You gotta hand it to FDR: he really knew how to pack a document full of information in the most tiresome way possible.

E.O. 9066 is super dense, but why? What makes it so dense? One reason has to do with its limited and dry vocabulary, which we've just discussed. The other reason is that it makes several references to external legal documents…but fails to elaborate on what they are.

Reading it today requires a bit of extra research on our part to figure out what is going on. That's because it wasn't written for us. FDR's primary audience was a specific set of members of his federal government. For them, it would have read with the ease of a drive-thru menu. They spoke the language of official decrees. References like "the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941" (8) would have been immediately recognizable.

Thanks to the info in the "Historical Context" section, we can surmise that FDR is talking about the presidential proclamations and declaration of war he issued just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Without that background info, however, things become confusing fast.

Another even more intense example is the last mile or so of text from the first sentence, which looks more like the factory-setting password on a Wi-Fi router:

[...] Section 4, Act of April 20, 1918, 40 Stat. 533, as amended by the Act of November 30, 1940, 54 Stat. 1220, and the Act of August 21, 1941, 55 Stat. 655 (U.S.C., Title 50, Sec. 104); (5)

Again, this reference to war and defense laws would have been immediately understood by its government audience, probably with such nonchalance that they didn't even think about it twice.

If you're in the mood to fall into a bottomless pit of government legal documents, feel free to check out the always thrilling U.S.C. Title 50, section 104, which is "related to [the] definition of national-defense terms."

The "terms" aren't actually defined here but appear in yet another awesome document, U.S.C. Title 18—Crimes and Criminal Procedure under the heading "Sabotage."

By the end, you'll be making your own external references…most likely of the four-letter variety.