title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: A letter by General DeWitt and Colonel Bendetsen expressing racist bias against Japanese Americans was circulated and then hastily redacted in 1943–1944. DeWitt's final report stated that, because of their race, it was impossible to determine the loyalty of Japanese Americans, thus necessitating incarceration. The original version was so offensive – even in the atmosphere of the wartime 1940s – that Bendetsen ordered all copies to be destroyed.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: In 1980, a copy of the original "Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast – 1942" was found in the National Archives, along with notes which show the numerous differences which exist between the original version and the redacted version. This earlier, racist and inflammatory version, as well as the FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) reports, led to the "coram nobis" retrials which overturned the convictions of Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui on all charges related to their refusal to submit to exclusion and incarceration. The courts found that the government had intentionally withheld these reports and other critical evidence, at trials all the way up to the Supreme Court, which proved that there was no military necessity for the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans. In the words of Department of Justice officials writing during the war, the justifications were based on "willful historical inaccuracies and intentional falsehoods".


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: In May 2011, U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, after a year of investigation, found Charles Fahy had intentionally withheld "The Ringle Report" drafted by the Office of Naval Intelligence, in order to justify the Roosevelt administration's actions in the cases of "Hirabayashi v. United States" and "Korematsu v. United States". The report would have undermined the administration's position of the military necessity for such action, as it concluded that most Japanese Americans were not a national security threat, and that allegations of communication espionage had been found to be without basis by the FBI and Federal Communications Commission.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Editorials from major newspapers at the time were generally supportive of the incarceration of the Japanese by the United States.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Since Dec. 7 there has existed an obvious menace to the safety of this region in the presence of potential saboteurs and fifth columnists close to oil refineries and storage tanks, airplane factories, Army posts, Navy facilities, ports and communications systems. Under normal sensible procedure not one day would have elapsed after Pearl Harbor before the government had proceeded to round up and send to interior points all Japanese aliens and their immediate descendants for classification and possible internment.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: This dealt with aliens, and the unassimilated. Going even farther, an "Atlanta Constitution" editorial dated February 20, 1942, stated that:


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The time to stop taking chances with Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans has come. . . . While Americans have an inate ["sic"] distaste for stringent measures, every one must realize this is a total war, that there are no Americans running loose in Japan or Germany or Italy and there is absolutely no sense in this country running even the slightest risk of a major disaster from enemy groups within the nation.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: There is but one way in which to regard the Presidential order empowering the Army to establish "military areas" from which citizens or aliens may be excluded. That is to accept the order as a necessary accompaniment of total defense.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: As to a considerable number of Japanese, no matter where born, there is unfortunately no doubt whatever. They are for Japan; they will aid Japan in every way possible by espionage, sabotage and other activity; and they need to be restrained for the safety of California and the United States. And since there is no sure test for loyalty to the United States, all must be restrained. Those truly loyal will understand and make no objection.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The Japs in these centers in the United States have been afforded the very best of treatment, together with food and living quarters far better than many of them ever knew before, and a minimum amount of restraint. They have been as well fed as the Army and as well as or better housed. . . . The American people can go without milk and butter, but the Japs will be supplied.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: As a race, the Japanese have made for themselves a record for conscienceless treachery unsurpassed in history. Whatever small theoretical advantages there might be in releasing those under restraint in this country would be enormously outweighed by the risks involved.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: While this event is most commonly called the "internment" of Japanese Americans, the government operated several different types of camps holding Japanese Americans. The best known facilities were the military-run Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) "Assembly Centers" and the civilian-run War Relocation Authority (WRA) "Relocation Centers," which are generally (but unofficially) referred to as "internment camps". Scholars have urged dropping such euphemisms and refer to them as concentration camps and the people as incarcerated. The Department of Justice (DOJ) operated camps officially called "Internment Camps", which were used to detain those suspected of crimes or of "enemy sympathies". The government also operated camps for a number of German Americans and Italian Americans, who sometimes were assigned to share facilities with the Japanese Americans. The WCCA and WRA facilities were the largest and the most public. The WCCA Assembly Centers were temporary facilities that were first set up in horse racing tracks, fairgrounds, and other large public meeting places to assemble and organize inmates before they were transported to WRA Relocation Centers by truck, bus, or train. The WRA Relocation Centers were semi-permanent camps that housed persons removed from the exclusion zone after March 1942, or until they were able to relocate elsewhere in the United States outside the exclusion zone.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Eight U.S. Department of Justice Camps (in Texas, Idaho, North Dakota, New Mexico, and Montana) held Japanese Americans, primarily non-citizens and their families. The camps were run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, under the umbrella of the DOJ, and guarded by Border Patrol agents rather than military police. The population of these camps included approximately 3,800 of the 5,500 Buddhist and Christian ministers, school instructors, newspaper workers, fishermen, and community leaders who had been accused of fifth column activity and arrested by the FBI after Pearl Harbor. (The remaining 1,700 were released to WRA relocation centers.) Immigrants and nationals of German and Italian ancestry were also held in these facilities, often in the same camps as Japanese Americans. Approximately 7,000 German Americans and 3,000 Italian Americans from Hawai'i and the U.S. mainland were interned in DOJ camps, along with 500 German seamen already in custody after being rescued from the "SS Columbus" in 1939. In addition 2,264 ethnic Japanese, 4,058 ethnic Germans, and 288 ethnic Italians were deported from 19 Latin American countries for a later-abandoned hostage exchange program with Axis countries or confinement in DOJ camps.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Several U.S. Army incarceration camps held Japanese, Italian, and German American men considered "potentially dangerous". Camp Lordsburg, in New Mexico, was the only site built specifically to confine Japanese Americans. In May 1943, the Army was given responsibility for the detention of prisoners of war and all civilian internees were transferred to DOJ camps.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Executive Order 9066 authorized the removal of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast; however, it was signed before there were any facilities completed to house the displaced Japanese Americans. After the voluntary evacuation program failed to result in many families leaving the exclusion zone, the military took charge of the now-mandatory evacuation. On April 9, 1942, the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) was established by the Western Defense Command to coordinate the forced removal of Japanese Americans to inland concentration camps.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The relocation centers faced opposition from inland communities near the proposed sites who disliked the idea of their new "Jap" neighbors. In addition, government forces were struggling to build what would essentially be self-sufficient towns in very isolated, undeveloped, and harsh regions of the country; they were not prepared to house the influx of over 110,000 inmates. Since Japanese Americans living in the restricted zone were considered too dangerous to conduct their daily business, the military decided it had to house them in temporary centers until the relocation centers were completed.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Under the direction of Colonel Karl Bendetsen, existing facilities had been designated for conversion to WCCA use in March 1942, and the Army Corps of Engineers finished construction on these sites on April 21, 1942. All but four of the 15 confinement sites (12 in California, and one each in Washington, Oregon, and Arizona) had previously been racetracks or fairgrounds. The stables and livestock areas were cleaned out and hastily converted to living quarters for families of up to six, while wood and tarpaper barracks were constructed for additional housing, as well as communal latrines, laundry facilities, and mess halls. A total of 92,193 Japanese Americans were transferred to these temporary detention centers from March to August 1942. (18,026 more had been taken directly to two "reception centers" that were developed as the Manzanar and Poston WRA camps.) The WCCA was dissolved on March 15, 1943, when it became the War Relocation Authority and turned its attentions to the more permanent relocation centers.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was the U.S. civilian agency responsible for the relocation and detention. The WRA was created by President Roosevelt on March 18, 1942, with Executive Order 9102 and it officially ceased to exist on June 30, 1946. Milton S. Eisenhower, then an official of the Department of Agriculture, was chosen to head the WRA. In the 1943 US Government film "Japanese Relocation" he said, "This picture tells how the mass migration was accomplished. Neither the Army, not the War Relocation Authority relish the idea of taking men, women and children from their homes, their shops and their farms. So, the military and civilian agencies alike, determined to do the job as a democracy should—with real consideration for the people involved." Dillon S. Myer replaced Eisenhower three months later on June 17, 1942. Myer served as Director of the WRA until the centers were closed. Within nine months, the WRA had opened ten facilities in seven states, and transferred over 100,000 people from the WCCA facilities.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The WRA camp at Tule Lake was integral to food production in its own camp, as well as other camps. Almost 30 crops were harvested at this site by farmworkers. Despite this, Tule Lake's camp was eventually used as a detention center for people believed to pose a security risk. Tule Lake also served as a "segregation center" for individuals and families who were deemed "disloyal", and for those who were to be deported to Japan.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: There were three types of camps. "Civilian Assembly Centers" were temporary camps, frequently located at horse tracks, where Japanese Americans were sent after they were removed from their communities. Eventually, most of the Japanese Americans were sent to "Relocation Centers," also known as "internment camps." "Detention camps" housed Nikkei who the government considered disruptive as well as Nikkei who the government believed were of special interest. When most of the Assembly Centers closed, they became training camps for US troops.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: These camps often held German-American and Italian-American detainees in addition to Japanese Americans:


