The episode of injustice we call the “Japanese American internment”Footnote 1 was fundamentally a creation and deployment of law. It was launched by an executive order, enforced by federal statute, litigated in the federal courts, and terminated as a consequence of a Supreme Court decree.Footnote 2 The ample legal historiography on the mass removal and imprisonmentFootnote 3 of Japanese Americans has focused chiefly on the genesis of the decision for removal and imprisonment and on efforts to attack (and defend) the constitutionality of curfew, removal, and detention.Footnote 4 Front and center have been the actions and decisions of figures at the “top” of the program: the president, the congresspeople and military leaders who pressed for it, the high-ranking Justice Department officials who defended it in court, and the Supreme Court justices who adjudicated its legality.
In all of this attention to the inception, defense, and adjudication of removal and mass confinement, scholars have overlooked a body of law that was arguably as important to the episode as the laws and decisions that set it in motion and ended it. This is what might be termed the administrative law of incarceration, the enormous body of rules and practices that governed the day-to-day operation of the camps and shaped the day-to-day interactions between the inmates and the employees of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency created in March of 1942 to implement the program.Footnote 5 Reflecting for a moment about a network of camps housing well over 100,000 people quickly confirms the need for a vast field of regulation, starting with the construction of the camps and the reception of people and personal property, and ending with the closing of the camps and the dispersal of people and property. Between these beginning and ending points lay the need for rules governing countless aspects of life in camp: food service, medical care, education, employment, recreation, agriculture, labor, policing, commercial activity, and community government. The WRA created many such rules from its headquarters in Washington, DC; by the war's end they filled hundreds of pages of an administrative manual.
These regulations were neither self-interpreting nor self-enforcing. Those tasks fell to WRA staff members at the ten camps, working in constantly changing conditions in remote locations, where instructions from Washington were normally available only at the pace of letters in the United States mail.Footnote 6 One of the most important of those staff members for the day-to-day interpretation of the rules was each camp's “project attorney,” a government lawyer who ran what in effect was a combination of a city attorney's office and a legal aid bureau in a few rooms in the camp's administrative barracks, often with the assistance of one or two Japanese Americans with legal training or tax or business experience. This article uses the work of the project attorney at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, one of the ten WRA camps, as a lens for viewing the relationship between the WRA and its prisoners on basic questions of the camp's structure and operation. It focuses on three of the many matters about which the project attorney simultaneously advised WRA administrators and camp inmates: the design of the camp's system of community government, its internal criminal justice system, and its community business enterprises that sold goods and services to the imprisoned population.
This article is a microhistory, mining the records of just one law office at a single camp for insights about how the internees and the WRA interfaced with each other. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive regulatory history of the WRA. Nonetheless, evidence from this one office tantalizingly suggests a need to revise current understanding of how the WRA and the prisoner community interacted. Noting the New Deal backdrop against which WRA policies were developed and implemented, it suggests that in practice, the WRA and the internees commonly engaged in a process of grassroots negotiation and reciprocal accommodation on matters of community organization. This model differs notably from what the literature now depicts: a top-down system of WRA dominance on community matters, and suggests a need to reconsider current understanding of how the WRA interacted with its captives on matters of governance.
I. The WRA: Wartime Agency with a New Deal Pedigree
Some background information will help place the Heart Mountain Project Attorney's Office in its context. Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, conferred on the secretary of war the power to permit military commanders to designate “military areas” from which they could exclude “any or all persons.”Footnote 7 Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, Commander of the Western Defense Command, invoked that authority almost immediately to begin uprooting all people of Japanese ancestry, citizens and resident aliens alike, from a wide coastal strip. By further executive order, President Franklin Roosevelt established the War Relocation Authority as a unit of the Office of Emergency Management of the Executive Office of the President on March 18, 1942.Footnote 8 The order conferred on the director of this new administrative unit the authority “to formulate and effectuate a program for the removal [from the coastal areas designated pursuant to Executive Order 9066] … of the persons or classes of persons designated under such Executive Order, and for their relocation, maintenance, and supervision.”Footnote 9 As a practical matter, the military shouldered the responsibility for removing the more than 110,000 affected people from their homes, transporting them to temporary “assembly centers,” confining them there through the spring and summer of 1942, and transporting them to the ten permanent so-called “Relocation Centers” that had hastily been constructed over the summer in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming.Footnote 10 The WRA assumed responsibility for the subsequent settlement and maintenance of the uprooted community in those camps, as well as, later in the process, the funneling of many of those deemed “loyal” eastward to new jobs and homes.Footnote 11
The WRA's headquarters were two blocks north of the White House. There the agency's director—for a few months Milton Eisenhower until he resigned, and thereafter Dillon S. Myer—supervised a staff of administrators, a great many of them poached from the Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service (SCS) and from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Eisenhower and Myer were themselves Agriculture men; Eisenhower had most recently directed the Office of Land Use Coordination and Myer had most recently served as assistant director of the SCS. During the year 1942, the number two man at the WRA was E. Reesaman (“Si”) Fryer, on leave from the superintendency of the vast BIA-administered Navajo reservation in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. And one of the WRA director's closest advisers was the agency's solicitor, Philip M. Glick, formerly chief of the Land Policy Division in the Office of the Solicitor at Agriculture. As solicitor at the WRA, Glick was responsible for all legal aspects of the agency's functioning, including the development, publication, and revision of rules governing all aspects of the development and administration of the camps.
Much more important to the daily lives of the prisoners were the WRA officials stationed in the field. Each camp had a director responsible for all aspects of the camp's operations; reporting to that person (or, at some camps, to an assistant director) were heads of administrative “sections” that dealt with one core component of operations: community management, agriculture, internal security, for example. These were all white people, as were most if not all of the subsidiary WRA employees staffing these various sections.Footnote 12 However, it was inconceivable that this relatively small contingent of “appointed personnel” (as they referred to themselves) could meet the needs of communities of many thousands of people. The inmates themselves did much of the work—food production and service, fire protection, policing, health care, and countless other services—at paltry WRA salaries of between $12.00 and $19.00 per month.Footnote 13 In a postwar self-portrait, the WRA asserted that it “recognized a definite obligation to make center life as decent and tolerable as it could be made within the framework of the established policies and all of the inevitable disruptions, shortages, and limitations.”Footnote 14 It acknowledged that it had no choice but to “exercise a rather large measure of supervision—or at least veto power— over the community operations.”Footnote 15 However, it insisted that “the desires, beliefs, and attitudes of the evacuees, so far as they could be determined, were constantly taken into consideration and weighed”Footnote 16 in the formulation and implementation of policy.
This self-serving assertion seems hard to credit, but is far from outlandish for an agency led by administrators steeped in the specific brand of colonialism practiced by the BIA and the community-based approaches to policy-making of both that agency and the Department of Agriculture's SCS.Footnote 17 WRA officials recognized that their project was not without administrative precedent. Writing in 1946, two of the agency's top lawyers acknowledged that “[a]dministrative agencies having functions rather similar to those of the War Relocation Authority so far as legal considerations are concerned are not uncommon.”Footnote 18 “Any instance,” they argued, “in which a self-contained organization or group somewhat removed from the ordinary social controls is set up under authority of law presents a legal situation comparable to that of a relocation center.” They cited state-run schools, universities, hospitals, asylums, and quarantine stations as examples. Distinguished anthropologist John F. Embree, the director of the WRA's community analysis section, argued in 1949 that parallels to the WRA's approach to self-government abounded in other contexts where “the American government has, or has had, a guardianship responsibility for dependent peoples.”Footnote 19 Embree cited colonial ventures overseas—the United States Navy's management of the civil affairs of Micronesia and the nearly five decade long American administration of the Philippines—as well as the domestic administration of American Indians' affairs by the BIA—as examples.Footnote 20
For the WRA, the BIA's colonial management philosophies were an example very near at hand. The BIA not only loaned personnel to the upstart WRA in 1942, but also initially administered two of the ten Japanese American camps, Poston and Gila River in Arizona, both of which were located on Indian lands.Footnote 21 John Collier, the energetic Commission of Indian Affairs throughout the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt, eagerly sought the siting of these camps on Indian reservations (over the objections of the tribes themselves, it should be noted) not only because he believed the camps would make substantial permanent improvements to the land but also because he saw a familiar mission in the WRA's task. He argued to the secretary of the interior that because of the BIA's “long experience in handling a minority group,” the BIA was “better equipped than any other agency to provide for the Japanese” the type of treatment that would “make them more acceptable as members of the American population.”Footnote 22
Here Collier had in mind the strikingly new approach to government—Indian relations we now call the “Indian New Deal,” launched by the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934.Footnote 23 Collier ended the decades-old autocratic administrative approach of his predecessors, which had sought the extinction of native identity, culture, and governance through, among other things, the evisceration of tribal governance systems, the forcible allotment of tribal lands to individual Indian owners, and the prohibition of indigenous cultural and religious practices. In place of this scorched-earth approach, Collier's Indian New Deal sought to protect and revive native cultures by reversing allotment in favor of collective land ownership, ending prohibitions of Indian cultural and religious practices, and restoring autonomous governing power to the Indian tribes under the (theoretically) light guiding touch of a BIA superintendent.Footnote 24 This new approach sprang not just from Collier's own early, much-romanticized experiences with the Pueblo Indians,Footnote 25 but also from his study of colonial administration around the world, including, particularly, the British experience.Footnote 26 His study left him persuaded of the virtues of “indirect rule,” an approach to governance in which the colonial power administered the colonized peoples by relying on and even strengthening certain colonizer-preferred institutions of local governance, be they monarchs, kinship systems, or councils, rather than imposing rule through direct order and subjugation.Footnote 27 Through indirect rule, the colonial power eased the dependent peoples toward “modern civilization” and perhaps eventual independence, all the while protecting its own economic and strategic interests. Much of the Indian New Deal was grounded in this principle, one that Felix Cohen, the Indian New Deal's brilliant legal architect, unabashedly termed “Colonialism: A Realistic Approach” in 1945.Footnote 28
The opportunities for influence of the BIA model on the WRA's development of its camps' community structures were many. John Collier himself sought significant input in the spring of 1942 when he successfully lobbied WRA Director Milton Eisenhower to place nearly a quarter of the uprooted people under BIA management at Poston and Gila River. A prominent BIA administrator, S.E. Fryer, served as deputy director of the WRA and ran its important Western regional office in San Francisco into 1943, and perhaps most importantly, the BIA-administered Poston Relocation Center was something of a model for the other WRA camps. It was the second of the ten permanent camps to open, in April of 1942 when construction on eight of the nine others had not yet even begun. Administrative policies piloted at Poston in the summer of 1942 were available as templates for other camps when they opened in the late summer.
