Title of Thesis: The U.S. Social Security Board and its Program of Assistance and Services to Enemy Aliens and Others During the Relocations and Internments of World War II

Larry William DeWitt, Master of Arts, 2004

Thesis directed by: John W. Jeffries
Professor
Department of History

This work describes a program of social welfare benefits operated by the U.S. Social Security Board during World War II, as part of the government’s program of forced relocation and internment of thousands of U.S. residents whose ethnic or racial origins lay in the countries of the Axis powers. This program, known as Assistance and Services to Enemy Aliens and Others (ASEAO), provided welfare benefits to some of those adversely affected by the wartime relocations and internments.

The goal of the present work is to restore our awareness of this program; to explain its principles and operations; and to analyze it in some depth as an example of federal social welfare policymaking in this highly unusual context during this remarkable episode in America’s history. The main conclusions of this study are: the ASEAO program was an important wartime program that has been overlooked in prior scholarship; it was a fairly traditional social welfare program despite operating in the unusual context of the internments; and that the federal officials responsible for the administration of this program exhibited patterns of policymaking that were consistent expressions of their ideological values and commitments to the principles of New Deal-era social welfare programs.