AMERICAN GULAG: THE INTERNMENT OF COLLEGE STUDENTS OOF JAPANESE ANCESTRY AT OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY, 1942

AMERICAN GULAG

OSU AND THE AMERICAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS 1942-45

"The first casualty, when war comes, is truth"

- Senator Hiram Johnson of California. 1917. Sen. Johnson played a large and sinister role in the disaster of 1942

Section i

"Not very long after the Friends Service Committee meeting, our contact in the White House called up and said, “Tomorrow morning there will be an order on the desk of the commanding officer in the San Francisco Presidio to evacuate all persons of Japanese ancestry, including half-Japanese, no matter how long they’ve been in America, from the entire West Coast to concentration camps to the east of Sierra Nevada, at least.” I said, “That’s insane. How are they going to do that?” He said, “Well, that’s their problem. The White House is in a turmoil. Eleanor has locked herself in her room. John has gone off somewhere and vanished. And the President insists on this and bites his cigarette holder and rears his jaw.” -poet Kenneth Rexroth, regarding "the first few days after Pearl Harbor"

Above: Eleanor Roosevelt: "Eleanor has locked herself in her room."

Above: Franklin Roosevelt visiting the shipyards and war industries in Oregon in 1942

In February 1942, the Roosevelt Administration issued Executive Order 9066 permitting the secretary of War to "prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commanders may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with such respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave".

The US Army saw the Order as its cue to launch an "ethnic cleansing" of the West Coast and imprison 109,384 people who had "one drop of blood" of Japanese descent. 70,000 were born in this country; they were citizens. The remainder would have been citizens except for the laws forbidding them to be so, due to their continent of origin. 3,500 were Oregonians. 2,250 were born in the state. Nearly 200 were from Marion County, north of Corvallis. 41 were Corvallis residents and more were Oregon State students and alumni.

Another 2,117 community leaders, including Oregonians, were also imprisoned in Department of Justice or US Army camps between Dec. 7 and Dec. 11, 1941. The parents of several OSU students were included.

Above: 1942. "Waiting for the bus to take the family and its possessions to a temporary assembly center, to wait until barracks could be built in the War Relocation Camps" - Allen H. Eaton, of Grand Ronde, Oregon - Beauty Behind Barbed Wire, 1944

The National Parks Service estimates a total of 4,000 others in the US were imprisoned prior to February 19. At the demand of the US government, 7,000 Japanese immigrants to Latin America were also shipped to the camps. There were also INS (Immigration and Naturalization) camps, FSA (Farm security) and others which housed Oregonians held against their will, and without charges. Altogether, the Congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation said, 120,313 were "in custody".

Above: Many of the homes of the OSU students victimized in 1942 remain, on 15th street, and are still used by students attending the university 3 blocks away.

ii. Hysteria

Left and above: the Corvallis homes of OSU students Tom Arai, Ray Hashitani, Sam Iwata, Kay Nakagiri, Harry Iwatsuki, all Oregonians, and Frank Saito of Hawaii - all imprisoned for reasons of ancestry. The house at left appears to have been designed by Dean Margaret Snell at the turn of the twentieth century, based upon descriptions and architecture.

The common report, that the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese ancestry sprang from war hysteria on the part of the general populace, is mythical. In February,1942, on the eve of "evacuation", an Oregonian poll showed only one third (34%) of all Oregonians favoring the imprisonment, after months of intense agitation by well-organized and very vocal anti-Asian groups, according to the biographer of Governor Sprague. Hysteria, there was, of course but hysteria - fear - is a widely recognized and central part of American culture, at all times.A search of Google.com for the phrase "culture of fear" yields 2.6 million "hits". Fear is always a present and restless figure in America, stalking the countryside, looking for a home, like the boll weevil in old Southern melodies. Its origin is speculative.

Right, 1941: "A young woman demonstrates how to put on and secure a gas mask" (NARA), embarrassingly reminiscent of those in government who suggested wrapping houses in duct tape and Visqueen after Sept. 11, 2001.

Right, 1941: blackout preparation in the home (NARA). "A Manhattan firm (Defense Blackout & Camouflage Co., Inc.) rushed into print, advertising a "blackout consultant service." - Time, 1941. Similar "services" bloomed after Sept. 11, 2001

Retired OSU professor Roger Weaver (right) remembers having to cover all the windows with black muslin in Corvallis in 1942, and all the street lights were turned off as part of a wartime blackout. Power cuts were common, he says. Kerosene lamps and candles were essential. Cooking and even toasting of bread, was sometimes confined to the fireplace due to power failures as well as blackouts.

