War Relocation Authority

thumb|The War Relocation Authority operated ten Japanese-American internment camps in remote areas of the United States during World War II.

The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was a United States government agency established to handle the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It also operated the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, New York, which was the only refugee camp set up in the United States for refugees from Europe. The agency was created by Executive Order 9102 on March 18, 1942, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was terminated June 26, 1946, by order of President Harry S. Truman.

Formation

thumb|[[Hayward, California, May 8, 1942. Two children of the Mochida family who, with their parents, are awaiting an evacuation bus. The youngster on the right holds a sandwich given to her by one of a group of women who were present from a local church. The family unit is kept intact during evacuation and at War Relocation Authority centers where evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be housed for the duration.<br />(Photo by Dorothea Lange).]]

After the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to create zones from which certain persons could be excluded if they posed a threat to national security. Many people of Japanese ancestry were also suspected of espionage after the Pearl Harbor attack. Military Areas 1 and 2 were created soon after, encompassing all of California and parts of Washington, Oregon, and Arizona, and subsequent civilian exclusion orders informed Japanese Americans residing in these zones they would be scheduled for "evacuation." The executive order also applied to Alaska as well, bringing the entire United States West Coast as off-limits to Japanese nationals and Americans of Japanese descent.

On March 18, 1942, the WRA was formed via Executive Order 9102. It was in many ways a direct successor to the Works Projects Administration (WPA) and the efforts of both overlapped and intermingled for quite some time. From March until November, the WPA spent more on internment than any other agency including the Army and was on the scene with removal and relocation even before Executive Order 9192. Beginning on March 11, for example, Rex L. Nicholson, the WPA's regional director, managed the first "Reception and Induction" centers. Another WPA veteran, Clayton E. Triggs, was the administrator the Manzanar Relocation Center, a facility which, according to one insider, was "manned just about 100% by the WPA." Drawing on his background in New Deal road construction, Triggs installed such familiar concentration camp features as guard towers and spotlights. As the WPA wound down in late 1942 and early 1943, many of its employees moved over seamlessly to the WRA..

Milton S. Eisenhower was the WRA's original director. Eisenhower was a proponent of Roosevelt's New Deal and disapproved of the idea of mass internment. Early on he had tried, unsuccessfully, to limit the internment to adult men, allowing women and children to remain free, and he pushed to keep WRA policy in line with the original idea of making the camps similar to subsistence homesteads in the rural interior of the country. This, along with proposals for helping Japanese Americans resettle in labor-starved farming communities outside the exclusion zone, was met with opposition from the governors of these interior states, who worried about security issues and claimed it was "politically infeasible," at a meeting in Salt Lake City in April 1942. Shortly before the meeting Eisenhower wrote to his former boss, Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard, and said, "when the war is over and we consider calmly this unprecedented migration of 120,000 people, we as Americans are going to regret the unavoidable injustices that we may have done".

Disappointed, Eisenhower was director of the WRA for only ninety days, resigning June 18, 1942. However, during his tenure with the WRA he raised wages for interned Japanese Americans, worked with the Japanese American Citizens League to establish an internee advisory council, initiated a student leave program for college-age Nisei, and petitioned Congress to create programs for postwar rehabilitation. He also pushed Roosevelt to make a public statement in support of loyal Nisei and attempted to enlist the Federal Reserve Bank to protect the property left behind by displaced Japanese Americans, but was unable to overcome opposition to these proposals.

Selection of camp sites

The WRA considered 300 potential sites before settling on a total of ten camp locations, mostly on tribal lands. Site selection was based upon multiple criteria, including:

Ability to provide work in public works, agriculture, manufacturing.
Adequate transportation, power facilities, sufficient area of quality soil, water, and climate
Able to house at least 5,000 people
Public land

The camps had to be built from the ground up, and wartime shortages of labor and lumber combined with the vast scope of each construction project (several of the WRA camps were among the largest "cities" in the states that housed them) meant that many sites were unfinished when transfers began to arrive from the assembly centers. At Manzanar, for example, internees were recruited to help complete construction.

While some community analysts viewed the Japanese American inmates merely as research subjects, others opposed the incarceration and some of the WRA's policies in their reports, although very few made these criticisms public. Restricted by federal censors and WRA lawyers from publishing their full research from the camps, most of the (relatively few) reports produced by the CAS did not contradict the WRA's official stance that Japanese Americans remained, for the most part, happy behind the barbed wire. Morris Opler did, however, provide a prominent exception, writing two legal briefs challenging the exclusion for the Supreme Court cases of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu.

The need for a more easily navigable system, in addition to external pressure from pro-incarceration politicians and the general public to restrict who could exit the camps, led to a revision of the application process in 1943. Initially, applicants were required to find an outside sponsor, provide proof of employment or school enrollment, and pass an FBI background check. In the new system, inmates had only complete a registration form and pass a streamlined FBI check. (The "loyalty questionnaire," as the form came to be known after it was made mandatory for all adults regardless of their eligibility for resettlement, would later spark protests across all ten camps.) Tule Lake and Jerome, and in two violent incidents at Poston and Manzanar in November and December 1942, individuals suspected of colluding with the WRA were beaten by other inmates. External opposition to the WRA came to a head following these events, in two congressional investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee and another led by Senator Albert Chandler. and ended with several inmates being badly beaten. The entire camp was placed under martial law on November 14, 1943. Military control lasted for two months, and during this time 200 to 350 When the Renunciation Act was passed in July 1944, 5,589 (over 97 percent of them Tule Lake inmates) expressed their resentment by giving up their U.S. citizenship and applying for "repatriation" to Japan.

End of the camps

The West Coast was reopened to Japanese Americans on January 2, 1945 (delayed against the wishes of Dillon Myer and others until after the November 1944 election, so as not to impede Roosevelt's reelection campaign). On July 13, 1945, Myer announced that all of the camps were to be closed between October 15 and December 15 of that year, except for Tule Lake, which held "renunciants" slated for deportation to Japan. (The vast majority of those who had renounced their U.S. citizenship later regretted the decision and fought to remain in the United States, with the help of civil rights attorney Wayne M. Collins. The camp remained open until the 4,262 petitions were resolved.)

Relocation centers

thumb|[[Dust storm at the Manzanar War Relocation Center]]

Gila River War Relocation Center
Granada War Relocation Center
Heart Mountain War Relocation Center
Jerome War Relocation Center
Manzanar War Relocation Center
Minidoka War Relocation Center
Poston War Relocation Center
Topaz War Relocation Center
Tule Lake War Relocation Center
Rohwer War Relocation Center

References

External links

War Relocation Authority photographs [graphic], The Bancroft Library
Files from the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, 1942-1943, The Bancroft Library
Views of War Relocation Authority relocation camps for Japanese-Americans [graphic], The Bancroft Library
Executive Order 9102
Compilation of information and maps concerning the location of War Relocation Authority centers in the United States, 1993, The Bancroft Library
Background documents, Truman Presidential Library
"The War Relocation Centers of World War II: When Fear Was Stronger than Justice", a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) lesson plan
Records of the War Relocation Authority in the National Archives (Record Group 210)