Wyoming Responses to Heart Mountain “Relocation” Camp, 1941-43
An Editor Speaks Out and a Senator Stays Silent
By Phil Roberts
This article first appeared as “Temporarily Side-tracked by Emotionalism,” in Mike Mackey, ed.,Remembering Heart Mountain: Essays on Japanese American Internment in Wyoming, (Western History Publications, 1998, pp. 37-50).
Much has been written about World War II and its impact on Wyoming.[1] Some historians considered World War II as having far less influence over the development of Wyoming than it had over all of the surrounding states.[2]
Until recently, few studies have considered the role of the war in influencing mass attitudes in Wyoming toward stereotyping of various ethnic groups. Civil rights issues involving African Americans simmered under the surface in Wyoming, not publicized because of the dissensions it might cause with the war effort.[3]
At the beginning of the war, federal and state elected officers were called upon to deal with issues involving one American ethnic minority–Japanese-Americans.[4] Despite initial objections from Wyoming Gov. Nels Smith, the state was chosen to be the site for one of the so-called “relocation centers” early in the war. The federal government set up the Japanese-American internment camp between Powell and Cody at Heart Mountain during early 1942.
In many ways, Wyomingites responded to the issue of Japanese-American relocation just as Americans did elsewhere. In the course of examining those responses from newspaper reports, personal recollections and contemporary letters to congressional officials, it appears there was no uniform Wyoming view, but at least five categories of response to the relocation issue.
The most hostile extreme view, representing a substantial portion of the population in the months immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, was xenophobia toward anything Japanese. The people holding these views diminished in number, but remained a particularly vocal minority throughout the war years. These people, with solidly racist opinions fanned by war propaganda, fervently believed that “no Japanese could be trusted” regardless of the record.
A more significant portion of the population, many living in areas benefiting economically from the presence of the camp, saw the financial opportunities for themselves and their communities that the camps presented and responded according to self-interest. For example, even at the beginning of the war before the camp location was even established, at least one Wyoming editor foresaw the value of camp internees for agriculture. “The Japanese could take up the loss in farm labor that is growing increasingly serious and they would become a factor in our economic business life,” the editor of the Sheridan Press wrote in March 1942.[5]
Some recognized the inherent discrimination in the policy, but were either too afraid or too disinterested to speak of it publicly.
Another common view, represented by many Wyomingites, was one of complacency over relocation. The unspoken assumption was the federal government knew best what the wartime conditions required and, if the military said so, the action was necessary for national security. Who are we to question the military and our government officials?
Many Wyomingites in the 1990s said they were “unaware that the camp existed.”[6] A look at contemporary newspapers, particularly those published in small towns outside the Big Horn Basin, suggests this may have true in the 1940s, too. Except for scattered references, many relating to sports activities in which students at Heart Mountain were involved, small weeklies practically ignored the camp and the surrounding controversies.[7]
Many of the daily newspapers covered important news about the camp, but usually, those stories were buried among headlines of wartime actions in Europe and the Pacific. Little specific reference was made to Heart Mountain or the other camps.[8]
Only a tiny minority spoke out against the policy. In fact, little evidence exists that more than a mere handful of Wyomingites saw the policy as wrong and spoke out against it. Only one editor, L. L. Newton of the Wyoming State Journal in Lander, openly opposed the policy on constitutional grounds.
One source of Wyoming attitudes toward war relocation comes from the congressional mail of Sen. Joseph C. O’Mahoney. Various citizens wrote to his office about the issue and, although the individuals who write to congressional representatives concerning any issue are self-selecting, the attitudes expressed in their letters provide an interesting cross-section of Wyoming public opinion at the time.
Sen. Joseph C. O’Mahoney was a senior member of the Democratic majority of the Senate in 1942 when the Heart Mountain camp was established. First appointed to the Senate seat on the death of Sen. John B. Kendrick, his former employer, O’Mahoney won reelection in 1934 and 1940. He was a dependable supporter of the New Deal until the Roosevelt administration tried to change the composition of the U. S. Supreme Court in 1937 as a way to keep the high court was striking down what it considered crucial anti-depression legislation. O’Mahoney gained constituent support from what Wyomingites saw as principled opposition to the President.
By the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, O’Mahoney had patched up those earlier differences with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The senator continued to support the administration during the war.
When Roosevelt signed the controversial executive order decreeing the lock-up of West Coast Japanese Americans into internment camps, O’Mahoney, just like many of his U. S. Senate colleagues, said nothing. Wartime contingency seemed to trump the civil rights of American citizens who had only one characteristic distinguishing them from their neighbors–race. Many senators, including O’Mahoney’s colleague from Wyoming, U. S. Senator E. V. Robertson, loudly favored relocation, even advocating for more stringent treatment of internees. O’Mahoney did not make such statements. Nonetheless, he remained silent, essentially condoning the unconstitutional deprivation of civil rights of internees.
