Executive Order 9066: Internment of Japanese Americans

Executive Order 9066, promulgated on February 19, 1942, was the first and most important document in a series of military and government directives in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. That order from President Franklin D. Roosevelt led directly to the incarceration of 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry residing in four western states in the spring of 1942. Executive Order 9066 authorized the secretary of war to establish military zones on the West Coast from which enemy aliens could be removed as security risks—a label that was soon applied to the entire Japanese population residing on the West Coast. Although two-thirds of them were natural-born citizens of the United States, the initial order and nearly all subsequent directives took no notice of their status and, in effect, suspended their civil rights under the Constitution. With few exceptions, no arrest warrants were issued, and no arraignments took place.

Forced to close their businesses and sell their homes, the evacuees, carrying the few belongings the army permitted them to take, were placed in ten concentration camps in remote and desolate places in seven western or midwestern states, where they remained behind barbed-wire fences and were watched over by military police until shortly before the end of World War II. The forced removal of an entire population based on ethnicity and race, which was hailed at the time as a justified response to the treacherous attack by Imperial Japan on the United States and as a military necessity to protect the American homeland, later came to be seen as a violation of fundamental American values. In 1976 President Gerald Ford rescinded Executive Order 9066. Twelve years later, Congress apologized to the sixty thousand survivors of the camps and paid modest reparations to each of them, thus closing a dark chapter in American history.