What if F.D. Roosevelt was killed in february 15, 1933?

War would have broke out in any case. The Japanese were going to take British, Dutch, French, Chinese and American holdings in Asia/Western Pacific no matter who was sitting in the oval office. The timing and circumstances might have been different, but that Japanese expansion was going to happen. They built their navy and army for a generation just to make that happen.

One thing that might not have happened is that another president may not have locked up 200,000 American citizens in concentration camps. That act was (in my opinion) the worst thing that any president of the United States has ever done. Just the thought of that makes me ashamed. And I know... some other guy in those racist times might have done the same thing, but maybe not. There were good men in government who might well have been sitting in that chair when war broke out, men who may have thought civil rights were valid and that the Bill of Rights wasn't just toilet paper.

Sorry if that's off topic, but when I think of Roosevelt that atrocity comes to my mind first and foremost.

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I'm not so sure. Johnson (or Kennedy?) sent the National Guard to the south when idiots made threats against school integration with black kids. In the war we had plenty of overaged and partially disabled men guarding every damned factory, beach and water reservoir across the country. I had a Greek great uncle who was a pastry chef that was given a commission just to keep his ears open around Italians and Germans working in a Detroit Defense plant that tended to hang around his bakery (he spoke both languages and never overheard anything suspicious). We could have done the same for Japanese neighborhoods. And once the Nisei began forming into combat units, much of that suspicion disappeared anyway, and that would have been even more dramatic if our propaganda machines would have put more effort into profiling those Japanese combat units.

Roosevelt was why we term limited the presidency. That was a damned good amendment.

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It's a two-way street, FDR & the Republicans were responsible. Had it been a Republican President in office for 4 terms, you can bet that the Dems would have done the same.

The also shot themselves in the foot, because Ike could have easily had three terms and maybe four.

 

I've always felt that sending them to the camps ended up being more in the lines of "protective custody". Even locking them up could've been carried out better. Who knows how attitudes could've changed when the casualty lists start hitting the papers. My dad (he was 8 years old when Pearl Harbor occurred) told me of the time in Independence, Louisiana. The populace there was overwhelmingly Italian and English was not commonly spoken there except for the school age kids. One day several young Ities committed an armed robbery of a store and ended up being caught, whupped and strung up by a lynch mob in the middle of the town (not in Independence, Tangipahoa I believe - 100% rednecks). A huge crowd of people turned out, and military men home on leave in uniform took part as well. The local police stood back and didn't intervene. There was only one or two men and the mob was just too strong and very fired up. This was not just the result of this one incident, but the culmination of many many small situations that ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back how they say. Not saying that it was justified, just pointing out that the war weariness was showing up in small town America by this time (maybe '43 or so, Mussolini was still in power and the older Ities were still shooting their mouths off about how things were going to be different when "they" won the war. The Axis, not the Allies. So maybe locking up the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast averted some of this behavior. Possibly on a larger scale. Just my observation on the matter of course.

 

I just don't buy the "mebbe this was better, or mebbe that" arguments. The hard line is that we have a Constitution and Bill of Rights. All citizens (and all legal residents) have firm constitutional protections, and those were thrown in the toilet for these people. Remember, congress didn't pass a new amendment abolishing the Bill of Rights, they just ignored it. This isn't a Republican/Democrat issue. In fact, from 1935 to 1947 the democrats controlled both houses of congress. I suspect that made little difference, I don't know the vote but I suspect the republicans went along with this as strongly as the dems.
I would not object (very strongly) if Axis citizens and residents had been screened for ties to political groups in the old country. You know, if Werner Kleinschmidt was a member of a 'bund" group, or Haruto Suzuki is sending money back to some militant group in Japan, maybe they need to be monitored. But just locking people up (citizens or not) based on race violated every liberty we hold dear.

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That's a crock.

There were few issues in Hawaii, and they had tens of thousands more Japanese, of which most were never relocated - IIRC, only 2,000 or so were sent to the mainland or interned locally.

 

Opana ic correct, this was not America's finest hour and I dearly wish we had been more enlightened on the matter. That being said, I understand why it was done. We had major race riots in the Great War and again in WWII and these did not involve ethnic groups who attacked the US. I have to wonder that if we fully integrated the military during the war instead of a few years after, we as a nation would be further along in our race relations today. It is somewhat ironic that in a war that had such overt racial overtones by our enemies we did not take the chance to seize the moral high ground. Certainly we fought with one hand behind our backs. Yes there were segregated units, and some had very commendable records, this was not always the case and too often this was due to assigning the worst officers to these units. This only reinforced the feeling in small minds.

 

Sorry I was unaware Pearl Harbor was located in California. Who knew?

 

hindsight is 20/20..nothing racist about it...Germany didn't sneak attack the US/etc
..realistically--nothing racist about it ..realistically, you probably would've agreed with it, if you lived in 1941--especially if you lived in Hawaii or CA

 

..what a lot of people don't understand about the Constitution/law books/company or school GUIDEs/etc is that, that is what they are = GUIDEbooks--for guidance ...not written in stone.....you can't put everything into them = you have to interpret and analyse a lot of situations.....what do you think judges, juries, lawyers do??!! they interpret laws in many ways....
..the writers of the Constitution never thought about Japan sneak attacking the US

..if you lived in 1941, chances are, you would think otherwise

caps for emphasis only

 

Oddly, we didn't lock up British/Americans in the war of 1812, or Mexican/Americans in the Mexican-American war, Or Spanish/Americans in the Spanish-American war, or Germans/Austrian/Americans in WWI, or American Muslims in the current conflagrations.

And no, the Constitution and Bill of Rights is not some set of rough guidelines to be trashed whenever some jingoistic notion sways the populace into idiocy. The mass incarceration of Japanese/Americans should be viewed in the same way we view slavery today. A dark page of American history.

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Ummm...we did lock up/intern Germans during WW1, some 2,500 of them in four internment camps. 250,000 or so were forced to register as enemy aliens, and under 10,000 were investigated and arrested.

It's just not talked about much.

Edit - after a little digging Austrians were also interned. Also during the War of 1812, there were also forced relocations of British sibjects as well as deportations.

This can be traced back to the Aliens Friends Act of 1798 and the Enemy Aliens Act of the same year.