Historical Dictionary of United States-Japan ... - Bakumatsu Films

116 • IRAQ
Roger Daniels’s estimation, “the worst single governmental violation
of civil rights in modern times.” In the early months of 1942, 120,000
Japanese–Americans living on the West Coast—more than two-thirds
of whom were native-born American citizens—were removed from
their homes and incarcerated in concentration camps from California
to Arkansas.
These people were incarcerated not for crimes—real or supposed—but
on the grounds of their ethnicity. War against Japan, and
in particular Japan’s stunning successes in the early months of that
conflict, brought into full relief deep-seated antipathies among many
West Coast Americans toward their neighbors of Japanese ancestry.
Newspapers and radio broadcasts on the West Coast loudly proclaimed
the dangers posed by this supposed fifth column. To cite but
one example, the San Diego Union argued that “a viper is nonetheless
a viper wherever the egg is hatched.”
These prejudices reached to the very top levels of the United States
government. Heeding the advice of General John DeWitt, commanding
officer of the Western Defense Command, and most of California’s
elected officials, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and his deputy,
John J. McCloy, argued for the internment of Japanese living on the
West Coast on the grounds that they posed a military threat to the nation.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 19 February 1942 responded
by signing Executive Order 9066, which in effect authorized Stimson
to carry out the internment of Japanese Americans living in California
and other western states. Although Hawaii suffered an attack by Japanese
military forces, only 1,000 out of 150,000 Japanese Americans
living on the island territory were interned because military and business
leaders did not want to lose so many needed laborers.
Historians have long disparaged the purported military necessity of
this measure. Their views were in large part mirrored by the presidential
Commission on the Wartime Internment and Relocation of Civilians
(CWIRC), which, in 1982, judged that the “promulgation of Executive
Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity.” Instead,
“race prejudice,” “war hysteria,” and “a failure of political leadership”
underlay the decision to incarcerate Japanese Americans. See also PA-
CIFIC WAR; WORLD WAR II.
IRAQ. See SPECIAL LEGISLATION CALLING FOR ASSISTANCE
IN THE REBUILDING OF IRAQ.