Ten weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066,[1] resulting in the forced relocation and incarceration of almost 120,000 Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast.[2] Evacuation orders were soon posted in public places and all those of Japanese descent were given ten days or less to pack up only what they could carry. Government officials initially claimed the evacuation was for reasons of public safety, but most scholars now affirm that this unjust course of action had been rooted in fear and racial prejudice.[3] As First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, would later admit,
[The Japanese] were marked as different from other races and they were not treated on an equal basis. This happened because in one part of our country they were feared as competitors, and the rest of our country knew them so little and cared so little about them that they did not even think about the principle that we in this country believe in—that of equal rights for all human beings.[4]
Milton S. Eisenhower, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) director responsible for the internment, also expressed his regret in a memoir:
The evacuation of Japanese Americans from their homes on the coast to hastily constructed assembly centers and then to inland relocation centers was an inhuman mistake. Thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry were stripped of their rights and freedoms and treated almost like enemy prisoners of war. Many lost their homes, their businesses, and their savings. For the 120,000 Japanese the evacuation was a bad dream come to pass. How could such a tragedy have occurred in a democratic society that prides itself on individual rights and freedoms? How could responsible leaders make such a fateful decision?[5]
After the war, an independent government commission authorized by the U.S. Congress would conclude, Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it . . . were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. Widespread ignorance of Japanese Americans contributed to a policy conceived in haste and executed in an atmosphere of fear and anger at Japan. A grave injustice was done to American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry who, without individual review or any probative evidence against them, were excluded, removed and detained by the United States during World War II.[6]
[1] Executive Order 9066. Federal Register 7, no. 38 (25 February 1942), 1407. Roosevelt’s order did not specify that the Japanese be singled out, but it gave the army unprecedented control over civilians which effectively resulted in the removal of anyone with one-sixteenth or greater Japanese ancestry from their West Coast homes. Some German and Italian aliens would also be interned, but nothing like the wholesale incarceration of the Japanese. Two-thirds of the Nikkei internees were American citizens and “no Japanese, citizen or alien, were indicted or convicted of sabotage, espionage, or any major violation of wartime security laws” (Jacobus tenBroek, Edward N. Barnhart, and Floyd M. Matson, Prejudice, War, and the Constitution: Causes and Consequences of the Evacuation of the Japanese Americans in World War II [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970], 101).
[2] According to the 1940 census, 126,948 people of Japanese ancestry lived in the contiguous United States. Eighty-nine percent of the Nikkei lived along the Pacific Coast and, of those, 83% lived in California (see Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 [Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1988], 115).
[3] This study uses the historic language of “the internment” to speak of that time in general and “assembly centers” and “relocation centers” to speak of the facilities specifically. Much ink has been spilled, however, regarding proper terminology. For example, President Roosevelt himself used the term “concentration camps” and his Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, clearly stated, “Crowded into cars like cattle, these hapless people were hurried away to hastily constructed and thoroughly inadequate concentration camps, with soldiers with nervous muskets on guard, in the great American desert. We gave the fancy name of ‘relocation centers’ to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps nonetheless” (Harold Ickes, Washington Evening Star [23 September 1946]). See Roger Daniels, “Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans,” in Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century, ed., Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 190-214.
[4] Eleanor Roosevelt, “To Undo a Mistake Is Always Harder Than Not to Create One Originally,” Collier’s (10 October 1943), Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, FDRL. Although her husband signed Executive Order 9066, Mrs. Roosevelt consistently spoke out on behalf of the Nikkei. Just over a week following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she wrote, “The great mass of our people, stemming from these various national ties, must not feel that they have suddenly ceased to be Americans. This is, perhaps, the greatest test this country has ever met. Perhaps it is the test which is going to show whether the United States can furnish a pattern for the rest of the world for the future. Our citizens come from all the nations of the world. Some of us have said from time to time, that we were the only proof that different nationalities could live together in peace and understanding, each bringing his own contribution, different though it may be, to the final unity which is the United States. . . . Perhaps, on us today, lies the obligation to prove that such a vision may be a practical possibility. If we can not meet the challenge of fairness to our citizens of every nationality, of really believing in the Bill of Rights and making it a reality for all loyal American citizens, regardless of race, creed or color; if we can not keep in check anti-Semitism, anti-racial feelings as well as anti-religious feelings, then we shall have removed from the world, the one real hope for the future on which all humanity must now rely” (Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” syndicated column [16 December 1941], Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, FDRL).
[5] Milton S. Eisenhower, The President is Calling (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), 124-25. Dillon S. Myer, who assumed direction of the WRA after Eisenhower, likewise admitted: “To be herded together, offered subsistence, and deprived of any reward for initiative was a spiritual death sentence. No matter how benign were the policies of the WRA, the situation was humiliating to all, intolerable to many” (Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis, The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the Japanese Americans During World War II [London: The Macmillan Company, 1969], 238). Myer, the son of a Methodist minister, issued another statement in March 1943: “After many months of operating relocation centers, the War Relocation Authority is convinced that they are undesirable institutions and should be removed from the American scene as soon as possible. Life in a relocation center is an unnatural and un-American sort of life. Keep in mind that the evacuees were charged with nothing except having Japanese ancestors yet the very fact of their confinement in relocation centers fosters suspicion of their loyalties and add, to their discouragement. It has added weight to the contention of the enemy that we are fighting a race war: that this nation preaches democracy and practices racial discrimination” (Dillon S. Myer, Uprooted Americans: The Japanese Americans and the War Relocation Authority During World War II [Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1971], 158).
[6] Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Citizens, Personal Justice Denied (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 18.
