When Eleanor heard of Franklin’s decision, she was disappointed. Even though the country was now at war, Roosevelt’s order, signed in his own hand, seemed to her a violation of democracy at home. For more than one hundred thousand people to be taken from their homes without any charges or chance to defend themselves against accusers seemed intolerable.
Eleanor went directly to Roosevelt and asked if they could discuss the issue. “No,” he told her coldly. And then he asked her never to mention it again.
When the novelist and humanitarian Pearl Buck, Eleanor’s friend, wrote to her protesting the “inhuman and cruel treatment” of the Japanese, an action Buck compared to the actions of the Nazi Gestapo, Eleanor replied, “I regret the need to evacuate. But I recognize it has to be done.” All through the war, Eleanor and Franklin would maintain their different stances. In the end, the president’s decision was the only one that mattered. However passionate an ally Eleanor was to families such as Ingrid’s and Sumi’s, her duty was to support her husband’s decision, and she did.
CHAPTER THREE
Strangers in a Small Texas Town
Earl G. Harrison, Roosevelt’s new commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, stood, on the morning of November 6, 1942, in a place so strange that it might have appeared imaginary to him. Before him stretched a desolate prairie of dusty soil, dry cactus, and a variety of wild, dense shrubs. The small town of Crystal City was named for a vast stretch of artesian springs, now dangerously dry due to a drought. The landscape was incongruous to the town’s name. Thirty-five miles to the west, the flat, bleached-out land emptied into the Rio Grande, and across that river the land stretched wide into Mexico. Locals called the region the Wild Horse Desert. It had a between-worlds feeling, not quite Mexico, not quite America.
Sixty-five million years before, in the Late Cretaceous era, this desert was the floor of the ocean. When the waters receded, deposits of oil and salt domes were left, grown over by grasses, plants, and trees. Small, peaceful groups were the first to live on the land. For sustenance, they gathered roots, hunted deer, and fished in the Gulf of Mexico. Apache and Comanche, warring tribes, followed them. The first European—Cabeza de Vaca—didn’t arrive until the sixteenth century. De Vaca was so struck with the loneliness of the land, so vast and so barren, that he named it El Desierto de los Muertos, the Desert of the Dead.
When Anglo settlers streamed into Texas in the 1820s, most colonists steered cleared of this forbidding brush landscape, calling it “heartbreak country.” Stephen F. Austin, the father of Texas settlement, preferred the rich, wooded lands of East and Central Texas. After a trip to Matamoros, Mexico, Austin wrote of the land near the future Crystal City, “It is generally nothing but sand, entirely void of lumber, covered with scrubby thorn bushes and prickly pear cactus.” On March 2, 1836, Austin and other Texas colonists, many of them slaveholders and secessionists, formed an independent republic. The new Republic of Texas had its own Texas Constitution, capital in Austin, and flag. Texas was its own nation—unto itself. Nonetheless, South Texas, where Crystal City was located, continued to function as it always had—as a direct channel into Mexico. As late as 1839, the Texas maps described South Texas this way: “Of this section of country little is known.” In those days, maps of Texas stopped in San Antonio, even though Texas extended farther south, all the way to the Rio Grande River and into Mexico.
One hundred and twenty miles from San Antonio sat the small Texas town of Crystal City. Large ranches dominated the border area. On both the US side and the Mexican side, vaqueros, Mexican cowboys, worked cattle on horseback. In 1905, two bankers from San Antonio, Carl Gross and E. J. Buckingham, bought a ten-thousand-acre ranch and platted the town site of Crystal City. They subdivided the ranch into ten-acre farms and set about selling the area to unsuspecting outsiders as a Garden of Eden. With other owners of large ranches, Gross and Buckingham invested $345,000 to build a rail line to connect San Antonio, Uvalde, and the Gulf of Mexico. The SAU&G line originated in 1909 in Crystal City and Uvalde, and by 1914 was extended between San Antonio and Corpus Christi. By 1914, the line, nicknamed the Sausage, was completed. Before the railroad arrived, Crystal City had a less-than-thriving population of 350 souls and no reliable connections with the outside world. The culture was built around cattle. With the arrival of the railroad, small farmers, many from the Midwest, made their way to South Texas. Most of the new residents brought farming methods and equipment unsuitable to the arid land. They introduced sheep, which ate closer to the ground than cattle, causing overgrazing and ferocious conflict between the ranchers and the sheep owners. Yet over time, progress came to Crystal City. Fields of Bermuda onions and spinach were planted. Cotton gins hummed. In 1928, Crystal City became the county seat of Zavala County. The train was a lifeline for the tiny town. In 1930, 3,959 train cars of spinach, 443 cars of onions, 214 cars of vegetable plants, and 140 cars of cattle were shipped from Crystal City.
