The Rise and Fall of America's Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s (Asian American History & Cultu) (Paperback)
The Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, is the only law in American history to legalize preventive detention. It restricted the freedom of a certain individual or a group of individuals based on actions that may be taken that would threaten the security of a nation or of a particular area. Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971.
Masumi Izumi links the Emergency Detention Act with Japanese American wartime incarceration in her cogent study, The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law. She dissects the entangled discourses of race, national security, and civil liberties between 1941 and 1971 by examining how this historical precedent generated “the concentration camp law” and expanded a ubiquitous regime of surveillance in McCarthyist America.
Izumi also shows how political radicalism grew as a result of these laws. Japanese Americas were instrumental in forming grassroots social movements that worked to repeal Title II. The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law is a timely study in this age of insecurity where issues of immigration, race, and exclusion persist.
Masumi Izumi is a Professor of North American Studies in the Department of Global and Regional Studies, Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.
"This is policy history at its best, showing the complex interactions between policy makers and their larger society. It is built on a sturdy foundation of an explanation of why and how the United States interned hundreds of thousands of people during World War II but is also informed by the cultural turn in historical analysis.... What Izumi reveals about those times speaks to our current time, as racialized imagery and hysterical fears about national security have moved the nation to create concentration camps for a different racial group of aliens."—Pacific Historical Review
"For a detailed analysis of the genesis of the Emergency Detention Act, its impact on ideas of citizenship, rights, the interpretation of the US constitution and the role of race in the legal culture of the country, this represents an informative and readable account. Stronger on narrative than it is on analysis in some cases, the book reveals a little-discussed episode in US legal history, one thankfully never invoked in practice, that sheds light on a period of contested civil liberties....The dangers and prejudices so well documented here have not gone away, and certainly in that sense there is a great deal to learn from history." —Ethnic and Racial Studies