UNT History Efficacy and Significance of Executive Order 9066 Essay

In partial fulfillment of the course learning objectives, you will submit one major research essay assignment. This project examines the efficacy and significance of FDR’s Executive Order 9066, which resulted in the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, most of whom were citizens of the United States. Your task is to read the Order, understand its historical context, and consider the degree to which the Order served the interests of the United States and its people. 

You will write a 3-5 page research essay (double spaced–format specifics below) in which you assert a thesis (argument), support it with relevant factual information (body paragraphs), and examine its significance (conclusion). This is a formal project requiring primary and secondary research, annotated with proper citations (see Format Requirements below).

Read FDR’s Executive Order 9066 (select this link to read the document).

Synopsis of Events

Perhaps the group that suffered the most on the Home Front during WWII was Japanese Americans. Based on the Immigration Act of 1924, the Japanese were largely banned from coming to the U.S. Consequently, at the beginning of the war, only 260,000 Japanese Americans lived in the United States. The majority resided in Hawaii, about 150,000; the remainder, 110,000, lived on the West Coast, operating small farms and businesses catering primarily to the Japanese community. After Pearl Harbor, though, Californians argued that Japanese Americans constituted an alien element or a fifth front. Rumors began to spread that Japanese troops were about to land in California and unite with Japanese Americans. There was a much larger Japanese population in Hawaii, but because they formed a majority of the population and a critical element of the workforce, the fear and race-based outcry was not as great.

On February 19, 1942, Roosevelt authorized the War Department to exclude anyone who posed a threat to U.S. security from residing in designated military areas. Japanese Americans were given just 48 hours to sell their property and pack their bags in many cases. 110,000 Japanese Americans, including 2/3 of whom were actually U.S. citizens, were sent to ten relocation camps in six western states and Arkansas. Barbed wire and armed guards surrounded the internment camps. The housing was barracks-style, with no insulation and a single light. Meals were held in a communal mess hall, and all toilet and bathing facilities were communal.  

Nonetheless, 18,000 managed to obtain early release – for of all things – to join the military to fight Nazis in Europe. The majority served in two segregated units, the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The latter lost over 10,000 in fighting in Italy. Men in the unit received 3600 Purple Hearts, 810 Bronze Stars, 342 Silver Stars, 123 divisional citations, 47 Distinguished Service Crosses, 17 Legions of Merit, 7 Presidential Citations, and 1 Congressional Medal of Honor. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team was the most decorated American unit in the war.  

Civil Rights protests came from across the U.S. when the Roosevelt Administration instituted the policy of internment. In Korematsu v. United States (1944), the Supreme Court supported the Administration, voting 6-3 to allow the camps to exist based on national security. 

The government had the right to exclude people of Japanese ancestry from military areas. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Frank Murphy decried the majority decision: “I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet, they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

Ironically, the very same Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Mitsuye Endo that the U.S. government could not detain citizens deemed loyal to the United States. On January 2, 1945, the Executive Order was rescinded, and Japanese internment ended. Thirty-five years later, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which issued a report condemning internment three years later in 1983. The report, titled Personal Justice Denied, noted internment was “unjust and motivated by racism rather than real military necessity.” Eventually, $1.2 billion was set aside for reparations.

Questions to Consider

Your primary task is to examine the efficacy and significance of FDR’s Executive Order 9066 through the lens of social responsibility. Social responsibility means that individuals and companies have a duty to act in the best interests of their environment and society as a whole. In this case, it means that you must consider the degree to which Executive Order 9066 met that criteria.

As part of your Essay, and to help you compose your thesis, you should consider at least the following:

What was the historical context of the Order?

Why did FDR issue the Order? What were his goals?

How and why were Japanese Americans targeted while not being labeled explicitly in the Order?

Presidents have a duty to act in the best interest of the American people.

Did the president violate the U.S. Constitution with this Order?

Did the president act in the best interest of the American people?

In what ways does this Order (its meaning and significance) speak to the problems and possibilities of the present?

In other words, why is this history valuable for us to understand today?

Academic Research

• You MUST utilize at least two (2) primary sources and three (3) secondary sources (in addition to the primary source provided). You must use at least one (1) book for your secondary source and at least two (2) academic articles. The best essays use more sources.
• Historians rely on two types of sources: primary and secondary. PRIMARY SOURCES are produced contemporaneously with the events or issues being studied, often by those directly involved. Historians reconstruct the past by locating, studying, and interpreting the evidence found in these sources, including such documents as:
• Letters
• Diaries

Journals

• Memoirs, even if written years later
• Newspaper articles from the period
• Official records

Interviews

• Speeches

Each of these sources provides only a narrow perspective on the subject, usually from a biased perspective. Only by piecing them together and interpreting them critically can the bigger picture (history) be constructed. You MUST utilize three (3) secondary sources in addition to the primary source provided.

