"In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms."

"The most serious discrimination during World War II was the decision to evacuate Japanese nationals and American citizens of Japanese descent from the West Coast and send them to internment camps. Because the FBI had arrested the individuals whom it considered security threats, FBI Director Hoover took the position that confining others was unnecessary. The President and Attorney General, however, chose to support the military assessment that evacuation and internment were imperative. Ultimately, the FBI became responsible for arresting curfew and evacuation violators." --From: A Short History of the FBI on the FBI website

Roosevelt had asked Dr. Ales Hrdlicka (a Smithsonian anthropoligist with some extreme racial views) to study the possibility of crossbreeding Asian and European stocks in order to eliminate the aggressive characteristics of the Japanese. D.W. Brogan observed, "in the years between the wars, the United States was only outdistanced by Germany as a market for race theories, some of them crude enough to have suited Hitler." On one occasion, Roosevelt joked that the Puerto Rican birthrate could be solved with "the methods which Hitler used effectively," an electric current, "very simple and painless," which would "sterilize subjects in about twenty seconds." In the fall of of 1942, he dismissed Italian Americans as "a lot of opera singers". --Franklin Delano Roosevelt

See also:

• Franklin D. Roosevelt - Biography at Grolier Interactive
• FDR - at pbs.org
• FDR - at Canadian Forces College, Department of National Defence (Canada)
• FDR - at Yahoo!