The issue is combing reactionary and bigot. The internments were done the watch for Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal coalition - a left leaning political movement that laid the foundations of the modern American welfare state. There were definitely many blatant examples of bigotry in the policies of this movement but they were far from reactionary.

Social issues change over time but the also correlate with otherwise unrelated social/political/economic issues so trying to apply political issues from 80 years ago into the modern era is going to lead to some incongruous positions.

The modern American welfare state was also reactionary and bigoted towards black people and minorities. It’s important to recognize that much of the social programs explicitly excluded people of color and then used their understandeable lower quality of life due to lack of safety nets as a justification for further racism. Black people have bad neighborhoods, but of course black people didnt get government housing assistance to repair anything, because the federal programs for that explicitly excluded them.

The same FDR signed Executive Order 8802, forbidding ethnic and racial discrimination in the defense industry and federal government.

And yet the federal housing administration continued to explicitly respect racist homeowner association laws (btw homeowner associations were originally created to enshrine into bylaws that no black people may rent or purchase a property), continued to offer lesser or worse terms, or would broadly consider black people too risky, until congress passed the fair housing act of 1968, decades later.

It was nonetheless the first time the Federal Government prohibited racial/ethnic employment discrimination, and was the first civil rights executive order since Reconstruction.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson helped found the US and gave the world ideas of democracy. They also both owned slaves, imagined democracy as just for white male landowners, and under nearly any modern interpretation of the power dynamic Thomas Jefferson raped and fathered children with his slaves.

Maybe we should stop pretending these people who did some good things for the country were perfect gods. You can praise their accomplishments while still pointing out their flaws.

I think there is also a obsession with presentism and applying modern morals to the past. It is almost as if the point of historical study is to sit in judgement, opposed to understand how the world worked and changed.

Ask most people what the defining characteristics or deeds of Washington of Jefferson and they respond with the points above.

Are those the most impactful or noteworthy characteristics of those individuals? I don't think so. Perhaps they are interesting context for understanding their other deeds or the human condition, but certainly not the primary impact they had on history.

I've never met anybody who thinks FDR was a "perfect god". Abe or Washington, sure, but no such personality cult exists for FDR. So what are you even responding to? I have not criticized anybody for pointing out FDR's flaws (which were numerous and are widely acknowledged.)

The New Deal coalition included the entire Jim Crow southern democratic establishment.

They weren't the opposition, they were a key part of the coalition.

True. But the broader point is that transposing political positions from 100 years ago into modern politics is always verging on anachronism. In many ways the modern American welfare state and the modern Democratic Party both originate in the South through the populist movement and William Jennings Bryan. But consider: does William Jennings Bryan's opposition to teaching evolution in public schools have anything to do with agricultural subsidies or inflationary monetary policy? He very publicly advocated for all of these positions, but trying to bring this association into modern debates about interest rates or public education is a distraction.

It's interesting to consider the trajectory of ideas/movements.

Lots of professional-class liberals today consider "populism" to be a dirty word. Would they have been Hoover Republicans in that era?

Maybe. Hoover was a politically moderate, 54 year old, Stanford educated engineer from the West with a successful career in both industry, and civil service administration? Sounds like a great candidate on paper (honestly sounds better than the current front runners for 2024 at any rate). We often forget that he was actually very successful/effective in every previous post he had served in prior to the Great Depression. Hoover's reputation has been badly tarnished by his response to the Great Depression (which was totally inadequate to the magnitude of the task at hand). He could have and should have done a lot of things differently but instead he made ideologically motivated policy decisions that did not pan out. But to be fair, it is also not entirely his fault that he took office on the eve of the largest global economic catastrophe in history. He would probably be remembered much more fondly had he taken office in place of Harding or Coolidge 8 years prior.

Yeah I too wouldn't describe FDR's coalition as reactionary. As well that coalition was deeply weird. Included the Industrial Labor, Socialists, the old southern Aristocracy and Blacks.

Random observation. The US has almost forgot that before WWII that Pols, Italians, eastern Europeans, Irish, etc were distinct. And Asians were even farther out.

