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This was published by LIFE, but internment wasn't inevitable, nor did it happen right away. In all likelihood, Roosevelt knew better. The camps weren't his idea, instead being proposed by several generals in California. Attorney General Francis Biddle said he was ashamed of them. Ironically, that racist prick J. Edgar Hoover was one of the handful of federal officials who opposed the plan, saying the Army was becoming hysterical. In fact, most Americans had initially supported Japanese Americans. However, things rapidly went downhill in the next few months. One of the major factors was the Niihau incident. There was, in fact, an isolated incident of Japanese Americans, with no history of questionable allegiance, collaborating with a downed Japanese pilot immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The pilot had crash-landed after participating in the attack on Pearl Harbor. The collaboration went well beyond harboring the pilot, and resulted in civilians being taken hostage and nearly killed. One of them was shot three times. Miraculously, the hostages managed to overpower and kill the pilot, after which the man who was violently helping him killed himself. I do think order likely would've happened anyway, but the Niihau incident made internment inevitable.
Despite this incident taking place in Hawaii, Japanese Americans on Hawaii were largely spared internment. The reason was that Japanese Americans comprised "over 90 percent of the carpenters, nearly all of the transportation workers, and a significant portion of the agricultural laborers" in Hawaii. Japanese Americans outside of the West Coast were also largely spared internment. The implication here is that Japanese Americans were interned in the Western United States mainly to appease rabid racists on the West Coast, which has a very bad history of racism against Asian Americans. In 1944, Oregon Governor Earl Snell, an ardent supporter of internment, had sponsored a law tightening alien land restrictions, which was aimed at returnees. The law would've denied Japanese-born non-citizens the right to own or lease land, and prosecuted landowning Japanese American citizens for allowing others of Japanese descent, including their parents, to occupy or work the land. The law easily passed through the Oregon legislature. Even then, former Oregon Governor Walter Pierce (and a former Klansman), who'd signed the 1923 legislation, held a meeting with 1,000 followers of the Oregon Property Owners' Protective Association, which demanded the end of the return of Japanese internees, the deportation of all Japanese aliens, and the denial of citizenship to people of Japanese descent.
Thankfully, the alien land law was ruled unconstitutional in a unanimous decision by the Oregon Supreme Court in 1949. The court went further, ruling that the less stringent 1923 law was also unconstitutional. In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled all alien land laws unconstitutional. The Oregon government, too, underwent great change. In 1947, the government was outright decapitated in a plane crash, killing Governor Earl Snell, Secretary of the State of Oregon Robert Farrell Jr., and President of the State Senate Marshall Cornett. Contrary to the claims of liberals who think voting and debating is the only way to defeat white supremacy, the deaths of three white supremacists who held top government positions were in fact, extraordinarily convenient and immediately paved the way for less racist officials lmfao.