Before O’Mahoney’s replies to constituent mail are noted, it is important to understand hia position with respect to relocation. No single piece of evidence points to O’Mahoney’s position on wartime relocation. No roll call votes were taken on the various relocation measures in the Senate throughout the duration. O’Mahoney did not speak on the floor either for or against the policy. In fact, nowhere is there a definitive statement on his position. Thus, sections of letters and reactions to correspondence during this period are all there are to go on. Even at that, few hints appear in the correspondence until January 1943 when O’Mahoney was appointed to a special sub-committee of the Senate Military Affairs Committee to investigate the War Relocation Authority.
One of the more explicit explanations of his position was made in two letters to Park County Democratic officials in February 1943. He had written frequently to both men during May 1942 when the senator was seeking sentiment about establishing a relocation camp in Park County.
I was made a member of the subcommittee which has been going into the matter and I found the testimony both surprising and interesting. It was, for example, clearly brought out by authoritative witnesses, from both the Army and the Navy, not only that 60 percent of all the evacuees are native-born Americans, but that most of them have been altogether loyal to this country. Some of the most effective work which has been done for the Navy in Hawaii, for instance, has been done by Japanese born in Hawaii.[9]
Later, in the same letter, O’Mahoney quoted former U. S. Ambassador Joseph Grew who had appeared before his sub-committee and urged that “nothing should be done to alienate the loyalty of the American-born Japanese.”
In a letter to the manager of the Holly Sugar Company in Worland during the previous year, O’Mahoney carefully distinguished between residents of prisoner-of-war camps and relocation center internees. “…many of them [internees] are natives of this country and apparently completely out of harmony with the Japanese militarists, they are not being treated as prisoners of war.” Not addressing the obvious point that they should not have been interned in the first place, O’Mahoney expressed compassion for their current situation. “[The Japanese-Americans] must be “relocated in a manner that will enable them to live as normally as possible,” the senator concluded.[10]
In a letter to Heart Mountain Director Guy Robertson in 1943, O’Mahoney wrote: “The treatment that we accord Americans of Japanese ancestry and even alien Japanese has a direct bearing upon the treatment given our own people in the hand of the Japanese.”[11] Practically speaking, he was advocating that America needed to retain the perception that it treated internees humanely, despite the obvious violation of depriving innocent people of their freedom.
Because O’Mahoney’s position was so publically ambiguous, his constituent mail seems to reflect a broad sentiment from Wyoming constituents concerning the issue. In fact, his correspondence has a broader and more representative sample of opinion than similar constituent mail to someone like Sen. E. V. Robertson, an outspoken critic of the War Relocation Authority, but who was insistent that such camps were necessary and, indeed, essential to American internal security.
While politicians held different views about relocation, newspaper editors in the state did as well. Many seemed caught up in the wartime hysteria at the beginning of the war. A few modulated their views as the war continued; some turned the hysteria toward their new neighbors, the unwilling inhabitants of Heart Mountain. Only one editor made a case that the executive order was unconstitutional and that internees were being denied their civil rights as American citizens.
L. L. Newton, editor and publisher of the Wyoming State Journal in Lander, stands out among Wyoming journalists for the unequivocal position he took on the camp. Unlike lawyer O’Mahoney, who avoided making legal arguments against the establishment of such camps, Newton flatly declared that the existence of the camps violated the internees’ constitutional rights.