I know for a fact that my silent generation dad feels prejudice against Chinese. Even though he hates it's there. My grandmother was an antisemite though oddly not prejudiced against Mexicans or blacks. That whole family was salt of the earth. And half were unreformed bigots as well.

People are weird. The past is not the present.

FDR was the president who had the Japanese Americans removed to concentration camps. He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation.

More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots. Which is not to say they weren't wrong.

What they did is the literal definition of bigotry. They rounded up as many Japanese-Americans as they could and put them in prisons under heavy guard without any cause other than other people that look like them attacked a military base.

It was objectively wrong then, and it is wrong through all of time.

They were not fucking immigrants! These were people who had lived in the USA their whole lives, with several generations of American citizens in these families. Anyone arguing Japanese internment was just for securing America is the same type of person who would round up trans people or musings Muslims today the same way.

You don't magically stop being an immigrant after a few years. Often it takes several generations to integrate. And particularly so if you form cultural enclaves and remain attached to your country of origin, as tends to be the case with the Japanese.

I believe they actually rounded them up to steal their farms in California. Japanese farms were the most productive back then, and they held almost all the best farms. During the war, they had their land and things stolen by politically connected neighbors.

http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/harvest.html#:~:text=The%20Wor....

>other than other people that look like them

You yourself are describing the people rounded up as Japanese (yes, with a qualifier). They were people more likely to have loyalty to an enemy state, weren't they? It was certainly a blunt tool; and not an issue I've looked at in detail; but do you expect FDR to have done nothing?

Interesting for me to consider whether UK was right to round up Germans for WWII, rather difficult when that includes the Royal Family, but they did imprison something like 10% of "Germans" living in the UK (I don't know if they were British, just visiting, naturalised, or what).

Is it ok to imprison people without cause? No, the answer you are looking for is no.

Right, that got us a long way. Is it OK to have less than 100% certainty before you detain someone? Would you detain one innocent person if it meant keeping 1000 murderers off the street?

If either of those is "yes" then we're just looking at where the line is.

Would you accept imprisonment if you knew it was keeping 1000 murderers off the street?

Do people who support Nazism deserve to get punched? Even if they're innocent of any crimes (a very oft heard sentiment from people who would otherwise say they value the rule of law)?

Nothing about war is OK, but sometimes we have to compromise on what we'd like to happen. I think it's interesting to try and be honest with oneself and ask where the line is.

Would I automatically lock up adults who described themselves as associated with an enemy country, when at war, probably not; but I wouldn't give them every freedom either. Indeed during times of war it is normal to curtail general freedoms. Would I consider it unjustifiable to lock up people who appear to be associated with an enemy country, also probably not. I guess I consider that sometimes it is acceptable, morally, to lock innocent people up ... no justice system could [barring future technology that can provide certainty on past events] ever lock anyone up without such a consideration.

I'm interested if you or others have anything to try and develop my thinking in this area. Thanks.

Wow, I don't think I've ever seen anyone dial a strawman argument to 11 quite like you just did. Nobody was talking about FDR until you hamfistedly brought him up in a reply to a post (indirectly) lamenting a period of history rife with racism. Prejudice was rampant all across the "political spectrum", but prevalence is not a measure of justice or humanity. Nor does any individual's competency in one area somehow ameliorate their flaws in other areas.

It’s ok to praise FDR for the New Deal and also recognise that sending all Japanese people (and not German or Italian people) to internment camps was a bigoted, evil thing to do.

What do you want? For us to say “ah well, that’s just how it was back in the day”? You’re the one incapable of nuance if you want to put everything FDR did into one bucket or the other.

People can praise or criticize FDR for whatever they like. I'm objecting to the name-calling, not the idea that the internment of Japanese Americans was wrong.

Why? Are your sensibilities so delicate that calling a spade a spade is offensive to you?

No, the idea that almost everyone born before 1980 was an evil bigot is stupid

Then it's a good thing no one said that.

You should probably take a break from the internet. There's enough things to get offended about. There's really no reason to start making up new ones.

