The Worst Thing FDR Ever Did As President

One person who remembers his time during World War II is George Takei. Speaking with Democracy Now, George Takei recollects how as a five-year-old his parents told him that the family was going on a vacation. His arrival at Rohwer, Arkansas revealed the barbed wire and sentry towers of the camp they would spend the next few years. However, his experience, though retrospectively awful, was not too terrible at the time: "[Children] are amazingly adaptable. And so, the barb wire fence became no more intimidating than a chain link fence around a school playground... And at school, we began every school day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. I could see the barb wire fence and the sentry towers right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words 'with liberty and justice for all,' an innocent child unaware of the irony."

Rather, it was the return to California that proved difficult. In 1944, when the swing of the war went to the Allies, the US government released its confined peoples only for them to face the racism that interred them in the first place.

It was only in 1976 that the Japanese American community received an apology from the American government when Gerald Ford repealed the Executive Order. Later in 1988, the government passed the Civil Liberties Act, raising $20,000 for each Japanese American who had suffered internment (Encyclopedia Britannica). Still, the racism and war hysteria that fueled FDR's decision-making remains a stain on his legacy.

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