Executive Order 9066

On 19 February 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The document ran to a few paragraphs and named no ethnic group. It authorised the Secretary of War and the military commanders he designated to prescribe “military areas” from which “any or all persons” might be excluded, and to provide those excluded with transport, food and shelter. In practice it served as the basis for one of the gravest intrusions of the American state on the rights of its own citizens in the twentieth century: the removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and their confinement in camps. Some 110,000–120,000 people were affected, two-thirds of them American-born citizens of the United States.

War chronologies record the matter three times: on 16 February as discussion “in high government circles” of interning Japanese Americans, on 19 February as the signing of an order whose zones were to apply to the Japanese on the West Coast and to Germans and Italians “mainly on the East Coast”, and on 25 February as the beginning of internment. The three dates mark a single process, but two qualifications are needed. In practice the order barely touched Germans and Italians, and there were no mass removals on the East Coast. And what began on 25 February was not mass incarceration but the removal of a single community, the fishermen of Terminal Island in Los Angeles. The first orders removing entire districts were not issued until 24 March.

A population that was not trusted

In 1940 some 127,000 people of Japanese ancestry lived in the continental United States, almost 113,000 of them in California, Oregon and Washington State. In Hawaii there were some 150,000–160,000, more than a third of the islands’ population. The older generation, the issei, had come from Japan at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. American law did not allow them to acquire citizenship by naturalisation, and the Immigration Act of 1924 had shut off further arrivals from Japan. California and other states also barred them from buying land. Their children, the nisei, born in the United States, were citizens by right of birth. In 1942 most of them were teenagers or young adults; they had gone to American schools and spoke little or no Japanese.

Hostility towards Japanese Americans on the West Coast was long-standing and also had an economic basis: Japanese farmers, market gardeners and fishermen competed with whites. The government had kept the community under observation since the 1930s. Yet the report that Curtis Munson prepared for the President in the autumn of 1941 concluded that the overwhelming majority were loyal and that no armed uprising was to be expected. The naval intelligence officer Kenneth Ringle reached a similar assessment.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor the FBI began, on 7 December itself, to detain leaders of the Japanese community from lists drawn up in advance: Buddhist priests, language teachers, officials of associations, business managers. By various estimates several thousand issei were detained in this way within a few weeks. These arrests rested on the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which from 8 December, when Congress declared war on Japan, applied to Japanese nationals, and after Germany and Italy declared war to nationals of those two countries as well. Each case was examined individually before Justice Department boards. This was internment in the strict sense, permissible against nationals of an enemy state.

From fear to demands for removal

For the first weeks of the war public opinion was relatively calm, and parts of the West Coast press wrote of California’s Japanese as good Americans. A series of defeats and rumours changed the mood. In Hawaii there was the Niʻihau incident, in which two local residents of Japanese ancestry helped a downed Japanese pilot. A commission chaired by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, investigating the circumstances of the defeat at Pearl Harbor, published a report on 24 January 1942 suggesting that a Japanese spy network had operated on the islands, including with the participation of local Japanese. Claims of sabotage in Hawaii were never substantiated, but the report had a great influence on public opinion. At the same time the Japanese were overrunning Malaya, the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, and on 15 February Singapore surrendered.

Calls for the removal of all Japanese from the coast came from the American Legion, nativist organisations such as the Native Sons of the Golden West, farmers’ associations, congressmen from California, Oregon and Washington, and the Attorney General of California, Earl Warren, later Chief Justice of the United States. Warren argued that the absence of sabotage proved nothing, because the enemy was waiting for the right moment. The commander of the Western Defense Command, General John L. DeWitt, reasoned in the same way. In December he had still been saying that “an American citizen, after all, is an American citizen”. By February he considered the very fact that no sabotage had taken place a “disturbing and confirming indication” that it would be attempted. On 12 February the influential columnist Walter Lippmann published an article on “the fifth column on the coast”, and on 13 February congressmen from the western states urged the President to remove all persons of Japanese ancestry from “strategic areas” immediately.

