Ah, yes, the German American Bund. I forgot them. They held at least one large rally that filled Madison Square Garden before the war. Nazis, clearly pro-German. Used the swastika, Hitler's straight-arm salute, had brown uniforms, were savagely anti-Semitic. And were handled on a case by case basis after Germany declared war on the US. No mass internment even of the members of that organization.
I think I knew to google "Bund" because you raised them in the first discussion of this subject.
Yes, they were overt Nazis, and there were thousands of members... and it didn't get even their Heil Hitler membership interned. A mystery.
"Despite an active German American Bund that promoted Hitler throughout the Midwest and boasted thousands of members, German U-boats shelling the Atlantic coast, and German agents actually being captured on U.S. soil before they could carry out their missions [neither the German-Americans nor Italian-Americans were interned]."
Actually, ten people were convicted of providing wartime secrets to Japan. All Caucasians.
I wonder why there weren't bunches and bunches of (or even one) Japanese-Americans resident in Hawaii among the ten convicted Caucasions, since the JA living in Hawaii were never interned! Why why why? It's another great mystery.
In California, after the Japanese-Americans were interned, property taxes were not paid on the farms and businesses they had owned. They were confiscated for taxes, then auctioned at a fraction of their value. A lot of other people picked up some real bargains that way.
That's one of the heart-breaking plot elements in the book Dave Ellen mentioned, Snow Falling on Cedars. An American family works like slaves for two or three generations to save and rise from day-laboring for pitiful wages on the farms of others to, putting their pitiful savings of generations together and buying a farm of their own, and... they're thrown into concentration camps (Roosevelt's term), complete with wives and children and old parents, their property bought for pennies on the dollar by neighbors. Those people were farmers and Americans with a capacity for labor beyond imagining by most of us. This is not fiction, it happened to thousands and thousands and thousands of these struggling farme families, husbands, wives, parents, children--take what you can carry and get off your land and go to those tar paper shacks for four years while the life's work of your family for generations is lost.
My husband's parents and uncles and aunts lived in San Francisco and Oakland, and his family has told stories of the looting of the humble homes and farms and the reducing to shard of glass the carefully-maintained greenhouses of the Japanese farmers in the area, after the farmers and their families were taken away.
My father was an SAC (Special Agent in Charge) in the FBI when this was happening, and, like Hoover, was appalled at the internments. He and his family being German-Americans, some first generation, and, he being in the FBI, fully aware of the Nazi German-American movement, might have been influenced by an awareness in his conscience that "something was rotten in Denmark," to use a phrase he sometimes used, and I haven't heard for years, and remembering which makes me sad, because I miss him terribly, and he would have been so interested in this election. |
