Why Did President Roosevelt Strip Japanese-Americans of Their Freedom?

A newsstand in San Francisco in February 1942.

(Library of Congress)

On February 19, 1942, more than 1,000 Japanese-Americans attended the first meeting of the United Citizens Federation, in Los Angeles. In the 10 weeks since Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, the situation on the West Coast had become precarious for Japanese immigrants and their families. Aliens’ cameras and radios were confiscated, their mail censored, their homes searched without warrants. On the night of February 19, the members of the UCF, a coalition of 21 Japanese-American organizations, considered how to convince the nation of their loyalty. Promising as their plans seemed, they came too late. Hours earlier, 65 years ago today, President Franklin Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed the War Department to incarcerate anyone of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast.

The order authorized the Secretary of War to “prescribe military areas . . . from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any persons to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.” Although the word “Japanese” appears nowhere in the text—as written, the Order granted the military the power to evacuate and confine anyone in America—Roosevelt and his cabinet intended it for Japanese-Americans alone. Eight months later, without charge or trial, more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans had been moved to government relocation camps. Two-thirds of them were American citizens.

The government justified the evacuation as a military necessity. As Japan racked up victory after victory in the Pacific—Manila, Hong Kong, Guam, and Wake Island fell within weeks—American generals worried that that empire, abetted by Japanese-Americans, would attack the West Coast. Although a November 1941 study predicted “no armed uprising of Japanese,” the War Department reasoned it was better to be safe than sorry. How the country came to define safe, in this case, was rooted in half a century of racial mistrust.

Japanese immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers in the late 1800s; by the turn of the century, 24,326 lived on the American mainland, most of them in California. They were not welcomed. Already set apart by their foreign customs and appearance, the newcomers carved a niche for themselves as farmers and produce merchants. Spurred by economic envy and fear of the “yellow peril” (the idea that fast-multiplying Asians would come to overwhelm white society), the government closed the door to Japanese immigrants in 1924. The remaining first-generation immigrants, known as the “Issei,” had been barred from citizenship by a 1790 law, but their American-born children, the “Nisei,” were citizens by birth.

But if white Americans had always distrusted these interlopers from across the Pacific, the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, turned suspicion into hysteria. In a country in which racial segregation formed an accepted part of the social fabric, the shock of the surprise attack—and the fear of reprisals—led many Americans to condemn an entire bloc of their countrymen without evidence of wrongdoing. After Congress declared war on Japan, on December 8, anyone of Japanese descent was the enemy, even U.S. citizens. On December 15, Frank Knox, the secretary of the Navy, announced, “I think the most effective Fifth Column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii with the possible exception of Norway.” He called for the evacuation of all Oahuans of Japanese ancestry, one the first voices in a growing clamor for large-scale racial exclusion.

Knox’s remark blaming Japanese-Americans for Pearl Harbor made headlines across the country. Of course his claims had no basis in fact. On January 23, 1942, the Roberts Commission, a Roosevelt-appointed investigation into the attack, issued its report, and it cited no evidence of collaboration from Japanese-Americans or immigrants. But that did little to assuage the paranoia building on the West Coast. Civilians reported strange aircraft flying overhead. The Treasury Department banned Japanese nationals from selling produce, lest they poison the vegetable supply. “Caps on Japanese Tomato Plants Point to Air Base,” a Los Angeles Times headline read, suggesting a hidden message in the vines.

None of the fears turned out to be substantiated, a fact little noted by the press. The same pattern was repeated in the government, spreading to ever higher levels of power. Intelligence was ignored in favor of fear-mongering, and suspicion was conflated with evidence. Even as military intelligence gatherers assured their superiors that the Japanese government preferred to rely on Caucasians for espionage (whites blended in better), nativist businessmen on the West Coast—who had long yearned for a way to get rid of their Japanese-American competitors—pressured their government representatives for an evacuation. In a telling analysis that equated the protection of the Constitution with sissiness, the Portland, Oregon, American Legion post resolved that “this is no time for namby-pamby pussyfooting, fear of hurting the feelings of our enemies; that it is not the time for consideration of minute constitutional rights.”

