Towards a New View of the Japanese American Concentration Camps

When you read the literature about the concentration camps in which the War Relocation Authority (WRA) confined some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from 1942 to 1945, you come away with a pretty grim picture of that federal agency.  At very best the WRA is depicted as administering the confined communities through benign decree; at worst the agency is caricatured as a malign enforcer.  The inmates, for their part, could choose between resisting the administration or trying to ignore it the best they could.

After extensive primary source research in the records of the white "project attorneys" at the WRA's Heart Mountain Relocation Center, I have come away with a markedly different account of how the camps ran, at least on large matters of community governance.  In several areas -- the design of community government, the running of the camp's criminal justice system, and the incorporation of the many "community enterprises" (retail and service establishments) -- the administration engaged in lengthy negotiation with Japanese Americans rather than ruling by decree.  This process of negotiation and mutual accommodation often led t0 results at variance with official WRA policy and that respected inmate preferences.  And the WRA lawyers on the ground in the camp were often instrumental in producing these results.

I document all of this in a new article "Of Coercion and Accommodation: Looking at Japanese American Imprisonment through a Law Office Window," which appeared online yesterday in the journal Law and History Review and is also on SSRN.  It is a micro-history, focusing on just one of the ten WRA camps.  For that reason, my conclusions are necessarily tentative; my chief argument is that the WRA-inmate relationship needs a fresh look.

This paper is part of a longer-term project of looking closely at these "project attorneys" -- lawyers who occupied a gray zone of conflicting loyalties to their employer (the WRA) and to the confined population.  To varying degrees most of these lawyers struggled with questions of conscience, trying to do what they believed to be work for the good in what they knew to be an unjust system.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

I've always been intrigued by lawyers in similar or analogous situations such as you describe here, although I was not aware of this specific instance (I'm reminded of the scientist, whose name I can't recall, who worked for the Nazis but deliberately altered some mathematical formulas so as to impede their progress in making a nuclear weapon(?) ... or perhaps it was some other sort of horrible new bomb). Also, and far more broadly, one thinks of defense lawyers who represent indigent defendants while keenly and painfully aware of "trying to do what they believe[] to be work for the good in what they knew to be an unjust system" (at least for the poor, people of color, those without sufficient incomes to hire their own attorneys, etc.), despite, as it were, "Gideon's Trumpet," and in spite of the "Ten Principles of a Public Defense Delivery System" promulgated by the ABA. Being caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place, the late and great Monroe Freedman recommended this: http://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1380&context=faculty_scholarship

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

I left a comment, but as it had one link, it was probably consigned to a spam folder [if you find it, you can of course delete this comment: thanks].

[Al Brophy]

This is a terrific article, Eric.

[Captain Hruska Carswell, Continuance King]

Trump world definition: A government funded safe space/home/community provided for an immigrant group.