 Contrasted with World War I, there was relatively little violation of civil liberties during World War II. President Roosevelt was a strong supporter of civil liberties, but – more importantly – there were few anti-war activists during World War II. The most significant exception was the internment of Japanese Americans. Two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt authorized the creation of military "exclusion zones" with Executive Order 9066, paving the way for the detention of all West Coast Japanese Americans in inland camps. In addition to the non-citizen Issei (prohibited from naturalization as members of an "unassimilable" race), over two-thirds of those swept up were American-born citizens. The ACLU immediately protested to Roosevelt, comparing the evacuations to Nazi concentration camps. The ACLU was the only major organization to object to the internment plan, and their position was very unpopular, even within the organization. Not all ACLU leaders wanted to defend the Japanese Americans; Roosevelt loyalists such as Morris Ernst wanted to support Roosevelt's war effort, but pacifists such as Baldwin and Norman Thomas felt that Japanese Americans needed access to due process before they could be imprisoned. In a March 20, 1942 letter to Roosevelt, Baldwin called on the administration to allow Japanese Americans to prove their loyalty at individual hearings, describing the constitutionality of the planned removal "open to grave question." His suggestions went nowhere, and opinions within the organization became increasingly divided as the Army began the "evacuation" of the West Coast. In May, the two factions, one pushing to fight the exclusion orders then being issued, the other advocating support for the President's policy of removing citizens whose "presence may endanger national security," brought their opposing resolutions to a vote before the board and the ACLU's national leaders. They decided not to challenge the eviction of Japanese American citizens, and on June 22 instructions were sent to West Coast branches not to support cases that argued the government had no constitutional right to do so.
