Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 9066: One Signature Changed It All, Episode 2

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

Children and their parents were taken at gunpoint, with barely time to pack. Their prized possessions, including family heirlooms and even pets, had to be left behind. Norman Mineta was still in elementary school when he was forced onto a train with his parents and siblings. He had no idea where he was going and the shock at seeing his new home would stay with him forever. Credits: Host and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Craig Thompson To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. In January of 1942, one month after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Norman Mineta's father sat his children down and said, I don't know what's going to happen to your mother and me. Just remember, all of you are US citizens, and this is your home. There is nothing anyone can do to take this away from you.

A few weeks later, with a flick of his pen, FDR signed Executive Order 9066. And six weeks after that, men with guns were at the door of Norm's home. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. All indications suggest it took very little convincing for Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 9066. Signed on February 19, 1942, it authorized the military to exclude any or all people of Japanese ancestry from designated areas of the United States. One of Roosevelt's military generals, John DeWitt, was in San Francisco the evening after

the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. DeWitt, a four-star Army general, stiffened his spine when he heard the news that 35 Japanese warplanes were flying above San Francisco Bay on a reconnaissance mission. Air raid sirens droned. But what DeWitt saw when he looked around was a city that was woefully unprepared for what he believed was about to befall them. He blasted leaders at a Civil Defense Council meeting, saying, death and destruction are likely to come to the city at any moment.

The people of San Francisco do not seem to appreciate that we're at war in every sense." And he took it even further by saying that it might have been a good thing if the planes had dropped bombs to awaken the city. DeWitt said, If I can't knock these facts into your heads with words, I'll have to turn you over to the police and let them knock them into you with clubs." When the city's leaders turned the tables on DeWitt and said people were wondering why he failed to give orders to fire on the plains, DeWitt told them it was none of their business. DeWitt, a man with a lean square face and round glasses, became an outspoken proponent

of incarcerating Japanese Americans. In fact, he initially also made the suggestion that people of German and Italian ancestry also face incarceration since they were fighting on the side of the Axis powers. Two weeks before President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, the U.S. Army mapped out designated restricted areas. And enemy aliens inside the restricted areas were required to observe a curfew and not travel more than five miles away from their homes. An enemy alien in this instance referred to all people of Japanese, German, or Italian

ancestry. But most of these restricted areas were racially targeted, like the Little Tokyo neighborhood in Los Angeles. On March 29, 1942, under the authority of Roosevelt's executive order. General DeWitt issued a public proclamation that began the forced evacuation and detention of Japanese-American residents of the West Coast. They were given 48 hours notice. Officials divided the United States into two military areas. Military Area 1 consisted of the westernmost half of Washington, Oregon, and California,

and the southern half of Arizona. The rest of the United States became Military Area 2. Any one of Japanese ancestry living in Military area 1 was going to be removed and put into prison camps. Even children and the elderly. Without being accused of a crime, without due process, simply because they had the wrong faces or the wrong sounding last names. Soon posters rustled on every telephone pole and street corner reading, Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry. Pursuant to the provisions of the Civilian Exclusion Order, all persons of Japanese ancestry both alien and non-alien

Will be evacuated by 12 o'clock noon on May 7th 1942 Anyone whose face looked Japanese would be forced to leave their home and report to a civil control station for evacuation station for…evacuation. No consideration was given to the citizenship status or age of the residents. It applied equally to people who were born in the United States, U.S. citizens, and to people who were not yet citizens but who had legally immigrated. Because families were given so little time to plan before they were to be rounded up,

people were forced to sell all of their possessions for a pittance, never knowing when they might be back. I'll give you $5 for your refrigerator, unscrupulous gawkers offered. You can't take your car with you, I'll buy it for $200." Traditional Japanese society is collective, and to be singled out for exclusion was experienced as shame. Saddled with that weight, many families accepted prices for their belongings that were far lower than what they were worth.

The evacuation instructions said that families could only bring a few changes of clothes, some bed linens, and eating utensils. Their businesses, homes, cars, and household goods were sold for pennies on the dollar or forcibly abandoned. Norm's father's insurance license was suspended for no reason other than he was of Japanese ancestry. The government ordered that anyone who had money in a Japanese bank should have their account frozen, leaving them unable to withdraw funds to pay for essentials.

The Army provided fleets of vans to transport household belongings and buses to move the people to assembly centers. The evacuees cooperated wholeheartedly. The many loyal among them felt that this was a sacrifice they could make in behalf of America's war effort. Let's take a listen to a government-produced video that was aimed to educate Americans around the country on what was happening to Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Behind them they left shops and homes they had occupied for many years.

