Ah yes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a well-known "reactionary bigot".
Were most of his policies based on the betterment of the oppressed? Absolutely.
Did he oversee one of the most objectively bigoted things that happened in 1942? Absolutely.
Was Roosevelt a bigot? I do not know.
But, is it fair to say that he was a reactionary bigot? Maybe.
That's the thing about people. They're very, very rarely one thing to the exclusion of all else. Violent racists can be outstanding community members on a very local scale. Extremely inclusive pacifists can be assholes to the people in their lives.
Uhuh. Sure you do.
Most charitably, my guess is you've developed a persecution complex which has you hearing a comment like (as an example) "the US would be better off if the GOP just disappeared" as "we must murder all conservatives".
Meanwhile, one side of the political spectrum appears more likely to inspire actual politically-motivated violence, and it's not the one you seem to be pointing the finger at:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122593119
> In short, our individual-level examination found that among radicalized individuals in the United States, those adhering to a left-wing ideology were markedly less likely to engage in violent ideologically motivated acts when compared to right-wing individuals.
...
> When compared to individuals associated with a right-wing ideology, individuals adhering to a left-wing ideology had 68% lower odds of engaging in violent (vs. nonviolent) radical behavior (b = −1.15, SE = 0.13, odds ratio [OR] = 0.32, P < 0.001). On the other hand, the difference between individuals motivated by Islamist and right-wing causes was not significant (b = 0.05, SE = 0.14, OR = 1.05, P = 0.747). Expressed in terms of predicted probabilities, the probability of left-wing violent attack was 0.33, that of right-wing violent attack was 0.61, and that of Islamist violent attack was 0.62.
Which, of course, is just more data backing up the many many analyses that right-wing violence is by far a greater threat than left-wing violence (this is from 2020):
https://www.csis.org/analysis/escalating-terrorism-problem-u...
> Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57 percent—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25 percent committed by left-wing terrorists, 15 percent by religious terrorists, 3 percent by ethnonationalists, and 0.7 percent by terrorists with other motives.
...
> Our data suggest that right-wing extremists pose the most significant terrorism threat to the United States, based on annual terrorist events and fatalities.
In fact, it's become institutionalized as this point. A recent poll showed that '30% of Republicans agree with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.' Alarming? I'd say so.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2022/01/05/a...
So, hey, let's pretend for a moment that you are in fact surrounded by crazed lefties that talk to you about exterminating you and your family over your political views. There's one big difference between them and folks on the American right: They're far less likely to actually do anything about it.
There's something about human nature that makes us want to think of influential people as saints but rarely do they live up to that standard. We'd be far better off if we could banish this tendency from society.
I think "reactionary bigot" is just a commonplace phrase often said perfunctorily, but I'm not sure the meaning of the original comment would change if the word "reactionary" was deleted. The argument over the word seems pedantic in the context. The original point is that Takei faced multiple forms of bigotry in his life.
The definition of reactionary is "opposing political or social liberalization or reform".
Whereas internment was a reaction, indeed an overreaction, to the war with Japan, based on the bigoted fear that Japanese-Americans were loyal to Japan rather than to America. Not exactly the same.
But getting lost in pedantry instead of just moving through common usage when in regular human discourse is useless. There is no reason to walk down that road, other than to obfuscate any point the other person is trying to make behind a smoke screen of pseudo-intellectualism.
Sort of like I tried to do with those last two sentences.
Social issues change over time but the also correlate with otherwise unrelated social/political/economic issues so trying to apply political issues from 80 years ago into the modern era is going to lead to some incongruous positions.
Maybe we should stop pretending these people who did some good things for the country were perfect gods. You can praise their accomplishments while still pointing out their flaws.
Ask most people what the defining characteristics or deeds of Washington of Jefferson and they respond with the points above.
Are those the most impactful or noteworthy characteristics of those individuals? I don't think so. Perhaps they are interesting context for understanding their other deeds or the human condition, but certainly not the primary impact they had on history.
They weren't the opposition, they were a key part of the coalition.
Lots of professional-class liberals today consider "populism" to be a dirty word. Would they have been Hoover Republicans in that era?
Random observation. The US has almost forgot that before WWII that Pols, Italians, eastern Europeans, Irish, etc were distinct. And Asians were even farther out.
I know for a fact that my silent generation dad feels prejudice against Chinese. Even though he hates it's there. My grandmother was an antisemite though oddly not prejudiced against Mexicans or blacks. That whole family was salt of the earth. And half were unreformed bigots as well.
