Repeating history? FDR, Japanese internment and Trump

Seventy-five years ago, Tom Shiroishi was a senior halfway through his final year in high school.

But he never finished.

Instead of classes, sports and graduation, Shiroishi and his family were forced from their home. They were sent to live in horse stalls at Santa Anita Racetrack in California. Then, he was separated from his family and they were sent to internment camps.

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He had been born in California in 1924, but that didn’t matter.

His parents had come to America from a poor fishing community in Japan. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, your heritage trumped where you were born in the eyes of the government.

With the stroke of a pen 75 years ago Sunday, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used Executive Order 9066 to send 120,000 people of Japanese heritage to internment camps. Of those, 80,000 were American citizens, like Shiroishi.

He wouldn’t see his family again until after World War II. Until after he came back from his enlistment in the U.S. Army.

“He was angry about it,” said Julie Shiroishi, his daughter. “He was very angry about it.”

And, the Beacon woman added, “I am angry on his behalf.”

She sees echoes of FDR’s action today, with the travel ban executive order that President Donald Trump issued last month. That executive order suspended refugee resettlement in the U.S. and entry into the U.S. of people from several Muslim-majority countries.

“I think it’s shameful,” Shiroishi said.

The Trump administration said in court documents on Thursday that it wants an end to a legal fight over its travel ban. Trump said a replacement ban would be issued in the coming days.

But the interplay of national security, immigration and the extent of presidential powers is being debated in the media and on the streets. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park may become a focal point for such debate with the debut Sunday of the exhibit “Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II.”

The internment exhibit, two years in the making, revolves around more than 200 photos that examine the lives – before and during internment, as well as while the camps were closing - of people of Japanese descent who lived in the U.S.

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According to the FDR Library, “FDR’s executive order is widely viewed today as a gross violation of civil liberties and a stain on his wartime record.” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt disagreed with FDR's decision and in April 1943 visited an internment camp.

Asked if internment and FDR’s executive order offered any lessons that can be applied to the circumstances surrounding Trump’s action, Greg Robinson, who served as a consultant on the exhibit, said, “race and national ancestry are bad predictors.

“Just because someone is black, for instance, doesn’t mean they’re going to act in a certain way,” said Robinson, author of “By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans” and a professor of American history at the University of Quebec at Montreal. “Someone’s race is a poor representation of their loyalty or their conduct.”

The White House Press Office did not respond to a request for comment about this article.

Now and then

Though issued three-quarters of a century apart, the actions by Trump and FDR share striking similarities. Both target ethnic groups, both utilize the presidential action of an executive order, both were done in the name of national security, both ended up in federal court and both have been sharply criticized.

And - both serve as a catalyst for debate over immigration, national security and the manner in which a president regulates both.

In November 2016, Trump super-PAC spokesman Carl Higbie said on Fox News that Japanese internment served as a precedent for a national registry of Muslims that Trump voiced support for while campaigning.

Shiroishi sees only one link between the two executive orders.

“It was illegal then and it’s illegal now,” she said.

This debate will likely gain momentum as Trump considers an appeal of a court decision suspending his order barring travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries.

“He said he was going to do something like this when he was running,” said Mehdi Owji, a 23-year-old senior at Marist College in the Town of Poughkeepsie who is from Iran. “I didn’t think he was going to actually do it.”

Owji is in the U.S. on a non-immigrant student visa and said he was not affected by Trump’s executive order when it was in effect. But under Trump’s directive, Owji’s parents, who live in Iran, would not be able to travel to the U.S. to see their son graduate later this year.

“It’s very upsetting,” he said.

Trump’s executive order invokes his authority as president to “...protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals admitted to the United States...” Trump also invokes the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

FDR’s executive order declared that “the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities...”

Miriam Cohen, the Evalyn Clark professor of history at Vassar College in the Town of Poughkeepsie, said attacks on a country can shift the paradigm in a dramatic way.

“With terrorist attacks come more and more of this willingness to accept something, like Trump’s order or internment,” Cohen said. “These terrorist attacks are designed exactly to do what, alas, I’m afraid they’re doing.”

Judith Dollenmayer is associate director of Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations at Vassar College. From 1981-83, she served as a writer and consulting editor for the Congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment.

That commission investigated Executive Order 9066 and its findings resulted in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which repudiated Japanese internment and awarded financial compensation to those who had been interned.

