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The Day of Remembrance, Feb. 19, should focus our attention on how a constitutional republic can shun its first principles

Today is the Day of Remembrance, marking the date that the United States officially marshalled the full force and power of the federal government against Americans whose only offense was being of Japanese descent. This day, which now lives in infamy, holds lessons for us now.

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed , which led to one of the most notable mass violations of civil liberties in U.S. history: the imprisonment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent without due process. Each year, the Japanese American community commemorates this Day of Remembrance to reflect on the lessons of that episode and resolve to advocate for justice for all.

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Dressed in his U.S. Navy uniform, World War I veteran Hikotaro Yamada enters the Santa Anita assembly center after being forced to leave his Torrance, California, home. (Photo: Clem Albers/U.S. Department of the Interior)

The attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 exacerbated decades of anti-Japanese racism. Japanese immigrants were disparaged from the 1890s onward as an invading “yellow peril” that brought crime and sexual deviance, stole jobs and threatened to impose a foreign culture.

Before 1941, the federal government barred them from becoming naturalized citizens and eventually prevented their migration. Many states prohibited them from marrying white people and buying land, a serious impediment for an ethnic group whose economy relied heavily on agriculture. Despite these barriers, the Japanese American community grew to include Nisei, children born in the United States who possessed natural-born citizenship.

After Dec. 7, government and military officials portrayed Japanese Americans as a monolithic threat to national security, alleging that they could not be differentiated individually and were thus all potential spies or saboteurs.

As the historian , Mississippi Congressman John Rankin told the House of Representatives: “I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting them in concentration camps and shipping them back to Asia as soon as possible ... This is a race war, as far as the Pacific side of the conflict is concerned ... The White man's civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism ... One of them must be destroyed ... Damn them! Let's get rid of them now!”

New Deal liberals like Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson declared, “Their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese.”

General John L. DeWitt, military commander of the West Coast, said, “In the war in which we are now engaged, racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted ... It therefore follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies of Japanese extraction are at large today.”

California Attorney General and future Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren called for the mass expulsion and incarceration of Japanese Americans just one decade before issuing the landmark decision barring school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

Newspapers added cruelty to the message. , “Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in the badlands. Let 'em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it... Let us have no patience with the enemy or with anyone whose vein carry his blood…”[1]

EO 9066 authorized the Secretary of War to remove civilians from areas deemed to be militarily sensitive. It named no class of civilians or ethnic groups and defined no geographic boundaries or criteria for designating sensitive areas.

The vaguely defined yet overwhelming power conveyed by the order resulted in Japanese Americans—accused of no crimes as individuals and receiving no due process—being removed from the West Coast and incarcerated in barbed-wire enclosed prison camps hastily constructed in interior states including Colorado. My uncle and aunt were imprisoned at the Amache camp near Granada, Colorado.

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Barracks at the Amache internment camp near Granada, Colorado. (Photo: Tom Parker/U.S. Department of the Interior)

Three legal challenges by Gordon , Min , and Fred to the removal and incarceration made their way to Supreme Court, which ruled repeatedly that EO 9066 and its implementation were constitutional.

In what has come to be a from the majority opinion in the Korematsu case, Justice Frank Murphy declared, “I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States.”

Here at the University of Colorado Boulder, the U.S. Navy established the Japanese Language School, which recruited some Nisei instructors out of the camps to train military translators and interpreters. President Robert L. Stearns supported the establishment of the school and urged the Boulder community to welcome the instructors and their families.

In response to the Denver Post’s propaganda campaign demonizing Japanese Americans, , writing in the school’s Silver and Gold newspaper, “Now that the Denver Post has embraced Hitler’s doctrines of race and Aryan superiority, now that the Post has converted this war from a battle of principles or even of nations into a battle of peoples, now that the Post has declared war on the Japanese Americans in our cities and internment camps, it’s about time we college students registered our protests against such fascist techniques in our midst.”

Posterity has condemned the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the , which offered an official government apology for the “fundamental injustice” done to citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry and providing monetary compensation to those still alive over four decades later.

In signing the bill, , “[M]y fellow Americans, we gather here today to right a grave wrong. More than 40 years ago, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States��were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps. This action was taken without trial, without jury. It was based solely on race, for these 120,000 were Americans of Japanese descent.”

What lessons can be drawn from this sordid episode that occurred eight decades ago?

• Justice is not a partisan issue. After all, the incarceration was perpetrated by the administration of FDR, perhaps the most consequential liberal president of the 20^th century.
• Unchecked federal executive power can lead to abuses of fundamental civil and human rights, especially when militarized forces are unleashed on civilians.
• Compliant courts and legislatures cannot be relied upon to provide the checks and balances necessary to ensure that constitutional rights are protected.
• Mass incarceration camps can be built in the United States and filled with both U.S. citizens and aliens alike without due process. Indeed, they have been.
• History will remember the words and deeds of those who support justice and due process.

So today, and indeed every day, we are obliged to remember and to learn.

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Daryl J. Maeda, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, has been a faculty member at ���� Boulder since 2005. He holds a PhD in American culture from the University of Michigan, MA in ethnic studies from San Francisco State University and BS in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College.��