Why the History of Japanese American Incarceration Matters Today

Rachel Maddow’s Latest Podcast Draws Important and Misguided Lessons from EO 9066

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized what became the mass incarceration of my ancestors and over 100,000 Japanese Americans. With the current administrations shredding the constitution and rule of law to detain citizens and non-citizens based on racial profiling, the lessons from that shameful moment in U.S. history could not be more vital or timely.

Such was the motivation for Rachel Maddow to tackle this history with her latest podcast, Burn Order. Although scholars, museums, and community activists have substantially documented the oppression and resistance that defined Japanese American confinement during World War II, Maddow and her track record of hit shows bring the capacity to reach new and much wider audiences at this pivotal time on the clock of the world. That alone provided motivation for me to follow Burn Order as closely as possible.

For a popular series designed to engage listeners with dramatic storytelling, Maddow and her team—to their credit—did a hearty amount of research, especially examining the motivation behind the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. In a time when the federal government is again rife with dubious accounts about the need to confront foreign and domestic threats to national security—blowing up ships off the coast of Venezuela and gunning down mutual aid workers deemed terrorists in Minneapolis—Burn Order drills home a basic but fundamental point: There was no legitimate basis for the mass incarceration.

Threats of sabotage were fabricated, often outlandishly so. The infamously paranoid FBI director J. Edgar Hoover even warned that policy was being driven by “public hysteria” and “political pressure” rather than “factual data.” As Maddow reminds us, the biggest evidence of espionage and fifth-column activity involved reports that Japan was deliberately commissioning Americans who were not ethnically Japanese, including white fascist sympathizers, because they were less likely to be detected. Maddow further stresses that not only was Japanese American incarceration based on lies, the key figures in the military and government knew they were acting on these lies and went to great lengths to cover them up.

As early as 1945, Yale Law School professor Eugene Rostow denounced this blatant suspension of civil liberties as “a disaster” and “our worst wartime mistake.” The word “mistake,” however, can be misleading. The wrong of mass incarceration should be judged neither as an accident of history nor as a jumbled outcome of “the fog of war.” Rather it was product of racism, built up over decades by economic exploitation and agitation for Japanese exclusion, then intensified by the drive for wartime removal. On this point, Maddow is both correct and unyielding.

Unfortunately, the benefit of Maddow’s star power to boost this story comes with a catch. In promoting Burn Order, Maddow has repeatedly seized on a narrative hook that threatens to undermine the show’s most laudable achievements. She fixates on Karl Bendetsen, the lawyer and army colonel who aided General John L. DeWitt in crafting the argument for mass exclusion, as the “bad guy” in this story. No doubt Bendetsen espoused and advanced racist ideas in a nefarious manner to stigmatize Japanese Americans and set them up for collective punishment.

Maddow, however, goes over the top in giving Bendetsen an outsized role. As she told TIME magazine, “Sometimes you can get one person—one able, clever, and I think twisted person—in a place with their hands on the levers of government who can make the whole country do something that they are ashamed of for decades.” In part, this focus on Bendetsen—a name known by Japanese American historians but anonymous in the public eye—guides the “reveal” within the series in true crime fashion. For Maddow, there’s also a contemporary analogue. She cast Bendetsen as the “Stephen Miller-type figure” who is pulling the levers of the entire government even though he’s “not the guy in charge” but rather “a staffer to the guy in charge.”

But the distortions inherent in the “one bad guy” approach to history can be just as great as those in the “great man” approach. There were clearly other figures involved in crafting and arguing for EO 9066. But more importantly, the decision ultimately fell on the shoulders of the man they were all working for, President Roosevelt. And counter to the notion that “one bad guy” within the bureaucracy altered the course of history, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was both highly popular with the U.S. public and pushed by a broad range of interests. White farmers and agricultural interests wanted to drive out Japanese American growers and seize their land. Journalists and newspaper editorials fanned the flames.

Flooded with calls and letters from their constituents, politicians on both sides of the aisle demanded that the federal government take care of “the Japanese problem.” Topping them all was the esteemed Earl Waren, later to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court but then California’s attorney general with aspirations for higher office. Warren was vociferous in his calls for Japanese American removal and unabashed in his racism. Deeming the American-born Nisei to be the most dangerous element of all, Warren testified to a Congressional committee that the lack of evidence of any sabotage was “the most ominous sign” that a sneak attack was about to hit the West Coast from within. Dr. Seuss portrayed this in a racist political cartoon featuring hordes of Japanese Americans lined up like slanted-eyed Sneetches to gather TNT.

FDR was right to oppose Japan’s brutal invasion across Asia and the Pacific, and Japan’s imperial government was more atrocious than the deeply flawed U.S. political system. But the American moral high ground was far from pure. Anti-Japanese slurs, racism, and xenophobia were prominent motivating factors used by American leaders to embolden U.S. soldiers to fight in the Pacific and to boost home front efforts. The link between domestic anti-Asian racism and overseas militarism could be traced back to the Philippine-American War and would recur in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

But the depiction of Japanese soldiers and citizens as subhuman and the calls to annihilate the entire enemy race had no parallel in the Atlantic Theatre—neither, of course, did the dropping of two atomic bombs. And less than a boost for civil rights, one of the principal factors supporting both the changes in policy to allow Nisei military service and the gradual release of detainees was a strategic decision by U.S. leaders to counter Japanese propaganda rallying all Asians to join its fight against American white supremacy.

