Use and Misuse of the United States Census: The Role of Data in the Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II 3031386183, 9783031386183

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Margo Anderson · William Seltzer

USE AND MISUSE OF THE UNITED STATES CENSUS

The Role of Data in the Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II

Use and Misuse of the United States Census

Margo Anderson • William Seltzer

Use and Misuse of the United States Census The Role of Data in the Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II

Margo Anderson History & Urban Studies University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI, USA

William Seltzer Gwynedd, PA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-38618-3    ISBN 978-3-031-38619-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38619-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To our respective spouses, the late Stephen Meyer and Jane Berger, who accompanied us on our research journey.

Preface

The origins of this study can be traced to William Seltzer’s work investigating the case studies of the intersection of official data systems and human rights abuses, and Margo Anderson’s social history of the U.S.  Census. In 1998, Seltzer coined the term “understudied borderland” to identify the complex interdisciplinary, linguistic, and temporal contexts of studying how official population data systems both inform and serve the welfare of people in their societies and can be deployed for abuse, harm, and antidemocratic surveillance. Recognizing that borderland is the first step to bridging it. Our professional expertise differed but overlapped at key points, as we embarked on a research odyssey to explore already identified examples of potential data misuse and conceptualize a statistical policy framework to protect against further misuse. The evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast of the United States and incarceration during World War II was an obvious case to explore. Because of the significant work of historians, Japanese American civil rights activists, and the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in the 1980s, there was a large corpus of source material that had already been identified and mined. By the time we began our collaboration, the US government had formally apologized for the “internment” and provided small sums of reparations to the survivors, though critical federal officials continued to deny involvement. We recognized early on, however, that the analysis of the “data” issues from the program, that is, issues at the borderland, had slipped through the cracks of previous research, and we undertook to address that omission. This study is the result. vii

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Over several decades, our research odyssey took us to the work of the rich array of scholars who had studied the episode, and to archives around the United States, to the records of statistical agencies and policymakers, to military records, immigration records, the war planning agency records, and to the personal papers of Presidents, members of Congress, and their staffs. They are identified throughout the text. Given the statistical policy questions we began with, we have focused primarily on the data issues. We hope, on the one hand, to provide evidence to support efforts of statistical professionals wrestling with their ethical and professional responsibilities in the face of demands to deploy “data” for targeting vulnerable populations and, on the other hand, to provide something of a civics lesson on the usefulness and relevance of data systems in modern states. Finally, we want to acknowledge that we owe an enormous debt to the many people and institutions that supported us along our research odyssey. They include the many archivists who curated the primary source material and evidence that we accessed. They include scholars and citizen activists in the Japanese American and larger civil and human rights communities, upon whose shoulders we were able to stand. They include the professional associations and committees that provided venues for presenting our work in progress and for the many discussants and commentators who prompted us to sharpen our analysis and answer the new questions they posed. They include our institutional homes as we researched at the University of Wisconsin  – Milwaukee and Fordham University. They include our editors at Springer Nature who have made this publication possible, and the journal editors who published our papers as they appeared over several decades. And they include the long-term researchers, friends, and officials who work in, advise, and support the federal statistical system, particularly the Census Bureau. Their support has been invaluable. Any remaining flaws in the study are ours. Milwaukee, WI, USA Gwynedd, PA, USA 

Margo Anderson William Seltzer

Contents

1 I ntroduction: The Census in Wartime  1 George Orwell’s Insight   1 Exploring the Reality   3 References   7 2 B  efore Pearl Harbor  9 Complex Threads   9 The American Census and the Demographic Development of the United States   10 The Japanese American Community on the West Coast on the Eve of War   12 Mobilizing the Nation for National Defense and National Security  17 Roosevelt’s Informal Surveillance Networks   21 Taking the 1940 Census   26 Understanding the Census Bureau’s Statistical Practice   28 The Roosevelt Administration Put Census Officials in a Bind   32 Roosevelt Selects a New Census Director   37 Technical Note: The Classification of Race and National Origin in the Census   40 References  44 3 The  United States Enters World War II 49 December 7, 1941   49 Federal Officials Secure the West Coast   51 ix

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The Census Bureau and the 1940 Census Releases on Japanese Americans  56 J.C. Capt’s Initiatives   63 Public Debate and Lobbying Activities on the West Coast   65 Technical Note: How the Census Bureau Tabulated the Releases on Japanese Americans   69 References  71 4 From  January to February 1942: The Decision to Evacuate 75 Justice Department and the Western Defense Command Meet   75 Implementing DeWitt’s Orders: The Northwest   79 Implementing DeWitt’s Orders: Los Angeles   79 The Public Debate About Enemy Alien Control   83 The Los Angeles Debate   84 Planning for Evacuating the Nisei   93 Repealing Census Confidentiality   95 Moving to Total Evacuation   97 Total Evacuation of Japanese Ancestry Population Authorized  100 References 103 5 Evacuating  the Japanese from Military Area 1: March to June 1942107 Census Officials Deployed to the Western Defense Command in San Francisco  107 The Problem of Identifying the Nisei  111 The Evacuation Process  116 Technical Note: Final Report Description of Social Data Registration Form Procedures  128 References 130 6 Population  Registration, Population Control, and Loyalty133 Ongoing Issues of West Coast Security and the Fate of the Evacuees  133 General Population Registration for Military and Statistical Purposes 138 Extending the Implementation of EO9066: Policies for German and Italian Aliens and Military Area No. 2  144 Building a Population Register of the Evacuated  147 Identification and Loyalty  150 References 160

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7 Census  Bureau Data Releases During Wartime, 1942–1947163 Converting the Census Bureau to a “War Program” Basis  163 Census Data Release Workflow in the 1940s  165 The Integration of Section 1402 of the Second War Powers Act into Census Data Release Practice  167 Releasing Information from the Population Census Schedules  170 Requesting a List of Japanese Americans in Washington, DC, from the 1940 Census  171 Secretary Morgenthau Contacts the Commerce Department  174 Looking Forward to Bureau Release Policy After the War  179 References 181 8 After  World War II: From the End of Incarceration to Redress and the Recovery of the Historical Record185 The Long Road to a Reckoning  185 Ending the War and Closing the Camps  186 Census Bureau Issues  190 Reestablishing Statistical Confidentiality  191 The War History Project  195 From Scholarly Research to Redress  196 Redress Activists Rediscover the Role of the Census Bureau in the Evacuation  198 Further Reexamination of the Historical Record and Census Bureau Apology  205 References 208 9 L  essons213 The Understudied Borderland Between Statistical Policy, Demographic, and Military History  213 Memory of Past Policies  214 Ethics 214 References 217 G  lossary221 I ndex225

About the Authors

Margo  Anderson  is Distinguished Professor Emerita (History and Urban Studies) at the University of Wisconsin  – Milwaukee. She specializes in American social, urban, and women’s history and has research interests in both urban history and the history of the social sciences and the development of statistical data systems, particularly the census. Her publications include the second edition of The American Census: A Social History (Yale University Press, 2015); Encyclopedia of the U.S.  Census: From the Constitution to the American Community Survey (ACS), 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011), coedited with Constance F. Citro and Joseph J. Salvo; and a coedited volume with Victor Greene, Perspectives on Milwaukee’s Past (University of Illinois Press, 2009). With UWM Professor Amanda Seligman, she is Lead Editor of the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee. In 2006 she served as the President of the Social Science History Association. William Seltzer’s  career spanned over a half century in a variety of positions as an official statistician in United States and abroad, and in international statistical agencies, including the U.S.  Census Bureau, The Population Council, and the United Nations Statistics Division, where he was Chief of Demographic and Social Statistics (1974-86) and Director from 1986 to 1994. From 1995, until his retirement in 2011, he held the position of Senior Research Scholar at Fordham University. He was a fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA), an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and chaired the ASA Committee on Professional Ethics. He served as a Consultant to the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1996), was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Population and Demography, and served as chair of its panel on data collection. His prexiii

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sentations and publications include studies of demographic measurement, statistical ­organization and policy, the interface between human rights and population data systems, and the promotion of ethical standards in demographic and statistical work.

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Manzanar war relocation center, 1942. (Source: National Park Service n.d.) Dorothea Lange photographed the barracks and bleak landscape of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1942�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    4 Fig. 2.1 1940 census population questionnaire. The 1940 census population questionnaire had 34 questions for the entire population, and an additional 16 questions for individuals who fell on the “5 percent sample lines.” The page had space for listing 40 people. The back side of the form [not reproduced here] asked 31 questions about the housing situation of the people enumerated on the population schedule. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.)�����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   26 Fig. 2.2 1940 census main population punch card [card A]. The 1940 census punch card A coded the information on individuals from the paper schedules so the census could be tabulated. The “color or race” information was in column 14 of the card. (Source: Truesdell 1965, p. 201) �����������������������������������������������������   27 Fig. 3.1 Japanese Population of the United States and its Territories and Possessions, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Series P-3, No. 23, December 9, 1941. First page of the first data release on the Japanese ancestry population from the 1940 census, December 9, 1941. (Source: US Bureau of the Census (1941a))���������������������������������������������������������������������   58 Fig. 3.2 Japanese Population for Each County in the Pacific Coast States by Sex and Nativity or Citizenship,… December 11, 1941. First page of the third data release on the Japanese ancestry population in the Pacific Coast States. ���������������������������������������������   59 xv

Fig. 5.1 Census Bureau Brain Trust. Meeting of the Census Advisory Committee, 1940. Calvert Dedrick is third from the left. Census Director William Lane Austin is to his left. (Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum 1940)�����������������������  109 Fig. 5.2 Memorandum for Colonel Karl L. Bendetsen, March 21, 1942. Dedrick’s memorandum was Exhibit A of Evacuation Memorandum No. 1, ordering the evacuation of Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island, Washington. (Source: Dedrick, Calvert L. 1942)���������������������������������������������������������������  120 Fig. 5.3 Social Data Registration Form. Family characteristics were entered on this form when people arrived at the “civil control station.” The forms were used to monitor people’s movements from roundup to relocation camp. (Source: Wartime Civil Control Administration, Civil Affairs Division 1942) ���������������������  124 Fig. 5.4 The Mochida Family Awaiting Evacuation, May 8, 1942. Dorothea Lange photographed the Mochida family from Hayward, CA, as they awaited evacuation. The tags the individuals wore provided the link to the family number on the Social Data Registration Form. (Source: War Relocation Authority 1942) ���������  125 Fig. 7.1 Japanese Residing in the Metropolitan Area of Washington, DC, April 1, 1940. Enclosure responding to Secretary Morgenthau’s request for a list of Japanese Americans in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, August 1943. (Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census 1943)�������������������������������������������������������������������������  176

1 Introduction: The Census in Wartime

At its core, public-sector use of big data heightens concerns about the balance of power between government and the individual. Once information about citizens is compiled for a defined purpose, the temptation to use it for other purposes can be considerable, especially in times of national emergency. One of the most shameful instances of the government misusing its own data dates to the Second World War. Census data collected under strict guarantees of confidentiality was used to identify neighborhoods where Japanese – Americans lived so they could be detained in internment camps for the duration of the war. Executive Office of the President (2014: 22)

George Orwell’s Insight In 1949, George Orwell published the dystopian novel 1984. In the novel, set in Britain, “Big Brother” controlled all in “Oceania.” The state was all-seeing, all-knowing, rewriting history as necessary and eliminating or reeducating people seen as threats to the social order. The novel has been enormously popular, and ever since, the term “Orwellian” has come to signify in the public imagination the threats from overwhelming state surveillance and control of the daily lives of ordinary people. Recently, the revelations that the US National Security Agency collected transactional information in phone calls and Internet communications reminded the public of the power of the state to collect and process information. Does such data collection make us freer, safer, or happier? Or does it threaten our privacy, constrain our freedom, or control our activities? When the Edward Snowden revelations were first published in 2013, the administration and many in Congress defended the practice. But some months later, one

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court called the collections “almost Orwellian” (Castle 2013; Mazzetti and Schmidt 2013; Savage 2013; Shane 2013). Similarly, in the 1960s, the US Bureau of the Budget (BOB) (today it would be the Office of Management and Budget or OMB) and prominent American social science organizations proposed the creation of a “federal data center” to take advantage of the recent availability of mainframe computer capacity to centralize and organize the disparate data collection systems of the federal government. At the time, the government’s records for social security, tax collection, draft registration, alien registration, and a host of other federal programs were all separate systems, and the administrators in the federal government and social science researchers saw the possibilities of merging these data systems for administrative and research purposes. When Congress and the public got wind of the proposal, they objected strenuously to the creation of such a “monster” and “octopus,” considering it an “Orwellian threat to personal privacy.” BOB scrapped the project (Kraus 2013). Orwell’s world is not ours. There were no computers yet in 1949, no social media, not even much in the way of universal telephone access. Yet, somehow, Orwell’s vision still resonates and directs us perhaps to look back at his world and try to see why. What Orwell did see in the 1930s and 1940s was the rise of Stalinism and Fascism, the Great Depression, and the carnage of the Second World War. He saw the rise of what came to be called “mass society,” the destabilization of Europe, the decolonization of European empires, and the start of the Cold War. In this context, around the world, elites mobilized new instruments of surveillance, propaganda, and control. Total war swept up everyone and everything in its path. The United States was not isolated from these events, though World War II did not destroy the economic infrastructure of the nation as it did in much of Europe and Asia. On the contrary, entry into the war finally helped pull the United States out of the Depression, and the war has come to be seen as perhaps America’s last “good war.” At the time, though, it was much less clear how it all would turn out. The country was blindsided by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. And the capacity of the state to fight the war and deal with internal security threats was not clear at the time. Americans generally supported strong measures to keep the nation safe. Thus, part of Orwell’s message, as we are discovering more recently from experience with social media companies, was that the very instruments that democratic societies had invented to promote communication and even

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protect themselves could become instruments of their own democratic downfall. And ever since, attacking a proposal to collect information on people and institutions and target them for surveillance as “Orwellian” is a particularly potent charge.

Exploring the Reality Did the United States ever make an earlier start down the road toward total surveillance of ordinary Americans? Or did the “Orwellian” challenge only emerge later, during the data bank debates of the 1960s, or after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the systems put in place to combat terrorism? Was there already a “dark side” of surveillance in the 1940s (Seltzer and Anderson 2001)? The World War II evacuation and incarceration of the West Coast Japanese ancestry population, misnamed as the “Japanese internment,” provides a concrete example from Orwell’s time of the issues he saw  – the power of the government to use its data capacities to harm the very citizens it was supposed to protect (Daniels 2005). The basic facts are well known. Starting less than 4 months after the attack on Pearl Harbor in March 1942 and continuing to August 1942, the US government rounded up over 100,000 West Coast Americans of Japanese ancestry and, without further investigation or due process, incarcerated them in purpose-built concentration camps, most for the duration of World War II when they were released (Fig. 1.1). At the time, officials argued, and the courts and Congress agreed, that the Japanese American ancestry population posed a security threat and thus “military necessity” required the mass incarceration. That understanding remained until the 1970s and 1980s, when the Federal Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians investigated the program again and repudiated the rationale of military necessity, instead writing that the policy was the result of racial prejudice, war hysteria, and failure of political leadership (U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982; reissued 1997). In 1988, the federal government provided a formal apology and reparations for survivors. In the 1980s, the federal courts also repudiated the Supreme Court decisions that upheld the constitutionality of the internment during World War II. Since then, an even greater outpouring of analysis has delved into the history of the event. Our primary focus here is on the public data systems that were available to government officials at the time and how those systems were deployed to

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Fig. 1.1  Manzanar war relocation center, 1942. (Source: National Park Service n.d.) Dorothea Lange photographed the barracks and bleak landscape of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1942

evacuate and incarcerate West Coast Japanese ancestry residents. As war loomed in Europe and Asia, federal officials prepared for a possible attack, tried to identify the security threats the nation faced, and worked to mobilize the resources to defend the nation. We explore what is now understood as a “shameful instance” of the misuse of federal data, primarily from the 1940 census, to illustrate how the information and expertise of the federal statistical system came to be an essential element of the overall “grave personal injustice…done to the American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese ancestry” during World War II (Executive Office of the President 2014: 22; CWRIC 1982: 459). Our exploration, therefore, takes us into the history of data, the rules, and expertise that had developed over the previous century or more on the kinds of information that modern states collected and used and how officials understood their authorities and responsibilities for collecting, curating, and preserving the information. It will take us into the history of the distinction between information collected for administrative purposes and for what came to be called “statistical purposes” and the logic and standards that governed each.

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And it will touch on the history of the relationship between such administrative and statistical data systems and the other functions of government to tax, regulate, provide benefits, and license people and organizations. The book is structured as a narrative, with each chapter designed to illustrate the context, issues, and decision-making processes and actions of a complex set of actors, in each phase of the overall story. We begin before the war. Chapter 2 describes the situation on the West Coast on the eve of World War II, as a number of historical threads converged and resulted in the evacuation and incarceration that followed the outbreak of war. They include the demographic and economic situation of the West Coast of the United States, particularly the Japanese ancestry community; the information from and characteristics of the federal statistical system and the census at the time; the emerging mobilization for national defense as war loomed; and the political strategies and personalities in the Roosevelt administration, who would soon be called upon to protect the nation and prosecute the war. Chapter 3 details how the West Coast officials, the military, the Japanese American community, and leaders in Washington scrambled in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and their efforts that month to protect the West Coast from further Japanese attack. No further military attacks occurred, but West Coast officials and the military continued to plan for more draconian moves to restrict the liberty of individuals and groups who they considered national security threats. Chapter 4 traces the pressure campaigns in the military and among public officials in January and February of 1942 to move to full-scale evacuation of all Japanese ancestry Americans from the West Coast of the US. In Washington, DC, Census Bureau leadership, Congress, and the Roosevelt administration moved to repeal the restrictions on identifiable data use in the census statute so the data could be used for military control. On February 19, 1942, in Executive Order 9066, Franklin Roosevelt authorized the removal of people deemed to pose a national security threat to the West Coast. The Second War Powers Act, repealing the confidentiality protections of census data, was signed into law in late March 1942. These measures provided the legal tools and justification for the evacuations that began in March. Chapter 5 traces the implementation from late February to June 1942 of the evacuation of over 100,000 residents of Japanese ancestry from the area designated by the Army as Military Area 1 in the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Census officials, census expertise, and census small area data were central to the planning and execution of the evacuation. Chapter 6 traces the continuation of the evacuation to Military Area 2 in the summer of 1942 and the integration of census officials into the

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management of the future of the evacuated community. It traces the debates about whether to extend the evacuation program to German and Italian aliens, whether to introduce a national population register for military control of the entire American population, and the bureaucratic infighting about how and whether to release evacuees from the camps for military service or civilian employment during the war. The repeal of the statistical confidentiality provisions in census law went into effect in late March 1942 under the authority of Section 1402 of the Second War Powers Act. From spring 1942 until spring 1947, officials from all federal agencies military and civilian, could request that the Census Bureau provide information from identifiable census microdata releases, as well as special tabulations and technical guidance, to support the prosecution of the war. The bureau deployed its wealth of economic, institutional, and demographic information to provide an arsenal of information for economic war planning and surveillance of potential national security threats. Chapter 7 describes these efforts, their extent, and bureaucratic procedures, focusing in particular on the 1943 case of the provision of a list of Japanese Americans in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area for a Secret Service investigation of an alleged threat to the President’s life. Chapter 8 traces the end of the Japanese evacuation and incarceration program in 1945 and 1946, the reintegration of the evacuees into American society, the restoration of the confidentiality protections for census data in 1947, and the beginning of a research tradition in legal and academic institutions and in the Japanese ancestry community, to evaluate and critique the wartime experience. In the late 1960s, a redress movement within the Japanese American community challenged public officials to acknowledge the “failures” that led to the program. In the late 1970s, Congress authorized an investigation, what became the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in the 1980s, and resulting apologies and reparations. The chapter concludes with the Census Bureau’s 2000 acknowledgment of and apology for its role in the evacuation program. We conclude with a brief discussion of the relevance of the events of the 1940s for current statistical policy, the trust Americans have in their official data systems, and how this historical analysis can inform debates about data stewardship and provide policies that protect against the threats that Orwell saw.

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References Castle, Stephen. 2013. TV message by snowden says privacy still matters. New York Times, December 26, 2013, A14. Daniels, Roger. 2005. Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans. In Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century, ed. Louis Fiset and Gail Nomura, 183–207. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Executive Office of the President. 2014. Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values, May 2014. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/big_data_ privacy_report_5.1.14_final_print.pdf (accessed 15 July 2014). Now: https:// obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/big_data_privacy_report_ may_1_2014.pdf. Accessed 9 Dec 2019. Kraus, Rebecca. 2013. Statistical déjà vu: The National Data Center Proposal of 1965 and its Descendants. Available at U.S.  Census Bureau History Working Papers. http://www.census.gov/history/pdf/kraus-­natdatacenter.pdf (accessed 5 July 2013); published in the Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality 5:1 (2013), 1–37, Available at: http://repository.cmu.edu/jpc/vol5/iss1/1. Mazzetti, Mark, and Michael S. Schmidt. 2013. Ex-C.I.A. worker says he disclosed U.S. surveillance. New York Times, June 10, 2013, A1. National Park Service. n.d. Dorothea Lange Gallery. https://www.nps.gov/manz/ learn/photosmultimedia/dorothea-­lange-­gallery.htm. Individual Image: https:// www.nps.gov/npgaller y/GetAsset/CA29BBD8-­1 55D-­4 519-­3 EED6 BD4123560A4/proxy/hires? Accessed 26 Mar 2023. Savage, Charlie, 2013. Judge questions legality of N.S.A. phone records. New York Times, December 17, 2013, A1. Seltzer, William, and Margo Anderson. 2001. The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses. Social Research 68 (2): 483–513. Shane, Scott. 2013. Data collection is illegal, A.C.L.U. says in filing. New York Times August 27, 2013, A14. U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). 1982. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1982); Report reissued in 1997 by University of Washington Press (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) with a new forward by Tetsuden Kashima.

2 Before Pearl Harbor

Regarding the 1940 census. Suggest someone get to work right away to see if they cannot break down at the earliest possible moment the Japanese figures of this census. I suggest this because I find that no one has any really reliable figures and the data are all available in the 1940 census which has already been taken. Each district is working on these figures but it means a terrible lot of work which they should be putting on other things and in the end will only be a duplication of what the census already has. These figures should be broken down to show distribution of all people in the United States of Japanese descent right down to counties…. Presidential Advisor John Franklin Carter to Henry Field, November 14, 1941 (Carter 1941)

Complex Threads The story of how the Census Bureau, using the information it had gathered and its statistical expertise, came to be a key actor in the targeting, forced evacuation, and incarceration of the Japanese ancestry population on the West Coast of the United States during World War II is indeed a complex one. It is a story of several completely unrelated threads, which converged in the late fall of 1941 to create the preconditions for the response to Pearl Harbor which followed. One strand involved the long term-institutional development of the federal statistical system, particularly the decennial population census. The second involved the growth and development of the Japanese immigrant community in the West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington. A third encompassed the defense mobilization of the federal government and national security preparations in anticipation of America’s involvement in the Second World War. The fourth involved a set of personal relationships forged in New Deal politics and personalities. As the threat of war loomed in the fall

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of 1941, these strands began to converge, as the nation’s civilian and military leadership in Washington and on the West Coast, and within the Japanese American community, recognized the increasing likelihood of war between the United States and Japan. Nevertheless, in the fall of 1941, the threat of war was latent, not actual, and few actors were prepared for the crisis that engulfed them all after December 7, 1941. Nor were they aware of the moral and ethical dangers lurking in their efforts, which the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians would later identify, namely, that “race prejudice, war hysteria, and failure of political leadership” would distort their decision-making and lead to the misguided policies that followed.

 he American Census and the Demographic T Development of the United States At first glance, the decennial census would seem to be an unlikely activity to be involved in national defense and preparation for war. The 1787 Constitution, which defined the structure of the American state, mandated a population census every 10 years to manage this process by counting the population and redistributing political power among the states and constituent elements of the population. That census has been taken regularly since 1790 and grew in scope and detail as the nation grew and the social, economic, and political issues facing the nation required more and better information on the constituent elements of the population. Early censuses were confined to asking simple questions about the age and sex distribution of the population and to separating the slave and free population as required by the Three-Fifths Compromise in the Constitution. Race, sex, and age thus were the initial core variables measured in the census. Significant European immigration and domestic internal migration in the mid-nineteenth century prompted federal officials to add a question on place of birth to the census in 1850, thus allowing for the analysis of westward expansion and the national origins of the population. The United States has a dynamic and diverse demographic history, growing in population from 3.9 million people in 1790 to just under 132 million in 1940 and spreading from a thinly settled group of colonies along the Eastern seaboard to a continental powerhouse stretching from the Atlantic to Pacific, with noncontiguous outposts in Alaska, Hawaii, and other territories. Managing that growth and diversity and integrating new lands and new people, immigrant or conquered, into the American state was accomplished by growing the states in the union from 13 to 48 by the 1940s and expanding the

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size of the bicameral national legislature from 65 to 435 members in the House of Representatives and 26 to 98 members in the Senate. In the nineteenth century, the Congress added additional questions to the census, on occupation, disability, fertility, marital status, literacy and education. By the late nineteenth century, therefore, the population census was an elaborate decennial event, capturing enormous detail about the characteristics of the population and publishing a dozen or more thick tomes of detailed information. The Congress also mandated the collection of census information on manufacturing, agriculture, and commerce. Those data were also tabulated and published in multi volume reports. Through the nineteenth century, all the data collection and tabulation were done in a temporary Census Office, set up a year or two before the census, and dismantled once the data were published. In 1902, the Congress finally recognized that the Census Office was effectively in business through most of the decade and made the office a permanent government bureau, first in the Department of Interior, then in the Department of Commerce and Labor, and by 1913, in the Department of Commerce. By the early twentieth century, then, the census reports had become definitive sources of information on the nature and trajectory of the people and economy of the United States. Americans literally thought in terms of census categories, of growth and expansion, and of monitoring new economic trends, new industries, and new people as the nation grew. They compared relative growth rates of particular regions, cities, and states and watched as the western frontier receded and settled agricultural and industrial communities grew throughout the nation. Nevertheless, aside from its apportionment functions, the census merely provided public information on American society. Neither the Congress nor the presidential administrations assigned administrative functions to the Census Bureau. It was a “scientific” agency. Census results documented demographic patterns in the United States, including the growth and settlement patterns on the West Coast. The Pacific Coast region became part of the United States in the mid nineteenth century. The United States acquired California from Mexico in the Mexican War. California became a state in 1850. The Oregon territory was defined by Treaty with Britain in 1846. The state of Oregon was formed in 1859. Washington State, also part of the Oregon Territory, acquired statehood in 1889. The California Gold Rush of 1849 prompted an economic boom that brought a population explosion to California of migrants from the East, immigrants from Europe and the Americas, and Chinese immigrants from the Far East.

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The Pacific Coast was awfully far away from the main political and economic heart of the United States until the 1920s and 1930s. The Census did not proclaim the official end of the frontier until after the 1890 census. US maps published in the nineteenth century frequently stopped at the Great Plains, leaving the states of California and Oregon as islands sitting in an ocean at the side of the map. The completion of the first intercontinental railroad in 1869 began to lessen the distance between East and West, but the West Coast states were still small outposts of American life. California’s population only exceeded that of Iowa in 1910, with 2.4 million compared to Iowa’s 2.2 million. Washington State’s only reached a population of 1 million in 1910; Oregon’s in 1940. Of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, only 19 members (4% of the House) hailed from the Pacific Coast as late as 1932 (Anderson 2015). The effect of this distance and relatively small population was that census officials placed relatively little energy into analyzing and exploring the particular economic and demographic character of the West Coast between 1850 and the 1930s. Instead, census officials, and federal officials in other agencies, framed the procedures, practices, questions, and classifications involved in population measurement and policy in terms of the more pressing social, political, and economic realities of the East Coast and Midwest and the ongoing struggles over race and discrimination between North and South. They then applied those understandings to the demography of the West Coast, whether or not they captured the local situations particularly well.

 he Japanese American Community on the West T Coast on the Eve of War Seen through a census lens, the Japanese immigrant community in the United States was a small contributor to the vast worldwide immigration to what became the United States. Of the roughly 40 million immigrants arriving in the United States between 1820 and 1940, a few more than a quarter million came from Japan. They arrived after 1880, settled overwhelmingly on the West Coast or Hawaii, and were initially often single men who returned to Japan after a period in the United States. Japanese immigrants came to the United States after the Congress had decided that “Asians” were “aliens ineligible for citizenship” since American naturalization law restricted citizenship to “whites.” They also faced severe discrimination and segregation in the white supremacist culture of the West Coast, including specific state legislation, such as California’s Alien Land Laws (1913 and 1920), which were designed

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to prevent Japanese immigrants from purchasing agricultural land. The community continued to grow, as did all almost immigrant communities in the United States in the early twentieth century. But the national movement against all foreign immigration also grew in strength in the early twentieth century, and with the Immigration Act of 1924, minuscule quotas of immigrants were allowed from Southern and Eastern Europe. Further, new immigration from Japan was shut off permanently. Nevertheless, by the early twentieth century, the Japanese immigrants who settled down in the United States had established small farming, fishing, and commercial centers scattered through the Pacific Coast states. Japanese truck farmers used intensive farming methods to grow fruits and vegetables for consumer markets in West Coast cities. Small fishing communities grew near coastal cities. And “Little Tokyos” or “Japan Towns” emerged in communities as ethnic enclaves serving both commercial and residential needs of the segregated community. By 1930, just under 140,000 people of Japanese ancestry lived in the continental United States, 120,000 on the West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Significant Japanese American communities existed in the cities of Los Angeles (21,000), Seattle (over 8000), San Francisco (over 6000), Oakland (2000), and Portland (almost 2000). Nevertheless, the Japanese ancestry population formed less than 1.5 percent of the total population of 8.2 million on the West Coast (Daniels 2004; Niiya 2001). The demographic character of the community reflected its immigrant experience. In 1930, the foreign-born immigrant generation, or Issei, composed 51% of the Japanese ancestry population. The second-generation Japanese, or Nisei, were the lion’s share of the remaining 49%. According to the 1930 census, the Japanese population was 59% male and 54% urban; 84% of the children aged five to twenty were in school. Japanese immigration patterns resulted in “long” generations. During the period of major immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many men had come alone and later returned to Japan to marry or bring their wives. Other men brought “picture brides” once settled in the United States. The result was that the Issei fathers were quite old when they had their families. The mean age of Issei in 1930 was 40 and Nisei was 9 (figures calculated from Ruggles et al. 2018). During the 1930s, the Nisei began to come into their own and shape a distinctly “Japanese American” social and political culture. By 1940, the mean age of Issei reached 50 and Nisei reached 18. A significant number of the second generation was just beginning to enter adulthood. Most visible in that regard was the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which was founded in1929 and explicitly organized for American-born “citizen”

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Japanese. But the Japanese, both Issei and Nisei, like other immigrant communities, developed all manner of community and religious organizations, from Buddhist temples to Protestant church congregations, from Japanese grower, farmer, and fishermen’s organizations to commercial networks and social clubs. Japanese language newspapers such as Nichibei Shinbun, published in San Francisco, or Rafu Shimpo, published in Los Angeles, provided the community with local, national, and international news. By the 1920s, Japanese American newspapers introduced English language supplements; solely English language papers, such as the Japanese American Courier and JACL’s Pacific Citizen, followed in the 1930s. Community baseball teams competed in Japanese sports leagues (Daniels 2004; Niiya 2001; Ichioka 2006; Modell 1977; Kurashige 2002; Hayashi 1995). As home to many recent migrants, the community also retained significant ties to relatives and institutions in Japan. Families sometimes sent children home for periods of education, so that American-born children would retain their family, language, and cultural ties to the homeland. Nisei who went to Japan in this way were termed in Japanese, Kibei, to designate their cross-­ cultural connections between Japanese and US society. By the late 1930s, there were clear signs of a fragile, modest prosperity within the West Coast Japanese American communities. The small Japanese farming communities had found viable economic niches on the West Coast. They delivered substantial proportions of the fresh fruit and vegetables on the West Coast. Thirty to 35% of the value of the truck crops in California were produced by Japanese ancestry farmers. On the eve of World War II, there were some 6000 Japanese-operated farms on the West Coast. Fishing communities grew on Terminal Island in Los Angeles, and in San Diego, Monterey and Seattle. The Japanese had almost no presence in manufacturing and heavy industry. Their retail and commercial occupations primarily served their own community or the fishing and farming work that was their major niche in the West Coast economy. By the late 1930s, local festivals, notably Nisei Week in Los Angeles, began to draw attendees from outside the Japanese American community and bring visibility of the community to the larger white Anglo world of the West Coast. The dark cloud on the horizon through this community growth was the increasing belligerence of the Japanese empire and the increasingly strained foreign relations between the United States and Japan. While in the early years of the Japanese migration, American racism was sometimes held in check by concern at offending a foreign nation, after the mid-1920s, the relationship between the two nations soured. Japan saw the Immigration Act of 1924 as racist, and protests broke out in Japan after its passage. The United

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States viewed the expansionist goals of Japan in the Pacific region with alarm. Such negative attitudes toward Japan’s expansionism served to fuel racism toward Japanese Americans and placed the community in the difficult position of choosing to identify with their traditional homeland and their current, not always welcoming, situation in the United States. The potential for being caught between these two impossible positions worsened in the 1930s. Japan invaded and took control of Manchuria and briefly occupied Shanghai in 1932. In 1937, the start of the Sino Japanese War extended Japanese expansionist efforts into northern China and coastal cities in China. During the initial months of the war, in December 1937, the Japanese air forces bombed and sank the American gunboat, Panay, which was patrolling the Yangtze River near Nanjing. A diplomatic apology from Japan cooled the incident. The United States continued to protest Japan’s expansionism but had little immediate impact on events. In Europe, the storm clouds of war also grew ominously after the mid-­1930s. Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 and vowed to restore Germany to its rightful place in Europe, reclaim lands lost in World War I, and build a Nazi empire in Europe. Allied with Mussolini’s Italy in 1936, the Axis powers moved to redraw the map of Europe under Fascist control. Germany reclaimed the Rhineland in 1937 and received the Sudetenland and annexed Austria in 1938. Italy annexed Albania in 1939. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany. The smaller invasions and diplomatic conflicts of the 1930s had given way to World War II. By the early summer of 1940, Germany had overrun the low countries, Norway, and installed a puppet regime in France. In the Pacific, by the spring of 1940 Japan established a puppet government in China and began to expand into Indochina. The Japanese formally joined the Axis powers in September 1940. In response, the United States embarked on a major rearmament effort and used diplomatic and economic strategies to try to counteract the potential for war and then to support the British once World War II began. Officially a neutral nation, and a nation with a strong isolationist following, the United States nevertheless made clear it supported Britain against Germany and Italy; China against Japan, through such measures as the Lend-Lease agreements with Britain (1941) and scrap iron and steel embargoes (1940) aimed at Japan. Japanese Americans had a variety of responses to these events. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) took an unabashedly pro-American stance and rejected support for or sympathy with Japanese imperialism in favor of a strong affirmation of American nationalism and patriotism (Hosokawa 1969; Hosokawa 1982; Masaoka and Hosokawa 1987). In 1940, Mike Masaoka,

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wartime JACL leader, wrote the Japanese American Creed, which eloquently defined the Nisei vision of their place in American society (Masaoka 1941). Japanese American Creed I am proud that I am an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, for my very background makes me appreciate more fully the wonderful advantage of this nation. I believe in her institutions, ideals, and traditions; I glory in her heritage; I boast of her history; I trust in her future. She has granted me liberties and opportunities such as no individual enjoys in this world today. She has given me an education befitting kings. She has entrusted me with the responsibilities of the franchise. She has permitted me to build a home, to earn a livelihood, to worship, think, speak, and act as I please as a free man equal to every other man. Although some individuals may discriminate against me, I shall never become bitter or lose faith, for I know that such persons are not representative of the majority of the American people. True, I shall do all in my power to discourage such practices; but I shall do it in the American way; above board, in the open, through courts of law, by education, by proving myself to be worthy of equal treatment and consideration. I am firm in my belief that American sportsmanship and attitude of fair play will judge citizenship on the basis of action and achievement and not on the basis of physical characteristics. Because I believe in America, and I trust she believes in me, and because I have received innumerable benefits from her, I pledge myself to do honor to her at all times and in all places, to support her Constitution; to obey her laws; to respect her Flag; to defend her against all enemies foreign or domestic; to actively assume my duties and obligations as a citizen, cheerfully and without any reservations whatsoever, in the hope that I may become a better American in a greater America.

Other Japanese American organizations, like those in other immigrant organizations, took more pro-Japanese stands, including forming aid societies to collect funds to support Japanese wounded war veterans in the Sino Japanese War, publishing political pamphlets defending the Japanese side of the war, and generally providing a locus for Issei to display their patriotism for their previous homeland (Ichioka 2006). Until World War II broke out in Europe in September 1939, these differing viewpoints and organizational campaigns, like the organizations and political activity within other immigrant communities, were of primary interest to the communities themselves and frequently not visible to Americans outside them. In fact, since Japanese Americans were without a naturalized citizen population to provide political leadership that could lobby Congress or the political parties, the activity within the Japanese American community was probably even more invisible to the larger American political class than that of other ethnic organizations.

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When war did break out in Europe in September 1939, all this changed. Suddenly, it was quite clear to the political leadership in Washington, on the West Coast, and within the immigrant communities themselves that issues of national defense, subversion, loyalty, or disloyalty were about to get profound new scrutiny by the media and the instrumentalities of the state.

 obilizing the Nation for National Defense M and National Security Franklin Roosevelt was by inclination an internationalist and advocated rebuilding the defense capabilities as the Axis powers expanded, despite the Depression. He also, however, was aware of the strong isolationist temper in the country, and thus the moves were limited. In the late 1930s, the administration proposed expanding the nation’s air and naval power and began systematic expansion of the national defense and military capacity of the United States in earnest in 1938 and 1939. By executive order, Roosevelt set in motion the first plans for “emergency management” on September 8, 1939, 8 days after Germany invaded Poland (Freidel 1990; Daniels 2015 and 2016). The administration and Congress also began to explore strengthening the instruments for ensuring internal domestic security and preparing the nation for war. At the time, it seemed to policymakers that internal subversion had contributed to the swift collapse of governments in several European nations that had fallen to the Axis Powers. The term, “Fifth Column” had come into common speech to explain how the Franco supporters in Madrid had facilitated the fall of the Spanish state to the Fascists in 1939. After 1940, the term “Quisling,” named after the Nazi collaborator in occupied Norway, came to symbolize a national leader who sided with the Nazis. Officials also recognized that there would be a need to build a stronger Army, Navy and air force and to have the tools necessary to mobilize a workforce for defense production. The United States certainly had some instruments of population surveillance and record keeping on Americans. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was fighting organized crime and communism at home. The Army and Navy had their intelligence arms (G2 and the Office of Naval Intelligence, or ONI). The Secret Service protected the president. The Army’s Provost Marshal General’s Office provided plant protection for vital war industries. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), soon to be the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was one of the innovations of World War II (Theoharis 2004; Dorwart 1983; Finnegan and Danysh 1998; United States, Central Intelligence Agency 2000).

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This was a substantial infrastructure, with substantial record-keeping capacity, but it was not coordinated and deployed in the sense of providing systematic total coverage of the American population. In fact, the opposite was the case in terms of records on ordinary Americans. The federal income tax system affected only a small proportion of households. The United States had never built a national vital registration system or population register, leaving the registration of births and deaths to the states. Only in 1933 did all states implement standardized reporting for births and thus participate in a nationwide birth registration system. As World War II began, some 50 million native-born Americans had no proof of identity in the form of a birth certificate, needed for work in defense industries (Hedrich 1942; Pearson 2021). Nor had the United States bothered to track the lives of the millions of immigrants who had peopled the nation. Though the United States had been a nation of immigrants since its inception, and had required ship captains to provide lists of immigrants arriving since the early nineteenth century, the federal government had given up efforts to maintain an alien registration system in 1828 (Neuman 1996). The Selective Service System, instituted during World War I to draft men into the armed forces, was quickly dismantled during peacetime (Chambers 1987). If anything, the federal government had precious few records on individuals or tools of surveillance at the ready as World War II loomed. In 1939 and 1940, federal officials and the Congress moved to clarify responsibilities and functions of existing security agencies and build new or strengthen existing administrative records systems for national defense. In terms of surveillance of subversives, in June 1939, the administration began to develop procedures for the coordination of investigations of espionage, sabotage, and other subversive activities in the United States. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Military Intelligence Service of the War Department (MID), and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had joint responsibilities, with the FBI serving as the lead agency for investigations within the United States. The Congress also instituted new measures. In June 1940, the Smith Act required aliens to register and obtain a proof of identity, what we call today the green card. All aliens in the United States had to register and be fingerprinted (Alien Registration 1940). The Congress also authorized the first peacetime military draft registration for men aged 21–35  in the September 1940. These new registration systems went far beyond any previous effort in the federal government to monitor the population and raised complex questions of administration. They involved establishing a bureaucracy to develop

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questionnaires and collect them from aliens and men liable to be drafted. Officials had to determine where the records should be located and how the forms should be organized. There were no ready models to copy. The recently created social security system captured the tax paid on behalf of those who came under the benefit system, but it made no provision for continuous monitoring of the location of any individual. From the perspective of the administrative agencies, the new alien and draft data collections were designed to facilitate a military draft and the monitoring of subversive activities in case of war. The information needed to be collected properly and accurately, and administrative officials were aware that individuals might not register. The federal government had conducted an unemployment registration in 1937, and the experience indicated that the results might be an undercount in the registration because of inexperience with the new, far-flung efforts and because the purposes of the registrations were inherently controversial. In the case of the unemployment registration, officials were aware that individuals might not want to admit to being unemployed. Similarly, officials were concerned that individuals might try to avoid registration as an alien or for military service because of the social stigma of admitting one’s status or out of fear or suspicion of government. The alien registration was particularly problematic and generated a storm of debate in the media about the loyalty of the foreign born, worries over discrimination against immigrants, and widespread press coverage of the entire effort. Interestingly, in the case of both the draft and the alien registration, more people registered than expected and, for the alien registration in particular, created backlogs processing the forms. Alien registration was the responsibility of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), recently transferred from the Labor Department to the Department of Justice. The INS required basic estimates of the number of aliens likely to register in order to print the proper number of forms and deliver them to post offices; and it had initially estimated that 3.6 million aliens would register. The registration period ran from August to December 1940. By late fall, more aliens were registering than anticipated. The number eventually approached 5.0 million (New York Times 1940, 1941). By December 1940, when the alien registration period ended, the INS was running behind in returning the receipt cards to the registrants; they estimated they would not finish mailing them until February 15, 1941. With the completion of the alien registration, the information was available for administrative purposes. The FBI began to match fingerprint files from the alien registration with their records of spying, crime, and subversive

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activity in the spring of 1941. Records were stored centrally in Philadelphia and at local FBI offices around the country. International law authorized the internment of enemy aliens during wartime (Martínez 2021). In 1940 and 1941, the FBI, the Special Defense Unit of the Justice Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and Army Military Intelligence (G-2) also began preparations for interning enemy aliens in case of war, including setting up procedures for identifying, arresting, processing, and interning enemy aliens. The Army reactivated the Office of Provost Marshal General in July 1941 and began acquiring locations for internment camps around the country. The Justice Department compiled substantial lists of potential subversives to be apprehended in case of war onto what came to be called the ABC lists (Irons 1983). Planning was not the only initiative at the time. For our purposes, West Coast Naval Intelligence officials were particularly attuned to the emerging military threat from Japan. The Office of Naval Intelligence, of all the security services at the time, was the one agency with intelligence agents with sufficient language training to read and understand potential Japanese plans. In the spring of 1941, Lt. Commander Kenneth Ringle, stationed at San Pedro, California, in the Eleventh Naval District, led a “black bag” break-in at the offices of the Japanese consulate to acquire evidence that Japanese naval language officer Tachibana Itaru [last name Tachibana] was conducting espionage in the United States. The evidence Ringle found led to the arrest of Tachibana in early June 1941 and his subsequent deportation later in the month. Prominent local Issei residents Dr. and Mrs. Furusawa Takashi [last name Furusawa], leaders of the Los Angeles branch of the Japanese Navy Association, also came under suspicion for the contacts with Tachibana and support for Imperial Japan. Similarly, an Issei accomplice of Tachibana, Kono Toraichi, was also arrested in June 1941. With the deportation of Tachibana, however, they were not prosecuted, lest the espionage case collapse without the chief perpetrator (Ichioka 2006). The Tachibana case drew dramatic headlines in the West Coast press at the time. As diplomatic relations deteriorated further between the United States and Japan in the summer and fall of 1941, the case aroused fears on the West Coast of further widespread potential Japanese espionage and sabotage and created doubts that the defense preparations currently underway would be sufficient to protect the nation. Ringle continued to monitor potential subversives and develop informants from inside the Japanese American community who could identify potential threats. By mid-1941 then, substantial new administrative records systems existed, some integrated into the surveillance and control systems of the federal government. They were still untested in case of a national emergency. Could the

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alien registration records be rapidly deployed in case of invasion or subversive activity? Were local officials sufficiently aware of the defense planning to be reassured that federal agencies would protect the public in case of emergency? Was enough being done? As the federal government searched for tools of national defense, the new registration systems also revealed the conceptual discrepancies in classification and counting in federal statistics. Naturalization law was restricted to “whites.” Japanese American immigrants, like all Asian American immigrants, were “aliens ineligible for citizenship” and thus were required to register. European immigrants, who were classified as “white,” could naturalize and become US citizens. If they had done so, they were no longer “aliens” and thus not affected by the alien registration, even if, for example, individuals might sympathize with their former “homeland” regimes in Germany and Italy. Relatedly, data from the census were supposed to provide an aggregate check and comparison with the alien registration data. The 1940 census included questions on place of birth and citizenship status. Tabulations for the alien foreign-born (reported in 1943) reported many fewer aliens than did the 1940 alien registration. The census reported about 3.5 million aliens and 835,000 foreign born residents with no citizenship status reported (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1943).

Roosevelt’s Informal Surveillance Networks In Washington, Franklin Roosevelt was also making additional efforts at understanding the true potential threat for subversion and enemy espionage in the United States. In the fall of 1941, tensions between the United States and Japan increased, and the likelihood of war continued to grow. The historiographical record is mixed on whether the United States and FDR, in particular, were actually trying to provoke the Japanese into an attack on the United States in order to provide the country with an excuse to enter the war (Fleming 2001). Evidence is clear, however, that Japan saw American restrictions on oil and other strategic exports as belligerent acts, and the United States did not take measures to change the Japanese impression. Despite almost 2 years of preparation by the fall of 1941, strong antiwar and isolationist opinions in the country still constrained and tempered those activities. In the summer of 1941, for example, the House came within one vote of defeating the continuation of the Selective Service draft put in place the year before. FDR was acutely sensitive to the political opposition any particular defense measure could generate. In light of what he saw as a difficult political environment, he

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developed a series of informal and covert initiatives to conduct activities for which he felt he could not generate public support and which might also provide a cross-check on the work of existing defense agencies. He used those informal structures to explore some of the most sensitive national security and defense measures (Persico 2001). Two such operations were “a secret White House intelligence unit” run by journalist John Franklin Carter (who wrote under the name Jay Franklin), which reported directly to FDR, and the Office of the Coordinator of Information, later the Office of Strategic Services, run by William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan. Carter’s operation began in February 1941; Donovan’s in June 1941. Carter’s operation had a domestic focus; Donovan’s was aimed at international issues. In the fall of 1941, FDR used agents from these offices to assess the possibility of and protect the nation against the possibility of “fifth column” activity by Japanese Americans in Hawaii and on the West Coast (Steele 1979; O’Reilly 1982; Ford 1970). In early October 1941, Roosevelt requested Carter’s unit to investigate the loyalty of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Carter dispatched Curtis B. Munson, a Chicago businessman, to the West Coast with a charge to investigate “the exact status of Japanese American relations on West Coast and in territory of Hawaii.” Munson had access to all military intelligence files and personnel on the West Coast and Hawaii, including to Lt. Commander Ringle and ONI. Munson began reporting to Carter on October 19, 1941, and continued through December 1941. His main report was dated November 6. Carter transmitted this 25-page report to FDR on Friday, November 7, 1941 (Weglyn 1996, originally published 1976). Carter’s transmittal memo summarized Munson’s report, quoting it: “There is no Japanese ‘problem’ on the coast. There will be no armed uprising of Japanese…. For the most part the local Japanese are loyal to the United States, or at worst, hope that by remaining quiet they can avoid concentration campus or irresponsible mobs….” Nevertheless, Munson did warn that “There will be the odd case of fanatical sabotage by some Japanese ‘crackpot’” and more ominously noted, “Your reporter… is horrified to note that dams, bridges, harbors, power stations, etc. are wholly unguarded everywhere. The harbor of San Pedro could be razed by fire completely by four men with hand grenades and a little study in one night. Dams could be blown and half of lower California might actually die of thirst…One railway bridge at the exits from the mountains in some cases could tie up three or four main railroads” (Quoted in Weglyn 1996, 194). And in an earlier memorandum, which may also have been transmitted to Roosevelt, Munson had noted (Munson 1941):

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My conclusions I am willing & best on however. I believe they are pretty sure…. In the first place there are no so many people of Japanese descent in the U.S. that in an emergency they could not all be thrown into a concentration camp in 48 hours. Of course you might get a few Chinamen too because they sort of look alike. But the looks are a great aid to rounding them up and in keeping them away from sabotage or other troublesome pastimes. We do not want to throw a lot of American citizens into a concentration camp of course, and especially as the almost unanimous verdict is that in case of war they will keep quiet, very quiet. There will probably be some sabotage by paid Japanese agents and the odd fanatical Jap, but the bulk of these people will be quiet because in addition to being quite contented with the American Way of life (sic), they know they are ‘in a spot.’

On Saturday, November 8, FDR responded to Munson’s report, transmitting it to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. “Please read this and let me have it back,” he wrote. “There is nothing much new in the first four paragraphs [of Carter’s summary] …but paragraph five relating to the guarding of key points should be examined into” (Quoted in Weglyn 1996, 195; see also Daniels., ed. 1989, volume 1, no page; President D. Roosevelt Office Files 1994)). FDR’s transmittal of the Munson report to Stimson was not the only transmittal. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles also received the Munson report from John Franklin Carter. On November 17, 1941, he transmitted it to Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark and US Army Chief of Staff General George C.  Marshall. Another of the informal experts who worked for both the COI organization and John Franklin Carter’s intelligence unit, anthropologist and population analyst Henry Field, took up the issues raised by Munson’s reports and inquired into the demographic character of the Japanese American population in late October 1941. Using the methodology he had developed for providing intelligence on population groups in the Middle East, the area of his professional expertise, he and his staff compiled a report in late October and early November 1941 to Carter using the 1930 population census. Carter then pressed Field for further research into Munson’s findings. Munson had analyzed the Japanese population in terms of Issei, Nisei, Sansei [third generation Japanese], and Kibei, that is, by age and generation, and particularly noted: “The Kibei, educated from childhood to seventeen, are still the element most to be watched.” Munson defined Kibei as “those American born Japanese who received part or all of the education in Japan.” Carter prepared a memo for Field “Regarding the 1940 census” (Carter 1941):

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Suggest someone get to work right away to see if they cannot break down at the earliest possible moment the Japanese figures of this census. I suggest this because I find that no one has any really reliable figure and the data are all available in the 1940 census which has already been taken. Each district is working on these figures but it means a terrible lot of work which they should be putting on other things and in the end will only be a duplication of what the census already has. These figures should be broken down to show distribution of all people in the United States of Japanese descent right down to counties. It should also show the total number Issei (first generation). Of Nisei (second generation). Of Sansei (third generation). Above all, the Nisei should be broken down to show the Kibei–how many received their education from the age of childhood to seventeen (their tender years) in Japan. It also should show the other Kibei who have returned to Japan after receiving their early education in the United States. It should show the length of time, say four to five years, that they spent in Japan receiving this education. I take five years as a shorter period might only indicate that they had visited Japan and for one reason or another had stayed longer than a more visitor but had not really gone there to be educated. The short time visitors usually come back very loyal American citizens.

Field took Carter up on his request. As he had for previous demographic inquiries, Field, a Chicagoan of the Marshall Field department store family, contacted his friend and another Chicagoan, Undersecretary of Commerce Wayne Taylor. (The Commerce Department is the parent agency for the Census Bureau.) On Saturday, November 22, 1941, Taylor responded to Field and reported that “the only tabulation of 1940 census data for the Japanese which is now underway” was the sex, age, and nativity cross tabulation, available for five states. He then noted that the California, Washington, and Oregon reports (that is, those for the West Coast) were expected in late January or early February, but “if conditions require it, these three states could be gotten out at some additional expense in the first part of December.” The data from the Pacific Coast states were not ready and would not be unless someone requested they be expedited. Taylor then responded to Field’s inquiry about special tabulations, stating that it would be “possible to make from our punched cards special tabulations showing for the Japanese practically any details which we are tabulating for the population as a whole” or “any combinations of any items returned on the Population Schedule except tenure and value or rent of home.” He suggested a price of $3000 for a “a special tabulation in January” of “five or six items or such number as could be carried on one tabulating machine run…for 100 or more Japanese.” Such fine-grained data clearly would make individual identification of households possible, and Taylor made no mention of any privacy

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or confidentiality concerns. He continued by explaining how to order and pay for such tabulations. Finally, he noted that the census did not provide information for “Kibei,” so for that kind of research, the census was a dead end (Taylor 1941; Field 1941). Taylor’s responses to Field echoed the questions of Munson’s report and Carter’s memorandum. Field focused their work further by specifically asking for the data for the three West Coast states and for the procedures for special tabulations. Field responded to Taylor on Tuesday, November 25, thanking him and asking to see Bureau of the Census Director J. C. Capt, “after I have excerpted the data from the Bulletins.” Taylor responded to Field on Saturday, November 29, that he felt “sure that Mr. Capt will be glad to discuss with you any problems growing out of these statistics” and repeating his earlier discussion that special tabulations be paid for in advance. This evidence would indicate that Field did not contact the Census Bureau directly before the beginning of December 1941. But the contact with the Census Bureau did occur, because by December 9, 1941, 2 days after Pearl Harbor, the Census Bureau had managed to tabulate the data that Taylor reported would be available in January 1942 (Taylor 1941; U.S. Bureau of the Census 1941). The administrative contact among Henry Field, Undersecretary of Commerce Wayne Taylor, and Census Director J.C. Capt in November 1941 marks the beginning of the formal Census Bureau involvement with what came to be called “the Japanese problem of the West Coast.” For over 2 years, the United States had been intensely involved in war planning and in building administrative structures for monitoring and controlling subversives and saboteurs in case of war. For the lion’s share of that time, the Census Bureau officials focused on planning, conducting, and tabulating the results of the 1940 census. To this point, when pressed by other officials in government about a possible role war planning and the surveillance of potential national security threats, census officials had deflected such discussions and argued that the decennial census administration took priority within the agency. War planning had proceeded without significant participation by the nation’s premier demographic and economic statistical agency. That was about to change rapidly, as the weaknesses of the new registration and surveillance systems emerged after Pearl Harbor, and the Census Bureau too found itself functioning as a “war agency.”

