President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, clearing the way for the evacuation of more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans from California, Oregon, Washington and parts of Arizona.
Lane Hirabayashi, chairman of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Department, said fears that Japanese-Americans would engage in espionage or sabotage combined with longstanding prejudice against Asians and resentment of their success in fishing and farming at the time. The order was opposed by the Roosevelt’s joint chiefs of staff and attorney general.
Hirabayashi said claims by Gen. John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, that there had been communication between the West Coast and Japanese ships were reported in the press but later were debunked.
Residents of German and Italian descent who were suspected of helping the enemy were given individual hearings to assess the charges. Hirabayashi said no Japanese-Americans were convicted of espionage or sabotage.
By the end of the war, about 120,000 Japanese-Americans had spent time in 10 camps created by the government—Tule Lake and Manzanar in California, Minidoka in Idaho, Topaz in Utah, Gila River and Poston in Arizona, Heart Mountain in Wyoming, Amache in Colorado and Rohwer and Jerome in Arkansas. The number increased because of babies born in the camps and because some people of Japanese ancestry from Hawaii and Latin American countries like Peru were later put in the camps.
Martial law was declared in Hawaii, but Japanese-Americans there—about 40 percent of the workforce —weren’t interned en masse because it would have crippled the economy, Hirabayashi said.
Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, apologizing for the internments, which a government commission found were carried out without adequate security reasons and “were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” It was signed by President Reagan and provided for $20,000 to be paid to every surviving internee.
