Korematsu and American Hypocrisy
Historians and legal scholars remember Korematsu v. United States, in which the Supreme Court upheld the validity of Japanese-American exclusion and internment, as one of the Court’s worst mistakes. Two months after the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to designate military areas from which to exclude “any and all persons,” citing the need to protect the United States from the risk of espionage and sabotage [1]. While he did not explicitly mention Japanese-Americans, the target of exclusion was clear. In May, General John DeWitt, head of the Western Defend Command, issued Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34, which required all people of Japanese ancestry to depart Alameda County, California, and report to a civil control station [2]. Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American, knowingly defied the order, remained at his residence, and was subsequently convicted of violating the exclusion order. In court, he argued that Executive Order 9066 violated the Fifth Amendment, which includes a Due Process Clause that states that no person shall be deprived of “life, liberty or property without due process of law.” The Supreme Court upheld his conviction on the grounds that the exclusion order was reasonably necessary to preserve national security [3]. It steered clear of the detention program, despite its inextricability from the exclusion order. The Supreme Court unjustifiably evaded the internment question and upheld the exclusion order with empty claims of military necessity, thereby descending a slippery slope of collective punishment based in racial essentialism.
While most people today associate Korematsu with internment camps, the Court, in its decision, completely avoided the internment question. It argued the case only concerned “petitioner’s remaining in the prohibited area in violation of the exclusion order” and not the detention of Japanese-Americans in internment camps; therefore, it would not evaluate the validity of the detention program [4]. However, had Korematsu not violated Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34, he would have been obliged to report to a civil control station, whereupon he would be transported to an assembly center. The order itself provided a list of personal belongings, such as bedding and toiletries that evacuees must carry upon departure to assembly centers [5]. Evidently, the order did not only require Japanese-Americans to leave the prohibited areas; it also compelled them to prepare for life in internment camps. Thus, with few exceptions, exclusion almost necessarily entailed detention. Because the only authorized destinations of departure were assembly centers, failure to depart was also failure to report to an assembly center. Korematsu could not violate one part of the order without the other, so the Court’s avoidance of the internment question was logically indefensible. It likely recognized that the injustice inherent in detaining innocent citizens far outweighed the already unreasonable act of displacing them from their homes and did not want to legitimize the former. However, in upholding an inseparable issue, it did exactly that.
The Court reached a conclusion on the justifiability of the exclusion order with minimal examination of evidence. Any critical analysis of General DeWitt’s “Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast” would reveal the insufficiency of the evidence upon which the military based the evacuation order. DeWitt introduced his view that Japanese-Americans are more likely to be disloyal in exceptionally vague terms: “While it was believed that some were loyal, it was known that many were not” [6]. “Believed” and “known” merely indicate personal judgment, and he failed to even mention from whom such belief or knowledge originates. Thus, without any provision of credible evidence or sources, DeWitt attempted to establish a large group of Japanese-Americans as possible spies. Perhaps the most revealing selection from the report is DeWitt’s acknowledgment that Japanese-Americans had, in fact, not aided the Japanese war effort: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken” [7]. The logical gymnastics that DeWitt must have had to perform to construe innocence as evidence of guilt is impressive. Evidently, he had already determined that Japanese-Americans would betray the United States and was willing to interpret any evidence, or the lack thereof, to support his belief. It was on the basis of such evidence—if it may be so termed—that the military justified its evacuation order, and it was on the basis of such reasoning that the Court validated the military’s decision.
Not only was there little evidence of the necessity of the order, there was sufficient evidence that the order was unnecessary. Even if there were substantial risk of Japanese-American espionage, the military could have employed feasible alternative measures to protect national security. Of the 112,000 Japanese-Americans interned, approximately 43 percent were over the age of 50 or under the age of 15 [8]. Within the time it took to implement the exclusion orders, the government could have easily examined the remaining 60,000 or so and detained only those deemed high security risks. Indeed, over a period of six months, the British government called before special tribunals all Germans and Austrians over the age of 16, numbering about 74,000, and categorized them according to the security risk they presented. The tribunals resulted in 2,000 interned and 64,000 subject to no special restrictions at all [9]. The United States could have certainly accomplished the same. Indiscriminate exclusion and detention were clearly unnecessary.
