Taylor, Sandra C., 1936-2014 "The Federal Reserve Bank and the Relocation of the Japanese in 1942" California: University of California Press, January 1983.

Title: The Federal Reserve Bank and the Relocation of the Japanese in 1942

Author: Taylor, Sandra C.
Date: January 1983
Page 1
image-container-0 Research The Federal Reserve Bank and the Relocation of the Japanese in 1942 SANDRA C. TAYLOR Introduction "THANK YOU FOR HELPING US," wrote Mary Tsukamoto, Secre- tary of the Florin chapter of the Japanese American Citizen's League, to the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank's Evacuee Property Division. As she and her family joined 12,000 other Jap- anese being evacuated from the Sacramento area in late May of 1942, she expressed her gratitude to the Wartime Civil Control Authority (WCCA) with unintentional irony: "Ever since the be- ginning of our preparation for evacuation, we have felt the kindly hands of the army.... The wonderful sincerity with which the WCCA worked has won the complete trust and faith of thousands of bewildered, frightened Japanese."'1 Mrs. 1. Letter from Mary Tsukamoto to the Sacramento office, files of the Evacuee Property Division, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, May 22, 1942. (Hereafter referred to as FRB Files.) 9 The Public Historian, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 1983) ? 1983 by the Regents of the University of California 0272-3433/83/050009-22$1.00
image-container-1 10 a THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN Tsukamoto thanked the many "fine Americans" dled the evacuation program, but offered special Federal Reserve, whose field agents in Sacramen other cities and small towns on the West Coast had assisted the evacuees in disposing of their property in a manner intended to be consistent with American traditions of justice, fair play, and free enterprise.2 That the Federal Reserve Bank (FRB) played a role at all in the human drama of evacuation and resettlement of 110,000 Japanese, 60 percent of them American citizens, may come as a surprise. Studies of this shameful episode in American history, condoned and justified on very loose grounds of "military neces- sity," have focused mainly on the victims' incarceration in such internment camps as Manzanar and Tule Lake for the duration of the war. Yet the uprooting must also be studied in terms of the bureaucracies responsible for implementing the decision. It was perhaps paradoxical that the same bureaucrats capable of arriving at such a basically inhumane decision as relocation should be concerned about its humane implementation. They assumed, however, that the evacuees would resume normal lives at some future time somewhere in America, where they would need material goods to reestablish themselves. Even the army recognized that they were entitled to compensation for their possessions and that they should be protected from profiteers seeking to take advantage of the situation. That they would suf- fer some economic loss was assumed, but the government sought to minimize it. The question of how well the bureaucracy charged with protecting the economic interests of the evacuees did its task is the subject of this paper, which is based on an examination of hitherto-unavailable records of the San Fran- cisco Federal Reserve Bank on the relocation.3 2. The author is indebted to Professors Roger Daniels and Geoffrey S. Smith, who critiqued an earlier version of this paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Toronto, March 4, 1981. That paper was included in the Testimony of the Japanese American Citizens League National Committee for Redress, presented to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, 1981. Funds for the study were provided by the Research Committee of the University of Utah. 3. The data for this study consisted of original interview records, correspon- dence, and official communications of the Evacuee Property Division of the Federal Reserve Bank, San Francisco. The author wishes to thank Dr. Kent Sims of the Federal Reserve, who facilitated access to this material for purposes of scholarly research.
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Date: January 1983
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publisher: University of California Press
place: California
Collections within FRASER contain historical language, content, and descriptions that reflect the time period within which they were created and the views of their creators. Certain collections contain objectionable content—for example, discriminatory or biased language used to refer to racial, ethnic, and cultural groups.
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From The Public Historian, 5 (Win. 1983), pp. 9-30.
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