Within the administration the matter was decided by a conflict between two departments. Attorney General Francis Biddle opposed the mass removal of citizens, considering it unconstitutional and unnecessary, and did not want his department to be responsible for it. The director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, took a similar view: the dangerous people had already been detained, and the demands for removal stemmed from the pressure of public opinion, not from the facts. The Justice Department designated only small prohibited zones around ports, power stations and arms plants, from which all enemy aliens, Italians and Germans included, had to move out. Officials of the War Department thought far more radically: the Assistant Secretary, John J. McCloy, the Provost Marshal General, General Allen Gullion, and his subordinate, Lieutenant Colonel Karl Bendetsen, who became the chief architect of the whole operation.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson hesitated. On 10 February he noted in his diary that second-generation citizens could be removed only as part of a general evacuation or openly on the grounds of their racial characteristics, and that the latter would make a “tremendous hole” in the American constitutional system. The next day he telephoned the President. According to Stimson’s notes, Roosevelt gave him a free hand and asked only that he act as reasonably as possible. McCloy told Bendetsen that the army had carte blanche. In mid-February DeWitt sent Stimson his final recommendations. He called for the removal from the coast of all persons of Japanese ancestry, citizens and aliens alike, as well as some Germans and Italians.

On 16 February, the day that appears in chronologies as the time of discussion “in high circles”, Roosevelt instructed Stimson to respond to the congressmen’s appeal. On 17 February Stimson conferred with McCloy, Gullion, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army Ground Forces, General Mark Clark, and Bendetsen. It was decided that DeWitt should carry out the removal to whatever extent he considered necessary. Clark warned that the operation would tie down many troops, but his view did not prevail. The same day Biddle wrote a memorandum to the President warning against giving in to hysteria and calling the advocates of removal “armchair strategists”. That evening men from both departments met at his house. The Justice Department lawyers James Rowe and Edward Ennis wanted to keep resisting, but Biddle, who already knew that the President had come round to the army’s position, gave way. On 18 February Bendetsen and lawyers from both departments drafted the text of the order.

What the order said

Roosevelt signed it on Thursday 19 February. The justification given was the need for protection against espionage and sabotage to national-defence material, premises and utilities. The document authorised the Secretary of War and the commanders he designated to create military areas of any extent, to determine who might remain in, enter or leave them, and to provide those excluded with necessities. The military areas superseded the prohibited zones hitherto designated by the Justice Department, and all federal agencies were to assist the army. Neither the word “Japanese” nor any other term for a group appeared in the text. It did not require the approval of Congress, which a month later, on 21 March, merely passed an act laying down penalties for violating military orders. The debate on it lasted about an hour in the Senate and half an hour in the House of Representatives.

The neutral wording did not change the purpose. The next day Stimson designated DeWitt to carry out the order, and DeWitt’s orders spoke openly of “all persons of Japanese ancestry”, regardless of citizenship. In 1943 Biddle reminded the President that the order had been signed so that the army could deal with the Japanese, and had never been intended for Italians and Germans. On the East Coast the army later designated a military area, but no mass removals were carried out there. Under the order only individual exclusion orders were issued, against a few hundred people, mainly of German and Italian ancestry, including American citizens. More than 600,000 Italian nationals and about 300,000 German nationals living in the United States were subject to the restrictions on enemy aliens, but their communities stayed where they were. According to the most commonly cited estimates, about 11,000 people of German ancestry and about 3,000 of Italian ancestry were interned in Justice Department camps during the war, in each case after individual proceedings. On 12 October 1942 Biddle lifted enemy alien status from Italians.

The comparison with Hawaii is also striking. There the population of Japanese ancestry was much larger and lived right next to the fleet’s largest base, but martial law had been in force since 7 December, and the islands’ economy would have ground to a halt without these people. As late as 26 February Roosevelt wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, that he had long felt most of the Japanese should be moved from Oahu to other islands, but the local commander, General Delos Emmons, quietly opposed this, and the cost and the shortage of ships settled the matter. In Hawaii, depending on the source, between 1,200 and 1,800 people were detained. A congressional commission later concluded that this contrast alone undermined the argument of “military necessity” on the coast.

Terminal Island and the beginning of the removals

The first community to be removed lived on Terminal Island in the port of Los Angeles, next to a naval base. Some 3,000 people of Japanese ancestry lived there, mostly the families of fishermen and women who worked in the fish canneries. On 2 February the FBI detained all issei men holding fishing licences. The navy announced that the remaining residents had to leave the island by 14 March. The deadline was suddenly cut short after a Japanese submarine shelled oil installations at Ellwood near Santa Barbara on 23 February, and on the night of 24–25 February the anti-aircraft defences of Los Angeles spent hours firing into the sky at a non-existent enemy, an episode later called the “Battle of Los Angeles”. On 25 February (according to some sources the decision was announced a day earlier) soldiers posted notices: all residents of Japanese ancestry, citizens and aliens alike, had to leave the island within 48 hours. Women, children and old people, without their men, hurriedly sold furniture, boats and equipment for next to nothing. The fishing village was afterwards razed to the ground.

