By David Kurlander
The Biden administration late last year opted to forego $450,000 payments to families separated at the Southern border under former President Trump’s policies. On this week’s Now & Then episode, “Restitution & Reparations,” Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman discussed other moments when the government considered recompense for wronged groups. Heather and Joanne zoomed in on the legacy of Japanese American internment during World War II, tracing the Truman administration’s efforts to settle claims for lost property and the Reagan administration’s eventual $20,000 indemnity to each internment survivor. In between those two decisions, President Gerald Ford also faced a dramatic reckoning over internment.
In the Fall of 1975, Washington Governor Daniel J. Evans reached out to the Ford administration. Evans, echoing Japanese American constituents, asked Ford to rescind Executive Order 9066, President Roosevelt’s 1942 directive that led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast in nine inland camps for the duration of World War II.
The road to undo the pain caused by Executive Order 9066 stretched back to the immediate post-War. In 1948, President Truman pushed through the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act, a relatively narrow bill designed to compensate internees for their lost property during the War. The Act was not a runaway success; only $37 million was ultimately distributed, about one tenth of the estimated total losses. Another step came in 1971, when Congress—responding to Japanese American advocacy groups—repealed Title II of the Internal Security Act of 1950, which had given the government authority to initiate preventive detentions during emergencies.
Evans’ suggestion, however, appeared doomed to fail. Jim Lynn, Ford’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, questioned the legal significance of rescinding an order that was no longer being acted upon. On November 5th, 1975, Lynn wrote to Counselor to the President Robert Hartmann about the Executive Order’s contemporary positioning: “It is as dead as the declaration of war against Japan (55 Stat. 795), which has never been revoked.” Lynn ultimately advised that “any Presidential Executive Order, proclamation, or statement related to Executive Order No. 9066 would be a hollow gesture.”
Ford’s foreign policy experts were lukewarm at best. On November 10th, Ford’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft suggested in a memo to White House Staff Secretary Jim Connor that the impact of the order on Japanese American relations would be minimal, particularly given the more visible gestures of goodwill to Japan over the previous year, like Emperor General Hirohito’s October 1975 White House visit. “A symbolic Presidential gesture rescinding the Executive Order could have a mildly positive public relations impact in Japan,” Scowcroft suggested. But Scowcroft acknowledged the potential stateside power of the move: “He should base his decision on its domestic impact, and as a gesture to Americans of Japanese ancestry.”
Four days after Scowcroft’s memo, on November 14th, that potential domestic impact made itself felt more dramatically. Ford received a letter from Shigeki J. Sugiyama, National President of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), a leading advocacy group founded in 1929.
Sugiyama argued that the emotional power of the rescindment would be vast: “Presidential action to rescind Executive Order 9066 would be not only appropriate, but also timely, particularly as we approach the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the founding of our great nation and a time to reaffirm our commitment to the ideals of freedom and liberty for all upon which our nation was founded.”
The JACL attached endorsement letters from leading Asian American political figures.
One endorser was Hawaiian Senator Hiram Fong, a moderate Republican of Chinese ancestry who had helped to pass the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which removed long-standing discriminatory quotas on Asian immigrants.
Another was Spark Matsunaga, a Democratic Hawaiian Representative of Japanese ancestry who would go on to lead the House fight for the Reagan-era reparations. Matsunaga had been interned in Wisconsin in 1942, before successfully petitioning President Roosevelt to create a Japanese American Army battalion, the 100th Infantry, which became one of the most decorated battalions of the War. He was wounded by a grenade fighting Nazis in Southern Italy in 1943. Matsunaga suggested that the rescindment could take place on February 19th, 1976, the 34th anniversary of FDR’s order.
Matsunaga’s Hawaiian colleague, Patsy Mink, was a Japanese American who helped to craft Title IX in 1972. Mink argued that the removal of the Executive Order would show the government’s “determination to rid itself and its people of the temptation of all forms of racism.”
Democratic Hawaiian Senator Daniel Inouye, who served in Italy in World War II, as part of an all-Japanese American Army Regiment, and lost his right arm while destroying three enemy machine gun nests, also sent a passionate co-sign.