People are weird. The past is not the present.
More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots. Which is not to say they weren't wrong.
What do you want? For us to say “ah well, that’s just how it was back in the day”? You’re the one incapable of nuance if you want to put everything FDR did into one bucket or the other.
My evidence for this belief is the fact that Japanese-Americans represented a third of people living in Hawaii, more than 150k of them, yet in Hawaii only ~1800 Japanese-Americans were interned. About 1%. This, despite the fact that Hawaii was closer to the war than the rest of America, and despite the fact that the Niihau incident occurred in Hawaii. Interning a third of the population of Hawaii simply wasn't practical, so in Hawaii they had to exercise much more discretion.
Furthermore, some people believe that Executive Order 8802, which forbade ethnic and racial discrimination in defense industries, was intended more to prevent discrimination against German-Americans and Italian-Americans than against African-Americans. Supposing that is true, it evidences the perception of FDR's administration that discrimination against German-Americans, despite their skin color, was a plausible scenario and would harm the war effort if permitted.
Further evidence for the plausibility of ethnic discrimination against Germans, despite their skin color, is easy to find during WWI. Across America and the UK, German families (including the Royal Family..) changed their names to conceal their German origins. Schools stop teaching German, businesses were renamed, sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage" (freedom fries, anyone?) The Red Cross even forbade people with German last names from joining.
tl;dr: The federal government recognized the potential appetite for discrimination against German-Americans, but forbade this because German-Americans were a very large portion of the population and excluding them would harm the war effort. At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population.
> At the same time the federal government perpetrated discrimination against Japanese-Americans, except they exercised more discretion in Hawaii where Japanese-Americans were a very large segment of the population.
Hawaii, not a US state at the time, was largely occupied by the US military prior to Pearl Harbor. After Pearl Harbor its residents were subject to martial law and their civil rights were suspended. The situation there was not analogous to the situation on the mainland, so I wouldn't use it to draw any conclusions.
> the only reason
Your thesis isn't wildly off-base, but how often is anything done by humans done for one single, solitary reason?
This isn't the reason relatively few Japanese-Americans were interned in Hawaii. Compare it to Alaska. Like Hawaii, Alaska was an incorporated US territory. Japanese-Americans were ordered out of Alaska or interned.
The reason general internment didn't happen in Hawaii is because:
> "The powerful businessmen of Hawaii concluded that the imprisonment of such a large proportion of the islands' population would adversely affect the economic prosperity of the territory.[74] The Japanese represented "over 90 percent of the carpenters, nearly all of the transportation workers, and a significant portion of the agricultural laborers" on the islands.[74] General Delos Carleton Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, also argued that Japanese labor was "'absolutely essential' for rebuilding the defenses destroyed at Pearl Harbor."[74] Recognizing the Japanese-American community's contribution to the affluence of the Hawaiian economy, General Emmons fought against the incarceration of the Japanese Americans and had the support of most of the businessmen of Hawaii.[74]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
Japanese-Americans were a third of Hawaii's population, so interning them all would have been a disaster for Hawaii's economy and harmful to the war effort. That's why it didn't happen in Hawaii. German-Americans, unlike Japanese Americans, were a very large portion of the population in all states and territories, not just Hawaii. The needs of economy and war obviously wouldn't tolerate the internment of all German-Americans, so it didn't happen.
If you think general internment of German-Americans would have been implausible regardless of population size, because the Germans were white, you need to remember that perception of race has never been a rational matter. During WWI, Germans were racially 'othered' in the UK and US by assertions off Germans being "asiatic Huns" and similar nonsense. Nevermind that you couldn't visually distinguish an average German from an average Anglo, racial othering is obviously not bound to rationality. This inclination to racially other the enemy is only tempered by substantial ethnic overlap between the two warring parties. Where there is substantial ethnic overlaps, discrimination will be officially discouraged and resisted because it impairs the war effort (e.g. Executive Order 8802). Where there is little ethnic overlap, racial or ethnic discrimination often become convenient to the government and becomes officially sanctioned.
What I was driving at, which sort of complements what you quoted, is: what would have been the rationale of sending all those Hawaiian Japanese-Americans to an internment camp in the midwest to be watched over by military police when they were in Hawaii, under martial law, being watched over by military police?