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Detainees convicted of crimes, usually draft resistance, were sent to these sites, mostly federal prisons:


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: These immigration detention stations held the roughly 5,500 men arrested immediately after Pearl Harbor, in addition to several thousand German and Italian detainees, and served as processing centers from which the men were transferred to DOJ or Army camps:


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Somewhere between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were subject to this mass exclusion program, of whom about 80,000 "Nisei" (second generation) and "Sansei" (third generation) were U.S. citizens. The rest were "Issei" (first generation) who were subject to internment under the Alien Enemies Act; many of these "resident aliens" had been inhabitants of the United States for decades, but had been deprived by law of being able to become naturalized citizens. Also part of the West Coast removal were 101 orphaned children of Japanese descent taken from orphanages and foster homes within the exclusion zone.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Detainees of Japanese descent were first sent to one of 17 temporary "Civilian Assembly Centers", where most awaited transfer to more permanent relocation centers being constructed by the newly formed War Relocation Authority (WRA). Some of those who reported to the civilian assembly centers were not sent to relocation centers, but were released under the condition that they remain outside the prohibited zone until the military orders were modified or lifted. Almost 120,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese aliens were eventually removed from their homes on the West Coast and Southern Arizona as part of the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Most of these camps/residences, gardens, and stock areas were placed on Native American reservations, for which the Native Americans were formally compensated. The Native American councils disputed the amounts negotiated in absentia by US government authorities. They later sued to gain relief and additional compensation for some items of dispute.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Under the National Student Council Relocation Program (supported primarily by the American Friends Service Committee), students of college age were permitted to leave the camps to attend institutions willing to accept students of Japanese ancestry. Although the program initially granted leave permits to a very small number of students, this eventually included 2,263 students by December 31, 1943.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: In 1943, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes wrote "the situation in at least some of the Japanese internment camps is bad and is becoming worse rapidly." The quality of life in the camps was heavily influenced by which government entity was responsible for them. INS Camps were regulated by international treaty. The legal difference between "interned" and relocated had significant effects on those who were imprisoned. INS camps were required to provide food quality and housing at the minimum equal to that experienced by the lowest ranked person in the military.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: According to a 1943 War Relocation Authority report, inmates were housed in "tar paper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind". The spartan facilities met international laws, but left much to be desired. Many camps were built quickly by civilian contractors during the summer of 1942 based on designs for military barracks, making the buildings poorly equipped for cramped family living. Throughout many camps, twenty-five people were forced to live in space built to contain four, leaving no room for privacy.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in northwestern Wyoming was a barbed-wire-surrounded enclave with unpartitioned toilets, cots for beds, and a budget of 45 cents daily per capita for food rations.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Armed guards were posted at the camps, which were all in remote, desolate areas far from population centers. Inmates were typically allowed to stay with their families. There are documented instances of guards shooting inmates who reportedly attempted to walk outside the fences. One such shooting, that of James Wakasa at Topaz, led to a re-evaluation of the security measures in the camps. Some camp administrations eventually allowed relatively free movement outside the marked boundaries of the camps. Nearly a quarter of the inmates left the camps to live and work elsewhere in the United States, outside the exclusion zone. Eventually, some were authorized to return to their hometowns in the exclusion zone under supervision of a sponsoring American family or agency whose loyalty had been assured.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The phrase ""shikata ga nai"" (loosely translated as "it cannot be helped") was commonly used to summarize the incarcerated families' resignation to their helplessness throughout these conditions. This was noticed by their children, as mentioned in the well-known memoir "Farewell to Manzanar" by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston. Further, it is noted that parents may have internalized these emotions to withhold their disappointment and anguish from affecting their children. Nevertheless, children still were cognizant of this emotional repression.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Before the war, 87 physicians and surgeons, 137 nurses, 105 dentists, 132 pharmacists, 35 optometrists, and 92 lab technicians provided healthcare to the Japanese American population, with most practicing in urban centers like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. As the eviction from the West Coast was carried out, the Wartime Civilian Control Administration worked with the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and many of these professionals to establish infirmaries within the temporary assembly centers. An Issei doctor was appointed to manage each facility, and additional healthcare staff worked under his supervision, although the USPHS recommendation of one physician for every 1,000 inmates and one nurse to 200 inmates was not met. Overcrowded and unsanitary conditions forced assembly center infirmaries to prioritize inoculations over general care, obstetrics, and surgeries; at Manzanar, for example, hospital staff performed over 40,000 immunizations against typhoid and smallpox. Food poisoning was common and also demanded significant attention. Those who were detained in Topaz, Minidoka, and Jerome experienced outbreaks of dysentery.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Facilities in the more permanent "relocation centers" eventually surpassed the makeshift assembly center infirmaries, but in many cases, these hospitals were incomplete when inmates began to arrive and were not fully functional for several months. Additionally, vital medical supplies such as medications and surgical and sterilization equipment were limited. The staff shortages suffered in the assembly centers continued in the WRA camps. The administration's decision to invert the management structure and demote Japanese American medical workers to positions below white employees, while capping their pay rate at $20/month, further exacerbated this problem. (At Heart Mountain, for example, Japanese American doctors received $19/month compared to white nurses' $150/month.) The war had caused a shortage of healthcare professionals across the country, and the camps often lost potential recruits to outside hospitals that offered better pay and living conditions. When the WRA began to allow some Japanese Americans to leave camp, many Nikkei medical professionals resettled outside the camp. Those who remained had little authority in the administration of the hospitals. Combined with the inequitable payment of salaries between white and Japanese American employees, conflicts arose at several hospitals, and there were two Japanese American walk-outs at Heart Mountain in 1943.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Despite a shortage of healthcare workers, limited access to equipment, and tension between white administrators and Japanese American staff, these hospitals provided much-needed medical care in camp. The extreme climates of the remote incarceration sites were hard on infants and elderly prisoners. The frequent dust storms of the high desert locations led to increased cases of asthma and coccidioidomycosis, while the swampy, mosquito-infested Arkansas camps exposed residents to malaria, all of which were treated in camp. Almost 6,000 live deliveries were performed in these hospitals, and all mothers received pre- and postnatal care. The WRA recorded 1,862 deaths across the ten camps, with cancer, heart disease, tuberculosis, and vascular disease accounting for the majority.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Of the 110,000 Japanese Americans detained by the United States government during World War II, 30,000 were children. Most were school-age children, so educational facilities were set up in the camps. Allowing them to continue their education, however, did not erase the potential for traumatic experiences during their overall time in the camps. The government had not adequately planned for the camps, and no real budget or plan was set aside for the new camp educational facilities. Camp schoolhouses were crowded and had insufficient materials, books, notebooks, and desks for students. Not only that the education/instruction was all in English, the schools in Japanese concentration camps also didn't have any books or supplies to go on as they opened. The state decided to issue a few books only a month after the opening. Wood stoves were used to heat the buildings, and instead of using separate rooms for different kinds of activities only partitions were used to accomplish that. Japanese concentration camps also did not have any libraries (and consequently no library books), writing arm chairs or desks, and no science equipment. These 'schoolhouses' were essentially prison blocks that contained few windows. In the Southwest, when temperatures rose and the schoolhouse filled, the rooms would be sweltering and unbearable. Class sizes were immense. At the height of its attendance, the Rohwer Camp of Arkansas reached 2,339, with only 45 certified teachers. The student to teacher ratio in the camps was 48:1 in elementary schools and 35:1 for secondary schools, compared to the national average of 28:1. This was due to a few things. One of them was that there was a general teacher shortage in the US at the moment, and the fact that the teachers were required to live in those poor conditions in the camps themselves. "There was persistent mud or dust, heat, mosquitoes, poor food and living conditions, inadequate instructional supplies, and a half mile or more walk each day just to and from the school block". Despite the triple salary increase in the concentration camps, they were still unable to fill in all the needed teacher positions with certified personnel, and so in the end they had to hire non-certified teacher detainees to help out the teachers as assistants.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The rhetorical curriculum of the schools was based mostly on the study of "the democratic ideal and to discover its many implications". English compositions researched at the Jerome and Rohwer camps in Arkansas focused on these 'American ideals', and many of the compositions pertained to the camps. Responses were varied, as schoolchildren of the Topaz camp were patriotic and believed in the war effort, but could not ignore the fact of their incarceration. To build patriotism, the Japanese language was banned in the camps, forcing the children to learn English and then go home and teach their Issei parents.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Although life in the camps was very difficult, Japanese Americans formed many different sports teams, including baseball and football teams. In January 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued what came to be known as the "Green Light Letter" to MLB Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, which urged him to continue playing Major League Baseball games despite the ongoing war. In it Roosevelt said that "baseball provides a recreation", and this was true for Japanese American incarcerees as well. Over 100 baseball teams were formed in the Manzanar camp so that Japanese Americans could have some recreation, and some of the team names were carry-overs from teams formed before the incarceration.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Both men and women participated in the sports. In some cases, the Japanese American baseball teams from the camps traveled to outside communities to play other teams. Incarcerees from Idaho competed in the state tournament in 1943, and there were games between the prison guards and the Japanese American teams. Branch Rickey, who would be responsible for bringing Jackie Robinson into Major League Baseball in 1947, sent a letter to all of the WRA camps expressing interest in scouting some of the Nisei players. In the fall of 1943, three players tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers in front of MLB scout George Sisler, but none of them made the team.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The Tule Lake agricultural program was constructed with the purpose of growing crops in order to feed both detainees in their camp and in the other camps. It is said that any extras would be sold on the open market. The agricultural program was a way for inmates to be employed while at the center, as well as a way for some to learn farming skills. A 4-H program was established to pave a way for children to help the agricultural process at the center. From 1942 through 1945, Tule Lake produced 29 different crops, including Japanese vegetables like daikon, gobo, and nappa.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Japanese-American students were not longer allowed to attend college in the West during the period of Internment, and many found ways to transfer or attend schools in the Midwest and East in order to continue their education.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Most Nisei college students followed their families into camp, but a small number arranged for transfers to schools outside the exclusion zone. Their initial efforts expanded as sympathetic college administrators and the American Friends Service Committee began to coordinate a larger student relocation program. The Friends petitioned WRA Director Milton Eisenhower to place college students in Eastern and Midwestern academic institutions.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The National Japanese American Student Relocation Council was formed on May 29, 1942, and the AFSC administered the program. The acceptance process vetted college students graduating high school students through academic achievement and a questionnaire centering on their relationship with American culture. Some high school students were also able to leave the internment camps through boarding schools. 39 percent of the Nisei students were women. The student's tuition, book costs, and living expenses were absorbed by the U.S. government, private foundations (such as the Columbia Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation) and church scholarships, in addition to significant fundraising efforts led by Issei parents in camp.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Outside camp, the students took on the role of "ambassadors of good will", and the NJASRC and WRA promoted this image to soften anti-Japanese prejudice and prepare the public for the resettlement of Japanese Americans in their communities. Some students worked as domestic workers in nearby communities during the school year.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: At Earlham College, President William Dennis helped institute a program that enrolled several dozen Japanese-American students in order to spare them from incarceration. While this action was controversial in Richmond, Indiana, it helped strengthen the college's ties to Japan and the Japanese-American community. At Park College in Missouri, Dr. William Lindsay Young attempted to get Nisei students enrolled despite backlash from the greater Parkville city.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: At Oberlin College, about 40 evacuated Nisei students were enrolled. One of them, Kenji Okuda, was elected as student council president. Three Nisei students were enrolled at Mount Holyoke College during World War 2.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: In total, over 600 institutions east of the exclusion zone opened their doors to more than 4,000 college-age youth who had been placed behind barbed wire, many of whom were enrolled in West Coast schools prior to their removal.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The NJASRC ceased operations on June 7, 1946. After the internment camps had been shut down, releasing many Issei parents with little belongings, many families followed the college students to the eastern cities where they attended school. In 1980, former Nisei students formed the NSRC Nisei Student Relocation Commemorative Fund. In 2021, The University of Southern California apologized for discriminating against Nisei students. It issued posthumous degrees to the students whose educations were cut short or illegitimated, having already issued degrees to those surviving.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: In early 1943, War Relocation Authority officials, working with the War Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence, circulated a questionnaire in an attempt to determine the loyalty of incarcerated Nisei men they hoped to recruit into military service. The "Statement of United States Citizen of Japanese Ancestry" was initially given only to Nisei who were eligible for service (or would have been, but for the 4-C classification imposed on them at the start of the war). Authorities soon revised the questionnaire and required all adults in camp to complete the form. Most of the 28 questions were designed to assess the "Americanness" of the respondent — had they been educated in Japan or the U.S.? were they Buddhist or Christian? did they practice "judo" or play on a baseball team? The final two questions on the form, which soon came to be known as the "loyalty questionnaire", were more direct:


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: While most camp inmates simply answered "yes" to both questions, several thousand — 17 percent of the total respondents, 20 percent of the Nisei — gave negative or qualified replies out of confusion, fear or anger at the wording and implications of the questionnaire. In regard to Question 27, many worried that expressing a willingness to serve would be equated with volunteering for combat, while others felt insulted at being asked to risk their lives for a country that had imprisoned them and their families. An affirmative answer to Question 28 brought up other issues. Some believed that renouncing their loyalty to Japan would suggest that they had at some point been loyal to Japan and disloyal to the United States. Many believed they were to be deported to Japan no matter how they answered; they feared an explicit disavowal of the Emperor would become known and make such resettlement extremely difficult.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: On July 15, 1943, Tule Lake, the site with the highest number of "no" responses to the questionnaire, was designated to house inmates whose answers suggested they were "disloyal". During the remainder of 1943 and into early 1944, more than 12,000 men, women and children were transferred from other camps to the maximum-security Tule Lake Segregation Center.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Afterward, the government passed the Renunciation Act of 1944, a law that made it possible for Nisei and Kibei to renounce their American citizenship. A total of 5,589 detainees opted to do so; 5,461 of these were sent to Tule Lake. Of those who renounced US citizenship, 1,327 were repatriated to Japan. Those persons who stayed in the US faced discrimination from the Japanese-American community, both during and after the war, for having made that choice of renunciation. At the time, they feared what their futures held were they to remain American, and remain incarcerated.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: These renunciations of American citizenship have been highly controversial, for a number of reasons. Some apologists for incarceration have cited the renunciations as evidence that "disloyalty" or anti-Americanism was well represented among the incarcerated peoples, thereby justifying the incarceration. Many historians have dismissed the latter argument, for its failure to consider that the small number of individuals in question had been mistreated and persecuted by their own government at the time of the "renunciation":


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: [T]he renunciations had little to do with "loyalty" or "disloyalty" to the United States, but were instead the result of a series of complex conditions and factors that were beyond the control of those involved. Prior to discarding citizenship, most or all of the renunciants had experienced the following misfortunes: forced removal from homes; loss of jobs; government and public assumption of disloyalty to the land of their birth based on race alone; and incarceration in a "segregation center" for "disloyal" ISSEI or NISEI...


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Minoru Kiyota, who was among those who renounced his citizenship and soon came to regret the decision, has said that he wanted only "to express my fury toward the government of the United States", for his internment and for the mental and physical duress, as well as the intimidation, he was made to face.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Civil rights attorney Wayne M. Collins successfully challenged most of these renunciations as invalid, owing to the conditions of duress and intimidation under which the government obtained them. Many of the deportees were Issei (first generation) or Kibei, who often had difficulty with English and often did not understand the questions they were asked. Even among those Issei who had a clear understanding, Question 28 posed an awkward dilemma: Japanese immigrants were denied U.S. citizenship at the time, so when asked to renounce their Japanese citizenship, answering "Yes" would have made them stateless persons.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: When the government began seeking army volunteers from among the camps, only 6% of military-aged male inmates volunteered to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. Most of those who refused tempered that refusal with statements of willingness to fight if they were restored their rights as American citizens. Eventually 33,000 Japanese-American men and many Japanese-American women served in the U.S. military during World War II, of which 20,000 served in the U.S. Army.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The 100th Infantry Battalion, which was formed in June 1942 with 1,432 men of Japanese descent from the Hawaii National Guard, was sent to Camps McCoy and Shelby for advanced training. Because of the 100th's superior training record, the War Department authorized the formation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. When the call was made, 10,000 young men from Hawaii volunteered with eventually 2,686 being chosen along with 1,500 from the continental U.S. The 100th Infantry Battalion landed in Salerno, Italy in September 1943 and became known as the Purple Heart Battalion. This legendary outfit was joined by the 442nd RCT in June 1944, and this combined unit became the most highly decorated U.S. military unit of its size and duration in U.S. military history. The 442nd's Nisei segregated field artillery battalion, then on detached service within the U.S. Army in Bavaria, liberated at least one of the satellite labor camps of the Nazis' original Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, and only days later, on May 2, halted a death march in southern Bavaria.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Many Nisei worked to prove themselves as loyal American citizens. Of the 20,000 Japanese Americans who served in the Army during World War II, "many Japanese-American soldiers had gone to war to fight racism at home" and they were "proving with their blood, their limbs, and their bodies that they were truly American". Some one hundred Nisei women volunteered for the WAC (Women's Army Corps), where, after undergoing rigorous basic training, they had assignments as typists, clerks, and drivers. A smaller number of women also volunteered to serve as nurses for the ANC (Army Nurse Corps). Satoshi Ito, an incarceration camp inmate, reinforces the idea of the immigrants' children striving to demonstrate their patriotism to the United States. He notes that his mother would tell him, "'you're here in the United States, you need to do well in school, you need to prepare yourself to get a good job when you get out into the larger society'". He said she would tell him, "'don't be a dumb farmer like me, like us'" to encourage Ito to successfully assimilate into American society. As a result, he worked exceptionally hard to excel in school and later became a professor at the College of William & Mary. His story, along with the countless Japanese Americans willing to risk their lives in war, demonstrate the lengths many in their community went to prove their American patriotism.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: As early as September 1931, after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, US officials began to compile lists of individuals, lists which were particularly focused on the Issei. This data was eventually included in the Custodial Detention index (CDI). Agents in the Department of Justice's Special Defense Unit classified the subjects into three groups: A, B, and C, with A being the "most dangerous", and C being "possibly dangerous".


