THE WAR RELOCATION AUTHORITY

Statement by Leland Barrows
Former Assistant Director for Administrative Management

I was invited to speak to you this afternoon about the work of the War Relocation Authority because my long-time friend and former chief, Dillon S. Myer, who directed the War Relocation Authority during all but the first three months of its existence, is unable to appear. He would be by far the best person to talk with about this extraordinary, and I hope unique, American experience. In his absence I shall do my best, first in a brief opening statement and then in response to your questions, to give you some understanding of the War Relocation Authority and the wartime task it performed.

The War Relocation Authority (which I shall refer to heareafter as WRA) was established on March 18, 1942, by authority of Executive Order 9102, as an independent agency in the Executive Office of the President. Milton S. Eisenhower was named Director. He made several of his earliest staff selections from among people with whom he had worked in the Department of Agriculture. I was in the first group recruited, and was chosen to serve as Assistant Director for Administrative Management. Although the staff worked as a collegial body, I was directly responsible for administrative planning, budgeting, finance, personnel administration and related functions. Within ten days after the Authority was established it was asked to submit a formal budget

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proposal to the Bureau of the Budget. The urgency of the situation, in any case, forced WRA to make prompt organization and policy decisions. We used the budget to formalize and articulate those decisions. Throughout WRA's existence the budget remained a day-to-day guide to management.

In this discussion I shall necessarily draw heavily upon personal recollections, although I realize, as you do, that one person's memory of events which occurred nearly forty years ago would provide a very incomplete and perhaps misleading picture. Moreover, I left WRA in 1944 to enter the United States Coast Guard. Since much of my duty was in Washington, however, I kept in touch with my former colleagues, and have some first-hand knowledge of the period after I left. In the two weeks since I was asked to meet with you I have done as much as possible to refresh my memory and to fill the gaps in my knowledge. have talked with former associates and found two sources of written material which were especially useful.

Sources of Information

Ten years ago Dillon Myer published Uprooted Americans, a candid personal review of the work of WRA, well-documented and factual. More detailed and complete, and, because they are official documents written close to the events likely to be expecially useful to this commission, is a series of closing reports written by members of the WRA staff in 19~5 and 19~6. These ten

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documents deal with every aspect of WRA work, and of the impact of evacuation and relocation upon the Japanese American population. They are comprehensive, detailed, honest and frank. A careful examination of these reports, which are in my experience unique among government publications, would give this commission a better understanding of WRA's role in the experience you are examining than you could obtain from any other source.

Establishment of the War Relocation Authority

WRA was established to care for, supervise and relocate the people of Japanese ancestry who were forced by military order to leave their homes on the Pacific coast of the United States. It had no part in the evacuation decision. The first and basic exclusion order was issued by Lieutenant General DeWitt, Commanding General of the Western Defense Command, on March 2, 1942, two weeks before Executive Order 9102 established WRA. At first the affected people were encouraged to leave voluntarily. Many thousands did, but the largest group merely moved to the interior of California from where they were later evacuated to relocation centers when on June 2, 1942 the exclusion area was extended to include all of California.

It became evident almost at once that the vast majority of the evacuees had no means and little inclination to relocate voluntarily, and no place to go. Many who did leave, commonly by automobile, encountered

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hostility and threats to their safety. It became clear that the federal government would have to assume responsibility for moving the people, caring for them, housing them and assuring their protection. On March 27, 1942, by military order, voluntary movement was suspended. Thereafter all evacuees were moved by the government, first to Assembly Centers operated by the Army, later directly to Relocation Centers.

Nevertheless, as WRA took form and prepared to assume its responsibilities, Director Eisenhower still hoped to distribute many evacuees widely in private employment, particularly in the western states. A national sugar shortage was in prospect, and the big sugar producers were eager to recruit evacuee labor. On April 7, 1942, Eisenhower and Colonel Karl Bendetsen, who handled evacuation for General DeWitt, met with governors and other representatives of ten western states in an effort to gain their support of the idea. By a large majority they overwhelmingly rejected it and made it clear that the government would have to support and maintain the evacuees in government centers indefinitely.

