Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism

Richard Drinnon, 1987

The book begins by comparing, in a way, the way the Native Americans were gathered up and put into reservations and the way the Japanese-Americans were gathered up and put into internment camps. The book itself is about Dillon s. Myer who was the head of the WRA from 1942 to 1946, and actually also headed the Bureau of Indian Affairs from 1950 through 1953.

Myer was not the first head of the WRA, though, and the book talks about Milton Eisenhower and how he was the first head of the organization and eventually quit.

The book proceeds to provide some information on Myer as a director, and then as a person backing the idea of scattering the Japanese Americans through the eastern and mid-western part of the country (but keeping them under surveillance at the same time). The author also does not speak well of the JACL during that time.

To put it mildly.

The next chapter starts out talking about the draft resisters using specific individuals and what happened to them. Some of the individuals were forced to perform slave labor. In addition, Myer was not even aware of when selective service registration was being required and when it wasn't. Specific groups of individuals from different camps that were imprisoned are also examined and the whole thing is almost enough to make one ill the way the government officials twisted things and lied.

More of the trouble at Tule Lake (after it became a segregation center) is covered. When an ACLU lawyer came to the camp to try and find out what was going on he received less than friendly welcome and was thrown out of the camp after only two days, but it was long enough to begin to clue him in to just how badly the locked-up internees were being treated.

There's a lot of very upsetting information in this portion of the book, some of the greatest violations of rights of individuals that have ever occurred in the U.S. (outside of the institution of slavery itself.)

The rest of the book deals with Myer's time with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and he did no better there than he did in the WRA.

This is a very hard-hitting, upsetting book but one that is important in any study of the Japanese-American internment program.

---

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page