they faced.11 In order to prepare for the inevitable crisis that would ensue in Japanese communities as family units broke down, LaViolette urged the government to abolish unequal laws and fund social service organizations (on the model of the National Urban League) to aid the development of a mature political consciousness among young Nisei.12
LaViolette completed his dissertation, “Types of Adjustment Among Second-Generation Japanese,” early in 1939. In it, he analyzed the development of Nisei society and its impact on character. As in his Japanese American Courier articles, LaViolette suggested that external factors would determine progress toward the ultimate (and desirable) goal of complete absorption of Japanese Americans into the larger society. He concluded that the acceptance and social integration of the Nisei was a complex matter, since it was not simply an interracial problem, like that of the Negro, but also an international one, as a function of the larger relationship between the United States and Japan and American hostility toward Japan's foreign relations.13 In an article summarizing his findings, LaViolette noted that Japanese Americans strongly distanced themselves from the Japanese culture of their parents and were not welcome in Japan (those who went to Japan for education, he explained, had experiences that were “usually not satisfactory”), and so were ripe for absorption into America. He added that Japanese Americans were as individualistic as other Americans and likely would not turn into a “racial bloc” like the Negroes. Conversely, he made clear that the Nisei, given an opportunity to prove themselves, would be completely loyal to the United States in case of war with Japan. “If the Japanese of the second generation are given an opportunity there is no question where their loyalty and patriotism would place them, either in peace or war.…This loyalty to the United States was shown clearly in Hawaii when the question of boycott came up.”14 Once the dissertation was accepted, LaViolette began on the work of transforming it into a book. However, because of the looming war situation and the widespread suspicion of Japanese Americans, two different publishers who had previously agreed to publish each cancelled his book contract.15
In fall 1940, LaViolette was hired as assistant professor of sociology at McGill University in Montreal. Once settled in his ancestral French Canadian homeland, he was able to make use of his French-language fluency (in tribute to his roots, LaViolette would thereafter sometimes sign his name using the more French “La Violette”). He also declared himself attracted to the job because he could continue his studies of Native communities on the Pacific coast of Canada. Montreal newspapers reporting his arrival described him as an expert on “the yellow peril,” adding that in addition to his five years of study of Japanese on the Pacific coast, he had already visited the Vancouver area in order to make preliminary studies of the “Japanese problem” in British Columbia as well. LaViolette warned that a Pacific war would be deadly for those communities:
The United States is not sufficiently involved for that country to start a war with Japan [but] Japan might readily provoke a quarrel whose proportions could attain war. The Japanese on the Western coast [are] placed in an embarrassing position. They are not wanted back in overpopulated Japan, where, if they visit, they are more ostracized than by Americans on this continent. The Nipponese here cannot escape westernization. Native Japanese detect this easily and shun the visitors.16
He expanded on these warnings in summer 1941 in a long article, “The American-Born Japanese and the World Crisis,” which, like his previous contributions, was based on a paper delivered at a professional conference. In his text, LaViolette pointed out that the growing war climate between Japan and the United States was forcing Japanese Americans to choose sides more clearly, a process that could also clarify the marginal position the Nisei held in both American and Japanese communities by making American nationalism more salient in determining the actions of Japanese Americans than family sentiment toward Japan. “This means that individuals are now more fully committed to being Americans. It means a more definite incorporation into the American social system.”17 However, LaViolette was well aware of the threats to the community that still loomed in case of war, and he was prophetic on the potential consequences:
By Japanese novelists the second generation has been portrayed as a tragic character, neither fully Japanese nor accepted by Americans but yet expected to fight for America. Rumors have it that the nisei would be the first to be sent to the front; others say they will be sent to concentration camps. One nisei told the writer that he was “fattening” himself up for the “long lean days behind barb wire.”18
LaViolette was midway through his second year of teaching at McGill when the United States and Canada went to war with Japan. Although military service was out of the question, as he was nearly thirty-eight, overweight, and medically unfit because of his ulcer, he drew from his youthful radio training and volunteered his services teaching evening radio physics classes to the Royal Canadian Air Force in addition to his regular duties. In marked contrast to this patriotic activism, LaViolette remained startlingly disconnected from the removal of 113,000 West Coast Japanese Americans and 22,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes during 1942 and their confinement in government camps in the interior of their respective countries. Despite his predictions of harsh consequences for Japanese Americans if war broke out in the Pacific, he remained publicly silent as pressure mounted on the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada during spring 1942 for mass action against their ethnic Japanese populations. LaViolette did not join the tiny group of liberal academics who publicly protested mass removal or formed Fair Play Committees. While he corresponded with numerous Nisei friends from Seattle, there is little record that he offered them financial or logistical assistance. (Frank Miyamoto, hired by University of California sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas as a “community analyst” for the Japanese Evacuation Research Study, spent the early war years in the Tule Lake camp.)19
Nor, however, did LaViolette line up immediately in support of the government, either with supportive public comment or with assistance to the War Relocation Authority, the civil agency created to operate the Japanese American camps. Although the WRA was desperate to recruit social scientists with experience among Japanese Americans to be camp administrators and community analysts (so much so that John Embree was named the WRA's chief reports officer largely on the basis of his having written “Suye Mura,” a short anthropological study of a village in Japan), LaViolette evidently either was not asked to join the WRA or refused, for he remained in Montreal throughout 1942. In contrast, in May 1943 LaViolette took a leave from McGill and entered the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. Over the following six months, he served there as an administrator and community analyst for the WRA (LaViolette also took a collection of stark photographs of the camp's guard towers and facilities). He clearly saw his role as one of an intermediary, trusted by both sides, between the camp administration and the Japanese “residents,” someone who could facilitate communication and community stability. He noted in one of his first memos:
It may not be obvious but I think we can see utility in the assumption that the Japanese community is tending to reconstruct itself somewhat along old lines. It should be helpful if we look to see what is likely to be missing due to certain limitations. In pre-evacuation days there were certain white functionaries who represented one of the few points of accommodation between the white and Japanese.…In spite of what we do, it is rather evident that the process of reconstruction is under way and that stability is coming, Here I think community analysts will be vital [in such accommodation]. First, we shall have to more and more make use of, cooperate with, these reconstructed and emerging patterns.20
LaViolette added that he hoped to train schoolteachers and others to fit that role. “It is my guess that we should plan seminars for [schoolteachers] in which we would educate them about the Japanese, about the world in which we live, and also take then into a more active part of WRA program.”21 Given his emphasis on education, he was outraged when he discovered that Japanese American schoolteachers were being issued only restrictive teaching certificates by the Wyoming state school board, with the result that they were forbidden to teach elsewhere in the state following resettlement. “Obviously, this is discrimination,” LaViolette fumed. “But it is the same
