The Displaced Japanese-Americans
The article originally appeared in Fortune Magazine of April, 1944, under a different title.
The author notes that the Japanese have used the internment as propaganda.
The author then makes a numerical mistake, talking about “three” types of barbed- wire enclosures, but mentioning only two types.
The author points out three specific anti-Japanese groups; the Hearst newspapers, the American Legion, and The Associated Farmers in California.
The author then goes into the process of evacuation of the persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, and how the assembly centers were built extremely quickly.
The WRA wanted to find places inland to put all the people in the centers, but they ran into problems.
This is the first reference I have seen to Hedda Hopper.
One of the complaints about the camps was that they were “coddling” the Japanese.
Another argument was that the internees were getting better food than other Americans.
Something else I have not seen elsewhere is that individual enterprise was forbidden in the camps.
He refers to the troubles in the camps. After that, he discusses the loyalty questionnaire and the segregation of a certain group of the internees. Then he talks about Nisei who were thinking about leaving the camps to live elsewhere, and says that a Nisei “has to muster considerable courage to go out into the society that rejected him two years ago.” “The most powerful magnets to draw him out are letters from friends who have already gone east.”
Illinois took some 4,000 internees in, and Ohio about 1,500.
Some states, like Arizona, were not welcoming to relocating internees.
He then discusses Hawaii, and the quasi-martial law used on the West Coast.
Again, the Hearst papers are mentioned.
This was sort of a dual-hate system that California set up. First, they hated the Japanese and got them kicked out, then they hated them some more and worked to make sure they would never be allowed in California again.
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