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Taking the 1940 Census The relatively late entry of the Census Bureau into war and defense planning was not an unintentional omission. Rather, it reflected the long-term development of administrative practice and understandings that officials in statistical agencies had crafted. Statistical agencies in the modern state, officials argued, should stand somewhat apart from and independent of main administrative activities of the government. In order to fulfill the mission of the objective collector and publisher of non-biased societal information, the leadership of the bureau had by and large kept the census at arm’s length from direct involvement in war mobilization. The 1940 census, like its recent predecessors, was collected by enumerators who walked the residential neighborhoods, farms, and countryside of the entire nation, hand recording on 23 3/4″ × 12 1/2″ paper census forms the names, addresses, age, sex, race, nativity, education, occupation, and many other questions of every resident of the country as of April 1, 1940 (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1  1940 census population questionnaire. The 1940 census population questionnaire had 34 questions for the entire population, and an additional 16 questions for individuals who fell on the “5 percent sample lines.” The page had space for listing 40 people. The back side of the form [not reproduced here] asked 31 questions about the housing situation of the people enumerated on the population schedule. (Source: U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.)

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The questions on the 1940 census generally followed those of previous counts and were designed to provide basic information about the demographic, social, and economic characteristics of the population, as well as the constitutionally required counts for congressional reapportionment. New in 1940 were questions to assess the effects of the Great Depression, including questions on income, where a person lived 5 years earlier, and whether they were working on a government emergency work program. To make it possible to add more questions, the Census Bureau added a 5% sample survey to the main population schedule and moved some questions to the sample, including those on birthplace of parents, usual occupation, and mother tongue (Anderson 2015). Once completed by the enumerators, the paper forms were delivered to the Census Bureau in Washington, where legions of clerks supplied numeric codes for non-numeric answers, such as occupation, and key punchers entered each line of information from a particular individual onto a punch card. See Fig. 2.2. All forms were received by September 1940, and the official population of 131,669,275 for apportionment was reported to the President in December 1940 (Jenkins 1983). Basic counts of minor civil divisions in the country were compiled and published in preliminary bulletins from hand counts of the schedules in 1941. In August 1941, the bureau completed the coding and punching operations that were necessary to produce the cross-­ tabulations for the published reports. The punch cards were tabulated by running them through sorting and counting machines to compile the tabulated information for the reports. Results began to be released as completed in

Fig. 2.2  1940 census main population punch card [card A]. The 1940 census punch card A coded the information on individuals from the paper schedules so the census could be tabulated. The “color or race” information was in column 14 of the card. (Source: Truesdell 1965, p. 201)

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preliminary form in late 1941 for individual states. Once the tabulations for all states were done, they were to be compiled in published volumes in 1942 or later. Thus, in November 1941, Carter was correct that the 1940 census had been taken and that the forms and the punch cards could be used to prepare tabulations on the Japanese ancestry population, but he was wrong to assume that the results he wanted were readily “available” then. As with the alien registration process, it took a great deal of clerical and administrative work to extract in tabular form even basic information on the location of the estimated 100–150,000 Japanese Americans from the 132 million responses to the census. The census identified a person as “Japanese” on the race question, so the practical issue was sorting the 9.7 million punch cards from the three West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington, to extract the estimated 100–150,000 cards for the Japanese American population. The tabulations that John Franklin Carter and Henry Field requested from Wayne Taylor and J.C. Capt were modeled on the tabulations that Field had already copied and compiled in tabular form from the results of the 1930 Census. The bureau staff could set the counting machines to tabulate the requested results from the sorted cards. If the sorting and tabulation process could be expedited, data from the recently completed 1940 census could indeed provide the most up to date information for the West Coast and the Japanese American population. As often is the case with programmatic action, though, the devil is in the details.

 nderstanding the Census Bureau’s U Statistical Practice Government officials concerned with national defense, like Carter and Field, saw their request as routine. They focused on the larger policy issues that statistical information was designed to address and quite naturally expected the statistical agency to provide all requested information promptly and cheerfully. As Carter noted, the issue was a simple one. Since “no one has any really reliable figure and the data are all available in the 1940 census which has already been taken,” the Census Bureau should report the needed tabulations. Referring to efforts in the local offices of the Justice Department and Army and Navy Intelligence to identify the Japanese population from the alien registration records, he continued, “Each district is working on these figures but it means a terrible lot of work which they should be putting on other things

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and in the end will only be a duplication of what the census already has.” What possible problem could there be in having the Census Bureau deliver the information? The tabulations that Field requested were just updates of the data published in 1930. As Wayne Taylor noted, the only limitation he saw was financial and logistical, e.g., that the bureau’s own publication schedule for these data would have to be adjusted to comply with Field’s request. Inside the Census Bureau, however, Carter and Field’s request resonated with a more complicated history of the collection and use of census information, questions of what information to collect, who could access the data, who could release it, and whose job it was, if you will, to curate and process the voluminous, detailed responses Americans had provided to the federal government each decade since 1790. For the previous two centuries, national states, primarily in Europe and the Americans, had developed processes and procedures to define and regulate what in the United States has come to be called the “federal statistical system.” National and international professional organizations, e.g., the American Statistical Association, Royal Statistical Society, International Statistical Institute, and many others, defined the new realm of statistical knowledge, particularly in the public sphere. Censuses, surveys, and eventually mathematical tools emerged as “information came of age.” Different countries used their new information systems, particularly on people but also on economic and social domains, for both age-old functions, like taxation and military recruitment, and new efforts to describe, monitor, and eventually legislate programs to, for example, improve social welfare, regulate migration, and manage the economy (see, e.g., Higgs 2004; Headrick 2000). Along the way, the new professional “statists,” soon to be called “statisticians,” developed best practice rules, administrative techniques, and mechanical data processing tools, to facilitate their work logistically, technically, and ethically. Often these new practices were the result of the recognition of failures or mistakes from “the last time” or recognition of side benefits that emerged from ongoing work, e.g., the capacity to produce a time series informational report if processes and procedures were repeated. One can see the evolution of these practices in the United States in the history of the administrative practice and law for taking the census. A number of themes run through the developments: issues of public cooperation with and trust in the results of the census; management of the logistics and costs of data collection, processing, and release; and timeliness of execution and completion of the count. If all goes well, the public and political leaders accept the published information as pertinent, accurate, and useful and even are willing to accept “bad news” for a particular purpose, particularly a loss of a legislative seat from apportionment, as fair and reasonable.

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Officials saw problems that would impair their work as practices to fix. One of the earliest to emerge was the behavior and competence of the local field staff, the enumerators who made personal contact with a householder to collect the data. By the mid nineteenth century, administrative instructions and oaths, aimed at making sure enumerators were respectful of their respondents, kept the information they collected on behalf of “the people” confidential and reported promptly. Census officials and members of the Congress debated what was appropriate to ask on the census, and either vetoed or removed questions that were deemed offensive or intrusive, such as on the ownership of property. To assure local people of the accuracy and completeness of the enumerators’ work, for many years, census law either authorized or mandated public posting of the information on the raw schedules before they were shipped to Washington for tabulation and publication. Local governments, governors, or courts could request copies of their individual level responses, and such filings were used in undercount challenges. In other words, there are both what we would today call “freedom of information” practices and “confidentiality and privacy” practices embedded in census administration well into the twentieth century. As the federal government took on more and more functions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and finally made the Census Office a permanent agency in 1902, the trend in data curation emphasized the practices of what has come to be called “statistical confidentiality,” the protection of the respondents’ reports from administrative use, embarrassment, and any action that would “harm” or be to the “detriment” of the individual, though the older releases of individual-­level information were fairly common through the 1920s as well. The stricter standard, written into census law between 1909 and 1929, imposed the responsibility for “protection” on the staff of the Census Bureau themselves, be they enumerators in the field or officials in Washington (Anderson and Seltzer 2007, 2009). By the 1930s then, census officials understood that they were banned from releasing information about an individual person from the census, except in very rare instances. For current purposes, these practices shaped what today is called “disclosure control,” how data were processed and published, particularly the provisions of the current Section 9 of Title 13 that ban officials from “mak[ing] any publication whereby the data furnished by any particular establishment or individual … can be identified; or permit[ting] anyone other than the sworn officers and employees of the Department or bureau or agency thereof to examine the individual reports.”

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For analytic purposes, we suggest a framework to understand how the bureau conceived of its possible “outputs” from a statistical data collection: (a) the use of macrodata, that is, the use of census results in terms of large aggregates and geographic units; (b) the use of mesodata, that is, the use of census results for very small geographic units; and (c) the use of unprotected microdata, that is, census information that permits the identification of individuals. (a) Macrodata The production of census tabulations of the type requested by Carter and Field would be considered “macrodata,” namely, the reports for large aggregates that form the basis of published census reports. These are the main outputs of a statistical agency and protect respondents’ individual information among “faces in the crowd.” In practice, bureau officials constructed table shells for characteristics and geography so that small cell counts would not exist. (b) Mesodata As used here, the term mesodata refers to statistical results presented at such a fine level of geographic disaggregation that the results may be used in conducting field operations at the local level, in other words, capable of being used to “target” a population, whether for a benefit, surveillance, some form of discrimination, or perhaps even a marketing campaign. The borderline between macrodata and mesodata is not always clear cut. In part it depends on the size of the geographic units, in part on the distribution of the target population among these units, and in part on the intended operational uses. Carter’s request for the distribution of Japanese Americans by counties might have allowed for targeting of Japanese Americans in small counties with a significant number of Japanese. However, for those cities and counties that were comparatively large or that contained many Japanese Americans, the operational significance of county-level or city-level data was limited. (c) Unprotected microdata Whatever ambiguity may exist surrounding the propriety of reporting mesodata, it was quite clear in 1941 that disclosure of data on specific individuals gathered under the protection of the existing language of the Census Act was prohibited. “Your Census Reports Cannot Be Used for Purposes of Taxation, Regulation, or Investigation,” census proclamations and

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promotional materials stated (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1979, 61). Section 18 of the 1929 census statute contained language which provided some discretion to the Director “upon the written request of the governor of any State or Territory or of a court of record, to furnish such governor of court of record with certified copies of so much of the population or agricultural returns as may be requested.” Section 18 also authorized the Director “in his discretion, to furnish to individuals such data from the population schedules as may be desired for genealogical or other proper purposes,” but it also included the proviso: “that in no case such shall information furnished under the authority of this Act be used to the detriment of the person or persons to whom such information relates” (Holt 1929, 189). In 1930, the bureau had even requested an opinion from the Attorney General on their authority to release a “list of names, addresses, occupations, and employment status of women living in Rochester, N.Y.” requested by the Women’s Bureau. On the basis of this opinion, they denied the request (Bohme and Pemberton 1991, 12.).

 he Roosevelt Administration Put Census Officials T in a Bind By the late 1930s, however, in the White House, war planning and the protection of national security were considerably more pressing issues than the long-­ term practices of taking and reporting the census. John Franklin Carter and Henry Field’s request to accelerate the release of information on Japanese ancestry Americans from the 1940 census was not the first time that census officials had confronted requests from the administration to change their administrative practice to support national defense. Two years earlier, in 1939, the Roosevelt administration looked at the statutory and customary rules for the census, found them wanting, and proposed that they be changed to harness the information in census records, economic and demographic, for war planning and subversion control. In particular, in November 1939, officials in the Justice Department proposed changing the qualification of the census statute to integrate census microdata information with that of the surveillance agencies. They proposed giving the military intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation access to confidential census information (President’s Official File 1939–1940). The Attorney General’s office drafted a bill to amend the census statute and transmitted it to the Budget Bureau, the office with responsibility for vetting

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all the administration proposals for legislation to be sent to the Congress. (The Budget Bureau was located in the Executive Office of the President.) “Under existing law,” noted the Justice Department memorandum accompanying the draft legislation: individual reports of the census office are confidential and may not be examined by any person other than sworn employees of that office. While this rule of law is generally desirable, it appears advisable in the interests of national defense to make an exception in connection with investigations of violations of the laws against espionage and other matters relating to national defense. In connection with such investigations the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice, the Office of Naval Intelligence of the Department of the Navy, and the Intelligence Division of the Department of War, should be permitted to have access to such reports.

The actual text of the bill added new language to Section 11 of the 1929 Census Act. The existing language required: That the information furnished under the provisions of this Act shall be used only for the statistical purposes for which it is supplied. No publication shall be made by the Census Office whereby the data furnished by any particular establishment or individual can be identified, nor shall the Director of the Census permit anyone other than the sworn employees of the Census Office to examine the individual reports.

The proposed language added: Provided, however, that the records of the Bureau of the Census, including the individual reports, shall be available to the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice, Office of Naval Intelligence of the Department of the Navy, and the Intelligence Division of the Department of War in connection with violations of the laws against espionage and other matters relating to the national defense whenever, in the opinion of the Attorney General, the Secretary of War or the Secretary of the Navy, the public welfare would be served by according such access to said records.

The Budget Bureau sent the draft legislation and memoranda to the Commerce Department. Commerce officials sent them to the US Census Bureau for comment. The bill arrived at the bureau during the most intense phase of 1940 census planning. The reaction was immediate. Officials mobilized to squelch the legislation as quickly as possible. Calvert Dedrick, Chief

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Statistician in the US Census Bureau’s Division of Statistical Research, wrote to Stuart Rice, then Chairman of the Central Statistical Board on December 5: “We consider this one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation which could be introduced, particularly at the time of the decennial census and during a campaign year.” Dedrick included a four-page memorandum detailing the history of the development of the confidentiality requirements protecting individual-level census information. “The Attorney General’s recommendation,” he pointed out, “runs directly counter to the development of public policy in this respect for the past 60 years” (Dedrick 1939a, b). A confrontation between the Department of Justice and the Department of Commerce loomed if the US Census Bureau strenuously opposed the legislation. David Niles, Senior Aide to the Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins, responded to the emerging opposition in the US Census Bureau and reported to the President. On December 7, Presidential Aide Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson sent a memorandum to Roosevelt, including the draft legislation and David Niles’ request for the President’s reaction. “If the President is interested, Niles will not make any opposition; otherwise, I believe they (the Commerce Department) will oppose it.” The next day President Roosevelt dictated his response through Watson: “Tell Dave Niles that unrestricted access to census files should not be given to Army or Navy Intelligence or F.B.I.  However, where G2 (as Army Intelligence was called), O.N.I. (Office of Naval Intelligence) or FBI need information regarding a specific person, the information should be given to them in confidence after they have stated the reason for asking it” (President’s Official File 1939–1940; O’Reilly 1982). The President’s brief response provided little clarification either on his thinking on the general issue of using individual-level census records for surveillance or on what to do with the draft legislation. Roosevelt implicitly suggested that he was not opposed to amending the Census Act to make information on individuals and firms available to the intelligence agencies. We have been unable to find records indicating if Watson ever communicated Roosevelt’s response to Niles or if Niles ever communicated Roosevelt’s wishes to the US Census Bureau, G2, ONI, or the FBI.  The normal channels of communication between Watson and Niles would have been oral. In its baldest form, the President was proposing action that violated the existing language of section 11 of the Census Act. At best, his instructions to provide information “regarding a specific person” put the Director in a perilous legal position. If the Director provided such information to the intelligence agencies, he risked violating the “detriment” clause of Section 18 of the Census Act. It is not surprising that Roosevelt’s directive, if it was transmitted, was not transmitted through normal bureaucratic channels.

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In light of the President’s ambiguous response, the Budget Bureau faced a conflict between two cabinet departments on the draft legislation. On January 4, 1940, the conflict became official. The Commerce Department formally communicated with the Budget Bureau opposing the legislation. On January 16, 1940, the Budget Bureau moved to resolve the conflict by broadening the discussion to other departments with defense or statistical responsibilities. The Budget Bureau requested “an expression of views on the proposed legislation from the Departments of Treasury, War, Navy, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor, and from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.” The expansion of the discussion of the draft legislation in turn created new political dynamics (United States, Bureau of the Budget 1939). From the moment they learned of the draft legislation in early December 1939, officials in the US Census Bureau were profoundly concerned that any news that such a proposal was afoot would have a negative effect on the responses to the upcoming census. Not surprisingly, then, they kept the internal bureaucratic discussion a quiet one among high-level policy decision-­ makers. Memos initially circulated among very few people: Stuart Rice, former head of the Central Statistical Board and recently named the new Assistant Director for Statistical Standards in the Budget Bureau; Census Director Austin; Census Bureau Assistant Director for Statistical Research Calvert Dedrick; and Budget Bureau Director Harold Smith (Ibid). In mid-January, however, when the Budget Bureau asked for responses from five other cabinet departments, the issue began to leak. Furthermore, the discussions from November 1939 through mid-January 1940 had taken place, while the Congress was out of session. The Congress returned on January 3, 1940. On January 24, 1940, Congressman Daniel Reed “voiced objections to the Census of Housing on the floor of the House.” In the first week of February, Senator Charles W. Tobey (R-NH) opened an attack and claimed that the questions on the 1940 schedule, notably that on income, violated individual privacy. Over the next few weeks, a crescendo of newspaper reports picked up the story and challenged the confidentiality of census responses (New York Times 1940, February 2, 1940, 17:2). In the meantime, on February 9, President Roosevelt signed the 1940 Census Proclamation, which included the following assurance: The sole purpose of the census is to secure general statistical information regarding the population … of the country, and replies are required from individuals only to enable the compilation of such general statistics. No person can be harmed in any way by furnishing the information required. The census has nothing to do with taxation, with military or jury service, with the compulsion

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of school attendance, with the regulation of immigration or with the enforcement of any national, State or local law or ordinance. There need be no fear that any disclosure will be made regarding any individual person or his affairs. For the due protection of the rights and interests of the persons furnishing information, every employee of the Census Bureau is prohibited, under heavy penalty, from disclosing any information which may thus come to his knowledge. (New York Times, February 11, 1940, 13)

As the proclamation was issued, the draft bill to repeal the confidentiality provisions of the Census Act was still under review in the Budget Bureau. It does not appear that in February 1940, Senator Tobey or other critics of the census in the Congress or the media had access to the actual language of the draft bill. There were hints of the debate, for example, an article in the New York Times on February 27, 1940, reporting that the “Budget Bureau Reveals Postal and Treasury Department Officials Disapproved FBI Request for Legislation to Permit FBI to Inspect Information.” Senator Tobey, however, did not directly frame his attack in terms of a pending piece of legislation. Accordingly, the controversy raged over hypothetical invasions of privacy and confidentiality from the new housing census and the question on income, rather than in terms of the larger question of the use of the data for investigation and surveillance (New York Times, February 27, 1940, 1:4). The story of Senator Tobey’s challenge to the income questions in the 1940 census is well-known (Eckler 1972; Barabba 1975). In mid-February, Tobey focused his attack on the new question on income. On February 20, he proposed a bill to eliminate the question. He sponsored Senate hearings to gain support for the bill; the bill passed a Senate subcommittee on March 5. Administration and Census Bureau officials strenuously defended the new question and the confidentiality of the census more generally. In mid-March, as Senator Tobey’s bill was moving toward further consideration in the Senate, Commerce Secretary Hopkins proposed that individuals who objected to providing an answer to the income question to the enumerator at the doorstep could send the information directly to the US Census Bureau in a sealed envelope. By March 20, Tobey’s bill floundered and the census proceeded. The story behind this story reveals a more complicated resolution of the issues. In early March, President Roosevelt agreed to withdraw consideration of the draft legislation. At the height of the uproar about the income questions in late February, Budget Director Harold Smith wrote a memorandum to Roosevelt that highlighted the language concerning census confidentiality in the President’s census proclamation, which Roosevelt had signed on

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February 9. Smith reminded the President that “It does not seem to me, therefore, that the enactment of the legislation proposed by the Department of Justice should be considered as being in accord with your program, and, if you approve, I will so advise the Attorney General and the other departments which have submitted their views with respect thereto.” In a handwritten note, dated March 2, the President replied, “I agree with you.” As a result, the proposed legislation was never introduced, and the census proceeded without further debate about surveillance and statistical confidentiality (President’s Official File 1939–1940).

Roosevelt Selects a New Census Director In 1941, however, as he began an unprecedented third term as the President of the United States and faced a threatening world at war, Franklin Roosevelt revived the issue of the role of the census in war planning. In a political environment in which the public was still unconvinced that the United States would or should enter the war, the President moved carefully to expand the defense infrastructure. He created new defense agencies and brought internationalist Republicans, Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, into the cabinet to build bipartisan support for expanding national defense and preparing for war. While census officials and administration advisors had been able to convince Roosevelt that a legislative battle over the confidentiality provisions of the Census Act during a census and an election year was politically dangerous, there were strong signals early in 1941 that the President still sought a mechanism to permit the administrative and intelligence agencies access to individual-­level information collected by the US Census Bureau. William Lane Austin, Census Director who led the battle against the 1939 legislation, was involuntarily retired at the end of January 1941. Austin reached 70 near the end of January, and it required a Presidential Executive Order for him to remain as Director beyond January 31, 1941. Such Executive Orders were by no means exceptional. Indeed, both he and the federal statistical community had expected that he would be extended for an additional year so he could complete the main work of the 1940 census (Rice 1941). Ignoring the universal recommendation from the statistical, social science, and user communities that a person with professional knowledge be appointed as Austin’s replacement, the administration announced the nomination of J.C.  Capt as Director on April 22. The Senate confirmed the nomination, without debate, on May 13 (Seltzer 2011). Capt took office on May 22, 1941.

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By the spring of 1941, the United States moved ever closer to war, and on May 27, President Roosevelt proclaimed an “unlimited national emergency” which “requires the strengthening of our defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority” (Roosevelt 1941). On June 6, in one of his first initiatives as Director, Capt obtained the support of Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones for legislation to eliminate the 1941 census of manufactures, to provide authority for periodic surveys for national defense needs, and to make individual-level census reports available for use in the “national defense program” (Quoted in U.S. Senate 1941; U.S House of Representatives 1941). Census Director Capt’s proposed legislative language was vaguer and broader than that of the 1939 draft bill. It no longer specifically amended Section 11 of the Census Act. Rather, it simply authorized the Commerce Secretary to provide officials in other government agencies access to confidential census data for the “national defense program.” The implication was that the new defense agencies, for example, the Office of Production Management, the Office of Price Administration, and the War Production Board, would have access to the data. The Census Director found a sympathetic reception in the Senate. Section 3 of the bill, which became Senate Bill 1627 (S1627), provided: That notwithstanding any other provision of law, any individual census report or any information contained therein may be used in connection with the national defense program under such rules and regulations as may be prescribed, with the approval of the President, by the Secretary of Commerce. No person shall disclose or make use of any individual census report or any information contained therein contrary to such rules and regulations; and anyone violating this provision shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof shall be fined not exceeding $500 or be imprisoned not exceeding six months or both. (Congressional Record 1941)

The Senate report accompanying the bill was explicit about the goals of the legislation: The needs of the defense program are of such a character as to require full and direct information about specific individuals and business establishments. It is clearly the intent of the Congress and of the administration to implement in every possible way the defense program. An essential part of this implementation must be through the proper use of statistical data to speed production and to provide the detailed knowledge needed for the planning of total defense. To continue to impose the rigid provisions of the present confidential use law of the Census Bureau on data now in the possession of the Bureau and that to be gath-

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ered and used for national defense would defeat the primary objects of the legislation here proposed. (U.S. Senate 1941)

But all was not clear sailing. According to established legislative practice, the House Census Committee was the likely place to initiate and vet such legislation, and thus almost simultaneously with S1627, several similar bills were introduced in the House and referred to the House Census Committee. On June 24, 1942, Representative Guy Moser, Chair of this Committee, introduced House of Representatives Bill 5139 (H.R. 5139), which among other provisions would permit individual census reports to be used in connection with the national defense. HR 5139 also permitted access to individual census reports to members of the Congress, and thus was unacceptable to census officials and others in the administration. On July 3, 1941, another member of the House Census Committee, Congressman John Rankin, introduced House Bill 5232 (H.R. 5232) to allow individual “census reports” to be used in connection with national defense. This bill also had other provisions unacceptable to the administration. Finally, on July 16, 1941, House Census Committee Chair Moser introduced House Joint Resolution 213, to permit individual census reports to be used in connection with national defense by the Office of Production Management. The resolution also permitted access to individual census reports to members of the Congress. Again the administration opposed the proposal. None of the House proposals made legislative headway. The Senate passed S1627 in August 1941 and sent the bill to the House, where it met a chilly reaction from Chairman Moser. Moser held hearings on all the bills in October and November, clearly distrusted the testimony of the administration, and vowed that the Senate bill would not get out of his committee (U.S. House of Representatives 1941). There was great concern expressed in the hearing testimony about giving government officials access to confidential data, particularly economic information about individual businesses. S1627 remained in the House Census Committee in November 1941. Thus, on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, much had been done to prepare to the national defense in case of war. Emergency agencies had been created. Aliens and draft age men had been registered. Plans for interning alien enemies were in place. Lists of potentially dangerous aliens were compiled, and plans for making arrests were in place if needed. But other aspects of war planning were still tangled in controversy, as with the proposed use of confidential census data for surveillance and war mobilization. The likelihood and severity of the threat of sabotage or subversion in case of war were subject to differing opinions within the intelligence agencies. From the White House

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on down, there were continuing efforts to acquire better information on Fifth Column threats. Those efforts led to White House authorized informal contacts with the Census Bureau in order to acquire statistical information about immigrant communities, particularly the Japanese American community, where such threats might reside. These were the understandings and instruments of the national defense in place when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Sunday December 7, 1941. They would be sorely tested in the weeks ahead.

 echnical Note: The Classification of Race T and National Origin in the Census The story of the development of standards for statistical confidentiality and the stewardship of data is one about the professional development of survey research methods and the efforts of career officials in the statistical system to write their understandings into law and administrative practice. Policy development and debates usually took place outside the harsh light of public scrutiny as officials drafted statutory language and administrative rules and sought to make sure the rules were enforced across the government. By contrast, the story of the development of the classifications for race and national origin in the census was a much more public debate, in which census officials responded to activity elsewhere, including the demographic realities of immigration and internal migration in the United States, the viewpoints and needs of the agencies and courts regulating immigration and naturalization, and the political preferences of Congress, state and local officials, and the racial and immigrant communities themselves. It was a confusing set of players, and not surprisingly, race and national origin classifications in the census vary across the years and are not logically consistent. The basic problem with classifying race and national origin in the census derives from the original constitutional structure of the American government, most notably, that in the eighteenth century, race-based slavery was a major element of the economy. That labor system fundamentally contradicted the ringing statements of the Declaration of Independence declaring “all men are created equal” and created the tortured solution to political representation in the Congress known as the Three-Fifths Compromise. The Constitution also formally excluded the indigenous American Indian population from the political system and hence from being counted in the census. The census, therefore, from the outset had to separate “slave” and “free” Americans and

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account for “whites” and “colored,” namely, “free blacks” or “free colored” and “civilized Indians” among the free population. Initially, the census only counted “slaves” and “whites” and with a residual category of “other free people.” By 1820, the census systematically began to account for the population by “color,” at the time in just two categories of “white” and “colored.” The Congress added “Mulatto” to the “color” categories in 1850. Throughout the antebellum period, the policy issue these categories addressed was the question of the abolition of slavery and the future of the slave economy. At their most militant, Southerners who defended the slave economy came to argue that slavery was the appropriate social status for Americans of African descent, and they articulated a virulent racism that claimed the “white” race the most advanced and that peoples that were not “white” were incapable of participating in the American state. Within this color system, antebellum Americans also had to define rules for the social and political status of immigrants who came to America. Who was “white”? Who was “colored”? And more crucially, who could become an American citizen and participate in the electoral process? Immigration policy as we know it today basically did not exist in the limited governmental structure of the early nineteenth century. While ship captains were supposed to provide harbor officials with lists of passengers on debarkation, there was no federal administrative structure to make use of these lists, nor were there restrictions on who could land. The United States effectively stopped monitoring foreign immigration in the 1820s (Neuman 1996). Federal naturalization law was also very welcoming of white immigrants. Early naturalization law simply required an immigrant seeking citizenship to swear allegiance to the United States before a judge after a two-year residence. The statutes restricted naturalization to “whites” though there is also evidence in the antebellum period of Asians naturalizing. In the language of the 1790 statute, “Any alien, being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof on application to any common law Court of record in any one of the States wherein he shall have resided for the term of one year at least, and making proof to the satisfaction of such Court that he is a person of good character, and taking the oath or affirmation prescribed by law to support the Constitution of the United States, which Oath or Affirmation such Court shall administer, and the Clerk of such Court shall record such Application, and the proceedings thereon; and thereupon such person shall be considered as a Citizen of the United States” (United States Congress 1790; also available at “An act to establish an [sic] uniform Rule of Naturalization” (March 26,

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1790), https://immigrationhistory.org/item/1790-­nationality-­act/; Daniels 2005, 7; Smith 2002). It was within this conceptual and classification structure that the new American territorial acquisitions on the West Coast had to integrate people into the American state. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo specified that Mexican nationals who lived in what was to become California were “white” and citizens of the United States. But the Asian Chinese immigrants who arrived during and after the Gold Rush were another matter entirely. In the censuses of 1850 and 1860, the categories on the census form for “color” were “white,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “Indian.” What was the “right” answer for a Chinese laborer in California? In the published reports of the 1850 and 1860 census, Chinese were sometimes included in the “white” population, sometimes separated as “Asiatics” but never classified under a “color” or “race” category of “Chinese.” Immigrants from China were identified in the place of birth question. The 1850 and 1860 census instructions to enumerators in 1850 and 1860 permitted the enumerators to leave the “color” code blank if the individual was “white.” It may be that enumerators in the field were able to avoid dealing with the question of how to classify “Chinese” by “color” by omitting an answer altogether and implicitly using the blank “white” response (IPUMS USA, n.d.). In the late 1860s, the question of the “color” identification of Chinese immigrants reemerged in the context of planning the 1870 census. The Congress looked at the census mechanism and asked what changes were needed in light of the Thirteenth Amendment abolition of slavery and hence the Three-Fifths Compromise, the reconstruction of the American society after the Civil War, and the integration of the freed population into the political system. The irony of abolition was that it delivered the southern states a 40% boost in strength for the freed population and hence enhanced their apportionment quotas for House seats. That increased strength in the House in turn prompted the Congress to pass the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, guaranteeing citizenship rights, equal protection and due process of law, and voting rights for the freedmen, in an effort to build a political black base in the South. In the context of those legislative debates, the Congress debated, but did not pass, comprehensive reform legislation for the census in late 1869 and early 1870, most notably H.R. 424, sponsored by James Garfield (R-OH). The reform bills contained clarification of the “color” question on the census and specified that the color categories include “Chinese” as well as white,

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black, and mulatto and Indian. [The capitalization is from the bill.] Census officials implemented the change to the “color” codes in the 1870 census form as they had been drafted in H.R. 424. No mention of the change was made in the instructions to enumerators beyond admonishing the enumerator not to leave the code blank (Anderson 2015). In a related debate in July 1870, the Congress debated removing the term “white” from the naturalization statute. The change was aimed at permitting the naturalization of the foreign born of African descent and Chinese immigrants. The Congress rejected the outright removal of the term “white” but did amend the statute to permit naturalization of “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” The end result of the legislative changes and administrative actions was to make the Chinese immigrants and, by extension, eventually all “Asiatic” immigrants “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” Individuals from Asia were free to immigrate to the United States but could not become American citizens. Their children, if born in the United States, claimed birthright citizenship while still retaining a nonwhite “color” classification in the census (Daniels 2005; Mezey 2003). Some 10 years later, in 1882, the Congress restricted Chinese immigration to the United States in the Chinese Exclusion Act and followed with additional measures in the 1890s, regulating Chinese immigrant travel to and from the United States. Over time, these measures slowed and eventually effectively stopped the flow of new Chinese immigrants to the United States. Since labor demand still existed on the West Coast, the measures did not stop all immigration from Asia, and by 1890, Japanese immigration to the West Coast was sufficiently noticeable to prompt the inclusion of a “Japanese” category on the 1890 census “color” question. In the censuses that followed in the twentieth century, then, both Japanese immigrants and their American-born children were racially identified as “Japanese” in the color question in the census. In the case of European immigrants, they and their children were “white” and counted and tabulated in the larger white population. From 1870 to 1970, it was possible to identify the national origins of second-generation European immigrants by the nativity of parents question on the census, but the asymmetry of the conceptual structure for the identification of Asian immigrants and European immigrants and the ban on naturalization of individuals who were not “white” had a fundamental impact on the popular and official understanding of the Japanese American community.

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References Alien Registration. 1940. Population. Index 6 (4): 250–251. An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization (March 26, 1790), Available at https://immigrationhistory.org/item/1790-­nationality-­act/. See also Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door (New York: Hill and Wang), 7. Anderson, Margo. 2015. The American Census: A Social History. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Anderson, Margo, and William Seltzer. 2007. Challenges to the Confidentiality of U.S. Federal Statistics, 1910–1965. Journal of Official Statistics 23 (1): 1–34. ———. 2009. Federal Statistical Confidentiality and Business Data: Twentieth Century Challenges and Continuing Issues. Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality 1 (Spring): 7–52. Barabba, Vincent. 1975. The Right of Privacy and the Need to Know. In The Census Bureau: A Numerator and Denominator for Measuring Change. Technical Paper 37, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Bohme, Frederick G., and David N. Pemberton. 1991. Privacy and Confidentiality in the US Censuses – A History. Atlanta: Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Statistical Association, August 18–22, 1991, 12. Carter, John Franklin. 1941. Memorandum by John Franklin Carter, November 14, 1942. [This Typed Memorandum Is Incorrectly Dated in a Handwritten Note at the Top. It Should Be Dated November 14, 1941 Based on Context]. In Henry Field Papers, Box 44, Special Files, Memoranda, 1941–1945. File: Japanese in the United States, 1941. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY. Chambers, John Whiteclay. 1987. To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America. New York/London: Free Press; Collier Macmillan. Congressional Record. 1941. (77th Cong., 1st Session). Vol. 87, pt. 6, 6969, August 11. Daniels, Roger, ed. 1989. American Concentration Camps. A Documentary History of the Relocation and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1942–1945. New  York: Garland Publishing. ———. 2004. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 2005. Guarding the Golden Door. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 2015, 2016. Franklin Roosevelt. Vol. 2. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Dedrick, Calvert. 1939a. Calvert Dedrick to Stuart A. Rice, December 5, 1939, Entry 210, General Records Maintained by Calvert Dedrick, Box 210, Folder: Rice, Dr. Stuart A., Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, D.C. ———. 1939b. Calvert Dedrick to William Lane Austin, December 5, 1939, Records of the Bureau of the Budget, Entry 20A, History of General Legislation, 76th–79th Congress, 1939–1946 (39.1). College Park, MD: (Legislative History of

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Unenacted and Vetoed Public Bills), Box 27, Folder C158(1)-(5), Commerce Department, Census Bureau # 2, Record Group 51, National Archives. Dorwart, Jeffery M. 1983. Conflict of Duty: The U.S.  Navy’s Intelligence Dilemma, 1919–1945. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press. Eckler, A. Ross. 1972. The Bureau of the Census. New York: Praeger. Field, Henry. 1941. Henry Field to Wayne Taylor, November 25, 1941. In Henry Field Papers, Box 44, Folder, ‘Japanese in the United States, 1941’. Hyde Park, NY: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library. Finnegan, John Patrick, and Romana Danysh. 1998. Military Intelligence. Washington, DC: Center of Military History, United States Army. Fleming, Thomas H. 2001. The New Dealers’ War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II. New York: Basic Books. Ford, Corey. 1970. Donovan of OSS. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Office Files. 1994. Correspondence Files 1933–1945, Part 3. Microform. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, Reel 33, frames 770–790. Freidel, Frank. 1990. Franklin D.  Roosevelt: A Rendezvous With Destiny. Boston: Little Brown. Hayashi, Brian Masaru. 1995. For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895–1942. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Headrick, Daniel R. 2000. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850. New York: Oxford University Press. Hedrich, A.E. 1942. Delayed Birth Registration. American Journal of Public Health 32 (4(April)): 365–368. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/ AJPH.32.4.365. Accessed 6 Jan 2023. Higgs, Edward. 2004. The Information State in England: The Central Collection of Information on Citizens since 1500. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Holt, W. Stull. 1929. The Bureau of the Census: Its History, Activities, and Organization, Service Monographs of the United States Government No. 53. New York: AMS Press. 1974, originally published, 1929. Hosokawa, Bill. 1969. Nisei: The Quiet Americans. New York: W. Morrow. ———. 1982. JACL in Quest of Justice. New York: W. Morrow. Ichioka, Yuji. 2006. Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History. Stanford: Stanford University Press. IPUMS USA. n.d. ‘1860 Census: Instructions to the Marshals’, https://usa.ipums.org/ usa/voliii/inst1860.shtml Irons, Peter. 1983. Justice at War. New York: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Robert. 1983. Procedural History of the 1940 Census of Population and Housing. Madison: The Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin. Kurashige, Lon. 2002. Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival in Los Angeles, 1934–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Martínez, Manuel Galvis. 2021. Internment of Enemy Aliens During the World Wars. American Journal of Legal History 61 (2): 211–234. https://doi.org/10.1093/ ajlh/njab006. Masaoka, Mike. 1941. Japanese American Creed. Densho Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Japanese_American_Creed/. Accessed 6 Jan 2022. Mezey, Naomi. 2003. Erasure and Recognition: The Census, Race and the National Imagination. Northwestern University Law Review 97: 1701–1768. Mike, Masaoka, and Bill Hosokawa. 1987. They Call Me Moses Masaoka: An American Saga. New York: Morrow. Modell, John. 1977. The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese in Los Angeles, 1900–1942. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Munson, Curtis. 1941. ‘Curtis Munson to John Franklin Carter’, John Franklin Carter Files on German Nazi Party Members, Part 5 of President Franklin D.  Roosevelt’s Office Files, 1933–1945, Microform. Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1994, Reel 1, frame 213. Neuman, Gerald L. 1996. Strangers to the Constitution: Immigrants, Borders and Fundamental Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press. New York Times. February 2, 1940, 17:2. ———. 1941. [7/6/40; 7/31/40; 9/2/40; 12/27/40; 2/20/41]. Niiya, Brian, ed. 2001. Encyclopedia of Japanese American History. updated ed. New York: Checkmark Books, an Imprint of Facts on File, Inc. O’Reilly, Kenneth. 1982. A New Deal for the FBI: The Roosevelt Administration, Crime Control, and National Security. Journal of American History 69 (3) (December): 638–658. Pearson, Susan J. 2021. The Birth Certificate: An American History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Persico, Joseph. 2001. Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage. New York: Random House. President’s Official File. 1939–1940. President’s Official File: 3b-3c, Department of Commerce. Box 6, Folder: Commerce Department, 1939–1940, Census Bureau. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY. Rice, Stuart. 1941. Stuart Rice to W.F. Ogburn, 2/6/1941. Chicago, IL: W.F. Ogburn papers. Box 27, Census Advisory Committee; Folder 5, Bureau of the Census, correspondence, 1941, University of Chicago Library, Special Collections. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. 1941. Announcing Unlimited National Emergency. http:// docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu:8000/052741.html Ruggles, Steven, Sarah Flood, Ronald Goeken, Josiah Grover, Erin Meyer, Jose Pacas, and Matthew Sobek. 2018. IPUMS USA: Version 8.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V8.0. Seltzer, William. 2011. Replacing Austin: A Study of Leadership Change at the US Census Bureau. In Paper presented at the Joint Statistical Meetings, Miami, FL.  Available in JSM Proceedings, Government Statistics Section. Alexandria: American Statistical Association.

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Smith, Marian L. 2002. Race, Nationality, and Reality INS Administration of Racial Provisions in U.S. Immigration and Nationality Law Since 1898. Prologue 34: 2. (Summer), available at https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/ summer/immigration-­law-­1#f2. Steele, Richard. 1979. Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Foreign Policy Critics. Political Science Quarterly 94 (1) (Spring): 15–32. Taylor, Wayne. 1941. Taylor to Henry Field, November 22, 1941 November 29, 1941. In Henry Field Papers, Box 44, Folder, ‘Japanese in the United States, 1941’. Hyde Park, NY: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library. Theoharis, Athan G. 2004. The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Truesdell, Leon E. 1965. The Development of Punch Card Tabulation in the Bureau of the Census, 1890–1940: With Outlines of Actual Tabulation Programs. Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O. United States, Bureau of the Budget. 1939. History of General Legislation, 76th–79th Congress, 1939–1946 (39.1). College Park, MD: (Legislative History of Unenacted and Vetoed Public Bills), Entry 20A.  Box 27, Folder C158(1)-(5), Commerce Department, Census Bureau # 2, Record Group 51, National Archives. United States, Bureau of the Census. 1941. Japanese Population of the United States and its Territories and Possessions. Sixteenth Census of The United States. Series P-3, No. 23 (December 9, 1941). Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce. ———. 1943. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population, Vol. 2, Characteristics of the Population, 10. Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office. ———. 1979. Twenty Censuses: Population and Housing Questions, 1790–1980. Washington, D.C.: GPO., 1979. United States Census Bureau. n.d. History. Questionnaires 1940. https://www.census. gov/history/pdf/1940_population_questionnaire.pdf. Accessed 26 Mar 2023. United States, Central Intelligence Agency. 2000. The Office of Strategic Services America’s First Intelligence Agency. Washington, DC: Public Affairs, Central Intelligence Agency. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-­for-­the-­study-­of-­ intelligence/csi-­publications/books-­and-­monographs/oss/index.htm. United States, House of Representatives. 1941. Papers accompanying specific bills and resolutions, HR 77A-D20, S2208-S2395, 77th Congress. Washington, D.C: Box 159, and ‘Letterbooks of the House Census Committee, 77th Congress’, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives. United States, Senate. 1941. ‘Senate Rept. 495, June 26, 1941, to accompany S 1627’. (77th Congress, 1st Session). United States. Congress. 1790. An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, 103–104. (March 26, 1790). First Congress, Session II, Chapter 3; 1 Stat. Weglyn, Michi Nishiura. 1996. Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps. Updated ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press [Original edition published in 1976].

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There were 126,947 Japanese in the continental United States on April 1, 1940, of whom 47,305 were foreign-born, and therefore alien and ineligible for citizenship, Director J.C. Capt of the Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce, announced today on the basis of the 1940 Population Census returns…. The Pacific Coast States of Washington, Oregon, and California had 112,353, Japanese, or 88.5 percent of the total in the country. Furthermore, these states contained 40,869 alien Japanese or 86.4 percent of the total. California alone had 93,717, or 73.8 percent of the total Japanese in the United States and 33,569 alien Japanese or 71.0 percent of the total. … U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Japanese Population of the United States and its Territories and Possessions,” December 9, 1941, Series P-3, No. 23 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1941)

December 7, 1941 On the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan launched a surprise naval and air attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The attack caught US army and naval forces unawares. The United States incurred devastating losses of nineteen ships, 150 planes, and casualties of almost 2400 dead and almost 1200 wounded. The news of the attack reached Washington shortly after 1:00  PM local time. Within a day, on Monday, December 8, 1941, Congress, with one dissenting vote, declared war against Japan. Three days later, on Thursday, December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The United States recognized the state of war with all Axis powers and officially joined the Allied forces of Britain, the Soviet Union, and exile governments to defeat the Axis (Morris and Morris 1976, 437ff).

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The Pearl Harbor attack stunned the nation and with lightning speed moved the nation from the campaigns for war preparations developed over the previous two to three years into full implementation. The immediate transition from war and defense preparedness to world war participation, even though widely anticipated within government and public discussion, nevertheless put tremendous strain on the state. Latent tensions about how best to accomplish national defense were no longer academic debates among planners, but potentially life and death decisions to be made in a day or two. Ambiguities in procedures or bureaucratic bottlenecks and rivalries among and between civilian and military organizations stressed operating relationships further and made for testy and frustrated communication. The early months of America’s participation in World War II were harrowing for American policy makers and the public alike. It was quite clear that it would take many months to move an American fighting force across the Atlantic to the scene of battle in Europe, while Hitler’s armies continued to overrun Europe. In the Pacific, Japan not only crippled the US fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, but she also successfully invaded the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island and captured Singapore and Hong Kong by the end of December 1941. The Japanese advance in the Pacific continued to overcome Allied defenses through the spring of 1942 (Ibid.). With such dire war news, the American military and civilian agencies moved aggressively to secure the continental United States from further attack. And that meant controlling the potential for sabotage, fifth column spying, or aid to Japanese or German forces attempting to bomb or shell the coasts or land any kind of invasion force. After the Pearl Harbor attack, the West Coast was the most obvious place to fear further attack, and the aliens from Japan, Germany, and Italy, now declared “alien enemies,” came in for immediate surveillance and control. For our purposes, several separate but soon to be related sets of actors began to mobilize the response to West Coast defense in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. First, federal military and civilian officials moved to implement plans for enemy alien control. Second, the Japanese American community and West Coast business and lobbying organizations began campaigns to secure West Coast defenses. These efforts took the myriad West Coast national defense initiatives out of the realm of planning and into the realm of action and almost immediately revealed very different understandings of what the actual security threat was, what the proper programs to control it were, and who should do what. It was a complicated situation exacerbated by the sudden immediacy of the war itself.

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In the context of this fraught situation, the Census Bureau began to publish data from the 1940 census on the Japanese, German, and Italian American populations and then to reach out and offer further support for the war agencies. At the time, it was becoming clear that there was disagreement on the conceptualization of who the West Coast “Japanese” were, whether particular individuals or organizations were “loyal,” and hence how and where to target resources to protect the coast from any kind of attack. The census was designed to address the demographic character of the nation and had a variety of basic questions which were tabulated to provide information on the age, sex, race, family relationships, migration, and occupational patterns of the country. It had several relevant pieces of information. “Japanese” was a census racial category. It was also a census place of birth category, i.e., people born in Japan. But the census had no information on someone’s sympathies with or loyalty to their ancestral homeland. John Franklin Carter and Henry Field had asked for potential information in the census on young Americans of Japanese ancestry, the “Kibei,” who had spent time in Japan and might be targeted for investigation of their “loyalty” to their ancestral homeland. They learned the census had no such information. In other words, the Census Bureau could report on the basic demographic characteristics of the Japanese ancestry community, but its data systems were not designed for assessing “loyalty.” Nor were these systems integrated into administrative programs to monitor or surveil individuals or groups for West Coast defense. Those functions were the purview of administrative agencies and administrative data systems, initially the Justice Department and the Army and Navy commands on the West Coast.

Federal Officials Secure the West Coast On December 7 and 8, Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527 invoked the president’s authority to define “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized” to be alien enemies who were “liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.” Title 50 of the U.S. code continued: The President is authorized in any such event, by his proclamation thereof, or other public act, to direct the conduct to be observed, on the part of the United States, toward the aliens who become so liable; the manner and degree of the

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restraint to which they shall be subject and in what cases, and upon what security their residence shall be permitted, and to provide for the removal of those who, not being permitted to reside within the United States, refuse or neglect to depart there from; and to establish any other regulations which are found necessary in the premises and for the public safety. (United States 1941; 50 U.S. Code 21 (1918))

These proclamations authorized the Justice Department to undertake the alien round ups as planned using the ABC lists of potential subversives (Irons 1983; ten Broek and Matson 1954). In Los Angeles, for example, some 300 Japanese aliens were arrested on December 7 and 8. The Los Angeles Times noted the names of prominent Japanese aliens arrested, including “Dr. Takastui Furusawa (sic),” the physician implicated in the Tachibana spying case the previous June (Los Angeles Times 1941a; Ichioka 2006). By Friday, December 12, the Justice Department reported that 2303 German, Italian, and Japanese aliens had been rounded up nationally and that the number arrested was expected to rise to 3000 (Los Angeles Times 1941c). By December 19, the Justice Department reported that the roundups were reaching completion. Some 2100 had been “arrested and jailed throughout the nation.” In Los Angeles, 442 had been arrested; 343 of those were Japanese, 85 German, and 14 Italian (Los Angeles Times 1941e). To calm public concern about potential “quislings” within the nation, Justice officials revealed the operational procedures that had led to the roundups. Before congressional committees, notably the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities raised concerns, the Los Angeles Times reported, “the F.B.I was working secretly in tabulating and checking those aliens who were either known agents of foreign powers or working closely with such agents.” After describing the coordination among federal and local law enforcement officials to conduct the actual arrests, the Times continued, “In all parts of the city and county, card-index files which had been prepared by the F.B.I were opened. On each card an alien was named, described, his home and business addresses given, his relatives listed, his probable whereabouts indicated.” The arrests meant that “/s/ecret plans for quick and crippling sabotage were nipped.” And, “civil and Federal agencies dispatched guards to bridges, airplane plants, oil tanks, the aqueduct, dams, public buildings, the harbor area” (Los Angeles Times 1941e). The media coverage of the alien enemy arrests nevertheless heightened public concern with the potential for fifth column sabotage on the West Coast. From the Justice Department perspective, they were designed to show that federal authorities had prepared for the outbreak of the war and were ready to

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protect the homeland. That was the immediate issue after the Pearl Harbor attack, and the media reports at the time said little about what happened next to those arrested. The procedures in place called for due process hearings for each individual arrested and a formal decision to intern or release the person. In other words, the program, even though tainted with racial profiling which over-classified suspected threats, still adhered to the usual procedures for handling such arrests in the American legal system. It provided aliens with their day in court to clear their name and resume their lives. The army also moved swiftly after December 7 to protect the West Coast. By a joint agreement between the Justice Department and the War Department from July 1941, the Justice Department had primary responsibility for arresting enemy aliens in the continental United States in time of war. The War Department, through the office of the Provost Marshal General’s (PMG) office, had responsibility for arresting alien enemies in US territories, including Alaska and the Panama Canal Zone. As of the summer of 1941, the army organizational structure within the continental United States designated four “defense commands” as operational units. The defense commands within the continental United States had responsibility for protecting the homeland from foreign attack. On the West Coast, the Western Defense Command had responsibility for the three Pacific Coast states, as well as Alaska, and Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Utah, and Montana, and was headquartered at the Presidio in San Francisco. It was commanded by Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt. Thus immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, General DeWitt and the Provost Marshal General’s office in Washington, DC, also initiated efforts to control enemy aliens and secure the defense of the West Coast (Conn 1962). General DeWitt was a career army bureaucrat close to retirement whose leadership during the early months of World War II was “indecisive” at best and prone to changes in policy depending on the last person he had talked to (Daniels 2004, 30). He saw the fate of the commanders of the Pearl Harbor forces and was quite determined to prevent the final years of his own career from being ruined. And frankly, he knew that in December 1941, his command had insufficient capabilities to successfully defend a full-scale attack like that on Pearl Harbor. He pushed immediately to preempt any attack by demanding further troops and support and by considering any potential indication of attack as real and deserving immediate total action. In this atmosphere, on December 10, the Western Defense Command sent its first proposal to Washington for control of all Japanese aliens on the West Coast. A local Treasury Department official claimed that there were “20,000 Japanese in the San Francisco metropolitan area…ready for organized action.”

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The claim was quickly proven false, but it set in motion proposals for further actions to defend the West Coast from internal subversion (Conn 1962, 127). On December 11, the War Department declared the Western Defense Command a “Theater of Operations” which in turn permitted DeWitt to call for further internal military control of the territory under his command. On December 19, he officially sent a request to the War Department that “action be initiated at the earliest practicable date to collect all alien subjects fourteen years of age and over, of enemy nations and remove them to the Zone of the Interior.” That request, of course, created a jurisdictional dispute between the War Department and the Justice Department, which from the Justice perspective had just completed the necessary arrests of enemy alien subversives around the country (Ibid.). At the Army’s General Headquarters in Washington, DeWitt’s request for mass arrests of enemy aliens was routed to the Military Intelligence Division (G-2) and the Provost Marshal General’s office. Provost Marshal General Allen Gullion took up DeWitt’s proposals and began to press for further action within the War Department. Gullion, like DeWitt, was a career army bureaucrat in his sixties and also invested in taking all precautions to prevent sabotage and fifth column attacks within the United States. The Provost Marshal General’s office had responsibilities for plant protection in the United States for controlling enemy aliens in US territories and for setting up prisoner of war camps and internment facilities in the United States. Within the Provost Marshal General’s office, the proposals for mass internment of enemy aliens from the West Coast were routed to the head of Aliens Division, Major Karl Bendetson. Bendetson, an attorney originally from Gray’s Harbor, Washington, and a bachelor’s and law graduate of Stanford University, had joined the Adjutant General’s office in 1940 and moved to the Provost Marshal General’s office when it was reestablished in the summer of 1941. At 34, he was an ambitious and able bureaucrat with boundless energy and dedication to both protecting the United States from attack and promoting his own military career (De Nevers 2004). Gullion and Bendetson were already dissatisfied with the arrangements that gave the Justice Department’s primary responsibility for handling of the threat posed by enemy aliens inside the continental United States. They felt that further measures at mass enemy alien control were necessary beyond the ABC list roundups. As early as December 12, DeWitt and Gullion discussed moving enemy aliens to a “zone of the interior” to protect the coasts, since the declaration of the West Coast as a “Theater of Operations” gave DeWitt much wider powers over the control of civilian life in the area under his command

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(Provost Marshal General Records, Classified Decimal File, December 12, 1941, Entry 433, Box 152, File 319.11). Thus when DeWitt made his formal recommendation on December 19, Bendetson and Gullion took DeWitt’s request as the opportunity to force the Justice Department to take further efforts to control the enemy alien threat on the West Coast. They proposed an immediate registration of enemy aliens and the promulgation of regulations authorized by the President’s December 7 and 8 proclamations banning enemy aliens from holding weapons, cameras, and radio equipment which could be used to foment subversion or spy for the enemy. In response to this pressure from the War Department, the Justice Department agreed in late December to consider further actions on West Coast enemy alien control and accelerate the promulgation of regulations on contraband. Gullion and Bendetson then pressed further and began to discuss several additional bureaucratic initiatives to position the Army and the Provost Marshal General’s office with the capacity to advance their particular vision of enemy alien control on the West Coast. First, they began work on a proposal to ask the Secretary of War for authority over the control of enemy aliens in all theaters of operation, that is, to remove Justice Department authority over the control of enemy aliens on the West Coast. This proposal did not receive immediate action. In the latter half of December 1941, there was scant support for such a move either in the Justice Department or within War Department policy making circles as the general staff recognized the drain such a move would make on already scarce army resource levels. The second proposal, seemingly an efficiency move, did make headway. In late December, Gullion proposed that he deal directly with the Western Defense Command on enemy alien control, rather than routing the issue through General Headquarters (GHQ) and then to the PMG office. He in turn would report to GHQ the progress made on the issue and any policy issues that required decisions from higher authorities. That decision, approved by General Headquarters, as Conn has noted, effectively removed GHQ from the day to day debates on West Coast enemy alien control, an issue that would soon become much more politically explosive both on the West Coast and in Washington (Provost Marshall General Records, Ibid.; Conn 1962, 129).

