Executive Order 9066 and the Korematsu Case

One signature from a president turned suspicion into policy and forced about 120,000 people to leave their homes. We sit down with Dr. Stephen Knott, emeritus professor of national security affairs and a longtime scholar of presidential power, to unpack Executive Order 9066 and the Japanese American internment that followed Pearl Harbor. Along the way, we ask the uncomfortable question that civics can’t dodge: how does a democracy justify stripping due process from its own citizens during wartime?

We walk through why Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the order, the political and public pressure driving it, and the lesser-known fact that key officials like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the attorney general opposed it. Dr. Knott explains how broad wartime authority was operationalized on the West Coast by General John DeWitt, and why the result became one of the darkest chapters in American civil liberties, equal protection, and property rights.

Then we turn to Korematsu v. United States and what the Supreme Court did with the case in 1944. The Court’s majority deferred to national security claims and upheld the exclusion policy, while dissenters warned about racial targeting. Korematsu is still technically precedent, even after later condemnation and the 1988 congressional apology and reparations. We also connect this history to the post-9/11 era, including the pressure to target Muslim Americans and why President George W. Bush publicly rejected repeating the internment mistake.

If you care about the Constitution, executive authority, national security, and the real-world meaning of civil rights during crises, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review with the question you want us to tackle next.

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Welcome back to Civics in a year. I am so excited and so honored by our guest today. With us today, we have Dr. Stephen Knott, who I have worked with for quite a while, it feels like. Dr. Knott is an emeritus professor of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Before his time at the War College, he served as co-chair of the presidential oral history program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, where he helped document and analyze the modern presidency through firsthand accounts. He is also the author of several works on the American presidency, including his recent book coming out May 19th, called Conspirator in Chief: The Long Tradition of Conspiracy Theories in the American Presidency. He also wrote about Alexander Hamilton before it was cool, before the Hamilton musical came out. His scholarship offers deep insight into presidential leadership, executive power, and the historical roots of political rhetoric in the United States. Dr. Knott, thank you so much. So I also want to say I have many of your books in my library, but the lap soul of the American presidency is one of my favorites because I just I love digging into you know presidents and having an understanding that they're not these perfect people. And that the presidency has evolved and maybe it has evolved into things that aren't that great. Anyway, thank you so much for being here with us today. We are talking about Executive Order 9066 and the Koromatsu case. So speaking of decisions that presidents have made that maybe are not the best. Can you tell us a little bit about Executive Order 9066 and how it kind of expands presidential power during wartime and what the constitutional justifications were used to defend it at the time?

Korematsu And Supreme Court Deference

SPEAKER_00 2:54

So, well, thank first of all, thank you, Liz, for that very kind introduction. And thank you for all you do for Civics. I mean, it's this is so vitally important these days, and God bless you for the work you do. Executive Order 9066 was issued by President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1942, just a little over two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which of course caught the United States off guard. The American people were quite angry, needless to say. Congress passed a declaration of war four days after the Pearl Harbor attack. And this executive order in February, ninth, February 19th, to be exact. So again, slightly over two months later, was issued by President Roosevelt out of a fear that Japanese, both Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals who happened to be in the United States, particularly on the West Coast, in Roosevelt's view presented a threat to American national security. Now it needs to be pointed out, Liz, interestingly, both the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, and Roosevelt's own attorney general did not support this order. They thought it went way too far. So this was an order that was driven by presidential by pres by the president's initiative. FDR is the one who drove the policy. And despite these objections from high-ranking people, he signed it. It did not specify Japanese Americans. It simply gave American military authorities on the west coast of the United States, Arizona, California, Washington, Oregon, the power to restrict or to label certain areas as military areas. And the man in charge of the West Coast of those states that I just mentioned was a general by the name of DeWitt, D-E-W-I-T-T. And he is the one who took the executive order, targeted towards Japanese, uh people of Japanese ancestry. At first, they were supposed to voluntarily move from certain areas, but there was a very small percentage of the population who voluntarily agreed to relocate. So at that point, DeWitt made it mandatory. And the numbers of people we're talking about here are approximately 120,000. Of those 120,000 people, 70,000 were Japanese American citizens who were being deprived of due process, deprived of their property, relic relocated to these isolated locations for the duration of the war. It is not, as you said, one of the high points of American civil liberties. And I would think of it to a great extent as a real negative mark on Franklin Roosevelt's record.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

So in Koromatsu versus the United States, how did the Supreme Court balance national security concerns with individual civil liberties? And what does that decision reveal about the court's role during crises?

