War’s Dependencies: Japanese-American Internees, Veterans, and the War-Welfare State

I study peace as a historical process in its own right, a set of economic, political, and social transformations that amount to much more than war’s final moment.  My current work examines the aftermath of World War II in the United States, and here, the shift from war to peace—or demobilization—involved policy dilemmas just as knotty as the mobilization.  One of these was how the federal government would actually deliver on its wartime promises.  I will look at two groups not often paired:  newly freed Japanese-American internees and returning soldiers.  This paper is not, however, about the internment or the G.I. Bill.  Rather, I focus on the aftermath of these policy decisions in order to reveal a stark political reality:  that some national security priorities would necessitate new, enduring dependencies, a realization that nagged policymakers as World War II came to a close. 

Remarkably, in a climate of anti-Japanese hysteria, the agency that imprisoned Japanese Americans feared more that their federal custody in wartime might foster federal dependency after.  Internment was an extraordinary exercise of state authority, but it was also a new fiscal responsibility, a commitment to shift a population from productive autonomy to federal dependence, and then back again.  Similarly, after the G.I. Bill passed, policymakers began to worry openly that they had promised too much to veterans at the cost of building a safety net beneath all war-weary civilians.  These concerns—that an epic war had fostered mammoth government—are my focus, but policy stories are human stories, too, and thus the voices of freed internees and returning vets will animate this rumination on the war-welfare state.