The Great Wrong of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942

 Blog by Donald P. Shoemaker

Highway 395 runs north/south on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.  I have driven it many times on my way to backpacking or hiking in the Sierra or to visit Mammoth Lakes.

Along one bleak, arid segment of the highway you come to Manzanar, where 11,000 Japanese Americans were placed during World War II (120,000 were interned in ten relocation centers).  I remember the first time I stopped there when the only thing to see was the old guard house at the entrance along with a couple of plaques.  Even then, it was a very moving experience.

Now the location has a fine museum and you can drive around and see signs telling you what buildings were at various locations.  Manzanar was not a “concentration camp” by any means, but it was not a retreat either.   Winters were cold; summers very hot.  The centers were essentially prisons for those who had done nothing wrong—they were simply Americans of Japanese descent.

In post-Pearl Harbor America there was much fear of what might happen on our West Coast.  Would an attack come? Would people of Japanese descent support Japan?  There was no evidence that they would and there were no acts by them against the U.S.  Still, President Roosevelt, encouraged by California Governor Earl Warren, signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942 that led to the internment camps.

Beside the forced and quick internments, these prisoners in most cases lost their livelihoods, possessions and properties.

As a descendent of German immigrants, how would I feel had the government rounded up German Americans and put them in such places?

Let the memory of this great wrong keep us from doing anything like it again.