Officials later admitted the 1941 Japanese-American arrests were arbitrary and silly.

Evidence

IN 1941, immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor, a similar hysteria burned through this country. The FBI swept through the Japanese-American community on the West Coast, as a lead-up to Japanese internment, arresting more than two thousand noncitizens. Those detained included community leaders, language teachers, and Buddhist priests. Edward Ennis, the general counsel of the INS, complained at the time that “the FBI was turning many aliens over to the INS without a written statement showing good cause for detention.” Herbert Nicholson, pastor of the West Los Angeles Methodist Church, objected that the arrests were arbitrary. Law enforcement “picked up anybody that was the head of anything,” he said. And Assistant Attorney General James Rowe Jr. later admitted that “we picked up too many… . Some of this stuff they were charged on was as silly as hell.” After these arrests the government proceeded to detain over 110,000 people, 70,000 of them American citizens, on the basis of ancestry alone, in internment camps that, in the case of the one at Tule Lake, didn’t close until eight months after Japanese surrender. In 1988, President George H. W. Bush formally apologized for Japanese internment. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 153

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the Milgrom work on reputation and the state: institutional control without evidence of individual wrongdoing. Also connects to moral panic scholarship referenced in the reader’s notes.