Hoover spoke out against thinking of the war in racial terms. “No man should be suspected simply because he is foreign-born or has a foreign name or accent,” he wrote in the summer of 1941. “Americans, unlike other nationals, are not a race. Americanism is an idea.” He also had a legal argument: while noncitizens could be detained, the federal government had no constitutional right to detain U.S. citizens without due process, even in a time of war.
