Fear Itself (103 page)

106
Washington Post,
July 8, 1943. In addition to Robinson,
A Tragedy of Democracy,
which offers a comprehensive overview, see Roger Daniels,
Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972); Roger Daniels,
Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Richard Drinnon,
Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillson S. Meyer and American Racism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and the discussion in David M. Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 748–60. A justification, written in the context of the recent “war on terror,” is Michelle Malkin,
In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World War II and the War on Terror
(Washington, DC: Regnery Press, 2004).

107
Rossiter,
Constitutional Dictatorship,
p. 282.

108
There were challenges that reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1943 in
Hirabayashi v. United States
that curfews could be imposed on a national group that originated from a country at war with the United States; and in 1944 in
Korematsu v. United States
that the exclusion order of Executive Order 9066 was constitutional. Fred Korematsu had resisted the deportation order by fleeing with his girlfriend, an Italian-American. Caught, he was arrested in May 1942. Though freed on bail, he was sent to an internment camp in Utah. He then sued the government with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, but he was unsuccessful. The case was decided by a 6–3 margin. Justice Hugo Black wrote for the majority, while Justice Frank Murphy, the former Michigan governor and U.S. attorney general, issued a notable dissent, referring to the internment as an instance that “falls into the ugly abyss of racism.” For discussions, see Eugene V. Rostow, “The Japanese American Cases—A Disaster,”
Yale Law Journal
54 (1945): 489–535; Roger Daniels, “
Korematsu v. US
Revisited: 1944 and 1983,” in
Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History,
ed. Annette Gordon-Reed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Korematsu was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton in 1998; he died in March 2005.

109
Sparrow, Warfare State,
pp. 100–104. For a discussion of the paucity of focused debate at the time about Japanese internment and the absence of empirical attention to charges of treachery, see David Riesman, “The Present State of Civil Liberty Theory,”
Journal of Politics
6 (1944): 327–28. Though German nationals and German-Americans were not rounded up en masse, the Justice Department’s Enemy Alien Control Program, whose remit extended to those of “enemy ancestry,” interned 11,507 ethnic Germans, some citizens, and evicted others from coastal areas. See Timothy J. Holian,
The German Americans and WW II: An Ethnic Experience
(New York: Peter Lang, 1996); John Eric Schmitz, “Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during World War Two” (Ph.D. dissertation, American University, 2007).

110
The FBI report was released after a Freedom of Information request by Robert A. Hill, who compiled and edited it in
The FBI’s RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States during World War II
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995). A brief but useful overview written at the time is Florence Murray, “The Negro and Civil Liberties during World War II,”
Social Forces
24 (1945): 211–16.

111
Maurice Isserman,
Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party during the Second World War
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 119.

112
The newspapers were the
Baltimore Afro-American
(said to have numerous “Communist connections”),
New York Amsterdam Star News
(the only one to escape criticism),
People’s Voice
(“a very helpful transmission belt for the Communist Party”),
Oklahoma City Black Dispatch
(thought to be sympathetic to Communist-front organizations),
Chicago Defender
(two of whose employees had attended Communist Party meetings),
Michigan Chronicle
(whose editor had been active, when a student at the University of Michigan, in the National Student League, a front organization), and the
Pittsburgh Courier
(deemed insufficiently critical of Japan). Though “Negroes as a whole” were “not “subversive or . . . influenced by anti-American forces,” it concluded that “a number of Negroes and Negro groups” were found to have acted “in a manner inimical to the Nation’s war effort,” a category it treated expansively to include “a new militancy and aggressiveness” in the North, as “old boundaries are crossed by the lifting of many restrictions to these people who have heretofore been subjected in other sections,” and “a general change in attitude of Negroes” in the South “as well as a new militancy on their part” that had led to “numerous reports and complaints of individual members of the Negro race expressing un-American sentiments.” See Hill, ed.,
The FBI’s Racon,
pp. 445–53, 77, 254, 255.

113
U.S. Army, “Inflammatory Propaganda,” undated (dealing with the black press from December 1941 through February 1942), cited in Patrick Scott Washburn, “The Federal Government’s Investigations of the Black Press during World War II” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1984), p. 99.

114
Washburn, “The Federal Government’s Investigations of the Black Press during World War II,” pp. 161, 205, 217.

115
Robert Higgs,
Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episode
s
in the Growth of American Government
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 206.

116
Andrew A. Workman, “Creating the National War Labor Board: Franklin Roosevelt and the Politics of State Building in the Early 1940s,”
Journal of Policy History
12, no. 2 (2000): 233–64.

117
Byrnes was a stalwart, if relatively moderate, segregationist. When governor of South Carolina from 1951 to 1955, he strongly opposed the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision late in his term. He became disillusioned with his party’s increasingly pro–civil rights stance. Byrnes endorsed Dwight Eisenhower for president in 1952 and 1956, supported Richard Nixon in 1960 and 1968, and backed Barry Goldwater in 1964. Late in life, in the mid-1960s, he switched to the Republican Party after Senator Strom Thurmond, his state’s leading politician, did just that in 1964. See David Robertson,
Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. 526–48.