California Representative Norman Mineta had been interned at Heart Mountain in Wyoming as a boy, where he met and formed a lifelong bond with a volunteer Boy Scout visiting the camp, the eventual Wyoming Senator Alan K. Simpson. In his endorsement letter, Mineta argued for “removing this ignominious mark on American history.”
Amid the groundswell of support attached to the JACL letter, Ford advisors worried that the rescindment might unintentionally provoke Japanese American activists to push for further monetary reparations.
Even in Governor Evans’s initial raising of the proposal, the fear of reparations loomed large. James Dolliver, Evans’ administrative assistant, warned Hartmann of sparking a reparations conversation on October 3rd, 1975: “It is also important that the matter of the E.O. be kept separate from the issue of ‘reparations.’ The two are not connected and in my judgment to tie them together would be completely unnecessary.”
After the JACL letter, on November 26th, 1975, Jack Calkins, Hartmann’s Executive Assistant, raised a similar concern in a letter to Hartmann: “There is a very small, but very militant, group of Japanese Americans who have been agitating for reparations for the internment action. Therefore, we should be aware of the slight possibility of this problem rearing its head down the line.”
Two days later, on November 28th, Hartmann himself parroted the warning directly to President Ford: “There exists a very small minority of Japanese-Americans who seek additional reparations for alleged damages resulting from the internment,” he told the President. “Creating the impression that the Order still had legal existence might unnecessarily fan the embers of hope for their cause.” Hartmann suggested a potential framing for Ford’s message, writing, “The appropriate course of action would seem to be the issuance of a proclamation or commemorative statement, carefully drafted so as not to raise legal issues.”
A brief debate ensued among Ford’s team over whether to issue the Proclamation on December 7th, 1975—the anniversary of Pearl Harbor—but all agreed that this could be perceived as profoundly tone deaf. Instead, they embraced the suggestion from Spark Matsunaga and others to issue the statement on the February 19th, 1976 anniversary of Roosevelt’s initial order.
That day, at a White House ceremony attended by 35 Asian American leaders—including many of the JACL endorsers—Ford signed Proclamation 4417, which he titled “An American Promise.” “I call upon the American people to affirm with me this American Promise—that we have learned from the tragedy of that long-ago experience forever to treasure liberty and justice for each individual American, and resolve that this kind of action shall never again be repeated,” Ford’s statement read.
Ford acknowledged that the Order itself was not operative but acknowledged that the perceived possibility of its further use was painful in itself: “Because there was no formal statement of its termination there remains concern among many Japanese Americans that there may yet be some life in that obsolete document.”
After the signing, Ford said simply, “This should have been done a long time ago, but it’s done now.”
The Los Angeles Times interviewed two West Coast local politicians who flew in for the event. One was Los Angeles Assemblyman Paul T. Bannai, who had been a 21-year-old bank clerk when he was interned. He was transferred to an internment camp in Lone Pine, California before the War Department eventually sent him to pick beets in Idaho. “I lost my car,” Bannai told the Times. “I just jacked it up and left it there. I was so bitter I wasn’t going to sell anything. I’d rather have burned it or given it away.”
Bannai also reflected on his resentful acceptance of the Order: “At the time I thought complying with the order was wrong, and I resisted it. But if I’d been older, I would have challenged it, gone to the courts, to prison to test its legality.”
Also at the meeting was Carson City Clerk Helen Kawagoe, who was interned in the Arizona Desert for three years beginning when she was fourteen. “The hardest part was to be there, behind the barbed wire, but my four brothers in Uncle Sam’s uniform were visiting you behind that barbed wire,” she recalled. “If many Americans didn’t know about it before, they do now, and they realize it has left an emotional scar on everyone.”
Another twelve years would pass before reparations, such a feared and fringe issue in 1976, were enshrined in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. A look at the inner workings of Ford’s decision to rescind Roosevelt’s order, however, showcases the set of priorities—foreign and domestic, moral and strategic—that continue to run through political restitution debates today.
The memos mentioned in this piece (and many more) are in this digitized file from the Gerald R. Ford Library. For more on the JACL’s advocacy before and during the Ford years, read Bill Hosokawa’s 1982 JACL in Quest of Justice: The History of the Japanese American Citizens League.
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