Americans, the goal was to ease the adjustment of the migrants and lessen prejudice against them in their new homes
It is difficult to measure whether any such dispersal strategy would have done much to dilute mass hostility toward Indochinese refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War. In any case, the punitive and ethnocentric nature of the policy undercut its purposes, and the policy was a radical failure on its own terms. Most of the refugees who had agreed to be dispersed soon undertook a second resettlement into ethnic enclaves (many on the West Coast) alongside friends and relatives, and a generation later the ethnic Vietnamese population in the United States remains concentrated in a few centers.
To conclude briefly, the lesson of Roosevelt's “political science” is that racial bias and eugenicist thinking can influence government policy in many ways, even—perhaps especially—when racial thinking bears the imprint of scientific expertise and is cloaked in humanitarian purpose. FDR and his advisors launched a visionary scheme through which they undertook to use scientific expertise to help guarantee a peaceful and stable future for the world. They genuinely believed that by shifting populations and deliberately remaking the racial composition of entire regions, they could lessen international tension and promote peace and economic growth. Yet what underlay this progressive goal was the reshaping of demographic patterns in accordance with Social Darwinist racial principles, which had already been called into serious question by Franz Boas and others, and which are outmoded and even shocking by current standards. While we are no doubt fortunate that none of the more radical elements of the MProject was ever put into effect, we should nonetheless remember that the project was designed (and funded to the tune of $180,000) to be used in a serious way. At the same time, the case of the Japanese Americans demonstrates the persistence of the dubious belief that destruction of ethnic communities will ensure assimilation and social harmony (the suffering of the Japanese Canadians, who were stripped of their property during the war, barred from the West Coast, and scattered throughout the nation, calls this thesis sharply into question). We must be wary of all attempts, however well meant, to redraw human population distribution patterns, for it is as easy to stigmatize so-called racial characteristics as to valorize them.
2. Forrest LaViolette
Race, Internationalism, and Assimilation
The career and complex views of Forrest Emmanuel LaViolette provide a special window into the question of Japanese American (and Canadian) resettlement and assimilation. LaViolette, a University of Chicago–trained sociologist engaged in research on Japanese Americans and cultural values, became a lecturer at the University of Washington in the late 1930s. Even as he conducted his research, he was welcomed into the Japanese community, and achieved an unusual measure of integration for a non–Japanese. After being hired as professor of sociology at McGill University in Montreal in 1940, LaViolette further distinguished himself as a scholar of Japanese Canadians and defender of their citizenship rights. During World War II, he returned to the United States and volunteered for service as a social analyst at the Heart Mountain camps. LaViolette's dedication to action for racial equality in the public sphere, which made him stand out among his colleagues, poses important questions about the role of outside “interpreters” in struggles against discrimination. At the same time, his belief in assimilation at all costs, which led him to welcome mass dispersion and resettlement of ethnic Japanese citizens and residents, and his subsequent withdrawal from Japanese North American connections are puzzling and deserve scrutiny.
Little is known about LaViolette's early life. He was born on January 9, 1904, in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. His father, John Emmanuel LaViolette, who was of mixed English and French-Canadian ancestry, grew up in Montreal. His mother, Isabella, was an immigrant from Scotland. His older brother was Dr. Wesley La Violette, later a noted composer and teacher of jazz in Los Angeles.1 Forrest moved to Spokane, Washington, as a baby. In 1918, he moved to Portland, Oregon. After completing a year of high school, he enrolled at the Oregon Institute of Technology in Portland. After receiving a radio certificate in 1920, he joined the merchant marine as a radio operator on ocean liners. During this period, he sailed around coastal Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia, interacted with native peoples, and made at least four trips to the Far East, including Japan.2 After giving up his seafaring and returning to Portland, he graduated from Franklin High School, then enrolled for a year at Willamette University in Salem. He then spent three years as an executive for Montgomery & Co. In the end, he decided on a scholarly career, and in 1930 he enrolled at Reed College in Portland.3 At first LaViolette was interested primarily in anthropology. His senior thesis, written in 1933 under the direction of P. K. Roest, a professor of sociology, was entitled “Japanese Nationalism: A Social Study.”4 LaViolette then enrolled at the University of Chicago in sociology. His original concentration was in social anthropology, and it was primarily as an anthropologist that he wrote his M^A. thesis, submitted in 1935, and entitled “Some Problems Relating to the Concept of Culture.”
Over the following two years, as LaViolette completed the coursework for his doctorate and began to think about how to structure his doctoral project, he realized he was attracted more by sociology and by American society. At that time, under the leadership of Robert Park plus such stalwarts as Louis Wirth and Robert Redfield, the University of Chicago's Sociology Department was the brain center of race relations research in the United States. In particular, Park and his colleagues had undertaken a series of studies of minorities, notably “oriental Americans.” LaViolette thus began to turn his attention to the experience of Asians in the United States and to accumulate research for a doctoral thesis covering the “problem dealing with assimilation of the American-born Japanese.” While exactly why he chose to concentrate on Asian Americans is unknown, doubtless his decision reflected both his own West Coast roots and the influence of his professors.
In fall 1936, LaViolette was appointed to an instructorship in sociology at the University of Washington (where he was joined soon after by his wife, Vera). He was dissatisfied with traditional research methods and strove to include himself among Japanese American communities to absorb his subject firsthand. LaViolette was drawn to Shotaro Frank Miyamoto, a Nisei graduate student in sociology eight years his junior. He relied on Miyamoto not only for professional discussions and insights into Japanese American life but also for introductions to others in the community, of which Miyamoto was a native. Miyamoto later affirmed that LaViolette was an enthusiast whose highly intuitive and spontaneous thinking and frankly unstructured method complemented his own more formalized and systematic approach.5 The two men became such close collaborators that LaViolette invited Miyamoto to share a house with him and his wife. The unorthodox living and professional arrangement persisted for some three years and worked to the advantage of all concerned—by 1939, LaViolette had completed his dissertation, while Miyamoto had written a long essay, “Social Solidarity Among the Japanese in Seattle,” the first scholarly article by a Nisei social scientist.6 Meanwhile, the LaViolettes hired a Nisei undergraduate, Michi Yasumura, to join the household as an au pair, although Vera LaViolette continued to do much of the actual work of caring for Forrest (whose ulcer required him to eat a limited diet; Yasumura recalled that he used to throw parties and buy all the food he could not eat to have the pleasure of seeing others devour it).7
Frank Miyamoto and Michi Yasumura meanwhile introduced LaViolette to James Sakamoto, editor of the Seattle-based Nisei newspaper Japanese American Courier.8 LaViolette soon became a semiregular contributor—the only non-Japanese to be so honored. His columns reflected the assimilationist views and antiracist vision of chief editor Sakamoto.9 In summer 1938, LaViolette published serially in its pages his first “scholarly article”—the text of a manifesto he had delivered before the National Conference on Social Work on the citizenship activities of American-born Japanese. In the speech LaViolette stated that the task was fundamentally one of applying social science knowledge to the service of race and cultural pluralism. “Our nation's problem,” he stated, “is no longer that of the melting pot, but of the symphony orchestra.”10 He described in detail the social structure of Japanese communities, and examined the