A conservative Republican who supported Gov. Nels Smith and E. V. Robertson in the 1942 general elections, he seemed an unlikely spokesman for constitutional rights of internees. The camp was far from Newton’s Lander home. Unlike the publishers of the Cody Enterprise and the Powell Tribune whose communities were less than 15 miles from the camp, Lander was more than 100 miles and a mountain range beyond.[12]
Unlike those respective publishers, Newton traveled with his family to the Heart Mountain camp three months after the first evacuees arrived in August 1942. In four consecutive issues of the weekly State Journal, Newton described what he had found at the camp in a column he titled “Travel with Your Editor.” In the first installment, he stated flatly: “Let us start out this rather rambling and sketchy story of the project with a few definitions, just to get the story straight. In the first place, they are not Japs…They are American citizens born in this country with the full rights of this country, ‘even as you and I.’ They do not have any other loyalty than to America and are as much our people as second generation German, Irish, Italian or Scandinavian citizens.”[13]
On December 3, Newton’s column continued the story by describing the interiors of the buildings and the conditions the evacuees faced. “The rooms are devoid of furniture” and the buildings are cold, he wrote. “You have camped out but you ‘had everything’ to do with. These people were dumped down in a new world of sagebrush and desert to be handled by a group of Caucasians who hadn’t time to organize themselves, let along handle such a vast throng of folk.”[14]
Newton’s columns were widely quoted by other Wyoming newspapers, but often not approvingly. Newton responded to the criticisms in his final installment on Dec. 17 by asserting that he wouldn’t mind “having any of them care to farm in the Lander Valley” or for the physician evacuees to treat him or members of his family. ” P. S. (and pardon me),” Newton wrote, “I have had many compliments and words of approval upon these series of ‘Travel with Your Editor’ articles, but they have all come and only come from those who have visited the Heart Mountain center. In the words of long ago, ‘Come and See.'”[15]
In the Christmas Eve issue of the State Journal, Newton printed a front-page story about Arapahoe Indians packing beans for shipment to Heart Mountain.
Older tribesmen conjured to their minds the paradox of feeding the Japanese internees at Cody and killing them off in the Solomons where some of their sons are defending their country with their lives. When they learned the Japanese descent people at Cody were really Americans–born in this country and many of them also fought in the Solomons alongside of their warriors–they understand they were no different than second generation Germans, Italians and others, also loyal Americans, and gave their approval to the shipment.”[16]
Newton was a veteran Wyoming editor and, despite the editorial criticisms of his position on the Heart Mountain camp’s legality, popular with fellow editors and publishers throughout the state. He was elected president of the Wyoming Press Association in January 1943.[17] He used his new position to continue to point out the constitutional flaws of keeping American citizens behind barbed wire. In March 1943, the State Journal ran a story headlined “Tojo of Heart Mountain Out to Get Tojo of Tokyo, Japan.” The story told of Rufus Tojo’s vow to avenge the good name of his family by enlisting in the U. S. Army.[18]
A few other papers tried to distinguish the Japanese-Americans from the Japanese enemy. For example, in one of the few articles relating to Japanese relocation to appear at any point during the war, the Jackson’s Hole Courier commented on an enlistment. Under the photograph of a World War I veteran, his wife and son (who enlisted in Hawaii), the Courier editor wrote: “Sends son to fight against homeland.”[19] The same paper, the Jackson’s Hole Courier, in April 1943, commented on a story about four “American-born Japanese, formerly from Seattle, Washington, and now at the Hunt, Idaho, Relocation Center.” As the item noted:
The group came to Jackson under a special permit to enjoy a short vacation before entering the U. S. Army, where the men enlisted. Those in the party are: Franklin Koriyama, Samuel Hokari and Mr. and Mrs. M. Masuda. All were excellent skiers, enjoyed their stay here, and were high in their praise of Jackson Hole hospitality and fine skiing conditions found here. They stayed at the Wort Hotel.[20]
The editorial writer for the Sheridan Press tried to justify his antipathy toward Japanese and Japanese-American internees by claiming the attitude was not rooted in any racism. “They” were the enemy, he confidently stated. He wrote an editorial in January 1942, titled “Let’s Salute Joe Louis, An American.”[21] An additional editorial later that month made a similar attempt to show he was not a racist. In writing about enlistees from the nearby Crow Reservation in Montana, the editorial notes that, as American soldiers in the war, they are “making the startling transition from travois-maker to technician.”[22]
Before the site selection, elected officials were asked to determine the sentiments from constituents generally about the location of internment centers. O’Mahoney wrote the secretary of the Sheridan Chamber of Commerce, asking about the local feelings of such a facility: “to date, no project in Wyoming is under consideration.” The senator then asked if Sheridan residents would welcome such a camp if one were to be located somewhere in the state. The secretary replied in June that most people “did not wish the camp here.”[23]
The senator did receive letters favorable to establishing a camp in Worland, but because of a controversy involving the availability of water, the site was turned down. The record shows that O’Mahoney pleaded the Worland case with vigor, not only with the War Department and War Relocation Authority, but with the State Engineer’s Office in Cheyenne.[24]
When the federal government announced construction of the camps in late December 1941, many Wyomingites wrote to their senator, opposing any effort to locate them near their communities. But, just before the camp was formally established on June 5, 1942, attitudes seemed to soften. It became apparent that money could be derived from hosting the federal facility. Several Wyoming constituents wrote to O’Mahoney requesting that any new “prison camps” be located in their towns. No longer were camp internees to be feared; their presence could bring with it economic benefits.