Now they were taken to racetracks and fairgrounds where the army almost overnight had built assembly centers. They lived here until new pioneer communities could be completed on federally owned lands in the interior. Santa Anita Racetrack, for example, suddenly became a community of about 17,000 persons. The Army provided housing and plenty of healthful, nourishing food for all. The residents of the new community set about developing a way of life as nearly normal as possible. They held church services.

They issued their own newspaper, organized nursery schools, and some made camouflage nets for the United States Army. Meanwhile, in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and elsewhere, quarters were being built where they would have an opportunity to work and more space in which to live. When word came that these new homes were ready, the final movement began. At each relocation center, evacuees were met by an advanced contingent of Japanese who

had arrived some days earlier and who now acted as guides. Naturally, the newcomers looked about with some curiosity. They were in a new area on land that was raw, untamed, but full of opportunity. Here they would build schools, educate their children, reclaim the desert. Norm's family was lucky in one respect. A white attorney named J.B. Peckham was incensed by California's long-standing policy of not allowing people of Asian ancestry to own land. So he created a workaround. Peckham would purchase property in his own name, allowing

the Asian family to pay him for the mortgage, and when a family's oldest child, a U.S. citizen by birth, turned 21, he would legally transfer the property to them. On paper, Peckham appeared to be one of the wealthiest men in Santa Clara County, California. In reality, he owned the properties in name only. Peckham gave the dream of home ownership to hundreds of families for whom it would have been otherwise out of reach. Because of their relationship with J.B. Peckham, Norm's family home was rented out to a college professor and they weren't forced to sell it for far less than the market value. But most Japanese Americans weren't so fortunate.

President Roosevelt also created the War Relocation Authority, a government agency that was tasked with organizing and speeding along the process of incarcerating Japanese Americans. From the end of March to August 1942, approximately 112,000 Japanese Americans were sent to what the military called assembly centers. And what about other populations of immigrants? Did the U.S. place restrictions or incarcerate Italian Americans or German Americans? Here's Professor Lorraine Bani, a legal scholar who specializes in this time period. Her grandmother was also incarcerated by the United States. Certainly in the research there wasn't that hostility against Italian Americans and German Americans.

So as you know, Japanese Americans were incarcerated in mass with no hearings or anything. German and Italian immigrants were given individual hearings if they were under suspicion, but there was no mass incarceration of them. You could see in some of the hearings that were conducted around the time, the feeling that Japanese Americans were the ones to be suspicious of. And there was nothing to fear from the

Italians and the German Americans. In fact, at one of the hearings, one of the people testifying said, you can't possibly have a situation where Joe DiMaggio's father will be stopped from fishing in San Francisco Bay. And so the whole idea that Joe D'Amaggio's father might be taken away was outrageous to anyone. In fact, Giuseppe and Rosalia D'Amaggio, baseball legend Joe D'Amaggio's parents, who were both Italian immigrants, were among the thousands of German, Japanese, and Italian immigrants the government classified as enemy aliens. The DiMagios lived inside of Military Area 1, but instead of incarceration, the DiMagios

were required to carry photo ID booklets at all times and had to apply for a permit to travel outside of a five-mile radius of their home. Giuseppe was ultimately banned from boating on the San Francisco Bay waters where he had fished for decades. His boat was later seized. Baseball legend Joe DiMaggio enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces and rose to the rank of Sergeant. He spent the war on bases in the United States, first in Santa Ana and then in New Jersey and Hawaii. And even though he asked for a combat assignment because he was embarrassed by his cushy military

jobs, he was turned down. No one was going to put famous Joe DiMaggio in harm's way. Legacies shape who we are, but who's shaping them? In the new season of Black History Year, our chart-topping history podcast by Push Black, we're breaking down the meaning and power behind the personal, familial, and systemic legacies that define our world. From the iconic legacies of Black family dynasties to the far-reaching impact of laws like the death penalty, we're diving deep into how political and cultural forces have historically molded black communities

and what it means for our future. Join us on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcast for a new season of Black History Year, dropping this February. Let's shape our collective memory and legacy together. The other thing, of course, is that Japanese Americans are much more readily identifiable, or at least the ideas that you can tell an Asian American from someone who's not Asian American and that at the time there were newspaper articles, magazine articles that had like

two page spreads. And on one side, it's kind of like how to tell a Chinese American from a Japanese American. And they had on one side a Chinese and the other side a Japanese, and they had little lines to their eyes and talking about the difference between their eyes and nose and things like that. And then there were buttons that some Chinese Americans

