THIS IS NOT WHO WE ARE

A national security scholar delivers a study of national division in which well-placed individuals override the dominant public opinion.

Contemplating whether to place Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II, Franklin Roosevelt asked J. Edgar Hoover to investigate their loyalty. Surprisingly, given his racism, Hoover “informed the President that there was no reason for concern.” Roosevelt proceeded anyway, giving in to a small number of Army officers and to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who, although an immigrant and minority member himself, supported internment. All this was in stark contrast to American public opinion, with one official government poll revealing that only 19% of those surveyed believed that internment was proper and desirable. In similar spirit, while the earliest period of American occupation of post–World War II Germany was marked by punitive and even vengeful policies, eventually the Truman administration took a more lenient attitude. Americans were also willing to give up a portion of their food and incomes to take care of the defeated Germans, and they organized a relief train to France with an astounding 481 railroad cars filled with food. As Shore notes, there may have been a “performative dimension” to this, the desire to show that Americans were kind and generous. However, Americans were also overwhelmingly on the right side of history during several key moments in which the governing class erred: the atomic bombing of Japan, for instance, whose aim of ending the war might have been accomplished just as easily by dropping one into the sea as a demonstration. Shore closes his detailed study with a nicely ironic moment in which a federal judge, one of those Japanese Americans interned as a child, rules against the Trump administration for its concentration camps for children caught crossing illegally into the U.S.

An instructive history that speaks to the better angels of the American nature.