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 he Census Bureau and the 1940 Census Releases T on Japanese Americans During the middle of December 1941, Americans were concerned about additional Japanese attacks on the continental United States, and within a week of Pearl Harbor, local officials on the West Coast, the media, business and industry lobbying organizations, civil rights organizations, and the Japanese American community itself, joined in a noisy and often confusing discussion about potential fifth column threats to the West Coast. In the early days of the war, concrete public information on the potential threat was scarce, and though there were no actual attacks on the coast, rumors of attacks, like the one that had prompted DeWitt’s request for enemy alien removal in San Francisco, were rampant. As Morton Grodzins (1949) demonstrated many years ago, the initial public reaction to a “threat” by Japanese Americans, as measured by newspapers accounts, was somewhat muted. The Los Angeles Times, a conservative paper, favorably reported on the Anti-Axis Committee of the Japanese American Citizen’s League and the efforts of JACL to support the US war efforts. Mayor Fletcher Bowron of Los Angeles warned against discrimination against Japanese Americans because of their ethnicity. Nevertheless, the endemic anti-Japanese racism on the West Coast was all too near the surface and ready to attribute the actions and goals of the Japanese Empire to the diaspora population in the United States (Los Angeles Times 1941b, 19). One major question at the time was a quite simple one, namely, who were the Japanese Americans, where did they live, and how many were there? These were the questions that had prompted J. Franklin Carter and Henry Field to contact the Census Bureau for information from the 1940 Census. The frequent newspaper reports of the ABC roundups listed the numbers arrested by local area, but the numbers clearly were quite small, as Biddle noted, totaling 3000 enemy aliens nationally. By comparison, DeWitt’s December 10 memorandum on the dangers in San Francisco quoted a number of 20,000 Japanese. His December 19 estimate of enemy aliens to be removed in the Western Defense Command was 40,000. At the outbreak of the war, the estimates for the total enemy alien population were drawn from the 1940 alien registration (Conn 1962, 127). The discrepancy between the numbers rounded up in the Justice raids and the estimates of the overall enemy alien population were troublesome on a number of levels. Could there really be many more potential dangerous enemy aliens who had escaped Justice scrutiny? And if so, what level of resources,

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military or civilian, would be required to identify and “control” the threat? These were the questions that concerned Carter and Field, and to which they hoped, the 1940 Census results could speak. And speak they did. On Tuesday, December 9, 1941, the Census Bureau had managed to tabulate the data that Undersecretary of Commerce Wayne Taylor two weeks earlier had claimed would only be available in January or February 1942, unless expedited and paid for by special request. On December 9, the Bureau of the Census published its first report on Japanese Americans based on the 1940 census, “Japanese population of the United States, its territories and possessions,” followed immediately by reports on the “Japanese population by nativity and citizenship in selected cities of the United States” on December 10, and “Japanese population in the Pacific Coast States by sex, nativity and citizenship, by counties” on December 11. Additional preliminary 1940 census reports on Japanese Americans were issued on December 19 and in early February for the Territory of Hawaii. On December 12 and 16, 1941, the Bureau also reported on foreign-born Germans and Italians in selected cities and only on September 30, 1942, a report on “Foreign white stock of German and Italian origin.” See Figs. 3.1 and 3.2 and Box 3.1 for examples. These reports used the standard form for releasing state population bulletins, the main format the Bureau used to release data by state on a flow basis. They encompassed both tabular data and short commentaries in the form of a press release from Census Director J.C. Capt. Copies of these reports can be found in census depository libraries and are duly noted in the publication lists from the 1940 census. The media were also quite used to receiving such publication notices from the Census Bureau, and not surprisingly, the reports were picked up and quoted in the press shortly after their release, for example, in the Los Angeles Times, on December 12, the New York Times on December 13 and December 30, the San Francisco Chronicle on December 17, and the San Francisco Examiner on December 16, 17, and 24. The reports provided the first detailed results on the distribution of the Japanese American population in the United States since the publication of the 1930 census. They showed a total 126,947 “Japanese” in the continental United States and an additional 157,905 in Hawaii. Of these, 47,305 in the continental United States were foreign-born and thus “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” In Hawaii, 37,353 were foreign-born. In other words, both in the continental United States and in Hawaii, a large majority of the “Japanese” were American citizens (63% in the continental United States and 77% in Hawaii). The reports further revealed that 112,353 of the Japanese ancestry

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Fig. 3.1  Japanese Population of the United States and its Territories and Possessions, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Series P-3, No. 23, December 9, 1941. First page of the first data release on the Japanese ancestry population from the 1940 census, December 9, 1941

population in the continental United States lived in the three West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington. In the press release, Census Director J.C.  Capt (Series P-3, No. 23) noted that “California alone had 93,717, or 73.8 percent of the total Japanese in the United States and 33,569 alien Japanese or 71.0 percent of the total.” The reports also detailed the concentration of the Japanese population by city and county on the West Coast. Capt reported that of the 18 cities in the

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Fig. 3.2  Japanese Population for Each County in the Pacific Coast States by Sex and Nativity or Citizenship,… December 11, 1941. First page of the third data release on the Japanese ancestry population in the Pacific Coast States

United States with 500 or more Japanese Americans, all but one (New York City) were in the West Coast states. He noted that Los Angeles County contained “over one-third of the State’s total Japanese” with 36,866 (Series P-3, No. 25). In Oregon, he continued “Multnomah County [Portland area] had more than half of the Japanese in the State” and “in Washington, King County [Seattle area] had two-thirds of the Japanese” in the state. The city of Los Angeles had the largest Japanese American community, at 23,321, of which

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63 percent were native-born American citizens. Japanese Americans encompassed about 1.5 percent of the total population of 1.5 million in the city of Los Angeles. The next largest urban concentration was in California was in San Francisco, with 5280. The 1940 census count for the Japanese American population in Seattle was 6975. The production of census tabulations of this type, on its face, is uncontroversial and appeared to be routine data production from the 1940 census results. These tabulations would certainly not be considered violations of any of the census confidentiality provisions. Capt himself was quite proud of his quick response to the Pearl Harbor attack. As he told his Census Advisory Committee in early January 1942, “we didn’t wait for the declaration of war [which took place on Monday afternoon]. On Monday morning we put our people to work on the Japanese thing. And before the German and Italians hopped in we were working on that…” (Census Advisory Committee 1942, 20). Capt did not tell his Advisory Committee that he had been in discussions with Henry Field and Wayne Taylor since late November about producing data on the Japanese population to assess the threat of sabotage and subversion on the West Coast. Thus, the public reading the dry tables of numbers had few clues to the behind the scenes debates that prompted these releases. Nevertheless within the releases themselves, and within some of the newspaper coverage, were indications that these releases were directly tied to concerns about sabotage and subversion. In the Thursday, December 11, release, the third release in three days (Series P-3, No. 25), for example, Capt opened the introductory section of the report with the statement: The Japanese population of the Pacific Coast States was largely concentrated in counties containing, or located near, important industrial and shipping centers.

The statement is extraordinary since Capt and the Census Bureau provided absolutely no data to support such a claim, beyond the obvious statement that Japanese Americans tended to live in the same areas populated by all Americans on the West Coast. In other words, the statement could easily be restated to note the obvious point that “the population of the Pacific Coast States was largely concentrated in counties containing, or located near, important industrial and shipping centers.” The bureau releases provided a small comment on population trends, but did not provide comparative 1930 figures in the tables. The commentary on the first release, December 9 (Series P-3, No. 23), noted that the Japanese ancestry population had declined by 8.6 percent between 1930 and 1940 and

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that the “alien Japanese” population had declined by 32.9 percent while the “Japanese born in the United States and who are therefore citizens of the United States, increased ….by 16.5 percent.” The commentary did not, however, elaborate on this shift, or note that while in 1930, the immigrant generation, the Issei, made up a slim majority of 51 percent of the Japanese ancestry population in the United States, by 1940, the Japanese American community was almost two-thirds (63 percent) American-born and thus citizens. To their credit, the bureau releases did begin to provide a measure of clarity to one question in the debate about the potential “threat” from Japanese Americans. After December 11, 1941, no public official or media commentator could afford to promulgate wildly inaccurate estimates of “alien” threats. The crude estimates, like the December 10 estimate of 20,000 Japanese in the San Francisco metropolitan area put forward by the Western Defense Command, would no longer be taken at face value, but would need to be checked against census results. The bureau releases, however, reported the population by race, eliding the distinction between a tabulation based on race with one by birthplace or citizenship status, and thus confused what was at that point still a discussion of the control of enemy aliens on the West Coast. In their releases on the German and Italian-born population from the 1940 census, the bureau was careful to specify this distinction. The December 12, 1941, P9. No. 1 release on “Foreign-born Germans and Italians in Selected Cities of the United States” included the caveat that “Not all persons born in Germany or Italy are enemy aliens, however, since a great many of them are naturalized citizens of the United States. The number of naturalized persons born in Germany and Italy is not available from census tabulations. All aliens were required to register, however, under provisions of the Alien Registration Act of June 28, 1940, and a register of such persons is kept by the Alien Registration Division of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.” The alien registration program was not designed to identify American-born descendants of immigrants, who by definition were citizens, not aliens. The census provided the only extant concrete data on the citizen Japanese ancestry population, and quickly racists and media used the tabulations to justify viewing the Nisei, as well as the Issei, as potential national security threats. The Los Angeles Times (1941c) reporters saw the new wrinkle immediately. In their December 12, 1941 article reporting the census releases, the unnamed “Staff Correspondent” led the report with the ominous lede: The importance of maintaining close check on the activities of both foreign-­ born and American-born Japanese on the West Coast was emphasized today by

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revised Census Bureau figures disclosing Los Angeles has nearly 16,500 more Nipponese than any other city in the nation and California, Washington and Oregon have a combined Japanese population of 112,353.

In fact, the data or “figures” in the releases provided no such evidence. Only Capt’s editorial comments or the existing racial biases against the Japanese might permit such an interpretation. In short, less than a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Census Bureau had inserted the 1940 census results into the raging debate about securing the nation from further attack and had begun to take on a new active role in war policy making. In the weeks following, J.C. Capt built close ties of communication with the surveillance agencies of the state and he moved aggressively to revive the dormant draft legislation to open micro level census information, both economic and demographic, to all federal agencies involved in war planning. These were extraordinary initiatives and set the stage for events to come. It is important to recall that statistical agencies, particularly statistical agencies not organized as adjuncts to administrative agencies, do not make public policy. The Census Bureau was such an agency, housed in the Commerce Department, but not bureaucratically embedded in the ongoing policy making process of the administration. Such statistical agencies are designed to be insulated from the ongoing policy making functions in Congress and the administration and to provide non-partisan, “objective” information for all policy makers. In contrast, the Justice Department, the War Department, the Navy Department, the State Department, the White House and Congress all had clearly delineated responsibilities for and authority over the control of national security and the potential threats from enemy aliens. The 1940 population registrations of aliens and men liable for the draft, for example, were conducted in administrative agencies and were designed for explicit identification of the registrants in time of war. Census officials lent their expertise to these activities, but the Census Bureau did not undertake the registrations themselves, despite what was probably at the time significantly better technical infrastructure for doing so (“News and Notes” 1940). Thus as Capt reached out to involve the Census Bureau in the war effort, he offered the extensive data systems gathered and managed by bureau staff and probably the best technical facilities for large-scale data retrieval in the federal government. The Census Bureau was a very large bureaucracy with the most up to date filing and record keeping systems, and mechanical keypunching and tabulating equipment beyond the scope of any other government agency. The bureau was also fully staffed, as it was working on the reports of

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the 1940 census (Agar 2003; Heide 2009). [See the Technical Note below on how the bureau did the tabulations to illustrate the issue of their capacity.] What Capt could not and did not offer was anything in the way of experienced officials who could translate census results into policy proposals. And thus, for the time being, his voice was the only one heard in the special releases of 1940 census results on the Japanese Americans, or later German and Italian Americans. And that fact meant that others outside the Census Bureau would take up the issue of what the outpouring of census results meant for enemy alien control.

J.C. Capt’s Initiatives When J. C. Capt proudly reported to his Census Advisory Committee that he had “not waited” to get started on the published tabulations of the Japanese, he also did not mention that the distribution of the tabulations to the media was not the only one he made. Once again, John Franklin Carter and Henry Field used their connections to high officials in the White House, State, War, and Navy Departments to make sure that Capt sent the tabulations in typescript form to the appropriate policymakers, with notes that he had been advised to do so by Carter or Field. Thus, on December 10, for example, J.C. Capt provided the December 9 releases to Harold B. Hoskins, Executive Assistant at the State Department. On December 13, Hoskins in turn requested Capt to send additional copies of these data to officials in ONI, Army Military Intelligence (G-2), and the FBI.  On December 11, Henry Field transmitted these tabulations to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles; on December 17, J. C. Capt forwarded additional tabulations to Welles at Field’s request. On December 18, Army Military Intelligence in Washington telegraphed the tabulations in the releases to the Western Defense Command in San Francisco (Records of the Department of State 1941. J. C. Capt to Harold B.  Hoskins, December 10, 1941, 811.5011/301, PS/KN; Henry Field to Sumner Welles, December 11, 1941, 811.511/2662 PS/LIC; J.C. Capt to Harold B. Hoskins, December 17, 1941, 740.00115 PACIFIC WAR/413, PS/MNP; J. C. Capt to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, December 17, 1941, 811.5011/261-1/2, PS/R). The evidence of the routing of these data tables within the State and War Departments indicates that at the time the agencies saw them as important, but didn’t quite know what to make of them. Beyond Hoskins’ response to Capt to send additional copies to the surveillance agencies, we have not discovered further discussion of the tabulations in the policy memoranda of the

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State Department, for example. Rather, they seem to have been lost in the blizzard of reports and memoranda coming into the department, and duly circulated to the Advisor on Political Relations, and the Division on Far Eastern Affairs, and then filed in April 1942. Capt’s transmittal letters or the notes attached to the transmittals that were delivered by Henry Field or J. Franklin Carter offered no further guidance on how to use the information, or identify a contact name in the Census Bureau for further information. The records of the Census Advisory Committee (1942) also do not indicate that J. C. Capt was making herculean efforts to revive the dormant bill to remove the confidentiality provisions for census data. Four days after Pearl Harbor, on December 11, 1941, Census Director Capt reminded the Commerce Secretary, Jesse Jones, that the US Census Bureau was still constrained by the confidentiality requirements of the Census Act and proposed to write the language of stalled bill S1627 into an executive order to get around the ban. As Director Capt wrote (General Records of the Department of Commerce 1941), [T]he Bureau of the Census has no authority at the present time to permit other governmental agencies to obtain from Census records information about individuals or business establishments that may be indispensable to the defense of the nation. Authority therefore is needed for the Bureau of the Census to make available for war purposes any record of information in the possession of the Bureau of the Census when directed to do so by the Secretary of Commerce. In my judgment, it is necessary to have these powers vested in the Secretary of Commerce at once to make possible the flexible, efficient, and economical war-time operation of the Bureau of the Census in obtaining and making available statistics for planning and directing war efforts.

Capt’s proposal received the endorsement of the Commerce Secretary and was sent on to the Justice Department for further action. Ironically, perhaps, this time it was the Justice Department, now under a new Attorney General, Francis Biddle, that objected to the proposal to void the confidentiality provisions of the Census Act with an Executive Order. The Attorney General’s Office decided that there was no legal authority for such an Executive Order (E.  T. Quigley, “Memorandum for the Record, December 23, 1941,” in General Records of the Department of Commerce), and the proposal did not make immediate bureaucratic headway. Accordingly, in December 1941, Capt’s further efforts were stymied. He failed to convince the administration and Congress that 1940 census data and the agency’s professional expertise should be seen as resources for ensuring

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national security and war planning. As a result, lobbying organizations outside government became the first voices to use the census releases to call for measures to monitor and control all Japanese ancestry Americans, both “alien” and native-born citizens.

 ublic Debate and Lobbying Activities P on the West Coast As many commentators have shown, in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, there was little insistent public pressure on the West Coast to consider all Japanese ancestry Americans as supporters of the Empire of Japan. On the contrary, newspaper editorials took a cautious and moderate approach to the question of the “loyalty” of aliens from Axis powers and warned against considering American citizens of Japanese ancestry somehow responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack. The elder leadership of the Japanese community was little heard from immediately after Pearl Harbor, both because the Justice Department arrests of Japanese aliens affected so many community leaders and because other Issei remained quiet for fear of being arrested themselves. Relatedly, the community faced almost immediate economic hardship as the Treasury Department froze the assets in Japanese banks in the United States, effectively preventing the Japanese American community that used the banks from accessing their accounts and savings and thus conducting normal business. In this environment, it fell to the emerging generation of Nisei to announce the formation of “defense” organizations and make repeated public statements of their full support for the American war effort. The West Coast press covered the Nisei efforts, and JACL leaders in particular made concerted efforts to publicize their contacts with local mayors and other government officials to show their support for the war. Nisei who had been functioning as informants for the FBI and Naval Intelligence for several years stepped up their efforts, now both to identify potential disloyal Japanese on the West Coast and to inform federal officials of the hardship and difficulties within the Japanese community caused by the outbreak of the war. The Los Angeles Times, for example (1941b, 1942b), reported on JACL defense efforts, and Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron appeared on photos of these activities (Ichioka 2006; Grodzins 1949; Daniels 2004; ten Broek and Matson 1954; U.S.  Commission on Wartime Relocation Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982).

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The threat of a naval or air attack on the West Coast had ramifications for the larger West Coast economy. Government, industry, and agriculture leaders who had seen the West Coast begin to prosper once again after the devastation of the Great Depression worried what the threat of a Japanese attack would do to their efforts to promote growth and prosperity. The region had developed significant aircraft and shipbuilding manufacturing industries and extensive military installations in the previous twenty years, and business organizations and local public officials were primed to secure additional growth in these areas. In 1920, the Navy had headquartered the Eleventh Naval District in San Diego. The Twelfth Naval District was headquartered in San Francisco and the Thirteenth in Seattle. San Francisco was the home of the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. Seattle (Boeing Aircraft) and Los Angeles (North American Aviation; Douglas Aircraft) were hubs of the aircraft industry. Steel, aluminum, and related metal industries also prospered with the growth of these manufacturing specializations. In 1938, the Navy opened a large Naval Base and Air Station in the Los Angeles Harbor on Terminal Island (United States. Office of the Chief of Naval Operations 1956). All these facilities brought jobs and economic prosperity to the region and were immediately threatened if the Japanese launched an attack on the West Coast. At the time, West Coast officials were also worried that cities and states in other parts of the country would press their case to locate defense work away from the West Coast on the grounds that the West Coast was vulnerable to enemy attack (Lotchin 1992). Thus, right after the Pearl Harbor attack, business lobbying organizations also noted the proximity of Japanese American farming, fishing, and commercial centers next to war production facilities and responded by asking what could be done to protect the facilities. Their response was not, like that of the FBI, Naval Intelligence, or the Nisei informants, to monitor and keep watch on potential spies or saboteurs. Rather it was to move the Japanese community out of the region. Anglo lobbying organizations representing agricultural interests in competition with Japanese American fruit, vegetable, and flower growers and distributors made the baldest proposals. They espoused an overtly racist position on the “threat” of Japanese Americans and saw an opportunity in the outbreak of war to rid themselves of Japanese American competition. In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, they began to articulate plans for “removing” the Japanese from strategic areas, initially in private letters to members of Congress and other public officials, and by the third week in December in public resolutions and petitions. The Saturday Evening Post reported that the lobbyists were quite plain in their positions. Austin Anson, managing secretary of the

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Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association of Central California, for example, freely admitted (Quoted in Grodzins 1949, 27–28): We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley [Salinas] to work, and they stayed to take over. They offer higher prices and higher rents than the white man can pay for land. They undersell the white man in the markets. They can do this because they raise their own labor. They work their women and children while the white farmer has to pay wages for his help. If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we don’t want them back when the way ends, either.

Business lobbying organizations began agitating in mid-December to “do something” about the Japanese and were among the first to call for removal and control of the Japanese American population in letters and meetings with public officials. Initially these calls were met with skepticism by members of Congress and the Justice Department, who countered, as noted above, by stating that federal officials had addressed the threat of potential alien subversion and sabotage and pointing out that American-born Japanese were American citizens with the same rights as all Americans. Unfortunately, in the context of the continuing dismal war news, these efforts at reassurance did not stop the agitation, and instead led lobby organization leaders to reject the assurances of federal officials, and then to mount even more extreme rhetoric. By the third week in December, there is evidence that the business and agricultural lobbying organizations had begun to coalesce in a more systematic effort to build an effective campaign to press their case in Washington. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which had a full time lobbying presence in the nation’s capital, took the lead. That office was headed by James C.  Ingebretsen, a Stanford Law School graduate. He was a well-known figure in Washington pressing for business development and defense contracts for Southern California and was widely quoted in the press. He would go on to become head of the national office of governmental affairs of the US Chamber in late 1942 (Los Angeles Times 1941d, 1942a, c). Ingebretsen had been in the same class at Stanford as Major Karl Bendetson of the Provost Marshal General’s office. They had developed personal ties that continued after college. In December 1941, in line with the standard lobbying strategy of the LA Chamber, Ingebretsen took a low-profile approach. His name does not appear as one of the authors of any of the

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petitions or dramatic public statements on what to do about “the Japanese.” But he acknowledged in a 1942 interview with Morton Grozdins that the Los Angeles Chamber focused on the “Japanese problem” by December 20, 1941, and he continued his lobbying thereafter (Grozdins 1942). A careful reading of the voluminous communications among military officials indicates his intervention, either in person or with other representatives of the Chamber or similar organizations, at key points to promote more drastic measures of control of Japanese Americans. We know, for example, from the records of telephone transcripts of the calls between the Provost Marshal General’s office in Washington and the Western Defense Command in San Francisco, that Major General Gullion reported to General DeWitt on December 26 that “he had just been visited by a representative of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, who had asked for a roundup of all Japanese in the Los Angeles area” (Conn 1962, 117). This communication and DeWitt’s response provide a window to view the emergence of the key players involved in West Coast defense and the evolution of their understandings since the Pearl Harbor attack. Perhaps surprising given DeWitt’s earlier heated demands for more resources and action to protect the coast, in his response to Gullion, he took a more measured approach. He reported that he had been in contact with West Coast governors and told them that the Japanese should be “watched better if they were watched by the police and people of the community in which they live and have been living for years.” This position was basically the approach of the F.B.I., Naval Intelligence in Los Angeles, and the JACL informants. He noted (Quoted in Conn 1962, 117–118): I thought that thing out to my satisfaction….if we go ahead and arrest the 93,000 Japanese, native born and foreign born, we are going to have an awful job on our hands and are very liable to alienate the loyal Japanese from disloyal….I don’t think it’s a sensible thing to do….I’d rather go along the way we are now….An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen. And while they all may not be loyal, I think we can weed the disloyal our of the loyal and lock them up if necessary.

Numbers, e.g., 1940 census numbers, demonstrated to DeWitt that wholesale calls for removal were irresponsible and not “a sensible thing to do.” At the end of 1941, DeWitt was still convinced that West Coast enemy alien control was a job for the Justice Department. His major complaint was that the Justice Department measures should be extended and were not being effectively implemented. To move the Justice Department to quicker action,

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in discussions with Gullion, DeWitt agreed to a meeting of Justice Department, War Department, and Western Defense Command officials in San Francisco in early January 1942. At those meetings, Bendetson was ready to propose further efforts to expand the control of the entire Japanese ancestry population on the West Coast.

 echnical Note: How the Census Bureau Tabulated T the Releases on Japanese Americans By twentieth first century standards, the capacity to sort and tabulate 132 million records in less than a week would be considered ridiculously slow. In the 1940s, the capacity to do so was true wizardry, and within the federal government, only accessible using the expertise and tabulating machinery of the Census Bureau. Jon Agar (2003) and Lars Heide (2009) have recently documented the worldwide innovations in government administration and technical computing capacity made during the 1930s and particularly during World War II for many government functions. These innovations were made using punch card systems of computing, that is, mechanical techniques. They would be surpassed and replaced with the development of the electronic computer later in the war, but at the outset of the war, punch card tabulating systems were the most advanced methods available. The technical and organizational capacities of the Census Bureau made it possible for the agency to undertake the special tabulations initially requested for the West Coast by Henry Field and John Franklin Carter and then to scale up those tabulations for the national reports that began to appear on December 9, 1941. Mechanical census tabulation systems were pioneered in the US Census Bureau in 1890 and led to the development of the private data tabulation industry, e.g., I.B.M. The Census Bureau invested in continued improvement in the breadth and speed of the tabulating systems and remained the locus of technical leadership in mechanical tabulations systems both in the federal government and internationally (Truesdell 1965; Ruggles and Magnuson 2020). By the late 1930s, large-scale population registration systems were being developed, for example, within the Social Security Administration, Selective Service System, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. These systems were name-based administrative records, designed to provide benefits for individuals or identify resources for the army or for alien surveillance. They relied on index card filing systems, or if using punch cards, as with Social Security, were not organized to undertake

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rapid tabulation or statistical analysis. In other words, rapid, large-scale mechanical tabulation of population information was not available anywhere else within the federal government. In practical terms, the census information collected in the spring of 1940 from households with residents recorded as “Japanese” on the race question had to be extracted from the information collected on the total population. By August 1941, the information for each person listed on a population schedule had been transferred to a punch card, one for each of the almost 132 million people in the United States. The bureau estimated that about 150,000 of the punch cards were “Japanese.” So the 132 million punch cards had to be run through sorting and tabulating machines to find the 150,000 cards on the Japanese. See Figs. 2.1 and 2.2. As the 132 million population punch cards were tabulated for the first time for the basic population count, they were collated by census geography to facilitate the later tabulation process. Thus, the cards used for the Japanese tabulation were already sorted by minor civil divisions and enumeration districts within counties and states, and by sex, color and nativity, the categories the bureau used in the December reports. The tabulating machines processed cards at the rate of about 600 per hour. At that rate, one tabulating machine working two shifts a day would require 258 days to tabulating and sort the cards. Ten machines could do the tabulation and sort in 26 days, and if more machines were available, or a third shift added, the time to complete the job would be reduced, perhaps to 9  days running 20 machines three shifts a day. Undersecretary of Commerce Wayne Taylor also told Henry Field that some of the state tabulations had already been completed, so the estimate of the need to sort 132 million cards is probably also substantially overestimated. If 80 million cards needed sorting and tabulating instead of 132 million, the job would take five days. These estimates accord with those provided by the Census Bureau in 1982 (Chapman 1982). The final relevant innovation in population data processing was the Census Bureau’s ability to duplicate rapidly punch cards, in this case, for the “Japanese,” once they had been sorted from the whole. The Bureau made a special set of “Japanese” cards, which in turn permitted even more rapid tabulation of smaller area counts and detailed cross tabulations from the separated cards. To our knowledge, no other demographic groups, for example, Italian aliens or German aliens, were the subject of special punch card duplications during World War II.

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Box 3.1 Selected US Bureau of the Census Preliminary Releases from the 1940 Census on Japanese Ancestry Americans and German and Italian Immigrants and Foreign Stock, 1941–1942 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Japanese Population of the United States and its Territories and Possessions, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Series P-3, No. 23, December 9, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce. 1941), Item 1286, 3 pages. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Japanese Population in Selected Cities of the United States, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Series P-3, No. 24, December 10, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce, 1941), Item 1287, 1 page. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Japanese Population for Each County in the Pacific Coast States by Sex and Nativity or Citizenship, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Series P-3, No. 25, December 11, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce, 1941), Item 1288, 5 pages. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population, Foreign-born Germans and Italians in Selected Cities of the United States, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Series P-9, No. 1, December 12, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce, 1941), Item 1289, 2 pages. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population, Citizenship of the Foreign-Born White Population in Selected Cities of the United States, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Series P-9, No. 4, December 16, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce, 1941), Item 1290, 3 pages. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Japanese Population in Selected Counties and Cities of the United States by Sex and Nativity or Citizenship, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Series P-9, No. 5, December 19, 1941 (Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce, 1941), Item 1291, 49 pages. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Foreign White Stock of German and Italian Origin, Sixteenth Census of the United States, Series P-15, No. 5, September 30, 1942 (Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce, 1941), Item 1299, 6 pages. Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Bureau of the Census Catalog of Publications, 1790–1972 (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1974), items 1286, 1287, 1288, 1289, 1290, 1291, 1299.

References Agar, Jon. 2003. The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Census Advisory Committee. 1942. Full transcript of meeting of January 9–10, 1942, General Records of the Census Advisory Committee (item 148), United States Bureau of the Census Records, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, DC. Chapman, Bruce. 1982. Letter to Raymond Okamura, dated October 21, 1982. Commission of the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) microfilm, Papers of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment

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of Civilians, Part 1, Numerical File. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America (1983). Conn, Stetson. 1962. Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast. In The Western Hemisphere: Guarding the United States and its Outposts, Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, in the series United States Army in World War II, ed. Stetson Conn, Rose C.  Engelman, and Byron Fairchild, 115–149. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Daniels, Roger. 2004. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang. De Nevers, Klancy Clark. 2004. The Colonel and the Pacifist: Karl Bendetsen, Perry Saito, and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the General Counsel. Memorandum from J.C.  Capt to the Secretary of Commerce, December 11, 1941. 12/11/41. Office of the General Counsel, Subject and Index File, 1903-1946, Box 152, File 5706-33, Record Group 40, National Archives, College Park, MD. Grodzins, Morton. 1949. Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grozdins, Morton. 1942. Report of Interview with James C. Ingebretsen, October 14, 1942, Reel 4, Frame 137, Grodzins, Morton, reports from Washington, BANC MSS 67/14c, folder A12.04], Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA. Heide, Lars. 2009. Punched-card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880-1945. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ichioka, Yuji. 2006. Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Irons, Peter. 1983. Justice at War. New York: Oxford University Press. Los Angeles Times. 1941a. Japanese Aliens’ Roundup Starts: F.B.I. Hunting Down 300 Subversives and Plans to Hold 3000 Today. December 8, 1941, 1. ———. 1941b. Citizens Offer Loyalty Pledge to Flag: Japanese-Americans Ready to Aid Nation. December 9, 1941, 19. ———. 1941c. Justice Department Starts Check on Potential Quislings. December 12, 1941, 8. ———. 1941d. Defense Perils Little Business: Los Angeles Chamber Man Says County Faces Postwar Disaster. December 18, 1941, 27. ———. 1941e. Roundup of Axis Aliens Jails 442. December 19, 1941, 8. ———. 1942a. Plants Will Stay on Coast: War Department Gives Assurances on Defense Industries. January 9, 1942, 6. ———. 1942b. Japanese-Americans of Southland Repledge Allegiance to Country, January 11, 1942. ———. 1942c. Angeleno Heads National Group: Capital Representative of Local Chamber Gets New Department Post. November 22, 1942, 8.

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Lotchin, Roger W. 1992. Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare. New York: Oxford University Press. Morris, Richard B., and Jeffrey B. Morris. 1976. Encyclopedia of American History. New York: Harper & Row. News and Notes. 1940. American Journal of Sociology 46(3): 381, November 1940. Provost Marshal General, Records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General, Record Group 389. National Archives, College Park, MD. Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59. National Archives. College Park, MD. Ruggles, Steven, and Diana Magnuson. 2020. Census Technology, Politics, and Institutional Change, 1790–2020. Journal of American History. 107 (1): 19–51. https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa007. ten Broek, Edward N. Barnhard, and Floyd W. Matson. 1954. Prejudice, War and the Constitution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Truesdell, Leon E. 1965. The Development of Punch Card Tabulation in the Bureau of the Census, 1890–1940: With Outlines of Actual Tabulation Programs. Washington, DC: U.S. G.P.O. United States Code. 1918. 50 USC 21. Restraint, regulation, and removal [of Alien Enemies]. http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-­prelim-­ title50-­section21&num=0&edition=prelim. United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). 1982. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office); Report reissued in 1997 by University of Washington Press (Seattle: University of Washington Press) with a new forward by Tetsuden Kashima. United States. Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. 1956. Fifty years of Naval District Development 1903–1953. Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Available at https://www.history.navy. mil/research/library/online-­reading-­room/title-­list-­alphabetically/f/fifty-­years-­ naval-­district-­development-­1903-­1953.html.

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The House Committee on the Judiciary before giving its approval today to the Senate adopted Second War Powers Bill, amended the measure to take back the promise it made in 1940 that all data obtained by the Census takers would be held strictly confidential, even from other bureaus and agencies.... Some agencies of the government want data now as a matter of national safety. They seek some of the information obtained particularly from Japanese and others who since have become enemy aliens, especially about those in coastal areas from which they have been ordered evacuated by the Department of Justice…. (Trussell C.P. 1942. “Spy Data Sought from 1940 Census: House Committee Votes to Let Confidential Reports Be Released to Federal Bureaus. Would Retract Promise.” New York Times. February 7, p. 9.)

J ustice Department and the Western Defense Command Meet In the first week of January 1942, Justice Department and War Department officials met in several days of high-level meetings in San Francisco to try to resolve their relative responsibilities for enemy alien control. Representatives of the Justice Department and the Provost Marshal General’s office in Washington met with DeWitt, his staff, and West Coast FBI officials. Representing the Justice Department were Edward Ennis, Chief of the Aliens Division, and James Rowe, Assistant Attorney General. Major Karl Bendetson represented the Provost Marshal General’s Office. Nat Pieper, FBI Agent in Charge, represented the San Francisco FBI office. The meetings quickly revealed the differing approaches and capacities of the two departments for protecting the West Coast from attack. Some of those differences were a function of the departments’ structures and larger missions within the federal government. The Justice Department enforced © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Anderson, W. Seltzer, Use and Misuse of the United States Census, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38619-0_4

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federal law and had authority to control enemy aliens. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was “assigned responsibility for investigating espionage, sabotage, and other subversive activities,” jointly with Army (G-2) and Navy (ONI) intelligence arms (Federal Bureau of Investigation, History. n.d.). The Western Defense Command had been designated a “theater of operations” after the Pearl Harbor attack, which added substantial authority for General DeWitt to take measures, including overriding civilian authority and declaring martial law, to protect the coast. To prevent a military attack, the Army looked to control territory, infrastructure, and vital installations and to protect the ongoing economic life of the West Coast. The Justice Department’s enemy alien control program protected the nation by monitoring and, if suspected of fifth column activity, apprehending aliens who might sabotage infrastructure or provide help to an Axis military attack. The Army could deploy troops to guard the coast. The Justice Department had built a record system of aliens for administrative use. Nevertheless, these systems and functions were not integrated. The Army did not have access to the alien registration system. The Justice Department’s Alien Division did not have a police force. Beyond these mandates and capacities, the Justice Department and the War Department also held quite different legal and administrative positions about what was necessary to protect the West Coast. The Justice Department was adamant that their remit extended to enemy alien control only, which federal law on enemy aliens did not apply to American citizens, whether “loyal” or not. If threats of sabotage and aiding the enemy came from citizens, different legal authority was required to address it. At the end of December, General DeWitt had expressed a similar position, primarily though from a logistical perspective. It wasn’t “sensible” to consider arrest and removal of 93,000 people in California. DeWitt wanted more draconian measures to control enemy aliens and called, for example, for a second alien registration and spot raids of suspected Axis sympathizers. Provost Marshal General officials, particularly Major Karl Bendetson, were quite willing to push past the legal constraint on the alien enemy control program overall to extend control measures to Japanese ancestry Americans in general. At the meetings, Justice officials were put on the defensive almost immediately. Bendetson had arrived a day earlier and had prepared the proposal for a new enemy alien registration and for authority for the Army to do spot raids of suspected saboteurs. Ennis and Rowe were apologetic about the Justice Department delays in promulgating regulations implementing the enemy alien control measures in the original declaration of war. They also kept insisting on following established procedures of due process for aliens arrested and

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reminded DeWitt that he would have to show probable cause for any police authority to enter a home for search and seizure. Nat Pieper had reported to DeWitt a few days earlier that though the 1940 alien registration theoretically permitted the development of lists of the names and locations of alien enemies, in fact, the records were not organized for effective use. As Lt. Col. L.R. Forney of the Western Defense Command had reported in a memorandum for the record on January 1, 1942, Pieper had found the “Immigration Records regarding enemy aliens. .. in a condition unsatisfactory for prompt use and estimates that extensive clerical work over a period of time will be necessary to put them in shape for ready use” (Daniels, ed. 1989. Vol 2. no page). DeWitt was noticeably agitated by these Justice positions and raised alleged incidents that he claimed were evidence of Japanese threats to the coast. His suspicions were later proven unfounded, but officials took them seriously at the time (US Commission on Wartime Relocation Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982). Over the course of the 2 days of talks, the Justice officials agreed to conduct a new enemy alien registration, to loosen the legal constraints on spot raids, and to ban or restrict enemy aliens from strategic areas around military installations, critical infrastructure, or defense manufacturing facilities within the Western Defense Command. German, Italian, and Japanese enemy aliens were to be removed from such areas. The Army would define the restricted areas, and the Justice Department would promulgate the locations of the areas and ban enemy aliens from being in such zones altogether or create a pass and permit system, which could be used to exclude enemy aliens. Justice and Army officials wrote a memorandum of understanding of their respective responsibilities at the end of the meetings, and Ennis, Rowe, and Bendetson returned to Washington. The new enemy alien registration was initially proposed for the latter half of January but ultimately rescheduled for the first week of February. DeWitt contacted the corps commanders within his command to define the restricted areas and to prepare maps and estimates of enemy aliens within each area. Naval officials in the Eleventh, Twelfth, and Thirteenth Naval Districts were also asked to define restricted areas and were to report their requests for restricted areas through local Army officials in their area. DeWitt originally believed he could have the requisite information from his corps commanders by Friday, January 9. He intended to compile the information and transmit it to the Justice Department in Washington for further action. In fact, the designation of restricted areas took much longer, and DeWitt did not have the initial requests for California until Wednesday, January 21.

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He transmitted them to the Provost Marshal General’s office in Washington and the PMG transmitted them to the Justice Department. They were received on Sunday, January 25. DeWitt compiled the proposals for restricted areas for Oregon and Washington the last week of January and submitted them in early February. It turned out that the designation of such areas was not the simple task originally envisioned. Though Army and Navy officials could readily identify and propose the “strategic areas,” they faced into the same administrative problems that Pieper described in identifying the numbers, location, and identity of enemy aliens that lived in such areas. The local military commanders, in both the Army and Navy, turned to a variety of strategies and a variety of sources for that information and then wrestled with the ambiguities of the data that they received. Inadvertently perhaps, the absence of readily available lists of enemy aliens and hence the difficulties in identifying credible and usable data sources for enemy aliens meant that military officials searched far and wide for the information they needed and found that information on the “Japanese” on the West Coast existed in a variety of sources, from land records to census data, to the collections of trade associations. But the search and the data the military commanders found reopened the question of whether the “threat” of sabotage and fifth column attack on the West Coast was from enemy aliens, that is, from German, Italian, and Japanese foreign nationals, or from people sympathetic to the Axis, be they citizens or aliens. That question, in the context of the West Coast, also raised the question of the loyalty of the Nisei, and Kibei, and thus reopened the question of whether American citizens were subject to the President’s proclamations of December 8 on enemy alien control. The Justice Department clearly stated that no Nisei were affected by regulations affecting enemy aliens, but several military commanders ignored that stricture and simply called for “control” of all “Japanese.” From the outset, the memos and documents compiled for this effort demonstrate that “Japanese,” not Italian and German, enemy aliens were the primary focus of concern, and fairly quickly the local commanders focused their efforts on compiling data on the “Japanese,” even though, as it turned out, the recommendations reported to the Justice Department would initially have involved the control of more Italian and German aliens than Japanese, as detailed in the official Army history of the Japanese evacuation (Conn et  al. 1964, pp. 115–149).

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Implementing DeWitt’s Orders: The Northwest The January 8 transmittal from Admiral C.S. Freeman, Commandant of the Thirteenth Naval District in Seattle, took a bald approach advocating total evacuation of “Japanese.” Freeman recommended that: all enemy aliens be evacuated from the states of Washington and Oregon; that all American [sic] born of Japanese racial origin who cannot show actual severance of all allegiance to the Japanese government be classified as enemy aliens.... From what is known of the Japanese character and mentality it is also considered dangerous to rely on the loyalty of native born persons of Japanese blood unless that loyalty can be affirmatively demonstrated (quoted in U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation Internment of Civilians. (CWRIC) 1982, pp. 63–64)

Freeman’s position was also that of Admiral John Greenslade of the Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco. Both districts, and their local Army commanders, took what seemed to be the easiest solution for the control of sabotage: simply move out “Japanese” and other “enemy aliens” from the theater. Their memos to DeWitt did not list any source of information to identify the locations of Japanese Americans in their areas, nor did they give attention to the logistics of how to do this, the costs involved, or the legality or advisability of such a plan. Those questions were up to DeWitt and the Justice Department. Freeman and Greenslade’s positions in effect stymied DeWitt’s efforts to report promptly to the Justice Department and threw the efforts to develop “restricted” areas for Northern California, Oregon, and Washington into chaos.

Implementing DeWitt’s Orders: Los Angeles In other areas of the West Coast, military officials acknowledged that DeWitt’s request for restricted areas and concomitant data only applied to enemy aliens. This was the position of military officials in Los Angeles, particularly the naval officials in the San Pedro district, where naval intelligence had close working relationships with the local Japanese community. These officials tried very hard to accommodate DeWitt’s orders for the definition of restricted areas while at the same time trying to preserve the economic and social viability of the Japanese communities in Southern California and root out any potential for subversive activity that would threaten American military efforts. They tried to develop what might be termed a “Los Angeles” approach to enemy alien control in the first few weeks of January. These efforts

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posed an alternative strategy, one which brought the complex logistical, legal, and ethical issues involved to the fore, initially in a discussion within the military and, by the latter half of the month, in a fractious public discussion. The Los Angeles approach ultimately could not be sustained because of political pressure, but it affected the ultimate shaping of Executive Order 9066  in February. The issue of enemy alien control in Los Angeles was key to the fate of all Japanese Americans for a number of reasons. Los Angeles County was the largest population center for Japanese Americans in the United States, so any plan for enemy alien control would have to be effective in Los Angeles (Modell 1977). Second, the city and county were booming with new defense industry and naval installations and yet were also distant from the official military command leadership in the region. The Western Defense Command was headquartered at the Presidio in San Francisco. The Eleventh Naval District was headquartered in San Diego. Thus, the most dynamic part of the West Coast Japanese American community demographically and economically was not the location of the military headquarters. The Eleventh Naval District had a branch office in San Pedro, and the large naval installations were recently built. The Los Angeles Japanese American population was bigger and more visible than in other cities and metropolitan areas and in terms of the large traditional fishing community in Fish Harbor near San Pedro, literally on the same small piece of land as the new naval installations at Reeves Field. Thus, a detailed look at the efforts to define restricted areas and the people who would be affected by the designation of such areas in Los Angeles opens up a window on the technical, legal, and logistical issues involved in West Coast enemy alien control. When DeWitt’s instructions reached military officials in Los Angeles, the Eleventh Naval District Commander R.R. Smith began his search for population data (Records of Naval Districts and Shore Establishments, 1942a). He contacted the District Director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service for “statistical information” on the number of enemy aliens within the INS district. On January 10, he received information on the Japanese, including a map and 32 pages of tabular information on “Japanese Locations” in the district as of June 21, 1941. The tables covered 12 counties in California and one each in Nevada and Arizona. Seven of the tables were by county; three contained two to three areas for the county. Imperial County was divided into four areas, Orange and San Diego into five areas, and Los Angeles into 10 areas. The total estimated adult Japanese alien population in

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California totaled slightly less than 46,000. On a note accompanying the data, the INS noted: Although there are no available records to substantiate the statement, it is believed that the majority of the Japanese accounted for are aliens.

On January 9, Commander Smith also contacted Howard Miller, Manager of the Agricultural Department of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, by phone and requested information on the production of agricultural products by Japanese farmers in Los Angeles County. Miller responded the same day with “unofficial estimates of the percentage of market garden, truck and berry crops produced by Japanese or Americans of Japanese parentage in Los Angeles County.” He admitted that “[t]here is no information available to us at this time that would give a satisfactory estimate for a breakdown of these percentages between Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans” and went on to express the Chamber opinion that “[t]he removal of Japanese aliens from our farms in Southern California would cause very little disruption in essential agricultural output.” He continued that “A survey of 108 of the Japanese operated farms made shortly before the outbreak of war indicatd [sic] that 68 farms were operated by United States citizens or aliens, with sons presumably of American citizenship and probably able to operate the farm.” The problems with these data sources were several. From the perspective of DeWitt’s instructions, the geographic detail in the material Smith received was too crude or incomplete for matching to proposed restricted areas. There was no evaluation of the accuracy of the information. There was no method to track back the statistical estimates to operational lists of enemy aliens within specific geographic areas. Finally, even cursory evaluation of these reports raised troubling issues of accuracy. For example, the June 1941, INS estimate was out of line with the estimate of the Japanese population reported in the 1940 census. While the INS reported that a “majority” of the 46,000 Japanese in the 10 California counties in the tables were “aliens,” the census estimated almost 48,000 both alien and citizen. Given that about two thirds of the Japanese population were citizens, the INS and census data were wildly different. In Los Angeles, the census reported 13,391 Japanese aliens. The INS count was a “majority” of 39,319. From an operational perspective, the data were very problematic. As Western Defense Command Military Intelligence Officer Colonel D.A.  Stroh reported to Karl Bendetson on January 21 on the delay in developing the definitions of the restricted areas, “it’s been a terrific job, much greater than any of us had anticipated” (Records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General, Entry 434 1942).

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Whether the Los Angeles naval officials were fully aware of these issues at the time is not clear. What is clear is that they were concerned about developing more precise geographic and nativity identification of Japanese Americans and that they turned to the only place where such data were available, the 1940 census. The same week, they contacted the Census Bureau to inquire whether it was possible to specify further detailed breakdowns of the 1940 census data that had been issued in December. And from the Census Bureau, they began to receive the information they were looking for. The Census Bureau geography at the time of the 1940 census was capable of making very fine geographic distinctions. These included entities, such as towns, townships, villages, or city wards, often collectively termed minor civil divisions. Another geographic unit often used in urban areas was the census tract, a well-defined and well-mapped way of dividing the land and population of a city. In 1940, each tract usually had a population in the 4000–8000 range (Truesdell 1941, p.  365). At these finer levels of disaggregation, the operational value of mesodata in  locating a target population was clear to both the users and producers of 1940 census mesodata on Japanese Americans. For example, during the January 1942 Census Advisory Committee meeting, the following colloquy (Census Advisory Committee 1942) took place between Dr. Leon Truesdell, the Bureau’s Chief Population Statistician; Dr. Virgil Reed, the Bureau’s Assistant Director; and Director J.C. Capt: Dr. Truesdell: ... We got a request yesterday, for example, from one of the Navy officers in Los Angeles, wanting figures in more or less geographic detail for the Japanese residents in Los Angeles, and we are getting that out.... Dr. Reed: [Commenting on all the hard work occasioned by numerous requests for data on the Japanese, Germans, and Italians] ... and some of them wanted them by much finer divisions than States and cities; some of them wanted, I believe several of them, them by census tract even. Dr. Truesdell: That Los Angeles request I just referred to asked for census tracts. … The Director: We think it is pretty valuable. Those who got it thought they were pretty valuable. That is, if they knew there were 801 Japs in a community and only found 800 of them, then they have something to check up on....

In short, neither the Army nor the Navy had the necessary technical expertise in collecting, processing, evaluating, and reporting population data suitable for administrative use, and they responded in a variety of ways. The commandants of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Naval Districts simply recommended that all enemy aliens and American citizens of Japanese ancestry be removed, without further clarification. Naval officials in Los Angeles searched for a solution from a variety of sources. Since they were more attuned to the impact of their decisions on the economic and social life of the local area, they

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continued to try to identify more precise geographic and nativity identification of Japanese Americans. They turned to the Census Bureau and found the beginning of the solution to the problem. The areas they initially recommended that would be banned for enemy aliens were drawn narrowly around industrial plants and military installations so that they did not include many enemy aliens. Most notably, naval officials did not recommend that the Japanese community at Fish Harbor on Terminal Island be designated an area prohibited to enemy aliens. The result was that DeWitt’s initial January 21 submission to the Provost Marshal General’s office and the Justice Department of Category A restricted areas only covered California, and for Southern California, it did not encompass the most prominent Japanese American neighborhoods. DeWitt’s transmittal estimated that 7000 enemy aliens would be forced to move from Category A, or the prohibited areas, and that only forty percent of those affected would be Japanese aliens. The estimated majority were Italian aliens. In effect, the local commanders had minimized the impact of the proposed relocations on the Japanese community. DeWitt’s recommendations were met with consternation when they arrived in the Provost Marshal General’s office in Washington and with a firestorm of protest from West Coast media and political leaders when announced by the Justice Department the last week of January (Conn et al. 1964).

The Public Debate About Enemy Alien Control During the first few weeks of January 1942, while the Army and Navy officials on the West Coast were struggling to respond to DeWitt’s instructions, a public debate calling for harsher measures of enemy alien control and “removal” of the Japanese from the West Coast also emerged. Some of the agitation was a continuation of the activities of the anti-Japanese sentiment already in evidence in December. But the January debate took on a sharper edge, involving radio and print media, local public officials, and public statements of concern from military officials about the security of West Coast military installations. Again, Los Angeles was key. Many scholars, as well as the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, have documented the rising tide of anti-Japanese agitation in January 1942 emphasizing how the endemic racism against Asian Americans on the West Coast and what the Commission called “wartime hysteria” combined in a toxic campaign for removal of the Japanese altogether from the region. In the Commission’s analysis, the “failure of political leadership” was the incapacity of military and civilian officials on the West Coast,

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and in Washington, to evaluate realistically national security threats to the Coast and effectively and efficiently counter those threats in the context of the overall war effort. Instead, they bowed to a flawed analysis of the “military necessity” for evacuation of the Japanese American population, fueled by rumors, fear, and race prejudice (US Commission on Wartime Relocation Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982); Daniels 2004; ten Broek, Barnhart and Matson 1954; Weglyn 1996; Grozdins 1949). In the years after the war, most surviving key decision-makers who looked back on their actions in those fateful months of January and February 1942 regretted their actions. For example, Fletcher Bowron, the Mayor of Los Angeles at the time; Earl Warren, the California Attorney General and soon-­ to-­be Governor and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; and West Coast Department of Justice Official Tom Clark, later Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice, all thought they had acted improperly. The interesting issue is why they did so, and a detailed look at the public discussion and debate among local officials on enemy alien control, particularly in Los Angeles, sheds some light on that issue (Daniels et al. 1986).

The Los Angeles Debate As noted above, public and private official debate during the first weeks of the war was mixed about the “threat” posed by potential supporters of the Japanese war effort. Newspaper coverage prominently warned against equating ethnic origin with political support of the Axis powers, and, for example, civilian and military officials were reported meeting with JACL leaders who affirmed support for the American war effort (Los Angeles Times 1942a). Obviously in the context of known Japanese submarine surveillance in waters close to the West Coast, the press also reported that military officials were on guard for communication from the coast to Japanese vessels. The widely publicized Justice Department raids, and the regulations that enemy aliens surrender cameras, radios, arms, or other equipment that could be used for sabotage, heightened public concern over security. But there were also some small signs of efforts at a return to normalcy for Japanese American communities. Banking restrictions were loosened slightly to allow for economic activity to resume Los Angeles Times (1941b). And in Los Angeles, harbor officials, cannery owners, and Japanese fishermen began to plan for resuming the seasonal sardine fishing industry. Over the next few weeks, the fate of the Japanese fishing community on Terminal Island came to encapsulate the larger debate about what to do about the “Japanese” on the West Coast.

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The declaration of war and the roundup of Japanese aliens had disrupted the Terminal Island fishing industry in December 1941 (Los Angeles Times 1941a, c). The dense community at East San Pedro, or Fish Harbor, on Terminal Island encompassed about 3000 people, including the fishermen, cannery workers, and the local businesses serving the residents. Men worked the fishing boats; women and some older men worked in the canneries. Thus, the entire well-being of the community depended on the health of the fishing industry. Over the course of the year, the catch shifted from tuna, to mackerel, to sardines (Bloom and Riemer 1949; Zierer 1934; Hirahara et  al. 2014). About 2200 of the residents of Terminal Island were of Japanese ancestry, of whom about 800 were Issei and thus enemy aliens. At the outbreak of war, the fishermen were in the middle of the sardine season, which ran from October through February. The main fishing boats for sardines were purse seiners, which made overnight trips from Fish Harbor, casting the nets at night while the moon was down and returning as dawn broke to unload the catch at the canneries on the wharf. After a few hours of cleaning and restocking each day, the boats went back to sea. The entire catch was canned, and at the time, contracted for government purchase. The outbreak of war affected the industry by raising insurance rates on the boats and fishermen because of the threat of Japanese attack, disrupting ship crews as Issei fishermen were arrested in the ABC raids, and by fears of contact between the Japanese fisherman and Japanese vessels patrolling waters off the coast. By early January, cannery owners, harbor and federal officials, and the fishermen had restructured the industry, so the boats were set to resume fishing. Boats were to be manned by American citizens, and the Navy, Coast Guard, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and harbor officials would conduct inspections of boats leaving from and returning to the dock and harbor. These were small glimmers of normalcy for Fish Harbor residents (Los Angeles Times 1942b). For Californians fearful of fifth column attacks on the coast, or convinced that Japanese Americans could not to be trusted for racist or any other reason, such moves toward normalcy with regard to Japanese Americans were a dangerous policy error. As indicators of normalization grew, they escalated their rhetoric of fear accordingly. The most prominent initial voice in what became a drumbeat of attack on the Los Angeles Japanese American community came from Mutual Broadcasting Company radio commentator John B.  Hughes. Broadcasting from Hollywood, on January 5, 6, 7, 9, 15, 19, and 20, 1942, his voice became, according to Edward Ennis, Chief of the Alien Enemy Control Unit of the Department of Justice, “responsible for arousing public opinion and

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flooding the California Congressional Delegation with protests which had the tendency to push the government into hasty and ill-considered action” (Quoted in Grozdins 1949, 386). Hughes (1942) made no distinction between Japanese military forces and the Japanese ancestry community in North America. The latter were “enemy plotters,” no different from the naval forces that had attacked Pearl Harbor. On January 6, therefore, he reported approvingly that the “entire state of Baja California...is being cleaned out” of Japanese by the Mexican government and asked why the United States was not doing the same. “Plans are under way,” he complained: to permit the Japanese fishing fleet to operate again out of Los Angeles harbor... Japanese language newspapers have resumed publication...Japanese still control the land along considerable stretches of the California coast ... and Japanese still control the growth and marketing of approximately eighty percent of California’s vegetable supply.

Hughes was not alone in these views. On January 10, Alfred Cohn, Head of Civilian Defense for the Los Angeles metro area, reported to Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron that: There is no doubt that in this horde of alien born Japanese, espionage activities have been in progress for several decades. Their considerable fishing fleet has been operated by naval officers still in service. They have been in constant contact with vessels of the Imperial Navy, especially tankers, which they are known to have met at sea. (Fletcher R. Bowron Papers 1942)

Ten days later, Cohn added a second report. “Amplifying my report of January 10th,” he noted: The situation at Fish Harbor on Terminal Island seems somewhat clouded by conflicting reports having to do with the issuance of permits to both alien and American born Japanese to leave the Harbor in trawlers during the current fishing season.... As you know, this place has been the focal point for most subversive movement among the Japanese in the past, there is little distinction between the alien and American born residents of this fishing colony. I am sure that there would be a feeling of great re-assurance on the part of the people, as well as the armed forces, if all Japanese were evacuated from this very vital spot. I am told on excellent authority that much political pressure is being brought to bear, especially by the fish canning companies, to keep several thousand Japanese now living there, in the fishing business. (Ibid.)

