Dillon S. Myer: An Autobiography

This is a long work, but I'm only going to comment on the section that dealt with his role in the internment of persons of Japanese ancestry during WWII.

1. He was not in sympathy with the idea of the evacuation, but he was requested to do it and it was a Presidential request.

2. At first, he didn't know much about the Japanese Americans, nor the reasons why there was so much pressure for their removal. He later determined that most of the given reasons were “phony.”

3. Voluntary evacuation didn't work for various reasons.

4. Earl Warren, who played a major role in all of this, was Attorney General of California, and was planning to run for Governor.

5. A radio commentator named John B . Hughes and a man named Walter Lippmann were also involved in the anti-Japanese movement.

6. Agricultural labor was needed, so the decision was made to allow some from the camps to have temporary leaves.

7. One of the reason that some universities and colleges would not accept PJAs as students was that they were afraid they would get would get in trouble with the Defense Department, since they had Defense Department contracts.

8. He uses the term “relocation centers” rather than “internment camps.”

9. The policy to allow evacuees to find jobs outside the camps started on July 20, 1942.

10. In describing the assembly centers, he says they used bars and put in partitions. “The Nisei still talk about the smell of horse manure that they lived with during those months.”

11. The first relocation center was Manzanar. He points out that even though some relocation centers were not ready, they still had to ship the evacuees in due to very strict train and bus transport availability and schedules.

12. He believes that the good health facilities in the camps helped some of the evacuees to extend their life span.

13. He notes that anti-Japanese groups on the West Coast were very quick to be “...out sniping at everything that was going on in the centers. They were claiming that the evacuees were getting better meats than the men in the Army were getting and all kinds of crazy stories were being put out in the Hearst press and in other ways to harass the evacuees and WRA.”

14. Trouble at Poston and Manzanar:

“Our first real trouble spot developed in Camp I of the Posten Relocation Center on November 14, 1942 when we had a community-wide strike and demonstra tion, which was called by the Hearst press and others a riot which it wasn t. This came about because the F.B.I, had come into the center and had arrested two or three people and they were put into jail and the com munity got up in arms and demanded that they be . re leased and when they weren t released immediately they went on strike and consequently nothing was done for about a week or ten days except to provide the basic food and essential services required by the evacuees.

“This had hardly settled down when we had a incident at Manzanar on December 6, 1942 and this was known pretty much as the Kibei rebellion. A group of Kibei and a group of people who were running the kitchens were involved. The chefs who had organized themselves into a kitchen workers union began to demand things. Here again this incident came about because there some arrests were made in the center and these people who were arrested were taken out to Independence or one of the nearby towns.

“This group demanded that they be brought back to the center and that they be released to the people in the center. As a result of discussions that Ralph Merritt, the director of the project, had had wivh the leaders of the group he thought they had arrived at a meeting of the minds and a compromise but he found out an hour or two later that the leader had simply announced another meeting later in the day. When he found that they had broken their word and were meeting again he called in the Army which he had authority to do. Unfortunately, after the Army came in some youngster climbed into a car and released the brakes and ran it right down toward the soldiers and some trigger-happy boy started shooting. Some people were wounded and three people ultimately died as a result of the shooting.”

15. Relocation Field Offices Established:

“About the same time we decided to go all out on a relocation program outside of the relocation cen ters. On January 4, 1943 the first two relocation field offices, called area field offices, were established to assist in helping people to relocate outside of the centers through finding jobs, housing and assuring them the opportunity to live peaceably and to carry on as other civilians would carry on.”

16. The registration program for the Army started on February 8, 1943. He talks about the questionnaire and some “poorly worded” questions.

17. The people from the camps did not participate in sabotage.

“HP: Getting back to the allegation by the American Legion that some of the people released from the centers to take jobs elsewhere v/ere guilty of sabotage. Was there ever an established case that a person from a relocation center had become a saboteur?”

“DSM: No, there never was an established case of sabotage. Not only as regards the people who had been in relocation centers who had lived on the West Coast but it also included Hawaii, which had more people of Japanese ancestry then we had in the United States mainland. There were lots of rumors about sabotage but none of them proved to be true. It took a long time to eliminate those rumors. Many people were still quoting them weeks and weeks after they had been knocked down by J. Edgar Hoover and others who had made the investigation.”

