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After Camp. Greg Robinson
Читать онлайн.Название After Camp
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520952270
Автор произведения Greg Robinson
Издательство Ingram
By mid-1943, the M Project was issuing reports almost on a daily basis. In Field's words, the task was to prepare “world-wide studies on areas with surplus population, their racial and religious composition, and their nationals' potential skill and adaptability as emigrants.” M Project staffers drafted studies of previous settlement attempts and of immigration laws of potential settler countries, as well as reports, translations, lectures, and memoranda on a wide variety of topics, including maize in Siberia, animal husbandry and the development of the paper industry in British Guiana, soils of San Carlos and Valencia, Venezuela, and the American Jewish Committee's detailed studies of eastern European Jews and Jewish colonies in Saskatchewan, Argentina, and other places.
Roosevelt remained informed about and interested in the M Project, although he had no direct contact with the staffers and did not issue further agenda items for M Project studies, apart from allegedly commissioning special reports on the status of Jews and minorities in the Soviet Union for ammunition prior to his meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at Teheran. In October 1943, he invited Field to visit him at Shangri-La, the presidential retreat in Maryland (later known as Camp David), and encouraged him to continue the M Project. The resettlement of millions of refugees, according to FDR, “was not only desirable from a humanitarian standpoint, but essential from a military point of view as well…For the discontented can and will cause trouble, serious trouble.”25 Field would later claim that Roosevelt envisioned a wide network of irrigation canals to enable Europeans to resettle in the deserts of North Africa, as well as a project to use desalinated Mediterranean seawater to make North Africa the granary of Europe. Although he was aware that such a proposal (and a similar one to resettle Asians in Australia) would be tremendously expensive, he declared they were worthwhile in averting further wars.
Even as Roosevelt continued to receive reports from the M Project staff, he turned his attention to the domestic scene. In addition to asking the National Resources Planning Commission to come up with ideas for the distribution of Jews, Germans, and Italians, the president did some of his own canvassing on the question. In May 1943, Vice President Wallace reported in his diary that the president had spoken at length on the possibility of scattering Jews to avoid conflict. “The President consulted his neighbors in Marietta County, Georgia [the location of FDR's home at Warm Springs] and at Hyde Park, asking whether they would agree to have four or five Jewish families resettle in their respective regions. He claimed that the local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.”26 In a fictionalized dialogue, John Franklin Carter summed up Roosevelt's rationale for forcing assimilation: “It's only human nature for people to want others to conform to their standards. The Jews are a race apart, a religion apart…a special group inside every other nation. Such separations have always caused suspicion and trouble.”27
Meanwhile, the question of Japanese Americans drew his attention. In the weeks after Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, the army prepared to remove some 112,000 people of Japanese ancestry from their homes. Roosevelt and his advisors seem to have given little thought at first to the long-term disposition of the inmates. On the contrary, they declined to assist a number of different projects submitted by Nisei leaders such as James Sakamoto, Hi Korematsu, and Fred Wada for voluntary relocation by groups of Japanese Americans and mass colonization of western farmland. Nonetheless, as plans for removal proceeded and a newly created civilian agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), began constructing camps in the interior for involuntary mass confinement, the president and various officials began to consider possibilities for permanent resettlement elsewhere. On July 7, 1942, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson wrote the president to warn him that California governor Culbert Olson, whom he facetiously referred to as “that great patriot,” had inquired whether Japanese Americans could be released from confinement to work as cheap labor during the autumn harvest. Stimson added scornfully that the same Californians who were so “hell-bent” on having the army rush “the Japanese” out should not be permitted to change their minds when it suited them. Instead, Stimson proposed going on with “our permanent relocation of the evacuees,” which he termed “the permanent settlement of a great national problem.”28
Once the Japanese Americans were moved into the camps, government authorities gradually developed a “leave clearance” system to permit those adjudged “loyal” to leave the camps and resettle in small groups outside the Pacific coast, which remained closed to Japanese Americans. Thus, a fraction of the inmates departed during 1943 and 1944. Within the government there were various discussions and exchanges of opinion with regard to the desirability of permanent dispersal outside the West Coast. For example, in April 1943, following a visit to the Gila River camp, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told the press, “I hope that as they go out, both after the war and during it, the [Japanese Americans] will go out in small groups to different communities scattered throughout the land. [Like] many people in this country [they] have lived at a concentrated point, in communities within a community, so to speak, a condition which has tended to delay their assimilation into the American society.”29 FDR himself told a Chinese American White House visitor, Hung Wai Ching, during spring 1943 that he favored resettlement of Japanese Americans nationwide and “felt that they should be spread around the country. [He] mentioned about Hyde Park” (i.e., his discussions with neighbors about resettlement of small groups). According to Ching's cryptic notes, FDR likewise proposed mass intermarriage of Japanese and the creation of a “Neo-Hawaiian” race,” in view of the “success of Chinese mixture with others,” and referred to a “Smithsonian anthropologist” (presumably Hrdlicka) as support for his ideas.30
All the same, there was little concrete planning, either in the White House or elsewhere in the bureaucracy, of means to encourage dispersion. Rather, the president and his advisors assumed, with good reason, that most Japanese Americans would seek to resettle in their prewar locations once released. FDR publicly pledged in September 1943 to permit the camp inmates to go back to their homes once the military situation made it possible, and even altered the draft of an official statement to excise language implying that Japanese Americans would not be able to return to the West Coast in due course.31
In spring 1944 the matter came to a head, as White House officials reached consensus that there was no threat to security that would justify further exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, who was responsible for the WRA, called for the immediate opening of the camps. However, in the face of concerns over potential violence against returning inmates, mixed with election-year political considerations, the president demurred. Instead of having Japanese Americans “dumped” in California, he proposed gradual release and piecemeal relocation of the camp inmates in areas such as Hyde Park. “He stated that by personal inquiry he had reached the conclusion that quite a few could be distributed in Dutchess County and that if the same could be done all over the country it would take care of all.”32 On June 2, Ickes wrote FDR to plead with him to revoke immediately the order excluding Japanese Americans from the Pacific coast. He explained that in the absence of military necessity there was “no basis in law or equity” for the ban, and added that exclusion interfered with resettlement elsewhere by stigmatizing inmates as disloyal. Ickes warned that the “retention” of the Internees in the camps would be “a blot upon the history of this country.”33
Roosevelt replied on June 12 that he opposed a “sudden” revocation of exclusion. Rather, “for the sake of internal quiet,” his plan was to avoid doing anything “drastic or sudden.” He proposed a gradualist approach, involving several steps:
(a)Seeing, with great discretion, how many Japanese families would be acceptable to public opinion in definite localities on the West Coast,
(b)Seeking