Whose civil liberties did the US government violate during ww2 and in what ways?

John Tateishi was incarcerated at Manzanar internment camp in California from age 3 until he was 6. Chloe Coleman/NPR hide caption

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More than 100,000 people of Japanese heritage from the West Coast were sent to war relocation camps during World War II. National Archives hide caption

Japanese Americans arriving at an assembly center near Stockton, California. Their possessions are piled outside awaiting inspection before being transferred to the barracks (1942).
(Image: National Archives and Records Administration, 210-G-C404.)

In the end, the newly created War Relocation Authority did move Japanese evacuees into a series of “relocation centers” for most of the rest of the war. Families were given only a few days to dispose of their property and report to temporary “assembly centers,” where they were held until the larger relocation centers were ready to receive them. Living conditions in these makeshift camps were terrible. One assembly center established at Santa Anita Park, a racetrack in southern California, housed entire families in horse stalls with dirt floors.

The more permanent relocation centers were not much better. The War Relocation Authority established 10 of these camps, mostly located in the West, although two were located in Arkansas (which later consolidated to one in Rohwer, Arkansas). The Army-style barracks built to house the evacuees offered little protection from the intense heat and cold, and families were often forced to live together, offering little privacy. The residents were not required to work, but the guard towers and barbed-wire fences surrounding the camps denied them the freedom to move about as they pleased.

Despite these conditions, the incarcerated Japanese Americans did what they could to make the camps feel as much like home as possible. They established newspapers, markets, schools, and even police and fire departments. At the Rohwer War Relocation Center in southeastern Arkansas, Japanese American high school students had their own band, sports teams, clubs, and activities like senior prom and student council. Flipping through the pages of the school’s yearbook, however, the makeshift barracks of wood and tar paper, the guard towers, and the barbed-wire fences visible in the photos are an obvious reminder that the experiences of these students were anything but normal. In 1943, the War Relocation Authority subjected all Japanese Americans in the camps to a loyalty test, in which they were asked to reject allegiance to the Japanese emperor and assert whether they were willing to serve in the US military. Many of the camp residents, especially those who were American citizens, were deeply offended by the government’s obvious suspicion that they might still be loyal to Japan. About 8,500 of these people, mainly second-generation Japanese American men, answered “no” to both questions, often in protest. All of these so-called “no-no” residents were labeled as disloyal, were separated from their families, and were sent to the relocation center at Tule Lake, California.

Segregating the so-called “disloyal” Japanese Americans from the “loyal” ones only made the relocation program even harder to justify. If the government had taken steps to identify and remove the “disloyal” Japanese Americans, why was there a need for any of the others to remain in the camps? Washington officials like Attorney General Biddle and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes urged President Roosevelt to end the relocation program as soon as possible, while several of the camp residents themselves challenged the program in court. Roosevelt hesitated, fearing a political backlash, but in December 1944 his administration declared the period of “military necessity” for relocation over, and officials began allowing Japanese Americans back into the Pacific Coast region.

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The Japanese American relocation program had significant consequences. Camp residents lost some $400 million in property during their incarceration. Congress provided $38 million in reparations in 1948 and forty years later paid an additional $20,000 to each surviving individual who had been detained in the camps. The Japanese American community itself was also transformed by this experience. Before the war, most Japanese Americans adhered closely to the customs and traditions enforced by their oldest generation (called Issei), which often deepened their isolation from mainstream American society. The experience of living in the camps largely ended this pattern for second-generation Japanese Americans (called Nisei), who after the war became some of the best-educated and most successful members of their communities.

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