Abstract
Masumi Izumi’s The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law addresses a range of topics: the relation between the mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII; the creation of The Emergency Detention Act of 1950, specifically Title II of the Internal Security Act (the McCarran Act) of 1950; the passage and repeal of Title II; the manner in which Title II’s passage reflects a tension between national/internal security and the protection of civil liberties in the face of potential “enemies of the state”; and, less overtly identified, the relation between racial/ethnic prejudice and the creation of both Executive Order 9066 and the 1950 Emergency Detention Act (Title II). In covering this ground, Izumi expands in several directions away from the problem of the “concentration camp” that might seem—given the book’s title, her prefatory “Note on Terminology,” and her conclusion (“A New Age of Concentration Camps?”)—to be the focus of her book. Indeed, the concentration camp theme mainly provides a topical frame for a revision of Izumi’s dissertation, “Japanese American Internment and the Emergency Detention Act (Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950), 1941-1971: Balancing Internal Security and Civil Liberties in the United States.” While President Richard Nixon repealed the law in 1971, on his way to meet Japanese Emperor Hirohito, and though Title II was never actually implemented, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law nevertheless presents a valuable cautionary tale, a sobering account of how bias and politics can shape rules of exception that are enacted during a state of emergency.
The very real potential of national security anxieties to limit civil liberties is clear in the case of the “Alienable Citizenship” (Chapter One) experienced by first- and second-generation Japanese Americans who had their rights as citizens taken from them with the enactment of Executive Order 9066. Izumi reads a range of documents from the period to illustrate how an aura of racial and ethnic suspicion combined with an increasingly militarized America, shocked to find its naval base at Pearl Harbor directly attacked, to create the state of emergency that enabled both social and legal acceptance of the terms of Executive Order 9066. Removed from their homes and property, retaining only what they could carry, Issei and Nisei Japanese and Japanese Americans were evacuated to far flung camps across the United States. Identifying her method as discourse analysis, Izumi examines cultural and legal documents to show how the Issei and Nisei were “alienated from discursive American citizenship” (14), which enabled their removal and disposition to be accepted despite the concomitant divestment of civil liberties generally guaranteed to U.S. citizens by the U.S. Constitution. Referring to earlier historic cases in times of war (beginning with the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798), Izumi demonstrates the pattern by which a nation in crisis suspends for particular people suspected of disloyalty the rights otherwise guaranteed to its citizens. These cases demonstrate for Izumi the fact that “the boundaries of citizenship are unfixed” and that “such boundaries tend to blur when the safety of the state is at stake” (23). Izumi shows how cultural and ethnic differences were used to construct Japanese Americans “as the cultural other. This otherness was then translated into danger, which legitimized their exclusion based on military orders” (32). Thus the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the practice of Japanese American removal and internment in both Hirabayashi v. United States and Korematsu v. United States because those citizens were “discursively placed [by the language of the Court] outside the national boundary and thus rendered . . . unprotected by constitutional assurances” (25). While discursively this is true, Izumi’s analysis of the motivations for this othering might be explored more closely, in order to provide a more complex theoretical foundation for and link to Chapters 4 and 5, which address the conflation of civil rights activists and communist subversives in the U.S. in the 1960s.
