Remember Pearl Harbor and Learn

What lessons can we learn from an earlier “day of infamy”: Dec. 7, 1941?

Shortly after the Japanese attack, then-Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox released a statement to the press that “the most effective fifth column work of the entire war was done in Hawaii.” He recommended the internment of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii.

In California, Gen. John DeWitt, head of the West Coast Defense Command, recommended in February 1942 the evacuation of all Japanese Americans: “In the war in which we are now engaged racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second-and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil possessed of United States citizenship have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”

On the basis of this recommendation, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the evacuation and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them citizens by birth.

Meanwhile, in the days after Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were victims of hate crimes, were assaulted on the streets and their homes and farms vandalized.

Decades later, in 1982, a congressional commission reported “that not a single documented act of espionage, sabotage or fifth column activity was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast.” This fact led Congress in 1988 to offer an apology and reparations to Japanese Americans who had been wrongfully interned.

Today, it is doubtful that the federal government would evacuate and intern more than a million Arab Americans. But in the fight against terrorism, the government needs to learn from the past, and be careful not to violate the constitutional rights of individual Arab Americans, aliens or citizens. Also there is the problem of the widespread hatreds and even violence aimed at Arab Americans.

In Hawaii, where military action occurred and where 160,000 Japanese Americans lived, the military governor, Gen. Delos Emmons, resisted pressures from Washington to intern them. He announced: “There is no intention or desire on the part of the federal authorities to operate mass concentration camps. No person, be he citizen or alien, need worry, provided he is not connected with subversive elements .... While we have been subjected to a serious attack by a ruthless and treacherous enemy, we must remember that this is America and we must do things the American way.”

Emmons was saying that all Americans are Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity, and that we have a Constitution to respect.