Topaz Oral History Project research files: News reports and articles (1942-1943)

Page 15

- AMERICANS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS By Harry Paxton Howard Over 70,000 native Americans, citizens born, are now lodged in concentration camps in the American West, with no criminal charges of any kind against them. No court has fo~nd them guilty or any of­fense against American law; indeed, no formal indictment has ever been dravm up against them. It is acknowledged that the great majo­rity of them are loyal, law-abiding Americans, true to the country o£ their birth. Some of them have given most useful assistance to the American government against enemy spies and other agents. Even in their present situation, most of them are trying bravely to make the best of things, and are willing to accept the government's ex­planation of military necessity. Vfuy are they there? First of all, because the United States is at war, and the Army has secured tremendous power in national af­fairs. The hapless citizens who have been deprived o£ their consti­tutional rights and constitutional protection have the misfortune to include among their ancestors persons of a non white country with which the United States is now at war. It is the "non white"· which must be emphasized. American citizens of German, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, or Roumanian ancestry have not been legally discriminated against. It is only our citizens o£ Japanese ancestry who have been put into concentration camps. They are not ttwhi te. n They are "not to be. trusted.'" There are also so~e 40,000 enemy aliens' in the same camps. These aliens also are not "white." If they were ttwhite», the great majority of them would not be aliens at all. Most of them have been in this country over ,thirty years; their average age is sixty,three ye-ars. But they have not been permitted to become American citizens, as they are .. Asiatics." During the generation and more that they have been in this country, over a million Germans and Italians have entered the country and been naturalized as American citizens. German Nazis and Italian Fascists are "white" - whatever their politics. But American naturalization laws, as interpreted by the United States su­preme court, deny the right of naturalization to Asiatics. So Asiatic innnigrants remain "aliens. n If we are at war with their homeland, they become "enemy aliens" -- including hundreds who fought in the American armed forces in the first world war1 They are "aliens•• only because America has refused them citizenship. ITALIAN-AMERICAN VS. JAPANESE-AMERICAN Along the eastern coast of the United States, where the number of Americans of Japanese ancestry is comparatively small, no concen­tration camps have been establish~d. From a military viewpoint, the·