/3 of these were Japanese citizens, 1/3 American adults, and 1/3 children, most of whom were also American citizens.
10 to 20% of those evacuated were allowed to get jobs and live outside the camps, though not to return to the West.
It's little known that around 12,000 Germans were also interned and somewhere around 2,000 Italians.
IOW, the scope of internment was a great deal less than commonly believed.
Startled me.
In Roosevelt's partial defense, it is not unreasonable or unconstitutional for the government to take over a great deal of coordination of the nation's economic and business activity during wartime.
Civilians are subject to rationing, and men are drafted and sent into harm's way against their will. Under such circumstances, businessmen should not expect that they are allowed to operate their businesses if they see fit even if it impacts the war effort negatively. Whether that was actually the situation in this case is another question, of course.
The Constitution allows for suspension of normal civil liberties "when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." The Founders themselves, prior to the Constitution, of course, did a LOT of violation of civil rights of Loyalists and people thought to be such.
The regimentation of business in WWII was actually a good bit less than in WWI, for which there was a good deal less justification.
You might find interesting some post-war accounts by Japanese veterans of New Guinea that your fathers may have been near.
Around 1987, one Japanese veteran dealing with what now might be called PTSD made a documentary titled The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On. Throughout the documentary he seeks out and confronts (sometimes violently) other surviving veterans and gets some to talk about their cannibalism while in New Guinea.
White meat means American and Australian, black meat means natives. By the end of the war, they were eating each other with Japanese officers apparently having the lowest ranking Japanese soldiers executed and served up as rations.
The documentary is in Japanese with English subtitles. You can turn on the subtitles by clicking the CC button in the lower right of the viewer. It's also long so, you might want to start at the one hour mark (1:00:00) to quickly get to the "meat" of it.
That was a shocker to me!
I also noted that Henry Morganthau, Jr. celebrating his 88th birthday was born in 1856! A lot of monumental events changes seen in that life.
When labor unions have the military to be their thugs for them, then we are in very perilous times. Did the government run Monkey Ward after that, too, or did they force the executives who knew what they were doing to come back in and do their jobs, after taking their decision making powers away from them?
“The government seized Montgomery Wards during WWII? I didn’t realize that.”
The M Ward workers were on strike. Management did not want collective bargaining and unions, at all. Roosevelt ordered Ward to unionize and stop the strike because the strike was interfering with war supplies.
Management said NO! So Roosevelt signed an EO to seize all MW properties under some War Powers authority, and he used troops to implement that. Truman reversed this after the war.
Yeah, not so great a moment, but it is something you’d expect FDR to do to advance unions and collectivism.
See 46.
I agree, the association of labor unions with big government is, may one say, rather Fascist.
I read a story a long time ago and have no source for it. Harry Truman told striking mine workers that if they didn’t return to work that he’d nationalize the coal mines they were striknig against, draft the miners into the army and send then back to mine coal as U.S. Army troops at U.S. Army pay. Don’t know if he was blowing smoke or not, evidently the miners didn’t either because they returned to work.
Well, Patton keeps things interesting. The movie showed Patton leaving the Russians out of his “world rulership” comments, unless that was a different speech.
La Guardia was a Republican, a liberal one, but a Republican. He defeated the Tammany Hall Democratic machine.
Henry Sr. was the old guy celebrating his birthday. Henry Jr. was Secretary of the Treasury. Junior’s son Robert was a long-serving and outstanding D.A. for Manhattan (New York County). Quite a tradition of service in that family.
The NYT was right there with him cheer leading then too.
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