would wear that I'm not Japanese. And so it was just a bizarre and frightening time. So I think certainly because of this history of animosity and because Japanese Americans look different, they would be treated differently from German and Italian immigrants. Anti-Japanese propaganda was at an all-time high. Political cartoons in newspapers and posters hung in populated places debased people of Japanese ancestry as subhuman, depicting them as apes and gorillas. It showed them as dishonest in nature, corrupt, and intellectually inferior to white Americans. Theodore Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, did not begin his career as a children's

book author. And even though he had published a few titles in the late 1930s, from 1940 to 1948, he worked full-time as the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York-based newspaper, PM. During the war, Seuss created nearly 400 cartoons that often supported America's war effort and criticized the Japanese. In one large black-and-white square in Seuss's signature rounded childlike sketching. A long line of Japanese Americans stretched through the West Coast, ready to each pick up a brick of TNT explosive.

The cartoon's caption reads, waiting for the signal from home, with the implication being that people of Japanese ancestry would only remain loyal to Imperial Japan and couldn't wait to destroy the United States. A poster prepared by the Special Services Division of the U.S. Army in 1942 read, How to Spot a Jap. And many similar articles ran in magazines, including Henry Luce's Life magazine, which published How to Tell Japs from the Chinese, a spread that broke down alleged racist physical traits for readers. Other images that were created as propaganda relied on scary illustrations to elicit fear

from Americans. A 1942 poster called This is the Enemy shows a menacing Japanese man looming over a fearful white woman. The man's teeth are bared, his hat is plastered with the Japanese flag, and as he reaches for the woman, in his clawed hands, he holds a sharply pointed knife. Not all Americans were swayed by propaganda, and many expressed their disagreement with Executive Order 9066 and the incarceration of Japanese Americans. A small group of progressive church organizations, including the Quakers, hosted protests. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover expressed doubts about incarceration, too. He wrote a letter to the U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle that said the demand for removal

was based primarily on public and political pressure rather than factual data. Attorney General Biddle was all too aware that this was the case. In a few meetings with military officials shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, Biddle spoke up against the idea of the forced removal of Japanese Americans, claiming it was ill-advised, unnecessary, and unnecessarily cruel. Even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt called for cooler heads to prevail. Eleanor Roosevelt traveled to California just a few days after Pearl Harbor, and although it was met with much disapproval, she insisted on being photographed with Japanese Americans,

a practice she would continue throughout the war as she visited incarceration camps. In her nationally syndicated newspaper column called My Day, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, This is perhaps the greatest test this country has ever met. If we cannot keep in check anti-Semitism, anti-racial feelings, as well as anti-religious feelings, then we shall have removed from the world the one real hope for the future on which all humanity must now rely. In the end, the call for the forced removal of Japanese Americans quickly drowned out

the voices that were opposed to it. When Jean Wakatsuki was seven, her family was told they were being forcibly removed from their home in Ocean Park, California. The Wakatsuki family sorted through their belongings, having been given only 48 hours to leave behind their entire life. The second-hand dealers prowled like wolves, offering humiliating prices for goods and furniture. Gene said they knew many of us would have to sell sooner or later. On the day we were leaving, the car was so crammed with boxes and luggage and kids, we had just run out of room. Mama had to sell her china.

One of the dealers offered her $15 for it. She said it was a full setting for $12 worth at least $200. He said $15 was his top price. Mama started to quiver. Her eyes blazed up at him. She had been packing all night and trying to calm down, and now Navy jeeps were patrolling the streets. She didn't say another word. She just glared at this man. All the rage and frustration channeled at him through her eyes. He watched for a moment and said he was sure he

couldn't pay more than $17.50 for that china. She reached into the red velvet case, took out a dinner plate, and then hurled it to the floor in front of his feet. Mama took out another dinner plate and hurled it at the floor, then another and another, never moving, never opening her mouth. Just quivering and glaring at the retreating dealer with tears. The Treasury Department began to freeze the assets of any issei, which is the name used by first-generation immigrants who were born in Japan.

