"Temporarily Side-Tracked by Emotionalism": Wyoming Residents Respond to Relocation

 By Phil Roberts, Department of History, University of Wyoming

My comments are in [ ].

After the federal government set up the Japanese-American internment camp between Powell and Cody at Heart Mountain during World War II, Wyoming residents responded to the presence of the facility in several ways. This paper will examine the various views of Wyomingites as they are demonstrated from the correspondence of a U. S. Senator as well as the senator's view and the editorial comment of various state newspapers.

Sen. Joseph C. O'Mahoney was a senior member of the Democratic majority of the Senate in 1942 when the Heart Mountain camp was established. First appointed to the Senate seat on the death of Sen. John B. Kendrick, his former employer, O'Mahoney won reelection in 1934 and 1940. He was a dependable supporter of the New Deal until the Roosevelt administration tried to change the composition of the U. S. Supreme Court in 1937 as a way to keep the high court was striking down what it considered crucial anti-depression legislation. O'Mahoney gained constituent support from what Wyomingites saw as principled opposition to the President.

No single piece of evidence points to O'Mahoney's position on wartime relocation. No roll call votes were taken on the various relocation measures in the Senate throughout the duration. O'Mahoney did not speak on the floor either for or against the policy. In fact, nowhere is there a definitive statement on his position. Thus, sections of letters and reactions to correspondence during this period are all there are to go on. Even at that, few hints appear in the correspondence until January 1943 when O'Mahoney was appointed to a special sub-committee of the Senate Military Affairs Committee to investigate the War Relocation Authority.

One of the more explicit explanations of his position was made in two letters to Park County Democratic officials in February 1943. He had written frequently to both men during May 1942 when the senator was seeking sentiment about establishing a relocation camp in Park County.

I was made a member of the subcommittee which has been going into the matter and I found the testimony both surprising and interesting. It was, for example, clearly brought out authoritative witnesses, form both the Army and the Navy, not only that 60 percent of all the evacuees are native-born Americans, but that most of them have been altogether loyal to this country. Some of the most effective work which has been done for the Navy in Hawaii, for instance, has been done by Japanese born in Hawaii.

[He's quite right here. About a third of the workers in Hawaii were of Japanese descent. What kept Hawaii from going the same way as the U.S. did in locking up the persons of Japanese ancestry was that Hawaii had a strong military leader who declared martial law and enforced it. ]

Later, in the same letter, O'Mahoney quoted former Ambassador Grew who had appeared before his sub-committee and urged that "nothing should be done to alienate the loyalty of the American-born Japanese."

In a letter to the manager of the Holly Sugar Company in Worland during the previous year, O'Mahoney carefully distinguished between residents of prisoner-of-war camps and relocation center internees. "...many of them are natives of this country and apparently completely out of harmony with the Japanese militarists, they are not being treated as prisoners of war." Japanese must be "relocated in a manner that will enable them to live as normally as possible," the senator concluded.

In a letter to Heart Mountain Director Guy Robertson in 1943, O'Mahoney wrote: "The treatment that we accord Americans of Japanese ancestry and even alien Japanese has a direct bearing upon the treatment given our own people in the hand of the Japanese."

[Unfortunately, things didn't work out this was as the Japanese camps for civilians were atrocious with terrible problems with disease and lack of food. There was also physical violence against many of the internees which was totally unjustified.]

L. L. Newton, editor and publisher of the Wyoming State Journal in Lander, stands out among Wyoming journalists for the unequivocal position he took on the camp. Unlike lawyer O'Mahoney, who avoided making legal arguments against the establishment of such camps, Newton flatly declared that the existence of the camps violated the internees' constitutional rights.

On December 3, Newton's column continued the story by describing the interiors of the buildings and the conditions the evacuees faced. "The rooms are devoid of furniture" and the buildings are cold, he wrote. "You have camped out but you 'had everything' to do with. These people were dumped down in a new world of sagebrush and desert to be handled by a group of Caucasians who hadn't time to organize themselves, let along handle such a vast throng of folk."

[They had needed to sell virtually all their furnitures, their homes, etc. before they were shipped to the assembly centers and then on to the regular camps.]

Judging from the letters sent to Senator O'Mahoney, few Wyomingites shared Newton's concerns for the constitutional rights of the internees. Instead, correspondents appear to have either a financial motive for writing or opposition to camp location near their communities.

Before the camp was established on June 5, 1942, several Wyoming constituents wrote to O'Mahoney requesting that prison camps be located in their towns. The economic benefits were of paramount concern.

