On This Day in History: March 18

Japanese internment

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People like to hold up FDR as one of the good presidents, but like all presidents, he made his share of dick moves. One such move was the establishment of the War Relocation Authority just a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, to take Japanese Americans into custody.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: March 18, 1942--

These were the American concentration camps. People weren’t sent there to die, but to be “secured” without any intent to file charges or have trials, just in case they might pose a threat to national security. Canada did it too, because we were all paranoid fucking dicks.

It began on March 18, 1942. At first, the WRA was under the direction of General Eisenhower’s younger brother Milton. Eisenhower wanted to round up Japanese men only, and to leave women and children out of it. He also proposed instead to send Japanese people to farms that were struggling to find workers, what with all the men going off to war. But he was not heard and resigned after only 90 days in the role.

There were 127,000 Japanese people forcibly relocated and incarcerated during World War II, 80,000 of them having been born in the U.S. and having full citizenship. The incarceration was seen to be more about racism than any actual security threat, and in California anyone with even 1/16^th Japanese ancestry could be incarcerated. Colonel Karl Bendetsen, who created the program, proclaimed that even if someone had “one drop of Japanese blood” they qualified for internment. Douche. By comparison, only about 10,000 Germans and Italians were placed in the American concentration camps, even though the U.S. was at war with those countries as well.

While not on par with life in a German concentration camp, life in the American camps was far from pleasant. They were hastily constructed and crowded. In many cases, 25 people lived in a space designed for only four. Privacy was non-existent. The camps were mostly located in remote and desolate areas and surrounded by armed guards. These people were incarcerated for years, having committed no crime other than possessing what their government falsely deemed to be a threatening ancestry.

In 1980 President Carter began an investigation into the legality of the mass incarceration, and eight years later President Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that said hey we’re real sorry about that, so here is 20 grand for anyone still alive who we forced into one of these camps.

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