February 27, 2026
Legal historian Eric L. Muller—Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—raises important historiographical questions about MS NOW’s podcast Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order. Looking closely at the various roles played by key participants in the genesis and defense of Executive Order 9066, Muller argues that the story of Japanese American incarceration should be understood not as a contest between a few unusually good people and one unusually evil one, but as a collective failure of many ordinary people to recognize and challenge injustice.
This article is part of a short series of Densho Catalyst posts reflecting on Burn Order. Read Brian Niiya’s article for more historical context, and a collective contribution featuring the opinions of various community members. Gain more historical information and insights for each episode in our Listening Guide.
Through the Smoke: What Rachel Maddow’s Burn Order Gets Wrong
“The general assumption,” wrote Harvard Law School dean Roscoe Pound over a century ago, “is that legal and political miscarriages resolve themselves into a matter of good men and bad men, and that the task is a simple one of discovery and elimination of the bad.” Not so, he argued. “The matter is much more complicated than the bad-man interpretation … assumes.”
Rachel Maddow and her team would have done well to consult Pound before launching Burn Order, her new six-episode podcast about Executive Order 9066, the decree that uprooted some 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans from the west coast in 1942 and drove them into concentration camps. As many members of the Japanese American community attest, Burn Order is gripping, dramatic, and no doubt informative to the many Americans who know nothing about the uprooting and incarceration of Japanese Americans. But it’s wrong where it really counts. It reduces a complex, collective failure of American law and leadership to a “a matter of good and bad men,” shaped for a 2025 audience beset by villains and desperate for heroes.
The Bad Man.
Burn Order’s supervillain – the “architect of the U.S. government’s mass incarceration policy for Japanese Americans” (Episode 6) – is Karl Bendetsen.
Most people have never heard of him. That’s the point. In this cloak-and-dagger telling, he’s the evil mastermind behind the government scenes, manipulating people and policy toward his own “racial, blood-and-soil” vision – toward what Maddow calls “Karl Bendetsen’s America.” (Episode 3).” The podcast doesn’t leave the characterization to inference; voices in Episode 2 call him “an evil man,” “a bad, bad fellow,” “a dreadful man.”
Those assessments are understandable. Bendetsen was deeply involved in the creation of Executive Order 9066, leveraged racism to support it, and let his driving professional ambition deliver injustice and suffering to tens of thousands of innocent people.
But “Karl Bendetsen’s America?” That was hardly true, and Burn Order creates the impression only by omitting some very important context.
The major excavations of governmental decisionmaking preceding Executive Order 9066 were published between the 1970s and 1990s, and the narrative they established has remained largely unchallenged. I refer here to Roger Daniels’ “Concentration Camps, U.S.A.: Japanese Americans and World War II” (1971), Michi Nishiura Weglyn’s “Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps” (1976), and Peter Irons’ “Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases” (1993). To the extent the literature identifies a prime mover – though it notably avoids singling anyone out for that role – that person is not Karl Bendetsen. It is his boss, Major General Allen W. Gullion, the army’s Provost Marshal (in essence its head of law enforcement). Roger Daniels described him as “the most crucial … supporter” of mass removal; Peter Irons called him its “dogmatic, diehard advocate.”
By the time the U.S. entered World War II, Gullion was at the end of a military career that began in 1905 after his graduation from West Point. He saw action in expeditions in the Philippines and Mexico before becoming a Judge Advocate in World War I. He served as an army lawyer in positions of escalating influence until the capstone appointment as Provost Marshal just before the start of World War II, when the sixty-year-old brought his thirty-three-year-old assistant Bendetsen along with him.
It is hard to overstate Gullion’s importance in the history that Burn Order recounts. His name studs the pages of the historical works I just mentioned. He was the first to propose the idea of uprooting and removing all people of Japanese ancestry, alien and citizen alike, from the west coast, just two weeks after Pearl Harbor. He tried to claw control over enemy aliens from the Justice Department, ordering his assistant to draft an executive order to that effect. (The podcast says in Episode 2 that the order was Bendetsen’s idea; it was really Gullion’s.) It was Gullion’s energy, often operationalized by Bendetsen, that effaced the line between Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese ancestry. Gullion was in top-level meetings, often with Bendetsen at his side, and surviving transcripts show him often on the phone with other army leaders of his rank urging more aggressive action.
Allen W. Gullion never appears in Burn Order.
