Larry DeWitt's Master's 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- Chapter 7

Master's Thesis - Chapter 7

VII. The ASEAO Program in Perspective

At the time of these events, the usurpation of civil liberties involved in the "restrictive governmental actions" was relatively easily rationalized by the majority of the American public as a necessary feature of the war effort. The most generous view was that it was regrettable but necessary; the least generous view was that internment was just what our "enemies" deserved. Many contemporary newspapers and magazines editorialized in support of the restrictive actions and opinion leaders were generally on-board the bandwagon. There were exceptions, but by and large, Americans not directly affected by the relocations and internments accepted them pretty much uncritically if not enthusiastically.

Originally, the WRA had hoped to avoid the use of permanent internment camps altogether by resettling evacuees throughout the country--an idea that the various state governors resisted with tenacity. The WRA also had to defend itself from the very beginning from public charges widely circulated in the media (and not just the west coast press) that they were treating the evacuees too leniently.⁽¹⁾ These attitudes seem fairly representative of the American public's views toward the internments during the war.

We should not, however, fail to note the significance of the dissenting viewpoints of leading opinion makers, even within the Roosevelt Administration. Attorney General Biddle and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes both expressed strong sentiments questioning the internments. After the Department of the Army announced the imminent lifting of all general exclusion orders in December 1944, Ickes issued a national press release, in the form of a message to the American people. Ickes was concerned about the acceptance of the Japanese internees as they faced resettlement in American communities. Ickes wrote:

The persons who are eligible for relocation or return to the West Coast have been found by the Army authorities to be loyal citizens or law-abiding aliens. They are entitled to their full constitutional and legal rights, and perhaps to something more than ordinary consideration because they have really suffered as a direct result of the war. In a real sense, these people, too, were drafted by their country. They were uprooted from their homes and substantially deprived of an opportunity to lead a normal life. They are casualties of war. It is the responsibility of every American worthy of citizenship in this great Nation to do everything that he can to make easier the return to normal life of these people who have been cleared by Army authorities. By our conduct towards them we will be judged by all of the people of the world.⁽²⁾

At the very start of the relocation and internment process Attorney General Biddle wrote an interesting memorandum to FSA Administrator Paul McNutt concerning how to provide support for the families of those individuals who were in custodial detention during the first months of the war. This was a particularly unsympathetic population, recall, in that they were by definition persons who the FBI had arrested on suspicion of their being in some way an imminent threat to the safety of the nation. These were not children and whole families, as in the later Japanese internments, but were persons like Herman Hoffman who were arrested because of, in Hoffman's case, participation in suspect pro-Germany groups. In any case, Biddle wanted to be certain that McNutt aided these detainees and their families under the just-authorized ASEAO program. He wrote to McNutt saying:

Unlike criminals, alien enemies are apprehended and detained, not because of proof that they have broken any of our laws, but because of the federal policy which makes national safety the paramount interest. Even where there is ground for suspicion that an alien enemy may be in some manner dangerous to national security, doubts are resolved in favor of the Government, and he is apprehended and detained pending a hearing. For example, a number of Japanese domestic servants employed in homes near the reservoirs of the New York City water shed which might be damaged were apprehended and detained upon the outbreak of the war although there was no adverse information against them as individuals. Even alien enemies who are ordered interned may not be guilty of subversive activities . . . As a matter of international law, it is an accepted practice for sovereign states at war to protect themselves by deporting or detaining alien enemies but this does not charge the aliens with any criminal guilt. Section 22, Title 50 of the United States Code, which was enacted in 1798, provides that alien enemies should be allowed time to assemble their goods and depart the country, 'according to the dictates of humanity and national hospitality.' I feel that under the conditions of modern warfare, in which we can no longer return all alien enemies to their own country, the same dictates of humanity and national hospitality require the Federal Government to take reasonable steps to care for them.⁽³⁾

While Franklin Roosevelt is rightly criticized for having agreed to the mass relocations and internments, and the usurpation of civil liberties they entailed, is he not rightfully entitled to a small entry on the credit side of the ledger for creating the ASEAO social welfare program to take some of the harsh edges off of his policy? Can it not legitimately be said of Roosevelt that to some limited but noticeable degree, he aspired to have the relocations and internments carried out in as compassionate a way as possible?