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In short, commentators from an emerging, more virulent anti-Japanese campaign were appalled at plans to permit Japanese Americans to continue their ordinary lives on the West Coast, and they began to apply increasing pressure. Hughes later claimed no racist intent and said his sources urging greater action came from military intelligence within the Western Defense Command in San Francisco (Grozdins 1943). Hughes urged the American public to lobby local and federal officials for more stringent measures of control and thus served put in the public forum the anti-Japanese position inside the Western Defense Command. Cohn’s audience was Mayor Bowron and directed to urging him to contact other high-ranking public officials and speak out publicly. Cohn also reported that he was setting up “propaganda operations” involved a variety of groups, including the Screen Writers Guild, the Radio Writers Guild, the Newspaper Guild of the C.I.O., and Nisei leaders, to lay out “a program of radio broadcasts both in Japanese and American (sic)” to influence public opinion. The campaign bore little fruit during the first 3 weeks of January, but it did create an echo chamber of prejudicial claims that served to keep the issue in the public eye. Ironically, perhaps, the seeming failure of federal officials to do anything except to normalize the lives of the Japanese community during this period also fueled further suspicion and fear. Mayor Bowron, for example, traveled to Washington, D.C., between January 12 and January 19 to discuss civil defense measures for Los Angeles and to gain assurances from federal officials that defense contracts would continue to flow to the region despite the area’s vulnerability. During this week, and armed with Cohn’s reports, he met with Attorney General Francis Biddle, to urge him to take stricter measures of enemy alien control. Bowron and other Los Angeles County officials were also becoming increasingly worried about the welfare costs the local governments would incur if large-scale enemy alien removals disrupted the economic life of the alien families. So, they also urged federal officials to make plans for income support for wives and children of those affected by the impending enemy alien restrictions. On January 22, 1942, Bowron reported to Congressman John M. Costello that he felt he was being rebuffed by federal officials, who did not take the West Coast situation seriously, either from the point of view of security or in terms of the burden on local governments affected by increased welfare costs (Fletcher R. Bowron Papers 1942). From Biddle’s perspective, the Justice Department at that point felt they were taking the necessary control measures. They were waiting for the recommendations from the Army and Navy on restricted areas, had made plans for a second enemy alien registration in early February, and were working with local FBI and INS offices to consider further alien enemy arrests under the authority of

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the December 8 presidential proclamations. Bowron returned home empty-­ handed from his perspective and vowed to take local action to remedy the situation. In fact, the Justice Department was actively considering additional alien enemy control measures in Los Angeles. While Bowron was receiving his “intelligence” reports from Alfred Cohn, for example, indicating that Issei fishermen might be returning to sea, Justice Department officials with responsibility for alien enemy control in Los Angeles, notably the local FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the US Attorney, were discussing whether to arrest all the Japanese alien fishermen in Los Angeles and San Diego under the presidential proclamations. By mid-January, they decided to do so, and on January 21, the INS, using the information on the commercial fishing licenses issued by the state of California, compiled a list of 544 Japanese alien fishermen for whom they requested warrants for arrest. The FBI transmitted the list to the Alien Enemy Control Unit in the Department of Justice in Washington (Records of Naval Districts and Shore Establishments. 11th Naval District, Commandant’s Office. Formerly Classified Files, 1921–1947, 1942b; Freedom of Information Times n.d.). Nevertheless, all this activity by the Navy, the Army, and the Justice Department was not visible to West Coast local officials or the general public. By the start of the third full week of January 1942, enemy alien control on the West Coast looked to the public much as it had at the beginning of the month, and there were even small signs that Japanese Americans might continue their ordinary lives during the war. For the proponents of more drastic measures, it was time to mobilize for action. The key locus of action came from officials in the Provost Marshal General’s office, in Washington, and the staff and leadership of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, both in Washington and on the West Coast. These two agencies are as follows: one strategically located inside the War Department and privy to the Army plans and the other a well-respected lobbying organization with connections to members of Congress and West Coast business and political leadership. As in the initial proposals for total evacuation of Japanese aliens and citizens of Japanese ancestry made in December, the two 1932 Stanford law graduates, James Ingebretsen, West Coast representative of the LA Chamber, and Karl Bendetson, Chief of the Aliens Division of the Provost Marshal General’s office, conferred and coordinated new strategies to press their agenda. On Wednesday, January 21, Bendetson phoned Col. D.A.  Stroh, at the Western Defense Command, to inquire about the status of the lists of restricted areas and to report that the Washington Representative of the Los

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Angeles Chamber of Commerce had just phoned and asked whether the West Coast Chamber officials, including President Carleton Tibbetts, General Manager Leonard Read, and Chairman of the Agricultural Committee Howard Miller, should try to meet with officials in the Western Defense Command (Records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General 1942). Bendetson reported that the West Coast representative, presumably Ingebretsen, stated “that the pressure down in that area is constantly increasing for what they describe as a necessity for immediate action on Japanese (sic)...that there isn’t really any action being taken and there ought to be” and “that the people down there feel that there ought to be an immediate evacuation from Terminal Island.” Bendetson pressed the issue further, asking about when DeWitt’s recommendations would be delivered to Washington and whether Terminal Island would be designated as a restricted area. Stroh responded by indicating that the recommendations were being prepared but claimed no direct knowledge about the inclusion of Terminal Island and told Bendetson to “assure the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce that action is being taken.” He reported that DeWitt had been away but was due back that day and would take up the matter immediately and that DeWitt still considered the issue of enemy alien control a “civilian proposition to handle” which “[h]e doesn’t want to handle if it can be avoided, but he’s perfectly willing to handle if it’s necessary” (Records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General, 1941, Entry 434 1942). Needless to say, this was not the response the Bendetson or the Los Angeles Chamber wanted. Bendetson did convince Stroh to route DeWitt’s recommendations, when they were complete, directly to the Provost Marshal General’s office. The PMGO would then transmit them to the Justice Department. DeWitt did submit his California recommendations by the end of the week, and the PMGO routed them to the Justice Department, on Sunday, January 25. There was no recommendation for Terminal Island to be a restricted area. And as noted above, the majority of enemy aliens affected by DeWitt’s Category A areas were German and Italian, not Japanese. Nevertheless, in the routing, the PMGO added a stern memo claiming imminent threats to the coast from the Japanese and urging Justice to prompt action (Conn et al. 1964). During the last week of January, what limited public support there was for treating the Japanese community in the same way as other enemy aliens gave way. At first glance, that change presents a paradox. Why would public and political support coalesce against the Japanese American community, just as local and federal action on controlling threats to the coast moved into high gear? The answer lies in the confused lines of authority for decision-making

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and the single-minded pressure and capacity for action coming from the PMGO and the Los Angeles Chamber to manipulate policy to a position of total evacuation. On January 23, the long-awaited Roberts Commission Report on the failures of military preparedness at Pearl Harbor was released (United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982, p. 57ff, 69–70). It claimed spying and fifth column action on the part of Japanese Americans in Hawaii. The claims were proven false after the war, but they served as “evidence” for those pushing for total evacuation that Japanese Americans could not be permitted to remain “loose” on the West Coast. In the week of January 26, Los Angeles city and county officials laid off all Japanese ancestry employees, on the grounds they might be a national security threat. Fletcher Bowron continued his campaign to pressure the Justice Department and the federal government more generally to address both the security and welfare needs of the Los Angeles region caused by the presence of enemy aliens and alleged Axis sympathizers. And Eleventh Naval District officials wrestled with security concerns posed by the Fish Harbor Japanese community and proposed taking over the land, either through direct purchase or condemnation proceedings. In Washington, Justice Department officials grappled with the mechanics of controlling the restricted areas recommended by DeWitt and coordinating the removal of enemy aliens from the areas with the upcoming enemy alien registration, scheduled for the first week of February. Justice officials recommended that the registration take place first before announcement of any alien removals, so that effective administrative lists could be prepared from the registration. Attorney General Biddle moved to designate a West Coast Coordinator of Enemy Alien Control to manage these complex administrative initiatives. He selected Tom Clark, then Head of the Justice Department Antitrust Division in Los Angeles, and announced his appointment on January 28 (Los Angeles Times 1942c). Despite the fact that the actual administration of the control of restricted areas was supposed to be a Justice Department responsibility, once again, Karl Bendetson involved himself and the PMGO in the work. On January 28, he reported in a phone conversation with General DeWitt that he had spent the previous afternoon in a meeting with Justice officials in Washington and had convinced them to announce restricted areas for the San Francisco waterfront and the area around the Los Angeles Municipal Airport before the February enemy alien registration. That decision created major administrative chaos, particularly for the newly appointed Tom Clark, when it was announced on January 30. Clark found himself trying to explain the relationship between

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the alien enemy registration program, which was to take place the week of February 2, and the restriction program, which was scheduled to take effect in late February (Los Angeles Times 1942d, e). In the January 28 phone call, Bendetson also pressed DeWitt about the Navy recommendations for restricted areas in California and specifically whether the Navy intended to recommend Terminal Island as a restricted area. DeWitt responded that he had spoken directly with Admiral Holmes, Eleventh Naval District Commander, the previous week and that Holmes did not want to designate Terminal Island as a restricted area. To Bendetson’s dismay, DeWitt reported that Holmes “felt that for the time being he would rather keep them [that is, the Japanese community] where he could watch them.” Bendetson did not relent. He continued to press DeWitt, telling him of “two things of interest on Terminal Island and other similar areas.” Bendetson reported that “I think we could persuade the Attorney General to agree that if the Army wants it – and the Navy wants it we could designate some areas which are restricted to everybody.” Second, Bendetson reported that a congressional appropriations committee had reported a supplemental bill on January 27 with “enough money for the Navy to buy Terminal Island lock, stock and barrel.” DeWitt agreed that “Well, I think that was in the back of Admiral Holmes head, at the time we talked to him, that they expect to gain control of the whole thing anyhow and that would settle the problem” (Records of Defense Commands, Record Group 338.2.1 1942). DeWitt also reported the increasing pressure he was receiving from the Governor of California and other local officials and reported there was “a tremendous volume of public opinion now developing against the Japanese of all classes, that is aliens and non aliens” and “they are bringing pressure in the government to move all the Japanese out.” He continued: As a matter of fact, it’s not being instigated or developed by people who are not thinking but by the best people of California. Since the publication of the Robert’s Report they feel that they are living in the midst of a lot of enemies. They don’t trust the Japanese, none of them. (Ibid.)

What DeWitt was not aware of was that Bendetson himself was part of the pressure group process and was also participating in Washington in meetings with Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce officials and the West Coast congressional delegation to spur more drastic action on the control of security on the West Coast. As it became clear that the Navy had not recommended that the Los Angeles harbor area be designated a restricted area for alien enemies and that

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the total evacuation of West Coast Japanese Americans was not being planned by the Justice Department, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce quietly organized several meetings of California congressmen. On Thursday, January 29, Ingebretsen and Los Angeles County Administrator Wayne Allen (who was also in Washington at the time) organized a luncheon of the California House delegation with speakers who urged total evacuation of all Japanese from California. The following day, a meeting was held of all the West Coast House members, which Bendetson also attended. The House members passed a resolution drafted by Ingebretsen, calling for the War Department to take over control of alien enemy control from the Justice Department on the West Coast and for mass evacuation of “all enemy aliens and their families” and for “voluntary resettlement” of “dual citizen” Japanese (Grozdins 1949, pp. 67–72). The West Coast House members’ resolution stopped short of calling for the total forced evacuation of all Japanese Americans from the region, couching the resolution in cautious language proposing “immediate evacuation from critical areas of all enemy aliens and their families including children under 21 whether aliens or citizens” (Los Angeles Times 1942f ). The headlines in the press describing the intent the meeting, e.g., “Speedy Removal of Japs,” revealed the clear intent of the proposal. So do the records of the Provost Marshal General’s office in the daily “Record of Operations” for the period. The January 30 report understood the House member action as a call “for the evacuation of all Japanese, whether citizens or aliens, from the Pacific Coast and placing a full authority and responsibility for the program in the Secretary of War, with power to requisition the aid of all other Federal agencies.” And Bendetson’s office would waste no time in pressing forward. On Saturday, January 31, 1942, the day after the House members’ resolution, the report on “Situation, Pacific Coast” opened with the statement: The entire day was devoted by the Aliens Division of this Office to the preparation of plans for the evacuation of Japanese from the Pacific Coast in the event that the President directs such action and imposes responsibilities therefor on the Army. (Records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General, Record Group 389, Entry 433. 1942)

The following Monday, February 2, the activity of the West Coast members of Congress expanded as a joint meeting of House and Senate members and representatives of the military, including Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations; Brigadier General Mark Clark, from the Army Chief of Staff’s office; and Bendetson, from the Provost Marshal General’s office. The

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group heard from the Army and Navy that the defenses on the West Coast, while not failsafe, were adequate in the context of the overall war strategy and improving. Thus, Clark and Stark cautioned, as one senator reported, against “any undue alarm relative to the safety of the people on the West Coast” (Quoted in Grozdins 1949, p. 72). Nevertheless, the delegation continued to press for more action and planned further meetings later that week. In the meantime, on the West Coast, the first restricted areas were announced to banner headlines in the local press. Tom Clark announced on January 30 that alien enemies would be banned from the San Francisco waterfront and the area around the Los Angeles Municipal Airport as of February 24. Dramatic headlines and breathless reporting telling the public to await the announcement of more restricted areas raised fears of invisible dangers and urged vigilance.

Planning for Evacuating the Nisei Sensing the emerging political opening, PMG officials and Bendetson in particular began to plan concretely for a total evacuation while continuing to press Justice Department officials to implement DeWitt’s requests for restricted areas. In practical terms, that meant the Aliens Division of the PMGO identified internment campsites that would be sufficiently large to house the Japanese ancestry population, over 100,000 people. They contacted public and private welfare agencies, ranging from the American Red Cross to the Federal Security Agency to the National Youth Administration, to marshal resources for any expected evacuation. And they confronted, it appears for the first time seriously, the problem of identifying the location of Japanese ancestry citizens, i.e., Nisei, who would not be readily identifiable from the alien registration records, or any other available data source. The evidence at this point is indirect, since the daily logs of Provost Marshal General officials do not identify contacts with the Census Bureau at this point. But when placed in the context of the activities of census officials in the first week of February, there are strong indications that the PMGO had recognized that the 1940 census schedules could provide the necessary information and that census officials understood and were willing to cooperate as well (Records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General, 1941, Record Group 389, Entry 433). Several clues emerge to support the case. First, Census Director J.C. Capt was already on record in December 1941, strongly arguing for the revival of the dormant legislation to repeal the confidentiality provisions in the Census Act. The proposed bill was intended to permit census microdata to be made

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available to war agencies. Second, even in the absence of legislative change, Capt had emphasized his willingness to cooperate with military authorities in discussions at the Census Advisory Committee in January 1942. At that meeting, he boasted about all the work the bureau was doing for the military and then expressed his willingness to take the next step: We’re by law required to keep confidential information by individuals. But in the end, [i]f the defense authorities found 200 Japs missing and they wanted the names of the Japs in that area, I would give them further means of checking individuals. (Census Advisory Committee 1942, p. 21)

Thus, as the Provost Marshal General’s office began to plan concretely to convert the alien enemy control program jointly run by the Army and the Justice Department to an “Evacuation of West Coast Japanese” program run by the Army, they began to define the practical question of the numbers and location of evacuees in terms of census data. On January 31, for example, the day “devoted” to the “preparation of plans for the evacuation from the Pacific Coast,” Karl Bendetson contacted Ed Ennis, of the Justice Department Alien Enemy Control Unit, with the proposal to evacuate all Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island, Washington. The occasion to raise the issue was the proposal from Admiral Freeman of the Thirteenth Naval District to evacuate Japanese from the island. The island abutted the ship channel from the Bremerton Navy Yard and was situated across Puget Sound from the city of Seattle. Bainbridge Island, like Terminal Island in Los Angeles, was an easily definable geographic area, close to military installations. Unlike Terminal Island, however, Bainbridge Island did not have a predominantly Japanese ancestry population. In fact, in all of Kitsap County, according to the 1940 census, there were only 345 Japanese residents (Daniels, ed. 1989, Vol 2, no page; United States Bureau of the Census 1941). But the Bainbridge Island Japanese Americans, unlike the Terminal Island Japanese Americans, did not have ties into naval intelligence officers in the Thirteenth Naval District, and thus Admiral Freeman, unlike Admiral Holmes, recommended the island as a restricted area for evacuation of both alien enemies and American citizens of Japanese ancestry. Bendetson told Ennis that Freeman wanted both Japanese aliens and citizens evacuated. Ennis balked, but Bendetson persevered, noting the population figures that would be affected by such a proposal included 91 Japanese, 5 Germans, and no Italian aliens, plus “the Nisei, the second generation, – 180, comprising 55 families.” These data were almost identical to those that census officials would use from the 1940 census to evacuate the Japanese in late March. They were

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not yet published in any census extant report and, like the Los Angeles tract data provided to the Navy officials in early January, were at a sufficient level of detail for operational purposes (Anderson 2015). In other words, by the time the political pressure to evacuate all Japanese from the West Coast emerged in full force, key Army officials in the Provost Marshal General’s office believed that they could solve the problem of the lack of readily available lists of names and locations of the Japanese ancestry population by making use of the 1940 census schedules. And Director Capt recognized the issue as well.

Repealing Census Confidentiality In early January 1942, Capt had contacted the Bureau of the Budget to propose inserting the language of the dormant confidentiality repeal bill, S1627, into the omnibus bill that would become the Second War Powers Act (Records of the Office of Management and Budget 1942). At the time, Budget Director Harold Smith refused his request, and the bill as introduced in the Senate on January 16, 1942, Senate Bill 2208 (S2208), made no mention of census data. Director Capt and commerce officials continued to try to find a way around census confidentiality in correspondence with Attorney General Francis Biddle through the second half of January. In late January, the Second War Powers bill passed the Senate and moved to the House and the House Judiciary Committee. There Capt found the opportunity he wanted. The committee held hearings the first week of February. On Wednesday morning, February 4, Census Director Capt and Commerce Department Solicitor South Trimble, Jr., appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to propose language to permit the abridgment of confidentiality. Both men were well-connected to Committee Chair, Representative Hatton Sumners (D-TX). Capt was a fellow Texan. Sumners had supported his nomination as Census Director. South Trimble, Jr., was the son of the Clerk of the House South Trimble. That afternoon, Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones, also a Texan, sent bill language to Sumners (Records of the United States House of Representatives 1942; U.  S. House of Representatives 1942). Jones proposed “a suggested amendment to the omnibus war powers bill which was presented to the House Judiciary Committee this morning by South Trimble, Jr., Solicitor of the Department of Commerce, and J.  C. Capt, Director of the Bureau of the Census.” “This authority,” he continued, “is urgently needed by the Department of Commerce in order to collect information in connection with

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the war effort without delay and to make this and other information now obtained by the Department of Commerce under the seal of confidence available to other war agencies.” On Friday, February 6, without further public debate, the House Judiciary Committee incorporated the language proposed by Capt, Trimble, and Jones into S2208. The new title read: TITLE XV – UTILIZATION OF VITAL WAR INFORMATION Sec. 1501. The Secretary of Commerce is authorized, subject to any regulation or direction that the President may issue, to make such special investigations and reports of census or statistical matters as may be needed in connection with the conduct of the war. In carrying out the purpose of this section, the Secretary is further authorized to dispense with or curtail any regular census or statistical work of the Department of Commerce or any bureau or division thereof.... Sec. 1502. That notwithstanding any other provision or law, any record, schedule, report, or return, or any information or data contained therein, now or hereafter in the possession of the Department of Commerce, or any bureau or division thereof, may be made available by the Secretary of Commerce to any branch or agency of Government for use in connection with the conduct of the war, subject to any regulations that the President may issue. No person shall disclose or make use of any individual record, schedule, report, or return, or any information or data contained therein contrary to the terms of such regulations; and anyone violating this provision shall be guilty of a felony and upon conviction thereof shall be fined not exceeding $1,000, or be imprisoned not exceeding two years, or both.

The House Report on the bill explained the addition: Title XV is a new title added to the bill after it was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. Its inclusion was requested by the Secretary of Commerce.... This new provision would authorize special investigations and reports of census or statistical matters as may be needed in connection with the conduct of the war. It would permit information in the possession of the Department of Commerce to be made available to any branch or agency of the Government for use in connection with the conduct of the war.

The House Judiciary Committee adoption of Census Director’s amendment to S2208 provided the vehicle to propel the abridgment of confidentiality forward. In the rush to move the overall bill, the Committee said little about its rationale beyond endorsing the wishes of Secretary Jones and

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Director Capt. Clearly one factor was that war was no longer hypothetical, as it had been when originally introduced in 1941. The amendment permitted the use of “vital war information,” not data for “national defense.” But the timing of the action is revealing. On Saturday, February 7, the New York Times (Trussell 1942, 9) reported the overall passage of S2208 in the committee. The bill was something of a hodgepodge, some provisions quite controversial, some not. Fifteen titles dealt with everything from the metallic content of five-cent coins to expedited citizenship status for alien soldiers, to the organization of war production. With all the provisions to choose from, the Times chose to highlight the new census provision. The article headlined “Spy Data Sought from 1940 Census”: The House Committee on the Judiciary before giving its approval today to the Senate adopted Second War Powers Bill, amended the measure to take back the promise it made in 1940 that all data obtained by the Census takers would be held strictly confidential, even from other bureaus and agencies.... Some agencies of the government want data now as a matter of national safety. They seek some of the information obtained particularly from Japanese and others who since have become enemy aliens, especially about those in coastal areas from which they have been ordered evacuated by the Department of Justice.... [Such] data, now a secret under law, government officers believe, would be of material aid in mopping up those who had eluded the general evacuation orders.

In fact, census data were not necessary to identify alien enemies, but they were essential to identify the Nisei. By mid-February 1942, alien enemy registration records existed from both the 1940 and the recently completed 1942 registration. The 1940 census data would likely be inferior to both sets of records for control purposes as the Immigration and Naturalization Service had more recent data organized for individual identification. The only use of census data for which it would be essential would be for total population control of the Japanese ancestry population.

Moving to Total Evacuation The final version of the census confidentiality provision, and of the Second War Powers Act overall, would not be determined until the bill became law in late March 1942, but the inclusion of the new language in the bill was sufficient to assure the Provost Marshal General’s office that there would be an operational solution to the problem of identifying and evacuating the Nisei.

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In the first two weeks of February, their complex maneuvering to propel the total evacuation program forward continued. DeWitt submitted more restricted areas to the Justice Department, finally calling for all the large cities on the West Coast to be restricted to alien enemies. DeWitt still balked at calling for the total evacuation of the Japanese ancestry population, unless recommended by one of the area commanders. Bendetson and the PMGO worked tirelessly to move the program forward to total evacuation. Bendetson met with political leaders and with officials in the War and Justice Department, returned to the West Coast on February 8 to shape DeWitt’s proposals, and then returned to Washington on February 17 to participate in what were to become the final meetings between Justice and War Department officials before the issuance of Executive Order 9066 on February 19 (Conn et  al. 1964; de Nevers 2004; Records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General, Record Group 389, Entry 434. 1942). By early February, the need for some kind of political decision on a Japanese evacuation was clear (Robinson 2001). The discussion moved to the White House and the cabinet. During the 2  weeks prior to February 19, Justice Department officials tried fruitlessly to prevent the evacuation of citizens of Japanese ancestry. They pointed out that there was no basis in law for such a removal, that the Justice Department did not have the resources or the stomach for such total population control, and that DeWitt’s expansion of restricted areas would require the Justice Department to ask that the overall program be transferred to the Army. Justice officials were reluctant to challenge DeWitt’s invocation of the “military necessity” of restriction for particular areas and in general tended to defer to pressure from the War Department. It is well-known that on February 19, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt succumbed to the pressure for a total evacuation and promulgated Executive Order 9066, the infamous vehicle for the incarceration of the Japanese ancestry population without any further procedures for evaluating the legitimacy of a claim of disloyalty or subversion from the 100,000 + individuals affected. The irony perhaps of these last 2 weeks before the President’s decision was that the relentless pressure that seemed to be coming from many places, lobbying groups, West Coast politicians, and the press, for a policy of total removal, pushed off the table what was soon to be a major administrative crisis, namely, the almost total lack of a credible operational plan for doing the evacuation. The established procedures for the control of alien enemies had been several years in the making and involved, as Justice officials kept pointing out, the issuance of named warrants, individual arrests, initial incarceration, a due process hearing to determine internment status, and then formal internment or release. The FBI oversaw the surveillance and identification requirements

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of individual alien enemies. Individual or group arrests like the initial ABC roundups were coordinated with other intelligence agencies and local law enforcement. Each alien enemy arrest generated an individual file in FBI records with evidence of the alien’s background and justification for internment. Even when such procedures were stretched to their limits, as they were when Los Angeles officials sent the mass request for warrants for all alien Japanese fishermen, they still required individual identification of the alien and an individual arrest and detailed accounting of the fate of each case. In contrast, despite the political pressure, a total evacuation of the Japanese ancestry population, 120,000 people, was still abhorrent on constitutional and civil liberties grounds, and thus national political leaders, from the President, to the Secretary of War, to members of Congress, avoided staring the issue in the face directly. “Be as reasonable as you can,” President Roosevelt was quoted as advising Secretary of War Henry Stimson on February 11. Over these weeks, as the argument raged on whether to evacuate citizens of Japanese ancestry, no detailed plans emerged on how to go about the undertaking. The complete lack of preparation perhaps best shows in an unsigned memorandum for the record in the files of John McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, dated February 8, the same day Bendetson returned to San Francisco, titled, “Japanese Evacuation, West Coast” (Quoted in Conn et al. 1964): Prepare definite instructions for DeWitt on following basis: Select key points where danger is great and size not too large. Put them in order of importance. Evacuate everybody, aliens and citizens. Institute system of permits. Whole matter to be handled by Army authorities. Then, as matter progresses, we will soon find out how far we can go. The memo continued with a list of potential areas: 1. Terminal Island, Long Beach 2. San Diego? 3. The shore areas of San Francisco 4. Highly important power stations all along the coast 5. Mare Island 6. Boeing Airplane factory 7. Bremerton Navy Yard

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In other words, the Army did not have a plan for how to evacuate the West Coast Japanese population, beyond using the small known hot spots already part of the public conversation, e.g., Terminal Island or Bainbridge Island, to “evacuate everybody” and “then, as matter progresses, we will soon find out how far we can go.”

 otal Evacuation of Japanese Ancestry T Population Authorized On Thursday, February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which permitted military commanders to prescribe military areas “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 shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.” The next day, the first steps for implementing the order began to emerge. On February 20, Secretary of War Henry Stimson sent instructions to General DeWitt on immediate implementation of the Executive Order. Recognizing the potentially explosive repercussions of the executive order, Stimson instructed DeWitt to take “fullest advantage” of “voluntary exodus of individuals” and “to avoid, so far as is consistent with national safety and the performance of your mission, unnecessary hardship and dislocation of business and industry.” He asked DeWitt to develop “detailed plans for evacuation” and not to proceed until such plans were approved and in place. He further instructed DeWitt not to “disturb, for the time being at least, Italian aliens and persons of Italian lineage except where they are, in your judgment, undesirable or constitute a definite danger to the performance of your mission to defend the West Coast.” He further noted that “it may be necessary for you to relieve Italian aliens from the necessity for compliance with the Attorney General’s order respecting the California prohibited areas 1 to 88 (Category A).” Only Japanese Americans were to be initially targeted for removal under Executive Order 9066 (Records of the Assistant Secretary of War, Entry 179 1942a). For the third time since January, now Lt. Colonel Karl Bendetsen, who had also now changed the spelling of his name from Bendetson to Bendetsen (as detailed in de Nevers 2004, pp. 108, 313–315), was slated to return to the West Coast to advise DeWitt – this time on implementation of the Executive Order. He left for San Francisco on Sunday, February 22, and as he did so, he

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drafted language for an enforcement statute for the Executive Order to be put “in the hoppers” of Congress. He drafted two versions, one making violation of the order a misdemeanor and another a felony, noting that DeWitt was recommending that a violation be deemed a felony. In an offhand comment Bendetsen attributed to DeWitt, he told McCloy that DeWitt supported a harsher statute that allowed for “maximum imprisonment” because “you can shoot a man to prevent the commission of a felony.” Bendetsen also offered advice for McCloy on moving such a bill through Congress (Records of the Assistant Secretary of War, Entry 180 1942b): I called J.C.  Ingebretsen, who represents the Los Angeles and Southern California Chambers of Commerce here. He is a good man and has a very profound influence, with the Pacific Coast particularly with the California delegation. He is very interested in the general problem and will help us push the legislation if we so desire. He can be trusted absolutely.

Bendetsen gave McCloy contact numbers for Ingebretsen and relayed Ingebretsen’s suggestions of individual congressmen and senators who could sponsor the bill. By February 23, as Bendetsen arrived in San Francisco, DeWitt had his hands full. The promulgation of EO 9066 created instant confusion from both an administrative and public relations perspective. What was the relationship between the Army mandate in the new executive order and the ongoing Justice/Army program of defining and barring enemy aliens from restricted areas or arresting and interning enemy aliens? While Congress and officials in Washington had wrestled with the issues of the “West Coast Japanese” during February, Tom Clark had begun to implement DeWitt’s restricted area designations, with most planning to take effect on February 24 or later. FBI officials had continued to arrest individual enemy aliens under the authority of the December presidential proclamations, including serving warrants on all 544 Issei fishermen on Terminal Island on February 2. The Navy had announced on February 12 the takeover of Terminal Island through condemnation proceedings, which would have the effect of ousting all residential dwellers of the island, mostly of Japanese ancestry, by mid-March 1942. During the last week of February 1942, the question of sorting out the relative responsibilities of the disparate federal agencies involved came to the fore, and they did so in the context of profound opposition to the emerging program in the Justice Department (Los Angeles Times 1942g). There was also something that looked like chaos developing on the ground on the West Coast. Two issues were emerging. The first was that the “removal”

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or “restricted area” programs made no provisions for where those removed would go. The original Army/Justice program for individual alien arrest and internment anticipated a program on a small scale, with indefinite internment for aliens deemed security threats, and release back to their home communities of those who were not. As that program shifted toward more “mass arrests” – e.g., for arresting all Issei on Terminal Island with fishing licenses, regardless of any evidence of subversive activity – the problem of either permanently interning the men or releasing them back to their home neighborhoods grew. Relatedly, state and local government officials like Fletcher Bowron had continued to press the Army and Justice officials about the impact of large-scale enemy alien removals on those families and communities, where the aliens had been removed. How, for example, were the families on Terminal Island to survive if all the breadwinners were summarily interned or even make ends meet during the period while their individual cases were adjudicated? And where were they to go once the island was taken over by the Navy (Records of Naval Districts and Shore Establishments. 11th Naval District, Commandant’s Office. Formerly Classified Files, 1921–1947)? Bendetsen arrived on the West Coast and immediately went to work to address these issues, including continuing the preparation for camps to house those removed and the contacts with federal relief agencies that would be called upon to support any mass evacuation. But he also had to grapple with the logistical problem of identifying not only alien enemies but also Americans of Japanese ancestry. For that, the Provost Marshal General’s office contacted the Commerce Department and the Census Bureau. On Tuesday, February 24, Commerce Department Solicitor South Trimble received a phone call from the Provost Marshal General’s office asking for lists of names and addresses of Japanese Americans on the West Coast (Bohme 1975). The Provost Marshal General’s office wanted “detailed information from the 1940 census records, culminating in a list of individual Japanese Americans by name and address.” At that date, the Second War Powers Act bill language, which would have permitted the Census Bureau to accede to such a request, was still tied up in Congress, and the Solicitor indicated that the bureau could not comply with the request. He did offer to “prepare a special tabulation of persons of Japanese ancestry by minor civil division (which the Bureau subsequently did).” And more importantly, he offered the technical expertise of the Bureau’s Head of the Statistical Research Division Dr. Calvert Dedrick. Two days later, on February 26, Dedrick left for the West Coast, and there he remained. He served in San Francisco for about a year starting from February 27, 1942. As he remembered it:

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The request for the assistance of the Census Bureau was made by General Allan Gullion, Provost Marshall General, in successive telephone conversation with Mr. South Trimble, Jr., Solicitor of the Department of Commerce, and Mr. J.C. Capt. At the outset it was anticipated that I would remain on the west coast for only 10 days or two weeks to assist Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt in preparing forms and procedures for the registration of enemy aliens in that area. (Dedrick 1946)

In March, after General DeWitt decided that evacuation of all Japanese Americans from the area was necessary, “arrangements were made by the Office of the Provost Marshall General with the Bureau ... for the loan of Mr. Dedrick to assist in this evacuation program.” As the plans were finalized to send Dedrick to the San Francisco, what came to be called the “Battle of Los Angeles” heightened the fear of invasion on the West Coast. On February 24 and 25, antiaircraft batteries opened up a barrage of shells against a suspected Japanese attack on the coast. Later analysis suspected the “attack” came from mistaking a weather balloon for an enemy plane. But the attack did have a direct impact on the Japanese ancestry population in Los Angeles. Naval officials and the FBI took the occasion to move onto Terminal Island and force everyone off the Island by February 27. By that date, pictures of personal belongings left behind, general disarray, and the faces of the displaced headlined the local newspapers. Once the removal was complete, the displaced residents became invisible and melted into the general population elsewhere in the region (Niiya, ed. 2001, 128; Los Angeles Times 1942h). As Dedrick arrived, the planning for locating, accounting, and removing Japanese ancestry Americans from the West Coast was only getting harder to do.

References Anderson, Margo. 2015. Public Management of Big Data: Historical Lessons from the 1940s. Federal History 7: 17–34. Bloom, Leonard, and Ruth Riemer. 1949. Removal and Return: The Socio-Economic Effects of the War on Japanese Americans. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bohme, Frederick G. 1975. Letter to Roger Daniels, dated December 3, 1975. “Records relating to the War History Project” (item 156); US Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC. Census Advisory Committee. 1942. Full transcript of meeting of January 9–10, 1942, General Records of the Census Advisory Committee (item 148), United States Bureau of the Census Records, Record Group 29, National Archives, Washington, DC.

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Conn, Stetson, Rose C. Engelman, and Byron Fairchild. 1964. Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, The Western Hemisphere: Guarding the United States and its Outposts (Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army), in the series United States Army in World War II, chapter 5 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Daniels, Roger, ed. 1989. American Concentration Camps. A Documentary History of the Relocation and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1942–1945. Vol. 9. New York: Garland Publishing. ———. 2004. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang. Daniels, Roger, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H.L Kitano. 1986. Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. de Nevers, Klancy Clark. 2004. The Colonel and the Pacifist. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Dedrick, Calvert L. 1946. Memorandum to [John V.] Dobbin. Activities of the Bureau of the Census Relating to the War Department Evacuation of Japanese from the West Coast, July 1, 1946, Records relating to the War History Project (item 156); United States Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC. Federal Bureau of Investigation, History. n.d.. https://www.fbi.gov/history/timeline. Accessed 24 Jan 2023. Fletcher R. Bowron Papers. 1942. Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. San Marino, CA. Freedom on Information Times, n.d. Custodial Detention Files of the FBI of the World War II Era, Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts, Subject: Custodial Detention (Los Angeles Division) Japanese 1941, File number: 100-2-29, Section: 3, particularly pdf pages 93, 105, 171, available at https://www.foitimes.com/ internment/LosAngeles3.pdf. Accessed May 10, 2019. Grozdins, Morton. 1943. Interview with John B. Hughes, California, July 19, 1943. BANC MSS 67/14c, Reel 9, Frames 50–51, Berkeley, CA: Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records, Bancroft Library. ———. 1949. Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirahara, Naomi, Geraldine Knatz, and J.  Eric Lynxwiler. 2014. Terminal Island: Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor. Los Angeles: Angel City Press. Hughes, John B. 1942. News and Views by John B.  Hughes, Mutual Broadcasting Network, January 6, 1942. Transcript included in Records of Naval Districts and Shore Establishments. Record Group 181. 11th Naval District, Commandant’s Office. Formerly Classified Files, 1921–1947. CF33j. Laguna Niguel, CA: National Archives. [Riverside, CA: These records have since been moved to National Archives] Los Angeles Times. 1941a. Terminal Island Isolated as Defense Precaution, December 8, 1941.

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———. 1941b. Regulations on Japanese Financial Deals Modified. December 24, 1941, p. 14, Part 1. ———. 1941c. Submarines Halt Fishing, December 27, 1941. A1. ———. 1942a. Japanese-Americans of Southland Repledge Allegiance to Country. January 12, 1942, Part 1, p. 8. ———. 1942b. Terminal Island Fishing Fleet Puts to Sea After 11 Days, January 12, 1942, A2. ———. 1942c. Head of Enemy Alien Control Appointed, Jan 29, 1942, 5. ———. 1942d. Axis Aliens Ordered out of Vital District Here, January 30, 1942, 1. ———. 1942e. Speedy Moving of Japs Urged, January 31, 1942, 1. ———. 1942f. Speedy Removal of Japs in Vital Areas Called for by Western Representatives, January 31, 1942, 5. ———. 1942g. Terminal Isle Put Under Naval Rule, February 13, 1942, 1. ———. 1942h. Army Says Alarm Real, February 26, 1942, 1. Modell, John. 1977. The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los Angeles, 1900–1942. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Niiya, Brian, ed. 2001. Encyclopedia of Japanese American History. updated ed. New York: Checkmark Books, an Imprint of Facts on File, Inc. Records of Defense Commands, Record Group 338.2.1, Textual Records, (reallocated to Record Group 499), Wartime Civil Control Administration, Civil Affairs Division, Classified correspondence, Box 15, File 384.4. Telephone Transcript, Major Karl Bendetson to Lt. Gen John DeWitt, Jan, 28, 1942. College Park, MD: National Archives. Records of Naval Districts and Shore Establishments. 1942a. Record Group 181. Eleventh Naval District Planning Office, San Diego, General Correspondence, 1925–1952, Box 10, A-7/3-A-9/3, File A8-5. Laguna Niguel, CA: National Archives. [These records have since been moved to the Riverside, CA National Archives facility.] Records of Naval Districts and Shore Establishments. 1942b. Record Group 181. 11th Naval District, Commandant’s Office. Formerly Classified Files, 1921–1947. Box 62, File CF 33-J-SF33. Laguna Niguel, CA: National Archives. [These records have since been moved to the Riverside, CA National Archives facility.] Records of the Assistant Secretary of War, Record Group 107. n.d. Entry 179, 1942a. Box 84, File: X-Defense Commands, Western, Commanding General, (confidential). College Park, MD: National Archives. Records of the Assistant Secretary of War, Record Group 107, Entry 180 (A-1), 1942b. Box 6, ‘Office of the Secretary of War, Formerly Security Classified Correspondence of John J. McCloy, 1941–1945, 014.1-014.311’, College Park, MD: National Archives Records of the Office of Management and Budget. 1942. General Records, 1940–1968 (40.7). Office of Statistical Standards, Entry 147, Box 51, File: Census Bureau, General File I, 1940–1959. Record Group 51, College Park, MD: National Archives.

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Records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General, 1942, Record Group 389, Entry 433, PMGO, Box 152 (NND). File 319.1 (Biennial Report, PMGO), January 10–11–March 7 Record of Operations, College Park, MD: National Archives. Records of the Office of the Provost Marshal General, Record Group 389, Entry 434. 1942. Unclassified Decimal File, Project, 1941–1945, 9th Service Command, Box 322. 004-729.3, File: 014.311. ‘Telephone transcript, Major Karl Bendetson, PMGO, to Col. Stroh, G-2, 4th Army, 1:35 PM, January 21, 1942’. College Park, MD: National Archives. Records of the United States House of Representatives. n.d. Papers accompanying specific bills and resolutions, HR 77A-D20, S2208-S2395, Box 159, File: S2208, Record Group 233, Washington, D.C.: National Archives Robinson, Greg. 2001. By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ten Broek, Jacobus, Edward N. Barnhart, and Floyd W. Matson. 1954. Prejudice War and the Constitution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Truesdell, Leon E. 1941. New Features of the 1940 Population Census. Journal of the American Statistical Association 36: 361–368. Trussell, C. P. 1942. Spy Data Sought from 1940 Census: House Committee Votes to Let Confidential Reports Be Released to Federal Bureaus. Would Retract Promise. New York Times. February 7, p. 9. United States House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. 1942. ‘Further Expediting Prosecution of War, Second War Powers Act, 1942, February 09, 1942’. H.rp. 1765. United States. Bureau of the Census. 1941. Japanese Population for Each County in the Pacific Coast States by Sex and Nativity or Citizenship, Sixteenth Census of The United States, Series P-3, No. 25, December 11, 1941. Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce. United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). 1982. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office). Report reissued in 1997 by University of Washington Press (Seattle: University of Washington Press) with a new forward by Tetsuden Kashima. Weglyn, Michi. 1996. Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps. Updated ed. Seattle: University of Washington Press, Original edition published in 1976. Zierer, Clifford M. 1934. The Los Angeles Harbor Fishing Center. Economic Geography 10 (4): 402–418.

5 Evacuating the Japanese from Military Area 1: March to June 1942

The 1940 Census reported 281 Japanese living on Bainbridge Island. They were distributed by precincts as shown in the table below. This table also gives the number of aliens and citizens, the number of heads of households (equal to the number of families) by nativity of the head, and the number of Japanese farm operators. Dedrick, Calvert L. 1942. “Memorandum for Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen, March 21, 1942.” War Department, U.S. Army, Western Defense Command, Civil Affairs Division, Wartime Civil Control Administration. Unclassified Correspondence, Box 15. File 093: Evacuation of Bainbridge Island. Record Group 338, National Archives, College Park, MD.

 ensus Officials Deployed to the Western C Defense Command in San Francisco Calvert Dedrick arrived in San Francisco on Friday, February 27, 1942, eight days after the promulgation of Executive Order 9066. He was the first civilian federal official to arrive to assist the military, in what he expected to be a short, ten-day assignment. He stayed until March 1943 and became one of the most important administrative officials of the evacuation and incarceration program. At the time Dedrick was Chief of the Statistical Research division at the Census Bureau. Born in 1900, he was the son of a missionary and had lived in Cuba as a child. He earned his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin in 1933 and joined the Census Bureau in 1935. He was one of a number of young academics and administrators who arrived during the New Deal years, as the Roosevelt administration revitalized the agency to address the data needs of the Depression and economic planning. He initially worked © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Anderson, W. Seltzer, Use and Misuse of the United States Census, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38619-0_5

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under long-time official Joseph A. Hill in the Division of Statistical Research and replaced Hill as Chief when he died in 1938 (Anderson 2015a; Official Personnel Folder, Calvert Lampert Dedrick n.d.; Dedrick 1981). From his position at the bureau, Dedrick participated in the most crucial technical innovations in survey and statistical research and the planning for the 1940 census, including the introduction of new questions on migration, usual occupation, and emergency work. In 1937, he was a key official in the introduction of a probability sample in the design of the unemployment census. That effort provided the first reliable estimates of unemployment and became the foundation of the methods for the new Monthly Report on the Labor Force. This survey we know today as the Current Population Survey, which provides the monthly unemployment statistics report the first Friday of the month. The success of the unemployment survey also confirmed the Census Bureau’s plans for adding a probability sample to the design of the 1940 census for the first time. Additional questions were asked of 5% of the population on sample lines at the bottom of the main schedule. Dedrick’s Statistical Research Division was at the forefront on these developments. See Fig. 5.1. Dedrick also had experience working with other statistical agencies and administrative offices of the federal government on issues of data collection, design, and administration. The Smith Act of 1940 required all aliens to register at their local post office and receive an identity card, what we know today informally as the “green card.” Dedrick was deployed to the Justice Department to help plan the forms and provide estimates from census data on the expected numbers of registrants. With other demographers, he also prepared papers for the potential uses of statistical analyses of the administrative data collected in the registration for general population analysis. Dedrick was a well-respected Census Bureau “insider,” well known in academic and government circles, a frequent presenter at professional associations such as the American Statistical Association and American Sociological Association, and liaison between university scholars and the Census Bureau. In the late fall of 1939, he was one of the few officials in the Census Bureau to know about the proposed Justice Department amendment to the Census Act which would have authorized disclosure of census microdata to the FBI, Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), and Army Military Intelligence. With Census Director William Lane Austin and other census officials, he undertook a vigorous and successful campaign to stop the introduction of the bill. A year later, in early 1941, Dedrick watched as Director Austin paid for that zealous defense of census confidentiality. William Lane Austin reached the then mandatory retirement age of 70 in early 1941, and the White House

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Fig. 5.1  Census Bureau Brain Trust. Meeting of the Census Advisory Committee, 1940. Calvert Dedrick is third from the left. Census Director William Lane Austin is to his left. (Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum 1940)

refused to grant an exception to the provision to permit Austin to extend his tenure until the completion of the 1940 census publication program. Austin retired in January 1941. Behind the scenes, Dedrick lobbied with his fellow academics and bureau professionals for a professionally trained statistician to replace Austin as head of the Census Bureau. The professionals were unsuccessful as the White House appointed Texan J.C. Capt to the position in May 1941. Capt had administrative experience and deep political ties within the Democratic Party, but no credentials or experience in statistics or survey research. He had been brought from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in mid-1939 to run the many patronage appointments for supervisors and enumerators for the 1940 census. From the White House perspective, he did a fine job, and by 1941, he looked like just the kind of loyal administrator the bureau needed. He was unanimously confirmed by the Senate. The archival record is silent on Dedrick’s response to Capt’s appointment, but it likely served as a wakeup call signaling the new pressures on the statistical system from the involvement in war planning (Seltzer 2011). Business as usual for the Census Bureau at the time meant completing the 1940 census reports and consolidating the innovations in sampling and administrative efficiency from the previous years. From the larger

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administration perspective, however, the Census Bureau looked increasingly like just one more large agency that could be harnessed for national defense. For that work, a political insider with strong ties to the White House through Harry Hopkins and Texas Democrats was a better pick for Census Director. It was not just the bureau’s overall work trajectory that came under scrutiny in terms of the national defense effort. In the spring of 1941, in the midst of the behind the scenes debates about the qualifications for the next Census Director, the State Department requested a high-level statistical official be deployed to Panama to “assist” with the successful completion of the Panamanian census. Cables between the US embassy and Washington expressed concern that the Panamanian census director was a Nazi sympathizer and that the Panamanian government could undermine US access to the Panama Canal in case of war. The State Department contacted the White House and the Office of Statistical Standards and proposed that Stuart Rice take on the assignment. Rice demurred and suggested Dedrick, and after several weeks of additional vetting, Dedrick was assigned to the task. He left for Panama in just after Capt became Director in June 1941 and returned in late December 1941. Thus, in the first crucial six months of J.C. Capt’s tenure as Census Director, and the US entry into the war, Dedrick was out of the country, working on the important but relatively invisible tasks of getting the Panamanian census on track for successful completion and publication. He came back to a nation at war and to a statistical agency Capt intended to deploy for the war effort. He had some inkling of what might be on the horizon as he left in June. One of his final tasks as Chief of the Statistical Research Division before he left for Panama was to rework and resubmit the legislative language to authorize defense agencies access to census microdata, which Capt then sent to Congress in June 1941. When Dedrick returned, it was still tied up in committee (United States. Department of State. Central Files 1941; General Records Maintained by Calvert Dedrick 1941; Dedrick 1981). Dedrick thus was out of the country during the crucial months from October to December 1941 when J.  Franklin Carter, Henry Field, Wayne Taylor, and J.C.  Capt discussed and then produced a duplicate set of the punch cards for the Japanese ancestry population from the 1940 census and when the bureau disseminated the first tabulations of Japanese Americans. We haven’t found evidence in the archival record that he was aware of what had occurred while he was in Panama, though Dedrick was at the Census Advisory Committee meeting in January 1942 when Capt bragged of his work preparing tract-level tabulations of Japanese Americans in Los Angeles for the Navy. Nor did we locate correspondence or any mention of Dedrick in

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communications with the War Department, the Provost Marshal General’s Office, or the Western Defense Command in January and February 1942. Nevertheless, his previous experience as a troubleshooter for complex survey operational matters made him an ideal choice for the Western Defense Command assignment. He was a “professional,” known to understand the requirements and standards of good statistical practice who would preserve the integrity of his home agency while assisting the military in their required tasks. Within weeks, he had proved his mettle to his military superiors and began to play an outsized if unobtrusive role in the evacuation and incarceration of the Japanese.

The Problem of Identifying the Nisei From December 9 through the promulgation of Executive Order 9066, the Census Bureau bulletins reported the aggregate number of Japanese Americans in the 1940 census and informed the debate about the alleged military necessity to evacuate the Japanese ancestry population from the West Coast. Anyone who had read a newspaper or listened to a radio report had likely seen the figures multiple times. By February 1942, Americans knew there were 93,717 Japanese Americans in California in 1940, and 4071 in Oregon and 14,565 in Washington. They also knew, if they read carefully, that two-thirds of those Japanese Americans were American-born citizens of the United States and thus not covered by the alien registration regulations in effect since 1940. That fact meant that though the military officials and the public knew down to the local area where Japanese Americans in the aggregate lived in 1940, and had name and address registers for aliens, there was no extant population registration system with name and address information that could be used to identify citizens of Japanese ancestry for evacuation. From the Army’s perspective, the situation was urgent. On February 14, in a memorandum to the Secretary of War, DeWitt claimed (quoted in United States Army, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943, p. 34): The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become “Americanized”, the racial strains are undiluted. To conclude otherwise is to expect that children born of white parents on Japanese soil sever all racial affinity and become loyal Japanese subjects, ready to fight and, if necessary, to die for Japan in a war against the nation of their parents. That Japan is allied with Germany and Italy in this struggle is no ground for assuming that any

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Japanese, barred from assimilation by convention as he is, though born and raised in the United States, will not turn against this nation when the final test of loyalty comes. It, therefore, follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today. There are indications that these are organized and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.

In a nutshell, this was the dilemma that Dedrick faced. How would the Army evacuate the American-born Japanese ancestry population without lists of names and addresses of those to be removed? The Army’s initial solution was to ask the Census Bureau for the name and address information on the 1940 census schedules. The Census Bureau balked at that request for two reasons. First, as of late February 1942, the Census Act prevented the release of name and address information under census confidentiality rules. The language to change the provision was included in the Second War Powers bill, but the larger bill was still tied up in Congress. Second, retrieving the information from the handwritten census schedules would be a time-consuming process. Coded information on the punch cards allowed census officials to retrieve a particular individual’s census information from the handwritten schedule, and was a common procedures, both to check for errors and to provide individuals with their own census information for age search or other legal purposes (Anderson 2015a, p. 187; U.S. Census Bureau n.d.). But to find and duplicate the handwritten information for 120,000 people would have taken substantial manpower and time, and delay any evacuation program. The bureau’s solution was to send Dedrick to California to address the problem, see what other data sources might be available, and consider a population registration of citizens of Japanese ancestry affected by Executive Order 9066. Census Director J.C. Capt reassured the Army of the bureau’s support, despite the technical and legal difficulties they had expressed. On February 26, 1942, Capt sent a telegram to Col. Karl Bendetsen, GHQ Fourth Army, San Francisco (General Records of the Department of Commerce 1942): Dr. Calvert L. Dedrick leaving Washington 6:30 pm today ... He has authority to act in helping you find solution of the problems discussed with you and General Gullion yesterday.

Dedrick soon recognized that a Nisei registration would face the same kinds of problems that were presented by trying to retrieve the information from the 1940 census schedules. It would take too long to do before it would

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be operationally useful to the Army. Dedrick also knew that by March 1942, the 1940 census information was two years old and would not reflect the normal patterns of population growth and change that had occurred since April 1940. A new registration might remedy that problem but could also face problems of accuracy and perhaps resistance, particularly given the chaotic conditions facing Japanese Americans already subjected to three months of fear mongering, alien roundups, and recent episodes like the Terminal Island expulsion. There was no easy solution to the problem of identifying the Nisei for evacuation. A little over a year later, the Army published Lt General DeWitt’s Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast 1942 (United States Army, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943). The report provided a thorough description and justification of the overall program and its successful completion. Written largely by Col. Bendetsen and Calvert Dedrick, the report was also designed to defend against any legal or political challenges to the evacuation program, praise DeWitt for completion of “this difficult task,” as Secretary of War Henry Stimson did in the Forward (Ibid., p. v), and claim the program represented a competent and efficient military and civilian collaboration. Read carefully, however, the Final Report also provides solid evidence of the administrative chaos and uncertainty at the time. A close reading of the day-to-day events involved in setting up and implementing the evacuation program sheds new light on the role of Calvert Dedrick and census officials in shaping the program. As Dedrick arrived in San Francisco in late February, through the first ten days in March, it appears that no decision was made on whether or how to proceed in identifying the Nisei for an evacuation. Dedrick set about compiling information from the alien registration records, the FBI, and military intelligence and planning on building a staff. At that point, the Western Defense Command still had no administrative structure in place to organize and plan an evacuation. General DeWitt’s only clear directives were to promote voluntary evacuation. Public Proclamation no. 1, issued March 2, 1942, designated, as the Final Report put it, “Military Area No. 1 as the zone from which persons of Japanese ancestry were to be required to leave.” The report continued, “Prior to March 10 the General Staff of the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army had not engaged in any extensive planning or preparation for the program. The tactical duties imposed upon it were such that it was unable to do so and at the same time meet the responsibilities imposed on the Headquarters by the essentially military aspects of its mission” (Ibid. p. 41). Public Proclamation no. 1 required enemy aliens and Japanese Americans to file change of address forms with the local post office if they

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moved. These forms, in turn, were sent to the Western Defense Command so that a database of the migrants could be compiled and, more crucially, Dedrick and his staff could track the migration process. At the end of the first week in March, the Army took steps to set up an administrative structure to undertake the evacuation. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy traveled to San Francisco on March 7 to discuss plans with Western Defense Command officials and Karl Bendetsen. As reported in the Final Report (Ibid), on March 10, General DeWitt “established the Civil Affairs Division as an addition to his general staff. On the day following... he created the Wartime Civil Control Administration as an operating agency of his Command to carry out assigned missions involving civil control.” The report continued: With the creation of these agencies specific plans for the evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry from Military Area No. 1, and the California portion of Military Area No. 2 were immediately initiated. The War Department liaison representative [Colonel Karl Bendetsen] was designated as the Assistant Chief of Staff for Civil Affairs, General Staff, and also as the Director, Wartime Civil Control Administration. The offices of Civil Affairs Division, General Staff, and of the Wartime Civil Control Administration [WCCA] were established in the Whitcomb Hotel, San Francisco.

