Civil Liberties
Civil Liberties in USA 1941-5
- Little of the intolerance and hysterical excesses of World War II
- 2 largest groups of enemy aliens: Italians – 700,000, Germans – 300,000
- Only a few hundred interred
- Most freely accepted in war industries and armed forces
- One major exception – forced removal and imprisonment of West Coast Japan
- Pearl Harbor greatly intensified an animosity long felt towards Japan in California and other Pacific coast states
- Rumours (unsubstantiated) of Japan –American sabotage and espionage
- It generated demands for government action against a supposed fifth column
- March 21st 1942 on advice of the army Franklin D Roosevelt removed 112,000 of Japan’s ancestry (71,000 were US citizens) from pacific coast to camps in interior
- All but a handful of the 150,000 Japanese in Hawaii (1/8 population) were unmolested
- Even liberals acquiesced in removal policy
- Supreme Court upheld it on grounds of military necessity
- After war 5,000 renounced US citizenship
- Slightly more returned to Japan
- Most remained loyal to US
- 12,000 Nisei (US born Japanese) served in forces
Civil Liberties Curbed
- Press censorship
- Father Coughlin’s “Social Justice” banned
- Dozens of other publications banned too
- Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act) did more than control aliens
- First peacetime sedition law since 1798
- It prohibited the advocacy or teaching of the forcible overthrow of government and membership of organisations deemed to be subversive
- 1942 several Nazi sympathisers were convicted under the Act
- Public opinion hostile to conscientious objectors
- US refused to grant unconditional exemption to genuine pacifists
- 43,000 men classified as conscientious objectors
- Most agreed to join army as non-combatants – usually in ambulance service
- 12,000 worked without pay in Civilian Public Service camps helping in medical research or conservation work
- 6,000 put in prison
Category
