Eighty-four years ago today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.
It was only a few paragraphs long. It didn’t even mention Japanese Americans by name.
It spoke instead of “military areas” and “exclusion zones.”
It sounded boring and procedural, but within weeks more than 120,000 people—most of them American citizens—were forced from their homes along the West Coast and into makeshift camps.
They were given days to sell their property, shut down their businesses, pack what they could carry, and report for “removal”. Many of them had spent decades building family farms, fishing operations and shops, and being good neighbors.
They sold for pennies on the dollar to buyers who knew they had no room to barter. Children watched silently as their parents dismantled their entire lives in just a few short days.
Families were sent to remote camps—places like Manzanar—surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Some were housed temporarily in converted horse stalls at racetracks. The government called these prison camps “relocation centers,” because the language of bureaucracy has a way of sanding down the moral edges of what’s actually being done.
It’s important to remember that no one was charged with a crime. In fact, no crime was ever uncovered. There was no espionage. There were actually just regular people who happened to have the wrong ancestry.
Most people think something like this could never happen in the U.S. Most who know it did happen, think that it could never happen again.
“That was in the old days. Back when everyone was worked up about WWII and we didn’t understand each other as well. That would never fly today,” they naively think.
They probably don’t know that the Supreme Court upheld these “relocations” in Korematsu v. United States.
And they likely don’t realize that a majority of the public supported it, civilian agencies carried it out, military leaders enforced it, and the press largely went along.
In other words, every institutional safeguard that was supposed to restrain government power yielded.
And that’s the lesson that needs to be learned.
We’re often told that the Constitution protects us—that our system of checks and balances prevents serious abuses. That “the stuff that happens ‘over there’ can’t happen here” because we have courts, elections, and procedures.
But Executive Order 9066 is a reminder that constitutional rights are only as strong as the willingness of those in power to honor them, and the willingness of the public to insist on it.
When fear enters the picture, that willingness evaporates faster than most people realize.
Look at the Patriot Act, or COVID lockdowns and their ensuing medical tyranny!
We’ve all lived through enough real-life examples of people behaving in insane ways that we should know that rounding people up and throwing them in camps for “safety” can absolutely happen again!
The attack on Pearl Harbor was real. And the war was real. And with it came very real fear and uncertainty. In that atmosphere, the idea of mass exclusion felt reasonable—even necessary—to many Americans.
Forty years later, a federal commission concluded the internment was driven by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Survivors eventually received $20,000 each in restitution.
(As if a dollar amount could reimburse years of confinement and lost life and opportunity.)
So what can we do to make sure we’re ready the next time an emergency comes along that the government looks ready to use to trample civil liberties and crush freedom?
We learn history.
Because it never begins with barbed wire, or forced relocation, or forced vaccination.
It always starts with paperwork, press conferences, and media blitzes.
It starts with carefully worded executive orders, or mandates, or “for your good” messaging from bought-and-paid-for “experts”. Then, courts start deferring to “military necessity” while citizens persuade themselves and each other that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures.
History rarely repeats itself in identical form.
It repeats in patterns:
A crisis.
A frightened population.
An expansion of power, and institutions that were designed to restrain that power, deciding not to.
A promise that it’s temporary.
It isn’t temporary.
That’s why we teach the lessons we do in our America’s History books and curriculum.
We want to help kids understand that liberty isn’t self-executing. It doesn’t defend itself. It is always under attack, and it survives only when people understand both its value and its fragility and are willing to safeguard it.
Presidents Day is often reduced to mattress sales and long weekends, but if we’re going to talk about the Executive, we should also talk about what happens when it goes unchecked—and how easily it can.
If we want the next generation to avoid repeating the worst mistakes of the past, they need more than feel-good slogans about democracy’s “checks and balances”. They need context, and that comes from a solid understanding of where we came from.
They need to understand that rights can be suspended by leaders who insist they’re acting for the common good—and that courts and public opinion often fail right in lockstep.
Those who don’t learn history aren’t just doomed to repeat it.
They’re far more likely to justify it when the pressure starts to build.
That’s why we’re using this Presidents Day to focus on the principles that were meant to prevent abuses like EO 9066 in the first place—and to help families teach them clearly, honestly, and without the sanitized language that so often hides truth.
Because the real safeguard isn’t a document in Washington.
It’s a citizenry that knows what happened last time.
— Connor
