Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s
Masumi IzumiNow in 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 Yet the Act was never enforced before it was repealed in 1971.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.
Praise for the hardcover:
"Izumi presents a compelling argument, claiming that US lawmakers, gripped by the fear of a communist (rather than Japanese) incursion, relied on the legal precedents created by the internment to institute America’s only preventive detention law—one aimed at potentially subversive individuals or groups.... The frequent inclusion of excerpts and illustrations from contemporary sources will help make the text more accessible for some readers.... (T)his is a welcome addition to both American and legal history. Summing Up: Highly recommended."
— Choice
"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
"The book’s most outstanding contribution is its compelling examination of how another preventive detention—the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans—formed the basis for the McCarran Act.... Izumi offers a compellingly argued and extensively researched study of the dangers of forgoing civil liberties for the sake of national security."—American Historical Review
“The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law reflects years of painstaking research and will serve as an invaluable reference for those interested in either the legislative history of the Internal Security Act or the ascendance of critical voices within the Japanese American community.”—Journal of American History
"The story is absorbing, and relevant for today’s politics as 9/11 shows. Izumi has done meticulous research, lays the arguments out logically so that each step in the history is clear. This is an important and valuable book for our community, for as hard as it was for our community, the harm that it did to the constitution was and is much more damaging."
—International Examiner
Asian American History and Culture
Constructing the Enemy
Rajini Srikanth
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