The War Relocation Authority officials chose the Heart Mountain site on government land in a relatively remote but agriculturally promising area in the northern Big Horn Basin. O’Mahoney had queried Park County residents about the proposed site in May 1942. Jack Richard, editor of the Cody Enterprise, responded that “although we have no great love for the Japanese” the project would be “accepted as necessary for the war effort.” Paul Stock, Cody mayor, agreed, as long as “they are properly supervised….it would be perfectly all right.”[25]
Besides concerns about security, two other themes appeared in correspondence from Wyomingites over the next two years: guarantees that, once the war ended, the camp would be closed and all residents removed; and that internees would be available, for free or very low cost, to assist in agricultural production.
Judging from the letters sent to Senator O’Mahoney, few Wyomingites shared Newton’s concerns for the constitutional rights of the internees. From summer 1942 forward, correspondents appear to have a financial motive for writing or outrage that the treatment of such “inmates” are too lenient. These were potentially dangerous people.
Park County commissioner Harry Atteberry warned O’Mahoney that the location of the camp at Heart Mountain might cause danger to the Willwood Dam and Corbett Dam, both small irrigation projects near Powell. He wrote that he thought Park County would accept the camp as long as the federal government could guarantee both security and “their removal from the county after the war.”[26] The removal theme was to gain added momentum as the war appeared to be winding down.
As soon as the first group of internees began to arrive in August 1942, O’Mahoney started receiving requests from people wanting camp residents to work in their fields or businesses–for little or not cost, of course. Requests from sugar beet growers were particularly numerous. G. N. Wells, vice president of the Montana-Wyoming Beet Growers Association, wrote to WRA Director Dillon S. Myer in April 1943, asking for labor. He warned that growers would be ruined if labor was not furnished from the Japanese ranks. “Too many of our workers are now in the armed forces,” he stated.[27]
Workers were needed for field work, but other businessmen made requests for Japanese-American laborers. A Cowley canning company official thanked O’Mahoney for assisting in recruiting labor from the Relocation Center to work in his plant. Labor requests also came from a Casper bowling alley (to alleviate the “war-time pinsetter shortage”) and a McFadden rancher wishing for a hired hand.[28] Fremont County farmers “feel that the crops must be harvested and this is the only solution thus far presented.”[29]
Later on, even construction contractors asked about gaining “Japanese laborers” for war-related projects. In 1944, the Casper Building and Construction Trades Council inquired if internees could be used to help in “tearing up the railroad between Shoshoni and Elco”–the duplicate tracks of the Chicago and Northwestern, the iron needed for scrap metal. O’Mahoney promised that “a copy of your letter will be forwarded to the WRA.”[30]
The War Relocation Authority, the agency charged with holding the internees, came under regular criticism from those believing that agency officials made life too easy for internees in the camps. In the fall of 1943, critics of the center pointed out that school teachers at the Heart Mountain camp were paid “in excess of other teachers in the state.” Eugene T. Childers, editor of the Riverton Review and a Newton competitor and staunch opponent of Japanese-American relocation to Wyoming, editorialized against the “teacher-grabbing policies” of the WRA. “Our Washington delegation should be flooded with protests,” he wrote.
The Pavillion Grange petitioned the WRA, protesting the high wages paid to camp teachers. The agriculture teacher had been hired away from them before the end of the term, the Grange petition noted, and the community demanded redress. Lander’s L. L. Newton pointed out the flaw in such complaints. “The teachers at Heart Mountain are on 11-month contracts,” he editorially noted, dismissing the Grange petition and the Revieweditor’s statements as uninformed.[31]
As the camps became more established, complaints starting coming in against the WRA for “coddling” internees. The letters to O’Mahoney range from mild complaints to viciously racist diatribes. A former Sheridan resident wrote in February 1943, doubting the need for a large food supply being kept at the Minidoka, Idaho, camp, an issue seized upon by WRA critics. O’Mahoney answered that an investigation would be held shortly to determine such matters. He added a compliment to the internees at the camp: “The War Department tells us that there has been such a demand among those Japanese [in relocation camps] to serve in our own military forces that the War Department is now raising a Japanese military contingent which is to be sent into the European Theatre of War.”[32]
