THE GREAT AMERICAN ATROCITY'
Romer, Samuel
'The Great American Atrocity' THE GOVERNING OF MEN, by Alexander H. Leighton. Princeton University Press. $3.75. Reviewed by Samuel Romer AMONG the great atrocities of the war was one which will...
...from their inquiries, they have tried to deduce general principles of government which might apply under similar circumstances...
...That some administrators sought to encourage a minimal self-government among the residents does not detract from the essential fact—behind the administrator were the machine-guns of the U. S. Army and the barbed-wire of exclusion from legal guarantees...
...it will prove as absorbing to the general reader as to the academician...
...At the concentration camp near Poston, Ariz., this revolt took the form of a 6-day strike of protest...
...its perpetrators will not be judged except by history...
...There was no democracy in these camps...
...As a consequence, there came the inevitable eruption—a slave revolt...
...he is no substitute for democracy...
...ON the flyleaf of the book lies a quotation from Dan-ton before his execution: "Oh it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men...
...Leighton, a well-known social anthropologist and psychiatrist, who as a naval officer was detailed to Poston to head a research project which sought to study human relationships during a period of stress...
...The same thing is true of the "principles and recommendations" developed by the researchers, although here a socially-minded reader may well shudder at the realization that basically these precepts are a guide for the master seeking the most efficient means of slave-control...
...the relationship which existed between camp administrator and camp resident was in all "essentials a master-slave relationship...
...Reviewed by Samuel Romer AMONG the great atrocities of the war was one which will go unmentioned in the legal records of Nuremberg or Tokyo...
...Despite Commander Leighton's use of considerable scientific jargon, the story of the details of the Poston strike reads like an exciting detective story...
...It occurred early in 1942 when more than 100,000 men, women, and children living in the Pacific Coast area, many of them citizens and all of them indistinguishable from other residents except by the color of their skin and the fold of their eyes, were rounded up with scant warning, forced either to get rid of their lifetime's accumulation of property for ridiculous prices or abandon it to the safekeeping of their neighbors, and shipped off into concentration camps, American-style...
...at Poston, Commander Leighton and his staff were offered this remarkable opportunity...
...The entire book is proof of this truth...
...Using the skilled technique of the social scientists, they weighed attitudes, tensions, and frustrations of both the governors and governed...
...A kind and just slaveholder may be preferred to the tyrant...
...The full story of Poston has just been told by Dr...
...One of the great difficulties confronting social scientists is their inability to secure laboratory conditions for their observation of the human animal...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 46