Even closer in reach than the BIA's administrative strategies were those of the units of the Department of Agriculture from which the WRA's top leadership came: the Office of Land Use Coordination and the SCS. These were but two of the many departments, offices, and agencies that came into existence within the New Deal Department of Agriculture to respond to the crises in farm production and pricing of the 1930s. Particularly as they developed after 1937, these offices and agencies “constituted radically innovative ways for the federal government to connect with local farmer-citizens,” effectively organizing them “into institutions of local-national collective action” in order to “induc[e] them to alter their behavior, usually by changing their use of the land.”Footnote 29 The WRA's top leadership—Directors Milton Eisenhower and Dillon Myer and Solicitor Philip Glick—had especially deep experience with the SCS-created Soil Conservation Districts, local collective-action units intended to encourage less erosive and more water-conserving land use by farmers. Largely the brainchild of Philip Glick, these districts were, in a meaningful sense, “a new form of local government” that brought together owner- and tenant-farmers to reform their approaches to land use with the assistance of experts at the local and national level.Footnote 30 The idea was to educate, persuade, and assist farmers in local communities to regulate their own affairs in new, conservation-friendly ways, but without the strictures of top-down regulation from Washington. The soil conservation districts featured local conservation boards consisting of three democratically elected farmers and two state-designated SCS experts. This meant that federal erosion control policy “would be administered not by a federal bureaucracy but by a decentralized, citizen-led unit of local government with regulatory powers.”Footnote 31 Glick maintained that this system was based on “cooperative independence”: an intermixed “marble cake” of federal, state, and local influences rather than the conventional “layer cake” with a controlling federal force on top.Footnote 32
This review of some of the key administrative commitments of the BIA and SCS of the 1930s and early 1940s reveals a pattern of interest in fostering and nurturing community-level self-regulation, although neither agency ever contemplated surrendering a veto power, or a superior agenda-setting prerogative, in the areas of their responsibility. The BIA in particular, mired in a dismissive or uncomprehending colonial mind-set toward its charges, had at best a checkered record of respecting the preferences and dignity of the peoples under its indirect rule.Footnote 33 Nonetheless, in their own minds even if imperfectly in practice, the leadership of the BIA and the SCS were making genuine efforts to break with the top-down administrative autocracy of the past in favor of a model that encouraged grassroots responsibility and dialogue between administrators and the communities with which they worked.Footnote 34
II. The WRA's Unique Historiography
It is a curious aspect of the historiography of Japanese American removal and incarceration that scholars have approached the WRA's project largely as an enterprise unto itself rather than as any sort of adaptation of the modes of administration its leadership knew so well. The literature on the WRA's policies for and posture towards its charges has (with the exception of often self-serving accounts by the WRA and its top officials)Footnote 35 not been at all kind to the agency, seeing it mostly as a top-down agent of unilateral federal control.Footnote 36 In his pathbreaking 1971 monograph “Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans in World War II,” Roger Daniels depicted the WRA as alternating between passive acceptance and active infliction of repression of its prisoners, under a veneer of efforts to “ameliorate the conditions”Footnote 37 they endured. He acknowledged that those “at the top of the WRA bureaucracy [had] been essentially on the liberal side of the American ideological spectrum” and “shudder[ed] to think what it might have been like” had others—presumably military agencies—been in charge. But Daniels' story emphasized (indeed, even mentioned) only episodes when the WRA manipulated and dominated the Japanese American community, putting down what the agency termed “riots,” bunglingly investigating the loyalties of the internees and then punishing those who failed its test, and rooting out resisters to the military draft. This story substantiated Daniels's contention that the WRA “execut[ed]” an “atrocity.”Footnote 38 The WRA's claims that the imprisoned Japanese American community controlled significant aspects of life were, according to Daniels, “propaganda.”Footnote 39 The majority of the administrators below the top echelon of the WRA “shared the contempt of the general population for ‘Japs’” which, he argued, produced “an unbridgeable gap between the Caucasian custodians and their Oriental charges.”Footnote 40 Those in the Japanese American community who reached across that gap, chiefly members of the hyperpatriotic Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), Daniels described as WRA “allies”Footnote 41 engaging in a self-serving “collaboration”Footnote 42 that much of the community condemned.
An equally influential monograph, “Years of Infamy,” published by former prisoner Michi Nishiura Weglyn 5 years after Daniels's book, shared and even intensifed this assessment of the WRA. According to Weglyn, WRA administrators showed “a pervasive tendency to look down on their charges as an untrustworthy, sinister, and morally inferior lot.”Footnote 43 The agency interacted with “the detainee population” through “JACL activists functioning as “liaisons.”Footnote 44
The nearest thing in the literature to a full history of the WRA, Richard Drinnon's 1987 monograph “Keeper of Concentration Camps,” pushed well beyond the Daniels and Weglyn works in its characterization (one might say “caricature”) of the agency. Drinnon acknowledged “the undeniable truth that the WRA did not treat [Japanese resident aliens and Japanese Americans] with the harshness Congress, military and intelligence agencies, and perhaps a majority of American citizens thought fitting,”Footnote 45 but devoted his monograph to presenting the WRA's work as “a story … of human betrayal.”Footnote 46 The directors of the ten camps were, in Drinnon's assessment, people who “indulged hidden psychological cravings for power and attention by keeping [their] wards in a state of childish dependence.”Footnote 47 “[T]he WRA never permitted inmates to rise to the level of the decision makers,” he wrote; “[t]hey were the objects administered.”Footnote 48 Only members of the JACL were allowed the “favor” of “shar[ing] the modicum of power WRA regulations allowed compliant inmates.”Footnote 49 The agency was “a huge detention and investigative machine”Footnote 50 in “the business of people-keeping.”Footnote 51
The passage of time has somewhat tempered the scholarly assessment of the WRA. The most influential recent account, in Mae Ngai's “Impossible Subjects,” depicts an agency interested less in controlling and crushing the Japanese American community than in reshaping it. On Ngai's telling, the WRA did not implement but “complicated” the foundation of “simple racism” on which “internment rested.”Footnote 52 WRA officials “did not believe that all Japanese were racially inclined to disloyalty” as did many military bureaucrats; instead “they practiced a kind of benevolent assimilation”Footnote 53 to produce cultural Americanism in the Japanese American community. The men of the WRA “believed they had an opportunity to turn an unfortunate incidence of war into a positive social good” and so ran the camps as factories designed to produce Americanism through “democratic self-government, schooling, work, and other rehabilitative activities.”Footnote 54 They failed to see the racism and coercion backing their assimilationism, Ngai argues, and treated the camp inmates as “racial children in need of democratic tutelage,” but they did permit the expression of Japanese culture in religious and recreational activitiesFootnote 55 and confronted genuine challenges in attempting to manage a community that included Japanese nationalists and people with divided loyalties.Footnote 56 Ngai certainly presents a more nuanced and somewhat more benign administrative agency than Drinnon's “detention and investigative machine” or Daniels' practitioner of “atrocity.”Footnote 57
But even Ngai's account depicts an agency that proceeded much more by decree than cooperation. WRA administrators, she reports, “did not have to negotiate with internees.”Footnote 58 The internees had “limited” power to organize themselves and “little power to enforce decisions made democratically amongst themselves.”Footnote 59 They took from the WRA's program what they wanted and “ignored or resisted”Footnote 60 what they did not think was in their interest, such as the WRA's support for community self-government.Footnote 61 Even for Ngai, the WRA and the community it administered stood fundamentally apart from each other, with the WRA in the role of a (sometimes) benevolent dictator. WRA policies confronted the prisoners with two essential choices: compliance or resistance.Footnote 62
All of these accounts of the WRA have merit: There are ample grounds for criticizing its engagement (or lack of engagement) with the population it confined and administered. In conceiving of itself as the beleaguered Japanese American community's protector and advocate, the agency was often blind to its capacity to manipulate, punish, disrespect, and mistreat that community or segments of it. It is these episodes of blindness on which the literature has universally focused: the harmful mishandling of uprisings at the Poston and Manzanar camps late in 1942, the contentious and damaging loyalty screenings the WRA undertook with the Army in 1943,Footnote 63 the agency's persecution of young inmates who resisted the draft, its dogged efforts to persuade and even drive its charges to “relocate” out of the camps to unfamiliar terrain in the country's interior. The literature has quite rightly condemned these WRA policies; however, these episodes cannot function as a complete data set for understanding the agency in its countless regulatory interactions with the Japanese American community.
