righting wrongs
In 1945 before his death, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt demonstrated little sympathy toward the sufferings of internment and made little efforts toward a redress movement. When sent a copy of Ansel Adams’s book, Born Free and Equal, a photographic collection of the Japanese-American internment experience, Roosevelt would not even look at it. The President refused to see conditions of camps and the miseries and hardships of internment represented in these photos.
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However, FDR’s successor, Harry S. Truman, began a movement of recommendation for Japanese-Americans. With Executive Order 9742, Truman ended the internment program and the War Relocation Authority. Additionally, in 1948, the president ordered the desegregation of U.S. armed forces. Later that year, Congress also passed the Japanese-American Claims Act, which distributed thirty-eight million dollars to settle the property claims of those emerging from internment camps. Over twenty-three thousand people were awarded compensation for their losses in World War II resulting from forced eviction. President Truman also held a special ceremony at the White House to award a Presidential Unit Citation to the Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which fought in WWII and was made up almost completely of soldiers of Japanese Ancestry. At the ceremony, Truman addressed the soldiers and said, “You have fought against prejudice and you have won”
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The question of whether the evacuation of the Japanese people from the West Coast was justified is now moot. The government did move these people, bodily, the resulting loss was great, and the principles of justice and responsible government requires that there should be compensation for such losses.” - The Senate on the Japanese- American Claims Act |
President Gerald R Ford also continued on the redress of Japanese-American citizens. In 1976, Ford used the thirty-fourth anniversary of FDR's Executive Order 9066 to issue a proclamation repealing it. This proclamation was made as part of the celebrations taking place to honor the two-hundredth birthday of America.
Furthermore, Ford issued a Presidential pardon for radio personality Iva I Toguri. Toguri went under the stage name Tokyo Rose while hosting a Japanese propaganda radio show directed at American troops in WWII. In 1949, Rose was put on trial and convicted of treason for making these wartime broadcasts from Tokyo. During this trial, witnesses against Rose were allowed to present testimony that the federal prosecutors knew was perjured. However, in 1976 Ford wrote an executive pardon for her.
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President Jimmy Carter began the last phase of the struggle for redress beginning in 1980, when he created the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. CWRIC was instructed to study the events leading up to and following Executive Order 9066 and advise a proper form of government reimbursement to Congress. After country wide public hearings, the commission recommended that Congress formally apologize to the people who suffered from internment; issue pardons to Korematsu and others charged with violating the West Coast exclusion orders; restore any federal claims lost due to evacuation; compensate camp survivors; and create a fund for an internment education program. The goals of CWRIC took time to achieve, but on August 10th, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which was designed to achieve the recommendations put forth by the commission. Building off of Carter’s efforts, George H.W. Bush signed the Civil Liberties Act appropriations bill in November 1989, which set aside five-hundred million dollars a year until every former internee had been paid back for their painful experiences in the Camps.
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We are not talking here about the wartime sacrifices that we all made to support and defend our nation. At issue here is the wholesale violation, based on race, of those very legal principles we were fighting to defend.” -Norman Mineta, a House Representative, urging fellow lawmakers to pass the CLA "[The relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans] was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it... were not driven by analysis of miltary conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race, prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership... A grave injustice was done to American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry who, without individual review or any probative evidence against them, were excluded, removed and detained by the United States during World War II." -A 1981 report by the CWRIC |