An American Paradox: The Emergency Detention Act of 1950

Abstract

T HE UNITED STATES currently is maintaining a group of six internment camps which will receive the thousands of persons who are to be apprehended and detained in the event of an internal security emergency. Congress in 1951 appropriated funds to rehabilitate and maintain abandoned Second World War facilities for this purpose. James V. Bennett, Director of the Federal Prison System, reassured a Congressional committee last year that the camps are ready for use. Future detainees may find themselves looking through barbed wire fences from former prisoner-of-war camps at Florence, Arizona, or El Reno, Oklahoma. Former Army installations at Avon Park, Florida; Tule Lake, California; Wickenburg, Arizona; and an ordinance depot at Allenwood, Pennsylvania, have also bieen set aside as detention facilities. It has been estimated that these camps could accommodate 12,000 to 15,000 persons. This would not seem an excessive capacity in view of the F.B.I.'s latest estimate of 22,663 hard core members of the Communist Party in the United States. The program whereby thousands of persons-regardless of American citizenship-will be arrested and interned on an administrative finding that there exists reasonable cause to believe they might engage in espionage or sabotage, is detailed in the Emergency Detention Act of 1950. This is the story of how that legislation found lodgment in the American statute books. It is an effort, also, to contribute to the understanding of some of the practical problems and theoretical implications stemming from the effort in a free society to cage human beings, without trial, and in consequence of their political beliefs and associations. In the spring of 1950, when dangers to domestic security represented by such names as Hiss. Fuchs. and Conlon were the siih[ 20 ]