West Coast politicians were quick to appease their white constituents. Seventeen California county governments passed resolutions requesting evacuation of Japanese. On January 16 Rep. Leland Ford, of Los Angeles, wrote the secretaries of War and the Navy and the director of the FBI, requesting “that all Japanese, whether citizens or not, be placed in inland concentration camps . . . if an American born Japanese, who is a citizen, is really patriotic and wishes to make his contribution to the safety and welfare of this country, right here is his opportunity to do so, namely, that by permitting himself to be placed in a concentration camp, he would be making his sacrifice and he should be willing to do it if he is patriotic and is working for us.” (That sort of Catch-22—if you’re loyal you won’t mind moving, and if you’re disloyal we must move you—underpinned more than one justification for evacuation.) Two weeks later, West Coast congressmen asked Roosevelt to give the War Department “immediate and complete control” over enemy aliens and citizens with dual citizenship in enemy nations.

As the furor for evacuation grew, two groups that might have opposed it—the intelligence community and Japanese-Americans themselves—remained strangely quiet. “Those with intelligence knowledge were few, and they rarely spoke as a body,” reported the congressionally appointed Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1983. “Stronger political forces outside the intelligence services wanted evacuation. Intelligence opinions were disregarded or drowned out.” Japanese-Americans, less than 3 percent of the population, lived in isolated communities; the Issei could not vote, and many of the Nisei were too young. They had little voice in government and thus posed a negligible political risk.

In Washington, evacuation became a point of heated debate between the Justice and War Departments. The attorney general, Francis Biddle, opposed mass evacuation of Japanese, not because it was unconstitutional but because he deemed it unnecessary. The FBI in December had arrested 1,291 Japanese-American leaders it identified as potential threats; as far as Justice was concerned, the remaining Japanese-Americans were not dangerous. But Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, continually begged for the authority to conduct warrantless mass raids of Japanese homes, to ban enemy aliens from military areas, and, eventually, to evacuate both the Nisei and the Issei from the coast. Afraid of a mainland attack that would disgrace him like the commanders at Pearl Harbor, DeWitt gave credence to every scrap of bad intelligence and rumor that crossed his desk, worrying especially that the Issei and Nisei were signaling Japanese ships at sea (even though the FCC, which monitored all transmissions, found no such evidence; in some cases the army had misidentified U.S. Navy broadcasts as treasonous communications from Japanese-American households).

“Racial affinities are not severed by migration,” DeWitt wrote in a recommendation to Henry Stimson, the secretary of War, in February. “The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted. . . . That Japan is allied with Germany and Italy in this struggle is no ground for assuming that any Japanese, barred from assimilation by convention as he is, though born and raised in the United States, will not turn against this nation when the final test of loyalty comes.”

Stimson, for his part, worried that evacuation would “make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system,” but as debate within the War Department shifted from whether it was necessary to how it should be done, Stimson seems to have acquiesced. Biddle, though continuing to oppose evacuation, acceded to more and more of the War Department’s demands, declaring 135 areas in the West off-limits to enemy aliens on February 7.

The President, meanwhile, had been busy preparing the nation for war and had given little thought to what was being called the “Japanese problem.” When he finally did turn his attention to the issue, in February, he seems to have been motivated by the need to preserve both public and political unity. A country divided over the fate Japanese-Americans would lag in the production of materiel, and a bickering government might slow passage of crucial wartime legislation. In a telephone conversation on February 11, Roosevelt gave Stimson permission to do whatever he needed to do with the Issei and Nisei, with the caution to “be as reasonable as you can.” War Department officials codified their carte blanche in a draft of Executive Order 9066 the night of February 17, and Roosevelt signed it a day and a half later.

Ever since, historians have been baffled by how the architect of the New Deal could be so cavalier with the civil rights of 70,000 American citizens. Historians have cited inborn racism, misleading information, political pressure, and icy pragmatism as possible motivations, although we can never know for sure what made him sign the order. No evidence had been found of any espionage or sabotage by Issei or Nisei at Pearl Harbor or after; nevertheless, without a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus or the declaration of martial law, more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans would languish under armed guard in 10 bleak relocation centers until as late as 1946, having committed no crime other than being of the wrong race. The federal government had ignored nonwhites’ Constitutional rights to due process and equal protection before, of course, the Fugitive Slave Act and the expulsion of Native Americans from the Southeast being obvious examples. But the slaves and Cherokees had not been U.S. citizens; on the morning of America’s entry into a four-year war for freedom and democracy, the Japanese internment seemed to signal an unprecedented violation of those ideals. “Has the Gestapo come to America?” asked James Omura, a Nisei journalist, in 1942. “Have we not risen in righteous anger at Hitler’s mistreatment of the Jews? Then, is it not incongruous that citizen Americans of Japanese descent should be similarly mistreated and persecuted?”

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.