History of the United States II / Unit 12 USH2 1706 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Wartime Error or Racial Policy
The idea
How to understand the internment of Japanese Americans is the second contested judgement of this unit: a wartime error made in fear, or a racial policy with a long history behind it. The sources give the facts both readings must account for. Executive Order ninety sixty-six named no ethnic group, yet it fell on one. About one hundred twenty thousand people of Japanese ancestry were held, sixty-six percent of them born in the United States. The Yawp records that detentions under the Alien Enemy Act had been meant to be for cause, and that the order then authorised removal from whole zones at the discretion of military commanders.
In practice
Japanese Americans losing their homes and jobs, while nearly thirty-three thousand Japanese Americans served in uniform and the four hundred forty-second Regimental Combat Team became the most decorated unit in American military history.
Where people slip
The anchor frames the policy as racial: it calls the removal the culmination of a cascade of racist assumptions that Pearl Harbor unleashed. The National Archives traces the history behind it: a California law of nineteen thirteen restricting land ownership to those eligible for citizenship, real estate agents confining Japanese Americans to enclaves, economic competition and long-standing anti-Asian racism, which the attack turned into disaster. Unit two's Chinese Exclusion Act belongs to the same history. Two misreadings sit on either side. The first treats internment as a regrettable response to real danger; the removal of citizens without the cause that earlier detentions required contradicts that. The second treats it as a sudden break with the nation's past; the National Archives' history contradicts that. The course's position follows the sources: wartime fear was the occasion, and the anchor names racial prejudice as the cause.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States II