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By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans

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Few Americans remember that in Winter 1942, weeks after the Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, officers of the U.S. Army rounded up American citizens of Japanese ancestry on the Pacific coast and sent them to internment camps on the orders of President F.D. Roosevelt (Executive Order 9066, 2/19/42). The order never said "Japanese", but it was directed towards the Issei , the first generation resident aliens who mostly arrived before 1907 and were forbidden by law to become citizens; the Nisei, the American born citizens of the second generation; and the Kibei, those Nisei who had been sent back to Japan for school. J. Edgar Hoover (FBI) said it was unnecessary as did Atty General Biddle. But Secretary of War Stimson advocated an "evacuation" and confiscation of Japanese American property. This is a fascinating book by Professor Robinson, which attempts to show that FDR himself took an active part in this order, and had his own anti-Japanese motives, both from his accumulated experience in the Navy, the Rape of Nanking, his sense of Japan as a rival, his family's great affection for China (Grandpa Warren Delano lived in Guanzhou), and his friendships with Captain Nomura, O. Matsukatam, and R. Asano. Whether or not you end up agreeing with the author's thesis, I still recommend this book as an excellent POLITICAL history of the period and the players, including the Federal Reserve (I had never heard of the Alien Land Act of 1913)

`By Order of the President' is a book that attempts to show how involved Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the internment of a group of Americans during World War II (more specifically, the Americans whom ancestrally came from Japan). The book starts out by detailing FDR's youth and pre-presidential opinions of the Japanese portion of the American population, as well as his position on the Japanese of Japan's population. It then proceeds to present the events that led to the internment and how the president contributed to the process. After the preliminary details on internment, Robinson goes on to bring forth facts and information in accordance with the continuation and eventual dismemberment of the internment as well as Roosevelt's involvement in the process.

Robinson's work presents many facets of popular and unpopular interpretations of FDR's involvement in the events leading to, and beginning the internment - as well as presenting details as to why each opinion is in existence. His book notably allows the reader to see into the meetings and investigations that went into the original initiation of the internment, as well as the misinterpretations and lies that led to the ongoing existence of internment. Robinson sets out to show the true circumstances and events surrounding the prosecution and incarceration of the so-called Japanese American population as well as the involvement of the president in the matter, who seems to have actually been in support of the internment.

The book presents its literary style in a very attractive manner and will keep the reader involved, despite the fact that the author does seem to use commas a bit excessively. Despite the title of the book, however, the book mostly centers on the positions and deliberations of the president's advisors - something that needs to be presented, but is focused on exceedingly in this case. Nevertheless, the factual evidence about FDR that Robinson does present is compelling and is demonstrative of the true nature of FDR. The facts are largely presented in such a way as not to force an opinion on the reader, but rather to allow the reader to come upon their own conclusions - a writing style that is seemingly growing rarer with every passing year.

Overall, `By Order of the President' is a work that should not go ignored and which presents the opinions of the president on internment, as well as how these opinions led to the internment of Americans under the pretext that they were dangerous due to their ancestry. Robinson presents a pleasing literary style and I personally look forward to any future publications by the author. The book is therefore highly suggested for anyone interested in Franklin D. Roosevelt, civil rights, American history, or the World War II era in general.

While United States pop culture has tradditionally portrayed the 40's as a binary of freedom vs. facism, this book exposes the truth that had long been supressed behind ideological walls.

The United States was in fact guilty of it's own internment of an entire group of people based on their involuntary membership in a subordinated group. Although taken to a lesser extent than that of the Nazi's, the actual reality of the country's actions severely clashes with the images of freedom and justice used to marshall support for the war effort.

Paranoia and bias about the potential actions of a few people led to the stereotyping of millions. Their only crime was being of Asian descent in a world where racism and fear was rampant.

The actual event in itself is still shocking, but what is even more shocking was that it happened under one of the great liberals whose presidency had been irevocably cross-referenced with the quest for social justice. FDR had openly built his presidency on advocating for the disavantaged and giving them access to the American dream, something which obviously did not happen here.

In this book, Greg Robinson reexamines one of the most controversial incidents in American history: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's decision to relocate more than 100,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, to internment camps for the duration of World War II. In this book, Mr. Robinson argues that scholars have not sufficiently examined Roosevelt's role in formulating and implementing the internment policy. Previous studies sought to explain FDR's decision primarily as a pragmatic reaction to political pressure from military and political leaders on the West Coast who feared pro-Japanese fifth-column activities, as well as powerful nativist groups motivated by racial prejudice and economic self-interest. While acknowledging the importance of these factors, Robinson also argues that standard accounts typically underplay two additional and important factors that influenced Roosevelt's controversial final decision: his own view of Japanese Americans as immutably foreign, and the weaknesses of his hands-on, competitive administrative management style.