The Department of Justice rounded up and arrested almost 1,500 Japanese-American community and religious leaders. The government said they were afraid that these men who held positions of influence would give commands to their followers to plan acts of sabotage against the United States. But we know now that neither the FBI nor the military, who both did extensive digging into the backgrounds of Japanese Americans, ever found any plans of conspiracy, espionage, or sabotage. or sabotage. Many Japanese Americans were fiercely proud to be Americans. Jimmy Sakamoto wrote an editorial in the Japanese American Courier saying,

This is our country. We were born and raised here. We have made our homes here. We're ready to give our lives, if necessary, to defend the United States. Congress passed Public Law 503, which made violating Executive Order 9066 a misdemeanor. Anyone who violated the order could be punished with up to a year in prison and a $5,000 fine. The majority of Japanese Americans on the West Coast began to comply immediately. It wasn't just family heirlooms that were lost or sold for a pittance.

Store owners were forced to sell their merchandise at incredibly low prices, and those financial losses meant that many were never able to fully recover in the years following their incarceration. Vultures hoping to take advantage of the situation swooped down on them quickly. According to one shop owner, when we complained to them about the low price, they would respond by saying, you can't take it with you, so take it or leave it. Another said, it's difficult to describe the feeling of despair and humiliation experienced by all of us, as we watched the Caucasians coming and offering such nominal amounts, knowing

we had no recourse but to accept whatever they were offering because we didn't know what the future held for us. And yet, Japanese-American merchants taped signs to their closed shop doors, thanking their customers for their patronage. One said, Hope to be serving you in the near future. God be with you until we meet again. Farmers also suffered greatly. Most farmers borrowed money at the beginning of the season to buy seed and hire workers.

And then when their crops were harvested, they sold what they grew and paid their debts. Many Japanese farmers who were quite successful planted their seeds but were evacuated before their crops were harvested, leaving them in debt and facing the humiliation of not being able to pay. At the appointed hour, Norm and Minetta's parents dressed in their nicest clothes. His father in a suit, his mother in heels, and they headed to the train station. On the day that we left, Norm said, I was wearing my Cub Scout uniform, baseball glove, and had a baseball bat. As we got on the train, the MPs took my bat.

I went running to my father, crying. His bat, they told him, could be used as a weapon. And that wasn't allowed. No pets were allowed where Norm's family was going, and he had to give his dog Skippy away, which haunted him. Would he be able to get Skippy back when they returned? How long would they even be gone? He hugged his beloved friend goodbye, told him to be a good boy, and turned over his

leash to the family who was taking him. He never saw Skippy again. Norm's family boarded the train to leave behind the life they had worked for. They remained calm, cooperative, to demonstrate their loyalty to America. They were willing to sacrifice if that's what it took. Norm sat opposite his mom and dad. The window shades pulled so that the people outside watching the train roll by wouldn't be afraid when it was full of Asian faces. Tears streamed down his father's face. What had he done? Norm's father wondered.

But raise good children and run his own business. The train journey to Southern California took more than 16 hours, and it was full of the quiet suffering of people who knew in their hearts their only crime was having the wrong facial features. When the train finally stopped, Norm realized where they were. At a famous horse track, the one where Seabiscuit had raced. They soon saw that the grounds of the racetrack had been transformed into a facility to imprison Japanese Americans. Barracks were erected, latrine facilities slapped together, horse barns converted into

housing. Before you get to your barracks, the MP barked, head to the mattress station to stuff yourself a mattress. Norm watched, wincing as his mother demonstrated to him in high heels how to stuff straw into a rough cotton sack. "'Be sure to stuff yours very full, Norm,' she told him, "'or there will be lumps.'" They arrived, mattresses in tow, at their assigned barracks which were nothing more than a small room for the entire family with a single light bulb. Cots lined the wall. There was no other furniture, no

table, no chairs. This is where they were to live now. For how long was anyone's guess? The one saving grace was that the weather was nice, and it made sitting outside comfortable. Old men sat in the bleachers of the race track, gazing at the San Gabriel mountains in the distance. Women sat in clumps, collectively watching their children make up games without toys. When night fell, Norm laid down on his crunchy, dank mattress and pulled the covers over his head. Even still, he couldn't shut out the constant sweep of the searchlight.

If they were being forced to stay here for their own protection as the U.S. government was trying to convince them. Why were the guns pointed at them? There were 18 of these relocation centers in cities on the West Coast. The military had fortified fairgrounds or racetrack stables by adding high guard towers and searchlights and by placing barbed wire around the properties. They were supposed to be temporary, while more permanent incarceration camps were being built.

