On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued EO 9066. The order allowed the secretary of war to “prescribe military areas in such places…from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The order did not specifically name the Japanese, but they alone were targeted supposedly out of military necessity for the safety of the nation.
The Japanese Americans stood to lose everything, and in their absence, there was so much to gain.
Shortly after the Japanese army attacked Pearl Harbor, Austin Anson, the managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, left for Washington, DC. His mission was to urge Federal authorities to incarcerate all the Japanese people in the area. Anson spoke to the War and Navy departments and any congressman he could get to listen, emphasizing the potential danger Japanese saboteurs posed on the Pacific Coast. It may seem odd that a representative for a farming group would talk about military strategy with political leaders, but Anson wasn’t afraid to say the quiet part out loud.
“We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons,” Anson told the Saturday Evening Post in May 1942. “We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, they stayed to take over…And we don’t want them back when the war ends, either.”
The forced removal of tens of thousands of American citizens was later investigated in the 1980s by a commission authorized by Congress and President Jimmy Carter. They found that the incarceration “was not justified by military necessity,” but instead shaped by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Though the latter two factors may have been a product of that specific moment in time, the prejudice against the Japanese people was a direct product of the decades of work by anti-Japanese labor and business groups. The Issei and Nisei were successful at what they did, despite the legal barriers they’d faced, and it terrified the agricultural establishment, and that fear was an essential component in instigating an incarceration that was otherwise unjustified.
At the same time Anson was in DC advocating the incarceration, Japanese families at home on the Pacific Coast were destroying their memories. As FBI agents began taking away important community members for questioning, families ripped up photographs and smashed mementos that could link them to Japan in an effort to stay safe. I lost heirlooms I don’t even know about. But the exclusion order went up anyway, and it did not discriminate between those Japanese people who were loyal to the US and those who were not.
“The Japanese were never Americans in California,” Dr. C. L. Dedrick, a sociologist and Census Bureau expert with one of the federal agencies tasked with implementing forced removal in 1942 told the Saturday Evening Post. “Now, when they are dispersed, they may ultimately become absorbed in American life, not by intermarriage, but through losing their concentrated identity. This may be their great chance to become Americans.”