The new WCCA was organized into four divisions: administrative, statistical, public relations, and inspection and fiscal divisions (Ibid, p. 68). Dedrick headed the “Statistical Division.” On March 12, Dedrick issued the first of his daily reports drawn from the change of address forms on the voluntary migration of Japanese Americans. Relatedly, on Monday, March 9, Secretary of War Stimson transmitted to Congress bill language to enforce Executive Order 9066 with federal penalties for noncompliance with Army directives. The bill prescribed a violation of the executive order as a misdemeanor, rather than a felony as Bendetsen wanted, but still mandated fines and/or imprisonment for noncompliance (ten Broek et al. 1954). With the creation of the WCCA and the introduction of the enforcement bill, concrete planning for the total evacuation of Japanese Americans went into high gear. Bendetsen mobilized civilian staff from a variety of federal agencies, including the Agriculture Department, the Federal Security Agency, the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, and the Office of Emergency Management, to undertake planning tasks, from setting up assembly centers

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to handing property to manning the evacuation offices. At the same time, Dedrick and Bendetsen still faced the dilemma of how to identify the Japanese Americans for evacuation. It became increasingly clear that the 1940 census was the only viable data source, despite its obvious flaws and legal restrictions. The Final Report described the decision-making outcome in broad terms (United States Army, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943, p. 355): Consideration was given by the Wartime Civil Control Administration to the possibility of conducting a general compulsory registration of all enemy aliens and of native-born persons of Japanese ancestry prior to, and in preparation for, the evacuation program.

The WCCA decided against such a registration for several reasons: 1. A registration would require some time for organization and tabulation before it would yield results useful in the evacuation program. 2. A registration of all enemy aliens had been conducted in February by the Department of Justice, and copies of the forms were on file with the local offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and at the Alien Registration Division, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Philadelphia, Penna. Certain preliminary data were made available to the Wartime Civil Control Administration from local counts of these registrations, but no detailed classified information, such as the distribution by small geographical units, age, sex, occupations, and family size, were available. 3. The Japanese community already anticipated evacuation, and it was felt doubtful that accurate information would be given in all cases. 4. A complete evacuation of the coastal area was contemplated, and a preliminary verification with Federal Bureau of Investigation and Military Intelligence data showed that the Census of 1940 would be sufficiently accurate for the controlled movement. What the report did not reveal were the very real limitations of the 1940 census for the task at hand and, thus, the contingency of the situation at the time.

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The Evacuation Process The Final Report detailed the planning process for the evacuation (Ibid., pp. 77–79; 86ff). There were a number of criteria that guided the plan. First, the plan was designed to remove Japanese Americans from specific geographic areas prioritized by their military importance, rather than to arrest and detain individuals wherever they might be found. That decision framed a geographic approach to the evacuation, and a systematic plan to evacuate all Japanese Americans from Military Area No. 1 and eventually Military Area No. 2, regardless of the individual characteristics or the purported potential national security threat of those removed. The old, children, men, and women, were all equally liable for removal. In other words, “military necessity” for removal characterized places, not the threat posed by individual people. This fundamentally “geographic” approach to securing the West Coast had characterized military thinking since Pearl Harbor. Military officials even made a virtue of this approach, claiming that such a plan would keep families and communities together, thus avoiding what they called “a community problem of dependency” that might come from only removing “dangerous adult males and females” as had been done in other countries (Ibid., p. 77). The evacuation was also designed to use as much civilian labor as possible to minimize the strain on military resources. It was to be done quickly, to lessen the alleged national security threat of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. And, to be completed quickly, the army shifted responsibility for the eventual “relocation” of Japanese Americans to a nonmilitary organization, what became the War Relocation Authority. The “heart of the plan” was to make the army’s responsibility a “transitory” one for removal, but not relocation or resettlement of Japanese Americans (Ibid., p. 78). With these criteria in hand, the operational plan emerged. The Final Report continued (Ibid., p. 86): For planning purposes the West Coast was divided into 22 basic units.... Estimates were made of the Japanese population in each of these areas and a tentative Assembly Center destination was given. Each of these general plan areas was considered as comprising a community of Japanese, all of whom were to be moved to the same Assembly Center and eventually to the same Relocation Center, if the capacity of the Centers and the logistics of movement permitted. The basic population data for the program were provided from a special tabulation by the Bureau of the Census of Japanese cards of the 1940 Population Census. The total number of Japanese individuals and families in each county,

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township and incorporated place, and for each census tract in the larger cities, was plotted on maps. These census data, though two years old, were found satisfactory for planning purposes when corrected for emigration, under-­ enumeration and voluntary migration. From these data and a study of the structure and characteristics of each basic area, it was possible to define and map Exclusion Areas, 108 in all, which were used for operational purposes.

The efficient system described in the Final Report, however, at the time looked a good deal more problematic on a number of levels. Many accounts have reported the unsanitary, crowded conditions of the assembly centers, the continued opposition of the Justice Department to the entire program, opposition from political leaders in nearby states likely to receive the Japanese, and uncertainty and distress faced by Japanese awaiting removal. Throughout March, the West Defense Command kept shifting the parameters of the restrictions on Japanese Americans. DeWitt issued three additional proclamations and ended voluntary migration altogether as of March 29. Public Proclamation no. 2 (March 16, 1942) extended the restrictions of Public Proclamation no. 1 to Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah. Public Proclamation no. 3 (March 24, 1942) imposed a curfew on enemy aliens and Japanese Americans from 8:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Public Proclamation no. 4 (March 27) halted all voluntary migration from Military Area No. 1 without approval or instruction from the Army (U.S.  Commission on Wartime Relocation Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982, particularly pp. 100–103; Daniels 2004; de Nevers 2004; ten Broek et al. 1954). In this environment, Dedrick was faced with providing the numerical information to organize the evacuation. Dedrick contacted the Census Bureau and requested the finest tabulations that could be produced from the 1940 census. He reported to Bendetsen that on March 15, he’d “received from the Bureau of the Census by airmail… a count showing the number of heads of Japanese families by counties, townships, and census tracts for California.” “This count,” Dedrick continued, “gives a much better picture of the possible ‘cases’ to be handled by the property sections than does the general count of total population” (Records of the Wartime Civil Control Administration 1942). In Bulletin No. 4 of the Statistical Section of the WCCA, dated March 16, 1942 (Ibid.), Dedrick prepared tables and maps for Bendetsen from the material he received. In fact, the tabulations in Bulletin No. 4 were much finer than census tracts. Since the Census Bureau had not yet defined census tracts for most of

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the country, Dedrick had received data by census enumeration districts, which provided comprehensive geographic coverage of the country. As he noted in his testimony to the Commission on Wartime Relocation of Citizens (Dedrick 1981, pp. 172–173), “I… asked the Bureau of Census to give me a detailed cross-tabulation for even the most minute areas, the smallest areas for which data were collected. In other words, enumeration district and in some instances cities by blocks…and those sheets of paper from the tabulation machines were sent out to WCCA at the hotel on Market Street in San Francisco, and became the basis for the WCCA statistical activities.” Enumeration district tabulations were not published from the 1940 census, in 1942 during the evacuation, or later in official 1940 census publications. In Bulletin no. 4, Dedrick could report counts of total population, alien and citizen population, and alien and citizen family heads, by enumeration district. King County, Washington, for example, was home to 9863 persons of Japanese ancestry or 68% of the Japanese ancestry population of the state. Some 71% of that population, 6975 people, lived in Seattle. Dedrick reported 87 other precinct, or enumeration district, tabulations for the remaining 2888 people. They averaged 33 people, or about 6 families per district. At that level of meso data, as Dedrick noted, he could provide a “much better picture of the ‘cases’ to be handled.” By Friday, March 20, WCCA memoranda provided evidence that the mandatory evacuation phase was about to begin, with the first exclusion order targeting Japanese Americans on Bainbridge Island, Washington (United States Army, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943, p. 90). The third week in March was the last moment that Dedrick might have objected to providing the operational data for the mandatory phase of the evacuation, either in the form of the very fine meso data provided by the special tabulations or for any kind of individual identification for “mopping up” operations to find Japanese Americans who evaded evacuation orders. By then, the bill that would become the Second War Powers Act had passed the House and Senate and gone to conference committee, with the repeal of the census confidentiality provision in the bill. At least some members of Congress recognized the implications of the repeal language. On March 13, 1942, in the hearing on the bill that would become P.L. 503, Senator Warren Austin (R-Vermont), who was also a member of the House-Senate conference committee dealing with the Second War Powers bill, remarked in the course of a closed hearing of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs (U.S.  Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs 1942, pp. 8–9):

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… we are now considering ... legislation that would empower the Secretary of State to requisition from the Commerce Department, Bureau of the Census, what the census shows about these people. That would give an enumeration of the Japanese and it would also give names and residences, so that, when the Army makes its evacuation it can ... compare its list of evacuees against the census and have some knowledge of whether this has been an effective protection or not.

Although Senator Austin misstated the administrative path by which the formerly confidential census information would be obtained under the Second War Powers Act (the law, as enacted, provided that the head of “any branch or agency of the Government” could request such information if it was needed “for use in connection with the conduct of the war,” not merely the Secretary of State), the planned use, “mopping up” as the New York Times termed it, is consistent with the intelligence and military agency efforts since 1939 to access confidential census data. In fact, indirect evidence indicates that Dedrick was having qualms about enthusiastically responding to the Army’s demands. Dedrick wrote to J.C. Capt on March 19 seeking guidance on what he should do about the demands he faced from Bendetsen and DeWitt. Though this memorandum has not survived, Capt’s response has (General Records of the Department of Commerce 1942). On March 21, Capt sent a telegram to Dedrick at the Whitcomb Hotel: Reference 9th paragraph your letter of March 19, phrase “Confidential until released” is habitual label long used by the Bureau and need not be taken too literally under emergency conditions prevailing in wartime. Your instructions confirmed by wire to Colonel Bendetsen gave you authority to act for this Bureau. Any information available to you should be used in accordance with good judgment as dictated by the needs of the national war effort. I am relying on you to be prompt, practical and effective in the performance of your duties without being hampered by old Bureau habits, precedents, and practices that are not in complete accord with the urgent, rapidly shifting necessities of the times as they develop from hour to hour. Of course you understand that it is important to the Bureau that it receive official and public recognition for all its work. J. C. Capt – Director – Census.

That same day, Dedrick (1942) provided the operational guidance for the Bainbridge evacuation in a one-page memorandum to Bendetsen. This memorandum provided in tabular form 1940 Census data, by enumeration district, relating to the 281 Japanese and 48 Japanese family heads, by citizenship

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status, and the 40 Japanese farm operators, together with a map of Bainbridge Island with the enumeration district boundaries. Dedrick’s memorandum, Fig.  5.2, constitutes one element of the Western Defense Command’s “Evacuation Memorandum No. 1. March 21, 1942 was a Saturday. On Sunday, the Army “ordered the forcible evacuation of all Japanese from Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound ... effective March 30” (New York Times 1942).

Fig. 5.2  Memorandum for Colonel Karl L. Bendetsen, March 21, 1942. Dedrick’s memorandum was Exhibit A of Evacuation Memorandum No. 1, ordering the evacuation of Japanese Americans from Bainbridge Island, Washington. (Source: Dedrick, Calvert L. 1942)

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The antiseptic tone of the exclusion order documents stands in sharp contrast to the description of the events on the ground from the local Bainbridge Island newspaper. On March 26, 1942, the Bainbridge Island Review headline told the story from the local perspective: “Island Japanese Accept Army Mandate For Move To Owen Valley, California” (Bainbridge Island Review 1942; Densho Encyclopedia n.d.): Virtually blocked by Army regulations from any practical attempts at voluntary evacuation to places of their own choosing, 274 Bainbridge Island Japanese aliens and Japanese-American citizens were resigned last night to a forced evacuation, Monday, to Owen Valley, Calif.

The article continued discussing the frantic efforts of the local Japanese farmers to dispose of their property and salvage what they could of their fruit crops. Children in the local schools would not be able to complete the academic year and the related loss of revenue to the school system. The school board “directed P.F. Ruidl, school superintendent, to make whatever arrangements possible to assure the issuance of Bainbridge High School diplomas to the 13 Japanese seniors.” And the reporter noted the media frenzy surrounding the removal plans: “The unhappy event proved a field day for newspaper men from Seattle and they spent several days gathering ‘color’ stories and posing Japanese for photographs.” Despite the problems of managing the property of the evacuees, the evacuation went smoothly from the army’s perspective (United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982, p. 109). The model that Bendetsen and Dedrick had devised worked and was quickly followed by April 8 with five more exclusion orders for Los Angeles and San Francisco, particularly the waterfront areas, Long Beach, and San Diego County (United States Army Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943, p. 77). Sixty-eight hundred people were evacuated. Exclusion order no. 6, for parts of Los Angeles, was issued on April 7. The effective date of removal for the estimated 2500 people in the area was April 14. After April 7, there was a lull in the issuance of additional exclusion orders until April 20. Several factors slowed the pace of the evacuation. First, the assembly centers to house the evacuees were still under construction. Relatedly, the question of where the evacuees would go after being sent to assembly centers was also causing opposition from public officials in inland states reluctant to accept the “relocated” evacuees (de Nevers 2004, 136ff). At the same time, the Justice Department and the Army were at odds over the relative responsibilities for enforcing violations of the exclusion orders and

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the proper bureaucratic processes to be used to signal that an exclusion process was to begin. Local US attorneys and the FBI presumably had the responsibility to arrest individuals who might resist evacuation, and thus required advance notice of when an order was to be issued, and for determining who was responsible for setting enforcement procedures in motion. These arrangements were further complicated by the continued resistance within the Justice Department to the evacuation program as a whole and by emerging legal challenges to the evacuation. For example, on March 28, 1942, Min Yasui, a Nisei from Portland, Oregon, purposefully violated the curfew order then in effect by walking the streets of Portland at 11:00 PM. After a local policeman refused to arrest him, he recalled, he went to the “Second Avenue police station and argue/d/ myself into jail. I pulled this thing on a Saturday and didn’t get bailed out until the following Monday” (Quoted in Tateishi 1984, p.  71; Yasui v. U.S. 1943; United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982, pp. 114ff). Similarly, in Seattle on April 13, lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of Nisei Mary Asaba Ventura, claiming the curfew orders were illegal (Irons 1983, pp. 112–113). The lower courts in these cases ruled against the petitioners, but the challenges indicated that the Army could not be assured of total compliance with the curfew or evacuation orders. In other words, despite the large-scale evacuations of thousands of people, how could military officials and the public know whether the alleged disloyal needles in the larger Japanese American haystack had actually been captured in the evacuation net? And whose responsibility was it to make sure that all subversives were actually identified and evacuated? Bendetsen’s solutions to these problems were to relentlessly push ahead, forcing the long-term relocation problem onto the shoulders of Milton Eisenhower, head of the War Relocation Authority, while pushing hard for the completion of the assembly centers so the immediate evacuations could proceed. On the legal problems of enforcement, Bendetsen pressed Provost Marshal General Gullion and Assistant Secretary of War McCloy to pressure the Justice Department to enforce Public Law 503. In April, Bendetsen reported “some very disturbing news” to Gullion to the effect that the Justice Department was refusing to prosecute individuals violating exclusion orders. To McCloy he reported that Justice officials James Rowe and Edward Ennis “say that Public Law 503 is not constitutional, in their view” (Quoted in de Nevers 2004, 141–143). Once again, Bendetsen’s pressure bore fruit. On April 20, Justice and Army officials met with DeWitt to clarify notification and enforcement procedures for PL 503, and again, the Justice Department

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acceded to the Army’s demands. The Army would inform the FBI of impending exclusion orders, and the Justice Department would enforce violations of the exclusion order. To address the question of whether the geographic exclusion area methodology would in fact successfully evacuate everyone, Calvert Dedrick built into the evacuation process a population registration system to make up for the lack of registration on the Nisei before the roundups. Dedrick built a complex system of identification records on all the evacuees, designed to record their movement from the moment they came to a Civil Control Station to be processed for evacuation through travel to an assembly center and eventually to a relocation center or other disposition. Dedrick described the system in the Statistical Summary of the Final Report (United States Army. Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943, pp. 353–355). It is worth examining in detail. See Technical Note. Dedrick’s Social Data Registration form, like the census household-based enumeration, was organized by family or household. It contained the name and address of the household head, and the age, sex, place of birth, education, industry, and occupation of each member of the household. Other information collected included alien registration number, “physical condition,” and the details of the household’s property at the time of evacuation. These handwritten forms were typed in triplicate with one copy remaining in the WCCA and the other two going to the Assembly Center and the “escort officer” transporting the family to the Assembly Center. The WCCA copy of the form was used to create an individual-level “Master Index” card file for each individual, so that “it was possible…to trace [each individual] through each step of controlled movement,” from control station to assembly center to concentration camp. Dedrick’s Master Index file also secured information on births, deaths, transfers, and releases of individuals. It tracked individuals who had been interned or detained before the evacuation and sent to relocation centers and people who had reported they had migrated before evacuation. In other words, while the Army did not have credible name and address lists of Japanese Americans before the evacuation, Dedrick’s system was designed to guarantee that they would have a thorough tracking system once the evacuation process was complete. See Figs. 5.3 and 5.4. The flaw in the system came if Japanese Americans did not voluntarily evacuate when the army issued an exclusion order for the local community. Then there would be no record to track. And to address that problem, Dedrick ran a series of demographic analyses for each exclusion area to see if the number of people registering for evacuation matched his estimates from the

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Fig. 5.3  Social Data Registration Form. Family characteristics were entered on this form when people arrived at the “civil control station.” The forms were used to monitor people’s movements from roundup to relocation camp. (Source: Wartime Civil Control Administration, Civil Affairs Division 1942)

corrected 1940 census figures. For each exclusion area, as he had in the Bainbridge Island memorandum, he first estimated the number of Japanese Americans to be evacuated and then matched the counts of evacuees from the Social Data Registration forms against his estimated evacuation population based upon the “corrected” 1940 census counts.

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Fig. 5.4  The Mochida Family Awaiting Evacuation, May 8, 1942. Dorothea Lange photographed the Mochida family from Hayward, CA, as they awaited evacuation. The tags the individuals wore provided the link to the family number on the Social Data Registration Form. (Source: War Relocation Authority 1942)

The early analyses were not encouraging. For Bainbridge Island, Dedrick estimated there were 281 people to be evacuated; 227 evacuated, an error of 54 people or 19%. For the second exclusion area, 531 (or 18%) fewer people evacuated than he expected. In exclusion areas three and four, 225 more people evacuated than estimated. For the San Francisco waterfront, the fifth exclusion area, 358 (35%) fewer people evacuated than expected. By mid-­ April, his overall estimate of the numbers affected by the first six exclusion orders was off by 477 people or 5%. It is not clear whether Dedrick’s military superiors were aware at the time of the possible flaws in the evacuation methodology. There is no indication that there was any rethinking of the basic procedures beyond plowing forward with further exclusion orders and seeing how things proceeded. In the second half of April, when the relative responsibilities of the Army and civilian authorities were clarified, the exclusion process resumed with a vengeance. By the end of the month, six more exclusion orders had brought the total number of Japanese Americans evacuated to assembly centers to over 20,000.

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By May 18, the number of exclusion orders in effect was up to 81. By the first week of June, all of Military Area No. 1 had been evacuated, affecting 100,313 people (United States Army Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943, p. 357). As the evacuation pace accelerated, additional legal challenges emerged. On May 16, 1942, for example, Gordon Hirabayashi, Nisei student at the University of Washington, went to the local FBI office and informed them of his intention to violate civilian evacuation order no. 57 and refused to register for evacuation. As with earlier curfew violation challenges, Hirabayashi aimed to take the Army’s program to court to challenge the evacuation program. The American Civil Liberties Union was known to be searching for a suitable case to test the constitutionality of the evacuation program. But perhaps the most serious legal challenge to the program from the Army’s perspective came on May 30, 1942, when San Leandro authorities arrested Fred Korematsu for violating exclusion order no 34, which was effective on May 9. Unlike Min Yasui or Gordon Hirabayashi or others who openly filed legal challenges to the evacuation, Korematsu simply wanted to avoid evacuation, and had, in the previous weeks, altered his appearance to hide his Japanese heritage, and thus merge into the local population (Daniels 2004; Irons 1983). His example had to raise doubts about the evacuation process. How many other young men and women might be doing the same, and thus undermining the claim that the evacuation effectively protected the West Coast from subversion? There is no evidence that Dedrick commented on the emerging legal challenges to the evacuation, but he was clearly aware of the slippage between his estimates of the number of evacuees from a particular area and the actual “yield” from the Social Data Registration forms. In the second half of May, he sent a telling memo to his superiors, including Karl Bendetsen, justifying his methods (Karl Bendetsen Papers 1942). Titled, “Accuracy of over-all (sic) and specific exclusion order estimates of Japanese population,” the memo recounted Dedrick’s evaluation of the validity of his estimates to that date. “One of the most unusual and trying experiences of any statistician,” he began, “is to have his estimates immediately checked by complete counts.” He continued, “I have followed with considerable interest and at times dismay the success of the Statistical Division’s work in estimating the Japanese population of the West Coast and of counties and cities, from two-year-old Census data.” He then proceeded to acknowledge that his error rate for the first 40 exclusion orders was 9.2%, but that the more recent exclusion order estimates balanced out the errors in the earlier ones, and thus for “the grand total of 81 exclusion orders, we have underestimated

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the registration by only 3.7%.” He concluded by confirming that he expected 101,000 people would be the “realized registration” for Military Area No. 1. This memorandum was not a routine transmittal of administrative reporting. Dedrick’s reputation was on the line, as he noted. From the Army’s perspective, the simplest method was still for the Census Bureau to generate a list of all the information on Japanese Americans, including names and addresses, from the 1940 census, which Dedrick opposed. The Second War Powers Act was signed into law in late March 1942, so the preparation of such a list would no longer be a violation of law. Relatedly, in May 1942, the Army was interested in developing an overall population registration system and thus asked the Census Bureau to prepare a plan to build a complete population registration system for the United States (Papers of Philip Hauser 1942; Anderson 2015b). Dedrick, however, professional statistician and survey researcher that he was, recognized that generating such a list of Japanese Americans from the 1940 census might be acceptable in the heightened security environment of the war but would likely undermine compliance with the census in later years. Forty years later, Dedrick was still defending his methodology while testifying before the CWRIC in November 1981. He spent quite some time explaining how he dealt with the problem of “errors.” Dedrick described his role at the WCCA to organize “a statistical section in WCCA, with a mapping unit, with a tabulating unit, with a report, analytical unit, and with in effect a war room, in which we kept the officers in charge up to date as to where people were, how many of them moved from here, how many were moving back and forth under permits of one type or another and so forth.” He stressed repeatedly his efforts to “protect the confidentiality of the census” by “not giving an individual [punch] card to anyone,” and admitted that made his task of planning for and monitoring the evacuation difficult (Dedrick 1981, pp. 175–76; 184–85): I might add that ...the census was taken on the 1st of April 1940, and a year –to April, 1, 1941, of course, or say a year and a half, until December 7, 1941, had the usual amount of migration of the Japanese as did all other parts of the population, from one area to another, so that the census as of the time of Pearl Harbor, of course was different; and immediately after Pearl Harbor it appears that there was a moment of Japanese consolidating themselves in certain areas, and not being quite as dispersed as they were; and we ran into that when we tried to use the cards in the spring,--or the data for the individual townships or cities or blocks or whatever enumerations districts, in the spring of 1942. They, like anyone else in a time of crises, as a minority group, always tries (sic) to

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consolidate, this is sort of a sociological wall; and our first statistics estimate of how many people we would find in a given exclusion area, was always much more than we found in the exclusion area which was way out on the fringes. But as we got more toward the center of the city, and the larger towns, we got more than we had originally estimated from the census, a very interesting sociological phenomenon.

The Final Report made it appear all was well. By June 6, the evacuation of Military Area No. 1 was complete. But the success of Dedrick’s method was still unproven, since between 10,000 and 17,000 Japanese Americans were still unaccounted for in Dedrick’s registration system. Two days later, on Monday, June 8, 1942, Dedrick (1981) was transferred to the Army from the Census Bureau for a war service appointment. It would take some time to sort through all the registration information from the voluntary change of residence forms, the social data registration forms, and build the master index that would permit the Army to track everyone’s whereabouts. Over 5000 Japanese Americans lived in Military Area 2 according to the 1940 census, and many more had migrated to the area during March. They had been told that they would not be disturbed. But with so many people unaccounted for, it would be hard for the Army to claim that they had removed any military threat on the West Coast. The “controlled movement” and Dedrick’s job were far from done.

Technical Note: Final Report Description of Social Data Registration Form Procedures Social Data Registration Forms executed by social workers at the Civil Control Stations provided the basic registration record of the program. These forms were numbered in accordance with the pre-numbered tag which was given to the head of each family. On the Social Data Registration form appeared the following facts relating to the family as a whole: Residence address at the time of evacuation; the number of persons in the family who were moving together and were, therefore, registering together. The following facts were secured for each individual: Name; relationship to registering head of family; sex; age; place of birth; education; occupation (and industry); alien registration number (if an alien); and physical condition. Space was provided on the form for notation of the date of departure, the appointment for medical inspection, and for indicating the completion of necessary property arrangements at the

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Civil Control Station. A special box was provided for Assembly Center notations on each family. Three typed copies were prepared from the longhand original of this form. The distribution of these copies was as follows: One was sent in advance of the evacuee to the Assembly Center to which he was being moved; one was given to the escort officer in charge of the movement (from the Civil Control Station to the Assembly Center) to be delivered to the Center Manager; and one was sent to Wartime Civil Control Administration. When evacuees were transferred from an Assembly to a Relocation Center, one copy of the Social Data Registration accompanied them to become a basic record for the War Relocation Authority. Both the type and the amount of information secured on the Social Data Registration Form was the minimum necessary for Civil Control Station and Assembly Center operation purposes. Prior to the establishment of the War Relocation Authority, Wartime Civil Control Administration had prepared an individual registration form which was intended for use in securing complete information for Relocation purposes. This form, together with its instructions, was given to the War Relocation Authority for its use in Relocation Centers. All of the names on Social Data Registration Forms (and received by Wartime Civil Control Administration from various other sources) were entered on cards by Wartime Civil Control Administration. This Master Index File was initially compiled at the Tanforan Assembly Center, from June to September, 1942, by trained evacuee clerks. This evacuee staff copied, on a 4x6 inch index card, all of the pertinent information from the Social Data Registration form. These cards were then arranged by Assembly Centers and verified against the information given on the Assembly Center census record as of June 30. The Relocation destination of each evacuee was posted on his card later from the train list certifying his movement. Births were recorded on new cards and the names of infants were entered on the Social Data Registration Form of the mother. Deaths, transfers, and releases were also posted. At the conclusion of the program, therefore, it was possible to reproduce the essential identification data for each individual and to trace him/her through each step of controlled movement. Subsequently, they were added to the Master Index, cards for all Japanese persons who had been interned or detained by various authorities and who resided in the evacuated area at the time of apprehension. Parolees and others released from internment or detention were registered at Assembly and Relocation Centers and were added to the Index. Master Index cards were also made for all persons who migrated from the evacuated area and reported this to Wartime Civil Control Administration.

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Subsequent changes of address were posted as well as the original move. Since many evacuees who had moved immediately prior to registration at a Civil Control Station and the Social Data Registration Form gave their address at the time of evacuation, all intra-evacuated-area address cards were posted to their corresponding Index cards to provide additional pre-evacuation residence addresses.

References Anderson, Margo. 2015a. The American Census: A Social History. 2d ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2015b. Public Management of Big Data: Historical Lessons from the 1940s. Federal History 7: 17–34. Bainbridge Island Review. 1942. March 26. Available at Kitsap Regional Library, Bainbridge Review, 1941–1946, https://www.krl.org/kitsap-­history. Accessed 21 May 2019. Daniels, Roger. 2004. Prisoners Without trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang. Dedrick, Calvert L. 1942. Memorandum for Colonel Karl R.  Bendetsen, March 21, 1942. War Department, U.S.  Army, Western Defense Command, Civil Affairs Division, Wartime Civil Control Administration. Unclassified Correspondence, Box 15. File 093: Evacuation of Bainbridge Island. Record Group 338, National Archives, College Park, MD. ———. 1981. Prepared Statement and Oral Testimony [including an audio file] before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians on November 2-3, 1981. United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). Hearing Transcripts. 7/31/1980-6/30/1983. Record Group 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, 1893–2008, National Archives, College Park, MD. de Nevers, Klancy Clark. 2004. The Colonel and the Pacifist. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Densho Encyclopedia. n.d. Bainbridge Island, Washington. https://encyclopedia. densho.org/Bainbridge_Island,_Washington. Accessed 21 May 2019. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum. 1940. Census Bureau Brain Trust. Image 21: 78–98. http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/collections/ franklin/?p=digitallibrary/digitalcontent&id=4246. Accessed 29 Mar 2023. General Records Maintained by Calvert Dedrick, 1935–1942. 1941. Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, Entry 210, Box 217. Folder: Canal Zone. National Archives, Washington, D.C. General Records of the Department of Commerce. 1942. Entry 1, Box 144, File no. 67104. Record Group 40. National Archives, College Park, MD.

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Irons, Peter H. 1983. Justice at War. New York: Oxford University Press. Karl Bendetsen Papers. 1942. “Dedrick to Lt. Col Hass,” Box 320, Stayback File, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA. New York Times. 1942. Army Ousts Japanese Near Bremerton Yard. March 23, 1942. 1. Official Personnel Folder, Calvert Lampert Dedrick. n.d. National Personnel Records Center, Annex. Valmyra, IL: National Archives and Records Center. Papers of Philip Hauser [Entry 146]. 1942. Calvert Dedrick to Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen, May 9, 1942. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29. National Archives. Washington, D.C. Records of the Wartime Civil Control Administration. 1942. Calvert Dedrick to Karl Bendetsen, March 16, 1942. Civil Affairs Division, Western Defense Command, Record Group 338 [renumbered to 499], Central Correspondence 1942-1946, Unclassified, 040-050, File: 050 Statistics, Vol. #1 (Closed). National Archives. College Park, MD. Seltzer, William. 2011. Replacing Austin: A Study of Leadership Change at the U.S. Census Bureau. In Proceedings of the Section on Government Statistics, Joint Statistical Meetings, Miami, FL, August 2011, 2964–2978. Alexandria: American Statistical Association. Tateishi, John. 1984. And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American detention Camps. New York: Random House. ten Broek, Jacobus, Edward N. Barnhart, and Floyd W. Matson. 1954. Prejudice War and the Constitution. Berkeley: University of California Press. United States Army. Western Defense Command and Fourth Army. 1943. Final report, Japanese evacuation from the West Coast, 1942. Washington, D.C.: GPO. United States. Census Bureau. n.d. Age Search Service, https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/agesearch.html. Accessed 15 May 2019. United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). 1982. Personal justice denied: Report of the commission on wartime relocation and internment of civilians. (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office). Report reissued in 1997 by University of Washington Press with a new forward by Tetsuden Kashima. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs. 1942. “S. 2352.” Unprinted hearing report prepared by Ward and Paul, official reporters, 77th Congress, 2nd Session, March 13 1942, Available at Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study Collection (JERS), BANC MSS 67/14c FILM, Reel 4, Frame 69, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, CA. United States. Department of State. Central Files. 1941. Microfilm Series, C0031, Reel 15, 1940-1944, Decimal File no. 819.51A/115. National Archives. College Park, MD. War Relocation Authority. 1942. Central photographic file of the war relocation authority, 1942–1945. Record Group 210. National Archives. College Park, MD. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/537505. Accessed 20 Mar 2023.

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Wartime Civil Control Administration, Civil Affairs Division. 1942. Classified correspondence. Supplemental report on civilian controls exercised by the Western Defense Command. Box 9. Record Group 319.1. Army Staff. National Archives. College Park, MD. Yasui v. United States. 1943. 320 U.S. 115; 63 S. Ct. 1392, May 11, 1943, Argued, June 21, 1943, Decided.

6 Population Registration, Population Control, and Loyalty

[T]he purpose of the discussion [at the Census Advisory Committee] will be to explore the need for and the feasibility of a general population registration, the urgency of such a program in the war effort, the interests of various agencies in special and general registrations, and the role of the Census Bureau in a population registration system…. J.C. Capt, Director, Bureau of the Census to Lowell J. Reed, Chairman of the Commission on Vital Records, July 1, 1942, in General Records of the Census Advisory Committee (item 148); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC.

 ngoing Issues of West Coast Security O and the Fate of the Evacuees The breakneck pace of the forced evacuation of Military Area No. 1 from late March to early June 1942 did not allow much time for reflection on the long-­ term implications of the evacuation process, on the evacuated, on the army, on the civilian agencies that supported the evacuation, or on the economic and social life of the West Coast communities the evacuated left behind. There was a war on, after all, and the West Coast evacuation of the Japanese was only one thread of the larger story of the war. On that score, the grim war news in the Pacific continued unabated. Japanese naval forces continued to expand control east until the battle of Midway, June 3–6, 1942. Allied victory at Midway for the first time relieved the military threat to Hawaii, and hence the West Coast of the United States. At the same time, the Japanese advanced in the Western Pacific and conquered South East Asia as far as Burma. The Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), the Philippines, Indochina, and Burma, as well as main land China, were under Japanese control by mid-1942. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Anderson, W. Seltzer, Use and Misuse of the United States Census, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38619-0_6

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General DeWitt and Col. Bendetsen’s immediate response to any challenges to the legality or advisability of their evacuation policies was simply to forge ahead, bullying any foot draggers into compliance, mobilizing public opinion to support their policies, and dismissing criticism as potentially threatening the security of the West Coast. In the short term, the approach worked, pushing the evacuation pace forward in Military Area No. 1 and muting any opposition. The approach did not, though, solve the underlying issues raised by the evacuation. Where were the evacuees to go? Were all Japanese Americans presumptively disloyal and thus best kept in concentration campus? Or was it possible, once the immediate evacuation was over, to permit some or all evacuees to return to normal civilian life? When might they be able to return to the West Coast? Were potential saboteurs somehow slipping through the evacuation net? And when might the huge mobilization of military and civilian manpower deployed to the evacuation be redirected to other programs for the prosecution of the war? There were indications that these issues were on DeWitt and Bendetsen’s radar. They justified, for example, the almost $89 million in “total costs” of the evacuation program, according to the Final Report (United States Army Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943, pp.  350–1) with the truly remarkable decision to deduct “estimated salvage values, expected refunds and construction costs” from the total and to calculate that the “overall net cost of the program as described in the preceding paragraph per evacuee-­day in Assembly Centers, en route thereto and therefrom was $1.46.” DeWitt and Bendetsen claimed that the responsibility of the Western Defense Command was to secure the safety of the West Coast and that further management of the evacuees, once they were out of the area, was a civilian matter. Not surprisingly, that stance prompted civilian officials and policy leaders to tackle the relocation tasks, both to build large relocation camps for the evacuees and to develop plans for releasing evacuees from the camps to normalize their lives. But once having ceded responsibility for the long-term adjudication of the fate of the evacuees to other government officials, DeWitt and Bendetsen discovered that these officials, both military officials and civilians in the War Relocation Authority, had very different plans for the evacuated Japanese than they did. Most dramatically, Bendetsen and DeWitt learned that the War Department was considering allowing, or even requiring, Nisei to serve in the military, even while the evacuation was still underway. As the evacuation of Military Area No. 1 was nearing completion, then, it became clear that sharp policy differences on the fate of the evacuees were emerging between the WCCA and the Western Defense Command, on the one hand, and the War Department and civilian officials in Washington, on

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the other. There were a number of points of emerging conflict. First, DeWitt and Bendetsen were not satisfied that the evacuation of the Japanese from Military Area No. 1 was sufficient to secure the safety of the West Coast. Executive Order 9066 also covered the threat posed by Italian and German enemy aliens, and even as the Japanese evacuation was in progress, the Western Defense Command ratcheted up their planning for controlling German and Italian enemy aliens once the Japanese evacuation was completed. Officials in Washington, in both the War and Justice Department, saw no need to press the evacuation to the Germans and Italians. Then, there was the question of the potential “threat” posed by the Japanese population in Military Area No. 2 in portions of California bordering Nevada and Eastern Washington and Oregon. Despite DeWitt’s March claim that residents of Military Area No. 2 would not be disturbed, by May 1942, WCCA officials were questioning that decision and considering extending the evacuated zones further into the interior. Third, when pressed on the question of the ultimate loyalty of Japanese Americans, the Western Defense Command offered confused and even contradictory statements of their evaluation of the “dangers” on the West Coast. Clearly, not all Japanese Americans were national security threats. Most notably, the Japanese American Citizens League pledged their cooperation with the evacuation and offered to help guarantee the security of the West Coast. As the evacuation proceeded, these arguments began to be part of the longer-­ term debate about how the evacuees would be “relocated” into other jobs and places in the United States. At the time, when pressed as to whether officials could distinguish loyal Japanese from disloyal Japanese and thus regularize the situation of what was likely to be the vast majority of those evacuated, Bendetsen and DeWitt sometimes claimed that there was no time to do so, given the military threat. The machinery for evaluating individual evacuee loyalty simply couldn’t be put in place in the spring of 1942. At other points, they deployed a fundamentally racist argument, saying that the Japanese “character” was fundamentally “inscrutable” and untrustworthy, so it wasn’t worth trying to evaluate individual evacuee loyalty. Effectively, they refused to engage in a discussion or consider credible responses to the questions that would loom after the evacuation was completed. The strategy worked in the short term but came back to haunt DeWitt and Bendetsen after the summer of 1942. For in response, the civilian officials in the War Department and the War Relocation Authority did take responsibility, and commit to develop programs to relocate the evacuees, and develop methods of assessing loyalty (U.S.  Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982; Irons 1983; Muller 2007).

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Finally, Bendetsen in particular continued to press for more general measures of complete population control on the West Coast. He had repeatedly raised the issue of a population registration system as a method of managing national security and mobilizing industrial and military manpower for the war. On December 8, 1941, and early in January 1942, while still in the Provost Marshal General’s office, he had pressed the Justice Department for a new enemy alien registration. In late February 1942, as he went to San Francisco to implement EO 9066, the Provost Marshal General’s office pressed the Census Bureau to provide the name and address lists from the 1940 census. Calvert Dedrick’s initial West Coast assignment was “to assist Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt in preparing forms and procedures for the registration of enemy aliens in that area....” (Dedrick 1946). The forced evacuation that began in late March 1942 pushed the question of a total population registration from the immediate agenda, but Bendetsen continued to press for planning to continue. On all these issues, Calvert Dedrick and his staff in San Francisco shaped and supported the Western Defense Command’s vision of the alleged security dangers of Japanese and other potential fifth column threats to American domestic security. Dedrick was known as the “census man,” though he was a War Department rather than a Census Bureau employee between June 1942 and mid-1945. He remained in San Francisco and provided detailed data analyses and policy advice to the War Department and the Western Defense Command until March 1943. That month he transferred back to Washington, DC, to work for the Provost Marshal General’s office in a position at the Japanese American Joint Board. He remained in the War Department until the summer of 1945 when he returned to the Census Bureau. During this period, particularly from June 1942 through the Spring of 1944, he was frequently a crucial, though unobtrusive, participant in the conflicts over the relative power of General DeWitt and the WDC, the mechanics of determining methods to regularize the status of evacuees, and the responsibility for securing the safety of Americans from fifth column attacks. Throughout this work, he walked a tightrope. Once on the staff of the War Department, he was fundamentally responsible for implementing the policies of his military superiors. But, as a sociologist, high-level census official, and statistician, he still maintained professional commitments as he saw them to protect the integrity of the federal statistical system and its data, particularly confidential micro-level census information. He repeatedly claimed that he had managed these dual responsibilities and loyalties. He argued that he had

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deployed his knowledge of statistical analysis and the planning and management of data systems for the efficient control of the Japanese evacuees, and he claimed that he had not damaged the integrity of the statistical system and its data. The archival record reveals, however, that at other points, he found himself in a much more compromised situation. He faced pressures from his military superiors. Census Director J.C. Capt had pushed him “to be prompt, practical and effective in the performance of your duties without being hampered by old Bureau habits, precedents, and practices that are not in complete accord with the urgent, rapidly shifting necessities of the times....” And at times, he revealed his own personal negative predilections about the national security threats posed by Japanese Americans. The implications of DeWitt and Bendetsen’s proposed policies were extraordinarily harsh for both Japanese Americans, other alien enemies, or anyone else who might be caught up in an accusation of disloyalty. Those policies, if fully implemented, also threatened to remake the federal statistical system, including the decennial census, into instruments of surveillance and control (Anderson and Seltzer 2007). It is fairly clear that Dedrick recognized that he was walking a tightrope. He worked very hard to define his work as above reproach and compatible with ideals of the federal statistical system. His strategy for doing so was two pronged. On the one hand, as he did with the original planning for the evacuation of Military Area No. 1, he used mesodata and high-level data analysis and expertise to obviate the need for microdata for operational planning. He defended his method publically, claiming that he had both protected the confidentiality of the population census and met the needs of military superiors. On the other hand, he oversaw a series of administrative initiatives and policy proposals to either deflect or accommodate the continued pressure from his military superiors for harsher population control. Most of this work has not been part of the well-known history of the evacuation and incarceration, partly because the events took place in obscure bureaucratic struggles long after the dramatic events of December 1941 to summer 1942. But they are also unknown because Dedrick himself and other Census Bureau officials did not write or talk about this phase of their wartime experience, and thus it must be pieced together from the archival record. It is to these events that we now turn.

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 eneral Population Registration for Military G and Statistical Purposes On Monday, April 6, 1942, 1 week into the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans, Calvert Dedrick sent a telegram to Census Director Capt (Records of the Wartime Civil Control Administration 1942): Civil Affairs Division of the Western Defense Command has requested me to prepare plans for a more extensive population registration than is now operative. Stop. Cannot get personnel here for this phase of program. Stop. Officially request detail of Parker and Staudt to this office for two weeks. Stop. Desirable that they arrive not later than Friday evening of this week. Stop. Would also like to borrow Hansen on this for a week if you find it possible to release him. Stop. Letter follows with details. Stop.

Katherine Parker, Esther Staudt, and Morris Hansen were on the staff of the Statistical Research Division, which Dedrick had headed. Col. Karl Bendetsen acknowledged that the initial work on the idea of a general population registration system was carried out at his behest (Bendetsen 1942). Capt also would not have been surprised at this request. Just prior to his departure for San Francisco in late February 1942, Dedrick drafted a letter that Capt sent to Professor William K. Ogburn of the University of Chicago as the new Chair of the Census Advisory Committee that contained the following (General Records of the Census Advisory Committee 1942): There is a growing feeling that a general registration of the inhabitants of the United States may become necessary. The Bureau has given some thought to this problem and has assisted other agencies, most notably the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Alien Registration Division, in the preparation of forms and the working out of satisfactory office procedures.... Should the legislative authority be given and sufficient funds made available, I believe the Census Bureau is in a position to assemble the data and keep a registration file for every inhabitant in the United States. There is no question but that we are better prepared to do this work than any other agency.

Staudt was sent to San Francisco and stayed through October 1942 and by August was serving as the Assistant Chief of the Statistics Division under Dedrick. Instead of Parker or Hansen, the bureau sent Forrest E. Linder, then an Assistant Chief Statistician for Vital Statistics. Linder went on to a distinguished career in statistics. He joined the US Navy on military leave and

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assisted in the establishment of the Medical Statistics Branch in the Office of the Surgeon General, US Navy (Dobbin 1946). After the end of the war, he created and led (a) the population and vital statistics program in the United Nations Statistics Division, (b) US National Center for Health Statistics, and (c) the International PopLab Program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Linder completed a short mission (May 1–10) to the West Coast for the WCCA and submitted a 35-page report, “Memorandum Relating to a General Population Identity Registration for Military Purposes,” along with a brief covering memorandum to Dedrick (Linder 1942). The Census Bureau War History draft chapter covering the work of the Vital Statistics Division (Dobbin 1946), which was based on drafts prepared by that Division, indicates that Linder’s mission was undertaken at the request of Dedrick “to assist Dr. Dedrick in studying the problems involved in a general identity registration for military purposes.” Despite the relatively narrow focus implied by the title of Linder’s report, its contents were far broader, covering a range of identity, administrative, and statistical functions that could be accomplished by different sorts of population registration systems. It is clear from both Linder’s covering memorandum and his detailed report that he wrote for officials with a variety of interests in a population registration system and only a vague awareness of realistic possibilities. (In his covering memorandum, Linder observed, “as you know, the techniques and procedures for a registration can be planned only in general terms until a policy regarding the extent and the objectives of the system is more clearly formulated.”) It also becomes clear, as one reads Linder’s detailed report, that at least one military goal was to institute a universal civilian identity card (Linder 1942, pp. 4–5). The introductory section to Linder’s full report first stressed the “magnitude and complexity of the problem” of even “a general population identity registration” system; it then went on to reiterate the “necessity for a clear definition of purpose” (Linder 1942, pp. 1–3). After examining and rejecting two alternatives, Linder then concluded that: if military necessity or national policy requires that each person carry an identification certificate, then a new registration must be had for this purpose.

He then observed such a new registration and identity system would be of great value in other future registrations. However, before turning to the body of his report, Linder (1942, pp. 4–5) continued:

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Emphasis has already been given to the technical and administrative difficulties of general population registration for identity purposes. Mention should be made, also, of the political and psychological dangers. Traditional American thinking regarding freedom of action and thought might consider a mandatory identification register as an infringement of that liberty and the beginning of an American “gestapo.” The political implications or effects of a compulsory identity registration might be considerable, unless a substantial part of the public clearly saw the necessity for it. Also the possibilities of a “blacklist” inherent in an identification system are certain to arouse the opposition of labor groups. The weight to be given such considerations by the War Department during time of war is a policy matter beyond the scope of this memorandum. However during peacetime, they have appeared to be effective barriers in the minds of population statisticians who have always been interested in creating a population register.

The balance of Linder’s report was a detailed 30-page technical exposition with sections on “Types of registration systems,” “Specific functions of registration systems,” “Possible developments which might necessitate an identity registration,” “The desirable functions of a registration system for each assumed condition,” “A minimum identity registration system,” “An optimum identity registration system,” and “Additional technical problems to be considered.” Beyond the technical issues, several aspects of the report provide insight into the emerging debates about the evacuation of the Japanese and the larger issues of security on the West Coast. First, it referred in several places to issues related to the statistical, demographic, and analytical uses of data that might be generated from a population registration system. Second, it included among the 22 items listed in the final section for further consideration one surprising topic, “5. Value of loyalty oath.” Linder’s inclusion of material related to analytical uses of data seems a logical part of his report. But the matter of the loyalty oath has no obvious function in a registration system. Linder had already noted at a different point that the individual registrant might be asked to take an oath swearing to the veracity of the information provided. Rather, the “loyalty oath” listing indicates that even in early May of 1942, the statistical division and their military superiors were wrestling with the problems posed by the indiscriminate round up of thousands of American citizens and the complete lack of hearings for evaluating the loyalty of individuals (Linder 1942, pp.  6, 11, 13, 25, 30–33, 34). Immediately upon receipt of Linder’s report, Dedrick wrote to Bendetsen to give his own “findings and recommendations as an independent judgment

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of some of the factors involved in a general population registration.” Not surprisingly, given the letter he had drafted for Capt some months earlier, Dedrick stressed the usefulness of a general registration of population to meet many military and civilian needs, including the provision of “quantitative population data on a current basis.” He also considered that such a system was “administratively feasible” and could be accomplished at “relatively low cost.” Emphasizing that the policy problems were of more immediate importance than the technical ones, Dedrick urged that the matter be approached so as to allow for the possibility of establishing an integrated national system and avoiding uncoordinated efforts. “To accomplish this,” he concluded, “will require consultation with other agencies in Washington and may require Presidential or Congressional approval” (Dedrick 1942). In accordance with Dedrick’s assessment, the locus of further work on the proposal for a national population registration system then shifted back to Washington, DC. For example, in early June, Professor Ogburn, perhaps by prearrangement, wrote to Census Director Capt (Ogburn 1942): When I was in Washington recently, I heard several suggestions about the desirability of the U.S. Census Bureau keeping its central registration file for every individual in the United States. I wonder if this matter has ever been given any consideration by yourself or the other members and officers of the census [advisory] committee?

Capt responded quickly by calling a meeting of the Census Advisory Committee for July 10–11 on the “general subject of national registration and its possible implications for the Census Bureau.” Capt’s letter, which was drafted by Halbert L.  Dunn, Chief Statistician of the Bureau’s Division of Vital Statistics, indicated the possibility that closely allied subjects such as delayed registration of births, the annual sample census, and population estimates might also be considered (Capt 1942). On July 1, Capt also wrote to Professor Lowell J. Reed of Johns Hopkins, to invite him to participate in the meeting to express his “point of view and thinking” as Chair of the Commission of Vital Records and to indicate that (General Records of the Census Advisory Committee 1942): the purpose of the discussion will be to explore the need for and the feasibility of a general population registration, the urgency of such a program in the war effort, the interests of various agencies in special and general registrations, and the role of the Census Bureau in a population registration system.

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Beginning with the July 1942 Census Advisory Committee meeting, a year-long battle then followed that turned on issues of statistical needs and policies, administrative needs and the public’s response to those needs, bureaucratic rivalries, and human rights and privacy concerns. There were three primary sides to the ensuing controversies, and, at least in nascent form, each was reflected in the July 1942 meeting of the Census Advisory Committee. The first position, reflected most clearly in the views of Halbert Dunn, was that the primary registration problem facing the country was the burden placed on the existing local and state registration offices by the thousands of native-born Americans, who were attempting to establish their citizenship by seeking a delayed certificate of birth (General Records of the Census Advisory Committee 1942, Meeting of July 10–11, pp. 1–2, 4; General Records of the Census Advisory Committee 1943, Meeting of January 22–23). Proof of citizenship was required for most war-related work, and since prior to 1935 most births went unregistered, large numbers of adults were filing applications for the delayed registration of their own birth. The second position strongly and consistently advocated by Lowell J. Reed, both individually and as Chairman of the Commission on Vital Records, was that population registration was very important for administrative and statistical purposes (General Records of the Census Advisory Committee 1942–1943, Meeting of July 10–11, 1942, pp. 3–5, and Meeting of January 22–23, 1943; Papers of Philip, 1942–1943). In his zeal to advance the cause of general population registration, Reed often seemed to be hampered by a commission that, like Dunn, gave priority to issues related to birth and death registration. The third position, reflecting the views of senior Census Bureau management, including Leon Truesdell and J.C. Capt, was that general population registration simply represented an opportunity for the Census Bureau to both gain resources and “provide the nation with much needed current statistical information.” In advocating this position, the Bureau was also hampered by the fact that those with primary overall substantive responsibility for work in the area of population and vital statistics within the bureau had at best quite mixed views on the advantages of general population registration (General Records of the Census Advisory Committee 1942–1943). Linder noted in his memorandum that “population statisticians… have always been interested in creating a population register.” But “political and psychological dangers” were seen as “barriers” to creating such a system “during peacetime.” There had been a number of articles in major statistical journals in the 1930s exploring the possibilities of population registration systems (Methorst 1936, 1938; Thomas 1937). If public officials determined that

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“military necessity” required such an initiative, the barriers might fall. Officials in the War Department and statisticians had already been discussing the question of the role of statisticians and larger issues of war preparation. One of the sessions at the December 1940 annual meeting of the American Statistical Association (ASA) was organized around the topic “Problems of statistical control of the defense program.” Richard O. Lang, Chief Statistician in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War, delivered the lead paper and cited in its opening paragraph the presidential address by the ASA president in 1917, Allyn A. Young. That address discussed analogous challenges for the statistical community occasioned by World War I. Decrying the lack of statistical preparedness, he found when the country entered that war, Young speculated on “what might have been accomplished... when we entered the war, or even when our participation in the war came to be a serious possibility. After first calling for an up-to-date population census, Young went on to suggest that (Lang 1941; Young 1918, pp. 878–79): The population census, even, might well have been used as a starting point for continuous local population registers, under the control of the police or of local registration officials. In all this work it would be sufficient if the general tabulations showed classes only, but information respecting individuals … ought to be available, by means of proper formalities, to the appropriate branches of the War administration.

In the context of this pressure for implementing a registration system for “military” purposes, Linder’s provided a cautionary note. He emphasized the need for clarity about objectives and the potential privacy and human rights threats lurking in the population registration proposal. The privacy and human rights issues were taken up, one way or another, by the other major participants in the registration proposal policy debates. For example, Dunn included the relationship between the proposed registration activities to the “police function and espionage in the minds of the public” among a list of dangers for the bureau related to the proposal. The Commission on Vital Records and Reed, in arguing for the population registration proposal, considered it necessary to attempt to counter Linder’s “American gestapo” comment (General Records of the Census Advisory Committee 1942–1943; Papers of Philip Hauser 1942–1943). The three conflicting positions were ultimately resolved in the Bureau of the Budget in the first few months of 1943. In the end, there was no general population registration system. The major urgently needed improvements in the system of vital registration were introduced, and the Census Bureau lost

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its responsibilities for vital statistics and related registration work. The report of the Bureau of Budget marked the formal end of the population registration proposal and pointedly included a warning of the need to avoid any system that would “lead to the compilation of a secret dossier on the American people” (U.S. Bureau of the Budget 1943).

 xtending the Implementation of EO9066: E Policies for German and Italian Aliens and Military Area No. 2 The February 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066 was written broadly. It provided General DeWitt broad authority to “prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as... the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.” The Secretary of War’s February 20th implementation instructions to DeWitt prioritized planning for the evacuation of the Japanese ancestry population and for “/a/ny persons, whether citizens or aliens, who are suspected for any reason by you or your responsible subordinates, of being actually or potentially dangerous either as saboteurs, espionage agents, fifth-columnists or subversive persons.” DeWitt was ordered to deal with “Class 3: German Aliens” later, and Stimson particularly noted that “In carrying out your duties under this delegation, I desire, so far as military requirements permit, that you do not disturb, for the time being at least, Italian aliens and persons of Italian lineage except where they are, in your judgment, undesirable or constitute a definite danger to the performance of your mission” (United States Army, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943, pp. 26–29). Despite these instructions, Italian and German enemy aliens were required to report change of address to the post office as called for in Public Proclamation No. 1. Dedrick’s statistical division undertook the preparation of data tabulations for the alien German and Italian population on the West Coast and reported these along with those on the Japanese ancestry population in his daily reports. For example, even before the WCCA was up and running, Dedrick reported on March 11, 1942, to Col. W. F. Magill, on the “Statistics on German and Italian Aliens and All Japanese in Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington by Broad-Age Groups.” He called his unit at the time,

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“Western Defense Command, Provost Marshal’s office, Statistical Unit.” On April 12, Dedrick wrote to Bendetsen complaining that he needed the alien registration data from the Department of Justice and Immigration and Naturalization Service, so he could can plan for evacuating German and Italian enemy aliens. He reported that he had requested the information on March 13 and felt the INS was not providing the required cooperation. In May, he was still pressing for the data, “The spot map requested by General DeWitt will be prepared as soon as possible and no effort will be spared to secure detailed local data on Germans and Italians” (Records of the Wartime Civil Control Administration 1942). He pressed ahead even as his superiors had conceded that there would be no mass evacuation of German and Italian aliens because of opposition from the White House, the War Department, and the Department of Justice (U.S.  Commission on Wartime Relocation Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982; De Nevers 2004). Dedrick also prepared reports on the Japanese population in Military Area No. 2. On April 30, 1942, he prepared a table titled “Estimated Japanese Population in Western Defense Area Exclusive of Military Area No. 1, April 1, 1941 and April 23, 1942.” That day, he estimated that there were 11,123 Japanese Americans in Military Area No. 2, roughly 10 percent of the Japanese ancestry population on the West Coast. On May 19, 1942, the day after his memo on the accuracy of his estimates for the evacuation of Military Area No. 1, Dedrick prepared a memorandum for Bendetsen: “Japanese Population of Military Area 2.” He estimated that once Military Area No. 1 was evacuated, “A total of 10,810 Japanese will remain in the states of Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington.” “California will have 9,108,” he noted. He continued (Records of the Wartime Civil Control Administration 1942): I believe that consideration should be given to treating that section of Military Area 2 which lies within the state of California somewhat differently from that which lies within the states of Oregon and Washington. The Japanese colonies remaining in California will be in territory quite like that from which all other Japanese have been removed, namely the edge of Imperial and Sacramental Valleys. On the other hand, the principal colonies of Japanese in Oregon and Washington are well removed, both by distance and by mountains, from the strategic areas from which the original Japanese in these states were removed. To evacuate Military Area 2 of the states of Oregon and Washington would extend the evacuation program much farther into the mountains and away from the coast than the eastern boundary of the state of California, which itself, more or less, marks the mountainous region which separates the other states.