It is this episode that is sometimes called the beginning of internment. The residents of Terminal Island, however, were removed on navy orders, not under DeWitt’s orders, and did not go straight to camps; they sought shelter in other districts of Los Angeles, from which they were taken away along with everyone else a few weeks later. The operation proper began on 2 March, when DeWitt declared the western part of California, Oregon and Washington and the southern part of Arizona Military Area No. 1. For a few weeks the Japanese were expected to leave “voluntarily” at their own expense, but the few thousand who did so met hostility inland. On 24 March the first of nearly 110 exclusion orders was issued: the 227 residents of Bainbridge Island near Seattle were given six days to prepare for departure to the Manzanar camp in California. At the end of March leaving the area was prohibited, and a curfew was imposed on persons of Japanese ancestry as well as on German and Italian nationals. By August 1942 there was no longer a single Japanese family on the West Coast outside the camps. The order was also applied to Alaska.

The camps

People who could take only what they could carry were sent first to temporary “assembly centres” set up at racetracks and fairgrounds, where some families lived in horse stalls. From there they went to the ten camps of the civilian War Relocation Authority, built in deserts and swamps in the interior, from Manzanar and Tule Lake in California to Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas. They consisted of tar-paper barracks behind barbed wire, with watchtowers, communal mess halls and latrines. In all some 120,000 people passed through the camps, including children born behind the wire. Among them was the five-year-old George Takei, later an actor. Families lost homes, farms, businesses and savings, and in 1983 a congressional commission estimated the property losses at hundreds of millions of dollars at the values of the time.

The authorities called the whole operation an “evacuation” and the camps “relocation centres”. The name that has become established in Polish literature is the internment of Japanese Americans. Many American historians and Japanese American organisations point out, however, that internment in the sense of international law applies to nationals of an enemy state, whereas two-thirds of those confined were American citizens. They therefore prefer to speak of forced removal and incarceration. Roosevelt himself and some of his ministers, including the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, called these places concentration camps, during the war and after it, in the older American sense of the term. They were not extermination camps, nor slave labour camps of the German kind. They were places where an entire group of the population was confined solely because of its ancestry, without sentences and without charges.

A long shadow

In April 1943 DeWitt told a congressional committee: “A Jap’s a Jap”, regardless of citizenship. In the same year the army began accepting nisei volunteers. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, formed from them and from Japanese Hawaiians, fought in Italy and France and became, relative to its size, one of the most highly decorated units in the American army. Among those who served in it was Daniel Inouye, later a senator. At the same time some of those confined refused to sign the so-called loyalty questionnaire or to serve in the army, and were sent to the Tule Lake camp or to prison.

Several young citizens refused to obey the orders and challenged them in the courts. In the case of Fred Korematsu, on 18 December 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the removal as constitutional by six votes to three. The majority opinion was written by Justice Hugo Black. Among the dissenters was Owen Roberts, author of the Pearl Harbor report, and Justice Frank Murphy wrote that the exclusion “falls into the ugly abyss of racism”. The same day, in the case of Mitsuye Endo, the court ruled that the government could not detain a citizen whose loyalty was not in doubt. The day before, knowing of these rulings, the army had revoked the exclusion orders with effect from 2 January 1945. The last camp, Tule Lake, closed in March 1946.

On 19 February 1976, the 34th anniversary of the signing, President Gerald Ford formally rescinded Executive Order 9066 and acknowledged that the removal had been a mistake. A commission set up under President Jimmy Carter concluded in 1983 that the decisions of 1942 had not been driven by military necessity but by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership”. In the same year a federal court vacated Korematsu’s conviction, after it emerged that in 1944 the government had withheld from the Supreme Court intelligence reports contradicting the claim of a threat. In 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed an act in which the government apologised, and every surviving person who had been confined received $20,000 in compensation. More than 82,000 people received payments. In 2018 the Supreme Court declared that the Korematsu decision had been gravely wrong the day it was decided.

Executive Order 9066 was part of a wider phenomenon. A few days later, on 24 February 1942, the Canadian government adopted a similar measure and removed more than 20,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the coast of British Columbia. The United States also brought more than 2,000 Japanese from Peru and other Latin American countries in order to exchange them for Americans held by Japan. In the history of the war the episode shows how easily the fear of a “fifth column”, which had gripped Western Europe in 1940, turns into collective responsibility, even in a state fighting in the name of freedom and human rights.