SECONDARY SOURCES, by contrast, analyze and interpret events based on the available primary sources. Secondary sources vary widely in their purpose, validity, and quality, including printed books, e-books, articles, and websites. As you research the secondary sources, note how the authors use primary sources. Check their notes and bibliography to determine what sources they are relying on and why. In the best historical writing, you will note the historian’s interaction with the evidence (primary sources) and with previous historical works (secondary sources). 

Locating Appropriate Books 

The place to begin searching for books is the NCTC library’s card catalog, which is available online. Use a keyword or subject search to find the call number that will direct you to the work. You may also come across titles and/or authors in your preliminary reading on the subject; look up those titles. As you read, you will locate additional resources. If you find a book that the NCTC library does not have, use the interlibrary loan service to get it. Librarians will always help with this process—that is, after all, their job!

Use academic works—monographs or biographies written by respected authors and published by a legitimate press. Do not use general reference works, such as encyclopedias, textbooks, or broad surveys.  Such sources are valuable for background reading and can lead to acceptable works, but you should rely on peer-reviewed sources in your paper (books from academic presses). Also, avoid books based on propaganda rather than evidence or books intended for children or young adults. Check the documentation—footnotes or endnotes and the bibliography—to evaluate the level of scholarship, and consider the author’s credentials. Do not use sources that don’t have authors. You must review many books before deciding on specific works that will be useful for your purposes.

Focus on that part of the book that relates to your specific topic. For example, use the table of contents and/or the index to focus on your specific topic.

• Locating Appropriate Academic Articles
• Do not rely on a Google/Bing/Yahoo/Etc. search to locate academic journal articles.  You must use peer-reviewed sources, and it is difficult for a beginning researcher to determine whether a journal article found through a general search meets this requirement. Do not use such sources as Wikipedia, ask.com, history.com, SparkNotes, cliff notes, etc. Instead, make use of the NCTC library’s database subscriptions. If you are not familiar with these resources, the homepage provides an easy tutorial, and librarians will also guide you through the process.
• Two good places to start are JSTOR and Academic Search Complete. (When using Academic Search Completes’ search function, be sure that you check the box that limits the search to “peer-reviewed” sources.) If you find an abstract (summary) of an article that sounds useful, but the text is not available online, the librarian can probably get it for you through interlibrary loan. You may want to take the library course available on Canvas to develop research skills. The course should appear on your Canvas page; if not, contact the library to be enrolled. When you finish the course, you will receive a “congratulations” page.  
• While what happened in the past cannot change, our understanding of it does. Therefore, it is best to use reasonably current sources (within the last 30 years) to take advantage of the most up-to-date secondary sources.
• Essay Format
• After you have carefully read the document, conducted your research, contextualized the content with lecture, the textbook, you will write a 3 to 5-page Essay considering the above questions. 
• The format of your Essay is as follows:
• Introduction

Your Essay must include an introductory paragraph that describes the argument you intend to make in your paper. This introduction MUST include a thesis statement, which clearly outlines what you intend to prove/argue in the body of your writing. Your introduction MUST also summarize the main points of evidence you will use in your Essay’s body paragraphs. Your paper’s direction and flow are primarily driven by the quality of the thesis and outline that you present in your introduction; so, be sure that you have a clear and focused thesis accompanied by a list of your main points of evidence. 

Body Paragraphs

Write supporting paragraphs that support the argument presented in your thesis. These supporting paragraphs MUST use the source document, Executive Order 9066, and your additional primary and secondary sources to support your argument. There is no maximum to the number of supporting paragraphs that you can use to make your argument; however, be sure to keep your paper focused on your argument and do not fill it with irrelevant material.

Conclusion

Write a conclusion (can be more than one paragraph) that re-frames your argument and sums up the overall Essay. This paragraph is the obvious location for you to consider why it might be vital for us to understand this history.

Format Requirements

Essays REQUIRE assertions supported with best evidence, paragraphs, proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, AND citations.

Your Essay MUST BE SUBMITTED as an MS-Word file attachment. You are not allowed to use any other format. 

You MUST use this Sample Essay-1302.docx (select link) to compose your answer.

In the Sample File:

In the header:

Replace ‘Lname, Fname’ with Your last name and first name.

Replace ‘Class’ with Your class name (HIST 1302.????).

Replace the Latin’ dummy text’ with your answer.