The fact is that welfare bureaucracies at both the state and federal levels worked throughout the war to provide a variety of welfare benefits to those affected by the relocations and internments. What is most remarkable about these efforts, in one sense, is how ordinary they were. The case files on these programs look and read very much like standard welfare case files, with similar procedures, familiar entanglements with similar policy issues, and abundant evidence of the mundane minutiae of standard bureaucratic processes. That is, the administration of these programs appears to be indistinguishable from that of similar welfare programs of the era (with some allowance for the unique aspects of the ASEAO program). This fact alone is remarkable, since in so many other ways the internments were widely divergent from America's professed social values and practices.

Moreover, a review of thousands of pages of documents from the ASEAO program, has failed to turn up even a single instance of caseworkers or other government officials expressing racial or ethnic animus or hostility to the "enemy aliens" served by the program. On the contrary, all the documentary evidence shows that government officials at the federal level made repeated efforts to treat the internees like everyone else--that is to say, like standard welfare clients of the era. While there may well be grounds to criticize the American welfare state--historian Michael Katz likes to refer to it as the "semi-welfare state"--it should be noted just how much fairness administrators had achieved in modern welfare policy even by the 1940s. And it should certainly be noted that these prevailing standards in social welfare policy and practice were applied, without prejudice, to the individuals affected by the wartime relocations and internments.

The ASEAO program was administered at the federal policymaking level with what can only be described as compassionate administration. Even beyond the surprising degree of fair and equal treatment, when faced with particular policy choices, there is clear evidence of federal policymakers repeatedly taking what can fairly be described as the liberal option when a choice was to be made. This disposition to liberal policymaking can be seen in the policy decision regarding the internees' eligibility for unemployment insurance benefits; in the decision to pay benefits to internees from Latin America; in the willingness of federal officials to bend the rules to pay benefits to needy individuals being unfairly denied aid by reactionary county officials; and in other policy decisions; and in the many small details of the actual administration of the program.

The attitude of the SSB employees can be glimpsed in an internal report submitted by the Board's Regional Director in California to the head of the Wartime Civil Control Administration, upon completion of the Board's initial work in the period of the forced evacuations of the Japanese from the west coast.

This active participation by the Federal Security Agency has been deemed a privilege by all who participated. Despite the innumerable difficulties of the task it has been performed without any serious hitches, and in a way that would prove a credit, I believe, to the Government as a whole . . . From top to bottom the spirit has been one of broad social sympathy and a devoted desire to protect individuals and family security insofar as it was consistent with military necessity. Particularly on behalf of our entire organization I should like to pay tribute to the Japanese themselves, who often at great sacrifice complied not only willingly, but in the main understandingly, with the regulations that have so disastrously disrupted their lives.⁽⁴⁾

The ASEAO program was, to be sure, a minor storyline in the trauma and social upheaval of the wartime "restrictive governmental actions." But minor or not, this storyline is largely missing from our historical narratives. Contemporary historians have generally overlooked entirely what might be called the "social welfare component" of the internment experience. To the extent that such efforts are acknowledged in contemporary historical narratives, they are brushed over lightly as if of no significance. These efforts are dismissed as if the efforts are somehow impugned by the presence of the larger injustice in which they were embedded--as if softening the blows is somehow invalidated by the presence of the blows themselves.

How the ASEAO program could operate during the wartime internments and go so little noticed both at the time and by subsequent historians is likely explained by five factors.

First, the larger context in which the ASEAO program was embedded was so overwhelming that it tends to absorb all our attention. After all, the most salient fact here is the outrageous loss of liberty and property that befell thousands of innocent men, women and children--many of whom were American citizens-generally for no other reason than that their ancestry was connected by race or ethnicity to distant European or Asian nations who were making war upon the United States.