Twelve years later, when Harrison arrived in Crystal City, the population had climbed to six thousand, 90 percent Mexicans and their children, most born in America. The town was divided into two segregated neighborhoods. Mexicans lived to the west, many of them in fifteen-by-twelve casitas made of adobe. In the morning, women hosed down their porches and watered their trees and plants. In the late afternoon, men gathered in backyards under the merciful shade of pecan, orange, and tangerine trees. They pulled chairs around small tables and listened to Spanish-language radio and played dominoes. To the east lived the Anglo population, farmers, small-business owners, doctors, teachers, and police officers. Though Anglos were newcomers to a land that was originally part of Mexico, they nonetheless saw themselves as dominant and viewed the Mexican Americans as outsiders. Schools were segregated, as were hospitals and funeral homes. The language spoken on the streets was a hybrid: English, Spanish, and both languages rolled into one, a mixture called Tex-Mex. In so vast and isolated a region, identity was confused and complex.
From his house in Rose Valley, a bucolic suburb of Philadelphia, it took Harrison three days on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to arrive in Crystal City. At forty-three, Harrison made a striking impression—grave blue eyes, wavy blond hair, strong jaw, broad shoulders, a face animated with thought. His friends called him an “indefatigable worker” and marveled at his capacity for long hours on the job. His secretary, Miss Margaret Paul Parker, who worked by his side six days a week for twenty-five years, described him as “always industrious,” a “real doer.” Harrison traveled to Crystal City that day to consider the town as a possible location for the only family camp for internees and their families during World War II. This much Harrison knew for sure: the future camp would be busy and require enough space and facilities to house as many as four thousand internees and their families at any given time during the war. Not many places in the United States offered enough empty space to accommodate Harrison’s needs, but Texas, a state larger than Spain, certainly did.
As commissioner of the INS, which in 1940 had become part of the Department of Justice, Harrison had jurisdiction over twenty-two district offices and ten internment camps that housed the aliens of enemy countries. During the war, the US government operated more than thirty camps, some administered by the Army; others by the War Relocation Authority, a civilian agency created by Roosevelt; and others as federal prisons, where prisoners of war were held in isolation.
The camp at Crystal City would be the largest INS camp, used to intern a wide variety of prisoners of war, including Germans, Japanese, and Italians, from the United States and thirteen Latin American countries—and their wives and children, many born in America. Many of these men were leaders in their respective communities—Buddhist and Shinto priests, German and Japanese businessmen, men of great wealth and influence from Peru, Bolivia, Honduras, Panama, and other Latin American countries. All of these enemy aliens had been separated from their bewildered families upon their arrest.
