Reagan signs law admitting the internment camps were wrong; $20,000 to every survivor
Forty-six years after Franklin Roosevelt ordered roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens, into camps behind barbed wire, Congress admitted it had been wrong. On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, authorizing $20,000 payments to each surviving internee and a formal government apology. The law found the internment had rested on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership," not military necessity. Checks began going out in 1990, and a total of 82,219 people ultimately received redress payments.
Reagan, a Republican president who campaigned against federal spending, signed a bill that cost the Treasury hundreds of millions of dollars to admit the government had wronged its own citizens by race. A majority of Democrats voted for it, and a majority of House Republicans voted against it, though Senate Republicans passed it by a narrow majority, making it one of the few times Congress crossed party lines to formally repay a group of Americans for a specific constitutional injury.
QWhat did property losses from internment actually total, and how much did the government first pay back in 1948?
Japanese Americans forced into camps lost an estimated $400 million in property, businesses, farms, and belongings sold off or abandoned under duress. Congress made a token attempt to address this decades before the 1988 act, passing legislation in 1948 that provided $38 million in compensation for property losses. That figure covered less than a tenth of the estimated losses, and claimants faced a lengthy, poorly documented process since many had lost the very records needed to prove what they once owned. The gap between $400 million lost and $38 million returned stayed open for another forty years, until the 1988 law addressed the moral debt as well as the financial one.
QHow exactly did Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt justify internment to Congress?
DeWitt, who headed the Western Defense Command and oversaw the removal orders, told Congress plainly that citizenship made no difference to him. His testimony read, "I don't want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine their loyalty... It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen, he is still a Japanese." He was also the source of the blunter phrase "A Jap's a Jap," a line historians have since cited when describing internment's racial logic. The 1988 act's finding that internment stemmed from "race prejudice" was, in effect, a direct rebuttal to DeWitt's own words decades earlier.
QDid the government consider targeting Japanese Americans before Pearl Harbor was ever attacked?
Yes, years earlier. In a private 1936 writing, President Franklin Roosevelt suggested that any Japanese citizen or non-citizen on Oahu who had contact with visiting Japanese naval officers or crew should be secretly identified and placed on "a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp." That was five years before Pearl Harbor and six years before Executive Order 9066. The note shows the idea of pre-listing Japanese residents for detention existed in Roosevelt's thinking well before the war made it policy, undercutting the later claim that internment was purely a wartime emergency response.
