It’s easy to get lost in the deluge of news, but I wanted to circle back to the Supreme Court decision because I think the long-term picture is important. I’ve been pretty direct about my opinion of the decision. I think it is entirely inconsistent with the intent of the framers of the Constitution. They agreed on almost nothing, but they explicitly rejected a king. The whole point of the revolution and the subsequent efforts to create a new government was to forge a system in which no one was above the law. Everyone could be held accountable for their actions, even the most powerful government official.
I think if you're talking Korematsu, it's worth bringing up John Dower's excellent book "War Without Mercy", which goes into the cultural context around the Asia-Pacific War. One of his major takeaways is that Americans conceived of the wars against Germany and Italy as wars against Nazism and Fascism, but tended to see the war against Japan as a racialized war against "the Japanese". The underlying theory around Korematsu was that ethnic Japanese did not lose their loyalty to Japan simply because they resided in the US (using the Niihau Island Incident and the alleged Fifth Column in Malaya as evidence), which was a standard not applied to Germans or Italians. Interestingly, there actually was a pro-Nazi German-American Bund and a Nazi effort at infiltrating the US (the rather incompetent Operation Pastorious), as well as uprisings by ethnic Germans in places like South Africa. The racial logic applied to the Japanese was never applied to Germans in spite of this.
The question I've always had is the extent to which intellectual elites like the Supreme Court actually fell into this same racist hysteria as the rest of the US, or whether the Korematsu decision was more based on a "rally 'round the flag" logic that saw it as unpatriotic to second guess the President and War Department. Either presents some uncomfortable possibilities for future Court decisions, although its decisions in (for example) Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush show a willingness to learn from some of its mistakes, although that could be attributed to a different perception of the threat level (ie. terrorism wasn't seen to be as existential as an interstate war).
Thanks so much for this insightful comment and the reading recommendation! I think it was probably some of both. The book I mentioned on the Supreme Court during FDR's presidency definitely has insight there. Looking forward to reading more.
I think if you're talking Korematsu, it's worth bringing up John Dower's excellent book "War Without Mercy", which goes into the cultural context around the Asia-Pacific War. One of his major takeaways is that Americans conceived of the wars against Germany and Italy as wars against Nazism and Fascism, but tended to see the war against Japan as a racialized war against "the Japanese". The underlying theory around Korematsu was that ethnic Japanese did not lose their loyalty to Japan simply because they resided in the US (using the Niihau Island Incident and the alleged Fifth Column in Malaya as evidence), which was a standard not applied to Germans or Italians. Interestingly, there actually was a pro-Nazi German-American Bund and a Nazi effort at infiltrating the US (the rather incompetent Operation Pastorious), as well as uprisings by ethnic Germans in places like South Africa. The racial logic applied to the Japanese was never applied to Germans in spite of this.
The question I've always had is the extent to which intellectual elites like the Supreme Court actually fell into this same racist hysteria as the rest of the US, or whether the Korematsu decision was more based on a "rally 'round the flag" logic that saw it as unpatriotic to second guess the President and War Department. Either presents some uncomfortable possibilities for future Court decisions, although its decisions in (for example) Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush show a willingness to learn from some of its mistakes, although that could be attributed to a different perception of the threat level (ie. terrorism wasn't seen to be as existential as an interstate war).
Anyway, excellent column!
Thanks so much for this insightful comment and the reading recommendation! I think it was probably some of both. The book I mentioned on the Supreme Court during FDR's presidency definitely has insight there. Looking forward to reading more.