O’Mahoney received a torrent of mail in April and May 1943, after the Denver Post in a series of articles accused the WRA of “pampering the enemy.” One of the Postheadlines read: “Food is Hoarded for Japs in U. S. While Americans in Nippon Are Tortured.” The sub-head read: “Openly Disloyal Japs Pampered.”[33]
The Post article was written by Jack Carberry, a sports writer with close ties to Wyoming’s U. S. Sen. E. V. Robertson. Meanwhile, the senator told the New York Times that he was certain “the Japanese are being pampered.” He provided no evidence and he admitted he had not visited the camp to investigate the charges.[34]
While his Senate colleague talked to the press endorsing Carberry’s unfounded charges in the Denver Poststory, O’Mahoney did not reply when the managing editor of the paper sent a clipping of the Carberry piece and asked for O’Mahoney’s reaction. This was the pattern in this response to inflammatory letters, too. Either he did not answer or he deftly made reference to a single point of common agreement he might have had with the writer.[35]
As a result of the Carberry piece, angry letters came in from throughout Wyoming. A Buffalo couple suggested that the Japanese-Americans be “segregated by sex because we don’t need more little Japs.” The Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen in Sheridan wrote that if the Carberry article about “luxuries for the Japanese” were true, why was the rest of the country having to sacrifice? An Arvada man wrote that the Post article “is the bitterest pill I’ve had to swallow yet.” A Basin man blamed the defeat of Democrats in the last election on the “information that came out of Heart Mountain project. Now comes the story told by Jack Carberry in the Denver Post and once more there is hell a’poppin.'”[36]
Glenn Neilson, still nominally a Democrat and president of Husky Oil Company in Cody, wrote to O’Mahoney that he was “pleased that the Denver Post had sufficient nerve to publish the articles about the camp.” He claimed that he had tried to recruit labor there and they seemed to be “a lazy and shiftless lot” to him.[37]
O’Mahoney did not respond to Neilson’s letter nor to other mail that week. “The senator is ill with the flu and out of the office this week,” Mary Mahan, his secretary, wrote. “I will see that he gets your letter when he returns.”[38]
The town councils of Powell and Cody met in joint session the same week the Post story ran, but it was more than merely “pampering” that concerned both groups. Both issued petitions asking for tighter security and the guarantee that the internees would be moved out after the war.[39]
At the same time, Newton of the State Journal continued to editorialize about the unconstitutionality of the camp. A few of his letter-writers defended the War Relocation Authority and its staff and wrote to protest the “untruths” in the Post story. “[They are] ignorant of the facts,” a Cody man wrote while a Hiland woman declared, “We know you are opposed to a campaign of retaliation and therefore we feel every confidence in your report. Some of [Sen. Robertson’s] accusations seem about as ridiculous as a Goebbels fantasy.”[40]
Bill Hosokawa, the internee/editor of the Heart Mountain Sentinel, editorially answered the Post charges. He chastised the Cody and Powell councils. He charged that the people had been “stampeded by the Post articles.” He noted that “it is evident that not all of Wyoming’s sheep are on the hillsides.” Hosokawa pointed to the curious fact that Sen. Robertson owned a significant interest in the Cody Trading Company, a firm that supplied the camp. The senator’s complaints about the WPA and its expenditures were clearly a contradiction to his own business interests, Hosokawa charged.[41]
Meanwhile, Sen. O’Mahoney confidentially consoled camp director Guy Robertson. “You have a difficult job,” he wrote. In his letter, the senator whole-heartedly accepted Dillon Myer’s refutation of the Postseries.[42] But his public response to the matter remained muted.
In a letter to the chairman of the Heart Mountain Volunteers, O’Mahoney made no reference to the Post charges, electing instead to salute internees who had enlisted. He wrote: “Let me acknowledge your letter of May 18 enclosing a copy of the credo adopted by the volunteers into the U. S. Armed Services from the relocation centers for Japanese ancestry persons…It is indeed gratifying to know that American citizens of Japanese ancestry have thus demonstrated their loyalty and desire to serve in the armed services of the U. S.”[43]
A center employee, Scott Taggart of Cody, accused the Post of distorting the facts, but also pointed to Sen. Robertson’s erroneous and inflammatory statements. He urged O’Mahoney to continue to counter Robertson’s statements. In the end, Taggart seemed to understand O’Mahoney’s reticence to speak out.
