Failure™ Magazine

Failures of the Presidents

The five greatest presidential mistakes of all-time.

Written by Thomas J. Craughwell   Filed under History

4. The Internment of the Japanese, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1942
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Californians feared they would be the next target. In a fit of paranoia, state officials and ordinary citizens alike imagined that their Japanese-American neighbors were spies and saboteurs. Before long, Governor Culbert L. Olson demanded that the federal government do something about this perceived threat to national security.

During a congressional hearing on February 4, 1942, General Mark Clark, the deputy chief of staff, and Admiral Harold R. Stark, chief of naval operations, observed that Americans living on the West coast were unduly alarmed. General Clark estimated the chances of a Japanese invasion of California as “nil.” Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney General Francis B. Biddle regarded the relocation plan as “ill-advised, unnecessary, and unnecessarily cruel.” And FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, dismissed relocations as “utterly unwarranted.”

Nevertheless, calls for the relocation of Japanese-Americans continued unabated. On February 19, 1942, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to designate military exclusion zones from which the United States could bar any person without having to prove that individual’s disloyalty or ill intent. Later, Congress unanimously passed a bill authorizing the removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast.

Over the ensuing three months, U.S. troops systematically removed approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes and relocated them to assembly centers, internment camps and detention camps. In most cases they were given no more than ten days to store their possessions and sell or rent their homes, farms, and businesses.

When Japanese-Americans returned to their neighborhoods in 1945, many found that their possessions had been looted and their residences and businesses purchased for pennies on the dollar by white neighbors.

5. The Alien and Sedition Acts, John Adams, 1798
The 1790s witnessed a surge of French immigration to the United States. Most of the émigrés were refugees from the violence of the French Revolution, and included French aristocrats and Catholic priests, two favorite targets during the Reign of Terror. President Adams and Federalist members of Congress feared, however, that among the French immigrants were clandestine groups that intended to lead a violent insurgency against the government. Adams said as much in a speech before Congress on May 16, 1797, when he warned that agents of France were at work in America stirring up “aggressions dangerous to the Constitution, union, and independence of the nation.”

In the summer of 1798, the Federalist-dominated Congress passed four new laws (known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts) that: Raised the residency requirement for citizenship to 14 years (The Naturalization Act); authorized the president to deport any resident alien believed to be “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” (The Alien Friends Act); authorized the president to deport resident aliens if their country was at war with the United States (The Alien Enemies Act); and made it a crime to “print, utter or publish … any “false, scandalous, or malicious” writing about the government (The Sedition Act).

Of course, the French invasion never came, nor did a coup against the government, and only a handful of men were tried for seditious libel. Meanwhile, the Federalists became notorious for passing legislation that ran roughshod over the First Amendment.

Thomas J. Craughwell is author of the new book, “Failures of the Presidents” (Fair Winds Press).

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