With the example of the alienability of citizens in a time of war—specifically WWII in the U.S.—as a starting point, Chapters 2 through 5 examine how Cold War politics, in which the country felt both at war and not at war, fostered a space for the creation of Title II. Title II enabled a similar exclusion of a particular group of citizens on the basis of disloyalty, an exclusion that might have been deemed, again because of the emergency of war, culturally and constitutionally acceptable. A few months after the start of the Korean War and the arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Emergency Detention Act of 1950 gave rise to Title II of the Internal Security Act (the McCarran Act) of 1950—a product of early Cold War anti-subversion law and anticommunist fervor. Viewing the spread of communism as a direct threat to the U.S. and its citizens, both the House and the Senate sought anxiously to find a way to contain actual treasonous activities as well as the threat or fear of communist subversion. Struggling between maintaining civil liberties at the risk of being ineffectual and posing a strong deterrent to treasonous behavior, a group of strongly anti-communist senators attached to the bill the capacity to extract potential subversives—those appearing disloyal to the U.S. government—from the general population. While the bill would be immediately stigmatized by senators opposing it as the “concentration camp bill,” the process it proposed had been widely accepted less than a decade before, with the removal and internment of Japanese Americans. Moreover, the legal precedent for such a practice stretched as far back as Lincoln’s removal of the writ of habeas corpus in the punishment of (potential) treason during the Civil War, as Izumi notes. In both cases, certain citizens were stripped of their rights as a preventive measure, on suspicion of being disloyal.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were many laws that balanced individual freedom with internal security. What distinguishes Title II, Izumi argues, is its emphasis on preventive detention. In preventive detention, she notes, there can be no trial to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt, because nothing has happened yet. In addition, the capacity to detain subversives enabled by Title II was different from military tribunals or enemy combatant cases, in that preventive detention addresses civilians. For this reason, the passage of Title II involved creating special detention facilities that would be available to house those suspected of disloyalty, a mode of incarceration distinct from the imprisonment of people found guilty in a criminal trial. Obviously, detention on the basis of suspicion—rather than guilt—conflicts with Fifth Amendment protections of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” because there is no due process. But, as Izumi notes, the fever of McCarthyism which grew out of anxious Cold War concerns over communism and nuclear espionage created an environment such that most Americans—and a majority of Congress—felt that extreme security measures “were acceptable and even necessary” (2-3).
As political activism in America became more prevalent—particularly in the Civil Rights era—the potential of the government to use detention and internment to quell social justice movements or racial uprisings became greater and more troubling. Izumi explores this development in chapters that take us through the history of the creation of the Emergency Detention Act of 1950 (Chapter 2), through the role played by the FBI and the Supreme Court in enabling and sustaining the measures taken to gauge the apparent loyalty of U.S. citizens (Chapter 3), and finally to the ways in which Title II rendered civil rights activists vulnerable and facilitated their suppression (Chapters 4 and 5). While on several occasions Izumi addresses the racist underpinnings of Executive Order 9066 and the segregationist attempts—especially on the part of some Southern congressmen—to subdue civil rights action by means of Title II, she largely misses the opportunity to explore these connections more fully. She neither analyzes the rhetoric of the “state of emergency” to condone overt racism nor does she carefully examine the different modes and motivations of racism at play within the historical and cultural context of each particular case. For example, when Izumi describes in Chapter 4 how tensions between safety and loyalty produced pressures from within and without civil rights activist groups in the 1960s, she abjures the opportunity to explore more carefully the role of racial othering in the crises of the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement. Instead of referring the reader in footnotes to see Jeff Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948-1968 (LSU Press 2004), she could have developed the links between national anxiety and racism, thereby connecting back to the scattered observations on racism that arise in her first chapter.
Developing these links more carefully would have served Izumi well. As Izumi observes in her “Acknowledgements” at the end of the book, “The political and moral polarization between those who defend civil liberties and those who prioritize national and internal security seems to intensify around the world year after year. We are facing the same dilemma that the protagonists of the story in this book faced. When I started this project, I intended to write about the past. I wish it had remained so” (181). Given the title of her book (and the title of its conclusion: “A New Age of Concentration Camps?”), one might imagine that she is making an implicit comparison between the Japanese Americans removed and interred during WWII and those legally seeking asylum, who are detained in overcrowded and inhumane camps on the border today. Yet the comparison in that case would be an overgeneralization, eliding significant legal and historic specifics. Therefore, despite the comparison that the title of her book encourages, I’d like to think Izumi is referring in this passage to the recurrent and evolving tension between civil liberties and fears about national security that prompted the unfortunate “solution” of “camps” in the U.S. in both the 1950s and the present day (and in many other places around the globe right now). This tension is the most consistent topic of Izumi’s book, and one well worth examining, given its timely and urgent relevance. In that regard, in its examination of the creation and repeal of Title II, and in its thorough research of just over two decades of legislative and juridical responses to the tension between a desire for security driven by anxiety or fear and America’s constitutional commitment to civil liberties, the book makes an informative contribution to scholarship. Though leaving race and the idea of the concentration camp relatively unexplored, Izumi’s study provides a wealth of useful details documenting legal and juridical decision-making and the dangers that a climate of suspicion, anxiety, and war can pose to civil liberties.