| Master's Thesis - Chapter 1 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I. The Wartime Internments & Other "Restrictive Governmental Actions" It is a well known episode in American history that during World War II the U.S. government forcibly interned somewhere between 110,000 and 130,000 Japanese aliens and Japanese-American residents of the west coast. (1) About 120,000 individuals were interned in one of ten Relocation Centers, and perhaps as many as an additional 9,000 were placed in custodial detention in one of 55 detention centers run by the Department of the Army or the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Approximately 42% of the affected Japanese were resident aliens and the remaining 58% were American citizens. Not all Japanese were placed in internment; some were simply relocated to interior areas of the continental United States in order to remove them from "militarily sensitive" areas on the two coasts and the southern border. In fact, as many as 5,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from the west coast resettled outside of California and avoided internment. (2) Likewise, the 15,000 or so persons of Japanese ancestry living other places besides the militarily sensitive areas were neither relocated nor interned. A special federal agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA)--which was initially in the Executive Office of the President but eventually was transferred to the Department of the Interior--oversaw the relocations and managed the ten major internment camps. The WRA was first headed by Dwight Eisenhower's brother, Milton Eisenhower, and then, for bulk of the War, by Dillon S. Myer. It is less well-known that these wartime internments and relocations included resident Germans and Italians as well-overwhelmingly, resident aliens, but a handful of German-American and Italian-American citizens as well (the percentage breakdown of citizens vs. non-citizens is unknown). The persons of European ancestry were typically arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and detained under the rubric of the Custodial Detention Program (CDP). About 9,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were also detained under the CDP procedures, some of whom were subsequently transferred to the WRA camps. (3) CDP internees were held in camps run either by the INS or the Army. In total, there were 55 CDP internment camps (which primarily housed Europeans), in addition to the ten WRA Relocation Centers, which contained persons of Japanese ancestry, almost exclusively. It is very difficult to recover reliable figures for the number of persons interned under the CDP procedures, owing to the general secrecy surrounding these detentions. The FBI did not open its operations to public review nor were the 55 CDP internment centers open for public scrutiny the way the ten WRA internment centers were. The existing photographs of operations in the CDP centers, for example, were all taken surreptitiously by camp guards or inmates, whereas the WRA camps were extensively documented by such renowned photographers as Ansel Adams and Dorthea Lange. Historian Arnold Krammer has reported that during the war the FBI arrested a total of 31,275 individuals, of which 16,849 were Japanese; 10,095 Germans; and 3,278 Italians. (4) Not all those arrested were interned; some were briefly detained then released under conditions similar to criminal parole; others were interviewed and released outright. So Krammer's figures are not necessarily the number of internees under the CDP program. In addition to American residents arrested under the CDP procedures, the FBI arrested and interned foreign merchant seamen and other non-resident foreigners who were citizens of the Axis powers and who were unlucky enough to be in America at the outbreak of the war. In addition, some Latin American governments transferred their own internees to U.S. detention facilities. According to journalist Michelle Malkin, the total population in custody under the CDP program was 25,655 (see Table 1, page 5, for a breakdown by ancestral group), compared with about 110,000 interned persons at the peak population point in the WRA centers. (5) The CDP numbers must be viewed, however, as somewhat uncertain given the lack of official government reports or serious scholarly studies of this program. (See Table 1 for summary estimates for the numbers of persons affected by these restrictive governmental actions.) The number of internees, however, is not a full indication of the number of persons affected by the "restrictive governmental actions." Resident aliens in all three groups were subject to various government-imposed restrictions on their actions. Among other restrictions, aliens in all three groups (but not citizens) were forbidden to possess short-wave radios, cameras, or weapons, and any they did own were seized. The government reported that during the war it conducted searches of the homes of nearly 2,900 Italian families, seizing contraband from 1,632 individuals. (6) Every non-interned resident alien of the three groups also had to carry special identification during the war and their freedom of travel was restricted and they were also subject to dusk to dawn curfews if they lived in certain "restricted areas" of the west coast, east coast and southern border. Italian fishermen on the west coast were forbidden from plying their trade, even if they were not forced to relocate, and resident aliens in all three groups were subject to loss of employment due to the limitations imposed on them by the travel restrictions and curfews.