…our security lies in men like you who have grown big enough to be able to approach all problems from the standpoint of right and justice and the public interest without regard to spotted public clamor. The people of Wyoming are both intelligent and honest, and though many may be temporarily side-tracked by emotionalism they will in the long run continue to honor their chosen leaders who have kept their heads in periods of excitement and quiet alike.[44]
Sen. Robertson continued his aggressive attacks on the WPA and their administration of the camps. Powell attorney Lowell C. Stephens wrote that Sen. Robertson “could speak in Philadelphia about the problems of the center although he was too busy to go the 14 miles” out there. Stephens claimed Sen. Robertson’s source was Cody attorney Milward Simpson, the head of the Park County Civilian Defense. “I think you know the kind of information Milward puts out in anything connected with politics,” Stephens wrote. (Simpson, a Republican, had run unsuccessfully against O’Mahoney for the Senate in 1940). Stephens said he had personally visited the camp and found that the “people in the camp seem to be loyal and law-abiding people and should have fair treatment.”[45]
Simpson wrote several times to O’Mahoney commenting on the camp. In one, he pointed out that the court system had been “jammed by Japanese cases.” He also questioned the security arrangements at the camp after 20 guards were withdrawn by the WRA:
This [withdrawal] stems from the silly namby-pamby policy of the WRA to give these people more freedom from restraint. They tell us that these internees will leave the camp and go out into useful occupations over the land. If this is the attitude of the rest, and I am dead sure it is, then by God, we don’t want them out away from the enclosure.[46]
Apparently unaware that many of the American citizens in the camp had lost homes and businesses on the West Coast, Simpson continued:
They are a sullen, nasty lot; a good portion of them are not even American born or American citizens. The percentage of native born citizens who have sworn allegiance to the Emperor of Japan is at least 25 percent of the total…Having established residence for probate and divorce…it now is a question whether or not they have established residence from the standpoint of voting. I know of no member of our delegation who would want their vote.[47]
O’Mahoney answered without specific comment on most of Simpson’s assertions, but he disagreed with Simpson’s criticism about camp security. He promised to check with the army about possible security gaps. Three days later, he wrote Simpson again to report that the Army claimed the “situation was well in hand.”[48] He offered no corrections to Simpson’s uninformed views of Japanese allegiance or their motives for using the courts. After all, O’Mahoney, too, was a lawyer and knew that American citizens had access to courts in civil matters wherever they were domiciled.
(Simpson had reason to be concerned if the internee-citizens were granted the vote in Park County. If they voted as a block, they could have nominated and elected their chosen candidates over the vastly outnumbered non-internees in the county!)[49]
After constant drumbeat against the WPA, the U. S. Senate authorized an investigation in 1943. O’Mahoney was appointed a member of the Senate’s Sub-committee to Investigate the War Relocation Authority, chaired by Sen. Albert B. Chandler (D-Ky.). The committee met during the first part of 1943 and numerous members made inspection visits to the camps. The focal point seemed to be Tule Lake, Calif., site of various violent incidents during the WRA’s short history. O’Mahoney received one memo from the secretary of the committee, asking if he wished to “make an investigation trip West on behalf of the committee.” He declined.[50] The committee issued its report in June 1943, including testimony from Dillon Myer, J. Edgar Hoover and Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy. Nothing of consequence resulted from the committee’s investigations except “junkets” for members, according to most observers.
As U. S. Senator representing a state where the majority of the population was not sympathetic to the internees, O’Mahoney demonstrated public ambivalence about the camp. O’Mahoney weighed the evidence, agreed that a threat to the nation existed, and therefore, the lock-up seemed justified. Politically, he defended the administration’s War Relocation Authority staff, but he did not become actively involved in the public debates over Heart Mountain Center’s “coddling.” He stayed above the fray, deferring to his Wyoming colleague E. V. Robertson who, O’Mahoney may have believed, might have a stronger interest in the camp because he was a resident of Park County.
The contrasts are even more stark between Newton and Sen. E. V. Robertson. In essence, Newton saw relocation as constitutionally flawed while Robertson believed it was a wartime necessity, whether or not it was constitutional.
As for the majority of O’Mahoney’s Wyoming constituents, many seemed blissfully unaware that more than 10,000 Americans of Japanese descent were being held against their will within the borders of Wyoming. The plight of the fellow citizens in their midst seemed drowned out by war news from around the world, letters from loved ones in military service, and the daily reminders of war in the form of rationing of food, gasoline and other consumer products.
But even if they had known, it is probable that, like O’Mahoney, they would not have spoken out. A letter writer to the Casper Star-Tribune wrote 50 years later:
The sneak attack at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese left the impression that all Japanese were sneaky and dangerous, and many believed the Japanese people in America were here as troops behind the lines for a takeover of America by the Japanese…This hurt many of us as we realized how helpless we were to help those innocent people caught up in such hatred.[51]
In the end, he cannot be charged with actively supporting repressive policies of relocation, but O’Mahoney was guilty of doing nothing about the injustices. Had he spoken up (like Newton did in his small weekly newspaper far from the center of federal power), there is every possibility that O’Mahoney, a respected senator from the President’s party and a leading spokesman for the New Deal, could have made a difference. Instead, like most of his Senate colleagues, he shares the blame for acquiescing to one of the greatest violations of human rights in American history.
