The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the Japanese-Americans During World War II

"In an ominous departure from American constitutional guarantees 100,000 West Coast American Japanese were evacuated and interned during World War II. Here is the whole shameful story, told in full for the first time. It is a story told largely in the words of the people themselves, about their reactions and experiences in their cataclysmic uprooting that robbed them of their homes, their businesses, their farms, their sense of belonging to a nation that repudiated solely on grounds of racial ties with the enemy, although the overwhelming majority of them had clear records of responsible and loyal citizenship, the young children and elders among them could not possibly have posed a threat to security, and the American-born men were asked to contribute to the very war effort they were assumed to jeopardize. This is the drama of their confinement, of their eventual release and gradual reacceptance by their countrymen, whose hysteria, whipped on by racial hate groups, was sanctioned by the highest tribunal of the land (through decisions which still stand unreversed today). Now, twenty-five years later, 'the apologies have been made, the reparations attempted, the claims settled, and the citizenship of the renunciants restored,' wrote the authors, 'but the evacuation cannot be relegated to a dusty corner of history. As a departure from American principles, it will stand as an aberration and a warning'"--