Hysteria is costly: "A shipyard worker, driving with shrouded headlights through the fog in Portland's blackout, ran down a pedestrian and killed him. A fisherman, serving as a defense guard in the town of Depoe Bay, stepped out to flag a car, was killed." - Time, 1941. Right: painting headlights black (NARA)

Corvallis resident Ed Epley remembers painting the headlights of cars black, and blimps patrolling the coast looking for Japanese Navy vessels as well as blackouts.

Hysteria is not rational. At left is a carrier of the Japanese Empire. It's 3,850 miles from Tokyo to Honolulu, and another 2600 miles from there to Portland, a little less to Newport, Oregon directly.

To cover this distance, the Japanese Navy had at most 10 aircraft carriers - with responsibility for protecting the Japanese invasions of English Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma, Dutch Indonesia, the American Philippines, the foreign legations in China's Shanghai, Siam, and various islands - all in addition to the feared bombing of Corvallis, Oregon with its population of 8,392 and its 'strategic target' of OSU, with fewer than 2000 students in WWII. It was absurd to fear the Japanese army would invade Corvallis. Yet fear, a minority did.

"Blacked out. Portlanders have worked into the routine smoothly except that they turn lights on dangerously early in the mornings. . . Night fogs, common at this season, are now welcomed as Portlanders watch for the grey haze rolling up the Columbia and Willamette Rivers at dusk. They like to compare Portland fogs to London fogs — previously treasonable."- Time Magazine 1941

"The first blackout has made the great difference. Darkness fell impartially upon all, the Shirley Temples and the Sadie Smiths, Dietrichs and Doakeses. . . . Groups gathered at street corners to reprimand motorists who drove with lights. In the quiet of almost absolute night, this city of klieg lights and neon signs found a new beauty in starlight." - Time Magazine 1941

Above: Marlene Dietrich had become a citizen in 1937, avoiding alien status, despite her country of origin. Corvallis' Japanese immigrants were denied that right by law.

Above: Patrolling the beach, in case of invasion.

"In Seattle, during the first blackout on Monday night, a mob of about 3,000 excited citizens gathered on a downtown corner, milled along the street, smashing 26 lighted shop fronts." - Time Magazine

Left: "My mother had been born in Japan, the daughter of missionaries. Nonetheless, after Pearl Harbor, a gang stopped a train she was traveling on, and asked every one where they'd been born. When she said 'Japan', they made her get off the train, hauled her away for questioning...

I don't know what our ethnic background is. Grandfather was a moonshiner and his 'still' blew up, scattering Drapers and jackasses across the country. We don't know which is from one, and which is from the other." -

Above: Corvallis resident Jim Draper (on left, in photo at left, receiving an award from the Corvallis NAACP)

"Patrolmen stamped out brush fires on the Olympic Peninsula, said they were set in the shape of arrows pointing toward Seattle and the Bremerton Navy Yard [below]." Time 1941 [ed. note: the 'arrows' proved imaginary]

"A woman in Pelham, on her way to the beauty parlor, heard the Boston plane roar overhead as the sirens shrilled. She jammed on her brakes, was rammed by a truck, staggered into the beauty parlor shrieked: "Hitler's coming!" and fainted." - Time Magazine

Above: A guard was mounted at the Corvallis city water reservoir "on Mount Baldy" (Bald Hill) to prevent acts of terrorism and 'sabotage'. Ridiculously, there was talk again in 2001 of so doing, around the state.

"On Seattle blackout nights gangs of high-school boys and girls run the streets, yelling "Put out your lights" and having a wonderful time." -Time

Above: An artillery piece trotted out in front of the OSU MU, manned by 6 cadets, in case the feared invasion of the Japanese Imperial Army came via Jefferson Street. Dec. 9th, 1941.

iv. Vindication of the 'Little People'

Fear - excitement is more accurate - was fostered in 1942 by even the best-intentioned, and there were many. Propaganda posters emphasized our inability to trust or talk to one another. At left is a 1942 poster which had a common theme, the risk of simple conversation. The implication, of spies and saboteurs everywhere, was nonsense.

People who had been marginalized all their life suddenly, after Pearl Harbor, had meaning in their lives, and suddenly had power, with a license to do such things as stop trains' and smash up lit shops, and question people on the street (right). This new sense of power and importance depended on the prevalence of fear and they quite naturally reinforced it with every tract, every visit.