If you extend your "calling a spade a spade" logic, it will to lead to some ridiculous premise like "everyone born before x year was an evil bigot" where x keeps marching forward year after year.

Where did OP call "everyone born before 1980 ... an evil bigot"? Where did OP single out FDR as a reactionary bigot? Yes, it was done under his watch, but there were, in point of fact, plenty of genuinely reactionary bigots who supported it at the time. You're lambasting OP for the words you've put into their mouth. Stop.

Not everyone. Just the guy who ordered Japanese Americans be sent to internment camps.

Would you not describe the internment of Japanese Americans as reactionary or as bigotry? Which label do you actually disagree with? OP wasn't just mindlessly adding invectives; they used those words for a reason.

You know what's also bigoted and evil? Kamikazi-ing planes into ships + bombing Pearl Harbor.

Japan probably should have thought about possible consequences before doing that.

Setting aside the historical veracity of this nonsense, are you suggesting that it was appropriate for US citizens to pay the price of that decision because of their ancestry? What is wrong with you?

if you know what a kamikazi is, then you know the ones who did that were not the ones sent to the camps. could you say anything more stupid? lol

I would say Bataan and PoW camps in SEAsia as well as treatment of mainland Chinese, Korean laborers, etc., are "better" examples of Japanese bigotry and cruelty --at the time. Japan has come a long way since then.

1 in 3 PoWs in Japanese labor camps would die during WWII: https://www.historyonthenet.com/world-war-two-japanese-pow-c...

> You know what's also bigoted and evil? Kamikazi-ing planes into Pearl Harbor.

Yeah, that didn't happen. Japan didn't start using kamikaze attacks until the end of the war, as an act of desperation. It wasn't just, like, a thing they did.

Japanese, Italians and Germans were declared Enemy Aliens: https://www.thc.texas.gov/preserve/projects-and-programs/mil...

I believe that the only reason most German-Americans were not interned is because they were too large a portion of the population to intern without seriously negatively effecting the war effort.

My evidence for this belief is the fact that Japanese-Americans represented a third of people living in Hawaii, more than 150k of them, yet in Hawaii only ~1800 Japanese-Americans were interned. About 1%. This, despite the fact that Hawaii was closer to the war than the rest of America, and despite the fact that the Niihau incident occurred in Hawaii. Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical, so in Hawaii they had to exercise much more discretion.

Furthermore, some people believe that Executive Order 8802, which forbade ethnic and racial discrimination in defense industries, was intended more to prevent discrimination against German-Americans and Italian-Americans than against African-Americans. Supposing that is true, it evidences the perception of FDR's administration that discrimination against German-Americans, despite their skin color, was a plausible scenario and would harm the war effort if permitted.

Further evidence for the plausibility of ethnic discrimination against Germans, despite their skin color, is easy to find during WWI. Across America and the UK, German families (including the Royal Family..) changed their names to conceal their German origins. Schools stop teaching German, businesses were renamed, sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage" (freedom fries, anyone?) The Red Cross even forbade people with German last names from joining.

tl;dr: The federal government recognized the potential appetite for discrimination against German-Americans, but forbade this because German-Americans were a very large portion of the population and excluding them would harm the war effort. At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population.

> Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical

> At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population.

Hawaii, not a US state at the time, was largely occupied by the US military prior to Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor its residents were subject to martial law and their civil rights were suspended. The situation there was not analogous to the situation on the mainland, so I wouldn't use it to draw any conclusions.

> the only reason

Your thesis isn't wildly off-base, but how often is anything done by humans done for one single, solitary reason?

> Hawaii, not a US state at the time, was largely occupied by the US military prior to Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor its residents were subject to martial law and their civil rights were suspended. The situation there was not analogous to the situation on the mainland, so I wouldn't use it to draw any conclusions.

This isn't the reason relatively few Japanese-Americans were interned in Hawaii. Compare it to Alaska. Like Hawaii, Alaska was an incorporated US territory. Japanese-Americans were ordered out of Alaska or interned.