III. The Project Attorney and Community Governance at Heart Mountain
The carefully documented work of a key camp administrator, its project attorney,Footnote 64 expands the historical record and complicates the prevailing scholarly narrative. The project attorney at each camp, including of course the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, was responsible for three kinds of legal services. First, heFootnote 65 “was responsible … for all legal advice and assistance to the project director and the center staff.”Footnote 66 Second, “he rendered all necessary legal services to the various evacuee organizations,”Footnote 67 including the community council, the judicial system, the camp's business enterprises and recreational associations. And third, the project attorney “was available to all evacuees for assistance in their individual legal problems.”Footnote 68 A postwar WRA-authored account of the agency's legal work summarized the project attorney's role aptly: “his was the combined role of Government lawyer, city attorney, and private attorney to an evacuee population of from 5,000 to 17,000 persons.”Footnote 69
The term “city attorney” might seem an odd designation for a lawyer serving what was in effect a prison surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, but it is accurate. By the time the Heart Mountain Relocation Center reached its maximum population of 10,767 late in 1942, it was Wyoming's third largest population center, dwarfing the nearby towns of Cody (population: 2,536)Footnote 70 and Powell (population: 1,948).Footnote 71 Prisoners lived as families or as individuals in tightly packed rooms in 468 wood-framed, tarpaper-covered barracks.Footnote 72 Additional barrack-type buildings housed mess halls, latrine and laundry facilities, schools, a hospital complex, recreation and commercial facilities, administrative offices, and other community services. The camp also included approximately 1,000 acres of agricultural land that helped supply the community with food. The army patrolled the exterior boundaries of the camp and its entry gate, but the WRA was responsible for the entire area inside the boundaries. All of the services a city typically supplies were needed at Heart Mountain: policing, fire protection, transportation, education, sanitation, recreation, social and family services, and many others. Heart Mountain's project attorney truly was, among many other things, the city attorney for this very unusual city.
Not long after the camps opened, WRA Solicitor Philip M. Glick ordered all project attorneys to submit to him (and copy each other on) a weekly narrative report documenting their experiences of the prior week in order to “come as close as possible to giving the Solicitor an adequate and clear picture” of the legal work going on at the camps.Footnote 73 He directed the lawyers to describe “assignments received, work completed, work in process, new developments, the more important or significant conferences, significant developments or prospects at the relocation center, significant news items,” and other “appropriate” information.Footnote 74 He also committed to responding to each and every report and distributing his replies across the whole network of project attorneys. After the war, Glick praised this system not just for providing “a broad, frequent, two way channel of communication that ensured adequate supervision, … coordination, and a basis for judging the attorneys' understanding of [WRA] objectives and their effectiveness”Footnote 75 in working with other administrators, but also for the “spirit of camaraderie”Footnote 76 that this web of communication engendered among the agency's lawyers. Today we might praise it for an additional reason: it generated, for our review, thousands of pages of lawyers' contemporaneous reflections on how they implemented WRA policies and engaged with other administrators and the Japanese American community. These letters offer the historian an unparalleled close-up view of the WRA's “field” legal work.Footnote 77
At Heart Mountain, three lawyers successively occupied the position of permanent project attorney: Jerry Housel, John McGowen, and Byron Ver Ploeg. All three were young—in their 30s—and none had extensive experience as a government lawyer.Footnote 78 Housel and Ver Ploeg had experience as private practitioners and McGowen had experience as an academic. They were men of the Midwest and Mountain West, not Washington-seasoned bureaucrats.Footnote 79
For the purposes of this article, the most important of the three is Housel. He was the first of the lawyers in the position and, therefore, had an outsized role in the development of Heart Mountain's policies and institutions. He was only 30 years old when he arrived at the camp in December of 1942. He held a law degree from the University of Wyoming College of Law and a Ph.D. in international affairs from American University. Before joining the WRA's legal staff, he had practiced law in Laramie, Wyoming, worked in the office of one of Wyoming's United States senators, and worked on the legal staff of the Federal Trade Commission. He was the son-in-law of the mayor of one of the camp's neighboring towns, a relationship that must have caused him discomfort when the surrounding communities spoke out against the internees and WRA policies, which they did with some frequency. Housel seems to have had pleasant interactions with the internee community, distinguishing himself by taking Japanese lessons from his secretary and greeting older internees with “konnichiwa” in place of “hello, how are you?”Footnote 80
Housel and his successors had occasion to counsel three Heart Mountain community organizations, all of them central to the life of the imprisoned community. One was the Heart Mountain Community Council, the community's body of self-government. A second was the Heart Mountain Judicial Commission and its subsidiary, the Preliminary Hearing Board. These were the prisoner-led bodies that processed criminal proceedings against alleged violators of camp rules and regulations. The third was the Heart Mountain Community Enterprises, which was the corporate entity that ran the system of retail and service shops providing the prisoners with goods and services ranging from ice cream cones to haircuts. As one would expect, even though these entities were made up of and led by camp residents, none of them existed outside the reach of WRA supervision and control. The Judicial Commission and the Community Council “reported,” as it were, directly to Heart Mountain's Project Director, while the Community Enterprises answered to the head of the WRA's Community Activities section at Heart Mountain (who in turn reported to the Project Director). As a practical matter, representatives of all three of the organizations often came to the project attorney (rather than their nominal superiors) for advice and assistance in organizing and running their operations. As a consequence, letters from the project attorney to the solicitor at WRA headquarters are rich with reports of the lawyers' encounters with these organizations and their internee leaders. What the correspondence reveals is that these entities enjoyed a notable degree of independence from WRA control in structuring themselves and that the camp's WRA leadership proved willing to make significant accommodations to certain of their basic judgments and preferences.
A. The Heart Mountain Community Council
From its earliest moments, the WRA recognized the importance of internee self-government. In a May 29, 1942 policy statement, issued before most of what would become the permanent camps were even under construction, the agency emphasized that those “responsible for local interpretation of Authority policy” in the camps should place “the greatest possible reliance on the evacuees in the administration of community affairs.”Footnote 81 However, the WRA did not manage to produce a final statement of policy on community government until the end of August 1942. The delay had partly to do with the extraordinary press of business that summer, but it also stemmed from internal disagreement about several key aspects of the policy: Should the WRA decree a highly specific, one-size-fits-all community government structure for all of the camps or leave the design of the government structure to each community to work out? What should the ambit of a community government's authority be? And most controversially, should office-holding in community government be reserved to the second-generation American citizens (“Nisei”), or opened to the non-citizen immigrant generation (“Issei”) as well?Footnote 82 The May 29 policy statement took the position that the Issei should be barred from holding offices, but the point remained a subject of hot debate within the WRA throughout the summer.
