Japanese American Forced Evacuation and the Quakers

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 into effect. This "authorized the U.S. army to exclude populations from designated zones when deemed necessary for security reasons." There was no mention of any specific racial or ethnic group, but it was understood that this was to apply only to the Japanese Americans, though people of German and Italian birth made up by far the two largest groups of enemy nationals.

The media played a large part in inflaming the public. At first, the Japanese Americans encountered a great deal of sympathy for their awkward situation, but this quickly disappeared as the weeks passed. The Hearst papers were especially influential, printing propaganda and fabricating stories. Nearly all the most powerful civil liberties groups turned against the Japanese Americans, and it was only a few Quaker groups that came to their defense.

-- from "'Slap the Jap': World War II Internment Camps web page

Added 9th Month 6, 1998

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