FDR Thought ALL Americans Entitled to the Economic Bill of Rights

[Ken Burch]

13. Once the war was over, obviously.

Had FDR has a few more years to serve out his last term and then have a retirement, I suspect that he'd have thought differently about the interment.

The decision to impose that was driven by presidential politics as anything else...Earl Warren(the future liberal Chief Justice of the Supreme Court)was in the World War II era a rising prospect in California Republican politics(and much further to the right than he would ever be on the Court). Warren was pushing the interment, especially after his election as governor, in the name of giving himself a national political profile...becoming "presidential timber", as the old phrase put it. He decided to foment anti-Japanese racism both to build that profile and to give Anglo farmers in California a chance to seize Japanese-American owned farmland(some of the most valuable in the state at the time). FDR gave in and imposed interment largely as a way to neutralize the Warren threat to Democratic prospects in 1944.