Dollenmayer called Trump’s executive order “a disastrous overreaction and something that we will regret. And it’s no favor to national security whatsoever. It’s a recruiting tool for radicals against the U.S., particularly because it seems aimed not at nationality, but at religion.”

Fear of invasion

FDR Library Director Paul Sparrow declined comment when asked about the relationship between FDR’s executive order and the one issued by Trump. But he spoke in detail about the circumstances that set the stage for Executive Order 9066.

As the Japanese were commandeering the South Pacific in the wake of their attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese ships and submarines were seen off the west coast of the U.S.

“The Japanese advance across the South Pacific was truly extraordinary and shocked everybody,” Sparrow said. “It really made people stop and think - ‘Could they invade the United States?’”

Sparrow continued, “The idea that this 5,000-mile ocean could protect us from the Japanese had been shattered.”

Following Pearl Harbor, in the western U.S., the call for incarcerating those of Japanese descent was growing.

California Attorney General Earl Warren - who later became chief justice of the Supreme Court - was among the staunchest supporters of internment. FDR was also under pressure from the U.S. military and the media. And every member of the California congressional delegation supported internment, Sparrow said.

FDR distrusted the Japanese, but needed to focus on the broader war by building tanks and planes and providing support to Great Britain and the Soviet Union, Sparrow said. At the same time, he could have faced impeachment if he held out on internment.

There were also “entrenched interests” that wanted to take possession of property and businesses owned by Japanese residents of the U.S., Sparrow said.

Even as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover found no need for internment, FDR caved in to the pressure. The result was a response with racist and geopolitical components, Sparrow said.

Security vs. liberty

Sparrow compared FDR’s Executive Order 9066 to President Abraham Lincoln suspending the writ of habeas corpus on Sept. 24, 1862.

According to the Library of Congress, “the writ of habeas corpus protects Americans' civil liberties by requiring the government to bring a prisoner before a judge to prove that there is a just cause for holding the prisoner.”

Lincoln, according to a provision in the Constitution, suspended this right requiring the government to bring a prisoner before a judge to prove just cause. He did this during the Civil War to apprehend Confederate spies and sympathizers.

“Franklin Roosevelt was one of our great champions of civil liberties and America has always had this struggle between national security and the highest ideals of our civil liberties, particularly in wartime,” Sparrow said. “This is a situation where the political and military pressure and the pressure of the media forced Roosevelt to do things he probably wouldn’t have done under different circumstances.”

Shiroishi, whose father died at age 66, praised the FDR Library for addressing the issue of internment with the new exhibit. And she remains hopeful about combatting Trump’s executive order.

"I am heartened that there are people standing up against things now, as opposed to in my father's day," Shiroishi said.

A nation of immigrants

Linda Merrell’s four grandparents, as well as her mother and her mother’s seven siblings, were interned during World War II.

“I don’t think I’m angry at FDR, partly because I don’t think my parents were angry,” she said. “I don’t even know how to characterize it. They were amazed it could happen. They were more miffed than angry.”

The Town of Poughkeepsie woman said the attack on Pearl Harbor differentiates Japanese internment from Trump’s executive order.

“I think racism was in a different place at that time,” she said.

Trump’s executive order, however, angers Merrell.

“You can’t do that,” she said. “This is a nation of immigrants. America owes its life to immigrants. To say, as a group, these people are not allowed to come - that’s not American. That’s not what America stands for.”

John W. Barry: jobarry@poughkeepsiejournal.com, 845-437-4822, Twitter: @JohnBarryPoJo

If you go

“Images of Internment: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II”

When: Feb. 19 - Dec. 31. 

The library is open seven days a week: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. November through March; 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. April through October; and closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day.

Where: FDR Presidential Library and Museum, 4079 Albany Post Road/Route 9, Hyde Park.

Admission: $9

Information: Visit www.fdrlibrary.org or call 845-486-7770

Also: Actor George Takei of “Star Trek” fame will be at the FDR Library Feb. 19 for a sold-out event that will analyze the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Takei and his family spent three years in internment camps in California and Arkansas. This event is for library members only. 

At 3 p.m. on Feb. 19, FDR Library Director Paul Sparrow will moderate a discussion featuring Takei and Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania Law Professor who is the great-great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. Kermit Roosevelt's book, "Allegiance: A Novel," examines the issue of Japanese internment.