Executive Order 9066
On Three Pillars
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law Executive Order 9066, which established a systematic disenfranchisement of American residents (and in the vast majority of cases, American citizens) of Japanese descent. The effort was labeled an “evacuation,” wherein some 125,000 persons were removed from their homes, from their businesses, from their communities. While no such politically charged effort is quite as simplistic as is its inevitable renown, even if the Roosevelt administration sought to head off possible violence against these citizens, the result is no less a shameful remark on the intolerance of a nation of peoples who owe their livelihood to tolerance.
While the detainees made the best of their new surroundings, creating a system of self-government and developing a community notwithstanding their captive state, they had left their homes, left the places of business and relationships they had built over typically one or two generations of hard work. It’s arguable that Americans of recent immigrant heritage value the freedoms afforded them by the Constitution more than many who have known nothing but freedom. Yet, these were the folks given at the business end of a stick brandished by the authoritarian regime of the day.
Three men–Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Minoru Yasui–resisted the government’s program of “relocation.” While none of the men had known one another, the character of their defiance was remarkably similar. Gordon Hirabayashi, seeing a devastating series of events unravel around him, decided that something needed to be done, that someone needed to speak out. “Someone needed to,” he said, “but no one else did. So I did.” Fred Korematsu responded to requests by the authorities to prepare for “evacuation” by saying, “I’m an American, and I haven’t done anything wrong.” Fred gave two months, a name change, and minor plastic surgery to his evasion efforts, but was eventually apprehended. Minoru Yasui, however, took the fight to the bully: he walked the streets of Portland for hours, openly, wantonly breaking the new curfew orders. It was only when he turned himself in at a police station that he was finally taken into custody and charged.
Each of the men served varying terms in jail, and some incurred additional jail time for insubordinate behavior. Not merely rebellious youths, each of the men staked on their principled disobedience the stress to their familial bonds and the potential depreciation of their means for livelihood. Moreover, given that Gordon aligned with a pacifist Christian faith and Minoru had been rejected from joining the American war effort against Imperial Japan, the federal government was actually devaluing the very industriousness and faith for which its founding fathers are lauded.
Despite the dramatic timbre of Fred’s, Gordon’s, and Minoru’s civil disobedience, we might find some logic and compassion in Executive Order 9066, if only in its intent. At a time when the United States was struggling to identify itself on a world stage, straddling as it was the clear need to support efforts to hold the Third Reich at bay and, alternately, the failing philosophy of fiscal isolationism, the attack on Pearl Harbor provided for some clear and compelling justification to look with scornful paranoia upon their fellow citizens, who merely happened to have descended from Japanese stock. As it is the role of government to provide for its body politic to the best of its aggregate capability, we may wonder if the America shaped in an early ’40s without the concentration camps might have been a blacker mark on our history than it turned out to be. With so much rising animosity, and some Americans? desperate grasp for some caricature of righteousness in the bleak years of the Great Depression, those 125,000 or so Japanese and Japanese-Americans living in the western states may owe their future prosperity on the act which kept them a safe distance from lynch mobs and wielders of intolerance.
Yet, that provides little true justification for the “evacuation.” Ends, while they may drive the focus of the means, are not justifications in themselves. Even if the first-generation Japanese immigrants, or Issei, had no Constitutional rights, their children, Nissei, as U.S. citizens, certainly did. Until, that is, the unfortunate cabal of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches all but nullified them. Legally, arguably morally, this is no different than the forced detention of any citizen of any ethnicity or other demographic classification.
Nearly half a century passed as one President after another, one Congressional body after another, failed to right their predecessors. Not until the 1980’s was any justice delivered on the matter. Gordon Hirabayashi’s conviction on charges of curfew violation, appealed after his months in jail and taken before a unanimously opposed Supreme Court in 1943, wasn’t appropriately addressed and overturned until 1987. Neither was Minoru Yasui’s 1942 conviction on similar charges overturned until the mid-’80’s, months before his death in November. Fred’s conviction had been overturned a few years earlier. Throughout the decades, each man, as part of a larger collective of social activists, challenged their convictions as well as the legal grounds for Executive Order 9066, among other legislative efforts.
These men, and the greater struggle they symbolize, eventually found their voice in the American culture. They and other Japanese-Americans have been remunerated for damages. However, their story isn?t over, because their story is our history. This story was written before them, and the only way to avoid writing it again is to learn from it.
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