(Ed. Note: In June 2018, Wyoming’s Congressional delegation had an opportunity to speak out against the most recent insidious incompetence committed against our country by our current President, against children on the southern border. So far, silence–indeed, acquiescence, that ought to haunt them for their careers, if not their entire lives. “History” has a long memory).
[1] The standard definitive work is T. A. Larson, Wyoming’s War Years. (Stanford, 1953, reprinted by the Wyoming State Historical Society, 1993).
[2] The main proponent of this view is Gerald Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
[3] Examples include several serious racial incidents in Cheyenne involving African-American soldiers assigned to segregated training units at Fort Warren, an army transportation and quartermaster training center during the war. Phil Roberts, “Case Studies of War-time Censorship in Wyoming,” article under review.
[4]Heart Mountain has been the subject of numerous articles and books. One of the earliest well-documented and detailed studies is Douglas Nelson, Heart Mountain: The History of an American Concentration Camp. (Madison: State Historical Society, 1976). Several works by Roger Daniels consider Heart Mountain in conjunction with the Japanese-American experiences in the other Western camps and provides in-depth views of the administrative decision-making process which brought the camps into existence. See, for instance, Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); and Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1971). Historian Mike Mackey has added to the literature on Wyoming relocation with several studies, including his most recent, Wyoming Samurai: The World War II Warriors of Heart Mountain. (Cody: Western History Publications, 2015).
[5]Sheridan Press, March 18, 1942, p. 4.
[6] For examples of all of these views in more recent times, see the Casper Star-Tribune letters to the editor in issues following the first Heart Mountain Symposium held in the spring of 1995, particularly those published during the last two weeks of May, 1995. The author was teaching History of Wyoming at the University of Wyoming during this period and asked students about Heart Mountain and whether or not their parents or grandparents ever had spoken about it. Few had any knowledge of it–even those who said they lived in the Big Horn Basin in the vicinity of the site.
[7] NAt its height, Heart Mountain had the fourth highest population of any “city” in the state. The high school, one of the largest in the state, competed against other schools in football, basketball and track. For this article, not all weeklies published in Wyoming were checked but a reasonable sample was consulted. Among the newspapers examined were those published in Jackson, Lusk, Torrington, Newcastle, Moorcroft, Wheatland and Douglas. The newspapers published in Cody and Powell during the period were analyzed by Michael Mackey in his unpublished M. A. thesis, University of Wyoming, 1994, and later incorporated in his histories of the Heart Mountain camp.
[8]The Sheridan Press is an example–banner headlines throughout the period featured war reports. But even early in the war, when the U. S. Attorney for Wyoming commented on incidents of Japanese-Americans adhering to federal orders, the item appeared on the second page. See “Enemy Aliens Are Complying with U. S. Order,” Sheridan Press, Jan. 5, 1942, p. 2.
[9]O’Mahoney to Ed Althoff, Park County Democratic chairman, and Paul Greever, Feb. 6, 1943, Box 85, War Relocation Authority file, O’Mahoney Papers, American Heritage Center (henceforth cited as WRA file). Oddly, just ten days after the letter was postmarked, Greever, a former Congressman, died from an accidental shotgun blast in his Cody home. See Wyoming State Tribune, Feb. 17, 1943.
[10]O’Mahoney to L. E. Laird, June 16, 1942, Box 67, Japanese Evacuation file, O’Mahoney Papers.
[11]O’Mahoney to Robertson, Feb. 27, 1943, Box 74, WRA file. Guy Robertson was not related to U. S. Senator E. V. Robertson.
[12]Actually, the camp was 14 miles from Cody and ten miles from Powell. Newton did have extensive ties in the Cody area. He once owned a weekly newspaper, one of two competing weeklies in the county seat town.
[13]”Jap Trap Misnomer for Relocation Center,” Wyoming State Journal, Nov. 26, 1942, p. 2.
[14]”Evacuees Tell Story of Life at Center,” Wyoming State Journal, Dec. 3, 1942, p. 2.
[15]”Japanese Evacuees Plan to Reclaim Desert,” Wyoming State Journal, Dec. 17, 1942, p. 2.
[16]”Indian Pack of Canned Beans Go to Feed Japanese,” Wyoming State Journal, Dec. 24, 1942, p. 1.
[17]”WPA Officers Elected,” Wyoming State Journal, Jan. 21, 1943, p. 1.
[18]”Tojo…,” Wyoming State Journal, March 11, 1943, p. 8.
[19]Jackson’s Hole Courier, April 8, 1943, p. 7.