No; it’s not just that he doesn’t appear. The podcast disappears him. Episode 2 narrates a crucial meeting in early February 1942 that capped off weeks of tension between Justice Department lawyers opposed to mass action against Japanese Americans and military officials favoring it. Maddow introduces the Justice Department lawyers by name; the military men she terms “two high-ranking officials from the War Department, and also … Karl Bendetsen.” At the meeting’s climax, a person she identifies simply as a “War Department official” dramatically “reaches into his pocket, and he pulls out a draft of an executive order for the president to sign.” It was 9066.
The pocket from which the order emerged was Gullion’s.
It’s not just Bendetsen’s responsibility for mass removal that Burn Order exaggerates. What followed mass removal from the west coast was multi-year detention in an archipelago of camps spread in desolate places from California to Arkansas. These camps were, in effect, prisons for people who had committed no crime. Fenced in by barbed wire and surveilled by searchlight from guard towers, Japanese Americans were not free to leave them for months. When release did become available to the prisoners in 1943, they could leave only by navigating a bureaucratic maze and passing an invasive and insulting test of their loyalty.
According to the podcast (Episode 3), all this was “set in motion” by Karl Bendetsen (and an inept lieutenant general he manipulated, John DeWitt). It’s this bleak landscape of incarceration that she refers to as “Karl Bendetsen’s America.”
The truth is more complicated.
Before Executive Order 9066, there was no real planning for what would come after. Bendetsen was placed in charge of that on March 12, 1942. What lay ahead was a task of monumental proportions—engineering the forced removal of 120,000 people from their homes and the coastal region.
One thing that did not lie ahead, at least at that point, was a system of mass prolonged detention in barbed-wire enclosures. The government started the task of implementing Executive Order 9066 with two strategies: a program of encouraging Japanese Americans to leave the coast voluntarily, which quickly failed, and a system of temporary camps mostly near big population centers—collecting points of a sort for the thousands being turned out of their homes. But what should follow that?
Bendetsen and Milton Eisenhower, the director of the newly created War Relocation Authority, envisioned a system of open-gated communities in the western states on the model of Civilian Conservation Corps camps. Willing Japanese Americans would be (strongly) encouraged to farm and do other sorts of labor to support the national defense effort. No barbed wire, no searchlights, no military police patrolling any perimeters.
A meeting in Salt Lake City on April 7 put an end to that vision, but it was not Karl Bendetsen’s doing. It was the governors of the states where these communities would be located. With the exception of Colorado’s governor Ralph Carr, the western governors stood up one by one and announced they would allow no such thing. If Japanese Americans were to enter their states, it would be under Army guard, and their destination would be concentration camps—true prisons from which they could not leave. Planning therefore had to pivot to what the western governors demanded.
Those camps sprang up in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and California in the summer of 1942, and Japanese Americans were transported to them under armed guard, just as the governors wanted. The War Relocation Authority, not Karl Bendetsen, administered them. Burn Order singles Bendetsen out as a supervillain, but in truth, villainy of different sorts and in different measures pervaded countless offices, both state and federal.
In publicity for Burn Order, Maddow calls her show a “surprisingly simple story about who came up with th[e] idea [for Executive Order 9066] and why and how he got it done.” But the history her podcast narrates is a complex tale in which Bendetsen is just one significant player. To identify him, as Maddow did in Time, as “the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time”—is not just to decenter Allen Gullion. It is to slight the roles and diminish the explicit or implicit racism of a bigger group of men, each of whom was essential to Japanese Americans’ persecution: Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Solicitor General Charles Fahy, DOJ War Division Chief Herbert Wechsler, and, notably, President Franklin Roosevelt. It is to forget the xenophobic intransigence of the western state governors. And it is to let off the hook the six Supreme Court Justices whose votes ratified mass exclusion in the now-infamous Korematsu case: Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone and Associate Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Stanley F. Reed, and Wiley B. Rutledge.
Why does Burn Order, as Scott Kurashige puts it in his perceptive review of the podcast at his new Substack, “go over the top in giving Bendetsen an outsized role?” Rachel Maddow supplied an answer when she said that “it’s worth being really specific about how this decision got made. In this case, there was a Stephen Miller-type figure who was not the guy in charge, who was a staffer to the guy in charge.” In another interview she presented Bendetsen as “a Stephen Miller type character” who “essentially takes over this part of the U.S. government, designs this policy, puts himself in charge of it, and implements it.”
