"A grave wrong": during World War II, more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans were forced to abandon their homes and businesses and move to guarded camps surrounded by barbed wire.

• Author: Berger, Joseph
• Position: TIME PAST

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Once upon a time in America--not in Nazi Germany--tens of thousands of citizens and their families were forced to leave their homes, take only as much clothing and other belongings as they could carry, and resettle in camps surrounded by barbed wire. They lived in flimsy barracks with cots and communal latrines in desolate, wind-whipped outposts. They suffered through all this not because of crimes they had committed but because of their ethnic background.

"We have had absolutely no fresh meat, vegetables, or butter since we came here," wrote Ted Nakashima, a young architectural draftsman who grew up in Seattle and was one of the 7,000 internees at the Puyallup Assembly Center, informally known as Camp Harmony, in western Washington State. "Mealtime queues extend for blocks; standing in a rain-swept line, feet in the mud, waiting for the scant portions of canned wieners and boiled potatoes."

The 120,000 people interned or relocated were all of Japanese descent. They were subjected to this treatment during World War II because the U.S., at war with Japan, was concerned about possible saboteurs or spies should Japan invade the West Coast.

Sixty-two percent of those resettled were American citizens and the rest legal immigrants, and no attempt was made to distinguish between those who were loyal or disloyal. Although a handful of Japanese-Americans were arrested for espionage in Hawaii during the war, and a few thousand renounced their American citizenship and in some cases returned to Japan, the vast majority of Japanese-Americans were indeed loyal.

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So why was their allegiance to the U.S. questioned? Asian immigrants had long faced hostility and discrimination in America, beginning with the Chinese who arrived by the tens of thousands in the 19th century to work in gold mines and, later, build railroads. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 all but ended Chinese immigration for 60 years.

PEARL HARBOR

In the decades before World War II, fears were raised that Asians would displace whites from their businesses because of their strong work ethic. Some localities enacted covenants preventing them from buying homes. In 1917, the U.S. suspended immigration of most East Asians, and in 1924, it barred citizenship to all ethnic Japanese except those born in the U.S.

Anti-Japanese sentiment reached a peak with Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, which led to a U.S. declaration of war against Japan and to America's entry into World War II against Germany, Italy, and the other Axis powers.

Two months later, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the military to...