[20]”Japanese Skiers Spend Weekend in Jackson Hole,” Jackson’s Hole Courier, April 8, 1943, p. 4.
[21]Sheridan Press, Jan. 12, 1942, p. 4.
[22]”The First Americans Rise Again to Defend the Homeland,” Sheridan Press, Jan. 29, 1942, p. 4.
[23]O’Mahoney to L. C. Morrison, May 1, 1942; Morrison to O’Mahoney, June 3, 1942, Japanese Evaculation file, O’Mahoney Papers.
[24]O’Mahoney to varoius individuals, Box 74, Japanese Evacuation file, O’Mahoney Papers.
[25]Richard to O’Mahoney, May 23, 1942; Stock to O’Mahoney, May 12, 1942, Box 74, Japanese Evacuation file, O’Mahoney Papers.
[26]Atteberry to O’Mahoney, May 13, 1942, Box 74, Japanese Evacuation file, O’Mahoney Papers.
[27]Wells to O’Mahoney, April 1, 1943, Box 74, WRA file.
[28]Big Horn Canning to O’Mahoney, Sept. 22, 1942, Box 74, WRA file.
[29]Riverton Review, Aug. 5, 1943, p. 1.
[30]Trades Council to O’Mahoney, May 17, 1944, Box 85, WRA file.
[31]Riverton Review, Aug. 25, 1943, p. 4; Pavillion Grange resolution, Sept. 21, 1943, Box 74, WRA files, O’Mahoney Papers.
[32]W. B. Johnson, Mountain Home, Idaho, to O’Mahoney, Feb. 5, 1943; O’Mahoney to Johnson, Feb. 9, 1943, Box 85, WRA file.
[33]Denver Post, April 23, 1943.
[34]New York Times, May 7, 1943, p. 5, c. 1.
[35]Lawrence Martin to O’Mahoney, April 24, 1943, Box 74, WRA file.
[36]Caroll and Mabel Beckwith to O’Mahoney, May 11, 1943; H. E. Fulbright, Secretary-Treasurer, to O’Mahoney, May 12, 1943; G. E. Pollard to O’Mahoney, April 25, 1943; A. W. Coons, Basin, to O’Mahoney, April 29, 1943. Box 74, WRA file.
[37]Neilson to O’Mahoney, May 10, 1943, Box 74, WRA file. Neilson, a Canadian-born former socialist, moved steadily to the right politically over the following decades.
[38]Mahan to Glenn Neilson, May 10, 1943, Box 74, WRA file.
[39]”Resolution of Policy Toward Japanese at Heart Mountain Relocation Center,” adopted at joint session of city councils of Cody and Powell, April 24, 1943, Box 74, WRA file, O’Mahoney Papers. The city clerks of each town mailed copies of the resolution to O’Mahoney but, apparently, he did not reply.
[40]Fred Butler to O’Mahoney, May 30, 1943; Mrs. Robert Maigh to O’Mahoney, May 1, 1943. Box 74, WRA file, O’Mahoney Papers.
[41]Heart Mountain Sentinel, May 8, 1943, p. 2.
[42]O’Mahoney to Guy Robertson, Feb. 27, 1943, Box 74, WRA file.
[43]O’Mahoney to Abe Cyamanda, May 21, 1943, Box 74, WRA file.
[44]Taggart to O’Mahoney, May 12, 1943, Box 74, WRA file.
[45]Stephens to O’Mahoney, May 20, 1943, Box 74, WRA file.
[46]Simpson to O’Mahoney, April 18, 1944, Box 85, WRA file, O’Mahoney Papers.
[47]Ibid.
[48]O’Mahoney to Simpson, April 21, 1943; April 24, 1943. Box 85, WRA file.
[49] In 1943, the legislature passed a law specifically forbidding internees from voting in Wyoming elections.
[50]Letters from the committee, Box 85, Military Affairs file; memo from Walter Mulbry, March 2, 1943, Box 85, Military Affairs file. Committee members were: Senators James E. Murray (D-Mont.); Mon C. Wallgren (D-Wash.); Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (R-Mass.); Chan Gurney (R-S.D.); Rufus Holman (R-Ore.)
[51]Ruby Bolderac, Letter to the Editor, ”Sneak attack hit Japanese-Americans,” Casper Star-Tribune, June 6, 1995, p. A7.
Policy-makers can learn much from reading history–not only about the events that reflect positively on our past leaders, but incidents when leaders acted with less than bravery. This article contrasts two individuals in Wyoming history–a newspaper editor and a U. S. Senator–who responded very differently to a national crisis in human rights.