Stephen Miller is, to be sure, a bad man. But Karl Bendetsen was no more singlehandedly responsible for the America of 1942 than Stephen Miller is for the America of 2026. We are hindered, not helped, by imagining that massive injustices are the work of singular supervillains.
The good men.
The podcast casts bureaucrats Kenneth Ringle and Edward Ennis as foils to the villain Bendetsen. Yet if the villain’s crown fits Bendetsen only awkwardly, the heroic crowns fit Ringle and Ennis no better.
Ringle was a Naval Intelligence officer tasked before the war with investigating Japanese Americans on the west coast to prepare for eventual conflict with Japan. Maddow describes the conclusions Ringle reached this way in Episode 1:
What Ken Ringle discover[ed], over his months of investigating and gathering intelligence in California, was that Japanese Americans on America’s West Coast not only posed no danger to America in the form of spying or sabotage. What he discovered was that they were so loyal, they were actually the best asset we had – the best defense we had against those types of threats from Japan.
We know how things worked out for Japanese Americans, though, so it’s obvious: Ringle’s report had to be (as Maddow says) “pushed aside” to make way for “a new story … to replace the truth that Ken Ringle had uncovered.”
The other good man, Edward Ennis, was a Justice Department lawyer who headed up its Alien Enemy Control Unit and was deeply involved throughout the war on many matters affecting Japanese Americans. His good-guy status in the podcast stems partly from the fact that he tried to prevent mass removal once it became clear that was what the Army wanted. Again, we know how things worked out, so plainly he did not succeed. The other thing casting him in a hero role relates closely to Kenneth Ringle’s “pushed aside” report. In 1944, while working on the government’s Supreme Court brief defending mass removal, Ennis learned for the first time that Ringle had written this report whose conclusions went against some of the government’s claims. He urged his bosses to disclose the report to the Supreme Court. Not doing so, he argued, “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” He was not heeded.
The podcast is right that Ringle and Ennis both did some good. But it was a more ambiguous good than the podcast would have us believe. And that matters a lot, for reasons I’ll conclude with.
Let’s start with Kenneth Ringle’s report.
First, it wasn’t an attestation to unalloyed Japanese American loyalty. Allow me to quote certain passages from the report’s conclusions:
“The primary present and future problem is that of dealing with [the U.S.-born children of Japanese immigrants] of whom it is considered that at least seventy-five percent are loyal to the United States….”
“[The immigrant generation] might well do surreptitious observation work for Japanese interests if given a convenient opportunity…”
“[There are] about 300 in the entire United States [who are] either deliberately placed by the Japanese government or actuated by a fanatical loyalty to that country who would act as saboteurs or agents.”
“[Even beyond those 300,] the most potentially dangerous element of all are those American citizens of Japanese ancestry who have spent the formative years of their lives, from 10 to 20, in Japan and have returned to the United States to claim their legal American citizenship within the last few years. These people are essentially and inherently Japanese and may have been deliberately sent back to the United States by the Japanese government to act as agents. In spite of their legal citizenship and the protection afforded them by the Bill of Rights, they should be looked upon as enemy aliens and many of them placed in custodial detention. This group numbers between 600 and 700 in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and at least that many in other parts of Southern California.”
“American citizens of Japanese ancestry should be officially encouraged in their efforts toward loyalty and acceptance as bona fide citizens” [by being] “accorded a place in the national effort through such agencies as the Red Cross, U.S.O., civilian defense, and even such activities as ship and aircraft building or other defense production activities, even though subject to greater investigative checks as to background and loyalty, etc., than Caucasian Americans.”
I quote these conclusions and recommendations of Ringle’s not to endorse their accuracy. It’s important to recall that no Japanese American in the United States was ever found to have engaged in pro-Japanese sabotage or espionage.
Rather, I quote the report to show that it didn’t come close to saying, as the podcast would have it, that “Japanese Americans on America’s West Coast … posed no danger to America in the form of spying or sabotage.” (Episode 1) It is not true, as Maddow says in Episode 3, that “the government knew from their own experts, from Ken Ringle—the Naval intelligence expert on this issue—that there was no justification for concerns about Japanese Americans’ loyalty.”
