 What's interesting about Executive Order 9066 is when you read it, it seems neutral. It seems innocuous. It looks like just another bureaucratic order. You would have difficulty understanding what it was all about. And indeed, that's true of many important historical documents. Many of them look like nothing. You might pass them by. You might shrug. Your eyes might glaze over because you think, what is this boring document? But what's crucial here is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, using the power vested in him under the Constitution within our system, gave authority to the military. What he did was he delegated. He said that the U.S. military would have the authority to do what it believed was necessary to protect the nation and specifically to protect the nation on the West Coast. And so even though the language is very neutral, you would look at this and say, well, this doesn't have to do with race or ethnicity. I can't even tell who this concerns. You might look at this and say, I don't even know what threat he's talking about. So you always have to look to the context and you have to look at what happened afterward. So right after Pearl Harbor, there was a roundup. It took place almost immediately. And what happened was people of Japanese descent, along with some Italians and some Germans, almost all of whom were foreign nationals, meaning they were citizens of a different nation. So for the people of Japanese descent, the Issei, that's first generation, they couldn't naturalize because there was a rule, there had been a Supreme Court case that said if you're not a free white person, you can't become a citizen. It doesn't matter how simulated you are, it doesn't matter how long you've been in this country, you'll forever be what they called an alien ineligible to citizenship. There's another phrase, it's just a lawyer's phrase, it sounds innocuous, it doesn't tell you anything about what's going on, but it's actually about race. And so there was an initial roundup of many hundred people. But then, as Congress held hearings, as there was panic and concern and anger that was built on top of the racial prejudice that was already there, FDR signed 9066. And then what happened is Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt decided that he would use the authority given to him, because even though FDR's language is very general, very vague, very bureaucratic, what it did was transfer power. And it gave the military this authority. So when you go and look at what General John L. DeWitt ordered, the signs that were put up, they're very stark, they say, instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry. So it's clear who he has in mind. And if you go back and look at what he wrote, there's a famous document called The Final Report where he explains what his plans are. And then he went and testified, and he told members of Congress, oh, you don't have to worry about the Italians, you don't have to worry about the Germans, but you must worry about the Japanese until he has wiped off the face of the map. He said, I'm paraphrasing here, in the war in which we are now engaged, racial affinities are not severed by migration. And he said it was a racial war, not just a normal war, but a racial war. And so you don't see any of that reflected in Executive Order 9066. In part, that's because when the president speaks through an official order, it almost always sounds like this, bureaucratic and legal, because that's what it is. It's been drafted for him by bureaucrats and lawyers. And it's meant to have a certain dignity, a certain majesty that's accorded to official actions. So part of the challenge for historians is to take just the text as neutral and innocuous as it is, and to go and look in the real world and ask, what did this piece of paper? That's all it is, just a piece of paper, just a few hundred words. What did it actually do? What did it enable? Because words are powerful. Words bring about changes in the world around us. This isn't just a set of words, why? Because these are the words that came from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or at least the words that he signed. And so they're not just anybody's words. These aren't just the words of a crank on a street corner giving us speech. These are words that have and are invested with a sense of meaning through law, through the Constitution. And so as we read it, it's important to read this and see that it's necessary to always go back to the primary sources. But that's not sufficient. We start there as a beginning. We don't just end there. We ask what did these words allow, what did they lead to?