Executive Order 9066: Internment of Japanese Americans

Context

In the days following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, rumors circulated on the American West Coast that Japanese aliens (the Issei) and American citizens of Japanese extraction (the Nisei and their children, Sansei) were a threat to the nation's security. Despite assurances from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover that the bureau had already taken suspected subversives into custody and that widely reported acts of espionage and sabotage were false, by late January the rumors had taken on a life of their own. Newspapers across the country, national columnists, radio commentators, a number of congressmen, and state officials in Oregon, California, and Washington, D.C., demanded that all Japanese—aliens and native-born alike—be rounded up and removed from the Pacific Coast.

The resulting hysteria, including isolated attacks on Japanese families, was fueled not only by fear of invasion or coastal shelling but also by a long-standing hostility in California and other western states toward Asian immigrants in general and the Issei in particular. From their first arrival in America as contract laborers at the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese had been denied citizenship because of their race under the Naturalization Act of 1790 and, in 1924, had been barred from further immigration altogether because they were ineligible for citizenship. The California legislature denied them the right to own land, their children were forced into segregated schools, and several hate groups regularly campaigned for their expulsion from the United States.

Despite these problems, by 1940 the Japanese population had become a prosperous, law-abiding segment of society and a major force in California's agriculture, producing 10 percent of the value of the state's farm output on less than 4 percent of the land. But like many immigrant groups that faced hostility and discrimination, they also had become insular, gathering in ethnic neighborhoods with their own shops, customs, and language. For many Americans, these separate ways were sufficient reason to doubt their loyalty, especially after Japan invaded China in 1937 and expanded into Southeast Asia in 1941. War between Japan and the United States seemed possible. As tensions increased between the two countries, in 1941 the State Department dispatched a special investigator, Curtis B. Munson, to the West Coast and Hawaii to study the likelihood of disloyalty among the Issei and Nisei should there be a war with Japan. His conclusion after a two-month study from October to November was unequivocal: “There is no Japanese ‘problem’ on the Coast. There will be no armed uprising of Japanese” (The Munson Report). Following the surprise attack of December 7, the State Department suppressed the report—President Roosevelt did not see it until late in February of 1942—and it was not made public until the Pearl Harbor hearings in 1946. Whether its publication earlier would have dampened the hysteria and aided the Japanese population in early 1942 is an open question.

The American public clearly received misinformation and fabricated claims of domestic treachery involving Japanese aliens in California and Hawaii. Owen Roberts, an associate justice of the Supreme Court sent by President Roosevelt to investigate the attack on Pearl Harbor, reported without any evidence that there had been numerous instances of sabotage and assistance offered to the Japanese fleet prior to the raid. He confirmed a widely circulated, though false, story that Japanese farmers on the Hawaiian island of Oahu had cut arrows into their fields pointing the way toward Pearl Harbor. Lieutenant General John DeWitt, the aging commander of the Fourth Army at the Presidio in San Francisco and, after March 2, 1942, the officer in charge of the Japanese civilian population, assured the president that enemy submarines off the coast received nightly radio and flashlight signals from disloyal Nisei on shore and that a fifth column—a vast network of saboteurs—lurked in the Japanese communities, waiting for the appropriate time to strike. It mattered very little that the FBI dismissed all such reports as false.

In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, as the Japanese army and navy moved relentlessly across the South Pacific and Southeast Asia, a legion of lobbyists descended on Washington, D.C., demanding that the government remove the Japanese as soon as possible from the West Coast to protect the nation's security. In February, under pressure from Congress, the Roosevelt administration debated what course of action should be taken. When Attorney General Francis Biddle and members of the Justice Department raised constitutional and ethical questions about relocating a population solely on the basis of race, the matter fell into the hands of the War Department, whose two top officials, with the consent of the president, were prepared to do whatever military necessity required.