WRA immediately began the task of finding sites and arranging for the necessary construction by the Army. Nine centers were needed, in addition to Manzanar, an Army Assembly Center which was transferred to WRA on June 1, 1942. All except two in Arkansas were established in the mountain states, generally on public land with agricultural potential and away from cities and strategic

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installations. They ranged in population from seven to nineteen thousand at the peak.

The Relocation Centers

Physically the Relocation Centers were typical temporary Army camps of wooden construction. The basic unit was the block, consisting of ten barracks grouped around a mess hall where all food was served. For evacuee use each barracks building was roughly partitioned into family apartments. Each block had 250 or more inhabitants. There was an inevitable lack of privacy; communal feeding made normal family cohesion difficult to maintain. There was a hospital in each center, generally a typical 200 bed Army hospital with multiple wooden buildings connected by long covered walk-ways. There was a fire station with equipment, and offices and quarters for the administrative staff which varied in number from 135 to 275 people. Schools were provided through high school, and were accredited in the states in which the centers were established. Each center developed a newspaper. A legal office, headed by an appointed member of the WRA Solicitor's staff provided legal services to the evacuees as well as advice to the center director.

Efforts to establish industrial employment and production in the centers met with very limited success. Agriculture was more successful, but seldom went beyond production for local use and transfer to other centers. Center operations - operating kitchens and mess halls,

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working in community and administrative offices, teaching school, and the other manifold activities of the community provided the bulk of evacuee employment. Pay was set at $12, $16 or $19 per month, deliberately fixed below the $21 per month pay of army privates. The nature of the job determined the rate of pay. After a time a clothing allowance of a few dollars a month was added for each family member. The pressure to spread the available work was so great that over-staffing became endemic, threatening to subvert the traditional work-ethic of the Japanese Americans.

Responsibility for feeding the evacuees gave WRA some of its most serious administrative, public relations and ultimately political problems. Mess hall operation and food supply were important in maintaining community morale. Center feeding was subject to frequent public criticism. With the nation subject to recurrent food shortages and governed by ration boards, it was easy for communities near centers to blame all their food problems on the "Jap Camps". Now and then the issue would go national, reaching a high point in the Denver Post-Dies Committee investigation of the Heart Mountain Center. At the same time, because they held Issei who were technically citizens of Japan the centers were governed by the Geneva Accords on the treatment of prisoners of war, and were subject to periodic inspection by representatives of the Spanish Embassy which handled Japanese interests in the United States. WRA spent an inordinate amount of time

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and energy trying to explain to press, public and Congress that it limited food costs to 45¢ per person per day, observed all rationing regulations, and bought only standard grades of food. It also, of course, pointed to the foodstuffs the centers produced for their own use.

Community councils, composed of a representative from each block, were established in the centers. Efforts were made to vest significant responsibility in the councils, and most of them performed effective and essential work. They were immediately responsible for the maintenance of law and order, for example, and for the trial and punishment of misdeeds which were less than felonies under local state law. But their power was, after all, subject to the over-riding authority of the center directors. Despite a constant effort to make the Relocation Centers self-reliant and as free internally as possible, they remained administered communities. Around them were the barbed wire fences, the watch towers and the military police, constant reminders that the centers could not be truly normal American cities.

Leave Clearance and Relocation

Director Myer speedily reached this conclusion, and for that and other reasons he decided that WRA should shift its emphasis from center operations to the relocation of individual evacuees anywhere in the United States from which the military orders did not exclude them. Thus began what WRA believed was the most

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constructive aspect of its task. WRA had had success in granting temporary leave to groups of evacuees for seasonal work in agricultural areas of the West. But indefinite leave of individuals presented new problems. WRA would have liked simply to open the doors and allow evacuees to leave at will and to resettle anywhere they liked outside the exclusion area. But the Director saw that such a policy, although simple, would not be feasible. He concluded that WRA could not thus abruptly relinquish responsibility for the evacuees without risking a widespread public reaction which would make relocation difficult, perhaps impossible. He issued basic leave regulations which required all evacuees who wished to relocate to satisfy WRA as to their loyalty, as to the availability of employment at the destinations they had chosen and as to their ability to finance their travel. Later WRA granted travel and limited subsistence allowances.

