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How Did Hysteria Affect The Internment Of Japanese Americans

521 Words3 Pages

In 1942, hysteria broke out after the bombing of Pearl Harbor removing 120,000 people from their daily lives. This is not the first time hysteria broke loose in history, such as when the Salem Witch Trial occurred in 1692. The hysteria of the internment of Japanese-Americans occurred because when people feel threatened, they usually take action. The Salem Witch Trials and McCarthy Trials were not the only occurrence of hysteria in history. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942, hysteria struck again. “The internment of Japanese Americans in the United States was the forced relocation and incarceration during World War II of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast in camps in the interior of the country.” (Crawford 1). After the attack, the government felt threatened by the Japanese. Therefore, they could not trust any, even the ones living in the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps or military camps where they were not allowed to leave. The movement of the Japanese was to prevent …show more content…

“Japanese Americans were suspected of remaining loyal to their ancestral land. In the event of a Japanese invasion of the American mainland, Japanese Americans were feared as a security risk.” (U.S. History 2). Everyone in society is panicking because they are still recovering from the bombing. People want to take action against Japan and do not want to take risk so they relocated most Japanese into camps. The US did not learn from the past because the Salem Witch trials happened hundreds of years ago, therefore it did not cross people’s minds. With the mass panic in Hawaii, there was no time for thinking, only action. Who knows, maybe hysteria will strike again in the future, which means the US did not learn from previous

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