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt authorized his attorney general to put a plan for the arrest of thousands of individuals whose names were on the potential enemy alien lists into motion, most of these individuals were Japanese-American community leaders. Armed with a blanket arrest warrant, the FBI seized these men on the eve of December 8, 1941. These men were held in municipal jails and prisons until they were moved to Department of Justice detention camps, these camps were separate from the camps which were operated by the Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA). These camps were operated under far more stringent conditions and they were also patrolled by heightened criminal-style guards, despite the absence of criminal proceedings. Memoirs about the camps include those by Keiho Soga and Toru Matsumoto.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Crystal City, Texas, was one such camp where Japanese Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans, were interned along with a large number of Axis-descended nationals who were seized from several Latin-American countries by the U.S.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The Canadian government also confined its citizens with Japanese ancestry during World War II (see Internment of Japanese Canadians), for many reasons which were also based on fear and prejudice. Some Latin American countries on the Pacific Coast, such as Peru, interned ethnic Japanese or sent them to the United States for incarceration. Brazil also imposed restrictions on its ethnic Japanese population.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Although Japanese Americans in Hawaii comprised more than one-third of Hawaii's entire population, businessmen prevented their incarceration or deportation to the concentration camps which were located on the mainland, because they recognized their contributions to Hawaii's economy. In the hysteria of the time, some mainland Congressmen (Hawaii was only an incorporated U.S. territory at the time, and despite being fully part of the U.S., did not have a voting representative or senator in Congress) promoted that all Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants should be removed from Hawaii but were unsuccessful. An estimated 1,200 to 1,800 Japanese nationals and American-born Japanese from Hawaii were interned or incarcerated, either in five camps on the islands or in one of the mainland concentration camps, but this represented well-under two percent of the total Japanese American residents in the islands. "No serious explanations were offered as to why ... the internment of individuals of Japanese descent was necessary on the mainland, but not in Hawaii, where the large Japanese-Hawaiian population went largely unmolested."


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The vast majority of Japanese Americans and their immigrant parents in Hawaii were not incarcerated because the government had already declared martial law in Hawaii, a legal measure which allowed it to significantly reduce the supposed risks of espionage and sabotage by residents of Hawaii who had Japanese ancestry. Also, Japanese Americans comprised over 35% of the territory's entire population: they numbered 157,905 out of a total population of 423,330 at the time of the 1940 census, making them the largest ethnic group at that time; detaining so many people would have been enormously challenging in terms of logistics. Additionally, the whole of Hawaiian society was dependent on their productivity. According to intelligence reports which were published at the time, "the Japanese, through a concentration of effort in select industries, had achieved a virtual stranglehold on several key sectors of the economy in Hawaii," and they "had access to virtually all jobs in the economy, including high-status, high-paying jobs (e.g., professional and managerial jobs)". To imprison such a large percentage of the islands' work force would have crippled the Hawaiian economy. Thus, the unfounded fear of Japanese Americans turning against the United States was overcome by the reality-based fear of massive economic loss.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Lieutenant General Delos C. Emmons, the commander of the Hawaii Department, promised that the local Japanese-American community would be treated fairly as long as it remained loyal to the United States. He succeeded in blocking efforts to relocate it to the outer islands or the mainland by pointing out the logistical difficulties of such a move. Among the small number incarcerated were community leaders and prominent politicians, including territorial legislators Thomas Sakakihara and Sanji Abe.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: A total of five concentration camps were operated in the territory of Hawaii, they were referred to as the "Hawaiian Island Detention Camps". One camp was located on Sand Island, at the mouth of Honolulu Harbor. This camp was constructed before the outbreak of the war. All of the prisoners who were held there were "detained under military custody... because of the imposition of martial law throughout the Islands". Another Hawaiian camp was the Honouliuli Internment Camp, near Ewa, on the southwestern shore of Oahu; it was opened in 1943 and it served as a replacement for the Sand Island camp. Another was located on the island of Maui in the town of Haiku, in addition to the Kilauea Detention Center on Hawaii and Camp Kalaheo on Kauai.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: During World War II, over 2,200 Japanese from Latin America were held in concentration camps run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, part of the Department of Justice. Beginning in 1942, Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and transported to American concentration camps run by the INS and the U.S. Justice Department. Most of these internees, approximately 1,800, came from Peru. An additional 250 were from Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The first group of Japanese Latin Americans arrived in San Francisco on April 20, 1942, on board the "Etolin" along with 360 ethnic Germans and 14 ethnic Italians from Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The 151 men — ten from Ecuador, the rest from Peru — had volunteered for deportation believing they were to be repatriated to Japan. They were denied visas by U.S. Immigration authorities and then detained on the grounds they had tried to enter the country illegally, without a visa or passport. Subsequent transports brought additional "volunteers", including the wives and children of men who had been deported earlier. A total of 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans, about two-thirds of them from Peru, were interned in facilities on the U.S. mainland during the war.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The United States originally intended to trade these Latin American internees as part of a hostage exchange program with Japan and other Axis nations. A thorough examination of the documents shows at least one trade occurred. Over 1,300 persons of Japanese ancestry were exchanged for a like number of non-official Americans in October 1943, at the port of Marmagao, India. Over half were Japanese Latin Americans (the rest being ethnic Germans and Italians) and of that number one-third were Japanese Peruvians.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: On September 2, 1943, the Swedish ship "MS Gripsholm" departed the U.S. with just over 1,300 Japanese nationals (including nearly a hundred from Canada and Mexico) en route for the exchange location, Marmagao, the main port of the Portuguese colony of Goa on the west coast of India. After two more stops in South America to take on additional Japanese nationals, the passenger manifest reached 1,340. Of that number, Latin American Japanese numbered 55 percent of the Gripsholm's travelers, 30 percent of whom were Japanese Peruvian. Arriving in Marmagao on October 16, 1943, the Gripsholm's passengers disembarked and then boarded the Japanese ship "Teia Maru." In return, "non-official" Americans (secretaries, butlers, cooks, embassy staff workers, etc.) previously held by the Japanese Army boarded the "Gripsholm" while the "Teia Maru" headed for Tokyo. Because this exchange was done with those of Japanese ancestry officially described as "volunteering" to return to Japan, no legal challenges were encountered. The U.S. Department of State was pleased with the first trade and immediately began to arrange a second exchange of non-officials for February 1944. This exchange would involve 1,500 non-volunteer Japanese who were to be exchanged for 1,500 Americans. The US was busy with Pacific Naval activity and future trading plans stalled. Further slowing the program were legal and political "turf" battles between the State Department, the Roosevelt administration, and the DOJ, whose officials were not convinced of the legality of the program.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The completed October 1943 trade took place at the height of the Enemy Alien Deportation Program. Japanese Peruvians were still being "rounded up" for shipment to the U.S. in previously unseen numbers. Despite logistical challenges facing the floundering prisoner exchange program, deportation plans were moving ahead. This is partly explained by an early-in-the-war revelation of the overall goal for Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry under the Enemy Alien Deportation Program. The goal: that the hemisphere was to be free of Japanese. Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote an agreeing President Roosevelt, "[that the US must] continue our efforts to remove all the Japanese from these American Republics for internment in the United States."


