American Wartime Democracy Redux: The Internment of Japanese Americans in 1942

Abstract

This paper explores how public opinion of political intolerance was represented and eventually formulated into a policy by examining the case of the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese descendants in the United States immediately following the Pearl Harbor attack. In this case, political intolerance was arguably accepted by the public and implemented by the elites without any detriment to democratic principles. It is also a case in which the discovery that public opinion does affect public policy-making does not make such a course of action laudable.After a survey of theoretical accounts, the remaining part of the paper is divided into three sections: the decision on evacuation which culminated in Executive Order 9066, the subsequent decision on incarceration rooted in Executive Order 9102 and a concluding remark. In the first two sections, the paper delineates how public opinion became framed into a policy by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a descriptive model of representation as reflected in policy decision-making: the reactive and preemptive representation of public opinion. As a conclusion, the paper dwells upon the dilemma in democracy and speculates on its ramifications. In so doing, this paper lays out 1) how American democracy worked in wartime in accordance with its principle, but 2) why its aftermath is discomforting even for its advocates by examining the 1942 relocation of Japanese ethnics, and 3) further research.