Executive Order 9066: Hawaii's Exemption, Horse Stalls and Coram Nobis

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, and the episode opens on a contradiction: Hawaii, the site of the Pearl Harbor attack, where Japanese Americans made up nearly 40 percent of the population, saw only a tiny fraction detained because removal would have wrecked the local economy, while the West Coast was cleared of about 120,000 people of Japanese descent, roughly two thirds of them American citizens. The order never mentions Japanese Americans, granting the Secretary of War power to exclude any or all persons from military areas. Congress backed it with Public Law 77-503 after about an hour of Senate discussion and 30 minutes in the House, and Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt then issued orders naming all people of Japanese ancestry.

The hosts trace the intelligence that leaders set aside: the Munson Report, delivered a month before Pearl Harbor, and naval intelligence officer Kenneth Ringle's January 1942 report both found no internal threat. They follow families from 48-hour sale notices to assembly centers in converted livestock stalls and on to ten remote camps paying $12 to $19 a month for labor. Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui lost at the Supreme Court, but after Peter Irons and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga found a surviving copy of the Ringle Report in 1983, writs of coram nobis led federal courts to overturn their convictions. The commission report Personal Justice Denied and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 followed, with $20,000 in redress for each survivor.

• Fred Korematsu, 23, had plastic surgery on his eyes and took the name Clyde Sarah to avoid removal before his arrest in May 1942.
• Minoru Yasui, the first Japanese American attorney admitted to the Oregon bar, walked Portland streets after curfew and turned himself in at 11 p.m. to force a test case.
• Official camp photographers were instructed to keep barbed wire fences and guard towers out of the frame.
• Colorado governor Ralph Carr opposed detention without due process and invited displaced Japanese Americans to his state, a stance that cost him his career.
• President Gerald Ford formally terminated Executive Order 9066 in 1976 and stated that the evacuation was wrong.