The August policy statement resolved these questions, or at least purported to do so. Each camp desiring community governmentFootnote 83 would have a community council and a judicial commission, but the communities would be left considerable freedom to devise their structures and procedures. The councils' ordinance-making powers would be subject to veto by the Project Director and confined to those matters of everyday camp operations delegated by the Project Director and criminal matters that did not amount to a state-law felony or were violations only of noncriminal WRA or council regulations.Footnote 84 Above and beyond these regulatory and adjudicatory functions, the WRA hoped that the community councils would serve as “two-way channel[s] of communication”Footnote 85 between camp administrators and the imprisoned communities. And on the most sensitive question, about Issei office holding, the WRA resolved to continue its earlier policy: only the Nisei could be elected to the council. The Issei would be ineligible even though they were the senior members of a community that prized and deferred to its senior members. Supporting this policy were a belief that the office holding in the camps should, as a democratic example, be off limits to noncitizens just as it was in other American communities, and a concern that aliens on the councils could shift power “to those who were not in sympathy with the objectives of the [War Relocation] Authority or with the war effort.”Footnote 86
Of course, while top WRA administrators in Washington were formulating these plans, time was not standing still. The camps were springing up and trains were delivering the inmate population to them. Unlike the camps, the community charters envisioned by WRA regulations could not simply spring up. They would need to be created by elected internee charter-drafting commissions and put up for community approval as well as endorsement by Project Directors. In the meantime, the camps would not run themselves. The WRA recognized that temporary councils and judicial commissions would need to be assembled in the camps to work with administrators and the imprisoned communities.Footnote 87 These temporary councils and commissions would come into being more spontaneously and organically, and would last only until their communities elected their permanent, charter-authorized replacements.Footnote 88 They too, as a matter of WRA policy, would be open only to Nisei.Footnote 89
The correspondence of Heart Mountain's first project attorney, Jerry Housel, reveals a rather different set of circumstances in practice than national WRA policy called for, and reveals a lawyer sometimes more interested in countering and tempering national policy than in implementing it. Housel arrived at Heart Mountain to take up the role as its project attorney in November of 1942 after serving for several months as regional attorney in the WRA's Denver office. In his capacity as regional attorney, he both worked closely with the solicitor's office in Washington on the development of WRA policy and maintained oversight on Heart Mountain through brief visits. It is, therefore, likely that Housel arrived with a clear understanding of the WRA's policies on Issei and Nisei participation in community government. The situation that confronted him there, however, was not entirely in line with WRA policy. Two governance groups were up and running. One was a temporary council of elected representatives from each of the camp's twenty residential blocks. This council met daily with the WRA officials running the camp and concerned itself with questions of camp organization and operation. All twenty of these elected temporary council members were Issei.Footnote 90 Running alongside the temporary council was a group of appointed block managers who, unlike the members of the temporary council, were paid for their services. All of them were Nisei. Their concerns were supposed to be more practical—resolving problems of daily living—but they, too, sought to opine on broader policy questions, sometimes in conflict with the Issei council.Footnote 91
Noting that “one of [his] main jobs while at Heart Mountain w[ould] be to help the evacuees in the organization of their government,” Housel set to the task of helping the permanent charter organization commission “weld…the two major interests,” Issei and Nisei, “into a workable government.”Footnote 92 Thus, right from the start, Housel dedicated himself to preserving an Issei role in Heart Mountain's permanent government structure, formal WRA policy notwithstanding.Footnote 93 Housel saw “the older group” as being “made up of very intelligent people who have been extremely helpful to [the WRA management] in getting things done in the community,”Footnote 94 and saw no reason to disempower or disestablish the elected temporary council, even though its members were all noncitizens. The lawyer understood that WRA regulations barred Issei from running for positions on the permanent council that Heart Mountain's charter would eventually authorize; therefore, he became creative. He proposed a bicameral council for Heart Mountain, with a lower chamber of elected Nisei and an upper chamber of appointed Issei.Footnote 95 (WRA policy did not bar Issei from serving in appointive positions.Footnote 96 ) Measures would originate in the lower chamber of Nisei and then be passed up to the Issei chamber as a reviewing body. If the Issei chamber disapproved, the matter would return to the lower chamber, where the Nisei would have the chance to re-adopt the measure and then send it along to the project director for approval.Footnote 97 Housel favored writing the upper body into the camp's charter, rather than leaving it to the discretion of an elected (Nisei) council, because this would “give it a more definite and influential status.”Footnote 98
Late in October of 1942, the WRA's solicitor disapproved Housel's two chamber proposal, citing the risk of intensifying the Issei–Nisei conflict if the lower chamber were to, in effect, “override” the upper chamber's “veto.”Footnote 99 For a few weeks after the rejection of his idea, Housel appeared to change his mind about the virtues of Issei participation in community government;Footnote 100 in a late November consultation with the organization commission, he went so far as to conceal the draft charters of two other camps, Tule Lake and Granada, because they provided for Issei participation.Footnote 101 But by December, as Housel continued to advise the organization commission on their efforts to craft a charter, he returned to championing Issei participation. Housel was in a position to see the political realities of the situation: he argued to headquarters that “the … danger in ruling Issei out of the picture too far is that we may not get enough support among the evacuees to establish a popular evacuee government.”Footnote 102 As the intra-internee wrangling continued through the month of December, Housel warned that “the Issei are going to die-hard [sic] if no provision is made for them in the charter.”Footnote 103
In mid-January of 1943, the organization commission finally managed to craft a draft charter that was acceptable to them and to Heart Mountain's project director. He forwarded it to WRA headquarters for approval, but the solicitor's office identified a number of inconsistencies between the proposed charter and WRA policies, rejected it, and returned it to Heart Mountain for redrafting.Footnote 104 One sticking point at this stage was that the WRA's top officials in Washington were wavering in their opposition to elective office for Issei, but were not managing to resolve the issue.Footnote 105 In this time of uncertainty about the policy, Project Attorney Housel once again took up the Issei cause, urging that resolution of the policy question should provide for “equal Issei–Nisei participation in evacuee government.”Footnote 106 The charter redrafting process dragged into April of 1943, with continued uncertainty about the electoral status of Issei bogging the process down. Yet again Jerry Housel took up the Issei cause in his letters to headquarters. He pressed the point most strongly in a letter on April 9.Footnote 107 Housel wrote that whereas he understood the general public might react poorly to news that the WRA was allowing Japanese aliens in the camps to hold positions of power, he still believed that “equal Issei–Nisei participation in the council” was the most “practicable way of setting up a community council in the relocation centers.” He reminded Washington that the majority of the voting population at Heart Mountain was Issei, not Nisei,Footnote 108 and the proportion of Issei to Nisei would rise further as more and more young and able-bodied Nisei began leaving camp for outside work under the WRA's “relocation” program. “[T]he successful administration of the centers,” Housel argued, was “of at least equal importance” to public relations, and Issei participation was key to that success.Footnote 109
On April 19, 1943, Heart Mountain's project attorney got his way (as did other WRA officials and internees who had been pressing the same position) when the WRA officially amended its regulations to permit Issei to hold elective office in the camp governments.Footnote 110 Housel wrote to the WRA solicitor that with this development he was “hopeful that the organization commission w[ould] now get busy and report a charter for the permanent evacuee government,” but he noted that by this point in the life of the camp, a full 7 months after the internees arrived, there was “not a great deal of pressure for a new government.”Footnote 111 This was because the community was finding that the temporary council in place since shortly after the camp opened “ha[d] been doing a pretty good job.”Footnote 112 That temporary council, it must be remembered, was 95% Issei.Footnote 113
The charter commission's work dragged on until June 25, 1943, when WRA headquarters finally approved a revised charter of community government for Heart Mountain. It provided that Issei as well as Nisei could run for seats on the community council. The community voted to adopt the charter on July 17, 1943, by a two-to-one majority. Elections to the permanent council were held on August 11, 1943, a few weeks short of a full year after the camp opened. The community elected a majority of Issei to the permanent council.Footnote 114 Only at that moment, after almost a year in existence, was the temporary council dissolved.
The ground-level view that the project attorney's weekly reports open up on the creation of community government at Heart Mountain reveals two significant things. First, the broadly accepted story of Issei disenfranchisement that dominates the scholarly literature about the entire incarceration experience appears to need revision, at least for the Heart Mountain camp. That story has the Issei “withdraw[ing] … from any significant public role” as WRA policy placed community leadership “in the hands of young, American-oriented Nisei,” and “withdr[awing] into an embittered but private disillusion.”Footnote 115 Issei at Heart Mountain experienced much bitterness and disillusion in their lives behind barbed wire, but it was not because the WRA's rules on office holding stripped them of position and influence in favor of their children. There was not a time, from the camp's opening to its closing, when Issei were actually barred from election to the temporary and permanent councils, and, in fact, they always held a majority of seats on those bodies.
The second striking thing in the correspondence about community government was the role the project attorney played as counsel to the temporary council and the organization commission framing Heart Mountain's community charter. On the crucial issue of who could serve on the community council, the lawyer did not see his job as counseling the community bodies toward compliance with national WRA policy. It was something closer to the opposite: he functioned more as an advocate for the internee community, or at least the sizable segment of it that wished to sustain rather than diminish Issei influence. Doing this did not require him to turn his back on the agency that employed him; in pressing for and creatively trying to devise an important role for Issei, he understood himself to be working toward the successful and peaceful functioning of the camp as a whole. This objective was certainly in the interests of another of his clients, the WRA managers of the camp. The project attorney's advocacy nonetheless showed surprising independence from national WRA policy as well as a greater attention to the interests of the imprisoned community than the literature would predict.
