Fear Itself: How Pop Culture and Pearl Harbor Drove the Japanese-American Internment (Liberties) (Viewpoint Essay‪)‬

FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO this month, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, creating exclusion zones around strategic installations on the West Coast and authorizing the relocation of residents of Japanese ancestry to ten sites in the interior. Some 112,000 "Japanese"--two-thirds of them American citizens--were sent to internment camps, where they spent much, in some cases all, of the war. For almost 30 years, I taught a course in modern U.S. History at UC Santa Barbara, a campus washed on its western edge by the Pacific surf, just a few miles south of a junction on the coastal highway that had been shelled by a Japanese submarine a few weeks after Pearl Harbor. I could have left "the Japanese Removal" out of my courses, as my teachers on the East Coast had done. But I believed that the nation's bad moments must be addressed along with the good, and this was one of the bad ones. The internment, in my view, was driven far more by hysteria and ethnic suspicion than military necessity. It is a blemish on the history of civil liberties in America and demands critical scrutiny.