What was it like when the President came after my grandfather?

You’re looking at the arrest warrant President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put out on my grandfather during WWII.

A bit overkill, don’t you think? After all, President Roosevelt had already locked him up in a concentration camp for almost 3 years at the time he issued this warrant.

Like so many Japanese Americans forced out of their homes during WWII and put into concentration camps, my grandfather was a native-born American citizen with an absolutely clean record.

His crime? Being Japanese at a time when America happened to be at war with Japan.

When President Roosevelt signed Executive Order (EO) 9066, anyone living on the west coast with as little as 1/16th Japanese blood – even orphan infants and young children – were rounded up in the name of national security.

Now, more than 75 years later, we know it was completely unnecessary. When President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, he issued a formal apology and acknowledged that this violation of civil liberties was driven by nothing more than “racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and failure of political leadership.”

But like current debates over immigration and national security, advocates of EO 9066 claimed these extreme measures were necessary to maintain our safety during WWII.

“A Jap is a Jap,” proclaimed John Dewitt, Commanding General for the Western Defense Command and one of the executive order’s greatest supporters. “The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on American soil, possessed of American citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”

So deep was his paranoia that General Dewitt took lack of evidence to be evidence. “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date,” Dewitt asserted, “is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.”

It didn’t matter that his own military intelligence showed that the Japanese residing in America posed no threat... A fact the government covered up, not just during the war but also during the Supreme Court hearings about the EO 9066 and it’s constitutionality.

2017 marked the 75th anniversary of EO 9066.

As our government imposes travel bans and the Supreme Court rules on their constitutionality, the lessons of the Japanese American wartime incarceration are more important now than ever.

But there’s more to that story than we know.

Because it turns out the government wasn’t the only one holding back important information...

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This is Part 1 of a 10-part series.

Click here to get Part 2!

#WWII #internment #civilrights