WTF? I just checked my E-mail and got this report from Military.com. Honestly, I’d never heard of this. Here’s the meat of the matter:
The chair of the national panel, retired Navy Admiral Michelle J. Howard, has notified the House and Senate armed services committees that the panel will recommend the Army eliminate a 1949 rule that gave U.S. military units permission to fly streamers symbolic of battles in which they fought for the Southern side. The commission released her letter publicly Aug. 1.
What the fuck? What happened in 1949 for someone to decide, “Hey, let’s go ahead and commemorate the CSA’s killing of US soldiers on US Army units’ banners”? And why are we just now hearing about this nonsense? Why hasn’t that rule already been revoked?
Of course I commend Admiral Howard for her recommendations. I’m still gobsmacked this is a thing.
Anytime blacks make strides in America, there is a conservative backlash, often involving confederate imagery: Trump after a black president, the terror riots in Tulsa and other cities after black American economic gains, and the erecting of confederate statues as talk of integration spread in the 20s.
1949 was a very different time in America. It’s hard to live in our world and see things from the past that make absolutely no fucking sense today. When I used to bring these up with my dad, who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in WWII, he would say, “those were different times; you just can’t compare them to now.” I’d ask how the US could round up Japanese-American citizens and throw them into internment camps. Why didn’t people protest? He’d say, “We all trusted our government in those days. You didn’t question a president’s decision.” A very different time indeed.
Well, also, a lot of people did protest internment. The US has never been a monolith politically. But it still happened.
I’m sure a lot of people back then thought this idea of Confederate imagery was also stupid and made their opinions known. But it still happened. Just because some (or a lot) of people object does not mean things don’t happen.
Hell, not all that different from comparatively recent times IMO. I remember shortly after 9/11 widespread popular willingness to entertain the idea of internment camps for American Muslims.
Maybe in this day and age such initiatives wouldn’t actually succeed, though I’m not sure I’d bet on it, but I don’t think willingness to run roughshod over the basic civil rights over people one fears as an existential threat to one’s existence is obsolete or incomprehensible in today’s America.
Not to pick on your dad but,
“those were different times; you just can’t compare them to now.”? No you can’t and you shouldn’t ignore that lots of these poor folks that were all “trusted our government in those days” would have been far happier if the round up Japanese-American citizens had ended in one large mass grave.
Most if not all of them are for state National Guard units, not regular Army units. They were Confederate units at the time, so that’s what the battle honors are for- battles/campaigns they participated in. They’re more of a historical acknowledgement saying that this regiment fought there, not an award for performance or anything.
Some of them have wars before the Civil War- take the 141st Infantry Regiment of the Texas National Guard. They were originally formed as the Texas Regiment of the Mexican National Militia, and have battle streamers for the Texas Revolution(Republic of Texas, The Alamo, San Jacinto), and Mexican-American War. They’ve also got ones for Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Meuse-Argonne, Naples-Foggio, Southern France, War on Terror, etc…
Many active-duty regiments have various Indian Wars streamers as well, for fighting the Seminoles, Nez Perce, Comanches, Pine Ridge, etc… Those seem more problematic to me than battle streamers for units that were in Confederate service.
I hope this is a purposeful exaggeration because none of the media I was reading, listening to, or watching at the time talked about this as anything more than a racist right-wing loonie idea. If, in fact, there were actual plans by the US Government, the only institution that could pull it off, then I’d like to see proof of that. And to my original point, if it did actually happen after 911 I think people would have actively protested against it, versus what happened in 1942, when people trusted the government 100%.
There’s some truth to this. The Japanese in America were truly hated after Pearl Harbor, and some people would have liked to have seen them marched into the Pacific Ocean.
My father, who lived in San Francisco with a sizeable Japanese-American population, told me that nobody said a word when the only Japanese-American kid in his high school class simply disappeared one day. He only learned later what happened to him.
Interestingly, there was no such animus toward Germans or Italians during the war. I suppose the Japanese were easier to identify and persecute than the others.
Not to mention…the leader of the U.S. Armed Forces in Europe…oh, what was his name…right. Eisenhower. Probably wouldn’t have looked good if the federal government had locked Mamie and the kids up.
There were some German Americans interned but far, far fewer. And even fewer Italian Americans. Race of course played an outsized part of why Japanese Americans were targeted so particularly as well as just flat out greed and corruption on the part of California farmers.
I distinctly remember having to look at this more than a decade ago for Starving Artist and finding contemporaneous documents citing the safety of those Americans (of Japanese decent of course) as a reason an excuse for the internment.
I’ve often wondered if their survival wasn’t an unintended consequence of the internment but never thought that the government had made that as a claim.
(No, I’m not saying the feds were right to intern the JA citizens. They weren’t. It was completely immoral and unethical and the living conditions in the internment camps were awful. I just wondered if, given the history of racism and race violence in the USA, it actually did save at least some lives. The Tulsa riots hadn’t been all that many years before, after all.)
As I’m remembering it,
It wasn’t from the Federal level, state or even lower.
It was basically a list of reasons in favor of internment, a ‘And if you don’t like that reason how about this one?’ the actual safety of Americans of Japanese ancestry wasn’t at issue.
Not what I was looking for or found the first time but,
The new order gave the military the authority it needed to remove individuals of Japanese descent from the Pacific Coast, but where would they go? Federal officials hoped that these individuals might be able to find work as farm laborers, but many state and local authorities made it clear they did not want Japanese Americans moving into their areas. The governors of Montana and Wyoming feared it would spark racial violence. “Our people cannot tell an American-born Japanese from an alien,” said Montana Governor Sam C. Ford. “When casualty lists start coming in…I fear for the safety of any Japanese in this state.” Idaho’s Attorney General, Bert Miller, was less sympathetic. “We want to keep this a white man’s country,” he said. “All Japanese [should] be put in concentration camps for the remainder of the war.” Japanese American Incarceration | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans
And why do I think that Attorney General said the not-so-quiet part REALLY LOUDLY?
[sigh] I always thought it was a stupid move by FDR (and his wife was very angry about it), but apparently it was some kind of horse trade to get part of Congress onboard with finishing the war in Europe first or something like that (been a while since I read that part of her biography).