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Many commentators have noted the “lame” explanation of the reversal of the decision to permit Japanese Americans to remain undisturbed in Military Area No. 2 (U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982, p. 111) and speculated that racist pressure from the California anti-Japanese lobby pushed the Western Defense Command to reverse its position. But Dedrick’s language above is echoed in the explanation in the Final Report (United States Army Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943, p. 15): In California the evacuation program encompassed the entire State—that is to say, not only Military Area No. 1 but also Military Area No. 2. Military Area No. 2 in California was evacuated because (1) geographically and strategically the eastern boundary of the State of California approximates the easterly limit of Military Area No. 1 in Washington and Oregon..., and because (2) the natural forests and mountain barriers, from which it was determined to exclude all Japanese, lie in Military Area No. 2 in California, although these lie in Military Area No. 1 of Washington and Oregon.

Reading these explanations in the context of Dedrick’s concern for the success of the evacuation, one can see another issue. If some 10,000 Japanese Americans were still on the loose quite close to Military Area No. 1 and if there was no ready data system to determine who among the evacuated might have been missed, the mesodata methodology that Dedrick had developed might be fundamentally flawed. In the end, without extending the evacuation to Military Area No. 2, Dedrick found it difficult to claim that the round up was successful. In short, even as the active evacuation of Military Area No. 1 was ongoing, three parallel discussions about population control were underway under the radar. By mid-May 1942, Dedrick and the Western Defense Command had proposed a full-scale population registration system for the United States and had sent the proposal to Washington for further consideration. Preparation for the control of German and Italian alien enemies began. And third, DeWitt and Bendetsen debated and then committed to extending the evacuation to Military Area No. 2 in California. The first two initiatives, the rapid initiation of a population registration system and the evacuation of German and Italian aliens, were either stopped decisively or slowed considerably by opposition from Washington officials. The Western Defense Command had greater success in implementing the evacuation of Military Area No. 2 and announced the program on June 2 by banning further migration in or out of the area (Ibid., p. 105).

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Dedrick thus still faced lingering questions about the effectiveness of his evacuation method. In response, he turned the efforts of his staff to convert the information collected on the Social Data Registration forms into a full-­ scale population control register.

Building a Population Register of the Evacuated After the completion of the evacuation of Military Area No. 1, the WCCA paused the process of forced evacuation until early July. In June, Dedrick worked to respond to the backlog of reports from the evacuated areas and put the population control system in place for further tracking of individuals. The problems were not insignificant. On June 14, 1942, for example, Lt. Col. Irwin Clawson reported to Lt. Col. Ira K. Evans about discrepancies in the reported numbers of evacuees at various points (Records of the Wartime Civil Control Administration 1942): Considerable doubt exists as to the number of persons who were received at the various centers due to the inability of the Sector Commander, the Central Station Manager and the Center Manager to agree upon the number of evacuees in several instances. For instance, in the movement on May 29 to Parker under Order 86, the Project Manager reported 612 arrived, while the Sector Commander and the Control Station Manager reported 941 sent. While the other discrepancies are not as great as this, there are many of them.

He concluded: “Recommend that the Manager of each center and Project make a field check of all present and report the evacuees by name and U.S.E.S number.” On June 18, 1942: Dedrick responded to Evans on the Clawson memo. Dedrick laid out a procedure for listing evacuees and then added a procedure for checking the identities of the evacuees (Ibid.): Upon receipt of the lists, the Statistical Division will check the names with the Master Index cards which will be prepared at the Tanforan Center beginning Monday, June 22. Master Index cards will also be made for all persons who have not been evacuated from Military Area 1: i.e., those recorded on reports from institutions, exemptions, etc....At a later date we hope to secure from G-2, WDC & 4A the name and certain other identifying information for all Japanese who have been sent to detention or concentration camps. At the same time, we will transcribe cards for individuals who voluntarily left Military Area 1, after March 2, 1942. This will provide us with a most complete and accurate index of Japanese in the United States. In accordance with Colonel Bendetsen’s

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Memorandum on this subject, this index will remain in the possession of WDC and a duplicate file will be transmitted to the office of the Provost Marshal General.

By August 8, 1942, nine more evacuation orders for Military Area No. 2 were published and implemented. The operational planning phase for the evacuation was complete. In response, on August 4, Dedrick restructured the Statistical Division for new responsibilities in population control. “The completion of the Japanese evacuation phase of the WCCA program and the assumption by this Division of certain new duties requires a change in its organization and procedures,” he wrote. He established six sections with a total staff of 29 people (Ibid.): (1) General Administration (2) Index and Records (3) Special Records (4) Repatriation (5) Reports and Drafting (6) Typing and Supplies The notable responsibilities of Sections 2 and 3 provide evidence of the work of this new phase of population control. Section 2, Index and Records, with a staff of eight: will have charge of the Master Index of Japanese evacuees of Social Data Registration forms, and of such other records as may be available for individual identification and search purposes. This section will conduct searches for address, age, citizenship and other facts desired for Japanese evacuees. A file of such searches will be kept by the section. Ordinary replies to requests for information concerning evacuees will be prepared by the section. The section has complete charge of work on the Master Index now being compiled at the Tanforan Assembly Center, and is responsible for the prompt and satisfactory completion of the index.

Section 3, Special Records, with a staff of five: will be responsible for recording, investigating, and preparing statistical reports on all transfers of Japanese from Assembly Centers to Relocation Centers, on releases for private employment, for the vital statistics of Assembly Centers, for deferments from evacuation, for delayed registrations, and for such other special cases as may be assigned to it from time to time.

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The section did more than aggregate statistical analysis. Dedrick also specified that: Upon completion of its records of such cases [e.g., investigations], the Section Chief will transmit the records to the Index and Record Search Section for the revision of the Master Index, and for inclusion in the general population files.

With this new organizational structure, Dedrick poured out report after report for his military superiors, mostly providing the kind of basic statistical tabulations he had been preparing since March. But additional memoranda reporting the results of investigative work provide a flavor of the division activity as the WCCA embarked on a more ambitious program of monitoring and control of the Japanese evacuees, including searching for individuals within the camps or for those who might have escaped the evacuation net. In late October, for example, Flora Clayton, Chief of the Index and Records Section, reported to Dedrick on the “Special Confidential List” she had received (Ibid.). “We are attaching hereto a list of names which is the result of our search of 309 names given to us October 17,” she noted. She continued: Since we’re given only names with no identifying information other than the fact that these were all male citizens approximately between the ages of 18 and 30, we have included in the list all possibilities which we found in our files under each name. For example, we had two Toshio Yamashita’s. We also had the problem of the alternate use of English and Japanese given names by the Japanese. We were unable to find Masato Fukumoto. We listed Fred and Joe Fukumoto. Either of these may also be known as Masato. We followed the same procedure when we were unable to locate the English name given in the list. For example, in place of Tom H.  Kunishi we found Hiroshi Kunishi. We have given all information available in all cases in order to assist in positive identification.

The memorandum has no additional information on the origin of the request, but these activities are those of an investigative unit, not a statistical unit. They also cast doubt on DeWitt and Bendetsen’s repeated claims that once evacuees were removed from the West Coast, they became the responsibility of the War Relocation Authority and the Western Defense Command bore no further responsibilities. In fact, the Western Defense Command placed the responsibility for the welfare of the evacuees on the WRA but retained the right to insert itself into questions of “security” and control.

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Through the fall of 1942 and winter of 1943, Dedrick continued to request information and records from other agencies that might have name and locational information on the Japanese ancestry population prior to evacuation, including from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) files of those interned before the forced evacuation. By January 1943, Dedrick received records on Japanese internees from the Los Angeles INS district. As his work neared completion, he proudly reported the results to Howard L.  Field, Director of the Los Angeles District of the INS (Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Los Angeles District): We are now able to complete our files for the Japanese who have been removed from the West Coast. Those files contain data not only concerning the evacuees who were removed to Assembly Centers and Relocation Centers, but also the names and addresses of persons who voluntarily left this area prior to evacuation. Heretofore we have also added the names of all internees and detainees from the Seattle and San Francisco offices of your service. With the addition of these names from your office we are in a position to give directory (sic) and some identification service for nearly all of the Japanese who were in the evacuated portion of the states of Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington.

And he offered help to Field: “I trust that we can continue to be of service to you in locating former Japanese residents of this area.”

Identification and Loyalty By the fall of 1942, Dedrick and the WCCA could begin to see the end of their immediate responsibilities for the Japanese evacuation. By early November, all the evacuees had been transferred from Assembly Centers to Relocation Centers (United States Army Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943, pp. 278ff). Dedrick reported to Census Director J.C. Capt that the Provost Marshal General’s reimbursement agreement with the Census Bureau was terminated on October 31, 1942. He informed Capt that the Provost Marshal General’s office would handle any remaining billing, “which would include all of Mrs. Staudt’s expenses which have not already been billed.” Dedrick anticipated that there might be future work requested from the bureau (Records of the Wartime Civil Control Administration 1942): Should we have any further work to be done by the Bureau of the Census–and it is possible that we may have–it is suggested that a direct reimbursement

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a­ greement be entered into between the Wartime Civil Control Administration and the Bureau of the Census covering such work.... [W]hen the occasion arises, the proper letters can [be] written.

Dedrick also reported that “I was transferred from the Office of the Provost Marshal General to the Office of the Secretary of War (reporting to Assistant Secretary McCloy) as of October 26, and... my title has been changed from Chief Statistician to Chief Economist. This raised me from a P-7 to a P-8 and took care of the part of the extra expenses which I have incurred because of my detail to the Pacific Coast.” Dedrick remained in San Francisco working for the WCCA for another 5 months. During that period, he took up two new tasks. First, he played a major role drafting and editing the 618-page Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942, DeWitt and Bendetsen’s narrative and defense of their policies (United States Army Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943). Second, he continued providing data tabulations and policy advice on the status of the evacuees, now focused specifically on the emerging debates about the “loyalty” of the evacuees and procedures for their release from or segregation within the camps. Dedrick’s work on the Final Report was completed in the winter of 1943. His work for the loyalty program began while he was still assigned to the Western Defense Command in San Francisco and continued in the Provost Marshal General’s office in Washington in a staff post for the Japanese American Joint Board from spring of 1943 through 1944. In the latter work, Dedrick confronted just how difficult it was to develop procedures to evaluate evacuee loyalty and undo the assumptions behind the mass evacuation. Many studies have examined this phase of the evacuation controversies, particularly in the context of the emerging court challenges to the legality of the evacuations, the administrative practices of the War Relocation Authority, and the proposals to establish an all-Japanese fighting force for the European theater (Hosokawa 1969, 1982; U.S.  Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982; Irons 1983; Muller 2007). It is a confusing story, with many threads and a cacophony of arguments about when and whether to release the incarcerated Japanese. For the current discussion, it is useful to explore the role Dedrick played and the implications of the mass evacuation for resolving the fate of the evacuees. As with other aspects of Dedrick’s work, the evidence is hiding in plain sight, generally seen as simple background information that the more formal policymakers in the Justice Department, War Department and the War Relocation Authority, in particular, all needed for their work. On closer

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examination, though, the statistical analyses and Dedrick’s policy memos once again played a crucial role in shaping the overall debate. As with Capt’s deployment of the 1940 census tabulations just after Pearl Harbor or Dedrick’s plan for the evacuation, the decisions shaped the character of what became the “loyalty review” program and defined what it meant to be a security risk or eligible for release from the camps. In the most active phase of transferring the evacuees to the relocation centers, the questions of the immediate transportation, housing, and basic care of over 100,000 people consumed the administrative time of War Relocation Authority officials. Once that phase was complete, the ultimate disposition of the evacuees came to be a more pressing policy matter. Dillon Myer, the WRA Director who had replaced Milton Eisenhower, took the term “relocation” seriously. Evacuees were to be “relocated” away from the West Coast but, he hoped, not held in camps for the duration of the war. That stance, echoed also within the War Department by key officials like Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, prompted discussions in the summer of 1942 and beyond on procedures for returning the evacuees to civilian life or, in the case of draft age Nisei, to eligibility for active military status. And that question raised the problem of assessing individual “loyalty,” which DeWitt and Bendetsen had dismissed in the context of mass evacuation. Some procedure had to be created to separate the “sheep” from the “goats” and to estimate just how many sheep and goats there were within the Japanese ancestry population. (Myer 1971; Muller 2007). In the language of statistical hypothesis testing, the evacuation method of sweeping all Japanese Americans into the net of subversion and potential disloyalty, because of their race generated massive Type I errors, or false-positive classifications. Some substantial proportions of the evacuees were not disloyal or a “security threat” and should not be incarcerated, particularly since the original decision to evacuate was based on such a crude racial stereotype. The problem of incorrect classification of individual cases is a common one in statistical testing. Some false positives are inherent in any testing situation. As students of statistics – and the law – know, the problem of accurate decision-­ making with imperfect knowledge cannot be solved completely, because trying to do so generates a different type of error, a Type II or false-negative error. The false-positive error overclassifies the innocent as guilty (or the loyal as disloyal). The false-negative error allows a guilty person to be deemed innocent, or the disloyal person to be deemed loyal. Avoiding the false-negative error at all costs was DeWitt and Bendetsen’s approach. Relaxing the racial standard for defining the disloyal by evacuating on a more restricted basis,

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they argued, would permit individuals to escape the net and continue to pose a security threat to the West Coast. There is a partial solution to the problem of overclassification when the need to avoid a false-negative error is deemed important. That is to conduct a second, more sensitive test, to validate the original judgment of guilt or disloyalty. The Department of Justice ABC list arrests of alien enemies in the early weeks of the war in effect used such a mechanism. After arrest on short notice, to remove the alleged immediate security threat, the detainee received a hearing to adjudicate whether he or she would be formally interned. If the judge ruled the individual was not a security threat, the individual was released from custody. Officials in the War Department and the War Relocation Authority effectively were proposing setting up the second testing situation, to find a way to determine individual loyalty and thus release substantial proportions of the evacuees from custody. The administrative problem the officials faced was twofold. First, they had to develop a mechanism for testing individual evacuees for release. Second, and more practically, they had to estimate how extensive a program to develop, whether it would affect all or just some evacuees, and which agencies would undertake it, how, and when. Officials needed answers to these latter questions to determine the administrative resources required to move forward. The concrete planning for the evaluation of the loyalty of individual evacuees came into focus quite slowly, after several false starts in the spring and summer of 1942. The brief mention of a “loyalty oath” metric in the May 1942 proposal for a population registration system hints at the issue, and by July 1942, more serious, though quite general, efforts were being discussed on developing concrete plans. On July 20, 1942, for example, WCCA official Lt Col. William Boekel prepared a memorandum and tabular material for Col. Bendetsen on “Induction of Persons of Japanese Ancestry into United States Army.” On July 22, Bendetsen followed up with a draft memorandum to the Chief of Staff, US Army, outlining a potential policy. Tab B of the document contained statistics, with estimates of the number of Nisei and Kibei. Data came from the 1940 census; Los Angeles port of entry figures were used to estimate the number of Kibei estimates of draft age for 1940, 1942, and 1944. Bendetsen reported estimates of 21,200 native-born Japanese males in the Western Defense Command area in 1942; he estimated 14,740 were “Nisei” and 6360 were “Kibei.” The administrative issues would be substantial for evaluating the loyalty of over 20,000 individuals. Boekel and Bendetsen proposed a simple initial mechanism to identify the disloyal and the loyal. The Kibei and Issei were “potentially disloyal” and Nisei were classed as “presumptively loyal.” There were several versions of these memoranda with slightly

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different numbers, indicating several drafts were done (Daniels, ed. 1989, vol. 9, no page; 442nd Regimental Combat Team Legacy Website 1942; Koenig 1942). By the fall, the issue became more pressing. During the summer of 1942, the War Department and Selective Service had stopped accepting the Nisei into the armed forces. In the fall, however, Dillon Myer supported the resumption of the draft, and in November, the Japanese American Citizens League urged the resumption of the Selective Service draft for Nisei. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy and his staff worked on more concrete plans. On November 6, 1942, for example, Col. M. W. Pettigrew, from McCloy’s office, phoned Col. Bendetsen about the proposed “Japanese recruitment for all Japanese division.” Pettigrew wanted numbers of possible recruits. Bendetsen responded that it would take 4–5 days to a week to develop the tables, “…because it simply can’t be developed that fast. We have been working on it for about two weeks already; started it before Dedrich (sic) got back here and when he came back I told him to get busy on it.” On November 17, 1942, Dedrick reported to Bendetsen and McCloy in a six-page memorandum, “Potential Military Service of Nisei Japanese.” In an interesting example of bureaucratic challenge, Bendetsen deleted Dedrick’s sixth bullet or “Recommendations,” “By direction of the General, paragraph 6 was removed, as containing recommendations not within the province of this headquarters. KRB.” Dedrick had recommended that the War Department create the unit “under Caucasian command;” use voluntary enlistment; separate Kibei and pro-Japanese individuals “who might block or seriously hamper the success of this program.” He also recommended that a small “staff of officers familiar with life in Assembly and Relocation Centers, Japanese psychology, and Army recruitment procedures be appointed by the War Department to formulate policy and supervise this program” (Daniels, ed. 1989, vol. 9, no page). As DeWitt reported to the Chief of Staff, US Army, on November 20, “Recently the Chief of the Statistical Division of the Wartime Civil Control Administration was in Washington on official business. At that time, he had an information interview with the Assistant Secretary of War. The Assistant Secretary of War expressed a desire for the development of statistics similar to those requested by the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2” on the potential “number of American-born Japanese who might be expected to volunteer for military service and for a statement of views on the methods which might best be employed in raising such a force from among evacuees and other American-­ born Japanese.” DeWitt continued, “The statements of opinion in the

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memorandum are chiefly those of the person who gathered the statistics and do not necessarily reflect my own views.” Dedrick estimated there were 18,727 Nisei males of draft age in the camps. These men would comprise the pool of evacuees to be tested for loyalty. He also estimated the actual yield of volunteers from such a loyalty program. He adjusted the figures by estimates of marital status, physical fitness, and the number of “native-born Japanese [who] feel some degree of loyalty to the Emperor of Japan because of education, Japanese military training, Shinto worship, membership in alien organizations, etc.” He used information from the Social Data Registration forms to estimate the number of married men and information from the San Francisco Recruiting and Induction Center for 1941 on the proportion of Japanese selectees who were rejected for physical reasons (9.1%). On the question of loyalty, he noted: There are no statistical data on loyalty to the United States, or loyalty to Japan. The writer believes that under present circumstances at least one-third of the native-born group would be of doubtful loyalty to the United States (emphasis in original). In this one-third would be found the Kibei (educated in Japan), the children of persons detained in Army and INS camps, and those who are embittered by the evacuation. This group is increasing because of pro-Japanese pressures in Centers.

With these corrections, Dedrick estimated there were 9,200 potential recruits in the camps. Dedrick also recommended several “necessary” steps to implement a recruitment program. He noted (Ibid.): The segregation of at least the anti-American elements must be a first step for any volunteer recruiting. Not only must the Nisei be relieved from the jibes and threats of the Kibei and pro-Japanese Issei, but the prospective volunteers must be given the assurance that these groups will not run the Centers and dominate their wives, children, and parents during their absence.

The plan for an all-Japanese combat unit moved through bureaucratic channels in the War Department in Washington in November and December 1942 and was approved for implementation on January 1, 1943. The program then went to a planning team to develop procedures for identifying Nisei volunteers, evaluating their loyalty, and recruiting them into the armed forces. The War Relocation Authority, which was also debating how to assess loyalty and streamline procedures for releasing evacuees from the camps, proposed expanding the program beyond draft age men and suggested that all inmates

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in the camps ages 17 or older fill out a questionnaire, which would then be available for use to release the individual. Military and WRA officials agreed to the expansion. Suddenly, a targeted selective service registration program for roughly 20,000 evacuees would explode in size to register 75,000 evacuees, male and female, Issei and Nisei. The basic form for the draft age Nisei was developed by the military, applying a model Selective Service used for aliens. DSS Form 304 A, “Statement of United States Citizen of Japanese Ancestry,” contained 28 questions. The War Relocation Authority version, WRA Form 126 Rev, War Relocation Authority Application for Leave Clearance, was basically the same and contained 33 questions used for Issei and female Nisei. By late January 1943, the forms were in place, and the registration was scheduled for early February. In the rush to launch the program, it appears that officials in the WRA and the War Department were only dimly aware of the complications they were about to face, much less how the evacuees would respond to this new initiative (Muller 2007; California State University Japanese American Digitization Project 1943). There is indirect evidence that Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy and his staff had some inkling of the administrative and technical issues before them and turned to Calvert Dedrick to address them (Daniels, ed. 1989, vol. 9, no page). On January 21, 1943, Col. William Scobey and Capt. John Hall called Karl Bendetsen, requesting Dedrick’s presence on the East Coast for training the staff who would undertake the registration and developing mechanisms to process the mounds of forms that were about to be generated. Hall explained to Bendetsen that he thought Dedrick “could be of assistance to these officers and men that are going to visit these centers. He could give them pointers probably to filling out these questionnaires,… [a]s to the mechanics of it.” He expected that there would be 3,000 questionnaires to process for potential recruits for the combat team in “a period of 3 to 4 weeks...quite a job.” Hall continued, “I had in mind that Dr. Dedrick could do a little weighting of answers to questions.... And you could perhaps arrive at some mathematical formula which would be very helpful. At least if the score ran up against an individual beyond a certain limit you could be pretty damn sure you didn’t want to examine him on an individual basis.” Responding to Bendetsen’s question as to when he wanted Dedrick in Washington, Hall answered, “As far as addressing these teams in concerned (sic), we’d want him for Wednesday or thursday (sic) of next week.” Bendetsen balked at sending Dedrick and said he needed him to work on the Final Report: “Dr. D is my editor...he is coordinating the work of the staff and the whole staff’s working on it...” Bendetsen asked if the registration teams could come to the West Coast to be trained, and Hall demurred, noting

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that McCloy asked specifically for Dedrick. After further discussion, Bendetsen conceded. Two days later, Bendetsen notified Hall that Dedrick would leave Wednesday, January 27, and return to San Francisco on January 29. The loyalty registration program reached the camps in early February 1943. Only then, as many commentators have shown, did government officials recognize that the two loyalty questions on the forms, Nos. 27 and 28, were problematic, if not fundamentally flawed (Muller 2007; Thomas and Nishimoto 1946; U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982). Officials seem to have only modestly revised the Selective Service form used for aliens, where the two questions made sense in the context of inducting aliens into the US armed forces. Question 27 read: “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?” Question 28 read: “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attacks by foreign and domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or disobedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?” To ask the question of American citizens made no sense. It was even more problematic to ask these questions of female Nisei, and Issei evacuees, who after all, were still aliens ineligible for citizenship. The first WRA version of these questions read: 27. If the opportunity presents itself and you are found qualified, would you be willing to volunteer for the Army Nurse Corps or the WAAC? 28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?

Quickly, question 28 was revised to read: “Will you swear to abide by the laws of the United States and to take no action which would in anyway interfere with the war effort of the United States.” But by then, the damage had been done. The registration process set off turmoil inside the camps, as families and friends wrestled with the implications of filling out the forms. Ultimately, over 20 percent of the Nisei males answered the loyalty questions negatively, refused to fill out the form, or left the question unanswered (U.S.  Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982, p.  195). Despite the controversies, recruitment for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team proceeded, though with fewer initial recruits from the West Coast and more from Hawaii, where there had been no evacuation.

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The processing of the registration forms for the combat team, though, was a simple matter compared to the much larger loyalty review anticipated for evaluating individuals who had asked to leave the camps for civilian work. In January, when the joint War Department and War Relocation Authority program was set up, officials created a Japanese American Joint Board (JAJB) to screen individual applications for leave. The board had initial members representing the FBI, the WRA, the Provost Marshal General’s office, the Office of Naval Intelligence, Army Intelligence (G-2), and the War Department General Staff. Each officer was to have one vote. The work of the board was staffed from John McCloy’s office, and Calvert Dedrick was assigned to the task of developing a method of evaluating what ultimately amounted to almost 40,000 requests for release. Dedrick returned to Washington, DC, in March 1943 to take up the position. As he left San Francisco, Col. Karl Bendetsen and General DeWitt acknowledged the indispensable role he had played in the administration of the evacuation and the preparation of the Final Report. With a “Dear Doc” cover note, Bendetsen sent a personal letter to Dedrick, thanking him for his contributions to the evacuation, along with copies of the draft letters from General DeWitt to Dedrick and John McCloy (Karl Bendetsen Papers 1943). “Your participation in the Japanese evacuation program has been from the beginning [sic],” Bendetsen wrote. He continued: As Chief of the Statistical Division, Wartime Civil Control Administration, you fulfilled a position of great responsibility. It is difficult to recall any single phase of evacuation operations which did not rely heavily upon the immediate availability of accurate information concerning the composition, characteristics, activities, and disposition of West Coast Japanese....In addition, the wide range of your experience and professional knowledge proved invaluable in developing the countless number of forms and procedures which aided so materially in the successful accomplishment of the mission assigned this agency.

DeWitt concurred: I cannot commend too highly the superior manner in which you discharged your heavy responsibilities. Yours was a material contribution in the successful accomplishment of a task of great magnitude, for which there was neither pattern nor precedent.

Despite this vote of confidence, this time Dedrick’s seeming statistical wizardry could not solve the logistical and conceptual issues he faced in his assignment at the JAJB.  As Muller (2007) has shown in detail, Dedrick

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recognized early on that it was going to be a bureaucratic nightmare to evaluate promptly 40,000 loyalty cases using the information on the loyalty registration forms and whatever information existed in the files of the military surveillance agencies and the FBI. The work was to be done in Washington, DC, far away from the evacuees themselves, who had no input into the process beyond filling out the original leave forms. On top of that, there were fundamental differences of opinion among the members of the board about where to place the burden of proof for loyalty or disloyalty. Dedrick addressed these issues by developing scoring systems from the information available that were intended to automate the review process. His initial system was a point scoring process that classified the evacuee according to their responses on the registration form. The system allowed the staff of the board to score the information on the registration form on more than 30 dimensions (Muller 2007, pp. 46–48). It was likely too complex for implementation. By May 1943, to expedite processing, Dedrick replaced it with a simpler color classification, placing each case into a “white,” “black,” or “brown” category according to a short four-question classification. White cases merited indefinite leave and provisional approval to work in a war-related industry and did not require further review at a formal board meeting. Black cases were rejected for leave by staff without further individual board review. Brown cases were sent to the Western Defense Command, to check their individual files for individual information, and were then adjudicated individually by the board. The board debated the details of the classification system into the summer of 1943 and began to meet in earnest to process cases in August, meeting twice a week in September and October and once a week until May 1944, when the board was abolished. To manage the task, the board had to process almost 4000 evacuee requests a month, an almost overwhelming task. In the end, the board recommended against release in 12,404 cases, out of the 38,449 processed. Ultimate authority whether to release an evacuee rested with the War Relocation Authority, which “ignored half ” of the board recommendations against release and “released the people anyway.” Almost one third of the board decisions were negative, just about the same proportion that Dedrick initially estimated in November 1942. The CWRIC report archly noted (Muller 2007, p. 53; U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). 1982, p. 202): That no espionage or sabotage occurred among this group of over 6,000 released despite JAJB objection suggests the doubtful value of the JAJB’s work. Clearly, it erred on the side of security, once again to the detriment of evacuees.

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Or in the language of statistical decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, the procedures of the JAJB also overclassified cases and generated false positives. The WRA, ignoring the board’s recommendation, created a natural experiment to test the validity of the JAJB procedures. As the CWRIC report commented, “it erred.”

References 442nd Regimental Combat Team Legacy Website. 1942. Memorandum to Chief of Staff, July 22, 1942. http://www.the442.org/images/RG499b07f5.pdf. Accessed 22 June 2019. Anderson, Margo, and William Seltzer. 2007. Challenges to the Confidentiality of U.S. Federal Statistics, 1910–1965. Journal of Official Statistics 23 (1): 1–34. Bendetsen, Karl R. 1942. Letter to J.C. Capt, July 4, 1942. Papers of Philip Hauser (item 146); US Census Bureau, Record Group 29; National Archives Building, Washington, DC. California State University Japanese American Digitization Project. Japanese American Archival Collection. 1943. WRA Form 126 rev., War Relocation Authority Application for Leave Clearance. https://cdm16855.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/ collection/p16855coll4/id/7645. Accessed 17 Feb 2023. Capt, J.C. 1942. Letter to Dr. W. F. Ogburn, June 18, 1942. General Records of the Census Advisory Committee (item 148); US Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC. Daniels, Roger, ed. 1989. American Concentration Camps: A Documentary History of the Relocation and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1942–1945. Vol. 9. New York: Garland Publishing. Dedrick, Calvert. 1942. Memorandum to Colonel Karl R.  Bendetsen, May 9, 1942. Plans for a general registration of the civilian population. Papers of Philip Hauser (item 146); US Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC. ———. 1946. Memorandum to [John V.] Dobbin: Activities of the Bureau of the Census relating to the War Department evacuation of Japanese from the west coast, July 1. Records relating to the War History Project (item 156); US Bureau of the Census. Record Group 29. National Archives, Washington, DC. De Nevers, Klancy Clark. 2004. The Colonel and the Pacifist: Karl Bendetsen, Perry Saito, and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Dobbin, John R. 1946. Vital Statistics – War History. Typescript of draft chapter initially prepared by the Vital Statistics Division. Records relating to the War History Project (item 156), 23–25. Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC

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General Records of the Census Advisory Committee (item 148); U.S. Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC. Hosokawa, Bill. 1969. Nisei: The Quiet Americans. New York: W. Morrow. ———. 1982. JACL in Quest of Justice. 1st ed. New York: W. Morrow. Irons, Peter H. 1983. Justice at War. New York: Oxford University Press. Karl Bendetsen Papers. 1943. Stayback File, Box 314. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Archives. Koenig, Theo J. 1942. Koenig to Lt. Gen. John L. Dewitt, July 14, 1942, “Military Utilization of United States Citizens of Japanese Ancestry,” in the digital collections of the Karl Bendetsen Papers. Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, CA. https://digitalcollections.hoover.org/images/Collections/75100/HIA-­R -­ BENDETSEN-­KARL-­R-­5B-­2-­399-­0.pdf. Accessed 22 June 2019. Lang, Richard O. 1941. “Problems of Statistical Control – Military Aspects.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 36(213): 11-17. Linder, Forrest E. 1942. Memorandum relating to a general population identity registration for military purposes and covering letter to Calvert L. Dedrick, both dated May 9, 1942. Papers of Philip Hauser (item 146); US Census Bureau, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC. Methorst, H.W. 1936. The New System of Population Accounting in the Netherlands. Journal of the American Statistical Association 31 (196): 719–722. ———. 1938. The New System of Population Accounting in the Netherlands. Journal of the American Statistical Association 33 (204): 713–714. Muller, Eric. 2007. American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Myer, Dillon S. 1971. Uprooted Americans; the Japanese Americans and the War Relocation Authority During World War II. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ogburn, William F. 1942. Letter to J.C. Capt, June 9, 1942. General Records of the Census Advisory Committee (item 148); US Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC. Papers of Philip Hauser (item 146), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Los Angeles District. Administrative Files Relation to Enemy Aliens. 1941–1948. Box 174, File 15942/2041: “List of all Japanese Interned in this District...Western Defense Command and Fourth Army.” Record Group 85. National Archives Pacific Region, Laguna Niguel, CA. Records of the Wartime Civil Control Administration. 1942. Civil Affairs Division, Western Defense Command, Record Group 338 [renumbered to 499], Central Correspondence 1942–1946, Unclassified, 040-050, File: 050 Statistics, Vol. #1 (Closed), National Archives, College Park MD. Thomas, Dorothy S. 1937. Review of De Bevolkingsboekhouding by J.L.  Lentz. American Sociological Review 2 (1): 117–118.

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Thomas, Dorothy Swain, and Richard S. Nishimoto. 1946. The Spoilage. Berkeley: University of California Press. United States Army. Western Defense Command and Fourth Army. 1943. Final report, Japanese evacuation from the West coast, 1942. Washington, DC: GPO. United States Bureau of the Budget. 1943. Measures Relating to Vital Records and Vital Statistics. Message of the President of the United States Transmitting the Report of the Bureau of the Budget (House Document No. 242, 78th Congress, 1st Session, June 24, 1943). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). 1982. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office). Report reissued in 1997 by University of Washington Press. Seattle: University of Washington Press, with a new forward by Tetsuden Kashima. Young, Allyn W. 1918. National Statistics in War and Peace. Quarterly Publications of the American Statistical Association 16 (121): 873–885.

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Census data have had an increased importance in the past year during which the human and material resources of the Nation have been mobilized for war. The participation of the Bureau in the war effort, while paralleling that of World War I, has been much greater than it was 22 years ago. Although most of the regular reports of the Bureau of the Census have been found to be directly related to the war effort it has, nevertheless, been necessary to obtain more detailed information or to provide special compilations of data to serve the administrative needs of war agencies….The conversion of the Bureau to a war program basis has been greatly facilitated by the provisions of the Second War Powers Act of 1942, and by the presence in the Bureau of trained professional and supervisory decennial census personnel and decennial census equipment, which have been diverted to the preparation of statistics required for prosecution of the war. The Second War Powers Act authorizes the Secretary of Commerce to make information on census schedules for individual respondents available to war agencies for use in connection with the conduct of the war. (United States Department of Commerce 1942.)

 onverting the Census Bureau to a “War C Program” Basis The Census Bureau’s participation in the evacuation and incarceration of the West Coast Japanese Ancestry population has, not surprisingly, been a major focus of the historical debates about the role of statistical agencies during periods of war and national emergency. That role, however, should not obscure other evidence of what bureau officials did and were called upon to do during wartime. As noted in previous chapters, officials in the surveillance agencies, both civilian and military, had long been interested in accessing the information in decennial census schedules for investigating subversion, disloyalty, and threats

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Anderson, W. Seltzer, Use and Misuse of the United States Census, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38619-0_7

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to the national security of the United States. They could point to such access in World War I, when the Census Bureau provided the Selective Service System with information on the ages of potential draft dodgers. Officials in regulatory agencies, from the Bureau of Corporations to the Justice Department to the Women’s Bureau, had also sought and sometimes received information from census schedules for regulatory purposes. In response, from the 1880s on, officials in the statistical system argued against such disclosures because they recognized the damage such uses would wreak on compliance with statistical surveys. They pressed Congress successfully to put confidentiality provisions into the Census Act to prevent disclosures. They also successfully pressed for Presidential Proclamations each decade from 1910 onward, which pledged that the information on a census schedule would not be used for purposes of taxation, regulation, or investigation of any individual or establishment. The successful institutionalization of confidentiality protections did not, however, prevent each new generation of officials in the surveillance and regulatory agencies from trying again. We have seen the White House and the Justice Department press for statutory changes in the Census Act as soon as the war broke out in Europe in the fall of 1939 and mount a continuing campaign to open up micro-level economic and demographic census data first for national defense and eventually to support the war effort. The effort met stiff resistance from officials in the statistical agencies and in Congress. It took the Roosevelt administration almost 3 years for their efforts to bear fruit in late March 1942 with the passage of Section 1402 of the Second War Powers Act. By then, even though Census Director Capt had expressed his willingness to use the information on the census schedules for rounding up the Japanese ancestry population on the West Coast, putting the administrative machinery in place to use micro-level census information on a mass scale to evacuate Japanese Americans would have delayed the evacuation a considerable time, perhaps months. And perhaps in that time, the hysteria that drove the public support of the evacuation might have dissipated. Calvert Dedrick’s mesodata evacuation methodology made it possible for the bureau in later years to acknowledge their role in the evacuation planning, but deny they had violated the legal and ethical norms then in place governing data provision and use. The fact remains, then, that there are still many unanswered questions about what the bureau did during the war, beyond its role in the evacuation and incarceration of the West Coast Japanese ancestry population. The Secretary of Commerce’s Annual Reports acknowledged that the bureau played a central role in the overall war effort. The provisions of Section 1402 were in effect from the spring of 1942 through the spring of 1947. Here we

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explore how routine bureau release practice and the provisions of Section 1402 were integrated into the services the agency provided in tabular releases, special tabulation, and technical support for the war effort.

Census Data Release Workflow in the 1940s The usual census data release workflow practice of the 1940s depended on paper, preliminary releases, often in loose leaf, or press release form, on a flow basis as the mechanics of collection, data editing, table shell design, and actual tabulation were completed. The preliminary releases were then compiled into thick, generally hard-back books, which were delivered to libraries, universities, and other government agencies and sold through the Government Printing Office. Such workflow made for permanent, authoritative, final publication reflected in the rows upon rows of census volumes in government depository libraries. Such an information production system was not well suited to the emergencies of the war. Census officials recognized it had to change fast, and it did, as J.C.  Capt demonstrated in his December 1941 releases on the Japanese ancestry and German and Italian alien population from the 1940 census. The new model was providing accessible information for the “war program,” producing what the requestor needed quickly from the enormous infrastructure of information the bureau controlled. In the heightened and fraught work atmosphere of the war, even in an agency like the Census Bureau known for documenting its activities, record keeping of what happened day to day was difficult. At the time, such “accounting” sometimes took a back seat to pushing the report, advice, or support out to the rest of the federal government as quickly and efficiently as possible and moving on to the next request. Formal publication of the annual reports of the Secretary of Commerce, for example, was suspended for the 1943–1945 reports. Those reports are available in typescript in archival form, resuming print publication in 1946. Thus, rather than an official accounting of the service that the bureau provided to the “war program,” one must rely on more scattered evidence. One of the most useful windows into the world of data release for the war appears in two detailed compilations: “Gratuitous Work Done by Bureau of the Census for War or Other Agencies Charged with Execution of Some Phase of the War Program December 1941 Through November 1942” and “Work Done on Reimbursable Basis by Bureau of the Census for War or Other Agencies Charged with Execution of Some Phase of the War Program December 1941 Through November 1942” (Papers of Philip Hauser 1942).

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The listings encompass 96 pages, approximately 10 listings per page, likely some 18 reports a week. The memorandum lists the “requesting agency” and a “brief description of work” and demonstrates just how extensive the work was. The requests ranged from quite simple tabulations, e.g., the “public employment in defense areas,” for the Office of Civilian Defense or the “tabulation on knitted underwear, men’s and boys’ underwear, 1939” for the War Production Board [on pages, 3 and 70, in the “gratuitous work” listing] to complex reports like the one on p. 66 to the War Production Board for: Number of 1-family structures by central heating for States in rationed (fuel) areas, urban and rural; Institutional population of the U.S. in 1940; estimated population of the U.S., by months; estimates of the civilian population by States, May 1, 1942; census tract statistics for the District of Columbia; number of farms by States and characteristics of housing in the U.S. in 1940; data on housing facilities and home equipment in the U.S.; number of individual garages in the U.S.; and number of persons 14 years old and over not related to the heads of the households in which they live, by labor force status and institution status, for the U.S., 1940.

The requests frequently mixed queries that would require tabulations from the economic, population, and institutional censuses. The specificity of the requests reflected the war planning administrative goals of the requesting agencies throughout the federal government, both civilian and military, and also represent requests to access the technical expertise in the bureau, the subject matters experts as well as the capacity for rapid, efficient machine tabulation. They range from requests about national patterns to more targeted requests for a very specific local area, e.g., the “number of aliens for 6 counties near Pittsburgh, Penna.,” for the War Department p. 74, or “the number of Jewish people in Fort Wayne, Indiana” for the Office of War Information, p. 73. We did not uncover equivalent reports for the years 1943–1945, though there is no reason to suspect that such activities slowed down as the war progressed. The 1942 report demonstrates the integration, as the Commerce Secretary reported, of the bureau’s statistical reporting system as a rapid information support system for the operating agencies. And as part of that integration, the provisions of the Second War Powers Act eliminated the usual ban on the release of micro-level information, or other support that would reveal micro-level information such as the address lists used for the economic censuses. The blurred line of just what the bureau could and would provide has not received systematic historical treatment, and our analysis here is more

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heuristic than systematic. The experience, even partially documented, however, provides important evidence on the interplay of user needs, residual respondent protections, and the role of officials who had to protect the statistical system and serve the “national interest” as defined at the time.

 he Integration of Section 1402 of the Second T War Powers Act into Census Data Release Practice Section 1402 of the Second War Powers Act 9 (United States Code Congressional Service 1943) specified: That notwithstanding any other provision of law, any record, schedule, report, or return, or any information or data contained therein, now or hereafter in the possession of the Department of Commerce, or any bureau or division thereof, may be made available by the Secretary of Commerce to any branch or agency of the Government, the head of which shall have made written request therefore for use in connection with the conduct of the war.

The phrase “notwithstanding any other provision of law” referred specifically to the confidentiality provisions of the 1929 Census Act. As originally enacted, the Second War Powers Act was set to expire in 1944, but Congress subsequently extended it periodically at the President’s request until 1947. The same section also specified that “The President shall issue regulations with respect to the making available of any such record, schedule, report, return, information or data, and with respect to the use thereof after the same has been made available.” These regulations were provided in the form of Presidential Executive Order 9157, “Regulations with respect to the Making Available of Records, Schedules, Reports, Returns and Other Information by the Secretary of Commerce, and with respect to the Use Thereof After the Same Have Been Made Available,” dated May 9, 1942, about a month and half after the law’s enactment.  The Executive Order prescribed the proper form for such requests and specified arrangements for reimbursing the Commerce Department for the costs incurred in providing the requested information. The Executive Order also provided that: If the information requested [from the Census Bureau] by the head of the department or agency is of a statistical character, a copy of the request shall be submitted to the Division of Statistical Standards of the Bureau of the Budget

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[the predecessor of OMB’s Office of Statistical Policy] at the time the request is submitted to the Secretary of Commerce.

and The Secretary of Commerce shall inform the Division of Statistical Standards of his action upon each request made, under section 1 of this order, if the information is of a statistical character.

The statutory language of Section 1402 and corresponding regulations in Executive Order 9157 implied that the Commerce Department and the Census Bureau would keep written records of the requests for and transmissions of confidential data. When the requests were of a “statistical character,” the Commerce Secretary had an additional reporting requirement to the Division of Statistical Standards in the Bureau of the Budget. Such reporting requirements should have made it possible to audit the uses made of Section 1402 for statistical purposes. In fact, as noted above, the records that were kept and archived are very uneven. Nevertheless, it is possible to trace requests for microdata in the transmittal files of the Chief Clerk of the Commerce Department, through whom all interdepartmental communications were to be routed, since Section 1402 directed that agencies seeking confidential census information make their requests to the Secretary of Commerce. One can then track the requests through the requesting agency’s records. We do not believe the Chief Clerk’s files are complete. We made selective efforts to track requests in the Chief Clerk’s files to the files of the requesting agency and Census Bureau records to understand how the releases were reported and used. We hypothesize that once the data transmissions of Section 1402 became routine, the cumbersome reporting channels were streamlined, and requesting agencies often contacted Census officials directly. Nevertheless, the current extant evidence of the bureaucratic routing and procedures used to provide unprotected microdata under the authorizations of the Second War Powers Act reveal how the provision functioned during the Second World War. They thus bring to light how, during the war, the statute removed the traditional firewall between the data collection, processing, and publishing activities of the Census Bureau and the administrative activities of operating agencies. The primary use of the Section 1402 authorizations appears to be requests for information on individual firms in the economic census schedules of the Census Bureau, in dozens of requests for the release of confidential economic

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data and their transmission to various administrative agencies for planning, procurement, and the administration of economic policy during World War II (Anderson and Seltzer 2009). An example illustrates the processes. On April 15, 1944. Undersecretary of Commerce, Wayne Taylor, instructed Census Director, J.C. Capt, to “make available to Mr. Hans Klagsbrunn, Executive Vice President of the Defense Plants Corporation, information on the production of chemical products, particularly chlorine and caustic soda, by individual plants, from the Biennial Census of 1939, and from the latest monthly production record available for these chemicals, by plants.” Taylor suggested that Capt “allow Mr. Klagsbrunn or his designated representative” to inspect “appropriate documents on file in your Bureau” (General Records of the Department of Commerce 1944). There are hints of these arrangements as well in the 1942 compilations of “Gratuitous Work Done” (Papers of Philip Hauser 1942, p.  40). See for example, the entry noting a “List prepared of the names and addresses of the 40 salt manufacturers who reported at the Census of Manufactures, 1939,” for the Office of Price Administration or the “Statement showing name and address, industry in which classified, and the production in quantity and value of quinine in 1939” for the War Production Board. It thus appears then that the individual-level releases authorized under Section 1402 were integrated into the larger universe of tabulated releases as requested by other agencies in the federal government for war-related work. The requested information was provided in a fairly routine manner between 1942 and 1945. Many agencies made requests, and the available correspondence indicates easy communication between the Commerce Department and Census Bureau and the requesting agencies. Agency officials in later years indirectly acknowledged the provision of these data. Calvert Dedrick, for example, in his testimony before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) in November 1981, admitted that under the Second War Powers Act, “the Administration and the War Production [Board] and other economic statistic agencies – it was a regulatory agency – were given power by the Congress to collect and compile statistics which the Bureau of the Census was already collecting and compiling” (Dedrick 1981).

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 eleasing Information from the Population R Census Schedules The administrative procedures put in place to release confidential economic information to the war planning agencies were available as well when officials from the surveillance agencies needed information on individuals in the records of the population census. The Commerce Department’s Chief Clerk’s correspondence documents requests from the FBI and Justice Department, and the “Work Done” listings include requests for tabulations from Naval Intelligence, the Provost Marshal General’s Office, the War Department, and the War Relocation Authority. The implications of the surveillance and national security requests, however, are different from those for economic planning and procurement. Rather, the surveillance requests were either for identifiable information on a particular person or for macro- and meso-level data on allegedly dangerous population groups, e.g., non-citizens. Census population records did not, and do not, contain information on political affiliations of individuals, their political behavior, or their religious identity. Thus, for an FBI request on a particular individual, the information gleaned might be meager indeed, perhaps confirming or contradicting information in an investigatory file. There are examples, as well, in the Chief Clerk’s records of the bureau reporting they could not find material on the individual requested. Nevertheless, the wartime procedures the bureau used to compile and release individual-level microdata from the population schedules represented a dangerous expansion of the power of the national government to monitor the civilian population. And unlike Calvert Dedrick’s very public methods using meso data to round up the Japanese ancestry population on the West Coast, the individuals targeted for surveillance using microdata information gleaned from Section 1402 releases might never have even known they were being surveilled. A particularly complex and poignant example in the Chief Clerk’s correspondence from mid-1943 illustrates the issues involved. In response to an alleged threat to the President’s life, it started with a request from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to provide information to the Secret Service on the Japanese ancestry population in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. And it ended with the bureau’s provision of a list of 79 “Japanese Residing in the Metropolitan area of Washington, D.C., April 1, 1940” to Morgenthau and the Secret Service. One of the individuals listed was Iwao Moriyama, a well-regarded Nisei biostatistician in the Vital Statistics Division of the Census Bureau.

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 equesting a List of Japanese Americans R in Washington, DC, from the 1940 Census Morgenthau’s disclosure request appears at first reading to be oddly timed. Why, 20 months into the war, was the Secret Service suddenly concerned with a threat to the president by Japanese residents in the Washington, DC, area? In fact, the Secret Service request was connected to the raging debates about the loyalty and potential release of the now incarcerated Japanese Americans and the controversies over the creation of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and the WRA program for releasing people from the concentration camps. The West Coast politicians and anti-Japanese lobby that had whipped up fears of fifth column activity by the Japanese ancestry population in the months after Pearl Harbor were deeply distressed by these emerging plans for release, and renewed their campaign of anti-Japanese propaganda in early 1943. General DeWitt lobbied strenuously against the resumption of the draft for Japanese American men and the relaxation of the bars on individuals returning to the West Coast. He was joined by organizations such as the Native Sons of the Golden West and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce which once again mobilized to keep the Japanese American population incarcerated for the duration of the war (Grozdins 1949; U.S.  Commission on Wartime Relocation Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982). Their congressional allies also mobilized to investigate the WRA and oppose any softening of sentiment on the threat posed by the incarcerated Americans. In this context, the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, also known as the Dies Committee after its Chairman, Martin Dies, held a series of hearings on the West Coast and in Washington, DC, in June and early July of 1943. Drawing on the Committee’s extensive investigative files, the Committee staffers shared stories with interested journalists about alleged disloyal Japanese Americans, alleged spy rings in the camps, the WRA actions in “pampering” camp residents, and the collusion of “New Deal” cabinet members with these activities. A number of witnesses at the Committee hearings repeated or elaborated on these charges and called upon Congress to keep the Japanese locked up. The hearings and, even more, the investigative “findings” leaked by Committee staff were extensively covered in the West Coast press. On June 20, 1943, the Los Angeles Times reported that an evacuee, Juichi Uyemoto, had made threats against President Roosevelt and that a Japanese American living in Washington, Paul Yozo Abe, had ties to the Japanese embassy (Los

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Angeles Times 1943). The story alleged that “on a train to the Owens Valley [i.e., Manzanar] relocation camp ... Hawaiian-born Kibei, Juichi Uyemoto voiced the feeling that ‘we ought to have enough guts to kill Roosevelt.’” The source of the newspaper account of this presidential threat was a letter written by Karl Yoneda, a fellow Manazanar inmate who wrote he was sitting three seats away from Uyemoto when the threat was made on March 23, 1942. Both the letter and an August 1942 account of a meeting in the Manzanar camp at which Uyemoto spoke are available in the House Committee files (Yoneda 1942). The Los Angeles Times story also referred to the unspecified “activities of the local J.A.C.L. unit [i.e., the Washington, DC chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League], including Paul Yozo Abe, former clerk at the Japanese Embassy who was recommended for a scholarship at a local university by the Tokyo Foreign Office.” Further information about the Committee and its investigation of the threats posed by persons of Japanese ancestry may be found in Ogden (1944) and Goodman (1968), although neither referred to Uyemoto’s alleged presidential threat or to the Los Angeles Times story. On June 25, 1943, the Secret Service opened an investigation into the matter. Frank J. Wilson, the head of the Secret Service, wrote to John J. McGrath, Supervising Agent of the Secret Service’s Washington DC office requesting “an extensive investigation be conducted to identify all known Japanese in Washington, D.  C. and environs for the purpose of the security of the President of the United States” and an investigation of two specific “Japanese,” Juichi Uyemoto and Paul Yozo Abe (Wilson 1943). In response to Chief Wilson’s request, Secret Service Agent Lee A.  Montgomery was assigned to carry out the investigation and he rather quickly determined that neither Abe nor Uyemato posed a threat to the president. WRA records indicate that Juichi Uyemoto was single, born in 1902, and had lived in Los Angeles prior to his confinement in Manzanar. He was born in Hawaii and both his parents were born in Japan. Much of his education was in Japan and his primary occupation was classified as Skilled Occupations in Production of Beverages (Records of the War Relocation Authority n.d.). By August 12, 1943 Montgomery (1943) was able to report that Abe had moved to New York. According to the Office of Naval Intelligence, Uyemoto, who was “alleged to have made a threat against the life of the President has been taken from Manzanar Relocation Center ... to the Los Angeles County Hospital for mental observation, and ... he was committed to the Camarillo State Hospital, Camarillo, California as the victim of dementia praecox [i.e., schizophrenia] of the catatonic type.” Despite Montgomery’s report of Uyemoto’s ominous psychiatric diagnosis and instutionalization,

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Uyemoto appears to have survived to 1969 (U.S. Social Security Death Index, n.d.). According to Montgomery, Uyemoto’s removal from Manzanar and commitment took place in October 1942, which was about 7 months after his alleged presidential threat in March 1942. There the matter might have ended, but Wilson’s initial directive had also asked for an investigation of “all known Japanese” in Washington, perhaps motivated by a reprise of the 1942 anti-Japanese American hysteria reflected in a number of Spring 1943 press accounts. Accordingly, Montgomery’s investigations continued on broader grounds and he reported on his progress to his superiors from August 1943 through at least the fall of 1944. Under this broader mandate to investigate “all known Japanese” in Washington, DC, Montgomery contacted officials from a variety of agencies, including head of the Employment Division of the War Relocation Authority, an Assistant Director of the FBI, several sources in the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Army’s Military Intelligence Division, as well as one source in the Army’s Provost Marshal General’s Office. Most of the information contained in Montgomery’s report related to this part of his investigation dealt with the presumed continuing threats posed by Japanese Americans generally, and much of it reflected the stereotyped views so prevalent in 1942. Indeed, Montgomery concluded his report by essentially recommending that an exclusion order be issued for East Coast Japanese Americans, “in as much as Japanese traits and customs differ from all other nationalities, and ... any one of them may be deemed potentially dangerous” (Montgomery 1943, p. 13). One focus of Montgomery’s broader investigation was the work of the Japanese American Joint Board. As part of this aspect of his field work, Montgomery reported that on July 14, 1943, he met with Dr. Calvert Dedrick, then working in the Office of the Provost Marshal General on the Japanese American Joint Board. Montgomery met Dedrick in the latter’s office in the Munitions Building in Washington, and extensively covered his experiences with the Wartime Civil Control Administration in San Francisco and in his current assignment (Ibid, pp.  9–11).  We cannot be certain that the Secret Service learned from Dedrick that the 1940 census was a possible source of information useful to the more general investigation of “Japanese in the Washington, DC area” and thus prompted Morgenthau’s August 4 request to Commerce Department. Montgomery, for example, did not identify Dedrick as a former Census Bureau official. However, Montgomery’s extensive account of Dedrick’s views, including the latter’s assessment of communist and fascistic influences on the Japanese American community, indicate that he felt that Dedrick had provided him with relevant information on the Japanese

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American population. His July 14 interview with Dedrick occurred about 3 weeks prior to Morgenthau’s August 4 request to the Department of Commerce. Moreover, Agent Montgomery’s 1944 report did thank the Census Bureau and presented an “analysis” of 1940 census data for Washington (Montgomery 1944).

 ecretary Morgenthau Contacts S the Commerce Department On August 4, 1943, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, sent a letter to Jesse Jones, Secretary of Commerce, invoking “the provisions of Executive Order 9157” requesting “for the exclusive and confidential use of the U.S. Secret Service in connection with the protection of the President of the United States, a list of the Japanese residing in the Metropolitan Area of Washington, D.C., as reported in the 1940 Census, including information as to addresses, occupations and whether citizens or aliens .... You are assured that the information will be handled under rigid confidential conditions.” Three days after Secretary Morgenthau’s letter to Jones, on August 7, 1943, Wayne C.  Taylor, as the Acting Secretary of Commerce replied that (Taylor 1943a): arrangements have been made for preparing a list of the Japanese residing in the Metropolitan Area of Washington, D.C., as reported in the 1940 Census. It is possible that there may be a little delay in completing this list because of the fact that the census schedules for this area have not yet been put back in the regular files after having been microfilmed. It is hoped, however, that the list may be completed and sent to you within a week.