The Court thus engaged in the dangerous practice of justifying the military’s dubiously meaningful ends with its certainly problematic means. While espionage among Japanese-Americans was a mere possibility, the damage that the exclusion order would cause in their lives was a certainty. Even without the difference in probability, any attempt at collective protection at the cost of minority rights is a slippery slope, no matter the validity of the risk. In practice, the order penalized Japanese-Americans as a collective for the government’s suspicion of a few, and any form of collective punishment without substantiation of individual guilt contradicts the philosophy of the American legal system and renders the nation susceptible to the very ideologies against which it purports to defend the world. The Nazi regime’s use of collective punishment to quash resistance movements and to punish relatives of criminals received warranted criticism [10]. While the American government’s mistreatment of Japanese-Americans is neither as severe nor exactly parallel—preventative rather than retaliatory—the underlying doctrine is appallingly similar to that employed by Germany: that the state can deprive entire groups of their rights when their only crime is their association with others.
More dangerous than the practice of collective punishment, however, is the exclusion order’s fundamental philosophy of racial essentialism. It assumes that national origins can determine allegiance and disposition, that the flimsy frameworks that construct race are sturdier than the foundations of the identity of the United States, an immigrant nation in which very few do not carry the blood of a land now ruled by another government. DeWitt’s report revealed his concerning yet unsurprising belief that the United States is, at its core, a white nation. He wrote plainly, “The Japanese race is an enemy race” and that despite the American citizenships and upbringings of many Japanese-Americans, “the racial strains are undiluted” [11]. Clearly, in his belief, Japanese-Americans can never be truly American. Their history in the country and the social forces into which they have integrated dissolve in the corrosiveness of their race. DeWitt further argued that to believe in the Americanization of Japanese-Americans would be akin to expecting that “children born of white parents on Japanese soil sever all racial affinity and become loyal Japanese subjects” [12]. Yet each of the “white parents” of which he spoke has “racial affinity” to some European nation, and he would raise no doubt to their loyalty to the United States. If descendants of European immigrants could be loyal Americans, yet descendants of Japanese immigrants could not due to their “racial strain,” then the only possible conclusions are that the United States is a white country and that people of color could never be true Americans. The connections between such ideas and Nazi beliefs about racial purity could not be more clear.
The Supreme Court never rules only on an individual case. Every decision it makes has far-reaching ramifications. Its opinions become case law and the moral and legal philosophies according to which the nation conducts itself. In upholding the validity of the exclusion order, the Court also legitimized racial essentialism and discrimination, the very ideologies of the enemies of the United States to which it viewed itself superior. As Justice Jackson wrote in his dissent, as a legacy of Korematsu, racial discrimination “lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Such is the true shame of Korematsu—not merely the uprooting of thousands of lives it sanctioned, but the deep hypocrisies inherent in the American claims of egalitarianism it laid bare.
Bibliography
[1] Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Executive Order 9066, Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military Areas.” February 19, 1942. Accessed October 3, 2021.
[2] DeWitt, John. “Civilian Order No. 34.” May 3, 1942. Accessed October 3, 2021.
[3] “Korematsu v. United States,” Oyez.
[4] Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944)
[5] DeWitt, “Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34.”
[6] DeWitt, John. “Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942.” U.S. National Library of Medicine. Accessed October 10, 2021.
[7] DeWitt, “Final Report,” 34.
[8] Rostow, Eugene. “Our Worst Wartime Mistake.” Harper’s Magazine, September, 1945.
[9] Murphy dissent
[10] “Sippenhaft.” Oyez. Accessed October 10, 2021.
[11] DeWitt, “Final Report,” 34.
[12] Ibid.