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: "Native" Peruvians expressed extreme animosity toward their Japanese citizens and expatriates, and Peru refused to accept the post-war return of Japanese Peruvians from the US. Although a small number asserting special circumstances, such as marriage to a non-Japanese Peruvian, did return, the majority were trapped. Their home country refused to take them back (a political stance Peru would maintain until 1950), they were generally Spanish speakers in the Anglo US, and in the postwar U.S., the Department of State started expatriating them to Japan. Civil rights attorney Wayne Collins filed injunctions on behalf of the remaining internees, helping them obtain "parole" relocation to the labor-starved Seabrook Farms in New Jersey. He started a legal battle that would not be resolved until 1953, when, after working as undocumented immigrants for almost ten years, those Japanese Peruvians remaining in the U.S. were finally offered citizenship.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: On December 18, 1944, the Supreme Court handed down two decisions on the legality of the incarceration under Executive Order 9066. "Korematsu v. United States", a 6–3 decision upholding a Nisei's conviction for violating the military exclusion order, stated that, in general, the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast was constitutional. However, "Ex parte Endo" unanimously declared on that same day that loyal citizens of the United States, regardless of cultural descent, could not be detained without cause. In effect, the two rulings held that, while the eviction of American citizens in the name of military necessity was legal, the subsequent incarceration was not—thus paving the way for their release.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Having been alerted to the Court's decision, the Roosevelt administration issued Public Proclamation No. 21 the day before the "Korematsu" and "Endo" rulings were made public, on December 17, 1944, rescinding the exclusion orders and declaring that Japanese Americans could return to the West Coast the next month.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Although WRA Director Dillon Myer and others had pushed for an earlier end to the incarceration, the Japanese Americans were not allowed to return to the West Coast until January 2, 1945, being postponed until after the November 1944 election, so as not to impede Roosevelt's reelection campaign. Many younger detainees had already "resettled" in Midwest or Eastern cities to pursue work or educational opportunities. (For example, 20,000 were sent to Lake View in Chicago.) The remaining population began to leave the camps to try to rebuild their lives at home. Former inmates were given $25 and a train ticket to their pre-war places of residence, but many had little or nothing to return to, having lost their homes and businesses. When Japanese Americans were sent to the camps they could only take a few items with them and while incarcerated they could only work for meager jobs with a small monthly salary of $12–$19. So when incarceration ended Japanese Americans not only couldn't return to their homes and businesses but they had little to nothing to survive on, let alone enough to start a new life. Some emigrated to Japan, although many of these individuals were "repatriated" against their will. The camps remained open for residents who were not ready to return (mostly elderly Issei and families with young children), but the WRA pressured stragglers to leave by gradually eliminating services in camp. Those who had not left by each camp's close date were forcibly removed and sent back to the West Coast.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Nine of the ten WRA camps were shut down by the end of 1945, although Tule Lake, which held "renunciants" slated for deportation to Japan, was not closed until March 20, 1946. Japanese Latin Americans brought to the U.S. from Peru and other countries, who were still being held in the DOJ camps at Santa Fe and Crystal City, took legal action in April 1946 in an attempt to avoid deportation to Japan.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Many detainees lost irreplaceable personal property due to restrictions that prohibited them from taking more than they could carry into the camps. These losses were compounded by theft and destruction of items placed in governmental storage. Leading up to their incarceration, Nikkei were prohibited from leaving the Military Zones or traveling more than from home, forcing those who had to travel for work, like truck farmers and residents of rural towns, to quit their jobs. Many others were simply fired for their Japanese heritage.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Many Japanese Americans encountered continued housing injustice after the war. Alien land laws in California, Oregon, and Washington barred the Issei from owning their pre-war homes and farms. Many had cultivated land for decades as tenant farmers, but they lost their rights to farm those lands when they were forced to leave. Other Issei (and Nisei who were renting or had not completed payments on their property) had found families willing to occupy their homes or tend their farms during their incarceration. However, those unable to strike a deal with caretakers had to sell their property, often in a matter of days and at great financial loss to predatory land speculators, who made huge profits.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: In addition to these monetary and property losses, there were seven who were shot and killed by sentries: Kanesaburo Oshima, 58, during an escape attempt from Fort Sill, Oklahoma; Toshio Kobata, 58, and Hirota Isomura, 59, during transfer to Lordsburg, New Mexico; James Ito, 17, and Katsuji James Kanegawa, 21, during the December 1942 Manzanar Riot; James Hatsuaki Wakasa, 65, while walking near the perimeter wire of Topaz; and Shoichi James Okamoto, 30, during a verbal altercation with a sentry at the Tule Lake Segregation Center.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Psychological injury was observed by Dillon S. Myer, director of the WRA camps. In June 1945, Myer described how the Japanese Americans had grown increasingly depressed, and overcome with feelings of helplessness and personal insecurity. Author Betty Furuta explains that the Japanese used "gaman," loosely meaning "perseverance", to overcome hardships; this was mistaken by non-Japanese as being introverted and lacking initiative.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Japanese Americans also encountered hostility and even violence when they returned to the West Coast. Concentrated largely in rural areas of Central California, there were dozens of reports of gunshots, fires, and explosions aimed at Japanese American homes, businesses, and places of worship, in addition to non-violent crimes like vandalism and the defacing of Japanese graves. In one of the few cases to go to trial, four men were accused of attacking the Doi family of Placer County, California, setting off an explosion, and starting a fire on the family's farm in January 1945. Despite a confession from one of the men that implicated the others, the jury accepted their defense attorney's framing of the attack as a justifiable attempt to keep California "a white man's country" and acquitted all four defendants.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: To compensate former detainees for their property losses, Congress passed the Japanese-American Claims Act on July 2, 1948, allowing Japanese Americans to apply for compensation for property losses which occurred as "a reasonable and natural consequence of the evacuation or exclusion". By the time the Act was passed, the IRS had already destroyed most of the detainees' 1939–42 tax records. Due to the time pressure and strict limits on how much they could take to the camps, few were able to preserve detailed tax and financial records during the evacuation process. Therefore, it was extremely difficult for claimants to establish that their claims were valid. Under the Act, Japanese American families filed 26,568 claims totaling $148 million in requests; about $37 million was approved and disbursed.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The different placement for the detainees had significant consequences for their lifetime outcomes. A 2016 study finds, using the random dispersal of detainees into camps in seven different states, that the people assigned to richer locations did better in terms of income, education, socioeconomic status, house prices, and housing quality roughly fifty years later.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Beginning in the 1960s, a younger generation of Japanese Americans, inspired by the civil rights movement, began what is known as the "Redress Movement", an effort to obtain an official apology and reparations from the federal government for incarcerating their parents and grandparents during the war. They focused not on documented property losses but on the broader injustice and mental suffering caused by the incarceration. The movement's first success was in 1976, when President Gerald Ford proclaimed that the incarceration was "wrong", and a "national mistake" which "shall never again be repeated". President Ford signed a proclamation formally terminating Executive Order 9066 and apologized for the incarceration, stating: "We now know what we should have known then—not only was that evacuation wrong but Japanese-Americans were and are loyal Americans. On the battlefield and at home the names of Japanese-Americans have been and continue to be written in history for the sacrifices and the contributions they have made to the well-being and to the security of this, our common Nation."


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The campaign for redress was launched by Japanese Americans in 1978. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which had cooperated with the administration during the war, became part of the movement. It asked for three measures: $25,000 to be awarded to each person who was detained, an apology from Congress acknowledging publicly that the U.S. government had been wrong, and the release of funds to set up an educational foundation for the children of Japanese-American families.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: In 1980, under the Carter administration, Congress established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to study the matter. On February 24, 1983, the commission issued a report entitled "Personal Justice Denied", condemning the incarceration as unjust and motivated by racism and xenophobic ideas rather than factual military necessity. Concentration camp survivors sued the federal government for $24 million in property loss, but lost the case. However, the Commission recommended that $20,000 in reparations be paid to those Japanese Americans who had suffered incarceration.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 exemplified the Japanese American redress movement that impacted the large debate about the reparation bill. There was question over whether the bill would pass during the 1980s due to the poor state of the federal budget and the low support of Japanese Americans covering 1% of the United States. However, four powerful Japanese-American Democrats and Republicans who had war experience, with the support of Democratic congressmen Barney Frank, sponsored the bill and pushed for its passage as their top priority.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: On August 10, 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which had been sponsored by several representatives including Barney Frank, Norman Mineta, and Bob Matsui in the House and by Spark Matsunaga who got 75 co-sponsors in the Senate, provided financial redress of $20,000 for each former detainee who was still alive when the act was passed, totaling $1.2 billion. The question of to whom reparations should be given, how much, and even whether monetary reparations were appropriate were subjects of sometimes contentious debate within the Japanese American community and Congress.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: On September 27, 1992, the Civil Liberties Act Amendments of 1992, appropriating an additional $400 million to ensure all remaining detainee received their $20,000 redress payments, was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush. He issued another formal apology from the U.S. government on December 7, 1991, on the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, saying:


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: In remembering, it is important to come to grips with the past. No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces of its past. We in the United States acknowledge such an injustice in our history. The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be repeated.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Under the 2001 budget of the United States, Congress authorized the preservation of ten detention sites as historical landmarks: "places like Manzanar, Tule Lake, Heart Mountain, Topaz, Amache, Jerome, and Rohwer will forever stand as reminders that this nation failed in its most sacred duty to protect its citizens against prejudice, greed, and political expediency".


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: President Bill Clinton awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, to Korematsu in 1998, saying, "In the long history of our country's constant search for justice, some names of ordinary citizens stand for millions of souls: Plessy, Brown, Parks ... to that distinguished list, today we add the name of Fred Korematsu." That year, Korematsu served as the Grand Marshal of San Francisco's annual Cherry Blossom Festival parade. On January 30, 2011, California first observed an annual "Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution", the first such ceremony ever to be held in commemoration of an Asian American in the United States. On June 14, 2011, Peruvian President Alan García apologized for his country's internment of Japanese immigrants during World War II, most of whom were transferred to the U.S.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The legal term "internment" has been used in regards to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. This term, however, derives from international conventions regarding the treatment of enemy nationals during wartime and specifically limits internment to those (noncitizen) enemy nationals who threaten the security of the detaining power. The internment of selected enemy alien belligerents, as opposed to mass incarceration, is legal both under US and international law. UCLA Asian American studies professor Lane Hirabayashi pointed out that the history of the term internment, to mean the arrest and holding of non-citizens, could only be correctly applied to Issei, Japanese people who were not legal citizens. These people were a minority during Japanese incarceration and thus Roger Daniels, emeritus professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, has concluded that this terminology is wrongfully used by any government that wishes to include groups other than the Issei.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: During World War II, the camps were referred to both as relocation centers and concentration camps by government officials and in the press. Roosevelt himself referred to the camps as concentration camps on different occasions, including at a press conference held on October 20, 1942. In 1943, his attorney general Francis Biddle lamented that "The present practice of keeping loyal American citizens in concentration camps for longer than is necessary is dangerous and repugnant to the principles of our government."