In Harrison’s mind, the need
for a camp to reunite families was a humanitarian step, one of many reforms he hoped to make as commissioner. He had his hands full, especially with the Latin American phase of the internment. In 1938, Roosevelt became convinced that in the event of war, Axis nationals living in Latin America would engage in pro-Axis propaganda and espionage. In October 1941 the State Department had reached secret agreements with Panama, Peru, Guatemala, and the other countries in Latin America to restrict Axis nationals living in their countries and to prepare for their arrest and deportation. The FBI station agents, known as legal attachés, were stationed at US embassies throughout Latin America. As early as July 1941 newspapers in Latin American countries published La Lista Negra—the black list—of Axis nationals. Hours after Roosevelt declared war on December 8, Guatemala froze the assets of Japanese, Germans, and Italians, and restricted travel. Costa Rica ordered all Japanese interned. Police in practically every Latin American country, except Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil, which had their own internment camps, arrested fathers first, held them in jail, and deported them to the United States on American troop ships. Their families were then arrested and deported as well. Those arrangements had been made by the Special War Problems Division of the Department of State. The justification for the arrests, from the point of view of the United States, was to protect national security. The media reported nothing about the deportations. Some of the countries—including Peru, which arrested 702 Germans, 1,799 Japanese, and 49 Italians—deported Axis citizens for economic motives. In return for delivering Axis nationals to the United States, the governments seized their homes, businesses, and bank accounts.
Once the Latin Americans set foot on American soil in ports in New Orleans or California, the INS was in charge. Officers arrested them for “illegal entry.” They were deloused with strong showers, sprayed with DDT, and loaded on trains bound for internment camps. Jerre Mangione, an Italian American writer who worked for Harrison at the INS and helped decide where to locate the family camp, later wrote in a memoir about why Latin Americans were deported to the United States: “The rationale for this international form of kidnapping was that by immobilizing influential German and Japanese nationals who might aid and abet the Axis war effort in the Latin-American countries where they lived, the United States was preventing the spread of Nazism throughout the hemisphere and thereby strengthening its own security.” According to Mangione, many in the INS, including himself, opposed the arrest of Latin Americans. One of the officers in charge of an INS camp told Mangione, “Only in wartime could we get away with such fancy skulduggery.”
In the wake of all that had occurred, Harrison wanted the camps under his jurisdiction to be as efficiently and humanely administered as possible. By law, interned civilians were not officially subject to Geneva Convention protocols that dictate treatment of prisoners of war, but the policy of the US government was that the treatment of enemy aliens should follow the principles of the convention. In most US internment camps the principles were loosely applied. In a manual he wrote for INS officers Harrison insisted that INS “humanize” immigration laws. “Immigration laws often appear to work a hardship on aliens. Officers can humanize these laws at the same time carrying out the intent of Congress and the will of the people. Officers should always keep in mind that their decisions may spell future happiness or despair for those affected by such decisions.”
With Harrison in Crystal City that day were two other people, Willard F. Kelly, Harrison’s number two man, who served as assistant commissioner for alien control, and Dr. Amy Stannard, the officer in charge of the INS internment camp in Seagoville, Texas, a small town near Dallas. Stannard was the incarnation of Rosie the Riveter, a wartime symbol on posters of a woman laborer performing what previously was a man’s work. A graduate of the University of California medical school with a specialty in psychiatry, Stannard was the only woman in charge of an internment camp, or any type of POW camp, during the war. The Seagoville camp opened in 1941 as a federal minimum-security prison camp for women. In the spring of 1942, Stannard’s facility was adapted to an alien detention camp for women and children, and she was named officer in charge. “I was surprised,” she later told an interviewer. “We didn’t have much advance notice, so I didn’t much dwell on the novelty of being the only woman with this kind of job. I had to get to work.”
The women’s camp in Seagoville was built on eighty acres and was surrounded by a six-foot, woven-wire-link fence topped by barbed wire. The guardhouse was manned at all times by agents of the Border Patrol. Guards also patrolled the perimeter of the camp, sometimes on horseback. The women and children lived in Victory Huts, prefabricated, small dwellings built during World War II, and six dormitories. Many of the women were Japanese, including fifty Japanese-language teachers from California. In addition, there were women and children from Latin American countries sick with flu, some with tuberculosis.
“We began admitting women and children from Central and South America. They were the families of male aliens, of enemy nationals—Germans, Japanese, and a few Italians who had been interned in other camps in the States. They had been caught up in a sort of dragnet because they were thought to be potentially dangerous to the security of the United States,” Stannard said. “It isn’t clear to me why the State Department came to work that out. Apparently it was the result of some fear that Japanese, Germans, and Italians in Central and South America might rise up in some way to endanger the United States. I know of no episodes where that happened, however.”
