Japanese Americans Interned: Rights Stripped by Fear

With a stroke of a pen on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the forced removal of over 110,000 people from their homes, businesses, and communities based on nothing more than their ancestry. Executive Order 9066 gave military commanders the power to designate "military areas" and exclude anyone they chose. The order never mentioned Japanese Americans by name. It did not need to — everyone understood who it targeted. The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, unleashed a wave of anti-Japanese hysteria along the West Coast. Newspapers ran headlines about Japanese saboteurs. Politicians demanded action. Lieutenant General John DeWitt, commanding the Western Defense Command, declared that "the Japanese race is an enemy race" and that the absence of any sabotage was itself proof of a coordinated plan to strike later. No evidence of espionage or sabotage by Japanese Americans was ever produced, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover privately called the military’s case weak. Roosevelt signed the order anyway. Beginning in March 1942, Japanese Americans were given days to dispose of their property, businesses, and possessions before reporting to assembly centers — often converted racetracks and fairgrounds — then transported to ten permanent internment camps in remote, inhospitable locations from the California desert to the swamps of Arkansas. Families lived in tar-paper barracks behind barbed wire, guarded by armed soldiers. Two-thirds of the internees were American citizens, many of them children. The internment continued until January 1945. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the order in Korematsu v. United States (1944), a decision that stood for 74 years before being repudiated by the Court in 2018. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, formally apologizing and providing $20,000 in reparations to each surviving internee. Congress acknowledged that the internment was motivated by "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." Executive Order 9066 remains the most sweeping violation of civil liberties in modern American history, a reminder that constitutional rights are only as strong as the willingness to defend them when fear demands their suspension.