MANZANAR Historic Resource Study/Special History Study

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE WAR RELOCATION AUTHORITY AND THE WARTIME CIVIL CONTROL ADMINISTRATION

While the voluntary program was failing, government officials and others began to propose programs designed to benefit the evacuees. On February 20, 1942, Carey McWilliams, a California state official who later became editor of The Nation, sent a telegram to Biddle recommending that the president establish an Alien Control Authority operated by representatives of federal agencies. The agency would register, license, settle, maintain, and reemploy the evacuees, and conserve alien property. During the first week of March, John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, proposed a constructive program for the evacuees, including useful work, education, health care, and other services, as well as a plan for rehabilitation after the war. While these recommendations were being circulated, the Tolan Committee filed an interim report which showed great prescience about future problems and concern for the fate of the evacuees. [34]

As these recommendations were being circulated, the realization that voluntary migration was failing and that considerable manpower would be needed to implement a mandatory evacuation program led to further discussions by federal officials as to how the government might systematize the process and supervise the evacuees. The War Department was eager to be out of the resettlement business, and discussed with the attorney general and the Budget Bureau the mechanism for setting up a permanent organization to take over the job. In his record of a Cabinet meeting discussion at the White House on February 27, Secretary Stimson noted:

The President brought this up first of all and showed that thus far he has given very little attention to the principal task of the transportation and resettlement of the evacuees. I outlined what DeWitt's plan was and his proclamation [Public Proclamation No. 1] so far as I could without having the paper there. Biddle supported us loyally, saying that he had the proclamation already in his hands. I enumerated the five classes in the order which are being affected and tried to make clear that the process was necessarily gradual, DeWitt being limited by the size of the task and the limitations of his own force. The President seized upon the idea that the work should be taken off the shoulders of the Army so far as possible after the evacuees had been selected and removed from places where they were dangerous. There was general confusion around the table arising from the fact that nobody had realized how big it was, nobody wanted to take care of the evacuees, and the general weight and complication of the project. Biddle suggested that a single head should be chosen to handle the resettlement instead of the pulling and hauling of all the different agencies, and the President seemed to accept this; the single person to be of course a civilian and not the Army . . . [35]

As a result of this discussion, Milton S. Eisenhower, Assistant to the Secretary of the Agriculture as director of information and coordinator of the department's land use programs and a brother of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a fast-rising and popular general in the military, was selected as the civilian to oversee the Japanese evacuation and resettlement effort. Eisenhower, a 42-year-old native of Abilene, Kansas, had been trained as a journalist and had served in the Department of Agriculture since 1926. A candidate fully acceptable to the War Department, he worked informally on the evacuation problem from the end of February, and McCloy took him to San Francisco to meet DeWitt in March 1942. By March 17, plans for an independent authority responsible for the resettlement of Japanese Americans were completed. The next day President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9102 establishing the War Relocation Authority in the Office for Emergency Management in the Executive Office of the President, appointed Eisenhower director, and allocated $5,500,000 for the WRA. [36]

According to Executive Order 9102, the purpose of the WRA was "to provide for the removal from designated areas of persons whose removal is necessary in the interest of national security." The director was given wide discretion; the executive order did not expressly provide for relocation camps, but it gave the director authority to "accomplish all necessary evacuation not undertaken by the Secretary of War or appropriate military commander, provide for the relocation of such persons in appropriate places, provide for their needs in such manner as may be appropriate, and supervise their activities." The director was to "provide, insofar as feasible and desirable, for the employment of such persons at useful work in industry, commerce, agriculture, or public projects, prescribe the terms and conditions of such public employment, and safeguard the public interest in the private employment of such persons." [37]

Until a meeting with the governors and other officials of ten western and intermountain states at Salt Lake City on April 7, the War Relocation Authority under Eisenhower continued to hope that it could arrange for the resettlement of a substantial number of the evacuated Japanese in the interior and provide for their employment in public works, land development, agricultural production, and manufacturing in the relocation areas. But the intransigent attitudes exhibited at that meeting persuaded all concerned that the Japanese, whether aliens or citizens, would have to be kept indefinitely in large government-operated camps, called relocation centers, to be hastily constructed by the Corps of Engineers during the spring and summer of 1942. With that final destination placed in the hands of a civilian agency, the Army was ready to push firmly ahead with its part of the evacuation. [38]

On March 10, 1942, eight days prior to the establishment of the WRA, General DeWitt established a civil affairs organization of his own to handle evacuation problems and facilitate voluntary migration. The War Department directives of February 20 to DeWitt in effect placed the Western Defense Command's evacuation operations under the direct supervision of the Secretary of War, and, as aforementioned, Colonel Bendetsen was chosen as coordinator of evacuation issues between Washington and San Francisco. Because Army headquarters was facing an impending general reorganization, the arrangements for supervision from Washington were somewhat confused, thus necessitating Bendetsen's role as coordinator. After the reorganization of March 9, the Washington military staff agencies would almost disappear from the picture as far as evacuation supervision was concerned, except for planning and direction of construction of assembly centers by the Corps of Engineers with staff supervision by the Services of Supply. During a visit by McCloy to the west coast, DeWitt established a Civil Affairs Division in his general staff on March 10. The following day he created the Wartime Civil Control Administration to act as his operations agency to carry out assigned missions involving civilian control and evacuation program procedures. At McCloy's urging, Colonel Bendetsen was transferred from the War Department staff and designated as Assistant Chief of Staff for Civil Affairs, General Staff, and also as Director, WCCA. Thomas Clark was loaned to the WCCA by the Justice Department to be head of its civilian staff and coordinate the many federal civilian agencies that took part in the evacuation program. The WCCA initiated its operations with a brief, but nonetheless comprehensive, directive from DeWitt:

To provide for the evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry. . . . with a minimum of economic and social dislocation; a minimum use of military personnel and maximum speed; and initially to employ all appropriate means to encourage voluntary migration. [39]

Although the principal activities of the WCCA would focus on processing the evacuees, the new organization initially established 48 service offices, one in each area of significant Japanese population in the area to be affected by evacuation, to facilitate voluntary migration. Announcements "through every available public information channel" encouraged evacuees to visit these offices in order to receive aid in undertaking voluntary movement. The offices were staffed by representatives of various federal agencies that were equipped to provide help to the evacuees. Provisions were made to assist in property settlements, provide social counseling and travel permits, and lend financial assistance to those evacuees who needed it. The WCCA offices also offered to locate specific employment opportunities in interior areas for voluntary migrants. [40]