It was November and the temperature was about eighty degrees as Harrison, Stannard, and Kelly walked around a 240-acre Crystal City site that was used as a migrant-worker camp for Mexican laborers. Later, an additional 50 acres was acquired to the south of the existing camp, enlarging it to 290 acres. Due to the mild winter climate, landowners in Crystal City had four growing seasons a year, much of it devoted to spinach. In March 1937, a statue of Popeye, built of shiny fiberglass, was erected in front of the tiny, one-story city hall in Crystal City. It was dedicated to “the children of the world.” City leaders, all Anglo, proclaimed Crystal City the Spinach Capital of the World. Spinach was referred to as green gold. In 1945, the Del Monte Corporation bought the town’s cannery and produced 2.5 million cases of spinach a year. Popeye became the city’s iconic symbol, a totem with mixed messages. On the Anglo side of town Popeye meant prosperity, a tribute to the thriving spinach industry. But on the Mexican side of town, where a majority of the citizens of Crystal City lived, the statue symbolized poverty. “We hated that statue,” said Jose Angel Gutierrez, who grew up in Crystal City and later became a civil rights leader in Texas. “The statue symbolized our servitude to the spinach and the Anglo owners of the company.”
On this day, only a few Mexican workers still lived on the migrant-worker site, which was owned by the Farm Security Administration. When war broke out, many Mexican migrant workers who came to Crystal City from the Northwest and Midwest each winter stopped coming for fear of being arrested. The federal government had doubled the number of agents patrolling the Mexican border, which was in effect closed.
It wasn’t only rock-ribbed Texas conservatives such as Congressman Martin Dies, chairman of the feared House Un-American Activities Committee, who stirred anti-immigrant sentiment. In San Antonio, liberal mayor Maury Maverick, who had served two terms in Congress as a loyal Roosevelt New Dealer, called on the chief of police to arm every officer with a submachine gun to defend against German spies who might cross the border from Mexico. Maverick’s edict alarmed San Antonio’s large German population.
At that time, one in every six persons who lived in San Antonio was of German heritage. The central street in town was King William Street, known by German Texans as Kaiserwilhelmstrasse. The street was lined with stone mansions built by the wealthy Germans in San Antonio who formed the mercantile class. Until 1942, San Antonio had a German newspaper, the Freie Presse für Texas, which was closed when war broke out. German Texans in San Antonio
who were involved in German cultural and singing societies became afraid when they learned that the FBI had arrested several hundred German Texans. Newspapers in San Antonio and Dallas asked their readers to be on the lookout for German agents. The readers responded. An FBI agent in Dallas stated that citizen reports had led to the arrest of sixty-one Germans, thirty-six Italians, and seventeen Japanese.
On the day that Harrison arrived in Crystal City, the internment of enemy aliens was well under way. Unlike in some less conservative towns and cities on the East Coast, Texas welcomed the idea of incarcerating suspected spies. Five internment camps were in Texas. The camp in Seagoville was occupied by single women and a few families, and the camp in Kenedy incarcerated only men. In San Antonio, a prisoner-of-war camp at Dodd Army Airfield at Fort Sam Houston held primarily German and Italian men. In El Paso, German and Italian prisoners of war were held at Fort Bliss. If the proposed family camp were to be located on the East Coast, opposition would be strong. Harrison understood political nuances and recognized that the establishment of a multinational family internment camp would not provoke hostility in Crystal City. Indeed, it would be welcomed. The farmworkers would be moved out, replaced by Japanese, German, and Italian enemy aliens and their families.
Surveying the site of the migrant-labor camp, Harrison noted what amenities existed. The site had been used to confine Mexican migrant laborers during their work stays, as well as illegal aliens arrested for border violations, and the facilities were stark. None of the 41 cottages or 118 one-room shelters had running water. The workers used outdoor privies. They slept on cots and hung their work clothes on nails.
The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Page 5