As relocation became the main objective of WRA's effort, relocation offices were established throughout the country, eventually totalling 47 outside the exclusion area. A "community invitation" system replaced the requirement of individual employment commitments. Sympathetic local people and organizations were found to help the relocating evacuees find housing, schooling and employment, and to smoothe their entrance into life in new communities. No evacuee in the centers was obliged to relocate, but every encouragement was given the evacuees

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to do so. WRA was convinced that the longer the evacuees remained in centers, the more difficult and less certain their eventual reestablishment in normal American life would be.

Japanese Americans in the Armed Forces

At the time of Pearl Harbor some 6,000 Japanese Americans were serving in the armed forces. Most of them were discharged, recruitment of Japanese Americans was suspended, and they were exempted from conscription, first as 4F and later as a special category, 4C. WRA believed, as did many Japanese Americans, that these discrlminations, although in a sense equitable, would become a powerful anti-Japenese argument in the hands of the racists. From the beginning WRA urged that the bar be lifted. There was also opposition to the restrictions from army officers in Hawaii where there was an all-Nisei National Guard infantry battalion ready to serve, and other Nisei who wished to volunteer. And as an exception to the general rule, Army Intelligence began the recruitment of Nisei with Japanese language skills for special training and service in the war against Japan.

Key officials of the War Department also felt that the bar against Nisei military service should be lifted. On January 28, 1943 plans were announced to form an all-Nisei Combat team to be made up of men recruited in the relocation centers and in Hawaii. WRA welcomed the announcement although it at first had misgivings about the

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segregated charcter of the unit. The Army proposed to obtain a questionnaire from each Nisei male of military age. Detailed information on each individual's background and an affirmative declaration of loyalty were to be requested of each registrant. WRA agreed to cooperate, suggested changes in procedure, and, seeing the mass registration as a way to obtain quickly the background information on the evacuees which would be necessary for granting leave clearance, proposed extending the registration to all adults.

Hurried by the military time-table, WRA's preparation for registration was inadequate. The effectiveness of its administration varied from center to center. One serious error of general impact was quickly discovered. Many Issei, ineligible by law to become American citizens, refused to sign the loyalty oath. Four days after the start of registration WRA authorized a substitute question for Issei which merely committed them not to take any action harmful to the United States. In only one center, Tule Lake, was there effective, organized opposition to registration. There, more than 4,200 refused to answer or said "no" to the loyalty question. Only 59 of the Nisei volunteered for military service. The registration period was one of the most turbulent in WRA history. Nevertheless, once the confusion had passed, the information obtained, greatly accelerated the relocation process.

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The brilliant and heroic record of the 442nd Combat Team demonstrated beyond question the value to the evacuees of reopening military service. As the Team fought its way up the Italian peninsula and across eastern France it dramatized in a way nothing else could have done, the loyalty of the Japanese Americans and the ironic injustice of their evacuation. WRA was convinced that this was not enough, and that if the Nisei went through the war exempt from conscription the stigma would be an inescapable future burden. WRA continued to urge restoration of the draft and was supported in its view by the Japanese American Citizens League. Restoration of the Nisei to normal Selective Service status was announced on January 21, 1944. Once again some evacuees understandably resisted, but generally the decision was accepted. Nearly 2,800 Nisei were inducted from the centers after January 1944.