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Following World War II, other government officials made statements suggesting that the use of the term "relocation center" had been largely euphemistic. In 1946, former Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes wrote "We gave the fancy name of 'relocation centers' to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps nonetheless." In a 1961 interview, Harry S. Truman stated "They were


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: concentration camps. They called it relocation but they put them in concentration camps, and I was against it. We were in a period of emergency, but it was still the wrong thing to do."


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: In subsequent decades, debate has arisen over the terminology used to refer to camps in which Americans of Japanese ancestry and their immigrant parents, were incarcerated by the US government during the war. These camps have been referred to as "war relocation centers", "relocation camps", "relocation centers", "internment camps", and "concentration camps", and the controversy over which term is the most accurate and appropriate continues.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: On April 22, 2022, The Associated Press edited its entry for "Japanese internment", changing the entry heading to "Japanese internment, incarceration," and adding the following wording:Though internment has been applied historically to all detainments of Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals during World War II, the broader use of the term is inaccurate—about two-thirds of those who were relocated US citizens and thus could not be considered interns—and many Japanese-Americans find it objectionable.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: It is better to say that they were "incarcerated" or "detained" and to define the larger event as the "incarceration of Japanese Americans".


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: In 1998, the use of the term "concentration camps" gained greater credibility prior to the opening of an exhibit about the American camps at Ellis Island. Initially, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the National Park Service, which manages Ellis Island, objected to the use of the term in the exhibit. However, during a subsequent meeting held at the offices of the AJC in New York City, leaders representing Japanese Americans and Jewish Americans reached an understanding about the use of the term. After the meeting, the Japanese American National Museum and the AJC issued a joint statement (which was included in the exhibit) that read in part:"The New York Times" published an unsigned editorial supporting the use of "concentration camp" in the exhibit. An article quoted Jonathan Mark, a columnist for "The Jewish Week", who wrote, "Can no one else speak of slavery, gas, trains, camps? It's Jewish malpractice to monopolize pain and minimize victims." AJC Executive Director David A. Harris stated during the controversy, "We have not claimed Jewish exclusivity for the term 'concentration camps.'", while also stating "Since the Second World War, these terms have taken on a specificity and a new level of meaning that deserves protection. A certain care needs to be exercised."


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Deborah Schiffrin has written that at the opening of the exhibition, entitled 'America's Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese-American experience', 'some Jewish groups' had been offended at the use of the term as after the horrors of the Holocaust some survivors feel an ownership over the semantics. However, Schiffrin also notes that a compromise was reached when an appropriate footnote was added to the exhibit brochure.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: On July 7, 2012, at its annual convention, the National Council of the Japanese American Citizens League unanimously ratified the "Power of Words Handbook," calling for the use of "...truthful and accurate terms, and retiring the misleading euphemisms created by the government to cover up the denial of Constitutional and human rights, the force, oppressive conditions, and racism against 120,000 innocent people of Japanese ancestry locked up in America's World War II concentration camps."


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The incarceration of Japanese Americans has been compared to Canada's incarceration of Japanese-Canadians, the internal deportation of Ethnically Volga German Soviet citizens from the western USSR to Soviet Central Asia, and the persecutions, expulsions, and dislocations of other ethnic minority groups which also occurred during World War II, both in Europe and Asia.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Nina Akamu, a Sansei, created the sculpture entitled "Golden Cranes" of two red-crowned cranes, which became the center feature of the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II. The U.S. Department of Defense described the November 9, 2000, dedication of the Memorial: "Drizzling rain was mixed with tears streaming down the faces of Japanese American World War II heroes and those who spent the war years imprisoned in isolated internment camps." Akamu's family's connection to the concentration camps based on the experience of her maternal grandfather, who was interned and later died in a concentration camp in Hawaii—combined with the fact that she grew up in Hawaii for a time, where she fished with her father at Pearl Harbor—and the erection of a Japanese American war memorial near her home in Massa, Italy, inspired a strong connection to the Memorial and its creation.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: United States Attorney General Janet Reno also spoke at the dedication of the Memorial, where she shared a letter from President Clinton stating: "We are diminished when any American is targeted unfairly because of his or her heritage. This Memorial and the internment sites are powerful reminders that stereotyping, discrimination, hatred and racism have no place in this country."


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: ...is symbolic not only of the Japanese American experience, but of the extrication of anyone from deeply painful and restrictive circumstances. It reminds us of the battles we've fought to overcome our ignorance and prejudice and the meaning of an integrated culture, once pained and torn, now healed and unified. Finally, the monument presents the Japanese American experience as a symbol for all peoples.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Dozens of movies were filmed about and in the concentration camps; these relate the experiences of inmates or were made by former camp inmates. Examples follow.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Many books and novels were written by and about Japanese Americans' experience during and after their residence in concentration camps among them can be mentioned the followed:


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Several significant legal decisions arose out of Japanese-American incarceration, relating to the powers of the government to detain citizens in wartime. Among the cases which reached the US Supreme Court were "Ozawa v. United States" (1922), "Yasui v. United States" (1943), "Hirabayashi v. United States" (1943), "ex parte Endo" (1944), and "Korematsu v. United States" (1944). In "Ozawa," the court established that peoples defined as 'white' were specifically of Caucasian descent; In "Yasui" and "Hirabayashi," the court upheld the constitutionality of curfews based on Japanese ancestry; in "Korematsu," the court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion order. In "Endo", the court accepted a petition for a writ of habeas corpus and ruled that the WRA had no authority to subject a loyal citizen to its procedures.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Korematsu's and Hirabayashi's convictions were vacated in a series of "coram nobis" cases in the early 1980s. In the "coram nobis" cases, federal district and appellate courts ruled that newly uncovered evidence revealed an unfairness which, had it been known at the time, would likely have changed the Supreme Court's decisions in the Yasui, Hirabayashi, and Korematsu cases.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: These new court decisions rested on a series of documents recovered from the National Archives showing that the government had altered, suppressed, and withheld important and relevant information from the Supreme Court, including the Final Report by General DeWitt justifying the incarceration program. The Army had destroyed documents in an effort to hide alterations that had been made to the report to reduce their racist content. The "coram nobis" cases vacated the convictions of Korematsu and Hirabayashi (Yasui died before his case was heard, rendering it moot), and are regarded as part of the impetus to gain passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: The rulings of the US Supreme Court in the Korematsu and Hirabayashi cases were criticized in Dictum in the 2018 majority opinion of "Trump v. Hawaii" upholding a ban on immigration of nationals from several Muslim majority countries but not overruled as it fell outside the case-law applicable to the lawsuit. Regarding the Korematsu case, Chief Justice Roberts wrote: "The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority."


title: Internment of Japanese Americans

text: Former Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, who represented the US Department of Justice in the "relocation", writes in the epilogue to the book "Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans" (1992):


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Roscoe Conkling "Fatty" Arbuckle (; March 24, 1887 – June 29, 1933) was an American silent film actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter. He started at the Selig Polyscope Company and eventually moved to Keystone Studios, where he worked with Mabel Normand and Harold Lloyd as well as with his nephew, Al St. John. He also mentored Charlie Chaplin, Monty Banks and Bob Hope, and brought vaudeville star Buster Keaton into the movie business. Arbuckle was one of the most popular silent stars of the 1910s and one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood, signing a contract in 1920 with Paramount Pictures for $14,000 ().


