Internment Quotes
the attack on Pearl Harbor
Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:
She was very conflicted about the interment of Americans of Japanese origin. She understood the arguments for the internment and some had some merit for her. But she was opposed to the internment from the beginning. However, she frequently discussed this issue privately with FDR. She consulted with the judges who dissented in the law suits and presented their arguments to her husband. She visited some of the internment camps and maintained a correspondent with some of the interned Japanese American leaders. Earlier, once FDR signed the internment executive order, she maintained a public silence on the issue until 1944 when she publicly broke with her husband on this issue. (While that may be shocking to us today—for a first lady to publicly disagree with the President—for Mrs. Roosevelt, it was not unusual and was not the scandal that it might be today. Throughout her over 3 terms as First Lady, she wrote a daily newspaper column and did a weekly radio show for much of the period.
In one of the great American disgraces, during WWII, American citizens of Japanese ethnicity were forced into an “evacuation” into camps for the duration of the war. German American citizens were not similarly treated. There was not a single act of sabotage or anti war propaganda by Japanese Americans before (or after) the “evacuation.” Many German Americans were so involved but never interned, but one of the major motivations was to get the valuable farmland owned by many Japanese on the West Coast. (The Japanese American citizens could not work or earn the money to pay the mortgages or taxes on their property and the white Californians were able to acquire the land for very little. Many believe this was the real motivation for the Japanese American incarceration as there was none such on the East Coast where there were few Japanese American land holdings.
