Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, some of the United States’ most senior military officials began advocating for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to order the mass detention of Japanese Americans. “The Japanese race is an enemy race,” wrote Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, the man in charge of the Western Defense Command. “And while many second- and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”
Although there were a few voices in the administration against internment—particularly Attorney General Francis Biddle and Gen. Mark Clark, the Army’s deputy chief of staff—the president disregarded the dissenters. On Feb. 19, 1942, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to remove anyone from any area of the country, if deemed necessary for national security. During the months that followed, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up throughout California and shipped to internment camps in Arizona, Wyoming, Arkansas, and elsewhere. Fred Korematsu, a resident of San Leandro, on the San Francisco Bay, resisted deportation and was arrested, setting in motion a legal struggle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1944, the court ruled, 6-3, in favor of the government’s action.
Continue reading "FDR’s Views on Japanese Offer a Window Into Why He Wouldn’t Save Jews" at...