1940's Government and Politics | People in the News

Attorney General Francis Biddle declared on 12 October 1942 that 600,000 Italian citizens residing in the United States were no longer "enemy aliens." American citizens of Japanese descent, meanwhile, were interned in concentration camps.

Returning to Mississippi to run for reelection in November 1946, Sen. Theodore Gilmore Bilbo answered northern critics of his white-supremacist speeches by saying, "We tell our Negro-loving Yankee friends to go straight to hell."

In July 1944 Republican vice-presidential candidate John Bricker made the first public statement of the Dewey-Bricker team about the Democrats' choice for vice-president, saying, "Truman—that's his name, isn't it? I can never remember that name."

On 27 October 1942 James F, Byrnes, director of the Office of Economic Stabilization and former associate justice of the Supreme Court, issued regulations limiting individual salaries at...