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Arbuckle was the defendant in three widely publicized trials between November 1921 and April 1922 for the rape and manslaughter of actress Virginia Rappe. Rappe had fallen ill at a party hosted by Arbuckle at San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel in September 1921, and died four days later. A friend of Rappe accused Arbuckle of raping and accidentally killing her. The first two trials resulted in hung juries, but Keaton testified for the defense in the third trial, which acquitted Arbuckle, and the jury gave him a formal written statement of apology.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Despite Arbuckle's acquittal, the scandal has mostly overshadowed his legacy as a pioneering comedian. At the behest of Adolph Zukor, president of Famous Players-Lasky, his films were banned by motion picture industry censor Will H. Hays after the trial, and he was publicly ostracized. Zukor was faced with the moral outrage of various groups such as the Lord's Day Alliance, the powerful Federation of Women's Clubs and even the Federal Trade Commission to curb what they perceived as Hollywood debauchery run amok and its effect on the morals of the general public. While Arbuckle saw a resurgence in his popularity immediately after his third trial (in which he was acquitted) Zukor decided he had to be sacrificed to keep the movie industry out of the clutches of censors and moralists. Hays lifted the ban within a year, but Arbuckle only worked sparingly through the 1920s. Keaton made an agreement to give him thirty-five percent of his profit from Buster Keaton Comedies Co. He later worked as a film director under the pseudonym William Goodrich. He was finally able to return to acting, making short two-reel comedies in 1932–33 for Warner Bros.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Arbuckle died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1933 at age 46, reportedly on the day that he signed a contract with Warner Bros. to make a feature film.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Roscoe Arbuckle was born on March 24, 1887, in Smith Center, Kansas, one of nine children of Mary E. Gordon (d. February 19, 1898) and William Goodrich Arbuckle. He weighed in excess of at birth and his father believed that he was illegitimate, as both parents had slim builds. Consequently, he named him after Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, a notorious philanderer whom he despised. The birth was traumatic for Mary and resulted in chronic health problems that contributed to her death eleven years later.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Arbuckle was nearly two when his family moved to Santa Ana, California. He first performed on stage with Frank Bacon's company at age 8 during their performance in Santa Ana. Arbuckle enjoyed performing and continued on until his mother's death in 1898, when he was 11. Arbuckle's father had always treated him harshly and now refused to support him, so he got work doing odd jobs in a hotel. He was in the habit of singing while he worked, and a professional singer heard him and invited him to perform in an amateur talent show. The show consisted of the audience judging acts by clapping or jeering, with bad acts pulled off the stage by a shepherd's crook. Arbuckle sang, danced, and did some clowning around, but he did not impress the audience. He saw the crook emerging from the wings and somersaulted into the orchestra pit in obvious panic. The audience went wild, and he won the competition and began a career in vaudeville.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: In 1904, Sid Grauman invited Arbuckle to sing in his new Unique Theater in San Francisco, beginning a long friendship between the two. He then joined the Pantages Theatre Group touring the West Coast and in 1906 played the Orpheum Theater in Portland, Oregon, in a vaudeville troupe organized by Leon Errol. Arbuckle became the main act and the group took their show on tour.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: On August 6, 1908, Arbuckle married Minta Durfee (1889–1975), the daughter of Charles Warren Durfee and Flora Adkins. Durfee starred in many early comedy films, often with Arbuckle. They made a strange couple, as Minta was short and petite while Arbuckle tipped the scales at 300 lbs. Arbuckle then joined the Morosco Burbank Stock vaudeville company and went on a tour of China and Japan, returning in early 1909.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Arbuckle began his film career with the Selig Polyscope Company in July 1909 when he appeared in "Ben's Kid". He appeared sporadically in Selig one-reelers until 1913, moved briefly to Universal Pictures, and became a star in producer-director Mack Sennett's "Keystone Cops" comedies. Although his large size was undoubtedly part of his comedic appeal, Arbuckle was self-conscious about his weight and refused to use it to get "cheap" laughs like getting stuck in a doorway or chair.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Arbuckle was a talented singer. After famed operatic tenor Enrico Caruso heard him sing, he urged the comedian to "give up this nonsense you do for a living, with training you could become the second greatest singer in the world."


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Despite his physical size, Arbuckle was remarkably agile and acrobatic. Mack Sennett, when recounting his first meeting with Arbuckle, noted that he "skipped up the stairs as lightly as Fred Astaire" and that he "without warning went into a feather light step, clapped his hands and did a backward somersault as graceful as a girl tumbler". His comedies are noted as rollicking and fast-paced, have many chase scenes, and feature sight gags. Arbuckle was fond of the "pie in the face", a comedy cliché that has come to symbolize silent-film-era comedy itself. The earliest known pie thrown in film was in the June 1913 Keystone one-reeler "A Noise from the Deep", starring Arbuckle and frequent screen partner Mabel Normand.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: In 1914, Paramount Pictures made the then unheard-of offer of US$1,000 a day plus twenty-five percent of all profits and complete artistic control to make movies with Arbuckle and Normand. The movies were so lucrative and popular that in 1918 they offered Arbuckle a three-year, $3 million contract (equivalent to about $ in dollars).


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: By 1916, Arbuckle was experiencing serious health problems. An infection that developed on his leg became a carbuncle so severe that doctors considered amputation. Although Arbuckle was able to keep his leg, he was prescribed morphine against the pain; he would later be accused of being addicted to it. Following his recovery, Arbuckle started his own film company, Comique, in partnership with Joseph Schenck. Although Comique produced some of the best short pictures of the silent era, Arbuckle transferred his controlling interest in the company to Buster Keaton in 1918 and accepted Paramount's $3 million offer to make up to 18 feature films over three years.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Arbuckle disliked his screen nickname. "Fatty" had also been Arbuckle's nickname since school; "It was inevitable", he said. Fans also called Roscoe "The Prince of Whales" and "The Balloonatic". However, the name "Fatty" identifies the character that Arbuckle portrayed on-screen (usually a naive hayseed), not Arbuckle himself. When Arbuckle portrayed a female, the character was named "Miss Fatty", as in the film "Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers". Arbuckle discouraged anyone from addressing him as "Fatty" off-screen, and when they did so his usual response was, "I've got a name, you know."


