Task
Use details from the sources below to support your ideas.
Please remember:
During World War II, the United States government put all persons of Japanese ancestry into internment camps.
What were the reasons Americans had for interning the Japanese? Were these good reasons? |
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A. |
The excerpt and photos below come from a Life Magazine article from December 22, 1941, a few weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. The article title is "How To Tell Japs From the Chinese"
"In the first discharge of emotions touched off by the Japanese assaults on their nation, US citizens have been demonstrating a distressing ignorance on the delicate question of how to tell a Chinese from a Jap. Innocent victims in cities all over the country are many of the 75,000 US Chinese, whose homeland is our staunch ally. So serious were the consequences threatened, that the Chinese consulates last week prepared to tag their nationals with identification buttons. To dispel some of this confusion, LIFE here adduces a rule-of-thumb from the anthropometric conformations that distinguish friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japs."
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C. |
The film below was produced by the Bureau of Motion Pictures of the Office of War Information. It is entitled "Japanese Relocation."
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D. |
The excerpt below was written by Supreme Court Justice Murphy, who disagreed with the decision of the Supreme Court to uphold the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1944 Korematsu v. United States case.
“This exclusion of `all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien,' from the Pacific Coast area on a plea of military necessity in the absence of martial law ought not to be approved. Such exclusion goes over `the very brink of constitutional power' and falls into the ugly abyss of racism.
…. Individuals must not be left impoverished of their constitutional rights on a plea of military necessity that has neither substance nor support..... Being an obvious racial discrimination, the order deprives all those within its scope of the equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. It further deprives these individuals of their constitutional rights to live and work where they will, to establish a home where they choose and to move about freely. In excommunicating them without benefit of hearings, this order also deprives them of all their constitutional rights to procedural due process. Yet no reasonable relation to an `immediate, imminent, and impending' public danger is evident to support this racial restriction which is one of the most sweeping and complete deprivations of constitutional rights in the history of this nation in the absence of martial law...” |
F. |
"That Damned Fence," an anonymous poem written by a person of Japanese descent, circulated at the Poston internment camp in Arizona.
They've sunk the posts deep into the ground
They've strung out wires all the way around. With machine gun nests just over there, And sentries and soldiers everywhere. We're trapped like rats in a wired cage, To fret and fume with impotent rage; Yonder whispers the lure of the night, But that DAMNED FENCE assails our sight. We seek the softness of the midnight air, But that DAMNED FENCE in the floodlight glare Awakens unrest in our nocturnal quest, And mockingly laughs with vicious jest. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, We feel terrible, lonesome, and blue: That DAMNED FENCE is driving us crazy, Destroying our youth and making us lazy. Imprisoned in here for a long, long time, We know we're punished—though we've committed no crime, Our thoughts are gloomy and enthusiasm damp, To be locked up in a concentration camp. Loyalty we know, and patriotism we feel, To sacrifice our utmost was our ideal, To fight for our country, and die, perhaps; But we're here because we happen to be Japs. We all love life, and our country best, Our misfortune to be here in the West, To keep us penned behind that DAMNED FENCE, Is someone's notion of NATIONAL DEFENSE! |