Has the United States ever forcibly evicted or moved a population of people who were not Native Americans?

by Vladith

I was shocked today to learn about the expulsion of Eastern European Germans after World War II. Did the United States ever commit a similar atrocity?

AlotOfReading

Certainly, this has happened several times with the Mexican-American border, depending on what you would consider "similar".

In the 1950s, a program known as Operation Wetback was put into effect to deport immigrant workers that had come over the border illegally. At a minimum, tens of thousands of Mexicans were deported to Mexico. However, there was an even larger deportation nearly 20 years earlier. In a previous answer, it was noted that upwards upwards of 25,000 people had been forcibly deported, with many of them legitimate citizens of the US.

If we permit ourselves to discuss expulsions that are not quite as forceful, we can go back to the early days of the American Southwest. There has been a long tradition of social pressures to repatriate [former] Mexicans and settle the land for America. From the very first years of American annexation following the Mexican-American war, Mexican landowners were disenfranchised by local governments to give up their land. Often, this was done by a confusing legal maze of ownership rights and the net result was the mass flow of property from Mexicans to American settlers. Once stripped of their land and hereditary property, many of these people were employed on their land or even forced to return to Mexico. Within perhaps 30 years, the last of the frontier land was vanishing and the seizure had abated. But anti-Mexican sentiment continued regardless. Immigrant workers in the mines were paid less than their "white" counterparts and at numerous points expelled from their homes in fits of intolerance. One particularly notable incident was the Bisbee deportation protests, in which hundreds of workers were deported from Bisbee and Jerome to remote areas and ordered not to return. Although the actions were widely criticized and contributed to the labor rights movement in the US, many of the workers were unable or unwilling to return.

I'm ignoring the numerous similar (albeit smaller scale) events in the southwest because they don't make much sense without a significant amount of context. However, there's no shortage of quasi-forceful incidents to choose from when it comes to Mexican-American relations.

teriyakithug

I'd say that the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II deserves mention, as it affected over 100,000 people. Virtually all Japanese on the West Coast were forced to vacate their property and enter internment camps. The majority of Japanese in the united States lived in Hawaii and California, and most in the latter were relocated to, interestingly enough, Native American reservations. During evacuation, Japanese were often forced into a position where they had to sell their properties at crippling losses, suffering even more from the material loss that internment implied.

I'd check out:

Wendy Ng, Japanese American Internment During WWII, 2001

Brian Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment, 2006

AlfredoEinsteino

On a much smaller scale, the Missouri Mormon War of 1833 and 1838 comes to mind (essentially the same conflict, just with a few years of relative peace in the middle). In 1838 the Mormons were removed from the entire state of Missouri by official order of the Governor enforced by the state's militia.

To oversimplify the whole story for the sake of summary:

In 1831, the Mormons designated the area on the western border of Missouri around Independence, Missouri, to be their center place and spot where their church members should gather and settle (see paragraph 1 of this scripture given 20 July 1831). The Mormons attached a lot of theological significance to the spot--it was to be the place where they'd build a new Zion and a city of God in preparation for Jesus Christ's second coming.

Independence at this time was a frontier town and sparsely settled. In a matter of months, the original settlers were outnumbered by new Mormon arrivals--a good portion of whom were very poor. This was in a day when local communities (and not the federal government) were responsible to care for the indigent--so for the old locals, new Mormons meant a potential added tax burden. In reality, the Mormons preferred to care for their own poor, but you can see how a bunch of poor people on your figurative doorstep could be distressing. Many original settlers were from southern states or south-central states such as Kentucky. Most Mormons were from Ohio or New York and other New England states. Politics between the two groups clashed (particularly on the point of abolitionism). Mormons at this time lived a version of economic communalism called the Law of Consecration that also didn't sit well with the original settlers. Some Mormons also tended to be insensitive in preaching about the imminent millennium and the fate of unbelievers, and the old settlers didn't enjoy hearing that all their land would soon be given to the Mormons as a divinely appointed inheritance. (For one eye-witness's observations about these differences between the Mormons and their neighbors, see pp. 18-19 of John Corrill's 1839 pamphlet.)

All of this percolated until finally a meeting of citizens was held in the town square in July 1833. Basically, after a couple of exchanges between committees of old settlers and Mormon leadership, the old settlers demanded that the Mormons leave the county (half in 6 months, and the remaining half in 9 months), stop future Mormon immigration to the county, and to never publish another newspaper in the county. They then took a vote and agreed to tear down the Mormon newspaper printing office (a two-story brick building), and tar and feather the Mormon leaders which they then did (they were only able to find the Mormon bishop and some poor guy who was passing by). They were a destructive mob of vigilantes--but they were a mob who voted and signed resolutions! (Seriously, the idea of an orderly mob is so bizarre and foreign to my 21st century mind.) The proceedings were written up, signed by several of the leading citizens, and widely published in newspapers across the country. The acquiescence of the Mormons (who by their own account agreed to the demands simply to buy time so they could arrange a more favorable agreement) settled things down for a few months. But then in November, vigilantes started pressuring the Mormons (who hadn't made any progress towards moving out of the county as they had promised) to leave. Groups of men in the nighttime pulled Mormon men from their beds and beat them, tore off the roofs of houses while the occupants were inside, threw rocks through windows, looted the local Mormon store--in short, it was not a safe neighborhood anymore. Mormon leaders tried to get local law enforcement (such as it existed) involved by swearing out warrants from Justices of the Peace, but they couldn't find one in the county that would sign them, so they went to adjoining counties. By the time warrants were signed, it was too late for them to be enforced. Most Mormons had literally fled the county. The worst accounts include stories of little kids who left bloody footprints in the snow because of the harsh ice and no shoes.

Despite it all, Mormons kept coming to Missouri, but ended up settling in the counties adjoining Jackson County where Independence is located. They applied to the state legislature and the governor for redress and asked to be given militia protection so they could return to their abandoned property and lands in Independence. They didn't receive satisfactory remunerations, but a new county--Clay County--was formed specifically for Mormons to settle in the hope that it would prevent similar conflict in the future. (Interestingly, the area was originally proposed as a "Mormon Reservation" like an Indian reservation.)

While all of that was happening, the Mormons also tried to sue the vigilantes for the destroyed printing office and tarring and feathering the Mormon bishop, Edward Partridge. The Mormons won both of their lawsuits, but in the case of the printing office, they were awarded less than a quarter of the worth of the destroyed property, and insultingly, in the case of the beaten and tarred bishop, he was awarded 1 cent in damages (see the last page of the PDF linked in Partridge v. Lucas for Trespass). To the Mormons, this verdict meant that they couldn't hope to find justice in the local courts, and their failed attempts at redress meant that neither the local state legislature, nor the governor could give them reparations for their losses.

Separating the Mormons into their own county didn't really work. Mormons mostly settled in Clay County, but not all, and non-Mormon settlers mostly settled outside of Clay, but not all. Within a few years, the same conflicts that caused the trouble in Independence caused more trouble across several counties. A lot more Mormons had since immigrated and so had a lot more non-Mormon settlers.

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