That Burn Order chose to center Karl Bendetsen while downplaying the role of FDR, Earl Warren, Dr. Seuss, and other icons of American liberalism is all-too convenient. When we recognize the systemic, hegemonic nature of anti-Japanese racism during World War II, it also becomes clear that there was also no single savior who could fix the problem—as many pined for Robert Mueller to do during the first Trump presidency. Burn Order, however, goes to great lengths to assure us that there were good guys within the government who opposed mass incarceration. And we should definitely recognize those like Colorado Governor Ralph Carr who stood on principle and sacrificed their political careers.

But I depart from Maddow, when she draws this unsubstantiated conclusion: “Doing the right thing doesn’t always pay off in the short run, but your country will ultimately get this right,” she said to TIME. “The good guys will be rewarded and the bad guys will be punished or forgotten.” This statement not only erases the victims of American genocide and white supremacy who have no chance at a long run; it also fails to see the “fork in the road” that the far right has seized upon. When a system is in crisis, short-run actions can cement in place transformative changes that determine the course of centuries to come.

That’s why Burn Order’s attempt to celebrate the good (white) guy bureaucrats as saviors within the deep state—though interesting as historical research—also goes too far politically. Let’s take a closer look at the dilemmas of the liberal New Deal Justice Department lawyer, Edward Ennis, who privately deemed the mass incarceration to be unnecessary and unconstitutional but publicly defended the government’s position.

Maddow praises Ennis for believing in due process and devising “a system in which everyone arrested under the Alien Enemies Act, they would at least eventually have an individual hearing.” And for his part, Ennis did later lead the ACLU and support Japanese American claims for redress. But as historian Greg Robinson notes, his wartime actions mostly reveal him enabling state repression. Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, “Ennis drafted a presidential proclamation providing for summary internment of Japanese aliens.” That’s significant to me personally because my grandfather was taken from his home by the FBI and torn away from my mom and her family.

But it’s more broadly relevant today because that’s exactly the type of order that the Trump administration uses to license detaining and deporting thousands of immigrants, mostly of color. Indeed, if Pam Bondi wanted to round up thousands of Somali immigrants, she could claim the government is not repeating EO 9066 but limiting its actions to an equivalent of the order that Ennis drafted and implemented against “aliens.” Similarly, naval intelligence officer Kenneth Ringle, another one of the good guys in Burn Order, staunchly opposed mass incarceration yet still posited that thousands of Japanese immigrants, as well as U.S.-born citizens raised in Japan, were dangers to national security.

Furthermore, the notion that due process procedures could be set up for Japanese Americans during World War II is tainted by the fact that racism biased every judicial proceeding. That’s the historical precedent that binds Japanese Americans to other disenfranchised subjects of the past and portends an authoritarian future. Fred Korematsu did get the formal trappings of due process. But as legal scholar Eric Muller has pointed out, the 6-3 SCOTUS majority in Korematsu upheld the mass exclusion order, deferring to the military and executive branch despite having essentially all the information necessary to point out that the “military necessity” claims were bogus. In his dissent, Justice Frank Murphy condemned the exclusion—and the majority’s decision—as the “legalization of racism.”

Just as it would be wrong to pin Japanese American incarceration on one guy, it makes no sense to single out Rachel Maddow for what is a broader problem of “Resistance liberalism.” I have no qualms with the “Resistance” part and am inspired to see millions come out for “No Kings.” The problem arises when Japanese American concentration camps or the fascist assaults of the Trump era are seen as un-American, as aberrations from our nation’s democratic heritage.

James Boggs corrected this assumption in a 1966 essay from his book Racism and the Class Struggle. “The United States has a history of racism longer than that of any other nation on earth,” Boggs wrote. “Fascism, or the naked oppression of a minority race not only by the state but by the ordinary citizens of the master majority race, is the normal natural way of life in this country.” In other words, fascism and concentration camps are not something that come from outside the nation; to the contrary, they arise through developments and contradictions that are internal to the nation.

When we see our struggle in this manner, it becomes more clear that, as Jamelle Bouie wrote shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, “There Is No Going Back.” Protest, voting, and upholding democratic norms are all necessary but also insufficient.

In the end, this is where we can highlight the most redeeming quality of Burn Order, which goes out of its way to recognize the many grassroots actors who changed the narrative of Japanese American incarceration from one of commonsense acceptance by the public to “years of infamy” that even the Roberts Court has now deemed unacceptable. We get historical accounts from ancestors like Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Norman Mineta, alongside contemporary interviews with Satsuki Ina, Lorraine Bannai, and Frank Abe.

When I was a child in the 1970s, there may have been public recognition that the incarceration was a hardship for Japanese Americans but no admission it was outright wrong let alone an atrocity of historic proportions. As the redress movement picked up through the 1980s, it was fueled by survivor testimonies, legal advocacy, political lobbying, pilgrimaging, cultural work, and, above all, grassroots organizing. No branch of government initiated the demand for apology or reparations payment. That came from Japanese American activists working in a multiracial alliance with civil rights organizations and supporters.

That’s the final lesson we should take from this history as we struggle for a future where the concentration camp is banished and democracy is truly for all.

Note: To learn more about this history and the broader history of anti-Asian racism and violence, look for my new book, American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism, coming April 7 and now available for pre-ordering from University of California Press (click on this flyer for 30% off discount code).