Emilie Vigliotta

February 21st, 2018

Blue Group

Japanese Internment Assignment

In this political cartoon, a contortionist stands at the front of the page. He points in one direction,
identifying the cruelty of Jewish concentration camps in Europe; with the other hand, he gestures to an image
that details the hypocritical actions the United States took against those of Japanese ancestry. The internment of
Japanese Americans went against the foundations of the United States, because although Congress claimed the
issue was a matter of national security, loyal Japanese-Americans were forced to leave their home without
evidence of supposed-betrayal. According to the Japanese Internment Textbook, “what happened to these
citizens during the war was easily one of the greatest abuses of civil liberties and civil rights in American
history.” Congress even ruled in December of 1944 that “the government could not keep a loyal citizen from
returning to his or her home,” yet the Japanese-Americans had been taken from their homes and were forced to
live in internment camps surrounded by barbed wire. The Ringle Report noted that the entire issue had been
blown out of proportion, explaining that Japanese-Americans were “no more serious than the problems of the
German, Italian, and Communistic portions of the United States population, and … should be handled on the
basis of the individual, regardless of citizenship, and not on a racial basis.”
The Ringle Report also adds that Japanese-Americans, although widely accused of betraying the United
States, were “rebuffed in nearly all their efforts to prove their loyalty to the United States,” many of them even
“[taking] legal steps … to officially divest themselves of Japanese citizenship, even though by doing so they
become legally dead in the eye of the Japanese law.” The Japanese Internment Timeline explains that President
Roosevelt signed the Executive Order 9066 in 1942, “authorizing military authorities to exclude civilians from
any area without trial or hearing,” and two years later, the War Department imposed a draft on these
camp-imprisoned Japanese-Americans, forcing them to fight for the country that had incarcerated them merely
for their racial background. The internment of Japanese Americans was unconstitutional, and as explained in the
Korematsu Supreme Court Ruling, “inconsistent with our basic government institutions.” Although there were
many constitutional and ethical objections to the exclusion of Japanese Americans, many of whom were
successful on the West Coast and consistently loyal to the United States, Congress upheld the legality of
Executive Order 9066 through the justification as a “national security necessity” and continued with the
internment of thousands of innocent Japanese-Americans.
 Emilie Vigliotta
Blue Group
February 21st, 2018

Japanese Internment Work Cited

The Korematsu Supreme Court Ruling

Japanese Internment Timeline

Ringle Report on Japanese Internment

Japanese Internment Textbook Excerpt

“Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942).” Our Documents - Executive Order
9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942),
www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=74.