General Delos Carleton Emmons, the military governor of Hawaii, also argued that Japanese labor was "'absolutely essential' for rebuilding the defenses destroyed at Pearl Harbor."[74] Recognizing the Japanese-American community's contribution to the affluence of the Hawaiian economy, General Emmons fought against the incarceration of the Japanese Americans and had the support of most of the businessmen of Hawaii.
The interesting thing is, in a 100% wartime economy with full employment, depriving the economy of the labor of all those other Japanese-Americans in the continental United States was hurting the war effort as well. Not as acutely as tearing a big chunk out of the Hawaiian economy would, but still, not very rational.
> If you think general internment of German-Americans would have been implausible regardless of population size, because the Germans were white, you need to remember that perception of race has never been a rational matter.
I think internment of German-Americans would have been less likely, not implausible or impossible. The differences of Japanese-Americans in terms of dissimilar appearance and less shared culture would have greased the skids of racism, as it were. And yes, it's fair enough to point out that it doesn't always work that way and sometimes really, really similar groups engage in ethnic othering.
I think a good lesson here is that wrongness is not a monopoly owned by just one political ideology.
those people have a pretty hypocritical and one-dimensional way of looking at history
> More broadly I object to this very modern attitude wherein people in the past who did things we consider wrong today were evil bigots.
but not me, I'm awesome
It was objectively wrong then, and it is wrong through all of time.
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist9/harvest.html#:~:text=The%20Wor....
You yourself are describing the people rounded up as Japanese (yes, with a qualifier). They were people more likely to have loyalty to an enemy state, weren't they? It was certainly a blunt tool; and not an issue I've looked at in detail; but do you expect FDR to have done nothing?
Interesting for me to consider whether UK was right to round up Germans for WWII, rather difficult when that includes the Royal Family, but they did imprison something like 10% of "Germans" living in the UK (I don't know if they were British, just visiting, naturalised, or what).
If either of those is "yes" then we're just looking at where the line is.
Would you accept imprisonment if you knew it was keeping 1000 murderers off the street?
Do people who support Nazism deserve to get punched? Even if they're innocent of any crimes (a very oft heard sentiment from people who would otherwise say they value the rule of law)?
Nothing about war is OK, but sometimes we have to compromise on what we'd like to happen. I think it's interesting to try and be honest with oneself and ask where the line is.
Would I automatically lock up adults who described themselves as associated with an enemy country, when at war, probably not; but I wouldn't give them every freedom either. Indeed during times of war it is normal to curtail general freedoms. Would I consider it unjustifiable to lock up people who appear to be associated with an enemy country, also probably not. I guess I consider that sometimes it is acceptable, morally, to lock innocent people up ... no justice system could [barring future technology that can provide certainty on past events] ever lock anyone up without such a consideration.
I'm interested if you or others have anything to try and develop my thinking in this area. Thanks.
If nothing else, this goes to show how far the scale is tipped in favor of right wing ideas and policies in the states and still is. The fact Biden, a fairly conservative politician, can be called a "Communist" with a straight face is an indictment of the American education system.
The labels don't even mean anything after a while. You can actively be enforcing fascist policies and still be labeled a socialist due to a population wide inability to understand what words mean.
The fact that some of the political leaders who approved that did other things doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold them accountable for a venal act – I would argue the contrary since they’re otherwise praised and it’s important to remember that our heroes are not perfect and should not be copied without improvement. One can make similar statements about how, for example, programs like social security or the GI bill were both good for many people of lower class backgrounds but also carefully designed and implemented to benefit black people less than white people.
Those countries didn’t attack directly in full force like the IJN did, by orders of magnitude. European Axis sunk a few American supply ships in international waters aiding their enemies.
There’s also the Niihau incident, which directly informed the response.
Truth is folks then had a tiny fraction of information that we have today—including hindsight. It’s unclear you would do any better in the same circumstances.
(Also, a few supply ships is whitewashing somewhat – hundreds of Americans traveling on civilian vessels were killed by the German navy and there were dozens of American flagged ships sunk prior to Pearl Harbor. No, not what the Japanese navy did but more than enough to have served as grounds for war if the US wasn’t trying so strenuously to stay out.)
The point I was trying to get at was that if you were faced with the same life-threatening decisions you'd likely decide the same. And if different it would only because of random chance. Not because you are smarter or more virtuous than FDR & Cabinet.
Shit, Truman had to decide to drop a nuke on the basis it would save more lives in the long run—with incomplete information. I don't envy those decisions at all.
There were anti-racist people at the time, even in his own cabinet, who resisted the calls for internment.