<Begin Segment 18>

SF: My recollection is that Tule was kind of a different camp, even from the beginning because, what you were suggesting about the kinds of people that were in Tule Lake. Maybe the administration and how they treated the folks at Tule. Anyway, apparently it was a major event, surrounded the whole question of registration at Tule Lake. And you were there until after, I guess, right after registration took place. What were the main things that led up to this very, very strong reaction to registration at Tule, and what were some of the main things that happened around this infamous registration issue?

FM: You're raising the question as to why Tule Lake had this very strong reaction against registration, more than at virtually any other relocation center. And, that's a kind of a complicated issue, and I want to go into the background history of it, because I think this is important to understand why there was the kind of reaction there was at Tule Lake.

The administration was headed up by a man named Sherrill, who came as I recall, out of the Indian Affairs Commission. A very liberal-minded... One of the finest people I can imagine to head up a project, as he did at Tule Lake. And he brought with him two or three people of his own background, or similar background, into the organization. He also had under him certain other people who were what we call bureaucrats, more oriented toward running things in the usual style of federal agencies given this kind of circumstance. But this kind of division of the administrative staff was fairly typical. I think Sherrill was probably more liberal-minded than virtually any other project director around, but the WRA administration was also filled with a lot of people who simply were there as federal employees, and we call those the bureaucrat types.

The problem of Tule Lake I think was in part, the size of the camp. Poston had more people, 18,000 in total. But, as I recall Poston was divided into three camps, physically separated camps, whereas Tule Lake had almost 16,000 people, all in one place, and in one local site. The administration therefore, was more centralized into one camp, and the problem of dealing with a large population, a larger population, under circumstances where the administration really didn't know just exactly how to administer something as new as a relocation center was, I think aggravated the problem of administration, the size of the center. Minidoka by contrast, as I recall had about 8,000 people, a little more than half of the size of Tule Lake. And size I think made a difference, because if you got feeding problems, that is mess hall problems for example, it tended to balloon out into a major difficulty in a camp like Tule Lake. Whereas at a smaller Center, you would have it under control a little more, because you were not feeding, trying to feed as many people.

The other factor at Tule Lake, I think, was the kind of Japanese evacuee population that was drawn there. Many of them came from the Sacramento Valley farming communities where, as I say, I think the people had been subjected to more severe discrimination and segregation than virtually anywhere else on the Pacific Coast. And if we could have, could make studies of what the attitudes of the evacuees was, by background factors such as the amount of discrimination which they had suffered prior to the evacuation, I think there would have been found a direct negative correlation, that the stronger -- or direct positive correlation -- stronger the antagonism previously experienced, the stronger their antagonism against the WRA administration within the center.

Therefore at Tule Lake, which opened as a center in the first of June, by the middle of August of that same summer, we had a major outbreak. What was called a Tule Lake Farm Strike, occurred at Tule Lake middle of August, only two and a half months after the camp opened. It was a wildcat strike, in that it was not a well-organized strike, and for that reason, the strike came to an end as suddenly as it occurred. It occurred on a Friday morning, when the farm workers gathered because there were complaints about the kind of terrible breakfast they'd had. "Farmers can't work on the kind of breakfast like the kind we had," was the kind of argument. And that spread over into questions of, when were they gonna' get clothing, when were they gonna' get paid, and so on -- as they had not, in the period when the strike broke out. And this wildcat strike over that weekend was the most dramatic sociological experience I've ever gone into, or had, in the sense that people are just wild with anger over what was happening to them. And then, Monday morning, everything broke up when one of the Issei farm leaders, a very small, quiet, very bright man, gets up and says, "Well," he says, "Let's go back to work." and, "The administration has promised us certain kinds of corrections of the difficulty which have developed here. Let's find out from, to see whether they will fulfill what they are promising us or not, instead of striking." Then some Issei farmers yell, "Sansei, Sansei!" "Approve, approve!" with his idea. And then the whole thing breaks up and the wildcat strike is over, well, whereas the strike leaders are trying to hold the workers there, they're unable to do so because, it breaks up so suddenly. And as I say, I think it was a great demonstration of what crowds are like.

But, given that event, why then we get a series of ten -- I've written them all up in a series of reports -- about ten strikes and rebellions, and protests of one kind or another which developed at Tule Lake, ending up in mid October, late October, in a camp-wide strike, because the mess hall crew struck. I guess it was a -- yeah. And if you have the mess hall crews striking throughout the camp, why that brings everything to a halt. Because the way they struck was to say "We will not feed you, except at the times when we ring the gong, and if you're not around the camp, you're not gonna get fed." [Laughs] And the director said, "This is a Communist plot to..." You know, because it was so cleverly designed to bring everything to a halt. It was a general strike of the community.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.