Resurgence of Racial Hostility

For a few months after the evacuation was completed, the racist critics of the Japanese Americans were comparatively quiet. They had seen the population removed and confined in camps from which many hoped and some believed they would be shipped to Japan at the end of the war. When they learned that WRA intended as rapidly as possible to release the evacuees to those parts of the country from which they were not excluded, and to take every other means at its command to regain full status as

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Americans for the evacuees, they began to direct their fire against WRA as an organization. There had always been the feeling among the hostile element that the evacuees should have been kept under military control after the initial evacuation. So the campaign against WRA took the form of demands that it be replaced by some other agency, commonly the Army.

Ordinary criticisms such as any governmental agency might receive WRA could deal with by explanation or corrective action. But it was constantly faced with sensational charges that it was "coddling, pampering or over-feeding" the evacuees in the centers, or that its relocation program was turning "spies and saboteurs" loose upon the American people. There were both hostile press campaigns and Congressional investigations which gained nation-wide publicity. The Scripps-Howard press carried a series of sensational stories based upon wild and unfounded charges made by employees of a construction contractor at one of the Arkansas centers.

Ostensibly in response to a proposed bill introduced by Senator Wallgren of Washington to transfer WRA's functions to the War Department, a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee under Senator Chandler of Kentucky made a well-publicized investigative visit to centers in California, Arizona and Arkansas. After a burst of negative publicity, the subcommittee, blocked from the transfer idea by vigorous War Department opposition, made only three recommendations:

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(1) restoration of the draft for Japanese Americans, (2) Speeding the release of evacuees for work outside the centers, and (3) separation of loyal from disloyal evacuees.

In January 1943 the publisher of the Denver Post told a WRA officer that he regarded all people of Japanese descent as enemies of the United States and that the news and editorial policies of the paper would reflect that fact. In May, the paper began a campaign with a report that the staple food warehouses of the Heart Mountain center were heavily over-stocked. Unfortunately, because of errors both by the Army Quartermaster Corps and the center management, there was some truth to the story. The newspaper never pointed out, however, that in the actual use of food the center followed food rationing rules strictly, and that the overstocking could easily be cured by transfer of surplus stocks to other centers. More serious than the stories themselves was the fact that at this point a subcommittee of the Dies Committee under Congressman Costello from California began a long, sensationally publicized investigation which drew heavily upon stories supplied by the Denver Post reporters.

The Dies Committee

In May 1943 two investigators of the Dies Committee paid an unannounced visit to the Manzanar center and questioned the senior staff at length. On June 8, 1943 the subcommittee began a nine-day series of hearings in

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Los Angeles, giving ample attention to the charges of several employees who had been discharged from the Poston center for incompetence. The sessions were in executive session, but at the end of each day produced some sort of sensational story for the press. A reporter for the Hearst press, was stationed in Washington apparently for the purpose of writing inflammatory stories about the WRA and the evacuees. For more than a month the senior officials of WRA spent most of their time running down the facts to answer the wild stories purporing to come from the committee.

Finally, on July 6, '9~2 the WRA Director was given the chance to tell his story to the subcommittee. He had a reasunable chance to explain the relocation program, answer the most important charges against WRA, and expose the unreliability of some of the key witnesses on whom the subcommittee had relied. After all the furor, the subcommittee made only three recommendations: (1) that WRA proceed rapidly with segregation, (2) that leave clearance be taken from WRA and put in the hands of a special board, and (3) that WRA launch an Americanization program in the centers. One member, Congressman Herman P. Eberharter of Pennsylvania dissented, charging his colleagues with prejudice and with making statements most of which were unproven. On this occasion, and in a later dissent to a second critical report the committee filed following the Tule Lake incident, Mr. Eberharter showed a

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kind of fairness, freedom from prejudice, and courage which was all too rare in those days.

Segregation

For several months thereafter WRA was relatively free from attack. Then came the Tule Lake incident, the worst public relations and one of the most difficult evacuee community relations problems with which WRA ever had to deal. It was precipitated by the segregation program. Segregation was a term used to identify the sorting out of people known to be loyal to Japan or believed to present a security risk to the United States from the rest of the population. If segregation had been undertaken before evacuation, with only the segregants being evacuated and the rest left to continue their lives in place, it might have been a constructive exercise. But once all evacuees had been moved to relocation centers, segregation seemed to WRA certain to have harmful consequences which might easily outweigh its benefits. Pressure for segregation was continuous, and that which came from security sources was particularly hard to resist.