To be sure, Ringle’s conclusions on Japanese American loyalty were generally favorable. He did say that “the entire ‘Japanese Problem’ has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because of the physical characteristics of the people.” He did argue for treating Japanese Americans “on the basis of the individual, regardless of citizenship, and not on a racial basis” (though this sits uneasily with his other recommendation that all US citizens educated in Japan were “essentially and inherently Japanese” and should be rounded up).
But the Ringle report did not “establish, firmly and factually, that Japanese Americans on the West Coast posed no threat — that they were eager to help, that they were in fact intensely loyal to this country,” as Episode 2 says it did.
Let’s now turn to Ennis. He can emerge from World War II as the ethical lawyer-bureaucrat opposite the unethical Bendetsen only if we zero in on his effort to counter the military’s push for mass exclusion in early 1942 and the red flag he raised about the Ringle Report in 1944. In those two settings he indeed acquitted himself well.
Outside of that, though, he devoted his wartime energies to developing, administering, and defending repressive measures against people of Japanese ancestry. He started early. On December 7, 1941, for example, he drafted for FDR’s signature the order that invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Yes, that Alien Enemies Act—the one the Trump Administration has controversially deployed to arrest, detain, and deport Venezuelans.
Soon he was named Director of the Alien Enemy Control Unit at the Department of Justice. Even the name of that unit should signal that he was not in the civil liberties business. Ennis was the man atop the program that sent FBI agents to range through Japanese American communities along the coast, arresting and detaining Japanese (and German and Italian) aliens on nothing more than the faintest hunch of suspect activity or connections. They numbered in the thousands.
In 1943 and 1944, Ennis labored to defend the ongoing rule of the Hawaiian Islands by martial law, which allowed citizens to be tried by drumhead courts, forbade the writ of habeas corpus, and permitted warrantless searches and seizures. Many thousands of Japanese Americans were subjected to interrogation and detention; some 2,000 were placed in internment camps both in Hawai’i and on the mainland. Ennis argued in court that a key rationale for continuing martial law was the presence in the islands of a huge community of Japanese Americans whose loyalties were unknown for racial reasons.
Even in the Supreme Court cases where Ennis urged disclosure of the Ringle report, he participated in other misrepresentations. He put his name to a brief arguing that uprooting Japanese Americans in the spring of 1942 had been a response to an imminent threat of a Japanese invasion – even after hearing top Army and Navy officials tell Congress in January 1942 that such an invasion was out of the question.
In 1944, Ennis supported the enactment of an unprecedented law allowing Japanese Americans in the camps to renounce their U.S. citizenship, thereby turning themselves from citizens into enemy aliens subject to more direct government control.
And as a last example, Ennis elicited fantastical, patently incredible testimony from military witnesses in a Los Angeles federal courtroom in 1945 to prop up the continued exclusion of individual Japanese Americans after the mass exclusion had come to an end. (I tell that story in my book American Inquisition.)
I cite these examples not to suggest that Edward Ennis was a bad man. Rather, they show that Ennis was no “good guy” in a heroes-and-villains story. He was a lawyer with a conscience trying to pick his way across a daily minefield of conscience-testing conundrums, ultimately collaborating in injustice more often than battling it.
Edward Ennis is a useful figure not for the purpose he serves in the podcast, but for demonstrating how unrealistic and unhelpful it is to do history as a search for villains and heroes. At a couple of key moments, Ennis used his position to try to diminish harm to innocent Japanese Americans. Much of the time, though, his work inflicted harm on them. Rather than lionizing Ennis, we might instead acknowledge the good he tried to do and ask what kept him from doing more of it.
The history of Japanese American incarceration is not a morality play about bad men thwarting good ones. It is a story of ordinary officials—some better, some worse—operating within institutions that rewarded racism, fear, ambition, and deference to military authority.
Roscoe Pound had it right. When we reduce legal catastrophes to searches for bad men, we spare ourselves the harder question: how decent people, doing their jobs, became indispensable to one of the gravest violations of civil liberties in American history. That is the question Burn Order should have asked—and the one it ultimately avoids.
—
Guest contribution by Eric L. Muller.
Eric L. Muller is the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Japanese American removal and imprisonment in World War II has been the focus of his scholarly research since the late 1990s. His four books and many other writings on these topics appear on his website. You can contact him at emuller@email.unc.edu
Read Brian Niiya’s article for more historical context, and a collective contribution featuring the opinions of various community members.