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On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, condemning more than 120,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps all along the West Coast, allegedly out of military necessity. These Japanese, most of whom were American citizens, were wrongfully incarcerated for up to four years. In 1981 the CWRIC released a statement which conceded that the actions taken by the United States government were due to “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” The two most outstanding reasons for Japanese internment are race prejudice, present since the initial mass immigration of Asians to America during the 19th century, and wartime hysteria in the form of propaganda, which portrayed the Japanese as ruthless killers, as well a general feeling of contempt towards them. Since the times of the American Gold Rush, Asians have been discriminated against. Daniels describes the United States as being “then an explicitly racist nation which discriminated in both law and custom against any persons who were not recognized as ‘white’”(Daniels, 8). Back then, it was mostly the Chinese who were segregated, but the feeling was carried over toward the Japanese, especially since there were an estimated 275,000 of them in 1940. Because of there numbers, the Americans living there felt threatened by these “brown men,” even though they never constituted more than .02% of the total population (Daniels, 8).
Approximate Word count = 827
Approximate Pages = 3.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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