It is important to note what the project attorney's correspondence does not reveal about the WRA and the community council. According to the evidence he left behind in his weekly reports, Housel worked with internees on the creation of the council, a process that lasted a full year. Neither he nor his successors wrote much about what followed: how the council actually went about doing its work of developing ordinances, supervising internee community service bodies, and channeling information back and forth between the imprisoned community and the project director. Its day-to-day functioning and its role in the operation of the camp were products chiefly of its relationship with Heart Mountain's project director, and that was by no means a relationship of equals; as the WRA itself admitted in a postwar self-study, the project director's primary goal was to secure order and compliance among imprisoned charges, and to these ends all of the project directors at the WRA camps used “techniques includ[ing] persuasion, threats, coercion, passive inaction, compromises[,] and attempts to split the unity of the evacuee community.”Footnote 116 The evidence in the correspondence of the project attorney should not be misread as characterizing the entire relationship between the community council and the administrators.
B. The Heart Mountain Judicial Commission and Preliminary Hearing Board
The project attorney's correspondence gives a broader view of another key organ of internee self-government: the community's criminal justice system. This was a system that the project attorney not only helped design but also helped run. His observations reveal an internee-led judicial system on which administrators conferred an astonishing scope of discretion. With the permission and even assistance of the camp's administrators, the system became an island of criminal justice apart from that of the state in which it sat, shaped in many cases by the distinctive norms and preferences of the internee community it policed and served.
Both the WRA and the internee community recognized at the outset of the program that prison camps the size of small cities would confront the ordinary problems that bedevil any community, including criminality. The WRA's May 29, 1942 policy statement characterized “internal security” as initially the responsibility of a camp's project director, but as soon as possible, “the war-duration project government, established by the residents, w[ould] include arrangements for maintaining law and order … [and] establish procedures for dealing with violations of the law and … subject[ing] offenders to arrest, trial, and punishment.”Footnote 117
The Heart Mountain community took this policy statement seriously. Discussions about a judicial system began immediately after internees began arriving, and by early September, the fledgling community council established a temporary judicial commission to hear cases of internee misconduct.Footnote 118 It appointed seven “older, substantial” men and two alternates as commissioners, most of them Issei; they were quickly confirmed by an overwhelming vote of the camp's residential blocks.Footnote 119 They named as their chairman the lone Nisei among them, Kiyoichi Doi, who had practiced law in California before the war and, at age 44, was old for the Nisei generation. Although the project director had ultimate authority for dispensing punishments and the power to try any case singlehandedly, his practice was to delegate virtually all criminal matters to the judicial commission for trial and a recommended sentence. These matters included violations of WRA regulations and community council ordinances as well as misdemeanors under Wyoming law, unless the project director elected to refer those to state authorities for prosecution. He had no such choice as to state-law felonies; those he was obliged to refer to the state.Footnote 120
Commission Chairman Doi was a commanding presence in the Heart Mountain courtroom, a converted barrack featuring a long bench for the commissioners, a witness chair, counsel tables, and bench seating for fifty to seventy-five spectators.Footnote 121 Given to grandiose speeches and a fixation on minute details of procedure, Doi conducted the commission's business so ponderously that the administration and community council agreed in early 1943 to create a grand-jury-like committee called the Preliminary Hearing Board to screen cases and decide whether to dispose of a matter quickly, refer it to state authorities, or refer it for trial before the judicial commission.Footnote 122 This board consisted of three internees, one of them the chief of police, and three WRA administrators including the project attorney.Footnote 123 This dual system of Preliminary Hearing Board and Judicial Commission worked well enough that the project attorney advocated for it strenuously over objections from WRA headquarters that it did not comply with official policy. His reason was that the system actually managed the difficult feat of fully engaging the community. “It is difficult to get the residents to assume primary responsibilities for many phases of center administration,” Jerry Housel explained. The judicial system was “an important responsibility of center administration which they have come to assume and to carry out with relatively little assistance or interference on the part of the administrative staff.”Footnote 124 On the strength of this defense, WRA Solicitor Philip Glick decided to allow Heart Mountain to continue to use its preferred structure even though it did not conform to agency regulations.Footnote 125
Heart Mountain's first criminal case, a prosecution for assault, set a pattern that would prove to recur frequently. The case arose in October of 1942, approximately 2 months after camp opened, during a time when the WRA was struggling to provide adequate and satisfying meals to the imprisoned population.Footnote 126 The situation in one mess hall was particularly bad as a result of mismanagement by its former steward, a white WRA employee. A Mr. Takeda, one of the mess hall's cooks, complained repeatedly about the food situation to George Kumagi, the assistant steward, but Kumagi said he could do nothing to improve things. Takeda, who was working 12–16-hour days in the kitchen, was bearing the brunt of the dissatisfied internees' bitter criticism, and one day it became too much for him. He went into the mess hall, asked for a knife, tracked down Kumagi, and went after him with it. The fight was broken up before Takeda was able to do any damage with the knife.Footnote 127
At trial before the judicial commission, the internee prosecutor asked for the dismissal of the assault charges filed against Takeda by the camp's internee police department. Kumagi, the victim, did not wish to testify, the prosecutor explained, and the police report was in his view not of acceptable quality because of a delay in the investigation. Deliberating for 15 minutes, the judicial commission ordered that the case be dismissed, subject to the project director's direction. This infuriated Mr. Griffin, the white chief of the WRA internal security section at Heart Mountain, who told the project attorney that it was “a farce from start to finish.”Footnote 128 Commissioner Doi, he said, bungled the trial through “his highly formal and technical account” and what he saw as Doi's ignorance about criminal law and procedure. Griffin complained that policing would be impossible if the internees came to believe that the commission would not “uphold law and order.”
Surveying a number of internees, however, the project attorney found general community satisfaction with the outcome. In the view of his informants, Takeda was suffering from overwork, he did not actually injure Kumagi with the knife, and, perhaps most importantly, “some action to correct the food situation was justifiable.”Footnote 129 The dismissal of the charges, in other words, conformed to community sentiment, including its perception about camp conditions and their impact on individuals. There is no evidence that the project director disturbed this (or, for that matter, almost any other) verdict, and, therefore, the first serious crime at Heart Mountain, a knife assault, went unpunished.
This lenient and context-sensitive approach to crimes of violence characterized the work of Heart Mountain's judicial commission throughout its nearly 3 year existence. A few examples will illustrate the point. At the end of February of 1943, a 17-year-old named Omar Kaihatsu and a 19-year-old named Yukio Kimura did something that was against the rules but that many teenagers did: on an evening when steak was being served, they went to the mess hall in a block other than their own and tried to get in for a second meal.Footnote 130 A man named Yoshio Teruya was checking people at the door and told them abruptly that they could not come in. Kaihatsu and Kimura, upset at being turned away, said they were going to “get” Teruya later. Teruya decided to go to the young men's barracks to explain himself and apologize for his abruptness. Kaihatsu and Kimura responded by beating him up.
This seemingly small conflict took on exaggerated proportions in the community because Teruya was from the farming area of Santa Clara and Kaihatsu and Kimura were Los Angeles urbanites; these two groups mistrusted each other and often clashed. The Santa Clara group became incensed when Kaihatsu and Kimura were released into the custody of their block manager pending trial and gathered angrily at the police station to protest and threaten vigilante action against the young men. To protect them, administrators transferred them to the county jail in nearby Cody, where they spent a week awaiting trial before the judicial commission and, in attorney Housel's words, “suffer[ing] considerably. When they came before the commission they pled guilty. As the community became aware of how unpleasant their stay in the Cody jail had been, sentiment shifted toward leniency for them. Even the leader of the group that had threatened vigilante action appeared at the sentencing hearing to ask for probation instead of jail time. The commission sentenced Kaihatsu and Kimura to 5 months' probation for the assault, and that ended the matter.”
A much more serious assault stemming from what administrators called a “love triangle” took place at around the same time. Mrs. Takeko Terada, while married to Mr. Wasuke Terada, had an affair in camp with a man named Mr. Masao Yamate. When Yamate flagrantly ignored repeated warnings from Terada to stay away from his wife, Terada and his brother paid Yamate a visit in his barracks and tried to force him to sign a note admitting that he had caused the trouble in the Terada household and promising that he would break things off with Mrs. Terada and do nothing to alienate the Terada children's affections toward their father. Yamate refused, and a struggle ensued. With Terada's brother holding Yamate, Terada grabbed a piece of steel and struck Yamate with it over the head, wounding him deeply. Yamate required an immediate blood transfusion and it was uncertain for weeks whether he would survive. He was paralyzed in one arm and was virtually unable to speak.