Above: "block wardens" (appropriately named) challenged 'suspicious' persons. - NARA (photo from the National Archives and Records Administration).

v. The Oregon "Raid" and the Vindication of the Coastal "Rube"

Left and right: Mr. Sadao Ijima and Mr. Sensuke Tao, both submariners of the Imperial Japanese Navy, really set the rumor pot to boiling as the only Japanese sailors to throw shells (9 of them) into the US, on to a beach at Fort Stephens at the mouth of the Columbia River, thinking, on the basis of incorrectly labeled maps, that a submarine base sat there. Coastal towns went crazy with rumors.

Because Supreme Court Judge Douglas was vacationing nearby, the most absurd conspiracy theories, and remedies, were suggested. "Veterans of previous wars, rifle club members and other local gun experts are planning to organize a home guard company at Newport to assist the army in thwarting any possible invasion attempts." - Gazette Times Mar. 4, 1942

"The Lincoln County Council of the PTA held an all day session presided over by Mrs. Leslie Smith Taft, president. A potluck lunch, served by the Newport PTA, was a feature of a noon recess. Entertainment numbers were presented by M. Nunnamaker and the high school glee club. Chief speaker was Rex Putnam, superintendent of public instruction, who discussed school sabotage activity." [ed. note: there wasn't any 'school sabotage' to report, incidentally] - Gazette Times Feb. 20, 1942

"Last week, the papers were full of news regarding an organization in Tillamook county which calls itself the Tillamook Guerrillas. The way the news story handled it, it seemed to be more of a joke than it really is. Mr. Oliver Beals of this city has a son living in Tillamook who is a captain of one of the companies. He received a letter from the son yesterday, in which objectives of the guerrillas is better defined. It reads as follows: 'If you take the papers, you probably have read about the Tillamook Guerrillas. We are sure getting s lot of publicity out of it but it wasn't started for publicity. Those pictures went all over the world and now a motion picture outfit is coming here a week from Sunday to make a newsreel of us in action. What you read in the paper is not hot air either, only they don't tell half of it. They keep enlisting until the companies get too large and then we divide the territory and organize a new company. I think there are 24 companies to date. When we first organized in this district, we had to go to the Trask River Company. They had a World War No. One Marine for a captain and I was First Lieutenant. But now it is divided and we have a company here at South Prairie and I was elected captain of it. There are 54 men in my company and they are not all in yet. If size counts for anything, my company's officers ought to be good. My First Lieutenant weighs 220 lbs., and my second Lieutenant weighs 206 and I weigh 212 and I'm the fattest of the three'." - Gazette Times, March 1942

vi. The public and the Japanese Americans

In 1941, little of the nation's fear and excitement had been turned on Americans of Japanese descent: "There was no general clamor for evacuation immediately after Pearl Harbor. The attitude toward the Japanese-Americans, as recorded in Congress and in the press, was warm, friendly, and confident of their loyalty. Neither the War Department nor the Department of Justice was considering plans for evacuation. As for the people, many of them remembered what had happened to some of their German-American neighbors in the first World War. But out on the coast - in California, especially - certain forces were galvanized into action. Old prejudice and pressure groups, whose chief business over the years had been to discredit and stigmatize the Japanese in this country, now saw the incomparable opportunity to to achieve their life ambition -- to get these people out and keep them out." - Allen Eaton, of the Grand Ronde, Oregon, 1944, in Beauty Behind Barbed Wire.

Outgoing California governor Olsen validated Mr. Eaton with his speech - click here to listen. Mr. Olsen's talk, unfortunately, was strictly for the sake of the public. Privately, Mr. Olsen was "up to his neck" in the campaign of racist groups to have people of Japanese ancestry taken away, as was Governor Sprague of Oregon. Mr. Sprague, publicly, in a speech was also saying that "those Japanese Americans who are citizens must not be molested." Privately, however, U.S. Sen. Mark Hatfield later reported, "Oregon Gov. Charles Sprague and [incoming] California Gov. Earl Warren had telegraphed Roosevelt, urging him " `to get the Japs out of the state.' And that's the word they used." To his eternal shame, and ours, Mr. Sprague would prove successful. The city of Salem has named a high school after him. Before he was governor, Mr. Sprague had been a partner and editor of the Corvallis Gazette Times.

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