https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-19-2024
"Today is the anniversary of the day in 1942, during World War II, that
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 enabling
military authorities to designate military areas from which “any or all persons
may be excluded.” That order also permitted the secretary of war to provide
transportation, food, and shelter “to accomplish the purpose of this order.”
Four days later a Japanese submarine off the coast of Santa Barbara,
California, shelled the Ellwood Oil Field, and the Office of Naval Intelligence
warned that the Japanese would attack California in the next ten hours. On
February 25 a meteorological balloon near Los Angeles set off a panic, and
troops fired 1,400 rounds of antiaircraft ammunition at supposed Japanese
attackers.
On March 2, 1942, General John DeWitt put Executive Order 9066 into effect. He
signed Public Proclamation No. 1, dividing the country into military zones and,
“as a matter of military necessity,” excluding from certain of those zones
“[a]ny Japanese, German, or Italian alien, or any person of Japanese Ancestry.”
Under DeWitt’s orders, about 125,000 children, women, and men of Japanese
ancestry were forced out of their homes and imprisoned in camps around the
country. Two thirds of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens.
DeWitt’s order did not come from nowhere. After almost a century of shaping
laws to discriminate against Asian newcomers, West Coast inhabitants and
lawmakers were primed to see their Japanese and Japanese-American neighbors as
dangerous.
Those laws reached back to the 1849 arrival of Chinese miners in California and
reached forward into the twentieth century. Indeed, on another February 19—that
of 1923—the Supreme Court decided the case of
United States v. Bhagat Singh
Thind. It said that Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as
Indo-European, could not become a U.S. citizen. Thind claimed the right to
United States citizenship under the terms of the
Naturalization Act of 1906,
which had put the federal government instead of states in charge of who got to
be a citizen and had very specific requirements for citizenship that he
believed he had met.
But, the court said, Thind was not a “white person” under U.S. law, and only
“free white persons” could become citizens.
What were they talking about? In the
Thind decision, the Supreme Court
reached back to the case of Japan-born Takao Ozawa, decided a year before, in
1922. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that Ozawa could not become a
citizen under the 1906
Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden
the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to “free white persons.” The
court decided that “white person” meant “persons of the Caucasian Race.” “A
Japanese, born in Japan, being clearly not a Caucasian, cannot be made a
citizen of the United States,” it said."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
