“Nothing Could Be More Hitlerian:” Pacifist Denounces Japanese-American Internment
Caleb Foote, a pacifist and West Coast staff member for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), on this day denounced the developing plans to evacuate and intern all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast as “nothing could be more Hitlerian.”
In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, there had been no immediate panic about the Japanese-Americans posing any threat to U.S. national security. That changed suddenly in mid-January 1942, largely because of agitation from West Coast politicians, who embodied longstanding anti-Japanese American prejudice on the coast.
Foote’s comment was one of the few during the war to draw the obvious comparison between the government’s plan and Adolph Hitler’s Nazi policiest: The very idea of stereotyping an entire group on the basis of their race, assuming that all members of the group posed a threat, and confining them to concentration camps without a trace of due process.
Foote went on to a distinguished civil liberties career. As a pacifist, he refused to cooperate with the draft, and was convicted and sentenced to prison. He later became a law professor and, in the 1950s, wrote path-breaking articles on how the money bail system in America discriminated against the poor. His articles stirred interest in the problems with the American bail system and helped pave the way for the historic 1966 Bail Reform Act, signed on June 22, 1966.
Read: Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (2001)
Learn more about Caleb Foote’s career here
View Dorothea Lange’s Internment Camp Photographs: http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/lange.html
Read a first-hand account of the evacuation and internment: Jeanne Wakatsuki Huston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (2002)
Watch an interview with Jeanne Wakatsuki Huston: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDDFw5TGkJo