Upon hearing about the crime, WRA Solicitor Philip Glick immediately wrote to the Heart Mountain Project Attorney Housel to suggest that “this case might well be one of the sort that ought to be referred to outside authorities for prosecution” regardless of whether the victim Yamate died because the case was an “extremely serious” one.Footnote 131 Failing that, Glick opined, the project director should hear the case himself rather than referring it for trial to the judicial commission.Footnote 132 Nonetheless, Heart Mountain's Preliminary Hearing Board voted to refer the case to the judicial commission for trial on misdemeanor charges of aggravated assault and battery.Footnote 133 Project Attorney Housel defended that decision to his boss in Washington. “Sentiment in the center,” he wrote just before the Hearing Board's decision, “appears to be entirely behind Terada as many of the people know the background of the whole case and are not sympathic [sic] with Yamada's [sic] success in winning the affections of Terada's wife and children.”Footnote 134 Just after the decision, Housel wrote to Glick that nearly all members of the administrative staff as well as the Preliminary Hearing Board thought the case should be “tried in the center.”Footnote 135 Housel acknowledged that the offense was serious, but pointed out that “a good number of the residents know the background and history of the entire case and they do not feel Terada is seriously at fault.”Footnote 136 Indeed, he noted, a group of internees had just filed a petition with the judicial commission requesting leniency for Terada. Housel won the battle with headquarters and the case stayed with the judicial commission.
The trial of the Terada brothers took place over 4 or 5 days at the beginning of May, 1943, with the spectator gallery packed and internees “h[anging] their heads in the windows to follow the proceedings.”Footnote 137 Because of the significance of the case, the members of the judicial commission conferred with the project director before announcing a verdict and sentence. They agreed that Terada should be found guilty and his brother found not guilty. They also agreed on a sentence for Terada of 30 days' imprisonment with 15 of them suspended. When the judicial commission announced this judgment in open court, they told the community that their verdict had the unanimous concurrence of all of the commissioners, the project director, and Project Attorney Jerry Housel. Fifteen days' imprisonment for a crippling blow to someone's head might seem a rather light sentence, but Housel noted in his weekly report to headquarters that it “was well received by the residents.”Footnote 138
The judicial commission took a comparably lenient approach to prosecutions for illegal gambling, a crime that at times reached epidemic proportions.Footnote 139 The first major gambling prosecution came before the judicial commission in April of 1943 after Heart Mountain police staged a raid that caught ten members of a “gambling organization” that was functioning “on a rather high professional level” in “several barracks” across the camp.Footnote 140 The Preliminary Hearing Board directed that the ten men be detained in the Cody jail rather than released pending trial because of the seriousness of Heart Mountain's “widespread gambling situation.” A few days later, they appeared before the judicial commission to enter guilty pleas that their legal adviser had negotiated with that body.Footnote 141 In exchange for their pleas, each would be given a suspended 30 day sentence and allowed to make a $15.00 contribution to the camp's Community Activities trust in lieu of paying a fine.Footnote 142 (The Community Activities trust was an internee-administered fund that supported recreational activities for the internee community.)
Project Attorney Housel was a bit unsure about the correctness of this procedure and, therefore, asked for advice from his superiors in Washington. He explained to them that “[e]veryone concerned feels that the procedure is a most beneficial one as far as the community is concerned,” vastly preferable to an alternative in which defendants would plead guilty to breach of the peace before a local justice of the peace in Cody and pay fines into the county treasury.Footnote 143 Headquarters agreed. In a reply to Housel, Acting WRA Solicitor Lewis A. Sigler called the approach “eminently sensible and practical” and said it was better for the defendants' money to go to the Community Activities trust or “some other worthwhile purpose” in camp than for it to go to one of the local justices of the peace.Footnote 144
With the approval of the solicitor's office, this became the standard practice for gambling cases at Heart Mountain: guilty pleas, suspended sentences, and the payment of a few dollars into the community kitty. Only once did the procedure engender disagreement. In July of 1944, the police arrested fourteen gamblers and brought them before the judicial commission. The commission dismissed the charges against nine who were in the barrack room where the game was taking place but not actually playing and imposed assessments of $3.00 on four of those who were actually gambling, and $6.00 on the fifth, who was a third time offender.Footnote 145 This slap on the wrist “discouraged” the internee police department, who “had the feeling that their efforts were all in vain,” and therefore the project director refused to accept the verdicts and remanded them to the judicial commission for reconsideration.Footnote 146 On remand, the project attorney reported that the commissioners were “quite reluctant to change their decision” but raised the fine amounts to $15.00 on the third time offender and $6.00 on the other four.Footnote 147 This the project director accepted.
Lest there be any uncertainty about the leniency of the criminal justice system that the internees created and ran with the assistance and approval of the WRA, two additional cases make the point with unmistakable clarity. In March of 1945, the Preliminary Hearing Board referred a number of criminal cases to Park County authorities for prosecution. One of them was an assault case in which Takamatsu Morinaga beat up Gyotoku Tokita. It is likely that the matter was referred to state authorities because that assault resulted, later the same evening, in Tokita's pursuing Morinaga and cutting him in the face with a knife.Footnote 148 This was a second offense for Tokita; presumably this is what led the Preliminary Hearing Board to send the case against him to state authorities and to send Morinaga's related assault of Tokita with it. Another of the cases referred at the same time was a gambling prosecution of nine operators of a gambling house. The Preliminary Hearing Board's reason for referring that case to state authorities is not revealed in the historical record.
The nine gamblers pleaded guilty in Wyoming District Court in Cody before Judge Percy Metz.Footnote 149 The judge began by commending Heart Mountain for its “fine record … on the absence of crime.” He also stated on the record that he would treat the gambling defendants in exactly the same way that he treated white defendants. Because the normal fine in his court for participants of “a gambling game where a ‘house’ was involved” was $75.00, Judge Metz sentenced them all to fines in that amount,Footnote 150 and warned them that he would give them “the limit of the law” if any of them came back before him for a second offense. Plainly, a fine of $75.00 was a good deal heftier than the “voluntary contributions” of a few dollars that gamblers were asked to make to the recreation department before the judicial commission. Similarly, when a justice of the peace handled the assault and battery charge against Morinaga for pummeling Tokita, he imposed a fine of 30 days in the county jail and a $50.00 fine. Again, this is a far more punitive sentence than, for example, the 15 day sentence that the judicial commission had imposed on Wasuke Terada 2 years earlier for striking Masao Yamate on the head with a metal bar.
On rare occasions, criminal justice inside Heart Mountain could be tough. Tellingly, this was in the rare cases that the project director tried, in which the internees' judicial commission was not involved. In one such case, Kumezo Tabuchi was tried for assault and disorderly conduct after repeatedly threatening Charles Oka, a member of the community council and someone the project attorney noted had “always taken a cooperative attitude towards the Administration.”Footnote 151 These threats occurred in a context in which internee factions were mired in conflict with each other about a number of explosive issues concerning resistance to, or compliance with, various government objectives, including the draft of imprisoned Nisei into the Army.Footnote 152 The project director, feeling, in the words of Project Attorney Ver Ploeg, that “it was time that definite and decisive steps were taken to see that threats and disturbances of this kind were stopped,” sentenced Tabuchi to 90 days' imprisonment.Footnote 153 In another case, Yoneji Morita, who had been ordered to transfer to a different camp as part of a major WRA reshuffling of internees in September of 1943, refused to board the train. The project director tried Morita for the regulatory offense of violating an order of the project director. According to Project Attorney John McGowen, the camp director “did not dare grant leniency” and sentenced him to 90 days in the county jail.Footnote 154
It is difficult to absorb the idea that one Heart Mountain internee who violently assaulted his wife's lover with a metal bar would get 15 days' imprisonment whereas another would get 90 days for simply threatening another internee or refusing to get on a train. What appears to reconcile the two scenarios is that threats to a WRA-friendly community councilman and refusal to follow transportation orders directly challenged the WRA's operation of the camp system and the project director's authority. Ordinary criminal conduct of one internee toward another did not. Therefore, at least in matters not challenging WRA authority, it appears that the administration at Heart Mountain was willing not just to permit but also to assist the internee community in enforcing moral standards that differed from those embodied in the law of the state in which the camp sat. As to what might be termed “everyday” criminality—crimes of violence, crimes against public decency and morality, for example—the project attorney empowered the internee community to vindicate its own interests as it perceived them, at times over the objection of his superiors in Washington.Footnote 155 As with the Heart Mountain community council, the project attorney's correspondence about the camp's judicial commission reveals a different, more collaborative, and more deferential relationship between the administrators and the administered than the literature would predict.
C. The Community Enterprises
The administration and the internees engaged with each other a bit more combatively over the camp's commercial life than over the community council and the judicial commission, but the result was roughly the same. Despite the WRA's constantly stated preference that the internee communities at each camp should own and run the camps' various businesses as a cooperative corporation, at Heart Mountain this never happened. For a number of reasons, the Heart Mountain community rejected the cooperative corporate form in favor of a trust, and the administration acceded to this preference. The project attorney worked carefully with the trustees and other groups to help the business run as favorably for the internee community as the trust format would permit.
