Executive Order 9066: Internment of Japanese Americans

Questions for Further Study

• 1. Given the hysteria on the West Coast in 1942, the successes of Imperial Japan in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, and uncertainty about the future, what alternatives did the Roosevelt administration have to the relocation and incarceration of the Japanese?
• 2. Long after the internment camps were closed, the survivors of the relocation authorized by Executive Order 9066 pressured the U.S. government for reparations for their economic and personal losses forty years earlier. Did the government of a later generation of Americans have a moral obligation to meet their demands?
• 3. Compare Executive Order 9066, which is intended to protect the United States from sabotage and espionage by resident enemy aliens, to the Patriot Act (House Resolution 3162) of October 26, 2001, which is designed “to deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes.” Given the circumstances (the attack on Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks), was the legislation in each case justified or an overreaction?