Executive Order 9066 Quotes

In February of 1942, President Roosevelt signed the most damning of Executive Orders: number 9066, the internment of the Japanese.

In 1924, riding a wave of anti-Asian sentiment, the US government halted almost all immigration from Asia. Within a few years, California, along with several other states, banned marriages between white people and those of Asian descent. With the onset of World War II, the FBI began the Custodial Detention Index—a list of “enemy aliens,” based on demographic data, who might prove a threat to national security, but also included American citizens—second- and third-generation Japanese Americans. This list was later used to facilitate the internment of Japanese Americans. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Alien Registration Act, which compelled Japanese immigrants over the age of fourteen to be registered and fingerprinted, and to take a loyalty oath to our government. Japanese Americans were subject to curfews, their bank accounts often frozen and insurance policies canceled. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked a US military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. More than 2,400 Americans were killed. The following day, America declared war on Japan. On February 19, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, permitting the US secretary of war and military commanders to “prescribe military areas” on American soil that allowed the exclusion of any and all persons. This paved the way for the forced internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans, without trial or cause. The ten “relocation centers” were all in remote, virtually uninhabitable desert areas. Internees lived in horrible, unsanitary conditions that included forced labor. On December 17, 1944, FDR announced the end of Japanese American internment. But many internees had no home to return to, having lost their livelihoods and property. Each internee was given twenty-five dollars and a train ticket to the place they used to live. Not one Japanese American was found guilty of treason or acts of sedition during World War II.

With the president’s signing of Executive Order 9066, Japanese-Americans were told to leave their homes, sell their businesses and possessions and move inland.

There was no mass public outcry to Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. No huge demonstration in Washington. Even the liberal newspapers barely objected. Columnist Walter Lippmann, the voice of progressive policies and individual liberties during the New Deal days, supported the internment, calling the Pacific Coast a “combat zone.”7

February 19—President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, incarcerating Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent. In all, some 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forced into squalid concentration camps.

Their worst fears came to pass when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. It allowed the military to create areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded” in order to protect “against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises and national-defense utilities.”106 Ten days later, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, responsible for West Coast security, established military zones covering Western Washington and Oregon, California, and parts of Arizona. His announcements made it clear that the approximate 112,000 Japanese aliens and citizens on the Pacific Coast would be moved inland.