WRA always recognized that there were elements among the evacuees who were of doubtful loyalty. It also knew, however, that the alien Japanese believed by the security authorities to be really dangerous had been interned at the beginning of the war. It had learned that the Kibei, a group especially suspected by Naval Intelligence, was far from homogeneous, and included some of the most

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patriotic Americans in the centers. It also recognized that much of the disaffection in the centers was simply the natural reaction of spirited people to the way they had been treated. Nevertheless, when the Project Directors and Evacuee Councils began to favor segregation as a way of reducing tensions in the centers, WRA decided to move.

No facilities for a segregation center could be found outside "the existing centers. An inevitably disturbing move was made worse by the necessity to use an existing center, move out the regular evacuees and move in the segregants. Tule Lake was chosen because it could accommodate the expected population, it had abundant agricultural land, and it contained the largest number of potential segregants. The major segregation moves were made between the middle of September and the Middle of October, 1943. Four categories of people were segregated: (1) Those who had requested repatriation to Japan, (2) Those who had said "no" to the loyalty question during the mass registration and declined in individual hearings to change their decision, (3) Evacuees denied leave clearance for cause, and (4) Family members of the first three groups. There was to be no leave from the segregation center and only limited self government. It is obvious that the segregation process destroyed the normal social structure of the Tule Lake community and left only a varied group which soon broke into factions. The project administration was unprepared to substitute for the

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community structure upon which it had come to rely, and perhaps did not realize the extent to which conditions had been changed.

The Tule Lake Troubles

Trouble began as a result of a truck accident in which several agricultural workers were injured and one died. A dissident group seized upon the incident to demand that Tule Lake cease to produce food for other centers. A general farm strike followed. Faced with the urgent neccessity to save crops ready for harvest and needed at other centers, WRA brought workers from other centers to complete the work. On October 26, 19043 a committee claiming to be representative met with the center director to demand a "resegregation" within the center, separating the truly pro-Japanese from others who, the committee said, had chosen segregation to avoid relocation or conscription. They also asked the food production for other centers be stopped. The director agreed to the second request but rejected the other recommendations.

On November 1, Director Myer visited the center for conference with the center staff and for a scheduled meeting with evacuee representatives. The day before the scheduled meeting a large crowd gathered outside the project director's office. They demanded that a committee meet with the national director. After pointing out that he was planning to meet them the next day, Mr. Myer met

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with essentially the same group which had met the center director the week before. They repeated the requests they had previously made and added that the center director and other staff should be removed. Mr. Myer refused to accede to pressure, but said the center director would give full consideration to their proposals as soon as possible. While this meeting was going on, a controversy in which blows were exchanged broke out between a group of evacuees and the center medical director. Investigation established no connection between the two events but reports outside the center soon described the two as evidence of a plot and the breakdown of order.

Tule Lake was calm for two days after the national director left the center to continue his tour of inspection. Then, without warning, on the night of November 4 a well-organized group of young men armed with clubs moved into the administrative area in an attempt to prevent food from being removed from the warehouses for the volunteer harvest workers from the other centers. An member of the internal security staff member was injured, and the crowd began to move toward the center director's residence. The military police from the perimeter guard were called in and the center came under military control. It did not return to WRA control until January 1944.

Then WRA found the Tule Lake community split into factions and the entire work force on strike. Months of careful effort, which began with a back-to-work movement, were required to regain a measure of evacuee confidence.

