APUSH
Mrs. Farris
Directions: Read the following 2 documents and 1 reading and answer the questions that follow
them. Answers should be handwritten and on a separate sheet of paper!
Executive Order 9066: The President Authorizes Japanese Relocation
In an atmosphere of World War II hysteria, President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials
at all levels of the federal government, authorized the internment of tens of thousands of
American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. Roosevelt’s Executive
Order 9066, dated February 19, 1942, gave the military broad powers to ban any citizen from a
fifty- to sixty-mile-wide coastal area stretching from Washington state to California and
extending inland into southern Arizona. The order also authorized transporting these citizens to
assembly centers hastily set up and governed by the military in California, Arizona, Washington
state, and Oregon. Although it is not well known, the same executive order (and other war-time
orders and restrictions) were also applied to smaller numbers of residents of the United States
who were of Italian or German descent. For example, 3,200 resident aliens of Italian background
were arrested and more than 300 of them were interned. About 11,000 German residents—
including some naturalized citizens—were arrested and more than 5000 were interned. Yet while
these individuals (and others from those groups) suffered grievous violations of their civil
liberties, the war-time measures applied to Japanese Americans were worse and more sweeping,
uprooting entire communities and targeting citizens as well as resident aliens.
Executive Order No. 9066
The President
Executive Order
Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas
Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against
espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and
national-defense utilities as defined in Section 4, Act of April 20, 1918, 40 Stat. 533, as amended
by the Act of November 30, 1940, 54 Stat. 1220, and the Act of August 21, 1941, 55 Stat. 655
(U.S.C., Title 50, Sec. 104);
Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and
Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War,
and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any
designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, 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. The Secretary of War is hereby
authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such
transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, in the judgment of
the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to
accomplish the purpose of this order. The designation of military areas in any region or locality
shall supersede designations of prohibited and restricted areas by the Attorney General under the
Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, and shall supersede the responsibility and authority of
the Attorney General under the said Proclamations in respect of such prohibited and restricted
areas.
I hereby further authorize and direct the Secretary of War and the said Military Commanders to
take such other steps as he or the appropriate Military Commander may deem advisable to
enforce compliance with the restrictions applicable to each Military area hereinabove authorized
to be designated, including the use of Federal troops and other Federal Agencies, with authority
to accept assistance of state and local agencies.
I hereby further authorize and direct all Executive Departments, independent establishments and
other Federal Agencies, to assist the Secretary of War or the said Military Commanders in
carrying out this Executive Order, including the furnishing of medical aid, hospitalization, food,
clothing, transportation, use of land, shelter, and other supplies, equipment, utilities, facilities, and
services.
This order shall not be construed as modifying or limiting in any way the authority heretofore
granted under Executive Order No. 8972, dated December 12, 1941, nor shall it be construed as
limiting or modifying the duty and responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with
respect to the investigation of alleged acts of sabotage or the duty and responsibility of the
Attorney General and the Department of Justice under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8,
1941, prescribing regulations for the conduct and control of alien enemies, except as such duty
and responsibility is superseded by the designation of military areas hereunder.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The White House,
February 19, 1942.
[F.R. Doc. 42–1563; Filed, February 21, 1942; 12:51 p.m.]
Source: Executive Order No. 9066, February 19, 1942.
1. What did this Executive Order do, and why was this decision made?
Korematsu v. US
Early in World War II, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive
Order 9066, granting the U.S. military the power to ban tens of thousands of American citizens of
Japanese ancestry from areas deemed critical to domestic security. Promptly exercising the power
so bestowed, the military then issued an order banning "all persons of Japanese ancestry, both
alien and non-alien" from a designated coastal area stretching from Washington State to southern
Arizona, and hastily set up internment camps to hold the Japanese Americans for the duration of
the war. In defiance of the order, Fred Korematsu, an American-born citizen of Japanese descent,
refused to leave his home in San Leandro, California. Duly convicted, he appealed, and in 1944
his case reached the Supreme Court.
A 6-3 majority on the Court upheld Korematsu's conviction. Writing for the majority, Justice
Hugo Black held that although "all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial
group are immediately suspect" and subject to tests of "the most rigid scrutiny," not all such
restrictions are inherently unconstitutional. "Pressing public necessity," he wrote, "may
sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can."
In Korematsu's case, the Court accepted the U.S. military's argument that the loyalties of some
Japanese Americans resided not with the United States but with their ancestral country, and that
because separating "the disloyal from the loyal" was a logistical impossibility, the internment
order had to apply to all Japanese Americans within the restricted area. Balancing the country's
stake in the war and national security against the "suspect" curtailment of the rights of a particular
racial group, the Court decided that the nation's security concerns outweighed the Constitution's
promise of equal rights.
