Petitioner
Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi
Respondent
United States
Petitioner's Claim
That following Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress unconstitutionally delegated its power to a military commander by authorizing him to impose regulations set out by President Roosevelt's executive orders. And that the regulations set through the order unlawfully discriminated against Japanese Americans in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
Chief Lawyers for Petitioner
Frank L. Walters, Harold Evans
Chief Lawyer for Respondent
Charles Fahy
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, Frank Murphy, Stanley Forman Reed, Owen Josephus Roberts, Wiley Blount Rutledge, Harlan Fiske Stone (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
None
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
21 June 1943
Decision
Affirmed the district court's conviction of Hirabayashi for knowingly disregarding military restrictions by finding those restrictions lawfully delegatedby Congress and not in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
Significance
In this decision, the Court reasoned that although racial discrimination wasusually irrelevant and illegal, "in time of war residents having ethnic affiliations with an invading enemy" might pose a greater threat to national security than other citizens. It also found that the urgency of war sometimes forced government to depend on military authorities to make quick decisions and take action. Based on this reasoning, the president's orders and the implementation of a curfew on Japanese Americans in wartime were deemed constitutional. In 1987 the conviction was successfully challenged and Hirabayashi was vindicated.
An Atmosphere of Suspicion
The roots of the social and legal conditions which surrounded the convictionof Gordon Hirabayashi during World War II can be recognized as early as the late nineteenth century. In 1880 and 1882 the U.S. Congress passed the ChineseExclusion Acts which blocked Chinese immigration for the next 60 years. In 1908 the Gentlemen's Agreement was adopted, preventing male Japanese workers from entering the United States. In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Ozawa case, prohibiting Japanese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens, and in 1924 a new immigration law effectively ended Japanese immigration to the United States.
Tatiana Klimova, in Internment of Japanese Americans: Military Necessity or Racial Prejudice?, asserted that these official actions were prompted by long-standing white majority hostility toward Asian Americans on the West Coast. She contended that Asian immigrants of the time often willingly took poorly-paid jobs and through hard work, many later became financially successful. This approach, she stated, was seen by the white populace as unfair competition. Accustomed to a different culture and visibly racially different, Asian immigrants also tended to remain within their own communities, she said, which intensified majority feelings that Asian immigrants did not really want to blend into the American way of life. This was the unsteady social relationship between Asian Americans and the dominant society in Pacific Coast stateswhen the Second World War erupted.
On 7 December 1941 the Empire of Japan executed a surprising and devastatingattack on an American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The next day theU.S. Congress declared war against Japan, and over the next two months Japanfollowed with successful attacks on Hong Kong, Manila, Thailand, Singapore, Midway, Wake, and Guam. Predictions of bombing and even invasion of the U.S. West Coast spread quickly, and with them came rumors of conspiracy by Japanesepeople living in America. On 19 February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9066, which stated that "successful prosecutionof war requires every possible protection against espionage and . . . sabotage." By this order, military commanders were given the authority and discretion to establish military areas and within those areas restrict the movement ofanyone they deemed potentially threatening to the national defense.
By the first two weeks of March of 1942, Lt. General J. L. DeWitt, Military Commander of the Western Defense Command, had issued proclamations establishing military areas and zones that included the coastal regions of Oregon and Washington, the state of California, and the southern half of Arizona. The proclamations said further that "certain persons or classes of persons" could beexcluded from those areas, or restricted if they stayed within them. On 21 March 1942 Congress made it illegal to defy any restrictions ordered by the military under Executive Order No. 9066 knowingly. Three days later General DeWitt issued another Proclamation confining "all alien Japanese, . . . Germans,. . . Italians, and all persons of Japanese ancestry residing within . . . Military Area No. 1" to their homes between 8:00 PM and 6:00 AM. The same day he also issued several Civil Exclusion Orders requiring that all persons of Japanese ancestry be evacuated from military areas and resettled elsewhere.
A Waiver Of Rights?
Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi was an American citizen born in Seattle, Washington in 1918. His parents had come to the United States from Japan, but Gordon Hirabayashi himself had never been there. In May of 1942 he was a senior attending the University of Washington in Seattle, and so was living within Military Area No. 1. On 9 May 1942 he broke the military curfew by being away fromhis home after 8:00 p.m. On 11 and 12 May he defied the exclusion orders whenhe failed to report to a Civil Control Station to register for evacuation. He took these actions purposefully, maintaining that if he had complied he would be waiving his rights as an American citizen. Hirabayashi later turned himself in and was charged.