A fenced-in community of approximately 10,000 people needs dozens of kinds of goods and services to permit even the semblance of a normal life. Clothing must be bought, or fabric must be sold to those who prefer to make their own. Shoes must be repaired. Hair must be cut and styled. New babies require formula and blankets and diapers. Students and artists need paper and pencils. Parents want books and toys for their children. Almost everyone wants the occasional diversion of a ticket to the movies. And these needs barely scratch the surface of a community's requirements. Heart Mountain, like the nine other camps, needed many kinds of businesses to serve the internees from the moment of their arrival.
Within 3 weeks of the opening of the camp, two canteens were already in operation, licensed under Wyoming law but with no legal form, and a third was in the works.Footnote 156 As of August 25, 1942, 2 weeks after Heart Mountain opened, WRA policy stated that “all community enterprises … although under government supervision, w[ould] function on a cooperative basis with all profits becoming the property of the residents organized as a cooperative.”Footnote 157 The WRA wanted all community businesses to function as part of a “consumers cooperative association, organized on Rochdale principles and incorporated under appropriate … laws” of either the state of incorporation or, if state law did not recognize a cooperative, of the District of Columbia.Footnote 158 Simultaneously, the WRA banned the operation of any private commercial operations by internees.Footnote 159 According to two of the WRA's top lawyers, the agency deemed a monopolistic community-owned cooperative the best solution for the camps because it would “assure to all the evacuees [sic] an opportunity to have a participating interest in the enterprises, avoid unfair profit to some at the expense of the others, and provide limited liability” for those who served as the cooperatives' officers, board members, and employees.Footnote 160 WRA officials also preferred the cooperative because of the prevalence of that business model in the programs of many New Deal agencies and states throughout the 1930s.Footnote 161
At Heart Mountain, the early chances for a cooperative seemed good to the project attorney. In October of 1942, Jerry Housel reported to Washington that the internees were “taking a very active part toward organization of the Community Enterprises Cooperative,” and had been learning about various aspects of the functioning of a cooperative in study groups. They were “about ready to start with the legal organization,”Footnote 162 he said.
Housel soon came to see that his optimism had been misplaced. In mid-November, he was invited to speak at a community forum about the idea of a cooperative. The audience peppered him with skeptical questions, revealing, in his eyes, that they did not understand the principle of a cooperative. “The great majority of evacuees in this center are suspicious of the whole plan for a cooperative,”Footnote 163 the lawyer related to headquarters. They “have the feeling … that … the WRA is trying to force a cooperative on them” and “apparently prefer that some system be worked out whereby a WRA employee can run the business and give the evacuees the lowest prices possible.” Housel admitted that he “couldn't answer their questions very fully” and asked for advice from Washington.
That advice came in a letter from WRA Solicitor Philip Glick in mid-January. Glick ticked off a long list of reasons why an internee-owned cooperative was a better solution for the community than the other reasonable alternative, an unincorporated business trust: A cooperative would owe no tax on its income if it distributed patronage dividend refunds before year's end. As a creature of statute, a cooperative would have clearer rules for its operation and management than a trust, and the leadership of a cooperative would face fewer vexing management problems, including challenges to their own authority. Because members of a cooperative have more control over the organization than do the beneficiaries of a trust, a cooperative would respond better to their needs and they would have a stronger incentive to learn about the business. Finally, Glick explained, because cooperatives are better understood than trusts in the commercial world, they would have an easier time doing business with third parties, including, for example, banks from which they might seek loans. Glick predicted that once the Heart Mountain community came to understand these advantages, their “reluctance” would “disappear,” as was happening at many of the other camps.Footnote 164
Glick's optimism was as misplaced as Housel's had been a few months earlier; the community's reluctance did not disappear but grew. From the WRA's perspective, an internee-owned business cooperative would be an independent revenue-generating vehicle not unlike other businesses (such as dairies or construction companies) with which it contracted. It therefore blithely proposed to charge rent for the barrack space housing the cooperative's stores, and to make the cooperative use its own funds to issue its employees the clothing allowances that the WRA itself paid for all other internees.Footnote 165 Although these arrangements took root at the other camps, at Heart Mountain they struck many in the imprisoned community as adding insult to injury. In addition, perhaps because it involved the internees' own money, the issue of the community's business activities surfaced mistrust, jealousy, and division in the community like almost no other issue. Two rival factions coalesced around the question of the cooperative—one favoring it and the other opposing—and they fought bitterly with each other for months in 1943, stringing the issue along, tying it up in procedural knots, and preventing resolution.
While the debate dragged on, the many community businesses could not continue to exist outside any legal framework, and, therefore, the project attorney worked with community representatives and other WRA administrators to hammer out the terms of an internee-controlled business trust. This too proved treacherous, with pitched battles over everything from how to select the committee that would have the power to determine the trust's terms, to how to select the trustees, to whether the trustees should be compensated, to whether employees of the trust should be permitted to sit as trustees, to whether the community council ought to have the power to investigate the trustees' management of the trust.Footnote 166 Arriving fresh in mid-1944, after almost 2 years of battle on the issue, new Project Attorney Byron Ver Ploeg naively imagined that “all sides [were] coming around to the viewpoint that ‘cooperative’ is the only answer.”Footnote 167 However, he soon came to see renewed flickerings of support for a cooperative as a gambit for control by one of the internee factions. The “two groups” were “at each other's throats,” Ver Ploeg reported to Washington. “If either of the two groups … were to sponsor a movement to incorporate the Community Enterprises,” said the project attorney, “they would immediately be opposed by the other group,” with “personalities rather than the merits of the questions … dominat[ing] the issues.”Footnote 168
And, therefore, the community cooperative of the WRA's wishes never came to be. It was an embattled, recurrently revised trust that, over the space of 38 months, provided approximately $2,200,000 in merchandise and services to the community and returned approximately $260,000 in “refunds” to the community (in lieu of the member dividends that a cooperative would have paid).Footnote 169
The trauma of mass removal and prolonged detention, and the resulting suspicion with which a great many in the community regarded the WRA, undoubtedly played a role in the community's rejection of the cooperative at Heart Mountain.Footnote 170 It bears mention, however, that throughout the process, the project attorney sought to assist the community in devising the best-functioning and most advantageous possible arrangement, even if it was not the cooperative that the WRA preferred. Early on, when a cooperative still seemed potentially palatable to the community, Jerry Housel traveled the more than 400 miles from Heart Mountain to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to lobby the governor and the legislature for changes to the state's statute on cooperatives that would benefit a Heart Mountain cooperative.Footnote 171 The Heart Mountain project attorney drafted and redrafted trust declarations as the preferences of the community shifted, in one instance proposing an “evacuee version” of the trust that he knew his fellow administrator, the director of business enterprises at the camp, did not like.Footnote 172 The project attorneys frequently advised the community enterprises trust on whether and how it could make charitable donations.Footnote 173 In one lengthy series of exchanges with the home office, the project attorney quixotically pressed to designate the trust's taxable “sales” of goods to internees as a nontaxable pass-through of goods at wholesale, with the trust functioning as the internee's agent. The WRA's solicitor in Washington saw the lawyer's efforts at sparing the Heart Mountain community from taxation as “interesting” but unworkable.Footnote 174
Interactions between the imprisoned community and the WRA over the camp's business enterprises were much pricklier than those over the judicial commission or the question of Issei representation in community government, but the larger pattern was quite similar: Heart Mountain's internees, often with assistance from the project attorney, managed to reach forms of accommodation with the WRA that defied the agency's national policy preferences. In these settings, the WRA's lawyer acted not so much as an instrument of coercion but as an instrument of mediation, often playing the role of advocate for the community's interests.
It is important to emphasize what these data drawn from the records of the Heart Mountain Project Attorney's Office do and do not permit one to say about the nature of the relationship between the WRA and its prisoners on matters of community structure and governance. The data are from just one camp, Heart Mountain, and should not be assumed to characterize relations at the other camps. The data do not capture the full range of the project attorney's legal practice at Heart Mountain, but focus on the office's work with just three (arguably the most prominent three) of the major internee organizations: the Community Council, the Judicial Commission, and the Community Enterprises.Footnote 175 Finally, the data reflect the perspective of only one participant in the events: the project attorney. There is no doubt that detailed recollections of various Issei and Nisei participants in these specific interactions around the judicial commission, community council, and business enterprises—if such detailed recollections existed—would differ in important ways from the lawyer's (and likely from one another's).
Even with these key caveats, however, the Heart Mountain project attorney's records suggest a more deferential and negotiated relationship between the agency and its wards than the prevailing narrative would suggest. On important matters of community organization and administration at Heart Mountain, internees were able to push away from the WRA's national policy preferences, often with the assistance of the agency's own lawyer in person.
