Executive Order 9066: Internment of Japanese Americans

Impact

The secretary of war gave the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army under DeWitt responsibility for enforcing Executive Order 9066. On March 2, 1942, the general, in the first of 108 proclamations issued from the command over the next three years, announced the demarcation of military zones from which the Japanese would be removed, encompassing the western half of Washington and Oregon; the lower, southwestern corner of Arizona; and all of California. (The Japanese population of Hawaii, then a U.S. territory, was unaffected by the relocation program because of its important place in the islands' economies.) By June 2 more than 120,000 men, women, and children, with only the personal belongings they could carry, were moved to widely scattered assembly centers and placed in makeshift quarters at abandoned military facilities. Some were housed in horse stalls at the Santa Anita Race Track.

DeWitt's men had swept up foster children, orphans, infants, the elderly, and children of mixed marriages. One-third of the detainees were Issei, many were over age fifty, and a large number were infirm. Of the approximately seventy thousand Nisei, who were American citizens by birth, roughly one-half were female, and a majority of them were under age twenty-one. No charges were leveled against them, and no one could appeal their incarceration. They lost their civil rights, jobs, businesses, homes, and personal property.

By fall they were moved under armed guard to live behind barbed wire for up to three years in ten remote relocation centers in seven states; the civilian War Relocation Authority built and managed Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Tule Lake and Manzanar in California, Topaz in Utah, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, Granada in Colorado, Minidoka in Idaho, and Jerome and Rowher in Arkansas.

When the Japanese first arrived in the camps, they found them to consist of rows of tar-paper-covered barracks, with communal bathrooms (separated by gender but, at first, without stalls and without doors after stalls were built) and community dining halls. Over time, the camps, designed to be self-sufficient, had hospitals, post offices, and schools. The evacuees produced their own food from the hardscrabble soil that lay beyond the barbed wire and guard tower. In time, the evacuees also planted flower gardens and painted the churches and schools white. The heat in summer was unbearable, with temperatures regularly rising above 100 degrees; in winter the buildings were not wind resistant, and the temperatures were often well below freezing. This difficult existence did not end for many until 1946, when the last of the camps (Tule in northern California) was closed.

The effects of Executive Order 9066 lived on to near the end of the century, beginning in 1948 when President Truman signed the Japanese-American Evacuation Claims Act, making $28 million dollars available for token payments to Japanese business owners for their property losses during the evacuation. Twenty-eight years later Gerald Ford rescinded Executive Order 9066, to lay to rest the fears of some former detainees that the document's authority was still available to the government. In December 1982 the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, charged by Congress to investigate the events of 1942 to 1946, concluded in its report Personal Justice Denied that no military necessity or security threat justified the exclusions under Executive Order 9066. The commission recommended that reparations be made. Six years later, in 1988, Ronald Reagan signed Public Law 100-383, the Redress Act, which offered an apology and compensation of $20,000 to each of the sixty thousand surviving evacuees and officially discredited the document that produced one of the nation's worst offenses against personal freedom.