At his trial in district court he sought dismissal of the charges because hewas an American citizen "who had never been a subject of and had never borneallegiance to the Empire of Japan." In a one-day trial in Seattle, the courtoverruled this, however, and he was convicted of violating the 21 March Act of Congress. Hirabayashi appealed the conviction, and his case went before theCourt of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. That court certified to the U.S. Supreme Court questions of law, and the Supreme Court directed that the entire record be certified so that the case could be heard there as if it had been brought there by appeal.
Equal Protection Versus Winning a War
Before the Supreme Court, Hirabayashi denied neither that he disobeyed the curfew, nor that it was authorized by the President's Executive Order and was punishable under the act of Congress. He even agreed that the exclusion orderwas a prudent defense measure, if applied to all citizens. What he challengedwas that Congress had unconstitutionally delegated powers to the military, and even if those powers had been lawfully delegated, the curfew and exclusionorders discriminated against citizens of Japanese descent.
In its decision, the Court focused on the importance of the conditions underwhich the disputed regulations were imposed. Writing for the unanimous Court,Chief Justice Stone began with the principle that "the war power of the national government is the power to wage war successfully," which he said included protection of war materials and personnel against harm. Consequently, he reasoned, when conditions required, as the Court believed they did in the weeksand months following the Pearl Harbor attack, it was appropriate for the president and Congress to defer to the judgment and discretion of the military in defending against espionage and sabotage. This deference was obvious throughout the decision--"it is not for any court to sit in review of the wisdom of[military] action or substitute its judgment for theirs."
Justice Stone went on to outline the justifications that the military commander had given for imposing the challenged regulations on Japanese Americans. He made it clear that the Court accepted the military's findings that there was not enough time for individual hearings to determine who were the loyal anddisloyal among the Japanese Americans living in restricted areas. It is interesting to note that the Court accepted prevailing cultural factors as support for military belief in the necessity of restricting and relocating JapaneseAmericans. It said, "social, economic, and political conditions which have prevailed since the close of the last century, when the Japanese began to cometo this country . . . , have intensified their solidarity and prevented their assimilation [into] the white population."
The Court was careful to note that racial classifications were under most circumstances irrelevant and unlawful. In one of the most echoed remarks of thedecision, the Court said that "distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." The Court further reasoned though, that it did not necessarily follow that during wartime, governmentcould not take ancestry into account when doing what it deemed necessary to successfully wage war and defend national interests. Largely because it deferred to military intelligence, and despite as has been argued, to racist suspicion, the Court found nothing unconstitutional in the curfew and upheld Hirabayashi's conviction. He was imprisoned at an Arizona federal road camp. From the question of internment, the Court distanced itself, saying, "we need not now attempt to define the ultimate boundaries of the war power."
Impact
In the years following this decision, the Supreme Court often defined the constitutionality of racial classifications using this important case and two similar others of the time. Yet since then, as Reggie Oh and Frank Wu stated inThe Evolution of Race in the Law, the three cases have also been roundly criticized for "being emphatically based upon acquiescence to racism."
These three cases made history again 40 years after they were first decided.In 1983 lawyers for Gordon Hirabayashi and the two other men, Fred Korematsuand Minoru Yasui, filed petitions asking federal judges to vacate, meaning torescind or set aside, their wartime convictions. Never before had convictions which had been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court been challenged in such amanner. The petitions were grounded on an obscure federal procedure called awrit of error coram nobis, meaning they were asking the original trialcourt to correct a fundamental error and injustice which occurred at the original trial.
According to Peter Irons in Justice Delayed: The Record of the Japanese Internment Cases, this error was the government's in that in 1943 it did not acknowledge a lack of evidence. It had since been discovered that General DeWitt was in fact informed that there was no proof of "acts of sabotage and espionage by Japanese Americans [which] required curfew and evacuation, and noevidence that Japanese Americans were disloyal." Since this evidence had been withheld, the Court's convictions were based on error. During Hirabayashi'shearing in June of 1985, witnesses testified to the suppression of a reportwhich said the military's contention that there was insufficient time to conduct individual loyalty hearings was untrue because there was no way todetermine loyalty.
This suppression of evidence was found to have limited the arguments that Hirabayashi's lawyers could have made in 1943 to counter the government's claimsof "military necessity." Thus the Court concluded that the original conviction was based on "an error of the most fundamental character," and one of Hirabayashi's convictions was vacated. In September of 1987 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit also vacated the other conviction against Hirabayashi.
