Special interest groups were extremely active in applying pressure for mass evacuation. See House Report No. 2124 (77th Cong., 2d Sess.) 154-6; McWilliams, Prejudice, 126-8 (1944). Mr. Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, has frankly admitted that "We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. . . . We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over. . . . They undersell the white man in the markets. . . . They work their women and children while the white farmer has to pay wages for his help. If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don't want them back when the war ends, either." Quoted by Taylor in his article "The People Nobody Wants," 214 Sat. Eve. Post 24, 66 (May 9, 1942).
It would be interesting to link Korematsu to the Lochner line of cases which ended not many years before Korematsu. A big idea in that line of cases was that certain government acts were of dubious constitutionality not simply because they violated the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment but because they were motivated by the government wishing to help out special interests under the pretence of aiding the public welfare. Justice Holmes argued against that essentially by saying it was irrelevant, and the government was free to do unjust and bad things to help special interests as long as everybody followed the political rules. Justice Brandeis argued, in at least one case that I can remember, that the suspect laws really *were* in the public interest. The Brandeis way of thinking won out with the death of the old justices and the resulting Roosevelt appointments to the Supreme Court. By the time of Korematsu, the special interest argument survived only in dissents, and feebly. Only in the 1970's (if we except Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, which didn't seem to have a big impact on legal thinking) did the interest theory of politics return with the work of such people as George Stigler and Gordon Tullock, returning this time via economics. And I don't think it's been used to strike down legislation as unconstitutional--- just to note that special interests are the causes of many many laws against the public interest.
[ http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/04.02.04b.htm . Erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]
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