In my book, Public Opinion, I wrote about the interpretation of historical survey data: "Sometimes the absence of survey questions can be telling. No survey organization seems to have asked about the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, or about reactions to the 1944 Supreme Court decision that found the internment to be constitutional, and this absence suggests that the policy was not regarded as particularly controversial at that time." I had searched the Roper Center's iPoll database for questions, and may have checked the historical compilation published by the Gallup Poll in the 1970s. But apparently I hadn't looked in Public Opinion, 1935-46 (by Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk), which attempted to collect the results for every survey question asked in those years. That reported a series of questions from an NORC survey from March 1942:
Do you think we are doing the right thing in moving Japanese aliens (those who are not citizens) away from the Pacific coast? Yes: 93% No: 6% DK: 1%
How about the Japanese who were born in this country and are United States citizens, do you think they should be moved? Yes: 59% No: 25% DK: 16%
....do you think they should be kept under strict guard as prisoners of war, or do you think they should be allowed to go about fairly freely in their new community?
Strict guard: 65% Go about freely: 28% DK: 7%
Should the government alone decide what sort of work they are going to do, or should the Japanese themselves have something to say about it?
Government alone: 66%
Japanese have say: 22%
DK: 12%
Of course, my general point is still true, and I correctly guessed that the policy was not particularly controversial. The 59% who thought that Japanese-American citizens should be moved was actually a bit lower than I would have guessed. It would be interesting to know if opposition rose over time, but while there were a couple of later questions about whether the people who had been moved should be allowed to return to their homes after the war, Cantril and Strunk don't report any others about general support for the policy.
A concluding thought: if enough people buy my book, the publisher might publish a second edition, and then I'll be able to correct this misinformation.
This is such an interesting question. I'm not sure that, at the time, the fact that someone of a different original nationality is an American citizen would have influenced my views. I know lots of people of other nationalities who are both first and second generation immigrants and citizens who make regular trips to their country of origin. Many first gen immigrants come to the US mostly for work opportunities and travel home regularly with their American-born children to visit their families. Often those overseas family ties continue for generations, so a person born in the US can still have very strong cultural ties to their parents' or grandparents' country of origin. On the one hand it's understandable and very normal for people to maintain their family connections overseas; but OTOH for people who maintain strong ties, there is no way of knowing where their loyalties lie when push comes to shove.
ReplyDelete