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On July 1, 1944, the president approved an amendment to the nationality code to permit renunciation of citizenship. The amendment, although general in language was obviously intended for the Nisei. The Justice Department began renunciation hearings in Tule Lake late in November, just as the Army was preparing to lift the exclusion orders on the Pacific coast. Thus once more external forces brought tensions to the center. In the abnormal atmosphere of Tule Lake, nearly 5,500 people signed renunciation applications. Some, later withdrew their applications, but 4,300 men, women, and children from Tule Lake eventually went to Japan.

The impact of the Tule Lake troubles outside the center was in some ways even more serious. The facts were distrubing enough, but the versions which circulated in the press and by word of mouth were much worse. WRA's credibility was seriously impaired by a breakdown in communications during the trouble and by inability to report on the center during the period of military administration. The Dies Committee resumed investigation, a committee of California launched an investigation, and several individual Congressmen got into the act. Most saddening to WRA was a scathing editorial attack by the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper which had always been fair and supportive of WRA and the Japanese Americans. Among many critical proposals was a recommendation to transfer WRA functions to the Department of Justice. WRA had clearly become a national political issue. On

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February 16, 1944, it was transferred by executive order to the Department of Interior.

Beginning of the End

As the year 1944 progressed, WRA concentrated more and more on relocation and began to look forward, and to push quietly for the lifting of the exclusion orders. As Americans throughout the country came to know Japanese Americans personally, the ignorance which was the root of their fears began to disappear. The glorious record of the Nisei soldiers in Europe won acceptance and goodwill for all Japanese Americans. Although there were certain favored centers, Chicago, Denver and Salt Lake City, for example, everyone of the 48 states except South Carolina received some relocated evacuees.

The Last Problem - Closing the Centers

On December 18, 1944, the day after the Army revoked the mass exclusion orders, WRA announced that all relocation centers would be closed sometime between six months and one year after January 2, 1945, the actual effective date of the revocation. This launched WRA into a comprehensive liquidation effort and confronted it with its last major public relations problem. Few of the evacuees greeted the announcement with enthusiasm; many were apathetic; some were hostile. As evacuees began to trickle back to their former homes, some encountered the

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old racial hostility. To help deal with the problem WRA established relocation offices in the former exclusion area. It had invaluable help In overcoming prejudice from a group of white military officers who had served with the Nisei and who went up and down California speaking on behalf of the returning evacuees.

Many of the evacuees simply did not wish to leave. WRA recognized that some, particulary several hundred bachelor Issei, would require help to become reestablished, and in some cases might become public charges. But the WRA Director was convinced that the centers would have to be closed and the population returned to normal communities, or they risked becoming permanent wards of the federal government. Organized opposition to WRA liquidation plans developed, supported by some who had previously been among WRA's strongest supporters, good people who thought it heartless to force evacuees to move. Organized opposition, especially in the Los Angeles area, came also from Nisei who had already returned and were reluctant to assume the family burdens which center liquidation might bring them. On the other hand, WRA had to fix a firm schedule well in advance in order to obtain the necessary trains from the overloaded transportation network. All of these problems were somehow solved, the evacuees were all relocated, and the centers were closed on time.

WRA never saw its responsibility as limited to the "removal ... relocation, maintenance, and supervision" of

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the evacuees. It felt the duty to do everything within its power to mitigate the harm done by exclusion and to help the Japanese Americans regain the rights and status of Americans. Within the limits set by the atmosphere of the time and the military necessities of global war, it took every important decision and planned every action with that goal in mind.

With the closing of the centers WRA's basic work was done. One task it was obliged to leave unfinished development of a procedure for compensating evacuees for property lost because of being required to move. As one of its last acts, WRA drafted proposed legislation establishing a claims procedure and vesting its administration in the Department of the Interior. I understand that when such a bill was passed the task of administration was given to the Department of Justice.

Looking back upon the relocation experience WRA feels it can point to at least one constructive consequence. Of the 110,000 people who were in the relocation centers only a few more than half returned to the areas from which they were evacuated. The remainder found homes throughout the United States. This wide dissemination, I am convinced, has helped to give the Americans of Japanese descent, the secure and respected place they now occupy in American society.