By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans

Abstract

In By Order of the President, Greg Robinson examines President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1942 decision to sign Executive Order 9066, which empowered the U.S. Army to incarcerate the entire Japanese American population of the West Coast. Robinson focuses in his first two chapters on the development of Roosevelt's sentiments about Japan and Japanese Americans, following the future president from his student days to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The rest of the book deals with the war years. Roosevelt acquired an anti-Japanese American bias early on, Robinson argues. Coming of age in an era when “scientific racism” was popular, the future president subscribed to prevailing views about the undesirability of racial mixing and held to them for the rest of his life. He generally considered Japanese equal to white Americans but believed they should stay in Japan. Roosevelt also drew few if any distinctions between the Japanese in Japan and the Japanese Americans of the United States, regardless of their birthplace. In this early section, Robinson's argument seems forced; he merely shows that FDR's attitudes resembled those of many of his elite white peers.