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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Izumi, Masumi. "Japanese American Internment and the Emergency Detention Act, 1941-1971: Balancing Internal Security and Civil Liberties in the United States," Graduate School of American Studies, Doshisha University, Japan, March 2004. Advisor: Taisuke Kamata
This dissertation elucidates how the historical memory of Japanese American Internment influenced Americans’ perceptions concerning civil liberties in the post-WWII United States, by analyzing the Congressional and civic debates on the passage and repeal of the Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950 (hereafter Title II). The Internment provided a historical precedent for Title II, and thus became a threshold for the U.S. government to legalize preventive detention for potentially subversive aliens and citizens. Debates on Title II in Congress and the legal community, however, indicate that both liberal and conservative politicians and lawyers regarded the Internment as a serious civil rights violation. Through discussing Title II and the Internment, Americans negotiated their equivocal memories of the Internment and their contested interpretations about what “freedom” meant in the early Cold War America. Once passed, however, Title II provided statutory justification of the FBI’s power to surveillance citizens and to create a black list of potentially subversive persons, and the Justice Department constructed six detention camps in 1952. In 1971, historical memory of the Internment became a crucial factor that propelled the act’s repeal. In the late 1960s, popular opposition to Title II arose, but its repeal was not seriously considered until Japanese Americans came to lead the repeal campaign. At both the grassroots and Congressional levels, Japanese Americans played a key role in repealing Title II, and civic organizations, ethnic groups, and liberal and conservative politicians who supported repeal built a consensus because Title II was discursively connected to the Internment. By providing a historical precedent of the incarceration of loyal citizens based on ancestry, the Internment, and consequentially the Title II repeal campaign functioned as a site for Americans to negotiate the complex inter-relationship between race, liberty, and security.
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