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Yeah, it's a somewhat disappointing mark, I think, also for the Supreme Court. The case you referred to, Koromatsu versus the United States, was decided in 1944 by the Supreme Court. And in a 6-3 vote, the court ruled in favor of Franklin Roosevelt, in favor of the administration's policy to issue this order and to relocate Japanese Americans. The court majority decided that they were not in a position to question the president's decision making, even with the benefit of about three years of hindsight. And the case those the majority made was the potential for sabotage, the potential for spying was so great that, again, they were not in a position to countermand that kind of an order. Now, the minority, the three members in the minority, took a very different stance. They were disturbed by the kind of racial targeting that one and ethnic targeting that one sees in this order. But again, they were very much in the minority. It is Liz typical of the Supreme Court, at least up until the mid-20th century. There were a few decisions along the way prior to FDR where the courts had a tendency to defer to the president, to defer to the commander-in-chief in wartime. I think perhaps some members of that majority later on came to regret their vote upholding FDR's power to issue this order. But again, they tended to weigh national security over the rights of this targeted minority group. And I do think it is something of a scar, both on Roosevelt's record and on the Supreme Court's record.

Legacy From Reparations To 9/11

SPEAKER_01 8:18

So looking back then, how is the legacy of this executive order and the Koramatsu decision shaped modern understandings of civil rights, equal protection, and limits on executive authority? Because Koromatsu has not been overturned, correct? Correct. So it's still technically Supreme Court precedent. And I know that in Trump versus Hawaii, it was mentioned, but again, not overturned. So, you know, how does this help shape this understanding?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Yeah, it's a terrific question. And I'm glad you pointed out that it has not been overturned. Uh, although we should add, Liz, in 1988, the United States Congress and President Reagan at the time signed into law a formal apology to those Japanese Americans who had been interned, and also a reparations check for$20,000 given to the survivors or the nearest relative of the survivors of those who had been interned. So that, I suppose, represents some attempt 40 years after the fact to provide some redress of grievances to those who had been denied their civil liberties. But yeah, I would say that at least in legal circles, there's still an overwhelming sense that that was a mistaken opinion, that it was a deference to executive power that was very much at odds with our tradition of trying to balance the need with for security with the rights of due process. I think it's it's a decision that lacks a kind of credibility amongst most law professors, most judges. I would like to think that something like this would never happen again. And I will give you an example, Liz, perhaps to uh support what I just said. George W. Bush, in the immediate wake of 9-11, was pressured by some folks, particularly on the conservative spectrum, to implement some kind of internment policy for those Islamic Americans. And Bush rejected it out of hand. And the reason he rejected it in part was that he had a member of his cabinet, Norman Manetta, who was his Secretary of Transportation. And Manetta, as a young man, a young boy, had been interned during the Second World War. And Bush made it flat out, he said it in cabinet meetings more than once, we're not going to do to Islamic Americans what we did to Norm's family. Bush, by the way, had a tendency to respond to those kinds of personal stories. And we should add one other thing. Within a week of 9-11, Bush traveled to the largest mosque in Washington, D.C., put his arm around the local Iman, and flat out said to the American public, these are our fellow citizens. We are going to respect their rights, their civil liberties, and we're not going to repeat the mistakes of the past. So I'd like to hope, even though the case has not been overturned, that we have learned something from it and it would not happen again. But I'm also somewhat jaded enough to know that there's always that possibility. Whenever people are scared, the desire to sort of lash out at unpopular groups really comes to the fore.

Final Takeaways And Next Time

SPEAKER_01 11:49

That's so interesting. I had never heard that about President Bush. And I'm I'm glad you brought up the apology too and the reparations check. It's, you know, and I know that the Koramatsu Institute does a lot of work to talk about civil liberties and you know, really bringing that case to light. So, Dr. Knott, thank you so much for running through both the executive order and Koramatsu. And for those listeners, Dr. Knott is also going to come back and do one on what was just mentioned on George W. Bush and 9 11. So make sure you tune in for that. Dr. Knott, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 12:26

Thank you, Liz.