A. General Background for Korematsu

On December 7, 1941, while their special emissaries were in Washington supposedly negotiating, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and wiped out a large part of the American fleet. They then swept across the western Pacific, quickly conquering Wake, Guam, the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies; invaded New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Burma, and even the westernmost of the Aleutian Islands, threatening Australia to the south, India to the west, and, so some panicked American civilian and military leaders thought, the American west coast as well.

Agitation for action against both alien Japanese and American citizens of Japanese descent (Nisei) began within weeks of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Some military leaders, most notably General John L. DeWitt, commanding the west coast area, wanted to intern these people. (He was also worried about the large number of "colored troops" under his command.) Others, such as the Office of Naval Intelligence, thought that the Nisei posed no danger to national safety-a view in which the FBI concurred. But more was involved than a dispute about national security. Racism, evidenced on the west coast by anti-oriental more than by anti-black prejudice, was hardly unknown in the United States. The Japanese government's treachery and their troops' systematic raping, torturing, and murdering civilians and prisoners of war provided a license for Americans to hate. Some public officials honestly, if incorrectly, feared mass violence against people of Japanese extraction and raised the argument that the Nisei as well as enemy aliens should be locked up for their own good.

Economic self interests encouraged radical governmental action against Japanese Americans. Their work ethic had made them tough competitors in farming, fishing, and small businesses. it did not escape notice that, if they were forcibly removed, competition from the Nisei would be destroyed-and their homes and businesses would have to be offered at fire-sale prices. Legislators, especially from the west coast, were soon swamped with demands from individuals and interest groups for action against all people of Japanese ancestry. Other groups, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Japanese American Citizens League, for example, fought back, but their prestige was low, their numbers few, and their influence small. Even the doubts publicly expressed by the ONI and the FBI about need for a restrictive program and the misgivings of some officials about the constitutionality of incarcerating people because their ancestors had emi rated from a countrv with whom we later were at war could not stop a juggernaut fed bv fear, hate,and economic self interest.

On March 27, 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed into law a bill which made it a crime to remain in a "military zone" designated by a commander acting under authority of the Secretary of War or, for those allowed to remain in such a zone, to disobey the commander's regulations. This statute legitimated an earlier executive order authorizing the Secretary of War to designate military zones "from which any and all persons" might be excluded. The statute also retroactively validated the curfew that General DeWitt had imposed on enemy aliens and Nisei living in the Pacific states.

Pursuant to this new authority, the Army required all persons of Japanese ancestry to report to designated centers for transportation to and imprisonment in concentration camps. General DeWitt explained that it was legitimate to put the Nisei behind barbed wire while allowing German and Italian aliens to remain free because "a jap is a jap" and World War 11 was "a war of the white race against the yellow race."

[From Walter F. Murphy, James E. Fleming & Sotirios A. Barber, American Constitutional Interpretation 88-89 (2d ed. 1995).]