Executive Order Imprisons 110,000 People!

On this day in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any and all people "as deemed necessary or desirable" away from "military areas." Pearl Harbor had been bombed ten weeks before.

The military decided that the entire West Coast was a military area. It also happened to be where most Japanese Americans lived. So off they went. A few months later, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans had been "relocated" (imprisoned) in internment camps built by the U.S. military. Sixty-two percent of them were American citizens. They lived in those prison camps for two and a half years. Then the "evacuees" were allowed to return to their homes . . . if they were still there.

Wow. Isn't that shocking? I'm so glad nothing like that could ever happen in America today.