FDR sets up War Relocation Authority , March 18, 1942
On this day in 1942, some four months after the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the War Relocation Authority. Its purpose, according to his executive order, was to “take all people of Japanese descent into custody, surround them with troops, prevent them from buying land and return them to their former homes at the close of the war.”
An estimated 120,000 men, women and children were rounded up on the West Coast. There were three categories of internees: Nisei (native U.S. citizens of Japanese immigrant parents), Issei (Japanese immigrants) and Kibei (native U.S. citizens educated chiefly in Japan). All the internees were shipped to 10 relocation centers in California, Utah, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, Colorado and Wyoming.
Anti-Japanese sentiment was particularly prevalent in California, where Earl Warren, the state attorney general and future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, asserted that lack of evidence of sabotage proved nothing, since the Japanese-Americans could be merely biding their time before acting.
Gordon Hirabayashi, (1918-2012) a Japanese-American, argued that the order violated his rights as a U.S. citizen. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, unanimously ruled that the nation’s right to protect itself against sabotage and invasion was sufficient grounds for curtailing Japanese-Americans’ constitutional rights. The ruling has never been reversed. (In May 2012, President Barack Obama awarded Hirabayashi posthumously the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.)
Life in an authority camp was difficult. Living space was minimal. Families lived in army-style barracks partitioned into “apartments” with walls that usually didn’t reach the ceiling. They were, at the largest, 20 by 24 feet and were expected to house up to a family of six. Each inmate ate at one of several common mess halls.
The authority allowed the Japanese-Americans to establish a form of self-governance, with elected inmate leaders working under administration supervisors to help run the camps. This allowed inmates some input in their day-to-day life, however, it also served the authority’s mission of “Americanizing” the inmates so that they could be assimilated after the war. The “enemy alien” Issei were excluded from running for office. Inmates found that the authority pulled the strings on important issues, leaving only the most basic and inconsequential decisions to the Nisei leaders.
For its first 90 days, Milton Eisenhower, brother of Dwight Eisenhower, the then-supreme Allied commander in Europe, served as the authority’s director. “When the war is over, and we consider calmly this unprecedented migration of 120,000 people,” Milton Eisenhower wrote his former boss, Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard, “we, as Americans, are going to regret the unavoidable injustices that we may have done.”
The federal government closed the last internment camp in March 1946. In 1990, Congress approved reparations for the surviving internees and heirs. Each received a formal apology and a check for $20,000.
SOURCE: “PRISONERS WITHOUT TRIAL: JAPANESE AMERICANS IN WORLD WAR II,” BY ROGER DANIELS (1993).