Japanese American Incarceration: The Ringle Report Hidden From Korematsu

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Before Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt sent businessman Curtis Munson and naval intelligence officer Kenneth Ringle to assess Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and both reported an extraordinary degree of loyalty. Months later, 120,000 people were incarcerated anyway. The episode traces the groundwork: alien land laws pushed by groups such as the Asiatic Exclusion League kept Issei immigrants, who were barred from naturalization, from owning or leasing farmland, while their Nisei children were citizens by birth. The Roberts Commission's unsupported line about spies, Lieutenant General John DeWitt's testimony, and a Salinas grower-shipper official's admission of selfish motives set the stage for Executive Order 9066 in February 1942.

Families sold property for pennies on the dollar, an estimated $400 million in losses, and were held in assembly centers such as the Santa Anita racetrack, living in horse stalls, before moving to ten camps including Manzanar, Tule Lake and Rohwer. In Hawaii, General Delos Emmons refused mass removal because it would wreck the labor force. To win the Korematsu case in 1944, Solicitor General Charles Fahy suppressed the Ringle report. Decades later Peter Irons and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga found the suppressed documents, coram nobis petitions overturned Fred Korematsu's conviction, a 1983 commission blamed race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership, and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 brought an apology and $20,000 payments.

• The U.S. arranged with 13 Latin American countries, including Peru, to send people of Japanese descent into U.S. custody for possible prisoner exchanges.
• More than 1,800 people died in the camps, and sentries shot and killed at least seven inmates.
• Camp rules reserved leadership roles for the Nisei and paid them more than the Issei, upending family authority.
• Questions 27 and 28 of the 1943 loyalty questionnaire could leave Issei stateless, and many who answered no were sent to Tule Lake.
• Nisei volunteers formed the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which rescued a surrounded "lost battalion" of Texas infantrymen.