Postwar. Laura McEnaney
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is like no other of the postwar generation. Millions had left home during World War II to find a job, follow family, or serve in the military, but only Japanese Americans were tagged, marched, and warehoused after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942. Their recovery, not their internment, is the focus of this chapter.1
This “exit moment” from camp has received less attention, but it is a fascinating story about how an internal “enemy” in wartime tried to reconstitute itself in the postwar. Internment made Japanese Americans conditional citizens. Once freed, they were still on racial probation, under pressure to prove their loyalty and worth as they tried to rebuild from scratch. Approximately twenty thousand to thirty thousand of these “resettlers,” as the government called them, arrived in Chicago from 1942 through 1950, making the city “the primary center of relocation in the United States,” according to the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the agency in charge of internment.2 Refugees from the West, now even farther from their agricultural and coastal homes, newly freed Japanese Americans had to fast become midwestern Asian urbanites. Boarding a bus, finding a flat, locating a friendly grocer, these were all essentially racial experiments, for Chicago’s new Asian migrants had to test their reception with every interaction. For them, demobilization was both a bread-and-butter struggle and a fight for racial redemption and justice.
It was also a welfare problem. Demobilization’s history offers a new opportunity to examine Japanese Americans’ attitudes about the state in the aftermath of an extreme and punitive statism. The government’s power to separate, remove, and imprison represented state authority at its peak, but that overreach created a novel predicament for postwar policymakers. Locking people up as national security risks meant they had to provide for them. When Dillon S. Myer assumed leadership of the WRA in June 1942, he thought of himself not as a prison warden but as the new mayor of “ten abnormal cities” whose needs he thought would mimic “most or all of the problems of the small city.” This was internment as city management, the chore of arranging the basic needs of shelter, food, education, recreation, and health care for over 120,000 people. As Myer put it, the essential challenge of wartime detention was “the problem of caring.”3 His odd but suggestive phrase nudges us to think anew about internment as a welfare dilemma for the wartime and postwar liberal state: how to transition a population from carceral dependence to, as Myer put it, “a normal useful American life with all possible speed”?4 The fear that wartime federal custody could foster postwar federal dependency nagged WRA planners more than any national security issue. Essentially, internment had turned a once productive population into wards of the state, and Myer and his staff worried that wartime “caring” would have to continue well after the war as former prisoners tried to regain their livelihoods. Even more worrisome, internment may have fostered in its detainees a sense of entitlement to that caring.
These national politics played out as local realities in Chicago’s north side neighborhoods. Here, contact with two federal agencies—the WRA and OPA/OHE—shaped resettlers’ understanding of the state in peacetime. They leaned on both, especially the OPA/OHE, but their postwar state was never just the federal government. They built their own welfare organizations, local and national, and when those could not meet their needs, they wandered a little farther from their base into Chicago’s network of settlement houses and aid agencies. Indeed, their war liberalism alternated between an older ethic of racial self-help and a new and evolving sensibility that the federal government bore some liability for their long-term well-being. Older Issei immigrants wanted restored financial security and family reunion; younger Nisei, the Issei’s American-born children, wanted new financial security and family formation. They all wanted to exhale the war and inhale a new normal—to tend to the mundane, to be bothered by the small irritants of a regular day. From certain angles, their demobilization history looks much like everyone else’s—a grand scavenger hunt for the good life. The evidence from Chicago suggests that Japanese Americans emerged from this long process with some of what they wanted, but also with a sharpened sense of the trade-offs and fragilities of citizenship—especially for nonwhites—and a deeper wariness of their government’s power.5
Involuntary Moves
The regional history of Japanese American internment is more varied than we think. The original exclusion area reached from Washington State in the Northwest all the way to the Arizona-Mexico border. The government imprisoned Japanese Americans in western states (California, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado), but also in the Southwest (Arizona) and South (Arkansas). If we include the Department of Justice prisons, which held those identified as “leaders,” internment’s territorial reach expanded to New Mexico, Texas, Montana, and North Dakota. And if we consider when Japanese Americans migrated eastward after their release, then the captivity geography extends even farther—to Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio, all the way to New York. In fact, the postwar history of internment anchors us in Chicago because thousands resettled there. Thus we tend to think about internment as a western story, but it is really a national one if we include demobilization in World War II’s time line.
We also have to rethink time, not just territory. The war began for Japanese Americans in government prisons. Midway through, the War Department granted them permission to leave if they swore their loyalty and found paid work east of the Mississippi. Here, they were in a strange moment of postinternment but not postwar, with many family and friends still in camp. In December 1944, the government revoked the exclusion orders, enabling them to return home, but the war was still on and most were afraid to go west. Their full release came after two atomic bombs ended the war in a place far away but deeply connected to them. Yet it was not until March 1946 that the last of those held as “security risks” were freed. It would take years for Japanese Americans to rebuild, and decades until the government admitted the injustice and apologized. In 1990, survivors or their descendants saw their first redress payments for what they had lost during incarceration. How, then, do we date World War II’s end for them?
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was an explosive start of the war, but for Japanese Americans on the mainland, their war began as a series of involuntary moving days. First, in the spring of 1942, families hastily packed their bags (only two per person allowed) and went to what the government called “assembly centers,” temporary holding areas where the bureaucracy of detention stalled until full-fledged concentration camps could be built. Here, families stayed an average of three months, a strange limbo lived in converted racetracks and stockyards that previewed the misery of the more permanent “relocation centers.” In these prison camps, conditions were only marginally better than some of the animal habitats they had just left. Japanese Americans moved into “blocks,” rows of long, rectangular buildings, each divided into small rooms, one room per family—no matter the size. These “apartments,” as they were called, were essentially army barracks lacking even the most basic amenities, some of them not even finished when the prisoners arrived. Bathing and going to the bathroom were now painfully awkward communal acts. Internee complaints about their apartments sound much like those in the rent control files, and like those tenants, camp residents had an official process through which to grieve wretched conditions. But they were prisoners, not renters, and barbed wire and men with guns made Chicago landlords’ power seem trifling by comparison.6
Each of these moves required trains, the workhorses of modern warfare and the equipment that ferried Japanese Americans into and out of federal custody. On the trains into camp, Japanese Americans rode as prisoners, sitting upright, tightly packed, windows closed and shades down by order of the military.7 On the way out, they rode like tourists, shades up, eyes wide open, surveying landscapes they were seeing for the first time. Before the war, few had any reason to go east for either work or family; that was in ready supply on the West Coast, where Japanese immigrants had first settled early in the century. Only a plucky few had crossed the Mississippi, with less than four hundred recorded in Chicago on the eve of World War II.8 As we will see, that number would rise dramatically when, in mid-1942, the WRA adopted a policy that allowed internees to apply for work leaves. This meant they could leave camp, perhaps indefinitely, as long as they had a job.
Their third and final move then was their postinternment resettlement, a longed-for liberation, but an exit wound, of sorts, for