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  • Trading Civil Liberties for National Security:Warnings from a World War II Internment Program
  • Max Paul Friedman (bio)

A recurring theme in American political discourse is how to strike the appropriate balance between protecting the nation against threats to its security without eroding the liberty that is at the heart of its democratic character. Civil liberties versus national security is a choice apparently to be made in every crisis and every war, whether hot or cold. We can trace the debate from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 through Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, to the Red Scares that followed both world wars. The classic case of going too far, and the most widely repudiated example, is the illegal mass internment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, without charge, during World War II.1 Today, in what is commonly called the war on terrorism, hawks and doves take up their customary positions on opposing sides of the old argument as they debate the U.S.A Patriot Act, the imprisonment of foreigners at Camp Delta on Guantánamo Bay, and the indefinite detention of American citizens by presidential order.

The familiar contours of the debate suggest an either-or dilemma, or values at opposite ends of a scale. However, some historical cases suggest that this formula may be inadequate. The internment of the Japanese Americans is one example of a misguided program that did not measurably improve national security, and may have degraded it because of the waste of human and financial resources. Studies of wartime censorship have reached similar conclusions about the counterproductive effects of a single-minded focus on security. As an international group of legal scholars has argued, although governments often instinctively [End Page 294] curtail freedom of the press in times of national crisis, press scrutiny and public debate can be indispensable to vetting policy options, while excessive secrecy can prevent the exposure of bad choices.2

This variance from the usual assumptions about the alternatives available to governments in wartime is of particular relevance today, as many nations enact or consider restrictions on expression and move to incarcerate individuals without charge, often because of group association. A little-known historical example adds to the evidence showing that this practice can be ineffective.

In December 1941, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II, American officials facing war on two fronts grew alarmed over reports of another menace that seemed to come not from east or west but from the south. More than a million and a half ethnic Germans lived in Latin America at the time, concentrated in tightly-knit communities throughout South and Central America. Overseas agitators for the Nazi Party made a few converts and a lot of commotion in these communities during the mid-1930s; by the war's eve, most German citizens in the region, although still unwilling to join the Party in proportions larger than 3 to 9 percent, enthusiastically celebrated the achievements of their homeland regime.3 Nazi spies contributed little to the German war effort but much to the menacing images.4 British propagandists and sensational news reports combined with the inexplicably rapid German conquest of Western Europe in 1940 to persuade the U.S. government and the public at large that a Nazi takeover of the Continent by a "fifth column" could be imminent.

To preempt the feared disaster, the United States embarked on an operation that long has been lost from sight. Roosevelt ordered the FBI to search for subversive, or potentially subversive, Germans south of the border. Between 1941 and 1945, the U.S. government orchestrated the arrest, deportation, and internment of more than four thousand German residents of Latin America, held in specially created prison camps in Texas, Louisiana, and elsewhere, with names like Camp Kenedy, Seagoville, and Camp Crystal City.5

This policy was based on a genuine desire for security against a real enemy, in the midst of a global war for survival. In practice, however, the expulsion and incarceration of Germans from Latin America neither hurt Nazi Germany nor helped the U.S. war...

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