118
Eliot Janeway,
The Struggle for Survival
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 185. Janeway writes that “more than any other factor, Byrnes’ involvement with the unpleasantness of manpower administration provoked the opposition which persuaded Roosevelt to make his famous last-minute decision not to run with his Assistant President in 1944,” but with Harry Truman instead. For an overview of the role played by Eliot Janeway, see Michael Janeway,
The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). For an overview of the mobilization effort under Byrnes, see Herman Miles Somers,
Presidential Agency: The Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950); on Baruch, see Jordan A. Schwartz, “Baruch, the New Deal, and the Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex,” in
Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
, ed. Robert Higgs (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990), pp. 1–21.

119
Waddell,
The War Against the New Deal,
p. 89.

120
Gerald T. White,
Billions for Defense: Government Financing by the Defense Plant Corporation during World War II
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), especially pp. 67–87.

121
John D. Millett,
The Organization and Role of the Army Service Forces
(Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1954); Russell E. Weigley,
History of the United States Army
(New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 442–50.

122
For an overview, see Ralph J. Watkins, “Economic Mobilization,”
American Political Science Review
43 (1949): 556–67. On the federal government’s investments and patterns of ownership, see Gregory Hooks, “The Weakness of Strong Theories: The U.S. State’s Dominance of the World War II Investment Process,”
American Sociological Review
58 (1993): 37–53.

123
John F. Witte,
The Politics and Development of the Federal Income Tax
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 123.

124
Andrew Roberts,
Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War
(London: Penguin, 2010), pp. 197–98; Higgs,
Crisis and Leviathan,
pp. 220–25; R. Elbertson Smith,
The Army and Economic Mobilization
(Washington, DC.: U.S. Department of Defense, 1959); Gregory Hooks,
Forging the Military-Industrial Complex: World War II’s Battle of the Potomac
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Bartholomew H. Sparrow,
From Outside In: World War II and the American State
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 107; http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals. For a discussion of the financing of wartime deficits, see Marshall A. Robinson, “Federal Debt Management: Civil War, World War I, and World War II,”
American Economic Review
45 (1955): 388–401.

125
George Horwich and David J. Bjornstad, “Spending and Manpower in Four U.S. Mobilizations: A Macro/Policy Perspective,”
Journal of Policy History
3, no. 2 (1991): 175.

126
This productivity, Richard Overy argues, was at the core of Allied victory. See Overy,
Why the Allies Won
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). It counteracted the superior fighting capacity of the German and Japanese armed forces. For detailed production figures, see http://www.taphilo.com/history/WWII/Production-Figures-WWII.shtml.

127
See http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat1.pdf.

128
For a discussion, see Robert Kargon and Elizabeth Hodes, “Karl Compton, Isaiah Bowman, and the Politics of Science in the Great Depression,”
Isis
76 (1985): 301–18. For the larger context of scientific discovery, see Helge Kragh,
Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

129
For a discussion of Oppenheimer’s role at this prewar moment, see Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin,
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 179–94.

130
Daniel J. Kevles,
The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), pp. 287–301, 277–84.

131
James G. Hershberg,
James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 128.

132
“For the next thousand years,” he wrote to former president Herbert Hoover in April 19, 1943, “I expect that the preservation of civilization will be based on force if it is preserved at all.” See G. Pascal Zachary,
Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century
(New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 164.

133
Zachary,
Endless Frontier,
pp. 138, 183.

134
David M. Hart,
Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United States, 1921–1953
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 122–29. Conant’s talk, “What Victory Requires,” was delivered on December 22, 1941; See Hershberg,
James B. Conant,
p. 135.

135
The letter and response are reproduced in Michael B. Stoff, Jonathan F. Fanton, and R. Hal Williams, eds.,
The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991), pp. 21–26; see also Garry Wills,
Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State
(New York: Penguin, 2010), pp. 10–23.

136
As early as May 5, 1940, the
New York Times
was reporting, on page 1, that German scientists were “feverishly” working to build an atomic bomb; cited in Hershberg,
James B. Conant,
p. 140. See Malcolm C. MacPherson,
Time Bomb: Fermi, Heisenberg, and the Race for the Atomic Bomb
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986).

137
Zachary,
Endless Frontier,
pp. 205, 214.

138
Stoff, Fanton, and Williams, eds.,
The
Manhattan Project,
pp. 24–25.

139
William L. Laurence,
Dawn over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), p. 181.

140
For an account of Los Alamos from the vantage point of Oppenheimer’s role, see Bird and Sherwin,
American Prometheus,
pp. 223–309.

141
Joel Davidson, “Building for War, Preparing for Peace: World War II and the Military-Industrial Complex,” in
World War II and the American Dream,
ed. Donald Albrecht (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 213; Max Hastings,
Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–1945
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 452. For an official history, see Vincent C. Jones,
Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb
(Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1985). On Groves, see William Lawren,
The General and the Bomb: A Biography of Leslie R. Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project
(New York: Dodd Mead, 1988).