Second, the relocated and interned individuals themselves probably tended to see the various complexities of the government's alphabet-soup of organizations and programs as essentially a monolith. From the perspective of the internees, it was "the government" who was disrupting their lives. It probably did not matter much whether the government labeled parts of itself WCCA, or INS or Social Security Board. It might have been too much to expect of internees that they would be able to parse those parts of the evacuation and internment process that were "supportive" from those that were "repressive." For example, if a relocated person is given job counseling and help in getting a job in a new location, which part of this transaction is the salient one for them, the fact that an ASEAO-funded caseworker sent them on a job referral, or the fact that the Army showed up in their town with bayonets on display and forced them to move in the first place?

Third, much of what went on in the ASEAO program was invisible to outsiders who were not themselves direct beneficiaries of the program, and may even have been unclear in its details to those persons who were direct beneficiaries. In the interview process in the WCCA centers, for example, officials of the Army's WCCA agency would be doing complex interviews of the Japanese evacuees for purposes of managing their internment, while state caseworkers funded by ASEAO would be doing similar interviews with an eye to identifying evacuees who had a need for financial assistance. If an interview indicated that assistance was not currently needed, would the evacuee even know that workers in the ASEAO program had been screening them? By the time resettlement comes into play, the internees who were aided might well have a stronger sense that the SSB or state welfare workers were striving to assist them, but here too, those individuals not aided would be unlikely to have much awareness of these procedures.

Fourth, we also have to remember that this program was welfare after all. Social welfare policy is often overlooked, especially in contexts like wartime, when the blare of martial trumpets drowns out quieter concerns. The tendency to overlook welfare programs is a tendency not just of present-day historians, but of historical actors as well. One reason--as is made clear in the oral histories from the internments reported by Fox, and by the detailed case-reports filed by the ASEAO caseworkers--that participation in the ASEAO program was as limited as it turned out to be, was that the internees themselves had negative views of welfare and attempted to avoid it. It is quite likely that this "anti-welfare prejudice," if one may short-hand it in a simple phrase, afflicted the internees and limited their perceptions and recollections of the ASEAO-related programs and services made available to them and their neighbors.

Fifth, and finally, there is I think one other truth that has to be mentioned here, a truth about the historiography of the internments. To put it bluntly: some historians are somewhat unprepared by their present historiographical paradigms to accept any "good news" in relation to the internment story. Most historians of this episode are now resolutely and grimly about the business of reproaching the nation for this injustice, and they tend not to look for shades of gray obscuring their vision--even small islands of liberal governance in a larger sea of repression is an anomalous sight to some of the present generation of hyper-critical historians of this aspect of the American experience.

Thus, it seems a whole part of the story of the wartime evacuations and internments is largely missing. And while it is essential to focus on the larger picture, and certainly on the moral dimension of public policies, it is equally essential to tell the whole truth--even the parts of that whole truth that make us look a little better than we want to look during our collective penance.

The present work is a modest effort to wave a tiny flag in the distance, to signal that there is yet more undiscovered land in the story of the World War II internments. The story of the social welfare programs embedded in the restrictive governmental actions of World War II is a story yet to be fully told, and is one that, in the judgment of the present author, has a pressing call on our attention.

1. "Officials Deny Jap Aliens Get Lavish Care," Washington Post, April 4, 1942, pg. 3.

2. "Department of the Interior, Information Service, press release, Monday, December 18, 1944. Statement by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes." National Archives II, records of the Bureau of Public Assistance- Master File of Civilian War Assistance to Enemy Aliens, 1940-1948, box 14.

3. Letter from Attorney General to Paul V. McNutt, dated March 6, 1942. National Archives II, records of the Bureau of Public Assistance- Master File of Civilian War Assistance to Enemy Aliens, 1940-1948, box 6.

4. "History of the Program of Services and Assistance to Enemy Aliens and Others Affected by Restrictive Governmental Action," Bureau of Public Assistance, August 1947. National Archives II, records of the Bureau of Public Assistance- Master File of Civilian War Assistance to Enemy Aliens, 1940-1948, box 13.