President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the now-infamous Executive Order 9066 on this day in 1942, which gave military commanders the power to prescribe areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded.” That gave the greenlight to forcibly relocate 112,000 residents of Japanese descent (two-thirds were American citizens) from their West Coast homes to internment camps in remote locales.

The internment was a dark day in American history and remains a stain not only on FDR’s legacy — but on that of Earl Warren. He was California’s attorney general and governor during the war, and eventually a liberal icon on the Supreme Court. Warren apologized in his 1977 memoir, where he admitted “it was wrong to react so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty.”

Indeed, it was. The interned Japanese-Americans and Japanese nationals committed virtually no acts of disloyalty — and few resisted (and many joined the armed forces) even after they were victims of this injustice. The disloyalty came solely from American officials, who betrayed our Constitution and, as Warren eventually noted, behaved in a way that “was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens.”

Although belated, California’s Legislature is this week considering a resolution to officially apologize to the people who were interned at camps such as Manzanar along the 395 in the eastern Sierras and Tulelake at the Oregon border. (In particular, we recommend a visit to Manzanar National Historical Site, which has extensive exhibits.)

The Japanese people weren’t only forced to leave their residences quickly, but their homes and property often were confiscated in the process. We remain proud of one of this newspaper group’s early publishers, the Orange County Register’s R.C. Hoiles. He inveighed against the internment at the time — and the newspaper helped some of the Orange County’s interned residents regain their property.

Even eight decades later, the internment serves as a telling reminder of the “impulsively” dangerous ways that people — and their government — can behave when they’re scared. Let’s make sure nothing like it happens again.

A version of this editorial was published in 2020