Lesson for President Obama: Beware of hysteria.

On December 7, 1941, an attack force of Japanese warplanes blitzed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The surprise attack (the United States and Japan were not at war) destroyed 19 naval vessels and 188 aircraft and killed 2,280, nearly eliminating the U.S. Pacific Fleet in a single morning.

A U.S. battleship sinks during the Pearl Harbor attack. National Archives, Washington, D.C.

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, California Governor Culbert L. Olson and State Attorney General Earl Warren (later chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) worked with sheriffs and district attorneys to dismiss from civil service positions all first-generation Japanese Americans (Issei) and their U.S.-born children (Nisei). Attorney General Warren froze their assets so banks would not honor their checks. Licenses to practice law and medicine were revoked, and commercial fishermen were barred from their boats. Insurance companies cancelled the policies of Japanese clients; grocers refused to sell food to Japanese shoppers. This was followed by the civil authorities’ drive to round up and intern Japanese Americans, a proposal that was loudly seconded by the West Coast press, especially the excitable San Francisco-based Hearst newspapers.

The strong anti-Japanese spirit of the times is captured well in the following video:

After Pearl Harbor Californians feared the next attack would strike their own shores. In a fit of paranoia, both officials of the state government and ordinary citizens suspected that their Japanese American neighbors were spies and saboteurs for the Empire of Japan. Governor Olson demanded that the federal government do something about this internal threat to national security.

In testimony before a congressional hearing on February 4, 1942, General Mark Clark, the deputy chief of staff, and Admiral Harold R. Stark, chief of naval operations, said people on the Pacific coast were unduly alarmed. General Clark estimated the chances of a Japanese invasion of California were “nil.”

But Clark and Stark’s reassurances calmed no one. A few days earlier a commission appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to investigate the Pearl Harbor attack reported that spies, some of them Japanese Americans, working in Hawaii had helped the Japanese war planes reach their targets. The authors of the report did not present any evidence to support this charge, but it did not matter. Soon The Los Angeles Times was calling for the relocation of all Japanese Americans from California, and Lieutenant General John De Witt, army commander of the West Coast, asked his superiors for permission to evacuate all Japanese from California, Washington, and Oregon. The army was not inclined to grant such a request.

When Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson raised the issue with President Roosevelt, FDR told Stimson to do whatever he thought best. Stimson passed this along to his assistant secretary for domestic security, John J, McCloy, who put the relocation plan into action. Writing to Fourth Army headquarters in San Francisco McCloy said, “We have carte blanche to do what we want as far as the president is concerned… He states there will probably be some repercussions, and it has got to be dictated by military necessity, but as he puts it, ‘Be as reasonable as you can.’”

Stimson was opposed by U.S. Attorney General Francis B. Biddle, who regarded the relocation plan as “ill-advised, unnecessary, and unnecessarily cruel.” He was joined by the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who dismissed the evacuation of Japanese Americans as “utterly unwarranted.” Nonetheless, on February 19, 1942, FDR issued Executive Order 9066 which suspended the civil rights of Japanese Americans and authorized Stimson to designate military exclusion zones (such as the entire West Coast) from which, for the duration of the war, the United States could bar any person without having to prove that individual’s disloyalty or ill intent. On March 21, Congress unanimously passed a bill authorizing the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast.

Over the next three months, U.S. troops systematically removed more than 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes and relocated them to desolate places inland, such as California’s Owens Valley. In most cases they were given no more than ten days to sell or rent their homes, farms, and businesses, and store their possessions (they were permitted to take only hand luggage with them). In 1945, when the Japanese Americans returned to their homes, in many cases they found their possessions had been looted and their homes and businesses purchased for pennies on the dollar by their white neighbors. In 1942, when Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had protested to FDR that the Japanese Americans were being exploited and their property scattered, the president replied, “I am not concerned about that.”

Not until 1976 did a U.S. President—Gerald Ford—rescind Executive Order 9066 and issue a formal apology to Japanese Americans. In 1990 President George H.W. Bush sent out checks for $20,000, tax free, to the 60,000 survivors of the internment camps. In a letter that accompanied the check, President Bush wrote, “A monetary sum and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories, neither can they fully convey the Nation’s resolve to rectify injustice and to uphold the rights of individuals. We can never fully right the wrongs of the past. But we can take a clear stand for justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.”

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Thomas Craughwell is the author of, with M. William Phelps, Failures of the Presidents: from the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and War in Iraq.