1 gen 1942 anni - Executive Order 9066 imprisons Japanese and Japanese Americans

Descrizione:

An order signed by President Roosevelt in 1942 that authorized the War Department to force Japanese Americans from their homes and hold them in relocation camps for the rest of the war.


Unlike World War I, which evoked widespread harassment of German Americans, World War II produced relatively little condemnation of European Americans. Despite the presence of small but vocal groups of Nazi sympathizers and Mussolini supporters, German American and Italian American communities were largely left in peace during the war — federal officials detained fewer than fifteen thousand potentially dangerous German and Italian aliens. But this increase in tolerance did not extend to Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens. Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the West Coast remained relatively calm. But as residents began to fear spies, sabotage, and further attacks, a long history of racial animosity toward Asian immigrants surfaced. Local politicians and newspapers whipped up hysteria against Japanese Americans, who numbered only about 112,000, had no political power, and lived primarily in small enclaves in the Pacific coast states.

Early in 1942, President Roosevelt responded to anti-Japanese sentiment by issuing Executive Order 9066, which authorized the War Department to force Japanese Americans from their homes and hold them in relocation camps for the duration of the war. Although there was no evidence of disloyal or seditious activity among the evacuees, few public leaders opposed the plan. “A Jap’s a Jap,” snapped General John DeWitt, the officer charged with defense of the West Coast. “It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.”

The relocation plan shocked Japanese Americans, more than two-thirds of whom were Nisei, that is, native-born children of immigrant parents (known in turn as Isei). Army officials gave families only a few days to dispose of their property. Businesses that had taken a lifetime to build were liquidated overnight. The War Relocation Authority moved the internees, prisoners in all but name, to hastily built camps in desolate areas in California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Arkansas (Map 23.1). Ironically, the Japanese Americans who made up one-third of the population of the territory of Hawaii, and presumably posed a greater threat because of their proximity to Japan, were not imprisoned. They provided much of the unskilled labor on the island chain, and the Hawaiian economy could not have functioned without them.

In 1942, the government ordered 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast into internment camps in the nation’s interior because of their supposed threat to public safety. Some of the camps were as far away as Arkansas. The federal government rescinded the mass evacuation order in December 1944, but 44,000 people still remained in the camps when the war ended in August 1945.


Cracks soon appeared in the relocation policy. A labor shortage led the government to furlough seasonal farmworkers from the camps as early as 1942. About 4,300 students were allowed to attend colleges outside the West Coast military zone. Other internees were permitted to join the armed services. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a unit composed almost entirely of Nisei volunteers, served with distinction in Europe.


As part of the forced relocation of 112,000 Japanese Americans, Los Angeles photographer Toyo Miyatake and his family were sent to Manzanar, a camp in the California desert east of the Sierra Nevada. Miyatake secretly began shooting photographs of the camp with a handmade camera. Eventually, he received permission from the authorities to document life in the camp — its births, weddings, deaths, and high school graduations. For Miyatake, the image gave new meaning to the phrase “prisoners of war.”


Gordon Hirabayashi was among the Nisei who actively resisted incarceration. A student at the University of Washington, Hirabayashi was a religious pacifist who had registered with his draft board as a conscientious objector. He refused to report for evacuation and turned himself in to the FBI. “I wanted to uphold the principles of the Constitution,” Hirabayashi later stated, “and the curfew and evacuation orders which singled out a group on the basis of ethnicity violated them.” Tried and convicted of curfew violation in 1942, he appealed his case to the Supreme Court in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943). In that case and in Korematsu v. United States (1944), the high court allowed the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast on the basis of “military necessity” but avoided ruling on the constitutionality of the incarceration program. These decisions underscored the fragility of civil liberties in wartime. In 1988, Congress would issue a public apology for the internment policy and pay $20,000 to each of the eighty-two thousand surviving Japanese Americans internees.

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