[This is one good argument for locating camps near towns as they bring a lot of business to the area once the internees were allowed passes to leave the camp for a brief time and go to the town and shop.]

Elected officials needed to know the sentiments from constituents generally about the location of prison camps or internment centers. O'Mahoney wrote the secretary of the Sheridan Chamber of Commerce, asking about the local feelings of such a facility: "to date, no project in Wyoming is under consideration." The senator then asked if Sheridan residents would welcome such a camp if one were to be located somewhere in the state. The secretary replied in June that most people "did not wish the camp here."

The senator did receive letters favorable to establishing a camp in Worland, but because of a controversy involving the availability of water, the site was turned down. The record shows that O'Mahoney pleaded the Worland case with vigor, not only with the War Department and War Relocation Authority, but with the State Engineer's Office in Cheyenne.

Besides concerns about security, two other themes appeared in correspondence from Wyomingites over the next two years: removal of internees after the war and use of their labor for agricultural production.

Park County commissioner Harry Atteberry warned O'Mahoney that the location of the camp at Heart Mountain might cause danger to the Willwood Dam and Corbett Dam, both small irrigation projects near Powell. He wrote that he thought Park County would accept the camp as long as the federal government could guarantee both security and "their removal from the county after the war."  The removal theme was to gain added momentum as the war appeared to be winding down.

As soon as the first group of internees began to arrive in August 1942, O'Mahoney started receiving requests from people wanting to obtain the services of the camp residents in fields or businesses. Requests from sugar beet growers were particularly numerous. G. N. Wells, vice president of the Montana-Wyoming Beet Growers Association, wrote to WRA Director Dillon S. Myer in April 1943, asking for labor. He warned that growers would be ruined if labor wasn't furnished from the Japanese ranks. "Too many of our workers are now in the armed forces," he stated.

[As I have pointed out elsewhere, there's a critical question here. If the persons of Japanese ancestry were considered so untrustworthy and potentially dangerous then why were any of them released from the camps at all? That includes the need for vital help in harvesting and doing anything else. If they were potential traitors and saboteurs then wouldn't it have made sense not releasing any of them at all?]

While workers were needed for field work, other industry owners made requests for Japanese-American laborers. A Cowley canning company official thanked O'Mahoney for assisting in recruiting labor from the Relocation Center to work in his plant. Labor requests also came from a Casper bowling alley (to alleviate the "war-time pinsetter shortage") and a McFadden rancher wishing for a hired hand.] Fremont County farmers "feel that the crops must be harvested and this is the only solution thus far presented."

In 1944, the Casper Building and Construction Trades Council inquired if internees could be used to help in "tearing up the railroad between Shoshoni and Elco"--duplicate tracks of the Chicago and Northwestern, the iron needed for scrap metal. O'Mahoney gave similar replies to such requests. He promised that "a copy of your letter will be forwarded to the WRA."

From the beginning, Wyomingites complained, not about violations of civil liberties, but what they considered as "coddling" of camp residents. The letters to O'Mahoney range from mild complaints to viciously racist diatribes. A former Sheridan resident wrote in February 1943, doubting the need for a large food supply being kept at the Minidoka, Idaho, camp. O'Mahoney answered that an investigation would be held shortly to determine such matters. He added a compliment to the internees at the camp: "The War Department tells us that there has been such a demand among those Japanese [in relocation camps] to serve in our own military forces that the War Department is now raising a Japanese military contingent which is to be sent into the European Theatre of War."

O'Mahoney received a torrent of mail in April and May 1943, after the Denver Post in a series of articles accused the WRA of "pampering the enemy." One of the Post headlines read: "Food is Hoarded for Japs in U. S. While Americans in Nippon Are Tortured." The sub-head read: "Openly Disloyal Japs Pampered."

Angry letters came in from throughout Wyoming. A Buffalo couple suggested that the Japanese-Americans be "segregated by sex because we don't need more little Japs." The Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen in Sheridan wrote that if the Carberry article about "luxuries for the Japanese" were true, why was the rest of the country having to sacrifice? An Arvada man wrote that the Post article "is the bitterest pill I've had to swallow yet." A Basin man blamed the defeat of Democrats in the last election on the "information that came out of Heart Mountain project. Now comes the story told by Jack Carberry in the Denver Post and once more there is hell a poppin.'"

The town councils of Powell and Cody met in joint session the same week the Post story ran, but it was more than merely "pampering" that concerned both groups. Both issued petitions asking for tighter security and the guarantee that the internees would be moved out after the war.

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