The file copy of the letter indicates it was drafted by Leon E. Truesdell, then “chief statistician for population” at the Census Bureau. It also clearly bears the initials of Census Director J.C.  Capt and the Commerce Secretary’s administrative assistant, Malcolm Kerlin. This file copy also has stamped on bottom—August 7, 1943—and indicates that the original papers were returned to the Census Bureau. Such a prompt response clearly indicates that no new policy decision had to be made by the Department of Commerce or the Census Bureau. Moreover, the fact that Truesdell drafted the response indicates that the process for responding to such requests was handled by the Bureau’s technical staff as an apparently routine matter.

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Somewhat sooner than had been anticipated in the interim response that the Census Bureau had drafted for Acting Secretary of Commerce, Taylor (1943b; Morgenthau Diary 1943) was able to write to Morgenthau again on August 11, 1943, that the “list of Japanese residents in the Washington Metropolitan Area which you requested under date of August 4, and to which I referred in my reply of August 7, has now been completed by the Bureau of the Census and is transmitted herewith. I hope that this information may be of service for the purposes mentioned in your letter requesting it.” The file copy of the letter indicates Truesdell drafted the letter. It bears the initials of J.C. Capt (Census Director) as well as two others, one of whom may have been Truesdell. There is a clear typed notice that the letter contained an “Enclosure.” A mixture of handwritten and stamped notations indicates that the text is an “Exact Copy as signed by Wayne C. Taylor,” that it was mailed on August 13, 1943, that a copy was provided to the Under Secretary [i.e., Taylor], and that, as usual, the underlying papers were returned to the Census Bureau. However, no copy of the enclosure was found with the August 11 letter in the files of the Commerce Department’s chief clerk. (This is not particularly surprising since copies of tabular material accompanying letters from the Census Bureau were often not kept in the chief clerk’s files.) The original of the Commerce Department letter, along with its enclosure—a listing in tabular format entitled “Japanese Residing in the Metropolitan Area of Washington, DC, April 1, 1940”—was saved in the Morgenthau Diary (1943) and archived in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library. See Fig.  7.1. The table is a typed list of 79 Japanese Americans enumerated in the 1940 census residing in the District, Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia, and Bethesda, Chevy Chase, and Edmonston, Maryland, showing for each person, name, address, sex, age, marital status, citizenship status, status in employment, and occupation and industry. At the time of enumeration, the youngest person enumerated was age 1 and the oldest age 76, while 35 were recorded as aliens and 44 as native born (i.e., citizens). The label bearing the notice “Determined to be an administrative marking” on the right side of the top margin of the list was added by the staff of the FDR Library after consulting with NARA when they provided the photocopy of the list in 2006. It refers to the handwritten notation “Confidential.” The existence of this tabular listing of Japanese Americans enumerated in the 1940 census and the Census Bureau’s ability to produce it within 7 days (August 4 to 11) from the initial request and within 4 days (August 7 to 11) from the earliest date that the schedules became available demonstrate that the Bureau not only provided identifiable microdata on Japanese Americans

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Fig. 7.1  Japanese Residing in the Metropolitan Area of Washington, DC, April 1, 1940. Enclosure responding to Secretary Morgenthau’s request for a list of Japanese Americans in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, August 1943. (Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census 1943)

to other federal agencies but also had well-developed procedures to do so expeditiously. Operationally, this could have been accomplished by first sorting the main 1940 census population card (Card A) to obtain a full listing for all persons in a given locality with a “Jp” in column 14 for the color or race item. See Fig. 2.2. While the punch card itself did not contain information on name or street address, each card did contain broader geographic identification information including Enumeration District (ED) number in columns 1 to 6 and the sheet and line number for each person enumerated within each ED in columns 7 to 10. Based on the technology available then, the cards for those reported with a Japanese “race” could be readily used to produce a printed listing of the ED and sheet and line number for each person identified as “Japanese.” See Fig. 2.1. It was then possible to go back to the enumeration forms (which did contain information on name and street address and which were stored by ED number) to generate the listing provided to the Secret Service (Truesdell 1965; U.S. Bureau of the Census 1982).

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Fig. 7.1  (continued)

A close examination of the table compiled by the Census Bureau reveals several anomalies. First, the table contains a footnote next to the name of one of the entries: “This man was born in Puerto Rico. He was reported “Japanese” but the name is Spanish.” Not noted by the table’s compilers or reviewers was that several other persons listed seemed to have non-Japanese names (for example, Appold, Moy, and Smith). If a person with a non-Japanese family name was wrongly included on the list provided by the Census Bureau, in modern-day terminology, each such person would be classified as a false positive. The list as typed also provides a hint of another issue that arose during its compilation. The 79 persons listed are each assigned a serial number (1, 2, 3, ...) in the leftmost column of the table. In addition, at the end of each group of persons listed for any geographic area, an extra line is provided to facilitate readability. Within the group listed for Washington, DC, persons appear to be arranged by Enumeration District. There are three related exceptions to these regularities. After the last person listed for the District of Columbia (No. 65) and before the first person listed for Virginia (No. 66), an additional person was listed in a line that should have been blank and he was assigned a serial number of “65½.” According to his address in the District, it appears he should properly have been listed as No. 15 in the table. The person listed as

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number 65½ was Iwao Moriyama, a Japanese American biostatistician then employed by the Census Bureau in its vital statistics program. On the original 1940 population schedule, Moriyama’s race was coded “w” for white, so the race sort procedure the bureau used to compile the list would not have generated his name. It appears that during the initial compilation of the table, Moriyama’s name was omitted. However, at some stage after the list was initially typed, the omission was discovered in the review process (either Truesdell or Capt would have almost certainly noticed the omission), and the missing Japanese American staff member was inserted in the list in a manner that did not require retyping the entire table (Bouk 2022). At the time, Iwao Moriyama (1909–2006) was just starting his distinguished career in public health. He was born in San Francisco and received his Bachelor’s degree from University of California, Berkeley (1931), and Masters (1934) and PhD (1937) from Yale in Public Health. He joined the Census Bureau in 1940 in the Vital Statistics Division and moved with the division to the US Public Health Service in 1946 and was Director of the Office of Health Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics Rockville, Maryland, from 1961to 1974. He retired from federal service in 1975 and continued as a leader in public health, including in the World Health Organization and researching radiation exposure in Hiroshima, Japan. He was a fellow of the American Public Health Association, Population Association of America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Statistical Association. His many honors include the Distinguished Service Award (1959) from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and the Halbert L. Dunn Award from the National Association of Public Health Statistics and Information Systems (1998) (United States Census Bureau n.d.; Washington Post 2006; Prabook n.d.). Bouk (2022) has additional background on his family in San Francisco, including Iwao’s Issei parents, Saburo and Reki Moriyama, and his Nisei siblings. Saburo Moriyama ran a photography studio in San Francisco. The family and their neighbors were liable for evacuation in 1942. In the spring of 1942, Iwao Moriyama was able to sponsor his parents to leave San Francisco and stay with him in Washington, DC, so they were not incarcerated in the camps. Since they were living in San Francisco in 1940, the census schedules reported Saburo and Reki there. Though likely resident in Washington, DC, in 1943, Saburo and Reki thus were also not named on the list the bureau provided to the Secret Service since it reflected census information from some 3 years earlier in 1940.

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Agent Montgomery’s August 10, 1944, report (Montgomery 1944, pp. 1, 3) listed the Census Bureau as a source of information on the Japanese population in Washington, DC: It was learned that ... according to the last Census taken in Washington, D.C. there were approximately 59 Japanese residing in this city. About 36 of these were attached to the Japanese Embassy in Washington, and with the exception of six, all were interned and later returned to Japan. The others residing in Washington were either in business or acting as domestics in various fields.

In other words, it seems that the Secret Service through its investigative work between August 1943, when it received the listing from the Census Bureau, and August 1944, when Montgomery wrote his second report, had confirmed that among 66 persons classified as Japanese in the census listing, 7 were false positives. This would imply that the gross false positive rate for Japanese Americans in the District in the 1940 census was just under12%. Other aspects of Agent Montgomery’s investigation and analysis seem to have been far less accurate. For example, looking at the age, sex, and occupations of the 66 Japanese Americans shown in the Census Bureau listing, we doubt that “about 36 of these were attached to the Japanese Embassy in Washington.” To begin with, foreign diplomats were not to be enumerated in the census. We think it far more likely that Agent Montgomery simply subtracted the number of those Japanese “attached” to the Embassy that he obtained from another source from the census-based number. Compounding the analytic and investigative confusion even further is the fact that the official 1940 census tabulated count of persons of Japanese race for Washington, DC, was 68 (United States Bureau of the Census 1941; United States Bureau of the Census 1943). It is not known whether the loss of two persons by the Census Bureau between the officially tabulated count and the August 1943 list was as the result of a deliberate edit or inadvertent, for example, by the loss or destruction of two punch cards.

L ooking Forward to Bureau Release Policy After the War The Chief Clerk’s files in the Commerce Department indicate that the FBI requested and received information about individuals from the population schedules during the war, though the requests we found were for a specific individual, not a targeted group. We did not discover specific records of

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further investigation of Japanese Americans in Washington, DC, after the 1943 census releases in bureau records or elsewhere. However, over time, and certainly in retrospect, the Census Bureau came to realize that the provision of information gathered under a pledge of statistical confidentiality to law enforcement and intelligence agencies was antithetical to the Bureau’s statistical mission. As we will discuss in the next chapter, that realization came slowly. We have aimed to analyze the less publicized activities that census officials undertook and their overall role in the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans. We note, similarly, that there has been little historical analysis of the bureau’s activities under the authority of the Second War Powers Act during World War II. As the war wound down in 1945, the impact of the bureau’s wartime activities on its future and the federal statistical system was just beginning to come into focus to officials within the bureau and within the rest of the administration. And as at the end of World War I, there would again be a spirited, if somewhat opaque, debate about just how far the statistical system should be realigned to support larger government policy. Was it necessary for statistical agencies to remain at arms length from the policy arms of government in order to protect the integrity and trust in the data? This was the traditional stance that statistical agencies understood as their role: they provided statistical information for policy development but were committed to preserving the integrity of the statistics at all costs. Or should statistical agencies take a more aggressive role in supporting the surveillance and regulatory functions of the state, as envisioned in the Second War Powers Act authorization of data releases? In early 1945, the aggressive viewpoint was ascendant as a memorandum from Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones to the President made clear. In January 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, recently elected for his fourth term, began assembling his Cabinet. Rumors in the press abounded about high-­ level changes, including in the Commerce Department. Jesse Jones wrote to President Roosevelt summarizing the Department’s contributions to the war effort, and hoping to keep his job. Jones had been a key member of the wartime administration, serving as Commerce Secretary since the summer of 1940, and he touted of his department’s accomplishments (Jones 1945): The Department of Commerce has participated in direct national defense and war activities to a major extent. Some of its Bureaus, such as the National Bureau of Standards, Civil Aeronautics Administration, Weather Bureau, Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the National Inventors Council have become virtual adjuncts of the military establishments; and the remaining Bureaus – Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Patent Office, and Inland Waterways have subordinated their normal functions to such an extent that war work has become their dominant concern.

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He continued with a specific catalog of the activities of each agency within Commerce. For the Census Bureau, he included the following, The Bureau of the Census provided much of the basic factual data needed for nearly every phase of planning for total war. It has been drawn upon for such statistical material by nearly every other agency of the Government; . . . From its population records, the Bureau of the Census was able to establish the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of workers who needed this proof in order to be employed in our plants; and, immediately after Pearl Harbor, was in a position to give the military services the name and residence of all Japanese nationals residing in prescribed West Coast areas.

Roosevelt soon replaced Jones with Henry Wallace, the former Vice President who had been removed from the 1944 ticket in favor of Harry Truman (Fenberg 2011). Nevertheless, Jones was proud of his department’s work. His claim that the bureau was “in a position to give the military services the names and residence” of “Japanese nationals” reflected official policy. Jones understood in broad terms what the administration goals had been even if he was somewhat less informed on what was actually done. As the war ended, and Calvert Dedrick prepared to return to a position in the Census Bureau, the understanding of the legacy of the bureau’s role in the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans and the future of the statistical system and “statistical confidentiality” was very much an open question.

References Anderson, Margo, and William Seltzer. 2009. Federal Statistical Confidentiality and Business Data: Twentieth Century Challenges and Continuing Issues. Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality 1 (Spring): 7–52. Bouk, Dan. 2022. Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them. New York: MCD: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dedrick, Calvert L. 1981. Prepared Statement and Oral Testimony [including an audio file] before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians on November 2-3, 1981. United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). Hearing Transcripts. 7/31/1980-6/30/1983. Record Group 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, 1893–2008, National Archives, College Park, MD. Fenberg, Steve. 2011. Unprecedented Power: Jesse Jones, Capitalism, and the Common Good. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. General Records of the Department of Commerce. 1944. Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence. 67104 (Part 2)- 67104 (Part 5). Box 144. File: 67104 3 of 5. Record Group 40, National Archives, College Park, MD.

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Goodman, Walter. 1968. The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Grozdins, Morton. 1949. Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, Jesse. 1945. Jesse Jones to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, January 19, 1945. Jesse H. Jones Papers, Box 174, Commerce Dept. Reading File, Dec 22, 1944 – Jan 27, 1945. Library of Congress. Washington, D.C. Los Angeles Times. 1943. Drive for return of japs – Dies group gets evidence indicating high government officials are working to that end. June 20, 1943, p. 1. Montgomery, Lee A. 1943. Montgomery to Frank J. Wilson, Chief, U.S. Secret Service, Intermediate Report (Confidential), 8/12/1943, p. 8, ref WH-29255-S. Records of the U.S. Secret Service, Record Group 87, Correspondence, 1863–1937, General Correspondence and Subject File, 1932–1950, File 162, Japanese in Washington (1944). Box 148. National Archives, College Park, MD. ———. 1944. Agent Lee A. Montgomery to Frank J. Wilson, Chief, U.S. Secret Service, 8/10/1944, “Supplemental Report (Confidential),” ref WH-29, 255-S, Records of the U.S. Secret Service, Record Group 87, Correspondence, 1863–1937, General Correspondence and Subject File, 1932–1950, File 162, Japanese in Washington (1944). Box 148. National Archives. College Park, MD. Morgenthau, Henry. 1943. Henry Morgenthau, Treasury Secretary, to Jesse Jones, Commerce Secretary, August 4, 1943. Morgenthau Diary, Book 655, August 10–12, 1943, Microfilm reel 190, frame 198, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY. Morgenthau Diary. 1943. Book 655, August 10–12, 1943, Microfilm reel 190, frame 196–198. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY. Ogden, August Raymond. 1944. The Dies Committee: A Study of the Special House Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Ogden. Papers of Philip Hauser. 1942. US Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29 (item 146). Washington, DC: National Archives. Prabook. n.d. Iwao Milton Moriyama. https://prabook.com/web/iwao_milton.moriyama/1692439. Accessed 2 Dec 2019. Records of the War Relocation Authority. n.d. Record Group RG 210, Japanese-­ American Internee Data File, 1942–1946, National Archives, Accessed at http:// aad.archives.gov/aad/record-­detail.jsp?dt=234&mtch=14&cat=TS14&tf=F&q= Uyemoto&bc=sl,sd&rpp=10&pg=2&rid=97853&rlst=97853,97854, 97858,97865 12-7-2006. Taylor, Wayne. 1943a. Wayne Taylor, Acting Secretary of Commerce, to the Secretary of Treasury, August 7, 1943. Records of the Department of Commerce, Record Group 40, General Correspondence, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, Box 146, 67104-67105; File: 67104/6,8 (Stamped on the Document: Files Office of the Chief Clerk; 67104 is the file number for Census). National Archives. College Park, MD.

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———. 1943b. Wayne Taylor, Acting Secretary of Commerce to the Secretary of Treasury, August 11, 1943. Records of the Department of Commerce, Record Group 40, General Correspondence, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, Box 146, 67104-67105; File: 67104/6,8 (Stamped on the Document: Files Office of the Chief Clerk; 67104 is the file number for Census). National Archives. College Park, MD. Truesdell, Leon E. 1965. The Development of Punch card Tabulation in the Bureau of the Census, 1890–1940, with Outlines of Actual Tabulation Programs. Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office. U.S.  Bureau of the Census. 1943. Japanese Residing in the Metropolitan Area of Washington, DC, April 1, 1940. [Typed listing with handwritten notation “Confidential.”] Morgenthau Diary, Book 655, August 10–12, 1943, Microfilm reel 190, frame 197, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY. U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). 1982. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office). Report reissued in 1997 by University of Washington Press. Seattle: University of Washington Press, with a new forward by Tetsuden Kashima. U.S.  Social Security Death Index. n.d.. Accessed at http://www.familysearch.org/ Eng/Search/ancestorsearchresults.asp?standardize=N&last_name=Uyemoto 2-6-2007. United States Bureau of the Census. 1941. Table 2. – Japanese Population of the United States by Regions, Divisions, and States: 1940, Typed table, 12/8/1941, p. 2, Field Papers, Box 44, Folder Japanese in the United States, 1941. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY. ———. 1943. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population, Volume II, Characteristics of the Population, Part 1, United States Summary and Alabama-­ District of Columbia. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. District of Columbia, Table 2 – Race by Nativity and Sex, for the District of Columbia: 1850 to 1940, p.  956. Accessed at http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/ documents/33973538v2p1ch9.pdf, accessed 12-13-2006. ———. 1982. “Statement on Census Bureau Actions at the Outset of World War II as Reported in Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath by John Toland, Attachment B, ... Population Individual Card, 1940.” Papers of the U.S.  Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), Record Group 220, National Archives, College Park, MD, Microfilm edition, Reel 28, box 30, frame 29634. United States Census Bureau. n.d. Iwao Milton Moriyama: Improving Life with the U.S. Census. https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/moriyama542017.pdf. Accessed 28 Feb 2023. United States Code Congressional Service. 1943. Acts of 77th Congress, Second Session, January 5 to December 16, 1942. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Co. (50 U.S.C.A. Appendix section 644a), P.L. 507, 77th Congress, 2d Session (S2208).

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United States. Department of Commerce. 1942. Thirtieth Annual Report of the Secretary of Commerce, 1942, Annual Report of the Secretary of Commerce (1942). https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/6150#594270, Accessed on 25 Feb 2023. Washington Post. 2006. Obituaries. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ local/2006/06/13/obituaries/18ea4b3b-­2 c9e-­4 bd8-­9 799-­0 e9a4b7d7475/. Accessed 28 Feb 2023. Wilson, Frank K. 1943. Interoffice Communication from Chief, U.S. Secret Service, to John J. McGrath, Supervising Agent, Washington, D.C., June 25, 1943. Cited in Lee A. Montgomery, Intermediate Report (Confidential), Agent Lee A. Montgomery to Frank J. Wilson, Chief, U.S. Secret Service, 8/12/1943, ref WH-29255-S. Records of the U.S.  Secret Service, Record Group 87, Correspondence, 1863–1937, General Correspondence and Subject File, 1932–1950, File 162, Japanese in Washington (1944). Box 148. National Archives, College Park, MD. Yoneda, Karl G. 1942. Karl Yoneda to E.  R. Fryer, Regional Director, WRA, San Francisco, July 11, 1942. and Notes and Observations of Kibei Meeting held August 8, 1942 at Kitchen 15 – only Japanese spoken. Records of the United States House of Representatives, Record Group 233, Entry 11, Exhibits related to Committee Investigations, Box 193, War Relocation Authority –War Relocation Camps, Folder: War Relocation Centers – Los Angeles, California Exhibits re above, Jun 8–18, 1943. National Archives, Washington, D.C.

8 After World War II: From the End of Incarceration to Redress and the Recovery of the Historical Record

In this Bicentennial Year, we are commemorating the anniversary dates of many great events in American history. An honest reckoning, however, must include a recognition of our national mistakes as well as our national achievements. Learning from our mistakes is not pleasant, but as a great philosopher once admonished, we must do so if we want to avoid repeating them. President Gerald R. Ford, February 19, 1976

The Long Road to a Reckoning It would take almost a half century for US policy makers to reevaluate the history of evacuation and incarceration of the West Coast Japanese ancestry population during World War II, repudiate the official justifications of the program during the war, acknowledge that great wrongs had been inflicted on the incarcerated population, and provide apologies and modest financial compensation to the survivors. The work of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in the 1980s marked the turning point, as surviving officials who had administered the program, Japanese Americans, and lawyers who had challenged the program testified before the Commission (United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982). During that long period between the end of the war and the movement for what Japanese Americans came to call “redress,” the former evacuees by and large tried to put the experience behind them and reconstruct their lives. Former officials who had administered the program, including those in the Census Bureau, went back to their peacetime positions. The court cases challenging the program reached final decisions in the US Supreme Court, and historians and civil rights advocates researched the program and debated its legitimacy. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Anderson, W. Seltzer, Use and Misuse of the United States Census, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38619-0_8

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In the late 1960s and 1970s, as Americans reversed their long legal tradition of official racial discrimination, a young generation of Japanese Americans, many of whom had been incarcerated as children, began to connect the threads between their community’s experience and the larger goals of the civil rights movement. Over the next decade, they built the redress movement to challenge the legitimacy of the program and provide reparations and apologies to the incarcerated. That long historical process eventually enveloped the Census Bureau and its activities and led to a reexamination of the issues of statistical confidentiality, harm, and ethics in the federal statistical system. But the fact that this long delayed reckoning occurred almost two generations after the fact meant that it was particularly controversial and did not occur simultaneously across the various government agencies involved. It still rocks policymaking in the federal statistical system. It is thus important to disentangle the threads of experience of the Japanese American community and the federal statistical system from the end of World War II to the present.

Ending the War and Closing the Camps May 8, 1945, known as V-E Day, marked the end of World War II in Europe. V-J Day, August 15, 1945, marked the surrender of Japan and the end of the Pacific War, just days after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The war was finally definitively over. Though the eventual allied victory had been clear from some time and postwar planning already in the works, the reconversion of the economy and the shape of the postwar peace were still very much undecided. For the more than 100,000 Japanese Americans who had been evacuated and incarcerated in concentration camps, the future was fraught with uncertainty. In the spring of 1943, the military had renounced its original justification for the evacuation. As the CWRIC report noted, “the War Department no longer believed that military necessity justified excluding loyal ethnic Japanese from the West Coast.” But the War Department took no action to “reverse its orders” at the time. The War Relocation Authority managed the camps and instituted a resettlement program to release the evacuees outside the West Coast. That program proceeded slowly. As of January 1945, almost 80,000 people were still in the camps, and almost 58,000 in August 1945 (United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982, p. 224; Daniels 2004, p. 72).

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The key legal challenges to the incarceration had also proceeded slowly through the federal courts during the war (Irons 1983). The first two test cases, the Yasui and Hirabayashi cases, reached the Supreme Court in 1943. Min Yasui, a young Nisei attorney from Portland, OR, had deliberately violated General DeWitt’s March 27, 1942 curfew proclamation on March 28 and was arrested. Gordon Hirabayashi, a University of Washington student, also violated the curfew restrictions. He also resisted reporting for evacuation in May 1942 and was charged with violating the curfew and failing to register for evacuation. Both men pled not guilty, were convicted, were jailed, and appealed their cases through the federal court system. In June 1943, the Supreme Court upheld their curfew violation convictions. The other two test cases, Korematsu and Endo, also dated from spring 1942 but were not finally decided until December 1944. They had slightly different fact bases and different paths through the federal courts. Fred Korematsu, a young Nisei from San Leandro, CA, working as a welder in Berkeley, didn’t show up for evacuation in May 1942, tried to disguise his appearance, but was caught and arrested in San Leandro on Memorial Day, 1942. Mitsuye Endo, a young Nisei California civil servant, became the fourth defendant, when San Francisco attorney, James Purcell, approached her at the assembly center where she had been moved in May 1942. She agreed to allow him to file a habeas corpus petition on her behalf to challenge the evacuation and incarceration. When she was moved to the Tule Lake camp in July 1942, he did so. Korematsu was tried and convicted in September 1942, sentenced to probation, but then returned to imprisonment at Tanforan. The judge in charge of Endo’s habeas corpus petition did not rule on it for over a year, when he dismissed her habeas corpus claim, effectively affirming her continued incarceration. The appeals of these cases worked their way through the federal courts, reaching Supreme Court oral argument in the fall of 1944, and decisions in December 1944. The Supreme Court upheld Korematsu’s conviction, supporting DeWitt’s authority to exclude Japanese Americans from the West Coast on the basis of “military necessity” and his claim that he was unable at the time to make a loyalty determination of individual evacuees. The government had conceded that Mitsuye Endo was “loyal” and thus that the WRA had no authority to detain her and thus that she “should be given her liberty” (Daniels 2013; Niiya, ed. 2001, p. 160). The day before the publication of the Korematsu and Endo opinions, the Western Defense Command lifted its ban preventing “loyal” Japanese Americans from returning to the West Coast. Along with the court decisions and the WRA release and resettlement programs, the path to ending the incarceration program and closing the camps took shape.

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That path was not without continued controversy. First, the basic logistics of releasing people back to their former lives was daunting. Would they face hostility on the West Coast? What about the status of the property and neighborhoods they left behind? Where would the financial resources come from to establish their post war lives? Second, the Western Defense Command’s announcement did not address the fate of evacuees in the camps who had not been deemed “loyal” by the WRA. More than 10,000 people were in this category, for a variety of reasons. In 1943, resistance had developed to answering the two loyalty questions on the WRA form originally modeled on the Selective Service form designed to recruit Nisei into the Army. The questionnaire was administered to all adults in the camps, male and female, alien or citizen. Refusing to answer, or answering no to the loyalty questions, put the respondent and his/her family into the “disloyal” classification. The War Relocation Authority had also instituted a program of “segregating” the disloyal and alleged troublemakers and in 1943 designated the Tule Lake camp as a “segregation center.” “Loyal” evacuees were to be moved out of the camp, and evacuees not deemed “loyal” were moved in. Over 5,000 evacuee citizens of Japanese ancestry renounced their US citizenship in late 1944 and early 1945 at Tule Lake, slating them for deportation to Japan. The WRA added heightened security, barbed wire fences. Relations among the inmates and between the WRA and the inmates worsened. At the beginning of 1945, the fate of the Tule Lake evacuees was still undetermined (Daniels 2013). Third, sharp critique of the constitutionality and legitimacy of the court decisions, emerged from respected legal scholars, opened a new set of questions about not only the damage done to Japanese Americans but also about the implications for future racial surveillance of vulnerable segments of the population and the authority of the state to restrict the civil rights of citizens. At the time, and in the context of even larger issues of winning the war and converting to a peacetime society and economy, most of these matters were addressed, if at all, by short-term solutions to relocate the evacuees and close the camps, relegating to the future more measured debate and action about the entire program. By the late fall of 1945, the WRA had released the evacuees from all the camps, except Tule Lake, and closed the facilities. Tule Lake remained open until March 1946. The WRA and Justice Department deported several thousand Issei, renunciants, and their families to Japan in 1945 and 1946. Federal officials had hoped that the evacuees would “resettle” or “disperse” across the country, but that did not happen. By 1950, the census reported that two

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thirds of the Japanese ancestry population on the US mainland were in the three West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington (Ibid., p. 114). Later, CWRIC testimony and many historical studies chronicled the hardships facing the returning evacuees, including property lost, neighborhoods occupied by new residents, and farms lost. At the time, though, the evidence in plain sight did not generate a sustained effort to provide resources to reintegrate the “evacuated people” as the WRA called them, into their former lives (Densho n.d.; United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982; United States War Relocation Authority 1946). Some voices raised the issues, notably Eugene Rostow’s June 1945 Yale Law Journal article, critiquing the legal justifications for the entire evacuation and incarceration program and calling for it to be repudiated. Titled “The Japanese American Cases-A Disaster,” Rostow (1945a) opened his 45-page analysis bluntly: Our war-time treatment of Japanese aliens and citizens of Japanese descent on the West Coast has been hasty, unnecessary and mistaken. The course of action which we undertook was in no way required or justified by the circumstances of the war. It was calculated to produce both individual injustice and deep-seated social maladjustments of a cumulative and sinister kind.

“All in all,” he continued, “the internment of the West Coast Japanese is the worst blow our liberties have sustained in many years.” After demolishing the justifications the Supreme Court used in upholding the program on the basis of military necessary, he concluded in the context of the real problems facing the community in 1945: Three forms of reparation are available, and should be pursued. The first is the inescapable obligation of the Federal Government to protect the civil rights of Japanese Americans against organized and unorganized hooliganism. If local law enforcement fails, prosecutions under the Civil Rights Act should be undertaken. Secondly, generous financial indemnity should be sought, for the Japanese Americans have suffered and will suffer heavy property losses as a consequence of their evacuation. Finally, the basic issues should be presented to the Supreme Court again, in an effort to obtain a reversal of these war-time cases. In the history of the Supreme Court there have been important occasions when the Court itself corrected a decision occasioned by the excitement of a tense and patriotic moment... Similar public expiation in the case of the internment of Japanese Americans from the West Coast would be good for the Court, and for the country.

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He followed up his legal critique in more public commentary in a September, 1945, article in Harper’s (Rostow 1945b). Rostow’s recommendations went unheeded. In 1948, Congress passed the Japanese-Americans Claims Act to provide a mechanism for “compensation” for the evacuees’ wartime losses. Even that provided little “financial indemnity.” There were $121 million in claims filed, but Congress appropriated $38 million to pay them, and the Justice Department “contested claims vigorously” (Daniels 2013, p. 133). For some years after the end of the war, there was little appetite in the Japanese American community or the larger public to press for further agitation about the legitimacy of the overall program. The federal war agencies most closely tied with the program were ended. The Wartime Civil Control Administration, which managed the actual evacuation in the Western Defense Command, had been shut down in 1943. The War Relocation Authority shut down in June 1946. The Western Defense Command was terminated in 1946. Other permanent federal agencies integrated any ongoing work from the program or examination of its legacy with their larger duties. Responsibility for any litigation from the program moved to the Justice Department, which also handled financial claims and the situation of people who renounced their US citizenship. The Treasury Department maintained its responsibility to manage the release of the funds frozen early in the war of deposits in the US branches of Japanese banks (United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982, p. 61; Daniels 2013, pp. 115–116, 141). By and large, lingering issues from the program in the federal government were matters to be dealt with as part of the general effort at reconversion to a peacetime economy and society.

Census Bureau Issues The participation of the Census Bureau and its officials in the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans had involved deploying bureau staff and data to the wartime agencies overseeing the program, primarily the Wartime Civil Control Administration and the Provost Marshal General’s Office. Once those activities ceased, Calvert Dedrick and the temporary staff he had assembled returned to their existing responsibilities, with Dedrick himself returning to the bureau in July 1945, first as head of the Governments Division and then in 1946 to head the newly created International Statistics Division. For the leadership of the Census Bureau, reconversion involved consolidating the new roles the bureau had assumed to provide information for governmental policies, documenting what the bureau had done to serve the war

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effort, and planning for ongoing data collections, particularly for the 1950 census. For example, as Duncan and Shelton (1978) have shown, during the war, the bureau had taken over the monthly sample survey on unemployment when the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was abolished and introduced major technical improvements in sample design. The statistical research division led by Morris Hansen, Dedrick’s successor heading this division in the bureau, also introduced sampling methods into the census of agriculture and planned larger initiatives after the war. The renamed Monthly Report on the Labor Force became the Current Population Survey in 1947 and, in conjunction with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has produced the monthly unemployment statistics for the nation ever since. Other bureaucratic changes in the federal statistical system saw the Census Bureau Division of Vital Statistics and its Division Head, Halbert Dunn, and staff transferred to the Public Health Service in 1946.

Reestablishing Statistical Confidentiality Some war related practices took longer to be integrated into ongoing work or replaced by peacetime policies. The most notable example for current purposes was the new practice of sharing confidential microdata under the authority of Section 1402 of the Second War Powers Act. The Second War Powers Act was an omnibus piece of legislation. Although it was adopted as a single legislative act, individual provisions were repealed or permitted to expire on different dates and by different legislative acts, with the bulk of them, including Section 1402, repealed with effect from March 30, 1947 (Act to amend the Second War Powers Act, 1942, as amended. PL 79-475, June 29, 1946). Having opened the gate to the disclosure of census information hitherto protected by the Census Act, the Census Bureau found the process of closing the gate and restoring the confidentiality practices from the 1929 Census Act to be an extended and difficult  – but important – effort. The first hint of some of the issues involved can be found in a letter drafted in the Census Bureau but sent from the Secretary of Commerce to the Chairman of the Civilian Production Bureau in November 1945 (Wallace 1945), 3 months after World War II had ended. Secretary Wallace’s letter is worth quoting at length, since it summarizes so clearly both the “shortcut” practices that had evolved to speed disclosures during the war and the new pressures the Census Bureau faced to end such confidentiality-breaking disclosures as rapidly as possible:

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During the war the Bureau of the Census of the Department of Commerce with the approval of the Secretary of Commerce … supplied the War Production Board with confidential data from the 1939 Census of Manufactures and other records collected by the Census Bureau. The Chairman of the War Production Board in order to expedite the transmission of information between the agencies delegated the authority to make requests to the Director of the Bureau of Program and Statistics who, on a restricted basis, subsequently delegated such authority to the Director of the Office of Survey Standards of the War Production Board. Now that hostilities have ceased and the War Production Board has been succeeded by the Civilian Production Administration, we would like to revert to the original procedure in which the head of the agency makes each request to the Secretary of Commerce. This procedure would appear to be more appropriate to present conditions. Also, we would like to emphasize in every way possible the confidential nature of information collected by the Bureau of the Census for statistical purposes. Numerous business establishments now reconverting to peacetime production have called this matter to our attention since the surrender of Japan.

It should be noted, however, that Secretary Wallace’s letter, in accordance with the law, permitted disclosures to continue. With respect to confidential information on persons, the FBI sought to continue the access to Census Bureau files it had gained under the Second War Powers Act, even after Section 1402 was set to expire. Accordingly, the Attorney General (Clark 1947) wrote to the Secretary of Commerce toward the end of January 1947, 3 months before Section 1402 was due to expire, but without any reference those provisions of law, that: The records of the Bureau of the Census of the Department of Commerce contain information which would be of great value in connection with confidential investigations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation dealing with internal security of the nation and with other important confidential investigative work. It would be of great benefit if you could authorize the appropriate officials of the Bureau of the Census to provide information upon request of Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who hold credentials certifying to their status as such. Such authorization would be of great benefit to the Government in connection with the official investigations made by the Special Agents of the FBI.

This request was notable in two respects. First, it made no mention of the arrangements then in place at least since April 1944 (Jones 1944), but

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presumably due to expire on March 31, granting the FBI access to confidential Census Bureau records, and second, it proposed an arrangement for obtaining access (i.e., requests from individual FBI agents) that was even less subject to oversight than the one developed in 1944 (i.e., requests from the Director of the FBI to the Census Bureau Director). It may be recalled that the 1944 arrangement was, in turn, even less restrictive than that specified in the 1942 law and Executive Order (i.e., requests from the Attorney General to the Secretary of Commerce). Commerce Secretary Averill Harriman (1947) replied in early March to this request in a letter drafted in the Departmental Solicitor’s Office. His response provided a clear indication how far Census Director Capt had moved from the views he had held in 1941 and 1942 when he had worked so diligently to provide the FBI and other agencies access to confidential information that had hitherto been protected by the 1929 Census Act. After citing the relevant portions of that act and observing that “under these provisions of law the Director of the Bureau of the Census is the official designated to protect these records – not the head of Department,” Secretary Harriman’s letter to the Attorney General continued: In connection with your request, the Director of the Census informs me that it would be impossible for him to agree to your request, because it has been the long-standing practice of that Bureau not to furnish such information either to private persons or officials of the Government. The Director pointed out that such practice is in accord with the views expressed in the Attorney General’s opinion to the Secretary of Commerce... of September 29, 1930. (36 Op. At. Gen. 362)

Harriman’s letter concluded, after referring to Section 1402 of the Second War Powers Act as “an exception to this rule” and noting that it would terminate at the end of the month, “in view of the foregoing, I am unable to comply with your request.” Several weeks later, the Commerce Department Solicitor (Fisher 1947) also wrote a legal memorandum to the Secretary, supporting the position taken by the Census Bureau and the Secretary in the department’s response to the FBI’s request. However, even after Section 1402 was repealed, various regulatory and investigative agencies continued to be keenly interested in obtaining information provided to the Census Bureau under the confidentiality protections of the Census Act. This gave rise to a number of administrative and judicial efforts over the next two decades to restore the wartime access provided to such information. For example, in late 1947, the Federal Munitions

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Board sought means to receive confidential information from the Bureau’s Census of Manufactures. After considerable correspondence between the Commerce Department and the Attorney General’s office and extensive consultations involving the Justice Department, the Budget Bureau, the Commerce Department, the Census Bureau, and the Munitions Board, an agreement was reached that disclosures would only be made after the Census Bureau secured affirmative waivers of confidentiality from the individuals and firms who provided the information to the Census Bureau (Foster 1948). In July 1948, the Census Bureau proposed a similar approach in a letter that W. P. McInerny and A. Ross Eckler of the Census Bureau had drafted for signature by the Secretary of Commerce (Sawyer 1948) to respond to a request by the Internal Revenue Service that it be provided information collected by the Census Bureau from the Zigler Canning Company. However, Secretary Sawyer wondered “if this is good government practice. In other words, … if the prohibition against giving this information applies to the heads of other government departments – such as the Commissioner of Internal Revenue.” Accordingly, he held up signing the draft until the matter could be reviewed by the Department Solicitor (Eaton 1948). Within 3 days, the Departmental Solicitor wrote to Secretary Sawyer a memorandum strongly endorsing the position taken by the Census Bureau (Stokes 1948), and the letter to the Internal Revenue Service was sent out as drafted by the Census Bureau. As we have shown (Anderson and Seltzer 2009) with respect to business data, efforts by the Justice Department and numerous federal regularity agencies to breach statistical confidentiality at the Census Bureau and elsewhere in the federal statistical system continued for at least another two decades. In the post-World War II period, then, the Census Bureau vigorously sought to end the microdata releases sanctioned by the Second War Powers Act. This was not always an easy task as a number of investigative agencies had grown accustomed to the relatively easy access they had had to Census Bureau microdata during the war years. Indeed, the history of war time disclosures puts a somewhat new light on Edwin Goldfield’s recollection (1991) that: Later on, when I had some major responsibilities for Census Bureau policy, including policy on access to individual records, I had the occasion to turn down people from the Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and elsewhere who came to the Bureau thinking that I could provide them with names and addresses of businesses or individuals. I always had difficulties persuading them that even though they represented an important Government concern, the Census Bureau would not cooperate with them, at least not to that degree.

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The bureau had managed to reaffirm the confidentiality standards from the 1929 Census Act in its day-to-day relations with other federal agencies. Knowledge of the practices under Section 1402 faded from institutional memory. This loss of institutional knowledge would come back to haunt the bureau in later years when critics of the bureau’s actions found that the bureau had in fact chronicled its practices during the war but had not built a critical understanding of those practices into the agency’s institutional memory.

The War History Project The Roosevelt administration was well aware of the need to document the government’s activities during the war and, in 1942, had alerted all agencies of the requirement to “prepare a record of their contributions to the war which would be of value to the Government in the case of another emergency as well as to provide material for historians.” In March 1946, Census Director J.C.  Capt sent a memorandum to his division heads noting that President Truman had “renewed” Roosevelt’s order, asking for each division to prepare its report “to get this job out of the way as promptly as possible.” The bureau hired a “full-time writer,” John Vance Dobbin, to compile the final history. Over the next few months, the divisions sent in their drafts describing the projects and activities in their division providing information and expertise government wide, often in outline or tabular form. The division reports included activities that involved disclosures under Section 1402 of the Second War Powers Act, though without highlighting those practices (Capt 1946). The reports also included a livelier document on the bureau’s role in the Japanese evacuation and incarceration, mistakenly titled “How the Census Bureau Helped the Program to Evacuate Japanese from West Coast Cities.” [All Japanese ancestry Americans were evacuations from the West Coast, not only those in “West Coast cities.”] That report documented Calvert Dedrick’s deployment to the Western Defense Command in late February 1942 and his use of “special tabulations, maps and other information.” Among other duties, the “statistical group” that Dedrick recruited “drafted details of the logistics of the evacuation movement, including the preparation of maps of individual evacuation area units…, registration for temporary detention in Assembly Centers, and plans for the regrouping of the evacuees in the process of transfer to Relocation Centers.” Dobbin (1946) reported in July that he and Dedrick were reviewing the draft report. In his March memorandum, Capt (1946) had given his division heads somewhat contradictory instructions. He reminded them that “we want to

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make sure that the splendid record of the Census Bureau in support of the war will be fully recorded” and counseled them that the reports were “not a job that can be done at odd times nor in a desultory manner.” Yet, he also noted that since “this project is expected to be a blueprint for national action in case of another emergency,” it should “contain not only a record of what we did, but why we did it and how, and how it could be better done if we had to do it over again” and “provide a better appraisal of ourselves.” Those standards, at least for the section of the report on the Japanese evacuation, proved too difficult to meet. Section 1402 of the Second War Powers Act was still in effect when Dobbin and Dedrick were reviewing the draft. While the draft acknowledged, for example, that the bureau had prepared duplicate punch cards from the 1940 census on the West Coast Japanese ancestry population, it also asserted that the bureau did not provide “name and individual identification data to the War Department,” because such disclosure would violate “Census Law.” There was no acknowledgment that the “Census Law,” still in effect in 1946, would authorize such disclosures. In the end, the account of the bureau’s role in the Japanese evacuation and the rest of the “War History” was cleared for publication but not published. Instead, it was archived with the drafts and correspondence in the official agency records in the National Archives. The official bureau analysis of its role in the program did not, in Capt’s language, “provide a better appraisal of ourselves” that would guide statistical policy going forward.

From Scholarly Research to Redress Other scholars and federal government historians did institute research on the evacuation and incarceration program. Some efforts started even while the evacuees were in the camps. Notably, University of California–Berkeley sociologist Dorothy Thomas headed up a university- and foundation-funded project, the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS), which placed Nisei graduate students in the camps for data collection and produced three substantial critical monographs on the program between 1946 and 1954 (Thomas and Nishimoto 1946; Thomas 1952; tenBroek et al. 1954; see also Densho Encyclopedia n.d.). The research materials were archived in the Bancroft Library at University of California-Berkeley and have been a source of information for generations of researchers since. A fourth monograph by Morton Grodzins (1949) also originated in his dissertation work as a graduate student researcher on the project at Berkeley but was not supported for publication by Thomas and, in fact, generated a substantial academic controversy over whether Grodzins was authorized to publish his work (Murray 1991).

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In the 1950s, Stetson Conn (1959, 1964) prepared a chapter on the Army’s policies on the evacuation for the Army’s official history of World War II. The analysis first appeared in 1959 in the US Army’s Office of Military History volume, Command Decisions, and was titled, “The Decision to Evacuate the Japanese from the Pacific Coast.” It was a “substantially similar account” to the chapter in the 1964 volume, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts. In the 1950s and early 1960s, this work did not translate into accounts of the program in standard history textbooks, or in the public mind. But by the late 1960s, as the Civil Rights Revolution exposed the long-standing evils of American racism and particularly as a younger generation of Japanese Americans entered college, the “internment” once again came under sustained scrutiny. Roger Daniels and Harry Kitano organized the “first academic conference devoted to the wartime incarceration” at UCLA in 1967. In 1969, Japanese American activists organized the first Manzanar Pilgrimage, which was followed up in later years at Tule Lake in 1972, and annual day of remembrance on February 19, starting in 1978. Daniels published his first major study of the incarceration, Concentration Camps, USA, in 1970. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) revived its efforts at what came to be called “redress” in 1970 (Daniels 2013, pp. 141–43). As the 1970s dawned, the evacuation and incarceration became a focus of community concern and increased scholarly interest. JACL developed a concerted political campaign for redress, aimed at securing an official apology and monetary compensation to the evacuees. New publications appeared and created a stir, such as Michi Weglyn’s Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps in 1976 (Weglyn 1996). Key decision-makers of the evacuation program publicly recanted their support for the program, including Milton Eisenhower, Tom Clark, and Earl Warren. The community was also finding political clout that it lacked in earlier years. The admission of Hawaii to statehood in 1960 led to the election of Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga, both veterans of the 442d Regimental Combat Team, to the Senate from Hawaii. By the late 1970s, democrats and former Nisei evacuees Norman Mineta and Robert Matsui represented California in the House, and Canadian-born Republican S.I.  Hayakawa represented California in the Senate (Daniels 2013; United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982). Despite this renewed energy and attention, at the time, the original JACL hope for an apology and monetary compensation was not politically viable, even to the Japanese American members of Congress. Instead in early 1979, Senator Inouye recommended that JACL propose the creation of a presidential commission. JACL adopted the strategy, and companion bills were moved through the House and Senate in late 1979 and the first half of 1980.

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As enacted into law in late July 1980, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians was to, among other charges, “Review the facts and circumstances surrounding Executive Order Number 9066” and “Recommend appropriate remedies” (Daniels 2013, p. 148).

 edress Activists Rediscover the Role R of the Census Bureau in the Evacuation While the scholarly and political campaign grew in depth and strength, census officials ramped up planning for the 1980 census. In the 1970s, the bureau had created advisory committees for the various race and ethnic groups concerned about census coverage and accuracy. The Census Advisory Committee on the Asian and Pacific Americans Population convened in 1976 and met periodically through October 1980. Thus, for the first time, Japanese Americans and other Asian and Pacific Americans had a direct entrée into the policymaking processes for the census and thus served as a channel for questions from ethnic organizations on these matters (U.S.  Bureau of the Census 1986). The bureau saw these new outreach efforts to minority communities as part of their larger efforts to improve the quality of the data collected and published and a means to encourage participation in the census, particularly since by 1980, the vast majority of American households were to answer the census by mail rather than be a visit from an enumerator. The ethnic communities paid close attention to their new roles as census promoters and reported in the ethnic media about the upcoming count. Thus, it was that the Pacific Citizen, the “national publication of the Japanese Americans Citizen League,” on January 25, 1980, published a short front-page article on Census Director Vincent Barabba’s press conference explaining the upcoming census. “Census Bureau refused to let War Dept. have Nikkei names” the article headlined. The piece continued: Those who cooperate with the population count on April, this year, will be guaranteed their privacy would be protected, even the illegal immigrant, assured Vincent P. Barabba, director of the U.S. Census Bureau. [H]e pledged the census would not be turned over to any law enforcement agency. As historical precedent, Barabba cited the Census Bureau’s refusal in 1941 to give the names of Japanese Americans to the War Department despite the anti-Japanese hysteria that struck after Pearl Harbor.

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By the spring of 1980, activists involved in the redress campaign challenged that claim and initiated efforts to press the bureau to rediscover and explain its role in the program. Raymond Okamura, a former Gila River evacuee and long-time JACL activist, made the first approach to the bureau to late May 1980, after he had received a copy of General DeWitt’s Final Report from Michi Weglyn. That report, as noted in previous chapters, provided a detailed accounting of the Census Bureau role in the evacuation program and credited the data from the 1940 census as the “most important single source of information prior to the evacuation” (United States Army Western Defense Command and Fourth Army 1943). Referencing Barabba’s confidentiality claim, Okamura pressed the bureau: “The Bureau of Census has been less than honest about this matter. I believe some sort of apology or explanation is in order for disseminating false and misleading information.” In a letter Dr. Mary Watanabe, “JACL Census Liaison and Census Advisory Committee Member,” Okamura was blunter: “I was foolish in believing the Census Bureau’s propaganda regarding confidentiality of records. Government agencies simply cannot be trusted, and I am embarrassed to have been so naïve.” The correspondence among Okamura, Watanabe, and bureau officials reached the bureau and was archived (Office of the Director 1984–1989). Bureau officials did not respond promptly to Okamura, perhaps because Okamura mistakenly sent his original inquiry to former Census Director Manuel Plotkin rather than the current director, Vincent Barabba. But the Asian stakeholder community had been alerted, and on June 9, 1980, Christopher Chow, Census Information Officer in San Francisco, wrote to Barabba, saying he was getting calls on the issue and urged the bureau to respond: “I think the credibility of the Bureau with regard to confidentiality could be seriously jeopardized if this issue is not clarified soon – before someone makes it (and our reference to it) a public issue.” He recommended “that the bureau review this matter thoroughly; that the Bureau undertake to explain what kind of information was on those punch cards, precisely how the data was used…, and what procedures are now in place as safeguards, and what policies would apply in such a situation were it to recur in the future…[T]his issue should be cleared up once and for all” (Ibid.). The bureau acknowledged Okamura’s inquiry on July 2, indicating that “[s]ince your inquiry refers to historical information, additional time is required to complete our research.” Theodore (Ted) Clemence, senior advisor in the bureau, researched the issues. The first draft response in July, “Confidentiality of Census Records during World War II,” drew a scathing response from Christopher Chow. “The Census Bureau will be blown right

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out of the water if you release the draft public statement….” Chow sent a four-page critique, challenging the defensiveness of the draft, noting its omissions and its silences on the clear harms that the evacuation and incarceration inflicted on Japanese Americans. Clemence went back to the drawing board, acknowledging in an October memo to Barabba that he had learned since August that the Second War Powers Act had suspended confidentiality “temporarily.” He told Barabba he had received a phone call from Mary Watanabe of the Advisory Committee and that “[w]e should be prepared for this topic to be brought up during the committee mtg. on October 30.” He also had tried to “reach” Calvert Dedrick but was unsuccessful (Ibid; Washington Post 1988 on Clemence’s career). On December 16, 1980, Barabba provided a six-page single-spaced letter to Okamura responding to his questions. He claimed that: “As to the 1980 census publicity about the Bureau’s refusal to disclose names to the War Department in 1942, the statements were made in good faith based upon existing knowledge of the events.” He continued, “Based on our recent review of the events, it is apparent that a different account would be appropriate in the future,” but still claimed, that the “dissemination of the 1940 census statistics to assist the war agencies in 1942 did not, in our opinion, violate the applicable census law, even though the aggregated information may have been used to the detriment of groups or individuals” (Office of the Director 1984–1989). On January 23, 1981, Raymond Okamura published an article in Pacific Citizen on Barabba’s response. Headlined “Census data used to plan ‘42 Evacuation,” Okamura quoted from Barabba’s response and added detailed discussion of the Second War Powers Act and the intent of Congress to repeal census confidentiality as a war measure. Okamura warned that the repeal policy had never been challenged in court and alerted readers to the lingering dangers that another national emergency could lead Congress to do it again. The Pacific Citizen editor also reported that the recent JACL national convention had recommended that the organization “study” these matters, including whether JACL should “initiate legislation to strengthen census confidentiality” and “urge the Redress Commission to investigate the role of the Census Bureau in 1942.” Okamura sent Barabba’s letter to the Washington Post as well, and the Post reported on it on February 15, 1981 (Washington Post 1981). By that time, Barabba had resigned with the change of administration, and the bureau was without a permanent director until his successor, Bruce Chapman, took up his post in the summer of 1981. In February 1981, Okamura contacted the bureau again, asking Acting Census Director Daniel Levine to send an enclosed letter to Calvert Dedrick,

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who had been mentioned in Barabba’s December letter to Okamura. Okamura asked Dedrick for further information about his role in the evacuation. Dedrick replied to Okamura on March 12, providing details on his role in a three-page single-spaced letter, though he also claimed that his memory of the events had faded. He concluded with a spirited defense of bureau actions: “I hope that this letter will be helpful in your research effort. I also hope that you will help to kill the canard which has been spread about the violation of its confidentiality laws and rules by the Bureau of the Census” (Office of the Director 1984–1989). Okamura was not satisfied. In September 1981, in testimony before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Okamura argued that census confidentiality was a “myth.” He recounted his prior research on the bureau’s claims, the inadequate historical understanding of the impact of the Second War Powers Act, and called upon the Commission to “further investigate the role of the Census Bureau in the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, and to make appropriate recommendations for legislation to strengthen the census confidentiality law” (Okamura 1981). In November 1981, Calvert Dedrick testified before the Commission and vigorously defended his and the bureau’s actions. He again denied that the bureau had provided names and address of Japanese Americans to the military officials, and he explained how the small area tabulations were used to devise the evacuation process. Commission member and Philadelphia Judge William J. Marutani, the only Japanese American on the Commission and himself an evacuee, challenged Dedrick’s claim that all his and the bureau’s activities were proper. The testimony revealed the chasm between the viewpoint of the Japanese American evacuees and census officials and is worth quoting at length (Dedrick 1981): JUDGE MARUTANI: So what I understand you are saying is you did know this information was going to be used by the WCCA to round up persons of Japanese ancestry so that they could be sent to the camps? MR. DEDRICK: Well, that was my duty to try to use it. JUDGE MARUTANI: And that was the reason for why this information was released, and you were aware of it? MR. DEDRICK: Yes. JUDGE MARUTANI: What about the provision in the law, sir, that was existing at that time reading as follows: “That … [and it does not say names or addresses] …in no case shall information furnished under authority of this chapter be used to the detriment of the person or persons to such information relates.”

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Dedrick responded that bureau attorneys understood the provision Marutani quoted to refer to requests from an individual for an age search, or a request for a special tabulation on an individual. He explained that an individual could request their own information, “in lieu of a birth certificate,” but that third parties could not receive it. Marutani followed up: JUDGE MARUTANI: Well, as I understand it then your solicitors have advised you what this language means…. If that means that A wishes to sue B, you can’t get that information, but on the other hand, if X wishes to incarcerate 112,000 people, you can get the information, is that what your solicitors gave you? MR. DEDRICK: … when we make a special tabulation we try to protect confidentiality showing inclination [sic, this is a transcript error and should be information] about a given individual. However, the fact that there are so many Cubans living in Miami, it is a census fact, and a statistical fact, and if something happens to Cubans in Miami, that is not our fault, that is not used to their detriment. Otherwise the hands of the government of the United States, which takes its census and is responsible for the census, will be completely tied in ever ever [sic] using information from the census, because somebody might consider it to their detriment. JUDGE MARUTANI: Well, I don’t want to prolong it, I think I have the answer, but I cannot help but make one comment, that perhaps if I was a Cuban American and the census information came around, and particularly if I lived in South Florida, I may leave that space blank or put something else other than Cuban with this type of interpretation, I must tell you that. MR. DEDRICK: Then, sir, you would be in violation of federal law. JUDGE MARUTANI: Well, it’s better than being jailed for certain.

