From Thinking, "Oh, Yeah, This Racism Sounds Like a Swell Idea…"

Here's some good news for all of you holding your heads in your hands and thinking people are horrible: even in 1942, the effects of Executive Order 9066 were greeted with some serious skepticism.

In light of newly assigned powers, military commanders like Gen. John L. DeWitt were all for it. Other colleagues within the federal government, like WRA head Milton S. Eisenhower, were...less convinced.

Publicly, the impact of E.O. 9066 was generally favored (though, obviously, not by Japanese Americans). It allowed the government to demonstrate that it was taking steps to bolster national security, and it was an answer to civilian war hysteria.

In fact, people thought jobs would open up due to the removal of Japanese Americans. They thought the evacuation would create opportunities for other Americans who weren't removed, most of whom were white, to improve their economic situations.

Um, it didn't work out like that. In reality, the absence of Japanese Americans actually caused a labor shortage, especially in the farming and agricultural sectors.

As a side note, in Hawaii (which was also part of the exclusion zone, btw), the local government opted not to incarcerate people of Japanese descent living on the islands. Unfortunately, that decision wasn't made because officials were against racism but because of money. An enormous percentage of Hawaii's population consisted of Japanese immigrants and their families. To imprison them would have decimated the workforce and crippled their economy.

To Second-Guessing Whether That Racism Was a Good Idea…

E.O. 9066, its author, and its proponents have been understandably judged by history. In the 1960s, Japanese Americans began to speak out about the injustices of the WRA relocation camps, often with agreement from the highest levels of the government. In 1976, President Gerald Ford terminated E.O. 9066 after it had lingered in "suspension" for 32 years.

With the efforts of the Japanese American Citizens League, 1980 saw President Jimmy Carter approve the formation of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). The commission investigated the circumstances leading up to and surrounding the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans.

Shocker alert: the commission determined it was primarily the result of racism.

To Realizing, "Whoa, We Messed Up Big Time"

Finally, in 1988, President Ronald Reagan responded to the CWRIC report by signing the Civil Liberties Act, which sought to rectify the damages done by E.O. 9066 nearly five decades earlier.

Early in 2017, during its first days, the new administration implemented Executive Order 13796. The order essentially imposed a travel ban on people of the Muslim faith from seven predominantly Muslim countries and imposed significant restrictions on refugees entering the United States.

The signing of E.O. 13796 occurred as part of a larger conversation in which the administration had mentioned the possibility of establishing a "Muslim registry" in the United States…which sounds an awful lot like something from E.O. 9066.

History: never exactly pleasant and way, way too fond of repeating itself.