After Camp - Greg Robinson

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or shared information, I wish to recognize particularly Konomi Ara, Taunya Lovell Banks, Jane Beckwith, Ben Carton, Robert Chang, Theo Chino, Margaret Chon, Frank Chuman, Michi De Sola, Emory Elliott, Mark Elliott, Frank Emi, Peter Eisenstadt, Kathy Ferguson, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Robert Frase, Max Friedman, Ben Hamamoto, Gerald Haslam, Alan Hayakawa, Wynne Hayakawa, Robert Hayashi, Ike Hatchimonji, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, William Hohri, Lei Hong, Kazu Iijima, Ernest and Chizu Iiyama, Tamio IkedaSpiegel and Julie Azuma, Jerry Kang, Tetsuden Kashima, Nori Komorita, Lon Kurashige, Yosh and Irene Kuromiya, Emory and Ayleen Ito Lee, Cherstin Lyon, Hugh Macbeth Jr., Daryl Maeda, John M. Maki, John M. Maki Jr., Greg Marutani, Marie Masumoto, Valerie Matsumoto, Yanek Mieczkowski, Dale Minami, John Mirikitani, Frank Miyamoto, Gerri Miyazaki, Marge and Aki Morimoto, Andrew Morris, Hiroshi Motomura, Philip Tajitsu Nash, Setsuko M. Nishi, Franklin Odo, Gene Oishi, Paul Okimoto, Chizu Omori, Peggy L. Powell, Cyril Powles, Toru Saito, Yasuo and Lily Sasaki, Naoko Shibusawa, Cedrick Shimo, Amy K. Stillman, Ina Sugihara Jones, Lewis Suzuki, Guyo Tajiri, Yoshiko Tajiri, Paul Takagi, Barbara Takei, Jim and Yoshie Tanabe, Russ Tremayne, Andrew Wertheimer, Duncan R. Williams, Paul Yamada, Eric Yamamoto, Hisaye Yamamoto, Traise Yamamoto, and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick.

      Kenji Taguma, editor of the Nichi Bei Times (now Nichi Bei Weekly), hired me in 2007 to serve as columnist for that historic journal. In the process my work has reached an entirely new audience and I have been able to form enduring bonds with readers and community members. I have benefited in countless ways from Kenji's warm friendship and kindness. Both Kenji and J. K. Yamamoto of the now-defunct Hokubei Mainichi generously permitted me access to their respective journals' back files. DENSHO, led by the magnificent Tom Ikeda, has been an exceptional force in preserving Japanese American memory, and its online archives are a primary source of material. The staff at the Japanese American National Museum have been exceedingly friendly and helpful.

      Numerous kindly relatives and friends provided logistical (as well as moral) support and/or put me up during research trips: Janet Baba, Judy Baker, Ken Feinour and Shin Yamamoto, Ed Robinson and Ellen Fine, Sheila Hamanaka, Craig Howes, Kwong-Liem Karl Kwan, Christopher Legge, Michael Massing, Martha Nakagawa, Heng Gun Ngo, Paul Okimoto, Chizu Omori, Neal Plotkin and Deborah Malamud, Rick and Maki Pakola, Sydelle Postman, Katherine Quittner, Jaime Restrepo, Ian Robinson, Jocelyn Robinson, the late Lillian Robinson, Tracy Robinson, Mitziko Sawada, Rob and Louisa Snyder, Bruce and Sondra Stave, Frank Wu and Carol Izumi, Terry Yoshikawa, and Fidel Zavala and Mark Williams.

      In addition to assisting with document research, Thanapat Porjit has brought sunshine into my life.

      Finally, this book would not have been possible without the contributions of my beloved mother, the late Toni Robinson. In 1998, after retiring for health reasons from her law practice, in which I had worked as her legal assistant, Toni grew absorbed in my evolving research on Nisei, interminority relations, and civil rights, and eagerly read through the material I uncovered. Intrigued by her insights, I invited her to collaborate with me. She accepted on condition that our blood relationship not be publicly identified, as she did not wish to seem a scholarly interloper. We started writing together, presented as a team at academic conferences, and completed a pair of law journal articles together. In July 2002, shortly before Toni left on a vacation trip to Europe, we finished revising one of these articles for publication, and we discussed expanding the other one into a book once she returned. Sadly, Toni collapsed during the trip and died a few weeks later. The two works subsequently appeared in print and remain my most-cited articles. While I have done considerable work on my own in more recent years, this collection represents in a larger sense the book we did not get to write together; not only do its contents incorporate our two joint pieces, but the rest is equally inspired by our discussions and by Toni's generous, lively spirit.