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: On September 5, 1921, Arbuckle took a break from his hectic film schedule and, despite suffering from second-degree burns to both buttocks from an on-set accident, drove to San Francisco with two friends, Lowell Sherman and Fred Fishback. The three checked into three rooms at the St. Francis Hotel: 1219 for Arbuckle and Fishback to share, 1221 for Sherman, and 1220 designated as a party room. Several women were invited to the suite. During the carousing, a 30-year-old aspiring actress named Virginia Rappe was found seriously ill in room 1219 and was examined by the hotel doctor, who concluded her symptoms were mostly caused by intoxication and gave her morphine to calm her. Rappe was not hospitalized until two days after the incident.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: At the hospital, Rappe's companion at the party, Bambina Maude Delmont, told a doctor that Arbuckle had raped her friend. The doctor examined Rappe but found no evidence of rape. She died one day after her hospitalization from peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder. Rappe suffered from chronic urinary tract infections, a condition that liquor irritated dramatically.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Delmont then told police that Arbuckle had raped Rappe; the police concluded that the impact of Arbuckle's overweight body lying on top of Rappe had eventually caused her bladder to rupture. At a later press conference, Rappe's manager, Al Semnacher, accused Arbuckle of using a piece of ice to simulate sex with Rappe, thus leading to her injuries. By the time the story was reported in newspapers, the object had evolved into a Coca-Cola or champagne bottle rather than a piece of ice. In fact, witnesses testified that Arbuckle rubbed the ice on Rappe's stomach to ease her abdominal pain. Arbuckle denied any wrongdoing. Delmont later made a statement incriminating Arbuckle to the police in an attempt to extort money from Arbuckle's attorneys.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Arbuckle's trial was a major media event. The story was fueled by yellow journalism, with the newspapers portraying Arbuckle as a gross lecher who used his weight to overpower innocent girls. William Randolph Hearst's nationwide newspaper chain exploited the situation with exaggerated and sensationalized stories. Hearst was gratified by the profits he accrued during the Arbuckle scandal, and he later said that it had "sold more newspapers than any event since the sinking of the "Lusitania"." Morality groups called for Arbuckle to be sentenced to death. The resulting scandal destroyed Arbuckle's career along with his personal life.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Arbuckle was regarded by those who knew him closely as a good-natured man who was shy around women; he has been described as "the most chaste man in pictures". However, studio executives, fearing negative publicity by association, ordered Arbuckle's industry friends and fellow actors (whose careers they controlled) not to publicly speak up for him. Charlie Chaplin, who was in Britain at the time, told reporters that he could not and would not believe Arbuckle had anything to do with Rappe's death; having known Arbuckle since they both worked at Keystone in 1914, Chaplin "knew Roscoe to be a genial, easy-going type who would not harm a fly." Buster Keaton reportedly did make one public statement in support of Arbuckle's innocence, a decision which earned him a mild reprimand from the studio where he worked. Film actor William S. Hart, who had never met or worked with Arbuckle, made a number of damaging public statements in which he presumed that Arbuckle was guilty. Arbuckle later wrote a premise for a film parodying Hart as a thief, bully, and wife beater, which Keaton purchased from him. The resulting film, "The Frozen North", was released in 1922, almost a year after the scandal first emerged. Keaton co-wrote, directed and starred in the picture; consequently, Hart refused to speak to Keaton for many years.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: The prosecutor, San Francisco District Attorney Matthew Brady, an intensely ambitious man who planned to run for governor, made public pronouncements of Arbuckle's guilt and pressured witnesses to make false statements. Brady at first used Delmont as his star witness during the indictment hearing. The defense had also obtained a letter from Delmont admitting to a plan to extort payment from Arbuckle. In view of Delmont's constantly changing story, her testimony would have ended any chance of going to trial. Ultimately, the judge found no evidence of rape. After hearing testimony from one of the party guests, Zey Prevon, that Rappe told her "Roscoe hurt me" on her deathbed, the judge decided that Arbuckle could be charged with first-degree murder. Brady had originally planned to seek the death penalty. The charge was later reduced to manslaughter.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: On September 17, 1921, Arbuckle was arrested and arraigned on charges of manslaughter. He arranged bail after nearly three weeks in jail. The trial began November 14, 1921, in the city courthouse in San Francisco. Arbuckle hired as his lead defense counsel Gavin McNab, a competent local attorney. The principal witness was Prevon. At the beginning of the trial Arbuckle told his already-estranged wife, Minta Durfee, that he did not harm Rappe; she believed him and appeared regularly in the courtroom to support him. Public feeling was so negative that Durfee was later shot at while entering the courthouse.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Brady's first witnesses during the trial included Betty Campbell, a model, who attended the party and testified that she saw Arbuckle with a smile on his face hours after the alleged rape occurred; Grace Hultson, a local hospital nurse who testified it was very likely that Arbuckle raped Rappe and bruised her body in the process; and Dr. Edward Heinrich, a local criminologist who claimed that the fingerprints on the door to the hallway proved that Rappe had tried to flee, but that Arbuckle had stopped her by putting his hand over hers. Dr. Arthur Beardslee, the hotel doctor who had examined Rappe, testified that an external force seemed to have damaged the bladder. During cross-examination, however, Campbell revealed that Brady had threatened to charge her with perjury if she did not testify against Arbuckle. Dr. Heinrich's claim to have found fingerprints was cast into doubt after McNab produced a maid from the St. Francis Hotel who testified that she had thoroughly cleaned the room before the investigation took place. Dr. Beardslee admitted that Rappe had never mentioned being assaulted while he was treating her. McNab was furthermore able to get Nurse Hultson to admit that the rupture of Rappe's bladder could very well have been a result of cancer, and that the bruises on her body could also have been a result of the heavy jewelry she was wearing that evening.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: On November 28, Arbuckle testified as the defense's final witness. He was simple, direct, and unflustered in both direct and cross-examination. In his testimony, Arbuckle claimed that Rappe (whom he testified he had known for five or six years) came into the party room (1220) around noon that day, and that sometime afterward he went to his room (1219) to change clothes after Mae Taub, daughter-in-law of Billy Sunday, asked him for a ride into town. In his room, Arbuckle discovered Rappe in the bathroom vomiting into the toilet. He then claimed Rappe told him she felt ill and asked to lie down, and that he carried her into the bedroom and asked a few of the party guests to help treat her. When Arbuckle and a few of the guests re-entered the room, they found Rappe on the floor near the bed tearing at her clothing and going into violent convulsions. To calm Rappe down, they placed her in a bathtub of cool water. Arbuckle and Fischbach then took her to room 1227 and called the hotel manager and doctor. At this point all those present thought Rappe was just very drunk, including the hotel doctors. Probably assuming Rappe would simply sleep it off, Arbuckle drove Taub into town.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: During the whole trial, the prosecution presented medical descriptions of Rappe's bladder as evidence that she had an illness. In his testimony, Arbuckle denied he had any knowledge of Rappe's illness. During cross-examination, Assistant District Attorney Leo Friedman aggressively grilled Arbuckle over the fact that he refused to call a doctor when he found Rappe sick, and argued that he refused to do so because he knew of Rappe's illness and saw a perfect opportunity to rape and kill her. Arbuckle calmly maintained that he never physically hurt or sexually assaulted Rappe in any way during the party, and he also stated that he never made any inappropriate sexual advances against any woman in his life. After over two weeks of testimony with sixty prosecution and defense witnesses, including eighteen doctors who testified about Rappe's illness, the defense rested. On December 4, 1921, the jury returned five days later deadlocked after nearly forty-four hours of deliberation with a 10–2 not guilty verdict, and a mistrial was declared.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Arbuckle's attorneys later concentrated their attention on one woman named Helen Hubbard, who had told jurors that she would vote guilty "until hell freezes over". She refused to look at the exhibits or read the trial transcripts, having made up her mind in the courtroom. Hubbard's husband was a lawyer who did business with the D.A.'s office, and expressed surprise that she was not challenged when selected for the jury pool. While much attention was paid to Hubbard after the trial, some former jury members told reporters that they believed that Arbuckle was indeed guilty, but not beyond a reasonable doubt. During the deliberations, some jurors joined Hubbard in voting to convict, but they all recanted except for Thomas Kilkenny. Arbuckle researcher Joan Myers describes the political climate and the media attention to the presence of women on juries (which had only been legal for four years at the time) and how Arbuckle's defense immediately singled out Hubbard as a villain; Myers also records Hubbard's account of the jury foreman August Fritze's attempts to bully her into changing her vote to 'not guilty'. While Hubbard offered explanations on her vote whenever challenged, Kilkenny remained silent and quickly faded from the media spotlight after the trial ended.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: The second trial began January 11, 1922, with a new jury, but with the same legal defense and prosecution as well as the same presiding judge. The same evidence was presented, but this time one of the witnesses, Zey Prevon, testified that Brady had forced her to lie. Another witness who testified during the first trial, a former Culver Studios security guard named Jesse Norgard, testified that Arbuckle had once shown up at the studio and offered him a cash bribe in exchange for the key to Rappe's dressing room. The comedian supposedly said he wanted it to play a joke on the actress. Norgard said he refused to give him the key. During cross-examination, Norgard's testimony was called into question when he was revealed to be an ex-convict who was currently charged with sexually assaulting an eight-year-old girl, and who was also looking for a sentence reduction from Brady in exchange for his testimony. Further, in contrast to the first trial, Rappe's history of promiscuity and heavy drinking was detailed. The second trial also discredited some major evidence such as the identification of Arbuckle's fingerprints on the hotel bedroom door: Heinrich took back his earlier testimony from the first trial and testified that the fingerprint evidence was likely faked. The defense was so convinced of an acquittal that Arbuckle was not called to testify. His lawyer, McNab, made no closing argument to the jury. However, some jurors interpreted the refusal to let Arbuckle testify as a sign of guilt. After five days and over forty hours of deliberation, the jury returned on February 3, deadlocked with a 10–2 majority in favour of conviction, resulting in another mistrial.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: By the time of Arbuckle's third trial, his films had been banned, and newspapers had been filled for the past seven months with stories of Hollywood orgies, murder, and sexual perversion. Delmont was touring the country giving one-woman shows as, "The woman who signed the murder charge against Arbuckle", and lecturing on the evils of Hollywood.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: The third trial began March 13, 1922, and this time the defense took no chances. McNab took an aggressive defense, completely tearing apart the prosecution's case with long and aggressive examination and cross-examination of each witness. McNab also managed to get in still more evidence about Rappe's lurid past and medical history. Another hole in the prosecution's case was opened because Prevon, a key witness, was out of the country after fleeing police custody and unable to testify. As in the first trial, Arbuckle testified as the final witness and again maintained his denials in his heartfelt testimony about his version of the events at the party. Buster Keaton is said to have been in the courtroom and provided important evidence to prove Arbuckle's innocence; Delmont was involved in prostitution, extortion, and blackmail. During closing statements, McNab reviewed how flawed the case was against Arbuckle from the very start and how Brady fell for the outlandish charges of Delmont, whom McNab described as "the complaining witness who never witnessed". The jury began deliberations April 12 and took only six minutes to return with a unanimous not-guilty verdict; five of those minutes were spent writing a formal statement of apology to Arbuckle for putting him through the ordeal, a dramatic move in American justice. The jury statement as read by the jury foreman stated:


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: After the reading of the apology statement, the jury foreman personally handed the statement to Arbuckle, who kept it as a treasured memento for the rest of his life. Then, one by one, the 12-person jury plus the two jury alternates walked up to Arbuckle's defense table, where they shook his hand and/or embraced and personally apologized to him. The entire jury proudly posed with Arbuckle for photographers after the verdict and apology.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: Some experts later concluded that Rappe's bladder might also have ruptured as a result of an abortion she might have had a short time before the fateful party. Her organs had been destroyed and it was now impossible to test for pregnancy. Because alcohol was consumed at the party, Arbuckle was forced to plead guilty to one count of violating the Volstead Act and had to pay a $500 fine. At the time of his acquittal, he owed over $700,000 (equivalent to approximately $ in dollars) in legal fees to his attorneys for the three criminal trials, and he was forced to sell his house and all of his cars to pay some of the debt.


title: Roscoe Arbuckle

text: The scandal and trials had greatly damaged Arbuckle's popularity among the general public. In spite of the acquittal and the apology, his reputation was not restored and the effects of the scandal continued. Will H. Hays, who served as the head of the newly formed Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) censor board, cited Arbuckle as an example of the poor morals in Hollywood. On April 18, 1922, six days after Arbuckle's acquittal, Hays banned him from ever working in U.S. movies again. He had also requested that all showings and bookings of Arbuckle films be canceled, and exhibitors complied. In December of the same year, under public pressure, Hays elected to lift the ban. However, Arbuckle was still unable to secure work as an actor.