The reason general internment didn't happen in Hawaii is because:

> "The powerful businessmen of Hawaii concluded that the imprisonment of such a large proportion of the islands' population would adversely affect the economic prosperity of the territory.[74] The Japanese represented "over 90 percent of the carpenters, nearly all of the transportation workers, and a significant portion of the agricultural laborers" on the islands.[74] General Delos Carleton Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, also argued that Japanese labor was "'absolutely essential' for rebuilding the defenses destroyed at Pearl Harbor."[74] Recognizing the Japanese-American community's contribution to the affluence of the Hawaiian economy, General Emmons fought against the incarceration of the Japanese Americans and had the support of most of the businessmen of Hawaii.[74]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

Japanese-Americans were a third of Hawaii's population, so interning them all would have been a disaster for Hawaii's economy and harmful to the war effort. That's why it didn't happen in Hawaii. German-Americans, unlike Japanese Americans, were a very large portion of the population in all states and territories, not just Hawaii. The needs of economy and war obviously wouldn't tolerate the internment of all German-Americans, so it didn't happen.

If you think general internment of German-Americans would have been implausible regardless of population size, because the Germans were white, you need to remember that perception of race has never been a rational matter. During WWI, Germans were racially 'othered' in the UK and US by assertions off Germans being "asiatic Huns" and similar nonsense. Nevermind that you couldn't visually distinguish an average German from an average Anglo, racial othering is obviously not bound to rationality. This inclination to racially other the enemy is only tempered by substantial ethnic overlap between the two warring parties. Where there is substantial ethnic overlaps, discrimination will be officially discouraged and resisted because it impairs the war effort (e.g. Executive Order 8802). Where there is little ethnic overlap, racial or ethnic discrimination often become convenient to the government and becomes officially sanctioned.

> This isn't the reason relatively few Japanese-Americans were interned in Hawaii. Compare it to Alaska. Like Hawaii, Alaska was an incorporated US territory. Japanese-Americans were ordered out of Alaska or interned.

What I was driving at, which sort of complements what you quoted, is: what would have been the rationale of sending all those Hawaiian Japanese-Americans to an internment camp in the midwest to be watched over by military police when they were in Hawaii, under martial law, being watched over by military police?

General Delos Carleton Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, also argued that Japanese labor was "'absolutely essential' for rebuilding the defenses destroyed at Pearl Harbor."[74] Recognizing the Japanese-American community's contribution to the affluence of the Hawaiian economy, General Emmons fought against the incarceration of the Japanese Americans and had the support of most of the businessmen of Hawaii.

The interesting thing is, in a 100% wartime economy with full employment, depriving the economy of the labor of all those other Japanese-Americans in the continental United States was hurting the war effort as well. Not as acutely as tearing a big chunk out of the Hawaiian economy would, but still, not very rational.

> If you think general internment of German-Americans would have been implausible regardless of population size, because the Germans were white, you need to remember that perception of race has never been a rational matter.

I think internment of German-Americans would have been less likely, not implausible or impossible. The differences of Japanese-Americans in terms of dissimilar appearance and less shared culture would have greased the skids of racism, as it were. And yes, it's fair enough to point out that it doesn't always work that way and sometimes really, really similar groups engage in ethnic othering.

You can recognize an action both being a product of its time and being objectively wrong.

I think a good lesson here is that wrongness is not a monopoly owned by just one political ideology.

FDR is an example of how a politician can be called a Socialist in the United States while also being extremely reactionary and push racist policies.

If nothing else, this goes to show how far the scale is tipped in favor of right wing ideas and policies in the states and still is. The fact Biden, a fairly conservative politician, can be called a "Communist" with a straight face is an indictment of the American education system.

The labels don't even mean anything after a while. You can actively be enforcing fascist policies and still be labeled a socialist due to a population wide inability to understand what words mean.

> He's a hero of the left and one of the presidents who would least likely be described as a "reactionary bigot" in any other situation.

those people have a pretty hypocritical and one-dimensional way of looking at history

> More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots.

but not me, I'm awesome