III. The ASEAO Program in Operation

The main purpose of the ASEAO program was as a funding mechanism to provide some assistance to persons who were under government restriction, such as forced relocation from sensitive defense areas or internment. The SSB did not participate in any of the decisions that resulted in these restrictions, and the SSB's role was ameliorative in that it paid monetary benefits and provided in-kind goods and services to some of the affected individuals and families.

The aid under ASEAO was a welfare benefit, provided only to those persons who, in addition to their other circumstances, were financially needy. Thus, not all relocated or interned individuals were served by this program. In general, the aid was meager, in keeping with the prevailing standards for state-provided welfare in that era. Also, the amount of aid provided in a given locale was conditioned by the prevailing standards in that locale--there were no uniform federal benefit amounts, although there were federal schedules for some unusual types of payments, such as those for furniture and household furnishings. Even so, the aid was more generous than standard welfare benefits in that some expenses that would not be reimbursed in general welfare programs--such as resettlement across state lines--were allowed in the ASEAO program.

The aid was provided through existing state and local welfare agencies, with the federal program as the funding source and the global policy maker--in much the same way the grants-in-aid programs of the Social Security Act had traditionally been administered. The aid was provided in three circumstances.

Those individuals or families who were ordered to relocate but who lacked the means to do so were given relocation assistance in the form of payment of transportation costs, shipping of household goods, assistance in locating new housing, sometimes new furniture and household supplies, often a brief cash stipend to get the family started in the new location, and even help in finding a new job. These moves were usually to nearby non-exclusion areas, but could be interstate.

Relocation assistance was interpreted broadly enough that persons who lost their jobs due to the travel restrictions or curfews limiting their employability, were potentially eligible for aid under the ASEAO program, even if they were not in fact relocated from their homes. However, resident aliens who lost their jobs due to prejudice on the part of employers were not eligible for aid--their adverse circumstance had to be directly connected in some manner to the government's actions.

Those families left behind when a breadwinner was incarcerated in an internment center, and who were financially needy, could receive ongoing monthly welfare benefits under the auspices of the ASEAO program for the entire period of their internee's detention. These benefits proved to be a crucial lifeline to many families who would otherwise have been left destitute by the government's action. Without the ASEAO program it is doubtful that all or even most jurisdictions would have voluntarily provided welfare benefits for these groups out of existing state or local funds. The presence of federal money earmarked for this purpose (as well as the federal reimbursement of state/local administrative expenses) provided a powerful incentive for the provision of assistance to these individuals. Moreover, as we will see, the federal government's role as global policymaker for the ASEAO program led to the adoption of many permissive policies that it is virtually certain would not have been done in many local jurisdictions in the absence of these federal mandates.

The third form of assistance was resettlement assistance provided to formerly interned persons who had been released from their internment and had to be resettled in the community. Releases from internment happened piecemeal throughout the war, and massively near the end of the war when all government restrictions were lifted in early 1945. Those persons lacking the financial wherewithal to resettle on their own, could apply to the ASEAO program for assistance. The resettlement assistance took the same forms as that provided to evacuees under the relocation assistance described above.

The internees themselves, while in government custody, were not aided by the ASEAO program. Their support was the responsibility of the custodial agency--either the War Department, the Department of Justice, or the War Relocation Authority. ⁽¹⁾

No new government bureaucracy was created to administer the ASEAO program. All aid was provided through the existing network of state/local welfare agencies, using, for the most part, the existing staff of welfare caseworkers. At the federal level, the Bureau of Public Assistance (BPA) within the SSB administered the cash benefit parts of the program; the Board's Bureau of Employment Security provided the job placement services; and the FSA's Public Health Service provided some medical care outside of the camps.

Within three days of the President's February 6th letter, the WCCA had set up operations in 29 offices along the coast of California (eventually, there would be 171 WCCA stations in operation in the states of Washington, Oregon, California and Arizona). Regional BPA officials provided some professional staff to these offices, provided direct supervision of the public assistance staffs, and provided overall federal policy oversight of the conduct of the public assistance portions of the WCCA operations. During the Phase 1 evacuations (February 9-March 7), BPA-supervised staff interviewed over 11,000 Japanese, German and Italian families, only 157 of whom (1 Italian, 11 German, and 145 Japanese) requested financial assistance in their relocations. ⁽²⁾ After the initial rush of interviews, the responsibility for the ongoing operation of the program was turned over to existing state agencies. As one SSB official later described these initial interviews:

Among these individuals and families were found many who had lived and worked in the communities for the greater part of their lives, and some who were German-Jewish refugees. There were alien parents whose sons, and alien women whose husbands, were serving in the armed forces; one alien parent whose son had been killed at Pearl Harbor. There were Italian fishermen who had already been barred from pursuing their occupations and were now required to move from seaside communities. In some families, a member had already been apprehended and detained. ⁽³⁾

In terms of the number of persons aided, the available statistics are ambiguous in key respects. The SSB reported its activities in terms of "cases." A "case" might be a single person or an entire family. The total number of cases receiving cash assistance under the ASEAO program was 17,861. The total numbers of cases listed as "receiving service only" was 13,415. ⁽⁴⁾ (A case receiving cash assistance might also be receiving services as well.) Moreover, it is important to understand that these are not necessarily unique individuals or unique cases. The SSB reported its data in the form of monthly pending caseloads. Thus a family might, for example, have received relocation assistance in early 1942, and then gone off the rolls when they entered a WRA camp, to reappear on the ASEAO rolls in early 1945 when this same family began receiving resettlement assistance after leaving the WRA camp. Such a family would be counted as two "cases" under the procedures used by the SSB.

