This led to Roosevelt’’s most radical measure in his entire presidency. On February 19th, 1942 he signed Executive Order 9066. This order gave the Secretary of War the power to open military zones within American borders to place any political prisoners seen as a threat. Said prisoners could be detained without due process or court hearings, and congress approved Roosevelt’s bill.
Even though 9066 did not mention any race or demographic specifically, the evacuation of the Japanese from America began on March 22nd, 1942 even though most Americans with Japanese decent were born United States citizens. Japanese Americans lost almost all property and could only take what they could fit on their backs. Children suffered the most during this era of imprisonment. In Years of Infamy, Michi Weglyn said, “Most of the 110,000
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Since over half of the Japanese internees were children, a source of education needed to be fulfilled. The American education system built schools within the barbed wire fences and machine gun mounted watch towers. The schools followed a very militaristic regimen. In A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Ronald Takaki states, “Every morning at seven, the internees were awakened by a siren blast. After breakfast in a cafeteria, the children went to school, where they began the day by saluting the flag of the United States and then singing, ‘My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty’” (346). The children attended the schools within the walls of the camps and feared for their lives. In Children of the Camps, a former student within the internment camps said, “I remember the soldiers marching us to the Army tank and I looked at their rifles and I was just terrified because I could see this long knife at the end . . . I thought I was imagining it as an adult much later . . . I thought it couldn't have been bayonets because we were just little kids”