Dedrick’s claim that the bureau activities were completely proper reflected the consensus in bureau leadership and signaled that further communication between the bureau and the Japanese American community would not be forthcoming. In 1981, Okamura published his CWRIC testimony as an article in Amerasia Journal; in 1982, Roger Daniels added a “note and a document” in the same journal, reporting that he had contacted the Census Bureau History staff in 1975, asking about the bureau role in the evacuation program. Frederick Bohme, Chief of the Census History staff, had sent him a copy of the War History draft on the program and he included the document with footnote annotations. Daniels also noted that he had written to Dedrick in 1975 and “received no reply” (Daniels 1982). The issue continued to percolate. In 1982, in his book Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, John Toland published another claim that names and addresses from the 1940 census had been furnished to the White House for

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surveillance and control. Toland (1982) reported on the recollections of Henry Field, informal advisor to the President, who claimed that in late November 1941, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary, Grace Tully, had asked him to contact the Census Director, collect lists of Japanese Americans from the 1940 census, and deliver the lists to the White House. Field claimed he met with Director J.C.  Capt and delivered the lists to the White House. Once again, census officials were called upon to respond to the claim by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, and Ted Clemence prepared the bureau response. Clemence contacted Calvert Dedrick; Morris Hansen, Dedrick’s successor as Assistant Director for Statistical Research while Dedrick was in California; and Henry Field. Clemence reported that Dedrick and Hansen did “not believe” the Field story. Field claimed that Toland had correctly reported the interview he did for the book, but “as far as he knows, no records of any kind were kept on the matter.” Clemence reported that Capt was deceased and “is one of the few Directors who left no papers in the National Archives.” He concluded that “we are not in a position to confirm the Field account nor to insist that nothing of the kind took place.” In October 1982, Census Director Bruce Chapman wrote to the Commission and denied that the Field account was accurate (Office of the Director 1984–1989). The Commission reported its findings in Part I of its report, Personal Justice Denied (United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) 1982). In June 1983, in Part II of the report, the Commission recommended remedies, including that a formal “act of national apology” be enacted into law. Its other recommendations included monetary compensation for surviving evacuees and the funding for public educational activities to clarify the historical record of the program. The treatment of the role of the Census Bureau and its data in the overall evacuation and incarceration program was limited to a footnote reporting the Field story, Dedrick’s denial in his CWRIC testimony, and citation of the Bureau’s October 1982 “Statement on Census Bureau Actions at the Outset of World War II as Reported in Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath by John Toland.” “There is continuing controversy,” the Commission wrote, “over whether the Census Bureau breached the confidentiality of census information in order to aid other government agencies in  locating ethnic Japanese.” After describing Toland’s claim and the bureau’s denial, the Commission added, “There is no direct evidence or testimony to the effect that the Western Defense Command was in possession of the names and addresses of individual ethnic Japanese, as collected by the Census Bureau, at the time that

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mandatory evacuation was carried out, but Field’s story raises questions” (Ibid., pp. 104–105). From the bureau perspective, though, the issue was closed. The bureau acknowledged its role in the evacuation during World War II but also asserted it had adhered to its historic commitment to statistical confidentiality as an “inviolate tradition.” As the Dedrick-Marutani exchange demonstrated, the bureau claimed its legal responsibility was to keep individual-level data confidential. It did not extend to data tabulations used to the “detriment” of a group of respondents. Thus, there was no reason to examine the role of the bureau in the evacuation further or apologize for its actions. Once the Commission reported, redress advocates turned their attention to securing federal legislation for an apology and financial compensation for the evacuees. They were successful in 1988, when Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which recognized that “as described by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, a grave injustice was done to both citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry by the evacuation, relocation, and internment of civilians during World War II. As the Commission documents, these actions were carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage documented by the Commission, and were motivated largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership” (50 U.S. Code § 4202). In late 1989, Congress appropriated funds for the payments to the evacuee survivors. President George H.W. Bush signed that appropriation, and in October 1990, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, on behalf of the President, presented the first checks and a formal acknowledgment of the injustice of the evacuation and incarceration program. Bush’ letter stopped short of using the word “apology” but did “recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.” It took 10 years to distribute $1.6 billion to more than 82,000 Japanese American evacuee survivors. In 1994, as President Bill Clinton continued to administer the distribution of funds, he strengthened the acknowledgment of the injustices done to a true apology. “Today,” Clinton wrote, “on behalf of your fellow Americans, I offer a sincere apology to you for the actions that unfairly denied Japanese Americans and their families fundamental liberties during World War II” (Daniels 2013, p. 162). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as it conducted the 1990 census, the Bureau continued its work on issues of statistical confidentiality, privacy, and the implications of the increasing power of computers and the need to protect individual level data from inadvertent disclosure. The conversation between the redress advocates and the Census Bureau about the meaning of the

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detriment clause in the census statute did not continue. Marutani had challenged Dedrick to take a broader view of the responsibilities of data stewardship and consider issues of group harm or the implications of the racial classifications and procedures it used. Studies on disclosure and improvements in administrative processes in the bureau focused on the technical production of tabulations that would protect individual level data, not on the ethical questions of whether any particular tabulation could be used to the detriment of a group or whether the bureau had responsibilities for monitoring uses that might harm its respondents. There were muted expressions of concern that indicated that senior officials were troubled by the actions of the bureau during World War II. In 1995, for example, Barbara Everitt Bryant, who had served as Director during the 1990 census, raised the example of the bureau’s participation in the evacuation program in her memoir recounting her experience as census director. “Even today,” Bryant wrote, “the Census Bureau promises confidentiality only to individuals. Neighborhood characteristics, including their racial and ethnic mix, are available to all and much in demand by racial and ethnic groups.” She pointedly continued, “The Japanese-Americans who lost property and were interned simply because of their ancestry see things differently, indeed. Their devastating fate has been cited repeatedly by critics as a breach in spirit, if not in fact, of census confidentiality” (Bryant and Dunn 1995, pp. 32–33). The Bryant and Dunn reference and thus the call, is missing from the reference list. Here it is: Bryant, Barbara Everitt and William Dunn. 1995. Moving Power and Money: The Politics of Census Taking. Ithaca, NY: New Strategist Publications, Inc. By the time she wrote, however, Bryant spoke as a former director, not as a leader of statistical policy planning in the federal government.

F urther Reexamination of the Historical Record and Census Bureau Apology In the international arena, however, prompted by larger debates about human rights, the ethical and professional responsibilities of official statistical agencies and statisticians did find resonance. Scholars of the Holocaust, South African apartheid, and the partition of India, for example, noted the role of population data systems in facilitating the identification and targeting of vulnerable populations for human rights abuses, from discrimination to actual genocide. And a small community of human rights advocates, social

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scientists, official statisticians, and legal scholars began to interrogate the interrelationship between state data systems and how such data facilitated or were used to advance democratic rights or harm people with records in such systems (Spirer and Spirer 1993; Spirer and Seltzer 1997). These analysts recognized the important role of such data systems for managing the functioning of modern societies. They thus explored how to protect the individual respondents to censuses and surveys, protect the integrity of the data and the data infrastructure, and protect from misuse in quite broad terms. These analysts saw multiple issues and thus explored particular case studies (Seltzer 1998), as part of this larger agenda of the management of official statistical systems in modern states. They thus examined what happened in particular cases but also recommended measures to strengthen the statistical infrastructure for future use. Our collaboration in this study falls into this tradition. We reexamined the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II through the lens of the debate in international human rights and statistical policy. We began our research in the late 1990s, following the trail of previous scholars, as detailed in this book. We soon recognized that prior examinations of the evacuation program had been carried by persons who either (i) lacked knowledge of population statistics operations and the history of the Bureau but who were independent of the Bureau or (ii) had such knowledge but were not independent of the Bureau. It was our hope that our combination of expertise and independence might help to provide some new insights into these events. We presented our first paper, in the form of a working paper, at the Population Association Meeting in Los Angeles in March 2000, titled “After Pearl Harbor: The Proper Role of Population Data Systems in Time of War.” The paper was controversial (New York Times 2000). But coming as it did after the CWRIC report, after the appropriation of compensation to the survivors, and after the acknowledgment of harm by Presidents Reagan and Bush and President Clinton’s apology, it also generated a formal statement of apology from Census Director Kenneth Prewitt (2000).

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Box 8.1 The boxes that follow here shouid be one box, not several, with the original ellipses included since the Prewitt statement is longer than what we've included for the box .The historical record is clear that senior Census Bureau staff proactively cooperated with the internment, and that census tabulations were directly implicated in the denial of civil rights to citizens of the United States who happened also to be of Japanese ancestry. The record is less clear whether the then in effect legal prohibitions against revealing individual data records were violated. On this question, the judicial principle of innocent until proven otherwise should be honored. However, even were it to be conclusively documented that no such violation did occur, this would not and could not excuse the abuse of human rights that resulted from the rapid provision of tabulations designed to identify where Japanese Americans lived and therefore to facilitate and accelerate the forced relocation and denial of civil rights. I would also like to state clearly that for many years the Census Bureau was less than forthcoming in publicly acknowledging its role in the internment process. Silence was not the worst offense, for there is ample evidence that at various times the Census Bureau has described its role in such manner as to obfuscate its role in internment. Worst yet, some Census Bureau documents would lead the reader to believe that the Census Bureau behaved in a manner as to have actually protected the civil rights of Japanese Americans. This distortion of the historical record is being corrected. The internment of Japanese Americans was a sad, shameful event in American history, for which President Clinton, on behalf of the entire federal government, has forthrightly apologized. The Census Bureau joins in that apology and acknowledges its role in the internment. In the post-war period, important safeguards to protect against the misuse of census tabulations have been instituted, notably stronger legal provisions to protect data confidentiality and the Census Bureau’s introduction of disclosure avoidance techniques. Adherence to these safeguards preclude a repeat of the 1941/42 behavior. Over the past half-century, and especially following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the critical importance of summary data for enforcement of voting rights and civil rights in this age is an important contrast to the misuse of information in the early 1940s.

As both we and Director Prewitt acknowledged at the time, there was still a great deal more to be learned from the historical record, particularly about whether microdata were used to target vulnerable populations during World War II. We continued our research and produced a series of additional papers (see, e.g., Seltzer and Anderson 2001, 2008; Seltzer 2005; Anderson and Seltzer 2007, 2009; Anderson 2015). In a 2007 paper “Census Confidentiality under the Second War Powers Act (1942–1947),” prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America in 2007, we recounted what we had discovered from the legislative history and implementation of

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Section 1402 of the Second War Powers Act, its uses to access economic and demographic microdata during the war, and its repeal in 1947. See Chapter 7 above. Notably, the paper traced the 1943 Secret Service request for microdata on Japanese Americans in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, and its provision by the bureau (Seltzer and Anderson 2007). Though by then, Kenneth Prewitt had stepped down as Census Director, he responded to the new information: “The [new] evidence is convincing,” he noted. “At the time, available evidence (and Bureau lore) held that there had been no … release of microdata.” “That can no longer be said.” (Minkel 2007). Bureau spokeswoman Christa Jones, Chief of the Census Bureau’s Office of Analysis and Executive Support, also issued a statement reassuring the public that such disclosures would not happen again: “The law is very different today” than it was in 1943. “Anything that we release to any federal agency or any organization … all of those data are reviewed,” to prevent disclosures of individual information (see Jones 2017).

References Act to amend the Second War Powers Act, 1942, as amended (PL 79-475, June 29, 1946). Anderson, Margo. 2015. Public Management of Big Data: Historical Lessons from the 1940s. Federal History, pp. 17–34. Available at https://shfg.wildapricot.org/ resources/Documents/FH%207%20(2015)%20Anderson.pdf. Anderson, Margo, and William Seltzer. 2007. Challenges to the Confidentiality of U.S. Federal Statistics, 1910–1965. Journal of Official Statistics. 23 (1): 1–34. ———. 2009. Federal Statistical Confidentiality and Business Data: Twentieth Century Challenges and Continuing Issues. Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality 1 (Spring): 7–52. Bryant, Barbara Everitt and William Dunn. 1995. Moving Power and Money: The Politics of Census Taking. Ithaca, NY: New Strategist Publications, Inc.  Capt, J.C. 1946. “Capt to Division Heads, “Preparation for the WAR HISTORY PROJECT (sic), March 18, 1946.” Record Group 29, Entry 156, Box 107, Folder: “Memos from JVD on the War History Project.” National Archives. Washington, DC. Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Statement of the Congress. (50 U.S. Code § 4202). https:// www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/4202. Jones, Christa D. 2017. Documents and Citations: Original Sources and Research Concerning Census Bureau Efforts to Support Japanese Internment, March 22, 2017. Available at https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/ 66186/2017-­005%20May-­22%20MEMO%20Jones%20Files.pdf?sequence=3.

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Clark, Thomas C. 1947. Letter from the Attorney General Thomas C. Clark to W. Averell Harriman, Secretary of Commerce, January 29, 1947. Record Group 40, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence, Entry 1, 1054, Box 94, File 47001 (Part 3 to Part 7), National Archives. College Park, MD. Conn, Stetson. 1959. United States Department of the Army, Office of Military History, Command Decisions. 1st ed, 125–149. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1964. Guarding the United States and Its Outposts (United States Army in World War II, Western Hemisphere), pp. 115–49. Washington, D.C: Office of the Chief of Military History, Dept. of the Army, GPO. Daniels, Roger. 1982. The Bureau of the Census and Relocation of the Japanese Americans: A Note and a Document. Amerasia Journal. 9 (1): 101–105. ———. 2004. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. Rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. 2013. The Japanese American Cases: The Rule of Law in Time of War. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Dedrick, Calvert L. 1981. Opening Statement and Testimony of Calvert L. Dedrick to CWRIC, November 2, 1981; Testimony before CWRIC, November 3, 1981, 170–190, Photocopy of transcript. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). Record Group 220, National Archives. College Park, MD. Densho.org. n.d. Oral History. https://densho.org/collections/oral-­history/. Accessed 2 Mar 2023. Densho Encyclopedia. n.d. Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Japanese_American_Evacuation_and_ Resettlement_Study/. Accessed 1 Feb 2020. Dobbin, John V. 1946. Present status of Census Bureau War History, July 18, 1946. Record Group 29, Entry 156, Box 107, Folder: “Memos from JVD on the War History Project.” National Archives. Washington, DC. Duncan, Joseph W. and William C.  Shelton. 1978. Revolution in United States Government Statistics, 1926–1976. U.S.  Dept. of Commerce, Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards: U.S. Govt. Print. Office. Eaton, Mildred. 1948. Interoffice note to the Solicitor, Commerce Department, July 9, 1948. Record Group 40. General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence, 67001 (Part 3 to Part 7), Box 94, File 67001 (part 3 of 7). National Archives. College Park, MD. Fisher, Adrian S. 1947. Memorandum from the Departmental Solicitor to the Secretary of Commerce, Request of FBI for access to Census Records, April 9, 1947. Record Group 40, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence, 67104 (Part 2) – 67104 (Part 5), Box 144, File 67104 (Part 5). National Archives. College Park, MD.

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Foster, William C. 1948. Correspondence, May 27, 1948, to Attorney General and Census Director J.C. Capt. Record Group 40, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence, 67104 (Part 2) – 67104 (Part 5), Box 146, File 67104 (Part 5). National Archives. College Park, MD. Gerald R. Ford. 1976. Proclamation 4417, Confirming the Termination of the Executive Order Authorizing Japanese-American Internment During World War II. Accessed at http://www.ford.utexas.edu/library/speeches/760111p.htm. Goldfield, Edwin D. 1991. Oral History Interview conducted October 8, 1991 by Frederick G.  Bohme, Chief, Census Bureau history staff. Available at http://www. census.gov/prod/2003pubs/OH-­GOLDF.PDF. Grodzins, Morton. 1949. Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harriman, W Averell. 1947. Letter from the Secretary of Commerce W. Averell Harriman to the Attorney General, March 10, 1947. Record Group 40, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence, Entry 1, 1054, Box 94, File 47001 (Part 3 to Part 7). National Archives. College Park, MD. Jones, Jesse. 1944. Letter from the Secretary of Commerce Jesse H. Jones to the Attorney General, April 12, 1944. Record Group 40, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence, 67104 (Part 2) – 67104 (Part 5), Box 144, File 67104 (Part 3). National Archives. College Park, MD. Minkel. J.R. 2007. Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave Up Names of Japanese-­ Americans in WW II. Scientific American, March 30, 2007. Available at https:// www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-­the-­us-­census-­b/. Murray, Stephen O. 1991. The Rights of Research Assistants and the Rhetoric of Political Suppression: Morton Grodzins and the University of California Japanese-­ American Evacuation and Resettlement Study. Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 27.2 (Apr): 130–156. New York Times. 2000. Report Says Census Bureau Helped Relocate Japanese. March 17, 2000, Section A, Page 14. Niiya, Brian, ed. 2001. Encyclopedia of Japanese American History. updated ed. New York: Checkmark Books, an Imprint of Facts on File, Inc. Office of the Director. 1984–1989. Recent Acquisitions, Entry 362L, Office of the Director Dr. John G.  Keane (1984–89). Box 18. Folder, “Japanese Americans (WWII).” Record Group 29, National Archives. Washington, DC. Okamura, Raymond Y. 1981. The Myth of Census Confidentiality. Amerasia Journal. 8 (2): 111–120. Prewitt, Kenneth. 2000. Statement of Census Director Kenneth Prewitt, March 24, 2000. Quoted in U.S.  Census Bureau, “Census Confidentiality And Privacy: 1790–2002.” Available at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2003/ comm/monograph-­confidentiality-­privacy.pdf. Rostow, Eugene. 1945a. The Japanese American Cases-A Disaster. 54 Yale Law Journal 489 (1944–1945).

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———. 1945b. Our Worst Wartime Mistake. Harpers (September 1945). Sawyer, Charles. 1948. Letter from Secretary of Commerce, Charles Sawyer, to the Commissioner, Bureau of Internal Revenue, July 15, 1948. Record Group 40, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence, 67001 (Part 3 to Part 7), Box 94, File 67001 (part 3 of 7), National Archives. College Park, MD. Seltzer, William. 1998. Population Statistics, the Holocaust, and the Nuremberg Trials. Population and Development Review 24 (3): 511–552. ———. 2005. On the Use of Population Data Systems to Target Vulnerable Population Subgroups for Human Rights Abuses. Coyuntura Social 32 (June 2005): 31–44. Seltzer, William and Margo Anderson. 2001. The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses. Social Research, Summer 2001 68(2): 481–513. ———. 2007. Census Confidentiality under the Second War Powers Act (1942–1947). Paper prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, March 30, 2007, New York. Seltzer, William, and Margo Anderson. 2008. Using Population Data Systems to Target Vulnerable Population Subgroups and Individuals: Issues and Incidents. In Statistical Methods for Human Rights, ed. Jana Asher, David Banks, and Fritz S. Scheuren, 273–328. New York: Springer. Spirer, Herbert F., and Louise Spirer. 1993. Data Analysis for Monitoring Human Rights. Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science. Spirer, Herbert F. and William Seltzer. 1997. Using Data and Quantitative Methods to Obtain Evidence for International Criminal Tribunals. Paper presented to conference. Columbia University, Center for the Study of Human Rights, April 12, 1997. Stokes, I.N.P. 1948. Memorandum from the Departmental Solicitor, I.N.P. Stokes, to the Secretary of Commerce, Disclosure of information obtained by the Bureau of the Census to other Governmental agencies, July 12, 1948. Record Group 40. General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence, 67001 (Part 3 to Part 7), Box 94, File 67001 (Part 3 of 7). National Archives. College Park, MD. Thomas, Dorothy S. 1952. The Salvage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomas, Dorothy S., and Richard Nishimoto. 1946. The Spoilage. Berkeley: University of California Press. tenBroek, Jacobus, Edward N. Barnhart, and Floyd Matson. 1954. Prejudice, War, and the Constitution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Toland, John. 1982. Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath. 1st ed. Garden City: Doubleday. United States Army. Western Defense Command and Fourth Army. 1943. Final report, Japanese evacuation from the West Coast, 1942. Washington, DC: GPO.

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United States Bureau of the Census. 1986. Procedural History of the 1980 Census, Chapter 2 https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1980/proceduralHistory/Chapter_02.pdf. United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). 1982. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office). Report reissued in 1997 by University of Washington Press (Seattle: University of Washington Press) with a new forward by Tetsuden Kashima. United States War Relocation Authority. 1946. The Evacuated People: A Quantitative Description. Washington, DC: GPO. Available at http://npshistory.com/publications/incarceration/evacuated-­people.pdf. Accessed 1 Mar 2020. Wallace, Henry. 1945. Letter from Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace to John D.  Small, Chairman, Civilian Production Administration, November 29, 1945. Record Group 40, General Records of the Department of Commerce, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence, 102517/106-108, Box 973, File 102517/106, National Archives. College Park, MD. Washington Post. 1981. Census Bureau Aided ‘42 Roundup of Nisei. February 15, 1981, G2. ———. 1988. Obituaries, Theodore G.  Clemence. https://www.washingtonpost. com/archive/local/1988/10/12/obituaries/263a965d-­8 492-­4 efe-­9 079-­6 6 8f04388ec7/. Weglyn, Michi. 1996. Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps. Updated edition. Seattle: University of Washington Press, Original edition published in 1976.

9 Lessons

[A colleague] suggested I contact you for a citation that covers the use of special tabulations at the census tract-level that were produced from the 1940 U.S. Census to assist in the internment of the Japanese Americans at the start of World War II. As I … recall, Vince Barabba commissioned a study to find out what actually happened. Do we recall correctly, what reference can I cite, and how can I get a hold of it? Personal email, William Seltzer to Margo Anderson, July 2, 1997

 he Understudied Borderland Between Statistical T Policy, Demographic, and Military History As one of us wrote (Seltzer 1998) when working on the study of the role of data systems in the Holocaust, he coined the term “understudied borderland” to identify the complex interdisciplinary, linguistic, and temporal contexts of studying how official population data systems inform and serve both the welfare of people in their societies and can be deployed for abuse, harm, and antidemocratic surveillance. This book does something of the same, assembling the evidentiary base to nail down precisely what happened when, how, and why for the data issues surrounding the evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II. While documenting relevant developments in diverse places, we have also tried to provide something of a roadmap on how to find materials that fell through the cracks in one agency, organization, or source in the records of another. Put somewhat differently, the events we describe represented communications and actions across federal agencies, between federal, state, and

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local governments, across many media platforms reporting events in real time, and among actors often with conflicting agendas. Without a firm foundation and systematic attention to documenting the activities of official statistical agencies within the statistical system itself, it is much more difficult to do the additional work contextualizing the actions of the statistical agency in the larger public sphere. Future officials are left scrambling to find out what happened when challenges to past practice emerge or simply to answer such basic questions as “why do we do this this way?” So our first lesson is to emphasize the importance of institutional procedural history in the workings of public statistical agencies. For example, at least as of 2023, the Census Bureau appears to have abandoned its long-­ standing tradition of preparing a detailed procedural history of each population census. Thus, the detailed procedures used in the 2020 population census remain largely undocumented, and with the passage of time, this failure becomes very difficult to rectify.

Memory of Past Policies Our second lesson is related, namely, that the memory of past problematic policies does not fade for those harmed by those policies, and can reemerge to disrupt the work of later data collections and the agency reputation. Former Census Director Kenneth Prewitt (2019) acknowledged as much. “The remarkable thing about what happened in 1942, basically,” he told NPR in 2019, “by using 1940 census data with the roundup of the Japanese Americans on the West Coast is that we’re still talking about it 70 years later. Every census that comes along – once again, the Japanese case gets brought to the surface. And the argument always is you can’t trust the Census Bureau. Look what they did back in 1940. So, yes, it cast a very long dark shadow.” Census official Christa Jones made a similar evaluation in 2017: “With each decennial census for the last 40–50 years, the question of whether the Census Bureau provided confidential data to facilitate the evacuation and relocation of the Japanese Americans during World War II (i.e., the “Japanese internment”) rematerializes, seemingly never resolved.”

Ethics Our third lesson is that the professional responsibilities of official statisticians require that they maintain an awareness that there are ethical dimensions to their work if they are to reduce the likelihood of fostering harm or the

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perception of harm among portions of the responding public. This has been widely recognized both in the United States (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2021; American Statistical Association 2022) and around the world (International Statistical Institute 2010; United Nations 2014; Seltzer 1994); Habermann 2006a). The Commission of Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (1982, p. 18) identified three causes of the unjust decisions that led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II: “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” These causes also characterize the actions of key census officials who deployed the data systems that allowed the Army to round up West Coast Japanese Americans and assist in their detention during the war. Within the US federal statistical system, and particularly among the senior leadership and staff of the Census Bureau, we could find little articulated recognition that any issues of statistical ethics arose from the assistance provided by Census staff and outputs to the harm caused to Japanese Americans individually or collectively during World War II. Indeed, we could find only three clear exceptions to this bleak record. First, and most notable, were the cautionary words expressed by the then Census Bureau staff member, Dr. Forrest Linder, in May 1942, within months of the Pearl Harbor attack, in a technical report prepared at the request of the US Army’s Western Defense Command to explore the technical feasibility of a related proposal to establish a population register (see the section “General Population Registration for Military and Statistical Purposes” in Chap. 6 above). As Linder (1942) noted in his report, “Traditional American thinking regarding freedom of action and thought might consider a mandatory identification register as an infringement of that liberty and the beginning of an American ‘gestapo’.” Once raised directly in this fashion, Linder’s cautionary views prevailed. Indeed, they were reflected in the report by the Bureau of Budget that marked the formal end of the population registration proposal, which included the pointed warning of the need to avoid any system that could “lead to the compilation of a secret dossier on the American people” (U.S. Bureau of the Budget 1943). The second exception was the observation offered by the then former Census Bureau Director Barbara Everett Bryant in her memoir (Bryant and Dunn 1995, pp. 32–33). The third exception was the forthright acknowledgments by Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt of the Bureau’s proactive involvement of Census staff and outputs in the initial round-up of the Japanese Americans and related monitoring of those detained (see, for example, Prewitt 2000a, Prewitt 2009). These latter two expressions came decades after the War was over and after redress legislation had been enacted. We encourage

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our readers to delve into the details of these three cases and think about the capacities of each actor to effect change in policy. See Chaps. 6 and 8. The US government at the highest level (see, for example, Ford 1976, Reagan 1988, and Clinton 1993), the military itself (Conn et al. 1964), and most other federal officials who supported or assisted in the round-up and forced confinement of the West Coast Japanese Americans came to the realization that the entire effort was morally wrong and legally questionable (see also, for example, Milton Eisenhower, who quit as director of the WRA after about 90 days (1974), Tom Clark, 1974, and Earl Warren, 1977, all also quoted in CWRIC, 1982). However, as we have shown, the leadership and most staff of the Census Bureau did not, and continued to deny the existence of possible unethical Bureau involvement in the evacuation and incarceration program until well into the 1990s. We speculate that the Bureau was strongly influenced in its denials by a faith in former long-term staff member, Dr. Calvert Dedrick as expressed in the colloquy between Dedrick and Judge William J. Marutani at the November 1981 hearing of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Dedrick 1981). These strong denials also seemed to arise from a faith in the Bureau’s view of its own good intentions (see, for example, “Census Confidentiality And Privacy: 1790–2002”, which contains a review of many of the events we recounted in Chaps. 4, 5 and 6 above, but which focuses only on the legality of its actions (U.S. Census Bureau 2017, particularly pp. 14–15). To better focus on whether any ethical issues are involved, it is useful to ask the simple question: if, as the US Congress and several US Presidents have determined, the internment program itself was morally wrong and substantially racist in nature, wasn’t the Census Bureau’s proactive facilitation of the internment equally wrong? Indeed, this view is implicit in Census Director Prewitt’s reference to this “sad, shameful event in American history” (Prewitt 2000b). The Bureau has begun to take on board that there are ethical dimensions to its work. See Habermann (2006a) and the several invited discussions and critiques of his paper in the same issue (Fienberg 2006), (Prewitt 2006), (Holt 2006), (Terwin 2006), (Clark 2006), and (Anderson and Seltzer 2006) as well as Habermann’s rejoinder (2006b). After Census 2000 the bureau revised its procedures to require that all special tabulations be identified on the bureau website as well (U.S. Census Bureau 2009). However, in our view considerable scope for improvement remains. See, for example, the 55-page monograph, “Census Confidentiality And Privacy: 1790–2002” just cited, which contains only a single reference to either the term “ethics” or “ethical” (U.S. Census Bureau 2017, p. 48).

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There are many other examples of the “dark side of numbers” (Seltzer and Anderson 2001) to be examined and hence lessons to be learned, but we conclude where we started. George Orwell’s novel, 1984, continues to resonate and symbolize how governments harmed vulnerable people during World War II and later. However, it’s not necessary to resort to fiction to address how to fix threats to human rights arising from official data systems. Real examination of actual events is a better approach, because it can lead to concrete improvements, by identifying and, where possible, fixing the abuses of the past and attempting to prevent those in the future.

References American Statistical Association. 2022. Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice, approved by the ASA Board of Directors, February 1, 2022. Available at https:// www.amstat.org/your-­career/ethical-­guidelines-­for-­statistical-­practice. Anderson, Margo, and William Seltzer. 2006. Discussion. Journal of Official Statis­ tics 22 (4): 641–649. Available at https://www.scb.se/dokumentation/statistiskametoder/JOS-archive/. Bryant, Barbara Everett, and William Dunn. 1995. Moving Power and Money: The Politics of Census Taking. Ithaca, NY: New Strategist Publications, Inc. Clark, Tom C. 1976. “Preface” to Frank F. Chuman, The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese Americans. Del Mar: Publisher’s Inc. Clark, Cynthia Z.F. 2006. Discussion. Journal of Official Statistics 22 (4): 637–639. Available at https://www.scb.se/dokumentation/statistiska-metoder/JOS-archive/. Clinton, Bill. 1993. Presidential Letter of Apology, dated October 1, 1993. Available at http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/clinton.html Conn, Stetson, Rose C. Engelman, and Byron Fairchild. 1964. Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, The Western Hemisphere: Guarding the United States and its Outposts (Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army), in the series United States Army in World War II, chapter 5. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Dedrick, Calvert L. 1981. Prepared Statement and Oral Testimony [including an audio file] before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians on November 2–3, 1981. United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). Hearing Transcripts. 7/31/1980-6/30/1983. Record Group 220, Records of Temporary Committees, Commissions, and Boards, 1893–2008, National Archives, College Park, MD.  U.S.  Census Bureau. 2017. “Census Confidentiality and Privacy: 1790–2002”. Available at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2003/ comm/monograph-confidentiality-privacy.pdf Eisenhower, Milton S. 1974. The President is Calling. Garden City: Doubleday.

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Ford, Gerald R. 1976. President Gerald R. Ford’s Proclamation 4417, Confirming the Termination of the Executive Order Authorizing Japanese-American Internment During World War II. Available at https://www.fordlibrarymuseum. gov/library/speeches/760111p.htm Fienberg, Stephen E. 2006. Discussion. Journal of Official Statistics 22 (4): 615–619. Available at JOS: Statistics Sweden https://www.scb.se/dokumentation/statistiskametoder/JOS-archive/. Habermann, Hermann. 2006a. Ethics, Confidentiality, and Data Dissemination. Journal of Official Statistics 22 (4): 599–614. Habermann, Hermann. 2006b. Rejoinder. Journal of Official Statistics 22 (4): 651–653. Available at https://www.scb.se/dokumentation/statistiska-metoder/ JOS-archive/. Holt, Tim. 2006. Discussion. Journal of Official Statistics 22 (4): 627–629. Available at https://www.scb.se/dokumentation/statistiska-metoder/JOS-archive/. International Statistical Institute. 2010. Declaration on Professional Ethics. Available at https://www.isi-­web.org/declaration-­professional-­ethics-­2010. Jones, Christa. 2017. Documents and Citations: Original Sources and Research Concerning Census Bureau Efforts to Support Japanese Internment, March 22, 2017. Available at https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/66186/2017­005%20May-­22%20MEMO%20Jones%20Files.pdf?sequence=3. Linder, Forrest E. 1942. Memorandum relating to a general population identity registration for military purposes and covering letter to Calvert L.  Dedrick, both dated May 9, 1942. Papers of Philip Hauser (item 146); US Census Bureau, Record Group 29; National Archives, Washington, DC. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2021. Principles and­ Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency: Seventh Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25885. Prewitt, Kenneth. 2000a. Statement of Census Director Kenneth Prewitt, March 24, 2000. Quoted in U.S.  Census Bureau, “Census Confidentiality And Privacy: 1790–2002.” Available at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2003/ comm/monographconfidentiality-privacy.pdf Prewitt, Kenneth. 2000b. Statement of Census Director Kenneth Prewitt, March 24, 2000. Quoted in U.S.  Census Bureau, “Census Confidentiality and Privacy: 1790–2002.” https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2003/comm/monograph-confidentialityprivacy.pdf Prewitt, Kenneth. 2006. Discussion Statistics in the National Interest. Journal of Official Statistics 22 (4): 621–625. Available at JOS: Statistics Sweden https:// www.scb.se/dokumentation/statistiska-metoder/JOS-archive/. Prewitt, Kenneth. 2007. Quoted in “Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave Up Names of Japanese Americans in WWII.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/ article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/Americans in WW II. Scientific American, March 30.

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Prewitt, Kenneth. 2019. Interview on All Things Considered, July 6. www.npr. org/2019/07/06/739227590/former-­c ensus-­d irector-­c itizenship-­q uestion­to-­hurt-­2020-­accuracy. Reagan, Ronald. 1988. Signing Ceremony, Japanese Internment Bill, 08/10/1988. Available at: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Digital Library Collections https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/digitized-textual-material Seltzer, William. 1994. Politics and Statistics: Independence, Dependence, or Interaction. Working Paper no. 6. Department of Economic and Social Information and Policy Analysis. ST/ESA/1994/WP.6. New  York. United Nations. Available at: https://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/FP-­Seltzer.pdf. Accessed 1 Apr 2023. ———. 1998. Population Statistics, the Holocaust, and the Nuremberg Trials. Population and Development Review 24 (3): 511–552. ———. 2007. Quoted in “Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave Up Names of Japanese Americans in WWII”. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/Americans in WW II. Scientific American, March 30. Seltzer, William, and Margo Anderson. 2001. The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses. Social Research, Summer 2001 68(2): 481–513. Terwin, Dennis. 2006. Discussion. Journal of Official Statistics 22 (4): 631–635. Available at https://www.scb.se/dokumentation/statistiska-metoder/JOS-archive/. United States Bureau of the Budget. 1943. Measures Relating to Vital Records and Vital Statistics. Message of the President of the United States Transmitting the Report of the Bureau of the Budget (House Document No. 242, 78th Congress, 1st Session, June 24, 1943). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. United Nations. 2014. Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics (A/RES/68/261 from 29 January 2014). https://unstats.un.org/unsd/dnss/gp/fundprinciples.aspx. Accessed 31 Mar 2023. [Initially adopted by the UN Statistical Commission in 1994 and subsequently by the UN General Assembly in 2014.] U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). 1982. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1982); Report reissued in 1997 by University of Washington Press (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) with a new forward by Tetsuden Kashima. U.S. Census Bureau. 2009. History: 2000 Census of Population and Housing. Vol. 2, 433–434. Washington, D.C.: GPO, ch. 9. https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/ Census2000v2.pdf. U.S. Census Bureau. 2017. “Census Confidentiality And Privacy: 1790–2002”. Available at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2003/comm/monograph-confidentiality-privacy.pdf. Warren, Earl. 1977. The Memoirs of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Garden City: Doubleday & Co, Inc.



Glossary of Selected Technical Terms

Administrative records. Records collected and maintained by federal, state, and local agencies for the purpose of program administration, implementation, and monitoring. Examples at the federal level include tax returns, demographic and earnings records of the Social Security Administration, and information on the foreign-born population (in 1940, maintained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)). At the state and local level, records are kept on births, deaths, marriages, and divorces (much of this for reporting to higher governmental entities), as well as on driver’s licenses, participation in programs for health and welfare, and on the size and characteristics of the housing stock. Such data can be used to check the quality of the decennial census, as a supplement to the census, or as a means of constructing population estimates and projections. Census block. The smallest geographic entity for which the Census Bureau collects and tabulates decennial census information; bounded on all sides by visible and nonvisible features shown on Census Bureau maps. They were first used for housing counts in the 1940 census in selected urban areas. Block counts are small, with limited breakdowns for characteristics. Block counts of populations were added in the 1960 and later censuses. Census tract. A small, relatively permanent, homogeneous geographic subdivision of metropolitan areas and selected nonmetropolitan counties, each containing approximately 4000–8000 people, delineated for the purpose of presenting census data. In the 1940 census they were used primarily for selected urban areas only.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Anderson, W. Seltzer, Use and Misuse of the United States Census, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38619-0

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Glossary of Selected Technical Terms

Editing. The process of checking collected data for missing, inconsistent, illegible, out of scope, or obviously wrong responses, and supplying numeric codes to textual answers, e.g., to responses for to such items as those on occupation and industry. Staff review responses as recorded before tabulation and, using a variety of rules developed by subject-matter specialists, add codes and deal with problematic responses. For example, a response that indicates that a person is 2 years old and married may require inspection of the original handwritten entry to determine whether, for example, the individual’s age or marital status was misreported. The entire process, including the rules for correcting, coding, and/or fixing anomalous data, is referred to as the editing process. Enumeration district. In the 1940 census, a geographic area, used as a work unit or physical area for one “enumerator” to canvass. “Enumeration districts” are designed for data collection, and are converted to relevant geographic reporting areas, such as cities, towns, counties, minor civil divisions, for the published tabulations. Ethical Standards for Statistical Practice. Norms and formal guidance for official statistics covering data collection, tabulation, dissemination, and use. Such ethical standards are available internationally (see, for example, the United Nations [Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics] and the International Statistical Institute [Declaration on Professional Ethics]) and for many individual countries. For the United States, see, for example, the American Statistical Association (Ethical Guidelines for Statistical Practice) and the US National Academy of Sciences (Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency: Seventh Edition). These ethical standards are periodically updated. Ethically based terms for Defining Statistical Reporting Outputs. [1] Macrodata. Reports of large aggregates that form the basis of published census reports; the main outputs of a statistical agency that protect respondents’ individual information among “faces in the crowd.” In practice, Census Bureau staff constructed table shells for characteristics and geography so that small cell counts would not exist. [2] Mesodata. Statistical results presented at such a fine level of geographic disaggregation that the results may be used in conducting field operations at the local level, in other words, capable of being used to “target” a population, whether for a benefit, surveillance, some form of discrimination, or perhaps even a marketing campaign. [3] Microdata. Identifiable responses with characteristics information for one or more individual respondents to a census or survey. Title 13

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bars the distribution or publication of such information. See also the Glossary entries for Tabulation Geography and Title 13 of the US Code. More recently, term microdata has been further refined by using the nomenclature of protected microdata and unprotected microdata, where the former term refers to data sets where some level of respondent protection is introduced by such means as sampling. As used in this book, microdata refers to unprotected microdata. False positives/False negatives. False positives are those cases that are erroneously assigned a given characteristic, while false negatives are those cases that are erroneously determined not to have a given characteristic. Both terms are also used in the singular. In classical statistics, the former are termed Type I errors, while the latter are termed Type II errors. For example, classifying a 1940 census respondent who was not Japanese American as Japanese American would be a false positive or Type I error. Japanese American population subgroups. Three groups were typically defined: Issei are immigrants from Japan. Nisei are children born in the Americas to Japanese immigrants. Kibei are children of Japanese immigrants residing in the USA who had returned to Japan for education or to maintain cultural ties for some period in their lives. The terms were used in the Japanese American community, but not in the census or elsewhere in the US statistical system. At the time of the 1940 census, the bulk of the Nisei were born in the USA and hence were US citizens. They also represented the bulk of those relocated to internment camps. Macrodata. See Ethically based terms for Defining Statistical Reporting Outputs Mesodata. See Ethically based terms for Defining Statistical Reporting Outputs Microdata. See Ethically based terms for Defining Statistical Reporting Outputs Punch Cards. A tool used for recording information obtained in data-­ gathering operations, such as a population census, and then editing and tabulating this information, until the 1960s, by mechanical means. Physically, each punch card was a thin, but semi-rigid, piece of card stock, approximately 7 by 3 inches in size. The basic punch card used in the 1940 US Population Census provided space for 45 columns, see Fig. 2.2. The term punch cards is used both to refer the physical card and the process of its use. Statistical confidentiality. A concept of fostering the protection of census or survey respondents from harm or embarrassment based on their responses to a statistical inquiry or simply their mere participation in such an inquiry. Adherence to statistical confidentiality can be fostered both by ethical standards (see Ethical Standards for Statistical Practice) and by law (see, for

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Glossary of Selected Technical Terms

example, Title 13 of the US Code). Those carrying out statistical inquiries are responsible for guaranteeing that statistical confidentiality is protected by establishing and maintaining appropriate disclosure control rules for all such statistical inquiries. Table Shell. A table shell displays the layout of a table without the actual reported numbers filled in. Survey research staff define the cases and variables that will appear in the eventual published table during the planning phase of the research. The staff plan the reporting categories, e.g., the number of people in various age cohorts for a jurisdiction to assure the eventual tables are informative, and to guarantee that the responses of individuals cannot be inferred from the aggregated table. They do this by setting a standard for a minimum number of cases reported in a particular tabular cell, and adjusting the table shell rows and columns to protect the statistical confidentiality of individual responses. Tabulation Geography. The geographic areas for which census data are reported, to be distinguished from collection geography, the geographic areas which were assigned to enumerators to collect census information. Tabulation geography used by the Census Bureau must allow for adherence to the confidentiality provisions of Title 13. Title 13 of the US Code. As codified in 1954, the law under which the Census Bureau operates. It includes provisions to protect the confidentiality of census information and establishes penalties if census officials disclose information they collect. The 1929 statute required that “the information furnished under the provisions of this act shall be used only for the statistical purposes for which it is supplied. No publication shall be made by the Census Office whereby the data furnished by any particular establishment or individual can be identified, nor shall the Director of the Census permit anyone other than the sworn employees of the Census Office examine the individual reports.”

Index

A

B

ABC lists, 20, 52, 54, 153 Alien Land Laws, 12 Alien registration, 2, 18, 19, 21, 28, 56, 61, 76, 77, 87, 90, 93, 111, 113, 115, 123, 128, 136, 138, 145 Aliens Division, Department of Justice, 54, 75, 88, 92, 93 Aliens Ineligible for Citizenship, 12, 21, 43, 57, 157 Anson, A., 66 Anti-Axis Committee, see Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) Apology, 3, 6, 15, 185, 186, 197, 199, 203–208 Assembly Center, 114, 116, 117, 121–123, 125, 129, 134, 148, 150, 187, 195 See also Concentration camp; Tanforan Assembly Center Austin, W., 118, 119 Austin, W.L., 37, 108, 109 Axis powers, 15, 17, 49, 65, 84

Bainbridge Island, 94, 100, 118, 120, 121, 124, 125 Barabba, V., 36, 198–200 Battle of Los Angeles, 103 Bendetsen/Bendetson, K., 54, 55, 67, 69, 75–77, 81, 88–94, 98–102, 112–115, 117, 119–122, 126, 134–138, 140, 145–147, 149, 151–154, 156–158 Biddle, F., 56, 64, 87, 90, 95 Boekel, W., 153 Bohme, F., 32, 102, 202 Bowron, F., 56, 65, 84, 86–88, 90, 102 Bremerton Navy Yard, 94, 99 Bryant, B.E., 205 Bureau of the Budget, 2, 35, 95, 143, 144, 167, 168, 215 See also Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Bush, G.H.W. (George H.W. Bush), 204, 206

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Anderson, W. Seltzer, Use and Misuse of the United States Census, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38619-0

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226 Index C

Capt, J.C., 25, 28, 37, 38, 57, 58, 60, 62–65, 82, 93–97, 103, 109, 110, 112, 119, 137, 138, 141, 142, 150, 152, 156, 164, 165, 169, 174, 175, 178, 193, 195, 196, 203 Carter, J.F., 22–25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 51, 56, 57, 63, 64, 69, 110 Census Advisory Committee (CAC), 60, 63, 64, 82, 94, 109, 110, 138, 141–143, 199 Census Advisory Committee on the Asian and Pacific Americans Population, 198 Census block, 11, 168, 169, 192, 194 Census presidential proclamation, 36 Census schedules, 93, 95, 112, 163, 164, 168, 170, 174, 178 Census tract, 82, 117, 166 Central Intelligence Agency, see Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Central Statistical Board, Bureau of the Budget, 34, 35 Chapman, B., 70, 200, 203 Chinese Exclusion Act, 43 Chow, C., 199, 200 Civil registration, see Vital registration system Clark, M., 92 Clark, T., 84, 90, 93, 101, 197 Clemence, T., 199, 200, 203 Clinton, B., 204, 206, 207, 216 Cohn, A., 86–88 Commerce Department, 24, 33–35, 62, 102, 119, 167–170, 173–180, 194 Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), vii, 3, 4, 6, 10, 65, 77, 79, 83, 84, 90, 117, 121, 122, 127, 135, 145, 146, 151, 157, 159, 160, 169, 171, 185,

186, 189, 190, 197, 198, 201–203, 206 Concentration camp, 3, 22, 23, 123, 134, 147, 171, 186, 197 See also Assembly Center; Relocation Center Conn, S., 53–56, 68, 78, 83, 89, 98, 99, 197 Costello, J.M., 87 D

Daniels, R., 3, 13, 14, 17, 23, 42, 43, 53, 65, 77, 84, 94, 117, 126, 154, 156, 186–188, 190, 197, 198, 202, 204 Data releases, 58, 59, 163–181 Dedrick, C.L., 33–35, 102, 103, 107–110, 112–115, 117–121, 123, 125–128, 136–141, 144–151, 154–159, 169, 173, 174, 181, 190, 195, 196, 200–205 DeWitt, J., 53, 54, 56, 68, 69, 75–81, 83, 89–91, 93, 98–101, 103, 111, 113, 114, 117, 119, 122, 134–137, 144–146, 149, 151, 152, 154, 158, 171, 187, 199 Dies Committee on Un-American Activities, 52 Dies, M., 52, 171 Disclosure control, see Statistical confidentiality Draft registration, 2, 18 Dunn, H.L., 141–143, 178, 191, 205 E

Eisenhower, M., 122, 152, 197 11th Naval District, 20, 66, 80, 88, 90, 91, 102 Endo, M., 187 Ennis, E., 75–77, 85, 94, 122

 Index 

Enumeration district (ED), 70, 118–120, 176, 177 Ethics/ethical, viii, 10, 80, 164, 186, 205, 214–217 Exclusion order, 118, 121–123, 125, 126, 173 Executive Order 9066, 5, 80, 98, 100, 107, 111, 112, 114, 135, 144 Executive Order 9157, 167, 168, 174 Ex Parte Endo, 187 F

False Negative Type II Error, 152 False Positive Type I Error, 152 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 17–20, 32–34, 36, 63, 65, 66, 75, 76, 87, 88, 98, 99, 101, 103, 108, 113, 115, 122, 123, 126, 158, 159, 170, 173, 179, 192–194 Field, H., 23–25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 51, 56, 57, 60, 63, 64, 69, 70, 110, 203, 204 Field, H.L., 150 Fienberg, S.E., 216 Fifth column, 17, 22, 40, 50, 52, 54, 56, 76, 78, 85, 90, 136, 171 Final Report, 113–117, 123, 128, 134, 146, 151, 156, 158, 199 Ford, G.R., 185, 216 Forney, L.R., 77 442nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT), 154, 157, 171, 197 Freeman, C.S., 79, 94 G

Gila River Relocation Center, 199 See also Relocation Center Goldfield, E, 194 Green card, 18, 108 Greenslade, J., 79

227

Grozdins, M., 68, 84, 86, 87, 92, 93, 171 Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association of Central California, 67 Gullion, A., 54, 55, 68, 69, 103, 112, 122 H

Habermann, H., 215, 216 Hansen, M., 138, 191, 203 Harriman, A., 193 Hayakawa, S.I., 197 Hirabayashi, G., 126, 187 Hirabayashi v. United States, 126, 187 Holocaust (also known as Shoah), 205, 213 Hoover, J.E., 17 Hopkins, H., 34, 36, 110 Hosokawa, B., 15, 151 Hughes, J.B., 85–87 I

Immigration Act of 1924, 13, 14 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), Department of Justice, 19, 61, 69, 80, 85, 88, 97, 115, 138, 145, 150 Incarceration, vii, 3, 5, 6, 9, 98, 107, 111, 137, 163, 164, 180, 181, 185–208 See also Internment Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, 202, 203 Ingebretsen, J., 67, 88, 89, 92, 101 Inouye, D., 197 Internment, see Incarceration Internment camp, 1, 20 Issei, 13, 14, 16, 20, 23, 24, 61, 65, 85, 88, 101, 102, 153, 155–157, 178, 188

228 Index

Kibei, 14, 23–25, 51, 78, 153–155, 172 Kitano, H., 197 Knox, F., 37 Korematsu, F., 126, 187 Korematsu v. United States, 126, 187

Matsunaga, S., 197 McCloy, J., 99, 101, 114, 122, 151, 152, 154, 156–158 Mesodata, 31, 82, 137, 146, 164 Microdata, 6, 31, 32, 93, 108, 110, 137, 168, 170, 175, 191, 194, 207, 208 Military Area 1, 5, 107–130, 147 Military Area 2, 5, 128, 145 Military Intelligence Division, War Department (G2), 54, 173 Miller, H., 81, 89 Mineta, N., 197 Morgenthau, H., 170, 171, 173–179 Morgenthau Diary, 175 Moriyama, I., 170, 178 Moser, G., 39 Munson, C., 22, 23, 25 Myer, D., 152, 154

L

N

J

Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), 14–16, 56, 65, 68, 84, 135, 154, 172, 197, 199, 200 Japanese American Joint Board, 136, 151, 158, 173 Japanese-Americans Claims Act, 190 Jones, C., 208, 214 Jones, J., 38, 64, 95, 96, 174, 180, 181, 192 K

Lang, R.O., 143 Levine, D., 200 Linder, F., 138–140, 142, 143 Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, 67, 68, 81, 88, 89, 91, 92, 171 Loyalty, 17, 19, 22, 51, 65, 78, 79, 112, 133–160, 171, 187, 188

Native Sons of the Golden West, 171 Niles, D., 34 Nisei, 13, 14, 16, 23, 24, 61, 65, 66, 78, 87, 93–95, 97, 111–115, 122, 123, 126, 134, 152–157, 170, 178, 187, 188, 196, 197 O

M

Macrodata, 31 Manzanar Pilgrimage, 197 Manzanar Relocation Center, 172 See also Relocation Center Mare Island, 66, 99 Marshall, G.C., 23 Martial law, 76 Marutani, W.J., 201, 202, 205 Mary Asaba Ventura, 122 Masaoka, M., 16 Matsui, R., 197

Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 2, 95, 168 See also Bureau of the Budget Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), 17, 18, 20, 22, 33, 34, 63, 76, 108, 158, 172, 173 Office of Price Administration, 38, 169 Office of Production Management, 38, 39 Office of Statistical Standards, 110 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 17, 22

 Index 

Ogburn, W.K., 138 Okamura, R., 199–202 Orwell, G., 1–3, 6, 217 P

Pacific Citizen, 14, 198, 200 See also Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) Parker, K., 138, 147 Pieper, N., 75, 77, 78 Population registration, 62, 69, 111, 112, 123, 127, 133–160 Prewitt, K., 206–208, 214, 215 Provost Marshal General’s Office, 17, 20, 53–55, 67, 68, 75, 76, 78, 81, 83, 88, 89, 92–95, 97, 98, 102, 111, 136, 148, 150, 151, 158, 170, 173, 190 Q

Quisling, 17, 52 R

Rankin, J., 39 Reagan, R., 204, 206 Reconversion, 186, 190 Redress, 6, 185–208 Reed, L.J., 141–143 Reed, V., 82 Relocation Center, 116, 123, 129, 148, 150, 152, 154, 195 See also Concentration camp; Gila River Relocation Center; Manzanar Relocation Center; Tule Lake Relocation Center Reparations, vii, 3, 6, 186, 189 Restricted areas, 89, 91, 94, 101, 102 Rice, S., 34, 35, 37, 110 Ringle, K., 20, 22 Roberts Report, 91

229

Roosevelt, F., 5, 17, 21–25, 32, 34–40, 98–100, 108, 109, 164, 171, 172, 175, 180, 181, 195, 203 Rostow, E., 189, 190 Rowe, J., 75–77, 122 S

Sawyer, C.W., 194 Second War Powers Act (1942), 5, 6, 95, 97, 102, 118, 119, 127, 163, 164, 166–169, 180, 191–196, 200, 201, 207 Selective Service System, 18, 69, 164 Smith Act, 18, 108 Smith, H., 35–37, 95 Smith, R.R., 80, 81 Snowden, E., 1 Social Data Registration Form, 123–126, 128–130, 147, 148, 155 Stark, H., 23, 92, 93 Statistical confidentiality, 6, 30, 37, 40, 180, 181, 186, 191–195, 204 Statistical Research Division, U.S Bureau of the Census, 102, 107, 108, 110, 138, 191 Staudt, E., 138, 150 Stimson, H., 23, 37, 99, 100, 113, 114, 144 Stroh, D.A., 81, 88, 89 Sumners, H., 95 Surveillance agencies, 32, 62, 63, 159, 163, 170 T

Tachibana, I., 20, 52 Tanforan Assembly Center, 129, 148 See also Assembly Center Taylor, W., 24, 25, 28, 29, 57, 60, 70, 110, 169, 174, 175

230 Index

Terminal Island, 14, 66, 83–86, 89, 91, 94, 99–103, 113 Theater of Operations, 54, 76 The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 204 13th Naval District, 77, 79, 82, 94 Thomas, D., 142, 196 Tobey, C.W., 35, 36 Toland, J., 202, 203 Treasury Department, 36, 53, 65, 190 Trimble, S. Jr., 95, 96, 102, 103 Truesdell, L., 27, 69, 82, 142, 174–176, 178 Tule Lake Relocation Center, 187, 188, 197 See also Relocation Center 12th Naval District, 66, 79 U

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, vii, viii, 142, 143, 205–207, 217 U.S. Public Health Service, 178, 191 U.S. Secret Service, 6, 17, 170–174, 176, 178, 179, 194, 208

War Production Board, 38, 166, 169, 192 War Relocation Authority, Department of Interior, 116, 122, 125, 129, 134, 135, 149, 151–153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 170, 172, 173, 186, 188–190 Warren, E., 84, 197 Wartime Civil Control Administration, 114, 115, 117, 124, 129, 138, 145, 147, 150, 151, 154, 158, 173, 190 Watanabe, M., 199, 200 Watson, E.M. (“Pa”), 34 Weglyn, M., 22, 23, 84, 197, 199 Welles, S., 23, 63, 95 Western Defense Command, 53–56, 61, 63, 68, 69, 75–78, 80, 81, 87–89, 107–111, 113–115, 118, 120, 121, 123, 126, 134–136, 138, 144–146, 149–151, 153, 159, 187, 188, 190, 195, 199, 203 William Jefferson Clinton (Bill Clinton), 204, 206, 207

V

Vital registration system, 18, 143 Vital Statistics Division, U.S. Bureau of the Census, 139, 170, 178

Y

Yasui, M., 122, 126, 187 Yasui v. United States, 122 Young, A.A., 143

W

Wallace, H., 181, 191, 192 War History Project, 195–196

Z

Zone of the Interior, 54