As for the accusations and charges that all Japanese Americans were probably disloyal and untrustworthy, it should be known that Japanese Americans did volunteer to join the US Army to fight against the Germans. For example if you read the book Go For Broke (written by Chester Tanaka), it tells about the bravery of the Japanese-American 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442d Regimental Combat Team during World War II. They were the most decorated unit in the United States Army; at least 680 of them were killed in action fighting the Germans.

The 100th Infantry Battalion fought in North Africa and Italy, joining the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in June 1944. They fought in Italy, France, and Germany, rescued the "Lost Battalion," and their 522nd Field Artillery Battalion liberated the survivors at the Dachau death camp. Of the 10,000 volunteers for the all-American combat unit, 1200 came from mainland U.S. concentration camps and the rest from Hawaii, where Executive Order 9066 to intern the West Coast Japanese-American community did not apply.

So if Japanese-Americans were considered to be so untrustworthy and disloyal, then why would the United States Army allow young Japanese-American men from internment camps to join their ranks to fight against the Germans?

No president did more to destroy the American constitution than FDR. The illegal,unconstitutional internment of innocent Japanese without legal due process shows the corrupt astute politician FDR was. America never recovered from the great depression prolonged by his fascist New Deal programs, modeled after Mussolini's Italy. It took a bloody nonsensical war to pull America out of the depression. A war that gave birth to the rise of Soviet despotism and the cold war. Only the establishment historians who rewrite history have falsely glorified FDR as a great leader. Nothing can be further from the truth that FDR left a legacy of destruction which to this day the world is suffering.

After reading, Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, also purchased from Amazon.com, we wanted to understand more about the internment of the Japanese during World War 2. The book, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, provides a well documented look at the period before, during and after the adminstration's decision to remove Japanese American citizens and aliens from the West Coast. The book has extensive footnotes that reference the Roosevelt Administration's struggle over the necessity, legality, and political motivation of the Presidential Order. The book presents an inside look at the various cabinet, military and political advisors providing the President with their particular points of view through letters, meeting minutes, newspaper articles, etc. It is a well written book and one that I found hard to put down.

to whoever wrote the review about "sickening anti-americanism"- that is completely ridiculous. the conditions in the internment camps are not the issues i am speaking of; it was the concept of forcefully interning american citizens that i find disgusting. that you defend this action is even more disgusting. perhaps you should rate the book- which i found extremely interesting- more on the basis of the information it gave rather than your view of American presidents being unable to do any wrong.

Greg Robinson's book tells an important story, but it's not the one the title or the cover promise. At bottom, this is neither an FDR book nor a book about Japanese Americans.

You figure out about halfway through the book that FDR involved himself either very little or not at all in the decisions to evacuate Japanese Americans from the West Coast, to place them into internment camps for the duration of the war, and eventually to release them and allow them back to the West Coast. He was running a war and a country, and he had many other, bigger things on his mind. The story that the book tells is therefore mostly the story of lower ranking government officials and their machinations over how to handle the problem of Japanese Americans during the war. FDR makes the occasional appearance, mostly to ratify the work of others. That's an important and an interesting story--but if you buy the book thinking you're going to learn much about FDR himself, you'll be disappointed.

You'll also be disappointed if you think you're going to learn much about the actual experience of the Japanese in the detention camps. Japanese people really don't make an appearance in this book, and the author doesn't really tell you much about what the camps were like.

Mostly you learn about the formulation of a government policy to deal with Japanese Americans during wartime, with a little bit about FDR's attitudes toward Asians thrown in for good measure. This is obviously a timely topic nowadays, given what's going on with Arab-Americans after the 9/11 attack.

The research is exhaustive and excellent, it seems like just about every relevant inter-office memo written during those years must be quoted or summarized in this book. The author's writing style isn't exciting, and it's pretty repetitive, but it's usually clear.

The author does a good job of examining just about everything FDR said or wrote about the Japanese and Japanese-Americans, but it can be difficult to see what his point is.

FDR is at first portrayed as a racist, then as partially sympathetic, and finally as more of a political opportunist. It's hard to figure out just what to think about FDR after reading this book.

The background on the machinations of government behind Japanese-American internment and the negotiations among the various parts of the Executive Branch are fascinating. However, the feelings of the Japanese-American community are almost entirely looked over in this work.

In "By Order of the President," Robinson dogmatically attempts to prove his theory that Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the worst biased and prejudiced presidents we have ever had, giving as proof, FDR's "undemocratic" methods of forcing Japanese Americans into incarceration, based upon his racist and prejudiced views of all Japanese. We shall see now just who is prejudiced.

The first impression one receives from any book, quite naturally, is from the cover. Judging then from the title, one would expect that this book would set out to prove that Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese Americans.