18. On March 11, 1943, he sent a letter to Secretary Stimson of the War Department suggestion a relaxation of the exclusion orders. It was two months before he got a reply, and the answer was no. Not only was the answer no, but the guy wanted a program established to separate pro-Japanese evacuees from all the others.

19. In May of 1943 the decision was made to make Tule Lake a place for pro-Japanese evacuees and any others they felt were necessary to isolate from the other evacuees.

20. Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Gila River camp on May 6, 1943. Myer asked her to tell FDR about the problems they were having in the camps, and the replies they were getting when they asked for help. She did, and FDR intervened.

21. The Dies Committee:

“The Costello sub-committee of the Dies Committee was appointed on June 3, 19^3 and they became a real harrassing element over the period from May until July 6th. They held so-called hearings in Los Angeles, to which we were not invited. One or two of the people from Posten were invited but the people who were testifying out there were mostly people whom we had fired because of the fact that they had either not been loyal to the service or who had left the center during the Posten incident.

“In one case a chap by the name of Townsend who testified had left the center in a government car because he was scared, to death, and was gone for a week. When he came back fortunately the director of the center had had enough experience that he sat him down and interviewed him with a stenographic transcript of the interview and of course fired him.

“This ex-employee told all kinds of wild stories at the time of the Los Angeles hearings which were fed out to the newspapers...”

22. There was trouble at the Tule Lake center when there was a truck accident that resulted in one of the workers being killed. A farm strike by the evacuees followed. He went to the camp to speak to the internees, but while he was doing that a non-Nisei doctor was assaulted at the base hospital.

He never felt in danger, and he explains some of the lies that appeared in the Hearst papers about what actually didn't happen.

On November 4th there was actually an outbreak of violence, and the military was called in. They remained in control of the camp until January of 1944.

23. In November he met with the California American Legion group and tried to clear up some of their many misunderstandings. He says they were very “snide.”

24. On January 20, 1944, the draft was reinstituted for the Nisei.

25. On June 30, 1944, Congress passed legislation allowing the Nisei to renounce their American citizenship. Around 5400 did, but many of those had done so under pressure from various elements at the camps, and later asked to have their decision undone.

26. The Jerome camp was closed on June 30, 1944.

On December 17, 1944, the War Department canceled the West Coast exclusion order, to be effective on January 2, 1945.

27. Finding housing for the evacuees when they were resettling back out of the camps was not an easy thing to do. There was a housing shortage, and some people did not have much money. Some of the older Issei were afraid to leave the camps.

28. On January 2, 1945, the Supreme Court ruled that he evacuation order had been constitutional in the Koromatsu vs. United States ruling.

29. Oddly enough, there was another case, the Endo case.

“In the “Endo” case, which was a case of a young Nisei girl who had asked that she go freely from the centers without signing up of forms or any thing of the sort, which we wanted heard long before it v/as heard, much to our pleasure they, the Supreme Court, held, that a loyal American citizen should not be held under any circumstances.”

30. Some of the evacuees encountered trouble when trying to return to their homes or find new places.

“DSM: 1 have mentioned the fact that there were some dastardly things perpetrated to keep people from coming back. On January 8 an attempt was made to dynamite and burn a fruit packing shed owned by a returning evacuee in Placer County, California. This was the first of about thirty incidents involving violence. Most of these consisted of shooting into the homes of returned evacuees between January 8 and about mid-June. They weren't shooting at people. They were using long range rifles, shooting into corners of houses hoping to scare people out and to discourage their return.”

“HP: Who do you suppose was doing this?”

“DSM: The people who were doing it were for the most part young farmer lads and others up and down the Central Valley who had either taken over some of the rented land that they didn't want to give up or who didn't want the competition. We pretty well knew who was doing it in some cases.”

30. On September 4, 1945, after the war was over, the Western Defense Command finally revoked all individual exclusion orders. On February 23, 1946, the last group of people who wanted to return to Japan left for there. Tule Lake was closed on March 20, 1946.



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