Atlas: A shameful time in America's past

Seventy-five years ago this month, with the stroke of a president’s pen, one of the most shameful episodes in our nation’s history began.

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which divided the West Coast into two military districts and authorized the U..S Army to “exclude” both Japanese-born residents and Japanese-Americans born in the United States (known as Nisei) from the coastal areas in which they lived and worked.

Within months, U.S. citizens were forcibly removed from their homes and separated from their property -- without arrest, trial or any form of due process -- and sent to Army-run internment camps for the duration of the war. Presumed guilty of “disloyalty,” more than 120,000 American citizens and Japanese-born immigrants were placed behind barbed wire and under machine gun towers. These War Relocation Centers were not Nazi death camps, but they were “concentration camps” in the true sense of the word. And they were located throughout the American heartland.

Roosevelt’s executive order was issued two months after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, at a moment when Japanese submarines were spotted off the West Coast and the Japanese Empire was enjoying a string of military victories across the Pacific. The Army’s “civilian exclusion orders” were first issued in a moment of hysteria. But even after it became clear that the continental United States was no longer in danger from Japanese invasion, the compulsory removal of Nisei continued unabated. No single case of sabotage or espionage against any of these internees was ever proven. The Nisei were deemed collectively guilty due to their Japanese origin — something that was not done to German or other white Americans, even though there were actual Nazi spies among those groups.

In my Introduction to American Politics course, I use the internment of Japanese-Americans as a case study of how the constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances can fail under stress. This gross deprivation of rights was made possible not only by the executive branch; rather, all three branches of government operated in collusion. Congress passed laws setting penalties for violating the military’s orders, and the Supreme Court, in Korematsu v. U.S. (1944), ruled 6-3 that the forced removal and internment of Japanese-Americans did not violate the Constitution.

Few people came to the defense of this demonized ethnic minority. Instead, ordinary Americans hopped on the bandwagon, expressing longstanding anti-Japanese racism and looting Japanese-owned businesses after the owners had been shipped off to the camps. Archives are full of photographs of anti-Japanese sentiment, including a large sign in a small town that says, “Japs — Keep Moving!”

When discussing the Nisei, I remind my students of a later episode, when another president faced a similar moment of crisis. Six days after the United States was attacked by radical Islamist terrorists on 9/11 (killing more people than were killed at Pearl Harbor), President George W. Bush went to the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and made it clear that, this time, there would be no collective guilt or collective punishment:

“America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country….In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect. Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes….Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.”

In 1988, Congress and President Reagan formally apologized for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and gave reparations to the survivors. The executive order 75 years ago, and the horrific events that followed, tell us that even a great president and our brilliantly designed constitutional system can falter under stress. As we face new challenges and new prejudices in the 21st century, we need to keep the lessons — and the shame — of our nation’s past in mind.

Atlas is a professor of political science and director of the Richard G. Lugar Franciscan Center for Global Studies at Marian University. Follow him on Twitter: @PierreAtlas.