First of all, just how many Japanese Americans (Nisei) are we talking about? Robinson says "more than 100,000." Actually, there were exactly zero.

Robinson should have known, and let the reader know, that no Japanese having American citizenship were ever ordered to be interned by FDR during WWII. Only enemy alien Japanese were interned, in Department of Justice internment camps, awaiting possible deportation. True, there were some Nisei wives (with their children) who joined their interned husbands at the Crystal City Internment Camp in Texas, the only internment camp that allowed families.

Could these be the ones Robinson refers to? Hardly, for they were not ordered to go there by FDR, either.

Then perhaps Robinson means the Nisei who were at the detention camps. No, those camps were really jails for the Nisei who were there because of their own fault -- they were never ordered there by FDR.

So, who exactly does Robinson mean by "Japanese Americans"? He states that FDR's "most tragic act of his administration" was "the internment of Japanese Americans." Then he says that Executive Order 9066 was intended to apply to Japanese Americans exclusively. Here is how he then defines these people:

"...the Japanese-American or Nikkei community was made up of several distinct groups. First-generation immigrants from Japan, ...Issei, ...resident aliens, ...(then) second-generation, ...the Nisei... by birth-right, American citizens, ...(and finally) a third group, the Kibei, American-born U.S. citizens who were brought up and educated in Japan."

Then he concludes that: "All three groups were interned."

So there you have it -- the Nikkei were all Japanese-American (including the enemy alien residents) and they were all ordered interned by Roosevelt's EO 9066. These resident alien Japanese are suddenly somehow given American citizenship, according to Robinson's theory.

Amazing, yet sad -- Robinson has not done his research very well at all. Perhaps we can give him the benefit of doubt and attribute his usage of Japanese Americans to how he felt _Roosevelt_ viewed them. But, that is stretching a bit too far.

More fallacious (and obviously under-researched) statements can be found in almost every paragraph of his "Introduction":

* Japanese Americans were "rounded up by the army" and "sent under armed guard to confinement in ten camps."
* Japanese Americans were damaged by "the stigma and psychological impact of segregation and incarceration."
* American citizens were "incarcerated without any charge, trial, or evidence against them."
* They were "forced to abandon their homes, farms, furnishings, cars, and other belongings," and as a result of EO 9066, the "vast majority of... Japanese Americans lost all their property."

One quote from FDR, which Robinson starts out with, is a favorite among many modern re-interpreters of this episode in US history: "And it is felt by a great many lawyers that under the Constitution they [Japanese of American citizenship] can't be kept locked up in concentration camps."

The "concentration camp" advocates say this is proof that even Roosevelt used the term. But does it? Was not Roosevelt only referring to what the _lawyers_ felt these camps were? He used the term only twice, Robinson says, but he fails to mention about the other times FDR called them relocation centers.

Regarding this and other vocabulary, however, Robinson has his arbitrary "Notes on Terminology," where he redefines usage of important words and phrases. This is somewhat confusing, and perhaps is the reason it has been relegated to the back of the book.

In the end, Robinson fails to convince us that Roosevelt was a terrible president, though he tries his best with these wild accusations:

* "He deserves censure for not providing moral and constitutional leadership." -- So, is that why he was re-elected to the presidency four times (over 12 years in office), with the largest electoral vote ever (98.5%), and ranks among the three greatest presidents, and is one of only four presidents who have memorials in the National Mall? Sir, you obviously missed reading about FDR's moral integrity, his faith in God, and, as he put it, his striving to "uphold the integrity of the morals of our democracy."

* "He repeatedly subverted the rights of those of Japanese descent." -- Mr. Robinson, what rights do enemy aliens have? No rights of American citizens were "subverted" by FDR, not even once, not even repeatedly.

* FDR made his EO9066 decision "casually... with no consideration... of the racial or constitutional implications."

* FDR "effectively stripped the internees of their property and possessions."

Robinson ends with his most vehement of accusations, stating that FDR bore "a special measure of guilt for his inability to project any real sympathy or consideration for the concerns and interests of the interned Japanese Americans." Especially damning he no doubt thinks, "FDR made little effort to defend the internees from the stigma of disloyalty," "took no steps to improve conditions in the camps," and "made no effort to assist them in... reintegrating into mainstream society."

For a president known for his secrecy and hiding his true feelings and his real motives, Robinson seems to have discovered the real Franklin D. Roosevelt, a feat not even achieved by the multitude of authors who have written biographies on FDR.

The reader will be greatly relieved to remember, though, that what Robinson has written is simply his theory. And theory it will remain, ill-conceived as it is. Try as anyone may, there will never be found proof that the people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast suffered irreparable damage due to Roosevelt's leadership, a phenomenal leadership that has never been equalled.