Related Cases
Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi
Respondent
United States
Petitioner's Claim
That following Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress unconstitutionally delegated its power to a military commander by authorizing him to impose regulations set out by President Roosevelt's executive orders. And that the regulations set through the order unlawfully discriminated against Japanese Americans in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
Chief Lawyers for Petitioner
Frank L. Walters, Harold Evans
Chief Lawyer for Respondent
Charles Fahy
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, Frank Murphy, Stanley Forman Reed, Owen Josephus Roberts, Wiley Blount Rutledge, Harlan Fiske Stone (writing for the Court)
Justices Dissenting
None
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
21 June 1943
Decision
Affirmed the district court's conviction of Hirabayashi for knowingly disregarding military restrictions by finding those restrictions lawfully delegatedby Congress and not in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
Significance
In this decision, the Court reasoned that although racial discrimination wasusually irrelevant and illegal, "in time of war residents having ethnic affiliations with an invading enemy" might pose a greater threat to national security than other citizens. It also found that the urgency of war sometimes forced government to depend on military authorities to make quick decisions and take action. Based on this reasoning, the president's orders and the implementation of a curfew on Japanese Americans in wartime were deemed constitutional. In 1987 the conviction was successfully challenged and Hirabayashi was vindicated.
An Atmosphere of Suspicion
The roots of the social and legal conditions which surrounded the convictionof Gordon Hirabayashi during World War II can be recognized as early as the late nineteenth century. In 1880 and 1882 the U.S. Congress passed the ChineseExclusion Acts which blocked Chinese immigration for the next 60 years. In 1908 the Gentlemen's Agreement was adopted, preventing male Japanese workers from entering the United States. In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Ozawa case, prohibiting Japanese immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens, and in 1924 a new immigration law effectively ended Japanese immigration to the United States.
Tatiana Klimova, in Internment of Japanese Americans: Military Necessity or Racial Prejudice?, asserted that these official actions were prompted by long-standing white majority hostility toward Asian Americans on the West Coast. She contended that Asian immigrants of the time often willingly took poorly-paid jobs and through hard work, many later became financially successful. This approach, she stated, was seen by the white populace as unfair competition. Accustomed to a different culture and visibly racially different, Asian immigrants also tended to remain within their own communities, she said, which intensified majority feelings that Asian immigrants did not really want to blend into the American way of life. This was the unsteady social relationship between Asian Americans and the dominant society in Pacific Coast stateswhen the Second World War erupted.
On 7 December 1941 the Empire of Japan executed a surprising and devastatingattack on an American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The next day theU.S. Congress declared war against Japan, and over the next two months Japanfollowed with successful attacks on Hong Kong, Manila, Thailand, Singapore, Midway, Wake, and Guam. Predictions of bombing and even invasion of the U.S. West Coast spread quickly, and with them came rumors of conspiracy by Japanesepeople living in America. On 19 February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 9066, which stated that "successful prosecutionof war requires every possible protection against espionage and . . . sabotage." By this order, military commanders were given the authority and discretion to establish military areas and within those areas restrict the movement ofanyone they deemed potentially threatening to the national defense.
By the first two weeks of March of 1942, Lt. General J. L. DeWitt, Military Commander of the Western Defense Command, had issued proclamations establishing military areas and zones that included the coastal regions of Oregon and Washington, the state of California, and the southern half of Arizona. The proclamations said further that "certain persons or classes of persons" could beexcluded from those areas, or restricted if they stayed within them. On 21 March 1942 Congress made it illegal to defy any restrictions ordered by the military under Executive Order No. 9066 knowingly. Three days later General DeWitt issued another Proclamation confining "all alien Japanese, . . . Germans,. . . Italians, and all persons of Japanese ancestry residing within . . . Military Area No. 1" to their homes between 8:00 PM and 6:00 AM. The same day he also issued several Civil Exclusion Orders requiring that all persons of Japanese ancestry be evacuated from military areas and resettled elsewhere.
A Waiver Of Rights?
Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi was an American citizen born in Seattle, Washington in 1918. His parents had come to the United States from Japan, but Gordon Hirabayashi himself had never been there. In May of 1942 he was a senior attending the University of Washington in Seattle, and so was living within Military Area No. 1. On 9 May 1942 he broke the military curfew by being away fromhis home after 8:00 p.m. On 11 and 12 May he defied the exclusion orders whenhe failed to report to a Civil Control Station to register for evacuation. He took these actions purposefully, maintaining that if he had complied he would be waiving his rights as an American citizen. Hirabayashi later turned himself in and was charged.
