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from Part I - Enemies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2023
We have longed believe that after Pearl Harbor, Americans demanded the removal of Japanese Americans from the west coast and into concentration camps. This views stems largely from the racist sentiments expressed by some prominent politicians and media figures along with one oft-cited poll showing fifty-nine percent of Americans supporting internment. But a closer look at public opinion polls conducted in the months after Pearl Harbor but before the President’s interment order reveal remarkably low support for the policy. The letters that supposedly flooded into the White House calling for mass evacuations only swelled after the order on February 19, 1942. In other words, it was only after Japanese Americans were framed as dangerous that the general public approved of internment.Unfortunately for the roughly 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the west coast, they were about to become the victims of one of America’s worst cases of misplaced revenge. Tragically, this would be only the first of many vengeful acts America inflicted upon the innocent during and shortly after the war. And with each destructive deed, a majority of Americans insisted that this is not who we are. Why, then, did the politics of vengeance prevail?
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