The moral and constitutional failure was not Roosevelt’s alone.
M arion Takehara, born in Los Angeles in 1925, was a student in high school when Japanese airplanes bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. “That’s when everything changed,” she said more than 80 years later.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The legalistic text of his order is almost indecipherable: “I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War . . . to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.” Roosevelt had to torture the language to obfuscate what he was really doing: ordering the imprisonment of innocent Americans.
They were innocent, those 110,000 Japanese Americans that the federal government herded into internment camps throughout the western states. Takehara certainly was. She and her family, who had lived in California since her parents were young, were given 48 hours’ notice to leave everything behind. “We had to put our dog to sleep because we didn’t know what to do with it,” she remembered painfully at age 96, in a 2022 interview with a San Antonio news station. They could not bring more than they could carry into the internment camp, so neighbors flooded Takehara’s home to purchase furniture and belongings that would otherwise be abandoned.
She ended up in the Granada War Relocation Center in Colorado, known to internees as Camp Amache, joining thousands of fellow Japanese Americans. Takehara recalled that the showers in the bathrooms had no doors. “Can you imagine what it’s like for an older person to have to go to the bathroom without doors in the showers? And, when I read over my notes, it made me sad again, too. But we got over it. We got over it. We got over it.”
About two-thirds of the interned Japanese Americans were born in the United States. Over a third were 19 and under, below the legal voting age. Many had to sell their homes and businesses at fire-sale prices before entering the camps. The majority remained incarcerated for the next three years as America prosecuted the world war against Japan and its allies. Internment camps began closing in 1945. This year marks the 80th anniversary of when America’s federal government allowed tens of thousands of its people to return to whatever lives they had left.
Over the past few years, the nation has commemorated the 80th anniversaries of some profoundly costly yet entirely necessary decisions made during World War II: America’s joining the war a day after Pearl Harbor, December 8, 1941. The Normandy landings, June 6, 1944. Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Nagasaki, three days later.
Internment, though, is the one most of us wish we could take back. Some still insist that it was necessary, to thwart espionage and sabotage by Japanese Americans along the Pacific Coast, but it wasn’t. In 1941, Roosevelt commissioned businessman Curtis Munson to investigate the sympathies of Japanese Americans in the war. Munson concluded in the 25-page report, “As interview after interview piled up, those bringing in results began to call it the same old tune. The story was all the same. There is no Japanese ‘problem’ on the Coast. There will be no armed uprising of Japanese.” Roosevelt may have read just a one-page summary of the report. Either way, he ignored it.
The president declined to intern German and Italian Americans not because they didn’t pose an espionage threat but because there were too many of them and they were considered better integrated than the Japanese. Meanwhile, he permitted 33,000 Japanese Americans to serve in the U.S. military during World War II. Thousands performed intelligence roles on Pacific islands that Japan had occupied. The Army held recruitment drives inside internment camps — the camps that existed because Japanese Americans were said not to be trusted. More than 800 of the recruits died fighting for their country — the United States — in the European theater.
In Hawaii — home of the critical naval base that Japan had bombed — 150,000 Japanese Americans constituted a third of the territory’s population. Large-scale internment on the islands was impractical, so the government allowed them to live unincarcerated throughout the war. Yet no Japanese American was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage in Hawaii — or anywhere else, for that matter.
Why did Roosevelt decide on internment, then? He was certainly prejudiced against the Japanese, once criticizing Japanese-Caucasian intermarriage for its “mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood.” But that wasn’t the overriding reason he did it. After Pearl Harbor, large majorities supported the removal of Japanese-American citizens and noncitizens from their communities. Internment was a democratic demand.
In the spring of 1942, the National Opinion Research Center polled Americans on their opinions of the internment policy. “Do you think we are doing the right thing, in moving Japanese aliens (those who aren’t citizens) away from the Pacific coast?” Ninety-three percent of respondents agreed that Japanese noncitizens should be “moved.” One percent was opposed. A second question was asked: “How about the Japanese who were born in this country and are United States citizens — do you think they should be moved?” Fifty-nine percent said yes. Twenty-five percent said no.
Roosevelt was fulfilling the American people’s wishes. In fact, by releasing Japanese Americans back into the country’s interior as the war ended, the president administered a more moderate policy than most citizens originally wanted. Gallup asked Americans in December 1942 whether those interned “should be allowed to return to the Pacific coast when the war is over?” Just 35 percent said they should, while 48 percent said they should not.
The most intense pressure for Roosevelt to implement internment came from the West Coast, where Japanese Americans were concentrated. If they hadn’t been removed from their homes, they likely would have faced sustained, violent harassment.
America’s constitutional order is set up to control public passions. But passions are never more popular or fierce than when a proud nation is ambushed and thrust into war. Acting on their passions in 1942, Americans ignored the right to due process before denying their countrymen liberty, in open defiance of the Fifth and 14th Amendments. The resulting policy denied tens of thousands the equal protection of the law.
In such moments, courts are supposed to be the bulwark. One Japanese-American man, Fred Korematsu, was arrested for refusing to comply with the internment order, eventually taking his case to the Supreme Court. He argued that internment of an ethnic group without a trial was unconstitutional. He was right. But in a 6–3 decision, led by Justice Hugo Black, the Court abdicated its duty to uphold constitutional protections in the hardest of times. Internment was justified by the “martial necessity arising from the danger of espionage and sabotage.” Black believed that there was danger in not deferring to the president. He had told his fellow justices, essentially, “Somebody must run this war. It is either Roosevelt or us. And we cannot.”
What the three dissenters recognized, however, was that there was grave danger in deference as well. Allowing Roosevelt to do what he wanted — what the American people demanded he do — was a legitimization of tyranny. The unifying fervor of war had diminished constitutional protections into little more than parchment barriers.
There is never a more inconvenient time to keep constitutional rights secure than wartime. Which is why there is never a more important time to insist that they are.