D. The Question of Motive
What might have led the project attorneys at Heart Mountain—chiefly the first and most influential of them on policy matters, Jerry Housel—to support certain internee positions? Unlike Byron Ver Ploeg, whose letters to headquarters often revealed their author's sentiments, Housel rarely disclosed private thoughts or feelings in his correspondence; therefore, his motives are largely a matter of inference and speculation. The most obvious source of Housel's posture toward the community on governance matters was an orientation of receptivity to internee involvement in the WRA's overarching sense of mission. An emphasis on community involvement in governance, adjudication, and business affairs was no idiosyncratic preference of Jerry Housel's; they were broad agency-level policy commitments. However imperfectly realized, they were, perhaps, a result of the influence of trends within the BIA and the SCS, stated values at the WRA. It should be expected, in such an environment, that a lawyer in the field would integrate those values into his understanding of his job to at least some degree.
Another likely influence on Housel was interpersonal. He had daily contact with the imprisoned community—something his superiors in Washington lacked—and this gave him a more direct and at times empathic view of the internee community and its preferences and divisions than the top WRA policy makers could have. He learned a few words of Japanese, he came to see the Issei as an “intelligent” and potentially helpful force in camp,Footnote 176 he voiced doubt to Washington about the necessity of building a perimeter fence around the camps, and he expressed the hope that the community could be given more freedom of movement.Footnote 177 In one letter, he reminded headquarters that the internees “ha[d] been uprooted from their homes in a hostile atmosphere, gathered together in relocation centers behind barbed wire fences far from their former habitation,” and were “every day having their property and life-time savings in the evacuated states taken away from them.” In at least some contexts, his familiarity with and feelings for the community might have helped shape the positions he took.
It is important, however, not to push this interpretation too far. Familiarity can breed feelings other than compassion. Late in life, Housel looked back on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans as “the worst damned thing we ever did.”Footnote 178 He said he “probably should've quit” his job, and cited his moral discomfort with his work as his reason for leaving the WRA to join the Navy.Footnote 179 His correspondence, however, tells a somewhat different story. In the spring of 1943, Housel was thrust into the role of negotiating a resolution to a strike in the camp's motor pool by all of its Japanese American workers. The strike had been the product of simmering resentments among the workers about how the white leadership of the motor pool had been treating them. Its specific trigger was a vicious fistfight between a Nisei worker and a white supervisor. Housel emerged from this mediation experience shaken, convinced that his intervention had “narrowly averted” a “crisis which would undoubtedly have resulted in calling the military police and probably bloodshed” and that Heart Mountain was “headed for an incident of major proportions.”Footnote 180 Housel's prescription to Washington for averting such an “incident” was tough and cold. He argued, among other things, that it should be made easier for project directors to “get rid of trouble-makers on whom they are not able to obtain complete evidence [of misconduct]” by shipping them off, without charges, to an isolation camp.Footnote 181 He also urged the WRA to “strictly prohibit” all “out-and-out Japanese activities” including Japanese dance, song, theater, poetry, penmanship, board games, and wrestling.Footnote 182 All of these, he maintained, were “a potent influence for perpetuating Japanese influence and pro-Japanese sentiment among the evacuees in the center.”Footnote 183 Within 2 weeks of writing these things, Housel was gone. It seems likely that his departure stemmed less from moral discomfort than from fear of being present for a violent uprising led by internees who were, in his eyes, “troublemakers” and traitors who acted too “Japanese.”Footnote 184
In the final analysis, it may be that Jerry Housel took the positions he did not chiefly out of compassion or ideology but rather out of his understanding of what his role called for. He was a city-attorney-cum-legal-aid-lawyer, shouldering all of the sometimes vexing and conflicting day-to-day responsibilities those roles required in a remote location and without a law library. He did not have the luxury of thinking systematically and ideologically that the New Dealers at the helm in Washington enjoyed; he had tasks to complete and a restive community both to serve and help control. Dorothy Swaine Thomas, a University of California Berkeley sociologist who ran a multidisciplinary study of the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans while the program was ongoing, observed that the WRA's leaders “carr[ied] the torch for the Japanese people, but always in abstract, idealistic terms without much understanding” of the problems being faced in the camps or of “what the people themselves really want.” Policies were developed “partly in terms of this abstract idealism … but almost never in terms of concrete problems met by actual individuals.”Footnote 185 In dealing with questions of community governance, Jerry Housel and the other Heart Mountain project attorneys were actual individuals—lawyers—meeting concrete problems as lawyers do, looking for solutions that worked.
It should come as no big surprise that Heart Mountain's governance structures were a product of negotiation and accommodation rather than relentless agency coercion. With so many transplants from the BIA and the SCS among the WRA's key staff, an instinct to site some power over the design and control of community governance in the affected community was an application of known administrative principles. The project attorney's practical and quotidian need to find workable solutions to specific problems often strengthened that WRA commitment, even if it meant that the project attorney sometimes ended up deviating from or lobbying against the agency's national agenda.
None of this is to suggest that the inmate community ever felt itself to be—or actually was—an equal bargaining partner with the agency holding it captive. Notwithstanding its selective empowerment of community governance structures, indirect colonial rule is ultimately a form of colonial control. There is no mistaking who holds the ultimate power in such a system. This was true for native tribes under the Indian New Deal just as it was for Japanese Americans under the WRA. It is nonetheless important to observe that ultimate power does not always lead to governance through ultimatum, and that comparative powerlessness does not always leave compliance or resistance as the sole options.
IV. Conclusion: Reconsidering the WRA
These insights from the work of Heart Mountain's project attorney leave the historiography of the WRA in something of a perplexing spot. The standard scholarly narratives would have it that the agency was either a tough and coercive enforcer or, in the more recent literature, a mostly callous structure that made the key decisions and left inmates to choose between compliance and resistance. However, the literature makes clear that this was not the model of community interaction that prevailed at the BIA or at the Department of Agriculture, whence the WRA's leadership came. Moreover, the literatures of other wartime captivities have tempered some of the rigidity of earlier depictions of captor–captive relations in favor of subtler accounts of negotiation and accommodation. For example, the literature on civilian internments in the Far East during World War II has seen an effort to move past the “resistance and triumphalism” themes drawn from captives' narratives toward an appreciation of what might once have been derided as “collaboration” and is increasingly understood as “accommodation.”Footnote 186 Writing about a Japanese internment camp for Allied civilians in China, Jonathan Henshaw describes a “balancing act between captor and captive” that “stemmed from shared interest, pragmatism and the internees' determination to make the best of a bad situation.”Footnote 187 Similarly, James Mace Ward's painstaking study of a Japanese internment camp for Allied civilians in the Philippines leads him to “contrast the collaborative character of [the camp] with how it has been remembered and studied” as a site of gritty resistance.Footnote 188 In these internment settings, what Philippe Burrin calls “structural” accommodation—the imprisoned population's engagement with their captors around the need to create and manage important services—is to be expected.Footnote 189
Accommodation comes much closer than coercion to describing the governance relationships between the WRA and Heart Mountain's internees as revealed in the project attorney's records. What is especially intriguing about the Heart Mountain example is that it shows how accommodation ran in two directions. The just-mentioned studies of internment camps in China and the Philippines reveal how common it was for captives to engage with (rather than simply comply with or resist) the confinement rules of their captors. Heart Mountain saw that, but it also saw the inverse: captors adapting rules to at least some of the key preferences of the captives.
Burrin's model of “structural accommodation” does not precisely capture the unique relationship that grew between agency and inmate at Heart Mountain around community government, criminal adjudication, and business. The accommodations struck between Allied prisoners and Japanese guards in internment camps in China and the Philippines were around the most essential of the community's needs: shelter, heat, food. The possibility of improvements in the bare necessities of living was what motivated Allied internees to seek accommodation with their captors. At Heart Mountain, prisoners and administrators reached accommodation on matters that touched not on survival but on higher-order needs for community structure, public safety, and quality of life. This is not surprising, given that the WRA entered the relationship with a more benevolent and constructive (even if patronizing and often misguided) charge towards its prisoners than the Japanese guards in China and the Philippines held towards theirs.
The Heart Mountain Project Attorney's Office was one arm of an agency that the literature has documented as violating the rights of tens of thousands of people, but the literature has had relatively little to say about how the program actually unfolded in real life, how midlevel administrators in the camps actually went about the daily tasks of making the system run and interacting with their charges. The standard narrative is one of coercion on one side and compliance or resistance on the other. The records left behind by the WRA lawyers at Heart Mountain should give at least a moment's pause in accepting that narrative as a full and accurate characterization, and invite consideration of a more nuanced account of a New Deal inflected “indirect rule” marked by patterns of reciprocal accommodation.