Guards blocked the entrances and the exits and patrolled the perimeter. An observer was sent to write a report on one of the temporary camps for the government, and the report read, The guards have been instructed to shoot anyone who attempts to leave the center without a permit and who refuses to halt when ordered to do so. The guards are armed with guns that are effective at a range of up to 500 yards. At the beginning, the incarcerated Japanese Americans had been told that they would only be held at these temporary camps for a few days. But those days stretched on, turning into weeks, and in many cases, months. It took the military time to build the long-term incarceration camps, and most were not ready

until the late summer and fall of 1942. This meant that people continued to be held in the roughest of conditions, sleeping on cots or straw-stuffed mattresses in horse and cattle stalls that had only recently been vacated by animals. Lines for meals would sometimes take three hours to wade through and people were fed hash, beans, and hot dogs, a far cry from the diet of fresh food that many Japanese Americans had been eating before they were removed from their homes. Even more humiliating than sleeping in horse stalls and waiting in line with the tin plate

for a serving of beans was the lack of privacy when showering and using the bathroom. The showers were cold and communal, and there were often no toilets in the temporary incarceration centers. People were forced to use latrine ditches that were dug into the ground. Many women avoided relieving themselves during the day and resorted to the cover of night in order to give themselves some semblance of privacy. The second generation, Japanese Americans, the ones born in the United States known as Nisei, remembered being watched by those on the outside. On weekends, one said, white people would come and look at us as if we were people in the zoo.

By the time the Japanese Americans were told they were finally leaving the temporary camps, many felt relief. They didn't know exactly what they'd find in the long-term incarceration camps that awaited them, but they hoped that they would be larger or better-run centers where they could start to feel human again. And while the longer-term incarceration camps were in some ways larger and less crude than the temporary ones they were leaving behind, they would soon see what was in store for them.

The hopeful Japanese Americans were placed on buses and trains that set off for some of the harshest and most desolate land in America. After months of living in the makeshift barracks at Santa Anita racetrack, Norm's family got new orders, and they once again boarded the train for a long journey, this time to a place called Hurt Mountain. place called Heart Mountain. When they arrived at the new incarceration camp, they found 740 acres of land ringed by barbed wire, their living quarters finished with tar paper. Heart Mountain housed more than 14,000 people in barracks which made it larger than the nearby town of Cody, Wyoming. Signs erected in the windows of Cody businesses read,

No Japs Allowed. To the imprisoned who were used to living in mild weather conditions along the western coastal regions, the intense weather conditions at the camps came as a shock. Eight out of the ten camps were built in desert regions and the two outliers were constructed in the subtropical delta region of Arkansas. For work during their incarceration, many Japanese Americans at Camps Jerome and Rower, located in Arkansas, were given the task of draining and clearing the unrelenting swamplands surrounding their barracks. One woman later recounted,

When the rains came in Roer, we could not leave our quarters. The water stagnated at the front steps, the mosquitoes that festered there were horrible, and the authorities never had enough quinine for sickness. Roer was a living nightmare. In most of the camps, barracks were arranged in blocks, with each block containing about a dozen barracks. Six barracks on one side, with a mess hall, laundry facilities, and latrines in the center, and another six barracks on the other side.

It was not uncommon to have 30 to 50 or so of these grid blocks set up in each camp. The camps also had other buildings. Military administrative buildings, general stores, recreation centers, schools, health clinics or makeshift hospitals. Barrack buildings were hastily constructed out of rough green wood that would shrink after a few months and create spaces for the dust to get in. The outside walls were covered with tar paper, and each barrack apartment was equipped with nothing more than a potbelly stove and a few cots and blankets. Often 20 to 30 people lived in spaces that were meant to house only four to six.

The barracks offered absolutely no privacy. The walls that divided one apartment from the next did not reach the ceiling, so there was a foot of open space at the top of each divider. In such cramped conditions, illness spread quickly. Three camps, Topaz, Jerome, and Minidoka, were plagued by outbreaks of dysentery caused by poor sanitary conditions. There were also reports of tuberculosis from every single camp. People were getting sick and not often getting the care they needed to recover their health. Medical centers were short-staffed and there were less than a handful of doctors stationed at each camp. There were even fewer trained nurses, and so many Japanese-American girls were hastily

trained to be nurse's aides. The camp operated like a small city. Except you were not allowed to leave without express permission. Able-bodied adults were assigned jobs like farming, teaching, or providing medical care. Incarcerated Japanese-American doctors were paid $19 per month, while white nurses from the outside were paid $150 per month. Life was somber, the unknown stretching endlessly before them. Waves of grief swallowed silently as children ran up and down the lanes between the barracks, stopping short of the barbed wire.

I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm your host and executive producer Sharon McMahon, our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks, and our audio producer is Craig Thompson. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or a review or sharing our new series, 9066, on social media? All of these things help podcasters out so much. I'll see you next time.