      PART I

      Resettlement and New Lives

      1. Political Science?

       FDR, Japanese Americans, and thePostwar Dispersion of Minorities

      The term political science usually refers to all the ways—polls, models, and statistics—that academics have used to bring scientific principles to the study of political behavior. Yet my use of these two words comes from a completely opposite direction and refers to the use of science for political purposes—an unexamined aspect of the domestic and foreign policy of President Franklin Roosevelt during the years of World War II. FDR and his advisors, believing that concentration of minority groups, especially urban-based, within established nations bred poverty and intergroup tensions, sought to alleviate conflict by scientifically planning the mass migration and absorption of unwanted groups into rural and underpopulated areas. Through the mass dispersion and assimilation of ethnic and racial minority populations, the United States would promote peace and economic growth.

      My focus is divided into two distinct, though interrelated, dispersion initiatives. The first one took place within the United States. Here, during 1943-44, Roosevelt formulated plans to “distribute” incarcerated Japanese Americans in small groups throughout the country to solve the “Japanese problem.” He meanwhile considered various proposals for the scattering of Jews and other immigrants. On the international side, FDR commissioned the M Project (the M standing for migration), a top-secret anthropological study by a team of scholars that eventually encompassed some six hundred reports, essays, and translations of articles on human migration and settlement. The goal of this project was to provide the president with expert advice on the possibilities for large-scale postwar relocation of millions of European refugees and members of unwanted populations to Latin America in accordance with Darwinian racial principles. The study of these interconnected programs reveals both the complexities of Franklin Roosevelt's views of race and society and the paradoxical nature of social engineering for Issei and Nisei.1

      Franklin Roosevelt's interest in demographics and migration developed early. As a child he noted the tensions stirred by the presence of a French Canadian minority in his grandfather's hometown of Fairhaven, Massachusetts. When he grew to manhood and moved to New York City, he was regularly exposed to nativist fears of immigrants and to the countervailing efforts of settlement workers (including his future wife, Eleanor) and other progressives to “Americanize” the newcomers. In 1920, during his unsuccessful campaign as Democratic candidate for vice president, the young FDR expressed his ideas on the subject in an interview with the daily newspaper Brooklyn Eagle:

      Our main trouble in the past has been that we have permitted the foreign elements to segregate in colonies. They have crowded into one district and they have brought congestion and racial prejudices to our large cities. The result is that they do not easily conform to the manners and the customs and the requirements of their new home. Now, the remedy for this should be greater distribution of aliens in various parts of the country. If we had the greater part of the foreign population of the City of New York distributed to different localities upstate we should have a far better condition. Of course, this could not be done by legislative enactment. It could only be done by inducement—if better financial conditions and better living conditions could be offered to the alien dwellers in the cities.

      During the mid-1920s, when he was a private citizen, Roosevelt expressed his admiration for the Canadian government's policy of assisted settlement of European immigrants in agricultural regions: “When the individual or family in the European country applies to the Canadian agent for permission to come over he must agree to go to one of the sections of Canada which is not already too full of foreigners. If, twenty-five years ago, the United States had adopted a policy of this kind we would not have the huge foreign sections which exist in so many of our cities.”2

      Even as Roosevelt expressed interest in resettling existing urban immigrants, he articulated support for official restrictions on immigration, in ways that followed popular racist prejudices. In 1925, one year after Congress passed a restrictive immigration act that effectively banned immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Roosevelt affirmed that European immigrants should be barred “for a good many years to come” so that the United States could “digest” (i.e., assimilate and Americanize) those who had been admitted already, and he added that the government should concentrate henceforth on admitting only the most

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