These restrictive governmental actions actually went through several stages. Starting on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, President Roosevelt issued a series of orders authorizing a progressively more harsh sequence of actions. For our purposes, we can mark out five distinct phases of these restrictive governmental actions. Phase 1: The Round-Up of Enemy Aliens- Starting within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued three proclamations declaring resident aliens of the three Axis powers to be "enemy aliens." (12) The designation of these populations as "enemy aliens" authorized the Department of Justice (DOJ) to arrest and detain them under authority of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Thus resident aliens of the three Axis powers who, for some reason or other, had come to the attention of the authorities as being potentially disloyal, were rounded up in the months following Pearl Harbor. This round-up included Germans, Italians and Japanese, primarily on the two coasts. Persons interned in this phase were housed in one of 55 INS or Army detention centers. This "phase" continued as an ongoing program (under the rubric of the CDP program) throughout the war, although the bulk of the arrests occurred during the early months of the war. Phase 2: Self-initiated Relocations- On January 29, 1942 the Attorney General issued a statement defining 137 geographical areas on the west coast and southern Arizona as "prohibited areas," and other large areas as "restricted." Resident aliens of the Axis powers living in the prohibited zones were ordered to move, on their own initiative, but no later than February 24, 1942. Resident aliens living in restricted areas were subject to limitations on free movement, curfews, and the like. This order affected Italian and German resident aliens as well as Japanese. Estimates are that 5,000 Japanese and as many as 10,000 Italians "voluntarily" relocated during the War (the number of relocated Germans is unknown). Phase 3: Removal of Persons of Japanese Ancestry- The Commanding General of the Army's Western Defense Command, John L. DeWitt, complained that Phases 1 and 2 were insufficient and so on February 19, 1942 President Roosevelt issued the infamous Executive Order 9066 that allowed General DeWitt to remove all persons (no nationalities were mentioned) from the prohibited areas. General DeWitt issued a mass evacuation order, with an effective date of March 7, 1942. DeWitt's order, however, only directed persons of Japanese ancestry to evacuate the prohibited areas. On March 11, 1942 DeWitt created an Army agency to manage the evacuation process--the Wartime Civil Control Administration (WCCA) which, with the War Relocation Authority, were the two federal agencies with direct responsibility for the Japanese evacuations and internments. Initially, the movement of people from the prohibited areas in Phase 3 was to be carried out, as under the earlier DOJ order, voluntarily. However, as the evacuations did not proceed fast enough for General DeWitt's satisfaction, on March 29, 1942 he amended his order to make the evacuations forced. Thus began the forced relocation and internment of the Japanese living on the west coast. Phase 4: The Internments- Prior to placement in permanent camps, Japanese evacuees were housed in one of 15 make-shift "Assembly Centers." These were hastily-constructed temporary shelters in all sorts of large public spaces. For example, the infield at Santa Anita racetrack in suburban Los Angeles was temporarily home to 18,000 displaced Japanese. From the Assembly Centers detainees went into one of 10 WRA "Relocation Centers" around the country, where they remained for the duration of their internment. Phase 5: The Resettlement & Return- The internments were not absolute nor irrevocable, for most internees. Even before the removal of Japanese residents from the "prohibited areas" was completed in August 1942, individuals who had been interned earlier were being released back into the community. Resettlements of the Japanese internees actually began in July 1942, but did not acquire significant momentum until the Spring of 1943 when release and resettlement became available to large numbers of internees. By September 1943, approximately 15,000 Japanese had been released and resettled back into the community (although not in their homes in the prohibited areas). By December 1944, almost 37,000 individuals had left the internment centers--including about 1,200 to voluntarily join the U.S. Armed Forces and another 2,500 who were drafted. The number of persons of German or Italian descent released from detention at various points in time is unknown. All restrictive government orders were rescinded on January 2, 1945, freeing all internees, except those still believed to be disloyal to the United States. At that point, there were still about 80,000 residents of the 10 WRA internment camps. It would be June of 1946 before all the internees would in fact leave the WRA camps. Large numbers of former internees were relocated to the upper Midwest; although there was some resettlement in every state in the continental U.S., with the possible exception of South Carolina. (13) For purposes of the present study, the pertinent point is that all three of these populations (persons of German, Italian and Japanese ancestry), and both of these programs (the WRA and the CDP programs), included persons who were potential clients of the ASEAO program. Moreover, the pattern of development of the ASEAO program over time, and the types of services delivered at a given point in time, tracked the sequence of events of the broader relocations, internments, and other "restrictive governmental actions." 1. See Table 1 on page 5 for a detailed breakdown of the number of internees. 2. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1997), 103. 3. See Tables 1 and 2 for the detailed totals. Note that in the case of the Japanese, there is some overlap in the figures for the two programs as some persons first detained under the CDP procedures were later transferred to the WRA camps and hence appear in both totals. 4. Arnold Krammer, Undue Process: The Untold Story of America's German Alien Internees, (London, Rowman and Littlefield, 1997),166. There is some ambiguity in Krammer's numbers regarding the Italians arrested, as he reports that 3,503 were arrested between December 7, 1941 and June 30, 1945, yet he cites the slightly lower figure as the being the "total arrested during the war." 5. The CDP numbers are from: Michelle Malkin, In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror, (Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, 2004) 53; and Krammer, 1997,167. The WRA data is from Table 2, page 6. 6. Report to the Congress of the United States: A Review of the Restrictions on Persons of Italian Ancestry During World War II, (Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, December 2001): 24. 7. This table is a compilation from the various sources cited in the text, including Table 2, on the following page. 8. The data in this column is from Malkin, 2004, 53-54. Malkin gives a figure of 11,229 Japanese internees in DOJ/Army custody; but this figure includes 2,220 former residents of Latin America of Japanese ancestry who were imported into the U.S. to be interned here during the war. These Latin American cases have been displayed separately for purposes of this table. (Also note that there is an duplication of about 1,700 Japanese who appear in both the WRA and DOJ/Army columns.) 9. The number Germans or Italians subject to restrictions is the number of resident aliens of these two groups living in the U.S. at the time of the 1940 U.S. Census, all of whom were initially subject to restrictions. 10. This figure is from the "findings" section of P.L. 106-451, the "Wartime Violations of Italian Americans Civil Liberties Act," signed into law by President Bill Clinton in November 2000. 11.
Table 2 is from the War Relocation Authority and appeared in several
of their publications. It is also reprinted in Personal
Justice Denied, 150. In interpreting the chart it is important
to understand that the number of people in WRA custody is the number who
came into custody anytime throughout the existence of the WRA--there was
no point in time at which over 120,000 people were in the internment camps.
The high-point in official camp residence occurred in January 1943 at
which time there were 110,240 residents on the books. However, this included
a number of persons who were absent from the camp on temporary leaves
so the actual high-point was somewhat less than 110,000.
12.
The Japanese were so-declared on December 7th, and the Germans and
Italians on December 8th.
13.
A September 1, 1944 status report showed every state having received
resettled internees with the exception of South Carolina.
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