Activity
2: The Four Freedoms vs. Japanese Internment[1]
General Information:
Chapter 22 – Historical Context
Primary Sources:
The Four Freedoms – Speech of
Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1941 (attached)
Voices of Freedom (Chapter 22):
· Henry Luce, The American Century (1941)
· Justice Robert H. Jackson, Dissent in Korematsu v. United States (1944)
Questions on Luce and Jackson:
1. What values does Luce wish America to spread to the rest of the world?
2. Why does Justice Jackson believe that even though military authorities have the power to violate the Constitution during wartime, the Supreme Court should not approve of their actions?
3. Does the experience of Japanese Americans during the war suggest any problems with Luce’s idea of an American Century?
Visual Sources
The
"Four Freedoms"
Franklin D. Roosevelt's Address to Congress January 6, 1941
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded
upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression --
everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship
God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want -- which,
translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to
every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the
world.
The fourth is freedom from fear -- which,
translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such
a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to
commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the
world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is
a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.
That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny
which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception
-- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination
and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Since the beginning of our American history, we
have been engaged in change -- in a perpetual peaceful revolution -- a revolution
which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions --
without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order
which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a
friendly, civilized society.
This nation has placed its destiny in the hands
and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in
freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights
everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep
them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.
To that high concept there can be no end save
victory.
From Congressional
Record, 1941, Vol. 87, Pt. I.
Questioning Freedom: Can
you speak about the significance of the internment of Japanese Americans during
World War II?
The Japanese
American internment—in which about 120,000 people, the majority of them
American citizens, were rounded up on the West coast and moved involuntarily
into what were called "concentration camps," which meant simply
places to "concentrate" them (later on that term came to be used for
the Nazi death camps)—was the biggest violation of civil liberties in American
history, other than slavery. It shows what can happen in wartime when hysteria
takes hold, when people are willing to sacrifice liberty in the name of
security. There is no evidence whatsoever that the internment of these 120,000
people contributed in any way to the war effort, that it led to stopping any
potential acts of sabotage, or treason, or anything like that. It was simply an
act of racism, of fear, and also of economic self-interest. Large numbers of
whites in California seized the property of Japanese Americans or bought it at
fire-sale prices when people had to leave their homes. The Supreme Court upheld
the internment in the Korematsu case later in the war, and I think that
experience warns us that we must be vigilant about liberty and that even when
it's only one group being stigmatized it still is a terrible violation of the
principles for which the country supposedly stands.