On the other hand, the figures understate the number of persons aided by the program because the case-load reports do not in general identify the number of persons included in each case. We know from some limited reports that, for example, the typical Japanese internee family consisted of, on average, 3.6 persons, so we could reasonably expect that the cases reported under the ASEAO program might easily represent three times as many persons. ⁽⁵⁾ However, since we cannot eliminate duplicate cases, we simply have no way of knowing how many of the 158,000 or so unique individuals affected by the restrictive government actions were served by the ASEAO program. The figure was perhaps in the tens of thousands, but more than that we cannot say, based on the available data.

As can be seen from Table 3, the cash benefits (totaling $1.3 million) peaked in the final two years of the program, indicating that the resettlement was the costliest phase of the program. Adding the additional $617,232 spent for administrative expenses, would be bring total dollar spending under the ASEAO program to approximately $1.9 million. These "administrative expenditures" were actually federal reimbursements from WCCA funds for SSB program costs. This expenditure was thus an indirect form of subsidy to the ASEAO program, rather than "overhead" in a traditional sense, and it might well be considered as part of the funds expended on behalf of the program, raising the total cash expenditures to the $1.9 million figure.(For comparison purposes, the War Relocation Authority spend a total of $158 million for the entire relocation and internment process. Also, for comparison, $1.9 million in 1940s-era dollars translates into roughly $20 million in 2004 dollars.) ⁽⁶⁾

The Federal Security Agency during this period opened an office in Los Angeles. . . . At first no one came for assistance; so the FSA contacted ministers, the JACL, the American Friends Service Committee, to make known their availability to people who needed advice and financial assistance. . . . The social workers knew it was futile to tell Japanese to register with the U.S. Employment Service since members of their race were being discharged in large numbers rather than being employed.

The FSA spent $300 on eighteen out of the 1,200 families who came to the Los Angeles office between February 9 and March 9. Only a fraction of a $500,000 assistance fund was used. ⁽⁷⁾

In his book on the Italian internments, historian Stephen Fox devotes a brief chapter to the topic of the ASEAO program. ⁽⁹⁾ He repeats the supposition from Girdner and Loftis that only a tiny fraction of the $500,000 allocation was actually used. Fox also invites us to consider as significant the fact that none of the 40 or so Italian internees whom he interviewed remembers anything about the federal aid through the ASEAO program--excerpts from seven of his interviews in which this question is asked in fact constitute the bulk of his chapter. Since we do not really know the number of persons served by the ASEAO program, it is unclear whether Fox's 40 interviews are a sufficient sample on which to base any firm conclusions. But one might reasonably expect the former internees to have been aware of the program. Fox does document the fact that the Social Security Board made efforts through the newspapers to publicize the assistance and in-kind support it provided. ⁽¹⁰⁾

Fox also incorrectly reports that the reimbursement data for the ASEAO program is "unavailable," although he did manage to discover some partial figures for ten of California's fifty-one counties. On the basis of this partial information he concludes the ASEAO program spent about $22,000 in California from November 1942 through June 1944, and that 72% of this money went to administrative expenses. He further reports that the number of cases receiving aid peaked in January 1943 at 29; and he implies that aid to California under the ASEAO program ended in June 1944. However, as can be seen from Table 3 on page 22, more than $191,000 was expended in California up through December 1945, and in that month alone, 1,155 cases were in receipt of cash assistance and another 253 cases were receiving services only.

As to administrative expenses, of the $1.9 million expended under the ASEAO program, $617,000, or about 32%, went for something categorized in the reports as "administrative expenditures." But here again, these were not "overhead" in a traditional sense. In any case, Fox's partial-county data paints a very misleading picture of the size and scope of the ASEAO program.

From accounts such as these, the ASEAO program seems an utter failure, helping only a handful of people and unable to even give away more than a "fraction" of its initial allocation. In fact, the ASEAO program aided several thousand persons with cash assistance, in an aggregate amount that would be the equivalent of $20 million in 2004 terms, plus an uncounted additional amount of in-kind goods and services.

1. The WRA itself was responsible for some initial assistance to all persons leaving internment from its relocation centers. Generally, this was a one-time stipend for travel and/or shipping of household goods. Beyond this one-time stipend, any more elaborate or sustained assistance was provided by the ASEAO program.

2. Leahy, 1945, 34.

3. Leahy, 1945, 28.

4. "Assistance to enemy aliens and other restricted persons: Number of cases receiving service only, number of cases receiving assistance, and amount of assistance payments, February 1942-November 1946," undated report from Bureau of Public Assistance, SSB. Document in National Archives II, BPA Master File of Civilian War Assistance to Enemy Aliens, Box 14. (A portion of these data are reproduced in Table 3 on page 22.)

5. Social Security Bulletin, Vol. V, No. 10, October 1942, page 29, table 5 and page 30, table 7.

6. Calculations by author, based on table of Conversion Factors constructed by Robert Sahr, http://oregonstate.edu/dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/sahr.htm [accessed May 2004].

7. Girdner and Loftis, The Great Betrayal:106.

8. Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 5, No. 10, (October 1942), Table 1, 27.

9. Fox, The Unknown Internment, 140-150.

10. Fox, ibid.