War Hysteria

"President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on this date in 1942. The order authorized the removal of any or all people from a military area, as deemed necessary by the military. Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor several weeks earlier, and residents of the West Coast felt especially vulnerable. There was a great outcry to do something about the tens of thousands of resident aliens from Germany, Italy, and especially Japan who lived on the West Coast. Roosevelt told the Secretary of War to execute the order as reasonably as possible, but apart from those vague instructions, he didn't take much active interest in how the order was carried out. As a result, the military deemed most of the West Coast to be a "military area," and over the course of the next several months, some 120,000 people - more than half of them American citizens - were sent to internment camps. Roosevelt rescinded the order in December 1944 and began the six-month process of releasing the detainees and shutting down the camps. In 1981, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded that EO 9066 was a "grave injustice" that had resulted from "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." In 1988, President Reagan offered survivors an apology and $20,000 each."

From the Daily Almanac