At his trial in district court he sought dismissal of the charges because hewas an American citizen "who had never been a subject of and had never borneallegiance to the Empire of Japan." In a one-day trial in Seattle, the courtoverruled this, however, and he was convicted of violating the 21 March Act of Congress. Hirabayashi appealed the conviction, and his case went before theCourt of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. That court certified to the U.S. Supreme Court questions of law, and the Supreme Court directed that the entire record be certified so that the case could be heard there as if it had been brought there by appeal.
Equal Protection Versus Winning a War
Before the Supreme Court, Hirabayashi denied neither that he disobeyed the curfew, nor that it was authorized by the President's Executive Order and was punishable under the act of Congress. He even agreed that the exclusion orderwas a prudent defense measure, if applied to all citizens. What he challengedwas that Congress had unconstitutionally delegated powers to the military, and even if those powers had been lawfully delegated, the curfew and exclusionorders discriminated against citizens of Japanese descent.
In its decision, the Court focused on the importance of the conditions underwhich the disputed regulations were imposed. Writing for the unanimous Court,Chief Justice Stone began with the principle that "the war power of the national government is the power to wage war successfully," which he said included protection of war materials and personnel against harm. Consequently, he reasoned, when conditions required, as the Court believed they did in the weeksand months following the Pearl Harbor attack, it was appropriate for the president and Congress to defer to the judgment and discretion of the military in defending against espionage and sabotage. This deference was obvious throughout the decision--"it is not for any court to sit in review of the wisdom of[military] action or substitute its judgment for theirs."
Justice Stone went on to outline the justifications that the military commander had given for imposing the challenged regulations on Japanese Americans. He made it clear that the Court accepted the military's findings that there was not enough time for individual hearings to determine who were the loyal anddisloyal among the Japanese Americans living in restricted areas. It is interesting to note that the Court accepted prevailing cultural factors as support for military belief in the necessity of restricting and relocating JapaneseAmericans. It said, "social, economic, and political conditions which have prevailed since the close of the last century, when the Japanese began to cometo this country . . . , have intensified their solidarity and prevented their assimilation [into] the white population."
The Court was careful to note that racial classifications were under most circumstances irrelevant and unlawful. In one of the most echoed remarks of thedecision, the Court said that "distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." The Court further reasoned though, that it did not necessarily follow that during wartime, governmentcould not take ancestry into account when doing what it deemed necessary to successfully wage war and defend national interests. Largely because it deferred to military intelligence, and despite as has been argued, to racist suspicion, the Court found nothing unconstitutional in the curfew and upheld Hirabayashi's conviction. He was imprisoned at an Arizona federal road camp. From the question of internment, the Court distanced itself, saying, "we need not now attempt to define the ultimate boundaries of the war power."
Impact
In the years following this decision, the Supreme Court often defined the constitutionality of racial classifications using this important case and two similar others of the time. Yet since then, as Reggie Oh and Frank Wu stated inThe Evolution of Race in the Law, the three cases have also been roundly criticized for "being emphatically based upon acquiescence to racism."
These three cases made history again 40 years after they were first decided.In 1983 lawyers for Gordon Hirabayashi and the two other men, Fred Korematsuand Minoru Yasui, filed petitions asking federal judges to vacate, meaning torescind or set aside, their wartime convictions. Never before had convictions which had been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court been challenged in such amanner. The petitions were grounded on an obscure federal procedure called awrit of error coram nobis, meaning they were asking the original trialcourt to correct a fundamental error and injustice which occurred at the original trial.
According to Peter Irons in Justice Delayed: The Record of the Japanese Internment Cases, this error was the government's in that in 1943 it did not acknowledge a lack of evidence. It had since been discovered that General DeWitt was in fact informed that there was no proof of "acts of sabotage and espionage by Japanese Americans [which] required curfew and evacuation, and noevidence that Japanese Americans were disloyal." Since this evidence had been withheld, the Court's convictions were based on error. During Hirabayashi'shearing in June of 1985, witnesses testified to the suppression of a reportwhich said the military's contention that there was insufficient time to conduct individual loyalty hearings was untrue because there was no way todetermine loyalty.
This suppression of evidence was found to have limited the arguments that Hirabayashi's lawyers could have made in 1943 to counter the government's claimsof "military necessity." Thus the Court concluded that the original conviction was based on "an error of the most fundamental character," and one of Hirabayashi's convictions was vacated. In September of 1987 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit also vacated the other conviction against Hirabayashi.
Related Cases
- Takao Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922).
- Toyosaburo Korematsu v. United States, 319 U.S. 432 (1943).
- Minoru Yasui v. United States, 320 U.S. 115 (1943).
- Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 500 U.S. 200 (1995).
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