Centerfield

After Pearl Harbor he locked all the Japanese American citizens up, while letting the German Americans roam free.

Wrong. Both Italian-Americans and German-Americans were also interned and travel-restricted and such during WW2. Just as German-Americans were interned during WW1.

It wasn't "all" JA's by any means either. The key was living in "military exclusion zones." Almost a third of the US was declared to be in an MEZ. The west coast Japanese-Americans were hit hardest when the entire west coast was declared an MEZ. Almost all the interned JA's were West Coasters. In addition, US immigration law of the time did not permit Asians to become naturalized citizens, only resident aliens. (Their children, of course, weren't subject to that and were citizens if born in the US.)

But many folks of all the respective ancestries were relocated or interned. Straight from memory, so take it with imprecision, but about 110K JA's and about 30K combined GA's and IA's were eventually interned. Many many more were relocated away from the coasts, or curfewed and restricted in their movements.

IA restrictions were lifted after the invasion of Italy in 1943. I don't know about the GA's, and the JA's remained under MEZ exclusion and internment orders until VJ Day.

Thanks! Fixed it.

Interesting side note: Gramma was German, but never mentioned the possibly of internment.

I guess that out in the boondocks nobody knew or cared. Yet I know that at least two of her sons fought in WWII. I will have to ask dad whether the feds ever payed her a visit or questioned her loyalty.

I think you're right about the death of Huey Long changing history, BTW, though I don't know that I'd have ever called him a "softy." I'm glad we didn't find out. :-)

We are a nation of almost 300 million people; on September 11th we lost about 3000 at the hands of 19. As traumatic an event as that was, that's not a lot of people.

I think you might be confusing resolve with fear. I don't know many people are afraid of terrorists. I know a large number (myself included) that are afraid of what happens to America itself if it doesn't stand up to these terrorists. Do you lock your door when you leave your house? Are you personally afraid of theives or is it more that you have resolved to take responsibility to protect your things?

WWII - and over 10 million deaths - most probably would have been averted if France would have identified the real danger posed by Adolf Hitler and posted a mere battalion of French troops in the Rhineland in early 1936. 10 million is, of course, a mere fraction of 200-odd billion. Some of us are truly afraid of the consequences of that particular flavor of math.

People stampede and get hysterical in times of crisis because that is their nature for the most part. The Media, whether the they intend it or not, feed off of crisis and negativity. Therefore, any time when have a "crisis" of any size or importance, the Media quickly jumps on it and hams it up because it gets people watching, listening and reading. People look for direction and orientattion and subconsciously (IMO) look for for marching orders and a sense of where everybody is headng so they can do the same.

The Japanese-Americans suffered the most in the U.S., both from the memory of Pearl Harbor and from anti-Asian racism. They couldn't just "blend in" as GA's and IA's could. But they weren't alone by any means, although as a class they took a harder hit.

We weren't the only ones who interned Japanese residents as "enemy aliens." Canada did as well, and were far more thorough, interning ALL of their Japanese-ancestry residents, 95% of whom were Canadian citizens. Conditions were much worse in the Canadian camps than in the American camps, which spent only about 1/3 as much per capita on food and shelter and such as the US did. They were so bad that people in wartime Japan sent food to the Japanese-Canadians via the Red Cross. Some of the JC's were not allowed to return to the coastal areas until 1949, four years after the war ended.

In America, many of the GA's and IA's who were "excluded" from the coasts simply went inland, and joined the ethnic communities of the Midwest and Plains. The Japanese didn't have large communities in the interior to flee to.

About 600,000 IA's (those who had not become citizens) were placed under travel and curfew restrictions, not allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes without police authorization, and many thousands were relocated and/or interned. 90% of San Francisco's fishing fleet was owned and run by Italians. Their boats were confiscated, and they were relocated inland.

The law used to intern "enemy aliens" remains in force today. Alien Enemy Act of 1798 (50 U.S.C 21-24). The executive order used to exclude people from "military exclusion zones" (even citizens) was Presidential Executive Order 9066, and amounted to martial law, giving the military great control over the MEZ's. It's always refered to as the "Japanese-American Internment Order" in the history books, but actually covered the entire range of relocations, exclusions, restrictions, curfews, and internments. (You won't find the words "Asian" or "Japanese" in it anywhere.)

This is one those "holes" in the (so-called) teaching of history nowadays that really annoys me. I doubt if you can find mention of the Euro-American internments and relocations in the public school textbooks of over half a dozen states, but can find the JA internments in all of them. Somewhat like Holocaust history, which focuses on the Nazi genocide of the European Jews, but usually only mentions in passing the other 4 to 5 million who died in the Nazi massacres and death camps. It's good that we remember some of them, but it would be better to remember all of them.

I really have to question the notion that WW I was a war that we had no business getting into. WW II and the Nazis has colored our view of the Wilhemine empire. Germany had some nasty plans for dominating Europe (albeit not like the Nazis) and especially eastern Europe. A German-dominated Europe, even if it wasn't Nazi would not have been good for the United States.

The traditional view of WW I that developed later was that it was simply a class of empires caused by the balance of power system and the arms buildup. However, I think more recent scholarship suggests that the original explanation was correct--it was Germany's fault. The Kaiser was spoiling for an excuse to expand both his overseas colonial empire and to dominate Europe. Our traditional foreign policy has been a lot like England's--prevent a single power from dominating Europe. Given that, I don't see how we could have refrained from entering WW I if the Allies were in serious danger of losing.

If you get past the obvious genocidal nature of the Nazis that made WW II look like more of a moral crusade, the situation interms of the international system really wasn't that much different than WW I.

My view of WWI is colored by John Keegan's "THE FIRST WORLD WAR", copyright 1998.

Specifically the description of how the communication systems (telegraphs) interacted with the general mobilization order (posted in the town square) and predetermined attack plans. If everyone is sitting around with loaded guns pointing at each other, can you really place blame the first guy who loses his nerve and fires.

Besides, by the time we entered the war all sides were pretty much exhausted. IMHO if the USA had stayed out, then the peace would have been more equitable.

Bob,

It wasn't clear at the time that the Germans were exhausted. It looked, in fact, as if they were about to win. Keegan's view was the traditional revisionist view about WW I and there is undoubtedly some truth to it. Certainly, the mobilization plans created a hair trigger that was inevitably going to be pulled. But whose fault was that? It was the Kaiser--a boob if there ever was one--whose policies scared the hell out of everyone else and helped precipitate the arms build up. That doesn't mean that Britain and France's policy of encircling German was necessarily correct, but I think that they had a right to be concerned about Germany.