I do think that was a huge over-reaction, particularly in retrospect, but you can't chalk it up entirely to hysteria considering it happened in the aftermath of the Niihau incident.
> but you can't chalk it up entirely to hysteria considering it happened in the aftermath of the Niihau incident.
You're right it wasn't hysteria, it was literal robbery. The white farmers were literally waiting to steal everything the Japanese left behind in California.
Oh yes, I'm aware. And in Seattle when Japanese-Americans were interned, many African-Americans moved into the property left behind, brought to Seattle by the huge surplus of jobs working for Boeing. Today there are Japanese-Americans who object to that neighborhood being called the "International District" because they feel that perpetuates the wrong done to their community.
Incidentally, Boeing was forbidden by the federal government from discriminating against those African-American workers, as they might well have in an earlier era. The Fair Employment Practice Committee which forbade discrimination against these African-American workers was created to implement FDR's Executive Order 8802. That executive order was motivated in no small part by FDR observing American defense companies discriminating against German-Americans and Italian-Americans, which he considered to be a threat to the war effort. This executive order was one of the first times the federal government ever took any action against racial or ethnic discrimination in the workplace.
Strangely the Wikipedia page for the FEPC suggests it was motivated to help "African-Americans and other minorities", while the Wikipedia page for Executive Order 8802 emphasizes that it was discrimination of German-Americans and Italian-Americans which motivated FDR. (I'm more inclined to believe the later, but either way it certainly had the effect of helping the African-American community find work in the defense industry.)
And did we put any members of the German American Bund into internment camps, or would it just have been less palatable to intern people with the same skin color?
I don't have a list of names to cross-reference, but I'd guess more than a few were. Their leader was stripped of his citizenship and kicked out of the country. A blanket internment of German-Americas was considered but deemed impractical:
>"Shortly after the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor, some 1,260 German nationals were detained and arrested, as the government had been watching them.[26] Of the 254 persons not of Japanese ancestry evicted from coastal areas, the majority were ethnic German.[27] During WWII, German nationals and German Americans in the US were detained and/or evicted from coastal areas on an individual basis. Although the War Department (now the Department of Defense) considered mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and ethnic Italians from the East or West coast areas for reasons of military security, it did not follow through with this. The numbers of people involved would have been overwhelming to manage.[28]"
> "In the 1940 US census, some 1,237,000 persons identified as being of German birth; 5 million persons had both parents born in Germany; and 6 million persons had at least one parent born in Germany.[25] German immigrants had not been prohibited from becoming naturalized United States citizens and many did so. The large number of German Americans of recent connection to Germany, and their resulting political and economical influence, have been considered the reason they were spared large-scale relocation and internment. "
Note also that in Hawaii, out of 150,000 Japanese-Americans, less than 2,000 were interned. In Hawaii Japanese-Americans were too numerous to mass-intern, as German-Americans were too numerous to mass-intern across America. However across the west-coast of mainland America, where the relative size of their population was much smaller, mass-interment of Japanese-Americas was considered practical and therefore enacted.
Another factor to consider is that America had already had a war with Germany, not many years before, so the loyalties of most German-Americans had already past muster in the eyes of many. Japan was considered a new unknown quantity. During WWI, anti-German sentiment across America was much stronger than it was during the subsequent war:
Stop acting like something that happened nearly 80 years ago is relevant today. Did we go crazy and lock up every Muslim after 9-11? That was a different time, a great deal of progress has been made since then. Sometimes I think too much progress as we are unwilling to be tough against those who seek to do us harm.
The problem is that the same people who sold the 9/11 surveillance state were (and still are) making the argument that Japanese-American interment was justified, and would be justified again in the same circumstances. For example:
> Sometimes I think too much progress as we are unwilling to be tough against those who seek to do us harm.
We invaded a whole country (Afghanistan), sent many to places like Guantanamo Bay, and bombed them throughout Africa and the Middle East. What more do you want?
Yea it's not like it had any long last effects such as the lost of valuable property and wealth that was stolen after they were forced from their homes or the lost of opportunity due to stolen years.
No that doesn't matter anymore even though the people that lived through it are still alive.
No that doesn't matter despite people in politics literally raising the specter of doing it again and in some cases, directly suggesting and defending it as a future potential action.