February 19, 1942: Franklin D. Roosevelt authorizes Executive...

February 19, 1942: Franklin D. Roosevelt authorizes Executive Order 9066.

The presidential executive order, issued in the wake of the United States’ official entry into World War II, granted to the Secretary of War the authority to “prescribe military areas… from which any or all persons may be excluded” in order to provide “every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage.” It formed the basis for broad racial policies that imposed curfews, restrictions, and eventually internment on approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans (70,000 of them citizens) living on the West Coast. Certain restrictions and internment also applied to several thousand individuals of German and Italian descent, but support for the indiscriminate removal of these groups lacked the hysterical vigor with which the government - and ordinary citizens - accused Japanese-Americans of espionage and treason.

This was not a spontaneous act; the FBI and military intelligence had, by the 1930s, already begun to compile lists of potentially dangerous civilians, many of whom were detained in the months between Pearl Harbor and the executive order. Executive Order 9066 granted these efforts expansive and systematic dimensions by way of murky wording which made no explicit reference to any ethnic group, but nevertheless existed to provide authority for the wholesale removal of entire populations from their homes. Washington and many American citizens likely shared WDC Commander John DeWitt’s shrug that “A Jap’s a Jap.” The Supreme Court agreed as well; it affirmed the constitutionality of curfews in Hirabayashi v. United States(1943) and later the entire order in Korematsu v. United States(1944). In Korematsu, dissenting justice Frank Murphy labeled the majority ruling a “legalization of racism.”

Nevertheless, the government soon shipped over a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans to different prison camps across the country. The most widely-known of these camps is Manzanar, where, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, some 10,000 prisoners lived, and maintained their own prison, for three years. After the end of the war, the War Relocation Authority allocated to each incarceree travel money providing for their return home, but by that time many had suffered irreplaceable material loss (of abandoned property) and profound psychological harm. 

Executive Order 9066 was repealed in 1976, and a 1980 government study concluded that the internment had little legitimate security rationale, that its reasoning instead lay on grounds of “racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.” Reparations payments and apologies to surviving internees began in 1990.