Executive Order 9066

Order 9066 granted the US military the power to declare any area it chose a “military area,” but the meaning and extent of this term are only vaguely indicated in the text. Although no ethnic or racial group is mentioned, it was for the most part Japanese Americans—two thirds of whom were born in the US and thus were American citizens—who were singled out when the order was put into effect. Those singled out, who numbered about 120,000, were rounded up and imprisoned without due process or any trial or formal accusation but simply on the basis of their race. About 2,000 German and Italian Americans were also interned as potential enemy agents after the passage of Order 9066.

In addition, Japanese Hawaiians were not incarcerated to the extent that Japanese Americans residing on the mainland US were. This is partly because, due to historical factors, Japanese Hawaiians—who constituted a larger proportion of the population in Hawaii than did Japanese Americans in the mainland—lived under more secure economic conditions with less overt racism, and were felt to be economically vital to the war effort.

At first, the evacuation was carried out on a voluntary basis, but when numbers of volunteers to relocate proved minimal, the military instituted forced removal. An American propaganda film of the time, however, titled Japanese Relocation (1942), gives the impression that Japanese Americans in general volunteered to sign themselves up to be evacuated, showing the government’s concern that the public see the internment as humane.

The evacuees were ordered to vacate their homes, leaving behind all but what they could carry. This often involved a hasty sale of properties and businesses at very low prices, and thus many evacuees had nothing to return home to after their detention. The fact that the interned had lost their homes and livelihoods was a determining factor in the government issuing monetary reparations in the years and decades after the war.

After the roundup, the evacuees were transported to “assembly centers,” often converted fairgrounds or racetracks in which the detainees were housed in hastily cleaned-up barns or horse stables. After weeks or months of waiting, they were sent to “relocation centers,” which were, in effect, concentration camps located in remote areas across the Western US and as far inland as Arkansas. The detainees lived in these camps, often in crude and cramped conditions and under the surveillance of armed guards, for the remainder of the war, trying as best they could to maintain a semblance of normal social existence (work, school, religious worship, etc.) while under detention.

Historical context, while it cannot justify Order 9066, can help toward understanding why it was issued. In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was a tendency for government and judicial leaders to adopt an attitude of deference to the military. This helps explain why Roosevelt decided to take unilateral executive action, in consultation with the military, to issue the order, and why the Supreme Court later upheld it.

The Pearl Harbor attack had demonstrated that Japan was a direct threat to the United States. However, military leaders miscalculated in assuming that enemy agents of Japanese descent were operating in the US itself. No such disloyalty on the part of Japanese Americans was ever demonstrated, although in 1942 many observers thought it a strong possibility. This assumption, added to the fact that many Japanese Americans lived on the West Coast near vital military installations, seemed to argue for the necessity of isolating them further inland for the duration of the war.

In issuing Order 9066, Roosevelt believed himself to be acting in the best security interests of the United States. At the same time, as quotations from government and military leaders show (See: Important Quotes), concerns about national security were often mixed with racial stereotyping in assessing the need for internment. For example, the fact that no subversive activity by Japanese Americans had been detected was itself used as proof that such activity was taking place deeply in secret or was about to take place, because of the supposedly clannish or “inscrutable” nature of Japanese people—a clearly racist supposition.

The racist idea that East Asians “all look alike” to white people was also evoked as a reason for internment, since Americans could not be expected to be able to distinguish between loyal and disloyal Japanese Americans. These racially  charged viewpoints are often considered to be an outgrowth of the “Yellow Peril” racial stereotypes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which depicted East Asians as a sinister threat to Western societies. In sum, Order 9066 has gone into history as an example of the government curtailing individual rights and liberties in the name of a supposed threat to the national interest.

That was, in fact, the line of argument taken by the Supreme Court when Japanese American citizen Fred Korematsu challenged the constitutionality of internment in the case Korematsu v. United States in 1944. Korematsu had refused to evacuate his home and was sent to prison. Although Korematsu argued that his detention was unlawful, the majority of the court’s justices upheld the right of the government to intern citizens in a time of war without the need to distinguish between loyal and disloyal citizens. A minority of the justices dissented from this view, arguing that internment was un-American, leading dissenting Justice Frank Murphy to use the term “racism” for the first time in a Supreme Court statement.

The dissenting side experienced a victory on the very same day in the case Ex parte Mitsuye Endo, in which a Japanese American woman had legally challenged her firing from her job because of Order 9066. In its conclusion, the court ruled that the military could release detainees from incarceration if they passed a loyalty test. That these two court cases were handed down on the same day demonstrates the divergent opinions that existed in American society on the implications of Order 9066.

Indeed, sentiment in the US was sharply divided, with widespread anti-Japanese sentiment balanced by some newspapers speaking out against the internment and some religious groups taking efforts to provide for the internees’ practical and religious needs (Onion, Rebecca. “An Eloquent Baptist Protest Against Internment Camps During WWII.” Slate, 9 Nov. 2015). First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt tried to sway her husband from the internment decision, but he sharply forbade her to discuss it. Nevertheless, Eleanor took a public stance in support of Japanese Americans, speaking out against racial and ethnic prejudice in her syndicated newspaper column. After the war, however, she protected her husband’s legacy by making the tendentious claim that Japanese Americans were removed to protect them from racist attacks.

December 1944—the month of the two Supreme Court decisions—proved a turning point, leading to the rescinding of the exclusion order and an announcement that the relocation camps would soon be closed. Already in early 1943, the military had started allowing Nisei Japanese American internees to enlist in the Army, which they did in considerable numbers. After the war, President Harry Truman congratulated a much-decorated all-Nisei combat team for its service to the country and for conquering prejudice at the same time.

Likewise, reparation statements in the decades following World War II have emphasized the loyalty and patriotism of Japanese Americans and the fact that not a single Japanese American was ever convicted of espionage, sabotage, or disloyalty during the war.

Despite these belated postwar honors, former internees often returned home to an uncertain future: Some had had their property confiscated or stolen, and many had to face suspicion and contempt from other Americans. Oral histories bear witness to the fact that emotional wounds remained for decades afterward on the part of many who went through the ordeal of internment.

Coming during an intensely confusing and chaotic time, Order 9066 and its consequences are generally seen as a blot on America’s record during World War II and as “a period of national shame” (Britannica), representing the first and only time that the US government imprisoned citizens on the basis of their ethnicity or race.