Justice Robert Jackson issued a vociferous, yet nuanced, dissent. "Korematsu ... has been
convicted of an act not commonly thought a crime," he wrote. "It consists merely of being present
in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has
lived." The nation's wartime security concerns, he contended, were not adequate to strip
Korematsu and the other internees of their constitutionally protected civil rights.
In the second half of his dissent, however, Jackson admitted that ultimately, in times of war, the
military would likely maintain the power to arrest citizens -- and that, possessing no executive
power, there was little the judicial branch could do to stop it. Nonetheless, he resisted the Court's
compliance in lending the weight of its institutional authority to justify the military's actions, and
contended that the majority decision struck a "far more subtle blow to liberty" than did the order
itself: "A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military
emergency. ... But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to
the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions
such an order, the Court for all of time has validated the principle of racial discrimination. ... The
principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring
forward a plausible claim of urgent need."
Justice Owen Roberts also dissented in the case, arguing that a relocation center "was a
euphemism for prison," and that faced with this consequence Korematsu "did nothing." Also
dissenting, Justice Frank Murphy harshly criticized both the majority and the military order,
writing that the internment of the Japanese was based upon "the disinformation, half-truths and
insinuations that for years have been directed against Japanese Americans by people with racial
and economic prejudices."
The Court's decision in Korematsu, loudly criticized by many civil libertarians at the time and
generally condemned by historians ever since, has never been explicitly overturned. Indeed, it is
frequently cited for its assertion that "all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single
racial group are immediately suspect." However, a report issued by Congress in 1983 declared
that the decision had been "overruled in the court of history," and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988
contained a formal apology -- as well as provisions for monetary reparations -- to the Japanese
Americans interned during the war. In 1998, President Bill Clinton awarded Fred Korematsu the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. Significantly, not until the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger
(dealing with the affirmative action policy at the University of Michigan Law School) did the
Court again approve an instance of racial discrimination against the application of Black's "rigid
scrutiny" standard. Jackson's dissent, though, reminds us of the difficult position the Court finds
itself in when it assesses claimed violations of constitutional rights in times of war.
1. What did the Supreme Court decide in this case and what was the significance of the decision?
Milton Eisenhower Justifies the Internment of Japanese Americans
America fought World War II to preserve freedom and democracy, yet that same war featured the
greatest suppression of civil liberties in the nation’s history. In an atmosphere of hysteria,
President Roosevelt, encouraged by officials at all levels of the federal government, authorized
the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens
from Japan. On March 18, 1942, Roosevelt authorized the establishment of the War Relocation
Authority (WRA) to govern these detention camps. He chose as its first head Milton Eisenhower,
a New Deal bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture and brother of General Dwight D.
Eisenhower. In a 1942 film entitled Japanese Relocation, produced by the Office of War
Information, Eisenhower offered the U.S. government’s rationale for the relocation of JapaneseAmerican citizens. He claimed that the Japanese “cheerfully” participated in the relocation
process, a statement belied by all contemporary and subsequent accounts of the 1942 events.
Milton Eisenhower: When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, our West Coast became a
potential combat zone. Living in that zone were more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry:
two thirds of them American citizens; one third aliens. We knew that some among them were
potentially dangerous. But no one knew what would happen among this concentrated population
if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores. Military authorities therefore determined that
all of them, citizens and aliens alike, would have to move. This picture tells how the mass
migration was accomplished.
Neither the Army nor the War Relocation Authority relished the idea of taking men, women, and
children from their homes, their shops, and their farms. So the military and civilian agencies alike
determined to do the job as a democracy should: with real consideration for the people involved.
First attention was given to the problems of sabotage and espionage. Now, here at San Francisco,
for example, convoys were being made up within sight of possible Axis agents. There were more
Japanese in Los Angeles than in any other area. In nearby San Pedro, houses and hotels, occupied
almost exclusively by Japanese, were within a stone’s throw of a naval air base, shipyards, oil
wells. Japanese fishermen had every opportunity to watch the movement of our ships. Japanese
farmers were living close to vital aircraft plants. So, as a first step, all Japanese were required to
move from critical areas such as these.
But, of course, this limited evacuation was a solution to only part of the problem. The larger
problem, the uncertainty of what would happen among these people in case of a Japanese
invasion, still remained. That is why the commanding General of the Western Defense Command
determined that all Japanese within the coastal areas should move inland.
Source: Japanese Relocation, produced by the Office of War Information, 1942.National
Archives and Records Administration, Motion Picture Division.
1. How did the first director of the War Relocation Authority justify his actions?